Getting the Whole Cake

It is all too easy to hear a lot of dharma and miss the point. Say if we’ve spent a whole week receiving teachings from a lama, and then still need to ask for an interview to ask; “Um, now what should I do when I go home?” Then we have to realise that we’ve totally missed the point of attending the teachings.

The dharma teaching is not like a birthday cake that gets shared out between all of the students. “Okay, ninety people here – ninety slices of cake.” If it were like that, then we may have good reason to go and see the lama afterwards and say; “I only got a small slice of cake, may I have some more please?” But that’s not the way it is. Instead, we are listening for the whole duration of the teaching, receiving it all ourselves, getting the whole cake.

Let’s say I teach for two hours. Those two hours of teachings are specifically aimed at you. I’m talking to you, trying to convey the message to each of you. And if you’ve received two hours of teachings every day for a whole week, and still haven’t understood what you need to do, then how likely are you to ‘get it’ in a fifteen or twenty minute interview?

We need to change the basic way we think about and listen to the teachings. The main point we need to understand is what we receive in the teaching is what we should practice. The very point of the teaching is to tell us what we should practice. That’s what the lama is trying to teach us —“When you go home this is what you need to do. This is how you need to think about, look into and examine things.” This means we need to listen with the thought, ‘What is it that I need to do now? What is it that I need to practise?’ That’s the way to receive dharma teachings. Please keep this in mind.