First-Hand Blessing

For those of you studying and training in Tibetan Buddhism, if you can receive the instructions from your lama in their own language, you will get much more benefit. It seems though, that most people don’t give a lot of emphasis to learning Tibetan. For example, many of the Nepalese and Indian traders around Boudhanath stupa in Nepal are willing to learn Tibetan, and speak it very well. They do this solely for the sake of business; whilst we, who claim dharma to be so much more important, are often not that interested in learning Tibetan at all.

Why is it so important to learn Tibetan? Because receiving the teachings from a translator is very different from receiving them directly from the lama – they are two distinct people with different ways of thinking. That means what we feel and how we respond to the teachings will be different. In terms of the words, there might not be much difference. But dharma is not just words.

True dharma is a feeling we have in our mind. But usually we think of dharma as being an external object, or a topic separate from ourselves. If that were really the case, then hearing the right words would be enough. But it’s not, our thinking is simply mistaken. So often dharma teachings become just words, dead and corpse-like, whereas teachings given by a true practitioner are alive.

Let’s say that I write out the Tibetan alphabet and so does His Holiness the Karmapa. Both sheets of paper will contain lines on a page of script, or characters. If you were offered the choice, which one would you take? It’s possible that my handwriting might even be better than His Holiness’ (I’m not saying it is, this is just an example), but you would not choose based on which is the better looking script. You would choose the one with His Holiness Karmapa’s script. Because in our way of seeing things we feel, “This one has blessing,” because we see His Holiness Karmapa as someone who has realisation.

In the same way, we can understand that whether the sound of the words someone says and their meaning carries blessing, depends on whether that person has good practice. So if we can understand the blessed lama’s words and their meaning directly, it is far better for us. Therefore, it is very important to learn Tibetan.