The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying: A Spiritual Classic from One of the Foremost Interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism to the West

[born in Kham in Eastern Tibet, [and] was recognized as the incarnation of Lerab Lingpa Tertรถn Sogyal, a teacher to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, by Jamyang Khyentse Chรถkyi Lodrรถ, one of the most outstanding spiritual masters of the twentieth century. Jamyang Khyentse supervised Rinpoche's training and raised him like his own son.

In 1971, Rinpoche went to England where he received a Western education, studying Comparative Religion at Cambridge University. He went on to study with many other great masters, of all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, serving as their translator and aide.

Karma, then, is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart. Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer

As everything is impermanent, fluid, and interdependent, how we act and think inevitably change the future. There is no situation, however seemingly hopeless or terrible, such as a terminal disease, which we cannot use to evolve. And there is no crime or cruelty that sincere regret and real spiritual practice cannot purify.

Milarepa is considered Tibet's greatest yogin, poet, and saint. I remember as a child the thrill of reading his life story, and poring over the little painted illustrations in my handwritten copy of his life. As a young man Milarepa trained to be a sorcerer, and out of revenge killed and ruined countless people with his black magic. And yet through his remorse, and the ordeals and hardships he had to undergo with his great master Marpa, he was able to purify all these negative actions. He went on to become enlightened, a figure who has been the inspiration of millions down through the centuries.

In Tibet we say: "Negative action has one good quality; it can be purified." So there is always hope. Even murderers and the most hardened criminals can change and overcome the conditioning that led them to their crimes. Our present condition, if we use it skillfully and with wisdom, can be an inspiration to free ourselves from the bondage of suffering.

Whatever is happening to us now mirrors our past karma. If we know that, and know it really, whenever suffering and difficulties befall us, we do not view them particularly as a failure or a catastrophe, or see suffering as a punishment in any way. Nor do we blame ourselves, or indulge in self-hatred. We see the pain we are going through as the completion of the effects, the fruition, of a past karma. Tibetans say that suffering is "a broom that sweeps away all our negative karma." We can even be grateful that one karma is coming to an end. We know that "good fortune," a fruit of good karma, may soon pass if we do not use it well, and "misfortune," the result of negative karma, may in fact be giving us a marvelous opportunity to evolve.