Sacred Path of the Warrior

Chogyam Trungpa is the teacher of Pema Chodron. It was Pema’s work Places That Scare You that opened my eyes to the beauty of Buddhism. It was pure delight going back to the source and reading about his vision of enlightenment. I can clearly remember riding a bus from Bacolod to Sipalay while reading The Shambhalla Warrior and I must have smiled the smile of an enlightened soul reading about wisdom, courage, and compassion while the bus was winding its way around roads hugging steep cliffs, the sun’s rays shining on me, and a magnificent view of the sea serving as a backdrop.

Chogyam teaches us to be genuine every moment. Being genuine means seeing ourselves as we are, and seeing our world as it is, and having the courage to live every moment unencumbered by ego. It means having compassion for others and for the self in recognition of the suffering we all bear as human beings. Life is full of suffering because of our failure to see and accept the world as it is, a world that is impermanent and full of pain, but also a world full of beauty and wonder if we only learn to keep the mind still.

Mindfulness is the key to becoming a Shambhalla warrior. To live mindfully is to be self aware and to have respect for other beings. It is difficult to live mindfully if one has to think about so many problems at work and at home, but it is precisely through watching our thoughts and focusing on our breath during meditation that we learn to stay still and stop resisting the reality of life. It is not by running away from the stressful, and hectic life in the 21s century that one becomes enlightened. It is precisely by living in the middle of all of this chaos and finding inner peace that one becomes a warrior.

Science of Self Realization

The cover alone would have been enough to repel me had I seen this book back in college. It depicts Krishna with glowing blue skin and with a black background as if floating in space.

This book, one of many written by Swami Prabhupada, founder of the Hare Krishna movement made especially famous by the Beatles, explains through a collection of lectures, essays, and interviews some of the key tenets of the movement, and of Hinduism in general.

I find some sections simplistic, and circular in reasoning. Swami Prabhupada sometimes sounds like a Christian fundamentalist when he insists that the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures, contains the incontrovertible truth. This should not really be surprising since all religious writers claim to know the revealed truth, except that he also labels his work as scientific.

Evidently, I am not about to chant Hare Krishna, but the key messages of Swami Prabhupada do resonate with me. Chanting is really another way of meditating and clearing the mind. Going back to Krishna, the supreme personality of the godhead, is a reminder of the interconnectedness of everyone, and everything. There is nothing permanent in this world for we live in a world of illusion, of maya, and we can only be truly happy once we are back with Krishna.