Great Fruit and Profit

I love the nitty-gritty details of the Dharma, but I also love skillful, pithy summaries of the teachings. I love them even more when they were spoken by Shakyamuni Buddha himself.

The passing of HH Penor Rinpoche has not been a mystical experience for me – my mind doesn’t tend to work that way – but there was one odd occurrence. The morning after His Holiness had ended his final meditation and released his wisdom mind from his apparent body, I didn’t know this had occurred but I had the strongest urge to don my patched, yellow robe and read aloud the full Mahaparinirvana Sutra, which I did. This sutra, included in the Digha Nikaya (“The Long Discourses of the Buddha”) of the Pali Canon, chronicles the final days of Shakyamuni Buddha’s life.

As was the Buddha’s habit, he wandered from place to place before arriving at Kushinagar, the site he selected for entering into final nirvana. He was accompanied by his long-time attendant Ananda, who recorded this summary of the teaching offered again and again by the Buddha:

“This is morality, this is concentration, this is wisdom. Concentration, when imbued with morality, brings great fruit and profit. Wisdom, when imbued with concentration, brings great fruit and profit. The mind imbued with wisdom becomes completely free from the corruptions, that is, from the corruption of sensuality, of becoming, of false views, and of ignorance.”

And, well, there it is. But the Buddha gives such varied and amazing teachings throughout this sutra, it really is well worth reading the whole thing.

Oh, and Brother Rigpa has posted the first photo I've yet seen of the "mourning" Padmasambhava statue at Namdroling's Zangdok Palri Temple.

Comments

[Oliver]

Thanks for the pic of the GR statue and link to the Sutta.

Best wishes to you Bhikku!