Happy Year of the Wood Snake 2025!

Losar Tashi Delek Phun Sum Tsok! May the Year of the Wood Snake 2025 bring the auspicious conditions for long life, prosperity, and lasting happiness. The Wood Snake year brings opportunity for deep contemplation, transformation of the afflictive emotions into wisdom, and favorable conditions for realization of our buddha nature.

In honor of this auspicious New Year, we are offering a 1997 teaching Lama Tharchin Rinpoche gave at Open Secret Bookstore in San Rafael, California, on Emptiness in the Three Yanas. Rinpoche explains how emptiness, or shunyata, is viewed from the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana perspectives, and especially on the Great Emptiness of Dzogchen Great Perfection.

You can stream the teaching for free on SoundCloud, where you'll find many other recordings by Lama Tharchin Rinpoche.

From the teaching:

“According to the Great Perfection point of view, there is no freedom and nothing to free ourselves from. The word “freedom” does not exist in the Great Perfection because we believe we are originally Buddha, originally pure. We have to recognize this and then stabilize that recognition. That's all.

In the Great Perfection view, the four kayas and five wisdoms are inseparable within our own mind. Buddha Shakyamuni taught 84,000 different techniques [to attain enlightenment]. The single point is how to purify our mind. What then should we purify? Our belief in dualism. We try to recognize non-duality wisdom, wisdom which is selflessness, egolessness, timelessness. That's called great emptiness.

That ultimate truth, the unchangeable state great openness or shunyata itself displays naturally because that luminous clear light, which is emptiness, is also a fullness of immeasurable qualities, naturally, spontaneously perfected. You cannot say that state of mind exists, because even Buddha never found anything substantial in the mind. You cannot say this mind does not exist, because our mind is the ground of all samsara, enlightenment, the path, everything. In this way, you are free from the two wrong views, the extremes [of eternalism and nihilism]. Then, what is there? [When you gain experience and realization,] you won’t have any words for it, no examples. It is inexpressible.”

Snake Art: Sun Moon Market Design

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