Great Perfection Teachings for Today and Tomorrow from the Grand Master Long Chenpa

You lucky people; click and attain enlightenment. Ah, if only it was that easy! Yet the world of Buddha-Dharma (liberating wisdom) is at our fingertips, in the palm of our hands, the click of a mouse. When you click this link, you will betransported to four minutes of Dzogchen transmission: in those four minutes you will hear this Long Island Jew with a Sanskrit name (Lama Surya Das) reading the poetic exhortation of a major 14th century Tibetan saint named Longchenpa (who probably composed the words in a cave), as translated by a “spiritual refugee” from England (Keith Dowman, author and scholar) who has lived most of his life in Nepal, and transmitted to your computer or hand-held device by way of satellites, fiber-optic cables, and silicon transistors, to appear, like a dream, on your liquid crystal display. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto! A tornado of technology and globalization has swept us up and transported us into a brave new world where all the knowledge, insights, stories and instructions that have ever been written down are available (or will be, if Google has anything to say about it) in downloadable bits from the cosmic brain we call the internet, the Wizard of Oz who knows nothing but can tell us just what we need to know.

Senior Tibetan monks in the early Seventies, when I first lived and studied in India and Nepal, used to swap stories of their first days in India, just down from the mountains after fleeing Tibet in 1959 during the Communist Chinese takeover of their homeland. “I remember seeing my first train,” said Gen Tenzin Dorje. “We were sitting on the ground. It was unbearably hot. I pointed at it and said, ‘Look. They have houses that move.'” In Tibet, when he was born, there were no cars, no electricity, no way of getting from one village to the next besides walking or riding a horse. Today he teaches Buddhism, jetting between centers in France and Wisconsin in less time than it took to go 40 miles in Tibet.

But it is the man in the cave, a medieval scholar-hermit, product of one of the most technologically primitive civilizations of the last 1000 years, whose words jump out at you when you click that link. Super Monk Longchenpa (1308-1363), who “created masterpieces of poetic philosophy remarkable for their aesthetic beauty and clarity.” It is Longchenpa whose simple words point us directly towards the timeless quintessence of the Dharma, the truth of who we intrinsically are and can be. Doctor Roger walsh points out that “these are words from the source.” That is why, in the new series of video excerpts from Lama Surya’s teachings that Dzogchen Center is making available on YouTube and on our website, it is Longchenpa’s 700 year old words that Lama Surya transmits in the first video. He may have written these words in a cave, and you may be listening to them on your iPhone, but the usefulness of his message hasn’t changed,

Let your complicated life and everyday confusion alone

And in quietude, doing nothing, watch the nature of mind and enjoy freedom and carefree ease…

Since everything is like a dream, beyond our judgments and evaluations of good and bad, desirable and unwanted, one might as well burst out laughing!”