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Shenpen.Rinpoche

Protectors & Rituals

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Answering a question about protectors and rituals:

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As about the protectors in general: if you practice Dharma correctly enough (accumulating merits, purifying negative karmas) then no need of protectors... because, anyhow, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas can help us only if we have created the karma for.

The efficiency of "protectors" is not to protect you from outside dangers, but from inside ones, from your own mind. If your mind is already at Peace, than you are safe :)

 

The practice of "you-know-who" ;) has been used and misused not for Dharma, but for personal benefit and wealth. Thus, feeding such non-enlightened being, you give him more power, and the balance in the forces is disrupted, till the point such being would like and could eliminate Holy Beings, especially those warning against them.

 

In any case, if you decide to practice a protector, you have absolutely to choose an Enlightened Beings, not to be misled at any point, and to keep purest goals.

 

Buddha's teachings might be "simple at heart", but the way to allow simplicity to pervade our tortured and conditioned mind is not that simple ;)

Rituals are to establish special states of mind allowing entering in contact with more subtle layers of our consciousness, to accumulate the necessary merits and purify negative karmas obstacle to perceive phenomena as they are.

So, if it's surely important not to fall in the superficial aspects of ritual and not to get attached to them, it is also important not to despise them.

The problem I see is that Vajrayana rituals were "built" within and embedded into Tibetan tradition, and the pictures, sounds, visualization do not really fit a westerner, Judaeo-Christian educated mind. For the later to benefit of these rituals, one need to seek the deep meaning of all elements of the ceremony, and relate to it directly; thus, allowing the consciousness to enter in touch with the highest aspect of consciousness, allowing to eliminate karmas from the mind-stream, allowing to accumulate merits. As a result, one can develop the "three pillars": Bodhicitta, Renunciation, and Emptiness.

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