Finding your Buffalo by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

  • 2010


There is a story about a farmer who has a buffalo. Without knowing that the buffalo is in his stable, the farmer goes there to look for him, thinking that he has moved away from home. Starting your search, see different buffalo tracks outside your yard. The buffalo prints are everywhere! So think, where did my buffalo go? He decides to follow a group of footprints and they take him up in the high mountains, but he can't find the b Alofalo ah . Then he decides to follow another group of footprints that lead him to the ocean. However, when he reaches the ocean, he still can't find his buffalo. Your buffalo is not in the mountains or on the beach. Why? Because he is at home in his yard stable.

As the farmer, we seek happiness and peace of mind outside of us. We seek the freedom of our problems on top of a mountain, in immaculate and beautiful beaches and in the serenity of retreats. In all these places there are traces everywhere, signs as seekers finding happiness and more of an enlightened existence. In the end, you can find traces of satisfaction and illumination that you have noticed. However, what you will not find is the only thing you are looking for your own happiness, peace of mind and enlightened nature. You will find someone else's version of it, but it is not the same as finding your own.

No matter how much you admire and aspire to the happiness and mental freedom that you perceive from someone else, be it a great spiritual master, a bestseller, a self-help guru or a real modern hero or hero, find your own wake up, your own lighting is much very different. It's like finding your own buffalo. Your buffalo recognizes you and you recognize your buffalo. The moment you find your buffalo is a very exciting and happy moment.

So you make your own discoveries, we have to start right where we are. We must look inside and outside. From the Buddhist point of view, supreme happiness - the state of freedom, or illumination - is within our minds and has been since the beginning of time. Just like our buffalo that rests comfortably in his stable, supreme happiness has never left us, even though we have developed the idea that he has left home. We think that it is somewhere outside and we have to find it, with so many footprints taking us to different directions, so many possibilities of where it can be, we can begin to imagine things. We can think that the neighbor has stolen it and gone forever. We begin to have all kinds of misunderstood concepts and erroneous beliefs.

From the Buddhist point of view, there is nothing within our ordinary life that we need to reject or put aside, and the state of enlightenment is not a place where we can go from here. It is not a place that is outside where we are right now. If you wanted to find a perfect way to say goodbye to all the stress and unhappiness, how far and how would you go? Across the world, to the international space station, or just to the nearest bar? Your body would be somewhere else, but still, you will carry with you your stressed and unhappy mind. What you are really trying to leave behind is mental confusion, which keeps us from being happy. It is how our minds work when we are in those mountains, the beach, at work or at home, which determines that we are happy or unhappy, awake in our life or sleeping in life.

According to the Buddha, the current point of all our efforts on the spiritual path is simply to return to the absolute state of awakening, which is the true natural state of our minds. Our minds are brightly clear and naturally attentive, but that bright awakening is hidden from our sight by clouds of confusion. These clouds are mainly caused by the turbulence of thoughts and emotions. There is a lot of fuss going through our minds that makes the vision of who we are and how the world is distorted.

If that is the case, then how can we recognize the natural state of awakening of our minds? The Buddha taught various methods of meditation, ways of relaxing, feeling as if we were waking up and reaching our senses. It is a very ordinary but profound experience that deepens us over time and transforms our vision of life. When we begin to work with meditation with our mind, there is a feeling of effort, but as we move forward, it transforms with less effort. A good example of this is when a bird wants to fly, at first it must run a little and then propel itself from the floor so that it can jump into the space of the sky.

While we are looking outside of us there is no place to go, there is no end of the road, where we will someday find perfect happiness. In the end, the awakening and a peaceful mind of what we are looking for is with us now, in this moment. We don't have to pack bags or follow someone else's path to describe the true nature of our mind - the Buddha is in us. May the Buddha always be in our search. You see it? Where are you looking for buffalo?

TRANSLATED BY KARLA

© 2010 Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

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