The Lotus & the Rose by Lama Tsomo

Author:Lama Tsomo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999577011
Publisher: Namchak Publishing, LLC
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

  CHAPTER 4

The Great Mother

TSOMO: So I’m going to speak of the Yum Chenmo, Great Mother. This is the best we can do for evoking something that’s really beyond thoughts, beyond words, and beyond concepts because this is the great emptiness out of which all of the Buddhas come. She’s the mother of all the Buddhas, and she’s known as Prajnaparamita, Perfect Wisdom. She’s beyond time. She’s completely pure. In this context that we’re speaking of, she’s beyond form. So everything issues from her—and this is why she is the mother of all the Buddhas, of course. As I said before, luminosity emerges from emptiness, so then we have to see the emptiness as the Great Mother. This emptiness is, again, not a vacuum; it’s this pregnant emptiness that’s constantly issuing forth all form, thought forms. Archetypes are forms, too, and, of course, the forms that we know of as solid forms.

She has been depicted over time because we’re fixated in this form level and we need something to evoke for us that sense of this Great Mother of all. In this country we are finally going to have a pilgrimage site where people can come and experience this. There’s the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas that Gochen Tulku Rinpoche, my teacher, has decided to create. He said, “Why should we have all of the relics and all of the pilgrimage sites in Asia? Let’s have something in America where people can come and be inspired.” And the understanding that they have is that through sacred architecture, through archetypal forms, we can actually have the seeds of enlightenment planted within us. And not just we humans, but the animals passing by—the bugs that land on her and fly by, the wind blowing past her—because there are relics inside of her and the whole statue was produced in a very particular way. It’s over twenty-five feet tall. It’s quite large. And then around her are the thousand Buddhas of this eon in the shape of a wheel, a Dharma wheel, with spokes, and they’re all along the spokes. They’re only about this high, so you get the sense of the great emptiness out of which these thousand Buddhas come. And, of course, there will be flowers and trees and places to walk. The statue is there, and we’re slowly but surely making these thousand Buddhas, and we’ll eventually then set all that into place.

I want to mention something called the “overtone series” in music. This is a law of physics that within a note on the piano, let’s say, it isn’t just the note that we hear, but there are overtones. The string isn’t just sort of bowing this way and that way as it vibrates. There’s actually quite a complex mathematical formula for figuring out how it’s dividing into many subdivisions of vibration. And each human’s voice has a different map of overtones, which are strongest and weakest, so that we can actually distinguish a person just as accurately through their voice imprint, if we get the overtones, as we can through fingerprints.

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