SPIRITUAL
TEACHING IN VANCOUVER
The arising of Bodhicitta
On
Sunday morning, April 18, 2004 His Holiness gave a Spiritual Teaching entitled “Good Heart -- Full Life” to over
12,500 intent listeners at the Pacific Coliseum. The event was organized by an Ad-hoc Coalition of Vancouver Tibetan-Buddhists,
including various individuals from the Gelugpa and Chinese Vajrayanist communities, and the following dharma centers:
In this Spiritual Teaching, His Holiness explained how conceptions of self affect our experience of
the world and our propensity for suffering. What is important, he stressed, is to realize that we all share a fundamental
need for happiness and freedom from the pains of existence. At the root of suffering is our delusion that there exists an
inherently real or independent self. This basic ignorance is a poison from which grasping and a host of negative emotions
and attitudes proliferate. His Holiness emphasized Maitreya’s view that altruistic awakening of
the mind is the key to generating compassion and recognizing the value of each human being. Altruistic awakening is the source
of all spiritual aspiration. It is where the expansiveness of meditative experience joins the highest ethical discipline,
where wisdom and the ethics of compassion come together. By understanding the interrelatedness of all phenomena, we come to
see our existence as linked with that of fellow sentient beings. Yet, His Holiness warned,
this level of wisdom and ethical discipline is not easily reached, nor is it a steady state in the absence of full enlightenment.
It needs to be cultivated with daily mindfulness and study. He reminded listeners that there is a tendency to be leisurely
with spiritual practice when life is rosy. If not cultivated properly, spiritual resources may be lacking when they are most
needed for the challenges that test us. At all times, he urged, “Use your own conscience as a witness to the mindfulness
and ethics of your actions.”
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