17/05/2026
🙏🏻✨❤️
"When I think back to my early years as a child, there's a lot I could say. This is a big story, so I'll try to give the main points.
I was born amongst nomads. As I examined their lifestyle, I found myself studying the animals alongside them. The goats just like me had tongues and teeth. The tongue in the mouth of a baby animal was soft and pink and looked a lot like mine. However they could eat thorn bushes and find them delicious, while I could not. How was this possible? Apart from karma, I had no way to explain it.
When I watched the baby animals being separated from their mothers so the nomads could take the milk, the babies crying and the mothers helpless, I felt such intense compassion that I would start crying myself. I would let the babies go back to their mothers, which caused a lot of arguments with the nomads. Reflecting on their way of life, I realized it came entirely at the expense of the animals. It was absolutely horrendous. Eventually I made a commitment not to stay with them.
I moved to the farmers instead. There I became fascinated by seeds. How does a seed grow? I planted one in the farmland and checked it each week. First it became moist and spongy, then a white thread appeared, then it lengthened and greened. Then I placed the same kind of seed in a broken saddle, covered it with cloth. After a week: nothing. The seed was identical but there was no change. Through this I came to understand the role of the five elements and how their combination makes things live and grow.
But as I observed the farmers' cycle, planting, harvesting, eating, planting again, I felt a kind of renunciation. Their life was a circle. There was no deeper result. What I really wanted was not to be found there.
Then one day my grandmother died. Before she passed, I would touch her, bring her tea in the morning. Now the tea sat untouched and people treated her body and belongings as something dirty. The same person who had been loved was now something to be feared. I hid and watched her sky burial, the body cut into pieces and offered to vultures. I was terrified, yet transfixed. The chopping was so forceful. I asked people: why doesn't she cry? They told me: the mind is no more. She has died.
That word, died, made me desperate to know: what exactly is the thing that dies? Whatever it is, mind or something else, I had to find it. So the question became: where does consciousness go? Where does it abide? When it leaves the body, where can it be found? I looked and looked, and could never find a place it had gone to. I felt very discouraged. This made me cry.
That night, as I lay down to sleep, I found myself studying the sleep process itself. What does it mean to fall asleep?
I noticed that in the process of falling asleep, the senses dissolved in a particular order and at different rates. Touch was brief. Taste slightly longer. Hearing lasted longer still. Vision longest of all. Each sense was withdrawing from the external world and dissolving into the mental consciousness. The meeting point, where sense consciousness ends and mental consciousness begins, was almost impossible to locate.
I was desperately searching for it and in one of these attempts, in the space before me, I heard a voice: “Fortunate one, my dear child. This junction, where all the senses dissolve, is the Bardo, the intermediate state through which all beings pass into their next life. That junction is the threshold that opens into the subtlest mind: the luminosity itself. So please, keep trying.”
It was incredibly difficult to find that junction. Most of the time, as the senses dissolved, I would pass into unconsciousness. But slowly, I began to be able to remain present at that threshold. Sometimes I felt I was entering a dark tunnel. No ground to stand on, no "me" that I could find, just a vast dark void. I was terrified.
Then the voice came again:
“Don't be afraid of that darkness. It explained the dissolution of the five elements and said that at the end of the tunnel, there is a light. After the dissolution, a tiny wakeful light comes back.”
And then it did. A small, luminous wakefulness returned. I felt so happy that the joy itself woke me up. I put all my effort into this as my practice.
One day, around the age of seven, resting quietly in the daytime, the mind became more and more subtle. Whatever was appearing before my eyes began to shimmer. Nothing was solid. It was like atoms in motion, a kind of boiling at the finest level of things. I then turned my gaze inward toward my own mind, looking into its subtlest levels. There, I found only a single unit of energy. And even that was devoid of any solid existence. Then at that moment, it disappeared as well. What remained was a strange feeling, a state I couldn't quite call mind, nor could I call it non-mind. And yet from that state, everything seemed to appear. Not a tangible atom but an all-pervading energy that encompassed the entire universe.
* * *
Since I was small, the experience of how things appear and how they truly are, unfolded in me. At that time, I had no philosophy, no texts, no Dharma vocabulary. I did not know the terms "nature of mind" or "rigpa." I could only use basic language. And I had no external measure for whether I was going in an authentic direction, only my own experience. If I felt joy, I took that as a sign I was on the right path. If there was suffering or dissatisfaction, I took it as a sign I had gone wrong. That simple.
What became apparent was that the nature of mind is completely pure, and within that complete purity, anything can arise. Everything, from the sky all the way down to the earth, the solidity of the earth, the spaciousness of the sky. This is really extraordinary and bizarre. The joy that becomes available in that recognition is not like ordinary happiness. It cannot be put into words. And then come tears and with them the question: can all sentient beings experience this?
Thinking of the animals I had watched since childhood, loved so deeply, seen so clearly, I thought: they simply don't understand the distinction between how things appear and how they truly are. If they could see that, their suffering would be completely eliminated. They would only know joy.
All sentient beings are actually the same as me. They have the same experience of the way things are, they have the same capacity to realize how things truly are and how things appear. But until they actually realize this: may I be a carpet for them, may I even go to hell to help them. The compassion that comes from seeing the nature of mind is not directed only at those who are visibly suffering. It is totally unbiased, totally equal. Love in every direction, without exception." - Khandro Tseringma Rinpoche
(This is an excerpt from Khandro Rinpoche's talk on Day 1 of the science conference recently held at Rigzin Drubde Monastery, Kathmandu. To read the complete transcript, visit: https://www.rigzindrubde.org/rinpoche-childhood-journey )
