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Vechi 18.04.2015, 11:48:38
stoogecristi stoogecristi is offline
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Data înregistrării: 15.04.2015
Locație: Bucuresti
Religia: Ortodox
Mesaje: 52
Implicit Testimony of a Former Tibetan Buddhist

The testimony of Katja Oberwelland, a leading disciple of Jamgon Kontrul Rinpocha.


We now complement the conclusions we arrived at earlier by sharing the testimony of Katja Oberwelland, a leading disciple of Jamgon Kontrul Rinpocha. In 1995 Katja converted from Buddhism to the Christian faith. The reasons for this should be of interest not only to Buddhists but also to Christians.

Always looking for a deeper meaning in our existence on this planet earth, I became interested in various philosophies in my early puberty and later was drawn increasingly towards Eastern spiritual disciplines. My Christian background in Germany seemed shallow and in fact was spiritually uninspiring. Christians often seemed narrow-minded, judgmental and self-righteous. The hypocrisy bothered me the most. As far as the Christian faith was concerned, Europe seemed spiritually dead, either because the churches which claimed to be Christian had no heartfelt connection to the living Jesus of the Gospels or because they tried to confine him into some rigid old-fashioned frames and rituals, diminishing his uniqueness and majesty more than exalting it.
Christianity appeared to be a nice comfort zone for simple-minded people who thought that there really was a personal and loving creator God. But this assumption already bothered me. Now could there be such a God? How could He create this broken world with all its pain, poverty, injustice and despair? And how could he just watch this chaos going on? How could this God be a truly loving God, a God who cares? Besides that the crucifixion did not make any sense at all to me: The idea of God brutally crucifying his own son, so we would be redeemed of our sins, seemed to be the ultimate karmic escape fantasy, an easy cop-out deal on a pretty cruel basis.
Buddhism made a lot more sense. Karma and the cycle of samsara including the assumption of numerous reincarnations explained the evil in this world and the possibility of liberation in a far more reasonable way. As far as I could see, Buddhism offered the only truthful path towards real enlightenment. So I became deeply involved with Tibetan Buddhism through a friend of mine in Germany. I liked its vastness of symbolism and variety of meditation practices and learned that this world is a samsaric network of conglomerated karmically trapped minds whose inherent, diamond-like, radiant Buddha-nature can only be revealed through a strict discipline of meditation and ethically pure motivated actions, offering us at least a chance to free ourselves from this useless merry-go-round of reincarnation.
For almost seven years I became entirely devoted to the Buddhist tradition of the Karmapa, the Karma Kagyu Linage (similar to the Gelgpa-Lineage of the Dalai Lama). My teacher was the third Jamgon Kontrul Rinpoche, one of the four "heartsons" of the Karmapa. The concrete path of different meditation tools and the close connection to a teacher who had mastered the transformation from samsara to nirvana was very appealing to me. Besides that I was blessed with a truly beautiful being accepting me as a disciple. I also saw the benefits of a consistent practice of contemplation and meditation in my own mind: more stability, clarity, inner peace and a sparkling sensation of joy. The purifying effect of the so-called Ngandra, the four preliminary practices with hundred thousand repetitions each, impressed me. I was convinced to finally have found the right spiritual path towards the perfect union of ultimate wisdom and compassion.
But unforeseen changes were already lurking. Through an unusual set of circumstances, I ended up moving to the island of Maui in Hawaii. My next-door neighbor was an interesting man with a fascinating background. About three years ago I asked him why he became a Christian since I knew that he also denied the existence of God for many years. (I didn't know at the time that he had been praying to God that I would ask him that question.) In response, he told me that no other spiritual teacher ever had the impact that Jesus Christ did, neither did anybody ever claim to be what he claimed to be, namely the unique son of God. I just laughed, because somebody who claimed to the unique son of a God who did not even give evidence for his own existence seemed more a lunatic than anything else to me.
However, as a Buddhist I was soon to be faced with my own spiritual perplexities. The sudden and entirely unexpected death of my young, spiritual teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, in a car accident in Sikkim, northern India, was devastating. It also irritated me deeply, because when I saw him the last time three months before his death, he gave me no warning of his death or any upcoming threat that he had to face. Instead he reassured me several times that he would come to Europe in the coming fall, where I was supposed to meet him again. But I was taught that an enlightened being had perfect insight into the future and makes careful preparations for his death as well as gives careful last instructions to all his disciples. So what went wrong? And why?
The whole linage entered into a time of intense mourning. Then something wonderful happened. But instead of uplifting hope, despair and confusion were heightened when the recent incarnation of the Karmapa was finally found in eastern Tibet after years of intense searching and brought back to his original monastery in central Tibet near Lhasa. The reason for confusion instead of hope was due to the fact that another one of Karmapa's "heartsons", Sharmar Rinpoche, refused to accept the boy as the true incarnation and proposed a different candidate. That started a roller-coaster of power-struggles in the linage, ending in a severe political split. (Although the Dali Lama and the Chinese government (for the first time in the history of Tibet) agreed in the acknowledgement of the Tibetan boy as the only legitimate, official reincarnation.)
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