To encourage some disciples who mistake fool’s gold for gold.
It is the heart advice of this homeless wanderer
With the title of a Dharma teacher.
With this verse I conclude the commentary with humility. I wrote these twenty-one verses of Heartfelt Advice of Dharma Nectar like a parrot mimicking human language, without the slightest experience of their meaning. It was in 2012 that my disciple with immense faith and aspiration, Ama Kunzang Wangmo, Susan Schek asked, What ‘homework’ practice should I do while you are away in India? In response to her request, and hoping to benefit all of my brother and sister Dharma friends, I must humbly say that I am like fool’s gold or an ordinary rock that people think is actual gold. I am a homeless one who has been separated against his will from his homeland for two decades wandering all over the earth, who is actually bereft of the study, contemplation, and meditation of Buddhist philosophy and practice that would be the accumulated causes for becoming a khenpo — an abbot — of a monastery, yet merely holds the nice-sounding title of an abbot, who everyone calls ‘Khenpo Karten’, wrote this commentary to each of the verses in order to make my root text of Heartfelt Advice of Dharma Nectar more easily understandable, on the 26th of August, 2018.
Further Prayers:
Before first knowing where I am going,
To be instructing others is a joke.
Yet when a drum is struck with a beater
It makes its sound. Like that, I have written this.
Moistening the untilled, dry, hard field
With a rain of nectar of holy Dharma,
May leaves of emptiness and compassion grow
And fruits of glorious happiness ripen.
For one with bad karma, wandering in the swamp of samsara,
Who wishes to climb from bliss to bliss
To the mansion of liberation and everlasting happiness,
This small book is a first step.
Not polluted by blind faith in a creator,
Nor asserting liberation through physical austerity,
The Buddhist system is that Liberation is found
By way of you training your own mind.
Identifying enemy delusions as the target,
And shooting the arrow of emptiness and compassion,
Self-grasping ignorance is completely beheaded;
One who defeats delusion is the true hero.
In short, may the disciples connected with me
Be cared for by glorious, qualified Gurus.
May your three doors be inseparable from holy Dharma
and may your body and mind be sustained by oceanic bliss.
SARVA MANGALAM
May all be auspicious.
