Book Review: Words of My Perfect Teacher by Patru Rinpoche

Having spent today reading most of Words of My Perfect Teacher I am now writing this post. The second chapter of the book (The Impernaance of Everything) was very very moving. I had the impression as though it was written by someone who had a deep understanding (informed by experience) of life, suffering as well as death. The perspective from which life,  in that chapter, was looked at was so darkthat I could not help but being drawn into this text.

The third chapter, seemed a bit more paradoxical and at odds with what I as a Westerner have been taught. I was trying to compare the Buddhist idea of Dharma, the “teaching” to which all human suffering points (ie that with which we can confront the reality of existence), to the Greek idea of logos (which is the rational articulation of the laws of the world). But, there are stark differences: the Buddhist Dharma hinges at all critical points on what the Greeks called Doxa (unsubstantiated opinion).  When Rinpoche talks about the necessity of virtue (10 right actions) as a vehicle for being liberated from suffering / Samsara his thinking is based mostly, in Chapter Three, on real life examples to which anyone can relate, but the imbues these histories with what the West would call myths (Virtue is often rewarded through reincarnation, but the existence of reincarnation is simply stated as a type of logical dicord in the discourse of the text). There were many examples of this all of which made me try to come up with a justification for or explanation of these” mythical” or “religious” themes that exist throughout the text, which are scientifically unfounded from what I have come to know and which are not necessary for the ideas put forth on human suffering and its liberation through a certain way of interacting wtih the world (the Dharma).

Consequently, the possibility of alternate non traditionally Western causes for the levels of Hell, the Jupkas, etc.  are what I was thinking of whilst reading. One explanation might be that the Buddhist idea of Hell is a type of “Noble Lie” (Like Nietzsche’s Overman) that was intentional told to monks and laymen in order perhaps become monks or give them the necessary incentive (like the Christian idea of Hell) for them to practice the Dharma. This also implies that power  could have played a role / that the higher ranking monks were trying to rule their culture or had, through suffering reached a state where their ideas seemed to them like the truth. At the same time, these hierarchies might have had to have been necessary if the mental purification the text discussed really did provide them with some sort of occult insight that could not have been communicated through language. At the same time, the ideas of Buddhism might outright have been a lie and I found it interest to see how the examples of human suffering tlaked about in the Impermance chapter become amplified (again to mythical levels) as though the buddhist myth employed were some sort of vision of what could be seen beyond the “visible” horizon. However, this is all speculation.