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Sep 04
Wednesday
Sakyong and Family
The Great Vow

Bodhisattva by Liza Matthews

Bodhisattva by Liza Matthews

Our motivation determines our success on the spiritual path, says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. And the greatest of all is the vow to save all sentient beings.

In Buddhism, it is motivation that defines what kind of practitioner we are. Simply put, the greater our motivation on the path, the greater our potential.

Traditionally, there are said to be three kinds of motivation: small, medium, and large. Within the small, there are three categories: the small of the small, the middle of the small, and the great of the small. This is also a way of describing our evolution as practitioners, and a teaching about how we relate to our lives.

There is motivation in whatever we do. In general, small motivation is when our goal is simply to be happy and content in this lifetime. When this is our motivation, we are not particularly concerned about what happened before we were born or what happens after we die. Our goal is simply to make ourselves comfortable in this lifetime.

If our motivation is the small of the small, we are worldly people who are not engaged in a spiritual path of any kind. The world is the way it is, and there is no need for further exploration. We’re here and we’re going to try to have a good life. Our thinking revolves around getting what we want, and we use purely worldly means to make ourselves content and happy.

If our motivation is a little bigger than that — the middling of the small — we add some spiritual elements to the project of making ourselves content. Some interest or faith arises; perhaps happiness is deeper than just getting what we want from the world. There is something about hearing spiritual teachings that quenches our thirst, so we turn our mind in that direction.

TSP-Sakyong-MiphamSakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s new book is The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity’s Hidden Treasure, published by Harmony.

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Excerpted from the September 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. To see what else is in this issue, click here.

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