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| Atisha |
I can’t decide if it’s because I’m a Libran, but I’m not
very good at making decisions!
But I am interested in Buddhism and got to wondering how a
Buddhist Master would make good decisions. The trouble is, Buddhism is a vast
and complicated subject and it’s hard to find a concise summary. But I came
across “Advice from Atisha’s Heart” in a book by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso called ‘How to Solve our Human Problems’. A very
promising title…
So I read Atisha’s Advice. It is incredibly concise and
concentrated. It’s also quite moving and inspiring. It is a holy man’s guide to
living, so I thought it ought to be a reliable basis for making good decisions.
Atisha was a famous Indian Buddhist scholar and meditation
master who lived around 1000AD. At one point he travelled to Tibet and began
the revival of Mahayana Buddhism in Tibet. His teachings were explained and
systemised by Je Tsongkhapa in the middle ages and became known as the New Kadampa
Tradition. This was more recently brought to the West by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.
When Atisha was about to leave Tibet and return to India,
his students asked him to give one final teaching. He emphasised that this
final teaching was “not just words from the mouth, but sincere advice from the
heart” and so it became known as the “Advice from Atisha’s Heart”.
I devised a sort of scoring model to go with the text that
you can use to see if something you are thinking of doing would concur with
Atisha’s Advice.
The model asks you questions about your proposed course of
action based on Atisha’s Advice and you give each question a score of 1-5. It
then calculates the percentrage of how right you think the course of action is
judged against Atisha’s Advice. It shows you this in a graph and provides
personalised feedback in the form of a feedback report, which is tailored to
the answers you gave.
Even if you do not have anything to decide on today, it’s
well worth reflecting on this man’s wonderful advice.
For the decision-making aid based on Atisha’s Advice www.thelifeeditor.com
For more on Kadampa Buddhism www.kadampa.org
For a copy of the book ‘How to Solve our Human Problems’ by
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso www.tharpa.com
