"Compassionate Teacher"
--The Edge
Interview
Considered by many Tibetan Buddhists to be divinely awakened and a living saint, His Holiness Tulku Buddha Maitreye Rinpoche is known by others as the young American boy whose life inspired and was chronicled in part in the film Little Buddha. He was discovered and recognized in 1984, bye series of Tibetan spiritual leaders, as a Tulku, or child born in perfection. He has since been recognized and enthroned as the Senior Rinpoche of the University of the Five Shastras, Kham Dema Monastery, Tibet. By the end of 2000, he was honored in multiple official enthronement ceremonies in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal and India.
His focus is self-healing and meditation, and he provides the public initiations to help them evolve spiritually without "New Age traps of illusion and delusion." The EDGE magazine spoke with Buddha Maitreya Rinpoche in April 2001 about his teachings and how they differ from many new age modalities that exist in the United States today.
You are going to be offering Dharshans throughout the year. What is a Dharshan and who do you hope will attend?
A Dharshan is a traditional Hindi/indi term. When a person like the Dalai Lama, or a teacher of the religions of India or of Tibet, gives a teaching, its called a Dharshan. Its a spiritual teaching given by someone who spends a lot of time meditating, someone who is recognized as a person who emanates a lot of healing energy. That healing energy becomes part of the teaching. A blessing is involved with the teaching. I'm hoping anyone will attend. I expect they will include a lot of people who are in the New Age, who I'm trying to help out, to help them get out of the new age.
You teach esoteric studies at dharshans How do your teachings compare with those of new age workshops on healing or psychic development?
They differ quite a bit. One, I look at the history of humanity, at least over the past 100 years and show the evolutionary course of events that demonstrate how humanity is moving in a very spiritual directed way. We're coming out of processes of wars and hate, smoking, alcohol, addictions, aggression, prejudices and the lack of human rights that we've put upon each other. We transmuted that, in a record time.
If you look back at it properly, with an attitude of seeing things for what they really are, and being patient, and developing it that way, we can actually let go of a whole lot of false prophetic thought forms that keep us from appreciating all these great changes that are taking place. There's a lot that can be released as far as doubts and fear. That can make a lot of difference in a person's spiritual direction on how or why they are going to get spiritual.
On the other hand, many people begin practicing healing and they're working with chakras and with how color works, and the science of metaphysics and whether or not channeling is correct or whether or not you should be using tarot cards or the I Ching, and contacting your 900 number "masters" who think they'll make you enlightened. I offer a lot of information as to why you should not be involved in that and explain that people can simply move beyond the phenomenon of spirituality and be more directed toward the possibility of awakening certain healing abilities within themselves.
Do you think that all these modalities have a place?
Most of the time, such as when people are beginning the process of becoming spiritual and a little bit more philosophical and want to apply less-concrete ways of developing that spirituality, they're going to pull out a Ouija board just for trying it out. They'll pull out a telephone book and call a psychic fora reading, just to see if ifs true or to see what happens. All of that stuff is the beginning phase of what we've got to develop and become aware of, but none of it has any foundations to it when it comes to real spirituality. Its just trappings, side show kind of stuff, like you find in a carnival. It has no real function when it comes down to learning to trust yourself and learning to make changes in yourself, and seeing those developments changing and having more willingness to make an adequate amount of shift within your behavior—toward your children, towards your wife, towards your job, all kinds of normal things.
Things like the 900 line, where you call and ask them to tell you whether or not you should marry this person, or not marry this person, or are you going to have any good fortune this week, lead to followings. I try and get people to trust the fact that the world is working out and that we have to make choices in order to begin co-operating with the process of what is taking place. We've got to become less fearful.
We have to make decisions and choices that allow us that trust. We do not have to accept the fact that we're under a burden, that we don't want to go to this job or we don't have to be in this relationship. If we don't have the strength and courage to face that reality and then deal with that reality, then we're going to find other neurotic, compulsive ways to hide and veil these energies. My teaching is to try and get people to deal with what they really need to change in their lives, and take a good look at it, and clean it up. Look at their habits and the ways in which they're feeling obligated to be with people that don't really love them and honestly want to use them and manipulate them, because that happens a lot. People can, by their own choice, by their own process of gaining certain strengths in themselves, step out of those circumstances and transform their lives. I believe that when a person makes a good choice and moves toward what may be really hard to do, he or she makes a complete transformation in the opportunity of what I believe to be the Soul energy to come into a person, which is a more healing energy.
It allows one to be able to have a higher mind, a more discerning mind, more credibility in relationship to one's own self esteem. That soul quality is absolutely important for a person to develop. There are all these other techniques that people try that are quick fixes. Follow this leader, or that teaching. I believe every single day in our life and every single circumstance around us is a karmic event. We can shift that if we make good choices right now. We don't want to follow through with bad habits, because that's what draws those karmic events to us.
If you can discern or discriminate what is a bad habit, your soul automatically gives you the Holy Spirit, or the energy to make a choice. And it's always a good choice. It may take a long time to fulfill that choice, because the havoc keeps coming back, but that choice will not go away and your conscience will be guiding you. You don't have to worry about whether or not God is guiding you, or whether or not the Lord loves you. The soul is in direct relationship with everything people talk about concerning God. The soul is our telepathic communion with that reality. We have to bring in virtues in order to get ft—there's no other way around it.
If I understand it correctly, you claim to be the physical reincarnation of the Buddha, Jesus Christ and other noted spiritual leaders in Mankind's recorded history. Is that correct? Can you clarify that for us?
In the movie Little Buddha, it doesn't really tell you much about the person's life at all. lt just implies that this is a reincarnation and it implies that he's the teacher to the Dalai Lama and that he's the senior teacher amongst Tibetan Buddhism. And then he's given a book, Siddhartha, which implies he could have been Siddhartha, or maybe because his teacher is Siddhartha that he would awaken to his previous lives and things of that nature.
In reality, the film documented the reincarnation of Siddartha Other than in Tibetan Buddhism, it's not well known that Gautama Buddha reincarnated as Jesus, and then reincarnated as Padmasambhava, and then 500 years later again as Atisha, and 500 years later again as the energy known as Tsong Khapa who founded what is now the Gelugpa sect of the Dalai Lama.
Few people know anything about Jesus' life in relationship to Buddhism, but in Tibetan Buddhism there's a lot of history in relationship to Jesus showing up in Srinigar, in a place called Ladakh,which was actually the foundation of Tibetan Buddhism at the time. All of Srinigar, and especially the place known as Ladakh— "little Lhasa"—was the headquarters of all the students and disciples who have come from Gautama's teachings and the lineage of Gautama's students and on to others. They all passed on from one student to the next, life after life, and that group of people came together in the area of Srinigar and Ladakh. Then Jesus shows up there. They have a book about the appearance of this person from Palestine and Jerusalem, noting that he'll die on a cross, but it has a lot more information about him being recognized as the reincarnation of Gautama Buddha.
What was-the significance of Jesus showing up there?
Well before Gautama Buddha there was Krishna, and well before Krishna there were many other incarnations all the way to Sanat Kumara, which is one of the earliest incarnations of a spiritual teacher teaching about Buddhism in the beginning, thousands and thousands of years ago in India, that's known as Sanatan Dharma, the very foundation of the teachings of Hinduism and the Hindu reality of all philosophy.
That was the beginning of Buddhism thousands and thousands of years ago. Gautama gained synthesized teachings of what Krishna gave, and Jesus gave synthesized teachings of what Gautama gave, but at a much higher level. Each incarnation synthesizes all the previous incarnations and then extracts those processes or teachings and puts that into a format that can be best understood at that time. It goes from Buddhism into what would be then known as Christianity. If you look at Tibetan Buddhism and the Christian Church, you'll find that there are abbots, there are monks and nuns, there are extreme parallels to the practice of the Tibetan philosophy and the Tibetan hierarchy and how it's manifested, along with the Catholic or Christian Hierarchy. The parallels are incredible.
So you are the reincarnation of this same entity?
Right.
As the Reincarnation of Jesus, what is the significance of Easter as a spiritual celebration?
It's a transformative situation in relationship to understanding initiation-and the process of initiation during the cycle of Christ. People know of the resurrection and the crucifixion and the ascension process. They look at these three things as the relationship to Christ and Easter. Those processes, in the Christian understanding, are also the process of redemption in which every soul has been cleansed and purified by the action and the sacrifice and the service and the ascended reality of Christ's forgiveness during that process. In reality, there are three initiations taking place during the time of Easter. In humanity, there are really very few people who can get beyond certain levels of initiation without freaking out and saying: "I can't take anymore." It takes a long time for them to develop the courage to go through another process. So they may not fulfill it in that lifetime, or the next. It may be a few lives down the road. But a large number of initations rarely are completed in one life.
In Christ's life, the recommendation was that for anyone who wanted to be with me, they needed to bee disciple and they needed to be like me. So the 12 disciples were expected to do all the great things Christ was able to do. They were expected to raise the dead and heal the sick. There were levels of initiations that Jesus expected of those beings. And he was recapitulating love of the initiations and people in that life, and all future lives of this world now have the opportunity of going on the same path and attaining those levels of initiation if they really do focus-if they really do have the merit and they continue life after life. We can get a lot of people at those levels of initiation, because its been fulfilled.
Easter is a time when humanity can see a parable of reality, a letting go of human form, without taking it so personally-even though there is pain and sacrifice and dying on the cross, and the last words were "forgive them, they do not understand." Wow, what a nice thing to say, you know? That's a difficult state of mind for humanity to step into. For humanity to understand it at that level means that they really are at a level of acknowledging the master who went through that level of Initiation. They were able to cope with and acknowledge what was being accomplished at that time.
It can go a long way to eliminating fear, because it truly means there is nothing to worry about.
That's right. Despite how horrible everybody was by putting him on the cross and all, you really can't judge a person for that. That's a heavy thing to teach someone. That`s a good thing.
Is there a message of Easter that can transcend all barriers, religious or otherwise, and that all of Mankind can benefit from regardless of their belief system?
I think that it is the reality of reincarnation. People may not be able to deal with the fact that I've incarnated, or deal with the reality of the return of Christ, but the reality has happened and externalization is the natural course of events, just like the incarnation of Jesus himself 2000 years ago. It was a natural course of events, no matter how many people want to make it into such an event like "Oh, there was a star in the sky." He was born in a manger-think about it. Very normal. Lots of pain, lots of suffering, lots of hardship, a very normal life. No big deal.
If there was to be another reappearance, it would be very similar. No big deal, go through life. No one notices the guy until he tums 30. No one even believes him because he was so normal all his life.
This just helps bring back a true recapitulation of what did happen 2,000 years ago, over all the emotional, illusionary, fanciful stuff that's been put on top of it. It doesn't matter if anybody believes and it didn't matter whether anybody believed in the previous life. It still affected everybody. That's really what I believe is going to take place in this life. I'm going to recapitulate initiations far beyond what took place during the Jesus period. That means that whatever initiations I recapitulate, it is also recapitulation for everybody else. Everybody else is going to move very quickly.
There are quite a few people who would be skeptical of your claims of being the reincarnation of Buddha and Jesus, even going so far as to consider them sacriligious to their belief systems. What would you say to these people?
Well, I agree. I would feet exactly the same way. My relationship is that because I'm externalized to the process of Tibetan Buddhism. I didn't come out to begin a process of telling everybody I'm the returning Messiah or anything like that. My process is that I'm working to an externalization process where, as a Tulku, my responsibility is to those disciples who know that I exist from my previous lives and am furthering my reincarnation from one life to the next.
So I have a pretty big obligation, in a way, to allow myself to sit amongst them in their monasteries and teach and recapitulate my previous lives, like in the move Little Buddha - and begin furthering that work continuously. But its not supporting myself. It's supporting large groups of people who don't have a problem with that. But in the West there's a whole other relationship. There's no recognition of reincarnation and a little recognition to how, if anybody was to come in this way, they would manifest How would we verify who they are, or anything like that?
I do have great abilities, and that's one of the recognition processes of Tibetan Buddhism, that Tulkus quite often are powerful spiritual healers and have knowledge that they shouldn't have, especially information about texts and books that they've carried over from their previous lives. In Little Buddha, you see that the Dalai Lama or other Tulkus usually are only 3 or 4 years old when they are found. They're given the opportunity to recognize certain objects from their previous lives, and automatically they grab those objects because they're theirs. They're able to begin remembering information or text that they've had no study to remember, they just recapitulate it.
When I step into a monastery, I'm immediately flooded with memories of the people. Right now I'm turning 49 years old, and many of the people who are in their 80's know me when I was in my 60's and 70's as I was leaving my body in my past life, and they're still alive.
That's kind of strange.
Yeah, it is really weird. When I go back to the monasteries, I meet these very official beings—abbots and others who are the elders of monasteries that I left in my previous life--and they have written information about me from my past life I just talk to them nonchalantly, and they pull out a letter and say, "This is exactly what you said you were going to say." And here I've said it. All that happens over and over again, for them to verify my recapitulations and that I am who tam. I enjoy that. I appreciate that, that we're in a world, in a situation, where there is an externalization process rather that just coming out as some kind of Messiah and having to deal with trying to prove it. hat would be very dangerous.
Yes, especially in mainstream America. Why would people in the West listen to you then, or why should they?
Well, usually I don't come out and do a Dharshan. Hardly anyone even knows that I exist, and personally I'd rather keep it that way. If
the world's not really in a process for this event, then it's better for it just to happen through the Holy Spirit and whatever good karmic events I can take on in my lifetime. That will benefit humanity and everybody else will do their good work, and I don't have to go through putting people through a great big process that can cause a lot of people a lot of harm. Personally I'd rather avoid that. So I put out tools that heal people, rather than them having to meet me. I've put out Etheric Weavers, Pyramids and Soul Therapy music, all this kind of stuff that's very passive and very non-intrusive. Although I'm honest about it, I say I am also the Tulku Buddha Maitreya, and I'm the reincarnation of this person and that person. That way they don't find out later and say "Oh my God! I've been sitting in this room with a guy who thinks that he's the Christi's You've got to be honest about it.
You now go by the name His Holiness Buddha Maitreya, This may not be understood, because of the teaching of others about who Maitreya is. Will you elaborate on why you have this name and on the meaning of it?
I had the name before the new age people came out with their definition of what it was. It just means "nice guy." That's all it means—kindness. In Chinese it means Messiah, and to the Tibetans it means compassionate or kindness, or the kind one. That's pretty much the way of my behavior, that I take care of a lot of people and I work real hard to provide for monasteries, for the poor, without big fanfare for myself. I don't keep money or anything like that. So it is a general way of my nature.
I can definitely identify with the name, but in this new age there area lot of people like Benjamin Creme or the Alice Bailey teachings that teach about Maitreya being some master and that Maitreya is the Christ, but Jesus is just a disciple to the Christ. That Jesus and Maitreya are two separate beings and that Jesus was never the Christ. That's untrue and very separative—and it leads to a lot of problems as I try to give an understanding for people with that term, or that name Maitreya. However, if people dropped away from channellers and a lot of this claim-making stuff, and if they actually studied historical books on Buddha, on Tibet, on where Maitreya teaching may come from, they they literally can find the lineage of what Maitreya is and who Maitreya has been—and how being Maitreya has been working on the planet.
It literally shows that this has nothing to do with Maitreya being separate from Jesus or separate from Gautama or separate from Krishna. In the teachings it shows that Krishna and Maitreya were the same person, that Gautama and Maitreya were the same person. If you study the actual traditional teachings its not a problem. That's what I give. I help people to get back to teachings that are founded in the monasteries and have been brought through the lineage of time. It's a pretty accurate form of history.
You were incarnated in the West this time. There are a lot of Westerners who seem to be seeking a different truth than they've been used to, Many westerners are creating their own forms of spirituality with esoteric Christianity, Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism and Native American traditions. What are your views on this trend in America?
In America we have a lot of people like myself and yourself. We're all reincarnated. Throughout the past 100 years, many monasteries, Buddhist and others, have been demolished throughout Tibet, Russia, China, Thailand and throughout the East. So now these people, who are spiritually minded people, have to reincarnate some place. They're monks and they're nuns. They've tried very hard to aspire, and then they've had to reincarnate. Now they're going to find a place where more liberation is evolving in the world, because their countries have been taken over by communists and others who just simply won't allow them to evolve. So they reincarnate in like-minded areas. The United States was, I believe, founded for that reason, to house a place for people from all over the world to evolve and reincarnate to further a spiritual, technological civilization.
Many Tibetans are resettling in India, and in America.
In Tibet, Gautama Buddha's prophecy is well-known. It says that when Tibetan Buddhism comes to its end, a sign of the time will be when all Tibetans will leave Tibet and go to the land of the Red Man where they originally came from. That will be at a time when the metal bird flies and the horse is on iron wheels. That was said 2,500 years ago and its a pretty bizarre philosophy.
But it is very big today in Tibetan Buddhism in relationship to why they are not in Tibet .There's also a prophecy that this is the last Dalai Lama, and there's a prophecy that Tibetan people used to be American Indians, originally. Tibetan people believe that. They talk about the fact that they came over from the land from America about 35,000 years ago and landed in Tibet, and founded themselves the Tibetan traditions. That's why the American Indian shamanistic traditions are extremely close. Their cultures are very dose.
Many people here in the West take this class or that workshop, or read this book and go see that speaker, and yet they remain confused and uncentered about what they believe or what their true path is.
There's a science to the relationship of getting grounded spiritually, because there's a lot of knowledge about chakras and Yogism and how to attain certain levels of groundedness along with spirituality.
I came from a background of working with that energy in relationship to geomancy and temple building and bringing energy together. People live a natural life without focusing on trying to attain great spirituality. Its a matter of getting out of the utopian type of ideology or fantasy or religious facade where people are not really sure that what's being said is true. They're living in blind faith, and they're ungrounded. When a person starts developing spirituality, there's a very strong tendency to move in that direction.
It's important to have the opportunity to build monasteries and help the process of teaching people how to restructure their lives that are harmful, where there's negativity in thinking and attitude, to really gets a grounded change in one's character without going into some utopian illusion. You know what I mean? Its not easy and it's not a quick fix to get spiritual and happy and developed. Today, that's the problem. The illusion is that if you join this group, then you're saved. Or if you do this and that, you're going to get spiritual. I think people should go to their courses, go to their lasses, make decisions about what they want to do and study, but don't get stuck in it. Don't get into a group that will recruit you for its own alternative reason.
When people are wanting to develop spiritually, quite often they're pretty easily persuaded. So people need to be cautious about being persuaded. Just step back, and discern, and take it easy and don't get attached to anything. Stay a little bit independent and don't get into a position where you feel you have to do something to be a part of a group or be a part of a belief system. That will allow you the open mind and the openness to team from your process.
If you discern and discriminate and decide one day that you want to become a priest, or go off in some spiritual ordained reality, then you'll have enough discernment, discrimination and character in yourself to make a good choice. I believe, in the end, the most evolved place is when a person
does become a monk or a nun. But it has to be done with absolute discernment and discrimination. For a soulful reason that you're doing this.
In the end, you think that becoming a monk or a nun is the most enlightened place to be?
Absolutely. If you took back in time, at Saints or people who have become more evolved, their character is uniquely the same.
We should be aware of the fact that when we evolve, we're going to go through a transformation in which some people will become priests, and others will become highly evolved spiritual healers like St. Francis or Jesus - or any incarnation that has gone down that road for such a long period of time that so much spirituality has developed so their relationship in life of sitting in meditation or prayer, opening up a church. Not for themselves, but to help others be more balanced in their community.
I would think that in the sense of a perfect utopia, this would be unnecessary, because people would do that automatically.
Exactly. It requires a transformative period. When we come down to the time where everything is okey-dokey and we're all pretty darn evolved, cities will be spiritual--everything will be spiritual. We'll be driving into the bank and it will be a pyramid. Every aspect of life will be fulfilling a spiritual purpose, but that's a long time away.
So in the scope of the world's progress to date, are we still in the stages of transformation?
Yeah, we're in the stages of transformation. Were in a place right now to where were clearing up a lot of possibilities that led to the destruction of a lot of monasteries in the past right now, we really don't have much understanding of the American Indians, so they're pretty much way off on their own - even though this is their nation.
The Tibetan people see them in a mythological, legendary way. As time goes on, these people are going to be more free to externalize. American Indians will build up their tribal reality, and Tibetans will build up their monastic reality. Certain types of things that have been suppressed are going to externalize, and in that process we will return to a culture that will move humanity to a cultural shift.
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The Tulku Buddha Maitreya Rinpoche is an American. He studied medicine in his youth and practiced it for a long time.
There after, Buddhism became his chief interest. He made an investigation of Buddhist systems in their entirety. In addition, he investigated Tibetan culture for many long years, and became familiar with Tibetan people. 
