coat and the hat and it’s cold, but we know that we
have to do it, and we teeter on the edge of the nest
and we take off. Then we find out for ourselves that
everything has to go. You just can’t fly when you are
wearing socks and shoes and coats and pants and
underwear. Everything has to go.
Marpa the Translator was Milarepa’s teacher. He
walked all the way from Tibet to India three times in
order to get the teachings. Once when he was re-
turning from India, he was with a companion whom
he met every so often to compare who was getting
the most teachings. His companion became jealous
because he felt that Marpa was getting more. When
they were in a boat in the middle of a turbulent river,
his friend took all of the texts that Marpa had col-
lected and threw them overboard. Talk about an
opportunity for tonglen! Marpa didn’t exactly feel
friendly toward this man. But he realized when he got
back to Tibet that he had understood something
about all of those teachings in all of those books. He
really didn’t need it all written down. He had under-
stood something; he had digested something. The
teachings and himself had become one.
Each of us has also understood something, and
that’s what we’ll take away from our study and prac-
tice of these teachings. These are things that are
going to be part of our being now, part of the way that
we see things and hear things and smell things.
We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and “get
Train Wholeheartedly 203