The Wit and Wisdom of Anam Thubten
The Will Rogers of our time, at least for Western Buddhists
Americans understand samsara. It’s country and Western music. —Anam Thubten
Meet Anam Thubten, one of the three Vajrayana Buddhist teachers from whom I take every opportunity to learn. The others are Lama Surya Das and Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Their life stories are accessible as well as compelling. I’m writing this post about Thubten because he’s less well-known and maybe most accessible via his spoken one-liners, some of which I’ve collected and will share.
As I began to write this, I realized he’s the modern Western Buddhist version of Will Rogers. For those too young to remember, Rogers was a master of the witty/wise one-liner and most famous for (not rephrased for today’s sensibilities):
I never met a man I didn’t like.
Thubten was born in 1968 and spent his early years with his grandparents in a tiny village in the Golog region of Eastern Tibet. He says the most excitement came on those rare occasions when a pickup truck drove by. Life would halt, and residents would watch the dust cloud. He was identified as a tulku (reincarnation of a great teacher) and, at age ten, began monastic life and formal Buddhist education.
It wasn’t until 1991 that he managed to leave Chinese-occupied Tibet and spend a year in India before Lama Tharchin Rinpoche invited him to teach in Northern California. Thubten founded the Dharmata Foundation, which operates out of a building in Richmond, California, with additional sanghas throughout the United States as well as in Canada, France, Mexico, South Korea, and Mexico.
He’s married with two children, lives in the East Bay area, and travels worldwide to teach. He describes his wonderment when first arriving in Northern California. (All Thubten quotes in this post are paraphrased from my notes and memory.)
Tibet, at the time, was truly a third-world country—poor and dirty. In the United States, everything was clean and new. It seemed as though the streets were paved with gold. My favorite place to go was McDonald’s. Everything was so shiny. I loved to sit and look at it. I didn’t have to pay anything.
He eventually got the message that in Northern California, it’s not cool to love McDonald’s. He recently said that if he prayed, he’d pray to be reborn in Northern California, so I guess it’s safe to say he loves his householder yogi/teacher life there.
With his background, Thubten could be known as Tulku Anam Thubten Rinpoche. Via a written question, I asked him during a retreat why he didn’t use the honorific “rinpoche” and didn’t expect people to stand when he entered and left a room. His answer:
I don’t know about “rinpoche.” Things are more informal here. What’s the saying about Italy? [I’m sure he was thinking of “When in Rome….”] I don’t use it in writing, but it’s OK sometimes. About standing up, it’s a sign of respect, and I think the respect should be for other members of the sangha. If you want a sangha where you stand up for the teacher, maybe you want another.
The informality is part of what I love about Thubten but also contributes to why his teaching isn’t better known. His all-volunteer staff is relaxed and not the most efficient. No one seems to be in charge of publicity and social media. In fact, the best way to browse the many books he has written in English is through his Amazon author’s page.
Now for the fun part—fragments from my collection (not all come with a laugh, but all are insightful):
In awareness meditation, it’s like you’re a babysitter for the mind, except you don’t get paid.
Treat your mind like your roommate. When you wake up daily, you ask: “Are you going to be nice to me today?”
It’s not that the mind is a bad thing. Who/what would get enlightened if we had no mind?
Shantideva taught that, through the power of the Buddha within, sometimes we have a flash of virtuous thought like a brief beam of light on a wall that has long been black.
Bodhicitta is courage, love, wisdom, and compassion.
Bodhicitta is the primal impulse of humanity.
Bodhicitta is not abstract but an everyday emotion that can be developed.
Spiritual practice doesn't develop anything. It removes the dust covering up the mirror within.
The Buddha within is like the Michelangelo quote about an angel in every rock; he just needs to remove the outer part.
If everyone was a Buddha, the world would be like a happy vegetable garden—boring.
There’s happiness in suffering, divinity in the devil.
Put one foot in relative truth where everything is true and one foot in ultimate truth where almost nothing is true.
Human beings need something tangible, like a sacred image, to remind them of the ultimate truth.
Samsara is a metaphorical knot, a knot of our channels. Spiritual beings are aware of the knot.
All of Tantric Buddhism is about loosening the channels.
We exist in a symbiotic relationship between mind and body. Recognizing the role of the body differentiates Tantra (Vajrayana) from other forms of Buddhism.
The inner poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance are not intrinsically bad. They're sacred compost, sacred fertilizer.
We’re born pretty pure but also with karmic baggage (a karmic suitcase) of self-awareness, ego, greed, and hatred.
We inherit our parents’ pride, prejudice, hatred, jealousy, guilt, etc.
Ego is an altered state of mind. Nondual awareness is the unaltered state (rigpa).
We already have wisdom. We need to discover how to tune in to it.
Dharma practice is guarding the mind. When you have negative (unhelpful) thoughts, you're aware of them and know how to loosen the knot, maybe simply by awareness. The mind undoes its own knot.
The nuggets above are all from one four-day retreat and one of his Sunday dharma talks. I didn’t need to search further through my notes. I want to be clear, though, that his teachings are more than pithy one-liners. His scholarship comes out more fully in his books, which are deep but written in clear language. His The Fragrance of Emptiness is the best commentary I’ve seen on the Heart Sutra. Into the Haunted Ground introduces the reader to the powerful practice of Chöd. He’s a prolific author, so there are many more.
If Anam Thubten interests you, browse the Dharmata Foundation website as well as his books. Twice monthly, he leads a free meditation followed by a dharma talk on Zoom. The schedule is on the Dharmata calendar. There’s also a link there to subscribe to his mailing list.
And check out this tribute in free verse that I mentioned in the caption of the photo.
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The musical bonus: a classic expression of samsara
Really love this post. What a precious teacher we have in Anam Thubten. I also remember him mentioning, during one of his talks, the “American highway mudra.” We all lost it.