Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Chapter 3. The Hallucination of the Real I
If modern technology is used in a positive way it has the potential to benefit billions of
people and animals in the world. But used in the wrong way it can bring unbelievably
disastrous harm to billions of beings. This is especially true of digital technology, the Internet
and so forth, which has the power to benefit immediately, sending images and words all over
the world in a second, but at the same time it also has the power to do great damage,
harming billions of people, polluting their minds, destroying their lives. It all depends on
how such things are used.
In a positive way the benefits from life to life are unbelievable. Watching His Holiness
online, for instance, allows the mind to develop like a lotus opening, bringing greater
happiness, more success from life to life, for hundreds of lives, thousands of lives, millions
and billions of lives. It leads to the total liberation from the oceans of samsaric suffering and
ultimately to the total elimination of all obscurations and the completion of all realizations,
to that peerless happiness, where there is no trace of ignorance, no obscurations. Therefore,
we must be very careful how we use modern technology.
Buddhism comes to Tibet
In Tibetan Buddhism there are four traditions: Nyingma, Kagyü, Sakya and Gelug. When the
Nalanda Monastery abbot Shantarakshita went to Tibet to purify the land, he built the first
monastery in Tibet in Samye. However, each night, after the human beings had erected the
monastery walls during the day, the spirits would tear them down so that the next day the
people would have to rebuild them. This happened again and again.
So King Trisong Detsen invited the powerful yogi Padmasambhava from India to visit Tibet.
There is a whole book—probably several books—on the life story of Padmasambhava.
When he got to Tibet, he arose in the aspect of an enlightened wrathful deity and hooked
the spirits. Three ran away according to the karma of the Tibetans, but he subdued the other
twelve and made them pledge to protect and not harm the Buddhadharma in Tibet and to
protect its practitioners as well. Having been subdued, those twelve spirits became Dharma
protectors. Since then, Tibetans have been making offerings and doing prayers to those
protectors and asking them for help. From that, Buddhism became firmly established in
Tibet.
Thus the Buddhadharma came to Tibet from India, from Nalanda Monastery—not Nalanda
in France but Nalanda in India. And speaking about Nalanda in France, that is now a real
monastery, not a diluted one, because they now do the three main practices of a monastery
there: the twice-monthly confession ceremonies, the yearly abiding in summer retreat and
following Vinaya. 15 It also fulfills the description of a monastery in that it is isolated from
villages and crowds. In Nalanda in India there were three hundred pandits. After the Buddha
achieved enlightenment and revealed the teachings, great pandits like Asanga and Nagarjuna,
who was like a second Buddha, came. These great pandits were holy beings who actualized
the path. They were not just scholars, not just experts in words whose minds remained
ordinary—these three hundred holy beings all actualized the path.
The Buddha’s teachings are contained in the Kangyur, a collection of more than a hundred
volumes, and the commentaries to the Buddha’s teachings by those great Indian pandits are
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