The Rare Chance: Meeting a Buddha Face to Face

It’s amazing to me to read about the ancient Chan masters of China. This is a country I’ve lived in and a tradition I’ve studied. People who yearned to receive teachings would wander in the wilderness. They would trek across the entire country on foot, and they would take up into a monastery during the rainy season because it was too perilous to travel because of weather conditions. People really endured crazy hardships to just go and find a good, high quality teaching. And here we are now: you can order a boxed set of CDs on SoundsTrue, click a button, they deliver it to your door and you can listen to world-class Dharma talks. You can get on tricycle.org and hear a series of Dharma talks and teachings and pointing-out instructions. 

All of that is remarkable, but It’s especially beautiful and potent to run into a living, breathing manifestation of the practice, a person who really embodies the fruits and the maturity of the practice. And there is a term that I really like in the Tibetan tradition which can translate in English as “the rare chance.” The Rare Chance is the chance we have to actually encounter a living, breathing Buddha, we could say, or more neutrally, a Holy Being. And just being around them, we sense what is possible in this practice, not just what is possible in the practice but we sense at a deeper level who we actually are.

I have a story about this. I remember my first conscious encounter with one such being. This being is David, and I met him when I was 19 years old. I was invited to his house, and he was just hanging out casual like and I was struck immediately by his presence. 

There was an air of just ridiculous happiness about him. There was a sense of freedom, profound presence. And his attentiveness to me — our conversation, our interaction — it really disarmed me. 

And all these years later, I remember one of the mind-boggling things he said. I was at the time a troubled teenager who was trying to work out my fraught kharma with Christianity, and of course we were talking about God, and I said, “David, who is God?” And he paused and kind of took a breath and he said something like, “I know enough to know that any thought I have about God is fundamentally inaccurate.” And it wasn’t his words in that moment, although his words were cool and his words have stood the test of time by Dharmic standards, but it was the feeling in the air after he said it. It was this sense of openness, of mystery, of total unknowing that just I’ve never tasted anything like it. 

Up until that moment I had a notion that if we didn’t know such an important thing like who God was, I’d just be riddled with anxiety until I figured it out. I’d be a dysfunctional human being. And here I was, meeting my Rare Chance, seeing a living, breathing being manifesting the exact opposite of what I believed to be true. He was showing me how wrong-headed my idea was.

I thought not-knowing would make me dysfunctional and reduce me to just total paralysis in life, and here I was in the presence of a being who was Unknowing. In Zen terms, he was the manifestation of “don’t-know” mind: I don’t know the answer to life’s mysteries, but I am accustomed to the free-fallingness of my life. I’m accustomed to the sense of free-fall. And in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s words, “The good news about the free fall is that there is no bottom.” We just keep falling and we can learn to appreciate the deliciousness of the free fall.

I’m using words to describe this moment years later, but in the moment it just got into my body, it got into my bloodstream, and it’s as if the potency of this being’s mindstream cleared me out. It just totally opened me up and gave me an insight into a possibility that was not possible prior to that moment. That is a little sketch of my first Rare Chance in life that was consciously met.

It’s so sweet to me, just remembering it now. I’ve been on the path for over 20 years and I’m one of those people who kind of after that seed was planted, I was just voraciously devouring books, traveling the world looking for teachers, giving my whole heart to my daily practice and every moment in between hopefully, and without that meeting, without that encounter with a living being I’m quite sure my fate would have been different.

It’s as if all of the books in the world, all of the teachings via the internet, via books, could not equal that single encounter which totally broke my heart open. 

And this is the Rare Chance spoken of in the Tibetan tradition. So here’s what I want to say to you, here is why we are talking about it and we’re going to do some practice with it momentarily as we do on the show. If you have had such a choice encounter already, if you are one of these fortunate beings who’s had an encounter with a living being who manifests the choicest fruits of this practice, then I want to take a little time really watering that seed, deeply appreciating that encounter. Because really that encounter is the foundation of everything that unfolds after it.

If you don’t feel like you’ve had that real life encounter with this type of being just yet, you can simply ask for it. There was never a more opportune moment on the planet than this moment right now to open up your heart and really ask for this, for a being to come into your life and really change you at the deepest level. 

And I might add that it’s not the person who changes you. It’s something much deeper, much more profound, much more nameless than any human form. It’s what’s behind these holy beings that makes them holy. In Christian terms, it is the light of Christ that pervades all of manifestation. In Buddhist terms, it is the Mother of the buddhas. It is the perfection of wisdom that enlightens and quickens these beings that makes them holy. So I’m not here to create a culture of teacher worship but rather to really acknowledge these beings as vessels of the timeless, formless wisdom and compassionate action that is the Dharma.

I’ll give Dan Brown the final words here. He speaks of the Rare Chance in his beautiful book Pointing Out the Great Way, and he writes, “The entire path towards enlightenment begins to ripen from this moment of interest generated during the Auspicious Meeting.”

The auspicious meeting is none other than the Rare Chance, and when we are gifted with this auspicious meeting, an interest in the Dharma is born, a seed is planted and from that seed begins to ripen the entire path of enlightenment. It’s my experience that wherever we are on the path, some seem to be far ahead, some seem to come long afterward, but we are all very much walking the path of enlightenment, and there is an unspeakable grace drawing us towards it.