No self, no problem

In the mod­ern world, pre­dom­i­nantly dri­ven by self-​​interests, the Buddhist notion that dis­solv­ing the “self” would improve our lives seems invit­ing, but how does that actu­ally play out — is that really pos­si­ble? Producer Julie Adler poses this ques­tion to Anam Thubten Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama liv­ing in the West who has writ­ten a book pre­cisely on this subject.

“Many peo­ple look for free­dom through accu­mu­lat­ing either mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions or spir­i­tual knowl­edge. These searches amount to noth­ing more than a don­key chas­ing after a dan­gled car­rot. When we wake up to that truth in this very moment we real­ize that what we were seek­ing was already here. The ques­tion is, ‘Can we wake up to this truth?’ It might be much eas­ier than we think. Remember, great ancient mas­ters often said that we don’t real­ize the truth because it is too sim­ple and too close to us. When we finally real­ize it, we will be shocked by two things: how much time we wasted search­ing and how easy it was after all.”

Born in 1968 and raised in the remote Golok region of Amdo, in north­east­ern Tibet, Anam Thubten was rec­og­nized at an early age as the incar­na­tion of the great yogi Anam Lama Choying Phuntsok (also known as Anam Tsetsampa). The young tulku began his for­mal Buddhist stud­ies at the age of 10. In the course of his stud­ies, in the Nyingma tra­di­tion, he devel­oped a spe­cial affin­ity towards a very inspir­ing teacher and her­mit named Lama Tsurlo. Lama Tsurlo’s kind­ness and wis­dom gave him the firm base to advance in his Dharma prac­tice. In 1991, Anam Thubten Rinpoche escaped Tibet and fled to India.

After a year in exile, Anam Thubten vis­ited a num­ber of Buddhist pil­grim­age sites and then moved to California and at the invi­ta­tion of Lama Tarchin Rinpoche, became one of the main teach­ers at Pema Osel Ling near Santa Cruz. Since them, he has been teach­ing and con­duct­ing retreats all over the US and he is the founder of the Dharmata Foundation and the author of var­i­ous arti­cles and books in both the Tibetan and English lan­guage. His first book in English is No Self, No Problem, released by Snow Lion Publications. Anam Thubten’s teach­ings mainly draw from pra­jña­paramita, the time­less non-​​conceptual wis­dom of Buddha. He cur­rently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.