Today he could barely make it to the end of a sentence without exploding in laughter. He told us that after reading Shantideva’s explanation of the Bodhisattva’s sleeping position he watched a lot of YouTube videos in an attempt to find this perfect technique, but it only ended in snoring problems - huge laughter. He openly quotes movies like Lord Of The Rings and The Lion King, while his metaphors linking cooking and Dharma’s symbiosis come directly from Ratatouille. Right in the middle of a long meditation, to a silent room of hundreds, he suddenly spoke in a deep echoing voice, “What are you all thinking about?” Huge laughter again, rising and growing as the joke’s truth settled in. And then, in a super serious voice he told us that knowing the real difference between a good action and bad one is like vanilla ice cream. We can be told what it tastes like, we can imagine all the vanilla ice creams of the world in our mind, but we could never really know its real essence until we try it for ourselves. Until we experience it all we have are just concepts. Like Gandolf says when we should just “follow our nose”. Laughter and applause again. He uses real life strung together with stunning genuine clarity to explain the most complicated situations of mind with ease and humor. He takes the seriousness out of the room with one fell swoop, replacing it with gentleness and a sense that all things are possible if we can just relax and enjoy ourselves. This is a teacher with real understanding of the Dharma, not just rattling off terms like a machine, but instead breaking it down into relatable, direct and simple understanding. Jokes and seriousness. Compassion and understanding. Dharma and Ice cream. The One and Only Karmapa.
