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The great gift of the Buddha is that he just looked at life as it is. By looking deeply into life, he understood it deeply, but most importantly, he understood how, even in the midst of it, one can still become a full human being, realizing all the positive, wholesome potential of the human mind and heart. We do not have to be slaves of our environment; we can always find freedom—it’s always available to us.
“Whatever has to happen, let it happen!"
“Whatever the situation is, it’s fine!"
“I don’t need anything whatsoever!”
~ Tsangpo Gyare, 12th century Tibetan Buddhist Ascetic
If we live the three fierce mantras, we will have the capacity to live wisely, intelligently, and compassionately in the midst of all kinds of difficulty and challenges. Our minds will not have anxiety or fear. Our minds will not have sadness. Our minds will not have anger or resentment. In the face of the instability of our times, if we still feel these emotions, please listen deeply to these three fierce mantras. Most importantly, take them into your heart, your life, and practice them.
Mantras are words of power. There are positive mantras and negative mantras. Positive mantras create good mind states, while negative ones can destroy. These are the fierce ones—they can destroy obstacles. They can blow things up, get things out of the way. They're very powerful words. These fierce mantras have a specific purpose: to destroy something. They are words of power.
The fact that Tsangpo Gyare called them “three fierce mantras” tells you that he gave them to us because they have the power to destroy obstacles, afflictions, and all the things that disturb us. Fierce mantras are meant to get rid of all the things agitating us. They are direct and powerful—like thunderbolts.
Whatever has to happen, let it happen.
This is so difficult for us. It's so much against the grain of our culture, because we are raised to think that if we don't want something to happen, we should do everything we can to prevent it. We are masters of an unwillingness to accept reality, and to accept that our ability to affect reality may be very limited, if possible at all.
"Whatever has to happen, let it happen." This is a mantra about our movement into the future. The world we live in often comes with many expectations: how we want life to be, how we want people to act, how we want situations to unfold, how we want the world to be, and how we want things to turn out. We have countless expectations about how things should go, don’t we?
This leads us to two paradoxes of Buddhism, which are often at the root of suffering: hope and fear. We hope that things will turn out the way we want them to, but we’re deeply afraid that they won’t. We go back and forth between these two extremes, caught emotionally. This can apply to big things, like the state of the world, human relationships, or how people treat each other. It can also apply to the smaller things, like how our day unfolds or how things go with our children.
We have expectations about how we want things to go, how we expect them to be. But what if we could simply say, "Whatever has to happen, let it happen"?
Can we do that? Can we simply accept what's happening right now, without resistance? This is not about being passive. Fear, anger, sadness, and despair are forms of resistance. Even though things are unfolding, we resist them—we don’t want it to be that way. And this resistance creates negative emotions and drains our energy. It holds us back from fully engaging with life.
What’s essential is that this resistance prevents us from responding wisely, intelligently, and compassionately. It prevents us from meeting life with presence. We need to acknowledge that life is unfolding, and it is what it is. Can we be in harmony with that unfolding, while still engaging with the circumstances in a way that is wise and compassionate? We’re not simply saying, "Whatever will be, will be." That's a passive surrender to whatever happens. Instead, we can accept what's happening without resistance and still respond in a thoughtful, intelligent way.
This is a mindset that allows us to free our energy. As Shantideva said, "If there's something to be done, do it. If there's nothing to be done, accept it." This is the essence of intelligent living.
In understanding the unfolding of life, we also understand cause and effect. We see how various causes and conditions bring about the present moment. Life is always unfolding in response to these causes and conditions. The world is constantly in play, full of variables, and we can’t control everything. We can’t stop ourselves from aging or from getting sick. We can take preventive measures, but life will unfold as it will.
Can we protect our children from the world? Can we make things turn out exactly the way we want? We can do our best, but in the end, we must understand karma and causes and conditions. The world is the way it is because of causes and conditions—not because of some divine will. Understanding this gives us the ability to truly accept what is.
So, “Whatever has to happen, let it happen” means fully accepting the unfolding of our life. It means not being separate from it. Too often, we live as if we’re outsiders to our own lives—observing rather than participating. But life is happening, and we are part of it. We can engage with it as it unfolds.
Whatever happens, let it happen. This is not a mindset of fear, despair, or judgment. It’s not saying, "It shouldn’t be this way" when it clearly is. It’s an open, accepting, and intelligent way of living. This mindset frees us from the grip of negative emotions and allows us to move with life rather than resist it.
Whatever the situation, it's fine.
This relates to the present moment. The first mantra was about accepting the unfolding of life—whatever is happening, let it happen. But now, we’re looking at the current situation. Whatever the situation is, it is fine.
This doesn’t mean everything is good or desirable—it means it is what it is. The situation just is, and in that sense, it’s fine. It's not fine from a moral or ethical standpoint, but it is fine because it’s the way things are. The world, as it is, is unfolding according to causes and conditions. We don’t have to resist it or judge it.
For example, life might be filled with suffering, difficulty, and pain. But to say, “It’s fine” isn’t to minimize the suffering—it’s about acknowledging that the situation simply is what it is. We have to stop resisting life as it is. Many of us resist life because we think it shouldn’t be this way. We may think, "I shouldn’t be living this way. Things shouldn’t be happening the way they are."
However, when we accept that everything that has happened has happened because of causes and conditions, we stop judging and resisting. We take full responsibility for where we are in our lives and for the situations around us. This doesn’t mean we’re passive or indifferent. It means we stop fighting what is and start engaging with it in a meaningful way.
I don’t need anything whatsoever.
This mantra calls us to realize that happiness doesn’t depend on external conditions. Whatever happens, whatever the situation, we can find contentment in the present moment without needing anything to be different.
Please take a moment to ask yourself: Is this the way I live my life? Do I really believe that I don’t need anything to be happy? Do I truly believe that I don’t need anything to be happy? The emphasis here is on "things." Can I say that about myself, that I know inside, of all the things in my life—not just the physical things, but also relationships, all the things in my life—can I sit here and say, "Yes, if I didn’t have any of them, I could still be happy"?
There's great freedom in realizing that I don’t need anything to be happy, because in the world of things—physical things, jobs, relationships—there is impermanence, right? There’s coming and going, gain and loss, instability. There are all kinds of things in the world of things: people's homes get burned, there’s social dislocation, wars, violence, famine. People lose everything; they have to leave their things behind. In many different situations in the world, if it happened to me, could I still know that the essential thing cannot be taken from me? I carry that, because I carry it within.
"We are aware that real happiness depends primarily on our mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that we can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that we already have more than enough conditions to be happy."
~Excerpt from the Seventh Mindfulness Training: Dwelling Happily in the Present Moment
Meditation Practice
The most direct way to learn these mantras is on the cushion. You might find that when you sit down to meditate, no matter how you expected it to go, it happens in its own way. One of the big things we learn on the cushion is that we can let things happen. We can let thoughts arise, feelings arise, bodily sensations arise, and we don’t have to repress them. We don’t have to control or manipulate them. We can learn to let them be, to see them clearly for what they are, and not grasp at them or avert them.
On the cushion, we may get in touch with feelings, mind states, or physical states that we might not consider "fine." This means we may think, “I don’t want to feel this, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to have this memory.” But we’re on the cushion, and it’s clear that all of this is going on in our minds. We have tremendous capacity inwardly to learn, "Whatever the situation is, it’s fine, it’s workable."
When we practice in meditation, we learn to deal with all the feelings that arise. You realize all the resistance, all the resistance to the feelings, is going on in my mind. Even though I may think it’s about the outer world, it’s a process in my mind.
The wonderful thing about meditation is that if you do it right, you take a posture and don’t move. At home, maybe we can move, but when we can’t move, it forces us to deal with things we don’t usually deal with. We have to deal with discomfort—physical discomfort, emotional discomfort. We might keep having a recurring memory, or this drama keeps coming up. We’re uncomfortable, but we learn not to move. That’s our usual go-to: "I’ll just change the channel, I’ll do something else." But no, if we sit and hold it in mindfulness and awareness, we can see what it is, experience it, and realize that we can hold it. We can sit with what we’re calling discomfort, or any of the afflictive emotions, and realize they don’t kill us. Shantideva said, “They don’t have knives. They don’t have swords. They can’t hurt me.” Physical things can hurt me, but emotional things don’t have the power to hurt me unless I turn them into weapons. They’re just feeling states, thoughts, memories—mind stuff. If we can see clearly what’s going on and learn to be present to them and understand their nature, we don’t have to be disturbed by them because they’re all arising where? In our minds.
Through deepening meditative practice, we develop the capacity to deal with life. It’s my mind that’s dealing with life, not my elbow, not my nose. My mind is projecting life, interpreting life. Meditation helps us develop the inner ability to have clarity and strength. When we’re out in the world and situations constantly unfold, we have the inner strength and certainty to respond skillfully. It’s a great strength.
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