That people are unknowing
does not mean that they are
unknowing like cows or
goats. Even ignorant people look for a
pathway to reality. But,
searching for it, they often
misunderstand what they
encounter. They pursue names and
categories instead of going
beyond that name to that which is
real.
-Digha Nikaya- from "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft,
2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications
Whatever attitudes we
habitually use toward ourselves, we will
use on others, and
whatever attitudes we habitually use
toward others, we will
use on ourselves. The situation is
comparable to our serving
food to ourselves and to other
people from the same
bowl. Everyone ends up eating the same
thing--we must examine
carefully what we are dishing out.
-Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to
Happiness"
While practicing
generosity, we should always remember how
very fortunate we are to
have this opportunity.
-Gomo Tulku, "Becoming
a Child of the Buddhas"
"The bird of
paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp."
John
Berry
We make every effort to keep things as they
are, because human beings, alone, lament transience. Yet no matter how we
grieve or protest,
there is no way to impede the flow of
anything. If we but see things as they are and flow with them, we may find
enjoyment in transience.
Because human life is transient, all manner of
figures are woven into its fabric. Shundo
Aoyama, Zen Seeds
Heedful
among the heedless,
wakeful among those asleep,
just as the fast horse advances,
leaving the weak behind:
so the wise.
-Dhammapada, 2,
translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Just
like a blossom,
bright colored
and full of scent:
a well-spoken word
is fruitful
when well carried out.
-Dhammapada 52,
translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with
one, and a lily with the other. -Chinese proverb
In my
own experience, the period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the
most difficult period in one's life. ...Through a difficult period, you can
learn, you can develop inner strength, determination, and courage to face the
problem. Who gives you this chance? Your enemy.
-His Holiness the
Dalai Lama
From
"The Pocket Dalai Lama," edited by Mary Craig, 2002. Reprinted by
arrangement with Shambhala Publications
It is
very important that you do not compare your actions to your partner's or judge
your partner's behavior as unskillful. Rather, focus on your own actions and
take responsibility for them. Recall those times when you looked into your
partner's eyes and saw the pain you caused this person you love to suffer. If
you can admit your own faults, if you can see how hurtful your actions were and
tap into a sense of concern for your partner's well-being, then compassion and
loving-friendliness will flow.
-Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"
Copyright Wisdom
Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist
Inspirations," edited by Josh Bartok, with permission of Wisdom
Publications
Friends,
I know nothing which brings suffering as does an untamed, uncontrolled,
unattended and unrestrained heart. Such a heart brings suffering.
-Anguttara
Nikaya
From
"Teachings of the Buddha," edited by Jack Kornfield, 1993. Reprinted
by arrangement with Shambhala Publications
Bereavement
can force you to look at your life directly, compelling you to find a purpose
in it where there may not have been one before. When suddenly you find yourself
alone after the death of someone you love, it can feel as if you are being
given a new life and are being asked: “What will you do with this life? And why
do you wish to continue living?”
My heartfelt
advice to those in the depths of grief and despair after losing someone they
dearly loved is to pray for help and strength and grace. Pray that you will
survive and discover the richest possible meaning to the new life you now find
yourself in. Be vulnerable and receptive, be courageous and patient. Above all,
look into your life to find ways of sharing your love more deeply with others
now. Rigpa
The
more often you listen to your discriminating awareness, the more easily you
will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even
laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are.
Gradually
you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the
dark emotions that have ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the
greatest miracle of all.
The
Tibetan mystic, Tertön Sogyal, said that he was not really impressed by someone
who could turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle,
he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion. –Rigpa
Someone who is about to admonish another must realize within
himself five qualities before doing so [that he may be able to say], thus:
"In due season will I speak, not out of season. In truth I will speak, not
in falsehood. Gently will I speak, not harshly. To his profit will I speak, not
to his loss. With kindly intent will I speak, not in anger."
-"Vinaya
Pitaka," translated by F.S. Woodward
Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood
and used, can turn out to be an unexpected source of strength. Gesar was the
great warrior king of Tibet,
whose escapades form the greatest epic of Tibetan literature. Gesar
means “indomitable,” someone who can never be put down. From the moment Gesar
was born, his evil uncle Trotung tried all kinds of means to kill him. But with
each attempt Gesar only grew stronger and stronger.
For the Tibetans, Gesar is not only a martial
warrior but also a spiritual one. To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a
special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and
fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are
courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental
fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties. –Rigpa
If
happiness hasn't been recognized when alone, a group of people will be a cause
of distraction.
-Adept Godrakpa,
"Hermit of Go Cliffs"
There is no
pleasure without some degree of pain.
There is no pain without some amount of pleasure.
-Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English" Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from
"Daily
Negligence
produces a lot of dirt. As in a house, so in the mind, only a very little dirt
collects in a day or two, but if it goes on for many years, it will grow into a
vast heap of refuse.
-Commentary to
Sutta Nipata
From
"365 Buddha: Daily Meditations," edited by Jeff Schmidt
Anger
is the real destroyer of our good human qualities; an enemy with a weapon
cannot destroy these qualities, but anger can. Anger is our real enemy.
-His Holiness the
Dalai Lama
If
false thinking suddenly stops for an instant, and you see through your own
mind, the vastness of its original perfect light, the purity of its original
state, no thing in it at all, this is called awakening. There is nothing to be
awakened or cultivated other than this mind.
-Han-shan
From
"The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999. Reprinted by
arrangement with Shambhala Publications
"But
what makes these 'experts' preach their own opinion and call it truth?"
asked the inquirer. "Is it an inheritance of humankind to do this, or is
it merely something they gain satisfaction from?"
"Apart from consciousness," answered the Buddha, "no absolute
truths exist. False reasoning declares one view to be true and another view
wrong. It is delight in their dearly held opinions that makes them assert that
anyone who disagrees is bound to come to a bad end. But no true seeker becomes
embroiled in all this. Pass by peacefully and go a stainless way, free from
theories, lusts, and dogmas."
-Majjhima Nikaya
From "Buddha
Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with
Shambhala Publications
Invitation to Meditate
Everything can be used as an invitation to
meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing
in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way
the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert for any sign of beauty
or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments, to “the news that is
always arriving out of silence.”
Slowly, you will become a master of your own
bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to
elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.
--Remember the View
Rigpa, Glimpse of the Day
September
22. 2003
All the spiritual teachers of humanity have told
us the same thing, that the purpose of life on earth is to achieve union
with our fundamental, enlightened nature.
From a Rigpa thought of the day
One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the
nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.” I cannot say it enough: Our true
nature and the nature of all beings is not something extraordinary.
The irony is that it is our so-called ordinary
world that is extraordinary, a fantastic, elaborate hallucination of the
deluded vision of samsara. It is this “extraordinary” vision that blinds us to
the “ordinary,” natural, inherent nature of mind. Imagine if the buddhas were
looking down at us now: How they would marvel sadly at the lethal ingenuity and
intricacy of our confusion!
***
The realm of reality is as vast as cosmic space; it
is the knowing mind of sentient beings that is small. Just as long as you do
not become egotistic and selfish, you will be ever sated with the spiritual
food of nirvana.
-Pao-chih
Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds cannot stay
still for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction? They
are so restless and preoccupied that sometimes I think that living in a city in
the modern world, we are already like the tormented beings in the intermediate
state after death, where the consciousness is said to be agonizingly restless.
We are fragmented into so many different aspects.
We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should
identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and
feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves
scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.
Rigpa
thought for the day
Wars arise from a failure to understand one another's humanness.
Instead of summit meetings, why not have families meet for a picnic and get to
know each other while the children play together?
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1981
If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom
method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become
enlightened.
Our minds, however, are riddled with confusion and
doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to human evolution
than is desire or attachment. Our society promotes cleverness instead of
wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of
our intelligence. We have become so falsely “sophisticated” and neurotic that
we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego’s
desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit
of true knowledge.
This form of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby
emperor of samsara, served by a flock of “experts” who teach us not the
open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was necessary for testing
and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive form of doubt that
leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live
by. **
Hatred can be the greatest stumbling block to the development of
compassion and happiness. If you can learn to develop patience and tolerance
towards your enemies, then everything becomes much easier—your compassion
towards all others begins to flow naturally.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
If you wish to
understand yourself, you must succeed in doing so in the midst of all kinds of
confusions and upsets. Don't make the mistake of sitting dead in the cold ashes
of a withered tree.
-Emyo From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas
Cleary, 1999.
Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this
is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.
Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how
to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she
drew water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself
in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.
And
better than a hundred years
lived without seeing
the Deathless state, is
one day
lived seeing
the Deathless state.
-Dhammapada, 114,
translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect,
we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence. In
fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations. There is a
Tibetan saying: “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”
Patrul Rinpoche said: “The logical mind seems interesting,
but it is the seed of delusion.” People can become obsessed with their own
theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet we say: “Theories are like
patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”
There is no evil like hatred.
And no fortitude like patience.
-Santideva,
"Bodhicaryavatara"
The practice of mindfulness, of bringing the
scattered mind home, and so of bringing the different aspects of our being into
focus, is called Peacefully Remaining or Calm Abiding.
All the fragmented aspects of ourselves, which had
been at war, settle and dissolve and become friends. In that settling we begin
to understand ourselves more, and sometimes even have glimpses of the radiance
of our fundamental nature.
'I am breathing in and making my whole body calm and at peace. I
am breathing out and making my whole body calm and at peace.' This is how one
practices." -The Sutra
on Full Awareness of Breathing
Nothing has any inherent existence
of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent
existence is what we call “emptiness.” Think of a tree. When you think of a
tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level
it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately
it has no independent existence.
When you contemplate it, you will find that it
dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across
the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the
soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight
and starlight and sunlight—all form part of this tree.
As you begin to think more and more about the tree,
you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what
it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at
every moment its nature is subtly changing. This is what we mean when we say
things are empty, that they have no independent existence.
Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much,
whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a
good life.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
None of the means
employed to acquire religious merit, O monks, has a sixteenth part of the value
of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, which is freedom of heart, absorbs them
all; it glows, it shines, it blazes forth.
-"Itivuttaka,"
translated by Justin H. Moore
From
"Teachings of the Buddha," edited by Jack Kornfield, 1993. Reprinted
by arrangement with Shambhala Publications
The cells of our body are dying, the neurons in our
brain are decaying, even the expressions on our face are always changing,
depending on our mood. What we call our basic character is only a “mindstream,”
nothing more. Today we feel good because things are going well; tomorrow we
feel the opposite. Where did that good feeling go?
What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts
and emotions: Do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next?
The mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream.
Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the
future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it,
becomes the past.
The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.
***
Everything that we see around us is seen as it is
because we have repeatedly solidified our experience of inner and outer reality
in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this has led to the mistaken
assumption that what we see is objectively real. In fact, as we go further
along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed
perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or of matter or of even
ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call
“heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up. As William Blake said:
If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.
***
We live under an assumed identity, in a neurotic
fairy-tale world with no more reality than the Mock Turtle in Alice
in Wonderland. Hypnotized by the thrill of building, we have
raised the houses of our lives on sand.
This world can seem marvelously convincing until
death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. And what will
happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?
***
Just as Buddha said that of all the buddhas who
attained enlightenment, not one accomplished it without relying on the master,
he also said: “It is only through devotion, and devotion alone, that you will
realize the absolute truth.”
So then, it is essential to know what real devotion
is. It is not mindless adoration; it is not abdication of your responsibility
to yourself, nor indiscriminately following of another’s personality or whim.
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted
in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and
intelligent.
***
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And sorrow will follow you As the wheel
follows the ox that draws the cart.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you As your
shadow, unshakeable.
THE BUDDHA
***
Buddha sat in serene and humble dignity on the
ground, with the sky above him and around him, as if to show us that in
meditation you sit with open, skylike attitude of mind, yet remain present,
earthed, and grounded. The sky is our absolute nature, which has no barriers
and is boundless, and the ground is our reality, our relative, ordinary
condition.
The posture we take when we meditate signifies that
we are linking absolute and relative, sky and ground, heaven and earth, like
two wings of a bird, integrating the skylike deathless nature of mind and the
ground of our transient, mortal nature.
***
Anyone looking honestly at life will see that we
live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity. Our minds are perpetually
shifting in and out of confusion and clarity. If we could be confused all the
time, that would at least make for some kind of clarity. What is really
baffling about life is that sometimes, despite all our confusion, we can also
be really wise!
This constant uncertainty may make everything seem
bleak and almost hopeless; but if you look more deeply at it, you will see that
its very nature creates “gaps,” spaces in which profound chances and
opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering—if, that is, they
can be seen and seized.
***
Nothing is born, nothing is destroyed. Away with
your dualism, your likes and dislikes. Every single thing is just the One Mind.
When you have perceived this, you will have mounted the Chariot of the Buddhas.
-Huang Po, "Zen Teaching of Huang
Po"
***
In his very first teaching, Buddha explained that
the root cause of suffering is ignorance. But where exactly is this ignorance?
And how does it display itself? Let’s take an everyday example. Think about
those people—we all know some—who are gifted with a remarkably powerful and
sophisticated intelligence. Isn’t it puzzling how, instead of helping them, as
you might expect, it seems only to make them suffer more? It is almost as if
their brilliance is directly responsible for their pain.
What is happening is quite clear: This intelligence
of ours is captured and held hostage by ignorance, which then makes use of it
freely for its own ends. This is how we can be extraordinarily intelligent and
yet absolutely wrong, at one and the same time.
***
Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature
of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene
happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday
situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or
seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling
into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace,
and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.
I think we do, sometimes, half understand these
glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to
comprehend them. Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more
deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and
subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we
try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing
experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the
darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and
repression of
who
we really are
.
***
Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
BUDDHA
***
A person of wisdom should be truthful, without arrogance,
without deceit, not slanderous and not hateful. The wise person should go
beyond the evil of greed and miserliness.
Do not get excited by what is old, do not be contented with what is new. Do not
grieve for what is lost or be controlled by desire.
-Sutta-nipata,
translated by H. Saddhatissa
***
Although the results of our actions may not have
matured yet, they will inevitably ripen, given the right conditions. Usually we
forget what we do, and it is only long afterward that the results catch up with
us. By then we are unable to connect them with their causes. “Imagine an
eagle,” says Jikmé Lingpa.” It is flying, high in the sky. It casts no shadow.
Nothing shows that it is there. Then suddenly it spies its prey, dives, and
swoops to the ground. And as it drops, its menacing shadow appears.”
***
The nature of
everything is illusory and ephemeral,
Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness,
Like they who lick the honey from a razor’s edge.
How pitiful are they who cling strongly to concrete reality:
Turn your attention within, my heart friends.
NYOSHUL
KHEN RINPOCHE
*** Lifetimes of ignorance
have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest
triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best
interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a
savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our
suffering.
Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have
been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless
terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich
romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead
vegetable.
***
You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible.
Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step
outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn not to want
what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.
-Bhanta
Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"
***
Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify
the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into
believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying
our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego
and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.
Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been
its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless
terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich
romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead
vegetable.
***
I always tell my students not to come out of
meditation too quickly. Allow a period of some minutes for the peace of the
practice of meditation to infiltrate your life. As my master, Dudjom Rinpoche,
said: “Don’t jump up and rush off, but mingle your mindfulness with everyday
life. Be like a man who’s fractured his skull, always careful in case someone
will touch him.”
***
As a single slab of rock
Won't budge in the wind,
So the wise are not moved
By praise,
By blame.
Like a deep lake,
Clear, unruffled, & calm;
So the wise become clear,
Calm,
On hearing words of the Dhamma.
-Dhammapada, 6, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
***
Worldly afflictions are as extensive as an ocean, noisy and
clamorous; but they all arise from the thoughts in your own mind. When not a
single thought is conceived, you are liberated from them all.
-Ta-t
***
Our mind is like an onion, and each day and month of practice
progressively peels away the layers of delusion.
-Geshe
Ngawang Dhargyey, "Advice From a Spiritual Friend"
***
The most important thing is not to get trapped in
what I see everywhere in the West, a “shopping mentality”: shopping around from
master to master, teaching to teaching, without any continuity or real,
sustained dedication to any one discipline. Nearly all the great spiritual
masters of all traditions agree that the essential thing is to master one way,
one path to the truth, by following one tradition with all your heart and mind
to the end of the spiritual journey, while, of course, remaining open and
respectful toward the insights of all others. In Tibet we used to say: “knowing one,
you accomplish all.” The modem faddish idea that we can always keep all our
options open and so never need commit ourselves to anything is one of the
greatest and most dangerous delusions of our culture, and one of ego’s most
effective ways of sabotaging our spiritual search.
***
The practice of mindfulness defuses our negativity,
aggression, and turbulent emotions, which may have been gathering power over
many lifetimes. Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it
is important to view them—your thoughts and whatever arises—with an acceptance
and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. Tibetan masters say
that this wise generosity has the flavor of boundless space, so warm and cozy
that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.
***
One of the major aims and purposes of religious practice for the
individual is an inner transformation from an undisciplined, untamed, and
unfocused state of mind towards one that is disciplined, tamed and balanced.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
Enlightenment for Gautama [the Buddha] felt as
though a prison which had confined him for thousands of lifetimes had broken
open. Ignorance had been the jailkeeper. Because of ignorance, his mind had
been obscured, just like the moon and stars hidden by the storm clouds. Clouded
by endless waves of deluded thoughts, the mind had falsely divided reality into
subject and object, self and others, existence and non-existence, birth and
death, and from these discriminations arose wrong views—the prisons of
feelings, craving, grasping, and becoming. The suffering of birth, old age,
sickness, and death only made the prison walls thicker. The only thing to do
was to seize the jailkeeper and see his true face. The jailkeeper was
ignorance. . . . Once the jailkeeper was gone, the jail would disappear and
never be rebuilt again.
THICH
NHAT HANH
THE BUDDHA’S
ENLlGHTENMENT
***
Taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly
freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of
permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built
everything. Slowly it dawns on us that all the heartache we have been through
from grasping at the ungraspable was, in the deepest sense, unnecessary.
At the beginning this too may be painful to accept,
because it seems so unfamiliar. But as we reflect, slowly our hearts and minds
go through a gradual transformation. Letting go begins to feel more natural,
and becomes easier and easier.
It may take a long time for the extent of our
foolishness to sink in, but the more we reflect, the more we develop the view
of letting go. It is then that a complete shift takes place in our way of
looking at everything.
THE DALAI LAMA
***
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection
You might as
well burst out laughing!
LONGCHENPA
***
One moon appears everywhere in all bodies of water; the moons in
all bodies of water are contained in one moon. This is a metaphor for one mind
producing myriad things and myriad things producing one mind. This refers to
dream illusions, flowers in the sky, half-seeming, half empty.
-Hsueh-yen
***
At the time of Buddha, there lived an old beggar
woman called Relying on Joy. She used to watch the kings, princes, and people
making offerings to Buddha and his disciples, and there was nothing she would
have liked more than to be able to do the same. But she could only beg enough
oil to fill a single lamp. However, as she placed it before Buddha she made
this wish: “I have nothing to offer but this tiny lamp. But through this
offering, in the future may I be blessed with the lamp of wisdom. May I free
all beings from their darkness. May I purify all their obscurations, and lead
them to enlightenment.”
That night, the oil in all the other lamps went
out. But the beggar woman’s lamp was still burning at dawn, when Buddha’s great
disciple Maudgalyayana came to collect the lamps. He saw no reason why one lamp
was still alight and tried to snuff it out. But whatever he did, the lamp kept
burning.
Buddha had been watching all along, and said:
“Maudgalyayana, do you want to put out that lamp? You cannot. You could not
even move it, let alone put it out. If you were to pour the water from all the
oceans over this lamp, it still wouldn’t go out. The water in all the rivers
and lakes of the world could not extinguish it. Why not? Because this lamp was
offered with devotion, and with purity of heart and mind. And that motivation
has made it of tremendous benefit.”
***
Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human
language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the
spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement.
There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but
half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
Visualize someone to whom you feel very close, particularly
someone who is suffering and in pain. As you breathe in, imagine you take in
all their suffering and pain with compassion, and as you breathe out, send your
warmth, healing, love, joy, and happiness streaming out to them.
Now, gradually widen the circle of your compassion
to embrace first other people to whom you also feel very close, then to those
about whom you feel indifferent, then to those whom you dislike or have
difficulty with, then even to those whom you feel are actively monstrous and cruel.
Allow your compassion to become universal, and to enfold in its embrace all
sentient beings, and all beings, in fact, without any exception.
***
In the ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of
thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover
for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is
past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will always find a gap in
which the Rigpa, the nature of mind, is revealed. So the work of meditation is
to allow thoughts to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent.
***
Even within the human realm, all of us have our own
individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things
utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual
world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:
“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them
will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said
to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s
dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each
perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”
***
A man was rowing his boat upstream on a very misty morning.
Suddenly, he saw another boat coming downstream, not trying to avoid him. It
was coming straight at him. He shouted, “Be careful! Be careful!” but the boat
came right into him, and his boat was almost sunk. The man became very angry,
and began to shout at the other person, to give him a piece of his mind. But
when he looked closely, he saw that there was no one in the other boat. It
turned out that the boat just got loose and went downstream. All his anger
vanished, and he laughed and he laughed.
-Thich
Nhat Nanh, "Being Peace"
***
Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of
losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: “I should really
let go of ego, I’m in such pain; but if I do, what’s going to happen to me?”
Ego will chime in sweetly: “I know I’m sometimes a
nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is
that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what’s going to happen to you?
Who’ll look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I’ve done all
these years?”
Even if we see through the lies of the ego, we are
just too scared to abandon it; for without any true knowledge of the nature of
our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and
again we cave in to ego’s demands with the same sad self-hatred as the
alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the
drug addict feels groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will
only leave her flat and desperate
***
Don’t be in too much of a hurry to solve all your
doubts and problems. As the masters say: “Make haste slowly.” I always tell my
students not to have unreasonable expectations, because it takes time for
spiritual growth. It takes years to learn Japanese properly or to become a
doctor. Can we really expect to have all the answers, let alone become
enlightened, in a few weeks?
The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning
and purification. When you know this, you become humble. There is a famous
Tibetan saying: “Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not
mistake realization for liberation.” And Milarepa said: “Do not entertain hopes
for realization, but practice all your life.”
***
ON BODHICITTA:
The Compassionate Heart of the Enlightened Mind
It is the supreme elixir
That overcomes the sovereignty of death.
It is the inexhaustible treasure
That eliminates poverty in the world.
It is the supreme medicine
That quells the world’s disease.
It is the tree that shelters all beings
Wandering and tired on the path of conditioned existence.
It is the universal bridge
That leads to freedom from unhappy states of birth.
It is the dawning moon of the mind
That dispels the torment of disturbing conceptions.
It is the great sun that finally removes
The misty ignorance of the world.
SHANTIDEVA
***
If you were to draw one essential message from the
fact of reincarnation, it would be: Develop a good heart that longs for other
beings to find lasting happiness, and acts to secure that happiness. Nourish
and practice kindness.
The Dalai Lama has said: “There is no need for
temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is
our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”
***
Nature’s
Law dictates that, in order to survive, bees must work together. As a result,
they instinctively possess a sense of social responsibility. They have no
constitution, no law, no police, no religion or moral training, but because of
their nature, they labor faithfully together. Occasionally, they may fight, but
in general, based on cooperation, the whole colony survives. We human beings
have a constitution, laws and a police force. We have religion, remarkable
intelligence and a heart with a great capacity for love. We have many
extraordinary qualities, but in actual practice, I think we are lagging behind
those small insects. In some respects, I feel we are poorer than the bees.
-His Holiness the
Dalai Lama
From
"The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999. Reprinted by
arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston,
www.shambhala.com
***
Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life
and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all
beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they
will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to
have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is
true spirituality.
CHAKDUD TULKU
RINPOCHE
***
Whatever joy there is
in this world
All comes from desiring and helping others to be happy,
And whatever suffering there is in this world
All comes from desiring myself to be happy.
SHANTIDEVA
***
To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we take
the spiritual path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost infinite, and it
can at every stage sabotage and pervert our desire to be free of it. The truth
is simple, and the teachings are extremely clear; but I have seen again and
again, with great sadness, that as soon as they begin to touch and move us, ego
tries to complicate them, because it knows it is fundamentally threatened.
However hard ego may try to sabotage the spiritual
path, if you really continue on it, and work deeply with the practice of
meditation, you will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you have been by
ego’s promises: false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to understand
that both hope and fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes deceive you,
and leave you empty and disappointed, and fears paralyze you in the narrow cell
of your false identity. You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the
sway of ego has been over your mind, and in the space of freedom opened up by
meditation, when you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the
exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature.
***
When you see others’ errors and you want to guide them because
you think they are wrong and you feel compassion for them, you should employ
tact to avoid angering them, and contrive to appear as if you were talking
about something else.
-Tact,
Dogen
***
The times when you are suffering can be those when
you are open, and where you are extremely vulnerable can be where your greatest
strength really lies.
Say to yourself: “I am not going to run away from
this suffering. I want to use it in the best and richest way I can, so that I
can become more compassionate and more helpful to others.” Suffering, after
all, can teach us about compassion. If you suffer, you will know how it is when
others suffer. And if you are in a position to help others, it is through your
suffering that you will find the understanding and compassion to do so.
***
Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country is spent
Developing the mind instead of the heart.
Be compassionate not just to your friends but to everyone
Be compassionate.
Work for peace in your heart and in the world.
Work for peace and I say again
Never give up.
No matter what is happening,
No matter what is going on around you,
Never give up.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
It is essential to realize now, in life, when we
still have a body, that its convincing appearance of solidity is a mere
illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to learn how, after
meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from solidifying, as we
are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and our world; and to go
on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we do in meditation, that
all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The realization that this deepens the
body’s illusory nature is one of the most profound and inspiring we can have to
help us to let go.
**
What is born will die,
What has been gathered will be dispersed,
What has been accumulated will be exhausted,
What has been built up will collapse,
And what has been high will be brought low.
TRADITIONAL
BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE
***
Fleeting is this world
Growth and decay its very nature
Things spring to being and again they cease
Happy the marvel of them and the peace.
-Nidana
Vagga
***
It is precisely because our present life is so inseparably
linked with desire that we must make use of desire’s tremendous energy if we
wish to transform our life into something transcendental.
-Lama
Thubten Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra
***
“Training” the mind does not in any way mean
forcibly subjugating or brainwashing the mind. To train the mind is first to
see directly and concretely how the mind functions, a knowledge that you derive
from spiritual teachings and through personal experience in meditation
practice. Then you use that understanding to tame the mind and work with it
skillfully, to make it more and more pliable, so that you can become master of
your mind and employ it to its fullest and most beneficial end.
***
A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without
dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are
human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities.
That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
Since the old days, it is said that "anger is the fire in
one's mind that burns away all of one's virtuous deeds." Anger should be
absolutely surrendered.
-Jae
Woong Kim, "Polishing the Diamond"
For the one who has no inner, angry thoughts,
Who has gone past being a someone, a this or a that,
That one is free from fear and is blissful.
Even the gods cannot win such serenity.
-Udana
Sutta
***
I see all the different religious traditions as paths for the
development of inner peace, which is the true foundation of world peace. These
ancient traditions come to us as a gift from our common past. Will we continue
to cherish it as a gift and hand it over the the future generations as a legacy
of our shared desire for peace?
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
Everything can be used as an invitation to
meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing
in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way
the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert for any sign of beauty
or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments, to “the news that is
always arriving out of silence.”
Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss,
a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to
elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.
***
When we have really grasped the law of karma in all
its stark power and complex reverberations over many, many lifetimes, and seen
just how our self-grasping and self-cherishing, life after life, have woven us
repeatedly into a net of ignorance that seems only to be ensnaring us more and
more tightly; when we have really understood the dangerous and doomed nature of
the self-grasping mind’s enterprise; when we have really pursued its operations
into their most subtle hiding places; when we have really understood just how
our whole ordinary mind and actions are defined, narrowed and darkened by it,
how almost impossible it makes it for us to uncover the heart of unconditional
love, and how it has blocked in us all sources of real love and real
compassion, then there comes a moment when we understand, with extreme and
poignant clarity, what Shantideva said:
If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?
And then a resolution is born in us to destroy that
evil spirit, our greatest enemy. With that evil spirit dead, the cause of all
our suffering will be removed, and our true nature, in all its spaciousness and
dynamic generosity, will shine out.
***
To recognize the nature of your mind is to engender
in the ground of your being an understanding that will change your entire
worldview and help you discover and develop, naturally and spontaneously, a
compassionate desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct knowledge of how
best you can do so, with whatever skill or ability you have, in whatever
circumstances you find yourself.
***
There is a spark of hope, a playful humor about the
posture we take in meditation, which lies in the secret understanding that we
all have the buddha nature. So when you assume this posture, you are playfully
imitating a buddha, acknowledging and giving real encouragement to the
emergence of your own buddha nature. You begin to respect yourself as a
potential buddha.
At the same time, you still recognize your relative
condition. But because you have let yourself be inspired by a joyful trust in
your own true buddha nature, you can accept your negative aspects more
easily and deal with them more generously and with more humor.
When you meditate, invite yourself to feel the
self-esteem, the dignity, and the strong humility of the buddha that you are.
If you simply let yourself be inspired by this joyful trust, it is enough: Out
of this understanding and confidence, meditation will naturally arise.
***
You can have no greater ally in the war against
your greatest enemy, your own self-grasping and self-cherishing, than the
practice of compassion. It is compassion, dedicating ourselves to others,
taking on their suffering instead of cherishing ourselves, that, hand in hand
with the wisdom of egolessness, destroys most effectively and most completely
that ancient attachment to a false self that has been the cause of our endless
wandering in samsara. That is why in our tradition we see compassion as the
source and essence of enlightenment and the heart of enlightened activity.
***
My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a
religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow
other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a
call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with
self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are
connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our
own.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
As Buddhists, our
task is to manifest compassion in everyday life, beginning with members of our
own family and extending it to all of society.
-
Taitetsu
Unno (Shin Buddhist professor at Smith C)
for Pure Land
Buddhists, the key to being illuminated with the divine light of compassion and
transcending delusions, is single-hearted recitation of NEMBUTSU, the name of
Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light. . . .”Namu-Amida-Butsu”
We cultivate the
aspiration to benefit others as an antidote to self-cherishing.
-
Dalai
Lama
We perceive conventional
truth , that is , the relative world in all its diversity, through our
everyday use of mind and our sense faculties.
However, it is only through penetrating
analysis that we are able to perceive ultimate truth, the true nature of
things and events.
-
Dalai
Lama
(after the first
stage of accumulation of knowledge to gain total clarity of insight, comes the
second stage of preparation, when) The
use of concepts in meditation gradually recedes. When all dualistic perceptions of subject and
object, of conventional reality, and of intrinsic existence are removed, one
enters the path of seeing. At this
point, there is no separation of subject and object.
the 5 spiritual
friends, or powers: faith, energy,
mindfulness, concentration, wisdom
Two fundamental
tenets of Buddhist practice are to want little and to be easily satisfied. Is that your aim? Are you helping people to live a life of less
suffering and more happiness through continuous practice of meditation, virtue
and insight?
-
Venzin
Wangyal Rinpoche
(There are 3 pillars
of all schools of Buddhism:) the method
of mindfulness, the motivation of compassion, and the liberating wisdom of
non-clinging.
-
Joseph
Goldstein
I think one can call
oneself a Buddhist because one is inspired by various and sundry aspects of the
Buddhist teachings (even if one hasn’t taken refuge in the 3 jewels).
-
Jeffry
Hopkins (Buddhism professor at U.
of Va.)
The mind plays a
game called “Attachment” and is fooling itself by pretending that external
forces are responsible for your happiness.
Attachment is the root cause of all mental disturbances, and
expectations play the biggest role. Your
expectations breed likes and dislikes.
Then you get attached to your likes and dislikes and cling to them. It is your expectations that create
distractions and disturbances when you do your meditation practice—not the
outside world and not the people around you.
. . .If we expect worldly objects and
relationships to secure our happiness, we will be disappointed. Disappointment leads to misery.
. . .How foolish I have been to forget
that invisible, benevolent force that accompanies us always, protecting, guiding,
and nurturing. Instead of remembering
that force, I am complaining and worrying.
.
. .Once the virtue of pure faith begins to blossom in your heart, you will no
longer be dependent on the world and worldly relations to make you happy. Contentment will become your nature.
- Pandit
Rajmani Tigunait (spiritual head of the Himalayan Instit)
***
As Buddha said: “What you are is what you have
been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you
want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to
know your future life, look at your present actions.”
***
The quality of life in the realm of the gods may
look superior to our own, yet the masters tell us that human life is infinitely
more valuable. Why? Because of the very fact that we have the awareness and
intelligence that are the raw materials for enlightenment, and because the very
suffering that pervades this human realm is itself the spur to spiritual
transformation.
Pain, grief, loss, and ceaseless frustration of
every kind are there for a very real and dramatic purpose: to wake us up, to
enable, almost to force us to break out of the cycle of samsara and so release
our imprisoned splendor.
***
Compassion is not true compassion unless it is active.
Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, is often represented in Tibetan
iconography as having a thousand eyes that see the pain in all corners of the
universe, and a thousand arms to reach out to all corners of the universe to
extend his help.
***
Anger
or hatred is like a fisherman's hook. It is very important for us to ensure
that we are not caught by it.
-His Holiness the
Dalai Lama
***
Karma means that whatever we do, with our bodies,
speech, or minds, will have a corresponding result. Each action, even the
smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said by the masters that
even a little poison can cause death, and even a tiny seed can become a huge
tree. And as Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions merely because they
are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as
a mountain.”
Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good
actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in the end
will fill a huge vessel.”
Karma does not decay like external things, or ever
become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or water.” Its power
will never disappear, until it is ripened.
***
The problem is not materialism as such. Rather, it is the
underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the
senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to
survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings
have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved,
can overwhelm unhappy experiences.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
***
Gradually, as you remain open and mindful, and use
a technique to focus your mind more and more, your negativity will slowly be
defused; you begin to feel well in your own skin, or, as the French say, être
bien dans sa peau (“well in your own skin”). From this comes release and a
profound ease. I think of this practice as the most effective form of therapy
and self-healing.
***
Every single negative thing we have ever thought or
done has ultimately arisen from our grasping at a false self, and our cherishing
of that false self, making it the dearest and most important element in our
lives. All those negative thoughts, emotions, desires, and actions that are the
cause of our negative karma are engendered by self-grasping and
self-cherishing. They are the dark, powerful magnet that attracts to us, life
after life, every obstacle, every misfortune, every anguish, every disaster,
and so they are the root cause of all the sufferings of samsara.
***
All
things are free-flowing, untrammeled—what bondage is there, what entanglement?
You create your own difficulty and ease therein. The mind source pervades the
ten directions with one continuity; those of the most excellent faculties
understand naturally.
-Tzu-hu
From Teachings of Zen,
edited by Thomas Cleary, © 1998. By arrangement with Shambhala Publications,
Inc., Boston,
***
How hard it can be to turn our attention within!
How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to dominate us! Even though
they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost fatalistic resignation, for
we are so used to giving in to them. We may idealize freedom, but when it
comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.
Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We
may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but
slowly we can
emerge from them and change.
***
Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma
means our
ability to create and to change. It is creative
because we can
determine how and why we act. We can
change. The future is in our hands, and in the
hands of our heart.
Buddha said:
Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.
***
The still revolutionary insight of Buddhism is that life
and death are in the mind, and nowhere else. Mind is revealed
as the universal basis of experience—the creator of happiness and the creator
of suffering, the creator of what we call life and what we call death.
***
Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking,
standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the
mind is empty is to see the Buddha...Using the mind to look for reality is
delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself
from words is liberation.
-Bodhidharma
***
A wave in the sea, seen in one way, seems to have a
distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth anda death. Seen in another
way, the wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the behavior of water,
“empty” of any separate identity but “full” of water. So when you really think
about the wave, you come to realize that it is something that has been made
temporarily possible by wind and water, and is dependent on a set of constantly
changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every
other wave.
***
If a man should conquer in battle a thousand and a thousand
more, and another should conquer himself, his would be the greater victory,
because the greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.
-Buddha
***
When anger arises,
whoever keeps firm control
as if with a racing chariot:
him
I call a master charioteer.
Anyone else;
a rein-holder--
that's all.
-Dhammapada,
17, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
***
Let us rise up and be thankful,
for if we didn’t learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little,
and if we didn’t learn a little,
at least we didn’t get sick,
and if we got sick,
at least we didn’t die;
so, let us be thankful.
-The
Buddha
***
The most important
thing is not to get trapped in what I see everywhere in the West, a “shopping
mentality”: shopping around from master to master, teaching to teaching,
without any continuity or real, sustained dedication to any one discipline.
Nearly all the great spiritual masters of all traditions agree that the
essential thing is to master one way, one path to the truth, by following one
tradition with all your heart and mind to the end of the spiritual journey,
while, of course, remaining open and respectful toward the insights of all
others. In Tibet
we used to say: “knowing one, you accomplish all.” The modem faddish idea that
we can always keep all our options open and so never need commit ourselves to
anything is one of the greatest and most dangerous delusions of our culture,
and one of ego’s most effective ways of sabotaging our spiritual search.
***
We
have been taught to spend our lives chasing our thoughts and projections. Even
when the “mind” is talked about, it is only thoughts and emotions that are
referred to; and when our researchers study what they imagine to be the mind,
they look only at its projections. No one ever really looks into the mind
itself, the ground from which all these expressions arise; and this has tragic
consequences.
***
As Buddhists, our
task is to manifest compassion in everyday life, beginning with members of our
own family and extending it to all of society.
-
Taitetsu
Unno (Shin Buddhist professor at Smith C)
for Pure Land
Buddhists, the key to being illuminated with the divine light of compassion and
transcending delusions, is single-hearted recitation of NEMBUTSU, the name of
Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light. . . .”Namu-Amida-Butsu”
We cultivate the
aspiration to benefit others as an antidote to self-cherishing.
-
Dalai
Lama
We perceive conventional
truth , that is , the relative world in all its diversity, through our
everyday use of mind and our sense faculties.
However, it is only through penetrating
analysis that we are able to perceive ultimate truth, the true nature of
things and events.
-
Dalai
Lama
(after the first
stage of accumulation of knowledge to gain total clarity of insight, comes the
second stage of preparation, when) The
use of concepts in meditation gradually recedes. When all dualistic perceptions of subject and
object, of conventional reality, and of intrinsic existence are removed, one
enters the path of seeing. At this
point, there is no separation of subject and object.
the 5 spiritual
friends, or powers: faith, energy,
mindfulness, concentration, wisdom
Two fundamental
tenets of Buddhist practice are to want little and to be easily satisfied. Is that your aim? Are you helping people to live a life of less
suffering and more happiness through continuous practice of meditation, virtue
and insight?
-
Venzin
Wangyal Rinpoche
(There are 3 pillars
of all schools of Buddhism:) the method
of mindfulness, the motivation of compassion, and the liberating wisdom of
non-clinging.
-
Joseph
Goldstein
I think one can call
oneself a Buddhist because one is inspired by various and sundry aspects of the
Buddhist teachings (even if one hasn’t taken refuge in the 3 jewels).
-
Jeffry
Hopkins (Buddhism professor at U.
of Va.)
The mind plays a
game called “Attachment” and is fooling itself by pretending that external
forces are responsible for your happiness.
Attachment is the root cause of all mental disturbances, and
expectations play the biggest role. Your
expectations breed likes and dislikes.
Then you get attached to your likes and dislikes and cling to them. It is your expectations that create
distractions and disturbances when you do your meditation practice—not the
outside world and not the people around you.
. . .If we expect worldly objects and
relationships to secure our happiness, we will be disappointed. Disappointment leads to misery.
. . .How foolish I have been to forget
that invisible, benevolent force that accompanies us always, protecting,
guiding, and nurturing. Instead of
remembering that force, I am complaining and worrying.
.
. .Once the virtue of pure faith begins to blossom in your heart, you will no
longer be dependent on the world and worldly relations to make you happy. Contentment will become your nature.
- Pandit
Rajmani Tigunait (spiritual head of the Himalayan Instit)
***
At present, our body is undoubtedly
the center of our whole universe. We associate it, without thinking, with our
self and our ego, and this thoughtless and false association continually
reinforces our illusion of their inseparable, concrete existence. Because our
body seems so convincingly to exist, our “I” seems to exist, and “you” seem to
exist, and the entire illusory, dualistic world we never stop projecting around
us looks ultimately solid and real.
When we die, this whole
compound construction falls dramatically to pieces.
***
There is a famous saying:
“If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water,
when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.”
I often compare the mind in
meditation to a jar of muddy water: The more we leave the water without
interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the
bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through. The very nature
of the mind is such that if you only leave it in its unaltered and natural
state, it will find its true nature, which is bliss and clarity.
***
Even though that which is usually called “mind” is
widely esteemed and much discussed,
Still it is not understood or it is wrongly understood or it is understood in a
one-sided manner only.
Since it is not understood correctly, just as it is in itself,
There comes into existence inconceivable numbers of philosophical ideas and
assertions.
Furthermore, since ordinary individuals do not understand it,
They do not recognize their own nature,
And so they continue to wander among the six destinies of rebirth within the
three worlds, and thus experience suffering.
Therefore,
not understanding your own mind is a very grievous fault.
PADMASAMBHAVA
***
The absolute truth
cannot be realized within the domain of the ordinary mind. And the path beyond
the ordinary mind, all the great wisdom traditions have told us, is through the
heart. This path of the heart is devotion.
***
Renunciation has both
sadness and joy in it: sadness because you realize the futility of your old ways,
and joy because of the greater vision that begins to unfold when you are able
to let go of them. This is no ordinary joy. It is a joy that gives birth to a
new and profound strength, a confidence, an abiding inspiration that comes from
the realization that you are not condemned to your habits, that you can
indeed emerge from them, that you can change, and grow more and more
free.
***
It is essential to
realize now, in life, when we still have a body, that its convincing appearance
of solidity is a mere illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to
learn how, after meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from
solidifying, as we are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and
our world; and to go on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we
do in meditation, that all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The
realization that this deepens the body’s illusory nature is one of the most
profound and inspiring we can have to help us to let go.
***
Quietly sitting, body
still, speech silent, mind at peace, let thoughts and emotions, whatever rises,
come and go, without clinging to anything.
What does this state feel
like? Dudjom Rinpoche used to say: Imagine a man who comes home after a long,
hard day’s work in the fields, and sinks into his favorite chair in front of
the fire. He has been working all day and he knows that he has achieved what he
wanted to achieve; there is nothing more to worry about, nothing left
unaccomplished, and he can let go completely of all his cares and concerns,
content, simply, to be.
***
Adopting an attitude of universal
responsibility is essentially a personal matter. The real test of compassion is
not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily
life.
-His
Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Imagine All the People"
It is very
important that you do not compare your actions to your partner's or judge your
partner's behavior as unskillful. Rather, focus on your own actions and take
responsibility for them. Recall those times when you looked into your partner's
eyes and saw the pain you caused this person you love to suffer. If you can
admit your own faults, if you can see how hurtful your actions were and tap
into a sense of concern for your partner's well-being, then compassion and
loving-friendliness will flow.
-Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"
Copyright
Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist
Inspirations," edited by Josh Bartok, with permission of Wisdom Publications,
199 Elm St., Somerville MA 02144 U.S.A, www.wisdompubs.org.
When someone is suffering
and you find yourself at a loss to know how to help, put yourself unflinchingly
in his or her place. Imagine as vividly as possible what you would be going through
if you were suffering the same pain. Ask yourself: “How would I feel? How would
I want my friends to treat me? What would I most want from them?”
When you exchange yourself
for others in this way, you are directly transferring your cherishing from its
usual object, yourself, to other beings. So exchanging yourself for others
is a very powerful way of loosening the hold on you of the self-cherishing and
the self-grasping of ego, and so of releasing the heart of your compassion.
Everything can be used as
an invitation to meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a
small flower growing in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a
shop window, the way the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert
for any sign of beauty or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments,
to “the news that is always arriving out of silence.”
Slowly, you will become a
master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies
always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and
movement.
To recognize the nature of
your mind is to engender in the ground of your being an understanding that will
change your entire worldview and help you discover and develop, naturally and
spontaneously, a compassionate desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct
knowledge of how best you can do so, with whatever skill or ability you have,
in whatever circumstances you find yourself.
You
can have no greater ally in the war against your greatest enemy, your own
self-grasping and self-cherishing, than the practice of compassion. It is
compassion, dedicating ourselves to others, taking on their suffering instead
of cherishing ourselves, that, hand in hand with the wisdom of egolessness,
destroys most effectively and most completely that ancient attachment to a
false self that has been the cause of our endless wandering in samsara. That is
why in our tradition we see compassion as the source and essence of
enlightenment and the heart of enlightened activity.
One of the greatest
Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.” I
cannot say it enough: Our true nature and the nature of all beings is not
something extraordinary.
The irony is that it is our
so-called ordinary world that is extraordinary, a fantastic, elaborate
hallucination of the deluded vision of samsara. It is this “extraordinary”
vision that blinds us to the “ordinary,” natural, inherent nature of mind.
Imagine if the buddhas were looking down at us now: How they would marvel sadly
at the lethal ingenuity and intricacy of our confusion!
As Buddha said: “What you are is what you have
been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you
want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to
know your future life, look at your present actions.”
If we were to put our minds
to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real
possibility we would become enlightened.
Our minds, however, are
riddled with confusion and doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even
greater block to human evolution than is desire or attachment. Our society
promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial,
harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely
“sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt
that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom
is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge.
This form of mean-spirited
doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara, served by a flock of “experts” who
teach us not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was
necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive
form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and
nothing to live by.
When little obstacles crop up on the
spiritual path, a good practitioner does not lose faith and begin to doubt, but
has the discernment to recognize difficulties, whatever they may be, for what
they are—just obstacles, and nothing more. It is the nature of things that when
you recognize an obstacle as such, it ceases to be an obstacle. Equally, it is
by failing to recognize an obstacle for what it is, and therefore taking it seriously,
that it is empowered and solidified and becomes a real blockage.
Compassion
is not true compassion unless it is active. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of
Compassion, is often represented in Tibetan iconography as having a thousand
eyes that see the pain in all corners of the universe, and a thousand arms to
reach out to all corners of the universe to extend his help.
For us to survive on the
spiritual path, there are many challenges to face, and there is much to learn.
We have to discover how to deal with obstacles and difficulties; how to process
doubts and see through wrong views; how to inspire ourselves when we least feel
like it; how to understand ourselves and our moods; how really to work with and
integrate the teachings and practices; how to evoke compassion and enact it in
life; and how to transform our suffering and emotions.
On the spiritual path, all
of us need the support and the good foundation that come from really knowing
the teachings, and this cannot be stressed strongly enough. For the more we
study and practice, the more we shall embody discernment, clarity, and insight.
Then, when the truth comes knocking, we will know it, with certainty, for what
it is, and gladly open the door, because we’ll have guessed that it may well be
the truth of who we really are.
Because in our culture we
overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands
extraordinary intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further
obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying: “If you are too clever, you could miss
the point entirely.”
Patrul Rinpoche said: “The
logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can
become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet
we say: “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”
Karma means that whatever
we do, with our bodies, speech, or minds, will have a corresponding result.
Each action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said
by the masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a tiny seed
can become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions
merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a
haystack as big as a mountain.”
Similarly he said: “Do not
overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of
water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Karma does not decay like
external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time,
fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.
The beginner’s mind is an
open mind, an empty mind, a ready mind, and if we really listen with a
beginner’s mind, we might really begin to hear. For if we listen with a silent
mind, as free as possible from the clamor of preconceived ideas, a possibility
will be created for the truth of the teachings to pierce us, and for the
meaning of life and death to become increasingly and startlingly clear.
My master Dilgo Khyentse
Rinpoche said: “The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the
more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.”
Realizing the View subtly but completely
transforms your vision of everything. More and more, I have come to realize how
thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being, quite
simply, in the absolute. Now I see clearly why the masters so often say: “Try
hard not to create too much hope and fear,” for they only engender more mental
gossip. When the View is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are:
fleeting and transparent, and only relative. You see through everything
directly, as if you had X-ray eyes. You do not cling to thoughts and emotions
or reject them; you welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa. The things
you took so seriously before—ambitions, plans, expectations, doubts, and
passions—no longer have any deep and anxious hold on you, for the View has
helped you to see the futility and pointlessness of them all, and born in you a
spirit of true renunciation.
We must never forget that
it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice. And if we
choose to do so, we can put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering,
and help our true potential, our buddha nature, to awaken in us. Until this
buddha nature is completely awakened and we are freed from our ignorance and
merge with the deathless, enlightened mind, there can be no end to the round of
life and death. So, the teachings tell us, if we do not assume the fullest
possible responsibility for ourselves now in this life, our suffering will go
on not only for a few lives but for thousands of lives.
It is this sobering
knowledge that makes Buddhists consider that future lives are more important
even than this one, because there are many more that await us in the future.
This long-term vision governs how they live. They know if we were to sacrifice
the whole of eternity for this life, it would be like spending our entire life
savings on one drink, madly ignoring the consequences.
To
realize what I call the wisdom of compassion is to see with complete clarity
its benefits, as well as the damage that its opposite has done to us. We need
to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego’s self-interest
and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the
other that all our suffering comes.
Self-grasping creates
self-cherishing, which in turn creates an ingrained aversion to harm and
suffering. However, harm and suffering have no objective existence; what gives
them their existence and their power is only our aversion to them. When you
understand this, you understand then that it is our aversion that attracts to
us every negativity and obstacle that can possibly happen to us, and fills our
lives with nervous anxiety, expectation, and fear.
Wear down that aversion by
wearing down the self-grasping mind and its attachment to a nonexistent self,
and you will wear down any hold on you that any obstacle and negativity can
have. For how can you attack someone or something that is just not there?
***
Each time we begin our
practice of meditation, we are moved by the awareness that we and all other
sentient beings fundamentally have the Buddha nature as our innermost essence,
and that to realize it is to be free of ignorance and to put an end, finally,
to suffering.
We are inspired with the
motivation to dedicate our practice, and our life, to the enlightenment of all
beings in the spirit of this prayer, which all the buddhas of the past have
prayed:
By the power and the truth of this practice:
May all beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness;
May all be free from sorrow, and the causes of sorrow;
May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless;
And may all live in equanimity, without too much attachment and too much
aversion,
And live believing in the equality of all that lives.
The practice of
mindfulness, of bringing the scattered mind home, and so of bringing the
different aspects of our being into focus, is called Peacefully Remaining or Calm
Abiding.
All the fragmented aspects
of ourselves, which had been at war, settle and dissolve and become friends. In
that settling we begin to understand ourselves more, and sometimes even have
glimpses of the radiance of our fundamental nature.
To learn how to die is to
learn how to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this
life but in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be
reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the
most powerful way of all.
Let us dare to imagine now
what it would be like to live in a world where a significant number of people
took the opportunity, offered by the teachings, to devote part of their lives
to serious spiritual practice, to recognize the nature of their minds, and so
to use the opportunity of their deaths to move closer to buddhahood, and to be
reborn with one aim, that of serving and benefiting others.
Our minds can be wonderful,
but at the same time they can be our very worst enemy. They give us so much
trouble. Sometimes I wish the mind were like a set of dentures, which we could
take out and leave on our bedside table overnight. At least we would get a
break from its tiring and tiresome escapades.
We are so at the mercy of
our minds that even when we find that the spiritual teachings strike a chord
inside us, and move us more than anything we have ever experienced, still we
hold back, because of some deep-seated and inexplicable suspicion.
Somewhere along the line,
though, we have to stop mistrusting. We have to let go of the suspicion and
doubt, which are supposed to protect us but never work, and only end up hurting
us even more than what they are supposed to defend us from.
Grasping is the source of
all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to
things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting
go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning
to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold
on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to
avoid.
The intention behind
grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be
happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.
The Tibetans say that you
cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter
how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”
Whatever we have done with our lives makes
us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.
A human being is part of a
whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He
experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the
rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a
few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by
widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the
whole of nature in its beauty.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Ego is the absence of true
knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching
on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an
inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep
alive the fiction of its existence.
In Tibetan, ego is called dakdzin
, which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements
of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the
concepts, ideas, desires, and activities that will sustain that false
construction.
Such grasping is futile
from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in
it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact
that we need to grasp at all and to go on grasping shows that in the depths of
our being we know that the self doesn’t inherently exist. From this secret,
unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fears.
As we follow the teachings
and as we practice, we will inevitably discover certain truths about ourselves
that stand out prominently: There are places where we always get stuck; there
are habitual patterns and strategies that are the legacy of negative karma,
which we continuously repeat and reinforce; there are particular ways of seeing
things—those tired old explanations of ourselves and the world around us—that
are quite mistaken yet which we hold onto as authentic, and so distort our
whole view of reality.
When we persevere on the
spiritual path, and examine ourselves honestly, it begins to dawn on us more
and more that our perceptions are nothing more than a web of illusions. Simply
to acknowledge our confusion, even though we cannot accept it completely, can
bring some light of understanding and spark off in us a new process, a process
of healing.
Everything that we see
around us is seen as it is because we have repeatedly solidified our experience
of inner and outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this
has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. In
fact, as we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly
with our fixed perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or of matter or
of even ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you
could call “heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up. As William Blake
said:
If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.
Anyone looking honestly at
life will see that we live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity. Our
minds are perpetually shifting in and out of confusion and clarity. If we could
be confused all the time, that would at least make for some kind of clarity.
What is really baffling about life is that sometimes, despite all our
confusion, we can also be really wise!
This constant uncertainty
may make everything seem bleak and almost hopeless; but if you look more deeply
at it, you will see that its very nature creates “gaps,” spaces in which
profound chances and opportunities for transformation are continuously
flowering—if, that is, they can be seen and seized.
When we die we leave
everything behind, especially this body we have cherished so much and relied
upon so blindly and tried so hard to keep alive. But our minds are no more
dependable than our bodies. Just look at your mind for a few minutes.
You will see that it is
like a flea, constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise
without any reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every
moment, we are the victims of the fickleness of our minds. If this is the only
state of consciousness we are familiar with, then to rely on our minds at the
moment of death is an absurd gamble.
Lifetimes of ignorance have
brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is
to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and
even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony,
considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.
Yet, ego is so terribly
convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we
might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is
to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot
or a brain-dead vegetable.
Taking impermanence truly
to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and
destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we
have built everything. Slowly it dawns on us that all the heartache we have
been through from grasping at the ungraspable was, in the deepest sense,
unnecessary.
At the beginning this too
may be painful to accept, because it seems so unfamiliar. But as we reflect,
slowly our hearts and minds go through a gradual transformation. Letting go
begins to feel more natural, and becomes easier and easier.
It may take a long time for
the extent of our foolishness to sink in, but the more we reflect, the more we
develop the view of letting go. It is then that a complete shift takes place in
our way of looking at everything.
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection
You
might as well burst out laughing!
LONGCHENPA
Wrong views and wrong
convictions can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely Adolf
Hitler and Pol Pot must have been convinced that they were right too? And yet
each and every one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form
convictions, believe them without question, and act on them, so bringing down
suffering not only on ourselves but on all those around us.
On the other hand, the
heart of Buddha’s teaching is to see “the actual state of things, as they
are,” and this is called the true View. It is a view that is
all-embracing, as the role of spiritual teachings is precisely to give us a complete
perspective on the nature of mind and reality.
To contemplate impermanence
on its own is not enough: You have to work with it in your life. Let’s try an
experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents the object at which you
are grasping. Hold it tightly clutched in your fist and extend your arm, with
the palm of your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your grip,
you will lose what you are clinging to. That’s why you hold on.
But there’s another
possibility: You can let go and yet keep hold of it. With your arm still
outstretched, turn your hand over so that it faces the sky. Release your hand
and the coin still rests on your open palm. You let go. And the coin is still
yours, even with all this space around it.
So there is a way in which
we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time,
without grasping.
ON BODHICITTA: The Compassionate
Heart of the Enlightened Mind
It is the supreme elixir
That overcomes the sovereignty of death.
It is the inexhaustible treasure
That eliminates poverty in the world.
It is the supreme medicine
That quells the world’s disease.
It is the tree that shelters all beings
Wandering and tired on the path of conditioned existence.
It is the universal bridge
That leads to freedom from unhappy states of birth.
It is the dawning moon of the mind
That dispels the torment of disturbing conceptions.
It is the great sun that finally removes
The misty ignorance of the world.
SHANTIDEVA
If you were to draw one
essential message from the fact of reincarnation, it would be: Develop a good
heart that longs for other beings to find lasting happiness, and acts to secure
that happiness. Nourish and practice kindness.
The Dalai Lama has said:
“There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own
brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”
Always recognize the
dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice
good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what
others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as
a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the
essential point. This is true spirituality.
CHAKDUD
TULKU RINPOCHE
Renunciation has both sadness and joy in
it: sadness because you realize the futility of your old ways, and joy because
of the greater vision that begins to unfold when you are able to let go of
them. This is no ordinary joy. It is a joy that gives birth to a new and
profound strength, a confidence, an abiding inspiration that comes from the
realization that you are not condemned to your habits, that you can
indeed emerge from them, that you can change, and grow more and more
free.
Sometimes when we see too
much truth about ourselves suddenly mirrored in front of us by the teacher or
the teachings, it is simply too difficult to face, too terrifying to recognize,
too painful to accept as the reality about ourselves. We deny and reject it, in
an absurd and desperate attempt to defend ourselves fromourselves,from the truth of who we
really are. And when there are things too powerful or too difficult to accept
about ourselves, we project them onto the world around us, usually onto those
who help us and love us the most—our teacher, the teachings, our parent, or our
closest friend.
How can we possibly
penetrate the tough shield of this defensive system? The very best solution is
when we can recognize ourselves that we are living duped by our own delusions.
I have seen how for many people a glimpse of the truth, the true View, can
bring the whole fantastic construction of wrong views, fabricated by ignorance,
tumbling instantly to the ground.
It is essential to realize now, in life,
when we still have a body, that its convincing appearance of solidity is a mere
illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to learn how, after
meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from solidifying, as we
are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and our world; and to go
on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we do in meditation, that
all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The realization that this deepens the
body’s illusory nature is one of the most profound and inspiring we can have to
help us to let go.
When we are in a negative
frame of mind, it is only natural to doubt rather than to believe.
From a Buddhist point of
view, doubt is a sign of a lack of complete understanding and a lack of
spiritual education, but it is also seen as a catalyst in the maturing of
faith. It is when we face doubts and difficulties that we discover whether our
faith is a simplistic, pious, and conceptual one, or whether it is strong,
enduring, and anchored in a deep understanding in the heart.
If you have faith, sooner
or later it may well be put to the test, and wherever the challenge may come
from—from within you or from outside—it is simply part of the process of faith
and doubt.
The teachings tell us what it is we need to
realize, but we also have to go on our own journey, in order to come to a
personal realization. That journey may take us through suffering, difficulties,
and doubts of all kinds, but they will become our greatest teachers. Through
them we will learn the humility to recognize our limitations, and through them
we will discover the inner strength and fearlessness we need to emerge from our
old habits and set patterns, and surrender into the vaster vision of real
freedom offered by the spiritual teachings.
In today’s highly
interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of
their problems by themselves. We need one another. We must therefore develop a
sense of universal responsibility . . . It is our collective and individual
responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker
members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live.
THE DALAI LAMA
A direct reflection on what
death means and the many facets of the truth of impermanence can enable us to
make rich use of this life while we still have time, and ensure that when we
die it will be without remorse or self-recrimination at having wasted our
lives.
As Tibet’s famous poet-saint,
Milarepa, said: “My religion is to live—and die—without regret.”
The greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.
-the
Thammapada
When someone is suffering
and you find yourself at a loss to know how to help, put yourself unflinchingly
in his or her place. Imagine as vividly as possible what you would be going
through if you were suffering the same pain. Ask yourself: “How would I feel?
How would I want my friends to treat me? What would I most want from them?”
When you exchange yourself
for others in this way, you are directly transferring your cherishing from its
usual object, yourself, to other beings. So exchanging yourself for others
is a very powerful way of loosening the hold on you of the self-cherishing and
the self-grasping of ego, and so of releasing the heart of your compassion.
When we have really grasped
the law of karma in all its stark power and complex reverberations over many,
many lifetimes, and seen just how our self-grasping and self-cherishing, life
after life, have woven us repeatedly into a net of ignorance that seems only to
be ensnaring us more and more tightly; when we have really understood the
dangerous and doomed nature of the self-grasping mind’s enterprise; when we
have really pursued its operations into their most subtle hiding places; when
we have really understood just how our whole ordinary mind and actions are
defined, narrowed and darkened by it, how almost impossible it makes it for us
to uncover the heart of unconditional love, and how it has blocked in us all
sources of real love and real compassion, then there comes a moment when we
understand, with extreme and poignant clarity, what Shantideva said:
If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?
And then a resolution is
born in us to destroy that evil spirit, our greatest enemy. With that evil
spirit dead, the cause of all our suffering will be removed, and our true
nature, in all its spaciousness and dynamic generosity, will shine out.
* * *
To recognize the nature of your mind is to engender in the
ground of your being an understanding that will change your entire worldview
and help you discover and develop, naturally and spontaneously, a compassionate
desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct knowledge of how best you can
do so, with whatever skill or ability you have, in whatever circumstances you
find yourself.
* * *
If we were to put our minds
to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real
possibility we would become enlightened.
Our minds, however, are
riddled with confusion and doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even
greater block to human evolution than is desire or attachment. Our society
promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial,
harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely
“sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt
that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom
is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge.
This form of mean-spirited
doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara, served by a flock of “experts” who
teach us not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was
necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive
form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and
nothing to live by.
* * *
Is karma really so hard to see in operation? Don’t we only
have to look back at our own lives to see clearly the consequences of some of
our actions? When we upset or hurt someone, didn’t it rebound on us? Were we
not left with a bitter and dark memory, and the shadows of self-disgust? That
memory and those shadows are karma. Our habits and our fears too are also due
to karma, the results of our past actions, words, and thoughts. If we examine
our actions, and become really mindful of them, we will see that there is a
pattern that repeats itself. Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain
and suffering; whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.
* * *
Because in our culture we
overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands
extraordinary intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further
obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying: “If you are too clever, you could miss
the point entirely.”
Patrul Rinpoche said: “The
logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can
become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet
we say: “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”
* * *
Karma means that whatever
we do, with our bodies, speech, or minds, will have a corresponding result.
Each action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said
by the masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a tiny seed
can become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions
merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a
haystack as big as a mountain.”
Similarly he said: “Do not
overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of
water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Karma does not decay like
external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time,
fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.
* * *
We must never forget that
it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice. And if we
choose to do so, we can put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering,
and help our true potential, our buddha nature, to awaken in us. Until this
buddha nature is completely awakened and we are freed from our ignorance and
merge with the deathless, enlightened mind, there can be no end to the round of
life and death. So, the teachings tell us, if we do not assume the fullest
possible responsibility for ourselves now in this life, our suffering will go
on not only for a few lives but for thousands of lives.
It is this sobering
knowledge that makes Buddhists consider that future lives are more important
even than this one, because there are many more that await us in the future.
This long-term vision governs how they live. They know if we were to sacrifice
the whole of eternity for this life, it would be like spending our entire life
savings on one drink, madly ignoring the consequences.
* * *
I often think of the great
masters and imagine beings who have their depth of realization as magnificent
mountain eagles, who soar above both life and death and see them for what they
are, in all their mysterious, intricate interrelation.
To see through the eyes of
the mountain eagle, the view of realization, is to look down on a landscape in
which the boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death shade into
each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality as
being “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.”
What is seen by the
masters, then, seen directly and with total understanding, is that flowing
movement and that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call “life”
and what we, in our ignorance, call “death” are merely different aspects of
that wholeness and that movement.
* * *
When you have learned,
through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of
meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and
negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in
the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you,
distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the
nature of reality.
* * *
To learn how to die is to
learn how to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this
life but in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be
reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the
most powerful way of all.
Let us dare to imagine now
what it would be like to live in a world where a significant number of people
took the opportunity, offered by the teachings, to devote part of their lives
to serious spiritual practice, to recognize the nature of their minds, and so
to use the opportunity of their deaths to move closer to buddhahood, and to be
reborn with one aim, that of serving and benefiting others.
* * *
Just as the ocean has
waves, and the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and
emotions. The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by
them. The waves are the very nature of the ocean. Waves will rise, but where
do they go? Back into the ocean. And where do the waves come from? The ocean.
In the same manner,
thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature
of the mind. They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the
mind. Whatever rises, do not see it as a particular problem. If you do not
impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its
essential nature.
When you have this
understanding, then rising thoughts only enhance your practice. But when you do
not understand what they intrinsically are—the radiance of the nature of your
mind—then your thoughts become the seed of confusion. So have a spacious, open,
and compassionate attitude toward your thoughts and emotions, because in fact
your thoughts are your family, the family of your mind. Before them, as Dudjom
Rinpoche used to say: “Be like an old wise man, watching a child play.”
* * *
The Buddhist meditation masters know
how flexible and workable the mind is. If we train it, anything is possible. In
fact, we are already perfectly trained by and for samsara, trained to get
jealous, trained to grasp, trained to be anxious and sad and desperate and
greedy, trained to react angrily to whatever provokes us. In fact, we are
trained to such an extent that these negative emotions rise spontaneously,
without our even trying to generate them.
So everything is a question of
training and the power of habit. Devote the mind to confusion and we know only
too well, if we’re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion,
adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote
it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find
that with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, the mind will
begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.
* * *
How hard it can be to turn our
attention within! How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to
dominate us! Even though they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost
fatalistic resignation, for we are so used to giving in to them. We may idealize
freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.
Still, reflection can slowly bring
us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again
and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change.
* * *
Our minds can be wonderful, but at
the same time they can be our very worst enemy. They give us so much trouble.
Sometimes I wish the mind were like a set of dentures, which we could take out
and leave on our bedside table overnight. At least we would get a break from
its tiring and tiresome escapades.
We are so at the mercy of our minds
that even when we find that the spiritual teachings strike a chord inside us,
and move us more than anything we have ever experienced, still we hold back,
because of some deep-seated and inexplicable suspicion.
Somewhere along the line, though, we
have to stop mistrusting. We have to let go of the suspicion and doubt, which
are supposed to protect us but never work, and only end up hurting us even more
than what they are supposed to defend us from.
* * *
As we follow the teachings and as we
practice, we will inevitably discover certain truths about ourselves that stand
out prominently: There are places where we always get stuck; there are habitual
patterns and strategies that are the legacy of negative karma, which we
continuously repeat and reinforce; there are particular ways of seeing
things—those tired old explanations of ourselves and the world around us—that
are quite mistaken yet which we hold onto as authentic, and so distort our
whole view of reality.
When we persevere on the spiritual
path, and examine ourselves honestly, it begins to dawn on us more and more
that our perceptions are nothing more than a web of illusions. Simply to
acknowledge our confusion, even though we cannot accept it completely, can
bring some light of understanding and spark off in us a new process, a process
of healing
* * *
We all have the karma to take one
spiritual path or another, and I would encourage you, from the bottom of my
heart, to follow with complete sincerity the path that inspires you most.
If you go on searching all the time,
the searching itself becomes an obsession and takes you over. You become a
spiritual tourist, bustling about and never getting anywhere. As Patrul Rinpoche
says: “You leave your elephant at home and look for its footprints in the
forest.” Following one teaching is not a way of confining you or jealously
monopolizing you. It’s a compassionate and practical way of keeping you
centered and always on your path, despite all the obstacles that you, and the
world, will inevitably present.
* * *
When we die we leave everything
behind, especially this body we have cherished so much and relied upon so
blindly and tried so hard to keep alive. But our minds are no more dependable
than our bodies. Just look at your mind for a few minutes.
You will see that it is like a flea,
constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise without any
reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every moment, we
are the victims of the fickleness of our minds. If this is the only state of
consciousness we are familiar with, then to rely on our minds at the moment of
death is an absurd gamble.
* * *
Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
BUDDHA
* * *
There are rough as well as gentle
waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The
real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or an obstacle but as a
great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with
habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are
distracted but that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of
Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds you even
tighter in the chains of delusion.
The great secret of Dzogchen is to
see right through them, as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the
vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you
gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold
of you and instead dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the
calm of the ocean.
* * *
Rest in
natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in
natural great peace.
NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE
* * *
At present, our body is undoubtedly
the center of our whole universe. We associate it, without thinking, with our
self and our ego, and this thoughtless and false association continually
reinforces our illusion of their inseparable, concrete existence. Because our
body seems so convincingly to exist, our “I” seems to exist, and “you” seem to
exist, and the entire illusory, dualistic world we never stop projecting around
us looks ultimately solid and real.
When we die, this whole compound
construction falls dramatically to pieces.
* * *
Always recognize the dreamlike
qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness
toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to
you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The
trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential
point. This is true spirituality.
CHAKDUD
TULKU RINPOCHE
* * *
Renunciation has both
sadness and joy in it: sadness because you realize the futility of your old
ways, and joy because of the greater vision that begins to unfold when you are
able to let go of them. This is no ordinary joy. It is a joy that gives birth
to a new and profound strength, a confidence, an abiding inspiration that comes
from the realization that you are not condemned to your habits, that you can
indeed emerge from them, that you can change, and grow more and more
free.
* * *
Even in the greatest yogi, sorrow
and joy still arise just as before. The difference between an ordinary person
and the yogi is how they view their emotions and react to them.
An ordinary person will
instinctively accept or reject them, and so arouse the attachment or aversion
that will result in the accumulation of negative karma.
A yogi, however, perceives
everything that rises in its natural, pristine state, without allowing grasping
to enter his perception.
* * *
What is
born will die,
What has been gathered will be dispersed,
What has been accumulated will be exhausted,
What has been built up will collapse,
And what has been high will be brought low.
TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE
* * *
If your mind is empty, it is always
ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are
many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
SUZUKI-ROSHI
* * *
What is compassion? It is not simply
a sense of sympathy or caring for the person suffering, not simply a warmth of
heart toward the person before you, or a sharp clarity of recognition of their
needs and pain, it is also a sustained and practical determination to do
whatever is possible and necessary to help alleviate their suffering.
* * *
Because the law of karma is
inevitable and infallible, whenever we harm others, we are directly harming
ourselves, and whenever we bring them happiness, we are bringing ourselves
future happiness. The Dalai Lama says:
“If you try to subdue your selfish
motives—anger and so forth—and develop more kindness and compassion for others,
ultimately you yourself will benefit more than you would otherwise. So
sometimes I say that the wise selfish person should practice this way. Foolish
selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is negative.
Wise selfish people think of others, help others as much as they can, and the
result is that they too receive benefit.”
* * *
What really matters is not just the
practice of sitting but far more the state of mind you find yourself in after
meditation. It is this calm and centered state of mind you should prolong
through everything you do. I like the Zen story in which the disciple asked his
master:
“Master, how do you put enlightenment into action? How do
you practice it in everyday life?”
“By eating and by sleeping,” replied the master.
“But Master, everybody sleeps and everybody eats.”
“But not everybody eats when they eat, and not everybody sleeps when they
sleep.”
From this comes the famous Zen saying, “When I eat, I eat;
when I sleep, I sleep.”
To eat when you eat and sleep when
you sleep means to be completely present in all your actions, with none of the
distractions of ego to stop you from being there. This is integration.
* * *
Buddha
was a human being, like you or me. He never claimed divinity, he merely knew he
had the buddha nature, the seed of enlightenment, and that everyone else did
too. The buddha nature is simply the birthright of every sentient being, and I
always say: “Our buddha nature is as good as any buddha’s buddha nature.
* When we have really grasped the law of
karma in all its stark power and complex reverberations over many, many
lifetimes, and seen just how our self-grasping and self-cherishing, life after
life, have woven us repeatedly into a net of ignorance that seems only to be
ensnaring us more and more tightly; when we have really understood the
dangerous and doomed nature of the self-grasping mind’s enterprise; when we
have really pursued its operations into their most subtle hiding places; when
we have really understood just how our whole ordinary mind and actions are
defined, narrowed and darkened by it, how almost impossible it makes it for us
to uncover the heart of unconditional love, and how it has blocked in us all
sources of real love and real compassion, then there comes a moment when we
understand, with extreme and poignant clarity, what Shantideva said:
If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?
And then a resolution is born in us
to destroy that evil spirit, our greatest enemy. With that evil spirit dead,
the cause of all our suffering will be removed, and our true nature, in all its
spaciousness and dynamic generosity, will shine out.
* * *
It is said that when Buddha attained
enlightenment, all he wanted to do was to show the rest of us the nature of
mind and share completely what he had realized. But he also saw, with the great
sorrow of infinite compassion, how difficult it would be for us to understand.
For even though we have the same
inner nature as Buddha, we have not recognized it because it is so enclosed and
wrapped up in our individual ordinary minds.
Imagine an empty vase. The space
inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the
vase separate one from the other. Our buddha mind is enclosed within the walls
of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if the vase
shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space
“outside.” They become one: There and then we realize that they were never
separate or different; they were always the same.
* * *
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche describes a
yogi wandering through a garden. He is completely awake to the splendor and
beauty of the flowers, and relishes their colors, shapes and scents. But there
is no trace of clinging or any “after-thought” in his mind.
As Dudjom Rinpoche says:
“Whatever perceptions arise, you
should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he
looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. You leave
everything fresh, natural, vivid and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in
its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade and its
glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then
all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the
indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness.”
* * *
Because in our culture we overvalue
the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary
intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations.
There is a Tibetan saying: “If you are too clever, you could miss the point
entirely.”
Patrul Rinpoche said: “The logical
mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can become
obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet we say:
“Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”
* * *
Karma means that whatever we do,
with our bodies, speech, or minds, will have a corresponding result. Each
action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said by the
masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a tiny seed can
become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions
merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a
haystack as big as a mountain.”
Similarly he said: “Do not overlook
tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in
the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Karma does not decay like external
things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or
water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.
* * *
We may say, and even half-believe,
that compassion is marvelous, but in practice our actions are deeply
uncompassionate and bring us and others mostly frustration and distress, and
not the happiness we are all seeking.
Isn’t it absurd that we all long for
happiness, yet nearly all our actions and feelings lead us directly away from
that happiness?
What do we imagine will make us
happy? A canny, self-seeking, resourceful selfishness, the selfish protection
of ego, which can as we all know, make us at moments extremely brutal. But in
fact the complete reverse is true: Self-grasping and self-cherishing are seen,
when you really look at them, to be the root of all harm to others, and also of
all harm to ourselves.
* * *
We must never forget that
it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice. And if we
choose to do so, we can put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering,
and help our true potential, our buddha nature, to awaken in us. Until this
buddha nature is completely awakened and we are freed from our ignorance and
merge with the deathless, enlightened mind, there can be no end to the round of
life and death. So, the teachings tell us, if we do not assume the fullest
possible responsibility for ourselves now in this life, our suffering will go
on not only for a few lives but for thousands of lives.
* * *
To realize what I call the wisdom of
compassion is to see with complete clarity its benefits, as well as the damage
that its opposite has done to us. We need to make a very clear distinction
between what is in our ego’s self-interest and what is in our ultimate
interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering
comes.
Self-grasping creates
self-cherishing, which in turn creates an ingrained aversion to harm and
suffering. However, harm and suffering have no objective existence; what gives
them their existence and their power is only our aversion to them. When you
understand this, you understand then that it is our aversion that attracts to
us every negativity and obstacle that can possibly happen to us, and fills our
lives with nervous anxiety, expectation, and fear.
Wear down that aversion by wearing
down the self-grasping mind and its attachment to a nonexistent self, and you
will wear down any hold on you that any obstacle and negativity can have. For
how can you attack someone or something that is just not there?
* * *
Each time we begin our practice of
meditation, we are moved by the awareness that we and all other sentient beings
fundamentally have the Buddha nature as our innermost essence, and that to
realize it is to be free of ignorance and to put an end, finally, to suffering.
We are inspired with the motivation
to dedicate our practice, and our life, to the enlightenment of all beings in
the spirit of this prayer, which all the buddhas of the past have prayed:
By the power and the truth of this practice:
May all beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness;
May all be free from sorrow, and the causes of sorrow;
May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless;
And may all live in equanimity, without too much attachment and too much
aversion,
And live believing in the equality of all that lives.
* * *
To learn how to die is to learn how
to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this life but
in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be reborn as
a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the most
powerful way of all.
Let us dare to imagine now what it
would be like to live in a world where a significant number of people took the
opportunity, offered by the teachings, to devote part of their lives to serious
spiritual practice, to recognize the nature of their minds, and so to use the
opportunity of their deaths to move closer to buddhahood, and to be reborn with
one aim, that of serving and benefiting others.
* * *
Nothing has any inherent existence
of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent
existence is what we call “emptiness.” Think of a tree. When you think of a
tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level
it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately
it has no independent existence.
When you contemplate it, you will
find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that
stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that
sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the
weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight—all form part of this tree.
As you begin to think more and more
about the tree, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make
the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything
else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing. This is what we
mean when we say things are empty, that they have no independent existence.
* * *
The still revolutionary
insight of Buddhism is that life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else.
Mind is revealed as the universal basis of experience—the creator of
happiness and the creator of suffering, the creator of what we call life and
what we call death.
*
* *
Grasping is the source of
all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to
things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting
go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning
to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold
on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to
avoid.
The intention behind
grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be
happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.
The Tibetans say that you
cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter
how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”
* * *
Mindfulness- the aware, balanced acceptance of present
experience. – Sylvia Boorstein
* * *
Mind-tangles and suffering are universal,
and the desire for happiness and the end of suffering is also universal.
. .
.Mind habits are hard to change.
Awareness, clarity, compassion, generosity,
understanding-these are in the middle of everyone’s
spiritual road.
The Buddha taught that it doesn’t make
sense to upset ourselves about what is beyond our control. We don’t get a choice about what hand we are
dealt in this life. The only choice we
have is our attitude about the cards we hold and the finesse with which we play
our hand.
The First Noble Truth is that life is
difficult and painful, just by its very nature, not because we’re doing it
wrong. . . . Dukkha: ultimate unsatisactoriness.
All relationships end in loss. . . .
Becoming aware of fragility, of temporality, of the fact that we will
surely all be lost to one another, sooner or later, mandates a clear imperative
to be totally kind and loving to each other always. . . . Holding onto anything, in addition to
being painful, is totally futile. . .
. Since everything is change happening,
there is no one who owns the changes
and no one to whom the changes are
happening. We are verbs, not nouns,
experiences unfolding . . .(awareness of this is anatta)
The Second Noble Truth is that craving
anything is suffering.
I once heard someone say that a sign of
enlightenment was the ability to say (and mean it) in any moment, “Well, this
isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay.” . . . spacious acceptance . . . the Third
Noble Truth says it is indeed possible.
. . . suffering is manageable. .
. . When I love, I’m happy.
In contact with pleasant experience, desire
arises. Nor is it necessarily naughty to
act on desire; sometimes desires are wholesome, expecially sense desires. . . .
The way the mind works is that in contact with pleasant experience, we
feel a kind of pull, an energy of wanting, and the mind moves toward pleasant
sense experiences. . . . we scan the
horizon for possible pleasant experiences and then dwell on them. It’s part of our conditioning. . . . The antidote for the hindrance of lust
is restraint. It means waiting around
long enough to see two things. The first
thing one hopes to see is whether or not the object of the desire is wholesome
and whether or not acting on the desire would be a moral, responsible, and
appropriate thing to do. The second
thing that waiting around allows us to see is that the desire itself is just a
mind energy. It’s a mind energy that
colors our feelings and motivates our behavior, but if we recognize it as just
an energy, we realize it’s not an imperative to action. It’s not a demand; it’s a suggestion. If the diesire is wholesome and the time is
appropriate, we can act on it. If the
desire is not wholesome and the time is wron, we can restrain ourselves, and
the energy will pass.
–Sylvia Boorstein
*
* *
Before admonishing another, one should
reflect thus . . .
In due season will I speak, not out of
season.
In truth will I speak, not in falsehood.
For his (her) benefit will I speak, not his
(her) loss.
Gently will I speak, not harshly.
In kindness will I speak, not in anger.
-the Buddha
*
* *
Don’t worry, be happy.
-Meher Baba
*
* *
When I love, I’m happy.
When we see clearly, we understand that,
given the history of all creation, each of us is the only person we could be
and the world is the only world it could be.
The truth is: “It’s all okay.”
The five confusing energies: lust,
aversion, torpor, restlessness, doubt.
The four Divine Abodes: lovingkindness (metta,
complete and unrestrained friendliness), sympathetic joy (mudita, shared
delight in another’s joy, happiness or good fortune), compassion, equanimity.
-Sylvia Boorstein
*
* *
I once heard the Dalai Lama teaching about
how sensible it was to put other people’s good fortune on a par, at least, with
one’s own. There are, he explained, so
many other people that your chances for delight are immeasurably increased if
the joys of others are experienced as your own.
Whatever mood is present is serving as a
grid for our experience.
The most magic mind balancer is clear
seeing.
You can’t see wisdom, but you can see its
reflection. Its reflection is happiness,
fearlessness, and kindness.
We can, with practice, begin to decondition
the mind from its unconscious reactivity.
Even without changing the habitual tendencies, we can be alert to them
and work around them. If the mind is
clear and steady, we can recognize filters as being just filters and choose the most wholesome response.
-Sylvia Boorstein
*
* *
To integrate meditation in
action is the whole ground and point and purpose of meditation. The violence
and stress and the challenges and distractions of this modern life make this
integration urgently necessary.
How do we achieve this
integration, this permeation of everyday life with the calm humor and spacious
detachment of meditation? There is no substitute for regular practice, for only
through real practice will we begin to taste unbrokenly the calm of our nature
of mind and so be able to sustain the experience of it in our everyday lives.
If you really wish to
achieve this, what you need to do is practice not just as occasional medicine
or therapy but as if it were your daily sustenance or food.
*
* *
I once heard the “Dalai Lama teaching about
how sensible it was to put other people’s good fortune on a par, at least, with
one’s own. There are, he explained, so
many other people that your chances for delight are immeasurably increased if
the joys of others are experienced as your own.
Every pain is important pain to whomever is
feeling it. …It’s ridiculous to decide
what “should” grieve someone else.
Everyone’s attachments are unique.
Since everything is change happening, there
is no one who owns the changes and no
one to whom the changes are
happening. We are verbs, not nouns,
experiences unfolding.
Life is so difficult, how can we be
anything but kind.
What the Buddha taught was simple: when we
see clearly, we behave impeccably, out of love, on behalf of all things.
Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.
I know I’m not paying attention if I’m not
feeling kind.
The 10 Perfections of the heart
(Paramitas): Generosity, Morality, Renunciation, Wisdom, Energy, Patience,
Truthfulness, Determination, Lovingkindness and Equanimity . . . together are the one path to goodness
and kindness. Each particular quality is
an entryway into that path.
Virtue is both the cause of happiness and
the expression of happiness.
The Buddha taught that suffering is the
extra pain in the mind that happens when we feel an anguished imperative to
have things be different from how they are.
It is possible-- indeed, imperative—to
change course, or to repair an action, whenever it is a mistake.
Everyone’s mind is outrageous.
The discovery that everything is always
changing, that everything has multiple causes, most of them beyond our control,
and that struggling to have things a certain way or to keep things a certain
way is both futile and painful is the key, the Buddha taught, to developing the
mind habit of noncontentious, gentle, wise response.
When we are relaxed and reasonably content,
we are naturally wise. We accept that
life is unpredictable, unreliable.
There is only one Dharma talk: How are we
going to live this life, invevitably challenged, gracefully, with kindness and
compassion.
Everything that is dear to us causes
pain. . . . caring makes us vulnerable.
Now is the only time anything
happens.
The Buddha’s criteria for Wise Speech
include—in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful—that it
be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful.
When I feel loved and loving, I am
protected and my speech is protected.
Every day I bump into “mind walls”, walls
that feel solid because the impact is
painful. Only when I remember that the
walls are the habits of my own mind, that I built them and they will continue
to exist as long as I insist that they are real, can I stop building. Then my mind relaxes and I see clearly. . . .
Practice is about recognizing traps and choosing freedom. . . .day after day, little by little, and
more and more often.
People who practice lovingkindness (metta)
Sleep peacefully,
Wake peacefully,
Dream peaceful dreams.
People love them,
Angels love them,
Angels will protect them.
Poisons and weapons and fire don’t harm
them.
Their faces are clear.
Their minds are serene.
They die unconfused.
And when they die, their rebirth is in
heavenly realms.
Hatred will never cease by hatred,
Only love will erase hatred,
This is the eternal law. (from the
Dhammapada)
“You did great!”—is probably the universal,
livesaving password for human connection.
Meet each arriving moment—each breath, or
each mood, each thought, or each idea—as the next word of the song that needs
to get sung. You can choose what line of
the score to sing—breath, mood, thought, idea—and still hear the others in the
background. . . . just do now, now.
We couldn’t any of us be beter, ever, than
how we are.
Only connect. Wherever you are, right now, pay
attention. Forever.
-Sylvia Boorstein
*
* *
Life is so short, we should all move more
slowly.
-T. N. Hahn
* * *
Everything that we see around us is
seen as it is because we have repeatedly solidified our experience of inner and
outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this has led to the
mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. In fact, as we go
further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed
perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or of matter or of even
ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call
“heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up. As William Blake said:
If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.
* * *
Wrong views and wrong convictions
can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely Adolf Hitler and Pol
Pot must have been convinced that they were right too? And yet each and every
one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form convictions,
believe them without question, and act on them, so bringing down suffering not
only on ourselves but on all those around us.
On the other hand, the heart of
Buddha’s teaching is to see “the actual state of things, as they are,” and
this is called the true View. It is a view that is all-embracing, as the
role of spiritual teachings is precisely to give us a complete perspective
on the nature of mind and reality.
* * *
Even within the human realm, all of
us have our own individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we
perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique,
separate, individual world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:
“If a hundred people sleep and
dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s
dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that
only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There
is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”
* * *
If you were to draw one essential
message from the fact of reincarnation, it would be: Develop a good heart that
longs for other beings to find lasting happiness, and acts to secure that
happiness. Nourish and practice kindness.
The Dalai Lama has said: “There is
no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own
heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”
* * *
Always recognize the dreamlike
qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness
toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to
you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The
trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point.
This is true spirituality.
CHAKDUD
TULKU RINPOCHE
* * *
To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is
why we take the spiritual path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost
infinite, and it can at every stage sabotage and pervert our desire to be free of
it. The truth is simple, and the teachings are extremely clear; but I have seen
again and again, with great sadness, that as soon as they begin to touch and
move us, ego tries to complicate them, because it knows it is fundamentally
threatened.
However hard ego may try to sabotage
the spiritual path, if you really continue on it, and work deeply with the
practice of meditation, you will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you
have been by ego’s promises: false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to
understand that both hope and fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes
deceive you, and leave you empty and disappointed, and fears paralyze you in
the narrow cell of your false identity. You begin to see also just how
all-encompassing the sway of ego has been over your mind, and in the space of
freedom opened up by meditation, when you are momentarily released from
grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature.
* * *
Sometimes when we see too much truth
about ourselves suddenly mirrored in front of us by the teacher or the
teachings, it is simply too difficult to face, too terrifying to recognize, too
painful to accept as the reality about ourselves. We deny and reject it, in an
absurd and desperate attempt to defend ourselves fromourselves,from the truth of who we really are. And when there are
things too powerful or too difficult to accept about ourselves, we project them
onto the world around us, usually onto those who help us and love us the
most—our teacher, the teachings, our parent, or our closest friend.
How can we possibly penetrate the
tough shield of this defensive system? The very best solution is when we can
recognize ourselves that we are living duped by our own delusions. I have seen
how for many people a glimpse of the truth, the true View, can bring the whole
fantastic construction of wrong views, fabricated by ignorance, tumbling
instantly to the ground.
* * It is essential to realize now, in
life, when we still have a body, that its convincing appearance of solidity is
a mere illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to learn how, after
meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from solidifying, as we
are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and our world; and to go
on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we do in meditation, that
all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The realization that this deepens the
body’s illusory nature is one of the most profound and inspiring we can have to
help us to let go.
* * *
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is
open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the
expert’s mind there are few.
* * *
If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our
smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real consequences
throughout the universe.
Throw a pebble into a pond. It sends a shiver across the surface
of the water. Ripples merge into one another and create new ones. Everything is
inextricably interrelated: We come to realize that we are responsible for
everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone
and everything else, and the entire universe.
* * *
Whatever you do, don’t shut off your pain; accept your pain and
remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, accept your pain as it is,
because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of
discovering, through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow.
“Grief,” Rumi wrote, “can be the garden of compassion. If you
keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest
ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”
* * *
Give all profit and gain to others,
Take all loss and defeat on yourself.
* * *
As Buddha said: “What you are is what you have been, what you
will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know
your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your
future life, look at your present actions.”
* * *
When the teachings “click” for you somewhere deep in your heart
and mind, then you really have the View. Whatever difficulties you face, you
will find you have some kind of serenity, stability, and understanding, and an
internal mechanism—you could call it an “inner transformer”—that works for you,
to protect you from falling prey to wrong views. In that View, you will have
discovered a “wisdom guide” of your own, always on hand to advise you, support
you, and remind you of the truth. Confusion will still arise, that’s only
normal, but with a crucial difference: No longer will you focus on it in a
blinded and obsessive way, but you will look on it with humor, perspective, and
compassion.
* * *
The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real
and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it
drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is
there something behind the appearances? Is there something in fact we can
depend on, that does survive what we call death?
Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on
them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view
everything. We come to uncover in ourselves “something” that we begin to
realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.
As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the
vast implications behind the truth of impermanence. We come to uncover a depth
of peace, joy, and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and
breeds in us gradually a certainty that there is in us “something” that nothing
destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.
* * *
Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you
really look at it, and this absence of independent existence is what we call
“emptiness.” Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a
distinctly defined object; and on a certain level it is. But when you look more
closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence.
When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an
extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The
rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes
and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and
sunlight—all form part of this tree.
As you begin to think more and more about the tree, you will
discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is;
that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every
moment its nature is subtly changing. This is what we mean when we say things
are empty, that they have no independent existence.
* * *
"Live with skillful nonchalance and
ceaseless concern."
~ Prajnaparamita Sutra ~
* * *
When a much larger number of people know the nature of
their minds, they’ll know also the glorious nature of the world they are in,
and will struggle urgently and bravely to preserve it. It’s interesting that
the Tibetan word for “Buddhist” is nangpa . It means “insider”: someone who seeks the truth not outside but
within the nature of his or her mind. All the teachings and training in
Buddhism are aimed at that one single point: to look into the nature of mind,
and so free us from the fear of death and help us realize the truth of life.
* * *
Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability
to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and
why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands
of our heart.
Buddha said:
Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.
* * *
Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to
us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things
change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since
learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the
irony of our struggle to hold on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us
the very pain we are seeking to avoid.
The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s
nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by
nature ungraspable.
The Tibetans say that you cannot wash the same dirty hand twice
in the same running river, and “no matter how much you squeeze a handful of
sand, you will never get oil out of it.”
* * *
A wave in the sea, seen in one way, seems to have a distinct
identity, an end and a beginning, a birth anda death. Seen in another way, the
wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the behavior of water, “empty” of
any separate identity but “full” of water. So when you really think about the
wave, you come to realize that it is something that has been made temporarily
possible by wind and water, and is dependent on a set of constantly changing
circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave.
* * *
Doubts demand from us a real skillfulness in dealing with them,
and I notice how few people have any idea how to pursue doubts or to use them.
It seems ironic that in a civilization that so worships the power of deflation
and doubt, hardly anyone has the courage to deflate the claims of doubt
itself—to do as one Hindu master said: turn the dogs of doubt on doubt itself,
to unmask cynicism, and to uncover what fear, despair, hopelessness, and tired
conditioning it springs from. Then doubt would no longer be an obstacle, but a
door to realization, and whenever doubt appeared in the mind, a seeker would
welcome it as a means of going deeper into the truth.
* * *
Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are,
together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled
together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan
self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its
existence.
In Tibetan, ego is called dakdzin , which means “grasping
to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a
delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas,
desires, and activities that will sustain that false construction.
Such grasping is futile from the start and condemned to
frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at
is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and to
go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self
doesn’t inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our
fundamental insecurities and fears.
* * *
As we follow the teachings and as we practice, we will inevitably
discover certain truths about ourselves that stand out prominently: There are
places where we always get stuck; there are habitual patterns and strategies
that are the legacy of negative karma, which we continuously repeat and
reinforce; there are particular ways of seeing things—those tired old
explanations of ourselves and the world around us—that are quite mistaken yet
which we hold onto as authentic, and so distort our whole view of reality.
When we persevere on the spiritual path, and examine ourselves
honestly, it begins to dawn on us more and more that our perceptions are
nothing more than a web of illusions. Simply to acknowledge our confusion, even
though we cannot accept it completely, can bring some light of understanding
and spark off in us a new process, a process of healing.
* * *
A meditation technique used a great deal in Tibetan Buddhism is
uniting the mind with the sound of a mantra. The definition of mantra is
“that which protects the mind.” That which protects the mind from negativity,
or which protects you from your own mind, is mantra.
When you are nervous, disoriented, or emotionally fragile,
inspired chanting or reciting of a mantra can change the state of your mind
completely, by transforming its energy and atmosphere. How is this possible?
Mantra is the essence of sound, the embodiment of the truth in the form of
sound. Each syllable is impregnated with spiritual power, condenses a deep spiritual
truth, and vibrates with the blessing of the speech of the buddhas. It is also
said that the mind rides on the subtle energy of the breath, the prana, which
moves through and purifies the subtle channels of the body. So when you chant a
mantra, you are charging your breath and energy with the energy of the mantra,
and so working directly on your mind and your subtle body.
* * *
In his very first teaching, Buddha explained that the root cause
of suffering is ignorance. But where exactly is this ignorance? And how does it
display itself? Let’s take an everyday example. Think about those people—we all
know some—who are gifted with a remarkably powerful and sophisticated
intelligence. Isn’t it puzzling how, instead of helping them, as you might expect,
it seems only to make them suffer more? It is almost as if their brilliance is
directly responsible for their pain.
What is happening is quite clear: This intelligence of ours is
captured and held hostage by ignorance, which then makes use of it freely for
its own ends. This is how we can be extraordinarily intelligent and yet
absolutely wrong, at one and the same time.
* * *
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection
You might as well burst out laughing!
LONGCHENPA
* * *
Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual
karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly
differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As
Kalu Rinpoche says:
“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will
experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be
true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was
the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver
according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”
* * *
Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual
karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly
differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As
Kalu Rinpoche says:
“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will
experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be
true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was
the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver
according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”
* * *
Listening is a
far more difficult process than most people imagine. Really to listen in the
way that is meant by the masters is to let go utterly of ourselves, to let go
of all the information, all the concepts, all the ideas, and all the prejudices
that our heads are stuffed with. If you really listen to the teachings, those
concepts, which are our real hindrance—the one thing that stands between us and
our true nature—can slowly and steadily be washed away.
*
* *
To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we take the spiritual
path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost infinite, and it can at every
stage sabotage and pervert our desire to be free of it. The truth is simple,
and the teachings are extremely clear; but I have seen again and again, with
great sadness, that as soon as they begin to touch and move us, ego tries to
complicate them, because it knows it is fundamentally threatened.
However hard ego may try to sabotage the spiritual path, if you
really continue on it, and work deeply with the practice of meditation, you
will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you have been by ego’s promises:
false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to understand that both hope and
fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes deceive you, and leave you empty
and disappointed, and fears paralyze you in the narrow cell of your false
identity. You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the sway of ego has
been over your mind, and in the space of freedom opened up by meditation, when
you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating
spaciousness of your true nature.
* * *
Sometimes when we see too much truth about ourselves suddenly
mirrored in front of us by the teacher or the teachings, it is simply too
difficult to face, too terrifying to recognize, too painful to accept as the
reality about ourselves. We deny and reject it, in an absurd and desperate
attempt to defend ourselves fromourselves,from
the truth of who we really are. And when there are things too powerful or too
difficult to accept about ourselves, we project them onto the world around us,
usually onto those who help us and love us the most—our teacher, the teachings,
our parent, or our closest friend.
How can we possibly penetrate the tough shield of this defensive
system? The very best solution is when we can recognize ourselves that we are
living duped by our own delusions. I have seen how for many people a glimpse of
the truth, the true View, can bring the whole fantastic construction of wrong
views, fabricated by ignorance, tumbling instantly to the ground.
* * *
If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our
smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real consequences
throughout the universe.
Throw a pebble into a pond. It sends a shiver across the surface
of the water. Ripples merge into one another and create new ones. Everything is
inextricably interrelated: We come to realize that we are responsible for
everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone
and everything else, and the entire universe.
* * *
Because the law of karma is inevitable and infallible, whenever
we harm others, we are directly harming ourselves, and whenever we bring them
happiness, we are bringing ourselves future happiness. The Dalai Lama says:
“If you try to subdue your selfish motives—anger and so forth—and
develop more kindness and compassion for others, ultimately you yourself will
benefit more than you would otherwise. So sometimes I say that the wise selfish
person should practice this way. Foolish selfish people are always thinking of
themselves, and the result is negative. Wise selfish people think of others,
help others as much as they can, and the result is that they too receive
benefit.”
* * *
There could be no bigger mistake than to think that ignorance
is somehow dumb and stupid, or passive and lacking in intelligence. On the
contrary, it is shrewd and cunning, versatile and ingenious in the games of
deception, and in our wrong views and their burning
convictions we find one of its deepest and, as Buddha said, most dangerous
manifestations:
What do you have to fear from the wild elephant
Who can only damage your body here and now,
When falling under the influence of misguided people and wrong views
Not only destroys the merit you have accumulated in the past,
But also blocks your path to freedom in the future?
* * *
The teachings tell us what it is we need to realize, but we also
have to go on our own journey, in order to come to a personal realization. That
journey may take us through suffering, difficulties, and doubts of all kinds,
but they will become our greatest teachers. Through them we will learn the
humility to recognize our limitations, and through them we will discover the
inner strength and fearlessness we need to emerge from our old habits and set
patterns, and surrender into the vaster vision of real freedom offered by the
spiritual teachings.
* * *
We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost
access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward,
because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even
think that if we do, we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last
and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us from discovering our real
nature.
So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest
risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people.
When they hear the words egoless or
emptiness, they think that
experiencing those states will be like being thrown out the door of a spaceship
to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the
truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify
us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking
into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
* * *
The masters tell us that there is an aspect of our minds that is
its fundamental basis, a state called “the ground of the ordinary mind.” It
functions like a storehouse, in which the imprints of past actions caused by
our negative emotions are all stored like seeds. When the right conditions
arise, they germinate and manifest as circumstances and situations in our
lives.
If we have a habit of thinking in a particular pattern, positive
or negative, then these tendencies will be triggered and provoked very easily,
and recur and go on recurring. With constant repetition our inclinations and
habits become steadily more entrenched, and continue increasing and gathering
power, even when we sleep. This is how they come to determine our life, our
death, and our rebirth.
* * *
Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized
by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to
human, but also human to other forms of life.
- His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
* * *
What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage
and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for
the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing,
to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform
it; at a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity,
peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature
of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master.
* * *
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a
dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
BUDDHA
* * *
You can have no greater ally in the war against your greatest
enemy, your own self-grasping and self-cherishing, than the practice of
compassion. It is compassion, dedicating ourselves to others, taking on their
suffering instead of cherishing ourselves, that, hand in hand with the wisdom
of egolessness, destroys most effectively and most completely that ancient
attachment to a false self that has been the cause of our endless wandering in
samsara. That is why in our tradition we see compassion as the source and
essence of enlightenment and the heart of enlightened activity.
* * *
The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its
continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and,
most important of all, complete absence of grasping.
The diminishing of your grasping is a sign that you are becoming
freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the
sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving and
the closer you will come to the infinitely generous “wisdom of egolessness.”
When you live in that wisdom home, you’ll no longer find a barrier between “I”
and “you,” “this” and “that,” “inside” and “outside”; you’ll have come,
finally, to your true home, the state of nonduality.
* * *
Sam Keen