Tribute to the Great Wave of Gen Tharchin’s Deeds

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life, 3. Tantra, 4. Practicing in Daily Life, 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden , , , ,

My dearest beloved teacher,

When I heard you were gravely ill, I reached out to a few friends to see if there was a (conventional) way to send you a message before you passed, but I wasn’t able to reach you in time. It doesn’t matter, I have no doubt that you hear me now.

I’ll start with what is funniest. Shortly after I heard the news of your passing, I got a very distinct feeling that I am now like Luke Skywalker and you are my Obi-wan Kenobi who I can now speak with anytime – the Force (of Tharchin) will be with me always. Of course that is the first blessing you give my mind after you pass, you always had a mischievous playfulness to you. Child at play indeed…

I have no doubt you are in hell right now. You taught that we need to design our own enlightenment – not just become a Buddha, but generate a specific bodhichitta of what we want our actual function to be. I remember you saying how it was your greatest wish to become a Buddha that has the special ability to help the beings in hell because that is where most living beings are. To paraphrase Shantideva’s dedication recounting his prayer for hell beings, “‘Why are the henchmen of the Lord of Death and the unbearable buzzards and vultures so afraid? By whose noble power is the darkness of our suffering dispelled and bestowed upon us?’ Looking above them, those in hell will behold the radiant form of Vajrapani Tharchin, the Holder of the Vajra. Through the force of their new-found faith and joy, may they be freed from past evil and come to abide with you.”

For myself, I wish to become the main gateway for those seeking liberation – the Dawn Gate, the first light living beings see as they emerge from their darkest hours. May my body, speech, and mind greet each being where they are at and guide them all the way into Heruka’s heart. Thanks to you, I know this is possible. You will be with them in the hells, you can hand them off to me and I will take them the rest of the way. In this way, we can work together again.

About 20 years ago you told me your main practice was transforming your dying body into the path. When I visited you in I think it was 2012 or so, you were in a room somewhere in Manjushri, lying on the bed, drooling, trembling badly, etc. I asked, “so how are you?” You said, “despite all appearances, I’m doing quite well, thanks.” Beautiful. When I look at the picture of your moment of passing, what I see is an example of somebody who despite really horrible bodily difficulties, you nonetheless were able to pass peacefully into the Dharmakaya. If you can transform your long and difficult aging and death process into the path, then the rest of us can certainly do the same for ours.

I first met you just before I received HYT empowerments the first time back in the mid-1990s. I was having difficulties with somebody close to me and you said two things that carried me for decades: First, that she is an emanation of Vajrayogini for me (not inherently, but functionally). Second, that whenever I perceived faults in others, I should “recognize that they are reflections of my own mind and I should own their faults as my own. I should look within myself, find those same faults, and then purge them like bad blood. And when I do, they will simply ‘dis-appear’ because they were never there in the first place.” The truth is Vajrayogini has been with me ever since. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns – far from it – but there is no doubt I was being ripened the whole way. And you were exactly correct, the appearance of those faults have largely disappeared, just in a way I never expected. Vajrayogini is still with me, appearing in different forms. I see her beautiful face everywhere now. She is my eternal partner. You helped me see her directly. She is now guiding me home.

My very first direct teachings with you were up at Tharpaland and you were guiding a retreat. I don’t remember what the retreat was on, but you gave extensive teachings on contaminated aggregates and how all of the path comes down to changing the basis of imputation of our I from our contaminated aggregates to the pure aggregates of a Buddha. There are two reasons why we do that – for ourself (renunciation) and for others (bodhichitta). There are two levels we do it at – gross level of generation stage and subtle level of completion stage. And there is one thing that lets us do it – the wisdom realizing emptiness. This framework has shaped my Dharma understanding of everything every since. Atisha had his Lamrim that condensed all 84,000 of Buddha’s teachings, you had this formulation. All of my Dharma understanding has fit within this framework ever since. It was also during that retreat that I generated the wish that one day you become my principal teacher.

When I moved to Geneva in 2000, my wish came true. I started doing correspondence courses with you. We did Joyful Path and Heart of Wisdom together. Your teachings on Joyful Path in particular have shaped my Dharma understanding more than any teachings I have ever received. I took a full transcript of the whole thing and later transformed it into my lecture notes for when I taught Joyful Path on FP myself in Geneva. So not only did I have the several years of studying the book with you, I then got to redo it as I taught it to others. We would then meet at every festival and stayed in close contact for many years after that. In my mind, you were my principal teacher in this life. Atisha had many teachers, but he considered Serlingpa his main teacher. Of course, Venerable Geshe-la is our Spiritual Guide, but I have had many, many teachers in my Dharma life, and without a doubt, you are my Serlingpa.

One of my favorite stories of yours is you said you had been in retreat for several years and you went to VGL and said you wanted another year of retreat because you knew if you had it, you would become a Buddha. VGL said, “yes, if you stayed in retreat, you would become a Buddha, but you would be a useless one because you would have no karmic connections with living beings. You would become the Buddha of the midges and bugs of Tharpaland.” He then said you needed to leave your retreat and start teaching. My Lord, look at all the lives you touched… You formed some of the greatest teachers of this tradition, many, many of whom are still teaching today. You led thousands on retreat. You showed the example of how to do retreat which has shaped every Kadampa retreat center in the world. And your love and wisdom pervade the entire tradition. We wouldn’t have Manjushri center if it were not for you. That room will forever be “Tharchin’s Tower.” You are in the hearts and on the shrines of so many.

You came to Geneva when I was teaching there and gave a weekend course on the Great Mother practice. I felt like those stories of old where great masters like Atisha or Je Tsongkhapa would give discourses and thousands would gain direct realizations of emptiness just be listening. I of course did not, but the understanding of emptiness I gained that weekend remains with me today. Shockingly, though, I never really did start my Great Mother practice, despite you saying you did it many times each day. I basically relied on Dorje Shugden for everything. But about 2-3 weeks ago, you worked through a friend of mine and I realized I have all these obstacles in my life right now and we have a perfect method for dispelling them. I have started doing it every day, just as you taught so many years ago. I can feel the effects already.

So much has happened since we last communicated. Too much to recount, especially publicly, but I will share it all with you in my heart. But I will say this: more than anything, you inspired within me a wish to do my three year retreat. Based upon this wish, just prior to VGL passing, I wrote him and asked for advice for how I should prepare for the retreat, what I should do during the retreat, and what I should do after the retreat to put it into practice. He then revealed to me a ten year preparation plan, what I should do during the retreat itself, how I can work to cause the Dharma to flourish afterwards, and for good measure explained what I needed to do in the five years leading up to my death to prepare for it. The wish you instilled in me and VGL’s plan have become the organizing principles of my entire life. Of course, I may die today and all that, but at least I will die with the wish to live my life by this plan on my heart and will be able to continue where I left off in my next life.

I quote you all the time and rely upon what you taught me on almost a daily basis. I love you so much. I’ll be honest, I’m very sad that you are no longer physically with us. You told me once that the world needs around five great masters at any one time to prevent it from sinking completely into the abyss. I don’t know how many other great masters there are left in the world today, but one thing I am certain of is you were one of them.

When I did Powa for you, it frankly seemed a bit absurd to do Powa for you since you are, in my mind, already a Buddha. But you exist on many levels and according to common appearance doing Powa is perfectly appropriate. But after completing the powa (which felt effortless, really), I felt you spoke to me and said, “Do Great Mother Practice for the 49 days instead.” It came to me, the best way I can honor your passing is to do the Great Mother practice for the next 49 days to blast away all the obstacles to the frictionless movement of the Great Wave of your deeds – both while you were physically with us and now that you are a Obi-wan Tharchin!

And I would like to say something about your name. Back in the day, people called you Venerable Tharchin. You were Venerable Tharchin to me. Later, everyone became “Gens” instead, but I kept calling you Venerable Tharchin. Eventually somebody said I shouldn’t do that publicly anymore, so I stopped, but in my heart and with some of my closest friends, I still call you Venerable Tharchin. Now that you have passed into enlightenment, I would like to publicly refer to you as Venerable Tharchin, but I should probably stick to “Gen.” But privately, you will always be Venerable Tharchin to me and I’ll keep calling you that. It will be our little secret, don’t tell anybody… haha

My dear teacher, here are my promises of practice to you on your passing.

1.  I will do the Great Mother every day for the next 49 days to remove all obstructions to the great wave of your enlightened deeds and our ability to commune with you directly Obi-wan Kenobi style.

2.  I will do a blog tribute post to you (which is what this post is). I hope others will do the same so we can capture your wisdom.

3.  I will eventually do a full blog series on all of Joyful Path based upon your teachings I received so that they remain in this world.

4.  I will make a Venerable Tharchin bot based upon all of the teachings I can find of yours. I’ve got many, many recordings and will collect others. I will convert them into transcripts and make a Venerable Tharchin bot that speaks from the perspective of your teachings.

5.  I will carry your teachings forward in my heart. Our lineage guru is of course VGL, but each teacher brings a unique flavor. I will preserve your flavor within me.

6.  When my path is done, I will meet you in Keajra and regale my tales of triumph.

To paraphrase Ragnar Lothbrok’s death speech, “It gladdens me to know that Heruka prepares for a feast. Soon you shall be drinking nectar from curved horns. This hero that comes into Keajra does not lament his death! You shall not enter Heruka’s hall with fear. There you shall wait for you sons to join you. And when they do, you will bask in their tales of triumph. The Lineage Gurus will welcome you! Your death comes without apology! And the Dakinis will welcome you home!”

Until that day comes, know you are in my heart.

Your loving disciple,

Kadampa Ryan (I go by Ash now… Another long story)

Happy Tsog Day: Destroying our Greatest Inner Demon

Kadampa Ryan Tsog Days

In order to remember and mark our tsog days, holy days on the Kadampa calendar, I am sharing my understanding of the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide with tsog.  This is part 29 of a 44-part series.

Equalizing self and others

In that no one wishes for even the slightest suffering,
Or is ever content with the happiness they have,
There is no difference between myself and others;
Realizing this, I seek your blessings joyfully to make others happy.

As explained above, there are two methods for generating bodhicitta: considering how all living beings are our mother and exchanging self with others. Meditation on equalizing self with others is the first meditation of the second method. The second method for generating bodhicitta is more powerful than the first method because we cherish ourselves more than we cherish our mother. Since it is more powerful, the practice Offering to the Spiritual Guide dedicates five full verses to the practice.

When we equalize self with others our objective is to generate the same degree of cherishing for others as we have for ourselves, in other words, to cherish others as we cherish ourself. This is not that uncommon of a mind. Political leaders who view their job as serving the public interest consider the happiness and welfare of all their citizens as being equally important. If some politicians can generate this mind, then surely we can generate this mind as a would-be-bodhisattva. We likewise find this mind in many families that consider every person in the family to be equally important and make decisions based upon what is best for the family as a whole. Some teachers do the same with the students in their classroom and some employers do the same with the people who work at their company. Even in normal society, we would say a political leader, a parent, a teacher, or an employer who puts their own interest ahead of the interests of those they serve is a corrupt person.

There are several different methods we can use to reach this mind. One method for doing so is to realize that all living beings have an equal wish to be happy all the time. There is nothing about our own happiness that makes it more important than the happiness of anybody else. Since we all share an equal wish, and there’s nothing that makes us more important than anybody else, it follows that we should cherish the happiness of each and every living being equally. A particularly powerful way of generating this mind is to consider how all living beings are like cells in the body of life. Just as we would not say the hand does not care what happens to the foot, so too when we have equalized self with others, we cannot say that we do not care about what happens to other living beings because we are all part of the same body of life. The definitive way of generating this mind is to consider how all living beings, including ourselves, are all equally empty and therefore equally projections of our mind. There is no basis for cherishing one appearance in our mind over another since they are all equally appearances to our mind. Whichever line of reasoning works for us, the goal is the same, namely to generate a feeling that cherishes all living beings equally.

The dangers of self-cherishing

Seeing that this chronic disease of cherishing myself
Is the cause that gives rise to unwanted suffering,
I seek your blessings to destroy this great demon of selfishness
By resenting it as the object of blame.

In the teachings on training the mind, we are encouraged to gather all blame into one. The meaning of this practice is every time we experience any problem, or we see anybody else experiencing any sort of suffering, we blame it entirely upon the mind of self-cherishing. In the Lord of all Lineages prayer it says, “since beginningless time the root of all my suffering has been my self-cherishing mind, I must expel it from my heart, cast it afar, and cherish only other living beings.”

How can we understand self-cherishing to be the cause of all our suffering? All our suffering comes from our negative karma, and all our negative karma is committed with a mind of self-cherishing. Self-cherishing considers our own happiness to be more important than the happiness of others and is therefore willing to sacrifice the happiness of others for the sake of ourselves. All non-virtuous actions fundamentally are willing to harm others in some way for the sake of ourselves.

Further, what happens to us is only a problem because we consider our own happiness to be important. If we did not consider our own happiness to be important, then what happens to us would also not be important, and therefore not a problem. From this we can see the only reason why we have any problems is because we cherish ourselves.

Intellectually this is not difficult to understand. The practice is to develop the habit of gathering all blame into one. We need to do this again and again and again throughout our life, whenever we see ourselves or others suffer, we do the mental exercise of identifying exactly how and why it is the fault of self-cherishing. The more we do this, the more determined we will become to destroy this demon within our mind.

Vows, commitments, and modern life:  Faith is part of Buddhism too

Kadampa Ryan Vows, commitments and daily life

Become acquainted with the three non-degenerations.  

The three non-degenerations are:  faith in Dharma, effort in our practice of Dharma, and not allowing our mindfulness to degenerate. 

Many people come into Buddhism motivated by a rejection of faith-based forms of religion.  For the modern, scientific mind, Buddhism can easily be understood as an inner science.  Indeed, we are encouraged to practice in this way, testing the instructions for their validity and usefulness in our life.  Blind faith is rejected, and we are encouraged to develop our own wisdom realizing the truth of the instructions for ourselves.  We are explicitly told to not believe somebody just because they are called a Buddha, but instead to examine things for ourselves.  Many people think of Buddhism more as a philosophy of life, or a time-tested form of auto-psychotherapy.  All these things are true, and such an approach very much appeals to the modern mind.  I remember when I first started practicing, I told my teacher, “I agree with and have no problem with basically everything in the Dharma, except this whole faith thing.”  For me, faith was for people who didn’t know how to think for themselves.  It was a convenient means of avoiding having good answers to the hard questions.  In fact, faith, to my understanding was where any religion was weakest, and wherever we were told to have faith is exactly where we should worry.  When we hear people talking about “faith” and “blessings” and “Geshe-la said this and Geshe-la said that” we quickly become very critical and we wonder whether we have found ourself in some crazed cult! 

Many people come into the Dharma with similar attitudes.  But there comes a point in our practice where faith and reliance become the giant elephant in the room we can no longer avoid.  I had been practicing for many years without really relying or having much faith at all.  I was then doing a retreat, everything was going quite nicely, and then all a sudden, I came to a screeching halt.  Nothing was working.  I was dead in the water.  I didn’t know what to do.  I then called up my teacher and explained what had happened, and she laughed at me.  She said, “you don’t know what to do, do you?”  And I said no.  She said, “you can’t do anything can you?”  And I said no.  She then said, “well I don’t know either nor can I help you.  You need to start your practice completely over from scratch.”  I asked, “how?”  And she said, “go sit down on your cushion, generate a wish to rebuild your practice from scratch and then with faith request blessings for guidance as to what you should do.  When you get an answer, do that.  When you need clarification, ask for guidance again.  Continue in this way until you have rebuilt your practice.”

Feeling like I had tried everything else, I then gave it a go.  At first, nothing.  But then, an “idea” popped into my head, so I started running with that.  Then another, then another.  I felt like I was being guided by the hand, step by step, being shown how I should rebuild my practice.  But this time, the fundamental difference was, I was being shown how to practice through reliance, not through my own effort with my own mind.  Instead of reciting the words of the sadhana in my mind myself, I request that the guru practice in my mind for me.  Instead of trying to understand the meaning, I request blessings that the meaning be revealed.  Instead of trying to understand the points of contemplation myself, I request the guru to explain it to me in a way I can understand.  What used to be just me with my mind turned into me with my guru.  I realized what still to this day is the single most important thing I have realized on the path:  If I am truly intelligent, I will rely upon my guru’s mind alone. 

If we have a choice of using a bicycle or a Ferrari, which do we pick?  If our choice is between a hammer or a nail gun, which do we use?  In the same way, if our choice is relying upon our ordinary mind or relying upon the guru’s mind, which do we do?  I consider myself pretty intelligent, but I am a fool compared to the guru.  His powers of reasoning and concentration far surpass my own; his heart of love and compassion warm the entire universe; his wisdom illuminates all.  In our Tantric practice in particular, the inner engine which makes it work is faith.  The guru-deity is already enlightened, all we need to do is impute our I onto his body and mind, and the rest happens effortlessly.  Once we have a taste for reliance, we can’t help but ask ourselves, “why would we practice any other way?”

Gen-la Losang said, “at the end of the day, there is really only one practice, and that is faith.”  One of my other teachers said, “we normally pray as a last resort after we have tried everything else, but we are spiritual people.  Praying should be our first response, not our last.”  I cannot speak to other religions, but in Kadampa Buddhism, with our teachings on the wisdom realizing emptiness, faith is best understood as emptiness in action.  Venerable Tharchin said, “what is true or not is not important, what matters is what is most beneficial to believe.” Because everything is empty, it is believing that makes things true.  It is because things are empty that we can believe in different ways and actually reconstruct a new, pure reality.  If things were not empty, we could not do this, and faith, frankly, makes no sense.  But it is because things are empty that faith works.  We have faith in things not because they are somehow objectively true, but rather because by believing in them we rewire our minds and karmically reconstruct our world. 

Happy Tara Day: Causing the three worlds to shake

Kadampa Ryan How to Rely Upon Tara, Tara Days

This is the fifth installment of the 12-part series sharing my understanding of the practice Liberation from Sorrow.

Praising Tara by the light that radiates from the letter HUM

Homage to you who strike the ground with the palm of your hand
And stamp it with your foot.
With a wrathful glance and letter HUM,
You subdue all seven levels.

This also refers to Tara’s ability to engage in wrathful actions and can be understood from the above.  I’m not sure what the seven levels are.

Praising Tara by her Dharmakaya aspect

Homage to you who are happy, virtuous and peaceful,
Within the sphere of the peace of nirvana.
Fully endowed with SÖHA and OM,
You completely destroy heavy evil actions.

This verse refers to definitive Tara.  The conventional Tara is the green deity we know and love.  She manifests this form so that living beings can more easily develop a relationship with her.  But actual Tara is Dhamakaya Tara, or Truth Body Tara.  This is definitive Tara.  The Dharmakaya is a Tara’s realization of great bliss mixed inseparably from the emptiness of all phenomena.  She is referred to as the mother of all Buddhas because all Buddhas arise out of her Dharmakaya – she gives birth to them from her realization of bliss and emptiness.  What does the Dharmakaya feel like?  Happy, virtuous, and peaceful.  This is her inner pure land, and anytime we ourselves feel happy, virtuous, or peaceful, we are experiencing a similitude of her pure land.

Praising Tara by her divine actions of peaceful and wrathful mantras

Homage to you who completely subdue the obstructions
Of those who delight in the Dharma Wheel;
Rescuing with the array of the ten-letter mantra
And the knowledge-letter HUM.

Peaceful actions refer to a Buddha’s ability to pacify negativity, delusions, or their imprints in either ourselves or in others.  All living beings possess Buddha nature.  What does this mean?  It means we all possess within ourselves the potential for an enlightened mind, and all we need to do is purify our mind of all that defiles it and our natural enlightened state will be unleashed or uncovered.  What is our mind defiled by?  Principally three things:  negative karma, delusions, and their imprints.  Technically negative karma is also an imprint of a delusion which is why we normally say the “two obstructions,” referring to delusions and their imprints.  But from a practical point of view, we place particular emphasis in the early stages of our practice on purifying our negative karma (lower scope meditations), then overcoming our delusions (intermediate scope meditations), and finally the remainder of our contaminated karma (great scope meditations).  Tara can help us pacify all three of these, as explained by her ten-letter mantra whose principal function is to bestow all of the Lamrim meditations.  According to Tantra, the two main objects to be pacified are ordinary appearances and ordinary conceptions.  Ordinary appearances are phenomena appearing to exist independently of our mind (the things we normally see), and ordinary conceptions are grasping at the wrong belief that objects do in fact exist in the way that they appear.  For example, when we think of ourself, we see our ordinary body and mind.  This is an ordinary appearance.  When we grasp at them actually being ourselves, this is an ordinary conception.  Tara also has the power to pacify all our ordinary appearances and conceptions.

Praising Tara by her divine actions of wrathfully shaking the three worlds

Homage to TURE, stamping your feet,
Born from the seed in the aspect of HUM,
Who cause Mount Meru, Mandhara and Vindhya,
And all the three worlds to shake.

Buddhist cosmology is incredibly vast.  The universe as we know it actually only one world system.  There are the thousand worlds, which is a thousand world systems or universes as we know them.  There are the two thousand worlds, which is a thousand of the thousand worlds, or one million universes.  And there are the three thousand worlds, which is a thousand of the two thousand worlds, or one trillion universes.  In truth, there are countless universes, and the three thousand worlds is a shorthand for implying countless that makes it somewhat easier to grasp.  Just as the stars in the sky form galaxies, super clusters, and so forth, the three thousand worlds also cluster together and are arranged in different ways, so too the three thousand worlds cluster together and are arranged in particular way.  In the center of the three thousand worlds is Mount Meru, which is actually comprised of countless different pure lands at different levels of purity, such as the Land of 33 Heavens where Buddha went to teach his mother after she took rebirth there.  At the top of Mount Meru is Heruka’s celestial mansion.  Surrounding Mount Meru are the four major and eight minor continents, like an archipelago of different clusters of universes – they can be likened to superclusters of galaxies.  The universe that we live in is simply one of many universes in what is known as the Eastern continent, but is in reality just a cluster of universes.  Traditional cosmology as we know it just talks of our one universe where the Big Bang unfolded, but this one universe is as insignificant as our own planet is in our universe.  The vastness of Buddhist cosmology is almost beyond comprehension.  Interestingly, some astrophysicists have a similar view arguing we live in a multiverse, or a n-dimensional multiverse, but they have no idea how these universes are shaped.  Just as the science of quantum physics is gradually catching up with Buddha’s teachings on emptiness, it is only a question of time before science catches up with Buddha’s teachings on cosmology.  Tara’s blessings and power pervade everywhere.  Vajrayogini and Tara are actually the same being, just appearing at two different levels – Action Tantra version as Green Tara and Highest Yoga Tantra version of Red Vajrayogini.  Vajrayogini is in union with Heruka inside his celestial mansion atop Mount Meru and her wisdom is able to cause all three thousand worlds to shake!

Praising Tara by her divine actions of dispelling internal and external poisons

Homage to you who hold in your hand
A moon, the lake of the gods;
Saying TARA twice and the letter PHAT,
You completely dispel all poisons.

Conventionally, Tara’s blessings are particularly powerful at dispelling external poisons, such as those we might ingest.  I personally suffer from terrible allergies, some of which are deadly.  When I have a strong allergic reaction to something I eat, I of course take my Benadryl or other allergy medications, but I also recite with great faith Tara’s mantra requesting that she protect me.  Those who have allergies can do the same, even allergies as light as hay fever.  But principally, Tara’s blessing dispel the inner poisons of our delusions.  Outer poisons can at most harm us in this one life, but the inner poisons of our delusions harm us in all our future lives.  Considering our delusions to be inner poisons is a particularly powerful way of thinking of them.  If we ingested an external poison, we would do everything we can as quickly as we could get rid of it from our body or to take an antidote.  But we would never think that the poison is us, we see clearly the difference between the poison and ourselves.  In the same way, our delusions are not us, but they do terrible harm to us, and we should feel great urgency to purge them from our system.  Tara is the antidote to all of the inner poisons of delusions.  She is known as the Lamrim Buddha because she helps Atisha’s followers and her blessings specifically function to bestow Lamrim realizations.  Lamrim is like a net of virtuous minds that functions to oppose all delusions directly or indirectly.  By weaving the Lamrim within our mind, we protect ourselves against any possible combination of delusions, and thus achieve protection from all inner poisons.  

It’s Not a Fault to Also Use Dharma to Solve Our External Problems:

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life, 3. Tantra, 4. Practicing in Daily Life, 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden , , , ,

When people first come into Dharma, they quite naturally think that the source of their problems is their external circumstances. This is what our delusions have been telling us since beginningless time, so of course they think that. Perhaps this was our story as well.

I remember once when I was in Geneva, there was a homeless guy who came to the center and he asked what we were all about and if we could help him. We explained that we can do nothing to help him with his external problem, but we can help him solve his internal problem. He replied, “what good would that do, even if I change my mind, I’m still going to be on the street, so that doesn’t help me.” Then he left. While that may be an extreme example, there are perhaps traces of this logic in many of us. We are convinced our problem is our external circumstance, and so fail to see the value of Dharma, so we never get serious about practicing it.

But when we came to our very first General Program class, we almost certainly received some variant of the teachings on inner peace as the true cause of happiness, how we find happiness from a different source. The logic for this is simple: happiness or suffering are states of mind, therefore their causes must come from within the mind. If we check, when our mind is peaceful, we are happy even if our external circumstance is terrible; and if our mind is not peaceful, we are not happy even if our external circumstance is ideal. This shows that our happiness does not depend upon our external circumstance, but instead depends upon our mind. Therefore, if we want to be happy, we need to train our mind – find happiness from a difference source, from within. Delusions function to destroy our inner peace and virtues function to cultivate it, so the name of the game is abandon all our delusions and cultivate every virtue until eventually we are happy all the time, in this life and in life after life. These teachings likely changed our life and began our Dharma practice.

We also no doubt received the teaching on the distinction between our outer problem and our inner problem with the example of our car breaking down. Normally, when our car breaks down, we think “I have a problem.” Geshe-la explains no, when our car breaks down, our car has a problem. Our problem is our deluded mental reaction to this event. The car breaking down is our outer problem, our mental unhappiness about it is our inner problem. We need a mechanic to solve our outer problem, and we need Dharma to solve our inner problem. All that of course is true, but we can sometimes become extreme with even that teaching. I know I did.

We have also all received the teachings on how it is a misuse of Dharma to use it for worldly purposes, especially the tantric teachings. Like using $500 bills for toilet paper or for lighting a fire. I became a purist with this, thinking it is somehow wrong to use Dharma to solve our external problems – a misuse of the teachings. I thought I just needed to accept the adversity and transform it into the path; and to do otherwise was somehow non-Dharma. I remember there was a time in the early 2000s when a particular very senior teacher was teaching it was wrong, for example, to take medicines or receive normal medical care if we had the ability to transform our sickness or pain into the path. We should push ourselves to our limit. Yeah, we know the teachings on patient acceptance say take the aspirin and then practice acceptance while we wait for it to take effect, but our pride and misunderstanding told us that teaching was for beginners. We are an advanced practitioner, so if we can transform it we should and not take the aspirin. Complete nonsense and in total contradiction with what Venerable Geshe-la teaches.

Those who have been reading my thoughts on line for some time no doubt know that Dorje Shugden is my favorite Buddha. I solve basically all of my delusions with my reliance upon him. My deepest wish genuinely is to make progress along the path. So I request him to arrange whatever conditions are best for my swiftest possible enlightenment. If the difficult situation changes, great; but if it doesn’t, then I accept this is what I need for my path. It may suck for my worldly concerns, but it is what I need for my spiritual progress, so I accept the difficulty as what his omniscient wisdom is arranging for me. Since I know it is perfect for my training, I can be happy with it, even if it is difficult. I see how it is good for my path, so I focus on that. This is wonderful. But it can also be taken to an extreme. I know I did. I started to think it was somehow wrong to change my external circumstances. I just needed to rely on Dorje Shugden, and if he didn’t change the external circumstance, then it must be what I needed, so I thought it was almost a betrayal of my faith in him to try to change my circumstance.

These errors in my thinking transformed my Dharma practice into some form of sado-masochism. The sign I was a good Dharma practitioner was just how much pain I could endure, a modern ascetic. I could even develop forms of pride in my ability to endure so much. It also helped contribute to the martyr complex I developed – I needed to stick around in suffering situations, be willing to sacrifice myself for the sake of supposedly “helping” others. Perhaps this is also your story to an extent.

I don’t want to publicly go into the details, but about a year and a half ago, I realized the first level of my mistake. If there was something I could do externally to change my circumstance so it wasn’t so miserable, I should do so and there is no fault in doing so. Indeed, it became a bodhichitta imperative that I do so. While at one level, this is obvious – Geshe-la does advise us to do so if we can – it was actually quite revolutionary for me to actually do so because I had fallen into the extremes explained above.

But I still thought it was somehow wrong to actually use the Dharma to change my external circumstance. Sure, it is OK to use external means to change my external circumstance, but surely it is a misuse of the Dharma to use it to change my external circumstance. I kept a strict firewall: external methods to solve external problems; Dharma to solve inner problems. But this too is an extreme. The Dharma actually teaches all sorts of methods for solving our external problems. To refrain from using them because we are some purist or we think doing so is for beginners (and our pride thinks we are an advanced practitioner) is just dumb. The teaching say if there is something we can do to change our circumstance, we should do it. It doesn’t just say if there are external things we can do, we should do them; it says if there is anything we can do, we should do so. So there is no fault in also using Dharma methods to solve our external problems.

For example, Venerable Geshe-la teaches various purification practices, like Vajrasattva, to purify our negative karma. So when negative karma is ripening, it’s perfectly OK for us to engage in our Vajrasattva practice to try purify that karma so it is less bad. Likewise, he teaches the practice of the Great Mother for dispelling obstacles. Sure, nothing is inherently an obstacle and with Dorje Shugden’s blessings we can view it as perfect for our spiritual training, but there is also nothing wrong with saying it sure would be better if I didn’t have these difficulties. So dispel away without thinking you are doing something wrong by doing so. Likewise, he teaches all sorts of methods for increasing our merit, such as making mandala offerings. Amitayus practice is all about increasing our merit, lifespan, and realizations. We struggle because we lack merit, so accumulate merit with the hope of improving your circumstance. Look at the dedication prayers in Chapter 10 of Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. There is no reason we cannot pray in the same way. These are all things we can do to improve our external situation and they are all taught by Venerable Geshe-la. Surely there is no fault in using them. They too are things we can do to change our external circumstance, so we should do them.

Of course we should try do so with increasingly pure Lamrim motivations, and not out of attachment or aversion. There are all sorts of initial scope, intermediate scope, and great scope reasons to improve our external circumstance if we can. So we should strive to do these Dharma methods for changing our external circumstance for increasingly pure Dharma reasons.

Likewise, if after using all of these Dharma methods to try to solve our external problems the external situation remains unchanged, then we can practice patient acceptance, faith in Dorje Shugden trusting whatever is happening is what we need for our path, and so forth. But we should not refrain from using these Dharma methods for solving our external problems thinking it is somehow wrong to do so.

Obvious conclusion you might say? Yes, in many ways that is true. But for some reason, it took me 30 years of Dharma practice before I realized it to be true. I was trying so hard to be the perfect Dharma practitioner who never misused the teachings that I in fact wound up rejecting some of the Dharma Venerable Geshe-la taught us. I share all this in case there are others who have been making similar mistakes as I have. And perhaps also to help others not go down the mistaken roads I have. If there is something you can do about it – externally or internally – DO IT! Without guilt, without shame, and unapologetically, do it. As it says on the tattoo I recently got, “sorry not sorry, namaste bitches.” 🙂

Vows, commitments, and modern life:  Yes, you do need a Guru; and you do need a Protector.

Kadampa Ryan Vows, commitments and daily life

We continue with our discussion of the three main causes of our Dharma practice.  The second main cause necessary for our Dharma practice is to rely upon a Spiritual Guide who teaches the Dharma.  When we have a legal problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a lawyer.  When we have a dental problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a dentist.  In exactly the same way, when we have an inner problem of delusions, what do we do?  We rely upon a Spiritual Guide.  If we don’t know how to get to where we want to go, we stop and ask for directions.  If our wish is to get to the pure land, we quite naturally need to stop and ask for instructions. 

Many people think they don’t need a spiritual guide.  They may think, “I will rely upon Dharma books.”  But who wrote the Dharma books?  A Spiritual Guide.  If there are some points that we don’t understand, what are we to do?  Other people think, “Buddha Shakyamuni did it on his own, so will I.”  Besides this being an incredibly arrogant thing equating ourselves to Buddha Shakyamuni, from a purely practical point of view isn’t it far easier to rely upon somebody who has already travelled the path than to forge out on our own.  Even if we were successful in the end, surely it would take us longer to get there.  And during that time, we would suffer more and all those who we would otherwise have been helping if we had already attained enlightenment earlier will be left to suffer for longer.  Why should they be made to suffer just so we can prove we can do it on our own?  But the reality is we most likely couldn’t succeed in the end.  We would become lost or discouraged.  We might be able to make some progress, but it is far more likely we would get stuck somewhere.  There is nothing in samsara that points to it being all a dream.  We can look everywhere within the dream and not have a clue we are dreaming, much less have any indication for how to wake up.  Only the Spiritual Guide, a being who abides beyond the dream but who nonetheless has the power to enter our dream, can lead us out. 

The Spiritual Guide helps us in more ways that just giving us flawless instructions of what we need to do.  He also blesses, or inspires, our mind to put them into practice.  His blessings encourage our effort, and his blessings ripen previously planted seeds within our mind in such a way that the light of wisdom begins to dawn within our mind.  If truth be told, it is impossible for us to engage in any virtue without the blessings and inspiration of the Spiritual Guide.  The tendencies within our mind are almost all negative.  We know this because we know what a struggle it is to do the right things.  Absent the Spiritual Guide’s blessings, we wouldn’t stand a chance.  All virtue arises in dependence upon blessings.  Absent these blessings, we would never have engaged in any virtue.  Without virtue, we would know no happiness. 

When we start practicing the Tantric path, reliance upon the spiritual guide becomes almost the totality of our practice.  The logic here is simple:  the Spiritual Guide’s mind already possesses all the realizations and qualities of a Buddha.  We merely need to download them into our mind and then we will too.  Having access to a source from which we can download these realizations is essential. 

The third and final main cause for our Dharma practice is having all the necessary conditions for our practice.  Externally, these include access to teachings or books, time to practice, adequate food, clothing, and shelter, and that’s about it!  Internally, these include the wish to practice, faith in our teacher’s instructions, and the wisdom which knows how to use any circumstance as an opportunity to practice.  Since everything is equally empty, everything is equally potentially perfect for our Dharma practice.  The problem is not the circumstance, it is our lack of wisdom which sees how the circumstances we have are in fact perfect for us.  To assemble this third main cause, externally of course we need do whatever it takes to gain access to teachings, make time to practice, and have enough money for food, clothing and shelter.  But internally, our main task is to rely upon our Dharma protector, Dorje Shugden.  Dorje Shugden’s main job is to arrange all the necessary outer, inner and secret conditions we need for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  In dependence upon our reliance upon him, he will activate the karmic potentials on our mind to have the necessary outer conditions and he will bless our mind with the wisdom to see how what has been emanated is in fact perfect.  He attained enlightenment to do this for us.  All we need to do is ask for his help.  If we do, he will be by our side forever.

Happy Protector Day: Preliminary practice of the Guru Yoga of Je Tsongkhapa

Kadampa Ryan Protector Days, Reliance upon Dorje Shugden

The 29th of every month is Protector Day.  This is part 4 of a 12-part series aimed at helping us remember our Dharma Protector Dorje Shugden and increase our faith in him on these special days.

Within the Kadampa tradition we are advised to practice the sadhana Heart Jewel as our daily practice as explained in the book by the same title.  If we are a Tantric practitioner, we engage in the Tantric version of this practice known as Hundreds of Deities of the Joyful Land According to Highest Yoga Tantra as explained in the Oral Instructions of Mahamudra.   In either case, the sadhana begins with the Guru Yoga of Je Tsongkhapa.  I will explain things from the perspective of Heart Jewel since it is a common practice. 

In general, the practice of Heart Jewel is the method for practicing the entire path to enlightenment.  There are three main parts – affectionately called a ‘Heart Jewel Sandwich.’  The first part is the Je Tsongkhapa part – the function of this part of the practice is to be able to draw closer to Je Tsongkhapa, the founder and source of the Dharma of the New Kadampa Tradition.  Through reling upon him, we receive his external and internal guidance to be able to realize his Dharma of Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  The second part is our Meditation on Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  We do this in the middle of the practice.  And the final part is the Dorje Shugden part – this creates the causes to be able to receive Dorje Shugden’s care and protection for being able to gain the realization of Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  This series of posts is primarily about how to rely upon Dorje Shugden, but I will nonetheless give a brief explanation of how to engage in the first two parts of the Heart Jewel sandwich. 

To actually engage in the Je Tsongkhapa part, we do as follows.  First, we generate the mind of refuge and bodhichitta – here we establish our motivation for engaging in the practice:  “With the wish to become a Buddha so I can help all the beings around me attain the same state, I will now engage sincerely in the practice of Heart Jewel, trying to generate the minds indicated by the words.”  Then, we engage in the prayer of the seven limbs and the mandala.  This accomplishes two main functions:  First, we accumulate merit – merit is positive spiritual energy.  It is like gasoline in our spiritual car.  Second, we purify negativities – negative karma prevents us from engaging in spiritual practices and is the substantial cause of all our suffering.  It is like lots of traffic and debris on the roads.  On this basis, we then recite the Migtsema prayer and prayer of the stages of the path.  These two enable us to receive the blessings of all the Buddhas through our living spiritual guide Je Tsongkhapa.  Blessings are like spark plugs which ignite the gas of our merit to push us along the road to enlightenment.  The migtsema prayer draws us closer to Je Tsongkhapa and enables us to receive the blessings of the wisdom, compassion and spiritual power of all the Buddhas.  The prayer of the stages of the path is a special prayer for requesting the realizations of the Lamrim.

At this point in the sadhana we typically engage in meditation on Lamrim.  Usually people use the book the New Meditation Handbook and cycle through the 21 Lamrim meditations explained there, one each day.  Alternatively, we can practice the 15-day cycle explained in Mirror of Dharma.  Instead of engaging in a daily Lamrim meditation, it is also possible for us to recite with deep faith one of the longer prayers of the stages of the path.  There are three main Lamrim prayers – the short prayer as explained in Heart Jewel, the middling prayer as explained in Oral Instructions of Mahamudra, or the extensive prayer as explained in Great Treasury of Merit.  When we recite the Lamrim prayers as our main Lamrim practice, we should do so slowly and from memory, trying to sincerely generate in our heart and without distraction the Lamrim minds indicated by the words.  For more information, we can also attend classes on the Lamrim at our local Dharma centers, including Foundation Program on the book Joyful Path of Good Fortune, which is our principal Lamrim text.  After our meditation, we recite the dedication prayer from the Je Tsongkhapa part of Heart Jewel.

For more detailed information, we can read in the book Heart Jewel which provides an extensive commentary.  Geshe-la has said that this is his most important book, yet sadly it is often overlooked.  It is available for sale at www.tharpa.com. 

We should also take advantage of the opportunity to attend courses on Heart Jewel at our local Kadampa center, and we should make many requests that our local teacher grant the empowerments of Je Tsongkhapa and Dorje Shugden.  What is an empowerment?  An empowerment in general is method for establishing a very close connection with a particular enlightened being.  The closer our karma with a given enlightened being, the more ‘bandwidth’ they have for being able to help us.  It is a bit like making a connection with a very special friend.  When we meet somebody very powerful and we have a close connection with them, we can more easily call upon them and ask them for help.

An empowerment is like receiving a personal deity within our mental continuum.  We can all appreciate the qualities of the different Buddhas, and think how wonderful it would be to know them and be able to call upon them.  But how much more wonderful would it be to have a personal emanation of a Buddha who is available for us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  During the empowerment, we receive our own personal emanation of Dorje Shugden into our mental continuum.  We will be able to develop a personal relationship with this Dorje Shugden and he will care for us.  Geshe-la once told a very senior teacher about the Dorje Shugden empowerment, “people need this empowerment, they need this protection.”

Vows, commitments, and modern life:  Wishing for nothing else

Kadampa Ryan Vows, commitments and daily life

 Practice the three main causes. 

 There are three main causes that are essential for successful Dharma practice:  the wish to practice Dharma, relying upon a spiritual guide who teaches Dharma, and having the necessary conditions to practice Dharma.  Each of these is fairly self-explanatory, if we do not wish to practice Dharma, we won’t do it.  If we don’t rely upon a Spiritual Guide to who teaches the Dharma, we won’t know how to practice.  And if we do not have the necessary conditions to practice Dharma, we won’t be able to even if we want to.  If we have these three main causes, then there is nothing that can stop us.  We will continue to practice and progress until enlightenment is attained.  So the relevant question is how do we assemble these three main causes.

We assemble the first cause, the wish to practice Dharma, by correctly identifying what our problem is.  Normally we think our problem is a lack of money, the annoying people in our life, and our government.  Geshe-la says we need to distinguish between our outer problem and our inner problem.  To illustrate this, he uses the example of our car breaking down.  If our car breaks down, we normally say, “I have a problem.”  This is not correct.  Our car has a problem, we do not.  Our problem is our deluded mental reaction to our car breaking down.  This deluded reaction creates an unpleasant feeling within our mind which leaves us unhappy.  Dharma has no power whatsoever to fix our car, we need a mechanic for that.  But Dharma practice can solve our inner problem of our unhappy mind.  If we solve our inner problem, we have no more problem.  We still need to get our car fixed, but it will not be a problem for us.  The same reasoning applies to all our other outer and inner problems. 

The lamrim meditations are, if we check, nothing more than a series of meditations helping us identify what exactly is our problem.  If we correctly diagnose the problem, then the solution becomes self-evident.  It is because we are confused about the nature of our problem that we apply the wrong solutions, and despite considerable effort on our part, we remain unhappy.  In this life, our problem is our deluded reaction to what happens in our life.  Looking beyond this life, we realize our problem is we will eventually die and due to all the negative karma on our mind, we will quite likely fall into the lower realms.  If we die with a negative state of mind, a common reaction we have to unpleasant circumstances, of which death is the most unpleasant, then it will activate negative karma, which will propel us into a lower rebirth where we can remain trapped for incalculably long periods of time. 

Looking deeper, even if we manage to avoid a lower rebirth in our next life, since our mind is still controlled by delusions, in particular by self-grasping ignorance, we have no freedom or control to choose our next rebirth.  Without choice, at the time of our death, we will spin the roulette wheel of samsara, and no matter where we land we lose.  For as long as we are in samsara, we are, for all practical purposes, in a perpetual slaughterhouse where we are born only to be tormented and eventually slaughtered, only to be revived again to start the whole process over again.  Such a situation is completely intolerable and we must break free.  In reality, we are trapped in a perpetual nightmare from which we can’t wake up.  This is our situation, and we must escape from it.

But we are not alone.  All our friends, family and loved ones – indeed all living beings – are likewise trapped in the same nightmarish slaughterhouse.  It is not enough for us to escape, but we must help everyone break free.  No one need suffer.  Everyone can abide in the eternal bliss of enlightenment.  At present we lack the ability to help others escape.  This is our problem.

If we understand our problem, then we naturally look for a solution.  There is nothing in samsara that can help us solve the problems of being in samsara.  Samsaric solutions, such as mechanics, dentists, lawyers, etc., can help us with our outer problems, but they can do nothing for our inner problems of delusions, negative karma and so forth.  What can help us?  If our problem is our mind, we need something that can help us change our mind.  The Dharma is exactly such a method.  It teaches us how to maintain inner peace in this life; it teaches us how to purify our negative karma, accumulate merit and receive the special blessings of the Buddhas at the time of our death; it teaches us how to gain complete control over our mind by permanently eradicating all our delusions, thus enabling us to wake up from the nightmare of samsara; it teaches us how we can develop within ourselves all the qualities of a Buddha, such as the minds of great compassion, love, generosity, patient acceptance, moral discipline, effort, concentration and wisdom.  It teaches us how to acquire these qualities quickly by explaining how we can effectively download them into our mind from our highest yoga tantra deities.  In short, the Dharma provides us with a solution to all our problems in this and all our future lives, and it gives us the ability to help others do the same.  It is the solution to all our inner problems.  Seeing this, we will naturally be very motivated to practice Dharma and we will have assembled within our mind the first of the three main causes.

Happy Tsog Day: Understanding the Truth of Samsara for Ourself and Others

Kadampa Ryan Tsog Days

In order to remember and mark our tsog days, holy days on the Kadampa calendar, I am sharing my understanding of the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide with tsog.  This is part 28 of a 44-part series.

Developing the wish to gain liberation

Being violently tossed by the waves of delusion and karma
And tormented by the sea-monsters of the three sufferings,
I seek your blessings to develop a strong wish for liberation
From the boundless and fearful great ocean of samsara.

Even if we take an upper rebirth, our situation is only temporary. It is just a question of time before we burn up the virtuous karma giving rise to our upper rebirth and we fall once again into the lower realms. Beings in the upper realms primarily just enjoy their good karma ripening. We can see this in our world with those who are extremely fortunate. How many dedicate their lives and their good karma to helping others? Besides Bill Gates, there is virtually no one. Taking an upper rebirth is extremely dangerous from a karmic perspective because we essentially create a bonfire for all our virtuous karma. Once it is burned up, all that remains on our mind is negative, and then we once again fall into the lower realms. Thus, to be in samsara is to be in the lower realms with only very temporary exceptions.

It is helpful to consider what exactly is samsara. In truth, it is a karmic nightmare that we are trapped in that we believe to be true. Everything we normally perceive does not exist, but we think it does, and as a result we suffer. To wish to escape from samsara, therefore is the wish to wake up.

How to practise the path that leads to liberation

Forsaking the mind that views as a pleasure garden
This unbearable prison of samsara,
I seek your blessings to take up the victory banner of liberation
By maintaining the three higher trainings and the wealths of Superiors.

All the so-called good experiences we have in samsara are in reality changing suffering – the temporary reduction of our discomfort. Eating temporarily reduces the suffering of hunger. Sleeping temporarily reduces the suffering of fatigue. Companionship temporarily reduces the suffering of being alone. The list goes on and on. And even if we were able to experience good things for all this life, we would still all inevitably get sick, get old, and die. We are imputing our “I” onto a sinking ship. From a tantric perspective, samsara is identifying with contaminated aggregates of body and mind. More profoundly, it is ordinary appearances and ordinary conceptions. These have all been explained in detail in previous posts. The point is, there is no lasting happiness to be found anywhere in samsara. If we contemplate this deeply, we see our only rational choice is to escape.

What are the three higher trainings? They can properly be understood as the process of letting go of samsara. The three higher trainings are higher moral discipline, higher concentration, and higher wisdom. They are called higher trainings because they are motivated by renunciation, the wish to escape from samsara. With higher moral discipline, we let go of deluded behavior. With higher concentration, we let go of our distractions being fascinated by samsaric objects. With higher wisdom, we let go of grasping at the things we normally see existing from their own side. In particular, we let go of grasping at our ordinary body in mind as ourself. Once we let go of samsara, it will gradually exhaust itself because it was never anything more than mere karmic appearance.

How to generate great compassion, the foundation of the Mahayana

Contemplating how all these pitiful migrators are my mothers,
Who out of kindness have cherished me again and again,
I seek your blessings to generate a spontaneous compassion
Like that of a loving mother for her dearest child.

Just as we are trapped in samsara, so too are all other living beings. But frankly, we generally do not care. Why? Because we do not think these other living beings are important, or that their happiness matters. Once we consider them to be important, then we consider how they too are suffering, and we will naturally generate a compassionate wish that they too escape from samsara. In the Lamrim teachings there are two principal methods taught for how to consider the happiness of others to be important. The first is to consider how all living beings are our mothers, and the second is to engage in the practice of exchanging self with others. In this verse, we train in the first method.

The logic here is very simple. Because we have taken countless rebirths in the past, we have had countless mothers. Where are all these mothers today? They are the beings around us. Buddha said there is not a single living being who has not been the mother of all the others. This is difficult for us to understand only because we fail to grasp the infinite past of our lives. We tend to think in very narrow terms just the human world on this planet. Time is without beginning, therefore there has been plenty of time for each and every living being to have at one point been our mother.

Some people also struggle with this meditation because they have a bad relationship with their mother of this life. For these people, considering how everyone is our mother does not help us to generate compassion for them because we do not like our present mother. There are two answers to this problem. The first is to see things in perspective. No matter how much harm our mother caused us after we were born, the truth is we would not even have this life if she had not kept us and kept us alive when we were younger. Thus, everything we have in this life is indirectly thanks to our mother. And even if she was abusive with us, this has taught us how not to be with others, and so even her negative actions have brought us benefit. The second way of avoiding this problem is to consider that all living beings are equally our child. We have been the parent or mother of all living beings at one point in the past. It is because our mother so mistreated us that we now wish to not repeat her mistakes and instead to care for all living beings as a good mother should that we can consider everyone as our child who we must care for. The point is to realize each and every living being is someone important whose happiness we should care for. It does not matter whether we reach this destination by considering how everyone is our mother or by considering how everyone is our child.

Vows, commitments, and modern life:  Living the dream

Kadampa Ryan Vows, commitments and daily life

We continue our discussion of the three difficulties.  The third difficulty is eradicating our delusions altogether by applying their antidotes.  The antidote to all delusions is the wisdom realizing emptiness.  In the discussion of the second difficulty, we said applying opponents to delusions is like two waves cancelling each other out leaving calm waters.  Applying the antidote is like realizing there are no waves, indeed there is no water. 

First, it is useful to say a quick word on what is the wisdom realizing emptiness.  Normally, we look out at the world and we think there is something really there.  We are merely observing what is there, and our mind and sense of perception have no bearing whatsoever on bringing these things into existence.  As such, we think, “even if I change my mind about this thing, it actually changes nothing because the thing is still going to be there.”  So changing our mind might make us feel a bit better, but fundamentally it changes nothing.  We strive to realizing an objective truth of things.  We recognize that everybody is biased and subjective in one way or another, so we try to strip away all that bias, look at things from multiple points of view simultaneously in an effort to distill the fundamental objective essence of a thing.  In science, we strive to remove the influence of the observer on the thing we are trying to test so that we can look at the relationship in and of itself, independent of those observing it. 

In reality, all this is completely wrong.  In reality, there is nothing really there.  It is all a giant karmic light show, with no more reality to it than last night’s dream.  We look out the window and see other buildings, but what we are really seeing is the reflection of karma on the surface of our mind.  Right now, we are a dream person sitting at a dream computer reading dream words.  Everything is created by mind through the force of karma, and none of it is real.  We have never actually spoken with anyone, we have never actually gone anywhere, we have never really done anything.  Our body, mind and self are merely one wave amongst many on the ocean of our mind.  For some strange reason, we think we are just this one wave, and that this wave can somehow be separated from its underlying ocean.  The things we see are nothing more than mere karmic appearances of mind.  “Mere appearance” means other than the appearance itself, there is nothing actually there behind it.  It is a mere reflection, a hologram, a hallucinogenic specter.  “Karmic appearance” means the appearances themselves are generated through the force of our past karma.  Each appearance is like a karmic echo of our past actions that has come back to us.  The aspect of the wave is shaped by the force of the karmic seed that has ripened.  “Of mind” means the nature of these appearance is mind itself.  “Nature” in a Dharma context roughly means “made of.”  So when we say an object is by nature mind, what we are really saying is the object is mind shaped in the aspect of the object.  Mind is like the playdough, karma shapes it, and in the end, it resembles an object.  It is like the gold of the gold coin.  It is like the ocean of the wave.  In the end, though, there is nothing there other than mere appearance.  The only thing that is actually there is the appearance of something actually being there.  Besides this mere appearance, there is nothing.

While it is interesting and fun to philosophically consider such things, the practical question is how can we use this understanding as the antidote to our delusions?  Some examples can help illustrate this.  Imagine for example you suffer from attachment to what others think about you.  This is a very common worry in the modern world, and we generate a lot of anxiety and stress about it.  We actively try to change what others think, and if they think something bad about us, it makes us very unhappy.  The reality, however, is there is nobody there thinking anything about you!  There is the appearance of somebody there thinking something about you, but actually this is just a karmic echo of you having thought something about somebody else in the past.  If you want to change what others appear to think about you, then change what you think about others.  If you only think good things about others, then the karmic echos which will appear later will only be others thinking good things about you.  This is how everything works. 

Another example is imagine you are afraid of something.  There is some thing that might happen or someone who is threatening you in some way.  So we are naturally afraid.  But in reality, we are jumping at shadows.  The things of this world can’t hurt us anymore than the dinosaur in the movie can eat us.  There is nothing there, and neither are we.  There is nothing in the world of appearances that can even touch our essential clear light essence.  In reality, we abide completely beyond appearance, but we don’t realize it.  Like somebody in a bad hallucinogenic trip or a schizophrenic, we grasp at projections of our mind as being actually real.  So what is there to fear?  Nothing.

Nagarjuna says for whom emptiness is impossible, nothing is possible; and for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.  We abide in a world of suffering only because that is the world we have karmically created.  If we change our karma, we can change our world, not just for ourselves but for all the being inhabiting our dream.  We currently mentally construct others as friend, enemy and stranger; but we can karmically reconstruct them as our kind mothers and indeed emanations of Buddhas.  What are they really?  Nothing.  But their function changes dramatically depending on how we impute them.  If last night we dreamt of somebody in a wheelchair, who put them there?  We did.  They are a being of our dream, so we are responsible for everything.  In the same way, if we see in the world a car accident, who caused it?  We did.  These are two waves of karmic appearance we previously set in motion which have collided.   Thanks to emptiness, we have it within our power to completely karmically reconstruct our dream from a world of suffering into a pure land.  We have it within our power to deliver people from the contaminated aggregates we have trapped them in to the completely pure and blissful aggregates of an enlightened being.  For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.

Of all the objects it is important to realize the emptiness of, our own mind is the most important.  In particular, our main task is to realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind of great bliss.  Why?  All our infinite previously accumulated contaminated karma is currently stored on our very subtle mind.  It is like a cosmic hard-drive which stores all our karmic movies.  If we realize emptiness directly, then when a particular karmic movie appears even though it may appear to be real, we will not be fooled by it, nor sucked into it, and so no matter what appears it will have no power to harm us.  But the movie will still play.  Things will still appear to be there.  But if we realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind, we uproot the contaminated karma giving rise to the movie itself.  When we realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind, it doesn’t just purify individual contaminated karmic seeds, it uproots all them simultaneously.  We can understand how this works by analogy.  If you have a wheel with a hub and spokes, if you shine a light inside any one spoke, it will illuminate that spoke.  But if you can place the light in the hub of the wheel, it will illuminate all the spokes directly and simultaneously.  In the same way, by realizing the emptiness of any one individual object, we illuminate the truth of that object.  But by realizing the emptiness of the very subtle mind upon which all our karma is equally planted, we illuminate the truth of all objects directly and simultaneously.  This is why Buddha said, “if you wish to attain enlightenment, realize your own mind.  Do not look for enlightenment elsewhere.”