2. Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  How to face the moments just before death.

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life, Uncategorized

(2.42) O Protectors, oblivious to dangers such as these,
I, who am devoid of conscientiousness,
Have committed many negative actions
For the sake of this transient life.

(2.43) Terrified is the person who today is led away
To a place where his limbs will be torn from his body.
With a dry mouth and sunken eyes,
His appearance is completely distorted.

(2.44) So what need is there to mention the terrible despair
I shall experience when, stricken by great panic,
I am seized by the physical apparitions
Of the terrifying messengers of the Lord of Death?

(2.45) “Who can grant me real protection
From this great terror?”
Petrified, with wide, bulging eyes,
I shall search for refuge in all directions,

(2.46) But, seeing no refuge anywhere,
I shall become utterly dejected.
If I cannot find refuge there,
What shall I do at that time?

We must be crystal clear:  if we die with a negative mind, we will fall into the lower realms.  The quality of mind we have in any given moment determines the quality of the karma that gets activated.  If we have a negative mind, it will activate negative karma; if we have a positive mind, it will activate positive karma; and if we have a pure mind, it will activate pure karma.  This is true during life as well as at the time of death.  The difference is the karma activated at the time of death ripens in the next life.  So if we die with a negative mind, we will fall into the lower realms; if we die with a positive mind, we will take rebirth in the upper realms; and if we die with a pure mind, we will take rebirth outside of samsara.

We must also be realistic:  since at present we respond to life’s difficulties with negative minds, it is highly probable that we will do the same at the time of death.  Whenever things get stressful in our lives, we respond with negative minds.  There is nothing more stressful than the moment of our death.  We should take our negative reactions to the little things of this life as a warning of how we will likely respond at the time of death.

At the time of death there are three especially strong death-specific delusions which arise.  The first is called, “dependent-related craving.”  This is a special form of craving for everything that we have had strong attachment for during our life.  This strong attachment comes flaring up, much in the same way a child’s attachment to a toy surges when it is being taken away from then.  Because we have residuals of unresolved attachment for certain things still on our mind, at the time of death they come surging to the surface.  There is a big surge in our mind of attachment as we realize that we will be forever separated from these things we crave.  We can see how much we suffer from facing the prospect of not having the objects of our attachment now, it will be many, many times worse at the time of our death because we are losing everything simultaneously and the finality of death is overwhelming.  For this reason, we need to make it a priority to overcome all of our attachments now.  We should essentially live our life as if we are already dead, so the things of this world are no longer of interest or use to us.  Overcoming these attachments now will enable us to die without attachment.  Soldiers are trained to do this to avoid fear in battle.  If they can do so for the sake of battle, surely we can do the same for the sake of bodhichitta.

The second major delusion that arises at the time of death is called “dependent-related grasping.”  When we are afraid or something happens suddenly to us, we feel this strong sense of self-grasping, usually at the heart, much like the feeling we get when the police car flashes its lights at us.  This flares up at the time of death just as dependent-related craving does.  The reason for this is not hard to understand.  We spend almost all of our lives living in total denial of our inevitable death.  There comes a point when we can no longer live in denial and the truth of our imminent death becomes inescapable.  If dependent-related grasping ripens at the time of death and we do not counter it with wisdom, it is guaranteed we will have a contaminated mind at the time of death and so take another samsaric rebirth.  Like with attachment, we need to make it a priority to overcome our feeling of self-grasping now.  The key is to cease identifying with the appearances and start identifying with the container of the mind.   Appearances come and go like waves, but the container of the empty mind is always the same.

The third and final delusion that often arises strongly at the time of death is extreme guilt for having wasted our precious human life.  We essentially die full of regrets.  We realize too late that we wasted our one opportunity to get out and that we will now fall for what will be incalculably long periods of time.  We see our whole life flash before us in a special way where we see all the opportunities we had to practice Dharma but that we wasted because we allowed ourselves to be distracted by samsara.  We realize that we have burned up all the good karma we had on our mind, and so there is no future for us except to fall.  It is too late to do anything about it.  We then feel like we are a total idiot for having known better but still wasted our life, and an enormous feeling of guilt arises in our mind, which is anger directed towards ourself.  We become incapable of stopping this anger towards ourself, even though we know it means it will send us to hell.  We then start to panic and the situation quickly spirals out of control.

We need to do two things to avoid this terrible reckoning.  First, we need to meditate on this possibility again and again to be able to generate a real fear of it happening.  This will lead us to the conclusion:  I will not let this happen to me.  I will leave no stone unturned.  I will do everything I can while I still have the chance.  Second, we need to make a concerted effort to overcome our guilt right now when we make mistakes.  When we make mistakes, we generally fall into one of two extremes:  either we fall into the extreme of guilt where we beat ourselves up about the fact that we made a mistake or we fall into the extreme of denial that we in fact did anything wrong.  We think it doesn’t matter.  The middle way between these two extremes is to accept that we made a mistake, to learn from it, and to generate the virtuous intention to do better next time.  If this middle way is made our habit during life, it will be our reaction at the time of death.  Instead of generating guilt when we see our life flash before our eyes, we will feel like we are being given one last teaching revealing to us the main lessons we can learn from this life before we proceed to our next life.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  It’s your karma, stupid.

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life, Uncategorized

(2.38) Thus, through failing to realize
That I shall suddenly die,
I have committed many evils
Out of ignorance, attachment, and anger.

Bill Clinton once famously said when asked what the most important issue was in the presidential campaign, “it’s the economy, stupid!”  His point was it is so easy to get distracted by other issues that we lose sight of what was important and mattered.  In exactly the same way, when we ask ourselves what the most important issue is in the campaign of our life, we should remind ourselves, “it’s our karma, stupid!”  The only thing we take with us into our future lives is our karma.  Everything else we leave behind.  So while what happens in this life matters (kind of, at least), what really matters is our karma.  We should not let ourselves become distracted about our real bottom line.

The fundamental reason we do not think about our karma is we don’t think about the fact that we are going to die – and we don’t know when we will do so.  The karmic consequences of our actions seem far off, affecting some abstract future self that we don’t know and we are not really sure we believe in anyways; but our present sufferings and problems seem quite real and immediate.  We should remind ourselves that our present self is the future self of our past self.  Don’t we wish our past self had enough foresight to not create all sorts of negative karma we are experiencing now?  We will wish the same in the future.

Why does our lack of death awareness enable us to commit negative actions?  When we think only in terms of this life, we think only in terms of cause and effect that we can see in this life.  So we don’t internalize the possibility of the horrific consequences of our negative actions in our decision to engage in them.  When we realize we are going to die at any point, we realize that the only thing that goes on are the karmic potentialities we have created for ourself.  When we deeply internalize this, we won’t engage in negative actions because we will rightly conclude it is simply not worth it.

(2.39) Remaining still neither day nor night,
This life is continuously slipping away
And never increases in duration;
So why should death not come to one such as me?

It is not enough to have an intellectual understanding of the fact that we are going to die, we need to deeply internalize what this means.  Venerable Tharchin says we should live our life from the perspective of not just “I may die today” but “I will die sometime around the end of next week.”  Such an outlook radically alters our decision-making calculus for how we spend our time and what sorts of actions we engage in.  If we make it to the end of next week and are still alive, then we can feel lucky to be alive (appreciate our precious human life), but then once again think, “I will die sometime around the end of next week.”  Week after week, we live our life with this view.  At some point we will be right.  Until then, we don’t waste a second of our time alive.

We may think we realize we are going to die, but the real test is whether our actions are consistent with this fact or not.  Venerable Tharchin also says that the sign we have a realization of Dharma is all of our actions are consistent with that realization and none of our actions are inconsistent with it.  In the present case, if we are confronted with some opportunity to engage in negativity, we ask ourselves, “is it worth it for me to engage in this negativity given that I am going to die sometime around the end of next week?”  Our prospects for harvesting a worthwhile samsaric reward for our negativity will seem insignificant compared to the karma we are going to create for ourselves.

Different people respond to the prospect of imminent death in different ways.  Some people, who think death is the end, reason, “well, if I can die at any point, I might as well enjoy myself as much as possible while I am still around.  When I stare death in the face, my answer is ‘time to party!’”  But as Buddhists, we view things differently.  Geshe-la explains in How to Solve our Human Problems that basic Buddhist view is “future lives are more important than this life.”  If we know death is not the end, our reaction to the prospect of imminent death is quite different.  We view what little time we have remaining as our opportunity to prepare for the long road ahead.  We are about to embark on a journey into a new life in some unknown world, and we don’t want to leave without sufficient karmic provisions.

The only way to bring the intellectual understanding of our death down to our heart is to meditate on this knowledge again and again trying to make it personal.  When we get some change in our feeling, we then meditate on that feeling to familiarize ourself with it.  This is not an intellectual exercise, but one we need to work on to provoke the correct feeling in our heart.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  Worry about your karma, not your pride.

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life, Uncategorized

(2.36) Just like an experience in a dream,
Everything I now enjoy
Will become a mere recollection,
For what has passed cannot be seen again.

Virtually every negative action we engage in is motivated by a false belief that the ends justify the means.  We are willing to lie because we think, “no harm will be done, and besides I can get something out of it.”  We think the same about stealing, divisive speech, hurtful speech, even killing.  Sometimes we will engage in some sort of negativity for the sake of our friends, family, company or country.  We think what happens really matters, and so it is OK to engage in negativity.  And sometimes, this is even true.  Whether certain bodily or verbal actions are negative depends in large part on the context.  Killing for sadistic pleasure versus killing somebody who if not stopped will kill many others are quite different things.  But such exceptions are actually quite rare.  Generally speaking, when we engage in negative actions we experience some short-term external gain at a long-term karmic loss.  The future karmic loss, almost always, far surpasses the short-term external gain.

But we generally don’t see that.  The reason is we believe in the external gain, we are not so sure about the long-term karmic loss.  That is why it is useful to realize that there are actually ultimately “no short-term external gains.”  In a conventional sense, of course there are, but ultimately there is nothing there to be gained.  It’s all mere karmic appearance.

All of these friends and enemies are nothing other than dreams, simple appearances.  Is it worth creating the causes for aeons in hell for a hallucination?  We think it is worth it because we think they are real.  But they are not.  They are just dreams.  We also think it is worth it because we think now matters, but nothing that happens in this life really matters.  The rest of this life is uncertain, whereas our future lives are certain.  We need to prepare for them.  We also think it is worth it because we think we can get away with it because we are a Dharma practitioner or because we don’t really believe in karma.  But there is no escape from our karma, and there is no guarantee we will be protected if we don’t create the causes to receive such protection.

(2.37) Even during this brief life,
Many friends and others have passed away;
But the unbearable results of the evil I have committed for their sake
Still lie ahead of me.

The point of contemplating all of this is to realize that it is not worth it to engage in negative actions on behalf of our friends or enemies.  The friends and enemies pass, but the karma we create in their regard remains with us forever.  I am not saying our friends and family don’t matter, of course everybody matters and we should care for everyone; rather, I am saying if we truly love and care for them we will not accumulate negative karma for their sake, because if we do we will not be able to provide them lasting benefit.  If our negative actions help them temporarily in this life, but as a result we fail to attain enlightenment for their sake, then in the long-run they are infinitely worse off.  If instead, we do not engage in negativity for their sake because we are prioritizing attaining enlightenment for their sake, in the short-term they might be marginally worse off, but in the long-run they are much better off.

If we have already engaged in all sorts of negative actions for the sake of our family and friends, or even for the sake of ourself, at some point we will need to admit our mistake.  One of the most deadly consequences of pride is it prevents us from admitting our mistakes, and without doing so we can never generate sincere regret nor will we ever take purification practice seriously.  Prideful people are loathe to admit their mistakes or that they were wrong.  They worry that if they admit they were wrong others will lose faith in them; but they don’t realize people are already losing faith in them because they are unwilling to admit their mistakes which are in fact manifest to all.  Likewise, people sometimes worry if they admit their mistakes then they will then become responsible for making compensation to the victims of those mistakes.  This sort of miserliness is extremely short-sighted.  If we fail to make compensation now, the karmic debt we will incur will be far more costly.  If we can’t admit our mistakes, we can’t change our ways.  We will then continue to habitually engage in the same negativities and our promises to not commit negative actions will be empty words.  In short, pride and purification are opposites.  We must choose between the two.

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  We repay kindness with harm…

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.30) Whatever harmful actions of body, speech, or mind
I have done under the influence of delusion
Towards the Three Precious Jewels,
My father and mother, my Spiritual Guide, and others –

(2.31) All the extremely unbearable evil actions
Committed by me, an evil person
Polluted by many faults –
I confess before the Deliverers, the enlightened beings.

Negative actions directed towards those that have shown us particular kindness are especially negative.  Sadly, we do this all the time.  It is sad truth that we often treat those who are kindest to us worse than we do strangers or even those who seek to harm us.  We take their kindness for granted, and we abuse it by getting angry at them when they don’t live up to our expectations.  We do this with our parents, with our Spiritual Guides and with our closest friends.

Towards our parents, we have nearly limitless expectations.  No matter how much they do for us, it is never enough.  We focus all of our attention on all of the things they haven’t done for us and are oblivious to all of the things they have done.  Like adolescent children, we rebel against their every advice and we spend our time cataloging all of the different ways in which they are wrong and we are right.  When they fail to show us the love we feel we deserve, we lash out at them and make them feel bad.  We yell at them, make nasty comments, and expect them to serve us.  We forget their birthdays, but can’t forgive when they forget ours.  We feel constantly judged by them, and we resent them for it.  We expect them to be perfect, and feel completely let down when they are not.  We covet their money, become jealous when they appear to love our siblings more, and find fault in most everything they do.  We become embarrassed by them in front of our friends or colleagues, and we talk behind their backs after they have left. We take completely for granted all of the kindnesses they have shown us, and we blame them for all our problems.  When they get older, we either neglect them completely or feel put upon when they need our help.  If we check, there is probably nobody else in our life who we have been systematically more cruel to than our parents.  It is often only when we become a parent ourself that we realize all that our parents do for us and how cruel kids can be in the face of a parent’s kindness.

Towards our Spiritual Guides, in this and in our countless past lives we have committed all sorts of negative deeds, including stealing from them, criticizing them, shunning their advice, creating division within their Sangha, failing to keep our commitments to them, taking their kindness for granted, making no effort to repay their kindness, thinking we know better than them, resenting them for seemingly judging us when we do something wrong, mistreating the sacred objects they have given us, such as our Dharma books, misusing their teachings for our own worldly purposes, lying to them to cover up what we have done wrong, the list goes on and on.

Towards our closest friends, we have talked behind their backs, abandoned them when they need us most, gotten mad at them when they don’t return our calls or text us back quickly enough, we neglect them when they are not around, and forget them when we find new friends.  It doesn’t matter how much past kindness they have shown, we find it hard to forgive even the slightest offense against us.  We become jealous when they hang out with somebody else, unfriend them on social media, and we enter into all sorts of bitter fights with them.  People who used to be our best friends or romantic partners become our worst enemies who we can’t see any good in.  We say all manner of divisive or hurtful speech and create no end of unnecessary dramas between us.  We use them as an object of attachment and expect them to be there to meet our needs.

It is important that we take the time to really look in the mirror and see how we treat those who have been kindest to us.

(2.32) But I might die before I purify
All my negativities;
O Please protect me so that I
May surely and swiftly be freed from them.

It is particularly important to purify the negative karma that we have with respect to the Spiritual Guide and the three jewels.  In fact, there is no karma more important to purify because by doing so we clear the way to receive powerful blessings – they can then easily bestow enlightenment upon us and help us without obstruction.  To purify this negative karma in particular, we need to generate a profound fear of losing the path.  We don’t know what negative karma we have created with respect to our Spiritual Guide, and if this ripens we can easily find ourselves abandoning the path.  If we lose the path, we have all of samsara to fear.  If we stay on the path, we have nothing to fear.

For me, my biggest fear is losing the path.  I have been practicing long enough now to realize it is going to take some time before I turn around this ship of delusion called Ryan.  If I lose the path, either in this life or at the time of my death, what will I do then?  It’s so easy to gradually and unknowingly get sucked back into samsara until pretty soon there is almost nothing left of the spiritual life we used to have.  If we die before we have purified our negative karma, we will almost certainly lose the path.  Falling into the lower realms is certainly painful, but the worst consequence of it is our losing the path.  We will then wander for countless aeons committing all sorts of deluded and negative action before we stumble on the path again.  One of my teachers once said, “we must choose:  hold on to our negative habits or go to the pure land.  We can’t have both.”  Either we leave our negative habits behind or we cannot enter the pure land.  If we remain in samsara, we will never know safety.  We take for granted the relative calm and stability we currently enjoy, but it will not last.  The end may not be near for the world, but it is for us.  We should take this to heart.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  Confessing to the holy beings

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.27) With my palms pressed together, I make requests
To those endowed with great compassion –
The perfect Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas,
Who abide throughout the ten directions.

When we engage in purification practice, there is a tendency to focus on the power of regret and the power of the opponent force, but to forget about the power of reliance.

When I first started practicing, I much preferred the term “purification” to the term “confession.”  I could relate to and understand neutralizing our negative karmic seeds by applying opponents, but I couldn’t see nor understand how confession to the holy beings worked.  Now, I find the biggest obstacle to engaging in sincere purification is our inability to admit the actions we engage in are actually negative.  Instead, we rationalize why what we do is not that bad.  This is why it is not enough to just admit to ourselves our negative actions, but instead we go before the omniscient holy beings who know our hearts and see through our self-deceptions, and we confess our wrong deeds.  When we are in their presence, our rationalizations are exposed for the flimsy pretexts that they are.  There is something far more definitive about admitting our mistakes in the presence of holy beings than doing so to ourself quietly in our room.

When we confess in front of the holy beings, we are going to them for help.  We are saying, “I have made many mistakes, I need your help to change my ways.”  Such a mind is ready to purify and sincerely engage in the power of the promise to not commit such actions again.  Without this, we are often just going through the motions of purification or mistakenly thinking that purification practice somehow lets us get away with our negative actions and avoid their karmic consequences.

(2.28) Since beginningless time in samsara,
Throughout this and all my previous lives,
Out of ignorance I have committed evil,
Ordered it to be committed,

(2.29) And, overwhelmed by deceptive ignorance,
Rejoiced in its being committed by others.
Seeing all these to be grave mistakes,
From the depths of my heart I confess them to the holy beings.

The key point here is not all that we have done wrong, but rather the understanding that we have committed these wrong deeds driven by ignorance and delusions.  Almost nobody, even the worst dictators, view themselves as willfully a bad person.  Everyone tries to be a good person and nobody wants to be a “bad guy.”  Nonetheless, our delusions take ahold of us and trick us into doing all sorts of negative and harmful things.  It’s not our fault, it is the fault of our delusions.

Geshe-la says that all delusions are deceptive.  They literally trick us or deceive us into doing things that are ultimately self-defeating.  When we engage in negative actions, we don’t do them thinking we will harm ourselves by doing so, rather we think such actions will bring us the happiness we seek.  Why do we think this?  Because our delusions have fooled us into thinking this way.

Blaming our delusions for our negative actions has two main benefits.  First, it protects us against guilt.  Guilt is a form of anger directed against ourselves.  It is quite different than genuine regret.  When we feel guilty, we beat ourselves up and chastise ourselves for how awful and how stupid we are.  We think beating ourselves up in this way will somehow deter us from engaging in negative actions again in the future (“punishing ourselves”), but it never works that way.  We don’t engage in negative actions knowing they are wrong, we engage in them believing it is not really bad to do them.  Beating ourselves up doesn’t change our assessment of what is smart and what is not, it just adds a layer of punishment onto the karma we will have created for ourselves anyways.

Second, it shows us the way forward for eliminating future negativities.  We need to see through the lies of our delusions.  We might gladly drink a glass of clear liquid thinking it is water, but we wouldn’t touch it if we knew it was poison.  If we see clearly negative as harmful to ourself and to others, it is actually not that difficult to generate regret realizing we have made mistakes and then abandoning our negative actions.

Once we are aware of our negativities as being negative, we then go before the holy beings and confess them openly and honestly.  We admit we messed up.  We admit our delusions fooled us once again.  We admit that our delusions are sometimes stronger than us and they overwhelm us even when we know better.  We then turn to them for help, that they bless our mind to purify our negative actions and to help us have the wisdom to see through the lies of our delusions.

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of life:  The greatest gift of the Dharma

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

We now enter the section of purification, the main subject of this chapter – how we actually purify our negative karma.  I am first going to say a few words about negative karma in general, then about purification in general.  In future posts we will go into the actual practice of purification.

In science, we divide causes into necessary and sufficient causes.  In the Dharma, we divide causes into substantial and circumstantial causes.  The substantial cause is the thing that transforms into the next thing, such as an acorn that becomes an oak tree.  The circumstantial causes are the causes and conditions which facilitate the transformation, such as the water, soil and sunlight which ripen the seed.

Negative karma is the substantial cause of all our problems, everything else is the circumstantial cause.  We often think and blame the circumstantial cause, for example somebody interfering with our wishes, but the real cause is our negative karma.  If we have a problem with somebody in our life, then the main cause is our negative karma and the troublesome person is just a circumstantial cause.  If we don’t get rid of the substantial cause giving rise to the problem, then the problems will keep coming back.  Normally we turn to all sorts of things to eliminate our suffering, but these are just rearranging the samsaric furniture, and don’t really deal with the real cause of the problem which is our negative karma.  Understanding that the real cause of our problems is negative karma, we then naturally focus our efforts on purification.

In particular, all of our difficulties in Dharma come from negative karma.  If we want to succeed easily in our Dharma practices the main thing we need to do is practice purification.  If we clear away all the obstacles, then our practices will become effortless and we will accomplish great results.

Venerable Tharchin says the greatest gift of Dharma is the teachings on how to purify.  Where else can we find such things?  He said that we should take purification as the leading edge of our practice, and then everything else follows in its wake.  He said that purification is like a great plow which clears the way for the rest of our Dharma practice.  We need to establish as a reflex every time we have the slightest difficulty in accomplishing anything spiritually we immediately start doing purification.  Normally our focus is on changing the circumstantial causes, but if we don’t change the substantial cause nothing really changes.  It is like trying to clean the movie screen when the mark is on the projector.

Sometimes when we contemplate our infinite negative karma we can grow despondent thinking we are hopeless and it is impossible for us to purify our negativity.  Our alternatives are clear:  either we proactively purify our negative karma or it will eventually ripen.  There is no third alternative.  But the power of the purification practices are FAR greater than the power of our negativity.  For example, Geshe-la says with the 35 confession Buddhas, we can purify aeons worth of negative karma with a single prostration.  Venerable Tharchin says we can purify all the negative karma ever accumulated with a fully qualified 3 month Vajrasattva retreat.  Purification can be likened to defusing a bomb.  It is relatively easy to defuse even extremely powerful explosives, but after they explode (our negative karma ripens), then it is very difficult to put back together the billions of pieces.

It is said if we do strong purification, we can purify all our negative karma and close the door on the lower realms forever; if we do middling purification, we can reduce our negative karma; if we do weak purification, we can prevent our negative karma from increasing; and if we do no purification, our negative karma will increase even if we don’t commit any new negative actions.

The practice of purification takes place through the application of the four opponent powers.  The actual effectiveness of our purification practices is a function of how well we generate the four opponent powers. The four opponent powers are:  the power of regret, the power of reliance, the power of the opponent force and the power of the promise.  We will discuss each of these in detail in the coming verses.

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  Seeking ultimate refuge 

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.26) Until I attain the essence of great enlightenment,
I will go for refuge to the Buddhas;
Likewise, I will go for refuge to Dharma
And to the assembly of Bodhisattvas.

At first, refuge practice seems very religions, which we don’t like.  It seems cult like.  But if we check, we see that we go for refuge all the time.  To go for refuge means to turn to something as a solution to your problems.  When we have a bad tooth, we go for refuge to the Dentist, when we have a legal problem, we go for refuge to a lawyer, etc.  There are two parts to the mind that goes for refuge – an awareness of the problem and a confidence in the object of refuge as the solution.

It is exactly the same thing with spiritual refuge.  The point of departure on the spiritual path is a redefinition of the problem.  A samsaric being thinks that the problem is the external situation.  A spiritual being understand that the problem is in fact how our mind relates to that external situation.

We have four types of spiritual problem.  The first is worldly problems in this life – things go wrong in this life and we are unhappy about them.  The second is the risk we face of falling into the lower realms – we have negative karma on our mind, and if we die with a negative mind we will fall into the lower realms.  The third is the risk of taking uncontrolled rebirth – we have an uncontrolled mind, and so uncontrolledly we will take rebirth into contaminated aggregates.  Finally, there is the risk of others we love taking uncontrolled rebirth – others have uncontrolled minds, and unless we save them they will take uncontrolled rebirths into contaminated aggregates.  The first type of problem we know very well, but the remaining three we are largely oblivious to.  We have no idea that we stand on a mountain of negative karma supported by nothing more than a water bubble of this human life which can pop at any time.  If truth be told, our real home is the lower realms, yet we go about our day as if we are on permanent holiday completely oblivious to what is but one missed breath away.  Samsara is nothing short of a slaughterhouse that is so cruel it revives us only to slaughter us once more.  Our parents, partners, children and friends are all relentlessly recycled though the samsaric meat grinder and nothing we are taught in this world (except the Dharma) can help.  Until we have deeply internalized these larger spiritual problems, we will lack staying power in our practice.  We will reach a point where we are usually happy with our present life, and we will become satisfied with that attainment alone.  The need to push further will seem remote.  But there is nothing like death to bring home the truth of Dharma.

Just as we need external objects to solve our external problems, so too we need Buddha, Dharma and Sangha to solve our internal, spiritual problems.  Dharma is the actual refuge, it is the supreme medicine.  Buddha is like the supreme doctor and Sangha are like the supreme nurses.

Dharma can help us solve our four types of problem.  Dharma helps us deal with our worldly problems of this life by helping us relate to our lives in non-deluded ways – then we are always happy.  With Dharma wisdom, if things go well, good; if things go badly, even better!  Dharma helps us deal with the risk of taking lower rebirth by explaining how to purify all our negative karma, how to accumulate positive karma and how to activate these seeds at the time of our death.  Dharma helps us deal with the problem of samsaric rebirth by giving us methods for purifying all of our deluded tendencies similar to the cause so that we never again activate contaminated karma and attain liberation.  Dharma helps us deal with the problem of others taking samsaric rebirth by giving us methods to purify all our contaminated karma and thereby remove the two obstructions and become a Buddha – a being capable of leading all beings to enlightenment.

At the Southern England Dharma Celebration many years ago, the teacher gave a very simple formula for how we build Dharma within our mind.  He said, “intellectual understanding plus believing faith equals realization.”  We can improve our intellectual understanding of Dharma through attending classes at our local centers, reading Dharma books, and discussing Dharma with our spiritual friends.  Believing faith is faith based on a valid reason.  Valid reasons can include conclusions reached through logical reasoning, but more often than not the valid reasons that truly move our minds are the ones born from personal experience of the Dharma working in our life or through having received powerful blessings.  Geshe-la likes the Dharma to supreme inner science.  The heart of the scientific method is experimentation.  We perform experiments to test the validity of our hypotheses.  When we do so, we either confirm or deny them.  It is the same with the Dharma.  When we sincerely put the instructions into practice in our daily life, we gain personal experience of their truth and transformative power.  This gives us believing faith.  When we combine these two – intellectual understanding and believing faith – authentic Dharma realizations naturally spawn within our mind.  This is our actual refuge.

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: Bowing down lifts you up

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.23) To these oceans of good qualities,
I offer a melodious ocean of praise.
May a chorus of sweet-sounding melodious verses
Always ascend to their presence.

(2.24) To all the Buddhas abiding in the three times,
The Dharma, and the Supreme Assembly,
I prostrate with as many emanated bodies
As there are atoms in all the worlds.

(2.25) I prostrate to the bases for generating bodhichitta,
To the images of Buddha’s body, speech, and mind,
To the Abbots and Preceptors,
And to the supreme practitioners on the path.

People usually have a lot of difficulty with prostrations because it seems quite bizarre.  When people first come to classes and they see people doing prostrations it seems weird and cult-like.  But when we understand what is going on, then it is in fact very beautiful.  Prostrations should come naturally as our respect grows.  For people we respect we naturally relate to them differently.

To prostrate means to sweep away all impurities and defilements and request all good qualities.  We request that all impurities and defilements that obstruct our attainment of the good qualities of our Spiritual Guide are removed, and we request that we attain these good qualities ourself.

The main point when doing prostrations is a genuine recognition that what we are prostrating too has superior qualities that we want to attain ourself.  It requires humility to admit that we have much left to do.  By paying respect to these good qualities we increase our admiring faith, which naturally transforms into wishing faith, which naturally transforms into effort, which then gives us these good qualities ourselves.

What are we really prostrating to?  The Spiritual Guide.  But  The Spiritual Guide is the synthesis of all three jewels.  All three jewels are an extension of the Spiritual Guide.  The Spiritual Guide is our own future enlightenment – our own pure potentiality fully developed.  We are not really prostrating to anything external, but rather to our true self fully realized.  When people understand this, they have no problem with prostration.

When we physically do prostrations, we usually place our hands together in the gesture of prayer and then touch our crown, forehead, throat and heart.  When we touch these four places, we need to recall what causes it creates, and feel our prostrating is creating these causes.  We should mentally want to acquire these abilities so that we can help others.  If we don’t do the mental work of generating wishing faith in this way and we simply touch these four places mindlessly, it is essentially meaningless.

When we touch our crown, we recall that a Buddha’s crown protrusion symbolizes his faith in his Spiritual Guide, and we wish to generate such faith ourself.  When we touch our forehead we recall that a Buddha’s hair curl at his forehead symbolizes his ability to see all of the past, present, and future directly and simultaneously, and we generate the wish to have such an ability ourself.  When we touch our throat, we recall that the speech of a Buddha has the power to liberate all beings from samsara.  And when we touch our heart, we recall that the mind of a Buddha is the actual refuge of all living beings, is omniscient, has universal compassion and has perfect skillful means to help others.  Physically we touch these four places, mentally we generate wishing faith to acquire these abilities ourselves so that we may better serve others.

There are three types of prostration:  Physical, verbal and mental.  Physical prostrations include doing full or half-length prostrations, or even just respectfully touching our palms together at our heart.  Verbal prostrations primarily include reciting praises.  Reciting praises is essentially a practice of rejoicing.  Whatever we rejoice in, we create the cause to obtain ourselves.  Mental prostration is our generating faith and respect.  There are three types of faith, believing faith, admiring faith and wishing faith.  We believe in the good qualities of the Spiritual Guide, then we admire these as fantastic, this leads to the wish to have these good qualities ourselves.

We should practice prostration all day long.  When we are with our fellow Sangha, we should see them as holy objects of refuge and make the three types of prostration.  Physically, we can just be respectful with our body.  Verbally, we can praise them and their example.  Mentally, we can generate the three types of faith with respect to them as an example, their good qualities and so forth.  We can do the same thing with everybody we meet, always relating to their good side.  This functions to draw out their good qualities and enables us to easily cherish them as precious.  A simple yet powerful way to practice prostration all day long is to regard everyone as an emanation of the Spiritual Guide sent to teach you something or help you overcome your delusions.

 

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  Seize the opportunity to work for your Dharma center

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.22) Just as Manjushri, Samantabhadra, and others
Made offerings to the Conquerors,
So do I make offerings to the Sugatas, the Protectors,
And to the Bodhisattvas.

When Manjushri and Samantabhadra made offerings, they did so realizing directly that their offerings are a manifestation of the emptiness of their own mind of great bliss.  This verse encourages us to make offerings in the same way.

Conventionally speaking, the greatest offering we can make to our Spiritual Guide is our own practice of Dharma.  The highest type of offering is of our practice because this is what pleases the Spiritual Guide the most.  Why?  Because his only wish is for us to be happy, and he knows that our practice creates the causes for happiness.  Amongst our practices, the highest practice is what?  As was discussed in an earlier post, it is offering ourself as a servant to the Spiritual Guide.  Practically speaking, we can do this through any virtuous activity, but the highest of all is directly working to fulfil the wishes of the Spiritual Guide, namely working to fulfill his wish of causing the Dharma to flourish.  He has given us local Dharma centers which are in reality his greatest gift to us because through them we can engage in the actions of a Buddha in this world.

Many practitioners work very hard to try overcome their delusions, but they don’t enjoy much success.  Why?  The main reasons are because we lack merit and we haven’t purified.  It is very easy to get so absorbed in our problems that we forget to assemble the essential conditions for our practice to succeed.  It is very good that we view the Dharma as the method for solving our inner problems, in fact that is what we need to do.  But we do not just solve our problems from within the context of the problem – we can also attack the problem from the outside by doing practices that are not directly related to our problem.  The main point is we need to assemble the conditions necessary for our direct efforts to succeed.  These are primarily accumulation of merit, purifying negativity and receiving blessings.

For many years, I had a teacher who had an interesting way of helping people when they had problems.  When somebody would come to her with a personal problem, instead of giving them advice or discussing the problem with them, she would often give them a job to do for the center.  People would sometimes misunderstand and think that now they have just one more problem – namely work to do for the center.  But they were missing the point – the point is to overcome their problems with their practice, they primarily need sufficient merit and sufficient purification.  They get this through doing work for the center.  Then, when they apply the Dharma directly to their problem, it works.  It is often amazing how many daily problems simply vanish while scrubbing the toilets in a Dharma center.  If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself and see.

How does work for the center accumulate merit?  All the merit we accumulate is necessarily non-contaminated because the final goal of the center is the enlightenment of others.  The merit grows exponentially as the generations continue.  If each student helps 10 people in their life, then each of those 10 people helps 10 people, after 2 generations the karma is multiplied by 100, after 3 generations the karma is multiplied by 1000, and so forth – so it grows exponentially.  Geshe-la has said that the merit we accumulate by working for our Dharma centers continues to accumulate for as long as the center – or the effects of the center – exists, which theoretically is forever.  My very first center was in Santa Barbara.  While a variety of teachers came through, the center was actually mainly established through the efforts of a woman named Leah.  Conventionally speaking, she did the work that made it happen.  Later, the center in Los Angeles emerged as a branch of the center in Santa Barbara, and now the center in L.A. is enormous helping people through many different branches and centers in the L.A. area.  I don’t know whatever happened to Leah, but I do know this:  the merit she accumulated by helping establish the center in Santa Barbara continues to grow on a daily basis and will continue to do so for as long as the center and those practitioners who have been touched by it – directly or indirectly – exist.  In other words, forever.

We can do the same with our local centers.  Such merit is non-contaminated and it grows expontentially for eternity.  Where else can we accumulate such merit?  We need to really see this as an incredible opportunity.  Normally when there is a call or volunteers at a Dharma center, people try avoid having to do too much and sometimes they even ask to receive discounts on the teachings or be paid for their labor.  But if we had wisdom we would realize that we should even be willing to pay to be able to do such work!  People pay money to do internships and gain certain experiences all of the time, but such experience has limited value.  The work we do for a center, in contrast, is laying the foundation for our enlightenment and that of all we love.

How does work for the center purify negativity?  Any virtuous action performed motivated by regret functions to purify negativity.  If we wholeheartedly accept the difficulties we encounter while doing work for the center as purification, we purify mass amounts of negative karma.  Also, as we do work for the center, various delusions (especially self-cherishing) will come up.  When we recognize this as self-cherishing and we don’t listen to it but instead follow our wisdom, we purify the tendencies similar to the cause of our delusions.  Work we do for the center should be viewed within the context of the accomplishment of our internal goals – not external ones.  To succeed we need merit and we need to purify, and the highest powered way we have of doing that is working for the center.  What other means do we have?

We can transform our work for the center into sublime offerings.  When we engage in the work we should mentally imagine that our Spiritual Guide is with us, helping us overcome our delusions by bestowing blessings and helping us complete the task whenever we have difficulty.  After we finish the task, we should mentally imagine that all of the merit of all of our work takes the form of fantastically pure offerings which we offer to our Spiritual Guide and feel him to be delighted (for us) with our offering.  This will keep us inspired to continue working as we will enjoy doing it.

 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:  Sending down an uninterrupted rain of blessings

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

(2.20) In addition to these, may masses of offerings
Resounding with music and beautiful melodies
Remain like so many clouds that send down relief
To suffering living beings.

(2.21) And upon all the holy Dharma Jewels,
The stupas, and the images,
May there fall an uninterrupted rain
Of flowers, jewels, and so forth.

We do not seek to attain rebirth in the pure land for our own sake, rather we seek to be born there because once we have done so we will be able to send out countless emanations into the realms of samsara to gradually lead all of our kind mothers to join us in eternal bliss.  When we send an emanation, we do not feel as if we have somehow left the pure land and gone into the realms of samsara, rather it feels as if we remain centered in the pure land, but are aware of what our emanation is doing in the contaminated worlds.  While a crude analogy, it is not that different than playing a video game, where we sit comfortably on our couch while our virtual avatar participates in epic adventures in the game world.  Hard-core gamers often talk of how they “lose themselves” in their games so much so they temporarily forget their living room and are completely immersed in the game world all while actually never leaving the couch.

Once in the pure land, we are not limited to a single emanation, but can send out increasing numbers of emanations as we move closer to enlightenment.  When we do finally attain enlightenment, we are able to directly and simultaneously send out countless emanations to each and every being without exception, guiding them, helping them, nourishing them progressively towards their own enlightenment.  Our emanations can take a variety of forms, from beings who appear to be Spiritual Guides giving flawless teachings in this world to an electrical outlet in the International Terminal of an airport powering your laptop and everything in between.

In the Guru Yoga of Je Tsongkhapa we pray that he please “send down a rain of vast and profound Dharma appropriate to the disciples of this world.”  The teachings of a Buddha are not even remotely limited to the sounds and sights of formal Dharma teachings in a temple or a Dharma center, but can be transmitted through conversations overheard, the clanking of dishes or even the rustling of the leaves in the wind.  All that is required is a special mind of faith that believes everything they see or hear is actually emanated by their guru to teach them the truth of Dharma and to guide them along the path.  This special mind of faith opens our mind to receive the blessings of all of the Buddhas through everything around us.  Some people who smoke marijuana report gaining deep realizations from activities as simple as opening a bag of potato chips, but the faithful practitioner has no need for drug-induced insight (and all the negative side effects associated with addiction) when through their mind of faith they are able swim in an ocean of wisdom teachings even as they brush their teeth.

While it is perfectly possible to receive flawless teachings through anything and everything if our mind of faith is sufficiently qualified, conventionally speaking it is often easier to do so when we direct our mind towards the Dharma when we have special objects, such as stupas, statues, Dharma centers and the like.  If Buddhas can emanate themselves as anything, surely they must also do so as holy and sacred objects.  Some people misunderstand the meaning of statues, shrines and temples as some form of idolatry.   But the qualified practitioner is not worshipping some piece of metal, rather they use the statue as a reminder of what lies beyond.  While their eye awareness may perceive some well-crafted metal, their mental awareness perceives a living Buddha.  It is towards that living Buddha that the practitioner directs their prayers and requests.

By offering an “uninterrupted rain” of holy objects in the way Shantideva explains, we create the causes for the Buddhas to enter into everything around us.  Geshe-la explains wherever you imagine a Buddha, a Buddha actually goes; and wherever a Buddha actually goes they accomplish their function which is to bestow blessings.  If we look around us, what do we see?  We see countless people all face down in their iPhones.  What if we imagined that instead of seeing Facebook or pictures of their kids they were actually looking at Buddhas?  By imagining this, whenever people looked into their phones they would receive the blessings of all of the Buddhas through them.  They might not be aware of it, but we know what is really going on.  In this way, we fill our world with holy objects through which all those around us receive blessings and teachings.  We literally bring the pure world into this world through the power of such faithful imaginings and as a result gradually ripen and liberate all living beings in our karmic dream.

If we practice in this way, it is certain that we too will begin to receive teachings through everyone and everything, no matter where we go and no matter what we are doing.  Every moment can be a formal Dharma teaching, and making offerings in this way creates the causes for this to be our living reality.