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 what 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 out 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 of 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 of 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 of 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.  Noone 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 of our delusions, thus enabling us to wake up from the nightmare of samsara; it teaches us how we can develop within ourselves all of 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 of 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.

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 realize 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 of 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 of 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.  She aspect of the wave is shaped by the force of the karmic seed that has ripened.  “Of mind” means the conventional 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.  The exact same reasoning aplies for the ultimate nature of the object.  The ultimate nature is emptiness.  The object is emptiness appearing in the aspect of the object.  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 drug-induced 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 of 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 as 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, 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 of our infinite previously accumulated contaminated karma is currently stored on our very subtle mind.  It is like a cosmic hard-drive which stores all of our karmic movies.  If we realize emptiness directly, then when a particular karmic movie appears even though it seems 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 of 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 of 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 of 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.”

We continue our discussion of the three difficulties.  The second difficulty is temporarily pacifying our delusions by applying their opponents.  Every delusion has an opponent.  When we apply the opponents, we reduce the power of the delusions within our mind.  I like to think of things in terms of waves.  If a wave with an amplitude of -1 is hit with a wave with an amplitude of +1, the result will be still water.  Each delusion is a different type of negative wave on the ocean of our mind.  To make the waters of our mind peaceful and calm, we need to neutralize these waves by applying the appropriate opponent waves.  The more we do this, the more peaceful and calm our mind will be, and the more genuinely happy we will be.  Many of our deluded states of mind are actually an interaction of many different delusions feeding off of one another.  So, quite often, we need to apply a variety of opponents.  This is no different than people who take several different medicines to counteract different illnesses within their body.

Kadam Bjorn says the power of the opponents within our mind depends upon two factors:  our personal experience of having used a particular opponent and the strength of our desire to be free from the given delusions; and of these, the latter is more important.

The lamrim texts explain in detail the different opponents to the different delusions, for example rejoicing is the opponent to jealousy, patient acceptance is the opponent to anger, seeing samsara’s pleasures are deceptive is the opponent to attachment, wisdom is the opponent to ignorance, etc.  But it is not enough to just “know” what the opponents are, their effectiveness depends on how skilled we are with using them.  An apprentice and a master craftsman use the same tools, but the quality of their work differs greatly.  In this light, it is generally better to pick a few key spiritual tools and to become highly skilled at using them than it is to use a little bit of everything ineffectively.  Over time, through decades and decades of practice, you will gradually become more and more skilled with more and more spiritual tools.

For me, I overcome almost all of my delusions with my faith in Dorje Shugden.  This is the most developed tool I have in my spiritual toolbox.  The way I use it is as follows.  If I am suffering from attachment, wanting something in particular, I request, “with respect to X, please arrange whatever is best.”  Or “with respect to X, if it is supposed to happen, please arrange for it; if not, please sabotage it.”  “Best” here means best for my spiritual training, not what is best for satisfying my worldly concerns.  Then I no longer worry.  I know Dorje Shugden is managing the situation, and whatever happens will be exactly what I need for my spiritual training.    If I am suffering from anger or frustration about something, again I request, “with respect to X, please arrange whatever is best.”  Anger, at its core, is a non-acceptance of things as they are.  It is a wish that things were different than they are.  Dorje Shugden’s job is to arrange the perfect outer, inner and secret conditions for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  If Dorje Shugden has arranged what is perfect and what is best, then how could I possibly wish things were different than they are?  Knowing it is perfect and for the best, I can then accept the aggravating circumstance.  Because I can accept it, I don’t suffer from it.  It is not a problem for me.  It can happen that I accept that something is for the best but I don’t understand why it is for the best.  Here again, I rely on Dorje Shugden.  Dorje Shugden is first and foremost a wisdom Buddha.  A particular external circumstance is neither a problem nor perfect from its own side, rather they become so in dependence upon our view and imputation.  Something is an obstacle only for a mind that imputes obstacle.  Something is perfect only for a mind that imputes perfect.  But it is not enough to just say “it’s perfect.”  For this imputation to have power and meaning within our mind, we need to realize how and why it is perfect.  So I request Dorje Shugden, “please reveal to me clearly how and why this is perfect for my practice.”  In dependence upon this faithful request, he will gradually bless our mind bestowing upon us the wisdom that sees how and why this is true.  On this basis, we can accept.  If we can accept, there is no basis for anger or worry.

But Kadam Bjorn said what is more important than experience with the opponents is the strength of our desire to be free from our delusions.  Here we need to look carefully and honestly.  All delusions promise us if we listen to them they will make us happy, but in the end they deceive us and make us suffer more.  Attachment, for example, tells us if we stare at that hot babe, take that drug or eat that last piece of chocolate, then we will be happy.  But what really happens is the hot babe thinks we are creepy, we become addicted to drugs and we get diabetes from overeating!  All the while, we are left unsatisfied.  It is like drinking salt water, the more we drink the thirstier we become.  It is like licking sugar off of a razor blade, we get some sweet but are cut painfully in the process.  It is like feeding the dinosaur which will eat you, the more you feed it the stronger it gets and the more quickly it devours you.  Anger tells us if we harm the object of our anger it will stop harming us, but the more we harm it the more it wants to harm us.  Jealousy tells us if we are jealous we will be able to hold onto our loved one for ourself, but in reality it just causes them to want to flee even further away.  Doubt tells us it will protect us from believing something that is wrong, but in reality it prevents us from believing anything, even what is right.  Our selfishness tells us it is the only one looking out for us, but in reality it is the root of all our negative actions and its sole purpose is to deliver us to the pit of the deepest hell.  Ignorance grasping at inherent existence tells us we are seeking objective truth, but in reality we are believing in things that don’t even exist.  All delusions lie.  All delusions deceive us.  But yet we still believe in them.  We want to believe their lies.  We like to think this time it will be different and it will work.

We can know all of the opponents in the world, but if we don’t really see how delusions are our enemy, if we don’t really want to remove them from our mind, then our application of the opponents will lack any power.  It is not enough to contemplate how delusions are deceptive in general, but we need to make it personal.  We need to take the time to consider how our specific attachments have created specific problems in our life.  We need to reflect upon how our anger has always backfired and harmed those we love.  We need our personal examples of how our jealousy has pushed away those we wish were closer.  The more clearly we see the harm our delusions are causing in our life, the more motivated we will be to eliminate them.  Then, when we do apply the correct opponents, our practice will have great power.

Train in the three difficulties. 

The three difficulties are things that we find difficult to do.  It is difficult to recognize our delusions, but it is even more difficult to overcome them.  And it is the most difficult to eradicate them altogether.

First difficulty:  recognize our delusions.  Gen Lekma was my first teacher, so in many ways she is my spiritual mother.  In my mind she is a saint, and my proof of this is she put up with me!  I was about as obnoxious as a new student could be.  I was incredibly arrogant and I doubted everything.  So I would alternate between being a “know it all” and somebody who wouldn’t stop asking probing questions about every little detail.  Come to think of it, I was like my 4 year old who never stops asking “why?” about everything!  So if you know her and then see her, please give her a hug from me, and tell her I say thank you for putting up with me!

Gen Lekma patiently and persistently answered all of my questions.  Probably every day I would send her a list of about 20 new questions I had, and she would answer them, each time giving me valid and definitive answers to my questions.  The reason why I kept asking was because I felt like I had found a spiritual gold mine – I was getting real answers and I couldn’t get enough.

At one point, though, she had other things to do and started falling behind with my questions.  They kept piling up, and I started growing anxious.  Several days went by, hundreds of questions were going unanswered, and then I received from her a very short email.  It said, “with respect to all of the questions you have asked, there are good answers.  Please go find them.  Love, Lekma.”  At first, I felt a bit abandoned, but then I started to think deeply about what she said – there are good answers.  Up until that point, doubts and questions for me were an object of stress and uncertainty.  If there are not good answers to my questions, then the Dharma was perhaps unreliable, and then I would go back to having nothing.  But here she was saying, “there are good answers.”  So I didn’t need to worry, questions didn’t have to be a problem.  In Understanding the Mind Geshe-la explains that there are two types of doubts, doubts tending towards delusion and doubts tending towards the truth.  Before, my default would be if I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t believe it.  But with this answer, my mind shifted where my default was if I wasn’t sure, I could trust that it was true I just don’t understand how or why yet.  So instead of being a source of anxiety and worry, my doubts became an inexhaustible fuel for joyfully plunging ever deeper into the Dharma.  Her answer also said, “please find them.”  In other words, I didn’t need to ask somebody externally, I could look for myself, cultivate my own discriminating wisdom, and find my own answers within the Dharma.  This helped me break my transforming my teachers into objects of attachment.

The reason why I bring up Gen Lekma is in my last meeting with her as my teacher before I moved to Europe, I asked her for some final advice.  She said, “train in the three difficulties, in particular identifying your own delusions.”  The most dangerous thing about pride is it makes you blind to your own faults and delusions.  If you can’t see them, you can’t overcome them.  Once we become aware of a sickness in our body, we are naturally motivated to find a remedy and to apply it.  It is the same with the inner sickness of our delusions.  Most doctors all agree medicine is 80% correct diagnosis, 20% cure.  Once the illness is correctly diagnosed, the cure is usually self-evident.  Again, the same is true with our inner sickness of delusions.

Our normal view is those thing which provoke our delusions are obstacles to our practice.  Quite the opposite, they are our practice.  Just as angry people are an essential condition for our training in patience, those in need are an essential condition for out training in giving, those who provoke delusions within us are an essential condition for our practice of training the mind.

So training in the first of the three difficulties is actually very easy – just interact with living beings!  Family, kids, co-workers and people on the road are all especially skilled at provoking delusions within us.  We should be incredibly grateful to them for this service they provide, because without them we would have incredible difficulty identifying our delusions.  If we don’t see our sickness, then our training in Dharma lacks any power.  We are told in the Lamrim teachings that the way we should listen to Dharma is the same way as a patient told they have some terrible sickness would listen to the doctor explaining their cure.  If we don’t have our own inner sickness in mind when we listen to or practice Dharma, it will remain abstract at best.  Most likely we will listen to the Dharma with a clear understanding of the inner sickness of delusions of all of our family members, and we will think, “oh, so and so really needs to hear this!”  No, all of the Dharma is personal advice for us.

The world is filled with deluded people.  This is why they are so precious.  This is why we don’t need them to change.  This is why we can accept them just as they are.  Their highly deluded behavior suits us just fine because that is how we are able to identify our own inner sickness.  These people are the field of our practice, they are in fact emanated by our Dharma protector to give us an opportunity to progress along the path.  The bottom line is this:  modern people are lazy.  If we weren’t forced to overcome our delusions, we wouldn’t and we would remain trapped forever.

Guard both as you would your life. 

Here both refers to the two types of commitments we have taken.  The two commitments are the specific commitments, namely the 18 commitments of training the mind; and the general commitments, which are all our other commitments, such as refuge, pratimoksha, Bodhisattva, and Tantric vows.  We should guard our commitments as we do our life because they are the best way to overcome our faults.

When I started this series of posts, I discussed at length how we tend to completely neglect training in our vows and commitments.  We go from viewing them as something we fear to something we pay lip service to until finally they are just something we ignore.  This vow reminds us to not make that mistake.  In reality, our vows are like the condensed meaning of the entire path.  Instead of upteen books with countless pages, all of our practices have been reduced down to the 240 or so essential instructions.  Each of these, in turn, can be reduced down further.  The Pratimoksha vows can be reduced down to “do no harm,” either to yourself or to others.  The refuge vows can be reduced down to “rely on the three jewels to solve your inner problem.”  The bodhisattva vows can be reduced down to “put others first.”  Our Tantric vows can be reduced down to “maintain pure view.”  Our task is to see how all of the books can be condensed into the vows and commitments, and how the vows and commitments can be condensed down into these basic principles.

Endure both, which ever arises. 

Here both refers to both good and bad conditions which we encounter in our life.  We should accept both and prevent either from interfering with our spiritual practice.

All good and bad circumstances in this context can be included within the eight worldly concerns.  If we are overly concerned with any of these they become obstacles to our Dharma practice.  If we are concerned about experiencing pleasant things, we can become elated and further attached to samsara.  If we are overly concerned about avoiding unpleasant things, we can easily lose our faith in the Dharma when things go wrong.  If we are preoccupied with wealth, it can become a distraction and cause greater involvement in worldly pursuits to the detriment of our Dharma practice.  If we are overly fearful of a lack of resources, we can become depressed and worry about material things to the detriment of our practice.  If we seek praise we can develop pride and a feeling of being superior to others.  If criticism scares us, we will suffer badly when we inevitably experience it.  If we are overly concerned with having a good reputation, we can wind up ignoring our fellow Dharma practitioners and may even feel superior to our spiritual guide.  Like with criticism, if we wish to avoid a bad reputation we will become unhappy in those unavoidable moments when we have one.

To “endure both” essentially means to transform both.  A Dharma practitioner seeks to accept all things as they arise.  What prevents us from accepting things is we don’t know how to use them to accomplish our purposes.  The primary reason for this is our purposes are worldly, so some things are good and other things are bad.  If our purposes are spiritual, namely we seek to advance ourself along the spiritual path, then all situations are equally useful, just in different ways.  With the wisdom that knows how to transform any situation into the path, we know how to “use” everything, and so therefore we can accept everything, indeed we can embrace everything.  With such a powerful mind, we become a fearless being.  Nothing is a problem for us, everything is fuel for our path.  Instead of being buffeted by life’s waves, we learn how to surf them to the Island of Enlightenment.  All anxiety, stress and worry simply fade away, and we become a pillar of support and stability for those around us.  Since we see nothing as a problem, when others explain to us their difficulties we quite naturally see how such challenges can be used for good.  A mind that can accept everything is actually a pre-requisite for the mind of renunciation because the paradox is it is only by fully accepting the truth of suffering that we can move beyond it.

How can we transform each of these eight conditions into the path?  Wealth can be used to benefit others and support them (or ourselves) in their (our) practice of training the mind.  Poverty can help us let go of attachment to all things and become truly rich with the mind of contentment.  Pleasant experiences can be offered to the guru at our heart, transformed in our tantric practice or serve as a reminder of the need to accumulate merit.  Unpleasant experiences can help us generate the wish to avoid negativity, engage in purification, escape from samsara and generate compassion for those who suffer.  Praise can be redirected internally into praise for the guru at our heart and all the Buddhas who inspired good things.  Criticism is our greatest teacher because we are so often blind to our own shortcomings, and without others pointing them out we wouldn’t be able to overcome them.  A good reputation can enable us to spread the Dharma easily and inspire others to follow the spiritual path.  A bad reputation can give us an opportunity to break free from concern about what others think, purify our negative karma and even go on retreat since those with a bad reputation often lose their positions.  If we practice like this then we can transform any circumstance into the path, and always remain happy and undisturbed regardless of the circumstances.

A pure practitioner seeks to simplify the entire path into two things:  appearances and response.  No matter what appears, they simply focus on responding with wisdom and virtue.  If we understand karma and emptiness, life is little different than a video game.  None of it is real, things arise and we respond.  To win the game, we merely need to respond correctly to whatever arises.  We will make many mistakes, but if our intention to complete the game never wavers, we will be reborn again and again as a practitioner, gradually improving the ability with which we play the game until eventually we master it and can respond to everything perfectly all of the time.  When we reach this state, we will attain a “deathless state,” we will become a true Conqueror, undefeatable by Samsara.  And then we can teach others how to play as well.

There are two activities, one at the beginning and one at the end. 

Whenever we engage in any Dharma activity, there are two important things.  First set a pure motivation at the beginning and then conclude with an appropriate dedication.  In between the motivation and dedication, we rely upon mindfulness and alertness.

Why are motivation and dedication important?  The quality of our karma is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) determined by our internal intention, or motivation for the action.  The same action, such as giving flowers to our wife, can have dramatically different karmic results.  If we give her flowers for selfish reasons, such as we want her to forgive us for forgetting our anniversary, then the karmic result will at most be some mild forgiveness.  If we give her flowers because we want others to give us flowers in our future lives, that is what will happen.  If we give her flowers motivated by renunciation wishing to escape from samsara, then the action will ripen in a pure karmic seed which will contribute to our liberation.  If we give her flowers imagining that by doing so we are giving flowers to countless living beings, we multiply the good karma by the number of beings we imagined we are giving them to (namely countless).  If we give her flowers with a bodhichitta motivation, the action will ripen in the form of our enlightenment.  Same action, different motivations, different karmic results.  The same is true for any virtuous action.  So by setting a good motivation at the beginning, we can make sure we get the maximum karmic benefit from our spiritual efforts.

Dedication is important because the mental action of dedication completes the virtuous karma we just accumulated, determining how it will ripen.  We can dedicate our virtues to winning the lottery or for the enlightenment of all beings, but the karmic results will be vastly different.  Dedication is like choosing how to invest our money.  If we earn a lot of money and want to invest it, we need to decide what to invest it in.  In exactly the same way, when we accumulate a lot of merit from our Dharma practice, we need to choose what to invest it in.  The greater the “scope” of the karmic investment fund we place it in, the higher the spiritual return.  Just as there are four different scopes of being, so too there are four different scopes of dedication.  An ordinary, initial scope being is concerned with the welfare of this life alone, and their dedication is made towards that end.  This has the lowest spiritual return on it.  A special, initial scope being is concerned with the welfare of all their future lives, and their dedication is made towards that end.  The same is true for an intermediate scope being striving for liberation and a great scope being striving for enlightenment.  The spiritual return of an initial scope being can be liked to a spark, the return of an intermediate scope being can be likened to a candle, and the return of a great scope being can be liked to the blazing of the sun.  It is important to note that the scope of our dedication (and our motivation for that matter) are not determined by the words we say, but rather by the mind with which we say them.  Just as it is possible to hold Mahayana tenets with a Hinayana motivation, so too it is possible to recite a Mahayana dedication verse with a worldly motivation with only worldly results.

Dedication also functions to protect the merit we have accumulated from our subsequent anger and other delusions.  All delusions, but anger in particular, function to destroy the non-dedicated virtuous karma we have previously accumulated.  The reason for this is easy enough to understand.  If a wave with an amplitude of +1 is hit with a wave with an amplitude of -1, the result will be the cancellation of any wave at all.  In the same way, when the positive wave of our virtues is hit with the negative wave of our delusions, the result will be the neutralization of our virtuous karma.  It will be as if we never engaged in the virtuous action at all.  Anger in particular is destructive because it runs exactly counter to all virtue.  The wish of anger is to harm, which is exactly the opposite of all virtuous wishes.  Since our virtues are still weak whereas our anger is strong, anger burns through our merit like a wild fire after a drought.  In particular, anger directed at a bodhisattva is karmically equivalent to wishing to harm all living beings (wishing to harm somebody who wishes to help all living beings indirectly harms all living beings).  Such anger almost instantly can wipe out aeons worth of non-dedicated merit.

When we dedicate our merit, however, the merit develops a type of special protective sheathing.  If we saved our money by putting it under our bed, it can be destroyed in a fire; if we saved it by putting it into the bank, it is safe.  If our wealth is primarily our house and we have no insurance, if it burns down, we lose everything.  But if we do have insurance, our wealth is safe even if the house burns down.  It is the same with dedication.

Very often we quickly blitz through generating a motivation because we want to get to the meat of the main practice.  We likewise distractedly recite our dedication prayers because we know as soon as we finish our practice we need to start our day.  During the day itself, we rarely if ever take the time to establish a good motivation and the beginning and almost never take the time to dedicate at the end.  As a result, all of this virtue largely becomes wasted.  We would not leave the family jewels just lying around, but would take great pains to make sure they were safe.  In the same way, we should not leave the inner jewels of our virtuous karma unprotected by not dedicating them.  We need to apply effort to make setting our motivation and dedicating to be our new habit, but of all the habits to cultivate, this is the most important one.

Perform every suppression of interference by one. 

Here one refers to the practice of taking and giving.  We should overcome all obstacles, delusions, etc., through the practice of taking and giving.  This is the supreme method for overcoming our obstacles.

This may be too cultural of a reference, but in the 1980s in the U.S. there was a television show called “MacGyver.”  I can’t remember the details, perhaps he was some sort of spy, but every show he managed to solve every adventure with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife.  With these two tools, he could put together anything with whatever other materials he had at his disposal.  So prominent was this show, that “MacGyver” actually became a verb, namely “to MacGyver something.”  This meant to find an ingenious solution to something with whatever limited materials we had at our disposal.  For Kadampas, the practice of taking and giving is our duct tape and Swiss Army knife of overcoming obstacles.  With taking and giving, we can not only transform any adverse situation into the bodhisattva’s path, but we can actually overcome the obstacles themselves.

How does this work?  The starting point for the practice of taking and giving is others’ happiness is more important than our own.  The mind of giving says, “I have something good, I would rather others have it instead of me.”  The mind of taking says, “others have something bad, I would rather I have it instead of them.”  About a year ago, on Facebook there was a picture of a police officer who gave his shoes to a homeless person.  Why did he do this?  Because the police officer realized the homeless guy needed the shoes more than he did, and besides he can always get more shoes later whereas the homeless guy cannot.  The practice of giving is exactly the same.  We have all sorts of good things, our time, our body, our mind, our energy, our love, our wisdom, and we see others need these things more than we do, so we give to them.  Besides, we know we have the means to get more of these things.  If we were walking down the street and we saw some old lady struggling to carry her heavy grocery bags, what would we do?  Quite naturally, we would carry the bags for her.  Why?  Because we realize we are in a better position than her to carry that burden easily.  The practice of taking is exactly the same.  We see others carry various burdens, physical or emotional, and we see that we are in a better position to carry those burdens than they are.  We know how to transform adverse conditions into the path, we have built up the strength of our body and mind through our previous bodhichita-inspired actions.  So we naturally assume the burdens and sufferings of others.

Perhaps the greatest example of this in the world is Christ dying on the cross.  We are told that he died to save us from our sins.  For many, many years this made no sense to me.  How could his dying help me in any way?  But Geshe-la explained in Eight Steps to Happiness that Christ was most likely practicing taking and giving on the cross.  He had done nothing wrong himself, yet he took the negative karma of all living beings onto himself so that others could be free.  By generating faith in him, Christians align themselves with Christ’s special blessings which function to take their negative karma away and to give back to them the Kingdom of Heaven.  How wonderful!

The question may arise, “why would anybody want to do take all suffering upon themselves and give to others everything good that they have?”  It is a good question, and on the surface it seems like a crazy thing to do.  We can barely handle our own problems, surely we would be crushed under the weight of taking on all of the negative karma, delusions and sufferings of all living beings!  First, we need to make a distinction between our external practice of taking and giving and our internal practice of taking and giving.  Externally, we should only give that which we can afford to give or can relatively easily replace.  If we give away everything and find ourselves on the street unable to eat, then we are actually undermining our ability to give in the future.  Externally, we should only take on burdens that we can reasonably carry.  If we stretch ourselves too thin, we will be unable to accomplish anything and those who were counting on us will be let down.

Internally, however, we can go wild with this practice.  How does this work?  The important thing to keep in mind is virtuous minds activate virtuous karma and negative minds activate negative karma.  The mind of taking and giving is a supremely virtuous mind, so it is impossible for it to activate any negative karma at all.  Quite the opposite, it will act as a force field protecting us from the activation and ripening of any negative karma.  But the trick to engaging in this meditation in a qualified way is we need to choose to completely forget this karmic loophole in the practice!  If we keep this loophole in mind, when we engage in the practice of taking and giving we will know we are not really doing it, and so our practice will lack power to move our mind.  Instead, we try to forget that we know it is a safe thing to do and we throw caution completely to the wind and with all of our heart we take on all their negative karma, delusions and suffering and give back all hard-earned merit, realizations and happiness.  The more we forget it is safe, the more powerfully this practice will transform our mind.  We need to genuinely be willing to take it all on ourselves and genuinely willing to give it all away.

The benefits of this practice are limitless.  We quickly purify all of our negative karma with respect to the beings whose suffering we take on.  We generate powerful and close karmic connections between ourself and others, through which we will later be able to lead these beings to enlightenment when we become a Buddha.  We accumulate vast quantities of merit which in the future will fulfill all of our wishes.  We completely eviscerate our self-cherishing mind because the practice of taking and giving runs completely counter to it.  We also quickly ripen our ability to actually be able to engage in the practice of taking and giving in the future, just like Christ could.  This practice is also a powerful method for transforming our love and compassion from some abstract notions to practical principles we live our life by.  This practice increases our wisdom understanding that suffering and happiness are merely imputed phenomena.  And almost miraculously, the more we engage in this practice in meditation the more circumstances will spontaneously arise in our daily life where we can practically, externally take the burden of others upon ourself and give to others all the good we have accumulated.

We may ask, “I see that the practice of taking and giving is beneficial, but why should I suppress every interference with this one practice?  Surely it makes sense to use a wide variety of methods according to the varying circumstances I find myself in.”  While it is true that it makes more sense to use different tools for different jobs, it is still nonetheless wise to perform every suppression of interference with this one practice.  Why?  First, the effectiveness of any practice is determined by two main factors:  the natural function of the practice and the depth of our experience in using that practice.  It may be that some other practice might be a more exact opponent to our specific problem, but if we have not used that particular opponent very often in the past, it will lack power in our mind.  Instead, if we use a general purpose opponent like taking and giving in every situation, then our personal experience of this practice will deepen quickly, making it a very powerful method for overcoming any opponent.  There was once a boxer named Mike Tyson who for many years was simply unstoppable.  He had a crushing upper hook that was knocking out all of his opponents in the first round.  He had so mastered this one punch, he basically needed nothing else.  It is the same for the seasoned practitioner of taking and giving.  The second reason why we want to focus only on this method is by directly training in taking and giving, we are indirectly applying every other method.  Taking and giving is a practice that directly or indirectly encompasses all of the other practices.  Third, taking and giving is the principal method by which Buddhas benefit living beings.  Every day Buddhas are constantly taking on the delusions, negative karma and suffering of living beings and giving back their wisdom, pure karma and realization of great bliss.  It is their main method of benefiting living beings.  Since we are training to become Buddhas ourselves, it is only fitting that we start acting like one now.

The precepts of training the mind

Do all yogas by one. 

This means that we should perform all of our actions with the intention of benefiting others.   If we do all our other practices with the same intention, they will all have great meaning.

In one of his most famous lines, Geshe-la says in Eight Step to Happiness that the path to enlightenment is very simple:  we simply need to cherish others’s happiness more than our own.  All other realizations flow naturally from this.  There is a tendency amongst many to always thirst for new instructions and more instructions.  We easily become distracted or bored when we hear the same instructions over and over again, and become very excited when we hear something new.  We often like to contemplate the really deep and profound questions that require us to push our analytical reasoning skills to the limit.  We love the intellectual jujitsu of the debates on tenants.  Why?  Part of it may be our love of Dharma, but if we are honest a large part of it is we treat Dharma instructions like we do any other samsaric object, namely some external thing that has some power to give us some happiness.  The first time we try mint chocolate chip ice cream, we are in heaven.  But if we had to eat it every meal, every day, we would soon become disgusted.  We treat the Dharma the same way, and quickly become bored.  Dharma teachings no longer “do it” for us.  The high gradually wears off and we wander in search of something new.

The solution to this problem is realizing that Dharma instructions are not something that have any power to do anything to us, rather they indicate practices we ourselves need to do with our mind.  If we are actually changing our mind with the instructions we have received, when we hear the same instruction again in the future we will get something new out of it.  Why?  Not because the instruction itself has changed, but rather because the mind understanding that instruction has changed.  If we find ourselves bored with Dharma teachings we have heard before, it is a perfectly reliable sign that we have not actually changed our mind with that instruction since the last time we heard it.  If we had changed our mind, even if only on the margin, hearing the instruction again will confirm and reinforce our own personal experience, and our mind will be blessed to see a new or deeper perspective on the instruction.

Many Dharma practitioners observe the fact that Geshe-la’s books don’t contain everything and there are many incredibly interesting avenues left unexplored.  So they set out to fill in the gaps with other books and other teachings.  I remember once, shortly after I became a Highest Yoga Tantra practitioner, I set out to understand the symbolism of every single aspect of every single visualization within the sadhana.  If we check the books, we will realize that Geshe-la explains – at most – about half of the symbolisms.  I knew that Gen-la Losang knew the symbolism behind every single aspect, so I prepared a spreadsheet with each aspect and all of the symbolisms I knew from the various books, and I asked him to help me fill in the blanks.  He wrote back saying he knew but said I didn’t need them.  This, of course, peaked my curiosity even more.  I knew he knew, but perhaps he didn’t know me and what a “sincere practitioner” I was.  So I wrote him back and lengthy email explaining to him all of the valid reasons (with scriptural references, of course) as to why I did need these explanations.  I concluded by reminding that it was a bodhisattva vow to respond to all questions asked out of faith!  He then wrote back again saying, “It is unthinkable that Geshe-la would not give us everything we need to attain enlightenment.  It is also unthinkable that he would give us something we don’t need.  Why?  Because he wants us to focus on gaining deep and personal experience of what is important and not become distracted by what is not.  So instead of trying to make your Dharma understanding more complex, try to make your experience of Dharma more simple.”

This was an incredibly powerful teaching for me, as I had become very attached to receiving more and more Dharma instructions and making my understanding more and more complete.  Now, my goal is to simplify my practice more and more down to the essentials.  When we do so, what we find is by practicing a few simple things directly we train in everything else indirectly.  So we actually lack nothing.  And if all of Dharma is boiled down to one thing, it is cherishing others.

We may object, “but it says in the Lamrim teachings that the quintessential butter that comes from churning the milk of Dharma is bodhichitta,” so shouldn’t bodhichitta be the “one” we perform all yogas by?  The answer is no because bodhichitta is the last domino that falls naturally if we, with effort, topple the first domino of cherishing others.  If we cherish others and then consider their sufferings, compassion arises naturally.  If we have compassion and we consider we currently lack the ability to help others, bodhichitta arises naturally.  So the real beating heart of bodhichitta is cherishing others.

Shantideva says in Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that cherishing others is the root of all happiness and cherishing ourelf is the root of all suffering.  He also observes that Buddhas cherish only others and samsaric beings cherish only themselves, and then he invites us to look at the difference!  There is no practice more important than cherishing others.  It is also one that we don’t have to be Buddhist to appreciate.  It is the true universal panacea, accessible to all.

Do not seek happiness by causing unhappiness to others. 

This includes obvious things like killing and stealing.  It also includes wanting others to have misfortune so that we benefit.  Karmically speaking if we violate this commitment we create the causes for future misery, whereas if we follow it we create the cause for future happiness.

This vow is fairly simple and straightforward:  don’t sacrifice somebody else’s happiness for the sake of our own.  Every decision we make in life will involve trade-offs.  Our normal way of assessing such trade-offs is “others lose, I win” is good, “others win, I lose” is bad.  The Kadampa, in contrast, always seeks win-win solutions; and when they are not possible, they would rather the other person win and they be the one who loses.  The reasons for this have already been explained in detail in the discussion of the previous vows, such as the one on not being the first to get the best.   The real trick of this vow is to be mindful of all of the different circumstances when it can arise.

This vow also advises us to not take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others.  Venerable Tharchin says that when we rejoice in the misfortune of others we create the causes to experience similar misfortune ourself in the future.  He gave the example of Palestinians rejoicing when an Israeli café is blown up, or Israelis rejoicing when Palestinian leaders are assassinated.  Think of Al-Qaeda’s rejoicing at 9/11 or American rejoicing in the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  Venerable Tharchin ominously said, “from a karmic point of view, rejoicing is no different than pulling the trigger ourself.”

Those who are in positions of authority or who possess some degree of power constantly have to make decisions that affect the lives of others.  From an ordinary point of view, their decision making criteria is:  (1) maximize the benefit and minimize the harm to myself, and then (2) divert benefit to my friends and deflect harm to my enemies.  Since everybody is doing this, society quickly becomes a war of all against all, where only might makes right.  It is for this reason that some ancient practitioners used to pray to never become politicians or to occupy any position of power.

Modern Kadampas, however, take a different approach to such questions.  We are taught not to shun wealth, power or position, but instead to use them to benefit others.  Bill Gates enormous wealth in and of itself is neutral, but it becomes incredibly useful when he uses it to help others.  Our mission as a tradition is to attain the union of Kadam Dharma and modern life.  Wealth, power and position are parts of modern life, so our job is to unite the Kadam Dharma with them.

The question then becomes, “how can a modern Kadampa wield power in a correct way?”  First, they use their wisdom born from seeing the benefit of cherishing others to see how “win-win” decisions can be arrived at.  Given that everything is in fact intimately inter-related, there are actually very few circumstances where a “win-lose” is required.  This will be self-evident to the mind that knows how to transform adverse conditions into the path.  Second, they make their decisions from the perspective of “maximizing the aggregate benefit for everyone involved, irrespective of who enjoys such benefit.”  If the policy is a good one, then the aggregate benefits will exceed the aggregate costs.  This is different than a policy that might be very beneficial for one group but at the expense of everyone else.  Third, the “winners” of the policy decision should be made to compensate the “losers” of the policy decision in such a way as the losers are at least indifferent between the policy being enacted and it not being enacted.  For example, in a free trade agreement, the country as a whole might benefit, but within that country different groups are winners and losers.  For example, the country’s exporters and their consumers might win, but the country’s farmers and industrial workers might lose.  A correct policy would be one where the exporter and consumer winners are taxed in some way, and the proceeds are transferred to the farmers or industrial workers in the form of professional re-training, etc.  Finally, if there must be “losers” then the modern Kadampa decision-maker will structure things so “wisdom wins” and “delusions” lose.  For example, guaranteeing equal rights represents a tragic loss for those in positions of privilege, but it is a victory for society as a whole when oppression and discrimination lose.  As Ghandi said, “even the oppressor is unfree when they oppress, they just don’t realize it.”

There may be some residual doubt in our mind about the wisdom of having wealth, power and influence.  Lord Acton famously said, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  But this is only true for a mind controlled by self-cherishing.  Therefore, as a practical matter, to protect ourselves against this danger, we should always make sure that our mind of cherishing others outstrips the power we wield.  If this is the case, we still need to be mindful, but we should be spiritually safe with such power.