The purpose of this meditation is to generate the determination to abandon completely our self-cherishing mind.  We do this in three stages:  (1) by understanding clearly what is self-cherishing, (2) by considering its disadvantages, and then (3) on this basis generating the determination to abandon it.  The perfection of this meditation is the determination to abandon our self-cherishing mind understanding it to be the principal object of abandonment on the Mahayana path and the ultimate perfection of this meditation is engaging in the three stages of the meditation conjoined with an understanding of emptiness.

What is self-cherishing?  Self-cherishing is a mind that considers the self that we normally see, namely an inherently existent self, to be supremely important.  Supremely here means the most imporant compared to everyone else.  As explained before, the inherently existent self is the one that we think exists from its own side, independent of everyone and everything else.  We view it as the possessor of our body and mind, as if it was somehow separate from them.  We conceive of our self as inherently distinct from all others, like there is an unbroachable chasm between ourselves and others so that what happens to others is of no importance to ourselves because it does not affect us and that what happens to us is the only thing that matters because that is all that we experience.  With self-cherishing, we value and consider our own happiness to be the only thing worth working for.  If we work for the happiness of others it is usually in some self-serving way, such as understanding how by being nice and helpful to others it serves our own mercenary interests.  Self-chershing is prepared to sacrifice the happiness and well-being of others on the altar of what is best for us.  If others have to suffer so that we can get ahead, this seems not only entirely justified, but entirely natural.  The mind of self-cherishing reasons that if we do not look after ourselves, then nobody else will.  It erects all sorts of elaborate philosophical justifications for its existence, which in the end boil down to “since everyone else is selfish, if I am to survive and thrive, I too must be selfish.” 

Self-cherishing only considers things through the very narrow  lens of how things affect ourselves.  It views all relationships through the lens of others relations with us.  Things derive their importance in dependence upon how they serve our interests.  The only needs that matter are its own.   Every other being is viewed as an object whose usefulness is measured by what we can get out of them.  Even though we may intellectually deny that we consider ourselves supremely important, when we examine things from the perspective of “for whose sake did I engage in that action” we realize that virtually all of our actions, even the few virtues we manage, are done for the sake of ourselves.  Our actions speak louder than our rationalizations.  It is a mind that is so all-pervasive in our thinking that we don’t even really notice it.

What are the disadvantages of self-cherishing?  Shantideva says all suffering in this world has one source:  self-cherishing.  In the lojong texts it says we should “gather all blame into one”, meaning we should blame all of our problems on self-cherishing.  How can we understand this?  According to Buddhism, all suffering is due to the ripening of negative karma.  Negative karma itself comes from negative actions.  Negative actions in general are those actions which harm a living being (ourself or others) in some way.  All negative actions are driven by delusions, usually attachment, anger or jealousy.  All delusions arise from self-cherishing.  For example, because I consider my own happiness to be more important than others’ happiness, I am willing to harm them to benefit me, such as by stealing or saying hurtful things.  In a subtle way, we can even say anytime I am doing something for the sake of myself I am neglecting all countless living beings, in other words I am putting the interests of myself over all others and depriving them of the benefit I could otherwise be extending them if I was thinking about and valuing their happiness. 

From the point of view of emptiness and the analogy of the ocean, if each being is a wave on the ocean of the emptiness of my mind of bliss and emptiness, self-cherishing values my wave over the waves of others.  But it is impossible to favor one wave without indirectly harming other waves since they are all inter-related.  The more I try to raise my wave or smash the waves around me, the more turbulent I make the waters of my mind.  A turbulent, violent mind appears (literally creates) a turbulent, violent world.  Additionally, from the point of view of emptiness we can see the absurdity of self-cherishing in that the object it cherishes, namely the inherently existent self, does not exist at all!  We have spent countless aeons trying to serve a master who is not even there – no wonder we have not gotten anywhere and have so little to show from the fruits of our labor.

Understanding clearly what self-cherishing is and its many disadvantages, we are naturally led to the conclusion that we must abandon it completely.  What does this mean practically?  It means every time the thought arises in our mind to favor ourselves at the expense of others, we should recognize this as a deceptive mind and not be fooled.  In Christianity, they say the Devil is the root of all evil and he tricks us into being evil.  In many ways, we can say the Devil is nothing other than the personification of the self-cherishing mind.  We can think to ourselves, “this thought is the devil of my self-cherishing mind trying to trick me, I will not be fooled.”  We take the time to identify the deception – how our self-cherishing promises us happiness but will deliver us only misery.  When we see clearly the deception, we will no longer be fooled and our self-cherishing will lose its power over us. 

From the point of view of emptiness, we can realize, paradoxically, that the best way to secure happiness for our wave is to allow it to settle into the stillness of the ocean.  Why be one wave when you can be the whole ocean?  When you stop trying to raise your wave or smash the ones around you, the waters of your mind become increasingly calm and peaceful, and as they do a profound feeling of inner peace and joy begins to emerge until eventually it becomes an almost overwhelming blissful contentment.  Once we have tasted this, the candy our self-cherishing offers us will seem woefully inadequate and won’t tempt us in the least – why sacrifice a feeling of universal bliss for the poisoned pleasures of samsara?

The next several meditations have as their goal to reach the goal of cherishing only others.  To cherish somebody means to consider thier happiness to be precious and important.  Practically speaking, it means to actively work for the happiness and well-being of that we consider to be precious.  In this first meditation, equalizing self with others, we strive to equalizing our cherishing of each and every living being – so that we cherish each being as much as we cherish ourselves.  In other words, we consider the happiness of each and every being, including ourselves, as being equally important.  Practically, this means we work to maximize the happiness of all beings in the aggregate, without favoring any one being (including ourselves) over any others.  This meditation differs from equanimity in that with the meditation on equanimity we develop an equal warm and friendly attitude towards everyone, but we never actually challenge our own self-importance.  Here, we try identify how much we consider our own happiness to be important and we realize all that we are willing to do to secure our own happiness, and we consider valid reasons why we should cherish each and every other being to exactly the same level.

Conventionally, the valid reasons for this are simple:  there is nothing about myself that makes me any more important than anyone else.  Happiness is happiness, regardless of who is experiencing it.  Suffering is suffering, regardless of who is experiencing it.  So there is no basis for considering my happiness and suffering to be any more important than the happiness and suffering of anyone else.  The fact that we experience our own happiness and suffering with our aggregate of feeeling does not make our happiness and suffering any more important than anybody elses in a universal sense, because they too experience their happiness and suffering with their aggregate of feeling – so both are equally important.  Sometimes we consider the happiness of our family, friends or the people of our ethnic, religious, or national group to be more important.  The reason for this is when we view things from the perspective of our self-cherishing mind, things derive their importance in terms of their relationship to ourselves.  But from a universal perspective, this makes no sense.  If there is nothing about ourselves that makes us more important than others, then likewise there is nothing about those in relationship with ourselves that makes them more important.

We may object, but they are more important to me for this reason, therefore it is perfectly appropriate for me to consider the happiness of myself and those close to me as more important.  But this does not follow.  The question is why should your own or their happiness be more important to you?  We have no valid reason for thinking this and there is nothing stopping us from considering the happiness of all beings as being equally important to us.  It is true from a practical perspective that we will have a karma which enables us to help and work for certain beings more than others, but that is a question of how we can act upon our equal cherishing of others, not what we actually consider to be important.  We can consider all beings as being equally important, but accept the practical reality that we can act upon that equal cherishing in different ways depending upon our karmic relationship with different beings.

To engage in this meditation from the perspective of ultimate truth, emptiness, we simply use emptiness as the ultimate definitive reason why the happiness of each and every being is equally important.  Since all beings are equally empty, there is no basis for considering any one being, including ourselves, to be more important than any other. 

Once again, the analogy of waves and the ocean serves us well.  Ryan is just one wave on the ocean of the emptiness of my mind of bliss and emptiness.  The same is true for every other being.  We are all equally waves on the ocean.  There is nothing about any one wave that makes it more important than any other wave, and since we all share the same underlying ocean, there is no basis for considering Ryan to be “me” and other waves to be “not me.”  Ignorance, at its root, is believing we are just the one wave and not the ocean coupled with a mistaken notion that our one wave is more important than all the other waves.  Clearly, that is absurd.  If all waves are equally by nature the ocean of my mind, then the happiness of each and every wave is equally important.  If I am the ocean, and not just the Ryan wave, then to consider the happiness of Ryan to be more important than the happiness of anybody else is the same as considering the happiness of my right hand to be more important than my left hand.  Venerable Geshe-la gives the example of the right hand doesn’t not remove the thorn from one’s foot arguing “it is not my problem.” 

Additionally, to cherish somebody means to consider them to be important or precious.  This depends entirely upon our mind.  “Importance” or “preciousness” depends upon mental imputation and construction.  It is our mind that makes things “important” or not, they have no such importance from their own side.  Venerable Geshe-la gives the example of a bone and a diamond – which is more important?  Most of us would argue the diamond, but for a dog the bone is far more precious.  So we cannot say that any one being is intrinsically more important than any other, rather we can say if we think this it simply reflects a laziness in our mind to have not yet taken the time and put in the effort to consider how each and every being is likewise important. 

A related mistake we make when we start training in this meditation is instead of raising the importance of the happiness and well-being of others up to the highest level, we rather reduce our cherishing of all others down to the lowest common denominator – so instead of cherishing all beings as equally important we neglect all beings as being equally unimportant.  We sometimes get so confused about this that we think it is somehow wrong to cherish any one being because we are not yet able to cherish all beings to the same amount, so we wind up cherishing nobody because that is something we can do equally!  Ridiculous!  But you would be surprised how many even senior practitioners accidentally fall into this trap.  Rather, we should find the person we cherish the most and then use that person as an example of how we should equally feel towards everybody else.  Ultimately, the person we cherish the most is ourselves, so we want to cherish all others as we cherish ourselves.  But as an intermediate step we can take the love we have for somebody very close to us who we naturally feel love for, such as a child, and then bring everybody equally up to that level.  What I do is I ask myself the question “what would I do if this person were my child?”  And then I act accordingly.  Later, we can ask “what would I do if this person were me?”  And then, we can act accordingly.

The general purpose of this meditation is generate a feeling of gratitude towards all living beings, wishing to repay their kindness.  The perfection of this meditation is I want to generate a wish to repay their kindness to serve as fuel for the ultimate way in which I can repay their kindness, namely by becoming a Buddha which then leads them all to enlightenment.  The ultimate perfection of this meditation is the perfection of this meditation combined with an understanding that ourselves, others and their kindness are all empty.

If we understand the emptiness of ourselves we realize that everything we are is in dependence upon others.  An inherently existent person is an island unto themselves, completely independent of everything.  But in reality, there is nothing about us that is not dependent upon everything.  In this way, meditating on the kindness of others is itself a way of meditating on the emptiness of ourselves.  Where does our body come from?  From our parents and from the food we eat.  Where does their DNA come from?  From the actions and activities of countless beings over countless generations.  Our food comes from the work of countless farmers, truck drivers, grocery store workers, etc.  Who built the trucks?  Who built the roads?  How was all of this paid for?  Without all of these beings (our parents, our ancestors, those in the food industry, taxpayers for roads, etc.) we literally would not be who we are today.  But surely our thoughts are our own?  No, everything we think ultimately comes from others as well.  There is not a single thought we have which we can say comes exclusively from us.  How to read, the language we speak, the ideas we have all come from others – we did not invent them ourselves.  Even if we have had some original ideas ourselves, these have come from understanding the connections between the ideas that other people have given us.  Without their ideas, we would have nothing to connect.  The mental habits we have in this life largely carry over from the mental habits we cultivated in previous lives.  These habits arose from an enculturation of countless others we have intereacted with in the past.  More profoundly, mind and its object arise in mutual dependence upon one another.  All minds have, directly or indirectly, others as part of the object of mind.  Put another way, without others serving as objects of our mind, we would simply not have any minds at all!  So there is not a single aspect of our body nor a single aspect of our mind that is not entirely dependent upon others.  We simply wouldn’t be without them.  So everything we have, everything we are is due to the kindness of others, and realizing this helps us realize the emptiness of ourselves.

Realizing others are kind is itself a meditation on emptiness, and meditating on the emptiness of others helps us realize their kindness.  It has been discussed before how others are empty, in other words mental constructions.  Nobody is “kind” from their own side, they become kind in dependence upon how we mentally construct them.  By focusing on certain aspects of them and mentally viewing them in particular ways, they become “kind” in our eyes.  For example, our mother cared for us throughout our childhoood.  This is an act.  We could say “that’s normal for her to do” and then we would not feel her to be kind, but would rather take it for granted.  We could say, “yes, but she also treated me badly” and then we would completely ignore all that she has done for us.  Or we could say, “she didn’t have to do any of these things and if she hadn’t I would surely be dead or completely screwed up right now” and then suddenly her acts become acts of kindness.  One final word on mothers, while it is true we may have had a troubled relationship with our mother, the fact remains that she did not abort us.  She could have, but she didn’t.  This means we owe our entire life we have to her.  Without that one act of kindness, we would not have had any of the other opportunities we have had in our life, including the opportunity to travel the path.  This one act of kindness so completely trumps any mistakes she might have made to make our focusing on her mistakes nothing but being petty.  We need to let go of our petty resentments and see the bigger picture.

Just as we say that “friend, enemy and stranger” are mere mental projections and just as we say “each being is my mother” is a mental projection, so too is viewing each being as kind.  For me, the most powerful way of realizing their kindness is to realize how the simple existence of beings – regardless of what they do – is an act of supreme kindness because they serve as objects of my practice.  If all beings are equally empty, then all beings are equally useful in terms of serving as an object of our practice of training the mind.  Some give us opportunities to practice patience, some give us opportunities to practice love, but all equally give us an opportunity to practice something.  If all we wish to do is train our mind, and all beings provide us equal empty opportunities to do so, what basis do we have to develop bias or aversion towards anyone?  All beings are equally kind in that regardless of what they do, they are an equal opportunity for me to train my mind, and without these opportunities that they provide me, I wouldn’t be able to attain enlightenment.  It is impossible to engage in virtue without others, and there is no happiness without virtue, so we can correctly say all happiness arises in dependence upon the simple existence of others.  How kind they are, regardless of what they are doing to me!

In this meditation, we consider how all living beings are all equally our mothers.  The purpose of this meditation is to break our normal imputations of friend, enemy and stranger and to instead replace it with “mother” for all beings.  By doing so, we eliminate our bias and generate a feeling of closeness towards all beings.  The actual mental action here is familiarizing ourselves with the wisdom recognition that realizes that indeed all living beings are our mothers.

Conventionally, the contemplation is very simple.  In the last meditation we considered how all living beings have equally been everything towards us countless times in all of our infinite previous lives.  Building on that, we say “so they have all been my mother.”  Why do we single out them having been our mother as opposed to say our assassin?  Because when they were our mother they were at their least deluded towards us.  When we engage in loving kindness towards somebody, it is actually us.  When we get angry or upset at others, it is our delusions.  We know this because delusions function to render our mind uncontrolled, whereas loving kindness never arises uncontrolledly.  We often generate regret after having gotten upset, but we never generate regret from having purely cared for somebody.  At the very least, we single out motherhood because this is when others have been very kind towards us and it evokes in us the least deluded response to consider them our mothers.

Some people object at this point, “but my relationship with my mother is terrible!  If I consider all beings my mother I generate all sorts of delusions towards them.  Can I instead consider all living beings my children?  That works better for me.”  The short answer is yes, of course you can consider others to be your children if that works for you.  But in my view it is nonetheless very valuable to also take the time to consider them to be your mother and generate the good feelings intended by this meditation.  Unfortunately, modern psychology can be summarized as “it’s all your mom’s fault.”   Psychologists get paid thousands of dollars to dig into people’s past to try identify how our mothers/parents screwed us up so people can say “it is not your fault you are messed up, it is your parents’ fault.”  Such thinking is completely counter-productive.  Yes, of course, we can recognize that our parents made mistakes, but don’t we all?  Anybody who has subsequently become a parent realizes how hard of a job it is and how nothing in life prepares us for it, so is it any wonder we make a mess of things?  Second, this is inappropriate attention at the extreme.  No matter how much harm our parents did to us, they provided us with so much more positive.  They gave birth to us (they could have aborted us), so we can say everything we have in our life is due to this one act of kindness which overwhelms everything else.  In the next meditation we will go into much more detail about the kindness of our mothers.  Third, if our being screwed up is somebody else’s fault, then our ability to get better is also dependent upon others.  So the end result is to make us helpless victims.  Sure, as children, we could not be expected to respond with wisdom to our parents’ mistakes, but there is nothing that stops us from applying our wisdom now.

When we engage in this meditation conjoined with an understanding of all beings as being equally empty, there is a danger we might start to think nothing of anybody and fall into the extreme of indifference.  Indifference is just as much of an extreme as attachment towards our friends and aversion towards our enemies.  From the point of view of satisfying the wishes of our self-cherishing mind, it is true some beings are more helpful than others, and it is usually upon this basis that we generate attachment, aversion or indifference.

According to Tantra, we can engage in the mother’s meditation in a special way.  When we engage in self-generation practice, we assume the role of the Guru-Deity.  Guru in this context is Lama Tsongkhapa and Deity is our Highest Yoga Tantra Yidam.  When Lama Tsongkhapa looks at any living being, he sees not only his kind mother, but he sees his kind mother who is his disciple/student he has the responsibility to lead to enlightenment.  So just as we can view all beings as our mother, we can also view them all as our future students/disciples who it is our responsibility to lead to enlightenment.  Of course, we don’t go around and explain to everyone, “I am your savior, who has come from Tushita Pure Land, to lead you to enlightenment.  Follow me, my child.”  Such behavior would quickly land us in the psychiatric hospital!  But internally, we can take the long-view of our relationships with living beings and say yes, it is my responsibility to lead this being to enlightenment.  Conventionally, right now, they are appearing as my boss or my colleague or my bus driver, but I must cultivate my relationships with each and every being in such a way that I may eventually conventionally appear to them as their Spiritual Guide.  It may be hundreds of lifetimes from now before that happens, but in the meantime I will do whatever I can to develop a warm and friendly relationship with the person as the foundation for later (most likely in a future life) leading them along the path.  Just as it is difficult to learn how to view all being as our mothers in a non-deluded way, there are also unique delusions that come up preventing us from looking at all beings as our future students in a non-deluded way.  But just as it is worthwhile to work through our delusions towards our mothers, so too it is worthwhile working through our delusions associated with viewing others as our future students.  We need to strive to learn how to do this in a healthy and balanced way that is entirely normal.

In a similar way, our Highest Yoga Tantra Yidam is a Chakravatin King or Queen (Heruka or Vajrayogini).  Chakravatin Kings and Queens are universal monarchs of the three thousand worlds (basically, every dimension of every universe).  But they are unlike monarchs as we normally think of them.  They use all of their power solely for the benefit of their people.  Their every action is aimed at serving the interests of their people.  Ghandi said the person who is the highest of all is the one who has managed to make themselves the lowest of all.  A Chakravatin King is, in reality, a servant of all who happens to have the power and resources of a universal monarch.  So just as we can view all beings as our mothers, children or future disciples, so too we can view all living beings as our “Chakravatin subjects”, in other words our people that we serve.  Again, it is easy to generate delusions if we consider ourselves as a universal monarch and all beings as our subjects.  But these are all wrong understandings of what is meant here.  There is a way to view things as a Chakravatin King would, namely genuinely using all our power and resources for the sake of serving all others, so we should try view things in that way.  A Billionaire philantrhopist is quite similar – they use all of their wealth to help and serve people.  This is the meaning.

All of the meditations up until now have concerned primarily adopting a spiritual attitude towards ourselves.  The remaining meditations concern adopting a spiritual attitude towards others.  Our first and fundamental problem is our mind remains biased towards others, considering some to be friends, some to be enemies and some to be irrelevant.  All three attitudes are wrong, and ultimately create most of our problems.  The goal of the meditation on equanimity is to adopt a balanced and equal attitude towards everyone.  If we have a positive attitude towards everyone, a good 90% of our daily problems with respect to others will fall away.  A balanced and equal attitude towards everyone is also the indispensable foundation for generating great compassion and bodhichitta, minds that seek to free all living beings without exception.  We cannot become a Buddha for all but a couple of living beings.  So either we hold on to our bias and forego ever becoming a Buddha or we eliminate all bias and open the door to enlightenment.  The choice is ours.

Conventionally, we engage in this meditation by considering how over the infinite expanse of countless previous lives, every single being has been everything towards us – sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, sometimes irrelevant – countless times.  When we look at things from a narrow scope of time, we might say some people are nice than others or some people are meaner than others and develop bias.  But when we expand the temporal scope of our vision we realize all beings have been equally everything in relation to us.  Their present appearance of friend, enemy or stranger is quite temporary and even in this life we see how it changes quite quickly (if you have any children in primary or middle school, you know what I mean!  They have new BFFs every day!).  So there is no sense in grasping at such labels.  Most of the “drama” we create for ourselves in this life comes from the ever shifting nature of these appearances and labels.  We get so wrapped up in these shifting sands of dependence that we drain ourselves of all energy and literally torture ourselves mentally.  If instead, we develop a warm, friendly and balanced attitude towards everyone regardless of how they are presently appearing then we stand above the shifting appearances and introduce a stability into our relationships.  We free ourselves from having our own inner well-being be dependent upon what anyone else might be saying or doing.  At a minimum, we make our lives far less “dramatic” and so therefore much more stable and calm.

If conventionally we develop equanimity by realizing everyone has been everything to us countless times, ultimately we develop equanimity by realizing everyone has been “nothing” to us countless times!  In other words, everyone has always been equally empty since beginningless time.  In reality, from their own side, others have been nothing.  It is not a case of from their side they have shifted from friend, enemy and stranger, rather it is our mind has been constantly shifting the mental labels we impute upon others depending upon the vagaries of our mind.  We have just been mistakenly blaming them for the change of label, when in reality it comes exclusively from our mind.

We might object by saying sometimes others are appearing to help me and sometimes others are appearing to harm me, so it is appropriate for me to change my mental label.  But why is the appearance changing?  As was explained before, each and every being is empty, a being in our karmic dream.  Nobody is actually there doing anything.  They are simply the theater of our karma playing itself out.  Venerable Tharchin once said “life is a play in which we write the script, others are merely actors playing out our karma.”  Others are mere karmic echos of our own past behavior.  Looking at others is like looking in a magical karmic mirror and seeing nothing other than our own past absurdities.  Why do people appear to us to be “fair weather friends”?  Because that is what we have been towards others in the past.  Why do people appear to betray us or abandon us or favor us?  Because we have done all these things to others in the past.

If we wish for stable friendships with others, we ourselves need to be stable friend towards them regardless of what they do and we need to be such a stable friend from now until the end of endless time.  We need to start – right now – creating a new karmic play.  It will take time for our past karma to work itself out, so there will be a long period of time where we will be a vajra friend (vajra means pure and indestructible) towards others and they will continue to shift, betray, disappoint or fade into irrelevance, but eventually that karma will exhaust itself and what will emerge will be a new pattern of vajra friendships with an ever increasing circle of people until eventually it embraces all living beings.  Once again, the analogy of the ocean is instructive.  If I favor some waves over others, trying to pull those I like closer to me and push those I dislike farther away, the only thing I do is make the waters more choppy.  The more intensely I do this, the worse it gets, and so I start doing it even more in increasingly violent and abrupt means and worse still it gets.  Such a strategy is entirely self-defeating.  The way to calm the waters is to neither pull nor push, but to accept.  If I accept all of the waves equally without trying to manipulate or control them, then eventually the waters around me begin to settle, the magnitude of the waves begins to diminish, the vividness of the appearance of friend, enemy and stranger begins to subside and the waters of my mind become clearer and more stable.

Happy Heruka Day everyone!

Normally, we don’t like meditating on suffering.  We find meditation on renunciation to be terribly depressing, and as such we put little effort into it or we skip it altogether.  This is a terrible mistake.  If done correctly, the meditation on renunciation is one of the most liberating and joyful meditations on the path.  It is a feeling of having suddenly realized our biggest mistake and having been revealed the way forward.  It is a feeling of having definitely emerged from obscurity into a clear vision of the path to freedom.  In and of itself, the mind is extremely blissful, a feeling of total release as we let go of all that binds us.  In reality, samsara is nothing more than a self-imposed and self-created prison.  We are trapped within it only for as long as we don’t make the decision to leave it behind.  But once we decide to leave, we realize that, despite all that we have feared, nobody and nothing can stop us from joyfully walking straight out the door.

According to Sutra, the meditation on the wish to escape from samsara, or renunciation, is one of the three principal aspects of the path (the others being bodhichitta and the wisdom realizing emptiness).  According to Tantra, the meditation on renunciation is one of the five seeds of enlightenment (the others being bodhichitta, the wisdom realizing emptiness, generation stage and completion stage). What we strive to escape from in Buddhism is samsara, what we try free others from in Buddhism is samsara.  It is impossible to gain a qualified realization of bodhichitta, which is the principal cause of enlightenment, without a qualified realization of renunciation (if we don’t know what it is we wish to escape from and we don’t even wish to escape from it ourselves, how can we know or wish this for others?).  In Tantra, we train in stopping identifying with samsaric aggregates and we train in identifying with pure aggregates – but how can we do this if we don’t even understand what it is we are abandoning or even want to abandon it?  Some of the meditations on the path are specific subjects, like the meditation on the lower realms or recognizing all beings as our mothers, but other meditations are the synthesis of all the previous meditations – how all of the previous meditations fit together.  The meditation on renunciation is one such meditation, so if we can learn to train in the meditation on renunciation correctly, we will be training indirectly in all of the previous meditations.  Conversely, knowing how to meditate on renunciation in a qualified way makes all of our earlier meditations far more qualified because we know where everything is headed.  For these and many, many other reasons, the meditation on renunciation is without a doubt one of the most important meditations on the path.  It is the synthesis of all that came before and the foundation for all that follows.

So what is this mind of renunciation?  It is quite simply the decision to do whatever it takes to leave samsara having understood its true nature.  Therefore, to understand renunciation we must first understand the true nature of samsara, then what it takes to leave it and finally make the decision to do what is necessary to escape.  The perfection of renunciation is the wish to gain this realization understanding it as an essential stepping stone on the path to enlightenment.  The ultimate perfection of renunciation is the perfection of renunciation conjoined with an understanding of the emptiness of samsara and nirvana.  These will now each be explained in turn.

Conventionally, we say the nature of samsara is suffering.  There are three types of suffering:  manifest suffering, or pain as we normally think of it; changing suffering, or pleasure as we normally think of it; and pervasive suffering, or identifying with our ordinary body and mind as we normally think of it.  Manifest suffering is self-explanatory.  Changing suffering says that every object of pleasure in samsara eventually becomes painful, for example the first ice cream makes us happy the tenth makes us sick.  Pervasive suffering is the most important type of suffering to understand.  Essentially, it means we experience human suffering because we impute our I onto the body and mind of a human; an animal experiences animal suffering because it imputes its I onto the body and mind of an animal, and so forth.  Samsara is also commonly understood as “uncontrolled rebirth”, meaning without freedom or control we are thrown into one form of contaminated rebirth after an another in an endless cycle.  Renunciation, therefore, is wishing to gain control over the process of death and rebirth.  All of the above is true, but for me personally what moves my mind the most is to think of the nature of samsara as deception.  Samsara takes me for a fool – it sadistically tricks me again and again into heading down wrong paths.  It promises me endless joys, only to reward me with endless suffering and problems.  When things are going badly, it fools me into creating the causes to make things even worse by encouraging me to respond with negativity.  When things are going well, it fools me into indulging in samsara’s treats whereby I burn up all of my merit and will be left with nothing to sustain me but the fires of hell.  It promises me life, but takes me to ritual slaughter again and again and again.  It promises me power, but makes me a slave.  It promises me riches, but leaves me always wanting.  It promises me joy, but leaves me in tears.  It promises me renown, but makes me hostage to what others think.  It promises me freedom, but condemns me to an eternity in prison.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool we twice, shame on me; fool me forever and it is pure evil.  There is no redemption ever to be found in it, no hope it will ever change its ways.  With such a place, there is only one thing to do – leave, and leave now.

But how?  This can be understood in two ways – changing the basis of imputation or our I and breaking the cycle of samsara.  As has been explained before, our “I” is nothing more than a mere mental label, an idea, that we impute onto the basis of imputation of our body and mind.  Currently, we identify with our ordinary body and mind.  Our ordinary body grows increasingly painful until it eventually dies and our ordinary mind is that collection of delusion we call our winning personality.  But our I is in no way fixed to our current body and mind.  Our I is bound to our ordinary body and mind only through the force of ignorant habit.  But like all ignorant habits, it can be broken with wisdom and effort.  Instead of identifying with a basis of endless suffering, with wisdom we can train in identifying with the pure body and mind of a Buddha.  No matter how beautiful you find your body, no matter how clever you find your current mind, they pale into petty insignificance compared to the luminescent splendor of a vajra body and the blissful omniscience of a vajra mind.  Our training in generation stage of Highest Yoga Tantra can be understood as nothing more training in the changing of the basis of imputation of our I from an ordinary samsaric being to a transcendental enlightened being.

The second way of escaping from samsara is by breaking its cycle.  The cycle of samsara can be understood by realizing how the five contaminated aggregates feed each other.  The five contaminated aggregates are essentially our ordinary body and mind.  The body is contaminated form, and the mind is contaminated discrimination, feeling, compositional factors and consciousness.  First, our contaminated discrimination discriminates objects as being inherently pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  Then, our contaminated feeling experiences these objects as being inherently pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  On the basis of these feelings, we generate contaminated compositional factors (basically delusions, such as attachment, aversion and ignorance).  On the basis of these delusions, we engage in contaminated actions which plant contaminated karmic seeds onto our consciousness, thereby making it contaminated.  When these seeds eventually ripen, they take the form of contaminated forms (or appearances).  We then assent to these contaminated forms with our contaminated discriminations and so the cycle continues without end.  The way to break this cycle is by training in the five omniscient wisdoms.  Our pure discrimination discriminates all objects as being equal manifestations of the emptiness of our very subtle mind of great bliss.  Our pure feeling then experiences all objects as the dance of great bliss and emptiness.  On the basis of these feelings, we generate pure compositional factors (basically pure mental factors).  On the basis of these, we engage in pure actions which plant pure karmic seeds on our consciousness, thereby making it pure.  When these seeds ripen, they do so as pure appearances which we then discriminate purely with our pure discrimination in a self-perpetuating cycle of purity.

Having understood the true nature of samsara and what we need to do to get out of it, all that remains is the decision to do it.  There is a big difference between intellectually understanding samsara is the nature of suffering and deception and actually making the wisdom decision to do what it takes to leave.  Samsara will be relentless until the very end, using every trick in its book to distract or deter us from our purpose.  Our ability to hold the line depends entirely upon two things:  (1) wishing for the freedom of nirvana more than the pleasures of samsara and (2) the wisdom attentiveness to not be fooled.  Both are very hard.  Samsara’s pleasures seem immediate and definite whereas nirvana’s bliss seems a long ways off and quite abstract.  We will be tested, again and again, in every conceivable way, but the test is always the same:  do I sacrifice the eternal joy of enlightenment on the alter of my immediate desire?  Our ability to make the right choice depends upon our wisdom attentiveness to not be fooled by samsara’s lies.  This is why for me it is most powerful to consider the nature of samsara to be deception.  All delusions are, by their very definition, deceptive.  If you want to break the power of a delusion over you, realize its deception.  Once the curtain has been pulled back and we see the lie for what it is, the delusion will have no (or less) power over us.  And we should never grow complacent.  I still keep a picture of Gen-la Samden on my shrine as a reminder because here was a man who was so wise, was so far along the path, he had everything, but even he, who was likely quite close to completing the path, was fooled in the end and he lost everything.  If a holy being like the Gen-la Samden we all knew and love could be fooled, then surely we will never be never safe until we have purified the very last obstruction on our mind.  In the story of Buddha Shakyamuni’s moment of enligthenment, there was a final flurry of all remaining delusions and obstructions, any one of which could have knocked him from his path.  No, we must remain vigilent to the very end.

In the end, the entire universe is the ocean of the emptiness of our mind.  Through the force of delusion and karma, it has assumed the aspect of a terrifying acidic ocean of suffering.  Through the force of wisdom and pure action, we can reshape it into the aspect of a pure land in which all beings are eternally free.  Samsara will never revert to a pure land on its own.  So either we do whatever it takes to reshape it or we remain forever its victim.  There is no middle ground.

In the previous posts, we have been explaining our problem – namely that we have a precious human life, we may die at any time and when we do we will most likely fall into the lower realms.  Our short term solution to this problem is simple refuge where we request the Buddhas to bless our mind at the time of our death so that we can continue with our practice in our next life.  While this is fantastic, there are two limitations to this approach.  First, for their blessings to work we need to have karmic seeds on our mind that they can bless.  If there are no seeds in the field, no amount of water and sunlight will work to produce a crop.  Second, it is less certain because we are dependent upon somebody else to avoid lower rebirth – it would be much more certain if we had the power ourselves to do it.  For this reason, simple refuge is not enough, we need special refuge – namely the power within our own mind to control our process of death and rebirth.

On the path to enlightenment, there are two essential wisdoms we need to acquire:  a wisdom understanding the functioning of conventional phenomena and the wisdom understanding ultimate truth emptiness.  According to Sutra, the fundamental characteristic of Je Tsongkhapa’s tradition is the union of these two wisdoms as explained in the Prasangika school (the highest school of emptiness).  The Prasangika school explains how everything is a mere appearance to mind.  The Tantra-Prasangika school, which is the highest school according to Tantra agrees that everything is a mere appearance to mind, but the nature of all of these appearances is the ocean of our very subtle mind of great bliss and emptiness.  So the Sutra Prasangika school explains the surface or shape of the ocean, the Tantra Prasangika school unites the surface with its underlying ocean.  Before we can gain the union of conventional and ultimate truth, however, we must first understand each wisdom individually and then we learn how to unite the two.  A basic explanation of the wisdom realizing emptiness has already been explained.  Here I will first explain the basics of the wisdom understanding the functioning of conventional phenomena and then I will explain the union of the two.

Conventional phenomena function according to the laws of karma.  The basic law of karma says the nature of our actions determines the nature of our future experiences.  If we engage in negative actions we create the causes to experience future suffering and if we engage in virtuous actions we create the causes to experience future happiness.  Every action produces four main effects:  (1) the ripened effect, namely the cause to take a certain type of rebirth, (2) the effect similar to the cause, namely whatever we do to others we create the cause for others to do to us in the future, (3) the environmental effect, namely our future environments will be the nature of the actions we engage in, and (4) the tendency similar to the cause, namely whatever we do now we create a tendency to do similar things again in the future.  These four main effects hold for both virtuous and non-virtuous actions.  There are also four general characteristics of the law of karma:  (1) the results of actions are definite, namely each action produces a specifically defined result, (2) the results of actions increase, namely the longer the duration between when an action is engaged in and when the effect is experienced the more pronounced will be the effect, (3) if an action is not performed its result cannot be experienced, namely if you don’t create the cause for something you will never experience its effect and if you experience some effect than you definitely created the cause for it in the past, and (4) an action is never wasted, namely if you engage in some action you will definitely experience its fruit in the future.  It is possible, however, to neutralize existing karma.  For example if we get angry it destroys our virtuous karmic seeds and if we engage in purification it destroys our negative karmic seeds.  This is not an exception to the fourth general characteristic, rather these are specific actions which function to neutralize previously existing seeds.  If we understand the basic law, the four effects and the four general characteristics of karma then we understand how conventional phenomena function.  When our own actions are consistent with this basic understanding, we have the actual wisdom understanding the functioning of conventional truths.  If our actions are still running contrary to this understanding, this shows we may understand karma intellectually but we have not realized its truth as a wisdom.

How then can we unite conventional and ultimate wisdom?  This is perhaps best explained through the analogy of waves and the ocean.    Each being is a wave on the same ocean of our mind.  Our ignorance grasps at each being as being somehow separate from all the others, but in reality we are all waves on the same ocean and thus are the same nature, like one giant entity of all living beings.  If we think we are separate, then we quickly think that our wave is more important than others.  On the basis of this mistaken belief, we become willing to harm other waves for the sake of ourselves.  If I harm the wave next to me, the ripples from that action will eventually find their way back to me – others will harm me for the sake of their wave.  The same is true for helping the wave next to me.  When we are all the same ocean and every wave’s existence depends entirely upon the waves around it, it is clear that it is impossible to do anything to another wave without it affecting our wave.  The ocean in the analogy is our mind.  The entire universe is by nature our own mind.  The world we see is simply the aspect or shape the body of water that is our mind has taken.  Every time we engage in any mental action, we introduce forces into the ocean of our mind, reshaping it in different ways.  Some actions make the waters more turbulent (negative actions) some actions make the waters more calm and translucent (virtuous actions).  From this we can understand the general law of karma from the point of view of emptiness.

We can understand the four effects from the point of view of emptiness as follows:  The ripened effect is a rebirth.  We can think of each rebirth as the rising of a wave and each death as the falling of a wave.  If I create a wave through some action, eventually that will filter back where, when my wave is at the bottom of its cycle, the forces of the waves flowing towards me cause a specific type of wave to rise.  The remaining three effects can be understood as the specific types of ripples on any given wave that has arisen.  When a wave rises, it does not just arise as a smooth, uniform thing, but it can take all sorts of different shapes and have all sorts of little ripples on it.  These are the other three effects.  The effect similar to the cause can be understood exactly as the ripened effect, just on a smaller scale as the ripple of one of our past actions coming back to us.  The environmental effect is if I spread contamination and negativity to the waves around me, then the environment of my wave will be contaminated and negative.  The tendency similar to the cause can be likened to if I push on the water in a similar way many times then the pattern of the waves which emerges will reflect that tendency.  Thus the more “natural” current of my actions will be consistent with the types of waves I normally create.

The four general characteristics of karma from the point of view of emptiness can be understood as follows:  The results of actions are definite – if I push on a body of water in a specific way, it will produce a very specific type of wave.  Just as the physical laws of liquid dynamics are definite, so too are the karmic laws of the liquid dynamics of the ocean of our mind.  The results of an action increase – if I get angry at somebody, they are likely to get angry at the people in their lives, who in turn will get angry at the people in their lives in an ever increasing effect.  The longer this process goes on, the more rounds of subsequent transmission there are, and as a result, the more the result will be when it eventually cycles back to me.  When an earthquake takes place in the ocean, the resulting tsunami grows in strength as it approaches the shore because the liquid forces get compressed into a smaller and smaller space as the water grows more shallow.  What started out as a small wave in the middle of the ocean becomes a giant tsunami when it reaches the shore.  If an action is not performed, its result cannot be experienced – a wave will not arise if there are no forces creating it, and if a wave did arise there must have been some forces which created it.  An action is never wasted – since within a body of water, all waves and currents are united into a single indivisible entity, everything that happens anywhere affects everything everywhere.  If you create a wave, it will definitely produce a result and the only way to stop it is to engage in the opposite of that action (anger, or the wish to harm others, is the opposite of virtue, or the wish to help others; purification is the opposite of negativity).

If we have gained the wisdom realizing karma, our natural conclusion is to avoid all negative actions and to engage in exclusively virtuous actions.  We also come to the conclusion that it is wise to engage in purification to neutralize our past non-virtues and to engage in dedication to protect our virtues from being destroyed by our subsequent anger.  Understanding the laws of karma from the point of view of emptiness we arrive at exactly the same conclusion, but in a more qualified way because we understand that everything is by nature the ocean of our mind, everything is inseparably interconnected and so it is obvious to us how all of our actions will produce effects.  We also understand that all action is, ultimately, mental action and so our focus will be on always controlling our mind – not allowing delusions to develop and actively striving to create virtuous patterns of mind.

If we consistently engage in virtuous and pure actions, eventually we will create the conditions for a “great wave” similar to the “great wave” of Je Tsongkhapa’s deeds.  Our enlightenment will radiate out in all directions pacifying all the waves around us.  In math, there is a concept called orthoganality.  If you have a bunch of vectors going in different directions, there is one vector called the orthogonal vector which will function to neutralize all of the other vectors bringing everything back to zero.  In exactly the same way, the great wave of a Buddha is a mental vector that is exactly orthogonal to all of the previous contaminated and negative mental vectors we have ever done.  The effect is to exactly and perfectly counter all the contaminated cross-currents within the ocean of our mind which will change the shape of the ocean of our mind from a turbulent, violent samsara into a perfectly still and clear ocean of blissful omniscient wisdom shared by all.  What does this enlightened orthogonal vector look like?  It looks like the object of our self-generation meditation.  Through our Tantric practice, we train in putting the ocean of our very subtle mind of bliss and emptiness in the shape of Keajra (supporting and supported mandala).  We keep doing this again and again, creating again and again this type of wave.  It builds in force until eventually it becomes a great wave of a Buddha.  Conventionally we manifest the great wave and experientially we enjoy the resultant clear light bliss and emptiness of having liberated all beings.  How wonderful!

At the end of the day, the Dharma is very simple:  we have a problem, Dharma provides a solution.  If we gain an exact understanding of what is the real nature of our problem and how only the Dharma can give us a solution to this problem, then we will have no difficulty generating the necessary effort to progress along and ultimately complete the path.  As Venerable Tharchin said, “if we see how the Dharma actually works, effort becomes effortless.”  Once again, this post is quite long and for that I apologize.  But what can be more important than a solution to our biggest problem of impending lower rebirth?  Even if nobody ever reads this, it has been extremely helpful to me to write it out to clarify my own understandings.  I now know much more clearly what it is that I need to do.

What is our problem?  We have a precious human life with which we can accomplish even the highest spiritual goals.  But we may die at any moment and lose this opportunity for a very long time.  From the point of view of our problem, it makes little difference whether we physically die or simply lose what makes our human life “precious.”  If we lose the path and spend the rest of our days engaging in only worldly action, from a spiritual point of view it is as if we are already dead.  I have virtually only negative karma left on my mind.  If I look at my own personal biography over the last countless aeons, I have spent virtually all of my time in the lower realms where I engaged in almost exclusively negative actions.  When I was in the upper realms, I simply burned up what little merit I had and did precious little that was actually virtuous.  Even now, when I have such perfect access to the methods for purifying my mind, I have done virtually no sustained and sincere purification practice.  So there can be no doubt that my own personal stock of karma is almost uniformly negative.  If one of these negative karmic seeds ripens at the moment of my death, I will be thrown into the lower realms where I will once again become trapped for an incalculably long period of time.  Statistically speaking, if I have 10 times more negative karma than virtuous karma, there is a 10 times greater chance I will fall into the lower realms than attain a fortunate rebirth.  To make matters worse, if I die with a negative or deluded mind, I will activate one of these negative seeds and fall into the lower realms.  When I am faced with problems, pain or difficulty, I tend to get grumpy, irritable and I respond with negative and deluded minds.  Facing death will be the biggest problem, the most painful experience and the most insurmountable difficulty I will face in my life.  If I respond to life’s minor annoyances with delusion and negativity, what chance do I have to not do the same at the time of my death?  If I am 10 times more likely to respond to pain and problems with a negative mind and I have 10 times more negative karma on my mind, then at a minimum I have 100 to 1 chance of falling at the time of my death.  In reality, the odds are much worse than that.  This is a huge problem.

This problem becomes all the more poignant when I consider things from the point of view of others.  If I fall, all those who I would otherwise have helped and lead towards enlightenment will have to remain trapped in their own samsaras for all that time.  So it is not just me who will suffer, but all those who I would have otherwise helped will be forced to endure their suffering even longer.  If we understand things from the point of view of dream-like emptiness, all of the beings of my dream are trapped in samsara because I have dreamt them there.  From this point of view, I am not only responsible for the suffering of all those who I would otherwise have helped, but I am responsible for all suffering of all beings.  How can I condemn countless living beings to endless suffering?  This is exactly what I am headed towards doing if I don’t purify my mind and attain enlightenment for their sake.  From the point of view of emptiness of others, it is no exaggeration to say the fate of all beings rests on my shoulders and depends upon what I do with my mind right here and right now.

This is my problem.  The question is what is the solution?  According to Buddhism, the solution is going for refuge.  The meaning of this phrase is not always clear to people.  What it essentially means is turning towards and relying upon a viable solution.  When you have a cavity, you go for refuge to the dentist.  When you have a legal problem, you go for refuge to a lawyer.  When you have a karma and delusion problem, you go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.  There are two ways of going for refuge:  simple and special.  The simple way is we create the causes for the Buddhas to activate our virtuous karmic potentialities at the time of our death so that we can continue with our practice.  The special way is we gain the power to do so ourselves.  In this post, I will explain simple refuge.  All of the subsequent posts in this series can correctly be understood as an extensive explanation of special refuge.

Since it will take a long time before we have the power to control our own process of rebirth, the first and most urgent thing I need to do is to try ensure that a positive seed ripens at the time of my death.  Even if I have 10 times more negative seeds than positive ones, if I can get that one positive seed to ripen at the time of my death I will at least buy myself more time to continue with my practice and thereby clean up the rest of my karma.  From my own side, I have little power to determine what seeds ripen because I have little control over my mental reactions to pain and difficulty.  One of the most important functions of a Buddha is they have the power to bless the minds of living beings.  What does that mean?  It means they have the power to activate on our mind our virtuous karmic potentialities – they can ripen those positive seeds.  If I can get them to do so at the time of my death, then I can avert my near-certain fall into the lower realms and then continue with my practice.

So the question becomes how can I ensure I receive a Buddha’s blessings at the time of my death?  From their own side, the Buddhas are constantly bestowing blessings on all beings much like the sun is always radiating light.  But for their light to enter my mind, I need to open the blinds to let the light in.  Very often we make requests for blessings, but sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking the Buddhas are holding back and will only bless our mind if we ask them or bribe them with offerings!  This is completely wrong – when we request blessings, what we are really doing is making the mental decision to open up our mind to receive their light.  This is how we open the blinds of our mind.  So every single moment of every single day we should be requesting blessings, in particular requesting that the Buddhas bless our mind at the moment of our death so that we may continue with our spiritual training for the sake of all beings.  Each request we make creates the karmic cause for the Buddhas to do precisely that at the time of our death.  Each request we make creates the karmic cause for us to open our mind to the Buddha’s light at the time of our death.

We need many such causes, we need these causes to be powerful and we need to increase the odds that their resulting karmic seeds are activated at the time of our death.  We create many of these causes by making this request many times.  We make these causes powerful in dependence upon the strength of our faith when we request them.  With faith, we trust, we believe and we don’t hold back.  We eagerly wish to come under the influence and protection of that which we have faith in.  The greater our faith when we make the request, the more completely will the blinds of our mind open to the blessing light of the Buddhas.  In the lamrim teachings it explains how we increase our faith.  We should actively train in increasing our faith which will create more robust karmic causes.

We increase the odds that their resulting karmic seeds are activated at the time of our death by having a close karmic relationship with the Buddhas.  If we have a close and frequent relationship with somebody, it is much more likely that our request will be fulfilled.  If we have no relationship with somebody, requests we make cannot be fulfilled even if the other person wants to fulfill our request because there are no points of connection.  So how do we develop closer karmic relationships with the Buddhas?  By believing they are always with us.  One of the unique abilities of a Buddha is wherever you imagine them to be they instantaneously appear.  The reason for this is simple when understood from the point of view of emptiness.  They already are everywhere, but by believing that they are there we activate the karma for them to appear.  Another unique ability of a Buddha is wherever a Buddha appears they spontaneously bestow blessings, just like wherever you bring a lamp it will spontaneously illuminate its surroundings.  If we can have the Buddhas with us at the time of our death, then they will spontaneously bestow the light of their blessings on our mind.  This will then activate the virtuous karmic potentialities on our mind which will then ripen in the form of a karmic dream in our next life where we can continue to have access to the path and we can continue with our training.  If we train right now in the mental action of always believing the Buddhas are with us, then this will become our mental habit.  We will eventually be able to remember this all of the time, and we can carry the continuum of this awareness with us into the moment of death.  Then it is certain that we will be able to avoid lower rebirth and continue with our practice in our next life.  Christians do the same for their preparations for the time of death – they try believe that Christ is with them (“know that I am there”).

Finally, we can enhance the above by also going for refuge to Sangha.  Sangha are our spiritual friends (I would say spiritual family) who are likewise training just as we are.  Who our friends are makes a huge difference to our lives because our friends have an enormous influence over us.  If our friends routinely bully others, we will start to do the same and indeed think it is funny and normal.  If our friends are routinely requesting blessings and trying to practice virtue then we will likewise do the same and indeed think it is entirely normal to do so.  For this reason, we must choose our friends wisely.  Sangha does not only matter from the point of view of how they support us, but they also give us a chance to support them.  When we support them when they are struggling, we create the causes for others to support us when we ourselves are struggling.  If we encourage them to go for refuge so as to prepare for their death, we create the causes for others to do the same for us.  If we support them, they will come to see that as normal and they will start to support others in the Sangha, so by supporting them directly we are indirectly supporting all of the others in the Sangha.  It is likewise extremely important to never create division within the Sangha and to always try to heal all relationships within the Sangha.  If each one of us is holding a candle, and we put all of our candles together we will make a giant flame which will benefit everyone equally.  But if we separate the candles, the resulting illumination is diminished for everyone.  Creating division within the Sangha does precisely that.  We need a robust, very close, very harmonious spiritual family.  This then functions as a beacon of light for us at the time of our death.  Our close relationships with the Sangha will create many karmic transmission channels through which we can benefit from their prayers for us at the time of our death.  Even if physically we die alone, with a closeness to spiritual family we are karmically never alone and there will be no obstructions to their prayers on our behalf at the time of our death.

If each being is a wave on the ocean of our mind, a spiritual practitioner is a calm wave.  A Sangha is a clustering of calm waves.  If we center ourselves in a patch of the ocean where the waters are calm and translucent, we dramatically increase the chances of our own wave being calm and translucent.  There is no more important time for that than at the time of our death.  But if we spend our entire life in turbulent waters, it will be very difficult to find the calm waters at the time of our death.  Since the time of our death could be at any moment, it is foolish to not always be centered in such waters.  This doesn’t mean we need to physically be with Sangha all of the time (though that certainly helps).  But with modern communication technology, such as email, Facebook and Twitter, we can mentally always remain close to our Sangha.  What a fortunate state of affairs!

We have a problem, but there is a solution.  Now it is up to us to put it into practice.

The purpose of meditating on the dangers of lower rebirth is to generate a great fear of engaging in negative actions, the karmic cause of lower rebirth.  The perfection of fear of lower rebirth is we fear taking lower rebirth because if we do so we will become trapped in the lower realms for an incalculably long time during which all the being who we would otherwise have saved if he hadn’t fallen in the lower realms must continue to suffer.  The ultimate perfection of fear of lower rebirth is the perfection of the fear of lower rebirth conjoined by an understanding that our negative actions, the lower realms and all the beings who inhabit them are empty.

One of the biggest obstacles to our generating a fear of lower rebirth is we do not really believe they exist.  An understanding of emptiness provides us with a definitive reason proving their existence.  Many do not believe in lower rebirth because they do not believe in rebirth at all.  They believe that when the body dies, the mind dies with it and nothing remains afterwards.  They believe this because they believe the body creates the mind.  But in reality, it is the exact opposite – the body is merely a dream-like projection of the mind.  It is fairly straightforward to understand how the body is nothing more than a mere mental label imputed upon the parts of our body, and that if we took away all of the parts of our body there would be nothing remaining that could be considered our body.  The same is true of all of the individual parts of our body, they too are just mere mental labels imputed upon their parts.  While our ignorance assents to the body as being somehow real or solid, when we check carefully all we find is mental projection.  Death is no different than one dream ending.  The body of last night’s dream never was anything more than a mental creation and when we wake up we do not wonder where the dream body went – we understand clearly that it has simply dis-appeared.  But a new body appears in the waking world.  We have all had experiences of having dreams within a dream.  One dream ends and we wake up only to later find that we woke up into another dream.  When we wake up from that dream then we are back in this world.  In exactly the same way, our waking world is simply another layer of dream.  When the karma giving rise to the appearance of this dream body and dream world fully exhausts itself, the body of this life will dis-appear exactly as the body of last night’s dream did.

In any moment, the quality of the mind we have determines the quality of the karma that ripens.  If we have a negative mind, it functions to ripen negative karma giving rise to negative appearances.  If we have a positive mind, it functions to activate positive karma giving rise to positive appearances.  If we have a pure mind, it functions to activate pure karma giving rise to pure appearances. This process is happening all of the time – our every mind is functioning to activate certain karmic seeds and our every mental action in response to those appearances functions to plant new karmic seeds.  This process equally functions at the moment of our death.  The last mind we have at the time of our death determines the quality of our next rebirth.  Why?  Because if for example we have a negative mind at the time of our death it will activate a negative seed, but this seed will ripen in the first moment after our death determining the  karmic trajectory of our next life.  Just as when we are dreaming we believe everything to be real, so too when contaminated karma ripens it does so appearing to be real even though it is not.  Seen in this way, rebirth in the lower realms is no different than being trapped in a dream of being in hell from which we never wake up and which we do not realize it is a dream.

To take this one step further, it is very useful to ask the question:  who trapped all the beings in the lower realms?  If last night you dreamt of somebody in a wheelchair, who put them in it?  Clearly it was you, since it is occurring in your dream.  In exactly the same way, if you dream of countless beings trapped in the lower realms, who put them there?  Clearly it was you, since it is occurring in your karmic dream realm.  Every being is empty – another wave on the ocean of our mind.  When the ocean of our mind assumes the aspect of hell, all the beings of our dream become trapped there.  Our negative actions do not just condemn us to hell, but countless other beings as well.  Out of compassion, we therefore wish to never take rebirth in the lower realms!

Every time we engage in a negative mental action we create the causes for lower rebirth.  We engage in countless such actions every day.  Conversely, it is quite rare for us to engage in virtuous mental actions.  When we are in the lower realms, we engage in virtually only negative actions, thus creating countless causes to remain there.  When we take rebirth in the upper realms, we very quickly burn up all of our positive karma, leaving only negative karma on our mind.  We also almost never engage in purification practice.  Therefore, it perfectly stands to reason that we have countless trillions of negative karmic potentialities on our mind and very few, if any, positive ones remaining.  Every time we experience the slightest discomfort or problem, we usually respond by generating all sorts of negative minds towards our situation.  What can be more uncomfortable than death?  What can be a bigger problem than dying?  It is almost certain that we will respond with a negative mind at the time of death.  So with virtually only negative karma on our mind and a near certainty that we will respond to the death process with a negative mind, can there be any doubt about the fact that we are almost certain to fall in the lower realms at the time of our death?  This is not just something we say, this is the reality of our situation.  We are, for all practical purposes, on the precipice of hell and we can fall at any point.

If we deeply internalize this truth, we will generate a very healthy fear of negative mental actions and a very healthy fear of all of the negative karma which remains on our mind.  This fear will push us to cease generating negative minds and encourage us to engage in sincere purification.

This is part 4 of the series on my understanding of how to engage in the ultimate perfection of each stage of the path.

Normally we call the next meditation on death.  But once again, each stage of the path is a mental action, so an awareness of death itself is not the meditation, rather it is the mental conclusion we come to practice the Dharma purely right now without wasting a single moment that is the actual stage of the path.  In the previous meditation we realized how we have a precious human life with which we can attain the highest spiritual goals.  In this meditation, we first realize how we may lose our precious human life at any moment and as such we cannot afford to waste even a single moment of our opportunity.  Since we may die at any time, we realize that the only thing we can take with us into our future lives is the karmic potentialities we have planted on our mind, so when we realize death we choose to use this present life for the sake of our countless future lives.  This is what makes our practice of Dharma “pure.”  Our practice is impure if we practice Dharma for the sake of this life alone.  The perfection of the realization of death is the decision to practice Dharma right now without wasting a single moment with the aim of using this life to become a fully enlightened Buddha.  The ultimate perfect of the realization of death is the perfection of the realization of death conjoined with an understanding of how our precious human life, our death, our practice and our future lives are all empty.

It has already been explained in the previous post how our precious human life is empty.

The emptiness of the death of our precious human life can be understood in a variety of different ways.  First, if we recall from the previous meditation our human life becomes precious if we make the mental decision to use it for the purposes of attaining spiritual goals.  If for whatever reason we abandon this decision and start to use our human life only for worldly purposes (meaning reasons concerning this life alone), then our “precious human life” has died even though our human life itself has not.  This is a form of death that depends entirely upon our mind.  It is quite similar in how we say ordained people disrobing is a form of spiritual suicide.  From the point of view of emptiness, quite literally it is a form of spiritual suicide because the monk or nun known as Kelsang Whatever is no more – that person has died even though their human life continues.

A second way our precious human life can die is the karma giving rise to the appearance of the 8 freedoms or the 10 endowments might exhaust itself before our human life comes to an end.  For example, imagine somebody moves to a country where there is no access to the Dharma and the person gradually loses interest and stops practicing.  This is a death of the person’s precious human life even though they are still alive.  This, sadly, occurs all of the time.  Each of the freedoms and endowments are a karmically appearing condition of human life.  As explained before, every phenomena is a mere karmic appearance of mind.  Every karmic appearance has a certain duration to it.  It is very similar to a DVD or a YouTube video.  Depending upon the intensity of the original karmic cause giving rise to the appearance, different karmic seeds will have different karmic durations to them.  Some appearances may last for many years, others may last for only a few moments.  Right now, we may have the appearing conditions of all of the freedoms and endowments, but there is no guarantee that this karma might not exhaust itself at any moment.  So it is not just an issue of we may get in some accident and die before we get old, the death of our precious human life can happen anytime through the simple exhaustion of the karmic appearances which enable our life to be precious.

A third way our precious human life can die is our human life itself dies.  This can actually be understood as a specific instance of what was just described.  Our human life is one of the freedoms.  The appearance of this life is a karmic appearance, and this karma can exhaust itself at any point.  When this happens, the appearance of this human life will cease completely.  When we die, it is like the karmic movie of our present life story coming to an end.  All of the appearances of this life gradually cease until we enter the clear light of death.  This is our very subtle mind which goes with us from life to life and never dies.  As will be explained in the next meditation, the quality of the mind we have at the time of our death determines the quality of the karmic potentiality that ripens at the time of our death.  This potentiality will then ripen in the form of the appearances of our next life.  It is like we put in a new DVD which will have its own duration.  We leave all of the appearances from our previous life behind, and the only thing we carry forward with us into our future lives are the karmic potentialities (each of which will eventually ripen as a different karmic YouTube video) we have placed on our mind during our life.  So if we think deeply about this, we will realize that the only thing that has any real value is the karmic causes we create – only this matters.  What appears does not matter at all.  The only thing that matters is what karma we create in response to what appears.

It is fairly straightforward to understand how our decision to not waste a moment of our precious human life is empty.  It is exactly the same as our decision to seize the opportunity afforded us by our precious human life.  Additionally, what does it mean to not waste a moment of our human life?  It means to use every moment of our life to train our mind in the Dharma.  To train our mind in the Dharma is to choose to engage in certain mental actions, such as choosing to abandon our attachment to what other people think or choosing to consider the happiness and well being of others to be something that is important.  These are mental actions, and thus depend entirely upon our mind.

In summary, understanding that our precious human life is nothing more than a mere karmic appearance of mind which can exhaust itself at any moment, we choose to use every moment of our life to train in engaging in the mental actions of the stages of the path so that we may plant on our mind the karmic potentialities that we can carry forward with us into our future lives and which will eventually ripen in the form of the appearance of ourselves as Heruka or Vajrayogini in our pure land liberating all living beings.