Practicing with Power: Going for refuge and generating bodhichitta

Kadampa Ryan 3. Tantra, Practicing with Spiritual Power

Every sadhana begins in the same way, by first going for refuge and generating bodhichitta.  So how can we do these practices from the perspective of increasing our spiritual power to overcome our greatest delusion?  The short answer is our faith and our motivation are two of the most important components of spiritual power. 

Before we go for refuge, there are several things we can do.  First, we need to adopt the correct meditation posture and be completely relaxed physically.  I think most of the people reading this blog already have experience with this, so there is no need for me to provide extra explanation.

Second, we should imagine that all conventional phenomena dissolve, like a dream, into the clear light nature of our mind.  It is as if our entire reality is made of holograms of light, which dissolve and reveal the clear light nature of our mind.  We should identify this clear light as the same nature as the omniscient mind of all the Buddhas, which is itself the same nature as the omniscient mind of our Spiritual Guide.  Doing this enables us to let go of our distractions and tune into the mind of the spiritual guide to be able to receive his blessings.

Third, we should imagine around us are our friends, our family, our colleagues, the people of our region, and finally all living beings.  We should strongly believe that they are actually with us in the clear light Dharmakaya.

Fourth, we should develop a strong desire to overcome our greatest delusion.  The first ingredient of spiritual power is our motivation or desire.  Kadam Bjorn said that our practices are powerful not in terms of how well we know the methods, but rather by how strongly we wish to overcome our delusions.  To help us increase our desire to be free from our delusions, we can view our delusions as demons or devils dwelling within our mind.  Would we allow a demon into our home or to remain?  They are not actual demons, since there is no such thing (there is also no such thing as you, but that is a different story…).  Much of Christianity, for example, can be correctly understood from a Dharma perspective if the devil is understood to simply be the personification of self-cherishing abiding in the minds of living beings; and God is the personification of the union of wisdom and compassion in the minds of spiritual practitioners.  To help us generate the specific desire to overcome our greatest delusion, we can consider how it creates countless problems for ourself and for others.

For ourself, we should consider how does our specific greatest delusion create problems for ourselves in our life.  We can consider how it has created countless problems for ourselves in this life.  All delusions are deceptive, they promise us one thing but give us the opposite.   We can think, “as a result of this delusion, I have engaged in many negative actions, which will later throw me into the lower realms.  If I do not get rid of this delusion now, it will assert itself at the time of my death, and I will be forced to return to samsara again.  In the end, I face a choice between remaining with this delusion or attaining enlightenment.  I can’t have both.”

For others, we can consider how our biggest delusion creates problems and suffering for the others around us?  We can think, “as a result of this delusion, I project a world filled with beings who suffer from similar delusions, which create countless problems for them in their lives.  When I engage in negative actions as a result of this delusion, I create the cause for others to engage in negative actions towards me in the future, and as a result of their actions, they later fall into the lower realms themselves.  When the karma I create from this delusion ripens, it will create a world which is the same nature as this delusion, and all the beings who abide in my dream world will suffer as a result.  For as long as I have this delusion, I cannot become a Buddha.  If I cannot become one, then it will be impossible for others to do so since they are my spiritual creation.  Because they are empty, they are ultimately the beings of my karmic dream.  Thus, for as long as I remain with this delusion, countless beings will remain trapped in the prison of samsara.”  We can consider these points to develop a heart-felt desire to overcome this delusion, indeed we need to make the firm decision that we will do whatever it takes to overcome our greatest delusion.

Fifth, we imagine that in response to this decision, from the Dharmakaya, the guru-deity spontaneously appears in the space in front of us in the conventional aspect of whatever deity we are practicing (Vajrayogini, Heruka, Je Tsongkhapa, Tara, Vajrapani, etc.).  His arising is the response to our desire.  The most important thing is for us to to have the conviction that the guru-deity is actually in front of us, inside our mind.  We then try generate faith in him by considering how he can help us overcome our biggest delusion.  For now, we just believe he has all the power necessary.  So we strongly believe that through relying upon the guru-deity in this way, we can gain all of the realizations necessary to overcome our greatest delusion. On the basis of this strong desire/decision and deep faith in the guru-deity, we are ready to go for refuge.

When we recite the refuge prayers, the most important thing is to imagine that we are leading all these beings around you in the practice of going for refuge to the guru-deity to overcome their own greatest delusion.  Each being is, ultimately, an aspect of your own mind.  They are a wave on the ocean of your mind.  By imagining each being is going for refuge with you, you literally karmicly reconstruct the beings of your dream into beings who will, in the future, actually go for refuge.  This is very profound.  This correct imagination plants the karma on your mind to have all of these beings actually go for refuge to the guru-deity in the future.

When we recite the prayers for generating bodhichitta, the most important thing is to generate a specific bodhichitta:  I must overcome my greatest delusion so that I can free all these beings from the suffering that flows from it.  Bodhichitta multiplies the power of our spiritual practices by the number of living beings.  Why is this?  When we engage in an action motivated by bodhichitta, we are seeking to attain enlightenment so that we may benefit countless living beings.  So our intention is to benefit countless others.  To engage in one virtuous action for the benefit of 1,000 beings has the same karmic effect of engaging in that same one virtuous action 1,000 times for the sake of one being each time.  Since the object of bodhichitta is the nearly infinite number of living beings, actions motivated by bodhichitta are karmically equivalent to engaging in a virtuous action nearly an infinite number of times for the sake of one being each time.  This is one of the most effective and direct ways of increasing the power of our virtuous actions.

 

Practicing with Power: Connecting the Dharma to our biggest delusion

Kadampa Ryan 3. Tantra, Practicing with Spiritual Power

One of the most important things to understand about spiritual power is that it does not exist in a vacuum.  Dharma instructions have power in a dependent-relationship with the delusions they oppose.  This is very important to realize, but not difficult to understand.  If at a given moment of time we are not suffering from a particular delusion, the Dharma instructions that are that delusion’s opponent will actually have no power within our mind even if we generate the opponent perfectly.  But if, for example, our mind is infected with jealousy, the teachings on rejoicing suddenly have great power within our mind.  It is for this reason that when we listen to or read Dharma instructions we are encouraged to maintain the recognitions that we are sick and that the Dharma is the medicine.

Practically speaking, what does this mean?  It means whenever we listen to or read Dharma instructions we should do so with our biggest delusions/problems in mind.  Then, when we hear or understand the instructions we will connect the Dharma we are learning with the sickness in our mind.  By doing so, we will then receive special blessings which will enable us to see how we can use the instructions to heal our own mind.  That is spiritual power.

In Universal Compassion, Geshe Chekhawa encourages us to “purify our greatest delusion first.” In this vein, I encourage you to read this series of posts with your greatest delusion in mind.  If we are working on our greatest delusion and we are looking at the instructions from the perspective of spiritual power, then we supercharge the power of the Dharma within our mind.

What does Geshe Chekhawa mean?  He means we should identify what we consider to be our biggest delusion, the one that creates the most problems for us, and then to focus all of our efforts on overcoming this delusion.  By focusing in a sustained way on a single problem, we can make definite headway and progress in overcoming it.  If we are scattered in our approach, it will be difficult to make any progress because our delusions are so strong and we are not applying enough effort to win.  By actually making progress against our biggest delusion, several things happen:  We will significantly improve the quality of our life by weakening one of the principal causes of our difficulties.  We will indirectly weaken all our other delusions, because our delusions are often interrelated to one another.  We gain confidence that if we can overcome or weaken our biggest delusion, then we should be able to do the others.  I had a student in Geneva who would each year have a sit down with me and we would discuss what would be the main delusion she was going to work on overcoming in the coming year.  Then, she would view the entire year as a spiritual project of working on overcoming that delusion, and she would apply everything she learned towards that end.  I find this way of practicing perfect.

So how do we know what is our biggest delusion?  It is the one that causes us the most problems and that we have the most difficulty in overcoming.  For some of us it is attachment, where we are convinced that our happiness depends on something external, such as a good reputation, being with a certain somebody, or perhaps attachment to some harmful substance like cigarettes or alcohol.  For some of us it is anger, where we are constantly frustrated with how things are and we wish things were otherwise.  We wind up lashing out at those we love and making everyone around us fear us and want to get away from us.  We see fault in everyone, and our mind is never at peace.  For some of us it is deluded doubt or holding wrong views.  Without control our mind manufactures a variety of ‘yes, buts’ which prevent us from ever fully engaging in our spiritual life and so we don’t get anywhere.  Or we hear instructions and our mind automatically misinterprets them or remains focused on how they can be taken wrong instead of how they can be taken right.  For some of us it is our self-cherishing.  We are so busy thinking about our own happiness and well-being that we are reluctant to do anything to help others.  We have before us the opportunity to become fully qualified spiritual guides for the benefit of countless living beings, but we allow our petty self-concern to hold us back from fulfilling our potential.  For some of us it is discouragement.  Everything just seems too hard, and we don’t believe that we are able to make any spiritual progress, so we feel it is hopeless to even try.  We are constantly judging ourselves and we feel we are never good enough.  We each have our own delusion, so we need to try identify what we perceive our greatest one to be.

For the rest of this series of posts, we are going to discuss how to systematically attack and hopefully destroy this delusion.  When we receive an empowerment, we should feel as if our guru is giving us each one a personal deity that is specifically empowered to help us overcome our own specific biggest delusion.  When we receive empowerments, it is important to develop a specific desire to receive a such a personalized Buddha who is specifically empowered to help us overcome our own personal biggest delusion.  Then, we when you learn how to engage in the practice of that deity, you should view it as a method for overcoming this specific delusion.  We can do this with any deity and with respect to any delusion.  I will try explain how we can engage in the common parts of every sadhana form the perspective of increasing our spiritual power to overcome our biggest delusion.  We can then engage in whatever is our daily practice from this perspective.

Specifically, we need to learn how to cultivate the essential ingredients of the spiritual power we need to overcome our greatest delusion.  These ingredients are:  a pure spiritual motivation, faith in the guru-deity, self-confidence, the concentration of great bliss, and a correct understanding of emptiness.  We will learn all of these in this series of posts.  Through continual training in these methods, we can eventually weaken and finally destroy this greatest of our delusions.  It is just a question of persistent effort in putting into practice the methods that we have learned.

 

Practicing with Power: Motivation for the series

Kadampa Ryan 3. Tantra, Practicing with Spiritual Power

At the core of it, our success in our spiritual path comes down to a very simple question:  which is more powerful, your delusions or your virtues?  When our delusions are stronger than our virtues, they will overwhelm us even if we don’t want them to.  If our virtues are stronger than our delusions, we will gradually overwhelm them and free ourselves in the process.  It is not enough to know the opponents, we need power in applying them. 

One may ask, “if spiritual power is so important, why does Geshe-la speak so little of it in his books?”  The answer to this is Geshe-la does talk extensively about spiritual power, he just doesn’t explicitly label it as such.  In fact, we can say that all of his teachings can be viewed from the perspective of they are methods for increasing our spiritual power.  There is a particular pole in Geneva that has metal bent in such a way that when you look at it from one point of view it reads “oui” (yes), but when you go around to the other side and look at it that same metal reads “non” (no).  So what does the pole “really” say?  It does not say yes, it does not say no, but it says both simultaneously depending on how you look at it.  In the same way, all of the Kadampa teachings can be viewed from multiple points of view.  For example, we can consider all of the lamrim from the point of view of emptiness, or we can consider our Tantric practice from the point of view of lamrim.  Looking at the teachings through different lenses reveals different interconnections between the teachings.  Exploring these myriad interconnections is the essence of contemplation.  Eventually, through looking at the teachings from many different spiritual vantage points, we build an intricate web of interconnections between the teachings that has the benefit of every time we deepen our experience of any one instruction, it ripples out deepening our experience of all of the other teachings.  The purpose of this series is to explain my understanding of how we can view all of Geshe-la’s teachings from the perspective of how they are methods for increasing our spiritual power.

Why would we want to do this?  Spiritual power is a force that pervades all of our spiritual practices.  If our body is strong and powerful, we can harness that power for any physical activity.  In the same way, if our mind is spiritually strong and powerful, we can harness that power for any mental activity.  In many ways, Dharma knowledge without spiritual power is essentially useless.  Mere knowledge will not be sufficient to change our mental habits.  We need to give that knowledge force by infusing it with spiritual power.  In this light, there are few qualities we need to develop more than spiritual power.  We live in degenerate times.  If the rate of degeneration is greater than the rate at which our spiritual power increases, we will never attain escape velocity from samsara.  When our practice is infused with power, we become the Barry Bonds of Kadampa practitioners that can hit out of the park every delusion that comes our way (sorry to the non-American readers for the baseball analogy).  When we have spiritual power, we have great confidence that attaining enlightenment is something entirely doable.  Venerable Tharchin explains that the key to effort lies not in hard work but in realizing that the goals of the path are entirely doable.  When we see it is doable, effort comes naturally – and indeed it comes effortlessly.

So how can we understand all of Geshe-la’s teachings as methods for increasing our spiritual power?  In general, we can say divide all of Geshe-la’s teachings into two categories:  those which are primarily focused on developing the subject mind and those which are primarily focused on realizing certain objects.  Ultimately, of course, mind and its object arise in mutual dependence upon one another.  A pure mind will perceive all objects purely through the power of the pure mind.  Focusing on a pure object will render the mind pure through the power of the pure object.  According to Sutra, the most powerful subject mind is bodhichitta realized with a mind of tranquil abiding (technically, the bodhisattva grounds and paths explain more powerful minds, but I set that aside for now for the sake of simplicity).  Likewise, according to Sutra, the most powerful object one can realize is the wisdom realizing emptiness according to the Madhyamika-Prasangika school.  According to Tantra, the most powerful subject mind is the very subtle mind of great bliss.  Likewise according to Tantra, the most powerful object one can realize is the wisdom realizing emptiness according to the Tantra-Prasangika school (don’t worry, all of this will be explained in the course of this series).  To increase our spiritual power, therefore, we need to cultivate both powerful minds and realize powerful objects.  The extent to which we can do so is the extent to which our practice will have power.

Breaking this down a bit, the main contributors to a powerful subject mind are faith, renunciation, cherishing others, concentration and the extent to which we can cause our winds to enter, dissolve into and abide inside the indestructible drop at our heart.  Of these, faith is actually the most important, in particular the faith of guru yoga.  A very good friend of mine once told me the greatest line of Dharma I have ever heard.  He said, “stop telling your spiritual guide how big your problems are and start telling your problems how big your spiritual guide is!”

The main ingredients of a powerful object, emptiness, are realizing correctly the object of negation, understanding things are mere projections of mind and understanding that these projections themselves are the nature of our mind of great bliss (waves on the ocean of the emptiness of our mind of great bliss).  Of these, realizing correctly the object of negation is actually the most important.  If we can do that, everything else comes naturally.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 11

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Being under the influence of wrong views you do not realize the ultimate nature of things, therefore investigate correct meanings.

This refers to the wisdom realizing emptiness. We have already established that everything is just a dream.  Now, I want to talk about the implications of this.

While there are many many different benefits of this sort of analysis, it seems to me there are two main ideas which stand out:  By understanding that it is our mind that is the creator of all we realize that we are uniquely responsible for everything that happens in this world of suffering.  It is very easy, due to our grasping, to think that some of the things that happen in this world or that happen to the people of this world, while sad, are not really our responsibility.  These are ‘events taking place’ in the world, and we feel as if our own mind has no role in their creation.  When we go this deep into emptiness we realize that there is absolutely nothing that happens to anybody that we are not responsible for.  It is our own mind that has created this world of suffering and all the beings within it.   When I look at the world I have created, I realize that I have imprisoned everyone I know into contaminated aggregates and trapped them in a cycle of uncontrolled rebirth.    When I see emptiness, I realize that I am responsible for everything that happens to everyone in my dream.  I realize that if I don’t save the beings of my dream, nobody else can; after all, they are the beings of MY dream.  Why are beings trapped in the lower realms or caught in the spell of samsara?  Because I, due to my self-cherishing and self-grasping, have been neglecting them.  When I think that their suffering has nothing to do with me, then I can perhaps say a few prayers, but I don’t really take any personal responsibility. But when I realize that all this suffering is caused by nobody and nothing else than my OWN mind, then I immediately feel a strong sense of responsibility for everything that happens.  In this way, the deeper we understand emptiness, the more effortless our superior intention and bodhichitta becomes.

By understanding that it is our mind that is the creator of all we realize that by changing and purifying our own mind we can actually free all those we know and love from the terrible dream we have created for them.  When I think that their suffering and their experiences have nothing to do with my own mind, then I think, even if I change my mind it won’t really change anything.  Others will continue to suffer, etc., and my efforts aimed at changing my mind will change little to nothing.  But when I understand that it is because I still have an ordinary, deluded mind that I perceive a world filled with ordinary, deluded beings I simultaneously understand that if I purify and perfect my mind I will naturally perceive a world filled with pure and perfect beings.  While of course there will be a ‘karmic lag’ between when I generate this view and when it becomes a living reality for the beings of my dream, I understand that if I am persistent in maintaining this view it will just be a matter of time before I have transformed this world of suffering into a completely pure world.  I will have freed all those I have, by ignorance and self-cherishing, imprisoned.

Neither of these two observations requires even one iota of faith.  Emptiness is something that does not require a leap of faith to believe, but it is something that we can verify and confirm beyond any doubt for ourselves.  We have been given tools for establishing that everything is the dream of our self-centered mind, and when we go and check we come to the simultaneously horrifying and liberating realization that it is true.  It is horrifying in the sense we realize what our self-centered mind has done since beginningless time (created and world of suffering in which all beings have been tortured endlessly) But it is liberating in the sense that we realize the solution to all of this suffering lies within our own hands (or our own mind, to be more precise).

When I understand this emptiness we have been discussing, a ‘real’ solution to all the suffering of all living beings becomes something ‘perfectly feasible.’  I see the feasibility of the bodhichitta task.  Instead of it being some insurmountable problem, it becomes a rather limited issue of purifying my own mind.  Gen Tharchin said that we cannot take on spiritual goals unless we see them as being feasible.  But when we see that they are feasible (we know what to do and we know that it is doable) then effort becomes, well, effortless.  We easily and joyfully take such spiritual challenges on board and with the confidence of conviction grounded in fact, not blind faith, we go about the business of building a whole new world for ourselves and all beings.  I think when we see the teachings on emptiness in this light, we start to glimpse the unimaginable and we are filled with an enormous energy and confidence in what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Friends, there is no happiness in this swamp of samsara, so move to the firm ground of liberation.

The main point of renunciation is we need to wake up.  We recognize that this dream is created by a contaminated source, so everything in it will necessarily be contaminated.  The mind of renunciation realizes that it is impossible to find any happiness anywhere in samsara, so the only thing that remains to do is wake up.  Samsara is like a Rubik’s cube without a solution.  No matter how long we play, we will never get the pieces lined up.  So we should just stop playing.

Meditate according to the advice of your Spiritual Guide and dry up the river of samsaric suffering.

Samsara is just a contaminated dream.  If we meditate on the mahamudra, we dissolve all contaminated appearances of ourself and others into the Dharmakaya.  This concentration functions to purify the contaminated karma giving rise to the dream of samsara.  When all this contaminated karma is purified, the dream ceases and everyone is freed.

You should consider this well because it is not just words from the mouth, but sincere advice from the heart.

If you practise like this you will delight me, and you will bring happiness to yourself and others.

I who am ignorant request you to take this advice to heart.

He is offering us this advice as a friend because he wants us to become freed from our contamianted dream.  We should take his advice to heart.

 

I dedicate any merit I have accumulated from doing this series of posts so that all Kadampas can easily follow Atisha’s advice and come to live their life in accordance with it.  By doing so, may they set an immaculate example for others inspring countless millions to enter into the Kadampa path themselves.  Through continuing in this way, generation after generation, may all living beings eventually be led to freedom.

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 10

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Distracting enjoyments have no essence, therefore sincerely practise giving.

We can understand the perfection of giving from a couple of different angles:  From the perspective of consuming merit, if we consider something to be ‘ours’ we burn up merit for as long as we consider it to be ours.  If we consider something to belong to ‘others’ we accumulate merit for as long as we maintain this view.  From the perspective of exchanging self with others, when we have completed exchanging self with others, we have the feeling that all beings are cells in a single body, and so just as our right hand gives to our left, we give to other parts of ourself.  Finally, from the perspective of karma and emptiness, karmically speaking, others are future emanations of ourself.  So by giving to others now, we are giving to ourself in the future.

Always keep pure moral discipline for it leads to beauty in this life and happiness hereafter.

Moral discipline is quite simply trying to have all of our actions move us in the direction of enlightenment.  The main point is no matter what appears to our mind, we should respond by trying to send our mind in the direction of enlightenment.  When we have a negative tendency and we resist assenting to it, we purify that negative tendency and we practice moral discipline.  This greatly simplifies our life into two things:  appearance – response.  That is all we need to know.  In terms of moral discipline making us beautiful, we can see this when we look at the monks and nuns.  They are all gorgeous people.  Moral discpline leads to happiness in future lives because it results in higher rebirth.

Since hatred is rife in these impure times, don the armour of patience, free from anger.

Getting angry at others is completely illogical.  Others harm us because we have created the karma to have the appearance of somebody harming us.  This is the karmic echo of our own past actions.  The other person was compelled to harm us by the force of our karma.  Likewise, if we get angry at others, karmically speaking we are getting angry at ourself in the future.  Everything we do to others we can correctly view as us doing to ourself in the future.  If instead we learn to accept others and respect their freedom to choose, then we likewise are doing the same thing for ourself in the future.  In short, karmically speaking, everything others do to us is our previous selves doing it to us, and everything we do to others is us doing something to our future selves.  If we keep this in mind, there will be no basis for anger or harmful actions.

You remain in samsara through the power of laziness, therefore ignite the fire of the effort of application.

The bottom line is this:  we are dreaming.  If we don’t do what it takes to wake up, we will remain forever asleep.  Since we have a (rudimentary) understanding of emptiness, we can liken right now to being in a dream, but realizing that we are dreaming.  We all know that this moment will quickly pass and we will forget we are dreaming and think it is all real again.  If this happens, there is no way we can wake up, because unless we wake ourselves up, we will remain forever asleep.  Effort in its simplest form is delighting in engaging in virtue.  The source of our pleasure is engaging in virtue.  What we enjoy is creating good causes.  We can generate this effort with the confidence that knows that if we never give up trying, nothing can prevent us from waking up and accomplishing all our spiritual goals.

Since this human life is wasted by indulging in distractions, now is the time to practise concentration.

Ultimately, a distraction is allowing ourselves to forget that we are dreaming.  When we develop attachment for things, we are necessarily grasping at things being real and not being just appearances in a dream.  As a result of this, we can easily get swept away and forget that it is a dream.  If it crosses a certain threshold, then there is no turning back and we lose this opportunity forever.

What does it mean to concentrate?  It means to not forget.  We try to maintain the continuum of not forgetting our Dharma understanding.  In general, Dharma is a process of familiarizing ourselves with the truth of how things are and how things work so that we don’t make mistakes.  The reason why we make mistakes is we forget our wisdom and believe our old deluded ways of viewing things.  We need to put to our mind again and again, ‘I am dreaming.  This is all a dream.’  ‘This is the contaminated dream of my self-cherishing mind.’  We keep doing this until we never forget it.  On the basis of that, we will naturally start changing our actions.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 9

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Since all the happiness and suffering of this life arise from previous actions, do not blame others.

Normally we blame others for our problems.  Our partner, our government, our friends, our boss, even the weather.  But we are the architect of our own experience, we created the cause for everything we experience.  Virtuous actions are the causes of happiness and non-vituous actions are the causes of suffering.

All happiness comes from the blessings of your Spiritual Guide, therefore always repay his kindness.

A blessing is a subtle infusion of our spiritual guide’s mind into our own mind that functions to transform our mind from a negative state to a positive state.  The spiritual guide explains the true causes of happiness, and so by putting into practice his advice we will become happy.  The supreme way of repaying the kindness of the spiritual guide is by putting his instructions into practice.  He gets nothing out of it, and he doesn’t want anything for himself since he already has everything.  We are the ones who benefit.

Since you cannot tame the minds of others until you have tamed your own, begin by taming your own mind.

There are a couple of different levels we can understand this:  At a purely pragmatic level we will not know how to help others tame their own mind if we haven’t yet tamed our own.  Somebody who has not learned how to drive cannot teach somebody else.  At the level of effectiveness, if we haven’t tamed our own mind, we will not be credible in the eyes of others.  We could be somebody who knows an incredible amount of Dharma, but if we have not been able to master our own mind, we will not be credible when we give advice to people about how to tame their own mind.  At a profound level, others are projections of your own mind.  This I will now explain in detail.

This is a love conjoined with a realization of emptiness, namely that your own mind is the creator of this world.  You can think, “I am dreaming a dream in which all of these beings are trapped in a cycle of uncontrolled rebirth.”  Buddha explains that all of this is just our dream.  We are dreaming.  This is the dream of our gross mind, our dreams at night are the dreams of our subtle mind.  But both are equally dreams.  In this dream of ours, all the beings are trapped in a cycle of uncontrolled rebirth in the various abodes of samsara.  In this dream, just in the human realm there are things like genoicides, AIDS, poverty, war, etc.  Basically, we are dreaming a world of suffering.

The way to free these beings from the world of suffering I have created for them is for myself to wake up from this dream by destroying its creator, my self-centered mind.  We can understand this through the analogy of a dream.  I once had a dream where I knew I was dreaming and I was playing with my kids.  They then put a plastic bag over my face and I couldn’t escape.  I knew the only way to escape from the situation was to wake up.  In exactly the same way, we are dreaming a world of suffering.  By following the stages of the path to enlightenment, we can learn how to wake up from this dream. When we do, we will wake up in the world of the Buddhas in which everybody is already enlightened and we are all in the pure land.  By waking up from this world of suffering, we free ourselves and all the beings of our dream from the world of suffering we have created for them.  The generator of this world of suffering is our own self-centered mind.  This creates the clouds of this dream.  By destroying this self-centered mind, we can cause the dream it creates to cease and we will wake up in the enlightened world of the Buddhas.

The method for destroying my self-centered mind is to develop and act upon the superior intention to lead all the beings of my dream along the stages of the path to enlightenment.  This superior intention is the exact opposite of the self-centered mind.  It directly opposes it.  First we need to develop the intention to free all the beings of our dream from the world of suffering we have created for them.  The greatest wish of a bodhisattva for others is that they wake up.  It is not enough to have the wish that others wake up, but we actually need to act upon it.  We need to engage in the actions necessary for all the beings of our dream to attain enlightenment – we do this by becoming a Buddha ourselves and helping others do the same. Developing and acting upon this superior intention is the actual method for destroying our self-centered mind.  When we do this, the samsaric dream will simply cease, just like last night’s dream, and all the beings of our dream will awake in the pure world of the Buddhas, and everyone will be an enlightened being.

Since you will definitely have to depart without the wealth you have accumulated, do not accumulate negativity for the sake of wealth.

Wealth and resources in and of themselves are not negative.  In fact, they can be quite positive if we use them to engage in virtue and to help others.  But it is foolish to attempt to accumulate wealth by engaging in negativity.  First of all, even if it works to accumulate wealth by engaging in negativity, it is not worth it since the negative karmic consequences of the negative actions far outweigh the potential benefit of our increased wealth.  Second, even practically it doesn’t work even though we think it does.  On the surface, it may seem like it is our negative actions which are making us rich, but from a karmic perspective it is actually our past practice of giving that is making us rich.  The question is not how rich are our negative actions making us, rather the question is how much richer would we be if we weren’t engaging in negative actions?  Virtuous minds function to active virtuous karmic seeds and negative minds function to activate negative karmic seeds.  When we engage in negative actions we necessarily have a negative mind, so this necessarily is activating negative seeds.  So we may wonder, why then are we seemingly getting rich by engaging in this negativity?  The answer is due to previous minds, our past karma of giving is ripening making us rich.  Our present negativity is actually slowing down and obstructing this process of ripening much in the same way that rocks in the soil obstruct the growing of a flower.  If we weren’t engaging in such negativity, this karma would be ripening even more fully and we would in fact be getting even richer!  Wealth and resources, whether they are inner or outer, are in and of themselves neutral tools.  The question is what do we intend to use these things for.  If we genuinely use them for virtuous purposes, there is nothing with having them.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 8

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

If you talk too much with little meaning you will make mistakes, therefore speak in moderation, only when necessary.

While normally we say that idle chatter is the least negative of the 10 non-virtuous actions, from the perspective of a Bodhisattva it is one of the most harmful.  Why?  Because when we say a bunch of non-sense, it creates the causes for people to not listen to what we have to say.  So then, in the future, when we do have something meaningful to say (such as giving Dharma teachings) people don’t really pay attention and therefore receive little to no benefit.  What makes our speech meaningless?  This is easier to define by understanding what is meaningful speech.  Meaningful speech is speech whose purpose is to help others find happiness and freedom from suffering.  Anything other than that is meaningless speech.

When should we speak?  Generally only when we are asked something (either directly or implicitly depending on the situation).  How much should we say?  Generally it is better to say too little than it is to say too much.  Je Phabongkhapa said we should end our conversations before they are over because that creates the causes to meet again in the future.  As a general rule, we should probably listen at least 3-4 times more than we speak.  This number doesn’t come from any qualified source (so take it with a grain of salt), but rather comes from my own understanding of the world.  But it seems about right!

If you engage in many meaningless activities your virtuous activities will degenerate, therefore stop activities that are not spiritual.

Again, what is a meaningless activity?  No activity is, from its own side, meaningless.  Activities become meaningless only when we engage in them with a meaningless mind.  What is a meaningless  mind?  Again, this can be understood by understanding what is a meaningful mind.  A meaningful mind is one whose intention is to help others find happiness or freedom from suffering.  Any mind other than that is a meaningless one, and therefore any activity engaged in motivated by that mind is a meaningless activity.  Notice this has nothing to do with what is our actual activity, rather it has only to do with what we are doing with our mind.  To keep things simple, we can divide our motivations into two types:  worldly and spiritual.  Worldly motivations are ones that are primary concerned with the happiness and well-being of this life alone.  Spiritual motivations are ones that are primarily concerned with the happiness and well-being of our countless future lives.  So it suffices to check to see if our motivation is spiritual or worldly.

It is completely meaningless to put effort into activities that have no essence.

We can basically view others as karmic echos of how we used to be towards others in our previous lives.  Because we were like that, we planted the karma on our mind which is currently ripening in the form of an appearance of somebody who acts like this towards us.  How can we blame the other person when there is no other person, it is just the karmic echo of our own past actions.  If we respond badly, all we do is create new negative karma and restart the cycle. By acting differently, we can create the karma to have different ‘others’ appear to us in the future.  So we accept whatever happens as purification for our past actions and we respond correctly to create the causes for a better future.

If the things you desire do not come it is due to karma created long ago, therefore keep a happy and relaxed mind.

Venerable Tharchin explains that virtually everything that happens to us in this life is the result of actions we engaged in in our previous lives, and virtually everything we do in this life will ripen in our future lives.  Sometimes we see people who lead very negative lives enjoying great good fortune and we see other pure practitioners experiencing endless suffering.  Understanding what is happening to them in this life comes from their previous lives and understanding that what they are doing now will determine the quality of their future lives it is clear who is better off.  This advice primarily is aimed at helping us completely abandon any and all attachment to results.  Ghandi said “full effort is [itself] full victory.”  We don’t care what results ripen, we only care about what causes we are creating.  Trying alone, regardless of whether we succeed, is what creates the good karma for our future.  So even if our life is one tragedy after another, we should not care but instead be satisfied that we are responding well.

Beware, offending a holy being is worse than dying, therefore be honest and straightforward.

From their own side a holy being cannot be offended, but from our side we can create the karma as if they were.  The reason why it is worse than death is death can only harm this one life, whereas the negative karma from offending a holy being harms us in all our future lives.  They are a particularly powerful object, so it multiplies the karma in relation to them, either for good or for bad.  Since we don’t know who is and who is not a holy being, we should treat everyone as if they were one.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 7

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Do not contemplate your own good qualities, but contemplate the good qualities of others, and respect everyone as a servant would.

What are some tricks to help us see the good qualities in others.  We need to make the distinction between the person and their delusions.  People are not their delusions.  Delusions are the cancer of their mind.  Geshe-la said it is useful to see delusions like evil spirits who temporarily take possession of those around us and cause them to engage in all sorts of negative actions.  They are the helpless victim of their own delusions. We can also practice pure view of others.  Pure view does not say that what the other person did was perfect, when manifestly it was not; rather it asks, ‘how can I receive perfect benefit from what they in fact did?’  By receiving such perfect benefit, as far as we are concerned, what they in fact did was perfect.  It was just an expression of their skillful means.  At the end of the day, all of our Dharma training is just a question of habit, so we train over a long period of time until eventually it becomes habit.  Once it becomes habit to see and relate to others good qualities, then the rest of the vast path falls into place like dominos.  From seeing their good qualities naturally comes affection love, which naturally leads to cherishing love, great compassion, bodhichitta and our eventual enlightenment.

See all living beings as your father or mother, and love them as if you were their child.

We are all familiar with the Lamrim meditation of recognizing all living beings as our mother.  The purpose of this meditation is to feel close to everyone and to develop a special feeling of gratitude towards them.  It is a sign of degenerate times that people often really struggle with this meditation because so many of us have strained relationships with our parents.  In ancient times, people generally respected their parents and generally felt enormous gratitude for all that they did for them.  Nowadays, we have psychoanalysts who tell us that our parents are the cause of all of our problems.  Our goal as an adult frequently becomes to avoid becoming like our parents instead of aspiring to emulate them.  This creates unique modern difficulties with this meditation.  The solution to this problem is fairly simple:  be grateful for whatever they did do (no matter how small it may be), don’t be resentful for what they didn’t do.  The reason why our parents “disappoint” us is because we expect so much of them.  When they fall short of our arbitrary expectations, we then get upset at them.  We may find it “normal” for our parents to live up to our expectations (often because everybody else in society expects the same things), and so therefore even when they do we don’t feel grateful for what they have done.  This is an incredibly ugly attitude.  Gen-la Losang advises us to “expect nothing from others.”  If our expectations are set to zero (and we are OK with that), then anything others do for us will be seen as special and we will find it easy to generate gratitude.  So the way in which we can practice this advice from Atisha in these degenerate times is to train in expecting nothing from anyone, especially our parents.  Once we have done that, then everything tends to fall into place easily.

Always keep a smiling face and a loving mind, and speak truthfully without malice.

While this is a very short and simple piece of advice, its application is virtually all of our daily life.  Keeping a smiling face does not mean we fake a smile, rather the meaning here is a smile should reflect what is in our heart.  If our mind is at peace, we view everything as emanated and we have the wisdom of samsara making us laugh, we can’t help but have a smile on our face.  To maintain a loving mind primarily is a question of what do we focus our attention on.  If we focus our attention on others’ good qualities and we take the time to appreciate and rejoice in those qualities, then a loving mind will develop quite naturally.  If instead we are always judging others and internally criticizing them for their short-comings, a loving mind will be impossible. 

We speak truthfully always for the simple reason that doing so creates the causes for people to believe what we say (giving our speech power).  But sometimes people misunderstand this advice to speak truthfully to mean we should tell others all of our deluded points of view.  No, it is not enough to speak the truth, we must speak that part of the truth which is beneficial to say.  If it is not beneficial to say, we shouldn’t say it even if it is the truth. 

Malice is an easy mind to develop, especially in our speech.  This most frequently arises when we want somebody to like us and we know they dislike somebody else.  So we say mean and hurtful things about the other person in an effort to get the person we want to like us to actually like us.  But this is completely wrong.  If somebody will only like us if we dislike somebody else, then that person is not a true friend anyways.  Wishing harm on others is a really stupid mind because our wishing that doesn’t harm them in anyway, but it definitely harms us.  Shantideva warns us that that there are special cauldrons in hell for those with a mind filled with malice!  But we need to be careful to distinguish between the ripening of a malicious tendency similar to the cause and the action mental action of malice.  As part of our legacy from our countless previous lives, we have innumerable tendencies in our mind to think malicious thoughts.  When these thoughts ripen in our mind (which, let’s be honest, happens to all of us), it only becomes a NEW action of malice if we ASSENT to the malicious thought.  If instead when this thought arises we realize the dangers of such thinking and apply effort to think differently then we will not only not accumulate new negative karma, but we will actually be practicing moral discipline (of restraint) and creating the causes for future precious human rebirths.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 6

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Since future lives last for a very long time, gather up riches to provide for the future.

The main point is this:  we are going to die and the only thing we can take with us are the causes we create for ourselves.  Realizing this gives us a total equanimity with respect to what effects happen in this life.  All equally give us an opportunity to create causes, so everything is equally good for us.  Realizing this also helps us to become a spiritual being.  The definition of maturity is when we use today for tomorrow.  The definition of spiriutal maturity is when we use this life for our future lives.

You will have to depart leaving everything behind, so do not be attached to anything.

At the time of your death, there is a very special delusion that arises called ‘dependent-related craving.’  Basically every attachment you haven’t dealt with during life will reassert itself at the time of death.  The most important thing to remember at the time of death is that all of this is mere appearance to mind.  I had a dream once which illustrates the dangers.  At first, there was a terrible monster who was chasing after me and attacking me.  In my dream, I remembered that it was a dream and I went for refuge requesting that this karmic appearance be pacified, and it immediately was.  But then there were a couple of dazzling Dakinis who were ready to ‘have some fun’, and because I had attachment in my mind towards this type of thing, I dove right in, even though I knew it wasn’t real.  I thought, ‘its just a dream, so why not have some fun.’  But then I woke up and realized that if this happened to me at the time of death, I would have been dragged back down into samsara.  I don’t have to worry about the Devaputra mara, but I do have to worry about the tempting demonesses.

If throughout our life, we have always chosen to pursue our objects of attachment, we will do the same at the time of death and go back into samsara.  But if we have always chosen the pure land in life, then we will be able to do the same at the time of death.  So our job is to abandon all of our attachments now while we still can.  In this way, we can approach death with a peaceful heart.

Generate compassion for lowly beings, and especially avoid despising or humiliating them.

We need to examine the nature of the others that we see.  Self-cherishing thinks that we are just this one appearance, and that only the happiness of this one appearance matters.  If we do the meditation on the emptiness of others, we realize that they are nothing more than mere appearances in our mind.  If we do the meditation on the emptiness of ourself, we realize that we too are just a mere appearance to our mind.  In this sense, we are exactly the same.  So if I think that this appearance is me, then I need to think that other appearances are also me.  Both are just thoughts in my mind.  Seen in this way, we realize that everyone is equally me.  Everyone is like a cell in a giant body or waves on the same ocean.  We impute our I validly on all living beings.  When we do this, just as our right hand cherishes our left, so too we cherish and care for all living beings.  Their suffering is our suffering.

Have no hatred for enemies, and no attachment for friends.

Geshe-la is very clear when he says there is no such thing as external enemies.  The only enemies we have are our own delusions.  External enemies actually have no real power to harm us, only we can harm ourselves by responding in a deluded way to what they do to us.  If instead, we transform their hostility towards us into the path, they become our kindest spiritual benefactors.  We generate enemies because we still grasp at our happiness as depending upon external conditions.  We have enemies only because we still have worldly concerns.

If we think carefully, we will realize being a friend and generating attachment to our friends are mutually exclusive.  If we generate attachment to our friends, we view them as causes of our attachment and our relationship with them is, in the final analysis, us using them for our own ends.  What true friend does that?  A Bodhisattva is a friend of the world.  A true friend is there for others when they need it most and what makes them a friend (as opposed to a business partner) is they ask for nothing in return.

Do not be jealous of others’ good qualities, but out of admiration adopt them yourself.

We need to understand cause and effect.  If we are jealous of the good things that others have, it creates the causes for us to not have such qualities.  Normally when we observe the qualities of others, we generate the thought, ‘yes, but …’ and then we find some fault in the person.  If we are critical of others when we observe their faults, it creates the cause for us to acquire those very faults ourselves.  But if we rejoice in the good qualities of others it creates the cause for us to acquire these good qualities ourselves.  Karmically, rejoicing plants the seeds on our mind which ripen in the form of the appearance of us having these qualities ourselves.  Because nothing exists from its own side, the world we experience is the world we pay attention to.  So by focusing on the good qualities of others, we draw them out and come to abide in a world with more and more qualities.

Do not look for faults in others, but look for faults in your- self, and purge them like bad blood.

When you see faults in others we should ‘own their faults as our own.’  The only reason why others appear to have any faults is because we yourself possess the same fault within our mind.  When we see a fault in somebody else, we should see that person as a ‘mirror-like’ Buddha who reflects back to us our own faults.  Then find we should that fault within ourself and purge it like bad blood.  When we do this, we gain the realizations we need to be able to help the other person overcome their fault and you set the best possible example for them.

 

Atisha’s Advice from the Heart: Part 5

Kadampa Ryan Advice from Atisha's Heart

Profit and respect are nooses of the maras, so brush them aside like stones on the path.

How are profit and respect harmful?  Seeking profit is trying to ripen merit.  We are trying to squeeze good things out of samsara.  Actually all of society has one goal – to burn up as much merit as we can.   If we do this and it works, then we think that samsara works and we don’t develop the wish to wake up.

The key question we should ask ourselves whenever we have any of the objects of the 8 worldly concerns is are we consuming them or are we investing them?  If we try to enjoy them, as ends in themselves, then we consume our merit and it is a total waste.  If we ‘reinvest’ them, as a means to the accomplishment of our spiritual goals, then the more such effects ripen, the more merit we can accumulate.  A good example of this is Geshe Langri Tangpa who had a habit of giving away everything he had accumulated every time he moved to a new place.  Through this practice of giving, he eventually became very rich and was able to support thousands of monks.

Venerable Tharchin explains that whether we are burning up our merit or increasing it depends on whether we impute “mine” onto any objects under our care.  For example, if we impute “mine” on our house, then our enjoyment of that house functions to burn up the merit.  If instead, we impute “others’” onto our house, viewing the house as our offering to our family for example or taking good care of our house as a custodian for the future owner, then our use of the house functions to increase our merit because we are continually offering it.

Words of praise and fame serve only to beguile us, therefore blow them away as you would blow your nose.

Who cares if we have a good reputation or not?  We do.  We’re very concerned, aren’t we, about what others think of us. It matters, a good reputation matters to us.  Why?  We need to check what our reasons are to see if they are good reasons.  I actually have a very funny story with this advice.  About 10 years ago I was doing a lot of formal work for the tradition, as a teacher, on the on-line chat groups and with NKTforKids.  Up until that point, I had not had the karma of meeting Geshe-la in person.  I was setting up the Creperie to be the day care for kids during the teaching and Geshe-la was going to give the teaching itself.  This was my chance when it would just be me and him, and I was certain he would just look at me with delight for all that I was doing for the tradition!  So I was standing there waiting for him to come.  He entered the room, took one look at me, then rolled his eyes away in disgust and blew his nose strongly!  Needless to say, this was not the reaction I was expecting, but I immediately remembered this advice from Atisha and realized the lesson.

Compliments and praise beguile us because we take credit for these things ourselves.  Also around the same time as the Creperie story, I started developing pride about all of my wonderous Dharma activities.  Then, all of a sudden, it felt as if the flow of blessings was completely shut off.  I was still responsible for everything I was responsible for before, but now I no longer had this flow of blessings working through me.  This lasted for several days and I was left dangling in the wind.  I realized clearly from this that I had started taking credit for me doing everything when in reality it was Geshe-la working through me all along.  Left on my own, I am completely useless.  Message received!

When it comes to what are others thinking about us, Venerable Tharcin answered this question with an emphatic ‘nothing!’ There is no other person thinking anything.  It is just our dream arising from our karma. So others are thinking about us what they are karmically determined to do.  If we want to change what they think about us, we need to change our karma.  We can think only good things about others, and gradually others will think only good things about us.  We can imagine that when others see us they think Buddha, in this way we can provide real benefit to them.

Since the happiness, pleasure, and friends you gather in this life last only for a moment, put them all behind you.

We are a society in search of stimulation.  Stimulation of any kind is the drug of modern times.  We need more and more just to feel something.  When we do not have strong stimulation, we feel like we are missing something.  When we do have strong stimulation, it makes us even more unhappy afterwards because it is increasingly rare to be able to generate such feelings.  In reality, what we are feeling is completely irrelevant.  Shantideva says if we awoke from a dream in which we experienced a few moments of happiness or a hundred years of happiness, once awake it is all the same.  Instead of running after intense feelings as the meaning of our life, we should build and invest in a solid foundation for the future.

We must be skillful – we cannot drop immediately all worldly concerns so that tomorrow we find ourselves with none. We must be skillful with how we approach our worldly concerns.  The correct model should be a child outgrowing their toys.  Because we have found better things within our mind, we gradually lose interest in our old things.  They don’t work for us because we have seen through their illusion.  Because we are desire realm beings, we will do whatever it is we want.  So the trick is to learn to want what is good for us (virtue) and want to abandon what is bad for us (delusions).  The trick to abandoning any attachment is to realize how it is in fact harmful to us.  Our objects of attachment pretend to be beneficial, but with Dharma wisdom we understand they are harmful.  If we see this, we will naturally not be as interested in them anymore until eventually we outgrow them.   When we do enjoy samsaric enjoyments, we should try to enjoy them in a spiritual way.  But our main focus should be learning how to find our happiness from a different source, namely from our own pure mind.