(2.50) To Protector Avalokiteshvara,
Who acts unerringly out of compassion,
I utter this desperate cry for help:
“O Please protect me, an evildoer!”

Normally, when we hear language such as this we cringe.  It just sounds so fire and brimstone, Inquisition-esque, or worse it reminds us of George W. Bush!  But if we are honest, that is exactly what we are.  Let me explain.

If you look at the long arch of our mental continuum, we will see that we have spent virtually all of our past lives in the lower realms.  What do beings do in the lower realms?  The kill their prey, steal from the weak, and torture their enemies.  When we read the descriptions of the lower realms in books like Joyful Path, we shouldn’t think they are describing some distant place, rather they are a description of our own past deeds.  There is no reason to assume we were a saint in the lower realms, there is every reason to assume we were like everybody else.  If a prisoner spent his entire life committing horrific acts, but then one day acted nicely, would we not fairly describe the bulk of his actions as bad?  In the same way, if we spent our countless past lives engaging in evil, but have managed so far in this life to avoid anything that would throw us in prison, can we say we are not an evil-doer?  In this life, we have lied, stolen, cheated, killed insects, said hurtful things, grasped tightly onto wrong views, wished harm on our enemies, etc.  While we may not be as bad as beings in the lower realms, nor as bad as some in this realm, compared to the holy beings our actions are beyond the pale.

As was described in an earlier post, the number one obstacle to our engaging in purification is our total denial of our wrong-doing.  If we can’t admit our wrong deeds, how can we hope to purify them?

Admitting we are an evil-doer does not mean we need to fall into some extreme of guilt and self-hatred at how awful we are.  Self-flagellation is not a stage of the path.  An honest reckoning of our deeds is.  Beating ourself up for our mistakes is actually a form of distraction from actually changing our ways.  So we admit our mistakes without guilt, realize they were driven by being confused by our delusions and through the force of karmic habit, and then we try do better going forward.

(2.51) Seeking refuge, from my heart
I pray to Arya Akashagarbha,
To Arya Ksitigarbha,
And to all the compassionate Protectors.

For purification to be effective, it has to be heart-felt.  When I was a young child, my father was thinking of buying some land right on the edge of a bluff overlooking the city.  Since we were little, he was worried that we might not appreciate the danger the cliff represented.  So he took us literally to the edge, held us tight and safe so we wouldn’t fall, but showed us what lay below.  I do not remember much from my early childhood, but this memory was burned into me forever.  I have since always been wary of getting too close to the edge.

In the same way, we literally need to stare into the abyss of the lower realms and see what lays below.  The compassionate Buddhas, like my father, will take us to the edge, hold us tight and safe so we won’t fall, but then describe to us the terrors that lie below.  Every 21 days, we come to the meditation on the lower realms and do exactly this.  The point is not to scare us, the point is to warn us of the dangers that lie ahead if we do not change our ways.

Irrational fear is destructive, rational fear is protection.  We should have a rational fear of the lower realms.  If we look honestly, it is far more likely we will fall into the lower realms than take another fortunate rebirth.  When adversity strikes, we respond with delusion and negativity.  Delusion and negativity activate further negative karma.  There is no adversity greater than death.  If we generate big delusions with respect to small things, what chance do we have to only generate small delusions with respect to the biggest thing of all – our own death.  And even small delusions are not enough, we need to respond with virtue if we are to have any chance of remaining in the fortunate realms.  How often do we do that now?

(2.48) Likewise, I sincerely go for refuge
To the Dharma they have realized,
Which dispels the fears of samsara,
And to the assembly of Bodhisattvas.

Our self is imputed upon our body and mind.  Up until now, we have – unwittingly – offered both to our delusions.  We are slaves to our delusions and we do whatever they ask of us.  Our thoughts are ruled by them and our bodily actions are as well.  For as long as we continue to make this mistake, we will forever remain enslaved by them and liberation and enlightenment will be impossible.

Instead, we need to offer ourself – meaning both our body and our mind – to the three jewels.  The function of delusions is to deceive us into engaging in actions that damn us to the lower realms.  The function of the three jewels is to enlighten us into engaging in actions that free both ourself and all living beings from suffering forever.  The choice is ours, but we must choose.  There is no middle ground between delusion and wisdom.  They are necessarily mutually exclusive.

To offer our mind to the three jewels means to make our every thought consistent with the Dharma.  The Dharma is a way of thinking.  We adopt that way of thinking as our own.  It is not enough to simply start parroting the Dharma we have heard, we need to do the internal work to convince ourselves of its truth by dispelling all wrong views.  The essential meaning of contemplation is “testing the truth” of the teachings.  We engage in this exercise with intellectual integrity, prepared to change our views where proven wrong.  We then examine for ourself whether the teachings are true and reliable.  Everybody who has engaged in such an exercise with an open mind has come to the same conclusion – “yep, that’s right.”  It is also not enough to just have faith that the teachings are true when we don’t really understand why.  Faith is good, wisdom realizing the truth of things ourselves is better.  Only wisdom has the power to actually free us from the control of our delusions.

(2.49) Overcome with fear, I offer myself
To Arya Samantabhadra,
And I offer my body into the service
Of Arya Manjushri.

To offer our body to the three jewels means to offer it into their service.  What does this mean in practice?  Sometimes people think it means we need to go become a slave for the Spiritual Guide, bringing them dinner and tea, and working long hours for Dharma centers.  For some, that may be the case, but for most people that’s not realistic nor even desirable.  To offer ourself into the service of the three jewels quite simply means to offer ourself into the service of all living beings.  The Buddhas have only one objective – to benefit all living beings, indeed to eventually lead them all to everlasting happiness.  When we dedicate ourselves to the same purpose, we offer ourself into the service of the three jewels.

What are the advantages of doing this?  First, all of our actions become powered by all the blessings of all of the Buddhas.  If a sail on a sail boat is not aligned properly with the wind, the boat will not go anywhere even if the wind is howling.  But when the sails are aligned with the wind, the boat is pushed forward.  In the same way, the pure winds of the blessings of all the Buddhas are constantly blowing around us.  They always point in one direction:  the enlightenment of all beings.  When we align the sails of our mind with this objective, their pure winds fill our sails pushing us swiftly and effortlessly towards enlightenment.

Second, all of our actions become causes of our own enlightenment.  Because we work for the enlightenment of all beings, the karma we create while doing so is necessarily non-contaminated.  Since the final purpose of our actions is beyond samsara, the karma we create takes us beyond samsara.  It is as if our body becomes an extension of the body of all the Buddhas in this world, where they act through us but we get the karma.

Third, we are happy all of the time.  Our happiness, quite simply, depends upon whether our mind is at peace or not.  When our mind is controlled by delusions, our mind is rendered unpeaceful.  That is the function of delusions.  The root of all delusions is the self-centered mind (self-cherishing and self-grasping).  Working for all others is the opposite of all delusions, and so it functions to oppose all delusions.  Virtue functions to make the mind peaceful and controlled.  There is no virtue greater than cherishing others because all other virtues flow from it.  Dedicating ourself to the service of others fills our mind with virtue, which makes our mind peaceful and enables us to be happy all of the time.  Even a superficial look around us shows that the selfish are miserable and the selfless are happy.  The question is who do we want to be?

Perhaps we still don’t appreciate just how much negative karma remains on our mind from our previous lives.  Perhaps we even look back over this life and think “I haven’t been that bad.”

The heart of purification is admitting our negativity.  If for whatever reason we can’t honestly admit it, our purification practice will lack sincerity and power.  We may superficially appear to be engaging in purification, but we won’t actually be cleaning up the karma on our mind.  If we don’t actually admit our actions are negative, we won’t regret them nor their karmic consequences, instead we will rationalize why they are not so bad.  If we don’t admit our actions were mistaken, we will have no real desire to change our ways.  If we don’t wish to change, then our turning to the three jewels will lack any real meaning or purpose.

When we engage in purification, it is generally more powerful if we have some specific negativity in mind.  It is true we can engage in generalized purification, but there is a tendency for this type of purification practice to become quite abstract.  But when we have a specific type of negative karma in mind, such as purifying all of the wrong views that prevent us from realizing we are bound for the lower realms if we don’t change our ways and purify our negative karma, then our purification practice becomes much more qualified and “real.”

One question we can ask ourselves is what exactly are we purifying?  If we don’t have something specific in mind, we won’t be purifying.  In particular we need to look at our vows: for example with respect to our Pratimoksha, Bodhisattva, and Tantric vows, we can go through all of our vows and ask ourselves honestly, “have I done anything wrong with respect to these?”  If we’re honest, we incur downfalls every single day of our life.  The truly amazing thing is we don’t even see it.  We tell ourselves, “I’m doing my best as a Bodhisattva”, but we use this as an excuse for doing nothing.  We need to check, how important do we feel it is not to incur a downfall?   We need to ask ourselves when we do go against our vows, what specific karma is placed in the mind?  What will the results of these actions be?  We need to examine carefully why we haven’t even looked at what the downfalls are or made any plans to avoid them?   Is it that we don’t want to look because we don’t want to change?  Is it because it requires changing our behavior?  Now is the time to really check how we feel about these things.

(2.47) Therefore, from today I go for refuge
To the Conqueror Buddhas who protect living beings,
Who seek to give refuge to all living beings,
And who, with their great strength, eradicate all fear.

Buddhas can help us with our purification practice in two main ways.  First, their powerful blessings function like a drop of soap dropped into a greasy pool of liquid, the grease is immediately dispelled.  Their blessings effectively neutralize the negative karma on our mind, disarming the karmic bombs we carry with us wherever we go.  Christians believe if they generate faith in Christ they will be saved from their sins.  How exactly does this work?  Each enlightened being has a “specialization,” where their blessings specifically function to help living beings in a particular way.  When people generate faith in Christ, for example, their mind opens up to receive his blessings.  His “special blessings” function to “take” the negative karma on our mind and have it ripen upon him in the form of his sufferings leading up to and including his crucifixion on the cross.  Christians understand his suffering on the cross is his having taken the consequences of our sins upon himself.  Understanding this karmic mechanism, we can say with confidence that Christian practices do indeed work.  In exactly the same way, the special blessings of Vajrasattva and the 35 Confession Buddhas likewise help us purify our negative karma through our generating faith in them.

The second way Buddha’s help with our purification practice is by helping us change our ways.  It is good to engage in purification practices, but such practices alone are not good enough if they are not accompanied with the power of the promise to change our negative ways.  We should not be like Don Corleone in the Godfather who confesses in Church while his hit men kill his enemies.  We should not be like the smoker who promises to quit, only to start up again the next day.  Buddhas can also give us the strength and wisdom to change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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