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2. Perfection of moral discipline

People may not like it very much, but moral discipline is there. One thing I like to emphasize. A lot of people think there is no hell in buddhism, there is no morality in buddhism. That is a mistake. There is a hell, but the hell realm is not permanent; it is impermanent. So you go in and come out and you are stuck there for a while too.

From Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Moral discipline is the water to wash away the stains of faulty actions.

It is the ray of moonlight to cool the scorching heat of the delusions.

It makes you radiant like a mount Meru in the midst of the nine kind of beings.

By its power, you are able to bend all beings to your good influence

without recourse to mesmerizing glares.

Knowing this, the holy ones have safeguarded, as they would their eyes,

the rules they have accepted to keep purely.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

So morality is really clear water which washes all our non-virtues. Here morality is maybe slightly different from the western idea of morality. Maybe not; I don’t know. Here morality means: honor your given commitments, commitments either in the form of a vow or in the form of a solemn commitment. Honor whatever you have taken on you. The vows are basically against the non-virtues. E.g. you say: ‘I will not commit killing, I will not take somebody else’s property or take what is not given to me, I will not have sexual misconduct, I will not lie...’ etc. etc. That are sort of solemn commitments of keeping pure, straight. By doing so automatically you cut off the killing, stealing etc. That is why we call it ‘the water which is able to wash the non-virtues’. There is no other water, no matter how holy it might be, that washes non-virtues.

In the buddhist tradition you have those vases with water and in an initiation we have that put on the head, we sprinkle water, we drink water, in christianity children are baptized in water, but whatever you do, I don’t think it washes non-virtues. The non-virtues are only protected by yourself if your keep your morality straight.

Morality is ‘the moonlight which cools down your delusions’. The delusions make you hot. You would like to kill somebody, steal, do something you are not supposed to do. So it cools you from those heats.

And also if you are good in that way, your friends will know. Your companions will trust you. Your friends will respect you, will honor you, you don’t have to advertise, by nature respect comes to you. That is why they give this example of Mount Meru which is majestically above. Because of the power of the morality, everybody will respect you and you will be able to help other people. Here also, if you are good, you can tell the others to be good. People will listen to you. If you are not good and you try to tell others to be good, they will laugh at you. As simple as that. That is why it says: ‘I the yogi have practiced this and you who want to follow...’ etc. From The foundation of all perfections:

Yet without habituation in the three higher trainings,

Thought-training accomplishes no enlightenment.

Empower me to know this deeply, and intensely to train

In the various ways of the great Bodhisattvas.

There are two ways of explaining the three higher trainings. One way will say: there are three higher trainings of the Buddha, which are morality, concentration and wisdom. But on the other hand, though the translator calls it three higher trainings, the tibetan texts calls it three higher moralities: 1) morality that protects from wrong doing, 2) morality of generating virtuous actions, 3) morality of helping all sentient beings. When I say here morality of generating virtuous actions, it sounds very much as a religion, but here it means creating positive karma. As much as you created good karma, you help others to create good karma. So you see, when you talk about morality it is a little more than the normal language understanding of the word.

3. Perfection of patience

From Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Patience is the best adornment to wear for those with power

and the perfect ascetic practice for those tormented by delusions.

It is the high-soaring eagle as the enemy of the snake of anger,

and the thickest armor against the weapons of abusive language.

Knowing this, the wise have accustomed themselves,

in various ways and forms, to the armor of supreme patience.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

Simple and difficult, that is the third activity, patience. Patience is the antidote to anger. Our anger is so powerful. No matter how good the person might be, there is a limit, it will burst out one day. When it bursts out it is very difficult. And if you are not patient at all, if you get angry immediately and you get irritated immediately then it is even very difficult to deal with people. We do have a lot of problems with anger. It is one of our biggest problems. It disturbs our everyday life, it comes between friends, it builds a war in between family members, it brings fear, it brings jealousy, it does a lot of harmful things to you all the time. I don’t have to tell you, you know yourself. As a matter of fact we are more expert on it than the buddhas are. We have full development of anger. And we know how much it harms us. It is very expensive.

One of these days I was watching a commercial on cnn. You saw a woman at her job, suddenly she saw it was around five, she rushed in the car, ran through the grocery store, then rushed to the school where you saw her child was waiting, the car came rushing by and ‘zuff!’, the child was gone. You know what I thought? That is what anger does. I comes with full speed, takes us, and ‘zuff!’ we go. We have a nice little peaceful mind and suddenly the anger sweeps us like a car passing full speed and before you know, the waiting kid, our peaceful mind, is gone. That was a good commercial for anger. That is how anger works with us. It comes up and gone you are. If you see that commercial again, think about it.

Not only it takes our peace of mind, according to the Buddha it takes a lot of our virtues too. That is important to notice. Anger comes without any difficulty. We don’t have to learn how to get angry, do we? We don’t have to go to school to get a degree on how to get angry. The only thing is, we have to be a little careful and take precautions. It is important to acknowledge and to notice that we are getting angry. And also to notice how we deny it.

You know, bursting out in anger, throwing cups down or hitting with a frying pan on your head, is not the bad anger to me, really. It is at least straightforward and honest. The bad anger is the one which is very quietly kept inside and with a nice smile outside and maybe a drop of tears along with it you try to say: ‘Well, bla bla bla ....’ while inside you are calculating, manipulating doing all kinds of funny things. That is the really bad anger. It does not burst out, it doesn’t fight, it gives the sweetest words ever possible, yet it is artificial, it is not meant from the heart; it pretends to be diplomatic. Bullshit. It is true anger. And we deny that. We deny so nicely: (in a sweet voice) ‘Bla, bla, bla, but...’ Sweet and gently we speak, but the deep mind is rough. We are manipulating, buttering.

If you want to help yourself, acknowledge your anger and don’t pretend. Don’t have anger inside that is wearing a soft and beautiful cover. That is like painting; you got anger inside but you paint that ‘piece of rock’ and one day it will rain and then the paint comes off [and your true face is shown]. We should be really careful.

If you are interested in helping yourself, if you claim to be a spiritual person, yet you are full of anger, it is not good. Some people live with anger and die with anger. And imagine what will happen to that in future life. So anger is really bad.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get angry. Everybody has anger some time or another. Probably there are very, very few people who do not get angry easily and there won’t be anybody who never gets angry. Whether our anger is strong or weak, manipulating or whatever, please acknowledge. Don’t deny it. You give yourself different reasons to deny the anger. You say it is not good, you say you are afraid of it. Fear is another one to keep the anger locked in. Once you accept you have anger within you, you can work with it. If you keep on denying, you can never work with it.

The antidote of anger is patience, however you have to work with acknowledgment [first]. Once you acknowledge it, try to work with love-compassion. Then when your anger-power is not so strong any more, try to develop patience.

Meditate on patience. Meditating on patience is nice, but if when you come off your cushion and deal with life, you forget what you meditated, then you wasted your time. The purpose or sitting on your cushion and meditating on patience is to try to influence the individual with patience. When you go out in the world and you don’t have that, then it is useless. The whole purpose of meditating it to soak your mind in it, so that when you go out, you have it as part of you. When on the cushion you have it and when you go out you don’t have it, it indicates that what you have is artificial. To begin with the artificial thing is fine, but try to make that artificial thing reality. So the individual becomes softer and gentle and kinder, a better person. When that happens, it is helping you. When that helps you, it helps your friend, your companion, your children, all of them. And you improve your relation with them also.

I have a black american student-friend in New York city, who incidentally happens to be the woman who stitched Jacky Kennedy’s wedding gown. She told me: ‘Rinpoche, you helped me a lot. I improved tremendously.’ I said: ‘What happened?’ ‘When I go the grocery store, they treat me better.’ Probably she was in the habit of complaining all the time, so she always made a fight at the counter. Once she began to stop complaining they treated her better. That is how it works. When you treat the other people better, the others will react better gradually. If some companion of you refuses to see it completely, but you have patience enough, there will be a time it changes. After all they are human beings, they have the beauty nature of human beings and no matter how much the delusions will cover, some time some human indications will come. So that is good.

Even you lose a little bit here and there, not a big deal, you are not losing anything big. If some of your competitors overdo you, let them do, sit behind and watch a little bit. That helps to build your patience too.

4. Perfection of enthusiasm

From Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Once you wear the armor of resolute and irreversible

enthusiastic perseverance,

Your expertise in the scriptures and insights will increase like the waxing moon.

You will make all your actions meaningful for attaining Enlightenment

and will bring whatever you undertake to its intended conclusion.

Knowing this, the Bodhisattvas have exerted great waves of joyous effort,

washing away all laziness.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

We talked about patience. In order to build patience you need enthusiasm, you need diligent work. Actually, I must tell you, enthusiasm is the antidote to laziness. There are three kinds of laziness. I won’t go in detail, but being busy for nothing is laziness. Please remember that.

When you need to do something you try to avoid it. In order to avoid that you make a lot of excuses and make yourself busy for nothing. That is laziness. Laziness doesn’t have to be sleepy sitting all the time. If you have laziness it will pull you away from your achievement. You need to overpower the laziness completely. If you have enthusiasm, all your development will be ‘like the rising moon’. All your activities become meaningful. Whatever work you start you will be able to complete. A lot of people start a lot of work but cannot complete it. That is again laziness. Whatever the work may be, spiritual or otherwise, you have to go according to what you can do. You know the expression ‘Bite what you can chew’. If you try to do so many thing you cannot do, it becomes laziness.

When you are finding excuses for not being able to work on whatever work you may be doing, if instead of putting major efforts on what you are supposed to do, you have a lot of unnecessary or may be even necessary activities going on, it is actually a disturbance. It is laziness. So, be aware of laziness in the busy-ness form. That is very important.

5. Perfection of meditative concentration

From Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Meditative concentration is the king wielding power over the mind.

If you fix it on one point, it remains there immovable like a mighty Mount Meru.

If you project it, it can permeate any virtuous abject at will.

It leads to the great exhilarating bliss of having your body and mind

be applicable to any virtuous task.

Knowing this, the yogis of mental control have devoted themselves

continuously to single-minded concentration

which overcomes the enemies of mental wandering and dullness.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

From The foundation of all perfections:

And empower me to pacify distorted mental wanderings

And to decipher the ultimate meaning of life.

That I may give birth within my mindstream

To the path combining concentration and wisdom.

This is talking about meditation. Not about ordinary meditation, but about shamatha meditation. What is meditation and what does it do to the individual? Now all the western people here are expert on meditation, because the moment the word meditation is said, they move, sit down, make hand gestures. I can look at it and say ‘Wow, great experts we have’, but I have no idea what you are meditating on, because I don’t read your mind. You may be meditating on something positive, or on your bank-account, or on your lover’s face, or your date of tomorrow. I have no idea. ‘Whatever you do, whether you meditate on your bank-account, or you meditate on your love’s face, if you concentrate, I think it serves the purpose here. It might not be spiritual meditation, don’t misunderstand that, but it is meditation, because you are concentrating.

This fifth activity is called the perfection of concentration. The word meditation is very romantic and mystic and people interpret it in many different ways. Here when we are talking meditation, it is about being able to concentrate.

The obstacles to being able to concentrate are two: the wandering mind and the sinking mind. What is a wandering mind? Well, you may be saying some words, you may be saying a mantra, you may be supposed to watch your breath, but your mind is shopping. That is the wandering mind.

There are two kind of wandering mind: the gross wandering mind and the subtle wandering mind. This shopping business is a gross wandering mind. You can clearly see that you lost the concentration. So what do you do? Again awareness comes in. Recognize that you are losing the concentration, acknowledge it and don’t pretend to sit. Move, move. Bring the mind back. That is it.

Bringing the mind back, doing something moving, is the main key. If you don’t move, if your mind is shopping and you let it shop from one counter to another while you are sitting still, it doesn’t mean anything. You have lost your control and the obstacles have taken over. So push that out and move and sit again. You may have to do that three hundred times in five minutes. It doesn’t matter. So start again! Keep on repeating it. After some time you will gain a stabilization of mind. You will be able to concentrate for a longer period and you don’t go for shopping. That is the beginning.

Now another problem will come. You fall asleep. That is called gross sinking. Bring your awareness back again. Wake up! Don’t keep on sleeping, wake up and keep on concentrating. Keep on repeating it till you lose your mind again in going for shopping. So you continuously keep on adjusting between shopping and sleeping.

These are practical problems, if you try you’ll experience everything. Believe me, you will. I am only talking the practical problems now. Okay? When after some time you are able to adjust, then you get a time you’re neither going asleep nor going for shopping – you remain there for a little while. Then you try to make that longer and longer.

Then you have the subtle problems, subtle wandering and subtle sinking. At subtle wandering you will not lose the object, but within keeping the object you get shopping material too. You really do. If you are meditating on Buddha’s face or something, the shopping materials come on Buddha’s lips or for that matter, if you are concentrating on your lover’s face, maybe a nice jewelry will be going by. These are the subtle wanderings. Why is it called subtle? You have not lost the point, however you are not altogether there.

Then if you can acknowledge what is going on and try to put it together, the subtle sinking wakes up. You don’t fall asleep, you have that subject in front of you, but somehow you got lost, your friends may accuse you of dripping water from your open mouth etc. But you have not lost the object of meditation. When that is happening, again acknowledge.

You see how important awareness is! In the beginning for looking into our habitual patterns, the awareness is important. If you meditate awareness has to be on duty for twenty-four hours. That awareness can give you the information of: ‘Hey, your concentration is not all together, you got a subtle problem’. So you have to correct. Just like with the gross disturbances, you balance. If you are able to balance, you will overcome the subtle problems too.

Then when the subtle problems are over, the awareness also has to be reduced, because observing will disturb. And then there will be a time that you totally will be concentrated, almost fixed on the object or subject you are meditating. You are really tight on that, fixed.

When you get that sort of level, you will experience tremendous joy and happiness. The joy will begin with the body and is followed by the mind. Not only you feel joy and are blissful, but also very light and happy to do whatever. At about that time you have control over your mind. You can use your mind on anything, good or bad, because you have control now. You have cut the obstacle of wandering, you have cut the obstacle of sinking, so your concentration is total.

Then whatever you do, whether you use that for study, or you use that for treating people like a conventional medical doctor, or you use that as a conventional lawyer for arguments of defending, in whatever position you are, you can use it. You can use it for writing a poem, making art, composing a book. Whatever you do, it can be used. It is not under the control of wandering and sinking – you have perfected it. So it is called perfection of concentration. Of course the spiritual people will recommend to you to use this for your spiritual upliftment.

I am sorry, I made the meditation a little cheap, but it is true. Don’t get disappointed. Because people have a feeling that meditation is something spiritual, a very holy business. I diluted that a little bit, I am sorry. But it is true, whether you like it or not.

Mediation is a tool actually, a tool to use the mind. Likewise patience is a tool, diligence is a tool, morality a tool and generosity is a tool. Just like that the wisdom will be a tool too. If you think on it the open way, it is very useful, not only on the spiritual path, but even for other business. Meditation is excellent for mathematics, excellent.

If you keep on meditating continuously, you will have joy, bliss and lightness. And if you still keep on continuing meditation, then you begin to absorb in the subject. And it will reduce all the delusions’ power, because the delusions won’t find room to appear. So it then reduces tremendously. And if you still keep on going, you come to the four form [meditation] stages, after that there are four formless stages. And then you reach the peak of samsara, where you can remain for a long, long time. That particular absorption is called ‘feeling less yet not without feeling’. It sounds very strange, it gives a picture of almost a vegetable state of being, yet a vegetable without suffering, a vegetable with joy, peace, harmony.

However it is not everlasting peace. I told a story about it, I think in Tilburg. When one day a rat comes and bites you at your hair and you get angry, it is the end of that peaceful, joyful state. Why? Because that [absorption] has temporarily blocked all the delusions, but you did not overcome the delusions. Your mind might have been under your control, but your delusions are not controlled. Therefore, when there is a chance, the delusions will pop up, like a piece of toast out of a toaster. The fault is: you have no wisdom. You have control of mind, concentration, but you don’t have wisdom.

So Buddha recommends very strongly, – here lies the difference between buddhism and hinduism – the moment you gain control over your mind, instead of continuously sitting, you try to move the mind and try to develop wisdom. This is one of the extra-ordinary qualities of Buddhism actually. Buddha knows -because it is based on his own experience- where to switch, what to apply, on what level. Because Buddha fought with the delusions and Buddha won. So he has the experience. Did you remember, Allen Ginsberg sung: ‘I fought with the Dharma and Dharma won’? They have a saying in America ‘I fought with the law and the law won’. It is just like that. So Buddha fought with the delusions and Buddha won. So he had the experience on where to switch and on what, rather than doing one thing forever. That is an extra-ordinary quality of Buddhism. That is why I told you this morning, I am proud to be a buddhist.

6. Perfection of wisdom

From Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Discriminating awareness is the eye with which to behold profound Voidness

and the path by which to uproot ignorance, the source of cyclic existence.

It is the treasure of the genius praised in all the scriptural pronouncements

and is renowned as the supreme lamp that eliminates

the darkness of the closed-mindedness.

Knowing this, the wise who have wished Liberation

have advanced themselves along this path with every effort.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

If you don’t have the wisdom, no matter how much control you have on the mind, you have problems. I told you earlier: ignorance is the cause of our delusions. So wisdom is necessary.

Here we are referring to a particular wisdom, the wisdom of knowing the true reality, the mystery of life. We do have a tremendous amount of mystery in our life. And where does that come from? That comes from ignorance, not ignorance of not knowing, but ignorance of wrong knowing. Ignorance of wrong knowing means: the ignorance of understanding some kind of permanent, independent, solid self.

Wisdom will go deeper into questions like: How does that self really exists? What way of existing it is? Is the way we exist dependently originated or is it raised out of an independent permanent self? This sort of wisdom, discriminating wisdom, wisdom looking deeper inside, is necessary. We don’t have that right now and it may not be easy to get it right now, but gradually we have to solve the mystery of life, which we can do with wisdom. The foundation of all perfections says:

And empower me to pacify distorted mental wanderings

And to decipher the ultimate meaning of life.

That I may give birth within my mindstream

To the path combining concentration and wisdom.

Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience tells us:

In a state of merely single-pointed meditative concentration, you do not have

the insight which gives you the ability to cut the root of cyclic existence.

Moreover, devoid of a path of mental quiescence,

discriminating awareness by itself cannot turn back the delusions,

no matter how much you analyze them.

Therefore, on the horse of unwavering mental quiescence,

the masters have mounted the discriminating awareness

that is totally decisive about how things exist.

Then with the sharp weapon of the Middle Path logic, devoid of extremes,

they have used wide-ranging discriminating awareness to analyze properly

and destroy all underlying supports for their cognitions aimed at grasping for extremes.

In this way they have expanded their intelligence which has realized Voidness.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

Once you have achieved single-minded concentration

through accustoming yourself to single-pointedness of mind,

your examination then of individual phenomena with a proper analysis

should itself enhance your single-minded concentration settle extremely firmly, without any wavering, on the actual way in which all things exist.

Seeing this, the zealous have marvelled

at the attainment of a union of mental quiescence and penetrative insight.

Is there need to mention that you should pray to attain one as well?

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

The two verses tell you what I have been explaining. Just concentration alone is not enough, you need to develop wisdom. The wisdom is also not an ordinary wisdom, but the wisdom to be able to analyze properly. The combination of it is very important! Since life is really very much a mystery, it is really very difficult to dig deeper into it in any other way. A very sharp mind that has the tool of stableness, that will be able to analyze life thoroughly and when all other faults are out, then you will be able to see the true reality. Tsong Khapa even mentions here that if you work jointly, there is something interesting that you can get out of it.

That is enough for this, because this is not very applicable to us at this moment. To continue from Tsong Khapa’s shortest lamrim, Lines of experience:

Having achieved such a union you should meditate both on space-like Voidness while completely absorbed in your meditation sessions

and on illusion-like Voidness when you subsequently arise.

By doing this you will, through the union of methods and awareness,

become praised as someone perfecting the Bodhisattvas’ Conduct.

Realising this, those with the good fortune to have attained Enlightenment

have made it their custom never to be content with partial paths.

I, the yogi, have practiced just that.

If you would also seek Liberation, please cultivate yourself in the same way.

What happens? You keep on concentrating, looking deeper inside to something called the ‘big boss’ or I, which has, ‘I want this and I don’t like that’, like and dislike, closeness and distance, love and hate. You try to trace that down. There is ‘somebody’ called I who is discriminating, who is passing judgements – deep inside somewhere. Today we are all slaves of that big person deep inside. That is a mystery.

Where is it? Who is it? Which one is it? Which part of me? Is it in my heart? Is it in my head? Is it in the brain? Where is it and who is it? We need to look carefully. Probably we say it is a part of my body. All right, take out the right leg, the left leg, the intestines and look, look carefully. You’ll find it is not your lung, not your heart, not your intestines, not your liver, not your kidneys, not your pancreas. Then where is it and what is it? So if you take them out piece by piece [you would have to find it].

If I lost my horse in the midst of the woods of Nijmegen, and I find a lot of horses and I take them out one by one, finally I’ll find my horse and I will say: ‘This is my horse’, catch the horse and bring it back, which means: my horse is here. If I take all the ‘is not’-s, then I find the right one. Like that, if you take all your body parts and if that I would be there, you would find it. But you are not going to find it there. Not because you are going to die when you take your parts out – nowadays they can look in your body through scanning machines – but you are not going to find that I anyway.

Then you say: ‘Ah, there is someone else known as mind, that is the one. It is not the body, but it is the mind’. Mind also has divisions, it has fifty-two mental factors and if you look in the same manner as before, you are not going to find it. So you lost your argument there. The I is not part of the body, it is not part of the mind.

Then you begin to see: ‘Ah, it is not there’. And you say: ‘It is not there! It is true that it is not there. Also Buddha said it is not there. Read the Heart sutra. It says: “No nose, no tongue, no smell, no sound…” etc’. You even use that to prove it is not there.

And that also is not true. I am here. I am talking, I am thinking, you are laughing, you are listening, I am making noise and it is poking your ears. That is all reality. I am sitting here and you are there and everybody is looking, Ed is concentrating, all this is there, so you can’t say it is not there. It is very much there. That is the dilemma. You sort it out.

That is the emptiness. And that is the wisdom. So you have to discriminate. It is interesting: what is this? A table. Right? Nobody can deny it. So I take this side out, I take that side out, I take the top off, then what happens? Then I have one big slide of wood and two small ones. Now what happened to your table? It disappeared. When you put the parts together again, you got your table back. What does that tell you? That tells you a table is a combination, a combination of a lot of particles together, which we call table.