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19960130GRAA5P

II

You are listening to a teaching on the five paths. These are part of Buddha’s teaching on the Four Noble Truths, the Truth of suffering, the Truth of the cause of suffering, the Truth of the cessation of suffering and the Truth of the path to the cessation of suffering. Those of you who are familiar with the teachings on the Four Noble Truths will have no problem. It is one of the most important subjects in Buddhism.

The Four Noble Truths and the Five Paths

The Four Noble Truths are based on Buddha’s experience of life, the experience of suffering which we all have, but sometimes don’t recognize. If the problems are not very strong we may not recognize them, but when they are strong we have no problem recognizing them, because we can feel them, mentally, physically, emotionally. There are some subtle ones which we don’t really recognize. The Buddha’s most important emphasis with regard to suffering is that you have to recognize it. You have to acknowledge it, not deny it. One of the most important ways for the sufferings to hide, is that they are being denied. We also tend to deny the causes of suffering. The human capacity of accepting suffering is also tremendous. Many of us will simply accept all the sufferings, saying that we have got to live with them. Human endurance is very strong. It is in both ways, being overly patient and over-accepting, and also in denying that they are there. These are the biggest problems we face. That’s why Buddha alerted us to the fact that suffering is a truth in our lives. Yet Buddha never said that we have got to live with it. Buddha thought about and looked at his experience and found the solution. There is a way out. One has to remember that Buddha did introduce the truth of suffering as the first truth and the quality that goes along with it is, that we can get rid of it. We can be free of it.

When we mention suffering, people tend to immediately project onto this the suffering of the homeless, who are cold and out there in the street, or the sick and hungry people. Many of us have that projection and it is true, these are sufferings. But I think, more importantly, we are talking here about sufferings that we ourselves have continuously. We have tremendous amounts of suffering on a physical, emotional and mental level. We, each and everyone of us, have a variety of different sufferings in our lives. In a very broad way of speaking there are the sufferings of illness, dying, separation, loneliness, the fact that things don’t shape up exactly the way we want them to. We have to compromise all the time. All these are the kinds of sufferings that we experience all the time. Often we don’t like to acknowledge them as suffering. Some people will say, ‘Don’t think of it as suffering. You have to think positively. Everything has to be shaped into a positive experience.’ True, you can think in positive ways. Tibetan Buddhism actually is extremely positive. Aura told me once, ‘Tibetan Buddhism must be the most positive religion. You are thinking that you are going to be a fully enlightened being, and you are already walking around, having the pride of the yidam. What more positive thing could you want?’ I could not add anything to that. So there is nothing wrong with thinking positively. Yet we still have to acknowledge the suffering.

All the time we will advise you to seek freedom. That is the general buddhist message. And we are not talking about political freedom. Even though we talk a lot about political freedom, we are not going to get it anyway, neither from Newt Gingrich nor from Governor Angler. (That is a joke. I better say that, otherwise some people may take it literally.) In this case we are talking about freedom from delusions, freedom from suffering and the causes of suffering, freedom from illness, freedom from aging, from sickness, from dying. These are our basic sufferings, and whether we like it or not, everybody goes through that. That is the truth of suffering.

Buddha says that there is a way out. He advises us not to deal with the symptoms but with the cause. Where are these sufferings coming from? Who made them? Who gave them to us? Why do we have them and what went wrong? Buddha, asking these questions, traced the sufferings back to our delusional thoughts, like anger, hatred, jealousy, and particularly ignorance. So Buddha said that the solution is not to give in to those emotions that cause pain. It is as simple as that. He told us not to give in to anger, to attachment, to jealousy and to ignorance. These are the causes of our pains, the continuations of our sufferings. So Buddha really showed a way to overcome the problems by dealing with their causes.

Since I talked about illnesses, death, etc, you will probably think, ‘Oh, does freedom from death mean that I can get some kind of immortality?’ We are not talking about that. We are talking about death which is controlled by negative karmic forces. Basically, even if we did not have negative karmic forces, we have to die, because our physical condition is such, that it cannot last forever. But we can have a death with choice. We can have a rebirth with choice. That is what Buddha means when he says that we can have freedom from death, freedom from birth, freedom from negative emotions, freedom from illnesses. It does not mean that we do not get sick. Our bodies are conditioned such that we have to get sick. But that sickness will not bother the individual. There is a big difference. When the sickness really bothers you, when it really gets you, mentally, emotionally, then that is different from having an illness that does not bother you much. I think that is what we are talking about.

We know very well that we have delusions. We know that anger arises, definitely. We also know how much trouble it causes. Anyway, Buddha said that it is better to deal with the causes than with the results. That’s why he gave us the Second Noble Truth, the Truth of the Cause of Suffering. The Third Noble Truth is the Truth of the Cessation of suffering. How can that be achieved? The answer for that is contained in the Fourth Noble Truth, the Truth of the Path to the Cessation of Suffering. And that is what we are talking about here, that is where the five paths fit in. I am just trying to give you some basic Buddhist knowledge.

Motivation – sandwich your day!

I also mentioned that it comes down to our own efforts, starting with generating a good motivation every morning. It is a bit funny for me to say this. When I was young, in Tibet, I used to get up approximately at 4.00 a.m. to 4.30 a.m. in the morning. That was done as a general rule. I don’t think there was anybody who slept later than 6.00 a.m. or 6.30 a.m. If I did not get up on time, my teacher would hit me with a little stick on my knees. I remember that. I must have been sleeping with my knees pulled up! So the first thing when you wake up is this pain in your knees. Now I don’t get up early at all. I get up very late. So when I tell you that it is good to get up early in the morning, it is embarrassing for me. You know, when you travel around a lot, and when you have to switch the time back and forth, it really confuses everything and then you don’t get up at the right time. But it is bad. Normally, in old Tibet, there were rules for when you had to get up. The deadline was ‘When the sun hits your butt and the dawn is on your face’. If you did not get up on time, it was a punishable crime under the monastic rules. The reason is that, by getting up early in the morning, you can achieve tremendous things – whatever you want to do. There is a lot of quality in that. It gives you the opportunity to develop a good motivation, to go through all the six preliminaries, such as cleaning your place, setting up offerings, developing the motivation, etc, and it gives you the opportunity to take refuge, to practice – all that even before you even get out and do anything. That is one of the very important points. It is an extremely important opportunity, at a time where you can think and function far better than during the day time, like later in the afternoon.

But in order to get up early in the morning, you have to go to bed earlier too. You don’t have to squeeze your sleeping period, it is simply a matter of changing the time. It is wrong to sit around until 2.00 a.m. or 3.00 a.m. or even 5.00 a.m., and get to bed that late. The whole thing gets upside down. I saw an ad on television, from some insurance company called ‘New York Life’ and they showed that last year a lot of people had turned their lives upside down and they showed everything happening upside down. Then somebody came, pressed a few buttons on the computer and everything turned back to normal and then he said, ‘This is New York Life’. In any case, when you stay up late and get up late, your whole life is turned upside down – as far as your spiritual life is concerned. It is very important to get up early in the morning. That goes for everybody. I don’t want to pin-point any particular people. Getting up early in the morning will make a difference in your life and give you an opportunity to practice and do a lot of things, particularly to set up a good motivation, because otherwise you have to rush. Usually you people have to get out of the door by seven or eight o’clock, unless you are one of those lazy bugs like me, who don’t have to get out.

Setting up the motivation is extremely important. It is one of the ways how to combine spiritual life and the every day, breadwinning life. It is the key point. It is so important to set up a perfect motivation, and if it is not perfect, at least a good motivation, dedicated to the benefit of all beings, including ourselves. If you don’t have love and compassion for yourself, you are never going to be capable of giving love and compassion to others. Period. So set up a good motivation in the morning, dedicate any positive karma to benefiting all beings, for the sixteen or eighteen hours that you are going to be active. Think, ‘All my daily chores, including going to the bathroom, dealing with people, doing my work, I am going to set all these up for the benefit of all beings.’ All beings means in particular the beings that you live with, who are close to you, who depend on you, who you are responsible for. So make that your principle and then do whatever work you normally do.

Do your business as usual. That is very important. A lot of people may think, ‘Now that I am a spiritually oriented person, I cannot be a hard person, I cannot do certain things.’ That is a completely wrong attitude. You can read the stories about Buddha’s previous lives. In some of his previous lives he had to do amazing things. In one life he gave his body to a starving family of tigers. That was one extreme case. In another case he had to execute some people, in order to benefit others. So motivation is very important. After setting up your motivation, you have to go and function in your business as usual and even be harder. If you read about how some of the early masters have dealt with people, it is sometimes terrifying. Look at Milarepa, how much he had to work. Marpa was always very firm and strong and never had any hesitation in hitting Milarepa. We all know very well that Marpa did not need a thirteen story-building as his residence. If you see drawings of the building Milarepa had to build, it shows that it was not the kind of building that you could live in. It looks like some kind of light house. Inside there were probably only staircases with just a few steps to walk on each floor. But Marpa forced Milarepa to build it. Not only that, he told him to build strange triangular shapes into this building and when it was completed, he shouted at Milarepa, saying, ‘Who told you to build it this way? Tear it down and start again!’

So one has to be very strict and very hard. Weakness in your profession is also weakness in your spiritual practice. This is something one has to be aware of. You are working for people who depend on you, who rely on you. This is why spiritual persons should not be soft-hearted in their dealings. If you do so – remember, there is something called ‘idiot compassion’; this sort of attitude is never an advantage, but always a disadvantage. So it is very important to set up your motivation. And then be very strong and hard in your profession. At the end of the day, rejoice in and dedicate your positive work, the positive karma that you have generated. Sandwich your daily life between the motivation and the dedication. Be strong on both points; these are the true ways of combining spiritual and material life.

Tibetans keep on telling you proudly that they have a system of religion and politics combined together. I never understood that. But all our ancestors, whether they were political or spiritual leaders, whether they were Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya or Gelug, were very proud of that. They would write books and poetry about it and praise it. I used to think that in the case of the Dalai Lama it was true, because he is the temporal and spiritual leader of all Tibetans, so naturally in his case it is combined. But I failed to understand the pride in it. Then I understood what they mean with it: the combination of spiritual practice and the work we do in our daily lives. The political aspect refers actually to the material, non-Dharma work that we have to do. In that way we can combine all our activities over the twenty-four hours of the day together, materially and spiritually. That’s what they were proud of. It may be wrong to say things like that here, because America is the country where church and politics have to be separate! (That is a joke again.) But it is true, if you combine the two, both will be strong and if you fail in one, you fail in both. That is the reality, unless you choose not to deal with ordinary life at all, but to walk around with the begging bowl in hand and sit under trees, whether it is cold or hot. That is also okay, it is acceptable and great. But as long as you cannot do that, as long as you have to do both, you might as well do it in a nice way. Half-heartedness will never work well. The traditional Tibetan example tells us, ‘You cannot stitch with a two-pronged needle.’ If you are half-hearted and think, ‘I cannot be that mean, maybe it is not right spiritually’, you are looking the for the ‘love and light’ life. And that is neither great on the spiritual nor on the material side. So, this is what you have to be like, particularly in the 1990s. You cannot afford to act differently.

You don’t have to worry about whether acting tough is spiritually all right, because you are carried through by your previously developed motivation. If your job is negative by nature, like if you work in a factory making B2 bombers or something like that, then you have to change your job. But apart from that, every job is right livelihood. If you are a butcher, have a meat shop, maybe it is okay, but being a slaughterer is not okay. You should not be somebody who kills the animals. By nature, most jobs are not negative. If you work for a company, you are servicing the people in that company. Don’t think with twisted wisdom that you are only working for the owner of the company. If you don’t work properly, others will not get their pay-check either. You are contributing to this and you are contributing to the economy of the whole country. Think in that direction. Don’t think with a narrow view in a negative way. Keep on thinking that through your work you are contributing to the whole economy of the United States and then your work will be great, even though you may be working for Mr. Joe Blow, who is going to pocket all the profits. Focus on the fact that you get paid and can look after your family.

Anyway, you have the motivation and the dedication and you sandwich your day between these. That is how you combine your daily life with the spiritual practice. If you are a health-care oriented person, it is even better. Keep on thinking that you are making a contribution to the members of the human society, and to society in general. The responsibility that you have is your share, your contribution. And of course you look at the money side – why not? If you work, you have to get paid. That is not non-spiritual, unless you are a monk or a nun who is not supposed to do that. Many years ago in Malaysia I met a couple of Thai monks. Traditionally they were not supposed to touch gold and silver. So they said they were not allowed to touch money. However they then said, ‘But you can give us a cheque!’

So our daily life is also part of the Fourth Noble Truth, the Truth of the Path to the Cessation of Suffering.

Things that we do at our level, at the preliminary level, are meditating, saying mantras, accumulating merits through a number of ways, like saying the tsog. Saying the tsog thirty-two times is actually not a big deal. We used to do hundreds of them. Particularly, I remember one day in Dharamsala, His Holiness was there and wanted to be involved personally. He called all of us. Both, Kyabje Ling Rinpoche and Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche were there, and we all had to go. It was 6 am in the morning. We did a very brief Lama Chöpa and then started the actual tsog with the verses Ho, ting dzin nga tang chak gye jin lab pai… This went from 6.00 a.m. until about 10.00 am. Then we had half an hour break and continued the tsog until 12.30 p.m. Then we had another hour’s break, and started back at 1.45 p.m. We had another hour-long break, started back at 7.00 p.m. and that session went until 9.00 p.m. This whole procedure then continued for twenty-one days without a single day off! Just the few verses of the tsog, again and again! And you had to be very seriously doing it. But I was clever. I came quite early and saw how the seats of His Holiness and the two tutors had been arranged. So I quickly took a seat at the back. Those that came later had to take the seats right at the front. The people in the front line had to do all the offerings and mudras, especially Serkong Rinpoche. The people in the row behind had to try and copy him. Then the people next to them and behind them, who saw the efforts at copying, started giggling. That was on the first day. His Holiness who had seen that called two or three of them during the break: ‘Wait, don’t go! What you think we are doing here? We are not playing!’ So from the second day on, everybody tried to rush and grab a seat at the back. So saying thirty-two of the tsog verses is not a big deal.

Accumulation of merit, Lam Rim meditations, etc. are preliminary to the path of accumulation. When you grow the perfect mind of seeking freedom – traditionally called ‘renunciation’- in other words, when you see the faults of samsara, and the positive nature of nirvana, and with that you develop the totally unshakable mind of seeking freedom, then you enter the first path, the path of accumulation. The person with that sort of development is said to be on the path. I am talking here about the Hinayana path of accumulation, not about the Mahayana path. The system of Stream Enterer, Once Returner, Never Returner, etc, this system of eight stages, only begins at the path of seeing.

The real path of accumulation of merit is the basic mind of the person who has developed the unshakable wish for freedom. Not every part of the mind of such a person is part of the accumulation of merit, because such minds have still a lot of negativities. There is anger, attachment, etc; every single emotion is still there. So these are not considered to be part of the path – only the main stream of their consciousness is.

That very path of accumulation is divided into three: small, medium and big. On what basis is this division made? How do I know if I am on the small, medium or big level? At the lowest level my understanding of wisdom, particularly in dealing with the wisdom that recognizes emptiness, is only the type of wisdom that follows from learning – nothing more. It arises from listening to teachings, reading books, etc. That is called ‘small level’. Your erudition could be great, but all your knowledge is only gained from learning, from taking in information. That is the small level.

When that understanding increases, you put it through the analytical process and when the knowledge from learning mixes with the results from the analysis, then you have reached the medium level. You learn and analyze together.

Through this analysis you gain some kind of understanding. It is the understanding following analysis. That is why in the Gelugpa tradition debating is emphasized so much. The debate is the analytical meditation. It gives you the opportunity to analyze. Your understanding will be better than by just picking up information. If you then focus and concentrate on the essence of that analysis, you will gain shamata. Shamata is a stable level of concentration. There are detailed teachings on the stages of shamata. It is a very stable, smooth mind. It can focus on any chosen object without any interruption for days at a time. If with such strong concentration you focus on the resultant essence of your analysis of emptiness, you have reached the big level of the path of accumulation. Even if you don’t have actual shamata, but a shamata-like level of concentration, it is still considered to be part of this level.

Towards the path of action

From then on, every meditation you will do will be a combination of shamata [Tib. zhiné] and vipasyana [Tib. lhagtong]. This is concentration and analysis combined together. Up to this level, it is alternation of concentration and analysis, until each of them becomes better and better, and from then on you will practice them in combination. You can concentrate and analyze together. That is called the union of analysis and concentration. When you can do this, you are getting quite close to seeing the real wisdom. As a sign of this happening, heat will develop. That is why the first level of the path of action is called ‘heat’. When you get close to the fire, you can feel the heat. In the same way, you are now getting closer to wisdom, and therefore that level is called ‘heat’.

When I talk about heat, that does not refer to physical heat. It goes with the example we gave earlier about the process of making a fire, which begins by rubbing two stones or two sticks together, until heat develops. What are you focusing on at that time? The subject you are really meditating on is the Four Noble Truths, particularly the wisdom part. You are now taking action to encounter the emptiness directly. That is why this path is called ‘path of action’. There are actually four levels of this path: heat , peak, patience, best of Dharma.

This much I would like to say for now. Let me conclude. We have so far covered the first path, that of accumulation. It has three divisions, small, medium and big. On the small level, your understanding of wisdom arises only from learning. When you intensify that knowledge through analysis, you are on the medium level. When you either gain the perfect shamata or a shamata-like concentration on the results of the analysis, you have reached the big level of the path of accumulation. Thereafter all your meditations will be the combination of concentration and analysis together. This will push you to the level of heat, which is the first level of the second path, the path of action.

Questions and Answers

Audience: Did I understand correctly that only at the point of being able to practice the combination of shamata and vipasyana, one can enter the path of action?

Rinpoche: That is right. And with that as a guide-line, if someone claims to be a spiritually highly developed person, you can find out where that person really is. It is very clearly marked. With that, the possibility for fraud on the spiritual path is limited tremendously. Even for ourselves it’s useful. We otherwise would not even know where we ourselves are. We would act and do all sorts of things, not knowing where we are.

Audience: Earlier, you were saying that any kind of work is really okay.

Rinpoche: Basically yes, provided it is not negative by nature. You can do anything. When you get a new job, you will enjoy it for a while, because it is new. It may give you more money, too. After a little while it will get boring and problems will arise. That is natural. There may be some cases where a job becomes a really big problem. In the majority of cases, the problems are not that serious, but we tend to make them very serious ourselves. That is because of our emotions. Generally I am saying that you can look at any type of work as contributing to society in general, and particularly to the group that you are associated with. Even if your job is not labeled ‘service-oriented’, you can make it service-oriented, by your way of thinking, by your own approach. You always have the freedom to do that, nobody can take that away from you. In that way your job can always be something worthwhile. A lot people tend to think, ‘I am doing something useless, I am doing nothing. It is just a job, only to pass the time and pay the bills. It means nothing.’ If you look from that angle, it naturally becomes more and more boring and more and more difficult. Whatever you do is your contribution, it is your in-put into society, and if you look at it in that manner, even a small job becomes significant. This is not just what I am saying, but it is the message that comes down all the way from Buddha. This is what traditionally is called ‘combination of politics and religion.’ Actually it is good policy too. What it boils down to is, that every work you do, can be combined with the spiritual path. Dedication and all these things can function because of that.

Audience: How does debate take place in the monasteries?

Rinpoche: It is like this: You say ‘Yes’, I say ‘No’! You give zillions of reasons why it should be, and I give zillions reasons why it should not be. But there is one important point. Both sides have to have an open mind and should never be stubborn and hard-headed. That would not work. That is why there are rules. You can only answer with four or five words, no more. You can also only challenge by using four or five words. You have to give your opponent time to think. The debate may be done from student to student, in front of a group or individually. When your opponent asks you questions, you can only answer with yes or no. Until the opponent asks ‘Why?’ you are not allowed to explain a difference. You are only allowed to state ‘Difference’. Then, even your explanation has to limit itself to very few words. The reason why half-page explanations are not allowed is not to cut the conversation short, but to be on the point and precise. And if you fail to convince the other party, you have failed, you have lost. These days Indian lawyers are learning this technique, I don’t know why, but they are learning it.