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Review

To talk about the five paths is not as easy as talking about the Lam Rim or the Three principles of the path, because all the different vehicles, Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, have their own set of five paths. What happens on these five paths, becomes different for each vehicle. So it is a bit complicated. The names of the paths are the same in all the vehicles, even the spelling.

To re-cap what we have talked about so far, let me say that on the Hinayana path of accumulation the main goal of the individual is no longer to satisfy the needs of this life and future lives, but his interest has gone beyond that level. He wants to end once and for all the suffering and pains that otherwise go on for lives after lives, and therefore seeks total freedom. The Tibetans have the habit to say at this point that the individual is no longer interested in the affairs of this and future lives. I can’t say that the person on this level is no longer interested in the pleasures of this and future lives. That would send the wrong message – especially in the English language. It is not that you have no interest in your life, or that you have no interest in the pleasures of life, it is not that you don’t want joy in your life, or in future lives, but the difference is that this is no longer your main goal. Buddha refused to admit people who did not have the wish to seek that freedom into the spiritual path. According to Buddha, a spiritual path has to be capable of delivering the individual to total freedom.

Some friends have mentioned that we in Jewel Heart live from event to event. We don’t have any long term planning, like normal organizations. We mind our own business and learn whatever we can and study and practice and don’t bother with the rest. That is what people complain about. And it is true. In our life we do the same. Whenever a particular problem comes up, we try to challenge it. We say that we take things as they come. So we also use our knowledge of the spiritual path to challenge just one difficulty after another, as they come up. A lot of people do that. It looks like living from event to event.

Buddha is not interested in that approach. His path is capable of cutting the difficulties once and for all. Anybody who would settle for less than that is not considered to be someone who is interested in the spiritual path. It is not a pain relief measure, some kind of aspirin to be used for the constant sufferings that we get one after another, like the waves of the ocean. Every time a wave comes, we try to sit behind a ‘spiritual’ rock and try to challenge it. That is not considered a spiritual practice according to Buddha. Unless and until you have the firm desire to free yourself once and for all from all sufferings, dealing with the problems that we face life after life, you are not considered to be on the path. The path of accumulation does not begin until you have this firm determination.

It is not good enough to be interested. There will be nobody who says not to be interested in solving all problems of this and future lives. But do we really have a strong desire? We don’t. This is because we have some kind of soft spot, or attachment, for the samsaric joys, whatever they may be. This depends on the individual. Some seek comfort in life. This could be success in a career, or in making money, or anything. We use the word ‘success’. If you try to translate that word into action, it seems to me that everybody has a different reading of it. This is because we have different attachments. To some people success means a big name, popularity. To some it means a lot of money. To others it means meeting lots of women – or boys, depending on your sexual preferences. That indicates the different attachments that we carry with us. All those attachments obstructs us from going beyond that level. Nobody is interested in having problems, everybody wants to be free of problems. It also depends what you call a problem. Attachment in a way will help you to succeed in whatever you are looking for. But it will also hold you back from cutting through it and going beyond that level and to be free of attachment and seeking total freedom from all problems from all different angles.

We are all interested, however we don’t have a firm commitment. There is a problem, there is a solution and these are our difficulties. These are the reasons stopping us from getting to the first path. We may not even perceive our attachment as attachment, but because of it we have lots of troubles in our lives. There are difficulties with ourselves, our companions, with society. The major difficulties we have – apart from perhaps financial problems –, particularly emotional difficulties, like relationship problems, are there because of attachment. It does not seem to work like that. To us it appears as if attachment supports our wishes, but in reality it is the real cause of our difficulties. When psychologists and therapists say that they want to get to the bottom of the problem, then this really is the bottom of the problem. It goes beyond what has happened in your childhood, beyond what the bearded uncle did to you. I am not criticizing anybody, but this is the bottom line. This is the cause why people sit in a corner and say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ – all because of this, even extreme, powerful anger, so strong that you physically shake. We all know that people do that. If you did not have that bottom line problem, you would not have that anger.

So attachment is not only obstructing the individual from moving along the spiritual path, but is also obstructing him or her from having a good time. That is really true. And it is very hard to even see it as a problem, because we love it so much, we are attached to that. And it is very painful to even be ready to look at the problem and admit that one is oneself the creator of the problem. Don’t try, unless you are ready! Otherwise you will make the psychologists very busy. True, if you are ready, then you tackle it. You need enough wisdom to first of all see, then to pinpoint it and then do some surgical work on it.

On the Mahayana level it is different. When the bodhimind grows with you, you become a bodhisattva and that is the point where you enter the first path. Growing the bodhimind is not easy either. Everybody has some love and compassion – everybody. Some have idiot compassion, some have good compassion. But that is not enough to get bodhimind. Bodhimind is ultimate, unlimited, unconditioned love and compassion. All our idiot compassion is limited. The feelings of the ‘love and light’ seeking people are all conditioned and limited. Compassion without feeling and understanding the pain is not good enough to be compassion. You have to feel the pain that other people are going through. You don’t have to physically feel it, you don’t have to sit there and try to experience the same pain as somebody else. The feeling of sharing pain is to truly understand what the other person is going through and what they are trying to express. Even in the normal American language we say, ‘I am familiar with that.’ ‘I know how you feel’, etc,. If you do know, then that is compassion. To presume that you know is not good enough. When you really look closely you can see what problems people have. You can see that they are feeling bad and that they want to express that. They want to get better, but they just sit there, digging in. Some people will try to escape by doing something else, perhaps drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, sniffing cocaine, or whatever. People try to get away from the problem by doing something else. Not many people actually investigate the problem. They don’t ask, ’What is this pain and where is it coming from and what exactly is it? Who is the one having the pain? How does it affect me? How do I perceive that?’ Not many people do that. We are either in the habit of escaping from it or just bearing it. We may just sit on it and wait for the time to heal it. If we do question the reason for our pain, we come up with quick and simplistic answers. We will say, ‘So and so did this to me’, or ‘I don’t know.’ If you dig down and look, you may not find a good reason why you should feel that way.

The Buddhist logical system of bringing about the wisdom of emptiness may be a useful point to apply here. But don’t overdo it, otherwise you will get into trouble. When you start looking for reasons, you will find various people you can put blame on, either yourself or others. But if you further analyze, for each one of these points of blame, finally you are not going to find any valid reason why you have to feel that way. Then you will begin to convince yourself that there is really no problem there. It is just delusion. I am not saying you don’t have pain. It is there, it is real, you feel pain. But it is real to ourselves, because it is relative truth. Absolutely it is not there. Relative truth serves all the purposes. Normally I say,

If you exist relatively, it is good enough to exist.If you don’t exist absolutely, it is not good enough not to exist.

I have not said that for a long time. It sounds funny, right? But it is true. So relatively, if you feel the pain, it is good enough. It is real. However, it is dualistic. It is a delusion. If you look from the angle of wisdom, it is not there. It takes a lot of effort of analyzing and thinking to cut through. If you do, then you become sort of a happy-go-lucky type of person. I don’t know if you want to be such a person. I do not mean it in a bad way.

I hope I have not done you a disservice, because if the individual is not ready and capable enough, then to say that it is all delusion can create misunderstanding. That is why normally we try not to talk about it. It is said,

If you do not know how to catch a poisonous snake, and you catch it in the wrong way, it can bite you.

So, things are real, but they are dualistic. That is the honest truth. If you look in that manner, if you really use your wisdom and search for the cause of your problems, rather than waiting for the time to heal them, or escaping and running away from them, take a step towards Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and take refuge. Don’t wait for the time to pass, but analyze and look carefully. Ask who experiences the suffering, what is it and where is it coming from. When I say that it is not real, that it is dualistic, I don’t mean to say that it is just a mental fabrication. I have to clarify that. I am not saying, ‘You just made it up in your mind’, that would be the wrong thought, the wrong perception. I am not saying that your pain is only a mental fabrication and that in reality there is no pain. I am not saying that at all. You are feeling bad, that is real. However, when you look deeply and analyze, you can cut through. You cannot come to the point where you can pin-point it and say, ‘This is it!’ You cannot pin-point it, because ultimately it is not there. It is real, you feel it, but in absolute reality – no.

[Everything] is just a combination of collected karmas, as well as circumstances – all of them jumbled together, and when the conditions become right, you experience that. The solution is to separate the conditions, trace the original one and find out the why and the where. You will not really find it. I don’t expect anybody to understand emptiness with regard to your emotional problems, however that is what I myself am looking for, when I have a mentally disturbed situation. Everybody will get abrupt sometimes, because we are not fully enlightened. We get that for short periods. It does not last long – in my case. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet. I am quite a happy-go-lucky guy, so those conditions don’t last long for me at all – I just get over them. When it stays with me for longer than an hour or so, I try to analyze it straight away. Then I find that there is nothing, and I am convinced it is not there. Then I tell myself, ‘Why am I cheating myself?’ and from then on it does not bother me. When it comes up next time, I will say, ‘I found out last time, it is not there. Why am I digging in here? All right, okay then, forget it.’ That is fortunate enough.

You may consider such a person to be a bad human being, to be a happy-go-lucky person. But it does not mean that one does not take things seriously. You have got to take things seriously. You need the balance. As a balance you have to be abrupt and yelling and screaming, and love and compassion has to be there. Without it is ‘love and light’. The balance to ‘love and light’ is the compassion, caring for yourself and others. That will make your jaws a little longer and make you come up with funny statements, something that you have to do. That’s how you go about life, I believe. Thereafter, whatever the problem may be, it will not bother you much, it will prick you a little bit, like for a couple of minutes or an hour. You may be worried what to do, but after a while it does not haunt you any more. What surprises me is that people carry such things with them day after day, month after month, even year after year. It is totally stupid to me. I can’t really say it is stupid, because people are experiencing it. I better don’t say it. That is not my job.

So in Mahayana, when you become a bodhisattva, you enter the path of accumulation. (In Vajrayana, it is different, but we will talk about that at the Vajrayana weekends.) From that moment on, anything you do will be part of the path of accumulation. Until then it will not, because of your mental limitations. It shows you where you are on the path. Earlier I have said that people should generate a nice, strong, good motivation in the morning, compassion-oriented, love-oriented. Then, by eight o’clock, go into your office, business as usual, sharp, crude, whatever you have to be. And in the evening, you to dedicate it. The mind makes the difference. This is exactly what happens on the path of accumulation. Your mental capacity of looking for total freedom makes everything you do part of the path of accumulation. If you don’t have that, you may do a million more things, but they still are not part of the path of accumulation. That is the difference.

One of the Tibetan teachers used to use snuff. It is the same as smoking cigarettes, it is the same tobacco, whether you snuff it with your nose or inhale it through the mouth. Somehow in the Tibetan culture, there is no big objection to snuffing tobacco, but still it is considered bad. People will hide. If you are in the presence of your teacher, or any respectable person, you go somewhere in a corner and take the snuff there. So one of the lamas started using it and someone saw it and said, ‘Ah, you are using tobacco, right?’ And the lama said, ‘The way you use tobacco and the way I use it is two different things. When I snuff in, I snuff in the sufferings of all the sentient beings. When I blow out, I blow out all my positive karmas. I am using tong len, while I am snuffing tobacco.’ Maybe he was just blowing his own horn, but maybe the mind of the individual makes it possible to do that.

One of the previous incarnations of my father, not the last recent one, was in the habit of hunting wild animals. Many people thought that it was terrible to go and shoot these poor, little animals, who were minding their own business up in the high mountains, especially when a well-known incarnate lama did that. They thought it was disgraceful. So the lama said, ‘All right, let me be disgraced.’ He went out shooting and got a deer. He had it brought to him and instructed the helpers, ‘You can use any flesh, but you must keep the skin and bones intact.’ So they did that and then the deer was completely eaten up. The lama then gave instructions to put the bones back into the skin, stretched the skin and then he put his mala inside that deer. He snapped his fingers and suddenly the deer got up and ran away. It was alive. Things like that happen. It can happen, when you cut through the basic form of attachment. When you cut through that, a lot of things can happen.

It is not necessarily the case, that bodhimind is developed before wisdom. It is also not necessarily the other way round. It depends on the individual. It is said that it depends on the luck of the individual rather than on the intellectual capacity. It does depend on intelligence and luck both, but mainly on luck. If you are not lucky, then no matter how intelligent you may be, you will not break through. And if you are lucky, even limited intelligence can cut through. You need both. With intelligence I don’t mean the intellectual kind of intelligence which follows from education. I am talking about some kind of naturally-born wisdom plus wisdom developed through study. The naturally-born wisdom could be called ‘God-given’ in English. Actually we have brought that with us from our previous life, so it is in-born. Then you also need the developed intelligence. So we need both types. Developed intelligence can only do limited things. The naturally-born intelligence makes a big difference. Both of them depend on luck. If you are not lucky, you cannot make it. But if you are lucky, even though your intelligence may be mediocre, you will make it.

This in turn depends on the related efforts you put in: purification and accumulation of merit. These are the causes of this particular luck. Because of that, the whole practice is structured the way it is. It is simply directed to developing that luck. That is why the Vajrayana self-generation sadhanas are dealing with the physical and mental aspects of enlightened beings and your own individual physical and mental aspects. In your practice you try to bring these together, merge them, regard them as inseparable. This brings about tremendous amounts of luck and that’s why we are doing this. If you are not lucky, you will not make it. That is why spiritual practice has to be balanced. If you lose one side of the balance, you will not make it. That is the simple reason.

When you see the reality directly, you enter the path of seeing. In case you have developed the path of seeing first and then develop the bodhimind later, what happens to that bodhisattva? That bodhisattva will automatically join the third path, that of seeing and by-pass the first and second paths, the path of accumulation and the path of action. This is because the wisdom was developed before the bodhimind. So you get a helicopter lift, rather than driving through. That’s how it works on the bodhisattva path. There are a couple of verses in Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland of Good Fortune which refer to that. It says that certain bodhisattvas will develop the wisdom before developing the bodhimind. It then says that in that case the bodhisattva will directly join the path of seeing.

Questions and Answers

Audience: You were talking about analyzing one’s causes of sufferings, emotional states, delusions, etc. It is also taught that when one sees that delusions cause suffering, to develop regret. Should one, after that, continue to analyze the feelings associated with the regret as well?

Rinpoche: The purpose of the regret is not to repeat the negative action. When that has registered with you, then you don’t have to do anything else. I make a big difference between regret and feelings of guilt. Regret is a nice, wonderful thing. It will contribute to making you a nice person. It will help you to improve. Guilt does not do that. It makes you miserable, hopeless and helpless. That is totally useless. There is no such a thing as hopeless and helpless. The simple reason is that all things are impermanent. Bad situations are impermanent. Bad conditions are impermanent. They change. We all know that. We have all had experiences of joy, we have all gone through difficulties. Nothing lasts, it goes away, because the nature of reality is impermanent. The situation may look like it is hopeless and helpless, but it will change, because it is impermanent. So guilt is something that I don’t buy at all. People like to lay a guilt trip on others, trying to make them feel bad. That is a very bad, mean thing to do. If you succeed in that, you are unfortunate. If you don’t succeed, you are lucky. Guilt feeling does not mean anything to me. If I made a mistake, it is bad, sure. I have caused suffering to someone, I regret it, I will not do it again. I try to change my character. It is not easy; we do repeat certain actions a number of times, because it is habitual. But it does not matter, try to change. Recognize that the action causes suffering for others, have a mind that wants to change. That is good enough. The purpose of the regret is served and there is nothing beyond that. It is impermanent. Just say ‘Good-bye’ to the guilt and move on. And if you want to get yourself stuck, then that is your choice. It is like the pigs who think that the slums of Calcutta are a wonderful place to be. It is your choice. And with your intelligence you have to tell yourself, ‘If I am not stupid, who else is?’ I welcome regret and reject guilt.

Audience: Which type of bodhimind is required to get onto the first Mahayana path? The aspiring bodhimind or the actual bodhimind?

Rinpoche: You need the actual bodhimind. The bodhimind is the doorway to the Mahayana, and taking refuge makes you a buddhist. When bodhimind develops, you become a bodhisattva. Taking vows and doing the bodhimind in prayer form and doing inspirational practices are nice things, but I don’t think that makes you a bodhisattva. (Technically I am not supposed to say this, because we lose our bodhisattva vow business. It is bad business tactics. Just joking).

Audience: But you said at one point that certain bodhisattvas can develop the wisdom of emptiness before developing bodhimind.

Rinpoche: Oh, I see what you are getting at. You are right. I should have said, ‘There are certain persons who can develop the wisdom of emptiness before developing bodhimind. They will, when they develop the bodhimind, become bodhisattvas and join the path of seeing straight away.’ You are right, I surrender. You caught me, right?

Audience: I want to develop spiritually, and I am interested in Buddhism as a path. But I have a certain personal resistance to following a program dogmatically.

Rinpoche: It might even be true. What I do, I don’t look at the program and whether it is dogmatic. I look at the spiritual path as some kind of struggle between the negative and positive. It is a fight on the battlefield of my own mind. Who is going to win? The negative or the positive? So far, the negative has been winning. What we are today is clearly telling us that the negative side has been winning. So we want to change that and let the positive side win. Simply look from that angle. Which direction am I going? Which influences me more? The negative or the positive actions? I don’t think there is a different presentation of negative and positive actions by the different religions and traditions, I mean the great, well-established religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, etc. They seem to have a very similar viewpoint of negative and positive. How to deal with that is different. You don’t have to depend on the doctrine that much at all. Go beyond the doctrine, nakedly deal with the positive and negative thoughts and emotions. Analyze their influence. See yourself responding to them. That is what I do. You don’t need to rely on doctrine for that, unless you come to a point where you are confused about whether an emotion is positive or negative. But that is a subtle level. On the gross level we don’t have that problem. On the gross level the action seen by the naked eye is enough to make your own judgement. That might be a solution. At least that is what I try to do. The other thing that may be helping me is that I really don’t know anything about Judeo-Christian doctrine or Hinduism for that matter. I know only one thing.

Audience: When you were talking about searching for the cause of our negative emotions and not being able to find them, I assume this points to the non-inherent existence of them. That means in the big picture there is nothing there, but in the little picture there is?

Rinpoche: Even in the little picture it is impossible to point out, ‘This is it.’ It is all collective, interdependent existence. It is a simple, straightforward search and if you keep going, you won’t find it. There are two ways of not finding it. One is by not looking properly, and the other is by looking properly and thoroughly and then not finding it. What you need is the second one. You have to get convinced that it is not there. When you are really convinced that the condition causing you pain is not there, then all the problems and pains you are experiencing are just like that too – they are gone. Just like that. You turn around and they are gone.

Audience: So in the end there is nothing there in itself, it is all just conditions coming together.

Rinpoche: Yes, and then you work on those conditions. You cut the ears off, you cut the nose off, and you will not recognize the person. That is called ‘laser beam surgery.’ I think only fortunate people can do that, not everybody. Firstly, people think you are crazy and secondly, if they tried they would not succeed. Unless you are fortunate enough, you will not succeed. You have to seriously look for the object of negation and not just pretend you are looking and quickly conclude that you did not find it. That is easy to do, but won’t get you the results. It is like Trungpa said, ‘If you don’t know how to meditate, you may try to copy the person next to you. You can quite easily copy their physical posture, but the mental aspect you can’t.’