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19960227GRAA5P

VI

The path of seeing is divided into two categories: actual seeing itself and aftermath. Actual seeing is seeing the true reality. You already begin to see the true reality on the path of action. This is divided into four levels, called: heat, peak, patience and best of Dharma.

This last one is called ‘best of Dharma’ because that is the best level you can achieve as an ordinary being. It is not the best you can achieve in samsara, because the path of seeing and the path of meditation themselves are still within samsara. According to the Hinayana system, you only escape samsara on the path of no more learning, that is when you become an arhat. Whether you are an arhat with remainder or an arhat without remainder is a different issue. Even the arhat with remainder has still something to do with samsara. On the path of seeing you become an extraordinary being, an Arya. So the dividing line between the path of action and path of seeing is whether you are an ordinary being or an extraordinary being.

The level of best of Dharma is serving as the preliminary level for the path of seeing. It brings you closer to the truth. As an ordinary being you are on the level of best of Dharma and when you really see the emptiness, you become an extraordinary being. Seeing the reality means seeing it directly, face to face. It is the direct encounter with reality. Because of that, you also have the direct encounter with yourself, and with consciousness, and there is no more mystery left. Is that the best possible achievement? No, but still, basically the mystery is solved. That is why it is called path of seeing. During that meditative level you are completely absorbed in emptiness or the true reality. Nothing else exists for that mind at that moment. You do not perceive anything, you do not conceive or conceptualize anything else. You are completely and directly absorbed in emptiness, that is why this state is called ‘like water poured into water.’ This meditative state is non-dual, because there is nothing else that exists for that perception. That does not mean that nothing exists outside of that mind. But in that meditative state, when you are completely absorbed in the nature of reality, you see nothing else. So the actual path of seeing is total absorption in the nature of reality. This has no obstacle, no dualistic mind, no delusion. You don’t even see anything else. Because of that the Heart Sutra says, ‘There is no eye, no ear, no nose, etc.’ It is not saying that the person does not have eyes, ears and nose, but one does not see one’s own nose, because of total absorption in reality.

As a result of that, in the period of aftermath, the person does have some difficulty adjusting. The walls move away, and you walk through them; the doors may be locked, but you can walk in; nothing physical can block you. You have seen the nature of reality, therefore the ordinary expressions are no longer working for you. But you have to learn to adapt to the normal behavior of human beings. That is why the aftermath is another difficulty. In the Lama Chöpa it says: In the aftermath, you begin to see everything like the reflection of the moon in a lake, rather than like the moon itself. You see things like a magician’s show or like a dream. Since you have cut through the true existence, you have seen that everything does not truly exist, therefore it exists like a reflection of the moon in a lake, etc. So in the aftermath, everything appears as unreal, as not true. That is why the individual can walk through walls, the walls will not block the individual, nothing will stop you. If you let it fly, you will probably lose everything. You may not lose yourself, but you may become a crazy guy. So the aftermath is the time, in which you have to train yourself to adapt. That is why the verse says that though phenomena appear, they do not truly exist. You realize that things do not truly exist, but exist like an illusion. But now you have to build up the relativity within that, so that you can function like a normal human being. That is why the path of seeing is divided into two: the direct absorption and the aftermath. The aftermath is the time to adapt to the new reality you have encountered.

Sometimes, when you go into retreat for a while, and then come out, you get disoriented. I had to do that once. I went to Lake St. Claire, where Ruby has a cottage, to do a retreat. It was just for a very short time. I had to get out before the lake completely froze over or stay until winter was over. I chose to get out before. Matthew came to pick me up and I was sitting with him in a restaurant at the other side of the lake and I was completely lost. I could not put things together. That is the little time you need to adjust to the aftermath of a small retreat – just a little disorientation But at the level of aftermath of the path of seeing you get a very strong disorientation.

I will use now some terminology that is not usually used. You need to hear it expressed differently sometimes, because it is about an unusual state. The true reality of existence is really shy towards you, because all this time we have been lied to by existence, we have been cheated, we have been taken in by delusions. But the ultimate lie can no longer remain, it has been busted at this moment. Because of that, all existence is shy, therefore things do no longer appear in the same way as before. Therefore, if you want to, you can walk through the walls, the walls move. You can do all sorts of things. Without the help of architects and engineers you can expand and shrink your whole house. All this becomes possible at that level, because the ultimate lie has been busted and is shy towards the individual. The relative existence is shy towards the individual, it can no longer face that individual. Now that individual will have some difficulty to adjust. You cannot walk around and tell people, ‘Hey, I am an extraordinary being now.’ It is not going to work like that.

It is also possible to do what Milarepa did. He once entered a yak horn, without shrinking his body or expanding the yak horn. He was sitting right in the tiny point of the yak horn. It used to be very difficult to explain to people, but since we now have computers, you can see it: a tiny, little window can open up a whole universe; it is all there. The only issue is whether the individual is capable enough to open that window. It is there, it is reality. If the individual is capable of finding his way in, the window will open and the whole world will open to you. There is a whole different reality in there, with everything in it. Within the small, little atoms of a single universe you can see the whole universe existing, because that is the reality. The only thing blocking it is the un-truth. When you really see the truth, the lie is busted. When it is busted, it is shy towards you, and it can no longer block you. During the concentrated level of the path of seeing, you are in total absorption. At that level you see nothing, you hear nothing, you smell nothing, you touch nothing, you feel nothing – you are totally absorbed in emptiness. In the aftermath, everything functions, but differently.

Then, learning to adapt to the aftermath situation and entering again and deeper into the concentrated phase of meditating on emptiness – the combination of these is done on the path of meditation, which is divided into nine different levels, which in turn have a lot of subdivisions. It is almost like computer software. You open one window and there is another program within that. You open another window in that program and you get another program, and so on. That is how the nine different levels work.

So when the big lie is busted, the relative reality feels shy, embarrassed, because it lied to you all this time. Because of this, the walls are tumbling down, they no longer work, and that is how you can cut through. Physically, literally, you walk through the walls. That is how Milarepa got into the small yak horn. And now the computers tell you, how a small, little atom can have a whole universe in it, and it can open up one after another, endlessly. That is one of the reasons why there is no single point, at which you can arrive, saying, ‘This is it.’ No matter how subtly you analyze it, there will always be another division. That is why Buddha’s way of expressing reality is different from any non-Buddhist. He never accepted a final, smallest item, which would be the ‘last of all’. There is no such thing as ‘last of all’. If you keep on dividing, you can go on forever, you can find the tiniest, smallest atom, but even that can be further divided. Buddha said that you can never reach the point, where you can say, ‘This is the last one. There is no more’. That is why the single atom which cannot be divided [Tib. du ten sha me] was never accepted. This is talking about material reality, which gives you the counterpart of the spiritual reality. Within the tiniest, little thing, everything is possible. That is why external blocks are a lie, a delusion, dualistic. People often use that word out of context. They love that word, but they use it out of context and for different purposes. Through that it loses the value.

Questions and answers

Audience: Is the path of seeing a point that one cannot fall back from? In other words, when one has reached the path of seeing, then dies and gets reborn, will one meet the path again and continue where one has left off sometime in that next life?

Rinpoche: No. Once you have become an Arya, an extraordinary person, you will be free from illness and death. That means, you are free from delusion-oriented, uncontrolled, unmanageable illness and death. Therefore such a person no longer takes rebirth through the force of negative karma and delusion. He or she is totally free from that. With that, the basis of your question is destroyed.

Audience: So when such a person chooses to be reborn as a human, will they have this view of reality from birth on?

Rinpoche: They should, at least by the age of seven. You are touching here on the issue of reincarnate lamas.

Audience: Will their experience of reality be entirely different from that of ordinary beings?

Rinpoche: It is supposed to be. According to the Buddha, everybody will be reincarnated. But the reason reincarnate lamas are considered more important, is because of that. The only reason why they are coming back is because of their compassion and commitment.

Audience: But since they are reborn, let’s say in a human body, that is within the karmic system. So there will be the appearance of suffering. Is there also the experience of suffering?

Rinpoche: In reality, there might not be. In case of a true incarnate lama, there might not be.

Audience: But not every person who has achieved the path of seeing is referred to as incarnate lama, are they?

Rinpoche: Not necessarily, but the achievement of the path of seeing is the basis for the incarnate lamas. People who have achieved the path of seeing, are in reality incarnate lamas. They may not have been recognized as this or that tulku. They might not have been labeled.

Audience: But does such an individual know who they are the reincarnation of ?

Rinpoche: They are supposed to. That is as far as I go.

Audience: Can someone, who in the previous life time has obtained the path of seeing, ever forget that in the next life?

Rinpoche: That is a big question. You have just seen the reality. You are not going to fall back into lower realms, but whether you can retain that knowledge as current knowledge, I am not sure. I don’t know the answer for that. You probably need to perfect that realization. That is why there is a whole further path to travel, before you become fully enlightened. That must be the reason for the path of meditation. Even in terms of the six paramitas, the transcendental actions, you are just beginning to touch them on the path of seeing, you have not gone beyond. So whatever you have done on the path of seeing you have to repeat again lots of time on the path of meditation. That is what the whole path of meditation is about, all the different levels of small small, medium small, big small, etc. It is the total repetition of the alternating experiences of concentration on emptiness and aftermath.

Audience: Is the achievement of the Theravadin path of seeing the level of an arhat?

Rinpoche: No, the level of the arhat comes through the achievement of the path of no more learning. On the path you seeing, you become an Arya, an extraordinary being, in Theravada as well as the Mahayana path.

Audience: You were saying that certain people on the Mahayana path can have the direct perception of emptiness before attaining bodhicitta and because of that, skip the first two paths and go directly to the path of seeing. In the teaching on the GATE GATE Mantra you said that the achievements of wisdom cannot be measured by looking from the wisdom point of view, but can only be measured from the method point of view. The example was birds flying through the sky and leaving no trace, but one can establish their progress from the level of the ground.

Rinpoche: The inability to measure the progress in wisdom from the wisdom point of view refers to the path of seeing and onwards.

Audience: During the GATE GATE teachings you also said that it can be dangerous to achieve direct perception of emptiness before making progress with the compassion-oriented aspects of the path?

Rinpoche: I don’t think I said that. I may have mentioned that there are certain intelligent people – actually fortunate people – who may encounter emptiness directly way before they achieve the bodhimind. If that happens, such a person, when they do achieve the bodhimind, will go directly to the third path and skip the first two paths. Until they have achieved the bodhimind, however, they are not yet on the Mahayana path. Whatever they have achieved so far, is a Hinayana path. Whoever develops bodhimind, becomes a bodhisattva and is therefore on the Mahayana path, and when such a person had achieved the direct perception of emptiness prior to that, he or she will go directly onto the third path, skip the first two. Referring to the danger that was mentioned, in the early stages of the practice, if one puts too much emphasis on the wisdom, before making progress with the method-related aspects of the path, there is a danger. This is what I said:

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

If you look at the emptiness wrongly, it can be like trying to catch a poisonous snake. The result is that you can get killed. A person who says millions of mantras, but with a mean mind, will get no good results from saying all these mantras. If in such a frame of mind you get angry while saying mantras, instead of helping you, they may harm you.

Audience: You have said that even on the path of seeing there are still karmic imprints.

Rinpoche: Even on the enlightened level there are karmic imprints. Some people will try to tell you that they are free of karma. That is bullshit. Even the fully enlightened beings, like Buddha and Avalokitesvara, all the yidams, deities, gurus, etc, are not free of karma. They have only positive karma. That is why they are such great beings.

Audience: Do you think that everyone is created equal?

Rinpoche: I think that everyone is not created. But I think every being is equal.

Audience: How can there be beings, if nothing is created?

Rinpoche: You just pop up.

Audience: Equally?

Rinpoche: The only difference is that some are a little taller, some are shorter, some are fatter, some are thinner.

Audience: Who says that?

Rinpoche: We all say that.

Audience: We all say that some are fatter, some thinner, and so on?

Rinpoche: That’s true. You look around and you can see everybody.

Audience: Does that happen equally?

Rinpoche: I don’t know, everyone is different, some are shorter, some are taller, some have less hair, some have more.

Audience: But are we not equally important?

Rinpoche: Equally important, yes, sure.

Audience: Is there just one lie, is there just one bubble to burst?

Rinpoche: When the big bubble bursts, all other smaller ones will just disappear. They are all under the wing of the one big bubble. I believe that is how the spiritual path really works. The struggle we have is whether we want to get away from that lie or want to remain within it. All the push and pull is because of that. That one thing causes all difficulties. Sometimes people want to be alone. At other times they want to socialize. Sometimes you want to hide in your cocoon and sometimes you want to get out there openly. All this in and out, back and forth, etc, all the difficulties we are having in life is because we could not bust the one big lie within ourselves. But we can’t say that too early, because it would cause trouble for the people. People will definitely misinterpret that. The whole idea of over-romanticizing the theory of emptiness ends up in senselessness. You lose the sense, and after a little while you think it does not matter, whether you have gold or sand, because it is dust anyway, gold dust or sand dust. You don’t care whether you are tied up by iron chains or gold chains, because in any case, you are tied up. In a way it is true, but in another way it makes a big difference whether somebody gives you a handful of gold dust or a handful of sand. It makes a big difference, although it is just dust.

Over-romanticizing will go out of the line, not differentiating between gold dust and sand. That is why we don’t want to talk too much about that, as long as the whole Lam Rim has not been studied and one has not heard about the path of seeing. Therefore we only recently have come up with the teachings of GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA and now the teaching on the five paths. That is a nice way of coming through and busting the big lie. We could teach that earlier, but we don’t want to encourage over-romanticizing. You know, in the sixties, some people went to the travel agent with a hand full of pebbles, saying that they wanted to buy air tickets; they insisted that they had the same value as dollars. That is over-romanticizing the meaninglessness and the busting of the great lie. You end up saying that everything is the same, that nothing matters, because ultimately everything is equal, everything comes down the zero level. You know, people do that.Rinpoche: The first bhumi, ‘boundless joy’, which coincides with the path of seeing, is only available on the Mahayana path. Literally it means sa tang me rab to gawa – very, very happy place.

Audience: On the path of seeing you cut out all negative karmic results. Therefore there is no return in samsara through karma. I can understand that bodhisattvas can return through compassion and commitment. But in the case of the Theravadin level, what happens to that person after this lifetime?

Rinpoche: In order to understand that, you have to know the four result-levels of the Theravadin path: Stream Enterer, Once Returners, Never Returners, No more Learning.

I am not sure whether the level of stream enterer coincides with the path of seeing of the Theravada level or not. But in any case, Once Returner means that you have to be reborn one more time to complete the path. Never Returner is the level where you can, if you don’t die before, achieve the level of an arhat in that very life time.

When you become an arhat in this life time, then your body, which is part of the First Noble Truth, the Truth of suffering, and therefore is a result of negative karma, is still with you. This is called ‘with remainder’. When you die with that body, there is no more left over and that is called ‘ultimate arhat level’. According to the Theravada doctrine this is like when a candle burns down and finally blows out. There is no more candle light, all the wax is gone too, all you get is a little bit of smoke and that will also disappear. Nothing is left. The body is dismantled, therefore all feelings are also gone. Because of that, there is no more cognition, and because of that, even consciousness disappears. There is nothing left over. That is called the ‘ultimate level of no more learning’. It is all dispersed somewhere. The Mahayana will call this level ‘ordinary enlightenment’, while Theravada will call it simply ‘enlightenment.’ In the Mahayana there is still the extraordinary enlightenment to come. So the Mahayana does not accept the viewpoint that nothing remains. They say that, when you reach that level, you may stay in meditative equipoise for centuries or eons, however, one day the Buddhas and bodhisattvas will come and wake you up and highjack you by helicopter to the path of seeing of the Mahayana path.

That is why in Buddhism there are two different focal points. One stream will say that ultimately there is only one vehicle or yana. The other will say that ultimately there are three yanas. That is why you have different schools of philosophical viewpoints in Buddhism. The lower schools, the Vaibashikas and Sautrantikas, will accept that there are ultimately three yanas. The Mind Only school [Chittamatra] and the Central Path Schools [Madhayamika] only accept one ultimate vehicle. This question is an important focal point of Buddhist theology. Before Dan Lopez took up his current position at the University of Michigan, they asked him to speak on this point: whether there is one yana or several. That subject is discussed in all streams of Buddhism.

Audience: I have heard about inner heat, or tummo. Is it useful to think about that in the context of the path of action and the level of heat, etc.?

Rinpoche: It is irrelevant here. It has nothing to do with the path of accumulation or the path of action. It may have something to do with the path of seeing, but mainly with the path of meditation.

Audience: I have a more technical comment to make. Perhaps the terminology of ‘path’ is not the best possible one to use for the five paths. It suggests that there could be five different paths leading to the same goal, whereas in fact it is more like one path, with five different levels of subtlety. I don’t know whether ‘path’ is the literal translation from the Tibetan.

Rinpoche: I don’t know, I am not really translating, I am just talking from the top of my head.

The five paths in reverse

With regard to the Mahayana five paths, total enlightenment is achieved on the path of no more learning. In order to get there, you have go through the path of meditation. That does not mean meditation in the way that we normally meditate. On that level you do a particular type of meditation. In order to get to the path of meditation, you have to meditate on true reality. In order to be able to do that, you have to know what true reality is. This is what you find out on the path of seeing. At that level you will be free of karmic forces, you have total control over your life. The capability to reincarnate by choice is developed at this level.

You do not necessarily have to reborn to achieve that, but the ability comes with the achievement of the path of seeing. Good, true reincarnate lamas should be at that level, not people like me, but the real ones, not the phony ones. In order to reach this, you have to complete the path of action which is divided into four: heat, peak, patience and best of Dharma.

The way it works on the path of action is through generating heat. It is an old, 2500-year old metaphor. If you try to make a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood against each other, you have to rub very hard. Through that, you generate heat. That is not yet enough to develop sparks or generate smoke. You have to rub harder, you have to go to the peak level. Even then you do not quite get a fire, so you have to be patient and work hard. That is the level of patience. Then you will get the best possible heat. After that you can burn the delusions. That is why we talk about heat, sparks, etc. It relates to the burning of the delusions – that is the true exorcism.

In order to even get to the level of heat, we have to accumulate merit, which happens on the path of accumulation. That, in brief, is the description of the five paths in reverse.

Karma is a basic, fundamental natural law governing all this. The higher positive karma brings the individual to these different levels.