Archive Result

20000328GRAABWL

Side A of tape 89 of 03/28/2000

At the end of this session we want to dedicate the merits to the father of one of our friends who has died and to the relatives of some of our students who are sick. Dedication works. I don’t want to spend time explaining how. We have already read through the Bodhisattvacharyavatara where this was explained. You know.

Last week end I went to a conference about the Art of Dying in New York which was organized by Tibet House and the Open Center together. Thousands of people came. It was very well organized, no doubt about it and no doubt also very expensive. For my session alone, which was only an hour and a half, they would not let anybody in unless they paid 350 Dollars per head. However, there were a lot of people who attended. Deepak Chopra was also there and in his session he must have had over 2000 people. It was very interesting. He talks always about the spiritual and the scientific together. Himself being a trained doctor, he has the scientific language. He can really introduce it scientifically. He could also throw challenges to various neurologists and others who had come to his work shop. He told them that they were missing a lot by looking at the scientific part only, without looking at the spiritual part. He went on to explain even mental patterns and the continuation of the mind and its discontinuation. He talked about quantum leaps and said that without looking at the spiritual path, there was no explanation for them.

Then I was doing a session with Ram Dass which I enjoyed very much. We didn’t get to prepare anything, we didn’t even have time to talk to each other before hand. We met on stage. Ram Dass told the audience that nothing was prepared and started and I plugged in and it went very well. Before I left I briefly spoke to Ram Dass and he said he liked it and we should work more together. Then I invited him to come to Ann Arbor and he agreed. He will come in September or October. He has recovered well from his illness [stroke]. You have to give him a little time to get the words out, but otherwise it is fine. It is not like earlier. He gets the message across. On the whole he is doing very good.

I have just come to do the Tuesday night teaching here in Ann Arbor and tomorrow I will go back to New York again. On the way here, before landing in Detroit, the plane was hit by lightning, but nothing happened. The crew was great, they didn’t say much. You could see the sparks going round even inside the room. Just before that happened, I was thinking about if something happened, would we be able to walk away from it? Then suddenly, without shaking and thunder, that lightning hit. Most people didn’t even notice. The air hostess came in and said, ‘There is lightning, but nothing has gone wrong.’ She didn’t say that the lightning had hit the plane. After landing the plane the pilot announced, ‘The plane’s nose was hit by lightning, but nothing happened, we are still here.’

During the Dying Work shop I talked on a subject called ‘Tibetan Buddhist Approach to Dying’ or something. Thurman always writes the titles, and he didn’t even consult me. So just before I got on to the stage I had to read from the program what I was supposed to talk about. Anyway, I went through the stages of dying and what people are expected to experience and what you can do and what you encounter with. I didn’t talk much in detail, just gave them the bare bones and I didn’t do any meditation because I didn’t want to give the impression of a religious trip. Thurman actually did meditations in his sessions. He spent quite a long time on it.

Let us continue where we stopped last time. We did verse ninety-eight. We have been doing this Bodhicaryavatara now since 1996. I began with explaining just one verse every Tuesday night and went into quite some detail. I am sure when this is made into a book one day, it will be a very good one, although there are already some English commentaries available. Actually, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s Meaningful To Behold has been edited by Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche. This is not mentioned anywhere, but when Geshe Kelsang wrote this commentary he sent the manuscripts to Dharamsala and Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche would read it and we all would get little excerpts to read too.

The worst thing we got to read was a story in which one Geshe in Germany wrote about Drepung. Kyabje Rinpoche gave this to me and told me, ‘Can you read this and figure out something to make this readable?’ I took it with me and tried over three months to do something with it. I gave it back to Kyabje Rinpoche and he then gave it to Doboom Rinpoche, the director of Tibet House. At that time he was not yet director. He played with this text for another two or three months and then Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche gave that to Samdong Rinpoche. He is the chancellor of the Institute for Higher Tibetan Buddhist studies in Sarnath in India. He was very busy. So he came to see me in Delhi one time and asked me, ‘Can you do me a favor? Kyabje Rinpoche gave me this text to correct. It is going to take me months.’ So I recognized it and told him that I had already worked on it and also Doboom had. So Samdong Rinpoche did something to it himself and finally Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche also worked on it and then gave it back to this Geshe who published it in Germany. He published it in Tibetan. I later saw that version and even then it was not readable! He used philosophical terms like in the Geshe teachings. Really tough.

Anyway, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s manuscripts were also corrected by Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche. That is why Meaningful To Behold is a very good book. It was his first book too. His Holiness’s Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night is also very good. The transcripts of our own Bodhisattvacaryavatara are coming out too. The first chapter is already done and that alone is over 150 pages long. I think it will be very good. I only hope it will not be too lengthy. So I am going to do at least a couple of verses each evening. We had begun to talk about verse ninety-eight.

Verse 98

Three times by day and three times by night

I should recite the Sutra of the Three Heaps.

For by relying on the Buddhas and the Awakening Mind

My remaining downfalls will be purified.

The three heaps in the title of the sutra refer to the harvesting time. When the rice, barely or whatever crop was harvested, the farmers would collect them and make them into big heaps. This therefore is the source of the food. Both, the Hindu – as well as the Buddhist teachings use that image a lot in religious information. It indicates to the individual that the content is a source of nourishment. The verse says to recite this text three times by day and three times by night. Actually it is a purification method. The three times refer to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Buddha in this case refers to the 35 Purification Buddhas.

In most other traditions you talk about the Almighty God, just one. In Hinduism there are several gods like Shiva and Shakti and so on. In Buddhism it is different. There are many Buddhas. It can be very confusing. Sometimes all the Buddhas seem to be one Buddha. There are the 35 Purification Buddhas, the 8 Medicine Buddhas, the 10 Directional Buddhas, the Countless, Limitless Buddhas, the Buddhas of the Three Times (past, present and future), there is Shakyamuni Buddha, there is the one thousand Buddhas of this fortunate eon, etc. You may ask, ‘What has that got to do with me?’ On top of that you have so many yidams. There are wrathful and peaceful ones, beautiful looking and fearsome looking ones. Some are smiling, some are terrifying. To create more confusion, there are also the Bodhisattvas. Then, of course, there are Dakas and Dakinis. Even that is not enough. There are also the Dharma protectors. So what have I got to do with them? Actually, as a matter of fact, every sentient being, not only humans, have something to do with those Buddhas. You may be Buddhist or non-Buddhist, knowingly or unknowingly, you have got something to do with those Buddhas.

These Buddhas are in absolute reality Buddha. But then they have their own different purposes. They are specialized. It is like they are all doctors. Some are surgeons, some practice general medicine, some specialize in stomach or kidney diseases. Looking at the doctors, they are different individual beings. When you are looking at the Buddhas, including the wrathful and peaceful yidams, etc, in absolute reality they all plug into one source. They are almost one enlightened being. It is a little complicated. I can’t quite say that they are all one person. Theoretically, that would not be right, but practically it is. However, each and every one of them have specialized activities, that is why you have to many different ones. It is almost like a computer server which keeps all the information in its storage. Then everybody can plug in and get everything they want out of it. I like to think that it works that way. I cannot say, ‘Yes, that’s what it is.’ I can’t be decisive about it. But I like to think that way.

The job of the 35 Buddhas is purification. There is a little prayer which Tibetans used to say almost all the tame. It is called tung sha. Tungwa is downfalls in English and sha means purification. Thus it means Purification of Downfalls. In there are all the names of the 35 Buddhas. Each line says, ‘I prostrate to you, Oh Buddha So and So’. Then there is the Seven Limb practice contained in it which mainly emphasizes purification, naming almost all the downfalls. It is a little prayer which you can say. So it is done on the basis of the 35 Buddhas. The object of this practice are these 35 Buddhas. The Bodhisattva-mind, both relative and absolute, are the Dharma, through which we will purify all our left-over downfalls.

How does purification really work? That is very important for everybody’s life. It is important in the judaeo-christian tradition. It is important in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition. It is important in any tradition. It is important in our life. We have to be pure. Purity is extremely important. We need to have it. There are downfalls and bad things in life. It happens. It is interesting. Whenever I am with Ram Das and say something is bad, he will ask, ‘What is that?’ Last time I almost said to him, ‘A perception of negativity’, but I swallowed the words back. I didn’t want to argue with him, out of respect for him. So I say, ‘Well, we want things to go the right way, but sometimes it does not go. I like to call that bad.’

When we look at the American spirituality it is very interesting. My perception of American spirituality is the judaeo-christian tradition. It was there. But then the interpretation of it has become so rigid. There is nothing else that you can do, unless you want to go to hell. You are going to be punished. That became so strong that the people who wanted to do the right things and good things couldn’t take it any more. Then the counter culture things came up, all the alternative things. The pendulum which had been at the extreme side of punishing everybody, swung completely to the other extreme. Everything is love and light. There is nothing bad, no negativity. So there are two camps. In one camp there are the totally dedicated and wonderful people who want to do the right thing for the right reasons, for the right purpose at the right time, so much so that they have become stuck at the right. Then you have another bunch of people who want to swing to the extreme left and be over there. Everything is wonderful, love and light, a manifestation of God, and so on. I am not criticizing anyone as wrong. But I am appealing to the people, that there is something called the ‘middle’. Everything cannot be so righteous. Nor can everything be only wonderful and beautiful. We go through a lot of suffering in our life every day, no matter how much we pretend not to. In general we can see it on television, read in the newspaper and hear about it on the radio. Then it also comes close to ourselves. It happens. There is no use for us to pretend that it is not going to happen. We know very well that the good things happen and the bad things happen. This is life, and we must accept that. We must ground ourselves. You have to accept that things can go right and wrong, that while going right, they can go wrong and while going wrong they can take a 180 degree turn. Everything is possible. When you accept that you are beginning to be grounded. Until then you are swinging from one side to the other. When you don’t swing you rest in the middle. Life is in the middle. Everything can happen. There is black, there is white and even gray. When I first came to Michigan I was accused of not seeing anything gray. Everything was black and white. But here I am saying that there is gray. That is an important point. There are good and bad things. They happen in our lives.

Why? Is it because God was happy and wanted us to be happy and then got mad and tortured us? I love to say that God is a loving God. I don’t want to have an image of God as an angry God. I don’t think anybody wants that. But good and bad things happen to us all the time – as a matter of fact, hundred times in one day. Good things happen, bad things happen. Buddha has a different answer. It is not punishment and reward. Buddha says that we are doing it ourselves. I am making myself happy and I am making myself miserable. It is not a second or third person. I am responsible. If I am responsible, I certainly would want to make myself happy, healthy and wealthy all the time. No one is looking to become miserable, suffering, poor an sick. So what are we doing? We are responsible but we are not in control.

End of side A of tape 89

Side B of tape 89 of 03/28/2000

[Lets say you have a pressure cooker and we put] all the ingredients in there. So we cut them all the right way and put them in that pressure cooker. We seal them in there and hopefully they will turn out all right. We don’t have much control once the pressure cooker is on. You cannot open it and do something else. When you finally release the pressure you will see if it has come out good or bad. It also depends on what kinds of ingredients you put in. No one else is going to put anything in there or take anything out. You may have thought that you did everything right, but you may not have put quite the right amount of water in, so it turns out a little burnt, or it may be okay or it may be a little too waterish. When you realize it is waterish, it is too late. You cannot do anything. It is already cooked and you have to put it on the table.

Just like that we create our own causes. Then we get them into the process. The process takes over and we can only wait. If it is negative, we hope that it may end soon. If it is positive, we hope and pray that it may last long. That is what we do. Buddha calls that karma. This word is now even in the English dictionary. It means cause and effect, natural circle, natural law. Who created it? I did. Who experiences it? I do, no one else. My karma will not effect you, your karma will not effect me. However, we also have commonly created karma which commonly effects us. There is common karma as a country, as a universe, as the whole existence, as interdependent nature we all have that. However, there is also individual karma which only that individual experiences. Therefore I am responsible for my future, whether it is going to be good or bad. I can make a difference. I can do and undo things. It is in my hand. Once it has been taken over by the process it is too late for me to do anything. Can I remain pure all the time, not creating any negative karma? No, it is not possible as a human being in this world, in the year 2000. With every movement we do, we create both, negative and positive karma continuously, endlessly, always. You can’t help it. For example, if you live in Southfield or Bloomfield you will not be able to get here without driving. Driving itself is not a negativity. But under your wheels you can crush so many beings, especially if you live on a dirt road. You cannot avoid that, unless you follow the Jain religion. This Indian religion requires everybody to walk bare foot and cover their mouths, because insects might jump in otherwise. They also carry some kind of animal’s tail to wave the insects away. 2000 years ago all that was possible. Today it is not. Even the greatest Jain, once he or she comes to the United States, has to go by car. Without driving there is no way to get to the places you want to go to.

So what can we do? We have to purify. It is absolutely important. It is one of the most important contemplations. How is this done? Do I have to go to church, get into that box and give my confession? I might find that James Bond is sitting on the other side of the window! So we don’t want to do that. In the judaeo-christian tradition unfortunately this became sometimes a source of corruption. The church knows what you did. When I was a monk, we had to do confession every second week. But it was simple for us. All we had to do was to recite all together a text in which it said that all downfalls have been confessed. It did not matter whether or not you did it. Why is it good to say it? Not because you have to tell somebody, but in order to remember and acknowledge that you have made a mistake. You have to regret what you have done. If you don’t regret, you are bound to do it continuously again and again. But you don’t have to say, ‘I am not going to drive my car any more’. What you say is, ‘I don’t want to kill, but when I drive my car I can’t help it.’ You can tell this to yourself You don’t have to tell others at all. The purpose of this is regret. You acknowledge the negative action and regret it. You have to be aware of what you have done and raise the regret. That is the most important. If you regret something you want to make yourself pure. If you think you have done nothing wrong, why would you want to purify?

There are some people who hurt others but still refuse to acknowledge and recognize that but keep on thinking that they did them a great favor. If you regret, it is almost automatic that you will not repeat that action. This is not going to happen unless we are crazy or unless we are addicted. This is probably what happens to us. We are addicted to the negative emotions. The consequence of that addiction is that you are going to repeat. You won’t get cured of that addiction. You are bound to repeat it.

Then you need an antidote action. In the case of killing insects, etc, the antidote is saving lives. If it is hatred, the antidote is compassion and love. If it is attachment or ignorance, develop wisdom. The antidote to stealing is generosity. The antidote to sexual misconduct is to regret that and do it the right way (laughs). If it is lying, speak the truth. Overall, meditate love and compassion. Try to develop the Bodhisattva mind, which is unlimited, unconditioned love and compassion. Also meditate on emptiness. This is really the sharp weapon which can cut through ignorance.

Then comes compensation. What is negativity? To me it is when you hurt somebody. Don’t leave yourself out. When you hurt somebody else or yourself, that is a negative action. Such an action will create negative karma. Some actions of hurting are more powerful, some less powerful. That depends on the action of hurting itself and on the motivation and on the conclusion.

It is very funny. Lets say you like to tease somebody else. However, you end up punching the other person. What happens? You hurt that person. No doubt, it is a negative action. But how strong it is going to be depends on whether or not anger has come in between while you were playing. It makes a difference if you get angry and hurt somebody or if by accident that person jumps over you and you happen to hurt them. I don’t want to go into detail here. You can use your good, intelligent mind here and make your own judgment. To make any negative karma powerful, there has to be a powerful motivation, a powerful action and a powerful satisfaction. The same thing is true for positive karma. You need a powerful motivation, a powerful action and a powerful conclusion to make positive karma strong too. The rules apply in the same way. Both is karma by nature, whether negative or positive. Whether it is strong or weak depends on you as the person who has created it. That is motivation, action and conclusion.

Can you purify? Sure you can, no matter how heavy or terrible the negativity we might have created. Everything is purifiable. Buddha has given examples. We ourselves are like the moon, nice, clean, clear and shining. The negative karma is like the clouds. Truly, the reason why karma is purifiable is that I am me. I am me, because I am purifiable. Who is that ‘me’? Deepak Chopra said, ‘We don’t know who we are, so we create negative karma.’ Didn’t he say that in his lecture? I disagree with him, definitely. How do I know who I am? The point of reference of who I am is my name and form. The name and form however, changes all the time, so how do I know who I am?

A few years ago Tricycle Magazine asked me to be a speaker in their Change of Mind Day in the middle of Central Park. There were loudspeakers everywhere in Central Park, all over the place. I was the next speaker. Somebody was saying, ‘Who am I, what am I?’ and so on. I kept on thinking, ‘What do I care who I am and what I am? I don’t care. But could I say that to the American spiritual listeners?’ These thoughts went through my head. At that point I saw Joseph Goldstein walking in front of me. I thought it would be good to ask him, because he has been an American spiritual leader for a long time. He is a tall guy and was walking along. I, being a short and fat guy, could not catch him at all. He was going faster and faster through the middle of Central Park. Then suddenly, the loudspeaker said, ‘Our next speaker is running right through Central Park over there. Would you mind to come up to the microphone?’ Joseph started looking round then. I had tried to avoid shouting after him, because that is disrespectful. So I was running after him.

The point really is that the question, ‘Who am I and what am I’ is really not the point. Now I can speak confidently. You can only know who and what you are with reference to time. The points of reference are time, name and form. These go on changing all the time. You may be able to trace it over a hundred or a thousand different lives. That’s about it. Beyond that it will be very difficult. Our lives didn’t begin a thousand years ago. Our lives didn’t begin a thousand life times ago. We have been here for a very long time. As a matter of fact in the seminar ‘Art of Dying’ Thurman said, ‘There are no dead people’. In a way that is true. The dead people will become living people. That is how reincarnation works. Each and every one of us is reincarnated. I am talking from the Buddhist point of view, from my own Buddhist background. You have every right not to believe it, and I have the right to say it and you may be kind enough to give it the benefit of doubt. You have got to, you have no right to say ‘No’, because you don’t have a valid reason at all. Neither can you quote from Jesus’ teachings, nor can you produce a valid reason that there is no reincarnation. I have some quotes coming from Buddha which say that there is reincarnation. I also have valid reasons. Reincarnation exists because of continuation, because of memory, because of reflection. Children remember what has happened before. It may not be very clear to that person. But each and every one went through that period. Each and every one of us has touched our previous lives in the form of memories, in the form of dreams, in the form of anything, like hallucinations.

Besides that, very clearly today’s I is the continuation of yesterday’s I. It was the same I who went to New York and attended that conference. It is the same I who sat in that plane when it was hit by lighting. It is the same I who landed safely and is talking to you today. It will be the same I who is going back to New York early in the morning. This I continues over the years, over the decades of ageing. It is the same I which has been fifty years old, forty years, thirty years and so on, right back to being in the womb of my mother and further back, in the bardo. In between the bardo and the mother’s womb you don’t see it. That limitation is not my fault. It is that with our present capability we cannot see it. It is going beyond our perception. That is why we don’t see it and why we cannot talk to anybody who has come back from death. When people come out of death they change their appearance, their identity, their name, their parents. They even change their sex. A male can become female, a female can become male. They change their color. Caucasians can become African Americans and African Americans can become Caucasian Americans. That is why we cannot shake hands with somebody who we used to know in their previous life. That is the only reason. It is not that they don’t have a life, that they are not there. Are you with me? That is my argument. You don’t have to buy that, but think about it, think about the continuation.

Then, how many stories have we heard about what happens after death, like ghost stories? How many psychics give messages to how many people? Do you think that they are all lying ? Certainly not. That at least should give you reasons enough to reserve the benefit of the doubt. I am not here to establish your past and future life. That is not my job. I am here to contribute to our life, so that we can make a difference. When we can make a difference in our present life, why can’t we make a difference in our other lives? These lives are much more than this life. Our life which we have now will last at the most a hundred years. I don’t know whether anybody wants to live longer than that. But when we talk about our lives, we are talking thousands of years. That is why when we contribute to our lives, it will make a big difference to us.

Anyway, I am talking so much nonsense. Are we going to remain stuck with this verse? In essence, no matter how heavy the negativity might be, there is nothing that cannot be purified.

I must share with you the story of Angulimala. It is very common. A number of you have heard it before. It was during the Buddha’s life time. There was a crazy guy. He was very rigid, very stubborn. He had a good mind and a desire to be liberated. However, he had a bad accident in form of a bad teacher. This teacher told him that if he went and killed one thousand human beings in one week, chopped their thumbs off, strung them through a thread and wore them round the neck, he would liberate him. So Angulimala killed 999 human beings. He could not get the last one. Everybody would run away as soon as they saw him, except his mother. Who would like to look at a killer? But the mother’s love did not let her forget her son.

Whenever we talk about the mother’s love, don’t think of your own mother and the relationship you have with her. Think of your own children and the relationship you have with them. There is a huge difference. It is like the difference between sky and ground, like mountains and oceans. Many people think, ‘My mother is angry, upset.’ That is your perception. But when you look through the mother’s window of how she cares for her children, it is very different. I don’t have the experience of being a mother myself, but I have seen it. I have seen many of them. They will not hesitate if the child calls up at two o’clock in the morning, saying, ‘I am stuck here, can you come and pick me up? I am 40 miles away.’ Mothers will not think twice. That is the example: How you as a mother will care for your children.

Angulimala’s mother could not let her crazy son go on and kill everybody, but on the other hand she was also afraid of getting killed herself. So she would come from distance, show her face and then hide again. Angulimala saw her, but he didn’t want to kill her. He was hoping that another person would show up. At that moment, suddenly Buddha appeared. Angulimala thought, ‘Oh great, now I don’t have to kill Mother, I can get this guy.’ He started going after Buddha who was walking on slowly. However, he could not catch him. He pursued him for a long while until he got tired. He shouted, ‘Hey, wait!’ Buddha replied, ‘I am waiting for you. Why don’t you walk a little faster?’ That is how he broke the ice. Soon a conversation started. Finally, Buddha brought him to his ashram and made him purify. He attained liberation and the position of nirvana within that very life time – after killing 999 people for no fault of their own. He murdered them. And even that person could become pure and did become an arhat. In contrast, what have we done wrong? Nothing like that. So we can certainly be purified. It is just that so far we didn’t have the opportunity or the know-how. That is the problem.

So this is purification with the four powers: Recognition, regret, antidote action and compensation. Compensation is taking refuge to the enlightened beings and developing love and compassion to the non-enlightened beings. It is simple, it is easy, everybody can do it. You don’t have to be a Buddhist. You don’t even have to be spiritual. You can be you and do this. I don’t have the time to give you the opportunity to have questions and answers today. So I am going to close shop. I will be talking to you next week for sure, although I don’t know yet whether I will be physically present here or not. Perhaps I will. Thank you.

End of side B of tape 89 of 03/28/00