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20020514GRAABWL

CD of 05-14-02

In the last few weeks I was away in Holland. In the time when I was away some senior students have covered the preliminaries and then Aura did the ‘Common with the Lower Level.’ There are three main divisions in the lam rim: common with the lower level, common with the medium level and the Mahayana. The ‘Common with the lower Level’ is really the basis.

The spiritual path is very important. You know that. That is why you are all here. The reason is that we live in such a crazy world. Even in the good old world, in Buddha’s time or when Jesus was here, even then it was crazy. If it weren’t crazy they wouldn’t have put Jesus up on the cross. So it is a crazy world, maybe it has been crazy right from the beginning. But the effect was a little less severe, because during that time there was no scientific development. Now we have all these planes flying over Afghanistan. They weren’t there then. There were not so many bombs to throw. So even though it was crazy, the effect was much less. Now, even if only a little thing goes wrong, the effect is huge. This is our wonderful scientific development. This world is beautiful and wonderful, however, if anything goes wrong, even slightly, the effect is so bad. We have nice houses with good temperature control, we can have environmentally friendly or unfriendly technology, yet we don’t have joy and peace of mind. We have tremendous pressure. There is individual competitiveness everywhere. We have education and PhD’s. Yet when we go looking for a job, we find that there are a hundred and one other PhD’s are applying for the same job. The work that is expected now is also much more and so this extremely competitive world makes us unhappy. We don’t have inner mental peace, inner satisfaction. Everybody is looking for some kind of peace, satisfaction, harmony and joy. That is why people turn to the spiritual path. That has to be the reason.

Buddhism is known to give you that peace. That does not mean that other religions cannot give you that. They can. But Buddhism is more known for it. I am just saying that because I am a Buddhist! But it is commonly accepted that it reduces our anxiety, our fear, even the threat of war. That is not just because it is Buddhism. It is the experience of Buddha brought to that level. The difference between the judaeo-christian tradition and Buddhism is that in Buddhism you don’t have a supernatural power like God. Neither has a Son of God preached this. Buddhism is totally based on the personal experience of one single individual human being. Unfortunately he happened to be an Indian prince. Being a prince did serve the purpose at that time. Today it would be far better if the Buddha was not a prince, but simply a guy from Detroit. That would be wonderful. That is what is really needed nowadays. That is why I say it is unfortunate that he happened to be an Indian prince. Perhaps, at that time, if he wasn’t a prince, nobody would have listened to him. In any case his teachings were based on his personal experience. It was the experience of encountering physical, mental and emotional pain. He was looking for a way to handle it. Is there a way out or do we have to say, ‘Since we are born we have to suffer’. The answer Buddha found was this: Since you are born you have an opportunity, because of this wonderful life.’

This life we have is wonderful. We all know that. It is unfortunately also very easy to destroy, easy to misuse. It is extremely easy to destroy. You don’t need a genius to destroy a human life. Everyone of us is already expert in how to destroy it. We do it by submitting to laziness and to our addictions. It is that simple. You don’t have to go to school to learn how to hate people or how to become obsessed with something or somebody. We learn it naturally. It is in our nature. Actually, it is not in our deeper nature. It is just that we are addicted and we pick this behavior up everywhere. Whenever there is an opportunity to be lazy we are the first person to be lazy. Whenever there is an opportunity to have … – you know what I am thinking – we are the first person to have it. We don’t have to learn how to do it. It is there.

So the life we have is wonderful, but extremely fragile and extremely easy to waste. We always think that if there is something to do we could be doing it tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. We know that. The earlier Tibetan lamas gave the example of the old man’s beard. You keep on shaving it and it will keep on growing again. If you shave today, you have to shave again tomorrow and every day after that and sometimes even again in the afternoon when you have a 5 o’ clock shadow.

Another example is a person sitting on the beach counting the waves. Day and night the waves keep coming. They never stop.

That is how we waste our life. Everything is so important for us. But the most important we can do for ourselves is to work out how we can fulfill the mission of our life. I am not simply talking about some simple meditation. I am not particularly talking about learning. All these things are necessary, but the whole purpose is to fulfill the mission of your life. The spiritual practice is nothing but fulfilling the mission of your life.

What is the mission of your life? If you don’t know that, then you don’t know what is your spiritual practice and you don’t know what to do. In order to fulfill the mission of your life you first have to have the wisdom that follows learning. If you don’t learn you don’t know what to do. There are people who meditate. They sit there, adjust their body posture and sit in a particular position. They may sit with open mouth or with shut mouth, with open eyes or shut eyes. You know why? Because they have seen the next person doing it that way. They are simply copy-catting. That is not the meaning of fulfilling the mission of your life. What you cannot copy is how to work out your crazy thoughts and what your mind is doing. It is like a cyclone. You have to find out what that is.

Right now we don’t know how to handle that. This is something we cannot copy, because we can’t see what the next person is thinking. That is why the wisdom following learning is necessary. Otherwise you are simply sitting there, waiting for something to happen. Or you simply sit there and pray and cry. I am not criticizing prayers, but just praying, waiting and crying is not going to solve the problem. There is nothing wrong with praying, but it is not enough. You have to handle it by yourself. This is such a wonderful life. It allows you to work it out by yourself, without depending on any second of third person.

You can seek help from supernatural powers, but you are still the one who has got to do the work. If you don’t do it and you just wait, nothing is going to happen.

When I was a kid in Tibet they were showing this romantic Indian movie called Anankari. It was funny. This was before the Chinese came, in the late 40s and early 50s. Actually, some Chinese were there already. A cousin of mine owned the movie theatre. Whenever I went there I would get a box for myself. In the beginning I used to see a lot of lay people there, but after a while, when I looked down, it was all just monks in the theatre. Actually the movie was full of love scenes. In one of the episodes that couple lay down in this fantastic place and there were these beautiful, ripe grapes almost hanging above their mouths. They were just lying there, but didn’t get up and pull the grapes to their mouths, nor did the grapes fall in their mouths. Finally some crazy person appeared and just shot them. Their joyful place was disrupted. This movie played over 40 years ago.

It is like that with the spiritual practice. If you are just waiting for the grapes to fall into your mouth, it is not going to happen, unless you put efforts in and pull them towards you. In the spiritual path, if you keep on waiting for something, it is never going to happen. You have got to act.

Don’t do a lizard meditation. I will tell you a story. I used to have a retreat place in between the big monasteries around Lhasa. It was very nice. The area around there is like the Rocky Mountains. There are beautiful caves. My cave had a living room, kitchen, dining room, toilet and even running water. Tibet in general doesn’t have running water. My cave did. It was quite easy to have running water, because there was spring above my cave on the mountain side. My father had built a small dam, where he had collected the water from the spring. There was a pipe through which the water was directed right into the cave. In winter it didn’t work, but in summer it came straight down. There was a knob at the end of the pipe where you could turn the water off. Since the pipeline was quite long and going over the rocks which were heated up by the sunshine, sometimes the water was quite warm. That was nice.

I used to spend one or two months there every year. In that area there were a lot of lizards. The lizards would fight with the scorpions. The lizards always swallow the scorpions. If the sun shines, the lizard will win, because the heat of the sun will make the scorpion inside the lizard’s belly melt. If it is rainy and cold weather, the scorpion will fight its way out of the lizard’s stomach. Then the lizard dies. I used to see that all the time. The lizard and the scorpion will get up on their tails and fight. So the lizard then goes to sit on a rock and puts his chest on the warm rock. He opens his mouth and sucks the air in. One of my teacher once called me and said, ‘Come, have a look’. He showed me this lizard sitting on the rock, with mouth wide open, just sitting there. So my teacher said, ‘Look, the lizard is meditating!’ Since then I have this understanding of ‘lizard meditation’. If you think nothing and just sit there and wait, that is lizard meditation. That will not fulfill the mission of your life. It may give you some relaxation. You may get some rest, particularly if you have been so busy running around and catching this event and that event, rushing here, rushing there, trying to this and that and everything. So you may get some relaxation, but not anything to fulfill the mission of your life.

The wisdom following learning is a must. But even that alone is not enough. A PhD has learnt their subject, every professor knows their subject and so does every teacher. Everybody knows their job, but that doesn’t help with the mission of your life. It serves some purpose in the material world, but it does not help much with the spiritual world.

What you need on top of that is the wisdom of contemplation or pondering. You learn something, you have notes on a piece of paper, or you have heard a tape. But that doesn’t mean you have really learnt it. You have got some information, but that is not learning. You have to think, contemplate. You have to draw a conclusion. You have to argue and analyze. You have to work out why this particular information would be relevant for you or not. If so, what is the relevance, if not then why are you spending so much time on it? Don’t waste your time, pick up something else that works better. This is absolutely necessary. Without that, all you have is some blind faith. You don’t know if what you are doing is right. The difference between intelligent faith and blind faith lies at this point. Intelligent faith must analyze, it has to have a good reason. It has to come up with a proof for what you are believing. That is the second category of wisdom. You do need that. Without it you can never fulfill the mission of your life.

That is also not enough. You need the third wisdom that follows meditation. Analyzing is meditation. However, it is fact-finding meditation. Then the concentrated meditation makes what you have understood part of yourself, part of your habit.

These three wisdoms make your spiritual path work. They follow each other. That gives you a result. I, as a teacher, can only give you the first wisdom. The second and third is your responsibility. You have to do it individually. You cannot do it collectively. You may be able to accomplish the second wisdom as a group, but the third one you definitely have to do on your own. If you just pray and wait and watch, you don’t develop anything. You can sit on the mountaintop and count the deer that have come past, but that won’t do.

The Bodhisattvacharyavatara is about the Bodhisattva’s way, how you think and how you function. We are at the level of patience. We spent more than a year on patience. By now we should know what kind of patience we are talking about. People say, ‘Yeah, I know what patience is. I don’t irritated, I can wait.’ That is not the patience I am talking about. Remember the example I gave you: your girlfriend has dumped you and then she calls and says, ‘Meet me in the middle of nowhere, in the desert somewhere at 2’ o clock tomorrow’. So you go there and wait till five or six or nine and you may think that this is patience. It is not. This is perhaps more obsession than patience. You may like to label it patience, but it is really not.

Patience here is something else. Once you know what the mission of your life is, you have to pursue it even if you have to lose your life in the process. That is worthwhile and if you can do that, that is the patience we are talking about – not to get the girl-friend back who dumped you yesterday!

How do you fulfill the mission of your life? There is no simple, straight answer. Actually, there is a direct answer: Liberate yourself. That’s it. You know what is blocking our liberation? Our ego-ignorance-fear combined together. We have to liberate ourselves. No one else will liberate us. Not Buddha, not any yidam, not the Bodhisattvas, not God, not any of the protectors. We have to do it ourselves. If they could, they would have done it long ago. Why would they let us suffer? The truth is that they cannot, even if they wanted to. There are limitations for the enlightened beings as to how much they can do.

Enlightened beings are not supposed to be limited, but there are limitations. That is why we still have sufferings and problems. We have physical, mental and emotional sufferings, just because they cannot take them away from us. So if you don’t do it yourself, who is? No one.

Is it simple to do? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says it is. The other day he was on Larry King Live. He says that TM will do it. He wanted one billion dollars so that forty thousand yogis can fly around and set up a world government. Maharishi Mahesh yogi is a great guy, no doubt about it, but his plan makes no sense to me. That is my fault, not his. Honestly. He did say a lot of wonderful things, but setting up a new world government, headed by some doctor from India and administrated by 40 000 flying yogis? I would like to wish him the best of luck. I don’t know what his reasons are. They are beyond my comprehension.

Larry King said to him that on September 11, ‘More than 2000 people died and TM didn’t help them.’ Maharishi said, ‘People die, they come and go.’ In a way he is right. That is what happens. A number of people would like to blame the victims themselves. They say, ‘These people must have done something wrong and their karma has got them.’ That is not right. It is just that the person was in the wrong place at the wrong time, connecting to some of their bad karma’. That can happen to all of us. It is called ‘accident’. This happens. It is not necessarily the fault of the people who died there. Larry King also asked the Maharishi, ‘John Lennon died, George Harrison is dead, are you sad?’ He answered, ‘They go, they come.’ That was quite nice.

Speaking of the mission of life – you should be able to go freely and come back freely. That is almost the first step of fulfilling the mission of life. Ultimately your mission is to liberate yourself. We are capable of doing it. Fortunately we have such a wonderful life. By sheer luck, believe it or not, we have found this life. This life is loaded with opportunity and capability. Really true. Your life is different from the life of your best friend who has no interest for whatsoever in any spiritual path. It is totally different. You do have the opportunity, they don’t. You can do what you like, try to drag your friend into the spiritual path, try to force them to read and meditate, but the person will simply say, ‘I am not interested, leave me alone.’ That is the clear sign that this person has no opportunity. Their life and your life are two different kinds of life. You may look the same, you may even wear the same dress, you may even share you glasses. But your life is different. You have got to realize that and make best use of the life you have.

As I told you, it is extremely easy to waste this life. Even if you think you are doing something worthwhile, you could still be totally wasting it, doing all kinds of things. You could be flying in the air and never land. If you don’t get grounded, how can you expect to make any headway in your spiritual path? It is not possible.

Let me read from the Bodhisattvacharyavatara. We have reached verse 126.

Verse 126

There is no doubt that those with the nature of compassion

Regard all these beings (the same) as themselves.

Furthermore, those who see (this Buddha nature) as

the nature of sentient beings see the Buddhas

themselves;

Why then do I not respect (sentient beings)?

One of the Bodhisattva activities is to have respect for every sentient being. It is not that we are here looking at the Bodhisattvas and say, ‘This is what you are supposed to be doing.’ This is talking to me, to each and everyone of us. Shantideva is saying, ‘You are on the path of liberation. You have to gain respect for each and every sentient being.’ In the judaeo-christian tradition we say you should love everybody, love your neighbor. In the Buddhist tradition we say, ‘Have compassion for everybody, have compassion for your neighbor’.

Both, compassion and love, are based on respect. If you don’t have respect, your compassion will just be a feeling of pity. You will say, ‘Oh poor you, you are suffering? What can I do for you?’ Then the other person will probably say, ‘I don’t want your sympathy!’ That is because there is no respect for the person as a person. If you don’t have respect for the person then no matter what you pretend to be, a mahasiddha, a great Bodhisattva or whatever, you have to know that you have nothing, spiritually. You only have self-interest, your life is run by that. You can say, ‘Oh poor little one’, but that is just the feeling of pity. You don’t have any respect, you are looking down. You are thinking, ‘Oh, this dirty little guy, poor thing’. The basis of love and compassion, both, is respect. If you don’t have respect for anybody, your love will probably be nothing but attraction, something you want, something beautiful that you like to have, for a long time or a short time or whatever. So there is no respect for the person. If you respect the person, you don’t do that. That is why these verses will say, ‘You have respect for the Buddhas, the enlightened beings, you respect God, so why don’t you respect people?’

It even gives you a little more than that. There is no doubt that these enlightened beings have accepted or adopted all the people. When the people are developing bodhimind through the exchange way or the seven stage way or especially through the 11 stage method, there is no doubt that they are being adopted by all the enlightened beings. So every person is a part of the enlightened beings. They are all of enlightened nature. They are not enlightened but they have the enlightened nature within them. So why don’t I respect them? Just as I respect the enlightened ones, I should also respect the non-enlightened beings.

We do not know that the people are great, because we see only their faults. We see that they are angry, that they have obsession, pride, jealousy. That is why we don’t respect them. But are you really sure that they have jealousy? Are you sure you have not misunderstood them? These are all important points. The reason we don’t respect them is our ignorance. Then, because of that ignorance we also suffer. We see others are angry, bad, we see that some are terrorists. So we lose the respect and that is where we begin to suffer ourselves. The verse says Those who see (this Buddha nature) as the nature of sentient beings see the Buddhas themselves. That does not mean that all sentient beings are Buddhas. It is saying that all sentient beings have been adopted by the enlightened beings. They are a part of them. If we respect the family of the Buddhas, why don’t we respect the sentient beings?

The problem we face before even getting to love and compassion is not respecting people. Love and compassion, these are beautiful words to say but they have to be grounded in respect. Without respect there is no love and compassion. It is only attachment, desire and hatred and pride.

Audience: The ultimate respect is to see the divine possibility and the spiritual potential, the Buddha possibility within everything that lives. You might have to fight with a person but you can still see that divine possibility.

Rimpoche: I am going to be straightforward. You are absolutely right in the context of talking about the divine nature, Buddha nature and so forth. But I am not talking about that. I am talking about simple, straight respect to another human being. Just treat that person as a human being. Don’t treat them as dust or dirt. That is simple and straight forward.

Audience: What about dictators and people like that?

Rimpoche: Dictators don’t have respect for people. Hitler didn’t, so he sacrificed many human beings. So did all the other dictators, Mao Tse Dong and so forth. If human beings don’t treat other human beings as human beings, but as something stupid, then that becomes a problem. We do that very often, particularly we Americans. We look down on those Afghanis, Indians, Pakistanis, or on the huge number of people in Africa. We do. If an American gets hurt somewhere, we yell and scream. On the other hand, hundreds and thousands of Afghanis get killed and there is not even a word about it in the news. That is lack of respect. The lack of respect has brought so many Africans as slaves to this country not that long ago. They were almost treated like domestic animals. Rulers often do that with their subjects. This is really lack of respect.

The same goes for other sentient beings. Other creatures also have the right to live. If we only think on the lines of Buddha nature, divine nature, and so on, we are flying, we are not grounded. From the point of view of Buddha nature, we will respect you. From the point of view of delusions, we will destroy you.

Audience: If you were to meet Mao Tse Dong, would you respect him?

Rimpoche: As a human being, sure. His Holiness the Dalai Lama once visited Israel. Somebody there asked him, ‘Do you think that Hitler has Buddha nature?’ and he said, ‘Sure he does.’ And next question, ‘Do you respect his Buddha nature?’ and he, ‘Sure I do.’ As a human being you have to respect every one, no matter how bad they are. Every human being has the right to be treated as a human being. Our human rights have become a very political issue. People make a lot of decisions about that. But the right of the human beings is their right. No politicians can twist them around. But the politicians have the upper hand. They don’t listen to us. They make decisions and declare that human rights means this and that and they even say, ‘Human rights change from country to country’, as if the human beings change from country to country.

Audience: You said that the purpose of life is to liberate ourselves. What does a liberated person do?

Rimpoche: Oh, a liberated person is very busy, so busy that they don’t have time to do anything. Actually, a liberated person, as they themselves have become liberated, have to show the other people how they can liberate themselves. That is their job and they are busy with that.