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20020709GRAABWL

CD of 07-09-02

Last Tuesday we read two verses and haven’t finished the second one.

Verse 2

What is enthusiasm? It is finding joy in what is wholesome.

Its opposing factors are explained

As laziness, attraction to what is bad

and despising oneself out of despondency.

If enthusiasm is defined as enjoying to do positive work, then what is the opposite of that? It is of course laziness. If you just translate the Tibetan word le lo, it does mean laziness. However, there are particular types of laziness. This here is thinking, ‘There will still be time to do whatever I want to do. There is still time, so I don’t have to rush. So I will delay.’

We do that very often. With every activity we have to do we think that there is plenty of time and we can do it later. Particularly, if it is about creating some positive karma, we think that we will have time later. That is this particular laziness. Every work, good, bad, important, not important, we like to delay. I find myself doing that all the time. If I am about to catch a plane in an hour, I think that there is still time to do this and that. And then, I notice that I have to drive like crazy to get to the airport, and hoping and praying that I don’t miss my plane today, because it is important to go. When there is an important deadline to meet and you miss it, then it is terrible.

It is the same with our prayers and daily meditation commitments. I don’t want to do it in the morning. I put it off until it is too late and I have to go to do something important. Then all the activities of the day take place and then at night, maybe after midnight, I would like to do my practice, but I also want to watch a movie and listen to the news – all three of them together. If you do it like that it will be 3.30 or 4 am in the morning, before it gets done. That is what is happening to me. All this is because of that kind of laziness that thinks, ‘There is still time to do it later.’ Yes, there is time, if you do it well. But then, if you want to do three things together, instead of one hour it takes actually three hours. So there is no time to spare.

Another similar laziness is this one. ‘I am still young, I am just twenty, I still have time.’ Then it will be, ‘I am quite young, I am thirty, I still have time.’ And then, ‘I am forty, I may still have time later’. Then, ‘I am fifty, I don’t know, if I can still do it.’ Then, ‘I am sixty, I am too old, I can’t do it.’

I told you the story of the great master Gungtang, Kon chog Ten pai Tron me, in the 1700s. He was requested by his disciples to give his autobiography. He said, ‘I have nothing to say.’ His students kept on asking him, however, until he agreed. So he said, ‘

I kept on thinking, ‘I am just a kid’ and thus I spent 20 years.

Then I thought, ‘I would like to do something’ and another 20 years went by.

Then I thought, ‘I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it’ and another 20 years have gone.

This is how I wasted my life. That is my autobiography.

That is what Kon chog Ten pai Tron me said. He is one of the great late Tibetan masters. There were so many great masters in the 1300s and 1400s, like Tsong Khapa and others. Then it became less and Kon chog Ten pai Tron me was one of the last great masters in the 1700s. Then later, in the 20th century, we had Pabongka and Kyabje Trijang Rimpoche.

So the key, how we waste our lives, is this particular laziness. Even if we want to say our prayers, we always want to wait until we get a solid, undisturbed chunk of time like 3 hours. But we are not going to find that. Out of 24 hours, some people sleep 12 hours. Out of the remaining time, 6 hours are spent on gossiping. Another 2 or 3 hours are spent on what we think is strategizing our life. But actually, we are doing all kinds of funny things. So we don’t really have a solid 3 hours. It is better to take whatever time there is. You may have half an hour here, twenty minutes there and so on. Better use that time. You don’t have to say all your prayers together. If you can, it is of course wonderful. But if you can’t, better use what time you have got. Everybody has to pay their bills and make money. Then, in the evening, you don’t want to go to bed early. You have to have music, dance. It is beautiful weather, so we want to go walking on Main Street and do something. The consequence of that is that next morning you are not going to get up early. You stay in bed later, then jump out, take a shower and it is time to go to work. On the way you may pick up a can of coca cola and a sandwich. You have that in the car, on the way to work. That is what we do. In one way, we are very short of time, but on the other hand, we waste a lot of time. So, where is the time for spiritual practice? Where is the time to do something useful, something that is good for us?

Then there is another type of laziness. That is attraction to what is bad. We have a lot of attractions. Actually, they are more addictions. We are addicted to all kinds of things. We are addicted to gossip. Some people are addicted to smoking joints. All that takes up your time. Some people have an alcohol addiction. Then some people have an addiction to smoking joints as well as drinking alcohol. In addition to that, some people are addicted to rock’n roll. You have to spend more time on that. Then, others have an addiction for sex. That takes time too. You have to work for it, prepare for it, do a lot of groundwork. That is the second kind of laziness, which would like to do other things than those that are really useful to us.

Not every attraction is bad. Some people like to grow organic food. That’s not bad. But still, it is laziness, if it takes you away from your spiritual work. I am one of the people who don’t recognize growing healthy food as spiritual work. For me, drinking wheat grass juice and eating brown rice is not a spiritual path. Sure, it is healthy, good for you, no doubt. But it is not anything spiritual. There is no holy spirit involved in there.

We are addicted to so many things in the name of good work. If you are doing something bad in the name of bad work, at least it is not lying. But if you do something bad in the name of good work, that is worse. It becomes cheating as well. We cheat ourselves and others. Eating good food or growing good food is not necessarily spiritual – unless you have a good motivation and purpose. I can’t say that every instance of growing healthy food is not spiritual work. There are always exceptions. But generally, for me, it is not.

Spiritual work needs to be more substantial in the sense of being able to reduce negative emotions, negative karma. There has to be something solid for me that I can carry to my next life. Without that, no matter what you do, it is not spiritual. You can walk on the fire, bare feet, on hot coals, if you like, but that is not spiritual. I actually have a very American attitude to this: I want to see some benefit for me. If there is nothing in there for me, I won’t go for it.

Attraction to what is bad does not have to be negative actions. It could be just something that doesn’t give you any positive result. In that case, even if it is something good, the outcome is bad. It is like working very hard on something but not getting any result. Neither there is production, nor achievement. It is work, work, work – for what? So, really, you want to work for something. Therefore, you need to work smart. You have to gain results. Otherwise, you spend a lot of time and energy, but achieve nothing. A lot of people do that. They work and work, sit there for hours and hours and achieve nothing. You could be a writer, but never even come up with one decent sentence in a whole day. Even if write a page one day, the next day you have to correct it ten times. That is not very productive.

The third kind of laziness is: Despising oneself out of despondency.

This is thinking, ‘I am incapable, I can’t do this, I can’t count, I can’t write, I can’t think, I can’t move, I cannot, I cannot.’ If you think like that, the result will be nothing. Nothing will happen. Sometimes my laziness does that to me. I would like to move a certain article from here to there, but I just sit there and nothing happens. You can’t just say, ‘I want this’. The article won’t come to you, and if you don’t do anything, you can spend the whole day watching it and nothing will happen. If you keep on thinking, ‘I cannot’, then that is what is going to be: you cannot do it. That is underestimating your own capability. This is another laziness. The same laziness is at work if you think, ‘How can a person like me achieve Buddhahood? It is impossible.’ If you remain in that frame of mind, there is no way you are going to make progress. Then who is the loser? The individual who thinks that they can’t do it.

It is much better to think, ‘I am going to make an attempt.’ There is a saying in Tibet, ‘If you don’t’ have teeth, bite with your gums.’ Even if I don’t have hands, I can still hit with my shoulder. That should be the attitude of a spiritual practitioner. A spiritual practitioner should never think, ‘I cannot.’

Earlier teachers would say,

If I have another three years to live, I will make sure that I become a Buddha. If it is less than that, I will make sure that I will become an arhat. If I have only a couple of months left, at least I will make sure that my future life will be a good human rebirth or better.

This is the attitude Buddha shared with us. Even in preliminary meditations they will tell you, ‘Sit and relax and look far ahead’. You should have a long view. Don’t hesitate to work for your goal. Even if you don’t achieve it straight away, you will go to a certain extent towards that goal. Otherwise you will forever say, ‘I cannot’ and you will end up with nothing. Even in usual American life people will say, ‘You have to be positive.’ People will tell you. Nobody will want you to be negative. But we like to be negative. That is our bad habit. It is an addiction. But we need to be positive.

Once I asked Aura, ‘What are these new age people talking about all the time when they say, ‘Be positive?’ She told me, ‘Rimpoche, Tibetan Buddhism, especially Vajrayana is totally positive. You are thinking, ‘I will be a Buddha’. What more positive thinking can you have?’ This is true. So a positive outlook is a fundamental attitude we have to have. You should never underestimate yourself. Buddha calls that laziness. We are all human beings and have tremendous, unlimited capabilities. Honestly speaking, the sky is the limit. And Buddha himself was a human being, not a superman. He was a normal human being. Einstein was a human being just like everybody. Perhaps his brain was a little bigger than usual, but not much. So every human being has the capacity. Every genius, every artist, scientist or whatever, are normal human beings, they are not abnormal or superhuman. So the capacity we have it equal. Whether we can use it or not, that is what makes the difference. Let’s talk from the scientific point of view. Even there they say that we human beings don’t use all of our brain capacity. And those people we call ‘genius’ and everybody else, we have the same brain, the same capacity. But some of us can use it, others can’t. It is just up to us, our determination, our enthusiasm. At the ultimate enlightenment level we are using the total brain capacity. Until then we are not.

In the stone age humans probably used much less of their brain capacity and now we are using a little more, because we are educating ourselves. Sometimes people that education has nothing to do with spirituality. Some think that any material life has nothing to do with spirituality. Do not make that mistake.

The Tibetans are very proud to have achieved the combination of the temporal and the spiritual activities. I used to think that was because His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the head of the Tibetan government as well as the spiritual leader. But that is not what it means. What they are proud of is the ability to handle material and spiritual life together. You cannot separate them. The texts may tell you that the material world and the Dharma world are totally different. Yes, it is true. They are totally different. But we have to learn how to handle them together. Otherwise you cannot be a good spiritual practitioner today at all. A materially capable person has to be spiritually capable. A spiritually capable person must be also materially capable. If you are not spiritually capable, you will not be materially capable. That is a fact. Otherwise it is like having lost one eye.

There is the example of a one-eyed yak. It cannot eat all the grass. It will eat the grass on one side and leave the grass on the other side. There are a number of people who are very doubtful about the combination of material and spiritual life together. Many think, ‘I don’t care about material things. I would like to be very spiritual.’ But when the bill collector knocks on your door, then you will know whether or not you care. You do have to care. That is the reality.

How did Buddha handle it himself? A lot of his disciples were kings and queens. The public in general was greatly benefited by the generosity of these kings and queens at the time. So Buddha did not say, ‘You are a king, you are a queen, you are out of here. I only want hippies!’ Neither did he say, ‘You are hippies. I don’t want you, I only want yuppies.’ He worked it together. If you are incapable of handling your material life it is very doubtful that you could handle your spiritual life. It is extremely doubtful. You may like to keep it as a cocoon, saying, ‘Well, materially I am not very successful, I don’t care. I am very spiritual. I go and do retreats and sit in my cocoon.’ That, in fact, would be this particular laziness again. It is about using your brain, using your wisdom, in order to overcome negativities. People in the material life are not all necessarily bad people. Good people are those who don’t submit themselves to the control of negative emotions, such as hatred or anger, jealousy, obsession. Every person in material life is not necessarily a wicked, crook politician. Nor is every politician, for that matter. Many really do mean it when they say, ‘By the people, for the people, in service of the people.’

Politicians are more publicly exposed. You can more easily catch them. That is all.

Many people around here used to think, ‘I cannot accept anything extra, because I am taking it away from somebody else. I should only have a limited amount of money.’ I think that time is over, except for a few people who are left behind – by their own choice. Most of us are on the boat now.

So, underestimating yourself is the third laziness. With the first two kinds of laziness you see what you should and could do, but you won’t do it. You think, ‘I can do it tomorrow.’ But tomorrow never comes. There is always another tomorrow. The 9th will become the 10th, but tomorrow always is tomorrow. So don’t rely on tomorrow.

The third laziness is a very terrible one. It is thinking, ‘I cannot do it, I am incapble, I will blow it.’ So many people suffer from this and they go further and further down, right into depression. In modern terms this third laziness is almost the same as depression. So it is not a new thing. I have seen it earlier even in Tibet. An old friend of mine, one of the richest incarnate lamas in Tibet, called Kundeling Taktsar Rimpoche, was a young man in his thirties when I was a kid. He was also extremely wealthy. He had his own jeep and truck. His labrang could compete with the Tibetan government. Who knows, he might have had more money than the Tibetan government. But he was unhappy all the time. He used to blame his manager for being too controlling. He had a beautiful house in the middle of a wonderful monastery garden. It was a huge house, with glass windows. It must have had 30 rooms. Everything was of good quality. He had expensive, heavy curtains and he used to close all of them and sit in a corner, depressed. Finally he went to India, but he wouldn’t take his own jeep. He was angry with the manager and so he wouldn’t talk to him. Instead, he borrowed my family’s jeep and took it to India. He died in Calcutta in 1954. They were the landlords of the British and the Indian diplomatic service in Tibet. They paid their rent in India, after Tibet was lost to China, both the British and the Indian government. So depression is not a new western phenomenon. It already existed in Tibet. Where does it come from? From this particular laziness, underestimating your capabilities.

Of course you can only bite what you can chew. But don’t forget. Even if you don’t have teeth, you can chew on your gums.

Can you now give me a definition of laziness? I am going to read from Asanga’s work, one of the early Indian pundits. There are six ornaments of the world and two excellences of the world. They are called the 8 outstanding teachers and Asanga and Nagarjuna are the most outstanding of these. Nagarjuna talks about wisdom and Asanga about everything other than wisdom. So Asanga says,

What is laziness? It is the mind that loves to sleep, loves to delay everything, that enjoys gossiping, enjoys wasting time. All the leisurely ways of doing things are part of ignorance. That makes you unproductive, using any excuse possible.

We give lots of excuses. In old Tibet, if we adopted the attitude of making excuses for ourselves we would get into trouble. As kids, you would get beaten up, even as incarnate lama. They would give us lashes and you were lucky if you only got thirty or forty. Sometimes you would get 200. That was a great antidote to my laziness. But that is the old fashion. You can’t do that in the west. So here we have to find new ways.

Not only does laziness cause depression. For some people it can get so bad that they want to commit suicide. It is all the fault of this laziness. They are too lazy to do anything, but are not too lazy to commit suicide. They say, ‘I cannot bear it, I better end it.’ But do you know what happens if you do that? There is going to be additional suffering. There is going to be suffering which is much more than the suffering you couldn’t bear in this life. Make it a thousand times more – that is what you are going to have. The minute after committing suicide, that is what you are going to encounter. Human life is so precious and killing yourself is also killing.

For me, those lashes have been helpful. I don’t know if I got damaged by that. I can’t see any scars on my brain. In the west, people think there is some damage. There were times when I couldn’t ride a horse because my skin was cut so much. I had to stand in the stirrups. I couldn’t put my butt down. That is how we were taught. Today I can be talkative and have something to share with you and I learnt it in that way. I learnt the hard way. I don’t mean that you have to go that way. You are educated and you can learn how to handle laziness. It is very important not to submit to laziness.

What does laziness do? It makes you lose all your positive deeds. Where does it come from? What makes it grow?

Nagarjuna says,

It is the delusion to think that sitting there and doing nothing is great joy.

This is the eastern laziness. We easterners have attachment to being idle. In the west that is not so common. Here, if you have to sit idle, you will be bored and you have to get up and run and do something and if you have nothing to do you will even dig a hole in the ground and fill it in again. Here it is not the attraction to idleness, but the attraction to be busy for nothing. What you are doing has no value, nor purpose, and yet you are frantically active everywhere. You have to reach here and then reach here, participate over here, then over there, three minutes later you have to go somewhere else and run and drive. That is busy for nothing. It is western laziness. My idea of laziness is sitting quietly, with a nice cup of tea or a glass of wine. That is eastern laziness. The culture makes the difference here.

Verse 3

Because of the attachment to the pleasurable taste of idleness,

Because of craving for sleep

And because of having no disillusion with the misery

of cyclic existence, laziness grows very strongly.

Instead of running everywhere trying to do everything, you have to concentrate and do the things you really have to do. Do you gain anything from going everywhere, doing everything? Is there any spiritual gain? Is there even any material gain? Do you at least gain some pleasure? If that is the case, at least there is some gain. Otherwise, it is crazy to do that and it is a cause of this laziness.

Some people love to sleep. They just sleep a lot. Some people say, ‘If I don’t get my 8 or 10 hours of sleep, I can’t function. My body demands that.’ Then other people manage on 4 hours of sleep. Others survive on 6 hours. So to think that you need 10 hours is crazy. It is just a cause of laziness. Really, it is sort of like that. The structure of day and night is such that we could sleep for 12 hours. On the equinox it really is half-half, 12 hours darkness and 12 hours light. But that is too much. We don’t agree with that. Imagine, you lived at the north pole. You would have to sleep for 20 hours for a few months.

The most important cause of laziness is not having the proper desire for seeking freedom from the sufferings of samsara. That is really the major cause, according to this verse.

Where is depression coming from? We do not have a proper desire to be free from samsaric suffering. We pray ‘May all beings be free from suffering’. But we don’t have the desire to be free ourselves! So if you are suffering from depression, you really don’t have the desire to be free from suffering. You may have a desire to have more money. But that is not freedom. You want more money, but preferably without extra work. We do have such crazy desires. Is it possible to have more money without working for it? Not unless you enjoy the ‘sky treasury’. I have to stop for today.