Archive Result

20020914GRAAWIS1

Wisdom Week end in Ann Arbor in Fall 2002 Gehlek Rimpoche

(based on Pabongka’s Liberation in the Palm of your Hands)

7 CDs

CD 1 out of 7

This weekend we are going to talk about wisdom. It is not going to be that easy. Wisdom is not something you can cover in a week end. In Chicago we talked on this subject based on the 3rd principle out of the Three Principles of the Path by Je Tsong Khapa. So, likewise here, we need a certain basis on talk on, rather than just talking generally about wisdom. If I just talk about it without base it will be scattered and nothing solid is going to remain with you. During the lam rim teachings, including the Odyssey to Freedom, the wisdom is always the last part. It is usually just dealt with in one or two sentences. Taking this into consideration I would like to rely on the wisdom section from Pabongka’s Liberation in the Palm of your Hands. I think it was during Day 22 of this particular teaching. Pabongka begins by quoting from Chandrakirti’s work.

With his great white wings of the conventional and ultimate outstretched,

The goose glides in the forefront of a multitude of geese towards the supreme, far shore of the victorious one’s ocean of good qualities, carried along by the swift wind currents of virtuous activities.

Pabongka, through this quote, is trying to establish two things: the relative and the absolute. The reason why you have establish these is that we have a body and a mind. When our body and mind continue to develop, there will be a time where we will obtain the wonderful body of the enlightened beings, with the 32 major and 80 minor signs. This is the ultimate of the body development. Where do you get such an expensive body from? It is the result of all our love and compassion, meditation, renunciation and all practices other than wisdom related ones. The results from that are all going to manifest as body aspects, and in Vajrayana, as the environmental aspects as well. It is also interesting in this context to read the Vimalakirti Sutra. In that sutra, Shariputra talks to Buddha and complains that in a particular retreat the food was terrible and the conditions were not good. Buddha told Shariputra, ‘You have no idea what I just ate.’ Shariputra said, ‘But we all received the same food.’ Buddha said, ‘Oh, you have no idea.’ He picked out a little bit of leftover food from between his teeth and gave it to Shariputra to taste. When Shariputra put this on his tongue he experienced some fantastic taste like he had never tasted before. He asked Buddha how this was possible and Buddha said, ‘This is the food that has a hundred different tastes. I am able to enjoy that because I worked so much during my periods of contemplation. Therefore everything that I personally consume is pure. That’s why, although it appears that we are eating the same food, I have different experiences of taste than you have.’

In Buddhism, during the subject of wisdom, we have to talk logic. Wisdom is based on logic. The statement by Buddha seems to be logically wrong. Logically, we say that a particular fruit from a particular tree has to have the same taste, because it is the same fruit from the same tree. If the first one is sweet the second one has to be as well. Especially, if Buddha produced that little morsel of food which had been prepared by the same cook at the same time in the same place and gave it to Shariputra it should have the same taste. But that did not happen. At the enlightened level, the usual logical and physical rules don’t apply any more. It goes beyond all that. The work that Buddha did during the contemplative period that was related to subjects other than wisdom all became his environment, his body, the atmosphere around. In short, everything enlightened beings deal with is provided for them.

In a way that is already happening with us. We live in our house or apartment, pay our mortage, rent and so on. We work and earn money and that is how we are able to afford this. If we don’t pay the rent, we will get kicked out of our apartment, right? You will be out on the street, with all your belongings. This is America. That doesn’t happen in India. India has a funny law that protects your living space. If you build a roof over your head somewhere overnight, nobody can kick you out from there. Another law says that if you are occupying a place they cannot kick you out. In Dehli there are some apartments where people have been paying 1000 rupees per year for the last 50 years and in another apartment somebody else is paying 100 000 rupees for just one month. This is all because nobody can get kicked out of where they live. Here in America, they can kick you out.

And just as we have to earn the money to pay the rent, at the enlightened level, the pure land, the pure body and everything has to be paid for. That payment takes place during the contemplative period, where you do things like purification, mandala offerings and any positive karma that we have created, other than the wisdom-oriented ones, goes towards that. Now, the wisdom oriented positive karma will go towards developing the mind of total knowledge of the enlightened beings. That is why the great Indian pundit Chandrakirti has given the example of the king of the eagles. I’d rather call it that than ‘king of the geese’. Another translation says, ‘King of Swans’. I think the eagle is good for America, since it is the national bird. This king of eagles has to have two wings. Without them he won’t be able to fly across the ocean.

Likewise, the spiritual practitioner also needs two wings to be able to go towards enlightenment. So Pabongka, when starting to teach on that day, chose this verse to indicate that both, method and wisdom are necessary in order to progress and that he would talk about both. The two wings are the wings of the relative and the absolute. The relative wing includes love, compassion, etc, and the related activities. You are beginning to see that if you have a spiritual practitioner who has great concentration and much love and compassion, but lacks wisdom, this person will be struggling, like a bird trying to fly with one wing. This person won’t get very far.

If we neglect the wisdom we would produce a Buddha without mind. Buddha would just be a statue. Wisdom is not that easy to catch. There needs to be guidance. If you want to liberate yourself there are three most important things: the Three Higher Trainings, which are morality, concentration and wisdom. They depend on each other. The wisdom is built on the basis of concentration. Without a strong shamata there will be no wisdom. Without good morality there is no strong shamata or full focus. One builds on top of the other. First you need morality, then concentration and then wisdom.

Next, Pabongka says that you have to have bodhimind, renunciation, wisdom and refuge all together. Through the bodhimind you become a Mahayana practitioner. Through proper renunciation you will be seeking liberation and by seeking refuge you will become a Buddhist. Without all of these, simple concentration on the mind will never be able to seriously undermine the ego or ignorance. Wisdom is such an important thing. The Buddhist tradition talks a lot about wisdom and how important it is before actually getting into it. You only get to hear more details very late in the piece, at quite a high level. But the teachers keep on talking about it from the beginning.

To get to the wisdom it is better to look from the opposite direction. What causes us to have to experience the continuous sufferings in samsara, life after life? Who creates them? Is it a decision made by somebody who says, ‘You will be this kind of person’? It almost sounds very silly. What makes me a man and you a woman? But it is almost like that. Why do we have mental or physical problems? There are so many different answers for that. Even in India there is a widespread belief in an ‘upper wala’, the person ‘upstairs’, who makes these choices. In the west, most people think that it is God who makes the decisions. Buddha does not agree with that. He says that nobody but ourselves is responsible for what we are. The reality is that whatever good time we enjoy in life is what we deserve and what we have earned. If you are having a terrible time, too bad, it is your own deed as well. Even if a natural disaster strikes, it is like that. It may not be appropriate to say, ‘Well, they caused it themselves, they deserve it’. But they did happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even being in the wrong place at the wrong time is also part of our own karma. During the wisdom-oriented practices we have to talk about all that. So many questions will come up.

Buddha’s answer here is that he went through it himself and discovered how it works. This discovery made a huge difference to his spiritual life. This is the quality of the so-called ‘living tradition’. You learn through your own experience. When you learn it this way it makes all the difference. The teachers and the tradition can talk about it and show you the way. But when you look at Buddha’s life story you see that he went through everything by himself.

First he was a prince in one of the biggest kingdoms in India. He had the best facilities available to him but that didn’t stop the sufferings and pains that he himself experienced and which he also witnessed his subjects go through. He began to look for other solutions. He thought the only way was to leave his family, so that’s what he did. Next he thought that he had to perform various sacrifices, so he spent six years not eating anything. This story came to us over 2500 years ago and tells us that he only ate a grain a day. I don’t think you can survive on that but in any case he ate very minimally. His body looked like a tree trunk. People couldn’t figure out any more whether there was a human being or a tree branch. He went to that extent. He made those sacrifices, disconnected himself from society, withdrew, because he thought that the cause of his difficulties came from outside. He found out that all these methods didn’t work.

Finally, in the end he pronounced ‘Profound light, uncontaminated nectar is what I found. To whosoever I may try to explain it, they won’t be able to understand. Therefore I am going to remain quietly in the forest.

That nectar-like profound peace is referring to the wisdom experience. Ultimately wisdom is the only thing that challenges and solves all problems. Again, we must look from the opposite direction, from where the problems originally come. This is very much interlinked with the Four Noble Truths. Even when you focus on suffering you do that in the context of emptiness. When you look inside very carefully you find that you are responsible for yourself and nobody else. Maybe I am teaching you how to be good atheists! The critics will probably say that. But in truth, we are responsible for ourselves. We know it in our daily life. If we have work, we can earn money, we pay our bills. If we can’t earn we can’t pay our bills and we have to suffer the consequences. There is no mystery about that. But the moment we switch focus from the financial system and look at other circumstances we think that different rules work there, that there is somebody else up there who is managing things. But that is not true. Just like we have to manage our daily affairs and be responsible, it is the same in the spiritual path. If God was running things everybody and everything should be perfect. This God should be compassionate, caring, loving. Why would he or she give us a hard time? In reality, it is ourselves who did it. We cause our experiences ourselves.

That is why I am very much against punishment. I don’t like people talking about punishment. Who punishes who? This is all out of order. That is my view. Nobody punishes nobody. The parents and teachers may try to give some extra hard time to the kids and students, because they want to help them to do a little bit better. That is a method they are using, not a punishment. Even if you get grounded, don’t think it is meant as punishment. It would be a mistake. Parents want to help the kids to understand that there are consequences to their actions and they would do a little better. That may help them. But if you want to punish a person and therefore ground them, it is not okay.

Those terrorists who attacked the twin towers and who killed themselves there might have thought it ended there. But I don’t think so. They have punished themselves. Perfectly, they did it by themselves, for themselves, for their own deeds. That’s for sure. I mentioned a couple of times that I felt so uncomfortable when I watched Larry King Live and he had all those ministers and bishops on the program and everybody said that the hijackers might be up in heaven with God. I felt very uncomfortable with that. They did such a horrible thing and they are supposed to be in heaven and we, who are struggling to do our best, are still suffering here? What nonsense. I am happy to be responsible. I like that self responsibility. Not only that, it is the only sensible explanation why we go through different experiences. Why is each and everyone of us different? We are different in thoughts, behavior, physical condition, mental condition, different in intelligence. It is all because we are actually responsible for ourselves.

Once you have established that, the next question is: Why don’t we help ourselves? We get all kinds of problems. One is fear. We are afraid. Some people, when they think that God may not be responsible, but they themselves are, may get afraid, thinking that God may get upset with them. I don’t think so. God is compassionate and doesn’t get upset for things like that. If he does, that would be his selfish, narrow interest and we may not be interested in such a God. No one has to worry about and be afraid about things like that.

If we are responsible for ourselves, why don’t we help ourselves? The answer is: We are afraid to do anything. Look back at how this country, the United States, has been formed. In the beginning, we were very afraid of England. The British came and controlled people. Now Tony Blair is buddy-buddy with George Bush, but earlier it was not like that. We were afraid of the British, until a few brave people got together and bravely fought and formed this Union or Federation. Then we began to manage. We broke through that fear that the Crown and Her Majesty the Queen would punish everybody. Once you break through that fear you begin to establish your own freedom. That is not only true for the United States, it works like that everywhere else. Look at India after World War II. At that time it was said that the sun never sets on the British empire. Now that empire is no more than a little island. Gandhi took on the empire and this shows that when you break through the fear you can manage. Why can’t we help ourselves? We are afraid not that God wont’ like it. That is true only for a few people. The real reason is that we don’t know how to do it. We know nothing about it. There are many people who say that they would like to practice. They attend teachings for a long time and at the end of that they still say, ‘What do I do?’ In other words, for all those weeks and months you have heard nothing!

I have given retreats and at the end of that people come and ask, ‘Now, what do I do? How do I begin?’ That shows that they didn’t really get it. Not knowing, being confused, fearful, the combination of these mental faculties is what is traditionally called ignorance. I would like to call that ‘ego’. I am borrowing this term from psychology, where it is actually used in the sense of building up your personality. But the greater public uses it differently. They say, ‘That is just your ego. It is terrible stuff.’ In that sense it is something we don’t like. I would like to borrow the term in this context.

Wisdom is the method to challenge this ego. The problem and the remedy both are within ourselves. The enemy is really inside. It is certainly not Saddam Hussein. Even if we kill him today we are not going to be liberated tomorrow. He is not our ego. I also like to share with you a certain terminology. In Tibetan this is called dag dzin and den dzin. Dag dzin is self-grasping and den dzin is truth-grasping. These terms come up depending on emphasis, but more or less they both refer to ego. I would like to make a distinction, however, between self-cherishing and self-grasping. Self-grasping, truth grasping, truth holding and so on are referring to ego.

Let me read something from the ‘Liberation in the Palm’. Pabongka says in there,

‘According to the root text of the mahamudra, observation of the conscious working of the mind is said merely to acquaint you with the relative truth of the mind.’

So there are a number of people who think that if you can really recognize your own mind you have understood the wisdom and you are liberated. According to this quote that is not the case. Mind recognition alone will only lead to the recognition of the relative mind and nothing more than that. Not only that. There is no one who doesn’t know their own mind, unless they are crazy. We may not recognize it, but we know it. Even if you recognize it well, you don’t recognize it’s absolute nature. There are people who spend a lot of time trying to find the relative mind. But that doesn’t solve the problem. Pabongka further quotes Sakya Pandita:

The blind usually turn

Meditation on the mahamudra

Into the cause for becoming an animal.

Those who do better fall into

The mind-stopped trance of Shravakas;

Or are reborn in the Formless Realms.

Again, this shows that working with the relative nature of the mind does not give us the greatest results. At best we can get a rebirth into the formless realms. Without wisdom these are the problems. Let me quote the next passage from Liberation in the Palm:

You may analyze the nature of the mind, which has no color or shape, but not in conjunction with any of the three fundamentals of the path; or perhaps you are familiar with the instruction, ’Do not retrace the past; do not anticipate the future’. [that is; dwell only in the present in your meditation]. Such slavish meditations only cause a human life to become empty and hollow. They cannot lead you to the higher levels of the paths. But in conjunction with bodhicitta, renunciation, correct view and taking refuge, such a practice becomes Mahayana, a practice leading to liberation, a Buddhist Dharma. You must enter this unmistaken path. If you don’t, the mere realization that the nature of the mind is clear, empty and without grasping [at the meaning] cannot make inroads on your grasping at a self. At best such meditations threaten to have the same effect as the efforts of the Thirtikas. Do not, therefore hold such inferior paths to be sound. You must know how to distinguish between the correct path and those that only seem to be correct.

This self-grasping is what the Tibetan term dag dzin refers to. So, to summarize, looking at the mind, analyzing the relative nature of the mind, is not the wisdom we are really looking for. That is the conclusion we have to draw from all these statements.

Then, what is the wisdom we need? According to the tradition it is called emptiness. This is divided into two: the emptiness of persons and the emptiness of phenomena. In other words: animate and inanimate. It is the division into self and anything other than self. There is no difference in depth. If you see the emptiness of one, you see the emptiness of all others. You don’t have to train yourself separately to see the emptiness of each and everything you encounter. One is good enough. Then, why is there this division?

The outlines according to the Liberation in the Palm:

How to train in the very essence of wisdom – special insight

This has three subheadings:

ascertaining the non-existence of a personal self

ascertaining the non-existence of a self of phenomena

the way you develop special insight.

ascertaining the non-existence of a personal self

a) How to pursue the absorption resembling space

b) When not in absorption, how to pursue the attitude that things are like an

illusion

Actually, as far as translations are concerned, the good old ‘emptiness’ is still better than ‘non-existence’. There is another translation that says ‘insubstantiality of a personal self’. Now we are talking about emptiness. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. When we say ‘emptiness’ we have to be clear what is empty of what. In the Heart Sutra it says ‘No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue’. Does that really mean that there is no tongue and no taste and no body? Another question: what understanding do I get when I think about emptiness? What am I thinking about? I need something to hold. What image do I get and what picture can I draw?

Even in the Tibetan tradition there are two systems. Tsong Khapa says that it refers to the emptiness of natural existence or independent existence. Form is not empty, but the natural existence of form is emptiness. When you say that there is no ear, that means that there is no naturally existent ear. Another school will say that you have to take the statement ‘There is no ear’ literally and there is no ear at all. These are the two viewpoints.

The first Noble Truth is the Truth of suffering. This can be dealt with under the following four aspects:

Suffering

Emptiness

Selflessness

Renunciation

So far I have introduced emptiness as the emptiness of a self-standing substantial existence. This is called kangsar rang gi trupai dze yul., actually a self-substantiating self. It is some kind of substance that can substantiate a self.

CD 2 of 7

It can stand by itself, does not depend on anything, and is an independent self. The notion of an independent, permanent self is much easier to understand than this subtler level of kangsar rang gi trupai dze yul, the substance that can substantiate true existence. We are playing with words here. The lack of such a substance is what is meant by emptiness here. I am trying to establish that there is just me, just you. Here this means that other than me and you there is no strong substance, which really calls out ‘me’. How do we perceive our ego? Many people don’t think about it. Maybe they see just a big letter E. But when you begin to look and bring a little more substance to that idea you find that what we perceive is something inside of us that is wearing the costume of me. That is a projection many people have. In Tibetan this is called tokpa.

It is like a dancer who wears different costumes, goes back stage, changes and comes out again. It is one person. That is how we may think it is. But that is not how it is. Our fears will now spark up. You think, ‘If I don’t exist solidly, what is going to happen to me?’ First we get a certain projection, then we get comfortable and happy with it, then we begin to know that this can’t be right. You begin to look closer. Right now we are holding the self as an entity that comes out when you die, gets into another body and continues. That is the idea of an independent self. According to my understanding the judaeo-christian tradition projects the soul to be like that. If there is the idea of a permanent soul, that must be it. When you are looking from our new perspective, that idea is not right. And now our fear will kick in. What is happening to me? That fear comes up because we haven’t been able to establish the tanyi tse drup, the relative existence. When you don’t realize how this fear takes over you will be pushed down again, grasping too much at inherent existence. It is like the computer is shutting down and there will be no e mails for seven days.

So far we have been coming to the view of emptiness as being the lack of a substantially existing self. Within that view you have to establish yourself as being relatively existent.

Along with that you have to do some more reading about it and practice purification. Wisdom is not an easy subject. It is very scientific, yet it also requires purification and accumulation of merit. If you don’t purify, the obstacles are still too powerful and will block you from seeing emptiness. It is not just a belief. You can exactly see how it works.

The first step is the recognition of the object of refutation or object of negation. Then according to Pabongka’s breakdown of the practice there comes the space-like meditation and the illusory aftermath.

a) How to pursue the absorption resembling space

That has four subheadings:

Determine what is to be refuted

Determine what are the full set of possibilities

Determine how the self and the aggregates cannot truly be the same

Determine how the self and the aggregates cannot truly be different

This translation uses the term ‘aggregates’ for the Tibetan pung po. That could mean ‘body’ or ‘heap’ or ‘collection’.

First you have to figure out the object of negation and then these four steps are how to negate that object of negation.