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SHANTIDEVA’S GUIDE TO THE BODHISATTVA’S WAY OF LIFE CHAPTER 8: MEDITATION PART I

Oral explanations by Kyabje Gehlek Rimpoche

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Talk 4: 3-23-04

Good evening and welcome. Last Tuesday evening we couldn’t meet because of the snow. We hope to make up for that day at the end of the series.

We are talking here about the obstacles to attaining zhi ne or shamata. In New York on Thursday nights I am talking about this same subject based on completely different texts, Tsongkhapa’s lam rim chen mo and lam rim chung mo. On Tuesdays here, it is the same subject following Shantideva’s Bodhisattvacharyavatara. The later part of the lam rim chen mo (Tsongkhapa lived from 1357 to 1419), is much more organized than the Bodhisattvacharyavatara. You find the same subjects here, but here there are no outlines, there is no PowerPoint style presentation. In Shantideva, everything flows. The information flows up and down.

So it is important to combine the transcripts of both teachings. If you attend the course in Ann Arbor or New York, you can download both transcripts from week to week. Normally the Tuesday nights are much more structured and the Thursdays more flowing, but this time, using these particular texts, the Thursdays turn out more structured and the Tuesdays have a little more flow. Right now, Ann Arbor has the hippie style and New York has the yuppie style. Putting them together makes it work better.

The main point at this time is what prevents you from concentrating better. First we talked about why we should have concentration or focused meditation. Last Thursday we heard that the first obstacle to concentration is laziness.

How do I overcome laziness? Is there an antidote? Yes, there is. The physical joy and mental happiness you get from concentration is the actual antidote to laziness. If that is the case, and if I don’t yet have this physical and mental joy [shin jang], what do I do? Physical joy and mental happiness are the result of enthusiasm that you put into your meditation. If you don’t have enthusiasm, you won’t get the result. Enthusiasm, again, is based on having an interest. If you don’t have the interest yet, this will be developed if you begin to see what this practice can do for you [learn about the benefits of zhi ne], that you can get this physical and mental joy and that you will be able to use your mind for whatever you want, as much as you want. Your mind will no longer act as if it had its own mind. When you hear and read and think about this, it will spark your interest, then you build up on that. This is the antidote to laziness at our level, that interest should bring enthusiasm. That in turn should bring the result of physical and mental joy. That’s what we talked about last Thursday and that is very organized.

Here, in the Bodhisattvacharyavatara we come from another angle. One of the kinds of laziness we have is that we lose our attention. We are attracted to something else.

Verse 16

In the same way as a bee takes honey from a flower,

I should take merely (what is necessary) for the practice of Dharma,

But remain unfamiliar,

As though I had never seen them before.

All these verses tell you about what attractions you get. We get a lot of attraction to material things. Material things draw a lot of our attention. We have to take care of these things, spend time and energy, look after them and so on. That is a fact. We know that.

The question then arises: Can I use material things at all? In the sixties and seventies many people thought, ‘We cannot take and enjoy any of those things. If we do this, it is taking it away from somebody else or misusing somebody else’s and it is wasted and we shouldn’t do that.’ A lot of people even felt guilty about having a good job, thinking that they were taking it away from somebody. This may only make sense to you who lived through this: you will remember. There was that idea if you take and enjoy good things it is not right.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, that may also be true. There are vows of celibacy and vows of poverty. You want to remain poor. That is fine. Even Buddha and Shantideva tell you to be satisfied with what you have. It doesn’t say that you can’t have extra things, but you shouldn’t spend extra time and energy trying to get these things. Your mind should not be controlled by desire. You should not be the slave of desire, rather, you should use desire as your slave.

It is interesting. Buddha’s teachings never say that his followers have to be wealthy, but the vow of poverty is also not emphasized at all. In addition, it is interesting to look at history of how Buddhism really came to develop in India in the beginning. Buddha was always dealing with royal families. The kings and queens invited him; it came from that level down. You can follow this throughout. The sutras themselves often start with There were the gods, humans and ghosts, this king and that king and this queen and that queen and all these monks among the 30 000 who attended.’ hat is how it usually goes. In the Buddhist teachings, we in particular, who are not monks and nuns, can learn from this. (Though monks and nuns do want the best they can.) The teachings tell us that you can use any materials you find, no matter how good they are. If you have them, you can definitely use them, without wasting your energy and so on. But make sure that they don’t use you, but you use them!

I remember, once I gave a talk in Hong Kong at the Peninsula Hotel. A wealthy business man sitting at the back raised his hand and asked, ‘So what do I do with my Rolls Royce?’ I said, ‘As long as you drive the Rolls Royce, it is fine. But as soon as the Rolls Royce drives you, you are in trouble!’

This is also the example in this verse 16: bees take the essence of flowers and fly away. They neither destroy the flower nor create difficulties for themselves. There is a very similar example in the Western tradition, too. Allen Ginsberg used to quote William Blake and I memorized the quote,

He who binds to himself a joy,

Does the winged life destroy.

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

What is the difference between verse 16 and Blake’s quote? They are exactly the same. You can use the material world, but make sure it doesn’t destroy you!

All these verses tell you what makes you lose. Which joys are you binding to yourself? If you do bind yourself to a joy, you are going to destroy the winged life.

Verse 17

“I have much material wealth as well as honor,

And many people like me,”

Nurturing self-importance in this way

I shall be made terrified after death.

This verse tells us that we are attracted to the material world. I am attracted to people liking me. That also builds pride. I think that I am somebody. People should come and give me gifts, praise me, respect me. I have to be popular and so on. You want fame [honor] and wealth. If don’t have it, there is no problem, but if you have a little bit, you can get into trouble. You want it bigger, better and stronger. We all do.

For Buddha, there was no problem, no matter how many kings and queens came. Buddha did give them the appropriate acknowledgment: when they came, he welcomed them and when they left, he said good-bye. If they didn’t come, he didn’t work for getting them to come and see him. He did not bind himself to fame or wealth. If he had done so, his teachings would not be useful today, almost 2600 years later, across the oceans, here on the other side of the world. They would be useless for us. Nobody would pay any attention, because it wouldn’t do anything for us. Because he didn’t bind to himself to a joy or name or fame, we find his teachings useful today.

If you do bind yourself to anything, this is obsession, attachment. If you bind yourself to name, wealth and fame, if you work for that, it will create tremendous fear for you, fear that you will have to suffer the consequences after your death: I shall be made terrified.

We worry about the consequences in our life today. ‘Am I going to be deprived of wealth, opportunity, health, family? Will I be lonely, will I be sick, will I be miserable, will I be crying, will I go crazy?’ These are our fears today, but when Buddha talks about fear, it goes beyond that. It is just like on the positive side, when he talks about generosity, morality, and so on that go beyond.

In the same way also, the fears are going beyond the fears we normally entertain. When we talk about misery we are just looking at a tiny, little thing, compared with the misery that the whole world goes through. There is a big difference between our own, individual misery and what so many others are going through. This is not because we are Americans and are protected by George Bush! [laughs] The suffering in general is huge. Individual sufferings are less.

We do not experience much direct suffering here, but in the world today there is tremendous suffering. Even in Iraq, the sufferings that the country is going through and the suffering that individuals have there is different. Iraq as a whole has tremendous pain, misery and problems and agony. People are fighting, losing their lives, getting wounded and tortured.

People worry about it. Some people like to watch the movie ‘The Passion of Christ’, but some don’t, because there is so much torture in it. It is depicted there very graphically, but otherwise people who die in the war today have very similar tortures, maybe not 12 hours, but some people have actually even more. They may not experience somebody whipping them, but they experience the same kind of pain.

When Buddha talks about fear it goes beyond all of this to the fear of samsara in general and particularly the hell realms. Those of you who went through the lam rim teaching before you have heard about the different hot and cold hell realms. These are reality. We may say we don’t care whether there is a hell somewhere else, that we still have the hell even in the human realm. Iraq is a hell right now. You can say that and it is correct.

But when you really talk about the actual hell realm suffering, it is much more, no comparison whatsoever. I’ll give you one little example why suffering as a human being differs from suffering as a hell being. In the human realm, no matter how much torture your physical body receives, after a while you cannot take any more and you die. In the hell realm you don’t. That body is made somehow different, almost like it is made by God to suffer. You get tortured and you suffer so much, but you don’t die. On top of that, if a piece of your flesh is cut off or if some blood drops down on the ground, which in the hell is a charcoal-burning ground, until the blood is totally dried up and evaporated, you still experience the pain of it boiling on the ground, even though it has gone out of your body, until it disappears. Have I seen this? No, I haven’t, but that is what the teachings say. That is why I say that everything in Buddha’s teachings goes beyond. The good and the bad both go beyond!

We have to think about all the attractions we have, the time we waste, and the consequences we have to expect. These are the consequences. These two last sentences of verse 17 indicate that. Why do we suffer these consequences? Because we have too much attraction. We bind ourselves too much to material wealth as well as to honor. We are stupid. We have to have a dialogue with our own mind and say, ‘Hey stupid mind! This is attraction. You bind yourself to that desire. Don’t you realize the consequences that is going to bring you?’

If we look in our life, the desires we have for material things are the real causes of our sufferings. From the teaching tradition, we can tell you here that if we didn’t have obsession and attachment we wouldn’t have any suffering. That is true.

Obsession and attachment are worse than anger and hatred. Anger and hatred are a little more wrathful, fierce and hot. Attraction and obsession are cool, smooth and soft, a little more peaceful, but more harmful. If there is no attraction and obsession, there won’t be anger or hatred. Think about it. Anger and hatred come because our desires are not fulfilled. Why do we dislike somebody? Because that person didn’t fulfill what I expected of them. No other reason. That shows that attachment is a deeper problem than hatred. Yes, hatred is very bad, we all know, but that’s what it is.

Verse 18

So, you thoroughly confused mind,

By the piling up of whatever objects

You are attached to,

Misery a thousand fold will ensue.

If you are a wise person, if you are not stupid, if you are not a confused person, then you should not entertain your obsessions. Never entertain your obsessions!

Atisha, the great Indian teacher who came to Tibet and purified all the misunderstanding of the earlier Buddhism in Tibet, who brought the perfect teaching to Tibet in the 1100s said,

Obsession is the biggest problem.

Avoid obsession completely and remain without it.

It will never give you joy, happiness or any good thing.

Not only that, it kills your liberation.

Obsession kills your liberation. That’s why traditional teachings will tell you, ‘Attachment is like glue’. It glues you to suffering. You cannot pull out. The winged life will be destroyed.

Verse 19

Hence the wise should not be attached,

(Because) fear is born from attachment.

With a firm mind understand well

That it is the nature of these things to be discarded!

Can we cut off our attraction, obsession and attachment? No, we cannot. Right now, we are not capable, because of our heavy addictions. If you force an extremely heavy drinker to stop drinking immediately or if you make a heavy smoker stop smoking immediately, the huge problem of withdrawal symptoms will almost kills you, if you don’t know how to handle it. We have eyes, ears, nose, feelings. Our eyes will see something else, our ears will see something else, our nose will smell something else, our body will touch somewhere else and we cannot cut the addiction. We want to enjoy.

So what do you do? A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, that’s your karma. You can’t help it.’ People accept that. But I think it is stupid, absolutely stupid. Who made the karma? Every karma I experience is karma that I made. Every karma that you experience is karma that you have made. I am responsible for my karma and you are responsible for your karma. If you and I have made karma together, we are responsible together. Who can do and undo this? Nobody, except ourselves. It is our own creation. Until it has started giving a result, we have got every right, opportunity and possibility to correct this. The fact that it is karma doesn’t mean that you can do nothing. It means that you can do something.

What can you do about obsession? Think that whatever I am after is impermanent. I am impermanent. [With a firm mind understand that it is the nature of these things to be discarded.] Let’s say you have a huge obsession for an antique crystal glass. You really want it and do everything to get it. If you get it, then what do you do with it? Honestly, you cannot use it. It is too expensive and precious. You better wrap it in nice little tissues, put it in a box and hide it. So, then what is the use? On the other hand, if you use it, it could break. It will fall off the table and break. Its nature is such that it is impermanent. It will go.

Not only that, I will go too. If I go and the glass is still there, who knows who gets it after me? Perhaps someone who doesn’t know anything about it. They might pick it up and think, ‘What a funny looking thing,’ and throw it in the garbage. You never know. It is true.

A few years ago something similar happened. I went to the New Jersey Tibetan Learning Center, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in this country, founded by a Mongolian geshe called Geshe Wangyal, the teacher of Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins. He was a very nice geshe who knew the value of a lot of things. He had this very nice, old excellent quality Russian brocade. It was from White Russia during the tsars’ period, way before the revolution. Geshe-la kept this brocade rolled up in a bag and kept it in a cupboard near his bed.

Then, when he died, all his possessions went to the New Jersey Learning Center, that was then run by his main disciples, Joshua and Diana who are still running it today. They probably had no idea that Geshe-la had kept that brocade there. Then another ex-abbot of Losseling came. He is another very good geshe. Besides being a good geshe he is also a very good tailor. He took great interest in the banners that are put up in Tibetan temples. He started cutting up this brocade and by the time I got there, I heard that this Khen Rimpoche had made some banners. When I looked at the banners I noticed that on the outside he had used brand-new cheap Indian brocade, but in the inside he had put that nice, old so-expensive Russian brocade. I asked Joshua and Diana, ‘Where did you get this brocade?’ They said, ‘We didn’t know he had that. He had kept it in his bag. Now we cut it into pieces and used it for the banners.’

I am quite sure Geshe Wangyal originally got this brocade in Russia. You couldn’t get it outside of Russia, since this was the kind the Russian royal family used. Geshe-la went as a refugee from Russia to China and from there he came to Tibet. Then from there he came to India and from there finally to the United States. He must have carried this brocade with him all the way. At the end of all that, another geshe came and cut it all into pieces and patches it into something else! Again, this shows the impermanent nature. Still, it is lucky, because a geshe came and used it for making a temple banner and offering material. From that point of view, it is good.

Now, from my point of view, what do I do with this? Do I rejoice, or do I say, ‘What a waste’? That is my choice. If I rejoice that it has been made into a temple banner, then I can get the benefit. If I say, ‘What a waste’, then I get disadvantages. So I probably got both!

If you are very obsessed with something, that kind of thing happens. That goes for everything, including people. This verse tells to remember that all these are impermanent. So far, we mentioned impermanence in the sense that things break, people throw them out or cut them up, but, even if nobody does anything to them, by their own nature everything decays.

We have tremendous obsession to our body. Who doesn’t have attachment and obsession to their own body? We do, no matter how ugly it might be. If we are fat, we are attached to being fat. If we are thin like a chopstick, we are attached to being a chop-stick. We all have that, but our body is decaying by nature. We can all see it, day by day, in our own face. We can see it in our own eyes, because we have to wear glasses, in our own ears, because we have to wear hearing aids sooner or later. We can see it in our hair. Of course we can color it, but otherwise it is going to be salt and pepper. But then, salt and pepper can be nice! So, even if nobody breaks or destroys something, by its nature it decays.

Verses 20 to 22

Although I may have much material wealth,

Be famous and well spoken of,

Whatever fame and renown I have amassed

Has no power to accompany me (after death).

If there is someone who despises me

What pleasure can I have in being praised?

And if there is another who praises me

What displease can I have in being despised?

If even the Conqueror was unable to please

The various inclinations of different beings,

Then what need to mention an evil person such as I?

Therefore I should give up the intention (to associate with) the worldly.

So what do we do? You may say, ‘I agree with not being attached to materials things. But to me it is important that people like me, that they say good things about me, praise me.’ So what? Some people may say good things about you, but others will say bad things about you.

Even Buddha, the Conqueror, couldn’t make everybody happy. Even God cannot make everybody happy. If God and Buddha could make everybody happy, they would be without a job! It is not because they are not doing anything, but because it is not possible.

They can’t, because human beings are such that we have so many different inclinations. Every person will have a different viewpoint. Everybody will have different arguments. Our minds have different capacities. The same thing could appear to one person as ugly and to another person as beautiful. To some it is great, to some it is horrible.

On the opposite side, it is no point trying to please everybody. Even Buddha cannot. Sacrificing yourself, your own time, your own opportunity, to try to please somebody is not right if it is too extreme. Particularly in this case, when you are trying to develop zhi ne, the concentrated power, it is absolutely not a good thing.

Trying to please other people is a big problem. If you don’t please anybody else and just be what you want to be, that is another problem. You really need to balance.

Verses 23 and 24

They scorn those ho have no material gain

And say bad things about those who do;

How can they who are by nature so hard to get along with

Ever derive any pleasure (from me)?

It has been said by the Tathagatas

that one should not befriend the childish,

because unless they get their own way

these children are never happy.

These verses tell us about the kind of laziness that makes us engage in so much entertainment. We need to chit-chat. That is one way laziness comes in. Trying to please other selfish or childish people is very hard. If they achieve something of their needs or wishes [if they get their own way], they will be very happy. If they don’t, they will be very upset. It is very difficult to deal with these non-Arya people.

On the other hand, it also tells sangha members how good you should be in order to qualify as sangha.. This is explained from the opposite point of view, since here you hear about the disqualifications [never being happy unless you get your own way, being hard to get along with]. When you see yourself in that mirror, you change yourself.

When you look at others, think, ‘Why should I spend so much time trying to please everybody? I will never be able to anyway.’ That is not your fault. It is the fault of the childish.

In conclusion, the verses up through 24 show us how to stop laziness. We make excuses like ‘I have to do this first,’ ‘I need to talk to this person,’ ‘I have to do this job first,’ ‘I have to entertain this person first, after that I will do it.’ The Bodhisattvacharyavatara is rather extreme in regard to what you get at the end of it: obsession gets you nothing. Even if you get something, it is impermanent in nature and has to go. You go, they go, all things go. Nothing will be left. This is telling you, ‘Stop fooling around. Just do what you need to do. Try to develop zhi ne.’ That’s what it is.

Questions and answers

Student: I am grieving for the loss of my sister. I seem to be fine, but the sadness is just under the surface, and then it comes up and I cry and cry, because I loved her so much. I am wondering about my attachment to her creating negativities. Should I feel less attached?

Rimpoche: This is an important and difficult question. In general, any attachment is not right. It is difficult, not good for you and not good for the departed soul.

I think we have to look very carefully at what you mean by attachment. If you mean appreciation of the person, that is a great thing. One should not hesitate to see the greatness of the person and have appreciation and gratitude always. But on the other hand there are these feelings, ‘Why did you leave me?’ ‘Why did you go?’ ‘I am so sad you are gone. I want you to come back. I want you to be here.’ All of these are bullets of attachment that will hit no one but ourselves and sometimes might even spark off and hit the departed person. Therefore, it is something one shouldn’t carry out.

You have to see it clearly. Sadness is sadness. It is not necessarily a negativity by nature at all. But if you cannot leave it, then it becomes very heavy and harmful to the individual and then it becomes negative, because you are hurting yourself.

How do you handle this? You appreciate the person, their life, their work and how they were as a person. Appreciate and rejoice and then let it go. Remember, when Allen Ginsberg’s father died, he talked to Trungpa Rimpoche, who told him, ‘Let your father go. Please continue celebrating your life.’ This advice made Allen write the poem ‘Father Death’. So you may like to write a poem called ‘Sister Death’. You are an artist and can express your feelings through art. Any form of art can do that. But don’t hold it.

Thank you.