Archive Result

1

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

Oral explanations by Kyabje Gehlek Rimpoche

20040608GRAABWL

Talk 1: 6-8-04

Welcome back for this meditation session. I brought the wrong book and I can't find where we are. We reached up to verse 70. In this Tibetan text the verses are not marked by numbers. Tibetan texts don't number the verses. We can be lucky to have page numbers and the pages themselves are also loose. We looked at the remaining verses of this chapter and I do want to finish it by the end of the year and apparently I would have to cover at least 8 verses every evening. But I can say the same thing that Lochö Rimpoche said at the Guhyasamaja retreat last week, 'Whether it is going to be long or short depends on how much you stretch out your hand.'

For those of you who couldn't come I would like to inform you that we had a wonderful retreat with Lochö Rimpoche. He gave the Guhyasamaja initiation. I always had the wish to introduce in Jewel Heart the Heruka, Yamantaka and Guhyasamaja tantras. These are the three most important yidams of Tsong Khapa. I wanted to make them available for the Jewel Heart people. The difficulty was with Guhyasamaja, because I myself never did the retreat on it. Even the shortest sadhana has so many pages. However, there is no commitment that you have to say the sadhana as a daily practice. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, does give a commitment when he gives the initiation. Before him, that was not done. When I requested Lochö Rimpoche to give it I did it under the condition that there is no commitment. He finally agreed this year and we had a wonderful initiation, followed by a short teaching on the Six Session Yoga. That is a commitment for every Vajrayana practitioner. So there is no commitment to say the sadhana, but the teachings are normally given on the basis of the sadhana. Therefore Lochö Rimpoche did his teaching based on the short sadhana of Guhyasamaja. It went very well and we are very happy with it.

We do meditations and all kinds of things that come from Tibetan Buddhism. However, we are not trying to make you and everybody into Tibetan Buddhists. That is not at all my mission. But what I present to you comes out of the Tibetan Buddhism. Besides that I have nothing else to give you. I would like you to remember that. For those of you who would like to do a Tibetan Buddhist practice that is fine. You are welcome. But it is not a requirement. I would like to be of service to as many people as possible. I am trying to bring the most important points out of Tibetan Buddhism, trying to present them in a simple way so that people can benefit from them. That's my mission.

At the same time, to those who are really engaged in Tibetan Buddhist practice, I would like to make something clear. Maybe it is not funny to you, but it sounds funny to me. I was brought up in the old Tibetan culture. There we also do make a division between vajrayana and non-varjrayana practices. It is true, but that division is not that big. It is not a big deal at all. There is a difference between vajrayana practice and non-vajrayana practice. But we don’t look at the practitioners whether they are vajrayana or non vajrayana. If we pick up a yidam, a teaching, a practice, we check what practice it is, whether we are doing it in the vajrayana way or whether it is non-vajrayana. We are only talking about the practice not about the persons. In the west, the distinction between vajrayana and non-varjayana is becoming a big gap. Some people say, 'I like the vajrayana better' and some say, 'I like the non-vajrayana better.' Yes, we all do. Even among people who practice vajrayana, there are some who like vajrayana practices better and some that like non-vajrayana practices better. We do choose that all the time.

When you seriously go into Tibetan Buddhism then it is all vajrayana Buddhism - whether you are vajrayana or non-varjayana. The gap is not that big in the practice. Some vajrayana-oriented practices are not permitted to be done by people who have not obtained a particular initiation. Otherwise the gap is not very big. In the west, I noticed that this big gap is coming up. Lochö Rimpoche this time reminded me, saying that he went to many places in the US this time, because the Drepung Losseling sent him everywhere. He also noticed that there was a big gap between the vajrayana and non-vajrayana groups and he was wondering how that happened. I also don't know. It think it just comes as people get into certain practices and then say, 'Now we are vajrayana and you are non-vajrayana'. I did not create that intentionally. I just want to make it clear. The Tibetan Buddhism is vajrayana, even the non-vajrayana part. [laughs]. Whatever I am presenting comes out of Tibetan Buddhism, and besides that I have nothing else to say. That does not mean that people who come here to listen to these courses have to be Buddhist or vajrayana Buddhist. You don't have to be. We are only presenting certain important points that don't have any restrictions. That again does not mean that you are not getting the real stuff. You are. Look at meditation. Even if you look at mediation, the vajrayana does not have a different meditation structure than what we are doing here. This is it. This is meditation. There is no more profound meditation in vajrayana. On the other hand, in vajrayana as well as non-vajryana, we do have a lot of visualizations.

Some people are not familiar with that. They cannot visualize. Or don't know what is meant by that word. I was looking for a different word to express that and I have been using the word 'imagine' sometimes. I forgot that a lot of scientists these days are interested, particularly in MIT. They are deadly into Tibetan Buddhism. They already have a name for visualization. They call it 'imagery'. You draw images out of your mind. At one of the recent scientific conferences the theme was imagery. In that conference they went through a complete sadhana, a very deep vajrayana practice. His Holiness was in attendance too. It was in MIT. Matthew Reker (?) presented and Stephen Cosslyn and Richard Davidson were also involved. They presented a complete sadhana practice and called it 'imagery'. So when you are dealing with visualization and that becomes difficult, call it imagery. The scientists have people do that practice and then they scan their brain and see what the effect of the meditation is on the different physical aspects of the brain.

So a part of meditation is imagery. But the basic rule and basic structure of meditation is totally what I am going to give you here. That's it. In other words, that is the pattern of the meditation and that is the same. The subject will change. Here were are going to talk about the pattern of meditation. First we will talk about the obstacles.

I have two courses running parallel. Tuesdays I am here in Ann Arbor and on Thursday I will be in New York. In Ann Arbor we have been doing the Bodhisattvacharayavatara, the Bodhisattvas's Way of Life, for a number of years. We have been going through chapter after chapter, crawling through the material. We cannot go on in this way with the two last chapters. The two last chapters happen to be the meditation chapter that we are dealing with this year and the last chapter is the wisdom chapter, which, if everything is okay, if we are all here, we will do next year. That will be for 2005.

In New York I have been doing a course on the Odyssey to Freedom, which is the basic foundation of a spiritual practice. It is very solid and wonderful, making people completely grounded, and uplifting them. It is really wonderful stuff. I taught the same thing here in Ann Arbor ten years ago, for 2-3 years. Many people came driving here for it from Chicago and Cleveland, every week end, Saturday and Sunday. The transcripts of that teaching is that huge lam rim transcript. It looks like a huge file. I was told it costs around $100. Now I cannot teach that again in such detail, so I taught it in a little shorter version in New York, over the last 3 years and that is the Odyssey to Freedom. The two last sections of that teaching again happen to be about meditation and wisdom. So I decided to put these two together, the meditation chapter of the Bodhisattva's way of life and the meditation chapter in New York, based on Tsong Khapa's lam rim chenmo.

The Bodhisattvacharayavatara talks about meditation from the point of view of obstacles, which is what draws your attention away from the object and so on. Tsong Khapa's lam rim chen mo meditation chapter has more structure. It tells you how to sit, where to sit, what not think, what to think. It is like a pattern of cloth for a dress. Something may be lacking in this particularly text book, but be there in the other one. If you put those two together, it makes a perfect set of meditation instructions for the individual.

So far we have been talking about the difficulties we are going to face and how to handle them. For the western mind these are mostly theoretical points. That was the subject of the last 8 week course. Now this course is for 5 weeks. I hope that the structure will come in now in the Thursday night talks. I wanted to share that with the people who are attending this. The transcripts are also going to be available on the website from week to week. You can just download them. If you put these two teachings together it will be very comprehensive and will be one the best meditation courses done in the United States. I am not just saying this. There are number of editors who have been editing so many Dharma books and they are telling me all the time that this is one the most detailed meditation courses ever done in the United States. This is going to be very helpful for people and very wonderful. I hope you people will enjoy this and take it.

Basically, what is meditation? You have to remember two things. Tibetan Buddhism is the only one that tells you that there are two types of meditation. There is focused, concentration meditation on the one hand and analytical meditation on the other hand. This is a little surprise to people in this country. For one thing, in this country, some 30, 40 years ago, meditation was considered to be something crazy, not normal, something that only hippies would do. The Beatles then picked it up and later the Hollywood people. Now it has become more ore less a fashion. Meditation and yoga are both very fashionable. But the kind of meditation that has been known so far is the concentrated meditation. You sit tight and just keep your mind on one point. Physically you sit still and relax and mentally you focus on one point. This is very important, because otherwise our mind is so busy and so crazy. The old Tibetan teachers gave the example of letting a crazy monkey inside a beautiful temple. Imagine a wild, crazy monkey let loose in a temple. Particularly, the Tibetan temples are very different from the temples you see in the zen tradition. In the west we have some Jewish temples and some zen and Japanese temples. They are very neat and clean and there may just be one image and nothing much else. Tibetan temples are not necessarily that clean, plus there are so many images. You have no idea what's what. Everybody has beautiful hand implements and so on. In Japanese and Chinese temples you see one or two beautiful offerings, like one little light burning, one beautiful plate of fruit and one for sweets. That much and it is neat and clean. The old Tibetan temples were always filled up with offerings. You have no ideas what is what. There are so many things to eat, sweet and sour, dry fruits, popcorn type of things and everything. It is just like a child's paradise. It is really in that style. There are so many beautiful, tiny, little things. If you let a monkey loose in such a temple, what will happen? The monkey will knock down the butter lamps, eat the sweets, throw things around, start playing with other monkeys, climb on the Buddhas' heads and move things around.

That is the example for the situation that our mind is in. That is completely true. Our mind is so crazy. We are thinking about the job, the house, the family, about bills that need to be paid, about cars, the garden and everything. It is so busy and so crazy. On top of that we have to listen to the news and we are bombarded with information. Every minute of the day there are tremendous amounts of people out there who want to get to you, politicians, interest groups, businesses. Everybody is trying to sell you something and is throwing information at you. Whenever we open our eyes and ears there are zillions of things attacking us, with the hope of selling us something. The politicians try to sell their policies and hope for your vote. The sales people try to sell their junk and try to get your money. It is all junk - absolutely - from Mercedes to Honda, nothing but junk. Television and all that is just junk - impermanent stuff. Hand phones, remote controls and everything, just junk. They are trying to sell their junk to us and get our money and it is not just one or ten or even a hundred, but there are zillions of them just waiting to chew us and get us. Honestly, that's what it is. The moment you turn your radio and television on, that's what you get. They give you a nice, little movie to watch. You have 30 minutes worth of movie and an hour's worth of commercials. They do that all the time. That is drawing our mind, not letting our mind be, not letting us be what we are.

My background is different. I was born in Tibet. We did not have television, not even radio, nor newspapers. It was a funny life. I did research for a history professor in Ohio. One of the biggest news in Tibet in the 1930s was the death of the 13th Dalai Lama. I did research to find out how long it took to get that information to East Tibet. It took one month to get the information out there. So when I tell you about quietness you know what I am talking about.

That does not exist in this part of the world at all. Even if you go to a remote area of Canada now, you will get all the information chasing you by any means. There is no quietness here. We are in the midst of a huge storm of information. It is not only a flow. It is attacking us, trying to get our attention, our money, our vote, whatever we have to give. If they couldn't get money out of it they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't spend a ot of money on the commercials to bombard us with. They are trying to get your mind. All right, if you lose your money, that is your choice, your right, your privilege. But if you lose your mind, that is not great. It is your privilege to lose, but it is not great. If you don't want to lose it, you have to protect it. For that the focusing meditation is extremely important. Without it you cannot do. So, first and foremost is learn how to focus.

Now the scientists are picking it up, but it has been there before, for a long time. It is one the best tools the individual person can keep in their own mind, to learn to be what you want to be. And it amazes me that no one has picked it up until now. It doesn't have to be spiritual. If you know how to focus and you want to get into law, you are going to be great. In India, the lawyers are now studying meditation. They are learning both, the focusing meditation and the dialectical meditation, the debating. They are picking it up now. The corporate businesses are sending their CEOs to learn meditation to make them more efficient, so that they can make more money. Even the LA Lakers, a basket ball team, is using meditation to play better. I am amazed that until now, people didn't pick it up. That tool has been available, but they didn't discover it. The scientists are picking it up because they are interested in finding the truth and the best way of handling. It is starting in a small way. If the Lakers do well, soon all the basket ball and football teams will pick up meditation. If they don't do well, nobody is going to meditate. But in reality it is one of the best tools to enable you to be what you want to be. I am not even talking from the spiritual point of view. It is just helpful to make yourself efficient with whatever subject you want to handle.

The second kind of meditation is the analytical meditation. This is absolutely necessary for spiritual practitioners. Now it is being found very useful even for the lawyers in India. They are picking up the analytical meditation in the best law schools. They are teaching it as part of litigation law. The lawyers of one party will anticipate what the lawyers of the other side will say next. If they say this, then the lawyers will already be prepared to have an answer. If they have another thing to say, there will be an answer prepared for that too. This way they are trying to get the edge over the other side's lawyers in the litigation.

But spiritual practitioners are seeking something beyond the material world. It doesn't matter whatever tradition you are following, the judaeo-christian, hindu-buddhist, east or west or whatever. But the wisdom aspect of it is extremely important. Here is why:

Samsara is where we are today. Buddha called that samsara. In Tibetan it is kor wa. To be free from that is nirvana. In Tibetan samsara and nirvana in one word is kor de. De means going beyond. I would like to talk to you from the perspective of the Tibetan term. I don't know what the word samsara means etyomologically. I don't know Sanskrit. So I don't even know what Buddha actually means. Of course I know that Buddha is the wise, awakened state. That much I know. I am not stupid in that way. But the Tibetan for Buddha is sang gye. I know exactly what that means. So when we are talking about samsara we are not talking about the perfume! We are talking about our life. Kor means running, circling. De means beyond. Who is running? We are not at the races, but we are all running. We are runners. What are we running from? There is a tremendous amount of explanations on that. Think: What are we running away from? We are running away from fear. Believe me, that's what it is. Where are we running to? We are running around, we are circling. We think we are running away. We think we are making progress, but we are not. Why are we running away from fear? Because fear combined with confusion has created our structure or pattern of life. What we want we don't get - exactly. What we don't want we do get - exactly. We get exactly that. That makes us busy. We create our own problem and then we try to solve that problem and so we run and take on stress and get into more problems and have to deal with everything.

Why are we running? Buddha has a funny answer: It is our karma. Well, our problems are coming from our karma. One of the great Indian masters, a nephew of Vasubandhu, in Tibetan Yig ne, wrote a root text on metaphysics. There he says, 'All the different things of this life come out of karma.' Where does karma come from? From our emotions, whether they are negative or positive. Where are our emotions coming from? From our confusion and fear combined. I like to call that ego. Traditionally, it is called ignorance. We are running away from that. Kor tells you how you got into that problematic existence. That covers the first two of the Four Noble Truths: The truth of suffering and the cause of suffering. The word kor alone tells you that. The word de gives you the second two of the Four Noble Truths: the truth of cessation and the truth of the path of cessation. In other words: what makes you get out of the circle and where you are landing.

Therefore the combined term kor de not only gives you the whole picture of running around but also the Four Noble Truths. That is why I am saying that I don't know what the term samsara really means. I don't know what sam means and what sara means exactly. In Tibetan I do know. It is the introduction of a practitioner's goal and purpose. The purpose is to get out of what we are caught in. We are caught in that circle. We are trying to run away, but we can't get out. It is tight system. There are 6 realms which are linked by 12 different events. They are also known as the 12 links of interdependent nature. These links are totally tight. You can't get out, except in one way. The only way out is to cut the root and then the whole chain of links opens. Inside of that circle we do have a lot of nice picnic spots. That is where we are now, in one of them. But mostly we don't get what we want and we get what we don't want. What we want is here but we don't get it, so much so that we don't even know what we want.

Honestly. Many people do not know what they want. They are interested in spiritual practice. They are interested in something better than just materialistic achievements. But they don't know what they want. Really true. I am not criticizing or shouting. It is the reality. Why don't we know? Because we don't have good role models and examples to look at. The best examples we do have are the religious organizations. And we know that these are full of…….I just remember we are on the internet, so I better not use the word that is coming up on my tongue. I should say the religious organizations are full of problems and difficulties. You know what is happening in churches, temples and monasteries. Buddhism is not an exception. Everywhere there is corruption and problems. We really don't have good role models. That's why we don't know what we want. If I asked each and every individual they would say, 'I want happiness and joy, something good' - whatever that might be. We like the positives and not the negatives. That is our natural instinct or inclination. Because we are human beings we do have goodness and greatness in our nature. When you look deep down into yourself, you will see that goodness is there. But we don't let it shine. We give the cold shoulder to everybody. And that is because of our addictions and habits, our way of thinking and living. This is the reality. We don't know what we want.

Buddha introduces kor de. De is nirvana. It is beyond samsara. It is peace. So just these two simple words will tell you what the purpose of spiritual practice is. It deals with what we want, where we want to go, what we want to achieve, what we are running away from. Our natural inclination is that when we suffer too much we want to run away from it. That is nothing we have to blame ourselves for. If you feel tortured at home as a kid you can't wait to become 18, so you can leave. Some kids even run away before. Legally you can run away at 18, so you are waiting to be 18. Just like that we have been waiting to run away, because we are tortured, we have been burnt. We want to get away form this. That's why are running. We have become runners. We want to get out of the suffering nature circle. For that we have to cut the root link. Without wisdom that is not possible. No matter whatever else you try is not going to work.

You could sit and meditate for eons, not just centuries, but without wisdom you can't cut it. When you don't cut it you won't get out. You will remain in there. The analytical meditation is really geared towards the wisdom part. That is the reason why there has to be two kinds of meditation. In the beginning these two meditations look contradictory. One will tell you to focus, the other will tell you to analyze. If you try to do them together and you cannot handle them, one will cancel out the other. First we should achieve what is the easiest and that is focusing. Learn to focus first. When you are used to it then you can handle the analytical one easily. It is like with anything. First, when you learn to drive you have to be totally focused. You hold the steering wheel really tight and you can't listen to anything else. You just have to go, right? After we lean how to drive perfectly, we can drive and talk on our hand phone at the same time. Then we can even drink our coffee and chew our hamburger on top of that. Not only that: you can talk to two people on the hand phone, by have one call waiting and switch back and forth between them! All of that you can do at the same time. It doesn't contradict your driving. Yes, the danger levels increase, but we can do it. So you can't learn how to do this all at once. First you just focus on one thing, the driving. Just like that, now we are spending a whole year talking about how to focus.

The New York talks will deal with the structure of that. Up to now, as far as the structure is concerned, we have covered where you can meditate. It has to be a good place. This should be a place that is comfortable, a place that doesn't make you sick. If there are toxins in the area, don't sit there. You will get sick. It should be a place without disturbances. It should be a place where you can think and feel safe. The bottom line is a place where you feel safe. Around here we don't have wild animals, but we do have these monsters: bombardments of information. You also need good friends. You don't want to be around people who irritate you all the time. You need friends that can help you, who you can trust. You should have friends that you can trust with your life. At least you don't want friends that you have to worry about when you are away for a while.

Then the necessary things should be easily available. You don't want to go way out there, because in case you get sick, who is going to look after you? Where can you find a doctor? Buddhism does recommend going away into the forests or caves, however, if you look further into the instructions, it comes down to this: it also has to be place where you can find help easily. Go away, but don't go away completely. You don't want to go somewhere where you cannot find food - unless you are an extreme person. Then you are okay. Extreme people can even meditate on top of World War II left-over ammunition dumps! That might not be a good place, because these things can go off. Some one who did that earlier might have been lucky. You may not necessarily be that lucky all the time.

It is very easy to say, 'I want to meditate'. But sitting alone anywhere might help you focus a little, but that is not good enough for you. I have told you the story of the lizard meditation. That is actually not meditation. When I was a kid I had a very nice, luxurious cave. Some of you may have seen it when you went to Tibet and visited that cave. It was really a nice cave. It is a hole in the rock, but at the same time it has living rooms, bed rooms, store rooms, kitchen, running water. It is warm in winter and cool in summer. There are lots of lizards near that cave, because it is a rocky area. One of my teachers one day called me, 'I want to show you someone meditating.' I went with him and he pointed out a lizard that was sitting on a rock, with open mouth. We call that 'the lizard is swallowing air'. Actually the lizard is resting its stomach on the hot rock and when it gets too hot, is taking some air in through the mouth. So if you just sit there without thinking anything, that is what I call 'lizard meditation'. You may be waiting for something to happen, but you can sit there till the cows come home. They are not going to come home anyway. That is why thinking is necessary.

Sitting blank is not even going to help you to focus. It won't do just to remove thoughts. You have to find something to actually concentrate on. I have no objection to removing your thoughts. But don't leave it blank. In that case you have to find your mind as the object you are meditating on. And it is not easy to catch the mind. Mind doesn't have shape or color. You have to find mind beyond physical shape and color. That is where thoughts are projecting from, where they are coming from, where they are disappearing to again. If you look into a mirror and then breathe on it, there will be the moisture covering the mirror. Gradually it will disappear and you will see yourself clearly in the mirror again. In that way thoughts are coming and going. Somehow you have to find that mind. It is quite difficult. That is why in Tsong Khapa's tradition, although meditating on the mind directly is also taught, the emphasis is on meditating on a figure, like the Buddha image. It creates positive karma and purifies negativity and is easier to find. If you can find the mind as an object you can use that. I have already done the teaching on that. There are six different ways of looking at the mind. I am not going to go into that now. Maybe I will time to revisit that later. You have to find something that you can label as mind. My objection at this level is that some people think that meditating on the mind in that way is wisdom. But it is not. Je Tsong Khapa insists that the object in that case is just your ordinary, relative mind, which you can look at in six different ways. Either of the six will do. But it tells you that it is not just a blank.

In the west, the meditation that people try to do very often is just sitting blank. That is a problem. Blank produces blank. We don't want to produce a blank. That can't happen if you focus on a Buddha image. If we want to do that, it is great. I noticed that many of our practitioners carry photos of Buddha images and other deity images around. And when they do their practice they like to look at these. That may be helpful for a short period, but it is the mind that we are concerned with, not the eye. We are not training our eye consciousness, but our mental consciousness. Whatever you focus on has to be either imagery or non-imagery, but it has to be something. A lot of modern artists draw wave type of patterns. Artists draw all kinds of never ending designs. They try to express something in physical form which cannot really be expressed. That doesn't mean that mentally you cannot hold that. You have to do that anyway. Our first job therefore is to create the basis for the meditation.

I realize we are going over the time, so I better stop. Good night.