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Wisdom teachings NYC 05 Lam Rim Chen mo

Part I

Talk I: 1-13-05

Welcome tonight. It is great to see all of you together here. And I am happy to be back. Good old friends getting back together, that is great.

Let me say a few words first about the terrible situation with the tsunami in Asia. I actually have to thank Colleen. If she had come out to Malaysia to meet me we were supposed to be going to Phuket the next day! The very day when the tsunami hit. Luckily she didn't come. So I didn't go to Phuket and went back instead. It is a sad and horrifying situation. I was told to say something, but I have nothing to say. It is indeed sad and terrible. Some people have sent me e mails and asked, "What kind of karma is that?"

To me, as follower of Buddha's path, I remember that all of his teachings fall under the Four Noble Truths and the first of these is the Truth of Suffering. That's it. There is no question about why and what. It is the actual reality with us, the truth of suffering. That happens everywhere. The truth of suffering is the actual reality we are in. This year I am supposed to be focusing on the wisdom. This is the wisdom of emptiness. The basis of emptiness is the interdependent nature of existence. That is the truth. It is all interdependent conditions, the people, the elements, the earth, the water, the fire and the air. All of those are very much interdependent. So this happens. We misuse them, taking total advantage of all the elements, misusing the earth. We do damage the earth, we pollute whatever we can: water, earth, air, everything. Then we throw bombs everywhere, as much as we can. That's what it is, honestly. It is the interdependent nature of existence. Everywhere, everything is linked together. I mean, it is a true fact. Even the scientists will tell you that the movement of a butterfly in China changes things in the United States. Then, whatever we do on earth is bigger than what a butterfly does. So that is going to have its effect. I cannot understand when people try to see what has happened in South-East Asia and then look at the weather in the United States and try to make that separate and compartmentalized and say it doesn't happen [here]. But it is very much interrelated and interconnected. Our total existence is interdependence. If any part, anywhere, is falling apart, that will cause other reactions.

It is not that somebody is trying to punish anybody. Neither God nor karma is trying to punish anybody. Yes, these are karmic consequences. Sure. These are karmic consequences not only of the individuals who have lost their lives and loved ones, but also all of us who are living together. This is a great example of collective karmic consequences. Those who lost their lives might have had the karma of losing their lives - not because they did something wrong, but they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. When the conditions come together in that way the individuals are just caught in there. Nobody is trying to punish any person or groups of persons, followers of a particular faith or caste. No, it is just when you are caught in it, that's it. Actually, each and every one of us has millions of karmas, due to which we can get killed. We also have many karmas due to which we can be extremely happy. All of these are there. It is the conditions that we encounter that make the difference.

This year I am supposed to talk about emptiness. It is going to be tough and difficult. But the basis of emptiness, the Buddha's idea of the wisdom called 'emptiness' is not that it is empty, but the interdependent nature. Everything is interconnected. The people are interconnected, the elements are interconnected - not only this world, but also all other galaxies everywhere. The individual human beings, the other living beings, everything is very much interconnected. Not only interconnected, but interdependent. That is why these things happen.

Almost every tradition also talks about the end of everything. They have different names for that, but that is also possible. I am not here to deny anything. If I remember, I told this as part of a teaching a few years ago that it is not going to be some kind of Armageddon, where the whole thing is going to disappear all at once. It is going to happen in bits and pieces, parts and parcels here and there, by the effects of the elements. That is how it is going to go. It is not that I have clairvoyance and I saw that coming, but it is my understanding of the Buddhist teachings that tells me that. Even the end of the world will also happen exactly that way. It is not that everything all at once is going to stop. At the end, it may all be gone, but it is going to go in bits and pieces here and there. Unfortunately, this has happened.

As admirers of Buddha's teachings, we dedicate all our positive karmas to the benefit of those who have lost their lives and we rejoice in the great, tremendous, wonderful response of help that people have given. The activities of generosity have been amazing. I am sure we all contributed something here and there, but even if we can't, we can rejoice and that is a great opportunity for us. We dedicate our positive karma to all those who have lost their lives, not only human beings. A tremendous amount of living beings have lost their lives.

This is also a reminder to us: we forget easily how impermanent, how fragile we are. We pretend that we know how to manage everything, how to control things. This is really telling us that we are not controlling and managing anything. So many things like that - this is the truth of suffering. We are not immune. We could have been there. I mean I was supposed to be there myself. My friend and benefactor in Malaysia has researched this for me even six, seven months ago. I would have been there exactly on that day, if Colleen had showed up. But she didn't. That is how karma works. It shows how we are not in control, how fragile we really are. It also shows how the First Noble Truth of Suffering is really true.

We are all interested in understanding why something like this happens. I got a number of telephone calls from local journalists. They tried to say, "How can the good Lord let that happen?" I said, "The good Lord is looking to the other side." That is not true, actually. Neither did the good Lord look to the other side, nor did he let it happen. It is just, when the conditions are right, things will materialize. And we all contribute to the conditions. No one can really say that this has nothing to do with how we treat the elements, the environment. How many toxins do we put out? How much poison do we deposit everywhere? And the bombardments that we do. They all create the conditions and when the conditions are right, this will materialize. When that happens, it becomes suffering.

On the other side, good things can materialize also just like that, not only the bad things. That is the truth. It is shocking, surprising, no doubt. But that is the reality and we have to understand that no one really did this. There is not one person who could be made responsible for this.

I also heard the rumor by some extremists who apparently said that the US has put some bombs under the ocean or something. [laughs]. If the Americans can't even manage Iraq, they won't have any time to go and do something like that just now. You know, the earth, the existence of the whole universe, depends on the balance of the elements, right? There is earth, water, fire and air. You can see that the life of the individual is exactly in the same way. We also depend on the balance of earth, water, fire and air elements. In the White Tara healing practice we talk about that. That is a major theme I have been presenting all the time. So it is exactly like that. The external and internal elements are extremely interconnected. If there is no interconnection, how could we get sick from chemical and toxic pollution? The earth element within the individual and the earth itself are interconnected. Air is connected, water is connected.

When I talk about the water in the body, you may think it is only the outgoing water. But all the liquids in our body are the water element. So the air is the circulation within the body. So, not only the earth is connected, but also the human beings and all living beings. This is what interdependence is all about.

That is not true emptiness, but a very gross way of looking at it. Those parts and parcels, the interconnected elements, if they either don't exist or are not balanced, that will cause us to get sick. We will even disappear and die. Exactly the same thing is happening with the earth itself. That is the interdependence of existence. Also, if the parts and parcels are not there, then it won't be there. That is the emptiness, really true. The true reality of emptiness is this. If one factor is missing, then the thing is not there. Existence depends on the conditions and parts and parcels. So here we go. These are my thoughts.

I am not sure for how many Thursdays I will be here this year, but the subject is only emptiness. I was really thinking quite a lot. If I don't base this on certain books, I may be misleading you. But if I do that it may be quite difficult and very tough this year. It is not going to be very simple. Anyway, my idea is to present this on the basis of Tsong Khapa's lam rim chen mo, the later part of which is called lhag tong chen mo. If I read this directly and talk to you from the text we are not going to get anywhere. So what I will do is highlight passages and then talk about it Thursday by Thursday.

I do understand that this lhag ton chen mo part of the lam rim chen mo has been published in English by the New Jersey Learning Center. If you are interested you may like to read or xerox copy from it. I am not going to read from it here word by word, because then we are going to be sitting here for three years. I will do so based on highlights.

The major point of emptiness is what you heard a number of times. Especially the shorter way of getting the main points is contained in the Three Principal Aspects of the Path. Here it is the Third Principle. That is the wisdom part. Even if you read the transcripts and the root text together, it will help. If you only read the root text of the Three Principles, it is very short. That might not make much difference. But together with the transcript it might help. You have heard the basis already and read about it, and then we try this year to gain some kind of understanding of wisdom.

The question is: Is this wisdom absolutely necessary? Unfortunately, according to Buddha, it is. Can we just gain it by reading about it? No. It has to be totally based on the shamata meditation we talked about last year, in 2004. We spent quite some time talking about shamata. That is a necessary requirement. A lot of people will ignore that, because it is not that much emphasized that meditation is necessary. In Tibetan Buddhism, you get so much information, there are so many things in there, and each and every one of them are absolutely important. We can't keep on emphasizing at each point that this is absolutely necessary and that is absolutely necessary. Everything is. The shamata, the concentrated meditation, appears to be not so important in the Tibetan tradition. A number of people have told me that. That means we are not getting the picture. Yes, it is true. We don't emphasize to go through all the stages of concentrated absorptions.

Once I had all the stages of development made into a chart. There are 17 and then others are added up until there are 52 different stages. We made a chart and distributed it. I call it the General Motors Chart. You know they make cars, vehicles. Here we have the Theravadan, and Mahayana and Vajrayana vehicles and this chart shows you their basic structure. And they all have to have the concentrated meditation. Actually, it is the chassis, the basis on which you build the car. The concentrated meditation becomes that. And the wisdom is like the universal cross in the middle where all the engines work. That is where everything functions. So the chassis, the frame on which you build everything, including the drive shaft - that rod in the middle - is the concentrated meditation. That is not only needed in the Theravada and Mahayana vehicles but even in the Vajrayana. It is a must in Vajrayana. Vajrayana without shamata can never work. It also cannot work without the vipasyana or lhak tong. There are several types of vipasyana¸ the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary vipasyana is looking inside and looking at the path and the development. According to the old Tibetan teachings this is ordinary vipasyana. The extraordinary vipasyana is the true emptiness, based on the Four Noble Truths, which is also the relative and absolute truth. The absolute truth is the extraordinary vipasyana. Without this you cannot really understand the emptiness of self. Actually, empty here refers to two types. In Tibetan they are called mega and ma yin ga.

Empty means a lack of something. When you don't have something you call it empty. When the wallet doesn't have money in it, that is called empty. So a lack of money is the emptiness of the wallet.

So mega means that something is empty because it is not there. ma yin ka means it is empty because whatever what was wrong has been corrected. For example, if I think I am my body and my body is me. When I correct this misunderstanding that becomes ma yin ga The other one means that we think there is something but it is not really there. That is me ga.

I don't know how many of you have heard about the Tibetan terms rang tong - self emptiness, and zhen tong - other emptiness. zhen tong is based on the ma yin ga. rang tong is based on me ga, because it is not there.

There are a number of great teachers who accept the zhen tong as true wisdom. Others don't. I don't know if you remember, but His Holiness the Dalai Lama taught last year in the Beacon Theatre here in New York and did talk about rang tong and zhen tong for a whole day. rang tong and zhen tong is the name and label they talk about. But it is actually based on negation. It is either that something wrongly perceived is negated or something that we thought was there, but really is not there and that is what is being negated.

We are having some trouble with the sound today. It is going in and out. So here you see again: if it is disconnected you can't hear it. That is emptiness. Also, if you have a little better idea about interconnectedness you can understand better why the tsunami was there, why there are earthquakes, and this thing and that thing. Because of that reason I told you that it is the First Noble Truth, the Truth of Suffering. The Truth of Suffering actually came out of what we call ignorance. What does emptiness do here? It shows that ignorance is not there. The lack of ignorance becomes emptiness. Therefore, the object of negation actually is ignorance. The theological dogma points don't talk about lack of ignorance, or emptiness of ignorance. They call it emptiness of self and emptiness of existence and that is technically right.

The major focus we should put on for the early part of the year, at least until the middle of summer or so is to find the object of negation. It is mega. We realize it is not there. We acknowledge that it is not existing. In order to negate that we have to find the thing we negate. That is complicated. Once you have found the negation point, emptiness is just on your finger tips. The most difficult is trying to find what we have to negate. I wanted to share that with you so that you know what we are looking for during this year. I like to warn you: this year is going to be tough. Honestly. The most difficult subjects is what we are trying to avoid and the easy ones is what we talk about. The easy one is easy to understand and I can present it nicely without putting in too much effort and you can say, "Yeah, I understand this!" But it is not going to be like that this year.

That is what wisdom is all about: negation, because it is me ga. There is nothing wrong that you are going to correct. It is not that there is something that we perceive wrongly, but rather we perceive something which is not there. To find that which is not there is difficult. That is why it is difficult to find the object of negation. But it is not impossible. Particularly, with the Vajrayana background it becomes much, much easier. Mind you, Vajrayana is totally built on this emptiness. If there is no emptiness, there is no Vajrayana. This is true even for the White Tara practice. That also begins with

OM SVABAVA SHUDDAH SARVA DHARMA SVABHAVA SHUDDAH HAM

That is the mantra of emptiness as we can call it. Not really, but in the normal sense of talking. It means that everything is built on the basis of emptiness. If someone thinks that without emptiness one can be liberated, forget it. That is never going to work. Just simply having faith, good thoughts, kindness and compassion, is not going to work out. It will build very good karma and make you a wonderful person, great. But are you going to be totally liberated? No. As it is said,

Love and compassion are not the direct antidote to ignorance

Therefore they are not going to destroy that heaviness we carry. That is why you can see that even people who are very good with love and compassion still have difficulty with push and pull and keep on revisiting, because it is not in direct contradiction to ignorance. Wisdom is. This is something very hard to find. Once you find it, thereafter you can almost just sleep. You can lie down and don't have to work that much. You can get fat, as much as you want to. So wisdom is necessary. Buddha said that it is necessary and everywhere it says that it is necessary.

That can raise many other questions such as: All right, so if you are not Buddhist, are you not going to be liberated or can you not become totally enlightened? Actually, to become totally enlightened you have to be Buddhist, because that is the terminology introduced and used by Buddhists, right? That is a joke. The reality is still that perhaps it is the case, but perhaps not. Otherwise we would have to say that all the great Hindu and Christian masters couldn't be enlightened. I don't know if you can say that - unless you are slightly cuckoo. But when you are talking within the Buddhist path, yes it is. That is not because the Buddhist path is the only one that can give you enlightenment, but the wisdom is.

There are different categories of wisdom. The "I", according to Nagarjuna's tradition, is to be negated. According to the other traditions, it is not to be negated. The atman, the soul, is accepted. That is why I am saying this year is going to be very tough. We will try to bite what we can chew. We are not going to bite something that we cannot chew.

Now I will say something funny. It also helps tremendously to use Manjushri. There is peaceful Manjushri and wrathful Manjushri. After all, Manjushri is the embodiment of wisdom of the enlightened beings. His mantra of OM ARAPACANA DHIH, the deity practice and the study, altogether will make a dent into our samsara. Even if we don't get to really negate the root of samsara, we will be able to make quite a big impact on it. That is what I am looking for. Let us hope for the best.

But you have got to put in a little effort. It is not like coming to an easy lam rim talk. lam rim is good. You can meditate and it will make an impact on you. If you don't meditate, then you don't. It may be the same with wisdom, but if you really want to get it, you got to put in a little effort. That means reading and thinking and using your basic intelligence. You must never lose that. Don't ever lose your basic intelligence. That would not be that great. There are certain groups of spiritual people who are even trying to lose their basic intelligence. It is very easy, not to have to make decisions and find somebody else who can make decisions for you. But one should never do that on the spiritual path. You have to make the decisions, based on your sound analysis. The basis on which you can make decisions is your basic intelligence. You know, our beautiful mind has tremendous capacity. We can see the faults, we can see the benefits. We can balance. That basic intelligence we should never lose. If you lose that, forget about wisdom. You are not even going to get a shamata meditation. To really make a big impact on wisdom you have to have shamata. That is why I put a whole year aside to talk about that. You understand, you hear about it, you see the steps. I gave you the stages, all the steps. But if you don't meditate, nothing happens. It all remains in your note book or transcripts. It will collect dust. Maybe one day you will dust it off and start looking. But that is not going to make much impact.

You don't have to make your meditations very long. Just a short time regularly will help. If people think that Tibetan Buddhism doesn't emphasize meditation, that is very wrong. Every point of Tibetan Buddhism is meditation. The fundamental basis of having a correct meditation is shamata. It has its rules and systems. It gives you a stable mind. Yes, it is true. We don't really want to go into the high absorption stages of form- and formless realms and so on. We don't want to go to the peak of samsara, but what we need is at least the first point of the breakthrough of the concentrated meditation. That is a must. It is an absolute necessary stage. In the Hindu tradition this is called "Pre-first level". Without that, you don't get anywhere. That's what it is. Are there any questions?

Audience: You said at one point that people during the tsunami happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But in other teachings you also say that you cannot experience any result that is not caused by a prior action. That seems to be contradictory. What makes the conditions come together then? My past actions?

Rimpoche: The condition for the tsuanami experience is the water. I believe the earth shook and that made the water move. These are the conditions. Every one of us has the karma of dying, for sure. No question. Whether it is going to materialize at a particular time or not depends on the conditions. You happen to be there. The tsunami happens to be going on. These are the conditions. If the conditions are right, karma will connect. If the conditions are not right, the karma cannot connect.

When we say that karma is definite that does not mean it should be at this time at this place, and that everything should be shaped. No. The dying karma, the karma of losing the life by drowning in water, burning in fire or falling from a height, getting sick, or whatever, that is karma of dying. I don't think it has to follow from karma exactly how you die. The dying karma can be connected any time, anywhere, if the conditions are right for that person to die. Then you will die, even if you try to hide in Buddha's begging bowl.

In the teachings on karma there is this example. Maudgalputra could see that war was being waged against the Shakya caste. He had magical powers and said, "I could pick up my hair and tie all the soldiers up. Should I do that?" Buddha said, "No. These people are going to die anyway, because that is their karma. If you don't believe me, let's try to hide two kids." So they kept one kid in Buddha's vihara. The other was put in the 37th heaven. By the time the sun set on that day, both of them died anyway.

I have a funny thought. According to that example, Buddha is said to have hidden that kid in his begging bowl. The kid might have suffocated in there! [laughs]. Who knows what happened. But if you keep on thinking like that, it doesn't become wisdom. It becomes wild, crazy thoughts. Of course, you should have total freedom of thinking whatever you want to think and explore. Locho Rimpoche kept on saying during the Guhyasamaja teachings in Garrison, "Whether Buddha is in the toilet or whether you shit on Buddha's head", and so on. He kept on scolding all the time. That is because these are wild thoughts. I don't know whether there should be limits on your intellectual thought, but according to old Tibetan wisdom, that is not the right way of thinking. It is not right to think that when that child was kept in Buddha's begging bowl, somebody might have covered it and the child might have suffocated. Whatever it may be, the child had died that day. The point is, the karma of that child was to die. It was supposed to die in the war, and there was no war in Buddha's begging bowl or in the 37th heaven, but they still died. So the dying karma did materialize. The conditions for that do not necessarily have to be war. That is exactly what I am trying to say.

The horrible high number of 160 000 dead in the tsunami - I am still thinking it is not the correct number yet. I can't be, because whole islands after islands are gone. They are just gone. Nobody really knows how many people were there. So all of them had the dying karma. Some might have died in the mud, some in the water, some might have died through falling or getting hit by something. All of these things are there, although generally it was due to the tsunami.

Karma is something very funny. Nobody makes or controls karma. The conditions control karma. When they just right, it happens. So what to do?

Audience: Can one totally understand wisdom before one really understands compassion?

Rimpoche: Both can happen. Honestly. Compassion can come first and wisdom later or the other way round. It depends on how intelligent the individual is. Great intelligent people can understand emptiness before they get compassion.

So it does go both ways. Great intelligent people can do it. Here I am not talking about what we normally call "brilliant", but much more than that. They can. For most of us, compassion goes first. That establishes the relative bodhimind and then you add up the wisdom and it becomes absolute bodhimind.

Audience: Is there a connection between the accumulation of merit and one's karma and the conditions that one finds oneself in, like for people who find themselves in the tsunami?

Rimpoche: What is merit and what is good karma? If you really go into detail there will be some slight difference. But in to order to understand easily, merit to me is more or less good karma. Being caught up in a tsunami and so on has to be the result of bad karma. I don't know whether there is any connection or not?

Audience: You mentioned different types of emptiness before, like mega and ma yin ga. Is there a difference also between tong pa nyi and de ko na nyi?

Rimpoche: No. That is terminology. tong pa nyi means "emptiness" and de ko na nyi means "really this one". Sometimes it is translated as "suchness". Suchness and emptiness are the same. As a matter of fact I was just reading the lam rim chen mo before I came here. I gained some understanding why it is called de ko na nyi - "only this one". It is the same as emptiness.

Audience: Sometimes it is also translated as "thatness".

Rimpoche: We have a number of difficulties in the west. First we don't understand Tibetan or Sanskrit and in addition to that we add English words. It becomes more complicated. Another similar term is de zhin nyi - "just like that" or "such it is". All of these terms are referring to emptiness.

Audience: I think there is also a verse in Chandrakirti's Guide to the Middle Way about developing compassion first.

Rimpoche: Okay. That would have to be in chapter 6 of the madhyamaka or u ma la gyu pa.

Audience: I just wonder whether that is more appropriate for us right now, to have more compassion for people who are confused about the subject.

Rimpoche: I think we are all confused. But we are working on that and it is becomes clearer and clearer and when you become enlightened then you really get absolutely clear. Sure, compassion is fine. There is nothing greater than compassion. There are just two different tracks. The emptiness-wisdom track and the compassion track. It is like two different railway tracks. That's about it. But do they interconnect? Yes, they do. If you have compassion based on the interconnectedness and emptiness, then it becomes absolute bodhimind. I thought you wanted to say that Chandrakirti states that you have to have compassion first and wisdom later. But that is not what you are saying, are you?

The u ma la gyu pa does talk right at the beginning about how important compassion is. It says that it is important and the beginning, in the middle and ultimately. It is saying that the bodhimind is the cause of the Bodhisattvas. The Sravakas and Pratyekas are born out of Buddhas. Buddhas are born out of Bodhisattvas and Bodhisattvas are born out of compassion. That is fine, but it doesn't contradict what I said about some people who develop wisdom first. I believe we have to have both, the wisdom and the compassion. The same text by Chandrakirti says that it is like a bird that has two wings. This is the last verse in the 3rd chapter.

Audience: Is there a remedy for the misapplication of discriminating thinking?

Rimpoche: Do you mean that positive or negative?

Audience: Negative

Rimpoche: Okay, we call that shal wei she rab in Tibetan. It is the wisdom that is going wild and crazy. The remedy for this, I believe, is the concentrated meditation, the shamata. That is the reason why the vipasyana has to be based on shamata. I believe that is the deep reason. Otherwise it can go completely. If you go into vajrayana there are different remedies for that, like vase-breathing and vajra-recitation. It is very easy to remedy that in vajrayana.

I will be here next Thursday. I believe that next Wednesday, the 19th, is another compulsory tsoh day for those who have mother tantra commitments. That is just to remind you. On the last compulsory tsoh day I went to see Ribur Rimpoche in Washington and did Vajrayogini there. Unfortunately Rimpoche is not that well. His condition is not that great, actually.

Thank you

1/16/2005