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SHANTIDEVA’S GUIDE TO THE BODHISATTVA’S WAY OF LIFE CHAPTER 9: WISDOM PART III

© 2005, Gehlek Rimpoche, All Rights Reserved

Oral explanations by Kyabje Gehlek Rimpoche

20050719GRAABWL

Talk 13: 7-19-05

Welcome here tonight. We are in the middle of the debate between two of the early great masters who are presenting the object of negation.

If you only come here for the first time today that may not be very clear to you. We are talking about wisdom, which is emptiness. Emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is about refuting something and what we refute is called "object of negation". We are refuting a particular perception of self. It is about "I" and "my". What kind of "I" are we talking about? Are we simply talking about the "I" which is functioning, the "I" that is the basis of karma? Another question is: What is the use of talking about that in the first place? Are we trying to become philosophers? What has that got to do with our lives? Many people ask this question.

The important point here is your goal of spiritual practice. In Mahayana Buddhism, the goal is total enlightenment and any Buddhist practitioner will at least have the goal of liberation. What liberates whom from what for what purpose? This is the issue. Otherwise all our practices will only be prayers or exercises. Just to do something, that is good enough for the purpose of whoever is doing it, but it doesnt' go very far. I don't want to criticize anybody, but for example one of our good friends does a workshop,. where people make masks themselves. Then they wear the masks, go into five different directions and dance around, then they come back. And that is the end of the particular part of the workshop. It is called dakini dance. That maybe good for whatever the purpose of the workshop may be but it doesn't go for liberation or enlightenment - unless there is some vajrayana link somewhere.

Whenever we have a spiritual path we need three things: the base we are standing on, the thing we are going to do and the result we hope to get. Without these any practice is limited. I have a friend who in the 1980s attended a workshop where people spent a whole week learning to walk on fire. They had to pay $100 a day for seven days. At the end of the $700 they had to cross over some burning charcoals in the street. Some managed to walk over, without saying Ouch, but many got blisters. And that was a spiritual work shop in those days! I don't really see anything spiritual in that. Nor is drinking wheat grass juice and eating brown rice anything spiritual. It may be very good for health, but those who are not used to eating brown rice may end up with stomach problems. Samdong Rimpoche came here once and we gave him nori rolls, which contain brown rice and he had a stomach ache for three days. He couldn't eat anything for the next three days.

Where we stand, what we do and what we get out of that is very important to know first. According to Mahayana Buddhism we are standing on the basis of the two truths. The method we apply is wisdom and compassion and what we hope to get is total enlightenment. This is our purpose, this is what we are doing. Let that be very clear.

If you are not a mahayanayin, but follow the Hinayana, still the same principles apply: where you stand, what you do and what you hope to get. The Hinayana does not have compassion to the extent that the Mahayana has it but Hinayana equally emphasises the wisdom aspect. Without that you can't get anywhere. There are five paths, in Hinayana as well as in Mahayana: the path of accumulation of merit, path of action, path of seeing, path of meditation and path of no more learning.

The path of seeing means to see emptiness. After that you keep on meditating on emptiness. That is the path of meditation which goes over 9 stages. The last of these, which is very subtle, is called the vajra-like stage. This is totally non-vajrayana, just called vajraa-like. From there you transfer to nirvana. There is nirvana with left-over and nirvana without left-over. The terminology of nirvana is used by both, Mahayana and Hinayana. But the Hinayana point of nirvana is not the total enlightenment. Their nirvana is the complete exhaustion of afflictive emotions. The Mahayana nirvana goes beyond that and goes up to the Buddha level, the total enlightenment. Both are freedom. The Hinayana-nirvana is free of samsara, the Mahayana nirvana is free of both, samsara and [the Hinayana-] nirvana. The Mahayana calls it freedom from the two extremes of samsara and nirvana. This is not exactly the same as the two extremes of existentialism and nihilism but in a way the Hinayana nirvana actually represents nihilism. Freedom from those extremes is called total enlightenment. But wherever you look, the path which delivers the goods for the individual in any case is the wisdom. How intense, how subtle the wisdom is, that makes a difference whether the individual is able to get rid of just the afflictive emotions or also their imprints, as in the case of full enlightenment.

That is the reason why Buddha comes out with all these different viewpoints about the object of negation. What are we negating exactly? That is the point where we are. That has everything to do with us as spiritual practitioners. We are seeking liberation. We are seeking freedom. For that we need wisdom. Love and compassion are great and necessary but they are not the direct antidote of samsara. The root of samsara is ma rig pa, which is usually translated as ignorance, not knowing, wrong knowing, not seeing and so on. It is the direct opposite of wisdom. Literally ma rig pa means not knowing or not seeing. You can say: not seeing rightly. Love and compassion is not the direct opposite of that. Therefore love and compassion alone cannot overcome samsara. Compassion brings the bodhimind and that makes you a Bodhisattva. You cannot become a Buddha with bodhimind only. Though bodhimind is a cause for becoming a Buddha it is the wisdom that really delivers it. Wisdom is the negation of whatever we think the "I" is made of. That's why we have all these terms such as selflessness, "I"-lessness and so on. For some reason the translators have to add up the -ness. They could just leave it at self-less.

There are many different viewpoint of what the object of negation is. We have come a long way from stating that it is some irreducible essence. Some talk about an indivisible self. Some say it is a mixture of the perceiving mind and the object that it perceives. We have been able to negate each and every one of those. Now we have come to the view that says: there is nothing external, it is only the mind. All the debates that are presented in the verses 11 onwards are about that view.

We are now talking about verse 15.

Verse 15

[Yogacharin:] When even a mistaken cognition does not exist, by what

is an illusion ascertained?

Before we go into this you have to know more about the mind-only way of presenting the object of negation. Asanga is one of the 8 great teachers of ancient India, the 6 ornaments and 2 excellences. The teachings will tell you that Asanga's actual viewpoint is the highest, but officially, for practical purposes, he is the founder of the mind-only school. His views are the mind-only school's views.

Buddha has stated in the Sutra of the Ten Stages:

All three realms are just mind.

The three realms are: above the ground, on the ground and under the ground. In normal American terms that means: hell, heaven and earth. That statement has created a flood of controversial interpretations and views. Buddha used the word "just" in that statement. The mind-only school takes that statement to be direct and straight forward. They say that whatever we see outside and experience is the effect of the mind inside. They say that there is nothing external. It is only the mind that has produced everyting, nothing else. Their line of argument will go:

Do you see me? Yes, I see you, because my mind perceives you. Therefore you are here. If my mind does not perceive you, then you are not here. You may be produced by somebody else's mind, otherwise you are not there at all.

That may be a little extreme, but that is what mind-only means. The Prasangika-Madyamaka school is negating that viewpoint. All these different views are presented in order to refine and sharpen the understanding of the individual, make it more subtle and more clear. That is why you go through the process of finding out that this view is not perfect, and that view is not perfect and finally you refute even the most subtle level of holding the wrongly perceived "I". For example the view that claims that existence depends on the perceiving mind as well as the external object is considered to be below that of the mind-only school. We have refuted this by saying that there must be something out there even if mind does not perceive it.

You know that zen story about the tree falling in the forest and if nobody sees is fall, does it really fall? There is the assertion that that tree does not fall if nobody has seen it or heard about it. This is the view that says, "Existence is the combination of perceiving mind and perceived object. If these don't meet, the object does not exist." According to them the tree falling in the forest does not exist if nobody sees is fall. That is not right. We all know that. The tree falls in the forest anyway, whether somebody sees it or not.

Very similarly, one school asserts something called basis of all (Tib: kun zhi) That means there is no external objects, and not only the mind either but there is some basis on which your karma is functioning. Your whole karma is carried by that. There is a lot of back and forth argument on that.

For example: If you accept such a base which includes your whole karma then if you have the karma to be reborn as an elephant, do you have an elephant in your karma? - if you accept that view you would have to say yes. Then it follows that if a little ant has the karma to take rebirth as an elephant and if that ant climbs up a little hair, is there at that moment hundred elephants climbing up that hair? The karma for that is there and the ant is carrying that karma. Of course it is crazy to say that there are 100 elephants on top of that hair. That is how you refute that view.

Similarly, now the mind-only school is the target to be refuted. Let me re-state their interpretation of Buddha's statement: hell, heaven and earth are just mind. They take that literally, saying that nothing exists that is not mind.

Nagarjuna interprets that statement from the Sutra of the 10 stages differently. It is a bit like the legal arguments in a court case. That can go as far as saying, "It depends what "is" is". [President Clinton's defense, when challenged with lying about a love affair]. Here it goes almost to this point. Nagarjuna accepts that Buddha said "just mind". Literally that means that everything other than mind is cut out. That's how the mind-only school takes it. Nagarjuna disagrees with that conclusion. He says that would be reading Buddha's statement out of context.

He points out that in the next section of the same Sutra of the Ten Stages Buddha says,

All the various kinds of existence come out of karma.

Nagarjuna says that this statement has to be seen in relation to the statement that says that all existence is just mind. According to that: hell, heaven and earth have come out of karma and karma is created by the mental faculty called mind. That is our normal mind and is one of the 5 mental faculties that always accompany a mental process. Therefore Buddha in his statement that all existence is just mind does not cut out everything that is not mind, but he cuts out everything that is not created by mind. In other words Buddha aims to cut out the view that some creator person has created all existence and the view that the whole existence is not created at all. The word "just mind", according to Nagarjuna, has to be understood in that way. This is a more subtle interpretation.

Nagarjuna further quotes Buddha saying in the same sutra,

All 12 links of interdependent existence are just mind.

The 12 links are a way of describing the whole existence in terms of 6 realms where all beings take rebirth. These are the samsaric gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. They are bound to their existence by 12 activties like in a wheel. The first of these 12 is ma rig pa, the ignorance which is the root of samsara. This is portrayed as a blind guy, someone who doesn't see what they are doing. In that blindness this guy creates all kinds of karma and that is the 2nd link. The third link is consciousness which is divided into causal- and resultant consciousness, which links up to the 11th link. In that way there are 12 links. It gets quite complicated. When Buddha says that all 12 links are just mind, that cannot be taken to mean that apart from mind nothing exists. Rather, it means that it is only the karma of the individual that creates everything. Karma (Tib: le) in turn is created by the mental faculty called mind. In that way your mind inside of you is the creator of your own existence. By creating karma, good or bad, there is the connection of the karmic result with your mind and you will experience good and bad incidents, birth, death and so on. When that karma is exhausted you go back into the gross impermanence of death and you start recycling your existence. Buddha's emphasis on "just" mind has to be taken to mean that there is no single person who created everything for everybody. Nor is there some kind of continuation that created it. Form did not create it. A cause or a condition did not create this. Atoms, molecules and particles did not create this. It has not been created by samsaric gods. So finally Buddha says,

I simply say that it is the mind that created it all.

With this Buddha is merely negating that our individual and collective existence has been created by any of the above mentioned. Actually it is created by ourselves. Here also, out of the external physical self and internal mental self, the internal mind-nature self is more important than the external form. Therefore Buddha stated that it is "just mind".

So we went round in this whole circle to find out that Buddha meant that mind is the most important thing. Nagarjuna explains that point further, by quoting Buddha from another sutra. The sutra gives an example of how doctors treat patients. This was before antibiotics came in. So in old India, 2600 ago, there were no thermometers. So when someone was suffering from fever, they would give them special herb mixtures and tell them not to eat meat. This is because meat can push the fever higher and you may not be able to control it. So then you eat other food like tofu, cheese or whatever. Then when the fever comes down quite a lot, the doctors would encourage you to eat meat because you have to rebuild your physical strength.

I have come from that old world and do have a very nice, kind doctor friend of mine. He treated a lot of people when I was a kid. Those doctors would never take money and even the medicines were free. Also, they would prepare separate mixtures of herbal medicines for each patient to suit their needs at the time. The doctors would make these preparations themselves, collect the herbs, dry them, soak them, whatever was needed. In the old days we never got those herbal medicine pills that you see nowadays. It was always like grass-dust, with wooden sticks mixed in. They were freshly made and the doctors would smash the substances a little bit but not much. Sometimes they would tell the patient to grind them down more, because one person can't do all that. The doctors would change medicine for each patient almost every other week, continuously checking pulse, urine and so on. This particular doctor I knew would always go to the market and buy legs of sheep or yaks and give them to poor patients and tell them to make bone soup. The medicine worked very well because of the individual attention.

Nowadays it is harder to make it work. I am not saying that Tibetan medicine doesn't work any more, but the recipes for the herbal mixtures are unified now. Everybody with high blood pressure will get the same thing. I am not sure how well it really works.

Anyway, the example says that like the good doctor who gives medicine to suit the individual's needs, Buddha also presented wisdom to people according to their capability of understanding. If he would have told certain people that they don't exist they would have got extremely scared and might have run through the streets, shouting, "I don't exist." To avoid that Buddha would share different ideas with different disciples at different levels.

There is one more important point in that regard. Even though these are Buddha's words we still should examine them. Buddha himself said,

Don't buy what I say just because I, the Buddha said so. Examine it like you would examine gold. You will burn, cut and rub the gold until you are convinced that it is pure gold.

When you examine Buddha's teachings in this light there will be two categories: one is where you take literally exactly what Buddha said. In the other category Buddha had a different intention and his words should be interpreted correctly. Buddha prophesied that Nagarjuna and Asanga would come. He said that they would appear 300 and 600 years after him and clarify what he had said. Therefore you cannot directly take everything literally, even if the name of the author is Buddha. This Sutra of the 10 Stages falls into that category.

So on the subject of wisdom particurly, you cannot just quote Buddha and say, "Buddha said so." This has been refuted by Buddha himself and many great masters after him. You have to rely on reality alone. Reality is using your own intelligent mind and check it against what has been accepted by outstanding persons; bring these together, turn them around, fool around and work with them, taste, them, smell them, bite them, do whatever you can and thereby increase your understanding.

So the bar of wisdom is raised ever higher. Otherwise all you would have to do is pick up any quote from someone and declare, "it is true, because So and so said so." Buddha advised not to do that. He said, "Use your own intelligence and find out." The mind -only school claims that based on Buddha's statement in the Sutra of the ten Stages there is only mind. But you have to work with this and deal with it and master it. That is what wisdom is all about.

For some people love and compassion is very easy to understand and wisdom is extremely difficult. On the other hand, those with scientific background may find wisdom easier to comprehend. Someone told me, "Wisdom is something I can quite easily comprehend, but love and compassion I just cannot buy it. From my scientific background I cannot just believe it. It doesn't work for me." Wisdom on the level of tracing the self, and finding that there is no irreducible essence, not even in molecules or atoms, and so on, is easier for scientifically trained people to understand. Scientists probably feel at home with this and it is not a problem for them. But for many others it is. For me wisdom was a big problem, and compassion comes easy. For them wisdom is easy and compassion is difficult. For a scientifically minded person to accept that every being has been their mother is next to impossible. They will say "No, I am not buying that, what are you talking about?" But when you talk to them about wisdom it makes perfect sense to them.

The bottom line on this debate about existence is: is there any external existence? The prasangikas say, "Yes, there is external existence and there is internal existence. You also have a link between those." Those who think that there is no external existence but only mind are being refuted. That is the textual material we are going to deal with. The prasangika madhayamaka, following Nagarjuna, do accept external existence, but all external existence only exists relatively. In other words, whatever the object you label may be, when you start searching for it you are not going to find it. Therefore it only relatively exists. Am I here? Yes, I am. Do I work? Yes, I do. Do I exist absolutely? No. When you search for "me", you are not going to find anything that you can point out. There is no end of the Russian doll. Therefore it doesn't exist truly, however it does exist relatively, because everything functions. We are siting here, listening, talking, working, and trying to break through the mystery of existence.

The wisdom of emptiness cuts through the mystery of life and existence. There is no question about it. Why is that necessary? Unless we do cut that we will be subject of delusion. Delusions and addictions use us and we become their slaves. That makes the suffering lives continue, one after another. We are born, grow up and die, continuously. We have not been able to break through the mystery of life. This is the bottom line of Buddha's teachings of wisodm. The real mystery is the object of negation. It mystifies us, makes us confused and every trouble comes because of that. When you are searching for that mystery, you start looking inside, outside, you consider the combination, you check whether it is mind only or only external. Has somebody made it and I have nothing to do with it? If you are searching for the mystery- that is where the search takes you.

You need to apply your own intelligent mind and find out what makes sense. Does it make sense that somebody has made us? Of course our parents made us. But that is not the whole truth. Every sperm and egg does not produce a human being. Some do, some don't. That clearly indicates that it is not only the parents who make the child. There is more than that. The mystery begins right there. I guess this is what we are up against. I don't know when we will break through, but that is the path Buddha laid out. Millions have followed it and broke through the mystery, so why not us?

The next verses, 16 and so forth, will directly contradict the mind-only view. I am going to stop here for today. Are there any questions?

Audience: Out of the five aggregates what is the mind that you are talking about?

Rimpoche: It is the sixth sense. You have the five senses, eye, ear, nose, etc and this mind is the sixth. It is also known as principal.

Audience: If external things only exist relationally, can the same be said of the mind?

Rimpoche: A lot of people say that the mind is the one that truly exists. That is not true. The mind does exist, but also not independently. It exists interdependently. The perceiving mind comes in here too. I just don't think that an external object exists only when it is known by somebody's mind. Otherwise, a tree falling in the forest couldn't exist unless someone sees it falling. The tree does fall, even if nobody knows. The zen people will counter-argue that in any case, somebody always knows, there are ants and bugs where the tree falls. You can say that. I am just joking.

Audience: Did you say that just mind creates our misperception of everything in heaven, earth and underneath?

Rimpoche: Nagarjuna says that this is all created by karma and karma is created by the mental faculty called mind. That is the Buddha's intention when stating that heaven, hell and earth are just mind.

Audience: Is karma equating misperception then?

Rimpoche: Everything is karmic. This is Buddhism.

Audience: I understood that mind only means that only the mind continues on. If karma is part of one's mind, and according to Nagarjuna karma creates everything, then what is the difference from Shantideva's and Nagarjuna's perception compared to that of mind-only?

Rimpoche: I will not say that karma is mind. I can say that mind is very involved with creating karma, but I will not say that karma is mind. Also, the mind only school says that mind is solid and permanent. Everything external does not exist. That is the mind only school's main tenet.

Audience: You mentioned base, path and result. I take it that each of the Buddhist paths will lead to enlightenment. What then is the necessity to have a more refined understanding of wisdom in the mahayana, if the result of enlightenment is the same?

Rimpoche: First of all, I don't think it is true that all Buddhists share the goal of enlightenment. The Theravada has the goal of attaining personal liberation, not full enlightenment. Out of the four schools of Buddhist philosophy, the middle path school (Tib: u ma-skt: madyamaka) and the mind-only school (Tib: sem tsam pa - skt: chittramatra) are mahayana. The other two, chetra ma wa and do de pa (Vaibashika and Sautrantika - great exposition school and realist school) are not. They are hinayana. Secondly, the goal of the middle path school and that of the mind-only school may be the same, but that still doesn't mean that they actually achieve it.

Thank you and good night

© 2005, Gehlek Rimpoche, All Rights Reserved

21-7-2005