Archive Result

;;;20110009GRGRMB5 – Evening Session Q and A

00:00 Protector Prayers 0:08

Audience: If we take an initiation into Highest Yoga tantra are we permitted to engage in the practices of the yidams of the lower tantric classes even if we haven’t received a specific initiation of a deity but feel there might be something beneficial to us such as some of the practices related to the Medicine Buddha. Are we able to do the self-generation of these yidams?

Rimpoche: If you have received Maha anu yoga tantra initiations, yes, you are permitted to do that. Tantra is such that the lower tantras, like Kriya, Charya or Yoga tantra don’t empower the maha anu yoga tantras, but the maha anu yoga tantras somehow do empower all the other, lower tantras. However, there are very specific detailed initiations, like the 3 Buddha-commitment or the 1000-arms, 1000- eyes Avalokitesvara, or the Vairochana or things like that. They have very specific requirements of their own initiation, which are needed. Although Highest Tantra does cover, but there are detailed exceptional things available. It is almost case by case, rather than general. Generally yes, but in some specific cases probably not.

Also those empowerments almost cover. If you have empowerments, like the Collected initiations of the Jewel system, which has 350 some initiations, actually more empowerments than initiations. There are lots of kriya, charya and yoga tantra ones in there and lots of maha anu yoga tantras. Of course you have to receive them by yourself. The best possible practice is then to do the retreat of each tantra. In that also the principal, for example for yoga tantra recommended is Nam nang ngon jang – Vairochana Buddha. In kriya there are 5 different systems and each have their principals of the castes. If you have all of them, that’s best. If not, then the Avalokitesvara 1000 arms – 1000 eyes will cover for those who are giving the initiations. If you can give the initiations, which you can do the practice, you have to do the practice and then generate the mandala and let the people enter into it. That’s how it works. If nothing is done, even the maha anuyoga tantra one or two yidams’s practice will cover it. But you can give those short empowerments, but not the detailed initiations. These case-by case things you have to go through. So with questions like this there are no yes-no answers. That’s how it is.

0:15 Audience: What are the 12 deeds of the Medicine Buddha?

Rimpoche: The Medicine Buddhas have their own dedication or commitments. Some have 8, some have 4 and Medicine Buddha himself may have 12. If you tell me to count, I can’t just now. If I look, I may be able to look it up. But I don’t think most of the short practices will count. When I did the 5th Dalai Lama’s Medicine Buddha ritual last year I think they were counted in there.

Audience: You were already alluding to it yesterday, but what’s the specialty of the 8 Medicine Buddhas all functioning together?

Rimpoche: Each one of them has their own commitment and when they get together in one place, working together, it is considered very important. That’s why you read in this practice

CHOM DÄN DÄN DZOM CHHEN PO GONG SU SÖL

DE SHE DÜN GYI NGÖN GYI MÖN LAM DAG

SHAKYÄI TÄN PA NGA GYÄI THA MA LA

DRUB PAR GYUR WA ZHÄL GYI ZHE PA ZHIN

DAG LA DEN PA NGÖN SUM TÄN DU SÖL

Great gathering of Buddhas, please pay attention.

All seven Buddhas who previously prayed and dedicated

That your commitments materialize at the degenerated age of Shakyamuni’s teachings,

Just as you have promised, may we see the truth today clearly.

These 7 Medicine Buddhas, their dedications and commitments have been done to materialize in Buddha Shakyamuni’s teaching period, also particularly the later end of his teaching period, which we are in. That’s why not only does each of them have their own commitment, but gathered together in one place and we are able to say their prayer together and invoke their blessings, make offering and the 7 limbed- offerings, purification and rejoicing to build merit, purifying and clearing the obstacles together at this time at the end of Shakyamuni’s teaching era, that’s considered something extraordinary.

Audience: Can you explain the meaning of the mantra itself?

Rimpoche: It is almost like Buddha’s mantra OM MUNI MUNI MAHA MUNIYE SOHA. This one has OM BEKANDZE BEKANDZE MAHA BEKANDZE BEKANDZE RAJA SAMUNGATE SOHA. I think it is very similar to “victor over ordinary gross delusions, victor over subtle delusions, great victor over both, obstacles and imprints totally cleared. Bendurya O kyi gyalpo – that’s the king of light. Raja is king and Samungate I don’t remember, must be blessing or something. This commentary doesn’t even write the mantra down, it just says “say the mantra”.

0:23

The benefit they give is this: Manjushri asked those 8 Medicine Buddhas, when they were together, “While you are together here, at this degenerate age sentient beings have weak luck and fortune. There is a lot of illness and disturbance. You 8 Buddhas have dedicated a lot of commitments. See how quickly you can materialize it. I also urge that the people may be able to see the faces of the 8 buddhas, that are wish-fulfilling and their mantra may be taught us.” It is said that all 8 replied by saying this mantra together, simultaneously. If one says this mantra the buddhas will pay attention. They will hold you. Vajrapani and the 4 dharma kings, etc, will always protect you and make your negative karma thinner. They will protect you from illness, obstacles and pacify all of them. It helps to fulfill our wishes. There are so many benefits.

I read last year the 5th Dalai Lama’s and that has the meaning of the mantra. If you look in the transcript the meaning of the mantra should be there. If not, then send me an e mail and we will put the answer up somewhere “on demand”. Today I don’t know. That’s possible right? We can say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember”. Even Ronald Reagan could do it, so why not me? “I don’t recall”.

Audience: When buddhas take on physical forms how do they avoid creating negative karma?

Rimpoche: Buddhas have gone beyond negative karma. Negative karma is created by negative thoughts and emotions. So buddhas are way beyond that. Simply by seeing the wisdom of emptiness, the person and their activities become uncontaminated. When they are uncontaminated, how can they create negative karma? They cannot. They are not beyond karma, but they are beyond negative karma. That’s the whole purpose of practice, to go beyond. Gate gage paragate parasamgate Bodhi soha – that tells you, these are the five paths of accumulation, action, seeing, meditating and no more learning. And that is the meaning of gone, gone, gone beyond. It has gone beyond creating negative karma. Buddhas have not gone beyond karma, but they only have positive karma functioning. Some people see that when you see emptiness you go beyond karma, but Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa says that this is not true. So it is gone beyond negative karma. Every moment, anything the buddhas do is the creation of positive karma and it becomes virtue. That is the importance of the people who have reached the third path. That’s why they are called aryas – special people. They are special because they have obtained the stage beyond those. Even negative consequences of falling into lower realms is also bone beyond by the third segment of the Second Path, the path of action. The 4 levels of the path of action are: heat, peak, patience and best of dharma. So when you have reached the “patience” layer you don’t go back to the lower realms. That doesn’t mean patience in general but this particular stage of patience.

When you reach to the path of seeing then your actions are no longer contaminated. You become uncontaminated, special, an arya. I believe that’s how it works.

0:34

Audience: When you speak about the need of seeing the guru as inseparable from all the buddhas, yidams, etc, is it possible because they all share the same mind stream?

Rimpoche: That could be. There are several things. Whether they become one mind, that is one angle, and whether the mind functions as one is another, or the mind merges to become one. Different teachers tell us that. Those are rather philosophical points. The truth is that all buddhas are almost one. If they don’t become one person, at least they are all equal. The dharmakaya is equal, the activities of helping people is equal. The difference is their physical conditions and how long they live as human beings. Vasubhandu says quite clearly in the abhidharmakosha: they are all equal and the same, however what caste they belong to, what physical structure they take, how tall they are, what they look like, how long they live and all this is different. That’s why there is the one-ness aspect and the separate aspect. If you go even deeper and more profound than that, you can say that from one base many are created and function. And many create one, they dissolve and become one. It is almost like one becomes many and many become one. All of them are possible at the enlightened level. The norm and structure that we think of is totally different. I mentioned to you that their body, speech and mind function on the same frequency, which means that wherever their body is, their mind is. Wherever their body is, their speech is. Mind means that the moment you think the mind gets there, like we do. We sit here today at this moment, thinking about say downtown Tokyo. Immediately our mind gets there. Likewise, if we think about Beijing, Singapore, Dehli, etc. mind gets there without difficulty. Our mind perceives the entity and identity of those cities. When you become fully enlightened, whatever they perceive is the reality, so without any obstacles they not only perceive that but also get there. When they get there, it means their thoughts, body and speech gets there simultaneously. The way the enlightened beings function and the way we function are totally different, totally different. That’s what we call “extraordinary functioning of the enlightened beings”. It is extraordinary, because others can’t.

Audience: Are energy, matter and consciousness/mind three separate constituents or are there just energy and matter or is energy everything?

Rimpoche: I don’t know, because that terminology of energy, matter and consciousness, truly speaking is foreign to me, though I know sort of what you are talking about.

0:41

You can explain to me what it is, but even then it is not going to click in my head. Honestly speaking, it is foreign to me. Is it really clear to people what energy is and that is the division between the capacity and capability of the person and the energy of the person? Even mind – couldn’t mind become energy? Can it become even more subtle than energy? All of them are not clear to me, so I can’t answer. To me, if I am guessing, the subtle physical form can become energy. With that I mean formless, intangible movement and that could even become more subtle, untraceable. Then it is also possible to pop up here and there and merge with the consciousness and become something else. All of them are possible. So when I talk about energy, matter and consciousness, I don’t know really what to say.

Audience (Dr. Tony King): From the little I know from your teaching is that the subtle energy or lung is a form or matter. It is not mind, but closely associated with mind.

Rimpoche: The moment you use the word lung then I can say something. But when it goes into matter and energy I am not sure.

Audience: Is lung material, non-mind?

Rimpoche: Yes, lung is not mind. It is movement. It is light, in the sense of having no weight. Lung pushes through all kinds of things, even mind and the circulation on the physical level becomes possible because there is a gross lung movement. The subtle lung becomes so difficult distinguish from subtle mind. The movement – what makes is move – is not mind. That’s something else, and the Tibetans call it lung, which actually means ‘air’. I don’t know if you can call that ‘energy’. Someone who has good knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism and a very good knowledge of modern science, like bio-chemistry, neuro-science, could perhaps answer that.

Audience (Dr. Tony King): The way you described lung would probably be understood by scientists as a kind of energy. Energy, while not the same as matter, is within the material realm as opposed to being consciousness. If lung is considered material, then it is just a matter of being more gross or subtle forms.

Rimpoche: I am not so sure whether or not the subtle lung can be considered to be material or not. What do the Mind and Life people say?

Audience (D. Tony King) They don’t talk about consciousness.

Rimpoche: Not even Mind and Life?

Audience: (D. Tony King) not so much.

Rimpoche: hmm, that is amazing. Why?

Audience: (D. Tony King) There is a specific reason. Richie Davidson and others do talk about consciousness, but not as something non-material and separate from the body. Quietly they are doing that research quite a bit, but they are not making it public for the reason that there is enough things to be worked on that are not as controversial or pushing the edge of controversy that are readily acceptable, and they don’t want to seem weird.

Audience: Dan Siegel challenged them on that one time here at Garrison at a meeting.

Audience: (DC) I am not very familiar with the vocabulary that you use, so I am not sure I can say much about it. Separate from certain general feelings and emotions we have inside of our minds I do know that Duke University does studies measuring energy that emanates from individuals. There are energy fields. I don’t know if that is in alignment with what you are asking about in terms of consciousness. They are just measuring emotions and I don’t know whether that correlates with consciousness.

Rimpoche: I don’t know but I guess that emotions cannot constitute consciousness. Yet they are part and parcel of consciousness. In other words, when there is strong movement of emotions we may not be able to say that that’s consciousness, may or may not. I am not so sure. But emotions are part of consciousness, not really consciousness [itself].

Audience: (DC) There are also studies done now to measure field of activity around those who are dying and again I am not sure how you would characterize what they are measuring exactly but there is certainly a shift to apply metrics to that experience.

Rimpoche: Interesting. Thank you. I am glad we brought that question up but I don’t know what it really is. The moment the terminology comes in that way I get confused.

Audience: You spoke about how mind and body strongly affect one another. You said that the physical and mental lineages both carry through. What does that mean?

Rimpoche: When I said physical lineage I mean the genetic system passed on from parents to kids and so on. They will pass on not only the physical thing, but also some habit structures, not whole habits and addictions, but it does affect them. They carry it around. An example on the very gross level: If the mother is pregnant and uses drugs and gets intoxicated, that affects the baby. Not only the physical addiction through the blood stream or other media, but mentally too. Traditionally you sit with a teacher. The teacher says prayers, you learn from them. The teacher meditates and you learn from them. Similarly, you have the parents-children relationship and that affects them through the genes – to a certain extent, not too much, but to a certain extent. That’s why we say that if the parents are very kind persons the child will be kind. We go to that extent. That is not necessarily as 100% proof, but it is a reasonable reasoning. No one can say it is not happening, unless there are other strong reasons. This influence is there.

Audience DC: The field of epigenetics is moving fast in that direction to explain that phenomenon. You can understand – from whatever level you know these things – and what is shown in studies is that we can tell that people are affected over 4 generations by the emotions of the parents – not just the mother, but the father as well. The moment of conception determines an enormous amount of what’s carried forward. Throughout our lifetimes everything we think, say or do, the very air we breathe translated through our genetic code into what will be expressed by our DNA. We used to think – probably until a year ago – that all of this would disappear in a moment of wiping the slate clean, but now we know that up to four generations, which is as far as we have been able to study – that these characteristics move forward with the next generation and carry on from there. All the things you talk about in terms of how we hold our mind, what we think of and focus on, now we understand is probably like the DNA being like the computer hard ware and the epigenetics, as a layer on top, the part which we have a choice about, is what goes in and determines our actions as a software that drives the computer and tells the cells how to replicate, either in diseased ways or healthy ways. So we are very powerful in that sense and it definitely carries through to future generations.

1:00

Rimpoche: That’s what Tibetan Buddhism does say. The mind and body relationship has that capability. It is not definite or certain, but there is the possibility and capability. They drag through both ways. A lot of people think that the mind is independently going and has nothing to do with the body you are going to get, but there is so much relationship between mind and body and is alters and changes. Yes, the original karma and conditions carry and they meet with new conditions and it happens. That’s supposed to be one of the major points of the body – mind relationship. I am glad we begin to see it through science that way too. I am a little disappointed that Mind andLife doesn’t talk about consciousness. What is Mind then in their very name?

Audience (D. Tony King) They do talk about consciousness but they try to stay away from the idea that consciousness exists in the absence of the brain.

Rimpoche: That means it should be called Brain and Life Institute! It is true, they are probably afraid of criticism and their findings being disregarded. They are accused of being biased and not objective.

Audience (D. Tony King): People like Richie Davidson have worked for so, so long to get a single study of meditation published in a good journal, in like preceding of the National Academy of Science. He has been up against so much criticism even now they are saying they cannot believe his studies because he is a Buddhist and he meditates. So the Mind and Life researchers are very sensitive about that. They don’t want to appear to be flaky or non-scientific. They choose not to talk about certain things.

Audience: Most of the people there actually believe that the material brain is the mind, that the mind is simply an animation of the brain in some sense, that there is no such thing as mind, but only the brain. They think that if we study the brain with sufficient rigor and detail we will know what mind is.

1:04 Rimpoche: Thank you for your comments. (playing Cyndi’s video clip about her dog being the reincarnation of somebody)

1:05 (laughs) I might be the reincarnation of my dog, but then I would have been born before he passed away and that proves that it is not, right?

At least let’s do one verse from the Three Principles:

9. NE LUK TOK PEY SHE RAB MI DEN NA

NGE JUNG JANG CHUB SEM LA GOM JE KYANG

SI PEY TSA WA CHE PAR MI NÜ PE

DE CHIR TEN DREL TOK PEY THAB LA BE

Without opening the wisdom eye seeking freedom and generating bodhimind cannot cut the root of samsara. Strive to see interdependence

If you don’t have the wisdom that understands reality, then no matter how perfect your First Principle, renunciation and your Second Principle, bodhimind may be, they will not be able to cut the root of samsara. Why? Renunciation sees that wrong doing brings the wrong result. So it makes you avoid and discard wrong doing. That alone will make the root of samsara weak, no doubt, but not cut and eradicate it. It is almost like cutting the branches. You notice anger, so you cut it out. You notice hatred, you cut it out. You notice obsession and you cut it out. But you are not really looking where they are coming from. You are not digging down under the ground and rooting it out. Similar bodhimind. That is kindness, compassion and love. But it doesn’t challenge the root of the problem face to face and that is ego, ignorance, confusion, fear and even the seed of hatred, the seed of obsession. All combined together, that is never been challenged. Traditionally that is called ignorance. You may have the perfect renunciation and bodhimind, but even then you are unable to cut the root of samsara. Therefore, what is the antidote of the root of samsara. It is the wisdom of emptiness. But Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa doesn’t say, “try to understand emptiness.” Instead he says, “Try to understand interdependence.

1:11

What does that mean? The essence of emptiness is dependent origination. The essence of dependent origination is emptiness. You get it? If you are here for the first time you may not get it. But listen to this 30 times and you will know. When you start looking for empty and zero you are not going to find anything. Instead look for dependent origination. See how things originate, what makes it grow, how it depends on causes and conditions and how it functions. When it comes up interdependently it shows that it lacks independence. When it exists dependently it lacks independent existence. When you see dependence the independent solidness of our perception becomes shaky and disappears and doesn’t happen. That’s why the essence of emptiness is dependent arising or origination. That’s why Jamgön Lama Tsongkhapa says:

de chir ten drel tok pey thab la be- strive to see interdependence

That gives you that particular punch that tells you that emptiness is dependent origination, though dependent origination is not really emptiness, but it leads you to it. The understanding will lead you there. Dependent existence proves lack of independent existence. Traditionally they give you the example of the walking stick. A person like me, when you can’t walk by yourself, you carry a walking stick in hand. That tells you, “I cannot function independently, because I have to depend on the walking stick.” I have that little scooter here. What does that tell you? That I can’t walk by myself far enough. I have sit on something and depend on that in order to move. That establishes that the independently walking human being is discarded. Yet there is still a walking human being, but if they don’t walk independently, then how? Dependently. That’s how it works, I believe.

Maybe we leave it here. We didn’t leave anything out in the Foundation of Perfections. The next verse there is on vajrayana. Thank you and good night. 1:17