Archive Result

20120715GRAATB29

Good morning and welcome to Tibetan Buddhism. I am Gelek Rimpoche. The question we raised is what does the practice of Tibetan Buddhism mean? We learnt and drew the conclusion that the first step is to get enough information so that you know what you are doing. It is important. In one way the spiritual path is so deep and profound and there are layers and layers of things. It is also very important to notice that there are number of varieties of spiritual paths. Particularly today here in the United States or in western civilized countries in Europe, Australia, and even China today there are all varieties of spiritual paths. It is more than a supermarket. It is almost becoming a junk yard. At this level, at this point, that’s where we are.

On the other hand we only have one life. We have to make sure we do right, because this is the life where we can understand. This is the life where we can think and change ourselves. This is the life where we can communicate. Otherwise some other lives, if you believe in reincarnation – and even if you don’t believe in it, doesn’t matter – we see by ourselves every day there are other lives than ourselves. Look at your back yard and if there is water there will be a number of frogs. They will wake you up at night by making all kinds of noises. If you look in the ground there are a number of worms. We kill them every day by stepping on them or digging them and cutting them. We may actually be doing a beautiful job of setting up our garden and planting flowers and food, but in the process we are killing lots of them. That’s a fact. I don’t want to go into the killing part, but just to point out there is somebody else with life. That itself tells us something. We are human beings. We happen to be human today, but the day we kick the bucket we cease to be human beings. Honestly.

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That’s why Buddha said that we are having a great opportunity. Tomorrow we could be anybody else but a human being. No one can rule out that possibility. No one, unless you are fully enlightened or God or something. Then you may say “no”. Other than that, no one can deny that. You may not accept or even believe it, but it doesn’t matter. We see all this. Someone may think that the worms will remain worms forever and frogs will remain frogs forever and dogs remain dogs forever and humans remain humans forever. But that’s not true. Almost every tradition will tell you that’s not true. Also if you have an intelligent mind you know it’s not true. Even if you would like to deny and stubbornly accept, even then you know it’s not true.

Let’s say that you are extremely conservative, whether Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or whatever. Even then in your heart of hearts you know it, and if not, you are not an educated person. So this is a great opportunity that you and I are enjoying today. If we waste this, then it is a big loss, because you never know what will be the next. You could be a frog that is screaming at night. I have a house in a semi-rural area, so there are deer moving around at night. You could be a nice deer.

The important point is you need to know what you are doing. We don’t have all the leisure time to experiment with everything. You can keep on experimenting from A to Z and find nothing too. It’s possible. There are many stories told by my teachers when I was young teenager in the monastery. All the stories have one common theme.

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My monastery at that time was oriented to the debate system. The story tells of someone who read ten volumes and found no debate. From the first to the last debate, they found no debate. What does that mean? It means that person didn’t understand a word that was said. A debate is raised on the basis of questions. Questions will come when you understand something but don’t understand fully. So when you find no debate after reading ten volumes it means you understood nothing. Then you can do nothing, because if you do something you have no idea what you are doing. These are the reasons why a person like yourself, educated, intelligent, devoted as well as interested for spiritual improvement tries to be better and helpful to others. Then you won’t get into trouble like joining groups like that of Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate and others. That’s all because if you don’t know what you are doing. You are doing something that you don’t know what you are doing.

It is very important. You can safeguard yourself by following one of the great, major, main stream traditions properly, not be on the fringes. I should not be saying this, because Tibetan Buddhism is not main stream and not major, nothing. But it has a very rich, wonderful background, history, tradition – all of those. That’s why it is acceptable and is accepted by people throughout the world. Not just because of Hollywood or some Beatnik poets. Maybe there happens to be the intelligent ones, but that’s not the reason. The real reason is that person after person sees the results, the effects. Even today we see not just an improvement, but huge effects within individuals. With effects I don’t mean the shaking of the physical body, like after taking a cold and hot shower. I am talking about an improvement in gentleness, kindness, caring, love, and wisdom. When you have that improvement you do have improvement. If you simply shake your head that is not necessarily an improvement. We see a lot of them in South-East Asia. At every corner there is somebody shaking with something.

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Check yourself and the attitude of your compassion, your love, your caring for yourself and for others. A lot of good people do think, “For me it doesn’t matter, but for them.” But then you get what is called “burn out”. You see them. They will say, “I have burn out”, or “I am taking a sabbatical” or “I am taking a break”. Yeah, you want to take a break from getting enlightened? Fine. It is a good break for you – and sometimes you take a break forever with that.

That’s why you have to learn what you have to know. I don’t mean you have to become a scholar. So we look at the subject, simply following Buddha’s footsteps. And Buddha’s first teaching was the “Four Noble Truths”. Out of that we have covered the first two and are now on the fourth. We have left the Third for later. The last two of the Four Noble Truths are cause and effect. The first two are also cause and effect. The Truth of Cause is the second truth and the First Truth is the result, suffering. Without cause there will be no suffering. There will be no joy either. Everything we are experiencing is a result. What we are thinking, doing, how we are functioning is creating a cause. There are causes and conditions that make a positive circle. How did we get the suffering today? What has caused it? So the Second Noble Truth is the cause of suffering and the First Truth is the Truth of Suffering.

Similarly, the second segment of cause and result. The cause is what we technically call path, the highway leading to enlightenment. That highway is the road map to becoming enlightened. That basically has two: the Theravadan yana and the maha yana. That is talking from the Buddhist point of view. This is Buddha’s teaching and you find these divisions and the systematic way of moving the individual. We have so far talked about the Theravadan path, which is basically the Four Noble Truths path or also the interdependent nature of how one moves within one’s life and intertwines life after life. We didn’t touch that part at all. We simply went with the Four Noble Truths and we talked briefly about the Theravadan path. Now we are talking about the Mahayana path. The retreat we are concluding today and finished yesterday, actually, is about one of the important points that the 8th century Indian teacher/scholar/saint known as Shantideva made. Shantideva can be translated as God of Peace. It is an interesting name. I never thought of translating that.

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He provided the materials with which to become pacified and peaceful, ourselves as well as all. We went through with this and for the first few days we talked about the advantages you have if you have bodhimind. Normally we talk about benefits, but that word is so commonly used that it has almost become a buzz word. We saw huge advantages in Shantideva’s statements. He calls it the “precious mind”, which is true. It is extremely difficult to get, difficult to understand and even difficult to get to hear about. Can you imagine, here we are. There are about 175 or 180 people in this room, 200 at the most. Then there people who are on line, watching live or later downloading this from digital dharma. As reported, currently we are getting 100,000 hits on our website every week. So maybe we get that many people. But even if you have ten thousand or twenty thousand people listening, that is nothing compared with how many people there are in the world. Right? That’s why it is rare. To many people it is nonsense. To some it is hocus/pocus or made up stories. To others it is the way how people used to control people – whatever excuse. We say that about certain traditions we don’t like. Exactly the same is what others say about us. That’s because we said it about them. Put yourself on their side and that’s how it is.

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Whatever it maybe, the bottom line is that people are deprived of the opportunity of even hearing about it, let alone examining or even being able to practice it. They won’t even hear the name. But out of that we are very much hearing it. Many of us have the opportunity to learn, meditate and live with this. The bodhimind, this precious mind, is something you live with, walk with, sleep with and die with. It is that much solid and beneficial. This will purify all our wrong doings that were previously done by ourselves, or which we made others do or in which we have rejoiced when others did them. They are all negativities. For us, we are sure that we did not engage directly in killing. But there are people who are being dragged into a war, with or without choice and they are literally involved. Those of us who are fortunate enough to just be on the side lines watching, we may not be literally involved but we rejoice and we have hatred. We have done both, positive and negative as much as we can. When they executed Saddam Hussein and when they killed Gaddhafi, how many people rejoiced in that? How many of us did? How many of us felt sympathy/compassion and how many of us felt real compassion? All answers are known to yourself. Many of us surely rejoiced, thinking, “At least he is gone now.” That rejoicing alone will cost us much more than we think.

There are tremendous amounts of known and unkown negativies with us. Unless we pacify or neutralize or purify them, we are going to carry that negativity with us. If we die with that negativity we carry these consequences over and beyond. So developing bodhimind, thinking, learning, listening, repeating, analyzing or gaining experience, all of them will help to purify. Repeatedly, constantly engaging in it will totally purify and that itself is a tremendous gain.

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That somehow by chance is left over as Buddha’s gift. It has trickled down for 2600 years and we are picking up drops here and drops there and this happens to be one of the big ones. Somehow we have access to it today. That’s what we have been doing for the last week. That is how we have been the beneficiaries of a very successful week, although it was extremely short for that subject. But still, it is completed and great and we had a very great successful and wonderful week and we will share that with you people on line and you can listen later. Even if you were not here but you rejoice, that itself will give tremendous help – according to Buddha’s statement.

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I would like to say thank you so much and as usual we will very appropriately say the Four Immeasurables and dedicate our positive deeds to benefiting all beings, freeing them from suffering and the cause of suffering, so they remain with joy and the cause of joy continuously. Especially, may they not be too much swayed and pushed by pulling into closeness and pushing out with hate, but remain at the level of equanimity. That’s what we dedicate for, so that everybody including ourselves, in life after life, every minute we exist, remain with this.

I am sorry I couldn’t give you an opportunity for questions. Thank you.

0:34 Chanting of the Four Immeasurables – 0:36