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I mentioned it earlier and I always emphasize very much that it is great and wonderful to talk about dharma, but if you regard dharma like looking at a television screen or a blackboard or a picture, if you are looking outside, you are merely becoming an academic or a showbiz person. It is not worth it. I mean, it is great, wonderful, no criticism whatsoever, it has its own purpose, but we as individual practitioners, as I say all the time, have to ask ourselves: ‘What of that is relevant for me, Joe Blow in Nijmegen?’

As I have been telling you, love/compassion, is wonderful, great. But, when you just close your eyes and you have love and compassion to all sentient beings [that is not enough]. Remember, I mentioned that the teaching tradition normally says to think that you are surrounded by all sentient beings and imagine, ‘I am the leader, I lead this, I take refuge, I meditate love, compassion, I do this, I do that.’

When you look carefully, you see that when you close your eyes over here this great monster called I is showing great love and compassion to all sentient beings, who in turn are little dots. All sentient beings are like little black dots, as if you are looking over a great ocean. All of them are nameless, faceless, identityless and have no reactions whatsoever. You just project them and they are there, right? You think, ‘That is good, that is wonderful,’ and you sit there with crossed legs, smiling in a nice way and you can have love and compassion so sweet, as much as you can. But if all of a sudden these nameless, faceless, identityless beings start reacting or talking back, you get upset, shocked, and irritated.

This is a common problem. You become arrogant, superior. Why does that happen? Because though love and compassion is great, out of that greatness you did not take the relevance to yourself. There is no heart-to-heart touch, no human to human, face to face, being to being, I to I contact. That is not there! These nameless, faceless, identityless dots are great, because they don’t react! The moment they react, you get problems, so from the beginning you have to start with the level where there is the relevance to me, where I can act, where I can function. This is very important.

We tend to make a big division between negative karma and positive karma, with one black lump over here and one white lump over there, totally irrelevant to me. I walk in between, I look up and down to a huge lump here and a huge lump there and it is not relevant to me. That is not going to have any effect on you at all!

We talked about consequences and about how long karma takes to complete. Again we think that some third person will get these consequences and I will be the observer. Do you see that? I am observing the process and see that Mr. Joe Blow is going from here to there and is having this experience and getting over it and going there and having all these common experiences and habitual patterns and changing. What is this nonsense?

That is not going to be karmadharma. That is karma-show. If it is karma-show, then it has no value for me. If it is going to be karma-dharma then it has to become relevant to me. Am I going to be part of it? What am I doing? Will this particular thing affect me? If so, how am I going to handle it? How much of it have I got in my storage? You have both positive and negative energy. Make a balance sheet. Whatever you have, you have to clear the negative ones and build up the positive ones.

You have to do something. Make it relevant, make it alive, then it becomes live karmic action, living dharma. You know what I mean? If dharma has no life, then it is no use. Buddha had dharma, but Buddha is gone. All the great Buddhists saints and masters had dharma, but they are gone. That doesn’t make a difference for us. It has to make a difference to each individual.

If you are a group studying and meditating together, raise the question of relevance. How is this relevant to me? Try to make it personal. If you personalize it, it becomes living. When it becomes living, it has effects, it is living spirituality. If you don’t like the word dharma, call it spirituality. Whatever you call it does not matter. You may call it ‘uncle John’ or something, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, but it must be a living practice. As long as it is a projection on the wall, it is no good.

0:09:42.4 Cut – new file (starting with long translation…) 0:14:01.1

How to clear the delusions - purification

Now let us talk about purification. That is the most important part of it. To make it brief, how do you clear the delusions? If you know how delusions grow, it is easier to know how to cut them.

The growing is a little complicated, but let me put it in a simple way. Earlier I mentioned fear. The fear of losing something, when you go deeply in it, is the fear of losing me. When you have fear of losing me, it means you hold that me rather tight. So all you say is ‘I’ and ‘I’ and ‘I’, out of protection. ‘I want to protect myself, I want to hold myself.’ This holding tight on the I becomes more and more important.

When somebody is shooting arrows in the direction of the I it becomes very sensitive for me, for this is what I am holding very tight, right? It is my secret and I don’t want anybody to come nearby. When [on the other hand] somebody is not shooting arrows at your sensitive areas, but tries to help you and protect your sensitivity, when someone tries to help you to radiate more, to help you to do things that you like to do, then you like them. Such people are harmless to us, they are not going to bother us. You like them, because they help you.

Both like and the dislike have been created because of the holding tight of me, protecting that I. So you have that like and dislike which create love and hate and so forth. That is how delusions really grow, which means that the root of all is ignorance, the ignorance of holding me tight. Without thought, without effort, sort of simultaneously it grows with you.

There are two things, 1. [our learned self-image of I], what we think, build up and hold tight as I and 2. [the deeply ingrained sense of I], that is simultaneously born with us, almost grown with us without thinking, without putting any efforts in it, just grown. Fear is really looking for that simultaneously grown I, rather than for the intellectually built one. For those of you who know the Tibetan language and want to know, it is jigta lhenkye. That is what I am talking about and this is where it begins. 0:22:20.6

Emptiness. If you want to try and get rid of this holding of I, this is the main point you have to touch. We are talking about the great wisdom which we call emptiness, the famous Buddhist ‘zero’. That is the one we are looking for.

Emptiness is difficult to understand. Those of you who have been in Buddhism for a number of years more or less accept now that it is difficult to grow an understanding of emptiness, yet some want to pick it up now. Though this is a little bit difficult, we should not leave it out, but rather we should see, again, what out of that is relevant to me, Joe Blow.

When we raise the question, ‘What is relevant to me?’ we may not be able to deal with emptiness directly, but let us start with impermanence. Then from gross impermanence we go to subtle impermanence, from subtle impermanence to dependent arising: how collectiveness functions, how existence depends on a collection of things. That becomes the emptiness relevant to us. Then over time our mind also will get raised and the emptiness will come down a little bit and then we can get it.

Every time you deal with these sorts of things, impermanence, subtle impermanence, dependent arising, you are throwing a kind of dart at the delusions, particularly aiming at ignorance. It may still be a plastic dart or rubber dart, not be a metal one yet – you know what I mean? – but it is an arrow shooting in the right direction. Gradually you can improve your weapon.

Can you purify negative effects just by shooting a rubber bullet? No, but you can still do something. Make your shooting more powerful. Though it is not a real bullet yet, you can make it powerful enough to stop the delusions.

I don’t even know if I should call it purification or not. I have a problem with words like that. What bothers me with the word ‘purification’ is that it sounds like we are impure or dirty. (The Chinese call the Tibetans ‘dirty fellows,’ meaning physical dirt. I don’t know if that is the reason or not, but I have some resistance using words like ‘purification’.) I like to call it ‘law of no-return’, something which makes it not to come back. You may be going in that direction, but it makes you stop.

The four powers of no-return

According to the Buddha, we apply four powers to do that. If you apply those four powers and you shoot those plastic bullets, it stops [the delusions]. This goes on until your bullet really becomes a metal bullet; then you don’t need the four powers any more. When you see the true nature of emptiness, you don’t have to apply the four powers at all, emptiness itself is enough. But as long as the emptiness is not there, you have to put in some explosives and these are the four powers.

1. The power of the base or recognition

The power of the base means the basis on which you create virtues or nonvirtues. Most of the non-virtues we create on beings, not so much on rocks or inanimate things. The base is a being, either enlightened or nonenlightened, there isn’t any third kind. (This is a slightly different way of recognizing the base from what some Tibetan teachers teach.) So you create a your base, which is beings who are either enlightened or nonenlightened. 0:36:08.7

If I hit you and I know that I have committed a bad karma on you and that you are enlightened, how do I compensate you? If I am not sure whether you are enlightened, how do I compensate you? The way of making compensation to enlightened beings and to nonenlightened beings differs. Spiritually speaking, we are left with two options, love and compassion, and taking refuge. Here we are not talking about material compensation at all. Materially you can pay money or do something, but that is a different matter. We are left with two keys, taking refuge, and meditating love and compassion.

If the object I hurt is an enlightened being, I cannot compensate by meditating love and compassion; it doesn’t work. I cannot say, ‘Oh, poor almighty God!’ or: ‘Poor Buddha, poor you !’ I cannot say that, can I? They will laugh at you. It is not compensation, but an insult. So what do you do? Take refuge. [That restores the connection].

If the object is a nonenlightened being, I can’t take refuge, because they, in turn, cannot do anything with that. I cannot say, ‘Oh, great Master doggie, please take my refuge!’ I can’t do that, right? Although some dogs may protect you better than many others, still somehow the refuge doesn’t work with them! So I meditate love-compassion to restore the connection.

Since we are not sure of the basis of the beings towards whom we have committed a variety of nonvirtuous actions, we do both. We take refuge in all those beings who are enlightened, and meditate love and compassion towards the beings that are not enlightened. Not that big monster type of meditating compassion, but meditating on the one-to-one basis. That establishes the base. That means that you compensate the base on which you have committed the wrong action. That is the first power. 0:43:10.4

2. The power of action or remedy

What antidote actions do you apply?

Audience: You can say mantras or do some positive virtuous action like generosity, reciting sutras, any positive action. You can call it antidote action. You have to have that. If you don’t have it, only the other three, it doesn’t work.

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