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19921020graa tape 06 JH

TRANSFORMING NEGATIVIES Doubt Vs Faith

We are talking continuously about the negative mental faculties or delusions or afflictive emotions. Out of the 6 root delusions we have covered briefly 1) attachment,and 2) pride. That’s all. I did not speak on anger as we had been doing it over and over again. Now we should be doing the fourth one Ignorance but as it is linked to the 6th delusion I shall cover it later.Now we will do the 5th one Doubt Versus Faith

They wander in space of darkest ignorance,

Sorely tormenting those who strive for truth,

Of lethal danger to liberation, the fell

demons of doubt - please save us from this fear!

DOUBT OR INDECISIVE WAVERING

Doubt and blind faith

The subject tonight is doubt. That is a very funny point to be talked here. I will talk to you from the background of a Buddhist practitioner, rather than speaking about doubt in the normal sense of understanding. Doubt is -very funny- It is counted here as one of the root delusions. in other words as the root of trouble.

I will like to read basically from the texts that I have been covering here : the first Dalai Lama’s Eight Praise to Tara for protecting eight fears and Pabongka”s Liberation in the palm of your hand.

From Pabongka’s Doubt of four truths and the Buddha dharma Sangha and doubt of karma and focused on that and see that whether it is truly existing or not.It says that by having doubt, it obstructs the individual’s development. The verse is also quoted by the First Dalai Lama.

One who has doubts on karma will obstruct the future life and one who have the doubt for the truths will obstruct the individual from getting total liberation.Doubt comes from the Buddhist background.So, if you look very carefully on what the First Dalai Lama had said on the eight fears is not the fear of this and that.It is the nightmare for the practitioner to develop.0:06:38.3

Doubting the four Noble Truths, doubting Buddha, dharma and sangha and doubting karma; focusing on them and being indecisive about whether they truly exists or not, whether they are real or not, is what this root-delusion is about.

Having doubt on Buddha, dharma and sangha obstructs the individual’s development. Having doubt on karma obstructs a better life in the future. Having doubt on the four noble truths obstructs the individual to get total liberation.

So, doubt is counted as one of the nightmares the practitioners For practitioners doubt is definitely an obstacle. That raises a lot of questions in our mind: Do we have to go without any doubt? Do we have to follow totally with blind faith? Is that encouraged? Certainly not! Blind faith is never, never encouraged. Particularly not in Buddhism. Buddha himself had repeatedly said:

Monks and scholars should

Well analyze my words,

Like gold [to be tested through] melting, cutting and polishing,

And then adopt them, but not for the sake of showing me respect.

Buddha said two-thousand five-hundred years ago: When you buy gold, you rub it, you burn it, you cut it. When you are satisfied that it is pure gold, take it and buy it, otherwise don’t bother. That is what Buddha himself emphasized.

Buddha also emphasized to have great wisdom in finding out the actual meaning/ intention of his words; whether the words he used express or do not expressed what he meant. Sometimes, in Buddhism you will find that Buddha is, a great, kind person. Whenever anybody went to him with any problem, Buddha always said, ‘Doesn’t matter.’0:08:38.7 It is very obvious.

There was a king, Ajatashatru, who accidentally killed his own father, king Bimbisara, who happened to be an arhat, a totally liberated being, a state he had obtained during his imprisonment. According to the Buddhist rules Ajatashatru committed a double unlimited limitless non-virtue:They count 5 limitless non virtues. Out of that, killing one of his parents and killing an enlightened being are two separate ones. This guy who had this incident. thought: first he had put his father in jail in order to get the power. Later he realized that his father had been very kind to him when he was young. He always thought that his father was against him and was jealous on him, so he had organized his own group and overthrew the father. Deeply his father had been very much kind to him, but he only realized that that was true when he himself had a problem with his own son. His own son had a blood-disease, a problem that his father and grandfather also had. His mother told him what to do. There were no doctors like today. Finally his mother said, ‘Now you have to suck the blood out of the boy, cut it here and suck it.’ He was hesitant and said, ‘How do you know?’ His mother said, ‘When you were young, you had the same problem and your father did that.’ Then he said, ‘Did my father really do that? Does he really care that much for me?’ That went on in his head and finally he realized it. So he said, ‘Release my father out of the prison.’

The old ministers liked the father, because he was a very kind and nice person. So they started running one after the other to get him out of the prison, which was an old palace, some old building where when people run upstairs you’ll know it downstairs. Everybody started running and the king in prison thought they were coming to kill him. So he sat down and meditated and died. And when they opened the door he had just died.

They went back and told the king that his father was dead. The king was very sorry. He had a lot of regret and felt very, very guilty. Finally he went to Buddha and he said, ‘What can I do?’ And he expected Buddha to say, ‘You are terrible...’ and this and that. But Buddha gave him a very funny reply:

Father and mother should be killed.

And if king, destroy all your subjects, you will liberate yourself.

He couldn’t believe what Buddha said. Anyway, Buddha had worked with him and had actually helped him to overcome that guilt.

Actually when Buddha said, ‘Kill father and mother’ he was not referring to the physical parents. He was referring to the father of ignorance and the mother of attachment. And when Buddha said, ‘If you destroy all the subjects...’ he did not mean the human beings. He meant the subjects of all twelve dependent links of how an individual runs through the circle of life. Then Buddha gradually started explaining, but what he directly said was, ‘All right, kill father and mother and destroy your whole kingdom and you’ll be liberated.’ Buddha did that sort of things. You can read it in the sutras. 0:13:37.1

So we don’t take the words blindly. You use your intelligence. Buddha himself has given this as an example. He said, ‘I used this word, I did this, I helped this individual king to come out of his mental agony, and when he is out of that I can communicate with him and gradually tell him that this is the father and that is the mother and this is the retinue I am talking about, and that I am not talking about this and that.’ With a little excuse we Buddhist followers call that skillful means. Whatever it is, skillful means or not, we do need skillful wisdom to be able to understand what it means. Therefore blind faith is never encouraged.

Doubt and over-cautiousness

However, being over-cautious is another problem. You have to be intelligent and be able to find out by your own wisdom how much is true, how much is relevant. And if you can’t find the answer, it is also important to ask somebody that you trust. That way you try to gain some kind of understanding and after that you follow it. If you are over-cautious, then it doesn’t work, then it becomes doubt. That is not good, it will definitely remain a very important obstacle for the individual.

As the first Dalai Lama in the

Praise to Tara protection from the eight fears says (quotes):

They wander in the space of darkest ignorance,

Sorely tormenting those who strive for Truth,

Of lethal danger to Liberation, the Fell

Sometimes they use as symbols animals like a lion and a snake. Here the first Dalai Lama referred to doubt as a ghost. It is the ghost that is threatening the very life of total liberation. These ghosts are travelling back and forth in the sky of ignorance. This is the way Tibetan poetry works.The sky is not really the sky but the sky of ignorance. These ghosts are running back and forth in the sky.

What are they threatening? They are a big threat to the liberation of the individual practitioners. So may I be protected from the ghosts of doubt.

That is how the first Dalai Lama put it. Doubt is in a way, if you over-carry it, definitely threatening the very life of liberation.

What is that telling us today? It is all right if you use your intelligence to find out and check. But if you keep on doubting every single thing that comes up, if you always look from the negative point, if you raise up all the negative things and look down on every positive point, then what happens? Nothing, but the individual is going to cut out

His/her opportunity.

If you keep on doubting every single path, you’re not going to have anything to develop, because you see only negative points. If you start looking from the negative points, there is no end. In every positive point you have, there is always something negative too!

If you start looking from the negative point, you find everything negative, whether it is a human being or a practice. In the practice, if you start looking at the drawbacks or difficulties; in individual persons you start looking at the faults of the people. As long as people are not totally liberated, as long as people are human beings, there will definitely be negative points.0:20:11.3

From the practice point of view,no matter how great the practice might be, if it is going to help you in the long run, you will have difficulties. Sure, you are bound to have them! If there are no difficulties, it is not going to help at all. Then it will be totally like entertainment: you have a nice little thing to go to and you go and say that it is nice and wonderful and you chat and you clap and then you go home. What does that do? Nothing, nothing to the individual. You may have a good time for an hour and a half, pay a few dollars and go home and that’s it. That is good entertainment, but practice it is not.

Practice is something in which we have to deal with our delusions and to overcome their effects within ourselves. By overcoming the delusions the positive nature will automatically build up. If you have doubt, you are not going to deal with it, because any method that you have, you started doubting. You keep on doubting, you have resistance, every single negative point that you can raise, you try to raise and that’s it. That is how your time will go. In every little thing you look a little bit, you go a little bit in, hesitate a little bit, see a few faults, pull back a little bit, raise those faults a little bit, see something else, poke your nose a little bit in, see a few faults, pull back..... And that you keep on repeating for forty years of your life. What are you going to get? Nothing! It will not affect the delusions within our mind at all. It does need a constant pounding on the head of each and every delusion we have, but we’re not going to give that, because every method with which we would like to hit on, we have doubts. How can you use that method against your own delusion if you keep on doubting whether this is going to work or not? It is not a material, thing that you can just look for outside and then see immediately whether it works You don’t, because it is within the individual mind. It only shows over a long time; when you look back you will see the difference within you. It is never going to work overnight. So if you keep on doubting everything, you let the opportunity pass by. That it is why it is threatening the very life of liberation. That doesn’t mean you have to buy everything at face-value. For some time you check things very carefully, whether it is your spiritual teacher, whether it is your spiritual path, whether it are your spiritual friends, whether it is the thing to do. These are the things you have to check. 0:24:21.1

Developing intelligent faith

How do Buddhist followers look to Buddha? We do not take refuge to Buddha because Buddha is great. We do not take refuge to Buddha because Buddha is pure. No, we don’t. How do we take refuge to Buddha? Why do we say Buddha is good ? Because the teaching of Buddha is effective. What did Dharmakirti, one of the great Indian pandits and scholars, in his Pramanavartika, the root text of Buddhist logic, say? The second chapter begins with,

Buddha is great and Buddha is reliable, because he protects.

How can he protect? Because he himself has gone through.

How do you know he himself has gone through?

Because his teaching is perfect.

So they say the Buddha is good, Buddha is reliable because He protects. How can he protect? It is because Buddha himself had gone through. How do you know he himself had gone through: because his teaching is perfect. Basic reason why they say Buddha is good is because of how the Buddha’s work affects the individual. That is great. By showing that Buddhism is helpful to the individual , with that reason you say you can respect Buddha, because Buddhism,the teaching that Buddha gave, is helping the individual. That is the reason. We don’t use as reason for taking refuge to Buddha because he is a buddha.No, that’s not right. Neither do we use as reason to take refuge to Buddha because Buddha is great or Buddha is pure or whatever. These are not reasons. The reason is: Buddhism helps!

Buddhism is nothing but the experience shared by Buddha. That is why according to Buddhism, out of all the activities of the Buddha, we never consider the magical power, flying power or the mystical power as Buddha’s greatest activities. The greatest activity is the activity of the communication, the sharing Buddha did. Whatever he gained, he shared. Tsongkhapa says:

If you are an intelligent person, you should be able to pay homage and respect to Buddha.

Why? Read what he said; look, experience and feel what he has shared.

When you feel it, you will automatically respect him.

Therefore his communication activity is considered the best activity.

How do you prove it? Also using reasons and all this. Once you feel it, once you think it is going to help you, then no matter whatever difficulties you may find, you have to go through with it. Because if you are afraid of having little difficulties here and there and if you start raising a little doubts here and there, you will be the loser. Then you become the quitter rather than the fighter.v0:29:18.6

The struggle for spiritual development

The point here is that we have to fight with the delusions. Spiritual development is a big struggle: a struggle between our negativities with its effects, our habitual patterns, and what we want to achieve,/ the positivity that we want to gain. We try to set up the pattern of the positivity within the individual. That is the struggle. I repeatedly shared it with you.

When you read those interesting textbooks, they talk about effortlessly happening of this, effortlessly happening of that. This effortless is only possible when the pattern is set up within us and becomes habitual to us. Then it is effortlessly happening.

We have strong negative habitual patterns within us. We don’t have to meditate how to get angry. We don’t have to put efforts on how to develop attachment. We don’t have to sit and meditate and work hard to develop pride. We don’t have to work hard to get our ego hurt. If somebody looks slightly different at you, your ego gets hurt; you don’t have to put effort in and meditate on this. But on the other hand every opposite of that, like pure love, you have to put efforts in, it will not come automatically; patience you have to put efforts in, it will not come automatically, etc. That way our habitual patterns are set. To put them the other way round is a big struggle. The struggle is here.0:32:03.1

The opposite of doubt is: after some time, you have to have some kind of intelligent faith or reliance on something when you are convinced. Our knowledge and information is very limited. We try to get as much as possible, but still it is very limited. That is because spiritual development is something very strange. You will only really know what it is like, when you get it. You really don’t know now. You do have some kind of understanding following learning, and then you think about it and you gradually develop. You do have some kind of basic understanding but you really don’t know exactly till you reach there. So if you keep on doubting till you know, you’re never going to reach there. After some time, when you have gained some kind of intelligent understanding, then you have to put in slightly intelligent faith. That is necessary. We quote from the sutra The Lamp on the Three Jewels:

Intelligent faith is like a mother.

It protects all your qualities and will help the qualities grow.

When a person doesn’t have intelligent faith,

no good dharma-quality is going to grow within that person.

Intelligent faith is like a mother. If you want to bring a human baby up, the first thing you need is a mother. The mother will nurture the baby, raise the baby and gradually it becomes a wonderful, fully matured human being. If there is no mother, it is not going to happen. So an intelligent sort of reliance or faith is necessary, like a mother.

It protects all your qualities and will help the qualities grow. I might as well share this with you. The problem in the West, particularly among dharma-practitioners, is thinking and saying that there is there is not so much encouragement. When they find difficulty of not finding encouragement,that is the problem.This is because you don’t have intelligent faith. Therefore you’re not going to get any encouragement at all. The boost of practice or the path you are going, depends on it. 0:36:01.2

When a person doesn’t have intelligent faith, no good dharma-quality is going to grow within that person. when practitioners don’t have intelligent faith, nothing of good dharma quality is going to grow within that person. The example is, if you have some grains ,when you try to grow grain, wheat or barley or rice, if the seed of the grain is burned, no grain is going to grow, no matter how much manure or fertilizer you put in or how much water you pour in. You may be very careful to put the right amount of moisture; you may be very careful giving the right amount of warmth, the right temperature; you may get the best soil and you may work very hard every day trying to look after it, weeding it and so on, but the grain is not going to grow because it is burned.

Likewise when practitioners don’t have intelligent faith, no matter how much effort they put in, no matter how early they get up, no matter how many mantras they say, no matter how many prostrations they do, no matter how many circambulations they do, no matter how many purifications they do, nothing is going to grow within that individual because the seed has been burned. That is why the first Dalai Lama speaks of doubt as a nightmare for the practitioners. 0:38:15.4

How to balance

So what do we have to do? We should be able to balance. The balance between blind faith and doubt is intelligent faith. That is the real balance. You do not totally take the face-value. You test. The actual test is on the practice. Whichever practice comes, take it, use it, see whether it makes sense or not, whether it affects you or not. If it affects here and there and you notice that it changes your life in a positive way, then you have to quit testing it and follow it properly.

The path is such a thing; when you go the path itself, you have to test. And when you have that and it works well, then you should really follow it. When you think, ‘This is not working. This may be great, but it is not for me’ then just quit and don’t linger around, because it doesn’t help.

So intelligent faith is how you balance. That is how you do not leave the doubt as doubt, but you leave it as an intelligent question and gradually you use it as a tool to develop some kind of intelligent faith within the individual. That only is what I know about how to turn this doubt into a positive way; I don’t know any other way at all.

If you keep on doubting everything, then no matter whatever comes, you’ll doubt it. If you keep on looking at the negative points, you’ll always find negatives. And the negative points will always overshadow the positives of the individual or of the practice, whatever it is.

The practice is the more important, not the person. As I mentioned to you, we say, ‘Buddha is great, because Buddhism is helpful’. Buddha is not great because he is pure, not because he is a buddha; this is not the point. It really doesn’t matter who does it, but it does matter what it is and how it affects the individual. Does that make sense? That is it. If you people start looking from the negative points, there are countless negatives.So you have to deal with your own mind. To a certain extent you raise intelligent questions, intelligent doubt. The intelligent doubt can become the very root of intelligent faith. That is how you really go. If you keep the doubt as doubt, then it will never end. You will keep on doubting everything till you die and then that is the end of it.0:43:13.1

I have nothing more to say.

Questions and answers

Audience: You spoke of attachment and anger and the first step being to become aware of it. What is the next step?

Rinpoche: Why don’t we take the first step first? I don’t mean that sarcastic, don’t misunderstand me. Truly, when you go this way, first recognize them and then think about the second step.

Audience: There is a lot of support in society to expressing anger that has been suppressed for a long time. Could you address that?

Rinpoche: The definition of anger: my personal feeling is that quite often there is a lot of misunderstanding. People who express their anger, who shout and scream and yell when someone in the traffic is moving on the wrong side of the road, or is giving the wrong signal,

That is giving the right signal and turning left. You go on yelling and shouting and screaming from behind. Whether that is anger or not, to me, it depends.The shouting screaming I don’t think is anger at all. The definition of anger really means, ‘The person did this and that to me and I really have to get back somehow!’, keeping it in mind and getting back to it, sort of leveling back at the person one time or another, no matter how much time it takes, sort of holding it in that manner. That is really the deeper anger. Just shouting and expressing and screaming and banging do…whether it is anger or not. Probably not.0:46:08.3

Whether just shouting and yelling and banging is anger or not depends on the feelings of wanting to get back. Without the harming attitude, expressing, shouting and screaming might not necessarily be anger. I think we have to draw the line somewhere in between.

The Japanese have a system. When they have problems with their executives, they have to run and scream and cry and do all sorts of funny things in a group, wearing for example a garland of shoes around their necks. I think anger has to have something which you cannot bear, or loss or exhaustion of patience and wanting to get back and somehow wanting to take some kind of revenge. If with that attitude you hit anything, it is non-virtuous. Whether it is really anger or not, it is non-virtuous, even hitting the wall or whatever it is.

If you ask me personally what do I do when somebody gives a wrong signal? If someone doesn’t go faster, I will yell. But am I really saying that from my heart with a feeling of frustration? I am not, to tell the truth. I try to act accordingly, try to go along with the people. That is what I do.

If I am angry, do I express my anger? I will not. I will not. If I am angry I will not express my anger at all. If you ask me straightforward, ‘What will you do?’ I will not. But that doesn’t mean that I am telling everybody to do that, because it depends on the effects. If you cannot control your anger and you keep on not expressing it, you can get hurt too, physically, emotionally, mentally and even spiritually too. I think the way and how you have to handle your own little anger, is according to the needs you have, at least from the physical, emotional and mental point of view. But as a delusion you will always try to withdraw from that rather than work with it. If you can manage it, sure, go ahead. If you can not manage you are better off to withdraw.

0:50:49.2

Audience:

Rimpoche: Delusion in the sense of not bad. If you go deeper into it then it is deluded. It is what we normally called as non-virtuous actions. It creates bad karma. It cuts good positive karma.If you look at it that way, every anger is quite heavy.

Audience: In order to cut the root of anger don’t you have to first recognize that you have it?

Rinpoche: Sure you do!

You feel guilty over being angry. Whatever rationalizations that people end to do: saying I am not angry in order to avoid having to admit anger, because it is so upsetting.So we have to admit it at some point.

Rinpoche: On the first day of this series of talks, we have mentioned that for each one of those delusions the first thing that you have to cut, is the denial. That is the basic principle we are following. So I am taking for granted people will do that..

You have to cut the denial, recognize and then go. I won’t repeat it every time because from the beginning we set some sort of pattern how you work with this. You first have to acknowledge. Then by the acknowledgment itself, you really almost got a grip on it. The moment you really recognize that you are angry, you feel embarrassed. That is how from the beginning we set as pattern on how to work with all these types of delusions First cut through the denial, then recognize and acknowledge and finally we talk on how to move that into the positive manner. These first two steps: cutting through the denial and recognizing it are the basic principle patterns you have to carry all the time, for all the delusions you deal with, whether with the six root delusions or the twenty secondary delusions. Out of the 52 mental faculties, there are 26 negative mental faculties That is how the delusions’ power is cut through. The basic pattern: first cut through the denial, then look at, recognize and acknowledge. Once you get that, you begin to feel a little embarrassed that you had been angry. Just using yourself as a reason or using others as a reason like, ‘I made a fool of myself; how can I show my face?’That is how you cut the delusion power. Then we talk about the delusions individually: try to recognize and find out the positive way we can go through.0:55:33.4

Audience: (about denying anger while expressing it)

Rinpoche:Very basic broad way, the broad framework.then within individual you cut slightly different here and there.That’s what we have been talking about.

Question: If you react when you are angry, are you saying that if you are reacting then you must be in denial and we must always think that I recognize that I am not in denial but I still feel I am reactive. In other words , instead of an automatic response…How do one go from the one to the other?

Rinpoche: I did not say that if you express anger, you are denying anger; I didn’t say that. Some people will recognize anger and still will keep on expressing it, helplessly or intentionally. Both ways are possible. Some people even though they want to say it they,don’t want to do it, but they can’t help it. Some people, if they recognize they are angry will still like to dramatize it more and like to say it. It totally depends on the individual character. I am not saying that when you are expressing it, you are in denial.I am simply saying that if you can sit down quietly, whether the anger has passed or is still going on, and you think about it, think what had happened, ‘What happened to me? What did I act? I made a fool of myself.’ If you keep on thinking that way, if you acknowledge a little bit, it may help. That is what I am saying. v0:57:53.5

There is no blanket pattern which covers everybody, definitely not. Every human being will have his own little pattern and will function according to that. Only oneself can find one’s own pattern and accordingly make use of it. Some people when angry like to smile and speak in a sweet voice or you keep quiet and say not a word. Some people, when angry would have to get up and walk away. Some people when angry will have to shout and scream. Individuals have different ways of doing, whether due to the influence of childhood or parents or environment or society or the individual himself. When you try to work with your own pattern, you also know the other side and you try to pick up the information and see which is helpful to you.

Audience: Are you saying that any expression of anger is non-virtuous? If you are angry because you saw someone had done you wrong, you could confront the person constructively and deal with your anger that way, by expressing that you have been hurt and the person didn’t recognize he made you angry. Will that still be non-virtuous?

Rinpoche: The moment you use the word ‘constructively’, it is difficult to say whether it is non-virtuous. We have to see what you mean by constructive. WE have seen this in election patterns.It seems to be that the majority people really didn’t like …..may call it a constructive encounter. Maybe not It seems to be a negative. The moment you use the word constructive, you have to look at two pictures: the individual karmic circumstances and the general effect, because we live in a society with encounters with the people. We always have to look at two sides: the individual karmic consequences and the society too.v1:01:46.1

Audience: (about by not expressing it, it becomes crippling, but suppressing the anger inwardly…..? Karmic implications…One become judgemental…To express judgement is a form of anger….)

Rinpoche:

I have 2 comments.

One is that when you express your anger you may win

I have a big question. Win what? Probably you will not win anything.You may gain some emotional disturbance of both this and that side. That’s what you will win out of anger but nothing else.

Two:When you said anger suppressed inwardly.

That is a very important point. When we don’t express anger, do we suppress anger or what do we do with that? As Buddhist practitioner, I don’t think we suppress anger at all. You may simply avoid expressing it in an angry way, but at the same time that very energy which is restless and really is really trying to get back, even imagining to the extent of whatever:maybe like some god coming out of the sky and hitting the other person with thunder and lightning, that restless energy I think we try to channel. We try to change it into developing patience rather than suppressing it and keeping it down.I don’t think it works that way at all.

When you say suppress inwardly, I have a question about it.If you said’ I am going to get angry ..then that make the people very bad.

The question of suppression, I don’t think it is there. In Buddhism, particularly in vajrayana Buddhism, as you know, if you look very carefully this anger and hatred are used as a path. So it is a big transformation rather than keeping it as anger and suppressing it. It becomes a path; that is why you have these terrifying deities. The terrifying looking dieties is the result of the transformation. The five skandhas are transformed and become the five buddhas, and the five deluded feelings become the five wisdoms. So I don’t think you suppress at all. That is my personal feeling.1:07:40.4