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19970204GRAABWL03

Side A of tape 26 of 02/04/97

Last time we were talking briefly about the Seven Limb Practice. Even the Bodhisattvacharyavatara talks very detailedly about that. In the Jewel Heart Practice we only have seven lines and try to make it very easy. The earlier masters tried to make it simple for some people and composed it in this one line per limb format. Some people need a lot of detail and there are whole books written just about the Seven Limbs. Some people need a very simple way. I made ours very short. The words are very short and provide the individual with the essence. The words you say don’t make a difference, but what you think and what you mentally exercise, that makes a difference. When the words are short, the mental support you put behind that can also be very short, yet it has everything complete in there. For example the first one is

I bow down with body, speech and mind.

The language can be a problem. People will ask themselves, ‘Why should I bow down?’ That is a language problem. People bow down for two reasons. One is that you want to butter up somebody. Another reason is because you are forced to. The circumstances may force you to or you may have gone off your head. Another reason is that you appreciate the qualities of that person. You may not even bow down, but you show some admiration.

Here nobody forces you and nobody will say, ‘If you bow down, I will give you x - amount of dollars.’ That does happen actually. But I better not talk about that here.

We bow down to the Supreme Field of Merit, to Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, etc, because we like their qualities, we admire them and we would like to have them for ourselves. So bowing down is the words and gestures expressing that wish. So when you bow down you have to know the Buddhist background, otherwise you will think that it is just some Buddhist custom. When you say ‘I bow down’, you may think it is some kind of Buddhist custom where you have to bow down. You will remember the Hindu tradition which includes bowing with folded hands. But here it does not work that way. When you appreciate a person you automatically like them and automatically you want to have their qualities with you. That is the reason.

Here in Jewel Heart we don’t make people stand up and bow down. We don’t like that. If somebody does that I will say, ‘Please don’t!’. In some centers they make you do that - particular in the California area. To me it has become so funny and very artificial. That is my view. Some people like to do it, that is their choice. To me it is artificial. People just think it is the Eastern custom and some people just say, ‘I have been told to stand up, so I am standing.’ If that is the only reason why they do that, it is not right. The reason is simply to gain respect for an individual.

Let us say in the future I expect that at least 50 % of the people in here will become some kind of guide or spiritual teacher. When you become that, if you want to have people’s respect, you have to give them something that they can respect you for. You give them qualities that they can admire you for. Then they gain respect. The quality you can give to the people is something that makes a difference to their lives, something that makes it easier for them to deal with their negative emotions. Actually Buddhism always demands and expects that a teacher should be able to lead the people that are studying with him to total enlightenment. Thats that - so here is the enlightenment - please enjoy! [laughs]. You can’t do that , right? But if you have something that makes a difference to their lives, that makes it a little easier to deal with their neuroses, something that makes them a little gentler and kinder, when you are able to deliver that, people gain automatically respect for you. That respect is not only respecting the individual but also expressing the quality which that individual has and which one would like to have. So that is the real meaning of bowing down.

So every morning, when you look at the qualities of the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, the Bodhisattvas, etc, then you say, ‘I would like to have their qualities. I admire that, I respect that.’ This gesture of bowing itself - that is cultural. It is the old Indian culture, picked up by the Chinese, Tibetans, Mongolians, etc. and even South - East Asians. But we don’t want to simply bow down. You can do that in the military. When you have to salute, you have to salute. Everybody will raise their hands together. It does not really mean much. You have been asked to do it and that is why you do it. If you don’t, you will be court-marshalled.

In future, when you are teaching other people, don’t demand respect. Some teachers do that. The first time when we prepared this room for teaching, we had a visiting teacher who demanded that we set up a throne for him. That sort of thing won’t do. It is not my style anyway. Respect is something you gain if you can help people. There is no need for us, the American people, to import the Asian culture - although we actually don’t have much American culture! Probably the reason why people introduce the bowing down, standing up and giving scarves is because there is nothing equivalent in the American tradition. It would be slightly strange if a traditional lama in robes, especially one of the older ones, came to visit and everybody would shake hands with him, right? So you import something, because you don’t have it here. Maybe that is the reason. In actuality you have to earn people’s respect. That helps both parties, the person who gets the respect and the people who are respecting. That is why we follow that and that is what the line ‘I bow down, etc’ means. The word bowing down is terribly [inaccurate in this context]. It does not do justice to the purpose. In the Tibetan language the word chak tsäl expresses the whole meaning. Chak means respect and tsäl means that I would like to have the qualities that I respect. So when you translate that word chak tsäl as bowing down, it does not do justice to the meaning.

Then the second of the seven limbs is offering.

I present offerings, both actually arranged and mentally created.

This is another important point. Offering is an act of generosity. In the karmic natural law generosity is actually the cause of having a lot. It makes you rich. In the Western culture you don’t have to talk much about the value of generosity. Somehow people know that. It is accepted without any question. It is widely accepted. I don’t have to put great efforts into explaining that. However, I would like to clarify how generosity is the cause of having a lot of things, like money, wealth, etc. It is not the result of a tight fist, stinginess.

Some people may think, ‘I have nothing to give, therefore I cannot be generous. I may not be able to build the good karma of generosity and I will never be wealthy at all.’ You don’t have to think that way, because you can offer actual things and things which you mentally create. You are not limited to the actual amount or article that you are going to part with. You mentally create it. Even in the case of actual material it does not have to be expensive. Look at our altar here. We have seven bowls filled with water and four roses - whoever brought them. Then we have a light which is not lit. These are the offerings which we have actually arranged here [laughs] How much can we hope to gain with that? Not much, right? If you look in the Bodhisattvacharyavatara and other earlier Buddhist texts, it will mention the light of the moon and sun, electricity - generated light, etc . They have done it that way. Another way is to mentally duplicate and multiply the actual offerings. The four roses we have here, you don’t think that they are four miserable roses but beautiful roses, peach - colored, opening, fresh. You also do not think that there are only four, but imagine zillions of them, so that the whole space and the whole ground is completely filled up. Each one of the roses has become millions of them. You think, ‘I am here to present millions of roses to the enlightened beings.’ Then you ask them to accept them ‘by their own power’. I don’t have the power to give them a zillion roses. So I ask them to accept these by their own power. This way they receive zillions of roses rather than just four.

What is the essence of generosity? It is the mind wanting to give, wanting to share, not necessarily what you are actually giving. The things you are actually giving is great, wonderful. It benefits people, it benefits yourself. But the actual generosity really lies in the mind of giving .The mind of giving itself is the act of generosity. That does not mean you should not give, that you should only think that you are giving. That will not work. You should have the mind of giving, and whatever you can share, you should. The traditional teachings will also tell you to offer good quality things. They say,

Don’t offer the yellow part of the vegetables and the green part of the butter.

When the butter goes bad it becomes green and when the vegetables go bad they become yellow, right? . If you give something because it is just going to go bad - that is not generosity.

Even if you only have a simple glass of water - that is perfectly fine. You can do that at home. Just get one glass of water and that is your offering. If you do that every day, it is great. It will build up. This is the important thing here. If you do the seven limb practice just for one day and think ‘I have done it, I am great.’ that is going to get you nowhere. But when you constantly do it every day, it is going to make a difference. If you put a drop of water into a bucket every day, the bucket will be full one day. We know that. Likewise, this practice should be done daily. Every day you put something there, again and again. That is how you save your positive karma. Economists will probably tell you, ‘That is how you save your money.’ It is the same principle with saving your positive karma. You may think that one drop is not doing much and wish for the day when you get a bucket full of water. But that day may never come. But if you do it every day a little bit, there is not so much pressure on you, yet it builds up. That is how the practice makes a difference to people. It does not make a difference if you are poor or wealthy.

There are a lot of stories about earlier masters who in the beginning did not have anything. Some - like Ketsang’s - total posessions amounted to one bowl. That is it. Early in the morning he would fill up that wooden bowl and make offerings. At breakfast time he would say, ‘May I borrow your bowl?’ and he would take it down and use it for himself. Afterwards he would wash it and pour water in it for offering. He began his practice like that and later he became extremely wealthy. He related his own story.

The next is purification. I am not going to talk much about that, because the chapter we are talking about in the Bodhisattvacharyavatara is about purification. But one thing I would like to say. If you do the practice and visualization of purification, again it makes a difference - if you do that every day. There is no such negativity or negative karma which cannot be purified. There is none, according to the Buddha. We do commit negativities, just because we are who we are. But no matter whatever we do, there is no such a thing as ‘I am completely doomed. I cannot do anything. I am sunk, I am stuck, I cannot move.’ Mentally, physically, emotionally, sometimes it looks that way, but in reality there is no such negativity that cannot get purified.

There is as story from the Jakata tales. It happened during the Buddha’s life time. I share that story very often. It is Angulimala’s story. Anguli means finger or thumb. A teacher of his told him, ‘I will liberate you, if you can kill one thousand human beings in one week, chop their fingers off and make them into a rosary. Wear that and come back to me within a week and I will liberate you.’ That is called a ‘non-virtuous master’. He told his students to go and create more negativities. So this guy started going round and killing everybody. After some time everybody who saw him ran away and he could not complete his one thousand killings. There was only his own mother. From the distance she watched him and did not run away - she wanted to talk to him and help him if she could. At the same time she was also afraid that he might kill her too. So it was the mother who was staying around.

Tibetan Buddhism talks a lot about the mother and her feelings. When you hear them talking about a mother’s care and feelings, don’t project that on to your mother and think, ‘But I hate my mother. She gives me trouble all the time.’ If you watch the people who are mothers, or if you have the experience of being a mother yourself, look from the window of being a mother and you will see how much you care, how much you are willing to sacrifice. It is totally different looking from the window of the child towards the mother as opposed to looking from the mother’s window towards the child. Those of you who have been mothers know that and those of us who are not, we watch them and we will know it.

So that mother wanted to help her boy who was going round killing everybody. She tried to get near him, stop him, but was too afraid to actually go to him. He had by then killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people, but he also was still hesitating to kill his own mother. You know in between that sort of period Buddha appeared. Angulimala was thinking, ‘Oh great, now I don’t have to kill my mom. I will go after this guy.’ He went after him but could not catch him. So he shouted, ‘Hey, wait!’ and Buddha said, ‘I have been waiting for a long time. Come a little faster!’ So Angulimala ran faster, but although Buddha appeared to walk slowly, he could never catch him. This type of thing is called ‘skilful means.’ So this is actually a situation showing skilful means, rather than what some teachers do nowadays. They do all sorts of funny things and call it ‘skilful means.’ Probably this is just corruption. Buddha was showing real skilful means. Apparently walking very slowly, he was always too fast for Angulimala who could not get near him. After some time Angulimala got tired and called him, ‘Hey, wait!’ and Buddha said, ‘I am waiting, why don’t you come a little faster?’ You see, once you break the ice you are then able to communicate. Finally, Buddha was able to show him the path, and Angulimala was able to purify his negativities and became an Arhat. An Arhat is a person who is totally free from samsara. What is samsara?

Aud1: Cyclic existence.’

R: Yes, you are right, but that does not explain much.

Aud2: Escape from life and death

R: We are getting very nice definitions here. You should just add two words though: without choice. You can escape from a life and a death in which you have no choice or decision power, no control. So Angulimala was able to achieve that condition even after having killed so many human beings. We have not been able to do that. We have not been generals in World War II nor in Vietnam or the Gulf War. I should not say that, but from the viewpoint of negative karma you appreciate not being such a person, whether it is President Bush or General Schwartzkopf. If you are in that position you have to give orders to shoot and kill and you get the equal amount of negativites as the individual soldiers. One soldier in the field may shoot and kill one enemy here and there. A pilot may throw a bomb that kills a number of people. These people definitely have the negativity of killing, but the person who is behind issuing the orders, gets the sum total of the committed killings. For the pilots it is limited. As many bombs they have thrown and killed people, that much negativity they accumulate. The boss at the back has much more negativities and so it goes on.

So we are not a person who is responsible for killing millions or thousands of people. There is no reason why we could not purify. Even if we happened to be somebody who was involved in killing hundreds or thousands of people, there is no reason why we cannot purify. We definitely can - for the simple reason that the negativities are impermanent. They are changing. Therefore, if the right conditions meet with such a karma, they can sweep it away. No matter how heavy, how terrible the negativity may be, everything is purifiable.

Purification if one the best practices. If you can purify, you don’t have negativities and therefore don’t get any negative results. The whole karma is nothing but cause and result. If there is no cause, how can there be an effect? That is one of the reasons why we are responsible for ourselves. If we do something good it makes a difference to us, if we do something bad it makes a difference to us. We are responsible for ourselves. This is the main reason. This reason gives us the opportunity to purify, to do whatever we need to do. It will make a difference to us.

You may think, ‘I have done terrible things in my life. I am hopeless, I am helpless.’ That is never true. Whatever negativities you may have, it is all purifiable. Believe me. Are there any questions?

Aud1: Last week you mentioned that is was okay for us to read Bob Thurman’s book ‘Essential Buddhism’, because he did not put any restrictions on reading. it.

R: Well, if he has not put any restrictions and puts that book into all the book stores, all the people who are going to read that don’t get any downfalls. If there are any downfalls, it is his problem, not ours.

Aud2: In his book he has a translation of the lama chöpa. Are you saying that one should not read that text without having received initiation?

R: The lama chöpa carries a lot of Vajrayana information. Theoretically speaking you should not read it without initiation. But then even in old Tibet it was read and said everywhere by everybody. So there is no such restrictions. Practically, everybody read it.

Aud3: One night we were staying with friends and they joined us when we were doing the lama chöpa with tsog, even though they had not taken any initiations.

R: That is all right. But not if you let them join in the Vajrayogini practice.

end of side A of tape 26

side B of tape 26 02/04/97

Aud4: We have to do analytical and concentrated meditation, as you said. The question is: Must the two go together?

R: Good question. The answer is no, but the analytical meditation makes the concentrated meditation strong and powerful. Remember the example I gave about the flag. When you do analytical meditation you convince yourself, you understand about the puppies and the meaning. This is not easy to shake and makes your thoughts stable and important. Analytical meditation makes a big difference to the people and their lives. The concentrated meditation delivers the goods. It makes you adopt something as part of your life. Analytical meditation makes you find what you are going to adopt.

Aud4: In that case, can analytical meditation take place as you are walking down the street or wherever you happen to be as you begin to think about some ideas or does it have to be formalized?

R: If you do it while walking down the street, as long as you are not hit by a car, that is fine. Really true. Analytical meditation is analyzing in your mind the points you are bringing up, working out if it is true or not. If it is true, how is it true? Lets say you are thinking about impermanence. You have to figure out what is impermanence. What does it mean? One day I am going to die, is that impermanence, or is it the fact that we are changing all the time, every minute? Finally you will find that both is true. The gross example of impermanence is death. The subtle impermanence is the change every minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, year by year. This is not that subtle, but not that gross. It is medium level impermanence. You recognize the truth in the statement that yesterday’s ‘I’ is not today’s ‘I’. We all know that. Yet we are responsible today for what we did yesterday. Seeing all this you begin to realize that impermanence is very much part of our life. If then somebody comes and tells you, ‘Your impermanence is totally meaningless, useless,’ you know that this is not true.

I am giving the impermanence just as one example. Every step in the lam rim or the Bodhisattvacharyavatara has to be established within ourselves, by ourselves, with our thoughts, our understanding. This is analytical meditation. You will be able to establish for yourself the truth of these statements. Through understanding and reasoning you will give the total picture to yourself. You analyze it, you see it, you get it and then you hold it.

Concentrated meditation is just single-pointedly holding one object. It does not have to be the breath. You are not going to only meditate on the breath for your whole life. You are going to shift to different points, like impermanence. When you concentrate on impermanence, you adopt it completely and every time when you are having difficulties and sufferings, you know it is impermanent, it is going to go away. It is like clouds in the air. They can be blown away by a powerful wind any minute. So you look for the sunshine.

Aud5: Last week you talked about anxiety experienced by a lot of people as they work through analytical meditation....

R: I forgot. I don’t recall. I hope I don’t have Alzheimer’s disease. [in reference to Ronald Reagan’s famous statement about the Iran Contra affair]. I did talk something, but I don’t remember what I said.

Aud6: When you visualize something, how do you do analytical and concentrated meditation?

R: In the Liberation in the Palm of your Hand it is probably mentioned. When you are meditating on the image of the Buddha, building up the visualization of the face, with the eyes, the nose, ears, then the whole body with legs and arms, sitting there - building that up point by point is labelled ‘analytical meditation’ and when the visualization is completed and you are just focussing and sitting on that, this is labelled ‘concentrated meditation’.

Aud7: Why do we do mudras?

R: Probably just to copy the monkeys. Just joking. It is not the essential part. The Vajrayana works with three things: Meditation, mantra and mudra. The mudras are part of that. Mudra is a Sanskrit word and means ‘hand gesture’. That is why I said that we are probably copying the monkeys. The monkeys do all sorts of things, right? When you put the forces of meditation, mantra and mudra together, that makes things work.

Most of the mudras, when you look carefully, are a reinforcement of what you are visualizing and meditating. For example, when you do the lotus circle mudra, you are actually visualizing the offering deities going round, dancing and carrying the offerings. So the mudra is the reinforcement of your visualization by physical movements. If you do this, you correspond the physical movements with the dancing movements of the visualized dakas or dakinis.

Aud7: Why were you saying that mudras are not the essential part?

R: They are not essential, but they help to make the practice stronger. But can you materialize the results without the mudras? You probably can. Are they absolutely necessary? No, they are not. But does making the mudras help? Sure, it does. As I said: they reinforce the visualization.

Aud8: You have said that we purify in order to undo some negative results that are about to come up due to previous actions. Within karma where does freedom of choice lie?

R: That is a very important question. Freedom of choice definitely lies in karma. A lot of people think, ‘It is karma, it has to happen.’ But that is not true, no. It is karma, therefore you have freedom. Karma depends on conditions. We provide the conditions. If we don’t provide the conditions, then no matter how much karma you have it cannot materialize. I always give this example: If you have a lot of bad karma to have stomach aches, but keep on eating the right food and maintain the right temperature, you are not going to get a stomach ache. You have not provided the conditions, therefore you are not going to get the stomach ache, even though you have the karma to get it.

The freedom of choice, the room for miracles to happen, the room for divine intervention, all of them are based on the conditions. If you do not provide the conditions, then the karma will not ripen. That is why purification works. That is why everything works. Karma is a dependent arising, not an independent arising.

Aud8: I still have an argument with this. Even if we choose not to provide the conditions, is not that decision also made possible by previous actions?

R: Maybe. That does not matter. The choice is yours. You can provide the conditions or avoid them.

Aud9: You said that if you do not provide the conditions for a stomach ache to happen, could the problem not manifest elsewhere?

R: Do you manifest an ulcer, did you say? [laughs] - that is what I heard. So if you eat too much brown rice, do you get an ulcer? No. All right. [laughs]. If the problem could manifest elsewhere? It could - if it was not purified, and if it is purified, it sort of gets neutralized or at least numbed or whatever. That is how purification works.

Aud10: If you only think ,’I would like to kill that guy’, or ‘I feel like stealing this’, but you don’t act on it, do you incur any negative karma through that?

R: You may. It is the wish to kill and the desire to have something which does not belong to you. You may have some weak, incomplete karma there. Do you have the karma of killing? No. You did not kill anybody. Neither do you have the karma of stealing anything. But something cloudy is there. It is not a hundred per cent clean.

Aud11: Could you clarify the difference between purification and suppressing? I am not really clear on that.

R: To me suppressing means: I don’t want to think about it. I should not think or worry about it. Don’t let that thought come up, put it down. Purification does not do that. It brings the problem up. It tries to remember and recognize that. I don’t want to use the term ‘relive’, but it sort of revives that condition and recognizes that. Sometimes it even connects to the feeling of that moment, even though years may have lapsed in between. Sometimes you pick up that feeling even though it is twenty or thirty years ago. It is not exactly reliving, but remembering and recognizing and then regretting and purifying. It is definitely more than suppressing it .

Aud11: I don’t mean suppression in that way but in the way that you don’t want to experience the results of a negative action that you are very much aware of. You are trying to force conditions.

R: I like to clarify for you that purification if not only thinking of purifying. It also needs an opponent action. You have to have the four powers. You have to take action. You have to revisit, recognize and do something about it.

Aud12: I think what is meant is suppressing the result of a negative action to occur.

R: Actually, you don’t want the result, you want to escape from it completely. You want to purify it. You don’t want it to come round at all. ‘

Aud11: But karma is definite, you get it and thats it. Right?

R: No that is not correct. The statement ‘Karma is definite’ has to be qualified by the statement, ‘If the result has started to materialize you have to wait until it is finished’. Remember that? This is part of the four qualities of the karma. So we try to purify the negative karma before the resulting symptoms start showing.

Aud11: So the process of purification then involves suppressing the result.

R: Well, you like to use the word ‘suppressing’. I don’t like to use that word. I would rather say ‘avoid’. You don’t want to experience the result.

end of side B of tape 26