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19970311GRAABWL08

Side A of tape 31 of 03/11/97

Bodhisattvas are those beings who are committed to become Buddhas. They have committed themselves to altruistic activities, to give them more importance than to self interest. This text, the Bodhisattvacharyavatara, is about how they conduct their lives.

Today we are going to talk about refuge which is the third of the four subjects of the second chapter, the purification chapter of this text, the other three subjects being offering, prostration and actual purification. In order to make the purification perfect, we first practice generosity, then prostration, then taking refuge and then purifying. This is the order of the verses in the text.

Verse twenty-six

I seek refuge in all Buddhas

Until I possess the essence of Awakening,

Likewise I seek refuge in Dharma

And in the assembly of Bodhisattvas.

In other words, until I become a Buddha, I take refuge in the Buddhas. The text says ‘essence of awakening’. That is the mind of the Buddhas. The mind of the Buddhas is called ‘awakened mind’, because it is the all-knowing mind. It is always awake, alert and knows everything. It is not the type of alertness they have in the army -ready to jump at any time - but always awake. It never misses anything, there is no such thing as not paying attention. Last week we talked a little bit about the quality of the enlightened beings. It is not like we have to put in efforts to sit tight and alert. It is completely relaxed, everything is completely functioning, going through every circle of life like waking, dreaming and sleeping. However the mind is all-knowing, so there is always awareness.

Refuge is called the doorway to Buddhism. The difference between being a Buddhist and not being a Buddhist is whether you have taken refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha or not. So this is the doorway, determining whether you are inside or outside. Normally taking refuge does not require taking refuge until you have become a Buddha. But in Mahayana it applies. It is slightly different than the Theravada refuge. The purpose is different, the cause is different and the way of taking refuge is different.

Generally, taking refuge has two causes. Without refuge, if something happens, who is going to protect me? I know I have a lot of negativities with me; so I need protection and I know that Buddha, Dharma and Sangha can protect me. There is the need of taking refuge and having trust in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and relying on them.

For the Mahayana refuge it is more than that. Here you take refuge from now on until you will need no more refuge - that is until you have become a Buddha. You also do not do it for yourself, but for the benefit of all sentient beings. The mind of taking refuge has the influence of compassion, and not only compassion but great compassion.

In the lama chöpa one verse says,

For the sake of all mother sentient beings I shall attain quickly, quickly in this very life the state of the Guru-Deity, the primordial Buddha.

That is the Mahayana way of doing it, and the Bodhisattvacharyavatara being a Mahayana text, gives you that style of refuge: until the essence of Awakening. I don’t have to tell you about what essence means. That is very well known in the West. We have the ginseng essence and the Chinese have chicken essence. In the Tibetan tradition it is said that butter is the essence of milk. You shake the milk until it becomes butter. Like that, there are all the different Buddhist teachings and practices and if you keep on shaking all of them, it will boil down to two: fulfilling the purposes of oneself and that of others. The fulfilment of the purpose of others is compassion and the bodhimind. Fulfilling one ‘s own purpose is to become fully enlightened. You don’t do that for your own sake but for the benefit of others. In this way the purpose of others is also fulfilled. So there is two types of butter here: with and without honey. Here you not only take refuge to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, but you do so until you have become a fully enlightened being.

What does a fully enlightened being really mean to us from the perspective of spiritual development? What kind of spiritual development is that? It is a very boring and dry subject, but I want those who are interested to pay a little attention here. For us spiritual practice is two things: to clear something and to obtain something. Instead of ‘purifying’ I would like to use ‘clearing’, or washing out or freeing yourself, or emptying it out of our system. I am talking about certain emotions and mental states which we process. We have to clean them completely out. After cleaning them out, you have to fill it with something. That is the spiritual work. What you are clearing out is the negative emotions we have, like anger, hatred, etc. You not only have to clear out the negative emotions but also their subtle imprints. As long as you have the imprints of the negative emotions, then whenever the conditions are right, the negativities can grow again and block the individual. Therefore the total eradication of negative emotions is what is called ultimate cleansing. By emptying these out, what you fill in is your spiritual development. The development which you fill in is the perfect understanding of reality. I am not talking about emptiness, but about truth, to know truth as truth. As soon as you have a certain level of clearing, automatically the understanding comes up. That building up is the spiritual development. So it does not come in a strange, mystical sort of way, but as knowledge, as understanding, as information and as quality. These are the two most important things taking place within the individual: cleansing of the negative emotions and replacing that with pure understanding, perfect knowledge and perfect qualities combined together. So knowledge is not on the level of information alone, but exists as quality. The quality is not just a quality attained through understanding, but has become a habitual characteristic of the individual.

Aud1: I don’t understand the difference between spiritual and scientific.

R: The spiritual is scientific. If the spiritual development is not scientific, it might not be true. Do you think that is a strange statement?

Aud1: So you think there is no breakdown between the two?

R: I don’t think there is.

Aud2 [Dr. Tony King, scientist and Buddhist practitioner]: This is a big question. But I think if somebody is operating within the world, they are going to use as a framework an ethical system to look at the world. Optimally, they would want to look at that realistically and would want to investigate what happens in different circumstances. Generally, I agree that the methodology in Buddhism is certainly consistent with scientific theory today, albeit a lot of it has not been proven. I mean, there is no scientific proof for karma and things like that. But they are consistent, they don’t necessarily contradict scientific theory.

R: So the ultimate enlightenment is the ultimate purified state and ultimate development. What is purified? Not only the emotions, but also their imprints. What has been fully developed? Not only knowledge, but knowledge as quality, not only quality, but quality as habitual quality of the individual. In other words, the individual’s personality, their way of thinking and functioning, has been changed; from the usual way you are. You are improving and getting into the ultimate level. That is what full enlightenment means.

Until you get there, you have a lot of different obstacles. There are inner and outer and secret obstacles. I should not bring the secret ones up here, because this is not Vajrayana, but still it is the reality. At each one of those levels taking refuge is one of the best protections, one of the best supports.

For example - let me share a very interesting story - there was a master and disciple living together in Tibet. It must have been in the 1600s or 1700s. A thief came at night to rob them. The student woke up and got hold of the thief and started beating him up. Then the teacher woke up and said, ‘You cannot beat the thief up’. So they had an argument about whether that was appropriate. Finally they agreed to beat him just four more times: one for Guru, one for Buddha, one for Dharma and one for Sangha. So after they let him go this thief went and sat under one of the bridges in Lhasa. He kept on repeating to himself, ‘I take refuge to Guru, Buddha, ‘Dharma and Sangha’. And the thought to himself, ‘I am lucky that there is not a fifth one’. So he kept on repeating that. This bridge is actually still there, it is near Mrs. Yutok’s house- for those who know Mrs. Yutok. The bridge is called Yutok Bridge and is known as a travelling bridge for ghosts too. That night, however, the ghost traffic got completely jammed, because there was this thief underneath, repeating to himself the refuge taking all the time.

So even a protection from ghosts is one of the qualities of refuge. You don’t need anything else. Just simply taking refuge protects from that.

Since we are talking about taking refuge we should know to whom we take refuge, why and what for and for how long .

To whom we take refuge is the first subject. The root text in Tibetan says ‘I take refuge to all Buddhas of past, present and future as well as to Dharma and Sangha.

What is Buddha? The moment we talk about Buddha, people get the image of the historical Buddha who appeared in India 2500 years ago. Immediately we think about that Indian prince who had become Buddha. Then when we tell you about the Buddhas of past, present and future, you will think, ‘What has the past and future Buddha got to do with that? Why take refuge to the future Buddha, and what do the past Buddhas do? Do you get these thoughts? Maybe I am the only person who thinks about that. The past Buddhas have already gone, and the future Buddhas [have not come yet]. Why take refuge to them?

Aud3: Probably it is because you are supposed to take refuge in your own future enlightenment. So you take refuge in your own development, in that Buddha nature within yourself.

R: That is a very good answer.

Aud4: I think taking refuge in the future Buddhas is a compassionate act which enables the future Buddhas to come into being.

R: But who are the future Buddhas?.

Aud5: The Bodhisattvas.

R: Only them? It is also you and me! That is the answer. So it was pointed out correctly that when we take refuge, we take refuge to our own future Buddha. That is more important than taking refuge to the historical Buddha. The historical Buddha is only a representation. He is equally important, but the purpose of taking refuge is bringing yourself perfectly up to that level. That is why you say, ‘Until I possess the essence of Awakening’. This means until you become a fully enlightened Buddha. The purpose of taking refuge is pushing yourself, moving yourself to that level of the Buddha. You will recall that when we were talking about the prostration, we are doing that because we admire the qualities of the Buddha. You are saying, ‘I admire your quality. I bow down to you as a gesture to express that I want your qualities. I want to become like you. As a matter of fact, I want to become you, not just like you.’ Likewise here: I take refuge in you, because you represent something fantastic, quality-wise as well as capability-wise as well as your mental state. I want to become like that.’

So the most important is your own future Buddha. As was said before, right now we have the Buddha nature within us. That Buddha nature is at the seed level. When it is fully matured it will become Buddha. That is the reason why we take refuge in Buddha. That is why the future Buddha is the most important.

The past Buddha is somebody who has already taken that position and is thus representing that attainment. We can look at that, admire the qualities and decide that, whatever the cost may be, we would like to have that. This is the causal part of the refuge. By doing that, the Buddha nature within your mind, the pure being of yourself, is on the way to becoming fully awakened, fully enlightened - a Buddha. That is the result refuge, which for us is more important. However, you cannot ignore the causal refuge, because cause and effect are linked together. The causal refuge makes the result refuge work.

Earlier I mentioned the cause of taking refuge. Why do we go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha? There is a very simple reason for that. Buddha is a being who had a personal experience of the troubles we are all in. He also had the personal experience of how to get out of that trouble. He also has the personal experience of the awakened state and because of that he has compassion, he is totally dedicated and he helps you whether you return the help or not. These are the most important reasons why we take refuge to Buddha.

How do we take refuge to Buddha? We take refuge to him like a guide. Is he the real refuge? No, he is not. The traditional teachings say that Buddha is like a doctor. When we are sick we go and see a doctor and tell him our troubles. The doctor will do all his tests and say, ‘You have this and that problem.’ Then he gives you medication. Don’t think necessarily of chemical medicine, if you don’t like it. You can go to a homoeopathic doctor. This doctor will give you herbs. The allophatic doctor will give you white pills.

What is actually working within your system, taking care of your problems, is the medication. Right? When you go and see Dr. Buddha, he will give you a Dharma prescription. He already wrote this prescription 2500 years ago. We simply try to get that prescription and try to get the medication. The Dharma is the real medication. It is nothing but your own spiritual development. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t think that Dharma is something else up there in the air. A lot of people think that Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are somewhere up there in the sky.

I told you a story earlier about this famous Tibetan governor who was also a monk. That was in Eastern Tibet in Kham. He was very famous, a good politicians, a good strategist who knew very well how to work with the village chiefs. He was great at that. He was supposed to be a monk, but he had no knowledge of refuge at all. So some of the Kampa chieftains asked him over lunch, ‘Where are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha living these days?’ And this guy did not know anything. He had heard of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, but did not know what to say. He played around with the bowl from which he was eating as much as possible. He bit into it maybe two hundred times, hoping for some idea to come to him. Finally he said, ‘These days the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are sitting in an invisible glass palace in the middle of the sky.’ That was his answer. Like that, we tend to think they are up there somewhere, because we project that they are higher and better. But that is not the case. Dharma is within us. Each and every one of us has Dharma within them, good or bad, strong or weak. It depends on our own quality. Our positive quality is built by cutting the negativities within us and that is our Dharma and that is growing. The sky is the limit. It will grow up to the invisible glass palace in the middle of the sky. [laughs]. When you reach to that limit you are fully enlightened. Until then, you are growing and that is why a lot of people will say, ‘On the spiritual path we are travellers’, or ‘We are warriors. We are fighting a war.’ All these metaphors work, because that is what we are, what the spiritual path is, that is what the Dharma is. That is why the Dharma is the real refuge, rather than the Buddha. That is why Dharma is the medication.

end of side A of tape 31

Side B of tape 31 of 03/11/97

So in this sense you have to protect yourself. Who else is going to protect you? Nobody. You know that. The way and how you protect yourself is by simply clearing your negativities and building your spiritual development within you. There is a harmony between the karma, the Dharma and your practice. All of them are so much in harmony. Don’t you see how you are responsible for yourself? No one else can do or undo anything for you, except yourself. You have to honor your karma and find out how it works. It is your own development that brings you to the enlightened level. Your spiritual development is your Dharma. Don’t you see how they are linked together and work together? That is the reality.

Taking refuge to Sangha is taking refuge to the helper, the person who is travelling with you, the companion, the person who supports you on your path, who gives you suggestions, who pushes you when you feel lazy, who holds you down when you are flying in the air, who keeps you on track if you are getting off the track. This is the sangha, the community, the friends, the fellow travellers, the fellow truth seekers, the fellow refuge seekers. Can you say that?

Aud6: The refugees!

R: The true fellow refugees. So Dharma is the main refuge. Buddha is nothing more than the doctor. The Dharma is the medication. The sangha is there to help, like the nurse who gives you the medication on time, like the friend who reminds you what you are supposed to do.

In Mahayana particularly, the Sangha is the ‘Assembly of Bodhisattvas’, as verse twenty-six says. The Theravada sangha are the monks and nuns - more monks than nuns anyway....that is the tradition. In absolute reality, however, it is those who have obtained the third path and above. That is the absolute sangha, no matter if it is man, woman, dog or cat or cockroach even. In the Mahayana path, the Bodhisattvas are the sangha. In Vajrayana the dakas and dakinis are the sangha. In absolute reality, those of us who are on the path, who sought refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, are the sangha. We are qualified either in this way or that way. Maybe from all angles. In the United States there is the system where all the members of a Buddhist organization together are referred to as sangha. I think it started with Trungpa Rinpoche or even before that. That is a very good system and we should follow that. That makes us qualified to be members of the sangha. That membership goes with responsibilities. We are responsible for our fellow travellers. We have to help each other, push each other in the right way and what you think is the right way is not necessarily the right way either. There are a lot of issues. Otherwise basically that is what it is. This is good enough for this particular verse.

Aud7: What is the right way to take refuge?

R: Didn’t I talk that right from the beginning? It is totally relying on Buddha, Dharma and Sangha with the profound understanding that Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are capable of protecting yourself from the fear of losing your spiritual development. When you lose your spiritual development, what you gain is negativities. What that leads you to is problems. So you rely on Buddha, Dharma and Sangha totally with that idea from the bottom of your heart and also verbally accept that. That might be the way of taking refuge. Are you with me?

Aud8: I am trying.

R: Try again! Buddha is the guide, Dharma is the actual refuge, Sangha is the companion. You rely on them with the intelligent understanding of what they can and what they cannot do.

Aud9: I have a question relating to prostration. You said that you imaginatively multiply your body for that purpose. At what point do you re-absorb the multiplications?

R: Good question. On this level we don’t talk about it. Just do the prostration with multiplying and then forget about it .

Aud9: What, leave them out there?

R: It is only imaginatively done, so maybe that is okay at this moment.

Aud10: Is the mental activity of feeling hope more related to the causal refuge and the mental activity of faith more related to the result refuge?

R: I would not say faith. Hope is definitely more related to the causal level. Trust is more related to the result level. So I would say ‘trust’ rather than ‘faith’.

Aud11: I am having trouble with the Buddha part of the refuge, because I have never seen one. Shall I just pretend that I do and see how that proceeds?

R: It is true, none of us have met Buddha - officially. We are a little too late - by 2500 years! But unofficially we might have met a number of Buddhas. We simply don’t know, we don’t recognize. Whether or not we have met Buddha officially, you know that there are enlightened beings. They are also active and committed. They have always wanted to help. They are there. So you are presuming they are there, you are not pretending. You are trusting that they are there and working with that may be a little better than pretending.

Aud11: How do you know that there are enlightened beings? From where do you take that confidence?

R: Can you see a Buddha through a telescope?

Aud12: Anything beyond the physical reality that we can see is imagination.

R: So ghosts are imagination?

Aud13: Imagining them does not mean that they are not real. I made a choice between them existing or not existing. I think it is a better world if they do exist. If I act as if they exist, that puts me in the position - and that is where the scientific part comes in - to allow for their existence and check back for their existence with my own experience. As I move through my life, my experience will either confirm that they exist or I can say that at least in this life time I don’t have any evidence of their existence. But I still would not know.

Aud11: Maybe it is my atheist, scientific upbringing. I can’t just take it for granted that there are such beings. The best I can do is hope that there is such a thing and with that attitude take refuge, rather than saying, ‘This is all just a story’. I can only act as if it were the truth. Is that the way to go if you don’t know?

Aura: If you don’t know then you can’t just tell yourself that you do, because there can be no development based on that pretence. If you begin with, ‘I don’t know’, then thats your basis. That is the basis of your inquiry. If you have an intuitive sense of going along with that which tells you that it seems probable, or ‘I have experiences that lead me to believe that it is likely’, then it kind of develops from there. On the other hand, if someone shows you a map of the world and they say, ‘If you proceed 2500 miles west. you are going to hit California’. You are really going on faith with that, aren’t you, until you actually go there and find California at the end of that. Faith is based on people who you judge to be trustworthy, who are supposed to know where that is, what that is. They have apparently been there and mapped it out, have come back and they say, ‘Go 2500 west and you find yourself in San Francisco’. But in the meanwhile you are going on faith or trust. You are relying on someone else’s experience that you determine is knowledgeable. That does not mean that you rely on that definitively. If you want to know for sure, you decide to set out and become a refugee and make the journey to determine that for yourself. Until you do that you rely on others’s information. That is why it is always talked about in these teachings that you have to test everything against your own experience, because your own experience is ultimately what becomes your own development. Your own experience of Buddha will be confirmed when you actually achieve it .

R: That is absolutely true. I would like to continue with that a little bit more. I raised the question of the ghosts. If there are ghosts, then there is no reason why there should not be Buddhas. In my personal experience I did meet with ghosts, so therefore I don’t have a problem with that. When I was young, we were in one of the gatherings at Jamyang. If you start out from Lhasa by horse in the early morning, you reach there by evening. I don’t know how many miles that would be. Probably forty or fifty miles at the most. There is a little valley in which three great monasteries are situated. A lot of monks go there, especially for deep study in the eleventh month of the lunar calendar which is the coldest period there.

In this place there are a number of ghosts. The most famous one is the ‘Donkey’s Ears’ ghost. It is said that this ghost takes people here and there. People talk about having seen that ghost at night. He was covering his head and putting a rope round his ears. But one day I saw it - truly, no joke. It was in broad day light, not at night. All the monks were gathering in the great hall where always have their tea and soup and money distribution. A teacher of mine was giving teachings way up in the valley somewhere. So I had to go in between. There is a couple of lanes going in between houses. One little lane ended up in a dead end and you had to do a ninety degree turn. When I was turning, the lane opened into a big, open area and there I saw a beautiful donkey. It was a donkey that looked like a peacock with so many different colors. It was quite a small one. I was myself small at that time too. When I went by, the donkey was looking at me and I could see the eyes following me and the ears moving. I thought, ‘What a beautiful donkey, I have never seen a donkey looking like a peacock, with a rainbow-colored neck!’ I went closer and the donkey looked and me and I thought, ‘How beautiful!’ and then I touched it and there was nothing! My hand went through. Then I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, this must be the ‘Donkey Ear’ ghost. Then I suddenly heard big, heavy footsteps coming from the distance. Some guy carrying cow dung on his back came walking that way. So I quickly ran.

That is how I came to see a ghost. So when there is ghosts, there is also enlightened beings. That is the reason for me [laughs]. I don’t have to borrow a microscope. I saw it with my own eyes and when I went and touched it, there was nothing. It could not feel it, but I saw it.

Aud12: Taking refuge is such a good gift to humanity. Who created it?

R: I don’t know if it is such a good gift or not. The commitments how to follow the refuge - that is a very good gift - to me. The act of taking refuge itself may be, I don’t know. If you can’t follow, it might not be that great. Am I being strange? I am sorry. That is the way I look at it. Taking refuge alone will not do much. Taking refuge and following the path makes a hell of a difference. So I thought that is a great gift. As far as the Buddhists are concerned, I think the Buddha showed the way. I am sure there are a lot of others who have their own way of doing it. Maybe they don’t call it ‘refuge’.

Lets close the shop.

end of side B of tape 31