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20010130GRAABWL

CD of 01/30/01

Lets start again with verse 45:

Verse 45

It is the fault of the childish that they are hurt,

For although they do not wish to suffer

They are greatly attached to its causes.

So why should they be angry with others?

We are like little children. If you are a child perhaps you don’t know very well. You don’t understand the consequences and so you do things that create suffering. Children think they are doing something great, but it causes them suffering. That is why the elders have to supervise them. But if you are dealing with young adults it is not so easy. You can’t supervise them all the time. They will give you trouble. For example, if a young adult wants to show off how well he or she can drive, the consequences of that are that the car won’t be working for a while or that a huge amount of money has to be paid. Kids will do that. They don’t want to see their incapability. They want to show their capability. By doing that they will present the incapability in it.

We are just like the young adults. We don’t want suffering but what we are really doing is creating the causes of suffering. We have attachment to the suffering. We work for the suffering to continue. We can’t help ourselves. We are working for the causes of suffering. If we really wanted to stop our suffering we would not create any more causes of suffering. But we don’t do that. We have attachment to the causes of suffering. We create that all the time. As a result we have lots of suffering – all the time. So why are you trying to blame somebody else? It is your own deeds alone that are causing suffering. Therefore it is not right, there is no justification to get angry with or hate someone else. This will be further be clarified by the next verse.

Verse 46

Just like the guardians of the hell worlds

And the forest of razor-sharp leaves,

So is this (suffering) produced by my actions;

With whom therefore should I be angry?

Here you have something very funny. You hear a lot about the hell business in the Judaeo-christian tradition, particular in the catholic tradition. That is what I understand. I don’t know whether that is correct or not. Then you go to some alternative religion like Buddhism, presuming that here you are free of hells. But unfortunately even Buddhism not only has hells, but there are eighteen different hells in Buddhism, not just one! Eight of these are torture chambers of heat and eight are torture chambers of cold. We call them the eight hot hells and the eight cold hells. Plus there are two near by neighborhood hells. All in all there are eighteen.

I have no idea how you get to the hell in the Judaeo-christian tradition. In Buddhism it is not that somebody else decides to send you down there as a punishment. It is only I and I myself alone who creates the causes for taking rebirth in these hot or cold hells. Nobody else. Others may contribute, but nobody else is the actual doer. That is only myself alone.

Of course I don’t choose to go to hell. No one would like to go to hell. When we really get to that point we try to drag our feet as much as we could and grab on to anything that could hold us back. But what happens is that we go through the process of cause and effect – karma.

We get upset and angry for nothing, for some tiny, little thing. People do that. There does not have to be a valid reason at all. We get upset for nothing. If we think in a different way, it is terrible what happens to us. That is how we build up our negative emotions like anger, attachment, hatred, jealousy and so on. Actually they all come out of ignorance, not knowing, misunderstanding. If you really trace each and every one negative emotion, they all come from ignorance. There are people who are angry with each other for years. They have to have been very good friends before in order to become very strong enemies. It has be people associated with you, people that you are dealing with. Then later, they become your enemy. You don’t look at each other’s face, you are angry, you just give them a sly look, pretending that you don’t see them. We do all that for years. If you are honest with yourself and trace back where that started you will find that it originated in some misunderstanding. ‘I thought I was doing this and she thought she was doing that. But she thought I was doing something else and I reacted.’ Somehow you couldn’t clarify that and it has become bigger and bigger and bigger, until one day you are almost ready to kill each other and even then you are not satisfied. It can come to that level, yet it just comes out of a misunderstanding. So every negative emotion, when you trace it back, will lead to ignorance. There is none which doesn’t.

Likewise, every positive emotion will come out of some positive emotion, maybe faith or something like that. I told you a number of times, when I use the word ‘faith’, people have a lot of misunderstanding what this faith is all about. I am definitely not talking about blind faith. Generally, Buddhism has no room for blind faith for whatsoever. Blind faith is almost like ignorance. There is just a very subtle difference. Intelligent faith is the source of happiness, the source of all our positive emotions. You know what kills the intelligent faith? Unnecessary, endless doubts. Generally doubts are good. But the unnecessary, endless doubts are bad. They kill the intelligent faith, particularly if that faith is not properly established within the individual. If it is it cannot be killed. If the intelligent faith is not properly established you don’t have a valid reason to back up your faith, or you may have some valid reason but you don’t know that it is valid. Perhaps you cannot protect or defend it. That sort of faith can be killed by doubts.

So doubts can help you and harm you too, particularly if you waste your whole life doubting. There are a number of wonderful, intelligent people, however their doubts continue forever. They never settle. That can waste your whole life. Anyway, things like faith are the base on which a lot of our positive emotions will grow. People who don’t have established a proper, intelligent faith try to use blind faith. That is very tricky and not very good. Educated, intelligent people like yourselves should never submit to blind faith. Otherwise, what do you have such a wonderful mind for? It will be totally useless. Further it gives a lot of room for corruption and misguidance on the spiritual path. I do not want to be misled by anybody, whoever that may be. I cannot afford to be misled. I only have one life with a limited number of years. This means all of us. Never let yourself be misled. Fifty per cent of your life can be lost. That is why intelligent faith is important. This is a faith that is established through solid reason.

But then, every answer does not always have to depend on reasons. If someone is telling you that the sun is going to rise in the east, you don’t really need reasons why that should be. There are reasons, like the earth going round the sun and the earth rotating round its own axis. That is why the sun always rises in the east. There are solid reasons. However, even if you don’t have all these reasons you can safely believe it. You are not going to be misled.

Just don’t submit to blind faith. Always try to find out reasons. That is very important. One of the worst things in our practice is that we try to explain things away by saying, ‘This is crazy wisdom’, or ‘This is skillful means.’ This gives so much room for misleading people. For example people say, ‘It does not seem right what he did to me, but I believe it is his skillful way of helping me.’ Bullshit! Really. Skillful means and also crazy wisdom is only applicable when both, teacher and student, are on a very high level. I am not saying that there is no crazy wisdom and skillful means.

In Buddha’s life time there have been examples. Buddha did not run around naked downtown and call that skillful means. I give you an example of his skillful means. Somebody asked him, ‘Where did we come from, when did our lives begin?’ Buddha did not answer. The reason for that is very simple. It is too far. There are so many lives. It is impossible for us to comprehend where we began. I am talking about reincarnation. You may be thinking, ‘I know where I began. I came out my mother’s womb, crying.’ I am not talking about that. Reincarnation goes way back, beyond comprehension. If Buddha tried to explain that, it would not be comprehensible for us. It would be for him. But we would never understand. The same was true for the people who asked him that question. So Buddha kept quiet. He gave no answer. At that point some people said, ‘Buddha has no answer to that question.’ And others said, ‘Hey, that is his skillful way.’ That is how this distinction came in. That is skillful means, rather than running around naked downtown. I am just giving you some example, so that you can judge for yourself, when skillful means really applies.

Lets talk some more about the hell realms. In these torture chambers there are persons who torture you. When I was a kid I was told that there are guys with cowheads, donkey heads and buffalo heads, that they wear hammers and swords and chase you around and push you back and forth. They are the guardians of the hell worlds that this verse is referring to.

Where are they coming from? Who are they and who made them? Nobody. They are not other beings. They are simply my own karmic results, my own creations. I don’t want to say they are my hallucinations, but it is similar to that.

A few years ago somebody read to me the book by Deepak Chopra called Merlin. In there everything is not real, the soldiers, the castle of Camelot and everything. The castle is attacked by soldiers but they are all not real. It is sort of like a magician’s play. This hell experience is very similar to that. However, it is not a magician’s play, but it is the creation of my own karmic results that I have to experience. Is there really another person torturing me? Probably not. It is only my own negative karmic results, and it is time to pay off my misdeeds. Nobody else made it. So Shantideva now says, ‘Why should I be angry with these hell guardians, if they are my own creations?’

Likewise, there is the forest of razor-sharp leaves. That is another story. One particular hell realm looks like a big forest. There are beautiful trees, with beautiful flowers and leaves. But in actuality they are razor-sharp leaves. You are sitting under the tree and when you look up you see all your loved ones, your near ones and dear ones, in the higher parts of this huge, 50 foot tree. They are calling out to you, ‘Hey, come up, come up. It is nice up here. There are beautiful flowers and beautiful fruits. We are enjoying ourselves here!’ Then you try to climb up, but you can’t get through. You get cut and wounded by all these branches and leaves, but yet you are determined to go on. You know how stubborn we can be. You really want that little pleasure up there and you try to drag your body there. But by the time you get there, you are totally chopped and cut and all your loved ones are suddenly down there on the ground. Now you think, ‘Oh, it is easy now to get down.’ But as you climb down, all the razor sharp leaves are facing upwards, so you get cut again. This is the hell of the razor sharp forest. Shantideva is saying, ‘Who are you going to get angry with? The razor sharp leaves?’ It is only your own karma. The people in that forest are not your loved ones. That is simply a delusion or sort of a hallucination. So that is one of the hell realms. I am only mentioning the light, gentle ones of the hells today. Shantideva says,

So is this (suffering) produced by my actions;

With whom therefore should I be angry?

Try to avoid getting angry with other people. We have this interesting habit. We say, ‘Well, there is nobody by myself to get angry with.’ But if you are in a situation like that of the torture chambers of hell, there is no opportunity to get angry with yourself. You don’t have a minute to do something for yourself. You will be burning, cut, chopped into pieces. There is no opportunity to get angry with oneself. To get angry with oneself is actually equally bad as getting angry with others. You create the same negative emotions. That will ensure the continuation of the wonderful hospitality of the razor-sharp forest and so on.

What kind of action can create experiences like this? Naturally it is not something that I did today, but something that I did before, in my previous reincarnation. I might have killed a human being, I might have tortured another person, with or without justification. I might have been a slaughterer of human beings. I might have been the jailor who tried to torture every person in jail and make a profit out of that. I might have been the crooked minister of some king in medieval times. I might have been a judge who decided that certain women were witches and condemned them to be burnt. This happened in the middle of Europe and even in this country. So that is where the hell experiences come from. Should I be angry with anyone for that? Is there a valid reason? No. If you are intelligent, you will not find one. If you are stupid, you will find reasons and think that they are valid. Or it could be your stubbornness. But they are not valid reasons.

Now you may think, ‘I might have created such karma before and not know about it. If I die tomorrow, will I have such a hellish reincarnation?’ You can actually not rule it out. No one can guarantee that it won’t happen – except yourself. If somebody did give you a guarantee it would not be valid. I am responsible to myself alone. You cannot create my negative karma, nor can you pay for my negative karma. I cannot create your negative karma or pay for your negative karma, nor can I wash away your negative karma or remove your suffering and pain by hand. I cannot transfer my spiritual development to you and you cannot transfer your spiritual development to me. This is more restricted than American Express which is non-transferable. You may be able to get away with American Express but you cannot get away with this. The only thing you can do is to work by yourself, clear your negative actions. With or without knowledge [of the particular negative action] purification can be applied, no matter what kind of heavy negativity one might have produced. You can always purify. There is no such a thing that cannot be purified.

Many people here and others may have heard the story of Angulimala. I will tell it for those who haven’t heard it. It is a traditional Indian story. ‘Anguli’ means thumb in Indian language. There was a teacher who was misleading his students and this guy went to him to seek help. This teacher said, ‘Yes, I can liberate you from all your suffering. But there is one requirement. Go out and kill one thousand human beings. From every human you have killed, cut off a thumb, put all of these thumbs on a string and wear it. Then come back to me and I will liberate you.’ Angulimala took that literally and he went and killed 999 human beings. We are talking about 2500 years ago. There was no police, no helicopters and nothing of that sort. He got away with killing 999 people. Of course by that time everybody knew and tried to run away whenever they saw him.

There was only one person who could not run away from him completely – his own mother. This is where the mother’s love sometimes becomes important. Here when I am talking about mother’s love, don’t think about your mother giving you love, but think that if you have children and you are their mother, how much you would give to them. Look from that window and that will make a big difference.

His mother on the one hand wanted to help him and on the other hand she was afraid too. He had hesitations of killing her. However, he was one short of his number. The only person he could see was his mother who would pop up and disappear, come close and then disappear again. He did not want to kill his mother. By about that time Buddha appeared, walking very slowly. Angulimala was very happy, thinking, ‘Good, I don’t have to kill Mother now, I can kill that fellow.’ He chased Buddha with his big sword, but although Buddha was walking very slowly, no matter how fast he ran, Angulimala could not catch up with Buddha. That is skillful means! Buddha was walking with full monk’s dress, not naked. Eventually Angulimala shouted after Buddha, ‘Hey, wait!’ and Buddha said, ‘I have been waiting all this time and you haven’t been coming for so long, come a little faster!’ That is how he broke the ice. Soon a conversation took place and finally Buddha brought him to his ashram or temple or monastery and in the end, in that life time, Angulimala was able to become an arhat, that means a person free of all suffering. That was after killing 999 human beings, chopping off their thumbs and wearing them.

If somebody like that can become an arhat, then why not us? We did not kill 999 human beings, forget about it, we did not even kill one, did we? If we did we would not be here, right? We would be meditating somewhere else. So no matter whatever we have done, how mean or harsh or terrible we have been, we can purify. I might have been the general who ordered World War One to begin, or World War Two for that matter. Whatever it may be, there is no such negativitiy that I could not purify. Negative and positive acts are both temporary. They are like clouds in the space. The clouds move and the space remains. If you get a powerful wind it will drive the clouds away. Today we have bad weather, raining and snowing. But when the wind comes, the storm will move away and tomorrow or the next day there can be beautiful weather. We, as human beings, are like space and our deeds are like clouds. We can remove them.

There is a valid reason behind that. No matter how heavy the negativity might be that we have committed, it is impermanent, it is changeable. There is change all the time. In the American culture we do say, ‘That person has changed.’ That is true, and I am looking more at the changeability of the deeds we have done. Although, if we have killed somebody, we cannot bring that person back to life, the negativity is changeable. If I work hard and purify enough I can change it, because it is impermanent by nature. That reason should work in your mind. No matter what the negativity, there is no reason to think, ‘I am doomed, I am finished, I am hopeless and helpless.’ Never ever. As long as you have the human life, you can change this. Hope never dies, unless you are dead and even if you are dead, you can have hope. Yes, you do have to worry, but it is not a hopeless and helpless condition. There is purification you can do.

If you like to know about purification, there are a lot of things I have taught about it. Even in the previous chapter of the Bodhicaryavatara I did talk quite a lot about purification. Those of you who are new can definitely look back at the transcripts of the previous chapters or other transcripts as well. Also there will be other teachings available from time to time. So you are certainly not helpless and hopeless, unless you choose to. Then no one can help you. If you choose to remain down in that pit and lock and seal and laser seal yourself in, you will be very hard to get out. Don’t do it.

Verse 47

Having been instigated by my own actions,

Those who cause me harm come into being,

If by these (actions) they should fall into hell

Surely isn’t it I who am destroying them?

Earlier I have created a tremendous amount of negative actions which caused me the suffering I experience today. These negative karmas force other people to hurt and harm me. Therefore my enemies today are being created by my negative emotions. As the consequence of their hurtful actions, they will themselves suffer in future, for example fall into the hell realms and so on. It is me who causes them that suffering. We have to call to mind that we are not only suffering ourselves but also causing others to fall into the hell realms. So they have every right to get angry with me, but I have no right to get angry with them. I am causing them to fall into the hell realms.

Lets look at it more closely. Somebody is angry with me, beating me up or torturing me. What happened here? I have originally created the causes to suffer in this situation where this guy is hitting and beating me. By doing that he is creating the causes for himself to go to hell or to get beaten up by somebody, the same way he is doing it to me right now. So he is not really destroying me, but I am destroying him. I am causing him to create his own suffering in future for much longer and harder than what he is doing to me right now. So is it worth to be angry with him or should I not be angry with me? Is it his fault or my fault? The Bodhisattvas choose to call it ‘my fault’. I create my own cause of suffering, forcing my enemies to do all these nasty things. You can see, the Bodhisattvas’s way of thinking is very different from ours.

If I am a Bodhisattva and something like that is happening to me, I am urged not to hate the person but to meditate on patience. The patience is necessary in this situation. Buddha said,

There is no such powerful negativity as hatred.

There is no such difficult virtue as patience.

That is what patience really is, not what we normally refer to as being patient, like being able to wait for three hours without getting upset. Patience is when you don’t submit to hatred in a difficult situation.

There was a monk in my life time who was the chanting master of the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, the Namgyal monastery. These are the monks who are doing his personal services. This chanting master was left behind in Tibet when the Chinese invaded. They accused him to be anti-national, imprisoned and tortured him. He went through the Culture Revolution. In the late eighties he was released and went to India, to work with His Holiness in Dharamsala in his own monastery which was re-established in India.

They had many conversations and His Holiness told us in a teaching that this monk had said, ‘Sometimes it was very difficult and became very dangerous. I came close a number of times.’ His Holiness thought he was talking about dangers to his life. He asked, ‘Were you afraid that they were going to kill you?’ and the monk said, ‘No, no. The danger was that I would lose my patience and submit to hatred.’ This is a guy who was in prison for eighteen years and tortured many times. And even His Holiness was thinking that he must be talking about the dangers to his life. But he was talking about the dangers of submitting to hatred. He is not known to be a Bodhisattva but there you are. This is an example that a spiritual person should not easily submit to hatred or anger. One should certainly not voluntarily walk towards hatred and anger. That is where you can judge whether you are a good person or a bad person. Don’t tell anyone but judge yourself on that point. If somebody booes us we have no hesitation to use the F – word straight away.

When you are in such a condition you may have to act as if you are upset. Otherwise people may run over you. If you are a good person you may think, ‘If I don’t act angry, he will get more angry.’ That would be a good reason to act that way.

I actually have good training in doing that, because I lived in India for a long time. In India, unless you yell and scream, you will never get anything done. You hire a gardener to cut your grass and you pay him, but he won’t cut your grass, if you don’t yell at him. That is true. You hire a sweeper to clean your toilet, but unless you yell at him, he will not do it. You hire a porter and pay him and then you have to pay more because he demands more. You have to yell and scream there, it is part of how society functions. You are not angry but you yell and scream. If someone says their service costs ten rupees you have to go, ‘Oh my God, ten rupees? Too much!’ Then you offer five. Then finally, at the end you may pay ten, but you will be okay. If you don’t put on that act, you will end up paying twenty, even though the person only asked for ten in the beginning. That is how everything works there, at least at the time when I was living there. You have to act like you are upset and you yell and scream but inside you are not angry at all. Sometimes you can’t even help smiling. But that is how it works.

One interesting example: Somebody delivers milk to you in the morning and every time you have to say, ‘Hey, your milk is no good, you have mixed it with water!’ You have to say it, otherwise the quality of the milk will become worse and worse every day. You have to act and go on about it and someone told me you have to almost force the person to swear that the milk is not mixed with water. It is half joke and playfulness. So once I got a picture of Vishnu and gave it to the milk seller and said, ‘Put that on your head and swear that the milk is not mixed.’ He hesitated for a while and then he said, ‘I did not put water in the milk.’ Then I said, ‘But did you put milk in the water?’ That is how you have to act there. You are not really angry, so that is okay. That is how you protect yourself and defend yourself.

Meditating on patience and not submitting to anger is important under the circumstances where you are in danger of losing it. When you lose your temper a little and you scream a little bit, it is not good, but it is not hatred to me. You are a little irritated, that happens in everybody’s life. Don’t worry about it. I mean, you should worry about it, but it is not that bad. Hatred is something worse than that. The temper tantrum can become hatred. Some of us keep that feeling inside for a long time and it becomes a powerful force working against yourself. That is hatred against yourself, no matter whatever you may say. You really hate yourself. The temper tantrum which you cannot show to others, you twist that and focus it on yourself and build it up and up. That is hatred. Hatred against yourself immediately gives you depression. Where do you think your depression is coming from? Not from the sky. It did not come down with the snow or with the rain. You created it yourself. Hatred and anger against whomsoever, including yourself, if you cannot express that, it will become depression. It is anger against oneself. Then there are so many layers of depression. It depends how deep it is, how many years it has been going on. That has its own consequence.

That is the material part. The spiritual path is even worse. So it is important for us not to lose it at difficult times. That is called meditation on patience, practice on patience. You may think that in order to work against your own hatred you have to sit down and meditate. Maybe, but maybe that won’t work. You never know. What you really need is the information. You analyze that information and digest it and that will become your wealth. When the conditions arise to make you angry, use your wealth and apply it. Try to rebuild your patience. That is called practice. To me practice does not necessarily only mean that you sit down and meditate. You could sit down and meditate on your girlfriend’s face. But that is not practice. It is meditation, sure, but it is not practice. You can meditate on anything. The Kadampa lamas very often used to say,

You can meditate on anything from yak horn to cow dung.

But meditation must become practice and that means you must be able to help yourself and train yourself. You are training yourself not to submit to those negative emotions. I am going to stop here. Are there any questions?

Aud1: Do hell realms actually exist in a physical, material realm or are they just psychological states? Are there other hell beings in shared hell realms interacting with each other in a physical space that we just cannot see? For me, if I don’t see that kind of connection I have trouble believing that and therefore I don’t have a very strong renunciation.

R: Good question. Do you want a straightforward, honest answer to that? I would have to ask you back: What difference would that make to you whether such realms do externally exist or just in the karmic experience of a person?

Let me give you an example. There is a person who is suffering, not necessarily mentally, but emotionally. Whether the situation under which that person is experiencing suffering exists in true reality or not, will that make a difference to the person experiencing the suffering? More or less it doesn’t. The hell realm sufferings are very similar to that.

On the other hand, as a card carrying Buddhist member I should say that the hell realms do also exist in reality. Don’t ask me where that is. It is said that it is seven layers below the earth. I don’t know about that, but the effect which the individual really experiences is what matters.

Aud2: I have a question to verse 43. It seems that the text is saying, ‘No matter what happens to us, we deserve it.’ But you try to explain to a person who has just been raped and beaten up that what they have done is purified their negative karma, especially if they don’t believe in reincarnation and that sort of thing!

R: You are absolutely right. But Buddhism never tells you, ‘You have been a terrible person and therefore you are being punished.’ If you trace it back, without having created such a karma, you would not have this painful experience at all. That does not mean that abuse, rape and beating people up is right. Buddhism is also not saying that it is your fault. One of the causes of that happening is definitely your karma. There is no doubt about that. But at the same time, the person who is hurting you is also creating his or her negative karma causing them in future to experience the same thing again and again, in the next life and in lives to come. This the vicious cycle in which people suffer continuously. That is how it works.

There are two points to consider here: Firstly you can advise the person who has experienced rape, etc. that they can use that experience as an opportunity to clear their previous negative karma. Secondly you have to understand that the person causing the suffering at the time is also continuously creating negative karma for themselves to experience the same thing or even worse, not only once but again and again.

This teaching is not saying, ‘You are a terrible person and you deserve it.’ However, all of our good and bad experiences come about due to our own deeds. The other thing is not to build hatred towards anyone, oneself and others. Building hatred does not bring help for whatsoever.

Aud2: Then how does a person come to grips what has been done against them?

R: See, you are saying, ‘The things that have been done against them’. That looks like the fault comes from the other persons. But in reality it is a common fault. It is not only your fault, but a common fault. As innocent as it might look, but there is a karmic cause which is really not that innocent. We can see that very clearly. If we see the picture as them versus us, it tells us that we have to re-think that perspective. Having said that, I am not saying that you deserve being hurt. You certainly do not deserve it. We certainly do not deserve it. Such things should not exist in society at all. They should be completely eradicated

However, to a large degree that does not happen. It still pops up here and there and everywhere. This is because there are bad people around all the time. These are people who are not satisfied with suffering, they still want more. The way to create more suffering for yourself is by giving more suffering to others. Violence against anybody else is creating the cause to experience violence oneself.

Aud2: A question to verse 40: This verse seems to say that it is pointless being angry with a person who just needs to vent their anger or frustration. It is probably not directed against you, but that person just needs to vent that anger and get it over and done with. Is that correct?

R: In the Tibetan text at least, it does not seem to say that. You cannot take that out of context. You have to see that in relation to verse 39 too. This verse talks about whether it is a natural thing. Verse 40 talks about whether it is temporary. You have to see both of them together in conjunction with the other verses.

The nature of people is pure and wonderful. Since the anger is temporary, you cannot have hatred for the people. In fact one should not have hatred to anyone. The question is whether it is natural to do bad things or whether that is just one instance. If it is just an instance of anger which is the problem it is much easier to deal with.

I am going to call it a day here. Thank you.