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The Abhidharmasamuccaya Venerable Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche The Abhidharmasamuccaya Teachings by the Venerable Traleg Kyabgon, Rinpoche The Abhidharmasamuccaya is an edited transcript of a series of talks given by the Venerable Traleg Kyabgon, Rinpoche at KEB1 from July to October, 1983. For further information, contact Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute 673 Lygon Street Carlton North 3054 Victoria, Australia Tel: 3_ 9387 0422 Fax: 3 9380 8296 Copyright 1993 The Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Third Edition, 1998 The Venerable Traleg Kyabgon, Rinpoche was born in 1955 in Eastern Tibet. At the age of two, he was recognised by His Holiness the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, head of the Kagyu lineage, as the ninth incarnation of the Traleg tulkus, which can be traced back to the time of Saltong Shogam, a contemporary of the first Karmapa. Traleg Rinpoche was enthroned as the Abbot of Tra'gu Monastery in Tibet and following the Chinese invasion of his country was taken to safety in India. There he continued the rigorous training prescribed for tulkus born with responsibilities as major lineage holders in the Tibetan tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. This training included five years at Sanskrit University in Varanasi and several years at Rumtek Monastery, the main seat of the Karma Kagyu Lineage. Not only has Traleg Rinpoche received the complete teachings of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism, but he is also well acquainted with the practices and philosophy of the Drugpa Kagyu strand of the Kagyu lineage, having spent nine years studying with the Regent of the Drugpa Kagyu, the late Dungse Rinpoche, at his monastery in Darjeeling. Rinpoche came to Australia in 1980 in order to make the teachings and practices of the Kagyu tradition available here. He established the Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute in 1982 and regularly conducts courses and retreats in the practice and theory of Buddhism for the Institute. Rinpoche has travelled widely, giving lectures and seminars on Buddhism and related topics in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South-East Asia and Europe. Contents The Three Levels of Consciousness 1 The Three Constitutive Principles 15 Proofs 23 The Five Skandhas: An Introduction 35 The Five Skandhas: In Detail 47 Mind and Mental Events: Conditions of Compatibility 59 Absolute and Relative Truth 69 The Four Factors of Basic Being 79 The Five Omnipresent Mental Events 87 The Five Object Determining Mental Events 101 The Eleven Healthy Mental Events 109 The Six Unhealthy Mental Factors 119 Path and Fruition 133 i The Three Levels of Consciousness We will be exploring the Abhidharmasamuccaya, a text that belongs to the later development of Buddhism. Early Buddhism is known as Theravadin or Hinayana Buddhism. Later Buddhism is known as Mahayana Buddhism. It has two schools: Madhyamika, the school of the middle way, and Yogacara, the practitioners of yoga. Yoga, in this case, has very little to do with physical dexterity, with how you can twist your arms or fiddle your toes. It is very much related with learning how to meditate properly and relate to one's own mind, with trying to understand the sort of mental states we go through in meditation and so on. The Abhidharmasamuccaya presents that kind of overall structure, in the fullest sense. The founder of Yogacara, the school of practice, was Asanga. As has happened so many times, it's very hard to be able to really grasp or understand what he was like as a person or what sort of things really took place, because he lived, roughly, in the fifth century, and historical facts seems to be somewhat secondary in this case. So many myths and legends revolve around a person when that person lived in such a remote age. Once we dispense with that, we get to Abhidharmasamuccaya. Asanga composed a lot of texts and among them the Abhidharmasamuccaya has a very prominent position. It is one of his most essential texts and it's also one of the most psychologically oriented. It provides a framework, as well as a general pattern, as to how a practitioner is to follow the path, develop oneself and finally attain Buddhahood. Rather than go into great detail about the Abhidharmasamuccaya, which might confuse, rather than enlighten you, we are just going to concern ourselves with basic concepts. We can just get the gist of Yogacara psychology or philosophy. Yogacara philosophy, as I've already mentioned, is not so much concerned with intellectual activities as with practice. At the same time, it gives some psychological explanations about how we function, how we exist, how we relate to the world and so on. Two of the most important notions related to the practice of Yogacara are known as atma and dharma. In this case, atma is not the Hindu notion of soul and dharma does not mean the Buddhist scriptures or Buddhism. In a Buddhist context, dharma normally means the law: Buddhism. In a Hindu context, dharma means the right way of living, right conduct, something of that nature. How to treat your wife or your husband properly is dharma. But here, dharma is related to the experienced. Whatever we experience is known as dharma. It could be an external object or it could be our own mental state. We experience pain, toothache, stomach ache. That is part of dharma. Anything that has to do with the subjective aspect of our life or experience is atma. We could say that dharma is objectivity and atma is subjectivity. So, we have these two situations. Yogacara philosophy makes a bold statement, which is that both subjectivity and objectivity are transformations of the consciousness. What we experience, as well as the experiences themselves, are 1 transformations of our own consciousness and there is nothing beyond that. There is no extra experiential thing that we could relate to. We can look at how this is possible, at how Yogacara tries to explain this, at what sort of justification Yogacara philosophy tries to offer. According to Yogacara, consciousness has three levels. The first level is known as the substratum of awareness. It's called alayavijnana in Sanskrit. Alaya means basic, basis, substratum. Vijnana means awareness or consciousness. So, substratum of awareness. Sometimes people translate it as storehouse consciousness. Professor Jeffrey Hopkins translates it as the basis of all. I'm not trying to be pedantic here. If you want to relate to it as being the substratum of awareness or the basis of all or storehouse consciousness, that's fine. There's no problem there. Basically, what this means is that all our conscious processes depend upon the storehouse consciousness. Everything comes from it and also dissolves somewhat back into it. We could almost say that it is a kind of unconscious, rather than conscious, state of mind, but if we say it's unconscious that is debatable in many ways. Even Western psychologists debate about this. When Freud says there is some kind of unconscious state, others say that all unconscious processes which take place are really our own decision. We don't like certain things, so we make the choice not to be aware of those things. That is a conscious act, in some sense. I think we could say the same thing here. There is a reason why Yogacara philosophy introduced the notion of the substratum of awareness. The Buddhist tradition is normally known as atmavadin, which means no-self school, no-self tradition. Most Buddhist schools had completely dispensed with the notion of soul or self, but the Yogacarins, the people who expounded Yogacara philosophy, thought that this really wasn't in keeping with our own experience of ourselves. We could say that we are made up of nothing but our own bodily constituents and thought process perceptions jumbled together and there's no self or soul to unify the whole thing, but Yogacara philosophy thought that this cannot really explain the problem of personal identity. If you woke up in the morning and had cornflakes for breakfast, then when you go to bed, you think you are the same person who had cornflakes in the morning. You don't think the person who had the cornflakes is someone different from the one who's going to bed tonight. We have thought processes taking place in a temporal way. Thoughts come and go, perceptions come and go, but there's some kind of unifying process whereby we are aware that we are the same person, through and through. So, the Yogacarins said there is a basic state of consciousness, which actually continues. There is also a problem, if we want to look at it that way, when we die. If we believe in reincarnation, there must be some kind of basic principle that goes through and gets reborn. Yogacarins said that we can't take rebirth, unless there is some kind of basic principle - the alayavijnana, the substratum of awareness - that is responsible for rebirth. 2 Yogacarins say we have to believe in some kind of substratum of consciousness or awareness to be able to really explain the rebirth processes, our memory, personal identity and so on. The Yogacarins1 postulation of a substratum of awareness is not just done arbitrarily. They also try to give a description of the evolution of consciousness. They feel that our whole conscious process is evolutionary. We begin from some kind of primitive and unsophisticated level, then we develop and get into more sophisticated states of mind.

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