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Readings Advised by Venerable Robina

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Readings Advised by Venerable Robina STEP BY STEP TO ENLIGHTENMENT FROM JUNIOR SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY INSTITUT VAJRA YOGINI MARZENS FRANCE WITH VEN ROBINA COURTIN DECEMBER 26, 2016–JANUARY 1, 2017 These teachings have been prepared at FPMT’s Institut Vajra Yogini in Marzens, France, for the students of a the annual Christmas retreat there with Ven Robina Courtin, December 26 2016 – January 1 2017. institutvajrayogini.fr Thanks to FPMT, Inc. for the teachings in chapter 1. fpmt.org Thanks to Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive for the teachings in chapters 3, 6, & 8. lamayeshe.com And thanks to Wisdom Publications for the teachings in chapter 2 & 7. wisdompubs..org Cover: Shakyamuni Buddha, painted in colour by Jane Seidlitz. CONTENTS 1. The Path to Enlightenment: From Junior School to University 4 2. What is the Mind? 27 3. To Help Others, First We Need to Help Ourselves 32 4. Think About Impermanence, In Particular Our Own Death 37 5. How We Create Karma and How to Purify It 43 6. We Need to Cut Off Attachment 59 7. How Do We Exist? 66 8. We Need Bodhichitta 70 1. THE PATH TO ENLIGHTENMENT: FROM JUNIOR SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY VEN ROBINA COURTIN BUDDHISM: FROM INDIA TO TIBET We’re going to be talking about the path to enlightenment. What does that mean? Well, there’s various ways, various packages of presenting Buddha’s teachings. The key thing with Buddha’s teachings, of course, is that they are meant to be experiential. They’re meant to be something that you put into practice. That’s the point of listening to it. It’s like if this were a cooking class; we know that the point of it finally is to go away and make cakes, right? If it were just to sit here and listen and fill our heads with nice words about how delicious cakes are, we’d feel a bit disappointed. So sometimes, when I think of spiritual practice, we’ve made it quite complicated, we think of it as something complicated. We think of it as rather esoteric. So we hear on the one hand that Buddha says lots of things – look at the number of books about Buddhism, probably more than about cooking these days, so many. But always, if you look in your cooking books, there’s always the recipe there and if it’s just only words and all about the theory, you’d think: “Well, what on earth can I do with this? How can I make cakes from this? How do I learn? It’s all too much theory. How am I learning from this?” And so this is very easy to think about Buddhism; it’s very easy to think about all religions. There’s lots and lots and lots of words. All the people giving lectures, all the people giving sermons, and all this stuff. (Homilies. They used to call them sermons. Doesn’t a priest give a sermon any more? It’s a homily.) So, then it’s easy to be confused. And if we look at all the Buddhist books, even the practical ones, the simple ones, how do I put this into practice? What do I get from this? LAMA ATISHA One thing marvelous in the Tibetan tradition is the way the teachings have been packaged. And it really comes from this person called Atisha, back in the eleventh century, around about then, a great Indian master, saint, scholar, practitioner, meditator. He was invited by the Tibetan King. There is a very long and marvelous story about how he got there. He lived the remaining fifteen to seventeen years of his life in Tibet. Well, one of the things that he did was that he wrote this little text called Lamp for the Path. It’s a deceptively simple little text. What essentially he did was, he had been in Tibet for a while and he could see that they had kind of lost the plot. Buddhism had been there for a couple of hundred years by then. There were already these marvelous practitioners in Tibet, extraordinarily great yogis, holy beings, people getting realizations. But somehow, if you look at Buddha’s teachings extensively and deeply, all the philosophy, all the things that Buddha talked about, and all the things the Buddhist masters over the centuries, from the time of the Buddha up to that 4 point had talked about, the commentaries on Buddha’s teachings, the extensive philosophy, the extensive psychology, the extensive esoteric teachings, it’s an enormous body of stuff and very easy to get lost in it. It’s like finding hundreds and hundreds of books on all levels of cooking, but you can’t see where the recipe is in there so it’s very easy to get confused. So he very kindly wrote this little text and what he did was he took the essential points from all of Buddha’s teachings and he presented them in a very orderly way. THE GRADUAL PATH Of course, the way you present information about cooking is that it has to be an orderly way and the orderly way has to be in terms of the cooking capacity, the simple ones first and the more advanced as you go along. That’s nothing surprising. Anything we’ve ever learned in our lives, we start in grade one, more move ahead gradually, and then, finally, we graduate. Whether it’s six-month course or a weekend course, or a twenty-year course, you start at the beginning and you keep getting better. You can track your progress can’t you? It’s something we are very, very familiar with. But I think we are not familiar with it when it comes to spiritual paths. We don’t think like that. In other words, we go searching for a cooking course, but we don’t go searching for a graded course on how to get enlightened. It sounds very strange because we mystify religion. I think we mystify spiritual teachings. The moment we hear the word spiritual we lose our common sense. Really. Then we necessarily think of spiritual as something beyond ordinary. We think of it as some special feeling. We think of it as something that happens when you close your eyes and cross your legs, something mystical, a vision, a special kind of dream. “Oh, I had a spiritual experience!” we’ll say. It really is not appropriate. It’s inappropriate to think this way. We also think of it as completely hit and miss. Not in a graded sense. Somehow, you just are a very spiritual person, we say. So what do we mean by “spiritual” and what was Atisha doing in this text? What did he present? Well, the lineage of practice, the method or lineage of presenting the Buddha’s teachings that is known as the Lam-rim in Tibetan, the Graded Path, is what has come from Atisha. We are talking here from the point of view of one of the four main lineages of practice in Tibet called the Gelugpas. Over the centuries, different great masters, different great lamas. (the term lama is equivalent to the Sanskrit word guru, I think I have heard it translated as. “ma” is the female ending actually and I have heard in this context that it means something like high female or high mother. The Sanskrit word guru means “heavy with knowledge.”) So all the great masters or lamas or gurus over the centuries have developed, in different ways, the teachings and the particular tradition here is known as Gelugpa, which is starting from Tsong Khapa in the fourteenth century or so. It is directly coming in the tradition of the way that Atisha practised and emphasized the practice in the eleventh century. So, this lam-rim then, what’s it all about? What is it? I think what we’ll do tonight is give a very brief overview, a conceptual overview. Then the pieces of it we’ll put together in the weekend. 5 LORD BUDDHA So then, it’s the eleventh century by now. but first, who is Buddha and how did Buddhism get to Tibet? Very briefly, let’s mention the historical context. It was something like 500 years before Christ, I think, that Buddha was around. He came out of the Hindu tradition. He was this Prince; people know roughly speaking the clichéd bits of his story. There was this Prince who eventually started to question very deeply the meaning of life, the meaning of his own present life, his enormously rich and marvelous life, and realized that somehow he wanted to understand the nature of reality, he wanted to understand how to go beyond suffering. He could see that everybody was fraught with suffering, at one level or another. And so he left his kingdom and he went off and practised the various ways that were current at the time by many great ascetics. There’s a very strong tradition among the Hindus to leave home and live very ascetic lives, seeking liberation (they used the same word). So, Buddha went and tried various methods and joined different groups of people and continued to develop. Found various great teachers. Went to the point of the knowledge of those teachers and they said they couldn’t take him any further. Continued to find teachers and eventually he started to realize that none of the current teachings that he was finding actually answered the questions he had. So he eventually continued to practise finding the truth, so on and so forth.
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