THE FOUR DHARMAS OF GAMPOPA This text is based on a transcription of a teaching given by Lama Lhündrub, April 1997 at Kündröl Ling, Le Bost, France Introduction As always at the beginning of a teaching, we develop the aspiration that the teaching may help us towards enlightenment and to become able to help all sentient beings on this path. The teaching is based on: the Four-themed Precious Garland (chos bzhi rin-chen phreng-ba) by Longchenpa, translated by Alexander Berzin with explanations by H.H. Dudjom R. (chapter III) and by Beru Khyentse Rinpoche (chapter IV) Die Vier Dharmas des Gampopa , teaching by Urgyen Tulku Rinpoche, Dharmanektar 1+3/89 teaching by Kalu Rinpoche , German edition pp. 56–67 Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche Remarks on the Tradition of Mindfulness , Garuda IV Gampopa's Precious Ornament of Liberation and Precious Rosary . All other teaching is based on explanations that we received from Gendün Rinpoche, who embodies their understanding, and who used the verses of the four dharmas every time he blessed students. The four dharmas present us with an outline of the path, right from the beginning up to the end, buddhahood. An Overview The four dharmas—dvags-po chos bzhi: i) Turning the mind towards the dharma—blo chos su 'gro-ba ii) Following the dharma as a path—chos lam du 'gro-ba iii) The path clarifying confusion—lam 'khrul-pa sel-ba iv) Confusion arising as primordial awareness—'khrul-pa ye-shes su 'char-ba i) The first dharma is ‘Turning the mind to the dharma’. This means that the discursive mind, ‘ blo’ , turns towards the dharma. It forms the basis for all that follows. In the beginning our mind has not yet turned towards the dharma but is turned towards self interest: fulfilling our desires and avoiding whatever we are averse to or afraid of. The basic point here is to become interested in the dharma because of our life experience. We turn our mind towards the dharma through a proper analysis of our situation in life until the interest in dharma becomes very strong, like calling for a doctor when severely injured or ill. The intention becomes as strong as wanting to extinguish the fire when our house is in flames. This is the common ground of all levels of practice. In the Hinayana we turn towards the dharma because we feel uncomfortable ourselves, and in the Mahayana we turn towards the dharma because all beings feel uncomfortable, because all beings are
1 suffering. In the beginning our attitude is usually predominantly Hinayana: to save ourselves. With this intention we develop renunciation and start to practise, but often there is already a little compassion in this initial turning to the dharma. We do not do it only for ourselves. ii) As our mind turns towards the dharma we take refuge and develop bodhicitta. These are the next steps. We do practices like tonglen, the six paramitas and so on. This is called ‘Following or taking the dharma as a path’. At this point the dharma really begins to fill out all our existence, it becomes the one thing of primal importance in our life. Here also, this can be on the level of Hinayana, dharma becoming the sole important thing in our life in order to gain personal liberation, or we can tune in to the Mahayana motivation and the welfare of others becomes the most important thing in our life. At this point we also begin to get some idea of Vajrayana practice. We start to practise the preliminaries, we get into contact with Vajrayana teachers and begin to listen to the first teachings. But we are not yet fully into samaya relationships, into deep commitments with our teachers. This only begins at this stage and will become more important later on. On the second level, for a Mahayana practitioner renunciation begins to combine in our practice with compassion. As we begin to work with the mahamudra preliminaries or Tchenrezi practice, we begin to also slowly develop more devotion, and the link between us and the teacher becomes stronger. iii) The third dharma of Gampopa is called ‘The path clarifying confusion’. It can be practised on all three levels, Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. From the Hinayana point of view we are really working on transforming the emotions at this point; from the Mahayana point of view we are completely entering bodhicitta; and from the Vajrayana point of view we are really entering the pure vision of tantric practice. This is the point of intensive practice, the time when we go into retreat and completely apply ourselves to the dharma without any distraction. iv) As we reach the fruit of practice, ‘Confusion arises as pristine awareness’, there is no more need to transform confusion, since it is by nature primordial wisdom and there is no need to change anything about it when it is perceived in its true essence. This is the step just before buddhahood, and for a buddha there is not even any confusion that arises as primordial wisdom, there is only primordial wisdom arising. There is no more experience of something first being confusion and then being recognised as primordial awareness.
Summary For travelling through these four dharmas all three qualities are needed: renunciation, which is the main aspect of the Hinayana; compassion which is the main aspect of the Mahayana; and devotion plus pure vision which are the main aspects of Vajrayana. As Longchenpa points out, and also Beru Khyentse in his commentary to the fourth dharma, the difference of realisation obtained in the three yanas is not one of quality—it is just the speed of how fast one reaches this understanding. If you want to reach it quickly, the Mahayana and Vajrayana offer methods, which enhance the speed of development. Why is there no difference in the attainment? The reason is that since time without beginning all appearances are primordial awareness, and there is nothing, which has to be done for that. As soon as the mind opens and relaxes enough to be free of hope and fear there is nothing to change in appearances in order for them to become primordial awareness. Their being of the nature of awareness, empty of any reality, does not depend on any method. The question is only
2 how fast one arrives at the point of being able to leave appearances as they are in their true nature without clinging to them; this is the important point. Recently (in 2002) I have found the Tibetan text where Gampopa himself explains the four dharmas, but it will need time to study it. He seems to have pronounced them first in the form of an aspiration prayer, which is recited in the Milarepa guru yoga: Please grant your blessings that my mind as well as the mind of all sentient beings turns towards the dharma. Please grant your blessings that we follow the dharma as a path. Please grant your blessings that the path clarifies confusion. Please grant your blessings that confusion arises as pristine pure awareness.
The First Dharma How do we turn our mind towards the dharma? This is something we have to do every day, every session. As we sit down on our seat, we sometimes wonder: How can I start the session, where will I find the motivation? Right there is the need to apply the first dharma to ourselves: ‘How do I turn my mind towards the dharma, if I have lost the track?’ The important point is to find the motivation. The whole first dharma is about developing the deep motivation to change our live and to get out of this ‘ocean of suffering’ in order to reach ‘the other shore’ of true happiness, liberation and enlightened activity. There are two aspects to developing this motivation: we examine what is and contemplate what could be . A. The Four Fundamental Thoughts First we examine closely our present situation by reflecting on the four fundamental thoughts. These are called ‘The four thoughts which turn the mind towards the dharma’. Often practitioners cannot fully relate to how these four thoughts are presented in the dharma teachings. The teaching about the precious human body, about the fact that one should be very happy about not being born as a hell being, not being born as a hungry ghost, or in the god realms and so on, does not really make sense to people who come new into the dharma, since it is not part of our culture to believe in these realms. We are not sure, if it is really like this—it needs a lot of confidence and trust in the Buddha's teaching to believe in it. For those who lack this confidence, this cannot be the starting point before having taken refuge. That is why these four thoughts will now be presented from a slightly different angle.
The precious human existence The contemplation of the precious human body starts with the preciousness of the situation right now . For this we will at first only use what we know ourselves, what we can see, touch, hear and experience ourselves. In order to appreciate the preciousness of our present situation we will let ourselves be guided by the question: ‘What factors were necessary and had to come together for this present situation to occur? What made this situation possible? How did it become possible that I can practise the dharma right now?’ This is a contemplation, which everyone can do, and some may easily spend an hour on it. First, we contemplate the conditions which have to do with us personally: ‘ In order for me to be here today, I had to wake up this morning and fortunately enough my body is healthy enough to
3 move; I have enough food; I have enough free time; I have the clothes to be able to walk around unhindered, and the contact that we established previously made it possible that we join as students and teachers.’ I also contemplate how during the last years different situations, wishes, decisions, acts of mine made it possible that the present situation arises. Due to these situations my mind directed itself towards the dharma, there were no obligations that made it impossible. Also, I was born in a country at peace, without war, into a family where I received the kind of education which made it possible to contact and understand dharma teachings. Already if I just look at my personal life, many, many situations have contributed to me being here today contemplating the dharma. But this is not all. Second, we contemplate what the dharma contributes to this situation: others who practised the dharma have also contributed a great deal to this situation. These are all the factors that depend on the dharma. The fact that the western lamas are here is due to their aspiration to practise the dharma, and due to the many days they have spent in practice; and this again is due to Gendün Rinpoche who himself devoted his whole life to practice and who was sent by the 16 th Karmapa; and behind the Karmapa there is the whole lineage of transmission going back to the Buddha, with millions of practitioners dedicating their life to the dharma. Further factors which made it possible are, for example, that a house could be bought; that the local people are willing to let us stay—all these are the conditions of the dharma. Just think of how many people have taken part in the transmission of the dharma texts so that they are available today, like the text of Longchenpa which I believe was written in the 13 th or 14 th century and is still available today. How many people have recopied this text, have preserved it, lamas who have given teachings on it, those who translated it, printed it, brought it here, and so on? All of this is part of a whole gathering of countless conditions that make the dharma present today. We contemplate them going back as far as possible into the past to understand that this situation did not arise just by itself but is due to a precious coming together of the effort of many, many human beings. And then, in a third step, we contemplate the factors that depend on the world around us: Someone has made this table. Someone has made this carpet. Someone has built this house, has arranged this retreat centre, has baked our bread, has cultivated the wheat, and so on. There are so many factors which have come together that this present life situation is possible with the freedom to engage in dharma practice. And then I take the whole thing from the opposite point of view and contemplate all the conditions that could have prevented me from being here today. Their absence is a source of joy, because otherwise I would not have encountered this dharma situation. What would have happened if I had been born in a country at war? How would my life have continued, how would it have been, if the countries here were not at peace right now? What would have been, if today in the morning I had become very ill? What would have happened if Gendün Rinpoche had not obeyed the 16 th Karmapa, or if he had not practised his whole life in retreat? Or, if the 16 th Karmapa had not seen that this could be a proper place and sent his lamas here? What, if the lineages of the teachings had been interrupted? If the texts had not been translated? So you take the whole thing at the reverse and you can see very easily this whole situation could not have happened. And this contemplation you can do every day on waking up or starting a session; you can come to a deep appreciation of the preciousness of the situation just by the things you know. There is no immediate need to go back into speculating about all that we have evaded in the cosmic play, there is already so much which we are free of and which we have avoided in terms of unfavourable conditions in this life. Then, if you have confidence, you look further into what has been avoided in terms of unfavourable circumstances of rebirth. First rebirth in unfavourable human circumstances—not having one's faculties intact, being mentally severely handicapped or being born in a country where there is no dharma, or being born into conditions without any leisure and so on. And then there is the condition with all these faculties intact but without the dharma being present , a time
4 when the dharma is not there, or even born in other realms where one cannot practise the dharma because one has only suffering or only distraction. In this way, we start from right here and make it very precise. Then our contemplation widens and becomes larger and larger to encompass realities of which we have no personal memory, all according to our own capacity. In order to appreciate the preciousness of our present situation it is not enough to contemplate all that leads up to this situation. At the same time we have to contemplate the preciousness of the dharma itself , the fact that it is really important to have the dharma in order to finish with suffering. We have to deeply contemplate the qualities and benefits of the dharma, otherwise we will never understand the preciousness of the situation. But this is a whole separate subject. Impermanence The present situation is so precious because it is full of qualities but rather impermanent. Many, very special conditions are needed for this situation to come together, and we do not know how long this rather shaky combination of conditions will continue. The maximum length would be that such a favourable condition for dharma practice continues for our whole life, but is it not more likely that due to illness, accidents, obligations, outer circumstances it will come to end much earlier? Most favourable conditions do not continue for more than a few days, some continue for a month, and if you are so lucky to be in a three years retreat, then they might continue for three years. It is very, very rare in this world to find conditions as stable as those in a three years retreat. But even here they can change from one day to another. Even in retreat we can die, have accidents, lose our teachers, support etc. Thinking of these factors of impermanence is just the beginning of a contemplation which is actually extremely vast. The traditional teaching on impermanence takes us from a personal perspective into a perspective of whole universes coming into existence, being burned, flooded and blown apart by elemental forces. Again, this dimension of the teaching is difficult for some to believe, since the notion of the cyclic appearance and disappearance of cosmic world systems is not very familiar to us. But here also, we can start with where we are. We see the changing of the seasons, we see the changing of each moment—and this has to become a personal experience. It is one of the very first buddhist meditation practices: sitting and getting in touch with impermanence, birth and death, arising and disappearing. First we observe impermanence outside: we just sit and look with our eyes. We see the carpet and we see the dust, the little spots or a little rice lying there. These are signs of impermanence, and if this continues, one day this carpet will not be there any more. It was fabricated one time and will dissolve another time. This table was freshly painted some years ago but so many traces are there already showing its impermanence. Every object which your senses touch shows signs of impermanence. Look at this text; already its corners are bent from use and they are becoming dark. We look all around and become aware that whatever we see is a manifestation of impermanence. Nothing is an exception to this rule. We become vividly aware that we are sitting on an impermanent cushion on an impermanent seat in an impermanent room with impermanent clothes... If we cannot sit, we can do this contemplation when we walk. We can go out and do this contemplation wherever we go with the one wish in mind: ‘May I come to understand impermanence.’ Wherever we look, everything is speaking to us about impermanence. We see people, look at photos. We see their wrinkles, the signs of age. We see children growing up, old people dying, the contemplation continues all the time. We listen to the chirping of the birds— already gone, just echoes in the mind. You meditate on sounds and what comes to other senses
5 as being impermanent. This is taking the outside world as a sign of impermanence. All of this has been just visual so far. These were some initial reflections on impermanence. One has to develop the faculties of deep meditation in order to become really sure about the omnipresence of impermanence. The first and easiest object is the body itself: mindfulness of the body. We sit and first notice the breath. It is coming and going. Meditating on the breath is actually meditating on impermanence. Breath is never the same. Then, if your awareness becomes a little bit more subtle, maybe you feel the heartbeat. You can meditate on the heartbeat as being the constant reminder of impermanence. And then maybe you feel the pressure of the cushion under your buttocks, and you feel how the sensation is changing from at first being agreeable to not so agreeable. And then you feel your clothes, your belly touching your clothes. Some regions of your body are cold, some are warm, and there are many changes happening. Warm zones become cold, and cold ones become warm. Warm ones become unbearably hot, and so on. Then you go into the kind of meditation which is extensively used in the Theravada tradition, the mindfulness of body sensations , of all what you can feel in the body, in every cell of the body, from the top of the head down to the soles of the feet. And as your mindfulness settles on each part of the body you begin to notice that each cell is alive. There is no part of the body which does not have this kind of tingling energy. This is life itself, the manifestations of your vital force. Some parts of the body may feel completely blank in the beginning, because we have not developed mindfulness connected to this region, but they will also ‘become alive’ later. As you are going through the body, you are usually not very equanimous, but everything is judged immediately as being agreeable or disagreeable. There is this judging mind which accompanies your journey through the body. There are feelings of pleasant and unpleasantness. And there are feelings of urgent need for relief like: ‘Oh, I have to immediately lift my leg because it has become numb, there is no circulation!’ We meet different kinds of fears, for example, also the fear that the breath might stop, the fear of becoming hungry, fear of falling asleep, or fear of not falling asleep. We notice this is due to increasing awareness. This is called mindfulness of feelings. We then see that also mind is constantly changing. We are not always in touch with its changes, this depends on our clinging, but it certainly changes. It changes every moment. When you are relaxed, you see that this whole process is continuous change and that there is nothing solid. This is what we call mindfulness of mind . We begin to see that the different capacities of the mind, for example the capacity to notice something, then the capacity to label something, also at the same time comparing it with something else, and then making plans about how to use or not to use this for one’s own benefit or the benefit of others and so on. These and the different functions which are called rig , yid , and sems in Tibetan. Basic dualistic perception is sems . Rig is the clear awareness of something, and yid is the connecting agent. And with this mindfulness of what happens in the mind we continue and become aware of all these different emotional patterns, all the different mental states which are never the same, always changing and combining to form different moods and states. This is the impermanence of mind and mental states. If we meditate in this way we become completely aware that our whole life is impermanent. Then we extend our awareness of impermanence to include others: our personal world is impermanent, but also all the personal worlds of everyone else are impermanent, the whole cosmos is impermanent. Here we come very close to an understanding of the illusory nature of phenomena. How could something be real in a fundamental sense, if it is impermanent? It cannot be, if it is constantly changing. The play of impermanent phenomena in our mind is due to the illusory nature of all phenomena. This is a key to understanding emptiness. Contemplating impermanence leads to the purification of mental states through recognition of emptiness: by the sheer fact of being aware of the impermanence of mental states! This is the traditional approach
6 practised in the Theravada school of buddhism. Based on anicca w hich is the impermanence one understands as the unsatisfactory nature of all existence, and dukkha , which is suffering. Meditating on the impermanent nature of this unsatisfactory world of dualistic clinging one understands anatta (an-atman) , which is the aspect of non self or egolessness, the absence of a self or shunyata, emptiness, which is the term used in the Mahayana school. When realising this one becomes a so called stream enterer, someone who has entered into the stream towards complete liberation. If you have difficulties with your practice and do not know how to find a way back into meditation, just use this easy method of meditating on impermanence. It will bring you right back into practice, because impermanence itself is already dharma, it is the truth of the situation. For our meditation on impermanence to become strong enough to change our attitude towards life, it should not just be a superficial gliding over the impermanence of the situation, but you should stay with each aspect of impermanence for a long time and repeatedly meditate on it. Meditate repeatedly on the breath and the impermanence of breath. Meditate repeatedly on body sensations and on the impermanence of mental phenomena. As we become completely permeated by this awareness of impermanence, it begins to undermine our clinging. Knowing things to be impermanent we take a little inner distance. We would still like to hold on to them but we know that the time will come when we have to let go. If the awareness of impermanence is very strong and combined with the awareness of one’s possible death very soon, then to occupy oneself with impermanent matters becomes really ridiculous. It becomes stupid in view of the fact of what else we could do with our life and what we should have attained in terms of understanding at the time of death. But there are more methods to help us to turn away from samsaric involvement.
Karma Dharma is not to change a situation into something else, it is just being there in the situation and experiencing it. And as we experience it fully, we will become aware of its preciousness, of all the conditions which are quickly changing, impermanent, which will end in death also, and we will see then, that these situations carry an emotional tone. This emotional tone can be characterised either as obvious suffering when the experience is unpleasant, or happiness which is in fact a more subtle form of suffering due to clinging to an agreeable situation, or a neutral, dualistic state which is also suffering due to the continuous clinging to self and other. These are the 3 kinds of suffering. But we will not go into more detail on this at this place. To look into the reasons why this suffering arises is the contemplation of karma . In the teachings we often present the contemplation of suffering first and only afterwards the contemplation of the law of karma. This was also the way the Buddha explained it. First he explained the truth of suffering and then he explained the noble truth of the origin of all suffering. This is rather logical: first we have to present the facts and then we give the explanation. Each one of us should do this again and again in our own practice. This analysis will make it very clear what our present situation is really like, and it will give us enough impulse to change whatever is necessary in our attitude to life.
How can we, as beginners, understand karma? How can we come to a personal understanding of this law of cause and effect, so that it does not simply remains a kind of dogma uneasy to digest? The meaning of karma is action, taking decisions and doing something with body, speech and mind. If we want to avoid using only a kind of slogan with no meaning behind, we should even talk only about actions and their result. You can express it in a way that you don’t have to use the word ‘karma’ at all. It is so easy to say to someone: ‘Well, it is just your karma.’ But if you want to say: ‘ It is the effect of your actions’, then you become a bit more careful, because the person could hit back and ask. ‘What actions do you mean?’ Then you have to explain him ‘It is the
7 effect of something which you did or thought or said in the past.’ And: ‘ Maybe you can find out the cause for yourself, or it may be out of reach for you, because the origin is too far away.’ If you use words from your own language, the communication becomes more direct, more honest. You cannot hide any more behind words. So, in order to contemplate karma we go through a similar process as for contemplating the preciousness of the present situation. We contemplate the decisions and actions that led up to this present situation by going back into the past following the chain of effects and their causes. For example, a whole lot of decisions and acts have led up to this present situation of this three years retreat—and this is true for everyone and everything here. For all of us there was the decision to enter intensive dharma practice, there was the decision to let go of important attachments in our lives, which could have changed our decision. We actually took the steps to be here, to get the money together, to get the conditions together. As we trace back further we come to our family life, our actions and decisions related to it, what priorities we set in life. We look back to our schooling, how we acted there and what priorities we set there. Then we come back to early decisions, early reactions in our lives as children. We go back to birth and we cannot go further than that, because we do not have a memory of what was before birth. But this is not the end of our contemplation, it was just the outer level . Then we look at the inner level, at our state of mind now, our specific mixture of doubts and confidence, of true compassion and true egoism, of whatever our mind has in terms of emotions, and we can trace it back to certain patterns and decisions which we have taken in our lives. We will find out that our inner set up, our personal emotional mixture is very much due to the way we have acted and reinforced our patterns. Because of our likings and dislikings, some patterns we did not reinforce as much as others. Some of these patterns we have developed consciously, others unconsciously. We liked certain things—a certain kind of music, of literature, of discussions, and so we met people with the same interests and finally because of our special set up and our experiences, we became interested in the dharma. Something inspired us. And this inspiration itself was due to attitudes already present in our minds due to previous acts and interests in which we engaged, or values which we had already developed in our mind. If we go back like this, we find out that everyone has consciously with his actions and with his way of reacting to situations, contributed to the way he is. It will not explain everything, but we understand that the fact that we are here is due to the karma, the actions that we have done in life. It becomes very obvious . In this way, once we realise how much we ourselves contributed to our present situation to arise, we can take full responsibility on our lives and to begin to actively change negative patterns, which we have realised to create only suffering. One can see this also in many therapies. If somebody is in a depression, you have to treat the victim feeling. If somebody is in a victim attitude, he will never get out of his depression. You have to emphasise the creator, the karmic side of it. Then you have to show patterns, how to try to change, how to influence ones life. But this analysis is not yet complete. There is also an influence of society on us which should not be neglected. We are born into a situation and live in a situation of overlapping influences. One is influencing the other. We are never independent. Actually, the contemplation on karma shows us how interdependent we are. Nobody can stick out his head and say: ‘I am here all alone, I don’t depend on anyone else.’ We have been given birth by a mother, we have been nourished, we have been talked to, we have exchanged objects, and through this we have been in direct or indirect contact with millions of people. Even the fact that the table is here is due to the action and decision of the person who made this table. This carpet, this house, the whole situation is due to the actions and decisions of many individual people. The situation of this country is due to
8 actions and decisions of people, to their mental states and so on. All these contemplations help to show us our interdependence. Just as can the paper to write on, the pencil, the book, the watch and so on. Then we come to the point in our contemplation where all of this is still not sufficient to explain why we are so different, because, after all, the impact of the decisions we took doesn’t seem to be all that great. If, for example, I look into my family, my parents had a very stable relationship. They have four sons, and if you look at these four, you cannot really understand why they are so different. They were brought up in very much the same way. The difference among them cannot be explained only by the fact of having been born at an interval of a few years. This is not a sufficient explanation. There have to be—and this is how far we can go with our contemplation of karma—some forces which are already active before birth. As babies are born into this world, they are not just a blank page, starting from zero, a nothing which is then forming into something. Already at birth we are actually reacting in a very specific and personal way. Some babies smile easily, some are very content, some sleep a lot, others hardly sleep, always cry or are very demanding. There are some babies who have a lot of fear, some who don’t seem to have much fear. We can notice many differences. Where do they come from? Do they just come from the mother? And the father? Or do they come from factors before? If you look clearly, probably you also come to the conclusion that, if the same mother and father have several children, the differences among these children cannot only be explained by their experiences during pregnancy. Very often there is not a sufficient reason. So we say it is the genes. But what decided the combination of genes? And the idea arises that probably there were forces which were present and active even before this body was formed, forces which determined the combination of genes and the specific reactions of the new born to its environment. So far we looked back. Now we will take this contemplation on karma and look into the future. This is an imagining process, but it is also a process of going along with life. Because I acted yesterday like this, today this is happening to me. Karma is very straight forward. We don’t always have to wait for our next life for karma to ripen. Some things are very, very quick. You hit someone in the face and you get it back, this is immediate result. You go out into the cold without being dressed properly, you have a cold the next day—karma of stupidity. Some karmic effects you can see after some years. If we overeat all the time and then get diabetes, we don’t have to look into a previous life to find the karma to get diabetes. This is right now. This is our desire of this life which has been leading to this. Or we have engaged ourselves in lying for example. Over a certain number of years we will see that around us people will stop trusting us. Our speech has become unreliable and this is the effect of lying, of not saying the truth for a certain amount of time, enough for the karmic fruit to ripen in everyone who knows us, to see that this person is actually not reliable. It does not explain why some people who are not lying also are not trusted by others. These are the kinds of questions which might only be answered by looking back to previous lives, which we cannot do. But some situations are the straightforward karma of this life, of what we have done. We could have done it differently. Therefore, if we take decisions now, we can all reflect, on what will the outcome be. What can we imagine? This reflection on karma refers to our own human experience. What are the probabilities of a situation to develop in such a way, if I decided this way? What are the cause—effect relationships that I can envisage from this action, what is the karma? This is why ‘The Four Thoughts’ are so important. They can help us to find the answer to every difficult situation. They help us to set priorities. What is really important in our life? If there is an important decision to take, we should apply the four fundamental thoughts as guidelines to all the aspects of it. If you consider the full preciousness of your life, how does this influence the
9 situation? How does the taking into account of impermanence influence the situation? Think of the imminence of death, the possibility of the situation changing quickly. And then what kind of karma will be created by either decision? And the last thing—will there be any suffering arising for myself and others? We should really look carefully not only at the outer results, but ask ourselves if our decision will help to alleviate or increase suffering for everybody involved. There remain some decisions, where it is not important whether you choose the one or the other, because the positive aspects are balanced on either side—so it depends on your state of mind. There is no need to worry about anything. One just waits for the situation to present itself and then does what feels right. For some of you there is, for example, a decision between monastery and doing a second retreat—actually, it does not matter so much. It will have some influence on the lifestyle, but there is not a very important difference in the direction life will take. Some indications about the practice The contemplation of the ‘Four Thoughts’ can really be done as a practice in itself. To people who have just taken refuge, I first give the instructions about one of the four thoughts at a time. It usually takes one hour, one and a half hours just to talk about one of them. Then they are asked to spend four sessions a day just contemplating in this way. They can take a piece of paper and write down their observations on preciousness, on all the conditions necessary which enable them to practice the dharma. Or they note observations on impermanence; or what kind of conditioning karma has brought them to the dharma; what kind of decisions they took; what kind of attitudes of mind had to be present. They find this actually very fulfilling. When I wanted to give the second thought to some people who were here in retreat, they told me: ’No, I’m not through yet with the first thought. I’ve spent four sessions on it, but I really want to deepen it, I want to continue. This is so rich!’ Then we just wait until the time has come to go on with the next Thought. It is not something which is just taking five minutes and then we are finished with it. It is something which takes your whole being in order to completely get into it and to really feel the impact of these Thoughts. Once this kind of first contemplation has been done intensively one knows how to contemplate on a subject. One knows that there is a certain benefit of writing and a certain defect also in taking notes. One knows how to focus the mind on the questions and then how to relax the mind from the question. In order to contemplate properly on a subject, it should be thought of in the form of a question. This is something very important. Let’s suppose you sit down in order to meditate on the law of Karma. Usually what happens is that you just go through your storage of memory on the teachings of karma. This is not the way to contemplate it. Instead, we have to contemplate about what causes what. What has caused this situation here to arise? What causes do I sow now for the future? It is the question of cause and effect. And we have to formulate this in the form of a question, otherwise there will be no answer. If it is just a rehearsal of things you have heard, the effect will be very short lived, not strong enough to change your mind. So the question of approaching the first dharma of Gampopa is not ‘Turning the mind towards the Dharma’, but ‘How to turn one’s mind towards the Dharma’. This is the interesting point. It is not something which happens all by itself. There has to be some research, some wanting behind it. Only then will one be properly interested. In order to help someone in this, you have to find the right question which will stimulate this person. The question should be limited and vast at the same time, to be able to be a reference point for the contemplation. Then the contemplation will work, otherwise it will be just reading books and entering all kinds of speculations.
10 The defects of samsara—suffering and it’s causes This is the fourth point. The Buddha does not throw the light on the basic joy of every situation, which he could also have done, but he sees that in order to change something one needs to be dissatisfied with what is there. That’s why he introduces a contemplation which creates dissatisfaction with the present situation. This is done on purpose because we do everything we can to turn away our minds from this bitter fact that situations are marked by the three kinds of suffering. Since we delude ourselves with all kinds of searches for happiness, we always think the next day will be better than this one. If we don’t think in this way, we’d rather commit suicide! So we try to talk ourselves into the next girlfriend will be better, or the next beer will be better, the next retreat will be better... But this is not necessarily the case, because there is a basic problem with every situation. The basic problem is that outwardly we have a body. This body is composed and impermanent and it will fall apart. And because of this, there are enough causes for physical illness, for physical suffering. Within this body there is a mind which is clinging. As long as situations are agreeable this clinging is not really experienced as suffering. There is experience of suffering only when the situation changes to something less agreeable. This is called the suffering of change . Suffering of suffering refers to all the situations which are disagreeable, the suffering of change refers to all situations which are agreeable. Their characteristic is not that they are suffering in themselves, but they are suffering due to our clinging to them, which makes us suffer as soon as they change and they change constantly. So when the situation is pleasant, we hope: ‘Oh, may this last’. Or we think: ‘How can I protect the situation to make it last longer?’ Or we get tense and try to manipulate the situation and find some means to prolong the happiness. All this is an expression of fear. So together with the clinging to happiness there is the fear of losing happiness and this is called the suffering of change. Then there is a basic characteristic of every situation in samsara, which is the dualistic mind. This is called the suffering of conditioned existence . Conditioned existence is a term which refers to the skandhas, to the aggregates. The aggregates are form, feeling, sensation, the different mental factors and consciousness. Form refers to the basic fact of dualistic perception. Where there is an “I”, there is a form which it is identified with, and there is the perception of objects. The subject/object relationship is called the skandha of form . The other skandhas don’t even interest us, because they are all also dualistic. So as long as one is in conditioned existence, operating within the skandhas, there will always be duality. This basic fact of duality means that there is a tension between the idea of an “I” which needs to be protected, has to be kept up artificially and the idea of an object which is supposed to be there. This basic tension is called the suffering of conditioned existence . You can also simply call it the suffering of duality. This is a suffering which is usually not noticed by normal people. Nevertheless, there is a notion of this. We all know this wish to, for example, melt with the partner we love, to become completely one. Or the wish to forget ourselves. The presence of this wish shows that there is a notion of the suffering due to separation. This notion is actually present in us. It is one of the basic motors of sexuality, of wanting to engage in relationships. It is the notion of being separated and wanting to overcome this separation by uniting. Another choice is forgetting, by getting drunk, by taking drugs—we look for all kinds of means to do this. So it is not completely true to say this suffering is not perceived at all by normal people. It is perceived but it is pushed away. It’s like an undercurrent. An unconscious or half conscious feeling which motivates many other actions. Then for the meditator, as you know, the observer becomes very prominent in the practice. You can see very clearly the observer and a longing comes to go beyond it, because it is constantly
11 harassing you with judgements and wishes and hopes and fears. We experience more and more in our practice the suffering of having this observer in one’s mind. This is why it is said that practitioners experience this third kind of suffering more than usual people, because they sit quietly in a place and they just look at what is and in this basic state of observing, everything becomes clear to the mind, which was not so obvious in the beginning. One was not so aware of the fact that one is always observing. How to contemplate all this? The question to ask is: ‘How is my present situation characterised by suffering?’ Contemplation of suffering is again not a contemplation of the suffering which is present in the world in general, but it is really focussed on my situation now. This means, sitting here, feeling the body. You examine the present situation with the understanding you have. First you check if there is any suffering in the body, in the physical realm. If there are, for example, machines running outside and you have an aversion to this, there is suffering due to noise. If you have an uncomfortable cushion or if you have been sitting for a while already there is suffering due to sitting. If you did not eat, there is suffering due to hunger. Or you suffer due to a lack of sleep. Sometimes there is apparently no physical suffering. The cushion is comfortable, you have had a good meal and a good sleep. But you just have to wait. After having stayed straight for one hour, you will see that there is suffering starting in the ankles, in the back… the suffering of the body starts again. If you happen to be in a happy, pleasant mental state, then you can look into your mind to see if you can find some hidden suffering and you can identify the clinging which is there to a happy state. If there is no clinging to the happy state, there is also no suffering of change. Actually, the experience of suffering and happiness is due to labelling. One labels situations as pleasant and unpleasant in relation to a self, in relation to one’s memories. So the first two could be absent. After this you check if there is an observer or not—and the simple fact that you ask yourself the question proves that it is there. The third kind of suffering is always there as long as we are not in mahamudra. As long as you are not in the completely relaxed state of mind, the tension of the ego perceiving its object is there. This is the basic tension, which is like the base line of our meditation, as long as we are in shine. As long as we are in shine there is always this basic tension, which can be very intense or which can become very, very subtle. There is almost no more of this tension, and if this breaks, you are in mahamudra. So you can look into your own mind, you can investigate your present situation, your present being in regard to the three kinds of suffering. If you find that you react with aversion to physical discomfort and with clinging to happy mental and pleasant physical states, and the observer is of course omnipresent, this can give rise to a real wish to get out of this, to contact a state beyond this suffering, beyond the observer, which you might not know yet, but about which you have heard from your teacher. Nya ngen de—the Tibetan word for nirvana, means ‘beyond suffering’. It is also called ‘peace’. It is the peace which arises from the absence of ego clinging—shiwa . This contemplation of suffering leads us to contemplating the alternative. We are not content with just being in that situation of suffering which is impermanent and conditioned by all kinds of activities, but you want to use it better. The goal is to go beyond suffering and to make better use of our actions, of our situations.
12 B. The first dharma and the Four Noble Truths The first dharma of Gampopa, ‘How to turn the mind towards the Dharma’ is not finished just by the contemplation of the ‘Four Thoughts’, and meditating on the situation as such, but we have to meditate also on the liberating qualities of buddha, dharma, sangha and then the path to liberation, which shows us how to let go of ego clinging. This is the noble eightfold path and all the elaboration of teachings, which we have received. These are the third and fourth of the noble truths. The first truth was the truth of suffering , the second was the truth of the causes of suffering. The third truth is the truth of liberation from suffering and the fourth truth is the truth of the causes of liberation. They make up two pairs. The first two give us the necessary insight into what is , the second two give us an notion of what could possibly be. When you explain the state of enlightenment, of mahamudra, the pointing out instruction of the cessation of suffering, which is in fact the third noble truth, those who are able to, can tune into it and experience it right now, because it is a potential of the present situation. It is always there. This was the case, I think for one disciple of the Buddha. And for those who do not understand, who just get a notion of what this means, the path to liberation is taught. These are the causes of liberation. There you take methods, you develop qualities of mind and step by step you approach more of letting go, relaxing more. When one gets more relaxed, the natural dimension opens. So in this way the four noble truths are a complete set of teachings. C. Some additional points Below there are some ideas which might help people to become clear about what motivates them in their life. You can make an analysis of your life and of your present situation. You can ask yourselves in summary, what is my basic problem, and, alternatively, what is my goal in life, what do I want to do with my life. I actually do give this as a task to people who come new to the dharma. Sometimes I ask them to make a list of the qualities which they would like to develop in their lives. They write down, of course, compassion, wisdom, but for example one person wanted wealth, beauty and so on. Then you discuss these qualities together with the person. It can also happen just in a talk, without the person writing everything on a paper before, but the paper is really like a mirror. When the people are serious, they really reflect and write down what they want to achieve in their life, without any judging. If they want power, they write down ‘power’. When you look at these qualities all together, there is a very important point to be made clear. Whatever quality they are aiming for can be potentially a quality of a buddha—if there is no ego clinging involved. So if there is a desire for power—the important point to look at, is that striving for personal power will be the cause for more suffering, because it is connected with the ego. If it is the power of a buddha, it is the power over phenomena, the power to help beings, which is free of ego clinging. The same goes for beauty. If beauty is connected to a self, then it just encourages pride and gives rise to a lot of clinging. If it is the beauty of a buddha it can serve to attract beings to the dharma and can actually be used as skilful means. Wealth can be the cause for a lot of problems as well as for a lot of benefit. It depends whether it is related to an ego or not. So what we do is, we take this list of qualities as a basis to see if they want these qualities in the pure form, without ego clinging being involved, or if they want them for themselves, in the ego form. Then one needs to talk about the importance of ego clinging, which makes this discussion about the qualities very clear, very tangible. It is also possible, if this reflection on qualities is too abstract for people, to write down the names of people, who were examples for them, who impressed and inspired them, like Jesus
13 Christ or the Rolling Stones. Together one could filter out the qualities of what was attracting them. Is it the whole personality? Or is it just a part which was appealing to them? This process can be necessary because many people when they come into the dharma, absolutely don’t know what they want. They don’t really know, why they are in the dharma. They have trust in the dharma, but why practise the dharma is really difficult to understand. There was never a clear analysis of one’s life and of what one wants in life. No practise will work, before they are clear about what they want. As soon as you can build the proper basis, the better the practise will be afterwards. The person is completely free to write down whatever is his personal goal. You can never have a person achieve a goal for which he is not ready. You can awaken a person’s understanding of higher goals rather than the limited ones he might envisage for himself, but you can never make a person want to obtain buddhahood if there is no readiness, no interest for this. If somebody wants to become a football star then you should help him to become a football star and not a buddha. One has to make clear to the person what the dharma is aiming at. We should not sell the dharma as something which will fulfil wishes, which the dharma does not fulfil as such. One needs to get the illusions out of the practice right from the beginning and to point out clearly what the dharma can do, which is indeed very powerful, because the dharma can eliminate all the ego clinging. This one has to point out and if then the person is willing to work on the ego clinging, then you know that this person is ready to practise the dharma. If there is no willingness to work on the ego clinging, the dharma has nothing to do with this person. Using the skilful means of the Buddha, one can then give advice to him or her. If they want to be beautiful, they should practise patience, if they want to be rich, they should develop generosity. One can expose the karmic law on the relative level, explaining that if you act in a positive way, you will have a positive result corresponding to this. In this way already a basis of positive karma is established. Conclusion Reflecting in this way about our situation and our goals, we reach a basic understanding of our situation as being very precious, very precarious, it is uncertain, full of suffering and determined by our own actions, decisions and state of mind. This is a summary of the ‘Four Thoughts’. Jamgon Kongtrul says that you have to practice these four thoughts with a lot of endurance and energy. In fact, the word in Tibetan for this is ‘ do rü’ . ‘Do’ means ‘rock’ or ‘stone’ and ‘rü’ means ‘rüpa’ , which is ‘bone’. This expression for endurance in practice is referring to the fact that when you have endurance, you sit so long until your bone touches the stone, just like in the case of Milarepa. He says that a little bit of this is however necessary in order to start one’s practice. Otherwise all the meditations of the main practice, which is mahamudra, will do nothing else but increase the eight worldly dharmas. It is due to the teachings on liberation that we become aware of the potential which lies dormant in our minds. The possibility to make good use of this potential begins to intrigue us. This means, just having heard about liberation and buddhahood as a possibility, it begins to attract us. Why not try this, why not go in this direction? This life is so short and it is full of suffering. There is nothing to loose if we try out the dharma. We contemplate again and again the present situation and the dharma becomes foremost in our mind. Then the difference of your personal situation and the dharma becomes really obvious. You see that the state of mind that is talked about in the dharma teachings and your present state of mind are not the same. And the more you get to know the dharma, the more obvious it becomes. This
14 is the suffering of a person contacting the dharma! It becomes very obvious how much one is stuck, you are told that there is another possibility, but you have not the means yet to live this. This can be a very disagreeable stage of transition before the dharma practice really starts to become effective. We begin to study more, and the teachings inspire us. At the same time we feel that we need help on the path which unfolds before our eyes. We look for a refuge and a teacher. We see that we cannot get out just by ourselves. We can make the first steps due to reading the books, but in order to really adapt the dharma to our situation, we need a teacher who is experienced. We develop confidence in Buddha, dharma, sangha, because this is really the source where the dharma comes from. This is the time when the mind turns towards the idea of taking refuge. One has looked around for any better teaching. If there are doubts, they should be clarified before one engages in too much practice, because their practice will be half hearted and it will not really have the full result. One will always be unstable. The basic practice of mindfulness, of working with the breath and so on, this will always do good. But before they are going into the Ngöndro, one should be careful to see if people are properly motivated and know what they are doing. D. Mindfulness Mindfulness on this first level is directed to the characteristics of our basic situation, which is the working basis of our existence. This includes body, breathing, sitting, hearing, the sense faculties. In a way it is a very physical starting point. In addition, our mindfulness is used for contemplation. It is used as a tool. Some people cannot contemplate at all. The mind cannot hold before its inner eye an object of contemplation. In this case one has to insist on 5 10 minutes every day of sitting practice, relaxing the mind and letting go. Then slowly within this not doing anything a mindfulness of the body and of the situation arises. Then this mindfulness is used to contemplate the four thoughts, linked to the question of what makes sense in this life. Later, we ask ourselves, ‘Where do all the complications come from?’ At this time we start investigating the emotions, ego clinging, karma and so on. Due to what we talked about before, the mind turns away from ego clinging, which you also call samsara. This is called renunciation and it is based on the mindfulness of body and speech and their actions. It is the very basic Hinayana mindfulness of being aware of what you do and refraining from negative actions. To refrain from a negative action, we have to be aware of what we are doing. If we are not mindful, there’s no way we can refrain from acting negatively. For this you have to develop at least a basic mindfulness of body and speech. You have to be present in the situation. If one does not have this naturally, one needs to develop this in the sitting practice. One has to develop already at this stage some discriminating wisdom in order to understand which action is a harmful one, that has to be abandoned and which one has to be cultivated. With this kind of basic renunciation and mindfulness we turn away from all actions which entangle us with samsara, those which cause suffering and those which make no sense with regard to liberation, which means that it is actually also important to turn away from useless actions, which are neither harmful nor beneficial. Wishes and general business become less. This is the business of always being active in samsara to improve one’s situation. One has to construct a house, one has to make the garden, one has to earn the money, one has to take care of one’s friends, then the telephone calls in between; you read the newspaper when there is a moment of time and listen the radio when there is the dish washing to do. This is the general business of our situation. And as the mind becomes settled on this first level and directed towards the dharma, you get less interested in those kinds of distractions. We turn towards positive activity.
15 We begin to take care about what and how to speak and we look for situations where we do not agitate the mind even more. This leads to what Longchenpa emphasises very much for the first dharma, ‘life in seclusion’. Here it is rather a life in relative seclusion, because there is indeed physical seclusion or isolation, but here ‘relative’ means to be less agitated than before. You can live a life in the same circumstances as before but which is less agitated, a life in relative seclusion. A person who does their normal work and takes care of the children without engaging in further complicated activity is a person who is leading a life of relative seclusion, of relative retreat. This is the basis for a mind which is directed towards the dharma in a stable way. I was very surprised, how much Longchenpa emphasises for the first dharma the need to live quietly. He encourages the practitioner, the one who wants to turn the mind towards the dharma to live in the forest for the rest of his life. He goes that far! This is if you want to reach enlightenment quickly. The moment you have understood, cut with all attachments and go where you have to go in order to practice the dharma. But one can be very agitated within a retreat and in this way one is not in a state of relative seclusion. One is in relative agitation. Whereas someone leading an ordinary life can be very stable and not agitated. At this point more and more actions arise from mindfulness and merit is accumulated. This means that one is mindful of the motivation of one’s actions and mindful of their character. These kinds of mindful actions are the cause of merit. We stop carrying out mindless actions, which do not have any merit at all. This is the path of accumulation , which is the first path of the different mahamudra paths, where you accumulate the causes of understanding later on. It becomes obvious, that all actions are governed by mind and are influenced by emotions. This is not something which is obvious for the beginner! We look for a path to become free from the emotional prison and to make better use of the mind. This is the result of investigating the situation. The first dharma—‘Turning one’s mind to the Dharma’—is basically Hinayana, since we are mostly concerned with ourselves. The analysis of our life situation, contemplation of liberation, can however be accompanied by reflections on the suffering of others and the possibilities of benefiting them, which are already the entry to the Mahayana. When Gendün Rinpoche taught, he always, right from the beginning, pointed out the suffering of others. We should contemplate even before taking refuge that our life could not only be of better benefit for ourselves, but also for others. The basic practice here is mindfulness of our physical situation, the so called mindfulness of the body . Being in touch with our basic situation, developing some stability, not letting the mind wander off into dream worlds, but using it to see what is and what happens.
The Second Dharma
A. Taking refuge Due to contemplating the qualities of the Three Jewels and the trust, which is inspired by meeting with teachers of the dharma, the wish to really take refuge arises in us. Taking refuge marks the entry point into the second dharma—following the dharma as the path. That is, you decide to take the dharma as the path and the refuge is the first practice on it. Then as you know,
16 you are told to study, to reflect and to practice the teaching. The refuge in itself is a complete practice. If we consider the refuge just as a preliminary practice, we don’t understand what it is, because all the different aspects of what will follow as a so called ‘main practice’ is nothing else but the refuge in another form. Any practice we do is just an expression of our confidence, that this practice will purify our own mind and help sentient beings. You place your confidence in what is the path, what is the teaching of the lama. If we take the mala and count manis it is nothing else but taking refuge. We take refuge in the mani. If you do trülkhor it is nothing else but taking refuge. The six yogas are nothing else but taking refuge in the lama. The melting of the lama into us in the guru yoga is just another way of receiving refuge. The taking of vows, commitments and samayas is just another way of confirming what one has already done at the refuge, to give body, speech and mind to the Three Jewels and the lama. So any practice of the dharma is entirely the practice of refuge. If we are able to completely open our mind, the simple practice of taking refuge would already be enough. It is the fact that we are not able to completely open our mind just by taking refuge in this way and thinking of the lama, that we have to use many other methods in order to try to open our mind a little bit more and work on ourselves through our blockages. All these different methods lead to the same effect of opening one’s mind. There was a sincere moment, many sincere moments of giving oneself to the three jewels, but in between we always kind of take back ourselves. Because of this it has to be repeated again and again. Only then are we able to receive the blessing, which enables us to see what is really there. Then the refuge begins to penetrate our whole life, there is not a moment where we are separated from the practice. It is actually a very crucial point. The refuge should not only be there for the moments when we are in difficulties, or when we receive something nice from the lama, which makes us feel confident, because our ego is respected. But any situation, as simple as it might be, all the seemingly neutral situations should also be pervaded by the refuge, by the same openness of mind. B. Developing bodhicitta In order to help us to let go further, there are all the teachings on developing an altruistic motivation. This is then the next practice of the path. Here, we actually enter the Mahayana path. It is not only the question of one’s personal liberation, which is the initial reason for taking refuge. Then we learn to take refuge for all beings so that they can reach enlightenment, which turns into the development of relative bodhicitta. We want to achieve buddhahood for all sentient beings. It doesn’t even matter who arrives first. This is called the bodhicitta of aspiration . At this point you can recite the refuge prayer and nurture the bodhicitta of aspiration for example, by doing the wishing prayer of Samantabhadra as well as other wishing prayers and further practices which engender this aspiration. So this is one of the more simple practices. In fact, the act of praying is already the bodhicitta of application . The recitation of prayers, or the formulating of these wishes in one’s mind, in one’s own words, is already putting the aspiration into practice. There is no need to look for any other activity in order to be able to finally perform the bodhicitta. Then as part of this second step, other Mahayana practices like the lodjong training and the seven branch prayers are employed. If the lodjong is taken seriously it completely transforms the whole life. It is turning upside down one’s priorities. Where one was looking for one’s own safety, for one’s own good health, for one’s own possessions, respect, and so on, one is now
17 looking for the benefit of others. One doesn’t care about being blamed, one doesn’t think about getting ill. It is a complete reversal of one’s tendencies. This is what should mark actually the entering into the dharma. If it doesn’t take place, one should consider that one has not completely entered the dharma. This is the guideline to look at. The practices help us to change in this way. The seven branch prayer includes practices of prostrations, offering and confession, rejoicing in the good deeds of others, asking for dharma teachings. These are all Mahayana practices which are necessary in order to accumulate merit and to come to an understanding. Without paying respect, we will get stuck with our own importance. And without confessing our negativity we will not see the extent of what needs to be purified. We won’t apply the means for purification. Then we need the teaching on meditation in order to learn how to meditate. The basic practice here can be just silent meditation. It can be the tonglen meditation or meditation on the thought processes, mindfulness of the general states of the mind, the impermanence of thoughts and states of mind, as we saw in the first dharma.
C. The Ngöndro a) Refuge and Dorje Sempa This is also the point where one can start with the four ngöndro practices, the specific preliminaries. First there is the refuge and bodhicitta, which is the key to all the rest. Then you have Dorje Sempa, which is putting the four forces of purification into practice on the level of the Vajrayana. b) The four forces of purification These four forces of purification are actually not limited to the Vajrayana. This is something which everyone in the world should practice. There is no limit to this practice, and it is not confined to people who have entered the dharma and formally taken refuge. These four forces you should explain also to people who are just looking for a way to get clear, to get out of their difficulties. To them you will give the four forces in terms which are not dharma terms. Concerning the force of support, you have to explain to them that in order to get completely purified, one needs to take a support of something which is beyond the personal ego, beyond one’s dualistic mind and turn to something which can be called a higher force or the true nature of oneself. This many people understand. If you get to know the programme of the ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ or the ‘Narcotics Anonymous’, you will see that this is part of their Twelve Step programme. You sit down and write down all the times when you have hurt someone. You go through your whole life. On the one side you write down what you have done and on the other side you write down all the patterns, which gave rise to this kind of action. This is a very important step in the process of someone getting out of his addiction. To see how much he was part of the addiction and how much he was perpetuating this with his own actions. With this inventory one goes to another person and confesses, so to speak, to a human person all one’s faults. This person just listens and may give some advice after the person has finished talking, but not necessarily. It is basically just the process of listening to the other person and of keeping everything to oneself. In this Twelve Step programme, the force of support, is simply what they call ‘the higher power’. There is the confession, which is the first force, then one decides to refrain from the kinds of acts which have been confessed, but only for one day, for 24 hours after each confession. The remedy
18 is, in this case, talking about it, admitting it, going through the process of writing the inventory. So there are all of the four forces present. This explains also, why this program is one of the most effective programs of helping people with very severe problems. Because we are all addicted to our own ideas, and completely clouded by our veils, the person entering the dharma has to do the same thing. There is no way of getting around it. We may not have taken the bottle or the needle in the case of heroin, which certainly makes a lot of difference for the course of our life, but inwardly we are just as addicted as anyone else. To work on it, we have to remove the veils of arrogance, which make us not want to see our own defects. Taking refuge and then confessing and purifying through the practice of Dorje Sempa is the supreme method to do this, because not only do you do this by your own effort on a very relative level, but at the same time you tune in already to the final point of your practice. There is Dorje Sempa representing your own buddha nature, which manifests above your head as the lama, who is the source of the nectar of bodhicitta flowing through us. This is supreme, because not only do you see your faults, but at the same time you see your true nature. There is not so much danger of getting hooked into all the negativities, which you see in yourself, but there is always at the end the dissolution of Dorje Sempa into yourself. In this way, one finishes off all that one has seen during the session in a state of complete relaxation and everything is purified at this time. Being a practice which is blessed by the buddhas this is very, very powerful. c) Mandala By doing the mandala offerings of body, speech and mind you give yourself completely on all levels. You do actually the same as during the refuge, only the part of offering becomes very extensive. Here one offers all one’s clingings as an expression of bodhisattva activity. As an outcome of the mandala offerings one should not be attached anymore to oneself, to one’s body, to one’s health, to one’s time, to one’s possessions … and as occasions arise where one can help others, one just gives, because one has already given. All this has already been offered to the three jewels, it does not belong to us any more. It was just that all this energy were stored within us, you can say, because the Three Jewels have no need for all this. But as the need arises through the presence of a situation which calls for it, then these things, this energy, are available and can now be handed out. It’s as if you open a big storehouse, and people who need it can come and they receive exactly what they need. This body does not belong to us anymore, this voice does not belong to us anymore, our mind with all that it knows or remembers, understands or fears, all this does not belong to us anymore. They have become tools of the Three Jewels through our repeated offering. d) Guru Yoga Then we become ready for the next step, the guru yoga. This is another form of transcending the limitations of the ego. First we transcend the ego limits by developing compassion towards our fellow beings. Then we do the same by developing devotion to our root lama, who is higher then us, who is the reference point for the ultimate sphere.
D. Accumulating merit and wisdom—the practice of the six paramitas The essence of the second dharma, following the dharma as the path, consists in practising the six paramitas in order to gather the accumulation of merit and wisdom. This is of course a very extensive subject, but in fact every little action can become the practice of the six paramitas. For example when you wash dishes, the time, the energy you give to washing dishes for the family or friends is an act of generosity. The fact that you take care not to break them and that you don’t do anything negative during this time, is the discipline of avoiding harmful actions. Doing this to benefit others makes it already a positive action. So this is the practice of discipline. Of course it
19 also needs patience to continue with the dish washing until the work is finished, you don’t leave it half washed. If you do it joyfully, wholeheartedly in order to help the family or the group this is the joyful perserverance. If you do it mindfully, in a relaxed way, just being there, not wandering off in daydreams, but doing it being aware of what needs to be done and based on the motivation to help all beings no matter what they need until they reach enlightenment, then this is meditative stability. On top of this, when at the same time, emotions arise you relax, or you think that the cleaning of your plate is the purification of your own mind, or if you are aware that all this is an illusory act, all this contributes to develop the aspect of wisdom. No matter what act in life you take, if the motivation is there and your mindfulness present, this becomes an act of practising the six paramitas. Much more so when you are in formal practice and on top of this, there is awareness. But much less so when you are in formal practice and when you are not aware of what you are doing. If one is practising carelessly, then this is not a great accumulation of merit and wisdom. That’s why the bodhisattva path is not necessarily bound to take place in retreat. If one has the motivation and develops in this way, there is the possibility to practise the six paramitas in every situation of life without exception. But to make this possible one has to train one’s mind. One has to find out whether one can keep this state of mind in every day life or whether one needs periods of settling the mind every day in the morning and in the evening, or if one needs periods of short retreats to get deeper into the understanding of how the dharma works, and in which way this transfer to everyday activity can be done. But basically it is possible to go the whole path of a bodhisattva in every day life. However it is very difficult to develop wisdom without sitting meditation and some teachers even say it’s impossible. The reason for this are the subtle dualistic patterns, like the observer always trying to assure oneself, the habits of keeping up an identity, which are very difficult to dissolve in normal activity. If you really want to go so far as to cut through the root of ego clinging, of samsara, one comes to the point where one needs to admit, that sitting practice is of great importance. When the Buddha was teaching lay disciples he only taught them the first three or four paramitas. The paramitas of stability and wisdom, the wisdom practices were more taught to the bikshus, those who had a lot of time for practice, although it seems that he also made exceptions and taught these deeper meditations on the wisdom, and the emptiness aspect also to some lay disciples. E. Mindfulness We are going to look now at what mindfulness is related to on the different levels. To sum up, on the level of the first dharma of Gampopa we had the basic mindfulness of one’s life situation; what we experience and what we feel, stabilising one’s mind with the body and sensations as they arise. The mindfulness is not only directed to the body, there is also the mindfulness of mind. Here on the level of the second dharma, as the teachings of the dharma are applied and studied, we understand the key message of the dharma, that the root of all suffering, the cause of samsara is clinging. Apart from all the classifications of mindfulness, the basic mindfulness, which one develops during the second dharma is the mindfulness of clinging . This clinging is discovered in more and more of our actions, in more and more of our mental states throughout the day, until one comes to the point of understanding that it is all pervasive. We see that ego clinging is the root of all negativity.
20 From this background the mindfulness of feelings , which is the second mindfulness of the traditional classification, means to become mindful of one’s grasping to life and every situation. As we sit in our basic sitting practice, we become aware of how we hook on to feelings. If there is a pleasant feeling arising in our mind we hook on to it. If there is an unpleasant feeling arising we want to get rid of it. We become aware of these more subtle forms of clinging, because we have reduced already the amount of manipulations in our lives to make it better, to have a better house etc. All this effort being withdrawn from the outer realm, we are more focused on the inner aspect of life, of improving our mental situation. This we improve through letting go, which is the main means of simplifying on the inner level. On the level of the second dharma, Gendün Rinpoche always emphasised the mindfulness of motivation , which is another key term. It is the basis for the fact that the whole second dharma of Gampopa can be practised in lay life, in a householder’s life. When lay people ask how they should practise, Rinpoche emphasised that they should be aware in every instant, of their motivation in every action. This is the only thing to do. Mindfulness of clinging is actually just the other side of the term. If you are mindful of your clinging, you are mindful of your motivation. If you are not clearly aware about your motivation, then you are clinging. As long as one has an ego centred motivation, one is clinging to some personal aims and when one is motivated by benefiting others, one can see that one has much more space in the mind. So the advice here is that in the beginning of each action we take refuge and develop bodhicitta. During the activity we are mindful with body, speech and mind. This means we are mindful of what we are actually doing, of the physical act, of what we are saying and of the state of mind which accompanies it. If we see that we stray off into negative activity, because of the mindfulness there is the possibility to correct it. Otherwise there is no path. If there is no mindfulness there is no possibility for correction. We are just carried away and afterwards we notice what we have done, which was contrary to our intentions. This means, if we practise the mindfulness of motivation, we need also the mindfulness of body, speech and mind, which provides a guarantee that we follow through with the motivation. In fact these two have to go together. Therefore it is rather difficult to practise only the mindfulness of the motivation without including basic sitting meditation, basic mindfulness practice to stabilise the mind. An unstable mind can have very good motivations, but will be unable to follow them through. This is the problem of many people who try out the dharma practice, because they do not find the means to develop any stability of mind. After the action we have the mindfulness of dedicating the activity. This is again mindfulness of the motivation. Mindfulness of the beginning is establishing the bodhicitta as a basis for our action and at the end it is the bodhicitta in the form of a dedication.
F. Renunciation The more we understand the mechanism of clinging, the more we develop a natural sense of renunciation for all the patterns of clinging and for all the objects triggering this clinging. This is just the outcome of seeing the tension in one’s mind. For example you are sitting, you are a little bit thirsty and there is the image of a nice glass of beer arising. If you get attached to it, it becomes so obvious how this image triggers further thoughts and further imaginations. The more one understands how objects trigger desire, which one then goes to fulfil by one’s actions, the
21 more one also sees that if one does not react, many of these desires just dissolve by themselves in the process of non acting. In this way one learns not to fall into the illusion just as easily as before. So in this way renunciation develops by the sheer fact of being mindful of clinging. There is nothing else to do. There is no need to cut through. It’s the wisdom of mindfulness arising which does the cutting through. The interest for things which are seen to be hollow of meaning just disappears by itself. Cutting through becomes necessary when strong patterns arise and when there is not the force of awareness, of mindfulness in the moment they appear. When you see that you fall again and again into the same pattern, you have to take a decision. Then one has to be mindful in order to follow through the decision. One has to be aware in the moment it arises, to remember one’s decision and to stop there. But normally you only have to look into this object which attracts us, to see how it is impermanent, how it is illusory, how much one will get entangled with different samsaric activities in order to get this thing. If one has the capacity to look at it in this way, one does not need to take radical decisions for all of one’s areas of life. G. Progression and development of the practice Gradually, we start to experience that samsara is happening within our own mind. We see that samsara is not an outer object. The problem is not with the people around us, but rather our reactions, the way we deal with the world. In this way the wisdom eye develops which is the eye looking inwards. Having realised that samsara is not outside, it’s our own state of mind we have to change. In this way the dharma is really entering into us. The wish for liberation becomes all the more strong, since we become aware of the great difference of the ego centred state and the truly open and compassionate mind. This comes through the practice of meditation. There are moments when we are relaxed in meditation and there are moments where we wonder, where has all this relaxation gone? Why does all this agitation come up now, where does all this clinging come from? The difference between these two states then becomes obvious. It is the mindfulness of clinging, which shows us the difference. We can identify clinging and tension now because we have experienced days of lesser clinging and tension. Before one starts to practice, one knows that there are different states of mind, but one cannot identify them. As a trained practitioner one should be able to know to what degree one is in tension. This makes the difference to someone who is completely untrained, who cannot even identify the amount of tension. If you go shopping in a supermarket, the practitioner should be able to see in one’s mind whether he is doing it in a tense way or in a relaxed way and to be able also to develop the relaxed way, to practise this actually. So as we understand this difference between the relaxed mind and the tense mind, the liberated mind and the samsaric mind, we begin to understand the qualities of the Three Jewels. We develop great respect for the enlightened ones and great joy in their activity, that they are present in our life, that the path is actually being shown. This joy and respect are key factors which are like the motor on the path. We have the example for our life in front of our eyes. It can be the lama, but it can be also the teachings which inspire us. Some people are very much inspired by human examples, some are inspired greatly by the teachings, by the texts. This depends on their personality. This inspiration and joy gives us the energy to practice. We dedicate ourselves fully with body, speech and mind to positive activity, without giving in to distraction for a moment. This is from Longchenpa and it is very, very important.
22 H. Meditation On this level of practice you start to completely let your mind open. But there are also times, like a period of transition, where you should practise shine with an object, you should practise mindfulness and try not to stray away. It is not always appropriate to completely open the mind without fixing. There should be a time where you develop the capacity of really staying with an object and coming back immediately. You go off and immediately come back to the breath, or the buddha statue or the visualisation, whatever it is. As this capacity is developed a little bit, the mindfulness of motivation and of clinging really becomes something which is present at every moment, because then, wherever your mind is, your mindfulness is also there, it sees the motivation behind the action. If you are completely distracted, you don’t have the chance of returning to your motivation and many times during the day you will not be aware of your emotions, of your basic state of mind. And then you will not be able to practise, to use the day as much as you could.
I. The path of accumulation and the path of junction So in the second dharma we are on the path of accumulation. It’s the time of active practice; one accumulates merit basically, with an understanding, prajña, already developing, but which has not yet touched the true nature of things. We are coming closer to an understanding of the true nature of things and of our mind, as we enter the path of junction, which will connect us with the actual seeing. In this path of junction we become less ignorant, we come to an understanding of the Four Noble Truths, with a good conceptual understanding and an understanding by experience which develops. Whatever you experience on the path of junction is still on the dualistic experience of ‘nyams’. Here all the four classic aspects of mindfulness are practised: body, feeling, mind and mental phenomena. These are the four mindfulnesses which are taught in the Sattipattana sutra. Our mindfulness here becomes more subtle and more relaxed. You are now able to sit and be aware of the basic situation and this creates a sense of well being, a sense of joy, of basic acceptance of the situation. It gives rise to the different shine experiences. All the shine experiences are part of the path of junction, but this starts already on the path of accumulation. Our mindfulness is subtle, because it is relaxed. A non relaxed mindfulness is always gross. It zooms into something, but as impermanence occurs, as mental events change, it has difficulties to let go. So this becomes more spacious and open. Because of this openness true mental stability develops. It is not a stability which blocks out things and becomes stable due to fixation, but it becomes stable because it is so open and cannot be shaken by anything whatsoever. It is a transparent stability, which is not refusing any of the sense impacts. You hear a sound, you hear someone screaming, you hear the cement mixer on the building site running all day long; it doesn’t disturb the mind because the mind doesn’t cling to this. The same with smells, you can have the most terrible smells passing by, or very pleasant smells, your mindfulness is such that you are aware and you let go, you touch and you let go. Your mind has no more need for this, you don’t need to investigate, you don’t have to name, you don’t have to label, because there is no need for this mindfulness to go further than just noticing and letting go. This is true stability. Here the five powers are developed. This is taken from the Dhagpo Targyen. In the chapter about the ‘Path of Junction’ you find the description of the five forces and five powers . The difference consists only in the degree of their stability. This is actually a description of what is needed in order to go on the path. You need confidence , which is the basic requisite. Then you need enthusiastic perserverance , which is also one of the paramitas. You need mindfulness and this is developed on this path and mindfulness leads into true stability—samadhi. The classical description
23 of the use of samadhi is to be able to investigate phenomena. We need samadhi which is like a magnifying lens to look through, to be able to investigate reality. It is like a big beam of light which is going into samsara and completely shows how the patterns of your own mind are working. This is a useful samadhi, because you can experience even the most subtle dharma teachings, it gives rise to understanding, and it develops your prajña. So samadhi is not an absorption which has any benefit by itself, one doesn’t dwell in absorption just because it is so nice. The samadhi of the buddhist practice is used to investigate reality and it will be the force which will make you transcend the prison of samsaric reality. It’s with the power of mind of developed samadhi that you can turn also the focus of mind, which enables you to look into the essence of an emotion and to look into the observer. You become aware of what is actually happening in the mind. You can see that there are times where the mind is not producing thoughts and that there are times where there are thoughts arising. You can see the gap between a thought and the next. You can see how the mind directs itself towards an object, how it identifies the object. All these descriptions of the different mind processes, all that you have described in the Abidharma, all this is due to the samadhi of the masters, who have applied samadhi to investigate reality. And then they described what they found. So this can be investigated by ourselves, if we develop sufficient mental stability. This second dharma is basically Mahayana dharma, but we are gathering already the conditions to enter deeper into the Vajrayana. The focus here is on relative bodhicitta, aspiration and application. This means that this whole first and second dharma of Gampopa is the ‘Path without Realisation’. Afterwards the path is based on realisation. The practice can be just silent meditation or it can be practised with beginners’ Vajrayana practises, but it lacks true real understanding of what it means. And it can all be practised in normal life. There was a question about touch and go , and of the practice of shine on the level of someone with a more subtle mindfulness. This comes from Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching on the Four Mindfulnesses. It is a very exact description of how one should use one’s mindfulness. When a thought arises in the mind, the simple fact of being aware of the thought is the touch. The rest is only letting go. There is no need to do more with the thought than to touch it. The term ‘thought’ stands also for emotions, sense perceptions, and so on. There is an arising in the dualistic mind, the observer perceives it and lets go. This is the shine meditation. The more subtle this touching becomes, the more subtle also your mindfulness becomes. When the touching is more heavy, it’s not only touching, it’s a grasping; you grasp the thought, you identify it, you make further concepts, trying to turn it around in your mental hand, where does it come from, where will it go, and so on. Then finally you decide to let it go, and then something else comes after which you grasp, and then you let go. This is heavy, artificial meditation. What Trungpa was pointing to is the subtleness of mindfulness, being there, knowing what’s happening and letting go. There is always a relaxation immediately, as if the observer is active for a moment and then dissolves again. He arises again as something comes up in the mind and dissolves again. Later on this touch and go stops, this is not a practice to continue forever. It becomes automatic. There is no more letting go, because there is no more a feeling of really touching. It is just being aware, it’s just a stream of mind in the openness of the sky. There is no more a feeling of the substantiality of the thought. As long as there is the concept of touch, you have the idea connected to the thought as being something, as if you could touch it. As thoughts arise in their true illusory nature, there is no feeling anymore of mindfulness touching an object. There is nothing to be touched, just like clouds cannot be touched. In this way, the touch and go
24 process becomes much more natural and spontaneous, and there is only the need for this touch and go, when things become heavy in your mind, when you are not relaxed any more. Letting go—in the beginning of the meditation the grasping is the bigger part of the session and the letting go is very, very small. It’s usually just that when something else is superposing itself on the previous thought that one lets go of the one and then fixes on the next. But as the letting go becomes more apparent in your practice, you can forget about the touch. You can let yourself completely go to the letting go. Letting go has all the answers. In the yidam practice, when the visualisation appears it’s like the touch, it is completely there and then it dissolves again, because there is no clinging. The Practice of mindfulness is being mindful from instant to instant. Third Dharma I will start now with the third dharma. ‘ How does the path purify our confusion ?’ The previous path has led us to the full understanding that confusion is present in our mind. Before, we were not so aware of this, now, we see our ignorance, our confusion and we struggle with it. Confusion means emotions. Confusion means not understanding the teachings. One feels limited with any kind of dharma practice: one tries, but one cannot really get the full taste of it. It means all these kinds of limitations. We have started already with the practice of relative bodhicitta in the previous dharma and we continue with this. We remain in this for the whole path: whenever there is not ultimate bodhicitta, we will always continue with the practice of relative bodhicitta. It will not be mentioned specifically, but it will always be there. The traditional practice of wishing prayers, compassion, the contemplation of the four limitless ones, joyful activity for the benefit of others and applying antidotes to the emotions, all this is on the level of Mahayana, which leads to a weakening of our ego centredness and a true accumulation of positive energy which is called merit. If you look into each of these practices, you can see, that if you do them from your heart, they have an effect on your sense of self. You don’t cling so much to the idea of others as well. It could be that one falls into the mistake of taking others as being really existing. The clinging to a self is transported to the others in a way. So there always has to be a lightness in this compassionate activity, not falling into the extreme of, for example, starting to cry and weep and pull one’s hair out because of the suffering of all sentient beings. This kind of overreaction of what some people call compassionis actually just a state of clinging. One feels so real, one feels so truly compassionate, because one is aware of the suffering of others. The suffering of others is so real, that one has no distance, one has actually no freedom in seeing the suffering of others. This is not the way a bodhisattva reacts to the suffering of others. One can be completely shocked to see the suffering of others, but then one should tune in to what is called the ultimate bodhicitta, or to remember at least the teachings on the illusory nature of all phenomena and of all beings. Until now, the basic work was to accumulate merit. As we have seen before in teachings, merit means positive energy due to actions which are not ego centred. When this energy accumulates,
25 then wisdom comes. It is like a barrel which has energy like a liquid inside and every meritorious action adds to it. The moment when the barrel overflows is the moment when there is enough of this positive energy for the first moment of insight to occur. Gendün Rinpoche said that this is an absolute law. There is no other way it can happen. If you do virtuous activity, which is by definition not for your own benefit, then this will happen, because each one of these non selfish acts weakens the ego clinging. If you continue with these non selfish acts, the ego clinging will be so much weakened that at some point, for an instant, it will give way to insight. It will give way for the non ego dimension to shine through. This is a ‘must be’ process, there is no other way. To understand how merit leads to wisdom is to understand properly what merit is. Merit means non selfish actions, activity of body, speech and mind, weakening the ego clinging. Because it is non selfish it leads to the realisation of non self.
A. The Path of Seeing In the third dharma, ultimate bodhicitta, the understanding of emptiness, plays the most important role. This is what changes the practice. From now on all one’s practice is based on the understanding of emptiness, which is the nature of mind. This understanding might at first be shaky. We come now to the path of transition, which is called the ‘path of seeing’ . Seeing the truth of non self, complete realisation of emptiness leads to a full understanding of the four noble truths. This path of seeing is described in different ways. One version is that it is just one moment, one samadhi of absorption, where one goes through understanding the four noble truths in a successive way, in successive different absorptions. This is one of the classical ways of describing the path of seeing, as if it happened in one single session. Another way of describing the path of seeing is the moment of fully understanding the nature of reality, for the first time. Afterwards, when coming out of this samadhi, the ‘ path of meditation’ starts. Then there is an explanation, that the path of seeing is the whole period of time, which lasts from the first shimmering through of lhaktong, of mahamudra in our practice, until we have cut the doubts about the nature of mind, until we are firmly established on the first bhumi. There can be actually years of practice on the path of seeing, according to this instruction. But however you take it, it’s only words. The moment you have cut through the roots of your doubts about the nature of reality, this is when you have completed the path of seeing. The point to arrive at is to be completely sure about your mind. Even if you don’t live in this certainty at all times, because you fall back into duality, concerning the basic nature of mind, you have no more questions. Even if the lama tells you this is not the nature of mind, you are wrong, your own understanding is so strong that you will not be confused, even if the teacher tells you with different instructions, the opposite of what you were saying. This is how strong you have to be, that the understanding of the nature of mind withstands even the most difficult test. Then you know that the path of seeing has been completed.
B. The Four Noble Truths There would be a lot that could be said about the full understanding of the Four Noble Truths. I don’t think I’m capable of explaining all this. First of all the traditional teachings are very technical and then it is quite presumptuous to say one has a full understanding of the Four Noble Truths. To summarise, if you understand the noble truth of suffering , it means that you understand the whole extent of how suffering is present in the mind in the actual situation, which is the first
26 noble truth. To fully understand the causes of suffering means to fully understand karma. Now, only a buddha can fully understand this. But at the moment you understand the four noble truths, you understand, that wherever there is clinging there is suffering. Wherever there is no clinging there is no suffering. So clinging as cause of suffering subsumes all that can be said about karma. Wherever there is clinging to duality there is suffering, where there is no duality, there is no suffering. If you understand this key point to the full extent, this can also be called a full understanding of the second noble truth. To understand the third one, the noble truth of liberation , means to understand the nature of mind, the nature of emptiness. For this it only needs one time of completely entering into it. From this entering into it arises then afterwards, the understanding, that it could never be anything else. This truth of emptiness could never be different under different circumstances. There is a complete knowledge that nothing in this could be changed, that for all sentient beings, the nature of emptiness, the nature of their mind will be the same. It cannot be any different. It is this complete certainty arising in the mind, that there is not different kinds of emptiness. If this understanding becomes completely sure in your mind, you know you have understood the third noble truth of liberation. You see that in this state there is no more operation of karma, there is no more dualistic activity, there is no more suffering, there is complete liberation of all complications, conceptualisation and so on. The body does not bind the mind any more, the mind itself does not exist, after the actual experience there is a complete comprehension and you understand all the different aspects. Then the understanding of the noble truth of the path , which is the fourth one, is something which is also difficult to gather in its whole extent, but easier to understand in its essence. In order to understand all the means of the path and also, how the whole path to buddhahood works, this means you have to have reached buddhahood. So only a buddha understands the fourth noble truth completely. But again, if you have understood what letting go means then you have understood the path. From that moment on, you know that every method of the dharma path is a means of letting go. This can be called an understanding of the fourth noble truth. C. The Seven Branches of Enlightenment Traditionally one gathers on this path of seeing what is called ‘ the seven branches of enlightenment’ : true mindfulness, true intelligence, true perseverance, true joy, true skill or flexibility, true samadhi and true equanimity. All these qualities become ‘true’ qualities, because they are now connected to insight. Otherwise they would not be true qualities. They are only true, when they are purified from the illusion that one exists as a real self. These branches of enlightenment, as with all the other qualities of the mind which are discovered in ourselves, are not something to be trained. Training you can only do in the first dharmas. From now on you have to rely on the spontaneous qualities of your mind and practice. This allows the process of bringing forth these qualities to happen. D. Practice a) General From the moment of touching the nature of mind, the only practice is to take it as a reference point for one’s practice and to give it higher priority than anything else. At this time you should not engage in all kinds of beneficial activity in order to increase your merit. From now on all your activity should be mixed with the understanding of insight. If you can give yourself the space to
27 let this insight happen in your mind this is the highest meritorious activity. From this point on, the bodhisattva does not consider accumulating merit as the thing to do, but he knows that the accumulation of merit now is done with just letting go to the ultimate state. If there is a proper understanding, with the insight being stabilised, one will again enter into outer activity. However, this is a very shaky phase. Usually as we go through this phase, we are first not sure if the insight will occur. We have some understanding, it dawns on us and we have to give a lot of time to our practice in order for the stability of this insight to happen. If we engage in too much activity at this point we lose the freshness of this experience and it cannot develop further. It is like a flower which you don’t give enough water. It cannot really come to a full blossoming. This is a time where one should definitely stay in retreat and continue. Here the paramitas develop their full power, since they are accompanied by an understanding of the emptiness of self and phenomena. Before this understanding is there, we cannot even talk of paramitas, because without the wisdom paramitas none of the other five paramitas are qualities which lead to liberation. Their practice without being connected to the wisdom aspect leads only to an accumulation of good karma, which leads to better circumstances within samsara but not to a liberation from it. It’s the wisdom aspect which transforms them into qualities which liberate us from cyclic existence. There is a process of purification taking place, which continues until buddhahood. b) antidotes In the ‘Dhagpo Targyen’, only at this point are the antidotes against emotion being introduced. This is because even when you have recognised the nature of mind, you cannot always apply this understanding all the time. When you are heavily involved in the emotions, you still have to apply the antidotes to avoid doing harmful actions. Sometimes the insight is far out of reach. You try to look into the emotion but due to karma there is just obscuration, so that the insight fails. Then you have to apply the antidote. You have to do the same practice as at the time where there was no understanding at all. In other times it is easier to apply the insight. Then you become more and more skilled and become able to apply the insight in more and more situations. That’s why it is said, that the need for antidotes gradually drops away.
The antidotes which are mentioned here (Longchenpa also mentions antidotes), are for desire: to contemplate the ugliness or the imperfections of the body or of the desired object. This is the traditional meditation on the different components of our body and also to imagine how it looks without the skin. For hatred it is the development of love and compassion and also an understanding of the one who is the object of our hatred, an understanding of the process of how he could act like this and also how we react like this. For ignorance traditionally it is said to study the twelve links of interdependent arising, to study karma and all kinds of dharma teachings. This seems to be quite theoretical, yet the study of the twelve links can actually be summarised to be a study of clinging and non clinging. The point is to understand where in the chain reaction I have the possibility to cut it. Can I cut already in the perception process; can I cut in the judgement which follows after; do I have to cut on the emotional level or at the action level which follows? There are different possibilities for us to cut through the chain reactions and depending on how we cut, this can be a complete cutting or a temporary cutting. The question is, ‘Where can I cut, to get out of my patterns?’ Then jealousy is rejoicing in the positive actions and the qualities of others, and for pride the antidote is exchanging others and oneself, putting others higher then oneself and giving them more importance. These antidotes are mentioned here in order that we do not forget that we should apply them, but they are practised already on earlier stages.
28 Ultimately, in the ‘Prajñaparamita’ there is no need for antidotes, since the nature of reality is without difference between samsara and nirvana. The ‘Prajñaparamita’ is also a key point in the presentation of the buddhist teaching. Usually for a śravaka there is an immense difference between samsara and nirvana. But in the Mahayana the teaching on emptiness is the main theme. The union of all the forms and appearances, of all the skandhas and emptiness is emphasised. Due to this, one cannot say that anything needs to be abandoned, because all has the nature of emptiness. The main point is to realise the nature of emptiness and not to work on abandoning some outer samsara. So in this case there is no need for an antidote, because since what seems to call for antidotes is nothing else but wisdom itself. What seems to be bad has the same nature as that which seems to be good. Wholesome and unwholesome have the same nature. The Prajñaparamita is beyond subject and object. You could say that there is even no need to transcend subject and object, because their nature is emptiness. For this reason there is no need to make anyone of these go away. There is no need to refuse entering the relative level of reality, because relative level of reality just means duality. But as duality is realised as being empty of essence, the relative level does not pose any problem whatsoever. Also the question of existence and non existence does not arise from the Prajñaparamita point of view, it’s beyond these extremes. c) General Mahayana vehicle and special Vajrayana vehicle First we work with antidotes as a kind of intellectual means of putting a stop to an emotion by encouraging its opposite. Then there is another way which is called the method of transformation . Here actually we work with the emotion itself and transform it into something else. There are two different vehicles for this. The first is called the general or causal Mahayana vehicle . This is a technical term which refers to the fact that this mahayana approach is practising the causes for buddhahood. It’s the point of view of saying: ‘I’m here, I’m obscured and buddhahood is there.’ The causes of buddhahood are such and such and I will practice them in order to arrive at buddhahood. In order to do this, one broadens one’s mind through deep and vast studies (Longchenpa), coming to an understanding of the interpenetration of relative and ultimate truth, of interdependent origination, form and emptiness etc., the six paramitas, the thirty seven factors of enlightenment, ethical and intellectual discipline. There is a whole form of study going along with the practice of the six paramitas of the bodhisattva. From this point of view the path to buddhahood is very long. It takes three kalpas to accomplish it. The fruit of the path is very far away for the beginner. And the whole path consists in using the causes to reach the goal. This is the general Mahayana teaching on which the Dhagpo Targyen is based. The Dhagpo Targyen contains very little explanation of what is called the special Vajrayana vehicle . Here one takes the result, buddhahood itself as the practice, practising the union of kyerim and dzogrim. Here one does not say, buddhahood is far away, but buddhahood is right here. It is the nature of myself and I will practise as a buddha. This is of course a slight trick, you could say, and a very special way of seeing the situation, because it’s quite daring to call a stupid unenlightened person a buddha. But it is completely true from the point of view of enlightenment. To make this risky journey of calling an ignorant person a buddha and practising in that way, to make it really into a path which leads to enlightenment, one needs safety belts. One needs the bounds of samaya. Otherwise one will not be able to stay clear of the ego on this dangerous path. One would end up in the big ego of rudra . Rudrahood means that the ego identifies with buddhahood and develops on top of this the powers of samadhi and so on. This ego would be much worse than before and much more dangerous. The instructions to avoid this are first of all the instructions on the relationship with a lama and on samaya and then the special instructions on kyerim and dzogrim. If they are practised in a
29 proper way, they will dissolve the ego centred tendencies of our mind. For this path we have, according to the dzogchen teaching, the outer and the inner tantras. For the outer tantras there is kriya-, charya- and yoga- tantras , which put emphasis on purification, giving up confusion and cultivating awareness. The practice of a divinity is seen as an antidote for impurity. This means, that in the outer tantras there is still a trace of seeing yourself as being impure. The outer tantras are working with the buddha aspect being present either in front of you or above your head and only at the end of the practice it melts into you and you yourself dissolve with this. You don’t visualise yourself all the time as the deity. This changes already with the yoga tantra, where you start to practice yourself being the deity, but the deity above or in front, which represents the true buddha is paid more attention to in the practice. As oneself is seen as impure, these practices include also rituals of purification, of respecting certain rules, not eating meat or drinking alcohol for example, in order to maintain the sense of a basic purity. From the point of view of the inner tantra this would be called an artificial purity. We don’t become more pure just because we don’t eat meat. But it is true, we do avoid negative actions through this, that’s why it is a good thing to do, but it is not really valid from the ultimate view. So the lower tantras give a possibility of gradually approaching this vision of the fruit already being present. The inner tantras are much more radical, as the practice starts out already from the point of view of complete purity. There is nothing which is left ordinary. The universe, oneself and all beings are seen as completely pure in body, speech and mind. The approach of Gendün Rinpoche is that the different classes of tantra are not seen as being separate vehicles. Each one does the practices which are taught according to his own understanding. Rinpoche preferred actually during the retreat, after the first year of introduction, that you are introduced to the anuttara yoga tantra, which is the highest tantra, and from the vast point of view of the anuttara yoga tantra, you can safely practice the lower tantras without clinging to these rules and regulations, as these can make your mind blocked and become too narrow. Originally this seems to have been different. There seems to have been a progression from lower tantras to higher tantras as you move along the path. But nowadays it is almost the opposite, you start with the highest tantras, because it is the easiest to practice, and then you go to the lower ones, which are more difficult. So in the inner tantras you have the maha-, anu-, and atiyoga tantras . According to the explanations, in the mahayoga tantra the emphasis is on the kyerim phase and on the purity of the universe. The kyerim consists very much on the visualisation of palaces, surroundings and so on. In the anuttarayoga tantra the emphasis is placed on visualising one’s own body as the body of the deity with the dzogrim practices of tsa, lung, and tigle. In the atiyoga emphasis is put on the mind as the great perfection of everything naturally being completely perfect in its own right from times without beginning. This is the dzogchen practice. The way the teaching is presented in our transmission is a combination of these three. You practice the complete purity of the universe as well as of the body and of the mind. There is nothing to be corrected as such in the mind, there is the application of the tsa, lung, tigle practices concerning the body and the visualisation of the body in the union of kyerim and dzogrim. The trap which could happen in kyerim is the visualisation as being something substantial and really existent. By teaching the instantaneous way of visualising, Gendün Rinpoche helped us to avoid falling into this trap. We always instantly let go of the object appearing in the mind which could be an object of attachment, of solid identification. By letting go of it, letting it appear and then dissolve again, this is the practice of the union of kyerim and dzogrim, which teaches us about the nature of thoughts and emotions arising in the mind as being of the same nature as our kyerim visualisation. In this way, impurities, thoughts, emotions
30 and veils themselves become the path. All appearances are transcended into primordial awareness, they are union of method and wisdom, by nature illusory, the empty play of mind, just like images in a mirror. The key point here is to develop the pure vision , which is the vision of a buddha, who has realised that the nature of everything is emptiness and for this reason nothing needs to be changed. One’s own body is the deity, one’s speech is the mantra, and one’s mind is the awareness of the deity, the whole world is the pure land. The five emotions are the five aspects of primordial awareness, the five aggregates are the five dhyani buddhas, the five elements are the five consorts. In this way there is a teaching for every aspect of reality, which we might cling to as being impure and its pure aspect is being shown. It is a teaching which leads us from our impure vision to pure vision. This is a radically different approach than for example the śravaka approach, where skandhas are seen as something impure which one has to get rid of. The idea of attaining nirvana there is exactly putting an end to the process of skandha reproduction from one cycle to the next cycle of life. In the tantra the process of the formation of skandhas is transformed into seeing their true nature. Then the clinging to them also stops and there is no need to take on rebirth, except through the wishes we make as a bodhisattva. The definition of kyerim is the union of manifestation and emptiness, dzogrim is defined as the union of emptiness and awareness. Now, this is a play with words. This is only to say that if you take emptiness as an object then the union of emptiness and awareness is the dzogrim, but there is no further thing to add to emptiness. Awareness is already emptiness, emptiness is already awareness. The same goes for appearance. Appearance is already emptiness, and emptiness is already appearance. But for the sake of explanation, kyerim and dzogrim are described like this in the teachings. d) Mindfulness Mindfulness on the third level of purifying our confusion is remembering the true nature in whatever one is doing or experiencing. This is what truly purifies. Letting go already of whatever arises in the mind, in what way you let go, is always already purifying. But to see the true nature of whatever arises enables you to purify on a deeper level. You cut through a basic pattern of clinging, not just through one little thing which you let go of and in the next moment arises the same clinging, but knowing the illusory nature of the thing which was there before, makes it much easier to see the true nature of the next thing which arises. You see the illusory nature of a similar event in the mind when it arises again. For example if we have anger, sometimes we manage to let go of the anger. In this way if we haven’t acted on it, we have purified or we have at least let go of this moment of anger. If we let go rather quickly, we can say that this moment of anger has matured in our mind as a karma and by not acting on it, has been purified. However, when you perceive at one given moment in your practice the illusory nature of anger, the empty nature of anger, this will leave a strong impact in your mind, not only at the time of whenever you have realised this and purified this anger but the next time it arises, it will be so much more easy to understand the illusory nature of this anger. Something has happened concerning the root clinging to this emotion. You can spread this understanding to other emotions also. It has to happen at some point for the first time, it is a little difficult to get there, but when it has happened it enables you to go further. It can spread out to all similar patterns. This is a really very effective way of purifying your mental states.
31 At this level, as we have seen in the outer and inner tantras, where we are working with kyerim and dzogrim, whatever arises is the kyerim. This means from the point of view of mindfulness, if we don’t use a deity practice, our normal thought process is the kyerim. There is no need to search for anything else. This is the explanation on the Hinayana/Mahayana level, where we don’t use the visualisation practices of the tantras. There the kyerim is whatever arises in the mind no matter what arises. Its natural dissolution is the dzogrim. You can say that impermanence is the dzogrim. To understand this leads you to the same understanding as the tantric practices. The tantric practices help you to see this through the process of creating a visualisation and its dissolution. It is exactly the same what happens with your thoughts and emotions. So you make the transfer of what you experienced while using the visualisation, to your thoughts. It is easier to recognise the way things happen, when you let something appear artificially in the mind and dissolve it again. It becomes much more clear. So to sum up, when you are not practising with the Vajrayana methods but you have just the background of the mahamudra teachings, then whatever arises is kyerim and whatever dissolves is dzogrim. Since everything arises and dissolves in the same time, kyerim and dzogrim are practised as a unity with whatever appears spontaneously in the mind. Mindfulness is needed at this point, when appearances due to momentary veils are grasped at as real. This is pointing to the fact that being aware of the simultaneous arising and dissolving of our thoughts is usually not what we experience. There are what is called the transitory, momentary veils, which can be so heavy that they last all our life. But from the point of view of the practice, they only exist from moment to moment. It is our own choice, if in the next moment they are there or not. It depends on our state of relaxation. Mindfulness is creating a link. When we grasp at appearances as being real, then we need a mindfulness to bring us back to the remembering of their true, illusory nature. That’s where mindfulness is needed, otherwise you would just practice in awareness. So, mindfulness here means to remember the illusory nature, thus letting go. At this level mindfulness as such is finished. Mindfulness is like a tool to bring us back into what really is. Whenever we are not in awareness, in ‘yeshe’, we are in mindfulness. This is a very important point for our practice as we like to think of shine, lhaktong and mahamudra as being completely different states of practice. But as we have seen repeatedly in the explanation of different practices, whenever we are not in the mahamudra awareness, we are by definition in the dualistic state, which is shine in our practice. There is no need to be averse to saying: ‘I’m practising shine’. Most of the time we are practising shine. And the single moments when we are not in duality, this is the mahamudra. The real shine practice is not cultivating concentration, but it is cultivating an open state of mind which is leading to mahamudra. So we should stop making a difference between shine and mahamudra. Shine is actually just a practice which guides us back to the mahamudra state, which is the original state of mind. It is different from the preliminary shine, which is an artificial state of producing calm in your mind. The shine we are talking about here is the mahamudra shine of a natural calm with a relaxed observer, who is still there but we do not worry about it. We do not have to chase it away. He is not an enemy. As long as you consider it as an enemy, you will never be able to see the other shore. The observer is simply accepted and the less we care about it the easier it disappears by itself. So this is not the heavy handed shine mindfulness of the beginning. It is imbued with the transparence of the kyerim—non substantiality. This is where the kyerim helps us, making the shine lighter. The visualisation of the transparent deities, mantras, light rays going out, should create a sense of lightness, a sense of transparency. This feeling of the transparent nature of mental events is then transferred to the times of practice where we are not visualising. There is no effort but to relax, when clinging arises.
32 Here the important word is the term ‘effort’. Trungpa even mentions the mindfulness of effort. We cannot go on the path without effort. First we have to really put a great amount of effort to disciplining our mind; to get our mind together; to sit down to do the practice; take refuge. We have to make strong efforts to bring the mind back to the practice whenever it goes away. But here at this stage the mindfulness needs very, very little effort. It is just the effort of having your priorities clear in mind. Relaxation is your first priority and this enables you to drop the priority of clinging to whatever fascinating thoughts are arising in your mind. In ordinary life we had different priorities, the fascination was what interested us the most and relaxation came only when we were tired. Now even if we are not tired the relaxation is utmost. This is the work of mindfulness, to always bring us out of the pattern of clinging to fascinating objects, to relaxation. The effort here is approaching non effort, spontaneous practice. But it is not spontaneous yet. Sometimes there is a resistance to relax. We do not enjoy relaxing so much yet because we do not have the full taste of the relaxed mind. Something is still fascinating for us in the thought process. This fascination is cut through by the mindfulness of effort, coming back to the relaxed state of mind. This is not the effort of fighting the observer, trying to subdue it or drive it away, to forget it willfully and so on. This will not work. We just consider the observer as a thought and just as with any other thought, we are not fascinated by the observer. We just drop it. We just drop the thought together with the fascination. Nothing is paid any special attention, nothing is rejected. In this way the observer does not have a hold. It has to be reinforced in order to survive. If the observer is reinforced by our paying attention to it, it will always be there. It will keep watch day and night. If it does not get reinforced, it will dissolve on its own. As a support for our practice of mindfulness, we use in retreat the sadhanas of the yidam practices with their visualisations, mantra recitations and samadhi. This is referring to body, speech and mind. Then there are also the methods of the six yogas together with the teachings on view, meditation and action, including ground, path and fruit of mahamudra and dzogchen. Now this is a condensation of the different explanations which were given by Urgyen Tulku on this matter and also by Longchenpa. We have already talked about the yidam practices, where the kyerim phase is predominant. In the six yogas the emphasis has shifted. There is just a little bit of kyerim in the introduction, and a lot of dzogrim, the emphasis being on the development of the awareness state. In this way the six yogas are considered as a dzogrim practice. You also have thoughts, because you have the natural arising of thoughts as in any practice, the emphasis is on realising their empty nature. This practice of understanding the true nature of mind is not possible if you do not have the background for your practice, with proper instructions on the view, meditation and action of the mahamudra, as they are given, for example, in the ngedön gyamtso and the dzogchen teachings. The mindfulness here is to remember the teaching . When we are lost in practice, when we don’t know what to do, this is mindfulness which goes over the teachings and recollects them. This is like an anchor for our practice. It is easy to get lost in the practice, because there is no real reference point. So the pointing out instructions of our lama in our memory become the reference point. With this we regain confidence: ‘Oh, yes, it is really just like he said’. For a moment we feel completely certain, that there is nothing to do, but the next moment or the next session we are not sure any more: ‘Oh, I should do something. I should do some bumchens, some visualisation or some mantras, I have to pray to the lama, what else can I do? My practice is not working.’ We have all these worries in our mind. At this point we have to remember the mahamudra teachings to bring us back into the certainty of what the real meditation is, and in between the sessions, the
33 real action. These are the supreme teachings of mahamudra and dzogchen, which give us the proper outlook, because it is these teachings, including also madyamika, which guide us to buddhahood. With these tools in our hands, ego clinging has no chance, it dissolves in a process of practice quite naturally, but not forever. It is getting less, but it can come up strongly again. We have to apply the practice again and again until all confusion is purified. The moment we apply the methods, confusion in the present moment is purified. If it is really penetrated by insight, then confused tendencies are purified. The more the insight penetrates, the more the underlying ignorance, the marigpa, is purified. The fully penetrating insight is that which uproots the last veils of the bodhisattva on the tenth bhumi before entering buddhahood. In order to be able to practice this in a natural way with very little effort, what we need is to have enough merit. Merit, just to remind you, means having performed actions which are not directed to one’s own benefit. It is the energy which reduces worries for oneself, clinging to oneself. If this energy is not sufficiently present, in the state of natural relaxation in the mahamudra practice, worries will come up again and again—all kinds of wishes, objects, concerning the future, the past and so on. This is traditionally called ‘not having enough merit’. This we can change by practising more of these actions which are directed to the ultimate benefit and the benefit of all sentient beings. We can encourage this by developing renunciation. e) Renunciation If we don’t have renunciation, no practice will work. On the level of what we call mahamudra practice, what is needed is the renunciation towards thoughts. The other forms of renunciation are just stepping stones up to a renunciation of all thoughts arising. First there has to be a conscious giving up of fascination. Then the more we see the illusory nature, the more we become disinterested. We have no hook of fascination onto which the thought could hang on and carry us away. This is called renunciation. It starts with an attitude of not being interested in samsara, which leads us to give up relationships, possessions and so on. Instead, we should be only interested in the dharma, the path which leads to enlightenment. But then it develops into a renunciation of the emotions and thoughts. You will find, that it is very difficult to renounce this. It might be OK with the simple thoughts, but when we come to renounce our emotions, it is extremely difficult. This is because our emotions are the core of our identification. We feel that we are not alive any more, we have lost our true self, when we don’t have our usual emotions. If we don’t worry about what we used to worry about, if we don’t get angry about what we used to get angry about. It is really scary to give up this identification but it is the kind of renunciation which is necessary at this point. f) Compassion The compassion, which is another way of helping us to do this practice, is not directed towards an outer suffering. It is a compassion which sees that our own mind and the mind of all other beings is permeated by the suffering of clinging to a sense of self. This is what really makes up the root suffering of samsara. Due to this understanding compassion arises. At the same time, in the compassion there is an understanding of this suffering as being illusory, because it is clinging to something illusory. So this suffering of others is not perceived as suffering about something against which one has to fight, against which one has to do something, but it is understood that this suffering can only be cured by letting go. What is to be done is helping others to let go. The only wish which is arising is to go oneself through this suffering and to purify it completely, in order to be able to show others the path. This helps us to let go of our fascination, our different types of identification to emotions and so on. This is compassion as a tool to help us develop the mahamudra.
34 g) Devotion Now we come to the most important quality, which is devotion. Devotion means to have complete confidence in the root lama to the point where one wants to completely melt one’s own mind with the mind of the lama, to become exactly like him, without hesitation, just melt completely with his dharmakaya mind. The lama is a mirror of our own nature of mind which we have difficulties in contacting. By putting ourselves trustfully into the mind of the lama, it is possible that the barriers dissolve, melt away in our own mind. This is the most important key for the practice of kyerim and dzogrim. We always visualise the lama, no matter what form he takes, yidam, protector or lama, it is always our own mind, its own innate creativity, which appears as the lama. We imbue this visualisation with all the qualities of buddhahood and let the lama who is a buddha, completely melt with our own mind. This is the moment of letting go completely of all ordinary identifications. All that we cling to is just ordinary; ordinary emotions, ordinary thought process, ordinary identification. The moment we melt and are really in the mind of the lama, all this is no more ordinary. All that appears in mind from that moment on is pervaded by the understanding of emptiness. These are the tools we have at this level of practice to deepen our mindfulness of the true state. E. View, meditation and action a) View The view is the basic understanding which we gain from the instructions of the teacher. When the teacher explains the view to us, he gives us an understanding of what is the starting point, what is our practice, and what the fruit will be. This is called ground, path and fruit, which is the way mahamudra is presented, following the instructions of Gendün Rinpoche and also of Urgyen Tulku. The ground is the buddha nature, which is naturally present as vajra body, speech and mind. The example given traditionally is that it is like a lump of gold which has fallen into the mud. This means that the base of our mind is temporarily obscured by the mud of the veils of confusion. Under the power of confusion we are caught in a dream, the dream of our usual identification. Other images are that these veils are just like obscuring clouds which move in the sky of buddha nature, or like waves on the surface of a great ocean. These are all examples to tell us that basically we are OK. Basically your nature is buddha, but all the rest, forget it! This rest is what needs to be purified. It is all that we identify with. This is the starting point. If we didn’t have the starting point of basic buddha nature being present in us, we couldn’t realise it. Buddha nature is in fact also just a concept, referring to space which cannot be named. There is nothing such as the buddha nature but this space which has always been there, because it is there, it is possible that one can realise it. This is why it is called the ground. The path is how to realise it and the fruit is the realisation of this same indefinable something or nothing. The path which we use is the union of method and wisdom, appearance and emptiness, compassion and emptiness, of kyerim and dzogrim, the tsa, lung, tigle practices and mahamudra, the union of bliss and emptiness. These concepts, or labels indicate to us that the path we are using is a path which leads beyond duality, beyond separating into one and the other. This is the basic instruction of the path: give up duality. The way this is explained is by combining seeming opposites, showing that they always belong together and that they were never separate. When we say ‘methods’, this refers to all the practices of the dharma. When we say ‘wisdom’, it is the understanding of emptiness, which all the practices should be connected with. When we talk about ‘appearance’, we mean everything which is arising in mind, and emptiness is their true
35 nature. The term ‘compassion’ describes the dynamic aspect of mind, which manifests from this empty nature. Kyerim and dzogrim, as we have already seen, are arising and dissolving simultaneously. Tsa, lung, tigle practice is the practice of using body, speech and mind on the vajra level of non identification to come to a deeper understanding of the true nature of vajra body, speech and mind. This union we also call ‘the great seal’, because it is a kind of stamp, the seal that shows the nature of everything. As we practice this, the nature of mind shows itself as a great joy, a great bliss, the experience of unconditioned happiness, which is no longer dependent on any outer, temporary condition. It is just the happiness of mind itself. This is called ‘bliss’. It does not mean ‘blissed out’, but it is a completely open, present feeling of non attachment. It has nothing to do with the ecstasy of some spiritual traditions. It is true bliss, because it is combined with wisdom, the insight into emptiness. Otherwise it would be ‘dualistic bliss’, with attachment being involved and therefore leading to all kinds of further entanglements and suffering. The fruit is what is called the realisation of buddhahood, which is the inseparability of the three kayas or the five aspects of primordial awareness. This means again, that awareness is one awareness, there are not five separate kinds of wisdom being realised one after the other. There is also not one kaya realised one after the other, but in buddhahood all this is spontaneously complete. It is like looking into a crystal from different angles, but depending from where we look, sometimes you see blue, sometimes red, sometimes yellow, all the different colours. You are back to where you started from, back to the ground, ground and fruit being identical. Also the path is not different from them. It is just the means to uncover the ground as being the fruit. So this is the view. b) Meditation Having acquired a certainty about the view one starts to practice meditation. There is not much sense in starting any meditation practice before one has established the proper view. That is why Gendün Rinpoche was not very fond of shine retreats and all these kinds of intensive practices before one has established a basic understanding of the mahamudra practice and before there is a basis of enough merit. This is a very important difference with other schools, where students are encouraged very much to sit right from the beginning. Gendün Rinpoche’s approach was that in the beginning people are encouraged very much to accumulate merit. Once you have gained a proper understanding, once you are filled with the teachings on mahamudra, silent sitting practice or yidam practice becomes more important. So there is a slight difference in approach. But you should also understand, that the other schools are not wrong in doing so, because they are not leaving their students alone with their practice. The teachers normally take care of the students in a very close contact. The students are checked regularly and then the faults of their meditation are shown to them. Through this the students get a proper understanding of how to meditate. This implies a lot of trial and error. The problem is for people who do not have enough merit to realise what is taught, but they might already get some intellectual understanding. They become very desperate, because they will find out that they cannot meditate. They know how it should be, only they cannot do it. It is like a trap. You have got some taste, you have some understanding, but you do not have enough merit to really put it into practice. This is where a teacher absolutely has to provide means to accumulate merit, by serving a community, or by constructing dharma centres, or by working on texts or the like. When we have gained some understanding of the view we should practice meditation . Meditation from the absolute point of view is the state of understanding the essence of the clear light, which is as vast as the sky, beyond any agitation, dullness and artificiality, beyond labelling and concepts. Meditation can be described as being the immediate outcome of having the proper view. When this has been established, this means that you have cut through your wrong views. This is a whole
36 process, which implies that you have to work on the teachings and ask questions to the teachers, establishing clearly in your mind what is the right approach and which is the wrong approach. Together with the background of enough merit, this kind of meditation happens spontaneously. Meditation can also be defined as coming back again and again into the right view, the view of letting go. Sitting in this, beyond agitation and fascination, whatever arises is purified. This is the path of meditation where everything is purified, until you are constantly in meditation. This meditation will then be the meditation of a buddha, who is uninterruptedly in this state, even in activity. c) Action Concerning the action, the practitioner applies the same view as for meditation. He is just transferring it into the activity and the relative level. The description of action in the mahamudra, is in fact just a reflection of what meditation is all about, including the special difficulties which arise when one is in activity. When you enter into action, you have more clinging, because you have a goal. There is wanting, you want to achieve something. You have more concepts and you need to have them. Also, you encounter all kinds of appearances, you meet with difficult as well as with agreeable situations. Then it is all the more important to let go of clinging in this process. You say to yourself, there is something to do, but in the doing you let go of the clinging. If obstacles come, you are flexible, there is no need to fight with anything, because there is no clinging to the obstacle. This turns the action into an aspect of the mahamudra practice. All these ‘geks’ and obstacles which arise in activity, are nothing other than thoughts and emotions. If one is clinging to a goal, wanting to achieve something etc. these are just thoughts, concepts and ideas, which one is clinging to. Whatever situation arises, nothing has to be avoided or driven out. Situations are welcomed as fire for your awareness. Activity becomes a source of deepening your meditation. This is only by accepting the situation, not falling back into patterns you had in previous times, but keeping on with the practice of meditation. Then whatever difficulties arise, they manifest as the lama, who is giving you the next teaching on your clinging. In this moment one has to relax and open the mind. If possible to relax so much that the illusory nature of the situation becomes completely clear. One is moving in a dream of action, which in itself is unreal, but on the relative level serves a purpose. You find yourself in the particular tension of going towards a goal, wanting to achieve this goal with all the usual patterns arising because of this, and in this striving the task is to let go and to relax, but nevertheless to go towards the goal. This causes a lot of patterns to come up in you, which have not yet arisen during meditation, where you didn’t have this kind of stress. Keeping up the meditation helps you to purify more patterns which arise in activity. This is meditation in action. Action should always be pervaded by meditation. When it is not by itself like meditation, we have to make repeated cuts in our activity in order to meditate, in order to contact again the state of meditation, so that we can see the difference between the state of non clinging which we experience in our meditation, and the state of clinging in which we fall when we are in action. When we lose the contrast, we lose our practice. Our meditation periods have to be long enough to allow us to really touch ground in our practice. If they are too short, they are only a kind of little brush over, we just calm down our agitation but we don’t really see much. It is just falling asleep for half an hour while doing our samayas. Or it is a period of reduced suffering, but there is not much clarity either. So the meditation periods have to be long enough that one can see fully the difference of the state of not clinging to appearances and how one clings as one enters action.
37 In activity the mindfulness is to remember the meditation and to immediately contact this quality, to do everything that we can to make it present within the action. This is where all the priorities of acting have to change. Our priority in action is not to have the result of the action, the priority is to have the result of buddhahood. For this, all other priorities should be put on a lesser level. The most important thing in action is to be relaxed. The outcome not being so important, activity is a method to purify more of our clinging. If one cannot stay relaxed in the activity, one finishes what one has to do and goes back to meditation. One links back into the stream of blessing which opens one’s mind and lets one’s worries dissolve, the clinging to one’s emotions and starts the next thing from a clear starting point. In this way samsara dissolves on its own because what seems to be samsara becomes your practice. As it becomes your practice it is no longer samsara which needs to be rejected, while nirvana is not to be searched anywhere else. It is right there, where we used to see only samsara. Into all this clinging, distraction, action and agitation the sense of relaxation and openness is introduced. Everything is moving with the same speed as before, but it is like a dream, and there is nobody who is moving with the dream. There is the complete stability of an open mind. This stability is the mahamudra in action. The greater the stability, or the greater the openness, the more complete the letting go, the more the speed of what happens around you can increase, because there is no more holding onto something and then letting go. For a normal practitioner, there is still a holding on, then remembering and then letting go. In the period of holding on, you can get quite agitated before you let go, because it can take some time before you realise that you are clinging. For a master practitioner there is no such time of clinging and being carried away. There is instantaneous letting go. The situations around, the tasks, the decisions to take, the people to see, the answers to give, all this can increase enormously without one’s losing the mahamudra practice. But all the others should take care that their activity does not go over the limit of what one can let go. One can do it for a short time, but then one will have to come back to the meditation to ground oneself. Then one can go into action again. Often one will go over the limits, but sometimes one will also not reach the limits. If things go too easy, the lama will find more food, and you will see that things are not so easy any more. But if things are already demanding, the lama will rather try to bring you back to your cushion. He will help you to balance your practice. If you are stable in your practice the lama is pushing you to more activity, to more engagement towards others to develop the capacity of letting go by more and more challenges. These are the essential instructions for the path of meditation where insight needs to be integrated with appearances. But there are labels also. In the mahamudra teaching there is ‘rotchig’ which goes into the path of no more learning . Inferior and medium path of no more learning also belong altogether to the path of meditation . The great path of no more learning links over into the path of completion , which is buddhahood. The insight on the different bhumis does not change. It is always the same insight but it begins to penetrate more and more of the meditation and of the post meditation, which is action. This is the whole process of how much one is caught by appearances and how much one can let go. The difference between the bodhisattvas on the different levels consists in the degree of clinging which is still present. From the letting go all the qualities of the bodhisattva arise.
38 The Fourth Dharma of Gampopa Here there is no more the question of how does confusion arise as primordial wisdom, but it is arising as primordial wisdom. This is how confusion is transformed on the path. The fourth dharma is the final point of the path but it also includes just the part of the path before the final realisation of buddhahood. There is a provisional stage and what is called the ultimate stage , according to the classification of Longchenpa. As long as we are still on the path of meditation, confusion will still arise as confusion. This means, there will still be a clinging to the phenomena when they arise. We remember that we need to let go and thus the confusion is purified, it is the same process as before on the third dharma. As long as there is still a need for such mindfulness, which brings us back to remembering the true nature, or for application of any methods to deal with our mind, this is called the provisional stage of the fourth dharma of Gampopa. A. Practice On this level the main practice in our tradition is the mahamudra of dzogchen, mostly with the support of the inner tantra practice and including the six yogas. But there are also other possibilities, because the four dharmas are not only referring to the Vajrayana path. a) Sutra path If we are on the sutra path, on this level we practice the complete renunciation of the emotions . We do not get entangled at all with whatever arises in terms of dualistic mental events and we reject them like poison. This is the path of the śravaka s and the pratyeka buddhas. Or we apply antidotes to the emotions. This is the path of the bodhisattvas. These are ordinary methods , because they only help us to see that basically all that arises is impermanent and empty. There is no need to always renounce and then employ an antidote. b) Tantra path Then we have the special methods of the tantra path, which are the six higher yanas—the śravaka , pratyeka and bodhisttva path being the lower. Here in the kyerim, we practice the pure vision of the aggregates, emotions, elements of the body and the world, the union of appearances and emptiness, sound and emptiness, awareness and emptiness. In the dzogrim we blend desire with the bliss of tummo. At this point Longchenpa gives a very short key instruction on the six yogas. In tummo we work with desire. If there is desire, we try to transform it into bliss. There is an ordinary kind of bliss and there is bliss penetrated by the realisation of emptiness. So the skilful method of tummo transforms or lets us see the essence of desire as being the ultimate bliss. In the same way the illusory body practice uses the potential of anger, or aversion, and blends this aversion with the realisation of the illusory nature of all existence. In this way anger loses its destructiveness and becomes an illusory manifestation of mind itself. Finally, the clear light practice is using ignorance, the stupidity of sleep especially, and transforms it into the awareness of non duality. These are called dzogrim practices. It is a way of dealing with the emotions by seeing their essence. Kyerim is a way of seeing the essence also, but using intermediary methods like visualisation and mantra recitation. Then we have the supreme method , which is not using tsa, lung and tigle any more, no kyerim at all, which is called the essence practice , or essence mahamudra or dzogchen . This refers to the natural arising of all phenomena as wisdom without having to use a method in order to bring the wisdom aspect into evidence. The arising and dissolution of confusion into primordial awareness is
39 simultaneous. On the provisional level we can still speak of the arising as confusion and dissolution into awareness. Later on, on the ultimate stage, buddhahood, there is no more arising as confusion which is then realised as purity, because the ultimate stage is stainless purity itself, where the buddha nature manifests completely unveiled as the inseparable three kayas, which act constantly for the benefit of illusory beings. There is no more clinging to the reality of any being and any suffering whatsoever. B. The path of completion This is the path of completion where the so called two purities manifest, the natural purity , which was always there, the inherent purity of all phenomena, and the achieved or realised purity of being free of stains. This is the purity which is revealed after one has gone along the path and realises the natural purity at all times. One has awakened from the dream of illusions forever. There is no more confusion, no more duality. There is not much to be said about buddhahood. There is nothing to be practised, nothing to be learned, nothing to be achieved. It is the state of perfection , of dzogchen.
Conclusion ‘Since ultimately delusions lack true existence and cannot be found, it does not matter which method you employ to eliminate them.’ This quotation of Beru Khyentse Rinpoche’s commentary on the fourth dharma of Gampopa leads us back to the contemplations we had in the beginning of this teaching, that no matter if you use the śravaka, pratyekabuddha or bodhisattva path, and within the bodhisattva path the Vajrayana, what one realizes will always be the same, because the nature of things is the same. The question is only how you arrive at this realisation and to what extent one can integrate it into every aspect of life. This sentence allows us to open our mind to a very vast view, accepting all the methods leading to enlightenment and not to stick to higher, lower, better, worse. However, in the Ngedön Gyamtso and also in other texts it is said, that the way you practice decides, especially if you practice the śravaka or bodhisattva way, the kind of enlightenment or activity you will have. This seems to be a contradiction to what I said before. The way you practice decides your activity. Also in a way the methods encourage different kinds of realisation. The problem with the paths, which are not mahayana, is, that they are not going to eliminate completely all the veils, because they are not practised to completion. If they were practised to completion, there would be no difficulty, because all delusions are without any true existence. But they are not practised to completion, because there comes a point where you are completely free. The person clinging to a self has completely disappeared. The only motivation to go further is the bodhisattva motivation, which drives you forwards to reach buddhahood. Arhatship is good enough for oneself. It is a great stage of realisation of the emptiness of self. But to go further, to deal with all phenomena, and engage completely in the world, to cross over all dualistic differentiation, samsara and nirvana—the impulse for this you find in the motivation of a bodhisattva. This is why the realisation concerning phenomena is indeed different for those who have this motivation from those who don’t. But basically the statement is really true as it stands. Only one should not stop applying the methods, once one has reached the personal liberation, of peace or cessation. This is really the big trap. Gendün Rinpoche explained repeatedly, that the big trap also for the bodhisattvas is on the bhumis, because the motivation might not be strong enough. One enjoys personal freedom and one does not see the need to go further. One is happy enough with the limited activity of a bodhisattva. There is the danger that one does not progress to the higher realisations, because of not having established this firmly as a goal in one's mind. Full enlightenment needs complete bodhicitta. END
40