Makes a real kind of makes a real struggle for us to keep our life together. So that’s the inner guru outer guru. Jowo Atisha, the great Buddhist master who came to Tibet in ten forty two and established the Kadampa school which became the new schools, most important of those being the Gelug founded by Tsongkhapa. He said that the objects that we can know, the sheya, the knowables in this world are infinite and our time is limited. Our time is short.
Our life is short. So we should be like the swan that takes the milk in its mouth, spits out the water from the sides of its cheek and swallows the cream. If we can do that then we can get the essence of all the knowables. That essentially what he meant by this is essentially the spheres of data can never be completed, lists of the spheres of data. We can count all the kinds of ants in Africa and numbers of specks of dust on the moon and so on but we’ll never get to the end of counting and listing.
What we have to do is get to the essence. If we can get to the essence, we can touch all phenomena. In the Far East, they had a big kind of discussion about enlightenment as an instantaneous process or enlightenment as a gradual process. The Tibetan take on that is that essentially both are right. That finally enlightenment is an instantaneous process.
There’s one moment when we’re unenlightened and the next moment were enlightened. Tibetans call this Ke Chit Ma, the last moment. But in another sense, enlightenment is gradual. Not the actual enlightenment but the process of getting to the edge of the cliff over which we jump into enlightenment. That process is gradual, getting ourselves to that place where enlightenment is one step away.
Tibetans, rather than gradual or instant enlightenment, preferred to refer to simply quick enlightenment or nyur lam in Tibetan or de lam, easy enlightenment that essentially getting to that point where enlightenment is instantly achieved need not take dozens and dozens of years and lifetimes and so on and need not be a difficult task That essentially one can get there very quickly and very easily if one simply stick to the essentials. So when AAtisha said, don’t go for all the objects of knowledge, endless lists of objects of knowledge, go for the essence, What he was talking about was quick and easy or comfortable enlightenment. Buddhism is often referred to as the middle path. Don’t make it because what is quick is kind of relative, isn’t it? Like, I expect three of you to be enlightened by the end of today but some of you may think that’s rather slow, it took a whole day.
And what’s easy, you may think sitting there all day on chairs and cushions is kind of tough. You’d sooner be like stretched out on a couch. We tried to get those couches in but what can you do? Sticking to the essence, holding to the essence, that is the key to quick and easy enlightenment. Quick because when you stick to the essence every moment of your life is a moment of growth and transformation.
Growth and transformation on every level. Karmically, meaning the processes that go into making up your life, your life processes moment by moment become more finely attuned, more refined. In terms of understanding, when you stick to the essence each moment is a moment of learning. In terms of interior growth and release, in Tibetan, inner release and expansion then each moment is a moment of release, each moment a moment of expansion. Then the question becomes how do we stick to that essence?
How do we find that essence within us and how do we always, twenty four hours a day, waking or sleeping, walk with awareness of that essence. So this is what we’re going to look at today and this is the life tool, life skill we’re going to try to acquire. Actitia said if you can get that power, if you can get that skill then your life becomes a wish fulfilling jewel. All wishes are fulfilled in your lifetime. Highest wishes, the wish for highest achievement is fulfilled because by sticking to the essence you always stick to you always get the highest from each moment.
Conventional wishes are fulfilled because when you stick to the essence you are happy every moment of your life and conventionally all we all want is happiness. We chase lots of money, we think the money will give us things that will give us happiness. We chase lovers, we think lovers will give us happiness. Fast cars, everything we do we do to get happiness. Sometimes we get the desired result from those things, sometimes they bring us more suffering than happiness.
Milarepa used to say, when it comes to wives or husbands, in the beginning of the romance they’re both like gods and goddesses to one another, just endless sources of merriment and laughter. In the middle they become a little bit like strangers and then in the end they often become like hated enemies, prisoner torturer roles with one another. The object of one’s happiness easily transforms if one does not stick to the essence. Similarly with any kind of material possession or wealth, if one sticks to the essence, it’s a source of goodness and happiness for self and others. If one goes astray from the essence, it easily becomes a source of inner suffering.
Worrying about it, fear about it, alienation with others because one is always suspicious that others only like one for one’s wealth and one’s money and so forth. When the mind goes in that way, the Tibetans had a saying, one currency note becomes the headache of one camel. A hundred currency notes become the headaches of a hundred camels. That essentially when one does not know how to stick to the essence, no physical thing brings happiness. It brings a bit of respite here and there, a bit of indulgence but one ends up avoiding the issue, using the money to insulate oneself against the real issue rather than using it in a creative, meaningful and fulfilling way.
For that reason suicide is higher amongst the wealthy than it is amongst the middle class or poor. Today I’d like us to go through four basic techniques for learning to stick to that essence. If we can, I’m sure those of you who’ve been studying here for some years much of this will be familiar to you. Perhaps I as someone who has practiced and trained for twenty five or thirty years maybe I’ll be able to throw something of a different perspective on it or bring out something of it that will be an aspect of it you haven’t looked at before. The Tibetan way of training in dharma traditionally I think is very unique.
It’s always presumed that even if you know the words of something you probably it doesn’t mean you know the meaning. And when Naropa was one of an Indian master of the late tenth, early eleventh century, was the greatest Buddhist scholar in India, a very highly respected Buddhist master. He had hundreds and hundreds of disciples. One day he was reading a text in a garden and a little ugly old lady came by and said, Do you know the words of what you’re reading? And he said, Yes.
And she started to laugh. And then he said, And she said to mom, Do you understand the meaning? And he said, Oh, yes. And she started to cry. And he said, Oh, you’re she said, You’re lying to me, Herr, and this is for a monk to lie as a source of great sadness and she wept and she wept.
And so it deeply disturbed his mind and he left the words and went in search of the meaning. Tibetan monks, young monks in the monasteries during the fifteen or twenty years of their training, they memorize four lines of text a day and then they debate it for eight hours. And even after debating it for eight hours it’s presumed that there’s a lot of implications in there which weren’t picked up. So even if we know the words, we’ve memorized the words, very often we have to do a little bit more digging to get under the soil and the texture of that technology and bring out other levels of meaning. So perhaps I’ll be able to help a little bit with that.
The four techniques I want to look at today and I think for me they’re the most, the four most important elements in the tun mong gi lam, we call it in Tibetan, the general Buddhist training. First of those is refuge. And I think many people think of refuge as a simple topic because we hear about it from the beginning. But when AAtisha went to Tibet, one of the greatest Buddhist scholars in Western Tibet was a guy called Rinchen Zangpo, eighty year old monk who’d been a monk since age five or six. He is considered one of the greatest Buddhist scholars of Central Asia.
Atisha met him and had a conversation with him and later Atisha said to him, well, actually, you know, you haven’t even got refuge straight so you’re actually not a Buddhist let alone a Buddhist monk. So Rinchen Zangpo was rather shocked and went into retreat from that day on and stayed in retreat as a teacher’s disciple for the remaining eight years of his life. Passed away in retreat, a happy man. So there’s something about this subject which obviously is very profound. So well, that’s the first thing I’d like to look at today and it said being on the path to enlightenment or not being on the path to enlightenment is defined distinctly by having the refuge correct.
If you have it correct you’re on the path to enlightenment. You don’t have it correct you’re not on the path to enlightenment. Very simple, very direct and very precise statement. Second technique I want to look at is breath control, breath awareness. Biggest single problem of humans today is that almost no one knows how to breathe.
We all think of breathing as something fairly simple but again something almost everyone gets wrong. When you understand your breathing and you know how to sit on your breath correctly everything changes. Health changes, body language changes, mental posture changes, spiritual ambiance changes. Perspective on all activities is utterly transformed. Buddha said learning to breathe is the quintessential method for self liberation.
It is the method used in all Buddhist schools to teach one the technique of inner spaciousness. Thirdly, I want to look at the training known as in the Tibetan world, the Buddhist world, the Mahāyāna world as becoming the universal hero. Hero, heroine, pa, pamo. All of us want to be a hero. Everyone likes to be a hero.
In our dreams, we’re always dreaming of great acts of heroism. Being a hero is something the potential to be a hero heroine is something always in the palm of our own hand. Fourthly, we wanna look at this word paramita, often translated into English as the perfection, but which in the Buddhist world doesn’t have any linguistic link or etymological link at least with the word perfection. This word paramita is said to be the quintessential dynamic by which this world is made whole within the mind of the perceiver. So those are the four things we’ll be working with today.
If people don’t mind, I’d like us to start with just doing a little bit of mantra. Man in Sanskrit means mind and ta means something like something like gathering up. We have to think up some You guys can do the rhythm, I’ll do the dharma rap stuff. So man means mind, tra means gathering up. So mantra we think of as being a sound that we chant or sounds that we chant.
The sounds, here mantra again has a sense of energy or lung in Tibetan, prana in Sanskrit. So it’s said that in tantra we say, and mantra essentially is borrowed by the general Buddhist teaching borrowed from the tantric vehicle. We say that all of the universe is really made up of only two things. The conventional reality which is illusory forms which is pure energy and the ultimate reality which is the radiant clear light mind. So mantra is in a sense the meeting ground of these two or how we bring conscious awareness to the point at which pure energy flows.
Sometimes we see mantra referred to as enlightenment without meditation. And in a way when we do mantra correctly, we don’t need to make any extra effort. Merely the doing is meditation. The meditational ambience arises within the mind merely by doing the mantra. The mantra I want us to do is Namo gurubhya, Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghaya which is the mantra of refuge.
And then we’ll talk about how that why having that together establishes the basis of enlightenment and how not having this together is the basis of saṃsāra or non growth orientated living. saṃsāra, just going round and round in circles rather than up the spiral of spiritual growth. So I think most of you know this mantra but anyway you can repeat it after me three times. Now what we’re gonna do while we do this mantra is, we imagine a little Buddha figure at the center of our heart, about the size of the top of one’s little finger and one thinks to oneself, this is the real me, this is the essence of my own mind, this is my little inner one inch Buddha. And some of us have a one inch Buddha, some of us have a two or three inch Buddha, some a one foot Buddha, some a ten foot Buddha, some a sixteen foot Buddha.
But it doesn’t matter how unevolved we are. Unevolved here just means unhappy, confused, frustrated, how much dukkha we have, how much confusion, how much negative energy. That little one inch Buddha which is the pure nature of our mind sits there at all times as the clouds of these and the storms of these experiences come and go. So as we do the mantra we imagine that lights go out from that little Buddha, totally fill our body and, go out into the world. As they go out into the world they then dissolve or melt all of the world into our body.
Our body melts into light, melts into that little Buddha, that little Buddha melts into light and we sit there after that without doing the mantra aloud. We just do the mantra. It’s said as though there were a fire burning and the mantra were coming from the sound of the sparks. Here the guru, outer and inner for both inner and outer for guru, inner and outer for Buddha, inner and outer for Dharma, inner and outer for Sangha. They can also be explained in terms of symbolic meaning and definitive meaning, higher meaning and conventional meaning.
Dozen or so, half a dozen or so ways of speaking about them. My favorite is the outer and the inner. The inner guru refers to our own ability to claim our territory. In a sense it’s our ability to make decisions and to stick to those decisions. Our ability to make wise decisions and to stick to those decisions.
If we could always in our life make the right decision and stick to that right decision our life would be greatly transformed. Therefore the more active the inner guru is within us the more effective we are as the more effective and dynamic our life becomes. For most peoples that inner decision making ability and the ability to claim one’s own ground and stick to one’s own ground is something like, in the Tibetan world we say, like trying to sew with a two pointed needle that we don’t know which way to push the needle. What we need to do is enhance and grow the power of the inner guru. We need to become men and women of greater character.
The outer guru is all, includes all those beings from whom one received good counsel in one’s lifetime. Some people will take a specific teacher and say, Well, that’s my Guru as kind of a symbol of all of them. In the Kadampa tradition AAtisha had three main disciples. Dromtonpa used to say, I have only one guru, AAtisha. All others are really just emanations of him.
But, Potowa, one the three, he was often criticized because he said, every person I meet in my life is equally my guru. The outer guru refers to within the sentient world how messages are always coming to us from all directions, from the time we’re born. The Trinley or the enlightenment energy is sort of whispering there through the breezes and coming to us in voices from every direction at all times. I was once sitting with Dalai Lama doing an interview with him, back in nineteen seventy six because he he had said he was going to be the last Dalai Lama. He made this announcement kind of in a Polish interview in a Polish newspaper.
This was at the time America and Russia were both kind of poised on either end of Poland because of the solidarity movement and Poland trying to break away from Russia. So the CIA translated everything in the newspapers into English so it ended up in New York and one of the newspapers telegrammed me and asked me to do an interview on it. He said, yeah, I may be the last Dalai Lama. He said, times have sort of become such that maybe it’s a good idea that I do something else. So I said, Well if you don’t come back as Dalai Lama you’ll be out of a job.
So like what’s your plan? And he said, I don’t know, maybe I’ll come back as a dog or maybe a book or maybe a bridge or maybe an incognito American like yourself. But we can never really say where the words of wisdom come from where the words of wisdom will come. Sometimes in the middle of a great need, spiritual need or guidance or counseling need we’ll be sitting on a park bench and some like homeless bum sitting on the same bench with us will have like a book under his head that he used for a pillow and when he gets up to scratch we’ll start reading the book and open it at a passage which really answers the questions that we need to know at that time. We’ll be walking along and we’ll just pause on a bridge and just looking down into the water and up into the sky.
The profundity of our own life will dawn upon us, the vast expansiveness of our reality. And for a moment this sort of claustrophobic feeling we get when we feel pressured from every direction inside and out will relax. That is the Guru. Or we’ll be sitting somewhere and a little dog will come up and we’re feeling unhappy or stressed out or, really tied all up in knots and a bird will land nearby us or a squirrel or a dog. In the Buddhist world we say, that’s the guru.
I was once sitting in Bodhgaya meditating like this, and Indian dogs I think, there’s really a lot of saints and Buddhists and great gurus amongst them. I’m sitting there like this, and this dog comes up behind me like this, and he puts his nose, if this is his head, puts his nose down like this and does a complete somersault, and lands with his head in my lap, his eyes looking right up at me, and he’s four feet in the air. And in the Buddhist world, know, you sit, you know, you sort of sit meditate like this, you don’t close your eyes, you’re just like this, know, eyes pointed down. And there I am and then suddenly, whoosh, and these two eyes turn directly one hundred percent into mine. So we say like that, from the animal world come messages of the gurus in phenomena and then within the human world words of wisdom issued, uttered by grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and school teachers and strangers that throughout our life we’re continually exposed to wisdom.
We’re continually exposed to good counsel. We’re continually exposed to Dharma. So remembering all those beings or people and events is a little difficult. So most people just choose the one who they think is kind of symbolizes all of that energy and all of that force and they’ll say, Well, Lama Yeshe is my guru or Lama Zopa or the Dalai Lama or No, no. But anyway we just think of one person with whom we have a strong feeling and when we think of that person just thinking of them kind of reminds us of all the goodness of the universe of all the kind of the way the universe is always teaching us.
The seventh Dalai Lama said, when you really understand the nature of the Guru that every experience of your life becomes your teacher. The teacher is essentially each moment’s experience. So the outer guru is that. The inner guru is our ability to take each moment of our life, integrate the totality of useful things we have learned or life skills, spiritual skills we have acquired and to stick to that course, whatever is the we think is the way to go with that specific, grist for the mill of our life. The ability to stick to that.
Otherwise if that inner guru is weak even if we’ve heard ten thousand words, ten thousand good counsels, we’ve had great grandmothers and grandfathers and mothers and fathers friends and uncles and spiritual teachers and lamas and so on and so forth. All of that becomes totally useless to us. Unless we can arouse the power of our own inner guru that is all just entertainment or it’s just more distraction, more data, more useless baggage that we’re carrying around. Tibetans, the philosophy of Tibetans is if you’re gonna do dharma, try and do it well. If you’re not gonna try and do it well, better not to bother with it.
You know, get up in the morning, have your breakfast, go to work, come home, watch some telly, go out to a movie, forget about the spiritual path altogether and just immerse yourself in conventional living. That when you immerse yourself in conventional living at least you get the pleasures of conventional life. Tibetans have a saying most humans are Golokpa, they have heads on backwards. So you can live quite well with your head on backwards or you can live even better if the head is frontwards. But it’s very awkward with the head at an angle, like not back and not front.
If it was totally backwards then you can live like the dogs and the cats and the birds and so on and so forth. Backwards in that, some backwards for four reasons we say. Things which are useful we don’t notice. Things which are useless we chase. Things which are impermanent we think we take as permanent and static, unchanging, and things which are permanent, lasting, and internal we don’t even notice.
Thirdly, things are all collected phenomena. When clung to, clung to in body or life become sources of suffering. But yet we cling to these things and bring suffering and difficulties to ourselves. And then fourthly, all living beings, all of us as all all living beings, essentially we all are in the same boat together. We’re all interconnected but yet I have the sense that I am more important than you, that somehow you’re not really in the same boat as me.
I think in most cases that’s not true. My case, maybe I am more important. So most peoples have Golokpa head on backwards about these four things. Now if we keep our head on backwards about them, we go on as though impermanence are static and as though useless is useful and as though I’m more important than others are kind of dispensable or disposable and as though all this clinging and pulling and grasping is going to somehow lead to an end of grasping. If we go on with the head on backwards like that the good thing about it is that we have a very short memory span.
So like from the grasping we get a little pleasure and then we get a little pain but we kind of insulate ourselves against the pain and say, Well, it’s no big deal. Everyone gets that kind of thing. It comes and goes. It’s just part and parcel of life. So then we don’t mind.
We take the good and the bad and we just kind of go on with things We think the impermanent is permanent and static and generally we don’t notice the difference. We own a table or a car or a house or a relationship or a wife or a husband or something. We think permanent static and whatnot and anyway it all changes so slowly that we hardly notice until sometimes eventually it slips out the back door and is gone. But we take the good with the bad and with mistaking sources of happiness for sources of for things that actually cause difficulty. We have a pretty short attention span.
Voltaire used to say that if you put peoples together and challenge them to tell stories of their own sufferings, each will come up with more stories than the other. People will get into a great competition in which everyone is completely convinced that they have had more sufferings than everyone else in the room to get down to listing them. Sort of like showing one scars, little kids showing scars. Well, this is mine on my leg here. Well, this one.
But we have a shorter spent attention span. If we keep the head on backwards, we essentially insulate ourselves against all of that and just try and keep a stiff upper lip about it. What is it? Wheel to the nose to the grindstone and shoulder to the wheel or something like that. So we can sort of go on like this for our life without and still kind of make it, so to speak.
But if we can get the head back on, instead of head on backwards, if we can get it the other way around, it’s a lot more effective because instead of chasing useless things we learn to chase useful things. Instead of seeing impermanent things as permanent we appreciate them the way they are. Life becomes much more fluid for us and much more attuned to its actual nature. Instead of seeing the things that are causes of clinging as desirable therefore holding or clinging to them and having the according frustrations. Clinging is a little bit like having a pair of trousers that won’t quite stay on, won’t quite stay up.
You want to keep those trousers on but they keep sort of slipping down at the oddest moments. Like this one Italian monk I knew, he went to Ladakh and he arrived late at the teaching and there’s maybe three or four thousand monks there and several thousand lay people. And the Lama had arranged a little place in the center for all the westerners, there was only about ten of them. So he had to go through the whole crowd and then because he arrived late and everyone’s looking at him, naturally he had to make prostrations because that’s a tradition. So he very carefully goes like this and then his lower robe totally falls off.
And like most monks, he wasn’t wearing underpants. So for us, the holding to things that we cling, they’re always falling away and they always fall away at the moment we least want them to fall away. Though if we can keep the head on backwards, we don’t mind. These things come and go. If we can get it back right, then that’s really great because then everything becomes much more innate in tune with the actual nature of being, the actual nature of life.
Getting in the middle is a little awkward. We don’t have the ease or forgetfulness of having the mind on backwards and we don’t have the kind of easy grace, the spiritual grace of being in tune with things the way they really are. So in a way we’re still seeing useless as useful and useful as useless but we’re struggling with it. Whereas in the back we don’t care. We just look at it useless, okay, it doesn’t matter.
It looks good, jump on it. It’s like impermanence and permanence. You can get it right then it’s very very helpful to know the nature of the reality of the phenomena you’re dealing with. So the inner guru refers to the ability to keep the head on this way. It’s kind of in a sense like an inner discipline in the true sense of the word tsultrim, sticking to the way or guarding the way.
The inner guru is what takes the spiritual learning you have from whatever source and keeps the head correctly focused. When we don’t have that inner guru strong, if it’s just a little bit this little bit halfway turned back or most of the way back The inner guru is a little on the clumsy side.