Like Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa painting. Everyone’s always been wondering why she’s smiling, that little curious little half smile she has. Zen practice. In the beginning of our training, we want to do more body based practice, mindfulness of the body. Emotions, thoughts, other things, the phenomena, these impact us physically.
So our body is our first focus of practice, body and bodily energies. When we do it formally sitting in meditation, then we sit nicely or we can sit on a couch or an armchair also, but just as long as the body is comfy. And I think in the east, they learned to sit like this because no one ever learned how to make a decent chair. You know, once you’re traveling east, once you cross Istanbul and come east, never again do you see a decent chair until you hit Australia. There’s no China, Japan.
The concept of the com infinite. Infinity, knowledge of infinity, which is the key to liberation and happiness, the key to release and transformation, infinity is always there with us. We are never one hair’s breath from ultimate reality. The clouds of confusion and so on may come and go in our mind, but the actual matter, the actual reality of things is that we ourselves never leave the sphere of the infinite. The body is made of the very stuff of reality.
Emotions are made of the very stuff of reality. Spirit, mind is made of the very stuff of reality. Because of that, we are always there with reality. That’s our eternal, our infinite inner Buddha. When we achieve enlightenment it becomes the Dharmakāya or the Svabhava, it becomes the Svabhava Kaya, the natural quintessential dimension of enlightenment.
It’s the same then as it is now, no difference in its essential nature. That’s our inner Buddha, our inner eternal Buddha. We also have the inner evolving Buddha which here it really means everything positive we have going for us. It’s a little bit like if you will as I mentioned earlier the one inch or the two inch or the three inch or the four inch inner Buddha. There is something.
We already have some degree of enlightenment within us. Our eyes are not completely closed to reality and to truth. Our eyes in this and in previous lifetimes have evolved some inkling of the enlightenment vision. In another way of expressing it, we have some compassion. We have some wisdom.
We have some power. However much inner compassion we have, however much inner wisdom we have, however much inner power we have, that is our evolving inner Buddha. Problem is even though people have this, some inner compassion, some inner wisdom, some inner power, unless we have good refuge, we don’t actually use them very much. We let those qualities take a back seat to other forces in our life. The option comes up of being loving, compassionate, kind, gentle, caring, empathetic with the other person, but the other person is perhaps sort of spiritually ugly, vindictive harsh words, unpleasant types of beings.
So rather than show that side of ourselves, we don’t resort on it. We don’t take refuge in it. Instead, just meet that ugliness with more ugliness. Harsh speech, we we respond with harsh speech. Vindictive mind, we we respond with malevolent, mean mind.
Same with wisdom. We have some inner wisdom, but how do we bring it into play each moment of our life? That’s what refuge means, being able to invoke that inner Buddha. Always, I think our society, like the way we approach education tends to be a little unenlightened sometimes. You know we try to give everyone an equally well rounded education.
In the enlightenment side we don’t really want to do that. We want to look for talents. Emphasize your natural talents. With Dharma, the inner Buddha here means that you have this some degree of talent, love, compassion, empathy, kindness, relating to others in a healthy positive way. You have some inner wisdom able to understand and project, and you have some inner power able to carry that vision of compassion and wisdom, however great or small it be, into your life.
But unless you actually call on that inner Buddha your compassion remains pretty well inactive. Your wisdom remains pretty well inactive. Your power remains pretty well unmanifest. So Maitreya said, if you don’t have real refuge, if you haven’t established the practice of refuge, you’re not on the enlightenment path. And it doesn’t matter how many words of Dharma you’ve heard, how many gurus you put on your altar, how many teachings or initiations you’ve attended.
Essentially, if you cannot invoke that inner Buddha on a moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day basis then essentially you’re not on an enlightenment path. Only when you invoke that inner Buddha is that moment or is that experience enlightenment orientated. If you deal with something, anything other than on the basis of love, compassion, wisdom, and power, it’s not going to produce enlightenment or growth for you. It’s not going to produce enlightenment or growth for those you’re dealing with unless they have a very powerful inner yoga method to transform your negativity. So the inner Buddha refers to that, the eternal aspect where we are always living in reality, immersed in reality so we can easily attune to reality.
And then the evolving, we always have some love compassion, some wisdom, some power. And the more we can resort to that or take refuge in that or invoke that then the more powerful we become spiritually. Dharma, inner and outer. Dharma means two things, both the inner and outer. On the inner side, Dharma means what we know, what we know.
Someone cannot be blamed for killing someone, if you’re a doctor and you’re doing an operation on someone and the person dies. They can’t really be blamed for it if they didn’t know how to do it correctly anyway and there was no other option than for them to give it a go. If they know how to do it and they don’t do it right it’s out of negligence. Therefore, in North America one could sue them for criminal negligence and malpractice and so on and so forth. Inner Dharma means what we know, conventionally means that.
Ultimately, inner Dharma means that there is always a taste of nirvana or peace there with us. There is always something of nirvana with us. We have to keep those two together, what we know and our sense of our own nirvana. nirvana here means something like transcendence. Externally the Dharma means two things.
One is the enlightenment teachings for why we understand reality. And secondly, it’s reality itself. This table, this chair, this house, the stars, the skies, the earth. They use the same word for teachings as for phenomena because teachings for enlightenment aren’t something fabricated. Enlightenment isn’t some kind of synthetic reality or alternate reality.
Enlightenment is simply attunement to the real way things are. So we use the same word for realities like a table reality, a chair reality, a house reality, all conventional realities, or ultimate reality like, the emptiness infinite nature of things. And so one we use reality like that or Dharma, the other Dharma, the path or the way or the path by which we can attune ourselves to the real nature of being. So on the inner side we have both of those Dharmas. We have some knowledge of the ways to happiness, enlightenment, liberation, freedom, and so on, some knowledge of that.
And also we have a reality factor, a kind of a natural predisposition toward nirvana. I think what that means is we all really like inner peace. We like to feel good inside. nirvana literally means gone and beyond, Nir, which means something like without or gone beyond, and Vanna referring to some kind of unpleasant experience. Includes pain, suffering, everything we don’t like in life.
So we all have a kind of a natural wish to go beyond the unpleasantries. We don’t want toothaches and headaches. We don’t want like sticky relationships. We want happy relationships. We don’t want poverty and starvation.
We want abundance. We don’t want a failure, we want success and so on. We all want a good inner feeling. We all want nirvana. And at the same time we all know a little bit about how to keep it.
We all have some sense of what those things which make us happy and those things which make us unhappy. What contributes to our inner peace, inner joy level, and what takes away from it. But even though we know that people very often do not invoke or make that a priority or keep mindfulness of it. Then thirdly Sangha. Inner Sangha is really I think our own love, compassion, caring for ourselves.
The word in Tibetan, gendun, the truth seeker, our happiness seeker about ourselves. And we think it sounds easy having compassion for ourselves, but like Buddha put it, you are your own best friend or you are your own worst enemy. And Dalai Lama puts it ninety nine percent of all human suffering comes from humans walking around poking themselves in their own eye. That essentially, even though we’re greedy for ourselves, we all have a kind of a self hatred thing there, a kind of a masochistic thing, a kind of a a spiritual spiritual in terms of our happiness, a kind of a self destructive kamikaze instinct. We, on the one hand, we think of ourselves as really hot and really great and the best in everything, but on the other hand we kind of blame ourselves for all of our failures and all the failures in this world.
So Lama Yeshe, who founded the FBMT Centers, he used to say, if you can’t do any other Dharma practice, simply practice getting to like yourself. Simply practice loving being loving to yourself. If you can be loving to yourself, your love for others will increase. If you can be gentle with yourself, your gentleness with others will increase. If you can be kind to yourself, your kindness to others will increase.
So in a way the Gendun, the inner one, is this kind of inner spiritual seeker and inner friend. Another word for another sense of Sangha is spiritual friend. Becoming a friend to ourselves. Now when we say we become a friend to ourselves, that we is really the aspect of our mind which makes our conscious decisions, isn’t it? Where is the I between me and myself?
Learning to love ourselves, learning to be gentle and patient and forgiving with ourselves. You know if you killed nine hundred and ninety nine people yesterday, one of the Buddhist masters, if you killed nine hundred and ninety nine people yesterday, don’t feel guilty about it, just try and cut it down a bit. Guilt is only useful in helping us break our bad habits. You know it’s kind of a natural, it’s like a toothache tells us something’s wrong with a tooth, or having our hand in fire tells us there’s something wrong with where our hand is. In that same way guilt is kind of a natural instinct of the mind to tell us that you know something has a bad after flavor about it.
You do something good to someone and it has a kind of a pleasant after flavor doesn’t it? You do something harmful even twenty years later thinking about it it still has a kind of a unpleasant after flavor. So in a way guilt is a useful useful enlightenment thing if it’s in a natural fluid way. Like, you know, you go home at night and beat your husband over the head with a frying pan. It’s good if you feel a little guilty about it if it stops you from hitting him over the head with a frying pan.
Unfortunately, with humans we kind of mix up guilt and kind of a sense of self hatred, a kind of a pure guilt and a sense of conditioned socialized self hatred. So if the guilt makes us stop hitting them over the head with a frying pan, that’s a good thing. But if we keep the guilt but keep hitting them over the head with a frying pan, there’s not much benefit. Like we should choose one or the other, or are they gonna happily bang them over the head with a frying pan and not think about it, or else we should feel the guilt and think this is a signal that I should stop hitting them over the head with a frying pan. But most of us kind of opt for an unpleasant combination of both.
We continue banging over the head with a frying pan and we continue feeling guilty about it. As the Buddha said, the function of guilt is a kind of an innate aspect of the wisdom mind. Like Angulimala, he had killed nine hundred and ninety nine people and then he met the Buddha and the Buddha said to him, well, you know there are career options and it may be time for you to look into one of those. Angulimala did feel a little guilty about all these people he had killed. And so he said, okay, if you can work it out with a king that I get a pardon on the basis of becoming a monk, I’ll become a monk.
So he went from India’s most renowned murderer to being a Buddhist monk. And for a long time he meditated and meditated and meditated, but he couldn’t achieve enlightenment because every time he’d meditate, feelings of guilt over these people he had killed kind of built up within him. And the Buddha told him, well, know, we’ve all killed millions and millions of people in our billions and billions of past lives. It’s no big deal. You know, once it’s over, it’s over.
And also you can’t kill someone unless they have a karma to die. In a way, you’re just being a condition there. You don’t wanna continue being that condition, but in a way, you know, these things that are all interconnected. So better not to kill, better to follow the path of peace, and now that you’re doing that what you have to do is just release any feeling of guilt about that. Basically, you have to get above it or beyond it.
But Angulimala couldn’t, he like would every time meditate he’d hear the cries of the people he was like, yeah. And he was a really great fighter at one time the king of Pataliputra sent forty men. They heard that he was in this one particular valley with no exit, And so he locked off the valley with an army and sent forty men in after him. And Angulimala, one by one killed off all forty of those men and they were all highly trained mercenary soldiers. So Angi Yamala was really considered a real tough, not only a real tough guy, but real real martial arts man.
So when the Buddha heard about him he said, well I’ll have to go in there and meet him that it’s time to tame Angulimala. And he purposely walked into the forest where Anghi Limala was living. And when Anghi Limala attacked him, Buddha as a young prince had also been very much into martial arts, but of course through the powers of meditation one gets even greater physical sort of elusiveness. Like as a young man when Buddha had to compete for his third wife, Yasudhara, one of his cousins. They did a test of strength and then they, you know, they did like many different tests as was the tradition.
Angulimala sort of hits an elephant and kills them with a single punch. So Buddha, knowing that it’s improper to have dead carcasses inside the city limits, put his little toe under the elephant and threw him five miles beyond the town. So he also was a bit of a martial artist. He wasn’t that afraid of Angulimala. So Anghili Mullah did become his disciple and because he couldn’t get enlightenment or nirvana because of his guilt.
And one day they’re walking down the street and there’s a woman beside the road having a birth, a child, and it’s a breech birth, the child won’t come out. So the woman’s mother calls out to the Buddha, come and help my daughter with her birth, and you’re a great holy man and a sage, say some mantras, say some prayers, something and something and the baby will be born. And Buddha kinda yawned and said, actually, I don’t have any real karmic connection with you or this village at all, there’s really nothing I can do, but Angulimala has murdered a couple of people in your village. He has very strong karmic connection. So if he says the following words and really believes them, the child will be born with no harm.
And the words were that if by the powers of invoking love and wisdom, all traces of sin and negative karma can be eradicated. If that is true, then may this child be born now without harm. And as he said those words, the baby slipped out of the womb and let out a cry. And with the sound of that cry, Angulimala realized that guilt for the past is useless. Guilt for the present is just basically a wisdom factor telling us we’re doing something wrong.
He understood that wisdom and love compassion is the power that frees the mind from all past activity, not activity, from the inner psychic seeds. You know, do something it becomes a habit, before long it’s a personality trait. So the power of love and wisdom has that in it. We don’t need self hatred, we don’t need guilt, we don’t need feelings of inadequacy, we don’t need any of that. It doesn’t matter how many people we have killed or robbed or raped or abused or whatever.
Guilt is good as a factor. It’s a kind of a little itching in our wisdom saying, something’s out here. And when we understand it as such and we give up killing, raping, beating, robbing, or whatever, then guilt is no longer useful in those spheres. There I think we have to in, you know, in life there’s two kinds of guilt from Buddhist sense. One is if it’s something which is naturally negative, meaning harmful to others or harmful to self, then when we feel a little bit of inner negative aftertaste about it.
This is the workings of wisdom. The other thing is in our life, in human society, kings and queens and rulers and priests and all these people come up with ideas of how we should and should not be. And they try and make us feel guilty when we don’t fit into their mold. And that is purely a fabricated reality, and the guilt felt because of such connivings on the part of worldly power brokers is totally useless. So kings and governments and the social social architects, priests and religious types always trying to tell us what reality is like and how to to fit in with it.
You know, we should be nationalistic. If you’re not a patriot then you should feel guilty. From Buddhist sense, that’s just another little square box that puts people into offenses that essentially leads to alienation of peoples from one another and eventually to war, destruction, and killing. So we shouldn’t feel guilty about not being patriotic. In fact, we should feel duped, suckered, if we feel nationalistic and patriotic.
Our patriotism should be to all living beings equally without regard to species, let alone regard to sex, race, color. That essentially all boundaries like that are created purely for convenience. We can accept boundaries that are fabricated for convenience, but we should accept them for what they are, simply little structures set up for the sake of convenience. And soon we forget that they were just set up for convenience and we think there’s something inherently real about them or profoundly real. Similarly in our society, I think we have a lot of things that society tries to make us feel guilty about which have absolutely nothing to do with spiritual reality.
Buddha said, there’s two things you should accomplish in this life, never harm others and always be try to be helpful to others. Outside of those two spheres nothing to ever feel guilty about. If it doesn’t harm someone and if in addition it’s a little bit beneficial to someone then that’s enough from a Buddhist point of view. So this third refuge, Sangha, is the inner invoking, the inner ability to be gentle with oneself, to be forgiving with oneself, to be kind to oneself, to be loving to oneself, to be one’s own protector. It’s said that the Buddha is like the doctor, in other words our inner love, wisdom, power really tells us, is one that diagnoses the problem and outlines the cure.
Inner Dharma, which is how much we know and our ability to apply that, is like the medicine. And the inner Sangha, our own kindness and caring for ourselves, is like the nurse, the one who helps administer the medicine. The outer Sangha there means all spiritual friends really. In the Buddhist world we put monks and nuns as kind of a symbol of them. The Dalai Lama says as I said because in one of my books when I was doing it, one of them in the interview he did, says, I suppose it’s kind of odd to do, like why put monks and nuns because it really means spiritual friends.
He says, cause most monks and nuns are so untogether from so many of the monks and nuns are so untogether in their whole spiritual practice that you’ll look at them and think, goodness, even I can race them to enlightenment. As a result they’re a very good refuge of Sangha because they really give us confidence. That’s what the Dalai Lama put it. I don’t know how it is in the western world, but in the Tibetan world it’s kinda like that, you know. You know most families, the brightest son or daughters, they keep at home to run the family business.
The next brightest they send to college to go away and try and get them into some other kind of sphere and expand the family influence. Finally the dumbest one they’ll put in the monastery. Between all of that the lamas, the high Lama’s themselves whenever anyone comes by with their kids, and if they see a kid who’s really bright they say, Oh, this child of yours has a really big death threat. There’s a big danger to this child’s life. If you don’t make him a monk or nun they’re not going to live out the year.
But if they didn’t do that, essentially they just get dummies in the monasteries, ain’t that right? But they do that so they get some really good ones. And of course you get do get some who run away from home because they want to, you know, study and practice meditation and all this. But probably in the Tibetan world like eighty percent at least are really on the kind of thick thick side. The one in the family they sent away as a token for merit, you know.
Partly they were driving the family crazy and they thought well maybe the Lama’s gonna do something for this guy. So the Dalai Lama says it’s very good to take them as the Sangha refuge because whenever you look at them you think, my goodness, I’m gonna raise them to enlightenment. Then ultimately, of course, the outer Sangha are the ārya, the Ārya Asaṇga, those who have achieved sainthood. Sainthood in Buddhism means in their meditation, meditate they go directly into the experience of the infinite. When they come out of meditation they don’t really carry the vision of the infinite with them anymore, they lose it a little bit, but something of the after flavor comes into their conventional activities.
So we call those Ārya. Then of course they go up through ten stages as all of you, I’m sure you’ve heard, and then they flip into enlightenment. So the best Ārya are those on the higher stages who have flipped into enlightenment, but at very least they should have in their meditation gotten the first stage which is experience of the infinite in their meditation. But because we don’t know who does and who doesn’t have that, we just think all spiritual friends are like Sangha, outer Sangha, and we’ll make the monks and nuns kind of symbols of this. So when we do in in Dharma, in Buddhist practice, it said we should take refuge three times a day and three times a night.
In other words, it is the most fundamental Buddhist meditation practice and spiritual practice. All other Buddhist meditations and spiritual practices are extensions of it. That essentially it really encapsulates all other methods in kind of embryonic form. The complete path to enlightenment with all of the sūtra meditations and tantra meditations are all there in the basic refuge practice, refuge meditation. In North America, because I travel and teach a lot over there with peoples that you know if you go to places like Iowa and Wyoming and Dakota and Arizona, and no one’s ever met a Lama or met a teacher really, you know.
So they’re just stuck with this little old Irishman. So when they asked me how to practice what they should do. For the first year I only let them do this meditation. I don’t let them do any other training, any other practice. That the inner guru their own power to claim, the outer all spiritual beings that you ever get in your life giving you good advice, formally or informally living or in phenomena.
Inner Dharma, your own love, wisdom, power combined with your own innate suchness or infinite nature. The outer dharma in a sense all the enlightened beings and in a more infinite sense or a more transcendental sense the dharmakaya which is how similar to the Christian idea of the Godhead except it’s not as worldly in nature. The dharmakaya, the kind of sphere of infinite divine energy which pervades everything, remembering that. Remembering you always have inner spiritual power, you always have outer spiritual support. You are never any distance from the Dharmakāya, the kind of godhead of Buddha so to speak.
That pool of etheric wisdom energy which is pervading, all pervasive in the universe. Dharma, the inner one’s own knowledge and one’s own natural inkling to nirvana or to inner peace and happiness joy, and the outer, the actual nature of reality itself combined with the spiritual lore on how to attune to that reality, and the Sangha, one’s own inner forgiveness, one’s own inner love, compassion for oneself, one’s own inner wish to benefit oneself, one’s own inner truth seeker, happiness seeker, knowledge seeker, and the outer, either the great ārya beings or all of one’s spiritual friends. And so one does the meditation by beginning with a little Buddha at one’s heart and one thinks this Buddha is one’s own inner guru, one’s own inner Buddha, one’s own inner Dharma, one’s own inner Sangha. It is also the outer gurus, the outer buddhas, the outer Dharma, outer Sangha. One concentrates first on the inner aspect, the mantra, Namo Guruve, Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghaya, the light fills one’s body.
When it fills one’s body you then do a kind of an awareness as you’re doing it, goes totally up and down the body very slowly just feeling the body relax and unwind, totally fill the body with enlightenment energy. The light then goes out from one’s body through one’s pores, goes through all oh, as and when the light fills one’s body one imagines that it completely removes energy, all stress, all anger, all attachments, clingings, all fears, all insecurities. One has one’s own little eternal inner Buddha, no need for fears and securities. One has one’s own inner Dharma, no need for anger, no need for clinging, no need for jealousies. One has one’s own inner Sangha, no need for feelings of self inadequacy, self hatred and so forth.
So in this way one totally fills oneself with the light of spiritual energy. It heals and cures physically, emotionally and spiritually. The light goes out from one’s body, fills all the universe, enters into communion with the forces of goodness and the forces of knowledge in all directions. It then comes back into one’s body drawing all of the universe back in it, back with it together with all of the knowledge, of the enlightenment energy, of the sacred power everywhere existent throughout the universe. This all comes into one’s own body so that the entire universe exists within one’s own body.
And then as one does the mantra, one’s whole body from head down and feet up all melt into light and all the universe melts into light into this little Buddha at the center who is the essential nature, one’s own self. This then melts into light and into vast radiance and then one stops doing the mantra and just sits in this vast radiance, sitting comfortably and essentially just bathing the body, bathing the emotions, and bathing the spirit in the vast infinite radiance. This vast infinite radiance is not a visualization or a fabrication. The pure nature of all physical matter is simply energy. The pure nature of mind is simply luminosity.
So this vast radiance is simply body and mind in their most relaxed form. Then at the end when someone sits quietly for a few minutes and at the end one arises from that quiet by saying a few mantras and then again thinking one’s own self, this body with that little Buddha at one’s heart. And as one goes about, gets up from the mat and the mattress, one thinks, me Buddha, you Buddha, me little Buddha, you little Buddha, and goes with all living beings. And it doesn’t matter if someone seems ugly and harsh and cruel, you think a little ugly, harsh, cruel but and try to keep that sense of spiritual energy in all things. If we take tantric initiation, highest tantric initiation, one of the precepts or Samaya, one of the things to do in the five the nineteen vows or precepts of the five Dhyāna Buddhas, as said three times a day and three times a night, we take refuge.
When we take, when we originally begin our training and we’re given the teaching on refuge, we’re. It’s not what Buddha meant. It really should be stretched out so that, you know, you’re doing it six times. So if you’re awake for eighteen hours a day, it means every three hours you sort of crank yourself up a little bit, pump yourself up, sort of like hyperventilating spiritually or, you know, taking a big dosage of spiritual vitamins or something like that. The idea is to interspace your day and interspace your night with practice of refuge.
So the first one is when you get up in the morning, it’s still dark. Next will be perhaps you’re driving to work and you do it while driving to work while stuck at a red light, or you’re working in the office and the boss isn’t looking so you look like you’re really thinking deeply about some administrative matter for five or ten minutes. Every two or three hours do the practice, every two or three hours. Do it exactly the way it’s taught, simply doing the mantra. If it’s in public then you do the mantra totally quietly.
And you recollect. Recollect really means, etymological meaning of recollect is to regather or bring back together. You recollect your own inner guru, your own inner Buddha, your own inner Dharma, your own inner Sangha. You invoke the inspiration of the outer gurus, the outer buddhas, the outer Dharma, the outer Sangha. I said that this puts one on the path to enlightenment.
I think it’s the same if you’re a Christian, if you’re a Hindu, if you’re a Taoist, a native North American shaman, essentially you should invoke the powers of your own and of universal sacredness or spirituality three times a day, three times a night. One doesn’t think of it that the Buddhas are only Buddhist. All Buddhas are Buddhists. A Buddha in the Mahāyāna Sūtra known as the Mahāyāna Pranidhana, it said that on every atom of the universe, every atom of the world, there’s a thousand Buddhas just trying to manifest that every atom of the universe has this dynamic on it. One of the Hindu critics said, that’s a few too many Buddhas.
But the idea, like the Dalai Lama saying, he’d come back as a book or a bridge or a dog or an incognito American. The Buddhas, we don’t know who and what and where they are. They can be manifest anywhere. You know, the Dalai Lama can die and be reborn in America, Lama Yeshe died and was reborn in Spain. Those are just as Tulkus of course, so it’s not exactly the same as an enlightened being as kind of just an emanation.
But direct manifestations of the Buddhas can be anywhere. Your dog can be a buddha, your cat, the bird in the tree outside, Christ could have been a buddha, Mohammed, they could equally have been charlatans. We don’t know, maybe they were also charlatans. Maybe they were instead charlatans, but they could also have been Buddhas. So when we take refuge, we don’t think it’s limited to the Buddhist tradition or that it’s especially Buddhist.
They are Buddhas, but they are not necessarily Buddhist Buddhas. Buddhism here really just refers to an historical legacy, doesn’t it? And language environment like Buddha was a Sanskrit word, so if it’s linked to Sanskrit in that lineage then it uses that word. But literally Buddha just means any being, any being purifying the mind and expanding wisdom. Purifying means getting rid of anger, pride, jealousy, and wrong understanding of self.
And expansion means expanding the qualities of love, compassion, wisdom, and so forth, knowledge of the two truths, wisdom of the two truths, the two levels of reality, infinite and the fine ultimate diversity of the finite and the one tasteness of the infinite that is all pervasive everywhere. So in that many spiritual masters have taught that same path. They’ve taught purify the mind of evil, of harm, of anger, of hatred, of jealousy, of pride, and they’ve also taught to expand the mind to understand reality. Then we can call them Buddhists. The Dalai Lama once said, well, we’d like to call Christ a bodhisattva, but then we’re scared the Christians would get mad at us and say we’re trying to kidnap them.
Christians always tend to be a little protective about Christ. Even when the Jews say he was Jewish, they try to come and say, no. No. He couldn’t have been really. Then all the blacks in America came up with some idea that Christ was really black.
That really got them nervous. But being by a bunch of Asians would probably be like too much. But who knows, he may have been, he may even have been a Buddha. You know, I’m sure some of you know there’s kind of a whole tradition of saying that Christ, after the big argument in the temple at age twelve, jumped on a caravan. His family had to jump on a caravan to escape because they ran into a lot of heat from the religious powers, and they ran away to India.
And he was in India between ages twelve and twenty eight, and there’s a whole tradition of how he studied in Ladakh and then went down to Orissa and all these places. If it’s true or not, who knows? But I think if you look anyway, Christ definitely would have been aware of Buddhism because the silk route and the caravan route, the silk route and the spice route to India was very well opened at that time. And in some ways the difference between Judaism and Christianity, you can quite clearly say, one can quite clearly say whether or not it’s an historical link or not, but the difference between Judaism and Christianity is kind of a smattering of Buddhism. And that difference between an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, and on the one hand being the Jewish approach to dealing with other people who are difficult.
And Christ’s idea of turn the other cheek, love your neighbor as yourself, and all these kind of ideas he introduced are very, Buddhist in flavor. So perhaps he arrived at them directly himself or perhaps he heard about them through travelers coming from India on a Silk Route because in his time Buddhism went all the way from Calcutta to the borders of Persia. Afghanistan was Buddhist, Pakistan was Buddhist, East Persia was Buddhist, and so it was the Greeks of course had established Indian Empire in those times had come into what they called the Kusana Empire, and the Greek capital of that was up on Khotan, north of Tibet, just east of Afghanistan. And Agra, where the Taj Mahal is built today, was the southern capital. So certainly the Middle East was totally exposed to Mahāyāna thought and Buddhist thought coming from there.
And so even if Christ didn’t travel east to escape is in accordance with that belief, certainly he would have learned about some Buddhism through the travelers and through the caravans passing. There’s also a tradition that he didn’t die on the cross, that he was taken down. He just learned that the Buddhist tantric technique of holding your breath and stopping your heart, and so they took him down and then he escaped and went back to India. There’s even a grave in Kashmir which for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years the locals have claimed was Isu, Christ who had escaped from the cross. But they don’t say they’re not Christians.
They say he wasn’t really the Messiah. He was just another prophet like John the Baptist, and the real Messiah didn’t come till the fourteenth century who just happens to be some little guy from their valley. But anyway, there’s a body in Kashmir which they say is is Christ. So but anyway, when we do the refuge thing, we don’t think of it as a Buddhist, as an exclusively Buddhist practice. Those beings who aren’t Buddhists also have an inner guru, an inner Buddha, an inner Dharma, and an inner Sangha.
Those beings who we call upon for our spiritual inspiration, from all directions includes all beings who have achieved those qualities or who. You benefit from a Sufi poet in a way that’s a little bit the gurus, the working of the gurus. You benefit from a Taoist encounters with Taoist masters. The wisdom you get from them is equally valid. In Buddhism we don’t exclude anything from the practice.
We say just so long as it harmonizes with the Dharma, the way to enlightenment, if it contributes to happiness, goodness, well-being, and enlightenment for self and others, then it’s useful. For that reason every time Buddhism goes to another country, it really changes quite radically because it incorporates rather than tries to replace what is there. It looks for what is there that is in harmony with the ways of goodness and enlightenment and incorporates them. So I think we’ll do the mantra now and then we do that visualization with it, then we’ll sit in meditation quietly for a few minutes and then do the mantra a little bit more and then come out of it and go for our tea time. So Buddha said, if you cannot do anything else in your lifetime, this simple practice, this very basic practice will be a complete safeguard.
If you can do this well, then nothing else really is needed. Anything else you learn is an extension of it, not a replacement for or an alternative to it. Everything else is a supplement or a complement, that this practice in itself in this life will keep all harmful ghosts, gods, and humans at bay. At the time of death, this practice alone is enough to safeguard on the path of the Bardo, but definitely anyone who keeps this practice strong in this lifetime from the moment they take it up their life each day grows happier and happier, more and more peaceful, more and more joyful. If you do it well you will learn always each day to be kinder and gentler and more wise with yourself, kinder and gentler and more wise with those whom you meet on the path of life.
We say to practice in conjunction with Tupasamba Gompa with a little bit of learning, learning a little bit more about what how the mind and body work and what life’s about, the spiritual dynamics of enlightenment will make it ever deeper, and Sangha reflecting on that or seeing what it all means to you, and finally Gampa which means meditation but has a sense of integration. We say there’s causal refuge, path refuge, and result refuge. Causal refuge is when you first start doing the practice. This becomes the cause. Refuge here is kind of a funny word in English, it’s hard to say exactly what it means.
The Tibetan kyabba means means generally in life good things come, bad things come, sicknesses, harms, unhappiness and all these things. So kyapa means that when it’s like a something you hold in your hand which gives protection like a sacred amulet or a magic wand or something like that. When you do this practice, invoke your own guru, your own Buddha, your own Dharma, your own Sangha together with the sacred and knowledge forces that are everywhere in the world. When you do this it’s like holding a magic stone in your hand. Your own goodness becomes your own protector, your own wisdom becomes your own protector.
Not only that, when you invoke it’s said that if you have this practice firmly inherently then no gods or ghosts can harm. You know recently Dalai Lama has been going on about a controversial Buddhist practice called Dorje Shugden, and some of the Lamas don’t like that very much because they like to do the practice. So Dalai Lama went on one of the things he went on about quite strongly was that it’s like a ghost which can harm. So Geshe Kelsang who’s a big in England who’s a big defender of the practice, he wrote to Tri Cycle magazine, Why is the Dalai Lama so worried about ghosts? If you have good refuge there’s no danger from ghosts, which is true.
So we’ll have to see what his holiness comes back with in response to that because Geshe Kelsang got him on point there. Got him on point there. But generally, oh, you know there’s a Chinese saying, An angry fist rarely finds a smiling face. When you have good refuge then all forces of nature feel that power. They feel that energy from you.
If someone is spiritually well centered. And here the centeredness is done by understanding that there is a place within you where you can be most strong, most balanced, most wise, most together. And there are also forces in the universe, powers pervading this universe. When you are centered you can draw on those forces, you can draw on those powers. One little drop of water isn’t much, but when you combine it with the flow of the ocean it becomes something very very great.
So we say Guru Buddha Dhamma Sangha, Guru is often often we say call these the three Ratna or the three wish fulfilling jewels. Even though we list four, we say the three wish fulfilling jewels because we don’t count the guru as as a fourth, but really as one which is all three. Your inner guru, the Buddha aspect is your own mind, the Dharma aspect is your own feelings if you will or articulation of your life process. And the your inner guru, the the Sangha aspect is your own body. Your body is your Sangha, your emotions and conceptual mind, sometimes translated as speech, but it’s referring to your whole conceptual mind pattern and an articulation pattern.
That is your Dharma, and your mind is your Buddha. So we say all three are in the guru and the guru is the embodiment of all three. So we take a tea break, and afterwards we do a short thing on using the breath, breath awareness and learning to breathe, then we take a lunch break. And generally, the time when you wake up sunrise means one before sunrise, and they divide the phases of the sunrise as being very good for meditation. So the best time for meditation for the Buddhist idea is from the time the light there’s a hint of the light on the horizon until the sun actually comes up or makes a hint.
You can actually see the first rays of the sun. So traditionally all Central Asians consider that the best time to meditate, that time before the sunrise. But after the first hint of light. Otherwise, you practice dream yoga, it’s also a very good time for dream yoga. When you practice dream yoga usually you get up at about three or four and you stay awake until that just before that first hint of light, and you go back to sleep and you try and practice your dream yoga techniques in that roughly hour, hour and a half period between the hint of dawn and the rising of the sun.
But the thing with refuge during the day then really means to kind of divide it into one in the morning, one in kind of midday, and one toward the end of the day. Essentially so that you keep your sense or awareness of sacredness strongly present. If you don’t, what happens is essentially the mind which practices fades. You know, what is it that makes a practice and what is it makes non practice? Practice is essentially the presence of two things, drenpa and shezhin.
Drenpa meaning a kind of a mindfulness or Mindfulness has a sense of memory about it. There’s something you’re remembering or recollecting, and it also has a sense of making that intensely present as an awareness. So if you do this practice three times a day, three times a night, then the three times during the day will keep that mindfulness very strong, and three times at night will mean that when you go to sleep, again, it’ll be a very strong, clear, meaningful sleep. People who don’t learn how to practice well, generally during their life, they collect mostly negative karma, and they go to sleep at night and dream about collecting negative karma. So we say the day is mostly negative and the night is just a kind of a regurgitating the negativity, reliving or further digesting the negative energy.
So the idea is doing it at night like that keeps your sense of sacred sacredness strongly present at the time of sleep, which means sleep will be more restful and relaxing. Mind will be clearer in sleep so dreams will be more significant. Tomorrow when we’re doing, if anyone has hair, tomorrow we’re looking at the tantras which takes a radically different approach to the stuff we’re working on today. Generally the stuff we’re doing today is considered prerequisites of tantric practice. In order to practice tantra well, you need a kind of a spiritually balanced boat vessel, body mind vessel.
Generally, these basic practices are the foundations on which Tantra happens. So one of the sessions tomorrow will be the Tantric Methods for Lucid Dreaming, But those methods are not accessible, not easily accomplished if one doesn’t first establish some basic inner stability through these kinds of simpler, more direct not direct, more obvious, less abstract kind of practices. So the second technique we’re looking at today is breath awareness, And every Buddhist tradition of the world does this. Tibetans have a number of varieties of it. The system that I myself found most useful in my own life was the breath awareness method of the early Kadampa Llamas which became a little rare in later centuries, kind of became less popular and or less less used, widespreadly used in later centuries.
But it’s very similar to the Soto Zen School of Japan and has some similarities to the four Satipatthanas of Thailand. Here the idea is essentially that our breath is the perfect mirror of our body and mind. It’s kind of, look at the breath and you know where the body’s at. Look at the breath, you know where the emotions are at. Look at the breath, you know where the mind is at.
Everything is reflected in the breath. So the breath is used in two ways here. One is as a kind of place from which you can look deeper into your body and transform the kind of relationship with your body that you have. And when as the four Satipatthana is first looking into the body then looking into emotions and looking into mind or thought and then looking into the way things appear to us, dharmas are phenomena. On the one hand it’s that, a method of looking more deeply into the realities of those four things.
In another way it’s a method of instantly, very immediately and directly imposing a pacifying ambience on the body, emotion, mind, and sense of phenomena or life flow. The minute we put the mind on the breath the body relaxes, the emotions relax, the thinking slows down or calms down a bit, and our sense of the flow of the events in our life become more almost like slow motion. In Canada we’re really into like ice hockey, you and you’re going like ninety miles an hour, you’ve got ten people going ninety miles an hour on the ice in every direction chasing after this little puck with clubs. So it’s like a very intense kind of sport, very physical, very emotional, very intellectual, and in a way very spiritual. And one of my my favorite players once commented, and he was asked why he thought that he was about ten times as good as any other player on the ice.
He always seemed to be in the right place at the right time and make the right moves at these tremendous speeds. He said, well for me, when I’m if I look at the game it looks very very fast, but when I’m out there on the ice everything seems to be moving in slow motion just like on an instant replay slow motion movie. And I think many of the great athletes of the world in those types of encounter sports, they have that talent because they are able to find a place in themselves similar to what we’re looking at here in meditation. They do it through the training of their sport. That place within themselves in which the timing of everything becomes radically transformed, the sense of timing becomes radically transformed.
So as a result they can look at the dynamics, we can look at the dynamics of what’s going on in a totally different perspective, almost like looking at the top, a very fast moving sport, but looking at it in slow motion. In a sense centering on the breath has this immediate impact. The body becomes clearer, the emotions become clearer, conceptual mind or thinking becomes clearer, and the experience of phenomena becomes clearer. Almost like we get inside it to a place where we can see exactly what’s going on as opposed to standing somewhere else where it’s just it’s very difficult to see the interconnectedness of things. When we do the practice of refuge, the first one we went through, essentially the way we stabilize that and take it into greater depths of practice is by means of the breathing exercises, by means of the breathing techniques.
Tomorrow in Tantra we’re going to look at some alternative sort of power breathing techniques, but today, this method is simple awareness, simple awareness. And it’s useful to do it a few times a day and get into the habit of doing it a few times a day in a very casual way, not formally sitting down and thinking I’m this and I’m that and I’m this and that, but simply every few minutes, alright, every fifteen minutes, every half hour, just put your mind back on your breath. Maybe count five breaths, ten breaths, something like that. In the Kadampa tradition, at the beginning of every meditation session you should do it. So they were monks and usually they do four or six meditation sessions a day.
So you begin your meditation session by essentially sitting down and for fifteen minutes or half hour, monks had nothing to do but meditate so long meditation sessions, like a prayer to Tsongkhapa says. You know one of the prayers to Tsongkhapa, we believe that when Mahāyāna Sūtra and Tantra we think that when the great beings die they don’t really die, they just kind of fade away to some other tantric realm. So the prayer to him says, well listen, you’re up there with nothing else to do other than benefit sentient beings, so come here. So in that same way the monks, know, they did much else to do, you know, no farming, no trading, no handling money, no like, you know, all this stuff. So just meditate, so six times a day, four or six times a day they’d meditate and each session, two or three hour session.
So then they’d make the first fifteen minutes or a half hour of basic breathing. And if you can do it as a sitting thing for a few minutes before doing the refuge practice that I taught earlier that’s very good. If occasionally you can do it as a more intense practice like take a weekend in the country or down by the seaside or somewhere beautiful or just take a tent and walk off into the bush somewhere, set up your tent and do a lot of it for a period of a day. Tibetans and Buddhists generally recommend new moons and full moons as the best for doing that kind of days of intense breath awareness. It kind of takes you inside yourself and reveals whole other aspects of your your being.
So if we practice it at the beginning of the meditation session, it’s quite simple. When we sit the important thing is comfort, and usually we put these seven points like cross your legs because when you cross your legs if you put one foot here, one foot here or at least just crossing the legs cuts down the flow of blood to the lower part of the body, which means you’re getting more blood in the upper part of your body and most important in the brain, the glands here, the heart, the navel chakra and so forth. So through that whole process. Important thing is back straight, but if people have bad backs, one of Buddha’s first five disciples had a bad back, he used to make him meditate lying flat on the the ground but without a pillow, so you just kind of lay flat on your back, but you’re not allowed to put your feet toward the Buddha or toward the teacher. If you do that with Tibetans they’ll think you’re real barbarians.
Tibetans already suspect that Westerners are barbarians. That’ll prove it to them. But so you just sort of lay down flat on your back, arms beside you like this, and get your back your whole body as comfortable as possible. Or if you can do it sitting up that’s great. So legs crossed, back, shoulders in line, head slightly inclined forward, eyes at the angle of the nose, but not looking at the nose just looking downward, take take a point on the floor at the angle of the nose, tongue placed on the palate of the mouth, on the roof of the mouth so you’re not just producing liquids in your mouth all the time and swallowing and disturbing your neighbors.
You keep the mouth shut because if you’re a great meditator like me and you meditate for six months at a time without even going to the bathroom, you don’t want birds making nests in your mouth. It’s true, these things do happen. Know, there’s a little like in India, when you get the power of the pranayama, you can hold your breath for like six months or a year at a time without moving and no heartbeat and no breathing or whatnot. Then like ants can build whole ant hills around you and you don’t even notice. Let alone a little thing like the bird making a nest in your mouth.
So you so you you keep your mouth closed. Usually, the eyes, we say keep half open.