Means guarding it or holding to it. So again, if we can’t find someone who is holding to the way, we can’t find a way which is being held to. We can’t find an act of holding, of a holder, holding to that way within me, the practitioner. I’m disciplined. I’m not in my body, mind, or anywhere else.
And the actual way, we can’t find that anywhere. Look where we may. So the act of holding to it, again, unfindable with gentleness or patience. My Buddhist name is Maitri Zopa, the patient, patient lover, patient lover. So where do you find patience in an Irishman?
Not to be found. There’s no practitioner of patience because we look in the body we can’t find a self, look in the mind we can’t find a self, looking separate from body and mind we can’t find a self. So no practitioner of patience, objects of patience, where are they? Cannot be found. Application of patience, not in the first moment, not in the last moment.
So similarly with all things, everything is essentially just a flow of energy and concepts. All objects of experience mere labels and names. We think I am. There is a me. That me is unfindable.
But nonetheless, we have a sense of me. If we check closely, we can’t find it. But, conventionally, it happens. Conventionally, it works. It’s there.
It’s operative. It’s like the atom. We think, where is the atom? We hold up a drawing. Well, this is the atom.
Was it in the right side or the left side or the top or the bottom? If you take away this do you have like the essence of the whole atom or did that part lose its atomness and this part get the atomness? But we say atom. So based on a particular tenshi, or basis of imputation, we put a label or a name or an idea. Then after that I deal with me as though there were a real me, not as though I were merely a concept.
I deal with you as though there were a real you. I deal with the act of doing as though there were really a doing. So the vision of the Mahāyāna perspective, the way of the universal hero, is that ultimately nothing is findable, nothing has any final existence in the sense of a findability. But conventionally, all things seem to exist. The example is a dream.
We dream of an elephant. Is the elephant in the elephant’s trunk? Is the elephant in the elephant’s tail? Does the elephant pervade all of the bodily parts of the elephant equally? Well, no.
It’s only a dream elephant. Actually, there’s not even an any elephant there. Just a dream elephant. But similarly in the waking state, things are just as different as in the dream state. The what we call in Tibetan, nang trul and nang trul.
The way in which things appear to the unenlightened mind or the uninquiring mind. And their actual mode of existence, those two ways are as different as day and night. The nang trul appears to the sense consciousnesses like I see an elephant, and I get an image of an elephant. So that’s the and it comes as a complete package. And that image arises in my mind and I say elephant.
And I think really that elephant is really something like an elephantness. There’s really an elephantness. But, well, like, the elephant goes to the bathroom, I don’t say the elephant has lost some of its elephantness. Or if it eats some grass, I don’t say the grass has lost its grassness and become an elephant. Now every day this body sheds five hundred million cells, but we don’t think of our body as being less bodiness with the loss of those cells.
That essentially all things lack any findability outside of our own mental processing. Those things that appear, the only reality they have aside from aside from their appearances, the only reality they have is the reality we, the perceivers, put upon them. You know, a newborn child doing something doesn’t think this is me, that is that, and I’m doing. The three with the newborn child, the doer, the doing, and the done to, are very, very innocent of any self or other, any duality. Duality in Buddhism often you meet Buddhists or people who read a little Buddhism, and they say, oh, that’s very dualistic about things.
Buddhism in doesn’t mean no this and no that or no right or no wrong. Duality is not referring to any of that conventional talk. He’s talking about the ultimate nature of things, how infinity pervades all things, and that there is no findability in the finite appearance. When you look inside an elephant, the elephantness melts into infinity. There’s nothing you can hold up and say, I’ve got it.
This is the elephant. There’s nothing. Not in the legs, in the horns, not in the ears, not in the tail, not in the mind, and not separate from those things. The infinity nature of things moves like a great flow. Moves yet does not move.
The things that appear in the face of infinity do so like dream objects, like objects that are illusory, like hallucinations, like flashes of lightning in the sky, like drops of bubbles on a water, and like a magician’s magic creation. Watching a magician, you know, in the old days in India, you weren’t allowed to have female striptease artists. Yeah. They were kind of prudish about that thing, that kind of thing. They thought it was denigrating to women to have them publicly strip tease.
So they had to get people like me with mantras to set up a stage and say mantras, and you’d see illusory naked females dancing on the stage. You go on. And suddenly, the forms of naked women would appear on stage. And guys would come in and pay a little bit of money to watch them dance. But actually, what was on the what was on the stage were just phantasms, moving holographic images created by the magician’s mind.
Just moving holographic images. Now where is the woman? In the form, separate from the form, in the magician, separate from the magician, unfindable. A woman who cannot have children, a barren woman, Mo shong, infertile woman, dreams she has a child. She cries and cries and cries tears of joy.
The child lives for many years in her dream. She has joy. She has tears from time to time, happy, sad with the difficulties of bringing up a kid. Then fifteen years later in her dream, that child dies. She experienced that child completely, utterly, and thoroughly as a real phenomena.
Was the child she experienced in that dream form, the body? Was it in the mind she dreamed that that child had? Was it separate from those? Was it in her? Unfindable.
Unfindable. In that same way, a giver cannot be found. A recipient cannot be found. The practice of giving cannot be found. Someone who practices discipline cannot be found.
A practice of discipline cannot be found. The act of practicing discipline cannot be found. Patience. No one. There is no patient person.
He or she cannot be found. Someone receiving patient behavior, that person cannot be found. The action of patient behavior cannot be found. All those things, just names and labels we put upon conventional flowing phenomena. Yet, nonetheless, even though if I put an an ultimate analysis to my body, I do not find a body.
Nonetheless, someone steps on my toe, I think my body hurts. If I look in my toe, my toe isn’t in the top of the toe or the bottom of the toe or the front of the bottom or separate from the toe. There’s no toe. But nonetheless, ultimately no toe. Nonetheless, someone steps on my toe, it hurts.
The woman who dreamed of a child then dreamed the child died. Her joy and her tears seemed to exist. That seemingness is enough. No more is required. You seem to exist.
That’s enough. I don’t need any more from you than your seemingness. I seem to exist. That’s enough. I don’t need any more purpose other than that seemingness.
Giving seems to exist. Someone gives, someone receives, there’s an act of giving. These three things seem to exist. No more is required. So when we bring the prajnaparamita, the perfection of highest awareness, down to the other five.
What it essentially means is that in all things in our life we find that place between the doer, the done to, and the doing, which is equidistant from all three. I am the doer, but I am not the doer because no doer is findable. I am the done to because the done to is part of my experience, but I’m not really the done to. I am the act of doing because it’s part of my experience, but then I’m not really the doing. This self, we cannot say the self is this or the self is that.
The self exists always completely immersed in infinity. If we say this, it’s finite. If we say that, it’s finite. So Buddha said, let’s drop this word self and say non self. Because if you say self, you’re hinting at something finite, something separatable from something else, something which is small part of a big picture like self and others.
Whereas the actual nature of our being is completely one hundred percent immersed in the realm of infinity. Infinity touches you on every side. Every atom of your body is completely caressed by infinity. There is not one speck of you which is not right now being kissed by infinity. Nothing in your body is any distance from infinity.
Nothing in your mind is any distance from infinity, and nothing other than those two is ever any distance from infinity. So Buddha said, the way of the universal hero or universal heroine is established by placing the mind in that highest analytical wisdom. Now analytical hero doesn’t mean analyzing way we think of it in Western philosophy. It means penetrating. Chewa.
Chewa means going Chewa means like if you’re navigating a river to get to the other side, you have to go very precisely. So the highest penetrating wisdom, keeping one eye on how nothing is really findable, but conventionally all things appear like in a dream, like in an illusion, and so on and so forth. But just as in a dream, a good dream is much better to experience than a bad dream. No one wants a nightmare. Everyone wants a sweet dream.
In that same way, on the conventional level, on the level of the experience of the finite, Everyone, all that appears, and all the living beings equally want good dreams. You may be unfindable. You may be indistinguishable from your infinite nature. Nonetheless, in your finiteness, you want a good dream. You want me to be generous with you.
You want me to be ethical with you. You want me to be gentle with you. You want me to have joyous energy with you. You want me to have a stabilized, focused mind with you, and you want me to have highest wisdom with you in that same way from you. It’s much nicer with me if you’re generous rather than miserable, if you’re sharing rather than stealing.
It’s much nicer for me if you’re ethical rather than cruel. It’s much nicer for me if you’re patient rather than intolerant of any of my nonexistent yet seemingly manifest shortcomings. It’s much better for me if your energy is joyous and intense rather than if you’re very lethargic and boring. It’s much better for me if you’ve got jnana, a mind which can stay on the topic rather than go here there, and there, and there, three words on this, and then you’re talking about the house and the country, and then you’re talking about your previous love affair, and then you’re talking much better if your mind is or or or or. And that’s much better for me if you don’t grasp at subject object and the exchange between the two.
So they’re called paramita because the vision of the infinite sphere is brought into all of them. Because that infinite sphere, that vision is brought into all of them, therefore, they have gone beyond. They are beyond. They’re beyond the realm of duality. When the practitioner keeps that vision of the infinite sphere, there is never a sense of gain and never a sense of loss.
All things rise and fall in the infinite. Infinite. There is never a sense of anything such like anger because no no self is here to become angry, and no object exists there at which to be angry. Like a man who dreams a dog bites him and gets up in the morning and goes and beats his dog, that’s what the expression of anger is like. Nothing to which to have attachment or clinging.
Essentially, nothing is there to cling to. So in the Heart Sūtra, Buddha says very clearly, there is no path to enlightenment because there is no enlightenment. There is no path to the cessation of suffering or nirvana because there is no suffering. This is the vision of the Bodhisattva. That if these things could be found, if they existed as findable separate realities, then we would have a real problem.
Then we would really be stuck. If it existed in some kind of eternal, you know, static, findable form like that, then if a suffering was there, it would be there forever. It would never be transcendable. If enlightenment were ahead of final existence, it could not be cultivated or achieved. Either we would have it or we wouldn’t have it.
There would be those like me who are enlightened and those like who? Who are enlightened. Well, essentially, if things were locked out of the infinite and put in cold storage in the finite that we would be in a world of no transformation, no change, no hope, no evolution. So when Nāgārjuna wanted to bring this all down to one simple statement, said, all things are infinite because seeds, sprouts grow from seeds. If you look at a seed in a sprout, if the seed were findable and had real existence, it could not sprout.
It would be frozen as a seed forever. If the sprout were findable in the sprout, it could never have come from a seed. The fact that everything is in a state of constant flux itself reflects the infinite nature of being. Itself reflects the ultimate sphere. So generally, if we want to practice tantra, we should, it said, make these four bases very stable.
Firstly, we make refuge stable because it gives us a sense of our own sacredness and the sacredness of others. And as we’ll see, any of you who come to the workshop tomorrow, when when we cultivate mandala meditation and tantric arrogance, pride of being a Buddha, that this same sacred quality from refuge is brought into that practice. We need the breath meditation and breath awareness for the simplification and stabilization of our body, our emotions, our thoughts, and the manner in which we experience phenomena. We need the mind of universal love and compassion because when we practice the tantra itself, we essentially want that as the ground on which the tantric mandala or edifice palace is built. And finally, in tantric practice, the main emphasis is on ego dissolution through the prajnaparamita or the the training in the prajnaparamita or the wisdom of the final with the wisdom of the final nature of things is the quintessential key required to release the ordinary sense of self and to allow that sense of self to reemerge as directed by the specific yogic technology.
So I’m delighted today I got to talk about these subjects. I’d like to thank you very much for coming, joining. The Dalai Lama always often ends up his talks by saying if there’s anything useful here, that then that’s that’s a great pleasure to be able to share it with you in words and in in dharma conversations. And if there’s some things you don’t like, well, just forget that you heard them here. We conclude.
I’ll just chant a few of the prajnaparamita mantras. Gate gate paragate parasamgate. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, gone to enlightenment. Svāhā. Svāhā is like, wow.
When they say it like this, this is like the five stages of the unfoldment of wisdom. Gone, gati, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, and enlightenment. Because in the beginning when we start practicing the Paramita, we don’t really have much of a sense of the ultimate reality other than as a fabrication in our mind which we apply. It’s like walking or walking along. You appear to me.
I appear to me. The trees appear to me. And I kind of fabricate a sense of the infinite. I say, not here, not there, between. Not here, not there, not in between.
But mostly, I just experience the finite aspects of things. That’s in the first. And that’s called in Tibetan, which means gathering together. So here the infinite, the finite aspect appears very strongly, and I kind of try to superimpose an idea of the infinite on it, always to mix that idea of the infinite in with the finite appearances. So then I go across and eventually in my meditations thinking about the infinite, a couple of little kind of sparks come, little sparks of the infinite, like seeing reflections of the stars in the ocean.
And not the real stars, but it gives you a sense sense of what the stars are like. So that stage is called, means something like it’s usually mistranslated as a path of preparation. As a translator, we translators like to giggle and chuckle about other people’s mistranslations. But actually means united, linked, hooked, hooked up. It means for the first time, you’ve gotten a little sense of the what the infinite is like.
You haven’t really fallen right into it, but like some little stardust has fallen down into your meditation, so you know what the stars are like. Like. So it’s called Jor lam, the path of connection. The contact direct con some kind of direct experiential contact has been made. And so that’s the second gati gati.
Then on the third one, paragati, then one day in your meditations, you just completely fall into the infinite. You fall utterly, completely, and thoroughly into the infinite. It’s a direct non conceptual. At that time, you become an ārya. You become a saint as far as we Buddhist believe in saints.
You become a transcendent one. Ārya means popped up. When you see the infinite, it like pops you up from before that you’re mostly seeing the the finite, so you’re kinda glued or stuck to it. When you get a direct experience of the infinite, it’s like it releases that and you just rise up to the top. So you rise above grasping to it or any kind of ordinary relationship with the finite.
Then you come out of your meditation. And as you go back amongst the finite phenomenas, you carry an air of the infinite with you. But when you look at the finite strongly like a glass of water, you kinda lose a little bit of picture of the infinite. Then when you go back in your meditations and meditate on the infinite, you lose the any sense of the finite. It’s like you’re between the two worlds, oscillating between the two worlds.
So the next stage is called gom lam, usually mistranslated by other translators as the path of meditation. Doesn’t mean that at all. It’s talking about integrating the experience. So it’s really the path of integration. You’re integrating infinite into your finite life and when you go into meditation, the finite into the infinite.
You go across ten stages of ever deepening integration. And then at the tenth, flip up you arrive at Ke Chig Ma, and then you flip over the last moment into enlightenment when the infinite and the finite becomes simultaneously and effortlessly experienced. When you look at the finite, you see the face of the infinite. When you look at the infinite, you see a reflection of all of the finite, the the countless finite phenomena that the two become experienced completely simultaneously. So gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi is referring to taking the prajnaparamita or the wisdom of the relationship between the ultimate reality and conventional reality or infinite and finite, bringing them to complete fruition within one’s own self.
It’s called Bodhi, the last stage, because in it, one looks at all the living beings with complete love, infinite love, infinite compassion, infinite caring. Yet looks at them in with that love, compassion, caring without distorting their situation by projecting a false self or ego status or ends upon them. Therefore, it’s called the parinirvana. It’s not abiding in nirvana because its compassion keeps it in the world. It’s not abiding in the world because it’s nirvana.
It’s wisdom keeps it beyond the world. So we can’t say it’s in the world, we can’t say it’s outside the world. We can’t say it’s worldly, we can’t say it’s spiritual. It’s non abiding. So that’s the meaning of the word bodhi, sees all living beings with love and compassion, so so is in the world, but does not distort them or separate them from the infinite, so is not in the world.
So it’s gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, gone to bodhi or perfect knowledge. Usually at all Buddhist gatherings, when we finish, we say a few verses for auspicious purposes, like, These days, all Tibetans say those ones because the Dalai Lama’s gurus used to say them in India, and so then the Dalai Lama got stuck with saying them and then because he said them all the time. Everyone else has to say them because they all like him. But, essentially, they mean by any positive energy through us coming together, may we achieve the state of the sublime mind. And then through that, any benefits that I get spiritually like that, may other living beings be positively impacted.
And the precious mind of enlightenment, if not born within me, be born now. And even if I have a little bit of that universal mind, even though it’s it’s perilous, may it grow from high to higher. Thank you very much. Collected great meritorious karma through that act of giving. Then later when Buddha was in his eighties, One night he went to dinner and he at the dinner he said, none of the other monks were allowed to eat.
He said, this meal is exclusively for me for me. And he ate it all himself, and it had some pork in it which had gone bad. So he died of food poisoning. And then when he’s getting sick and as he’s about to die, the the householder who gave him the food was feeling a little guilty like, oh, sorry about that, Buddha. And Buddha said, no big deal.
You got the same amount of positive karma as the woman who gave me the milk rice that brought me my enlightenment. But actually, living, dying, these things are just theater which are all parts of our life. We all know we have to die. We’re all happy to stay alive as long as we can stay alive and do what good works we can do as long as we can do those good works. But someone comes along and actually kills us.
This actually saves us all that hard work. So actually, it was a bit of a kindness. And some people will argue, well, they did it out of anger or out of meanness or out of cruelty or out of ignorance. But again, like someone giving you a precious gem knowing they’re giving you a precious gem and someone giving you a precious gem simply because they don’t know what it is and wanna get rid of it. Both ways, a precious gem equally benefits you.
So both ways, you should say a special thanks to those people, those that being. So in that way, we meditate on the kindness of all. And in so that’s when we meditate on the kindness of all, we feel love for all. When you meditate when you think of it as kind, you think of it you put out a positive energy. When you have that positive energy towards all, compassion will naturally come.
If you like someone, you’ll feel bad about their suffering. In the same way, if we can establish strong love, then strong compassion naturally will come. So the first step of the meditation, we do this thing of trying to equalize and look at the way we our likes and dislikes and attachments and aversions towards people and living beings develop, and we establish a kind of a sense of equality between them. In the second one, we meditate on the kindness of all, how all living beings benefit us in some ways. The Dalai Lama often says, see those who harm you as emanations of your own guru.
Now this center here is associated with Lama Rinpoche, who lives in Nepal, travels the world a lot. A friend of mine in France was living and working in France and hadn’t seen Rinpoche for about two years. And one morning, he got a a telegram from Rinpoche saying, your life is in danger. Don’t go out of the house today. In fact, stay home for a month and do a one month retreat, and don’t leave your house for one month.
So this was just some guy living in the south of France who hadn’t seen Rinpoche for two years and wasn’t really, you know, thinking about him or anything like that. So he phoned up his but he was rather startled by this telegram. So he phoned up his boss and said, listen. This is a problem. My guru just sent me this telegram out of the blue telling me I’m not allowed to leave the house for a month.
So his boss said, well, if you don’t come to work, I’m gonna have to replace you. The position’s gone. I can’t really just let you take a month off with five minutes notice. So you decide what you want. If you don’t want the job, then okay.
But if you want it, you have to come to work. So he went to work. And about three or four days later, was walking home from work, and as he walked by a pub, three or four skinheads jumped up to him and said, tonight is a feast, and you’re the item on the main item on the menu. And they beat him and thrashed him and beat him and thrashed him and put him in the hospital for two months and broke both his cheekbones, his jaw, all his teeth, four or five ribs, one arm, cracked the other leg, broke his knee. Anyway, my opinion is that those skinheads were really emanations of Lama Zopa because he didn’t take Rinpoche’s advice to stay home and do a retreat for a month.
He broke the advice, went to work. The only way to keep him in retreat was break his arms and legs and smash up his pretty face a bit to keep him out of the nightclubs. But in all the text that says, all those hardships that come to you, whatever hardships come to you, see it as an emanation of the guru. As the problem is, I think it’s what Jung spoke about as the problem principle. Most people don’t grow left to their own devices.
You know, humans are kinda like water. They sink to the lowest spot and when they get there, just sit and stagnate. So light the force of life is our protector. It keeps us flowing, keeps us moving. We interpret those flowingnesses.
We interpret those meaningness and flowingnesses. We interpret those pushes that fate, destiny, and life gives us. We interpret those as pleasant or unpleasant or in between, but usually as unpleasant. humans are a utterly and thoroughly complacent, a lazy bunch who essentially, you know, they they’re happy to think about this and that and the other and run around full blast doing it. But in another way, they’re totally lazy in that they really hate the unknown.
They find comfort and ease in the known. They don’t like to move into the unknown. It scares them. It intimidates them. It holds them.
So Jung spoke of this as the problem principle. Unless humans get some problems from time to time, they essentially just stagnate. We really grow through our problems. Unfortunately, because we’re such a lethargic and lazy bunch, when those problems come, we don’t think, ah, fabulous, a problem. Time for a growth spurt here.
Rather than that, we think, who is this absolutely useless blah blah blah making these headaches for me? And we get angry at them and we shout at them and we throw things around and so forth. We feel the opposite of love, compassion, kindness, caring for them. So if we want to grow at accelerated speeds, we need to essentially take all those little problems that come into our life and embrace them, look on them as great friends, the the the arrival of wondrous news. So your banker is there trying to get your house back, you think, I feel this.
What do I have to learn from this? Like, Lindy Abrams phoned me up yesterday and she said, I’m sorry. I couldn’t come to the talk. I had this bout of dizziness dizziness. What do you think that means?
What do you think that’s telling me? And I said, probably that you’re a dizzy lady. Yes. What everything every hardship that comes to us in our life is telling us something, not something negative. It’s not telling us this in a sense, you can say hardships come as a result of negative karma.
I mean, talking about karma, looking at it that way. But here, we’re not looking at it that way. From the deeper sense, hardships come because of, you know, yesterday, I go, you know, jump on your wife. Then today I meet you on the street and you hit me over the head with a club. You know, in a way, we can say it’s karma.
It was this yesterday happened, and today when you saw me, you hit me on that. We can see a cause and effect happening there. So there’s a karmic flow. But here, we’re not talking about that aspect of it. We’re talking about the the learning process.
As you look at me with this tremendous anger and hit me over the head with the club, firstly, it makes me rethink the process of what I’m doing with my life. The the logic of jumping on your wife again, for instance, it will probably discourage me from doing that. So it’ll teach me something on and so forth. Secondly, as you hit me on the head with the club, it kind of purifies any negative karma I have with you there. Like in a way, you know, there was a that generated a little bit of negative karma with you, obviously, or you wouldn’t be running up and down with a stick, you know, waving it at me.
So there’s a little negative karma that was generated as an off spin of that earlier event. You hit me on the head with a glove. It’s kind of like instant purification, isn’t it? It’s like, wow. Fabulous.
Thank you. I’ll do that again. And it it is. And, of course, it it’s also other things, like at the time of you jumping up and down and raging and waving this club. It really makes me check myself up, doesn’t it?
And it does a quick instant review of all my options under that circumstance. And here, we’re presuming, of course, that you’re bigger than me, stronger than me, tougher than me. Otherwise, you know, I’d take the stick away from you perhaps and bang you over the head with it, and then I wouldn’t learn anything from it. You would learn something about it. And you would get the opportunity to do that same meditation that now I have to do because of your superior size, strength, and so on.
But many of the problems that come to us in life are superior size, are superior strength, and that essentially we have to meet them head on, and we have to deal with them in a way which is spiritually meaningful for us, which somehow gets to the deeper issue of why this whole thing is happening, what’s going on between me and that other thing, whatever it may be. You know, otherwise, if you come with a stick and, like, I just pick up another stick and we fight and da da da da da da da, eventually, thing just goes on and on and on and on, doesn’t it? And the next time you see me, like, you bring two sticks or you bring your brother, and then I bring my brother. It’s a never ending cycle. So it’s like we say, saṃsāra.
But if one can deal with those intense encounters in a very direct, very honest, very courageous way, that essentially one learns from them, one purifies from them, one grows from them. Śāntideva said, we grow from those who show us meanness, those who are mean to us. If we have the right way of seeing, if we have the eyes of love, compassion, the bodhicitta, then that doesn’t matter. Someone’s good to us, and that’s that’s okay. That’s no problem.
Someone’s objective to us, that’s okay. That’s no problem. Someone’s mean to us, that’s okay. That’s no problem. But, essentially, everything becomes okay.
No problem. And from whatever comes, we can get the best of that encounter, like maybe just one bang on the head rather than two. Whereas if we take the opposite approach, the thing comes, it just becomes another negative energy spin. Rather than us set the agenda for what’s happening, that negative energy spin sets the agenda. So if we have the eyes of love, compassion, universal, the universal hero, every energy spin that comes to us ends right there.
It’s brought to a stop right there. So we think like that. First, we develop the three people. We try to develop a sense of on an ongoing way, how no one is really everyone’s really equal. There’s good.
There’s bad. There’s indifferent, but everyone’s really equal. Why we call some good, some bad, some indifferent is purely arbitrary. So secondly so firstly, they’re all equal. Secondly, they’re all equally beneficial or kind to me.
So that being the case, I should be equally sweet to them, show equal love, caring, compassion, gentleness to each of them. What do they want? What do they not want? They don’t want suffering. They want happiness.
So then we sit and we breathe. And it’s kind of an extension of the breathing exercise we did before, this third step in the meditation, but rather than just place the mind on the breath, when we breathe in, we breathe, we imagine that whatever is the hardship that we’re encountering, the difficulty, we breathe that in and lift it off. Now you’re jumping up and down and waving a club at me because I jumped on your wife. So I breathe in, I think. All those people whose wives I have jumped on, may I take away their anger?
No. No. No. All those people angry because all those people angry because of this kind of thing. Not with me, but others.
May they may the causes of those being unhappy for them be removed. And this little bang on the head I’m going to get right now. All those beings who have ever jumped at someone else’s lady and have gotten banged on the head and in the present are doing it and in the future will do it. May this bang on the head somehow relieve them of some of this angst. And then as we breathe out so we breathe in, we think like that.
We’re breathing in whatever is the negative energy. We bring it straight to the heart, and we think it’s only a matter of me of a kind of an egoism or a self-cherishing. What’s a little bang on the head? It’s really nothing, is it? It happens to people all the time.
Nothing to get excited about. So all the karma those other beings have to happen to it, I breathe it in. I breathe it down to myself cherishing, like my heart, my holding myself as better than others, and my own interest is more important than other others. Obviously, when I jumped on that fellow’s lady, it was my self interest I was concerned with, not his self interest, and it’s that which put me in this predicament. So with all things in life, we only see them as difficult if we cling to ourselves as the target of that difficulty.
If we put ourselves in the place of the one making the difficulty, it’s not actually a difficulty. It’s the over there is getting the difficulty. This one is kind of actually having a good time. So because we identify too much with this side, this side, then we kind of, you know, that that difficulty becomes amplified. If we identify with the other side, then actually, we’re having a good time.
We’re like giving someone who needs a good thrashing a good thrashing. Right? So we think, I’m not me. I’m him. Go ahead.
Hit him. So like that, we think, you know, change the sense of ego, ego identification. Am I the being hit? Am I the hitter or am I the act of hitting? Where is the I between all of this?
And for how we’re doing all this thinking, we get thumped a couple of times. But it’s not as bad as we as if we got thumped a couple of times without thinking like that. The seventh Dalai Lama said that most people take a small difficulty and that their mind amplifies it and makes it a thousand times bigger. So a little pain becomes a big pain, a little toothache becomes a big toothache, a little headache becomes big headache, a little suffering becomes a big suffering. But if instead we take the mind and make it do just the opposite, like looking through a tell through what do call this?
Binoculars. Instead of looking this way and making everything bigger, we turn it around, make it very, very small. Then the whole perspective changes on the on all of that. A little thump on the head, it’s nothing. Gosh.
My dad used to hate going to dentist. He’d get his brother to come down and take out his teeth with pliers rather than go to the dentist. What’s a thump on the head compared to that? It’s nothing. And same thing with all of our other hardships in life, really.
We amplify them in the mind, but when it gets right down to them and like a friend of mine in the States was waffling on and on and on and on and on and on on on about how he had just lost twenty five million dollars. And he was absolutely upset about it and hardly seemed to notice the fact that he still had fifty or sixty million left. You know? It’s like, you know, pain and suffering are such relative things. You know, suffering, how we take things completely determines the impact they how we look at them and how the perspective we put on them totally determines the kind of sense we have towards them.
So in that way, we breathe it in and we think all this negative energy, this little hardship I’m going through here, all those other beings who go through similar hardships may may that ripe one on me right now and when you breathe out, breathe out good energy. When you breathe out great white light, so you breathe in like a dark light, like you’re taking on negative energy, negative karma. And through this hardship, it comes to the center of your heart, and you think right there, the self-cherishing. Let it go into that. Let it teach this self-cherishing.
Let it transform this self-cherishing into universal cherishing. And one breathes out and sends out white light. And one and as the person was angry at you jumping up and down, you’re sort of breathing in a bit of black light, breathing in a bit black breathing a bit of black light. Or is it or if it’s any other difficulty, like an illness, you’ve got a bad illness, you breathe in the black light. You think that pain, that physical pain.
Or if it’s a financial problem or a job problem or a romance problem or a any kind of problem, you breathe in the dark and you think, all of this, I take as a way of transformation. Yeah. And you breathe out the light, and you think, release. Release. In the Kadampa tradition, they would try to do this kind of meditation a few times a day to get used to it.
You can kinda do it in an objective way, meaning nothing very specific. Like, you think all the beings suffering in the world, like, you can choose a place like Bosnia and you think all those people suffering in all those ways, you know, how very, very sad. And you kind of breathe and you think, may some of that negative energy come on me? May I lift it off of them? And you breathe out the light and you think, may some may I pour some good energy into that place?
You know, scriptures talk about the six realms, the heavens and the the titans and the human realm and the animal realm and the ghost realms and the hell realms. And they all have their different kind of sufferings, you know. The hell realms, they suffer from heat and cold and torture and things. The ghosts suffer from deprivation. The animals suffer from eating one another and various things, and humans suffer from arrogance and all the problems that arrogance brings into human society.
The titans suffer from always fighting with the gods and getting beaten. And the gods suffer because when they get very, very old, even though that they’re at the tent at the top of the world, the flower gardens garlands that they wear around their necks wilt, which is a terrible suffering. And for fifty thousand years they had lived without ever having to take a bath, and suddenly they start producing body odor. A metaphor for the sufferings of the rich. Anyway, so we think of these you can just think of the six realms.
You think all of beings in hell kind of environments suffering from cold, from heat, from torture, like that. Think I take some of that onto myself and breathe out light. I breathe out good energy to them. If you don’t like like the six realms, think of it in the human realm. All those humans who are like greedy ghost like beings who can never be satisfied no matter what they get, breathe in their greed and breathe out like good energy to them.
And from the animals, you know, they’re always eating one another, torture torture the suffering of being domesticated and beaten by us humans and eaten by us humans and of, you know, humer and cold and thirst and all those things that happen. And one breathes in, breathes out positive energy. With the humans, all of the problems humans have on the earth, birth, sickness, old age, death, not getting what they want when they want it, getting too much of what they don’t want when they don’t want it, and so on. Breathe it in. Breathe out light and positive energy.
Śāntideva said, love and compassion isn’t a matter of being loving and compassionate. That’s a matter of having a loving and compassionate mind. When you have a loving and compassionate mind, you are loving and compassionate in every circumstance. If you don’t have a loving, compassionate mind, then sometimes some events will arise and you’ll think I should be loving and compassionate. But sometimes you won’t remember whatever is the agitation or the difficulty.
You’ll forget. So the idea is the mind itself becomes so infused with that way of looking and dealing with others that it always deals on the basis of love and compassion. Then we do we meditate like that, and then the fourth step is we say to ourself, well, can I really be of great benefit to everyone else or of great love, great compassion? Obviously, the more enlightened we are, the more beneficial we can be. The more messed up in our minds we are, the more ignorant, the more confused, the more angry, the more attached, and so on, the less enlightened.
Then the more we are part of the problem, the less we are part of the cure. So we think, well, to make the ultimate contribution, I should really try to live the ways of love, compassion, wisdom in order to achieve enlightenment as a means of being of greater benefit in this world. So we kind of conclude the practice with that kind of thought. We try to mix love, compassion with the determination of enlightenment or the resolve to enlightenment, generate generated as a general kind of feeling tone and then just rest the mind in it. Generally, in Buddhism, we say there’s two kinds of mediteachings.
Those which, when you think of them, they have an indirect impact, like impermanence. You think of impermanence, you don’t become more impermanent, but rather it has an indirect impact. It gives you a certain wisdom. When you think of emptiness, voidness, the infinite, you don’t become more empty, more void, or more infinite. You’re already totally empty, void, and infinite, but it has an indirect impact.
Other kinds of mediteachings, when you just rest the mind in them, you grow in those qualities. Rest the mind in thoughts of love and compassion, you will grow in love and compassion. Here, we rest the thought in the mind of love and compassion aimed at enlightenment or mixed with the aspiration to enlightenment or with enlightenment as a focus, Letting the mind settle in that feeling, bathing it in that pool causes that quality to grow. Love and compassion as an enlightenment lifestyle grows as a primary quality directly within our mind. Yes.
Tea break, guys. In the fourth session, we just look at the way these first three are contextualized by the wisdom training and the prajnaparamita. So the fourth and final thing I’d to look at today, and I don’t have much time to cover it, but what we know what we speak of as the prajnaparamitayana, the perfection of wisdom vehicle. The first meditation that on invoking the forces of guru, Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha are the spiritual forces within us. It’s common to all enlightenment vehicles or enlightenment paths.
The second one in nature, quintessentially, is what we call Hīnayāna practice or minimal minimalist the minimalist way. We try to simplify our lives, bring it down to basic essentials, and the most basic essential is our breath. When in doubt, resort to the breath. So it’s basically a way of always simplifying whatever is going on in our life and looking at it from that place of simplicity. That’s the second.
The third one, generating the mind of the universal warrior is or universal hero heroine is the basis of all Mahāyāna or a great vehicle. Called great because it takes as its focus all living beings and it embraces all living beings. The fourth and final one is in a sense a summation of all of them, of all the different ways, if you will. But in particular, it is the great vehicle or the great vehicle as integrated into one’s life. It’s called prajnaparamita, which means the perfection of highest awareness or best awareness.
Or prajnaparamita means best awareness. Paramita means that which carries or it could mean paramita. Para beyond mita as in the sense of gone beyond. So it either can be that which carries one beyond or actually that simply the way itself is beyond. But only we say pragya paramita, but it really refers to the six perfections.
And, I’m sure all of you have seen the list of these, but perhaps something that I say will throw a deeper or a different light on it for you or bring bring an alternate understanding to your own or something which enriches your own understanding. We say the six, generosity, discipline, gentleness or patience, joyous energy, stabilized application. Means kinda like meditation, dhyana in Sanskrit. It’s the same word that got translated into Chinese as chan and into Japanese as zen. The Sanskrit word is dhyana, which Indians today say jian.
So it became chan in Chinese and zen in Japan and Korea. And sixthly, prajnaparamita, the perfection of highest awareness. We list six are listed, but to be a paramita, the six is the one implied. To be a gone beyond or a carrying beyond, the six is a prerequisite. Thus, it is said there are not six perfections, but thirty six perfections.
Generosity as generosity, generosity as discipline, generosity as joyous energy, generosity as gentleness gentleness or patience, generosity as meditation, generosity as highest awareness or wisdom. Secondly, with discipline. Discipline as generosity, discipline as its own self, discipline as gentleness, discipline as joyous energy, discipline as dhyana or meditation stabilized application, and discipline as wisdom or highest awareness. Whenever one practices sick any one of the six, one practices all six. It’s this joint application or simultaneous application which makes it or makes it makes it gone beyond.
What this means is essentially in the four modes, in sitting down, standing up, walking, or sleeping, in any of those four modes, one is always engaged in these six paramita. Everything one does is paramita, gone beyond. In a way, have to look at them back to front to understand them, highest awareness or wisdom. What is this referring to? When you practice generosity, with each of these we talk about three types.
So with generosity, giving things to people. Someone needs something and you’ve got a bit to spare, you give it to them. A glass of water to a person dying of thirst thirst in the desert. That’s first secondly is giving good counsel, being kind with your words and helpful with your words to others. And thirdly, if the police or government is looking for anyone, you hide them.
In Buddhism, we always presume that governments are wrong. If the government is chasing someone, probably that person is a good person. So in the Paramita, the third one expressly says, anyone running from the government or the government’s men, you hide them. But in the practice of generosity, Śāntideva said, we say the Paramita are gone beyond the perfection of generosity, but we still see people without things, we still see people without good counsel, and we still see people unprotected. So it would seem that no one ever perfected generosity because we still see those three things in the world.
He says, but actually, what generosity is referring to is not an actual act itself, which is just the symptom or the outward expression, but it’s referring to the generous mind, the mind which always wishes to help or be of benefit to others, the mind which essentially looks on others as one’s own brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, regards every other living being as important as one regards oneself. When we practice an act of generosity, we have three things, a giver, a given to, and an act of giving. How does it become a Paramita? One meditates on the illusory nature of the three circles. It seems like I am giving.
But what is giving? My hand gave? Well, no. The hand was driven by the arm. My arm gave?
Well, no. The arm was driven by the shoulder. My trunk gave? Well, no. The body as a whole is driven by the mind.
My mind gave? Why did the mind give? What motivated the mind to give? No matter where we look, we cannot find the giver. It’s not in the arm, it’s not in the shoulder, it’s not in the body, it’s not in the mind.
Where do we find the given to? I gave something to you. Where are you? In your ear, which is what heard the words that were said? Are you in your chest, in your arms, in your toes, in your fingers?
I say this to women. We all know where men are. But basically, look where you will in the body. You do not find someone or something to represent you. We look in the mind.
Where are you in the mind? Yesterday’s mind is long gone, so you can’t be there. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. It’s not in tomorrow’s mind or it’s not yet to come. As for the present moment, it’s such an infinitesimally small point that even as we in a snap of a finger, it disappears.
So the self that self you cannot be found in the past, in the future, or in the present, in your mind, can’t be found in your body. Could it be separate from your body and mind, like, I don’t know, in Los Angeles or somewhere? Where do you keep that self? So if we look in the giver, we cannot find a giver, a self, an entity there to represent that. We look at the receiver, we cannot find a self or an entity there.
We look at the act of giving. Is the self of the giver or receiver in the act of giving? Well, it’s not in the first moment, It’s not in the second moment, not in the third moment because we have the same problem with time as we did with self being in the mind, past, present, or future mind. So we can’t find a giver, we can’t find a receiver, and we can’t find an act of giving. So who bought this idea of the perfection of generosity?
Generosity? No giver, no receiver, no giving. How can we talk about a perfection of generosity? That’s a question. That’s a question.
How can you have perfection of generosity without a giver, without a receiver, and without giving? So what it comes down to is that giving. Discipline. Again, discipline is not a very good word in English. The Tibetan for it is tso trim or Śīla in Sanskrit. I think Sheila is very nice, especially in Australia.
It’s my favorite of the parameters.