Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A yogi who spent years practicing Hevajra — a highest yoga tantra — but ended up as a Hīnayāna arhat: this cautionary story, which reportedly made Atisha burst out laughing, anchors Khensur Rinpoche’s 94-minute commentary on Je Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path. The story drives his central argument that no practice — Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, generation and completion stage — escapes saṃsāra without renunciation, bodhicitta, and correct view in place. Rinpoche relays Mañjuśrī’s direct advice to Tsongkhapa: set the high practices aside; build renunciation through analytical meditation first; then cultivate bodhicitta by shifting focus entirely to others. He traces the causal chain — renunciation enables compassion, compassion generates bodhicitta, correct view removes the two obscurations — and closes with a candid personal reflection on how even practitioners with many tantric commitments may be neglecting these foundations.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 3PA 2001 06 13.mp3
UUID: 8cd2a172-3221-414b-b46e-70488115f13d
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: 3 Principle Aspects of the Path (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 2001-06-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 93.9 minutes
Words: ~6,526
So we continue, there’s a little bit of overlap where we left last week. So we are at the point where the text says, our commentary says that these very teachings actually constitute the great path that was traveled by all the Buddhas of the past to those of the present, and it will be travelled by those who will come in the future. Now, we have to understand that there is a countless number of Buddhas who have already become enlightened. There are those who are in the process of becoming enlightened right now, and there will be a great number of those who will come, who will manifest enlightenment in the future. All of them, they have to follow one single path that leads to enlightenment, and this is called the great path that leads to enlightenment.
Now what we are studying is what is called the essence of this great path that leads to enlightenment. And because it is the essence of this path, it is considered to also be the life of the path, the life force, if you want, of the path. In a similar way that we look at our life or the life essence and we value that, we think that it is the most precious thing that we might have. And if we get separated from that, we cease to exist. In a similar way, we have to understand that these teachings constitute the very life force, the very essence of this great path that was traversed by all the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future.
Now, what practice each one of you does is completely up to you, it’s your own choice. But in general, we would have to say, having heard so much about the preciousness of the practice of the great vehicle, there seems to be a tendency or there is an interest for most people to direct, pay some attention and take on some practices of the great vehicle. So when we talk about practices of the great vehicle, the most important thing is to understand that when you engage in like that, you are not going to be preoccupied with your own well-being. The well-being of others becomes most important. So since that becomes more important, what you are looking to achieve is to bring about the happiness of others, to make others free from their suffering.
And in order to bring that welfare of others, to establish that thing, you decide that you yourself, you have to reach the state of enlightenment. So if you understand that you need to reach a state of enlightenment in order to be able to benefit others, then of course it becomes very important to know how to get to enlightenment, right? To know the path that you need to follow. That’s very important. So how are you going to know about it?
It becomes very important to listen to instruction of the great vehicle in order to understand it. So when we say here that in order to get to know the path, in order to know the practice of the great vehicle, you need to listen to a presentation of that. You understand that it becomes very important to have sources, to have some kind of material from which you will derive your information. It’s not only, let’s say, live teachings, here we are talking about books and references, material that you will use as reference. So if you want to know about the great vehicle, it is almost obvious and of course it is very important to look it up in books and in texts that present and explain the great vehicle.
If you are not looking at texts who present the principles of the great vehicle practices, you cannot say that you’re learning about those things. You cannot say that you’re practicing proper great vehicle practices. So it is very important to find authentic sources, books, and material that present the different aspects of the Great Vehicle. So for example, if we look at this text which was composed by Je Tsongkhapa, the original text, The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, this is an excellent example of a text that presents all the practices of the great vehicle in a very condensed but at the same time complete and full way. So you have the essence of the complete teachings in an excellent text.
So that can be used as a basis for learning about the practices. Now, as we said last time as well, there was one particular person who requested these teachings. So in a sense you can say that the teachings were given for this particular disciple. His name was Ngawang Dragpa. But of course we have to keep in mind that these teachings are not addressed to this one particular individual.
They are relevant to everyone, to hundreds, millions of people who are interested in engaging in the Mahāyāna practices. Actually what we have here is actually then the promise that this will be the material upon which a commentary will be presented in the remainder of the text. Now, the commentary continues by saying that this particular text, the three principal aspects of the path, actually deals with the same things that we find presented in the Lamrim text that was composed by Atisha. The only difference that we find is that time to time the outlines of the two texts are presented in a different way and also the headings or the titles of the different chapters might vary. But the essence or the context of these teachings are the same.
The Lamrim, Atisha’s Lamrim and Je Tsongkhapa’s three principal aspects of the path are presenting the same material. Now why is it that this why is it that we talk about the three principal aspects of the path? What is the importance of those aspects that will be presented? It is said that if we are to engage in practices of the great vehicle, there are actually two things to practice. There is sūtra and tantra.
There is nothing else that is included. If you want to practice great vehicle, these are the two main areas of your practice. Whatever you want to practice, whether it is sūtra or whether it is tantra, unless you are applying the three principal aspects of the path, then your practice is not a proper practice. If you want to practice sūtra, have to make sure you have in place the three principal aspects. If you want to practice tantra, again, you have to make sure that the three principal aspects are If you’re missing those, your practice will not be complete.
Now, in the Great Vehicle, when we talk about possible goals to be achieved, we identify as two main goals. One of them is liberation and the other one is omniscience. Now in order to achieve these two distinct goals, we need to have different causes, different practices. Practices. And they say that from among the three principal aspects of the path, the first one, which is renunciation, is the one that will bring about liberation.
And the second one, which is bodhicitta, is the one that will bring about And finally we say that if our practices are influenced by the third principal aspect, which is the correct view then it is said that whatever we do becomes an actual antidote to the suffering of cyclic existence. So they say that if actually our practice is influenced by those three, there is great benefit. Having explained the benefits that can come about if one’s practice is influenced by the three principal aspects of the path, of course the question arises naturally: What fault will be there? What results will come about if I am not influenced by the three principal aspects of the path? We have the answer here where it says that if you engage in non meritorious actions, that is, if you engage in non virtuous actions, the result will be to fall into lower migrations.
If you engage in virtues or meritorious actions, then you can be reborn as a human or as a god in the desire realm. And if you accumulate unwavering actions, unwavering karma, then you can be reborn as a being in the formless realm. Now all these possibilities are possibilities within cyclic existence. None of these results goes beyond cyclic existence. So what is stated in the text is that if you are not influenced by the three principal aspects of the path, no matter what karma you accumulate, you will never go beyond saṃsāra.
Now, there are other possibilities that are explained here in the text. What is examined here is what happens if you engage in Dharma practices but without being influenced by the three principal aspects of the path. It says whether you try to do meditation on the channels, the winds and the drops, you try to do meditation on Mahāmudrā, whether you try to do meditation on Dzogchen, whether you try to practice generation and completion stage, all of these things will not become the cause for you to attain liberation or to come out of saṃsāra. Now if we look again at the different practices that are enumerated, the first one which is meditation on the drops, the winds, and the channels, is mainly practices that are done in the Sakya tradition. The second one that is mentioned is meditation on the Mahāmudrā, which is something that is stressed a lot in the Kagyu lineage.
The next one is Dzogchen, the great practice of the Nyingma school, the Nyingma tradition. And finally we have generation and completion stage, which is what is stressed in the Gelug tradition. Tradition. So it says no matter which tradition you follow, no matter what you try to do, if you’re not influenced by the three principal aspects of the path, still you remain within cyclic existence. So it’s clearly stated here all these practices become the cause for remaining within cyclic existence.
None of it becomes a cause for your liberation or omniscience. Now, the text continues by giving an example of what has happened in the past. This was a conversation that took place between two Kadampa Geshes. The first one was the Geshe Potowa, and he asked a question to another Geshe who was Geshe Chengawa. So Geshe Potowa asked, now suppose you were in a situation to choose between two things.
I would like to know which one would you choose. On one hand, let’s say that you could become a great scholar in the five sciences. And when we talk about the five sciences, one of them is how to be very skilled in making artefacts, for example making statues of a Buddha or painting tankas and so forth. The second one was to be skilled in medicine and have skills on how to recognize diseases and how to help people recover from them. Another one would be to be a scholar in different languages and understanding, for example, Sanskrit or understanding the root syllables of different words and how they change from one language to another.
Another one of the sciences was to understand logic and reason and how to apply those. And eventually the fifth one was, as it’s called, the internal science which is nothing but a study of Buddhism how you can reach enlightenment, how you can reach omniscience and things like that. So that was one of the things. Suppose you could become very learned in all the five fields of study. Suppose you could attain very stable concentration.
Suppose you could attain the five higher perceptions and suppose you could attain the eight great siddhis. Put that on one side And on the other side, suppose you could choose to generate some understanding of this advice of how to proceed along the path, to generate some understanding of the three principles of the path, Which one would you choose? That was the question. And the answer that came from Geshe Chengawa comes here in the text where he says master and when he says master, of course he’s addressing Geshe Potowa and he says, First of all, there is no doubt that my choice is to generate within my own continuum an understanding of the path. And secondly, not only just to generate some understanding, but if I could roughly follow that path, this is my choice.
And the answer continues, there was some explanation, some reason given for that. And he says, I choose the second one because many times in the past we have, all of us, we have been scholars in the five areas of study. We have spent many eons in deep concentration. We have achieved again and again the five clairvoyants or the higher perceptions. We have achieved all the great siddhis but we have derived no benefit from that.
Now, on the other hand, if we were to have an understanding of the stages of the path, it is definite that if we get a clear picture of how to complete the whole path then there will be great benefit. And that is the reason why I make this choice. The other things I have achieved many times in the past, but to have an understanding of the Lamrim in my continuum, that’s a precious thing. Now, there’s also an instance here of somebody who was actually a great yogi, a great meditator, and he was practicing Hevajra Tantra. Now that’s a secret tantra, Highest Yoga Tantra.
He spent many years meditating and practicing with a lot of effort, but it is said that at the end he did not achieve enlightenment. Not only he did not achieve enlightenment, but he fell into a state of a practitioner of the lesser vehicle. He attained the state of an arhat, but an arhat of the lesser vehicle. The explanation that is given for that is that although this person was putting so much effort in their practice and was practicing highest yoga tantra, they were lacking bodhicitta. And because they were lacking bodhicitta, they were not working towards the benefit of others.
Being preoccupied with their own benefit, they fell from the Mahāyāna to the Hīnayāna practice. Eventually they reached the state of an arhat in the lesser vehicle. This is actually an antidote because they say that when the master visited Tibet, of course he had to leave India to go to Tibet. Having spent some time in Tibet, somebody was visiting from India and went straight to see the great master and teacher. The master and teacher asked, What’s new in India?
What’s the situation in India? This person reported that, Well, we have this very unusual situation. We have a yogi who was meditating for years practicing highest yoga tantra, Hivajra, and he ended up as a Hīnayāna Arhat. And Atisha bursts out laughing, thinking, Oh, this is what comes out. This is the latest report from India.
People practice Hevajra Yoga Tantra, they end up in the lesser vehicles. And he was laughing. You can understand, this is a laughable situation. This is why the great master Atisha was laughing about it. You start by following practices of the highest yoga tantra, you are expected to reach enlightenment, are not expected to fall back, reach a completely different destination.
Eventually, very similar to saying, will start, let’s say, to go from Tibet straight into Australia. If you end up somewhere else, suppose you end up in Singapore, people will laugh at you because you don’t know how to reach your destination. It’s a similar plan. So he got it completely wrong, right? Now, you look at this example, it’s a very good case.
Somebody had a very high goal and he was following a method which was really a supreme method, right? So he had a high goal of reaching enlightenment, he had the secret tantra as a method to follow and he missed out on bodhicitta. Because he missed out on bodhicitta he could not achieve his goal. So that shows that it’s very important. Once you set a goal, once you have a good method, you have to make sure that all the three principal aspects are there to make sure you end up where you target to be, right?
Now, for that reason, it is said that Mañjuśrī himself said to the great protector Je Tsongkhapa gave the following advice: It is not enough just to meditate on the faults of saṃsāra and the benefits of liberation. It is not enough to spend your time contemplating that thing alone because this on its own will end up in a faulty situation where you will continue circling within saṃsāra. Just seeing the fault of one and the benefit of others does not guarantee that you will transcend saṃsāra. It’s not enough just to look at the faults of saṃsāra and just to look at the benefits of liberation. On top of that, you have to make sure that you generate a very strong feeling of renunciation.
The intention of renunciation has to be fully generated in your mind. Otherwise, it says here, whatever you engage in, whether you practice generosity, whether you practice ethics, patience, enthusiastic effort, absorption, whatever you do is just going to become another cause for you to remain in saṃsāra. It is not becoming a cause for your liberation. So it is very clear, without renunciation, without the clear sense of emergence from cyclic existence, you will still remain within it no matter what practice you engage in. Now we continue at the point where we see the instruction that Mañjuśrī gave to a great protector, Lama Tsongkhapa.
Rinpoche was actually commenting on, let’s say, the style of the instruction that is given. You realise that if you are in a position to receive direct instruction from Mañjuśrī, the instruction that you’re going to get is actually very valuable but in a sense it’s very direct. And because it is very direct, it should have a great impact. We look at these words here, the actual words, where Mañjuśrī says, There are many Dharma practices, but they are quite high. They are quite complicated.
They are quite deep. Forget about all that. There are many high practices but you will never get there. What you need to do in the beginning is just to do conceptual meditation on renunciation. And when it says conceptual analytical meditation.
So get your renunciation straight from the beginning. Forget all of those great, exalted practices. Get your renunciation to be the base of your practices. And then, if you want to make sure that your practice is the practice of the great vehicle, forget about cherishing yourself. Forget about your own benefit.
Completely forget about that thing. Put it on one side and preoccupy yourself with benefiting others. So you can see it’s very direct. Straight from the beginning, there are certain things that you’re better off forgetting for the time being, for a long time. Forget about all these high practices and forget about taking care of your own self.
Establish your renunciation, get it right with your analytical meditation and then make sure that you’re working for the benefit of others. Because if you look at the example of the bodhisattvas, you see that they do one thing and that thing that they do is that they cherish the well-being of others, not of themselves. If you lose that main focus, if you go wrong in that main instruction, what you do is you actually fall into a situation where you are working for your own benefit. And if a bodhisattva were to start working for his or her own benefit, that means it would automatically fall from the great vehicle to the lesser vehicle. And this is how we end up with people who inspire to reach enlightenment and they end up as arhats of the lesser vehicle.
This is how you lose your status from the high vehicle or the great vehicle to the lesser vehicle. Going back into the previous advice, it’s very important to see what it says here. If you don’t establish renunciation, if you don’t have renunciation, no matter what activity you engage in, the most virtuous dharma activity, still it will not become the cause for liberation. It will not bring about the results that you are aspiring. It just becomes another cause for you to remain within cyclic existence.
If your practices are not influenced by renunciation, everything you do, the best Dharma practice, becomes another cause from saṃsāra. Now, it’s interesting because it’s very important to pay attention to the individual words and one of the words that is mentioned in this direct advice is forget about all these high and subtle practices. And here of course we have to take this to refer to tantra because tantra is indeed a high practice. But what it’s saying is forget all these subtle practices, whether they are sūtra, whether they are tantra. What you need to get straight is your renunciation.
It says put all this aside and in the beginning do analytical meditation on your renunciation. And then it says make sure you develop your bodhicitta. The first two of the principal aspects of the path are outlined straight from the beginning, that these are the two main things that we need to put our effort, our attention into. Influenced by renunciation? The benefit is that whatever virtue you do, no matter how small it is, and of course it goes without saying about big virtue, right?
So no matter the size of the virtue that you do, whatever you do will become a cause for your liberation. If you like renunciation, whatever you do remains a cause for saṃsāra. If you have renunciation, the smallest act becomes a cause for liberation. And what will be the results of having generated the experience of bodhicitta? So whatever virtue you do, whatever action you do, the smallest one such as reciting one’s Om Maniprama Home, that becomes the cause for you to reach the ground of a Buddha.
Right? And if that applies to small virtue, imagine how much more applicable it is to bigger virtue. Now, we see that if these two actually influence our motivation, it is as if there is no choice for the motivation. Now, what we mean by that, if your motivation is influenced by renunciation, there is no choice. Whatever you do will become a cause for liberation automatically, in a sense.
If your motivation is influenced by bodhicitta, whatever you do will become a cause for you to become a Buddha automatically. There is no choice. It cannot be otherwise. Now, we see actually that this was advice that was given by Mañjuśrī to the great Lama Tsongkhapa himself. Mañjuśrī is a Buddha, he’s an enlightened being.
So you have one enlightened being having a dialogue and giving advice to one of the greatest scholars and practitioners, Lama Tsongkhapa, whose word, of course, we would not question. There is no way that Tsongkhapa would deceive us as to what advice Mañjuśrī gave to himself. I would say that the advice is pretty clear. It says, In the beginning make sure you have renunciation and you have bodhicitta. And if that is the advice that an enlightened being gives to a great scholar, there is no reason why we ordinary dharma practitioners should not follow something like that.
There is no deceit from the side of the being who gave the advice, from the being who reported us having received the advice, so there is no reason for us to question that this is a good line to follow. Now, having said that, if our practice is influenced by renunciation and by bodhicitta, it will become a cause for us to reach liberation and to reach enlightenment. It is also quite important to understand that this result is not automatically achieved because what stands between us and actualizing that result is the fact that we have the fundamental ignorance of self grasping. And because self grasping is there, it needs to be annihilated. And the only thing that has the power to act as a direct antidote to this fundamental ignorance is the correct view, is an understanding, a wisdom, a realization of emptiness that understands this lack of existence of the self that we are grasping to.
Therefore it becomes important to combine renunciation and bodhicitta with an understanding of emptiness. So this is how the third principle, correct view, comes into the picture. Mañjuśrī has continued actually on this line of advice and said, the person who thinks that practices such as Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā and secret tantra and generation and completion and so forth, the person who considers all these practices to be high, exalted, and superior practices and then looks at practices such as things that bring about understanding of renunciation and bodhicitta and thinks that those are small, that these are insignificant things, then this is a person who is confused, who does not know anything about the path, does not know the points of the path. Now if you start comparing different practices and create this hierarchy and you put renunciation at the bottom as being small and insignificant and everything else in the top, then you don’t know about the path. And that’s a personal comment Rinpoche was talking about himself.
He says, look at myself, I have reached this age, I have this status. Of course I have listened, I have received many teachings. I’m in a position where myself I have given many teachings, not only sūtra teachings, mean tantric teachings as well, initiations. Look at my practice, it mainly comprises of recitations of sadhanas, of tantric practices and so on. And here I am, I come to this, I look into this text, and I really question, you know, where do I stand when I come in front of this advice?
I wonder myself, where do I stand? Once you have taken your commitments, there is no question about it. You have to spend your time going through your commitments, you have to do your recitations, you have to do your sadhanas, and you have to consider actually how much time you spend in in essence, so called high practices. You have to consider that. Now, of course it is understood that if you are very busy, if you do have other commitments, it is let’s say the time that you have freely to spend meditation, on other topics of practice might be limited by these other commitments that you have.
If you are one of those people who are really busy already with lots of commitments, still you have to make sure that even if you do it for a very short time, you have to spend some time on those basic things. The rest of you who are, let’s say, the privileged ones who do not have the other commitments and have more time, make sure you spend a lot of time and you meditate sincerely on those principal aspects. The advice of today is to do analytical meditation or conceptual meditation on renunciation. We continue here with the commentary that is given here and it says that if actually if you are trying to attain the state of the Buddha, then it is very important to have two things in place. Those two things that you need in order to reach enlightenment is method and wisdom.
You need to train on those two. These two are the main ones, and in order to practice in method and wisdom you need to cultivate the mind of bodhicitta and correct view. These are the two things that relate to method and wisdom. Now, it is important here that we have a presentation from point of view of method and wisdom. Method and wisdom are identified as bodhicitta and then correct view of emptiness.
So you might wonder where does renunciation fit into that picture? Well, it says here that unless you’re capable of completely turning your back into the pleasures or the bounties of cyclic existence, unless you have renunciation, you will not be capable of generating great compassion that is needed in order to have bodhicitta. So unless you have renunciation, you will never generate bodhicitta. Now, we talk about generating bodhicitta, but bodhicitta is the end result of a long process. And before one is capable of generating bodhicitta, one needs to generate great compassion.
Now, in order to generate great compassion you should be in a position where you look around and you identify, you recognize the suffering that each and every sentient being carries within them. There is no way you can sympathize with the suffering of others unless you are capable of recognizing your own suffering within cyclic existence. So unless you do have renunciation for the situation in cyclic existence, you cannot sympathize with the suffering of others. You cannot generate this great compassion that is necessary. It’s one step prior to actualizing bodhicitta.
Excuse me, so it is very clear without renunciation you cannot have great compassion and without great compassion there is no bodhicitta. Now we talk about bodhicitta and correct view and we stress the importance of those two but we need to understand why these two are important in order to reach the state of the Buddha, in order to reach enlightenment Once you actualize the state of the Buddha, what you actually establish is the four bodies of the Buddha. Now, the four bodies of the Buddha can be condensed, can be presented as two bodies of the Buddha, the Dharma body and the form body of the Buddha. The Dharma body is a body that is actualized once you have a complete correct understanding of emptiness. And the form body of the Buddha is actualized once you have generated bodhicitta and engaged in activities such as generosity and so on.
So, in other words, in order to achieve the final result, which is the two bodies of the Buddha, you need to rely on method and wisdom and you need to put together your two accumulations. After you put those two things together, you reach the final result. This is why we need to cultivate both bodhicitta and correct view of emptiness. Now, in order to generate bodhicitta you need to have compassion. And before you have compassion for the suffering of others, first of all you need to look at yourself and see the suffering that you undergo.
Therefore, renunciation is the first step. From that, you go into compassion, and for compassion you go to bodhicitta. Authorship. Now, we have a mind and what we need to do is we need to direct the mind towards the dharma. When Rimshi was doing that, was directing the mind towards the dharma.
Now if you want to direct your mind towards the dharma and make sure it engages dharma, you need to have renunciation. If you want to make sure that the dharma that you engage is great vehicle dharma, then you need to have bodhicitta. And then if you want to be completely to rid yourself completely of the two obscurations, which is afflicted obscuration and knowledge obscurations, then you need to have realization of emptiness. When we talk about these two types of obscurations, we need to understand these two as being the cause and in a sense the origin for us experiencing all suffering. So in order to reach enlightenment, these two types of obscurations have to be eliminated, and that happens through the correct view.
It is very clear that the mind actually has this tendency to wander in different directions. And in a sense there are only two choices. You’re either going to wander off towards the dharma direction or you’re going to wander off towards mundane directions. And we see that the tendency is always to go towards the mundane. We don’t naturally go towards the dharma.
What is it that is missing that does not allow us to direct the mind towards the dharma? Well, it’s renunciation. If you want to stop your mind entering and wandering within mundane activities, you have to generate renunciation. That’s the only thing that takes your mind straight into the Dharma. And once you have directed your mind towards the Dharma, again there are different choices to make there.
You could end up in practice of the great vehicle or practice of the lesser vehicle. And it seems that it’s a bit more difficult to engage in practice of the great vehicle. If you want to find a method that will ensure that you will end up in practice of the great vehicle, then you have to generate bodhicitta. bodhicitta is that means, that method, that directs you towards great vehicle practice. Rinpoche was insisting on that point, in order to see the implications of what we’re saying, we say that in order to make your mind go towards Dharma, to engage Dharma, you need to have renunciation.
So what does that mean? Without renunciation what you do is not really dharma. So what are we actually doing? Like the average practitioner who does not have the genuine renunciation, does not have the experience of renunciation, does not know what renunciation is all about. What does this person do when they sit down and they set the motivation and they do their recitation and they do their commitments, do they practice Dharma?
What is this person doing without renunciation? Now, it is interesting because the way it is phrased is that without being influenced by renunciation you will not achieve liberation. So that means that the Dharma you’re practicing is not a Dharma that will bring about liberation. It’s not a liberating Dharma. I’m sure you can say you can say it’s sort of like a mere Dharma, a confused Dharma, because it will not bring you to liberation.
Yes, you generate virtue and that virtue will bring about, as a result, a future migration in one of the fortunate realms, a fortunate migration. Because it is virtue, you will not fall into the lower migrations. You will have a fortunate migration, but this is not liberation. So the Dharma you are practicing without renunciation is not the one that leads to liberation. Now, we talk about the importance of renunciation, and actually we have to see where does renunciation begin?
Where is the beginning? What is the initial thought that will lead to fully developed renunciation? We say, if we look at the possibilities we have within cyclic existence, we have the lower migrations and we have the higher migrations, the fortunate migrations. But whether we talk about lower migrations, whether we talk about fortunate migrations, both of them still exist within the boundaries of saṃsāra. Even if you are in a fortunate migration, still you have not transcended saṃsāra.
Now, if we look at the conditions of the lower migrations, what usually we do is we generate some fear, we generate appreciation. The living conditions, the body that you take in such a birth, the suffering that you experience, they are very unpleasant. And by looking at the situation of the lower migration, you generate this initial thought of aversion towards a situation within saṃsāra. It’s not the whole of saṃsāra, it’s just the lower migrations, but this thought is actually the seed or is the beginning of renunciation. This is where renunciation begins.
It is not a full and complete renunciation because still you’re only dealing with the suffering of the lower migrations. Now, this you can say, you can identify actually as being a practice of an individual of the small scope, developing aversion or fear towards the situation in lower migrations. Later on you come to examine the situation in the fortunate migration and you see that in those existences there are different types of suffering. You’re born, you’re getting old, you’re getting sick, you die, there is suffering in the so called fortunate migrations. And eventually you come to generate aversion and fear towards that type of suffering as well.
So you see that step by step your renunciation becomes more and more full. So you come to a point where you have complete renunciation that completely turn in sense you completely turn your back to everything that is nice or is considered to be good and nice within cyclic existence. So once you have this sense of complete renunciation, you look at the whole of saṃsāra, not just the lower migrations, and all you see there is faults. You see the shortcomings, you see the faults. So this is where renunciation begins.
So keep that main instruction that was given by Mañjuśrī to the great Ramadan Kappa where he said If you are lacking renunciation, you’re lacking bodhicitta, you’re lacking the correct view, no matter what practice you do, it would just become another cause for you to remain within cyclic existence. You do not reach liberation, you do not reach omniscience, nothing becomes the antidote for saṃsāra if you like these three. It’s interesting what the old Kadampa Geshes, the early Kadampa Geshes used to say. They say that more or less each one of us has our yidam, right? We have our own deity and we have our own mantras and of course we meditate on the deity, of course we recite our mantras.
But which one of us has actual renunciation? Which one of us has the bodhicitta? So the question was, is it’s almost everybody. You know, these days everybody has the deity. Everybody meditates on the deity.
Everybody recites the mantra. But who is actually practicing the actual thing, you know? It is true, isn’t it? We all say that we practice something, right? But if we all lack renunciation, bodhicitta, and correct view, what is the benefit of what we practice?
This advice that is given here, whatever is said here is we can say it’s very deep and it’s very very beneficial. So, Rinpoche would just give very short time for questions. He said one or two minutes if you have any questions. Okay, so what could be analytical meditation on renunciation? What could we do?
It’s not very difficult to translate actually. What Rinpoche was saying is that if you look at the term analytical meditation, what basically you’re doing is you’re analyzing and you’re going to use some reason, some logic. So it’s a logical investigation, a logical analysis. And what you do is you’re analyzing and in a sense you’re sampling different situations. So you’re going to do analytical meditation on renunciation, which means you’re going to search and say, is this renunciation?
Is this situation a situation that is inducing for