STEP BY STEP TO ENLIGHTENMENT FROM JUNIOR SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY

Transcription

1 STEP BY STEP TO ENLIGHTENMENT FROM JUNIOR SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY INSTITUT VAJRA YOGINI MARZENS FRANCE WITH VEN ROBINA COURTIN DECEMBER 26, 2016 JANUARY 1, 2017

2 These teachings have been prepared at FPMT s Institut Vajra Yogini in Marzens, France, for the students of a the annual Christmas retreat there with Ven Robina Courtin, December January institutvajrayogini.fr Thanks to FPMT, Inc. for the teachings in chapter 1. fpmt.org Thanks to Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive for the teachings in chapters 3, 6, & 8. lamayeshe.com And thanks to Wisdom Publications for the teachings in chapter 2 & 7. wisdompubs..org Cover: Shakyamuni Buddha, painted in colour by Jane Seidlitz.

3 CONTENTS 1. The Path to Enlightenment: From Junior School to University 4 2. What is the Mind? To Help Others, First We Need to Help Ourselves Think About Impermanence, In Particular Our Own Death How We Create Karma and How to Purify It We Need to Cut Off Attachment How Do We Exist? We Need Bodhichitta 70

4 1. THE PATH TO ENLIGHTENMENT: FROM JUNIOR SCHOOL TO UNIVERSITY VEN ROBINA COURTIN BUDDHISM: FROM INDIA TO TIBET We re going to be talking about the path to enlightenment. What does that mean? Well, there s various ways, various packages of presenting Buddha s teachings. The key thing with Buddha s teachings, of course, is that they are meant to be experiential. They re meant to be something that you put into practice. That s the point of listening to it. It s like if this were a cooking class; we know that the point of it finally is to go away and make cakes, right? If it were just to sit here and listen and fill our heads with nice words about how delicious cakes are, we d feel a bit disappointed. So sometimes, when I think of spiritual practice, we ve made it quite complicated, we think of it as something complicated. We think of it as rather esoteric. So we hear on the one hand that Buddha says lots of things look at the number of books about Buddhism, probably more than about cooking these days, so many. But always, if you look in your cooking books, there s always the recipe there and if it s just only words and all about the theory, you d think: Well, what on earth can I do with this? How can I make cakes from this? How do I learn? It s all too much theory. How am I learning from this? And so this is very easy to think about Buddhism; it s very easy to think about all religions. There s lots and lots and lots of words. All the people giving lectures, all the people giving sermons, and all this stuff. (Homilies. They used to call them sermons. Doesn t a priest give a sermon any more? It s a homily.) So, then it s easy to be confused. And if we look at all the Buddhist books, even the practical ones, the simple ones, how do I put this into practice? What do I get from this? LAMA ATISHA One thing marvelous in the Tibetan tradition is the way the teachings have been packaged. And it really comes from this person called Atisha, back in the eleventh century, around about then, a great Indian master, saint, scholar, practitioner, meditator. He was invited by the Tibetan King. There is a very long and marvelous story about how he got there. He lived the remaining fifteen to seventeen years of his life in Tibet. Well, one of the things that he did was that he wrote this little text called Lamp for the Path. It s a deceptively simple little text. What essentially he did was, he had been in Tibet for a while and he could see that they had kind of lost the plot. Buddhism had been there for a couple of hundred years by then. There were already these marvelous practitioners in Tibet, extraordinarily great yogis, holy beings, people getting realizations. But somehow, if you look at Buddha s teachings extensively and deeply, all the philosophy, all the things that Buddha talked about, and all the things the Buddhist masters over the centuries, from the time of the Buddha up to that 4

5 point had talked about, the commentaries on Buddha s teachings, the extensive philosophy, the extensive psychology, the extensive esoteric teachings, it s an enormous body of stuff and very easy to get lost in it. It s like finding hundreds and hundreds of books on all levels of cooking, but you can t see where the recipe is in there so it s very easy to get confused. So he very kindly wrote this little text and what he did was he took the essential points from all of Buddha s teachings and he presented them in a very orderly way. THE GRADUAL PATH Of course, the way you present information about cooking is that it has to be an orderly way and the orderly way has to be in terms of the cooking capacity, the simple ones first and the more advanced as you go along. That s nothing surprising. Anything we ve ever learned in our lives, we start in grade one, more move ahead gradually, and then, finally, we graduate. Whether it s six-month course or a weekend course, or a twenty-year course, you start at the beginning and you keep getting better. You can track your progress can t you? It s something we are very, very familiar with. But I think we are not familiar with it when it comes to spiritual paths. We don t think like that. In other words, we go searching for a cooking course, but we don t go searching for a graded course on how to get enlightened. It sounds very strange because we mystify religion. I think we mystify spiritual teachings. The moment we hear the word spiritual we lose our common sense. Really. Then we necessarily think of spiritual as something beyond ordinary. We think of it as some special feeling. We think of it as something that happens when you close your eyes and cross your legs, something mystical, a vision, a special kind of dream. Oh, I had a spiritual experience! we ll say. It really is not appropriate. It s inappropriate to think this way. We also think of it as completely hit and miss. Not in a graded sense. Somehow, you just are a very spiritual person, we say. So what do we mean by spiritual and what was Atisha doing in this text? What did he present? Well, the lineage of practice, the method or lineage of presenting the Buddha s teachings that is known as the Lam-rim in Tibetan, the Graded Path, is what has come from Atisha. We are talking here from the point of view of one of the four main lineages of practice in Tibet called the Gelugpas. Over the centuries, different great masters, different great lamas... (the term lama is equivalent to the Sanskrit word guru, I think I have heard it translated as... ma is the female ending actually and I have heard in this context that it means something like high female or high mother. The Sanskrit word guru means heavy with knowledge. ) So all the great masters or lamas or gurus over the centuries have developed, in different ways, the teachings and the particular tradition here is known as Gelugpa, which is starting from Tsong Khapa in the fourteenth century or so. It is directly coming in the tradition of the way that Atisha practised and emphasized the practice in the eleventh century. So, this lam-rim then, what s it all about? What is it? I think what we ll do tonight is give a very brief overview, a conceptual overview. Then the pieces of it we ll put together in the weekend. 5

6 LORD BUDDHA So then, it s the eleventh century by now... but first, who is Buddha and how did Buddhism get to Tibet? Very briefly, let s mention the historical context. It was something like 500 years before Christ, I think, that Buddha was around. He came out of the Hindu tradition. He was this Prince; people know roughly speaking the clichéd bits of his story. There was this Prince who eventually started to question very deeply the meaning of life, the meaning of his own present life, his enormously rich and marvelous life, and realized that somehow he wanted to understand the nature of reality, he wanted to understand how to go beyond suffering. He could see that everybody was fraught with suffering, at one level or another. And so he left his kingdom and he went off and practised the various ways that were current at the time by many great ascetics. There s a very strong tradition among the Hindus to leave home and live very ascetic lives, seeking liberation (they used the same word). So, Buddha went and tried various methods and joined different groups of people and continued to develop. Found various great teachers. Went to the point of the knowledge of those teachers and they said they couldn t take him any further. Continued to find teachers and eventually he started to realize that none of the current teachings that he was finding actually answered the questions he had. So he eventually continued to practise finding the truth, so on and so forth. He eventually became enlightened, as they say, developed all the realizations, removed from the mind all the misconceptions we are going to talk exactly about that. And then he taught for the remainder of his life, something like 30 years. He was 80-something when he passed away. So, that s Buddha, very brief. Buddha s teachings of course existed in India and then, already by the third or fourth century, there were so many traditions set up, so many establishments of practice and study. By then the Chinese had started to come; they d heard about it. People, travelers, had learned about the Buddha and I think that the beginning of Buddhism strongly developing in the other parts of Asia, China, Japan, all around there, Tibet in something like the seventh or eighth century. It took until 1959 I think for Tibetan Buddhism to come to the West. There were trickles of Westerners; it s only really exploded, it would seem, in the last 50 years in the West, with the Tibetans coming. LAMA TSONGKHAPA So, here we are in the eleventh century; there s Atisha. So let me get to the fourteenth century and we have Lama Tsongkhapa, this lineage lama of our tradition. He was really big on the lam-rim. So the way we re presenting the teachings here in this packaging known as the lam-rim, the Graded Path, is according to the tradition of Tsongkhapa. THE STRUCTURE OF THE LAM-RIM Using really ordinary terminology, let s just look at this structure. We ll do the pieces tomorrow and Sunday. So, if you go for a cooking class, you know the goal - the goal is to learn how to make cakes. It s very obvious that if you join a course, it s usual that you know what you want to graduate in. It mightn t be so when you go to school or to 6

7 college, you kind of pick your courses, you re not really sure, but as you move along, you got enough options, to eventually focus in on some topic. But here, like cooking, you fairly much know you want to learn cooking, you re inspired about cooking, you know about cakes, you ve tasted cakes, you ve seen other people making cakes. I d like to learn that, please. I d like to learn how to make cakes. So, then you go find a course, don t you? THE GOAL, ENLIGHTENMENT So, here what is that we are trying to achieve? What is the result of this graded course, this lam-rim, what s the result of this path, this course? Well, it s the word enlightenment or the term buddhahood. This term enlightenment is used by lots of people in lot of traditions in lots of different ways. First of all, as we already know, when it comes to math and science and making cakes, we ve got to be very clear about our terminology. If you start making a cake recipe, and it says a half teaspoonful of this, and a gram of that, you know you ve got to go check up the meaning of a gram and the meaning of a half a teaspoon, otherwise you ll make a mess. So we do understand very naturally in our daily, ordinary life the necessity for precision, for accuracy. Again, that s something we re not used to thinking about in spiritual terms. We all bandy the word enlightenment about and assume we re all speaking the same language. It s like we all bandy about the word called love. I say I love you, you say you love me, and we actually think we are communicating. But if we actually defined our terms, we ve probably got two completely different meanings. So, Buddha is really big on accuracy, he s big on precision, and the Tibetans are past masters at this, I tell you. They don t know how old they are; they talk about an arm s length if I ask something like how long? So, they re not so clear and accurate about those things, but hey, any of the ones who have studied, they know exactly the definition of love, the definition of enlightenment, exactly this and it s not this, and it is that, and therefore this. And that s not meant to just be intellectual, just like learning a recipe precisely isn t intellectual. You need it to get the cake. So the Buddha s approach very much is that and, as I said, the Tibetans especially, the way they have developed and practised the Buddha s path. A BIRD NEEDS TWO WINGS: WISDOM AND COMPASSION Okay, enlightenment, buddhahood, what is it? Well, it s the name given to what the Buddha would say, from the Mahayana point of view... because there are two main approaches to Buddhism, there are two wings of the bird: Buddha says a bird needs two wings, wisdom and compassion. Really, broadly speaking, we can say the wisdom wing is all the, what we call the Hinayana approach to Buddhism, which is the Buddhism that s developed in countries like Burma and Thailand or known very commonly as Theravadin Buddhism (Theravadin Buddhism is one of the only remaining of the eighteen sub-schools of what is known as this wisdom wing, the Hinayana, which has its very specific goal. The other wing is the compassion wing. These two together, the combination of these two, this is the Mahayana path, the Mahayana course, and the goal of that is this enlightenment. 7

8 The term used here, according to the Mahayana Buddhists is the term enlightenment. What Buddha is saying is every living being has just necessarily the potential to achieve buddhahood, enlightenment. The goal of practicing this course not this weekend, we won t get it by Sunday! But I mean, we might if we are really ripe and ready. This course that we re describing this weekend, the accomplishment, the end result, the culmination, is one s own buddhahood, one s own enlightenment. BUDDHA S VIEW OF WHAT THE MIND IS So, what is that? What is that? The simple way to say it is that it occurs in your mind, where it occurs is in your mind we re going to be discussing all of this in its place. In part of the overview we ll discuss that, tonight; that it occurs in the mind. So, if this is potential that we ve all got, no choice about it, Buddha says: that if you exist, then it s your potential. If it occurs in the mind, and the part of us that has to do the job is the mind, not your toenails and not your nose, and not your fingers, but your mind, then we better know what the mind is. So, let s look briefly at that. We ll get in to more detail in the second stage of this course. What is the mind? Well, mind in Buddhism is used in a much more broad way than we tend to use it in our own culture. It is used synonymously with the word consciousness, one. Two, it isn t physical. So if you re a Christian, or a Muslim, or you talk about some non-physical part of you, it s known as the soul. But Buddha doesn t use that term at all. He would use the term mind, but it would incorporate concepts, feelings, thoughts, emotions, unconscious, whatever you want to call, what you even like to refer to as the spiritual part of yourself, whatever you like. All of this is your mind. The whole spectrum of your inner experiences is your mind, and in Buddha s terms it is necessarily non-physical. It isn t the body. It s not the brain. We ll go into more detail about that, but we re just stating this now. It isn t the brain. So, this enlightenment is the potential of your mind, this Buddhahood. What does that mean? Well it s, simply speaking, the full development of your mind from the point of view of the positive qualities. Buddha would say they are actually innate to us, and these words we all know: love, compassion, wisdom, joy, contentment, whatever. That is our natural potential, the full development of these, beyond which you can t develop them further. DEVELOPING THE POSITIVE This is an interesting concept because we don t even talk like that. We know the words, but we don t talk like that in our ordinary daily life. We tend to think we re born with a certain amount and we stuck with that much and that s it. What to do? But the Buddha s deal is very much that we can develop that part of ourself to phenomenal degrees and this course is all about that. GETTING RID OF THE NEGATIVE So that also implies, well, it certainly does here, this Buddhahood, when you ve achieved it, this enlightenment, not only will you be fully developed in all your positive qualities, but necessarily, you ll be completely removed from all the negative ones. All the negative qualities will be completely removed from your mind because they are the ones that hold back the positive ones. And what are they? We all know 8

9 the words: hate, fear, jealous, depressed, anxiety, wish to kill, low self-esteem, attachment, anger, pride, you name it, we all know the words. So the complete removal of all of those. Now that is quite a shocking concept. In fact, psychologically speaking, it s quite radical to state that. None of us would think we can totally get rid of that because we just assume, along with our positive qualities, we are born a certain way and that s just the way it is. You just have to do your best, you know. We don t think in terms of growing that part of us, the positive qualities, whereas we do, for example, when it comes to cake making. You are not born as an innate cake maker, but you ve got the potential and you go learn the course. You re not born as a mathematician, but you can learn it. You re not born as Mozart, but, hey, you can become like him. We have courses, don t we? But we don t have courses on how to become more loving, more wise, more compassionate. Look at the stunning degree to which we can learn piano. We are phenomenally brilliant, aren t we, in the West, technically brilliant in the things we can achieve, but we don t have that level of technical brilliance when it comes to emotional things; and that s Buddha s specialty. He s brilliant at helping us develop to phenomenal degrees what we would say are the emotional, which we ought to be hungry to get. I mean, the courses on Buddhism should be packed with people. We mightn t all want to be mathematicians, and we don t necessarily suffer because we are not a mathematician, but hey, we all suffer in terms of jealousy, and confusion, and depression and want to kill and lie and steal, you get my point here. We should be packing Buddha s courses. Buddha s specialty is emotions, the mind, and the capacity of the human to phenomenally develop the positive parts of ourself. So, enlightenment is the term used to refer to the mind of the person who has done the job of perfecting their own positive qualities and absolutely removing the negative. Now those words just themselves are kind of understandable, nothing shocking about the words, but it s a shocking concept. But when I tell you more precisely more detail of the qualities of the person who has achieved those things, then it really sounds insane. Because we usually refer these qualities that I am about to tell you about to a person called God. NO CREATOR Now, Buddha says there is no such person as a creator, which is what we mean by God, but he certainly doesn t say that there aren t superior beings. He uses the term, in Sanskrit, Arya being, the superior being, and this is the term for the ultimate, the final superior being who has done the job of becoming a Buddha. So he has no problem with describing the qualities. THE QUALITIES OF A BUDDHA I ll come back to tell you now the qualities of a Buddha. It sounds like God. Sounds like God, and we would only think one person has it and that s God the creator, and there s no way, you d say, that we could become this way. If you go off to some person and ask for a course in how to become like God, they ll lock you up and put you on a pill; definite. But this is what Buddha is saying. 9

10 The fully developed person, fully developed in the wisdom wing point of view: they use the term omniscience. But it s interesting, a teaching I was going to this morning from one lama from another tradition, he said the meaning of the word in Tibetan, it s very broad here, is: accurate cognition, meaning knowing exactly what is, seeing as it is, which is very interesting. Seeing something as it is : how cute, we ll think. And this really gets us into how Buddha talks. We re going to be unraveling this, but the way Buddha s saying, roughly speaking now, is because of all that neurotic stuff inside us, it completely blinds us from really seeing how everything is, and completely causes us suffering. So, when we utterly remove this suffering and delusions, we are in touch with exactly how everything is. Omniscient, we could say literally knowing everything, but it would mean this, too: seeing perfectly the minds of others, seeing exactly how things are, at a level of knowing or cognition that, again, is radical in comparison with what we everyday think of in scientific and ordinary psychological terms. Buddha is radical in what he is asserting: the levels of cognition that we can achieve. And he would say that is just the nature of the mind. So, when the mind is fully developed in the wisdom wing, one sees the minds of all beings, one sees everything as it is. Then there s the compassion wing. When that s fully developed, you can say the mind of this person, this consciousness of this enlightened being, has absolute empathy with all living beings. Not a fraction of distinction, not a fraction of discrimination; infinite compassion, love, affection for every being, equally. Which is, again, pretty insane. We find it hard to love even one person well. So, what Buddha s saying, again, this is our natural potential. It s the nature of mind to be this way. It s just our nature, so we need to develop it. But there s another quality, too. They even call it omnipotence, infinite power: the effortless ability to do whatever needs to be done to benefit all living beings, because the job of a Buddha, the heart job of a Buddha, is infinite compassion. There s the wisdom that knows exactly what and how and where and what and who. And then there s the capacity to do what needs to be done, to perfectly benefit all beings. So, we re talking a bit like God, like we talk about God, omniscient, allknowing, all-compassionate, all-wise, all-pervading. And then, indeed, because the mind is not physical, when it s fully developed, this Buddha-mind, it is just necessarily pervading wherever there is existence, which is a really interesting concept, because that is, for sure, only what God does. God is everywhere, we say. Well Buddha talks just like this and he would say that s the capacity of a person called a Buddha, which is the potential of every one of us. Not to be just like it, not like this; and he s not saying a Buddha is a creator. So there s many similarities, but fundamental differences in explaining. These words are quite different. BUDDHA NATURE So, what Buddha is saying is this is, just naturally, the potential of every being... and the term in Tibetan for sentient being is interesting, it s mind possessor. A sentient being is a mind possessor, sem-chen, mind possessor. Sem is mind and chen means having. So, if you are a mind possessor, if you possess consciousness, 10

11 then this is your potential. It s like if it is an acorn, it just naturally is a potential oak tree. It s not as if you come along and you force oak tree-ness into it and now suddenly your acorn becomes an oak tree. It is just naturally, by its existence, an acorn, in its nature is a potential oak tree. So, if you are a living being, in your nature you are a potential Buddha. It s not just for the Mother Teresas, you know. This is how Buddha talks. ENLIGHTENMENT IS DOABLE So, the culmination of this course, this A-Z course to enlightenment, is this perfection, is this enlightenment. So, naturally, you start at Grade One. Then, when you have accomplished this, you go to Grade Two and so on and so forth until, eventually, you have achieved it. It is as practical as that. The Buddha s approach is that type of practicality. It s not this mystical, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the best sort of hit-and-miss affair that we think of as spiritual. Do you see what I am saying? And it s extremely important to think this way because it s really a sigh of relief, actually. We all know we want to be loving and kind. We all know we don t want to be mean and depressed. We kind of don t really know how. We sort of think well, we ve heard about this thing called meditation and somehow, if you close your eyes, and put the incense on, and make the light low, so the music s sweet, somehow something will happen inside called spiritual. It s very kind of strange, really. You understand what I m saying? It s not like that. The Buddha s approach is not like that. He says it s a really tough job, but it s a do-able job and you start at the beginning and you just keep going. You just keep going and you will get there. We all know practice makes perfect. We all know practice makes perfect. Well, the saying they have in Tibetan is that Nothing gets more difficult with familiarity. It s a different way of saying it. What a relief! The more you do it, the better you get at it. What a relief! It should give us great courage. So, in a way, it s good to know this at the starting point that the goal of all of this is to achieve this Buddhahood. Because why? Because, hey, you re a living being and this is the potential of your mind. They say we possess Buddha-nature. Buddha says this term. We don t talk like that, right? We don t say, oh, yes, an acorn possesses oak tree-nature. But we know exactly the meaning, don t we? It s a quaint way to put it. This is how these Asians talk, Indians probably, you know, just a bit of the terminology. We d say: that s a potential oak tree. Well, you re a potential Buddha. Very simple. That s what it means. You possess Buddha-nature. It s not a little Buddha in there, hiding from you, for you to find. Like there s not a little oak tree in there that, when you find it it ll suddenly explodes into life. We know that. You understand. An acorn is something that when you give it the right causes and conditions, the sun, the water, the soil, and time and patience, it will just naturally become an oak tree. The same here. The same here. It s something very organic and natural, whereas, again, we don t think like that. We think it s something you ve got to force. So, okay, this lam-rim, this packaging of Buddha s teachings, presented in an orderly and experiential way, is what we will be presenting this weekend in a very speedy way. One lama in Wisconsin, who is a professor at the University, he s retired 11

12 now, Geshe Sopa. I think Wisdom Publications has published now, soon, the third volume of his commentary on the lam-rim. It s not huge, the books, but he took 25 years to teach it, 25 years! Gradually, really slowly, really in depth, taking one of Tsongkhapa s texts. So, we ll speed through and just touch on the main points in a day and a half or two days or however long a weekend course is. OK, so far, so good? Makes sense? And if we ve heard it a thousand times before, does it make even more sense? Because that s the point. That s good. We need to hear this, again and again you hear it. Just like with your piano, you keep practicing the same thing. You don t say, Oh, yeah, I did the C Major scale, yesterday. Give me a new one, please. You ve got to keep practicing, don t you? That s what we mean by practice! So, a part of the practice is keep hearing. THE THREE SCOPES: JUNIOR SCHOOL, HIGH SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY Okay, so, let s talk a little bit more about the mind. But first, this packaging, it s really like, the way they talk about it in Tibetan is divided into, as they call it, three scopes. The meaning of that is, the scope of someone s potential, is according to your level of capability. Now, we understand that. So we can see the junior school is a certain series of things that are taught according to the level of capability of that type of person, isn t it? Junior school. So, then you graduate to high school. And then you graduate to university. And then you have your post-graduate. Well, I can say that that s an exact, a perfect analogy, for the packaging of the lamrim. There s the first scope, which they call the Lower Scope, there s the Medium Scope, and there s the Highest Scope; junior school, high school, university, and then there s, within the university, you ve got the post-graduate, which is tantra. Using this other analogy of the two wings of the bird, how those three scopes fit in, and it s a perfect way to fit: the wisdom wing is the first and the second scopes: the junior school and the high school. So, if you were just to complete that, your goal would be your own liberation. And the term often used to refer to that, although it has a deeper meaning too, is the word nirvana. So, nirvana isn t some kind of holy place up in the sky that you got to give up sexy samsara for, kind of reluctantly. All pure up there, you know? Nirvana is not equivalent to Heaven or something. Nirvana is a word that really is quite abstract in meaning; the meaning is powerful but almost abstract conceptually: it s freedom from suffering. THE WISDOM WING: JUNIOR SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL So, the first two scopes, junior school and high school, that s the wisdom wing. And what you would have achieved if you have achieved that is you would have removed to a phenomenal degree, but not completely yet, all the gross levels of all the delusions, all unhappiness, all the ego, if you like and we are going to go into this very much. ROOT OF SAMSARA The ignorance, the root of this, is this deep, deep, primordial ignorance in us, the Buddha says, that causes us to not be in touch with reality. Remember one of consequences of this wisdom, one of the achievements of the Buddha s mind, is to be completely in touch with reality, omniscient. So, right now, we re way out of touch 12

13 with reality, Buddha says, because our minds are completely polluted by all the delusions. One of the things you ve achieved when you ve achieved this nirvana is, for sure, the wisdom wing, which means, not totally though, but pretty much, removed the gross degree, all the nonsense of the ego, which, just naturally means that you are now extraordinarily blissful, content, fulfilled person free from suffering to an enormous degree, an amazing being. You are liberated from suffering, thus the term liberation. You are liberated. You are freed from suffering. Hey, pretty astonishing person. THE COMPASSION WING: UNIVERSITY But there s more you can do. So, if you just practise the wisdom wing, you ve done your junior school and your high school and you re finished. You re a pretty stunning person, but there is still more potential. So, you can go on to university and you can then really accomplish the compassion wing. And the unique characteristic of this is, just by the very nature of the word, is it s connected to others. So, you could say very much the purpose of the first one is for yourself. And don t underestimate that. Don t think that s something small. I mean, if we even began just to think about ourselves in an appropriate way and do the things that were beneficial to ourselves, we d be stunning beings. Right now, Buddha says, we re harming ourselves constantly and, of course, we re going to be discussing this. Or as my mother would say, you re own worst enemy. Well, Buddha would agree. We re our own worst enemies, Buddha would say. You ve gone beyond masses of this when you ve done the wisdom wing, if you ve just done that, junior school and high. The compassion wing, you start to look around and realize that everybody is in the same boat. You start to develop this phenomenal capacity to encompass others, to reach out to others, to utilize what you ve learned in junior school and high school now for the benefit of others. You help them do the same thing. POST GRADUATE And then you want to go to post-graduate. All that is really is then you are moving along so radically on this path, moving on, becoming an amazing person, getting rid of all the nonsense in yourself, becoming an amazing being, free to a huge extent from your own suffering, now able to do the same thing to help others, developing, developing, developing, but then you can enter the post-graduate one, the esoteric teachings, Buddha s tantra. The goal of this is the same, to become a Buddha, but it s a really more sophisticated level of practice, a much more speedy way to now finish accomplishing your goal of Buddhahood. Propelled by this immense compassion for all the sentient beings who are in this same boat of suffering as we are, ourselves. So, you ve got your three scopes. BUDDHA S APPROACH TO CHANGING THE MIND Okay, that s one lot of stuff that I ve said. Another thing now to talk about is really to try and get our heads around just the approach that Buddha takes, where he s coming from, in terms of just how he talks, because I think, already, in the room, if 13

14 we ve not heard this before, let s say, we ve got a lot of concepts about what we mean by spiritual, by what we think what practice means. Maybe we have heard it, but we ve still got a lot of concepts. And so let s see how Buddha s talking. Ok? What he s saying is, and I ve already implied it quite a bit, said it directly, too, is that we ve got this potential in our minds, in our consciousness, so what is it, right now, that is preventing me, this second, why is it, at this very moment I am not a Buddha? Why is it I am not fully developed in the two wings? Why is it my mind isn t pervading the universe, seeing everything as it is, encompassing all beings? What is it? What are the things that are preventing me? Well, it s stuff within the mind. Right? The potential of this consciousness of mine is to be absolutely pure and clear and all expansive and wise and blah, blah. So, right now, it s completely polluted. It s a good analogy. Buddha s saying this: it s polluted by, as I ve been saying, these unhappy states of mind, the components of ego. Okay, what is the mind? How do we talk in ordinary terms? When we say the mind, we say the word think, thoughts, concepts. We understand that very easily. Then we have words called emotion and we sort of point here [the heart] for this. Then we do confuse things by then saying there is another part of us called spiritual. It s almost like a third part. Buddha doesn t talk like this. In fact, what he says, what he s implying, spiritual means, you re being spiritual when you are recognizing and acknowledging and beginning to change your neuroses. If you re working on your attachment, if you re working on your anger, if you re working on your jealousy, hey, you re being spiritual. Now, we would call that psychological and we go to a therapist. But if we want spiritual, we go to a Tibetan lama and we think that ll sort of give us something different and they ll give us a mala and we ll say mantras and we ll see Buddhas: we think that s spiritual. But, if you hear about psychology from Buddha, about anger and jealousy and depression, we kind of think: that s not spiritual. But that s what Buddha means by spiritual. You even would, indeed, get from a Tibetan lama... look at all the pictures in the paintings here: you re going to get pictures and malas and prayers until they come out your ears, so much! But even that is not necessarily only spiritual. They re simply a whole set of tools that one can use, which are actually from the postgraduate level, from an esoteric level, from the advanced level, that we can utilize to help do this constant job of getting rid of the junk, developing the good. It s always psychological. Buddha is only talking psychologically. It s just that his view, his assertion of what we can achieve psychologically is pretty stunning when you hear about enlightenment. It s not as if suddenly when you re just dealing with ordinary depression, that s psychological, and when you re dealing with enlightenment, that s not psychological, that s spiritual. That s a real misconception. All of it, as far as Buddha is concerned, is psychological because all of it is all the time to do with the mind. And we know the word mind is used in context of psychology. It s just that the word wasn t coined back then, was it? You know, Buddha didn t use the word psychology. I mean, who invented it? The Greeks. It s Greek language. We utilize it. We bandy it about now in our culture. So, for Buddha, psychological and spiritual, they re synonymous. It s the same meaning. Because what you re doing, the job that you are doing as a Buddhist, is psychological. If you re working on your mind, how can you say it s not 14

15 psychological? It s just that his view of psychology and this is my way to say it is radical. He is far more outrageous in what he is asserting we can achieve, psychologically. But, you know, if you talk about Buddhahood, like I m saying, you go to your therapist and say I want to know how to get enlightened. Oh, you better go find a Tibetan lama, they ll say. But they ll say, That s not psychological; I m here to help you with your daily life, as if, again, that was sort of separate. The way to say it, really, is we have an understanding of psychology to some degree in our culture. In fact, there are many models of it, but I would say that they are all very firmly based in the Western or materialist view of the mind being the brain, of the fact that you are made by someone else, that you are created by your parents, and it s not called spiritual. Whereas Buddha is using the term spiritual, the practices that we label spiritual, but all they are are tools to help you develop psychologically all the way to enlightenment. So, we re talking about the mind. BECOMING OUR OWN THERAPIST So therefore, okay, in the mind, the mind, one of the major jobs of a Buddhist and this is really in the high school; in junior school it s not even too much talked about, the mind, ok. In junior school we re dealing with even more fundamental things like body and speech, understanding basic laws about how things work, like karma, cause and effect. So, when we go to high school, the second scope, we really start becoming our own therapists, as Lama Yeshe would put it. Not joking, you know? Not joking. Exactly the point. Deeply understanding this mind of ours, really beginning to unravel it, really learning very profoundly how it functions, and distinguishing between the so-called positive and negative, because that s the real nitty-gritty of the job. So, okay, if the mind is the main thing we have to work on, how do we change the mind? What are the tools Buddha is using? So, really, you could say what you re learning to do as a Buddhist is change the way you think. So, Buddha, really, I would say he s a supreme cognitive therapist. There s a type of therapy in the West called cognitive behavioural therapy, isn t three. The Buddha s really saying exactly this: he s saying what we think impacts upon what we do and say, which impacts upon what we feel, which, therefore impacts on what we do and say, and therefore impacts upon the world, and so forth. It all comes down to the mind. Buddha, too, has far more radical ways of talking about the mind because he doesn t assert a creator, which is a shock if you think he s spiritual. We only have two options on this earth, one is you re a materialist and one is you re religious. And if you re religious, you posit a God, you posit a creator. Well, Buddha doesn t. He doesn t assert a creator. He just doesn t say there isn t one. His whole explanation of how things are is, absolutely, he has a way of describing exactly how things come into being, why I am the way I am, why universes, why happiness, why suffering. And his creative principle, if you like, is called karma, which you learn in junior school, so we ll do that tomorrow morning. It s explaining, it s utterly based on the understanding of... karma is absolutely based on the understanding of what the mind is. 15

16 Your practice is to do with changing the way you think. And again, really you could say, Buddha s understanding of thinking, of concepts, he goes to much more subtle levels. He is saying that our minds are riddled with misconceptions, but deeply packed away, so deeply that it takes a long time to unravel them. We can see even the level that we begin to unravel our minds, we go off to our therapist. To begin to see what we re feeling is extremely painful, isn t it? Because we ve not looked most of the time in our life, it s not part of our culture to investigate what we think and feel until it s too late, until it s kind of some problem. Buddha is dealing exactly with that. And, again, the methods that Buddha uses these kind of very skillful, sophisticated psychological techniques called meditation they are psychological techniques that enable one to go very, very deep, to plumb the depths of this mind of ours, to really become an amazing skillful therapist of your own self. It s very really, definitely true. I m using very Western terms, but we understand these words. But even saying, more than anything, when it comes down to it, we re learning to do cognitive therapy. We are learning to radically de-construct the elaborate conceptual constructions that Buddha says our minds are. It is radical, really, what we re attempting to do. And it s scary as hell, because we all know that even a little bit of therapy, even a little bit of looking at your feelings and taking responsibility is painful. We know this. So that s that. Another little piece that s important, extremely important. DON T BELIEVE A WORD BUDDHA SAYS Buddha, he ok d religion, no problem, religion yes, but not creator, as I said. So, his deal is, Hey, please do not believe a single word you re going to hear this weekend. The whole point of Buddhism is absolutely not to do with believing something in the way we understand beliefs. I m not criticizing that approach. I m just saying that Buddha doesn t take it. So, for example, we all know well you don t know but I m telling you! that I was brought up a Catholic, okay? So we all know, as a Christian let s say, God is seen as the creator of the universe, the creator of me, the creator of good, the creator of the laws of morality, and so therefore God is to be obeyed. Now, I m not complaining about that; I m just saying that s not how Buddha talks. I mean, I was talking to an old Catholic friend of mine years ago, and I said what is it that defines something as a sin? in Buddhist terminology, a negative action. He said it necessarily is something that goes against the will of God. Now, that s very reasonable. If God created the universe, that means he created the law don t kill, or don t lie. So, if you do it, what you re doing, why you did a bad action is because you went against God s will. That s totally valid. It fits. But it s not the Buddha s approach. He didn t create. Buddha would say don t kill, for example, in the junior school teachings. But he s not saying don t kill because he said so. He is saying don t kill because he has found, from his own experience, that the action of killing is something forget about the harm it does to others it comes necessarily from a negative place here, therefore is leaving a negative imprint or seed in our own mind, which will then necessarily ripen in the future as my suffering. 16

17 So, yes, it s sort of like, your mother says, Don t go near the fire! when you re a kid. And you probably will say, Why not? And she will probably say, Because I say so. Well, it s good enough. It works, doesn t it? It prevents you from getting burned. But eventually you have to learn, don t you, that the real reason she says don t go near the fire isn t because she s said so, it s because you will get burnt. Now, if you, for the rest of your life, here you are, 30, 40, or 50, not going near the fire because Mummy said so, that s a little bit unintelligent. CHECK IT, TEST IT I m not being rude about Christianity; I m not trying to say that, but you get my point. Eventually, you know, and your mummy hopes, you will learn the real reason not to go near the fire. So, your mummy might, you know, Buddha is saying don t kill. Good enough even to respect that, but you ve got to know why. And that s the Buddha s approach. So, he s saying don t just believe me; check it out for yourself. So, again in just the same way, we understand, very comfortably, in our culture that what we mean by science is not something that we must believe. We know perfectly well, if I m Einstein or if I m Mr. So-and-so, the apple one what was his name? Mr. Newton. If I m Mr. Newton, and I ve been telling you about my latest findings about gravity, you know that I just didn t have a vision of it last night or got revealed by somebody. You get my point here? You d chuck me out the door as a bit of a maniac, if that s the case. You understand my point? And therefore, I m not demanding that you believe me, you people. You see my point here? You know that. You know that I m a person, Mr. Newton, who has, from my own experience, from my own observation, has observed, has seen something and has articulated it, and I ve labeled it gravity, it s a law, and I ve put it all down. See my point? So, you didn t have to take it away. You can believe me if you like and I think, frankly... You check this: we say, Oh, but it s scientific. Excuse me, when was the last time you checked on gravity? As a proof? When was the last time you checked on E=mc 2? When was the last time you verified Einstein? So, we really just go around believing Einstein. We say, Oh, it s science. Well, excuse me, it s someone else s science, not yours. You re just believing it, just quoting it because someone told you. So, actually, we act just like we do all the time, but we say, Oh, I don t believe anything, I don t have any beliefs. Well, nonsense! So Buddha s approach is exactly like the scientists in this context, which is a big surprise, because we don t think of religion like that. So, Buddha is not a creator. He did not invent what is called Buddhism. He didn t create it; make it up, in other words. He articulated it, yes, but based on what? His own experiences. His own observations. So, he s presented it. And he doesn t mind if we don t like it. You can be rude about Buddha. He doesn t mind. You won t get kind of hanged, like in some religions, if you criticize God. He doesn t take it personally. It s very reasonable. Let s say you re here tonight and you haven t heard this stuff before and you think it s a load of rubbish. It s totally reasonable to walk away and say thanks a lot, goodbye, Buddha. He will not mind. He doesn t want you to stuff yourself full of what s called Buddhism. He wants, he demands, that you think about it, listen to it, and then eventually prove it. Get the proof of the pudding, taste it that s if you want to and then you continue to apply it in your life because it works. 17

18 IT MUST BE EXPERIENTIAL Finally, again, the point is, it s got to be experiential. You ve got to see the results. It s got to be a method that you ll use to help you become a happier, wiser, more compassionate human being. That s the purpose of all of this, to finally achieve your full potential, so that you can truly be of just spontaneous benefit to others. TAKE IT AS A HYPOTHESIS So, do not believe a single word you are hearing. Take it, in other words, like any decent scientist, take it as a hypothesis. We get quite anguished, let s say we hear about, especially Buddhism, I m talking about reincarnation. It s huge one in our culture because it s just seen as kind of ridiculous. More and more people these days do talk about it. Lots of people who do call themselves Christians just naturally, have the view of reincarnation, but it utterly, when you want to look at the big picture of Buddhism, it absolutely is at the centre. You can t have Buddhism and the whole picture, Buddha s whole deal, without hypothesizing continuity of consciousness, the non-physicality and the continuity of what s called mind or consciousness. Nothing of his teachings lots of things you can apply but if you want to look at the big picture, you have to take this as a hypothesis. And so taking something as a hypothesis is very reasonable. Scientists do this. A really good scientist is one who s got a mind that s open enough that can take something that initially is weird and then work with it. You understand my point? Otherwise, you have tunnel vision. So, that s a really important point. Take it as a hypothesis. You don t have to squeeze it inside yourself. You don t have to believe it. No one s asking you to do this. But at least give it some thought, you ve got to say the words and act as if, in order to follow through on what Buddha s saying: if it were true that the mind is this and this, therefore this, therefore this, therefore this. If it were true. So then the Buddha s approach is that you take that onboard and like anything, you learn about it first conceptually. Don t you? You learn the theory of cakes, first conceptually. It s got to fit, conceptually. Then you can get the fruit, then you get the result. So, same here. And eventually, Buddha says, we can verify it for ourselves, within our own mind. Eventually. We can. So, take it all as a hypothesis. HEAR THE TEACHINGS AS PERSONAL ADVICE Another way they say to listen, that s really valid to listen, to summarize: listen to this as if it were personal advice just like you d listen to a recipe: it s personal advice so you can go and put it into practice. Well, it s the same here. Listen to it as personal advice. Like I said, you mightn t like it as personal advice, in which case you don t have to do it. You re the boss, not Buddha. That s the approach. THE THREE POTS There s a very nice, sweet way that they say it, of how to listen. They talk about don t be like the three kinds of pots. Don t be like, I forget the order, but don t be like one kind of pot, or a mug, or something, that is upside-down. Nothing will go in. Useless. Waste of your time. Don t be like the pot that s got a hole in it, sort of like in one ear and out the other. And don t be like a pot that s full of dirty, yucky stuff because 18