Lam-rim 16: Will Our Next Rebirth Go Up or Down; Joyless Realms

Next, we have the meditations on what can happen after death. Of course, all of this is based on having some level of conviction that there is rebirth. Without that, none of this lam-rim material makes terribly much sense. As it says in the texts, when we take rebirth seriously and think about what our next lives will be, we see that there are only two ways to go: either to one of the better rebirth states or to one of the worse rebirth states. This has to do with the types of potentials we’ve built up on our mental continuums – whether we have built up negative potentials from having acted destructively or positive potentials from having acted constructively. Any positive actions we have done would, however, have been mixed with the confusion, or unawareness, of grasping for a solid “me,” a solid “you,” etc. So, though they would help to bring about one of the better states of rebirth, that rebirth would still be a samsaric rebirth. 

What determines the kinds of rebirths we will have is what have we predominantly done during our lifetimes, as well as the thoughts we have as we are dying. As it says in the texts, it’s not too difficult to tell beforehand in which direction our next rebirths will go. Most of us spend most of our time building up negative potentials, and these can lead only to a disastrous future. 

Reviewing the Day

The first meditation is to look at today and to take account: How many times since I’ve woken up have I become angry, thought ill of others, criticized, been negative, been overwhelmed by thoughts of greed or lust, engaged in idle chatter, taken what I haven’t been given, etc.? How many times during the day have I done anything positive or constructive, refrained from acting out a negative thought, or changed my way of thinking when I started to become very negative? How many times have I actually thought in a compassionate, loving way and done something beneficial for others? 

If we were at work during the day, did we think in terms of doing our work to benefit others, or did we just complain and criticize? Or, on the other hand, did we just pass the day in a neutral state of mind, not thinking anything particularly positive or negative, just doing our jobs in a mechanical way like robots – which, certainly, is not going to get us a better rebirth in the future either? 

Obviously, we can, and will, review our lives and what we have actually done to see which of the potentials that we have built up are the most predominant ones. Based on that, we can have a more realistic idea of where we might be heading in a future life. This is probably not a very pleasant meditation to do, but it can be very effective and help us to be more realistic about our states of mind and the types of potentials we build up every day.

Participant: It’s like the third thought that turns the mind toward the Dharma.

Dr. Berzin: The four thoughts that turn the mind to the Dharma are (1) thinking about the precious human life, (2) thinking about death and impermanence, (3) thinking about karma, cause and effect, and (4) thinking about the disadvantages of samsara.

This type of meditation could be part of the third thought or the fourth thought. We can include the suffering of the three worst realms, the three better realms, and samsara in the disadvantages of samsara. But we can also include the suffering of the worst realms in the division of karma, given that it is our destructive karmic actions that lead to rebirth in these realms. It’s just a matter of how we classify the lam-rim topics. In general, though, I think it’s probably better to think of the worst realms in terms of the disadvantages of all the different states of samsara. In the lam-rim, worst rebirths is put in the initial scope because, in the initial scope, that is what one is aiming to avoid.

Let’s do the meditation.

[meditation]

It’s very interesting to review the kinds of thoughts and attitudes we’ve had and how we’ve behaved during the day.

Participant: As far as one can remember.

Dr. Berzin: Well, that’s true. So, one of the recommended practices is to get in the habit of remembering what we have done during the day by having a dedication at night.

There is the well-known example of Geshe Benkungyel – “geshe” (dge-bshes), here, just means “spiritual friend,” not a degree of study. Geshe Benkungyel was one of the Kadampa geshes. He had a pile of black stones and a pile of white stones. He was in retreat, and at the end of the day, he reviewed everything he had thought and done. For all the positive things, he would put a white stone, and for all the negative things, a black stone. If there were more black stones than white stones, he would scold himself and say that he was going to tell everybody in town what a terrible mind he had and that the next day, he would try to do much better. If he had more white stones, then he’d congratulate himself and encourage himself to continue in that way. 

Whether we do this with stones or not is irrelevant. The point is that when, at the end of the day, we dedicate what we’ve done during the day, we actually review what we’ve done. That doesn’t mean just reviewing what we have physically done – I’ve done this amount of work, that amount of taking care of the family, the dishes, or whatever – but reviewing what our states of mind have been like. Then, like Geshe Benkungyel, either we rejoice in the positive things and encourage ourselves to continue, or we regret the negative things and set the intention to improve the next day.

Reviewing Our Lives

Let’s now extend this meditation and think about our lives. What have we done in our lives? What types of potentials have we built up? What types of states of mind have we had? If, in our lives, we’ve been very negative or have done many destructive or negative things, what have we done to try to counterbalance that? What have we done to try to change our ordinary states of mind? That, again, gives us a clue as to what we could look forward to in our next lives. 

Participant: Is the intention also taken into account? What about unintentionally or unknowingly having done something wrong?

Dr. Berzin: The strength of a destructive action is very much affected by the motivation. So, if the motivation was ill will and we had the intention to cause harm, the action would be a much heavier negative action than if we had no negative motivation or we didn’t know what we were doing, were confused, or were forced into something by very difficult circumstances.

Participant: I was wondering, is this meditation just referring to the ten destructive actions, or is it also referring to all negative states of mind, like being very stressed, very anxious, and so on?

Dr. Berzin: I think that we have to take all states of mind into account here. If we’re always stressed, nervous, and tense, we have to look: what is behind that? Behind that is usually thinking “me, me, me” very, very strongly and “I can’t do it. It’s too much for me. What are people going to think of me?” So, there’s a very strong grasping for a “me.” 

One could also, of course, be very upset about a situation that others are in. But, in general, when compassion is practiced properly, though we’re emotionally moved by the situation, we’re not stressed. Rather than feeling overwhelmed – “Oh, it’s too much. I can’t do it. I can’t help everybody,” in which case, we’re putting more of the emphasis on the “me” – we feel, “I wish that I could develop myself further and further so that I could deal with even more and bigger problems.” So, there’s quite a difference in the emotional state when the focus is on me and thinking, “I can’t do it,” and when it’s on others and thinking, “I wish that I could develop myself so that I could be of more help.”

OK, let’s take a little bit of time to review our lives. If we want to do this in a more detailed way, we go through our lives in five- or ten-year segments. That, actually, is more productive than looking at the whole of our lives all at once. That’s the way the more extensive version of the meditation is done when we are remembering the kindness of our mothers and what have we done in return: we do it in terms of five- or ten-year periods. If we’re still quite young, five-year periods are significant and probably long enough. If we’re much older, ten-year periods probably make more sense. 

So let’s do that. Try to see the trends. If there are certain periods where, as I said, we were very negative or disturbed, see what we might have done since then to counteract or counterbalance that. 

Again, the whole point of this is to see what have we done so far that’s going to affect our future lives. What this is leading to is to doing something now to stop any negative trends by applying the teachings on refuge and karma to ensure that we don’t go to worse states of rebirth in the future. We at least want to go to better samsaric states of rebirth, if not go on to gain liberation and enlightenment.

[meditation]

Applying the Four Opponent Forces at the End of the Meditation

At the end of that meditation, what is always very helpful to do, especially if we’ve engaged in a great deal of destructive behavior, had a lot of negative thoughts, and gone through a lot of negative periods, is to apply the opponent forces: 

1. We admit having committed the negative action to ourselves – we don’t have to confess it to someone else – and feel regret. 
2. If we haven’t been doing very much to avoid that action in the future, we make a very firm decision to try to stop committing it.
3. We reaffirm the direction we’re going in life – Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha – and our bodhichitta motivation. 
4. We resolve to try to counteract these negative things by engaging in more positive actions and more positive states of mind in the future. On the other hand, if we’ve done a lot of positive things, we rejoice in that, without feeling any arrogance and thinking how wonderful we are for what we’ve done, but, instead, strengthening our wish to do even more.

[meditation]

Maintaining Enthusiasm for the Dharma in the Long Term

Participant: I started the meditation with my Dharma life, which began almost ten years ago. In the beginning, I had huge enthusiasm. I bought all the latest Dharma books, went to all kinds of teachings, and lived in a Buddhist community. Over the years, my life has become more settled, especially since I started working. I still practice Dharma but at a lower level of intensity. And though both the earlier and later periods have positive and negatives aspects, I think that the earlier period in which I was really enthusiastic was more effective and that I developed more.

Dr. Berzin: I must say, this is a very common experience. I have had that experience as well. Most people talk about it in terms of “falling in love” with the Dharma. In the beginning, we become very enthusiastic. We get very inspired, and we practice in a very strong way. Perhaps, it is not a very wise way, but it’s a very strong and idealistic way. We romanticize the Dharma: “How beautiful it is! How wonderful the lamas are!” etc. Some people get burned out from that and find that, in the end, they haven’t really accomplished very much. Or they start to see faults in their teachers they had overlooked at the beginning and, so, get very disillusioned and drop everything. It’s quite common that, after having gone to that extreme of idealization of the Dharma, we go down to a very low state. Those who survive that report coming to more of a middle path, having developed a more mature attitude toward the Dharma. 

Also, I think that in the beginning, most people are much stricter in their practice, stricter in terms of following vows, for example. They’re less flexible, primarily because they’re not yet very comfortable in their Dharma practice and don’t feel very secure in it. So, to overcome that insecurity, they’re very strict. But then, as time passes, they become more secure, more stable, and are able to relax. So, does that phase of being more relaxed mean that we adhere more loosely to the teachings and are less resolute about keeping the vows and, therefore, that the direction in which we’re going is a negative rather than a positive one? 

I would say that, for most people, that very strong, idealistic, almost fanatical level of practice is very difficult to sustain and not terribly healthy in a number of ways. In the beginning, it might look as though we are overcoming more because we’re starting to change our habits. But I think that if we’ve been working for a long time in the Dharma, we reach a plateau and then stay at that plateau for a very long time. It’s very difficult to go beyond that plateau, so it seems as though we’re going nowhere. I’ve found that one of the major reasons that most people stay at that plateau is that they don’t really know how to integrate the Dharma into their everyday lives. The Dharma, then, becomes more like a side activity. They meditate or go to a Buddhist center or to pujas, but those activities are quite separate from the rest of their lives. That was actually the main motive for writing the sensitivity book, Developing Balanced Sensitivity. It was to help people integrate Dharma into their ordinary lives. When it is integrated into our ordinary lives, it becomes just an ordinary part of ourselves. I think that, at that point, although things might not be as dramatic, the Dharma becomes more deeply integrated. 

Of course, things will always vary according to the individual, but I don’t think your experience is unusual at all, and I don’t think it’s something to worry about. It’s very hard to keep up a very strong enthusiasm. It’s sort of like a love relationship with another person. When we first fall in love, everything is so exciting, and the energy is very, very high. But that’s hard to sustain. Also, there’s an idealization of the other person. We don’t really see their faults. Once we get to know the person better, we find out their faults. That can cause us to have negative feelings about the relationship. But if the relationship lasts, then it becomes much more mature. We accept the less attractive sides and appreciate the more attractive sides, and it becomes a more human type of thing. I think the Dharma practice also has to become a more human type of thing. That’s my personal opinion and personal experience. 

Whether that’s the case with these very high lamas, I don’t know. They seem to have very strong energy that is sustained throughout. But for us who come from a non-Buddhist background, going through these dramatic shifts seems to be more the case. If the Dharma is part of our culture, we don’t go through that phase of falling in love with it. When it’s not part of our culture, we tend to idealize it, particularly when we are young. Young people tend to idealize things anyway just by virtue of being the age they are. The early- and mid-twenties is the period of time when we idealize and romanticize the most, actually. In the teenage years, we have a more immature form of that. In the mid-twenties, we think we have a very mature outlook already, but that’s when we are the most idealistic – although also more able to accomplish something than when we were teenagers. But that idealistic period passes as we gain more experience in life. 

There are three factors involved in that strengthen or weaken the potentials that are built up and determine how strong the result will be:

• The intention
• The way in which the action is carried out
• The attitude we have toward it in retrospect 

So, this is another way of examining our actions – to look at our negative and positive actions in terms of these three factors. 

The examples that I wrote up for meditating on these three factors are to help us examine our attitudes when engaging in a positive action such as meditating, attending a puja or a teaching, and so on:

• We don’t want to get up early to meditate, but we force ourselves, out of guilt, to get up  to do our meditation. Or we’re tired at night and don’t really feel like going to the teaching or the ritual, but we force ourselves to go.
• During the event, we participate only half-heartedly and are full of mental wandering. We are constantly checking our watches, hoping that it will be finished soon. 
• At the end, we feel, “Thank goodness it’s over. What a waste of time!” and we can’t wait to get back to our warm, comfortable beds.

The positive potential built up in such a manner is extremely weak.

Then we look at a destructive action, like killing a mosquito that has come into the room: 

• We track it down with determination and glee, as if it were the world’s worst villain, with the single-minded thought that “I’m going to get that pest!” We never get tired hunting for it, and we have no problems with mental wandering. 
• Then, with great vengeance, we smack it between our hands as hard as we can to make sure that we squash every ounce of life from it. 
• In the end, we feel proud of ourselves and rejoice: “I got that bastard!” 

This is a perfect and complete negative action, and the negative potentials built up from it will be strong. Having built up such strong negative potentials, are there any doubts as to where we will be reborn? And although the descriptions here might be amusing, the result is unfortunately true. This is why, as they explain, the number of animals and insects far exceeds the number of humans, the number of ghosts far exceeds the number of animals and insects, and the number of trapped beings in the joyless realm, or the hells, far exceeds the number of ghosts.

I think that this is very helpful to look at. When we start to do something positive, how strong is our intention? When we are doing it, are we fully engaged or are we just impatient for it to be over with as soon as possible so we can get on to better things? And what is our attitude at the end? Is it, “Thank goodness it’s finished”? And then look at our attitudes when we’re doing something negative – or even something not negative, like going to a rock concert: we’re all excited beforehand, we really get into it while we’re doing it, and in the end, we rejoice in how much fun we had. Are those the same kinds of attitudes that we have when going to a Dharma teaching or doing a meditation? Hardly.

[meditation]

Now we start with the meditations on the three lower realms. There’s a long list of the various hells, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go through each of them one by one. Instead, we can think about the hells as a whole. 

I don’t particularly like translating these realms and the beings in them as “hells” and “hell beings” simply because those are terms that can elicit strong emotional responses in Western people. Serkong Rinpoche used to explain that the Tibetan term (dmyal-ba) has the connotation of “difficult to get out of.” For that reason, I like to refer to the beings in those realms as “trapped beings.” We’re trapped in the sense that these realms are very difficult to get out of and it takes a very, very long time. The connotation of the Sanskrit word (naraka) for the hells is a place where there’s no joy – so, a joyless realm. I therefore like to refer to the beings in these realms as “trapped beings in the joyless realms.” I think that’s a more meaningful translation than “hell beings,”  “hell creatures,” or “hells.” 

There’s a quotation from Gungtangpa, a great Tibetan master. He said, “During the short nap of your impermanent lifetime, you may be disturbed by dreams of meaningless pleasure and pain. If when you awake, you were suddenly to find yourself in a pit of thorns in a hellish state, what could you do then?”  It would be like going to sleep, having disturbing dreams of one kind or another, and then waking to find ourselves in an actual nightmare type of situation. 

What we experience in sleep is very much affected by the states of mind we’ve been in during the day. If our states of mind have been very negative, or we’ve done or experienced many destructive things, we tend to experience nightmares. Then, when we wake up from the nightmare, we often have a bit of residual uneasiness and fright. This is similar here when we think in terms of future lives. If we’ve lived our life lives being in very negative, destructive states of mind, the bardo period will be filled with nightmares. And, then, just as it is when we wake up from a nightmare, we will not only continue to feel residual uneasiness and fright, we also may very well find ourselves in a horrible rebirth situation. All of this is brought on by our negative attitudes and actions committed because of our lack of awareness. 

As Shantideva wrote in chapter 5 of Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior (Bodhisattvaacharyavatara):

(6) The Speaker of the Perfect (the Buddha) himself has shown that, in this way, all fears, as well as immeasurable sufferings, come from the mind.

(7) Who intentionally created all the weapons for the beings in the joyless realms? Who created the burning iron ground? Where did all the siren-maids come from?

(8) The Sage has said that all such things as that are (what come from) a mind having negative karmic force. Therefore, in the threefold world, there’s nothing to fear except the mind.

So, it’s our minds and attitudes that affect our behavior, all of which affects what we will experience in the future.

Not Taking the Hell Realms Seriously and Being Averse to Looking at Suffering

Most of us rebel against having to listen to descriptions of these hellish states of existence. We don’t take them seriously. I think that attitude is perhaps made stronger by our seeing violent movies all the time. It’s unbelievable how many movies are filled with shootings, murder, and violence. We tend to become immune to the violence and to not take it so seriously anymore. Even the actual scenes of war, terrorism, and things like that we might see in the news on TV seem very distant to us. But if, all of a sudden, we were to find ourselves there in those scenes, we would experience them very, very differently. This is what the meditations on the joyless realms, or hells, are all about – learning to take them seriously.

Often, we have very closed-minded attitudes toward intense suffering, not only toward our own suffering but also toward that of others’ suffering. The repulsion or reticence that we feel is similar to the type of repulsion or reticence we feel when hearing about – never mind having close physical contact with – people who are involved in gory accidents or who have been victims of battle, people who have leprosy or are deformed, people who are lunatics or senile invalids. Most of us feel very, very uncomfortable and don’t want to hear about them. We certainly don’t want to have close physical contact with them.

A closed-hearted and anxiously hostile response toward a being who is suffering intensely indicates not only a defensive, self-cherishing attitude but also a gross lack of sympathy and feeling for others. This lack of sympathy not only prevents us from helping others but also prevents us from developing the motivation to avoid the causes in our own behavior to have the same problems and suffering ourselves in the future.

The Buddha didn’t teach about the hell realms out of a sadistic desire to cause us to be fearful and depressed, but out of great compassion and sympathy. His only wish was to help save others from going there. These joyless realms actually do exist. We have to try to understand that. The Buddha had no reason to lie about them. His teaching us about these realms is like a mother telling her child about the dangers of playing with matches or swimming in a deep river. She doesn’t do so out of some kind of morbid wish to frighten the child, but out of intense, loving concern, wanting the child not to get burned or to drown. It’s like a doctor who shows us a picture of someone with a venereal disease. This is not simply to scare us. He’s being very kind by trying to motivate us to take measures to prevent this type of problem.

So, again, what we need to do – and will continue to do next time – is to think about why we have this reticence and repulsion when it comes to thinking about suffering or seeing suffering. Even horror movies can be hard to watch, though some people just laugh at them. They can give us nightmares and stuff like that. What about people who have been in battle and seen their friends’ heads blown off and so on and who are then haunted by nightmares long afterwards? So, we have to think about whether contemplating the suffering of others, let alone our own, is going to call forth these types of responses or whether it will, instead, motivate us to develop more compassion and sympathy and to take the preventive measures that can help us to avoid the causes that lead to those kinds of states. Of course, we also need to deal with the issue of whether or not these joyless realms actually exist and to think about how we relate to that. That’s not an easy one.