The Best Qualities of a Precious Human Rebirth

To gain this level of insight, the points that you meditate on to try to build these good habits of mind, are, first, thinking of the precious human life that you have with all its respites and rich opportunities. Next, meditating on death and that the present situation will not remain static, that all of this is impermanent. The third thing is, to take a safe and sound direction in your life by taking refuge. Fourth is to think of the laws of karma, of behavior and their results.

When you meditate on these and try to build them up as a good habit of mind, the way that you do this is first with a discerning type of mediation, sometimes called analytical meditation, and then a stabilizing type of meditation with which you fix on a point, or fixating meditation. In the first of these, the analytical or discerning type of meditation, you think of all these points, analyze, investigate and try to discern things in that light. Then, when you have come to a firm decision that this is the way that things are, you fix your mind on that, and that is called a fixating meditation or stabilizing meditation. You alternate between these two, trying to discern a certain fact in an analytic manner, and then fixating upon the certainty that this fact is true.

Now I’ll ask you some questions. First of all, how do you start meditating, what’s the starting point? What’s the starting point that allows you to get into meditation?

To think how you are meditating for the sake of benefiting all sentient beings.

Dr. Berzin: That’s true in terms of the motivation, but Rinpoche asks again, what is the actual starting point for getting into it? I mean it’s true you need the motivation, but what’s the starting point?

Focusing on the breath to quiet down the mind.

Dr. Berzin: Rinpoche asks is there anything other than that?

Awareness of the dissatisfactoriness of cyclic existence that would motivate you to go beyond it?

Serkong Rinpoche: For all of you, that again falls in the category of the motivation for meditating and all three answers that have been given are more general answers in terms of the procedures for meditating. The question is, what is the gateway that distinguishes between a Dharma practitioner and one who is not actually practicing the Dharma, or between a Buddhist and a non-Buddhist. So the question is more in terms of what is the demarcation point that defines meditation?

[pause]

Dr. Berzin: If you were meditating on voidness what actually... Probably the word gateway or door is not translating it correctly. I don’t actually get the point either of what exactly is being asked. So it’s not communicating very well.

Do you mean the foundation for meditation?

Dr. Berzin: It was more, “What’s the gateway with which you start meditating,” that was more the question that was being asked. Rinpoche was explaining that when you are starting to learn to write, for instance, what is the starting point, what is the first thing that you do? That’s more the question that was being asked. What’s the first thing that you do to start out? When you start to write, the first thing you do is learn the alphabet. Likewise, when you start to meditate the first thing that you do is examine what your motivation is for doing the meditation. This is more general than the specific answers that you were giving. You examine what the motivation is and then, if your motivation is not good, you do what you said, which is focusing on the breathing. In order to settle the mind if you are in a very hostile frame of mind or whatever when you sit down, you do the breathing techniques.

So, after you’ve swept the room, cleaned the meditation place and sat in the proper posture, the starting point for any meditation is to examine what is your motivation for sitting down there. That first thing that you do is this examination and it doesn’t mean you start off sitting, closing your eyes tightly and just proceed from there. The point is first to look at what your motivation is for doing this. Rinpoche will tell you a nice story about establishing the motivation for meditation.

Serkong Rinpoche: There was in Tibet a notorious bandit by the name of Ben Gungyal (’Ban Gung-rgyal, ’Phen rKun-rgal). He had a forty acres farm and tried to eke out a living from this, but that wasn’t sufficient and so he was also a bandit and went out plundering as well as fishing and hunting. Once he was up on a mountain pass when a traveler came by on horseback. The traveler didn’t recognize Ben Gungyal and asked him, “Have you heard or seen this notorious bandit Ben Gungyal around here?” And so he roared back to him, “I’m Ben Gungyal,” and the traveler was so scared out that he fell off his horse and down the mountain. Ben Gungyal was quite disturbed seeing someone fall off a mountain simply at the sound of his name and he decided that this was really wrong, his being a bandit and all the things that he had done. He admitted his wrongdoings honestly to himself, regretting his actions, and he made up his mind to try to mend his ways, take up Dharma practice and live an honest life from then on.

To that end, he kept a particularly close watch on all the destructive and constructive actions and thoughts that he had in the course of a day, keeping an account of them. Every day he kept a tally. For every destructive thing that he did or thought, he would put down a black mark, and for each positive and constructive one, he would write down a white mark. At the beginning, he had mostly black marks and hardly any white marks at all. As he meditated and built up beneficial habits, the black marks at the end of each day eventually became less and less, and he got more and more white marks. Later on he realized that he had many, many white marks each day. He then took on the spiritual name, the religious name of “The Victor over Ethical Self-Discipline.”

As he kept on training in this way, if at the end of the day he saw that he had more black marks, he would take his right hand with the left and shake it very severely, and would say, “Ben Gungyal, you’re really rotten! You are trying to practice Dharma but all you are doing is really messing up,” and he would give himself a severe scolding. If he had more white marks, then he would take his left hand in the right and shake it, and he would congratulate himself saying, “Yes, you’re really doing a fine job, you are really being this one who is victorious over ethical self-discipline,” and he would praise himself, encourage himself.

Later he became very famous as the good mentor or geshe Ben Gungyal, the one who was victorious over ethical discipline, and many people came to visit and see him, and many patrons came to support him. One day, a lady who was one of his patrons invited him down to her house for a meal. While he was there, she stepped outside, and from all the instincts that he had from having been a thief, he saw this large basket where she kept tea and stuck his hand in the basket to steal some tea leaves. But then, realizing what he was doing, he grabbed his hand with the other hand and shouted out to the woman, “Hey mother, come quickly, I’ve caught a thief!”

Another time, someone who was also helping him out as a patron sent a message saying he was going to come up to his little hut and visit him. So Ben Gungyal got up very, very early that morning and he worked very hard to clean his hut immaculately, setting up beautiful offerings, making butter lamps and lighting very fragrant incense. Then he sat down to do some meditation and the first thing he did was examine what his motivation was for what he had done that morning. He realized that he had done all these preparations because his patron was coming and he wanted to impress this patron and gain more from him. He realized that this was a pretty terrible motivation. So he got up and went over to the fireplace where, in Tibet, they’d have these little containers where all the ashes were kept, and he picked them up and went around the hut pouring ashes over everything, and made a complete mess of his house.

This illustrates the point that you start off any meditation by examining your motivation for what you are doing. When you examine, if you find that you have a great deal of hostility, anger, desire or whatever, if you find that you have a lot of mental disturbance, then it is at that point that you do the breathing exercises. For instance, you breathe out slowly and then breathe back in slowly and count that as one, then repeat twenty-one times, and in the process calm your mind down. You’ll find that whatever disturbing thing has been bothering you, it will momentarily subside.

Later, Ben Gungyal, who now had a great deal of patrons and was receiving help from everybody, remarked, “Before, when I was a bandit, I had forty acres of land, and I thieved at night, fished and hunted, and my mouth was still unable to find enough food to eat. Now that I have become a spiritual practitioner, even if I don’t need things, people come and give them to me. Whereas before my mouth couldn’t find enough food to eat, now the food cannot find enough of a mouth here to get all inside me.”

After you have examined your motivation, if it’s a poor motivation and you are in a bad state of mind, you settle down by doing breathing exercises. After that, you get down to the actual main body of the session, which would be, for instance, building up beneficial habits of mind thinking of the precious human rebirth that you have, and so forth, whatever topic you might be addressing for that session. If when you examine your motivation, you find that it’s alright, then there’s no need to do the breathing techniques first, you can go straight on to the actual subject matter.

The meditation posture is referred to as either the seven or eight-point posture of Vairochana. The eighth part, which can be included or not, refers to the breathing. There’s a simile for understanding how counting the breaths can fool your disturbing attitudes into momentarily going away. The simile is, suppose this room was completely filled with people coming to the discourse. If an extra person wanted to come in tomorrow, there would be no room for this person to get in and get a seat. If he just came in and said to someone directly, “Hey, give me your seat, I want to sit down,” that wouldn’t do and he wouldn’t be able to get a seat. But if he came in, and made up a story, saying to someone, “Hey, there’s something really interesting outside. Why don’t you get up and go have a look?” – and that person got up and went outside, then he could sit down in that person’s seat. So he would have connived his way into getting a place to sit. It is like that that the breathing fools your disturbing attitudes into going away for the time being.

Dr. Berzin: I asked Rinpoche the question of past and future lives that you brought up last night. The question was, if you are still working through the issue of whether or not there are past and future lives while you are doing various practices, would that still be considered Dharma in a formal sense? Rinpoche said that if you define Dharma as preventive measures to stop you from falling to a lower rebirth in the future, then, if you don’t think in terms of benefiting your future lives, your actions won’t go in the direction of preventing you from falling to a lower rebirth, because you are not actually thinking in those terms. That doesn’t negate the fact that what you are doing is building up positive potentials. It is beneficial because there are many levels of preventive measures in terms of the general ordinary use of the term as a translation for the word Dharma.

For instance, you go to the doctor and get a shot or something like that. That’s a preventive measure to prevent you from getting sick and that is of benefit in this lifetime and, naturally, at a certain ordinary level it is a preventive measure. Likewise, what you do in this life, whatever particular measures you have to apply at the moment, when they have a result here, that’s also, in this life, a preventive measure. But if you are talking formally about the actual paths of the mind described by the lam-rim, the graded paths of the mind of someone with an initial, intermediate and advanced level of motivation and scope with which they are working, all of that comes before the initial scope. You can only get into the first step given in the description of the paths when you actually think in terms of benefiting future lives.

So that is where, as Westerners, we start from, the step before that. If the actual boundary where the Tibetans start describing the spiritual path lies where you actually work to benefit your future lives, then, in order to actually reach that stage, it is necessary to know about future lives and how to go about establishing their existence for yourself.

Serkong Rinpoche: Now we all know that we have both a body and a mind. Pillars, beams and these things don’t have a mind in the sense of a consciousness that we all can understand. If we were simply a physical body without having different ways of being conscious – or a mind – then, if everything were just physical, we would be no different from a corpse and no different from a pillar or a beam.

What’s your name?

Thubten.

So when you say Thubten as your name, we see your body; we can’t actually see your mind, your ways of being conscious. But when you speak in terms of your mind as mental activity, then there’s your mental activity of yesterday and today and also tomorrow. There is never a moment when the mind, the mental activity, becomes nonexistent, it is a continuum. When you start to think in those terms, you should try to realize that although the body can come to an end and become nonexistent, it is not the same case with the mind.

As for the way in which you actually become convinced of the laws of behavior and its results – that performing a positive and constructive type of action builds up a positive potential and results in happiness as its fruit – as I discussed the other day, it is something that you become convinced of on the basis of scriptural authority. It is very difficult to see that with your eyes, to be able to prove to yourself that cause and effect works like that. You have to accept the word of the Buddha on that matter.

Now, if that is something that you can’t actually see with your eyes and you just have to accept the Buddha’s word, how can you come to accept the word of the Buddha on these matters? What makes the Buddha a correct and valid authority on these things, in terms of happiness resulting from doing positive things and the mental continuum going on into future lives? The way that you can comfortably and validly accept the Buddha’s word on these matters is by thinking about some of the other things that the Buddha spoke about. Namely, the Buddha spoke about voidness or reality, and also spoke about the methods for gaining shamatha, which is a stilled and settled state of mind or mental quiescence. If you look at what the Buddha said on those matters and you actually practice according to what he said, you find that, in fact, it is all true. You can verify for yourself, from your own experience, that what he said about reality was true because you can see it. What he said about gaining a stilled and settled state of mind is true because you attain it. So, on the basis of that, you can accept his word on other matters such as future lives.

You can consider the example of identical twins or triplets. These two or three children may be physically identical, but one of them will be smarter than the other; one of them will be able to learn things very quickly and the other will be duller. The reason for that lies in their past lives. One of them trained their mind very well in past lives and had the instincts to be smarter, whereas the other did not do so and, therefore, was a little bit slower of mind. In any case, even if you can’t prove that the mind does come from past lifetimes and that past lifetimes and future lives exist, even if you can’t prove that, it is also the case that you can’t prove definitely that they don’t exist. However, if you gain this stilled and settled state of mind, shamatha, where you have perfect single-minded concentration, then you will acquire different types of ESP; and when you have these, you will actually be able to see your past lives. You might not be able to see a huge number of them, but at least you will be able to see a few. The same applies in terms of your future lives: you will be able to know where you will be reborn. By following the methods, it actually is possible to see for yourself the existence of past and future lives.

May I ask a question?

Yes.

What kind of detail would you be able to see?

Naturally you are going to have people with different levels of memory of what they did in past lifetimes and this is true for this lifetime as well. Some people can remember every meal they had in this life; others probably have no memory at all of most of the meals that they took years ago, what they actually ate and did on each specific day, let alone remember what they did on each specific day in past lives. It depends on the individual. Some would be able to see with more or less detail. Do you remember each meal that you had eight years ago on each day of that year?

Maybe four and a half.

Do you remember each meal that you had four and a half years ago?

From January to March, but only lunch time.

But you don’t remember what you had the month before that though?

No.

The same then is true of past lives. It is going to be pretty rare for you to remember every excruciating detail of it. Even among regular folk there are ordinary people who also have memories of past lives.

Proving logically the existence of past and future lives is quite difficult. The great logician and master Dharmakirti, in ancient India, also had a tough time proving it to a king through logic. What he did was he found someone who was dying and placed a pearl in this person’s mouth. Afterwards, some months later, a child was born with a pearl in his mouth and in this way he demonstrated, on a very physical level, the existence of rebirth. You should likewise consider His Holiness the Dalai Lama who at present is the fourteenth reincarnation of the line of Dalai Lamas; the Panchen Lama as well, who is more than the tenth in that line; also the line of the Karmapas, the past one was the sixteenth in that line. Although these great lamas have changed bodies in all these incarnations, their mental continuums have continued without a break. It’s not simply like finding an official to replace a retired old official, it’s not like that. When they look for the reincarnation, they are not looking for a replacement, but rather they are looking for the continuity of that mind-stream. After the thirteenth Dalai Lama passed away and they looked for signs to find the fourteenth, very many amazing things happened. There’s a lake that is sacred to Palden Lhamo, and in this lake there appeared images of the house, place and letters indicating the name of the area and so forth where the fourteenth Dalai Lama would take rebirth.

When you think about all these matters, you will start to get more into the idea of past and future lives. When you accept this, then you will find that doing various positive actions in order to benefit future lives will become very important to you. If mind was simply a mechanical or physical device that you could install into machines, for instance, you could make a computer and then install a mind and it would actually be a living being. Then you could make dogs, cats, insects and various beings out of machines and, in fact, you could put consciousness into absolutely everything. The absurd conclusion that follows from this is that if mind was purely physical, then you could put mind into absolutely everything in the world, and everything around you would be alive and consequently would be capable of growth. Either that, or it would absurdly follow that, if you could put life and mind into machines, then as all the machines broke down, life would become extinct. We’d all become like dinosaurs and disappear if it was purely something mechanical, that as the machines break down life is finished. Both possibilities are ridiculous when you think about it.