After reaffirming the direction that you want to go in, you reaffirm your bodhichitta motivation. There are two aspects that make up a motivation, what is translated as motivation. Actually the Tibetan word for motivation (kun-slong) is “something that causes you to rise and go toward a goal.” So there’s two parts: One is the goal, the aim; the other is the emotional state that would drive us to achieve that goal. Motivation has these two aspects.
Here the goal is not just going in a safe direction up till liberation, because the goal of safe direction is three, either:
- Liberation, which means becoming an arhat, as a shravaka – a listener to the teachings, when the Buddhas’ teachings are around
- Liberation as a pratyekabuddha – during the dark ages when the Buddhas aren’t around and you just have to rely on your instincts
- Or as a bodhisattva – aiming for enlightenment, not just liberation.
Safe direction is for these three possible goals.
From a Mahayana point of view, we’re aiming for enlightenment; nevertheless, we have to attain liberation in order to attain enlightenment. So don’t think that the shravaka goal is irrelevant. You could aim for the shravaka goal with the Mahayana motivation of love and compassion, etc., but you’re going to have to attain that goal as well. And it may very well take a tremendous amount of time – three zillion eons – of building up positive force in order to reach enlightenment, so we probably are going to have to practice during dark eons when the teachings aren’t available, and we will need to have strong instincts to be able to practice like a pratyekabuddha. So it’s not irrelevant.
I think it’s quite important not to have this arrogant attitude: “Oh, I want to be a bodhisattva. I want to gain enlightenment. And these lower beings, the shravakas and pratyekabuddhas, they are not only not worthy of respect but irrelevant.” They’re not irrelevant, especially the pratyekabuddhas – those are the ones that people usually ignore the most. But if you think about it really, about the amount of time that it will take to reach enlightenment, for sure we’re going to be around during dark eons. Now, you could say, “Well, Buddhas teach in infinite universes and so on. So when it’s a dark eon here, a Buddha will be teaching in some other place, and we could be reborn there,” but nevertheless you never know. You never know where you’re going to be reborn. “Even if the Buddhas aren’t around and the teachings aren’t available, may my instincts be so strong that I’m drawn in this direction anyway.”
People who have lived through the strongest totalitarian anti-religion regimes I think have a little bit of an idea of the relevance of what I just explained.
Now, with bodhichitta the aim is enlightenment. And again a Buddha that we visualize in front of us, inseparable from the spiritual teacher, represents enlightenment, the aim. And the emotion that is driving us toward that is love, compassion, and this exceptional resolve that we take the responsibility not just to help others with the up and down of life but to bring them all the way to liberation and enlightenment. That’s why I always emphasize that when I speak about motivation. It’s not just our usual helping them with being hungry, and so on, but to help them to overcome the basis for the suffering of suffering and the suffering of change (the ordinary type of happiness), namely the all-pervasive suffering (uncontrollably recurring rebirth). So take the full responsibility to help them all the way to overcome that. That’s the exceptional resolve.
We are not aiming, however, to achieve the enlightenment of Buddha Shakyamuni nor enlightenment in general, but it is our own individual enlightenments that we are aiming to achieve. But that enlightenment has not yet happened, but it can happen on the basis of the natural purity of the mind, the voidness of the mind – that it’s possible to attain the true stoppings of suffering and its causes – and the so-called two networks (the two collections) of positive force and deep awareness. If we are convinced that the goal is attainable in terms of the natural purity of the mind and so on, then the various Buddha-nature factors will be causes in relation to that. A cause, after all, can only be a cause in relation to the possibility of there being an effect).
Actually the deeper that you think, aside from the whole emotional side of compassion, love, and so on, the bodhichitta aim requires a tremendous amount of understanding – based on this safe direction of the true stopping and the true pathway leading to it being possible – understanding cause and effect and the voidness of cause and effect in terms of how the various factors on my own mental continuum can act as causes for bringing that about. This becomes a very deep, profound topic, which we unfortunately don’t have time to go into. But when we speak in terms of bodhichitta, the conventional bodhichitta and the deepest bodhichitta, the deepest one is the understanding of voidness. Really that is very important to have in order for the conventional bodhichitta aiming for our individual enlightenments to be firm.
Now, the guru and Buddha in front of us, inseparable from each other, represent that aim of what we are striving for. This is very interesting. You have this comment from Gampopa: “When I realized the inseparability of my own mind and the spiritual teacher and Buddha, then I understood mahamudra.”
After reaffirming our safe direction and bodhichitta aim, then from Serkong Rinpoche’s instructions, we can do one of the following:
- We can imagine that a duplicate of Buddha Shakyamuni dissolves into us.
- We transform into a Shakyamuni Buddha with a HUM in our heart.
- We send out various rays of light, and this purifies and transforms and brings all beings to a state of Buddhahood, and they all transform into Shakyamuni (so we imagine them all in the form of Shakyamuni Buddha).
Then we realize, we understand, that this is just a visualization: they’re not yet enlightened (neither are we, for that matter). So why aren’t they enlightened? Because they don’t have equanimity, to start with. So this leads, in a logical progression, to the meditation on the four immeasurables:
1. Immeasurable equanimity – “How wonderful it would be if they had equanimity. May they have equanimity. I will definitely bring it to them. Inspire me, O Buddhas, to bring that about.
2. Immeasurable love – “May they all be happy and have the causes of happiness.”
3. Immeasurable compassion – “May they all be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.”
4. Immeasurable joy – not just the usual types of sufferings and happiness, but “May they attain the bliss of enlightenment and never be parted from that.”
And then the more usual instructions that you find – and then following from that, the next step:
- The visualized Buddha in front of us gets smaller and smaller and enters between our brows and disappears like melted butter. That’s a less tantric flavor of practice.
- The alternative visualization is that the Buddha raises up, and when we visualize the bountiful field in the next step, the Buddha comes back down and merges with it.
So there are two variants.