Meditation – Integrating the Teachings into Our Lives
Today, we are beginning a new course, which is basically a practice group, in which I’d like to devote some of the time actually meditating on the teachings that we find in the lam-rim. I think that most of you have some idea that meditation is the third step of a three-step process, the three steps being:
- Listening – listening to the teachings about some specific point so that we have it correctly in our minds and have no doubts about what we are trying to develop.
- Thinking about it – which means not merely trying to understand that point but also to be convinced that it’s correct, that it refers to reality. We also want to be convinced that, if it’s talking about a state of mind, we would want to develop that state of mind – and that it’s possible for us to develop it. All of these different factors come in, in the thinking process. If we’re not convinced that it’s true, or if we just consider it an anthropologically interesting fact that’s not really relevant to our lives, why would we want to go any further with it? If we don’t want to develop it and don’t believe that we can develop it, then we’ll never try. So, all of that is part of this second step of thinking about the teachings.
- Meditating – which is the process of actually integrating the points we’ve listened to and thought about.
How do we become convinced that a teaching is true? We come to an inferential understanding based on a line of reasoning: that because this and this and that are so, the conclusion is correct.
Discerning Meditation and Stabilizing Meditation
The process of meditation itself involves two steps: discerning meditation (dpyad-sgom) and stabilizing meditation (’jog-sgom).
“Discerning meditation” is usually translated as “analytical meditation,” but what it really refers to is going through a line of reasoning again and again in order to familiarize ourselves with a certain state of mind or understanding. Then, we try to actually discern, or perceive, things with that state of mind. If we are trying to develop compassion, for example, we would go through a line of reasoning – recognizing that everybody has been our mother, remembering the kindness of our mothers, etc. – in order to generate a compassionate state of mind. That is the process of discerning. It’s an active mental process.
Stabilizing meditation is one in which we try to let that understanding or state of mind sink in without actively discerning things.
Also, when we are doing discerning meditation, we are not necessarily using a verbal thinking process. We might have to use a verbal thinking process to build up an understanding, but that’s not absolutely necessary. Some people might be able to build it up using visual imagery or something like that. People’s minds work differently. But the process of actually discerning something once we have built up the understanding is not a verbal process. This is the general procedure.
Creating a Proper Atmosphere for the Meditation Session
Now, before we begin the actual meditation session, we have all the preliminaries – sweeping the meditation room, setting up the offering bowls, and all of this. It is very important to have a proper atmosphere. A proper atmosphere for meditating is one that’s quiet. We don’t necessarily have to have elaborate offerings – certainly not music in the background, which is very distracting. It can be very nice to have candles, incense, flowers, etc., but it’s not absolutely necessary. An offering of a cup of water is quite sufficient – just something.
After we’ve done the preliminaries and before we sit down to meditate, we try to quiet down, focus on the breath, and do prostration. We then reaffirm our motivation for meditating and set our intention to meditate with concentration. It is very important to do this before meditating; otherwise, it’s very easy to just sit there and have our minds wander all over the place, thinking about what we are going to do or have already done during the day. Also, it’s quite easy to become dull and to fall asleep, especially if we meditate at night before going to bed or in early the morning before we’ve woken up sufficiently. So, that intention to meditate with concentration is very important. As we usually say at the beginning of our sessions here, “If my mind wanders, I’m going to bring it back. If I become sleepy, I’m going to try to wake myself up.” It’s important to take that seriously.
There are various breathing exercises that we can do to help us to quiet down. We don’t really need to explain all of these today. The simplest one is just to focus on the breath coming in and going out and to count each round of breath up to, usually, seven or eleven. So, we breathe out and in and count one; out and in, count two. Like that. We can also do it the other way around: breathe in and out, count one; in and out, count two, and so on. There are reasons for doing it one way instead of the other, but we can simply choose what we like and experiment. Also, there are the nine rounds of cleansing the channels. That’s a bit more complicated to do to begin with, so perhaps we can explain it in a later class.
As I said, we’ll be using the various points in the lam-rim, the graded stages of the path, as our topics of meditation, and we’ll go through them in the way in which they’re presented by Tsongkhapa. In his presentation, there is an initial discussion of the reliance on a spiritual teacher – how to rely on the spiritual teacher properly, what the benefits of doing so are, what the faults of not doing so are, and so on. His Holiness the Dalai Lama points out that this is not really the best way for us as lay people to begin. One needs to understand that these lam-rim teachings were originally delivered orally and that they were intended for a monk or nun audience, namely, a monastic audience – people who were already well involved in the teachings. These teachings were given as a preliminary for receiving tantric initiations. In that context, the recipients, the listeners of the teachings, already had teachers, so it was appropriate to emphasize the role of the teacher at the beginning of the initiation.
The teacher is referred to as the “root” of the path, not the beginning of the path, not the seed of the path. The root is what anchors and nourishes a plant; it’s not where the plant begins. So, as His Holiness has said, it’s best to put the discussion of the guru at the end of the lam-rim, rather than at the beginning.
Appreciating Our Precious Human Rebirths
We’ll follow His Holiness’s advice and begin our topics of meditation with the precious human rebirth. This has to do with appreciating the situations that we now have. The whole idea is to understand that we have a certain freedom from the worst states, the “states of no leisure,” as they’re called, in which we would have no opportunities to be able to practice the Dharma teachings. “Freedom” is how the term is usually translated, but that’s not really a proper translation of the term. What the term actually means is a respite, a temporary break or timeout from those terrible situations, which – unless we do something about it – we are likely to fall back into again. I think that’s a much better way of looking at it. To use the words of one of my teachers, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, the human rebirth is only a temporary vacation, a very short vacation, from the lower realms.
So, we look at the eight situations of no leisure to practice the Dharma and also at the ten enriching situations that enable us to practice the Dharma. We go through each of them so as to appreciate the precious human lives that we have now. The whole point of doing it like that is to come to realize that our precious human rebirths are not going to last forever and that, therefore, we need to take advantage of them by actually accomplishing some of the Dharma goals.
The Eight Situations of No Leisure That Prevent Dharma Practice
We start, then, with the eight situations of no leisure, those that would prevent our Dharma practice. Of these, there are four non-human ones and four human ones. Let me just list them.
The non-human situations are:
- Rebirth as a “hell creature” – that’s how it’s usually translated. I prefer a “trapped being in a joyless realm.” That’s more the connotation of both the Sanskrit term (naraka) and the Tibetan term (dmyal-ba) – namely, a being that is in a situation in which there is no joy, no happiness, and where one is trapped. It’s very difficult to get out and takes a very, very long time. That gives more of a flavor of the beings in these realms than “hell creature,” which sounds like it’s a punishment.
- Rebirth as a desperately clutching ghost (Skt. preta). It’s translated in Chinese as a “hungry ghost” (egui), but that’s not the original connotation. The connotation of the Tibetan (yi-dags) is that of a being whose throat and mind are tied up and who desperately clutches, constantly trying to get food, water, or anything.
- Rebirth as a creeping creature, an animal. The connotation of the Tibetan and Sanskrit words is of a being that creeps, bent over, along the floor. So, the image is more of a cockroach rather than of a deer – like Bambi – or a puppy dog.
- Rebirth as a long-lived divine being, or god (Skt. deva). We’re not talking about Almighty God. The beings in the god realms have lives that are filled with trivial pleasures.
The four human situations of no leisure are rebirth:
- As a barbarian in a savage border region
- In a land where the Dharma is unavailable
- With severe learning disabilities
- Instinctively holding a distorted outlook on life, denying what’s true
The Three-Step Structure of the Meditation
The structure we use to meditate on these eight states is similar to the one we use for voidness meditations. In the voidness meditations, we first need to identify what we are refuting, then to refute it, and then to focus on the absence of that impossible way of existing. Here, as well, we first need to identify what this state of no leisure would be like, then to focus on the fact that we don’t have it, that we are free of it, and then to focus on the feeling of relief – being free of it.
In other words, what is important here – especially if we are thinking in terms of beginningless rebirth – is to recognize that we have undoubtedly experienced all of these states of no leisure many, many times before. It’s not as though these are theoretical situations that have never happened: they have. They are part of our experience, part of our mental continuums. So, we recognize that, now, we are free of that.
We can build that recognition and feeling of relief up in a logical way, thinking, “If I were in a situation of no leisure, I would not be able to practice the Dharma. Now I am free, temporarily free, from that situation; therefore, I have the leisure to practice.” But whether we work up to it with a line of reasoning or not, the main part of the meditation is to imagine what it would be like to be in that kind of situation and then to focus on “phew, now I’m free of that!” and to feel that a heavy burden had been lifted off of us.
I’m sure you’ve probably been in a situation in which you’ve had a very severe cold or a terrible sickness, and, then, when it was over, you felt tremendous relief. I’m just trying to think of an example of a situation in which you would have experienced an instantaneous feeling of relief. It could also be having very tight shoes on; your feet are very, very hot and uncomfortable. Then, when you take them off, there’s a feeling of “ahhh!” – fantastic relief. Some sort of feeling like that is what we try to feel – that we have been relieved of these terrible situations.
What I would propose that we do is to go through each of these eight situations. We’ll do the four non-human ones first, one at a time, imagining what it was like to have experienced them – rather than imagining in a purely theoretical way what some creature in some cartoon or something like that might have experienced – and then feeling relief at not experiencing them anymore.
The Four Non-Human Situations of No Leisure
Now, of course, there are many descriptions in various Buddhist texts of the non-human realms and of what it’s like to be a trapped being in a joyless realm, a clutching ghost, an animal, and a god. We can imagine those realms in terms of those descriptions or not. I don’t want to spend a lot of time describing them. The whole point of this class is not for me to talk the whole time but for us to actually do the meditation practice.
- In the joyless realms, obviously, the beings are tortured by heat, pain, freezing cold, and so on.
- The ghosts are starving to death. They’re dying of thirst and hunger and are not able to relieve their situations.
- Creeping creatures are always under the heavy influence of instincts; they have no control over their lives and are not able to understand very much. They are hunted by larger animals, often eaten alive, and used by humans for work. If you’re an insect, people just want to step on you, swat you, etc.
- The divine beings live very trivial lives, just playing around all the time. But when it comes time to die, they get the signs of death and everybody totally ignores them. It’s like being in an old age home where nobody comes to visit you – this sort of thing.
We can also imagine them in terms of situations that might be more familiar to us, such as:
- Being tortured in a concentration camp
- Being in a famine area, not having any food or water
- Being hunted by others and always being attacked as an animal would be
- Being totally ignored by everybody because we’ve gotten old
Let’s go through these, one by one. I won’t necessarily talk you through the meditations. I don’t think that that’s terribly useful. Maybe for some people it is, but you’ve heard me speak enough. So, I will just introduce the topic, and then we can meditate for, say, five minutes on each of these. Then we’ll go on. Maybe after these first four, we can get some feedback whether this is helpful for you or not. Until we find the best format for these sessions, you’ll need to give feedback. OK?
Rebirth in the Joyless Realms
We start by thinking about the fact that we have undoubtedly experienced innumerable rebirths in joyless realms where we have suffered terribly from heat, cold, pain, torture, and all of that. We can imagine what that’s like by thinking of analogous situations, such as being in a concentration camp, being stuck in a burning desert, or being trapped in a freezing place, like the Arctic or Antarctica. So, we try to imagine what that’s like.
Here, we’re not trying to build up the causes to be like that by familiarizing ourselves with that state of mind. That’s not the point. The point is to recognize what we are free of and then to feel that that burden has been taken away. We are relieved that we don’t have that now and that we are in a situation in which we can make best use of our precious human rebirths. This can be done in a Mahayana way, which means to use our precious human rebirths not just to ensure fortunate future rebirths or to gain liberation for ourselves but to use them to help others reach enlightenment. So, we try to do this from within a Mahayana context, realizing that “if I were in these terrible situations, I really wouldn’t be able to help others. What could I do? What I would be able to do would be very, very minimal.” Obviously, if we were great practitioners, we would be able to help others in one way or another, but we’re not there yet. Nonetheless, we can try to do this meditation with this larger scope in mind.
Let’s start with the situation of being a trapped being in a joyless realm.
[meditation]
Before we go on, I’d like to ask you how you did this meditation. What did you do?
Participant: I just imagined different kinds of terrible things happening to me, like being dropped in fire or being compressed, and imagined how I would feel.
Dr. Berzin: Did you focus on that for a long time or not?
Participant: Yes. I focused on different kinds of suffering.
Dr. Berzin: I’ll tell you what I did. I tried to relate being in this kind of situation to experiences that I’ve had. First, I imagined having had root canal work done without painkiller and how, when it stopped and the dentist was finished, having felt a great sense of relief. I didn’t dwell too long on the pain. I think the main emphasis here is focusing on being free of that suffering.
Then I thought about being on the streets of Delhi – it’s forty-five or forty-eight degrees centigrade, and there’s horrible traffic, noise, and dust – and about how there was no way that I could do anything else except be focused on “when will this be finished!” Then I imagined going into an air-conditioned room and feeling the relief.
I’ve also had to be outside in places like in Mongolia or Wisconsin when it was twenty-five degrees below zero and there was tremendous wind. In that situation, also, there was absolutely nothing that I could do except be totally focused on getting out of the cold and wind. Then I imagined walking into a warm room.
So, we alternate, not staying too long with any of these situations. It’s just for ten seconds or so that we imagine being in each of these situations and then getting out and feeling relieved. I think that’s better than spending a long period focusing on experiencing one kind of difficulty and then a long period focusing on feeling free of it. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to stay so focused on one thing. My mind is quite active, so going back and forth like this in shorter periods works better for me. What about you?
Participant: For me, it’s easier not to lose the object of focus if I alternate.
Dr. Berzin: Right. What about any of the others here? How did you do it?
Participant: I didn’t switch back and forth as quickly. I wanted to build up more strength first.
Dr. Berzin: You wanted to build up more strength so you could feel it more. Yes, the speed with which one does it will vary very much with the individual.
Rebirth as a Clutching Ghost
Let’s try it for another five minutes with the next one, the clutching ghosts. We think of situations in which we’re starving or dying of thirst and are not able to get anything to eat or drink. And even if we were to get something good, it would make us sick. So, there’s this beautiful meal there, but if we put it in our mouths, we’ll throw up. I’m thinking of my nephew who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. He’s nauseous all the time and can’t eat anything. Even if his favorite food is put in front of him, and even though he’s hungry, he can’t eat it. So, we imagine having that kind of situation and then feel the relief of not having it.
[meditation]
Was that any better?
Participant: I found it good to focus on a personal situation.
Dr. Berzin: You found it easier to focus on something you’ve experienced. I find that to be very helpful as well.
I was just thinking back to the hell creature type of situations that I have experienced. For instance, I had a chronic itch on the top of my head for about three years. I learned to deal with it, but what a relief not to have it anymore! I was also thinking about how happy I am not to be in my freezing cold concrete room in Dharamsala. In the winter, it was freezing cold, and I had to wear every piece of clothing that I owned. I couldn’t actually work because I had to wear gloves; otherwise, my hands would have been frozen. So, I was thinking about that and really appreciating how wonderful it is not to be living like that anymore. So, I think part of the meditation is not only to have the feeling of being free of those situations but also to realize that our living situations now are without those sufferings and to appreciate how great that is.
Participant: I’ve experienced some situations where I had constant pain and nausea, but, nevertheless, I was able to practice Dharma. So, for me, it was easier to think about the general situations of the hell beings or clutching ghosts and how, if one experienced those kinds of sufferings, one would have no possibility at all to practice.
Dr. Berzin: Well, yes. One could infer from what one has personally experienced what it would be like to be without any Dharma training and how, if the situation were really severe, one wouldn’t really be able to do anything.
I don’t think there’s any one formula for how to do this. I think that by discussing like this, we become acquainted with the different ways in which people approach the topic. We can then try out the different approaches and see how they work. For me, thinking theoretically doesn’t make such an impact.
You wanted to say something?
Participant: For me, it works very well to put the situations of the hell creatures and clutching ghosts in the context of getting what one does not want and not getting what one does wants (which is the case with these ghosts) and then, drawing from my own experience, as you said, to imagine that state of mind being greatly intensified. In that way, I can imagine how one’s mind would be so completely preoccupied with these difficulties and that one would be so frustrated about not to being able to do anything about them. For me, that’s quite helpful.
Participant: I found it more difficult to feel relief when imagining the clutching ghosts. The feeling of relief was much more intense when I imagined the hell beings. I really don’t want that! Clutching is already so much a part of the human situation. There are things that you desire very much, but even if you get them, you’re still not satisfied. You always want more. Because I felt that that clutching was more or less still there, I didn’t feel great relief from it.
Dr. Berzin: So your meditation on the clutching ghosts was more focused on the suffering of change rather than the suffering of suffering.
The suffering of suffering is difficult to relate to if you haven’t experienced that type of suffering yourself – for example, running out of water and not being able to drink and being really, really thirsty, or having only filthy water available, which you know will make you sick if you drink it. Living in India, one experiences things like that.
Participant: And then you get only Coca-Cola.
Dr. Berzin: Right. And then you get amoebic dysentery.
Participant: I was thinking about traveling in Rajasthan. We were so thirsty. We ran out of water, and the only thing we got to drink was this sickly sweet soft drink. Oh, my goodness. That was suffering.
Dr. Berzin: I can relate to that. Or how about the water in the restroom of an Indian train station? Imagine the water that comes out of the faucet in the sink – how filthy it must be – and that that’s the only thing you have to drink.
Well, those of us who have experienced that can relate to that. For those who have not, it’s more difficult. But as I say, we can either relate to things that we have experienced, or we can use our imagination, imagining, for example, being in a famine area or a drought area.
Participant: I was also having difficulty with the suffering of the clutching ghosts until I remembered having been in love when I was younger. I couldn’t get the guy, and I was so upset. Just the very thought of not getting him made me want to die. I had all these strong feelings, and I couldn’t think about anything else. So, there was the relief of “I’m not like that anymore”!
Dr. Berzin: That’s mental pain. If one extrapolates from that experience of mental pain what it would be like to experience the physical pain of hunger and thirst, one can get a little bit of an idea of this kind of meditation.
Rebirth as an Animal
Anyway, let’s go on to the creeping creatures, the animals. With this meditation, we could imagine what it would be like to be a rat living in a sewer, or a little fish in the sea being eaten alive by larger fish, or an insect being eaten by a larger insect. Or being hunted – can you imagine being hunted and having people run after you with guns and this type of thing? We can certainly imagine living in a place where that happens amongst humans. We could also imagine being an animal like a cow that is always outside. Even if it’s raining or freezing cold, it has to just stand there and take it. How fortunate it is that we’re not like that anymore.
[meditation]
There were many examples that came to my mind. For instance, I imagined being in one of these chicken prisons where the chickens are locked up in cramped cages and can’t move. You’re force-fed so that you can be killed and used for dog food. Imagine what that would be like that. Then imagine being freed from that situation. Imagine being a mouse in a laboratory and being injected with some horrible disease so that the scientists can test if some drug is effective or not; then they cut you open to see what’s going on. Then imagine being freed from the laboratory. Or imagine being a tiger or a lion locked up in a tiny cage in a zoo. You just walk back and forth, back and forth because you’ve gone crazy. Then imagine being set free.
Or this thing of being like an insect – I saw a movie the other day about the holocaust. The Jews were considered sub-humans that were just to be gathered together and exterminated. To be freed from that…
There are many examples of an animal rebirth that we can think of that illustrate how fortunate we are to be free of that type of rebirth.
Remember, the freedom, the respite that we have is only temporary. If we’re not careful, if we don’t make use of the opportunities that we have, we could be back in that kind of situation, and how horrible that would be.
Participant: It doesn’t work that well for me to imagine those kinds of suffering. I need to imagine the mental state of an animal – the fear or the state of dullness.
Dr. Berzin: Those are other things that we can think of.
Participant: They’re also helpless, basically, and aren’t able to understand what’s going on. For example, if you’re an animal about to be slaughtered, you know something’s wrong, but you don’t understand what’s going on.
Dr. Berzin: Right. The point is that we can think of more and more situations and realize how fortunate we are to be free of them.
Participant: I have the type of response that “I don’t want to be like that again.”
Dr. Berzin: That’s a very important state of mind to develop. Also, of course, one could put this into a Mahayana context and think how nobody wants to be in those situations and how horrible it is for those who are experiencing them now.
Participant: I find it more helpful not to go into too many examples. It’s more helpful for me just to stay with the mind of “I’m happy that I’m free of it now.” If I lose that thought, I can go back to the example.
Dr. Berzin: This is a very good illustration of the difference between discerning meditation and stabilizing meditation. The discerning meditation can include thinking of more examples. That’s basically what the process of building up the feeling involves. But once you’ve built up that feeling, then you try to stay with it. You discern that “yes, I’m free from that,” and then you let it sink in. What does it actually mean to let it sink in? That’s hard to describe. It’s just a feeling, an understanding that you stay focused on.
Rebirth as a Divine Being
Let’s go on to the last one in this set, which is a long-lived god, or divine being. One of the main sufferings here is that at the end of a very long life spent in a very trivial way and death is approaching, everybody who was so nice to you before now totally ignores you.
The example that I, at least, can relate to best, since I’ve had many relatives who have been in this situation, is to be abandoned in a nursing home. Nobody wants to visit you, and anybody who does visit you just wants to leave as soon as possible. They don’t know how to relate to you or how to speak to you. There you are. You’re thinking back to all the good times that you had with these people, how beautiful you were, how young and healthy you were, and “now look at the way I am.” If you’ve had that type of experience, you can extrapolate from that what it would be like in a god realm – though it would be much, much more intense.
[meditation]
Meditating on All Four Situations Cumulatively
I would just like to bring in the final step in this series, which is to do these meditations in a cumulative way. In other words, we feel that the burden of the state of being tortured as a trapped being in a joyless realm is off our backs, then the burden of the state of the clutching ghosts is off our backs, then that of the animal realms is off our backs, and, finally, the burden of the long-lived-gods is off our backs. As we imagine each one, one after another, we feel more and more relieved. So, at the end, we need to put them all together. OK?
Let me add one more thing: We feel free from experiencing severe heat, severe pain, severe cold, severe hunger, severe thirst, severe fear, severe stupidity; free from being unjustly and intolerably used and locked up; free from being acutely ignored because we’re old and about to die. One after another of these sufferings is removed, and we feel relief. Then we just focus on that feeling of being free of all of this.
Again, as with the voidness meditation, it’s an absence that we’re focusing on. When we’re focusing on that absence, we’re no longer thinking of that which is absent. We understand what’s absent, but we’re focusing only on the feeling of that absence, which, in this instance, is a temporary absence of something that had existed in our experience and could exist again. So, we focus just on the feeling of that absence and on the tremendous joy and relief – which we would also have with the understanding of voidness, but that’s a different type of joy.
Let’s do this again for one moment.
[meditation]
If, when we are meditating, we are no longer able to feel that absence, then we have to go back and recognize again each one of these situations that we’re free of in order to build up that feeling of freedom again. As I said, when we’re discerning it with understanding, we’re not verbally thinking of what we’re free of. But when that understanding of what we’re free of is no longer there, we have to work ourselves back up to that understanding and feeling again, and this may or may not be accomplished through a verbal process.