Review
We have been going through the graded stages of the path, which refer to the different levels of understanding, levels of mind, that we want to develop progressively, one after the other, to serve as a pathway leading to liberation and enlightenment.
The Precious Human Rebirth
We started with appreciating this precious human life, which is really very, very rare. Most of us don’t appreciate it at all and just waste it. But if we think of the worst types of situations in which we’d have no liberty or opportunity to develop ourselves further – whether because of having too much suffering, being too involved in trivial things, or being in places where no teachings are available and where there’s a lot of violence, hunger and so on – we see how horrible that would be and how fortunate it is that we are free of that. Although it might not be impossible for those who are in such situations to further their spiritual growth, it’s so much more difficult. How fortunate we are to have the opportunities to be able to grow, to meditate, to learn, etc. We really have very precious human lives.
We saw how rare the causes of it are – namely, ethical discipline, prayer or intention to achieve such a thing, and practicing the far-reaching attitudes – how difficult it is to find, and how easily it can be lost.
Death and Impermanence
In order to be even more motivated to take advantage of our precious human lives and not waste them, we think about death and impermanence – that death will come for sure and that it can come at any time. There’s nobody who’s never died, so why should we be any different? What’s going to be of help when death actually comes and we look back on our lives? The amount of money we have, the number of friends we have, the number of television programs or movies we’ve seen, etc. – that’s going to be absolutely trivial. The only things that will be of any benefit – and here we’re thinking in terms of future lives – are the various habits and karmic legacies that we’ve built up (not just the legacies we’ve left behind for others, which is of course very important) and that will carry on into our future lives.
That means taking preventive measures – which is what the word “Dharma” means – to prevent worse rebirths, worse situations in which we’d have no opportunities to further ourselves and continue on this path.
Dreading Worse States of Rebirth
We think of what could possibly follow our deaths. All of this, of course, assumes rebirth, which is not such an easy thing to accept. But given that that’s a basic premise here in the training, then according to the way that it’s done in the Tibetan tradition, we think of the suffering and lack of opportunities that we’d have if we were reborn in one of the worst states. So, we think of being in some hellish situation where we would be trapped for a terribly long time, just being tortured and so on. We could also be reborn as a wandering ghost, always clutching to get something to eat or drink and never being able to enjoy anything. We also think of being an animal that can be eaten at any time by some larger animal or exploited by humans. Imagine being a chicken in one of these chicken farms where you can’t even move and you have your beak cut off and stuff like that. And in the end, you just end up as dog food, half of which would be thrown away in the garbage. How awful that would be.
So, then we think, is there a way to avoid that? And what are we motivated by? What we’re motivated by is usually called “fear.” I prefer “dread.” It’s a healthy type of fear. His Holiness the Dalai Lama uses the word “fear,” but he makes a differentiation. He says there’s a healthy and an unhealthy type. An unhealthy type is one that paralyzes us. It makes us feel hopeless and that there’s nothing that we can do, which is not at all helpful. A healthier fear is one that makes us want to avoid something because we don’t want to get hurt. For example, when we take something hot from the oven, we’re careful because we don’t want to get burned. We use a potholder or something to take it out. So, there’s a subtle, healthy fear here of being burned. This is the healthy type of fear that we’re talking about. As I said, I call it “dread,” but it’s not easy to specify what it is because a lot of people think of fear in a negative way.
Safe Direction
So, that dread is the state of mind that we have when we think of these worst states of rebirth. We really want to avoid those, and we’re going to be really careful. But in addition, we see that there is a way to avoid them. There is a direction that we can put in our lives indicated by the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha – the Dharma being a state of mind in which all the confusion and instincts of confusion are gone, all the habits and disturbing emotions are gone, all the mental blocks that prevent us from being able to fully know everything and how to help others – all of that is gone forever, never to return.
The mind that has not only realized its natural, pure state but also realizes its full potentials in terms of understanding reality, understanding how things exist and the extent of what exists, and that has infinite love and compassion equally for all others and the full ability to communicate with them, as well as the full ability to physically appear to and help others in whatever way is necessary – that state is the ultimate source of direction: Dharma. The Buddhas are those who have achieved this in full and the Arya Sangha are those who have achieved this in part, so not the full thing. This is the direction that we want to go in, and we put that safe direction in our lives. That’s called refuge.
Refraining from Destructive Behavior; Developing Our Discriminating Awareness
We saw that the first thing that we need to do to be able to go in that direction is to modify our behavior. Basically, what we’re talking about is self-control – avoiding destructive behavior based on a healthy fear of the consequences. We want to avoid experiencing the results that would follow just naturally in terms of the negative potentials and habits that we build up when we act destructively. So, what we experience is not a punishment or anything like that. There’s nobody punishing us, no judge judging us. It’s almost a mechanical type of process.
But building up the potentials to experience similar negative things happening to us is not the only consequence of our destructive behavior. It also builds up the potentials for us to have strong impulses to repeat that type of behavior.
Mind, mental activity, is the arising of some sort of mental hologram, or appearance, and some sort of cognitive engagement with what appears – so, seeing it, hearing it, feeling an emotion toward it, knowing it, and so on. These two happen simultaneously; they’re two aspects of the same process. What comes up – namely, what appears – can be strongly determined by the karmic impulses that arise due to our previous behavioral patterns. But it’s not inevitable that we act on those impulses, because we also have another mental factor called “discriminating awareness.” So, we can discriminate between what’s beneficial and what’s harmful.
As human beings with precious human rebirths, this is our greatest asset. Discriminating awareness is the most wonderful positive quality that we have compared to animals. We have a sense of what’s beneficial and what’s harmful. And we have it not just on a short-term basis as animals might have but on a long-term basis. So, if we build up strong habits of positive behavior and also generate strong positive intentions and motivations, we can override the compulsive or impulsive aspect of the karmic impulses that come up to repeat the destructive types of behavior that we’ve done in the past or to get into unhealthy situations, situations that would be harmful to us. This is what developing discriminating awareness is all about.
We start developing this discriminating awareness here, with the initial scope, with the teachings on karma, applying that awareness to our behavior. Then, with the intermediate scope, we develop it further by applying it to the disturbing emotions, discriminating which emotions to follow, which not to follow, and which opponents to apply to counter them. That requires concentration, so we also have to discriminate between a wandering state of mind and a concentrated state of mind. With the advanced scope, we develop it even more by applying it to our motivation, discriminating whether we are motivated by selfishness or the wish to help others (though the motivation all along is important), as well as applying it to the understanding of reality, discriminating what is pure projection and absolutely impossible and what is actually the case.
The Four Laws of Karma
We’ve been going through various aspects of the teachings on karma. If you recall, we spoke about the principles of karma. In order to actually live our lives based on an understanding of and respect for the teachings on karma – for example, that certain actions will bring about certain results – we need to become convinced that the teachings are so.
We looked at these principles in a very critical way to see if there was a connection between unhappiness, suffering, etc. and destructive behavior. What actually is going on here? How do the consequences of our behavior increase? How is it that if we have done something, we will definitely experience the results, and that if we haven’t done something, we won’t experience any results? These are some of the basic principles of cause and effect that we looked at.
Later on, we will analyze how cause and effect actually works. That’s not a very easy topic – namely, the voidness of cause and effect. It’s not that the cause is like one ball and the effect is like another ball, that the two are connected by a stick, and that one ball follows the other ball in time. It’s a very subtle thing to understand. But, here, on the initial level of the discussion of karma, we don’t really get into that. Instead, we try to understand in a more general way how cause and effect could work and why it works.
The Four Factors That Make a Pathway of a Karmic Impulse Complete
We started our discussion of destructive behavior, and we saw that there are four factors that need to be present at the time of a physical, verbal, or mental action in order for the pathway of the karmic impulse (las-lam) for that action to be complete. What that means is that for the pathway of a karmic impulse for the action of killing, for example, to be complete, certain things need to be fully there. If they’re not fully there – let’s say the person we try to kill doesn’t die – the karmic pathway for the action of killing is not complete. Either it’s an incomplete karmic pathway for the action of killing, or it’s a complete karmic pathway for a different type of action – injuring somebody, for example. So, for the consequences of a certain karmic action to be full, in full accordance with the kind of results that that specific action would necessarily give rise to when the pathway is complete, certain factors need to be there in full.
These four factors are:
[1] A basis at which the action is directed. In the case of killing, the basis is a person, a being (which could be an animal) that could die as a result of our action.
[2] A motivating mental framework, which includes:
- An unmistaken distinguishing (‘du-shes). We need to distinguish whom it is that we want to kill. If we kill somebody by mistake, the results will be different.
- An intention (’dun-pa). We discussed what intention means. It’s the mental factor of wishing for an intended object and the wish to do some intended action involving that object. We aim to do something specific with or to a specific being.
- A motivating emotion – in the case of destructive actions, it is one of the three poisonous disturbing emotions or attitudes (nyon-mongs): hostility, longing desire, or naiveté.
Again, the state of mind, or motivating mental framework, that we’re describing here is the contemporaneous one, which means that it is the state of mind that we have as we enter into the actual action and with which we sustain it.
Our states of mind change. If we observe our behavior, we might notice that, before we even start to do an action and are just thinking about doing it, a certain motivating emotion, disturbing or otherwise, is there as part of the causal motivation, but that when we actually start doing the action, a different state of mind, a different emotional state is there. After the action has ended, we might again feel differently: we could regret what we’ve done or rejoice in what we’ve done. All of that affects the fullness of the result that we would experience.
[3] An implementation (sbyor-ba) (of a method that causes the action to occur) – we have to actually do something to bring about the murder.
That becomes interesting to analyze: If we give somebody a meal and they choke on it and die, would that action be one of killing or something else? It’s quite different from attacking them with a machete or shooting them with a gun.
[4] Then, a finale (mthar-thug) – the person has to die as a result of our action.
It could take a long time for the person to die. What about the people in Hiroshima who were poisoned by the radiation from the atom bomb? It took a very long time to die for those who weren’t burned up instantly. They developed cancer later in life. What, in that case, is happening with the karma of the person who ordered the bombing, the person who actually dropped the bomb, etc.? For the whole action to be complete, then, a long period of time could pass. Also, we might die before the other person dies.