Lam-rim 52: Twelve Factors That Affect the Happiness or Unhappiness That Ripens

Review

We’ve been going through the various aspects of the graded stages, trying to analyze on a deeper level the various points that are covered in this material. 

Just to recapitulate very briefly, we’ve gone through the precious human rebirth with all its opportunities and freedoms and how that will be lost when we die. We’re certainly going to die, and we don’t know when. After we die, nothing is going to be of help unless we’ve built up some preventive measures to avoid worse rebirths. That means integrating the Dharma methods into our lives. 

We looked at the rebirth states that would follow if we haven’t done that and if our lives have instead been filled with destructive ways of thinking, speaking, and acting, being under the influence of disturbing emotions, like anger, jealousy, greed, attachment, desire, naivety, and arrogance. Surely, what would follow is a worse state of rebirth, because those destructive types of behavior just bring on more and more suffering, more and more difficulty. 

There’s certainly no guarantee that we will be reborn as humans, let alone humans with precious human rebirths with all its opportunities and freedoms. So, we looked at the non-human rebirth states that we could be born into: as a trapped being in one of these so-called hells, these joyless realms, as a clutching ghost, a so-called hungry ghost, and as a creeping creature, an animal. That would be quite awful, especially if we take such rebirths quite seriously. Even having a human rebirth without all the opportunities to study and practice and to progress spiritually – like if we were in a war zone, or in a very primitive place where everybody is really violent toward each other, or in some sort of dictatorship where spiritual things are forbidden, or being seriously handicapped – would be quite awful. We certainly want to avoid that, and we see that there is a way to avoid that in terms of a safe direction, what’s called refuge.

We saw that what will enable us to avoid that is getting rid of the disturbing emotions and the confusion and ignorance that dominate our mental continuums now, which would thus enable us to get rid of any destructive behavior, any sort of syndrome that perpetuates this type of rebirth cycle. In other words, what we’re talking about is attaining a true stopping of all of these things and attaining the states of mind, the true pathway minds, that bring that stopping about and that result from having eliminated all these troublemakers from our mental continuums completely and forever. That is what really will enable us to get out of this syndrome, this so-called samsara, and to avoid suffering. That’s the third and fourth noble truths and the deepest Dharma Gem. Those who have achieved these true stoppings and true pathway minds in full are the Buddhas. Those who have achieved them in part are the Arya Sangha. 

The Real Refuge Is the Dharma

Look at what Buddha himself advised. He said that the real refuge is the Dharma – “After I pass away, let the Dharma be your guide” – not a specific leader, not the community itself. Although the Buddhas, teachers, and community are obviously very, very essential, Buddha emphasized the Dharma, the teachings themselves, as our refuge. Elsewhere, in other texts, the Buddha is emphasized as the main refuge, the very source of direction, because the Buddha is the source of the Dharma teachings. From that point of view, yes, the Buddha is the most important. But in terms of what we have to actually rely on in our daily lives, it’s the Dharma itself, actually taking these preventive measures. We get inspiration from the Buddhas, we gain support from the Arya Sangha, we even gain support from our fellow practitioners, but, in the end, it’s up to us to really do things. 

And inevitably people let us down. We get disappointed in others, and those that we thought were great teachers are sometimes involved in scandals and so on. This is something very important never to get discouraged by. We have to remember what Buddha said: the ultimate refuge is the Dharma itself. “Let my teachings be your guide.” That’s very important to realize; otherwise, we can easily get discouraged when things go poorly with those that we looked up to.

Then we looked at what the first step of going in that direction actually means on a practical level. It is to exercise self-control, to avoid destructive behavior. 

Second step, of course, would be to rid ourselves of the disturbing emotions that bring on our destructive behavior. But before we can work to get rid of those, we need to work on exercising self-control, to refrain from acting in a destructive way. If we can discipline our bodies and our speech, we will have the strength to discipline our minds – and not just in terms of concentration, of staying single-pointedly on an object. That’s part of concentration. But this term that I like to translate as mental stability (dhyana), is, as Shantideva points out, not just concentration; it’s also avoiding all the emotional ups and downs, all the distractions that keep us from focusing on the object. We’re not just talking about mental wandering, which keeps us from being focused, but about desire, anger and these sorts of things that drive mental wandering. So, that requires a great deal of discipline. And it doesn’t mean just blocking all emotion. There are positive emotions and negative emotions. What we want to get rid of are the negative emotions, not the positive ones, like love, patience, kindness, affection, compassion, and generosity.

Then we started our discussion of karma, analyzing all the various aspects involved with our behavior in terms of destructive types of acting, speaking, thinking. We’ve gone through a tremendous amount of detail and discussion of that. 

Before we move on to the intermediate scope, I wanted, as a way of concluding the discussion of karma, to go through a list of factors that can affect the intensity of either the suffering that we will experience as a result of destructive behavior or the happiness that we will experience as a result of constructive behavior. This is a list that I put together from Vasubandhu’s and Asanga’s presentations and the Tibetan commentaries. When we put all the factors together, we get one grand list of things that affect the intensity. This shows that there’s a great deal of variation in the strength of the results that we can experience from having committed a certain action. We saw this in terms of all the factors that are involved in making the pathway of karma complete. We looked at the motivating intention and emotion. We looked at whether the basis is complete, whether the action complete – does it reach its finale – and so on. The factors that we will be discussing here, though, are yet other aspects that affect the intensity of the results that we will experience. I think that this is very important for understanding more fully what is involved with cause and effect.

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