We have been looking at this early Indian Mahayana text, Letter to a Friend, that Nagarjuna wrote. In it, he explains the Mahayana path to his friend King Udayibhadra. He starts this, first of all, by explaining having confidence in the teachings and then, the six things to always keep in mind that are the support of the path. Then he explains the essence of the path, which can be divided into teachings about the six far-reaching attitudes. We are now up to the last of these, which is far-reaching discriminating awareness, or the perfection of wisdom.
Here, Nagarjuna first gives a brief account of the essence of the path, which has five features, and then he gives a detailed explanation. The five features that he is referring to are the five powers and five forces that are part of the general path. The verse that we are discussing is Verse 45.
[45] Belief in fact, joyful perseverance, and mindfulness, absorbed concentration, and discriminating awareness are the five supreme Dharma measures. Strive after them. These are known as the forces and the powers, and also what brings you to the peak.
What one has to adopt here as the essence of the path – in other words, what we are actually trying to develop in order to reach liberation or enlightenment – is belief in the truth of something. So, what are we talking about here? We are talking about the truth of the four noble truths. We have to have complete confidence in them, perseverance to put them into practice, always keeping mindful of them with absorbed concentration (so, perfect concentration), and the discriminating awareness to discriminate what the four truths actually are and what they are not – so, discriminating both the conventional level and the deepest level of them.
Review: The Importance of Understanding the Sixteen Aspects of the Four Noble Truths
To look more specifically, what we are looking at here are all five of these aimed at the sixteen characteristics of the four noble truths. Although these five factors are things that specifically refer to something that one develops on the second of the five paths, the path of application, or pathway mind of application (which is when we already have shamatha and vipashyana and are working with them with our conceptual understanding of these sixteen aspects in order to gain the nonconceptual understanding of them), nevertheless, these five are important throughout our entire spiritual progress. We have been looking at what these sixteen aspects are since this is the major focus as we progress through these pathway minds.
Our study of the Dharma, our study of lam-rim (the graded stages of the path) and lojong (the attitude training, or mind training practices) – all of that comes first. It is what will help us to actually achieve the first of the pathway minds. These five paths, these pathway minds, start at a very, very high level, so we have to work ourselves up to that. And that we do with the training in the lam-rim, basically working to train ourselves with the proper motivation.
It’s only when we have unlabored renunciation and unlabored bodhichitta that we can actually enter, can start to have the first of these five Mahayana pathway minds. “Unlabored” means that we don’t have to go through a line of reasoning; we just have it automatically, all the time, as our primary motivation. That, obviously, takes a lot of work. Also, through the lam-rim training, we gain the basic skills of concentration, the six far-reaching attitudes, a certain basic level of discriminating awareness, and so on. All of these are like a preliminary.
And the attitude training, the Mahayana teachings of lojong – this also helps us very much to change. The big focus in lojong is changing negative circumstances into positive ones so that we will not be so blocked in our practice of the path by the various obstacles and difficulties that come up. The practices in the attitude training include tonglen (taking and giving), which, when we are experiencing suffering and problems, is to think, “I’m not the only one,” and to think in terms of everybody having this same type of problem and, therefore, dealing with it on this much larger scale. In order to do that, of course, we need to have a proper understanding of the voidness of the self and not grasp at a tiny, little, individual “me” that is totally isolated and unrelated to everybody else. Anyway, once we have progressed along the stages of lam-rim and so on and are ready to focus on these sixteen – we have all the proper tools – then, we progress through the five pathway minds.
I think that these sixteen aspects are very important to understand and to work on even before we gain all these skills with the lam-rim training. We have been going through what these sixteen are. Also, the fact that we focus on these sixteen all the way up until liberation or enlightenment, focusing on what these sixteen actually are as well as the voidness of them, indicates that they are not so easy to understand. That means that we are not going to be satisfied with the level of understanding that we might gain now. We always need to go deeper and deeper and try to understand them more and more fully.
We have gone through the sixteen; there is no need to repeat them. However, an important point about the sixteen aspects – four aspects for each of the four noble truths: true sufferings, true origins of suffering, true stoppings of suffering, and the true pathway minds that leads to that stopping – is that there are sixteen distorted ways of embracing, or taking, or engaging, with the four noble truths. It’s a difficult word to translate in the Tibetan term for these sixteen, but it means a distorted way of “entering into,” or “approaching,” “getting into,” these four noble truths.
There are four distorted, or incorrect, ways of approaching, or getting into, each of the four noble truths. I think these are very, very important things to consider in our own contemplation and meditation – how we hold these incorrect views – and to see that these are things that we really need to work on. So, let’s go through them.
The Four Distorted Ways of Understanding True Sufferings
Concerning true sufferings, the first distorted way of understanding is:
[1] Holding, or considering, what is unclean to be clean.
This refers to the fact that, although the five tainted aggregates – for example, the body – are filled with unclean substances, this mistaken view entails incorrectly considering them to be clean.
We’ve had lots of teachings concerning this with respect to the body from Shantideva, in which we’ve seen that, if you actually peel off the skin, the body is not at all something attractive. If we look inside the stomach, inside the intestines and all these sorts of things, we seed that it is filled with substances that we wouldn’t really want to get all over our hands or anything like that. So, by nature, the body is something that is not clean. We need to try to overcome this mostly Western phenomenon, I think, which is the worship of the body – “The Body Beautiful.” Obviously, we might find, because of attraction and attachment, various shapes of body beautiful, but what helps with that is to not only to peel the skin off in our minds but also to realize that the body is changing all the time; it is getting older and so on, and there are many times when it doesn’t look very beautiful. So, that’s one aspect.
The Mind Is By Nature Pure. What about the Body?
We can also think in terms of the mind. Do you think that the mind is clean? It’s an interesting question, actually. Or is the mind also unclean? That’s slightly different from the body, isn’t it? The mind by nature is pure, isn’t it? All the stains are fleeting stains in the mind; they don’t really stain the essence of the mind. Now, is that the same with the body? What’s the difference?
Participant: It’s the same.
Dr. Berzin: It’s the same. So, that means that the body is by nature clean and pure and that it just has fleeting stains? If you washed yourself in the Ganges River enough times you would be clean?
Participant: It’s just because of the mind that you see it as not clean. For example, I imagine that when you are enlightened, you don’t see unclean bodies because then you see that there is no such thing as an unclean body; it just depends on the perspective.
Dr. Berzin: So, what you’re saying is that when we become enlightened, we’ll see everything as pure, so we won’t see a body as unclean. Well, please bear in mind that seeing everything as pure refers to seeing everything without an appearance of truly established existence. I don’t know that “dirty,” or “unclean,” refers to “with an appearance of true existence.” Also, another level of a pure appearance is that, rather than our ordinary appearance, there is an appearance as a Buddha figure.
Actually, I think this is a difficult point. What comes to my mind is that when we speak about the mind being by nature pure, we have to speak about the clear light level of the mind. The grosser levels of the mind, although they are fleeting, are infected with conceptual thought, disturbing emotions, and they make appearances of true existence and grasp for true existence, and so on. Similarly, together with the clear light mind, we have the subtlest level of wind. That’s body. That’s pure in the sense that that is not stained with anything. But when that becomes grosser – in other words, when the mind leaves that clear light state – it becomes associated with elements. I think that’s where the dirtiness comes in, where the un-cleanliness of it comes in. So, I think that in order to really understand what it means that all five aggregates are unclean, we’d have to go to the level of tantra.
Participant: That was just my question. This would be a tantric view?
Dr. Berzin: That would be a tantric level.
Participant: So there must be a sutra view…
Dr. Berzin: I think there must be. But how it would actually be explained, I’m not quite sure.
Participant: I remember some years ago I was at some teachings of Kenpo Tsultrim Gyatso. We were constantly debating all this kind of stuff that comes in Nagarjuna’s texts about emptiness and these things. He was also always repeating, “There is nothing impure,” and saying that, actually, this concept of impureness is just a concept; that it’s not really something that you can point to and say, “OK, this is pure, that is impure…”
Dr. Berzin: You have to differentiate between the two truths. Conventionally, something would be clean or not clean. But on the deepest level, nothing is inherently clean or unclean; nothing has cleanliness or lack of cleanliness established from its own side. So, yes, you have to see which level we are speaking about – the conventional level or the deepest level.
Participant: Even from the conventional level, if you look at the clear light mind or at the body that’s associated with it, then the body is also pure on the conventional level.
Dr. Berzin: Well, yes. If you look at it from the point of view of subtlest clear light mind and subtlest wind as the subtlest body, then, from a conventional point of view as well, the body is pure. Yes, correct.
OK, clean and unclean. So, we hold what’s unclean to be clean. When we discuss these sixteen distorted ways of understanding the four noble truths, there is a correlation of correct ways of understanding the sixteen aspects that will counter almost one for one the wrong views here.
Why Does the “Me” Grasp at Its Aggregates as Inherently Clean?
Here, this type of incorrect consideration, according to the explanation, comes from believing that there is a static, monolithic “me,” separate and independent from the aggregates, which makes use of the aggregates and enjoys them. That means that the aggregates are something that this separate, independent “me” makes use of. Now, the word meaning to “make use of” (Skt. sambhoga) is also the same word as to “enjoy.” But how could the “me” enjoy something that isn’t clean? So, we think that it must be clean if we can enjoy it and use it. So, if we understand the third aspect of true sufferings – that the aggregates are void phenomena, void of this impossible “me” that is a static monolith separate from them – that will eliminate this mistake.
So, what do you think of that? Can you make the association?
If we think of a “me”… you know, “Here I am – a ‘me’.” Sure, we think of the “me” as being some pure entity, some little spark of light (or whatever we might think of as a soul) that’s static and part-less and that comes into the body and goes out of the body. Why would we make use of something and enjoy something that is dirty? If we are this type of “me,” wouldn’t we make use of something that is clean? That makes a very interesting point. If we think of some of the other religions like Manichaeism… Manichaeism is one of these strongly dualistic religions. Matter and the body are seen as dirty and bad, so what we want to do is to isolate the soul, the self, from that. There are a lot of religions like that that consider the body as something dirty. Our Western religions consider that as well.
Why do you consider the body as clean and beautiful? This is really what studying this type of point and going deeper and deeper into it leads you to. Why are we so in love with the human body, whether it’s our own body (if we are narcissistic) or somebody else’s body or the body of somebody in a magazine? And why would we want to have a beautiful body? Don’t we want to have a beautiful, clean body? If we’re grasping for a solid “me,” would we want a dirty body? A dirty, ugly body? A smelly, horrible body filled with excrement? Is that what we would want?
It’s an interesting point. Think about it for a minute. Why would you want a nice, clean body? And why do you want a beautiful, clean, lovely lover, and why don’t you want a lover who is ugly, smelly, and dirty? What does that have to do with your concept of “me”? OK, what do you think?
Participant: Maybe we want this to attract or impress others, to get some kind profit from it. You can attract others. Maybe this is the reason.
Dr. Berzin: We want to gain some profit, you say, by attracting others, which we can do if we have a beautiful body. That profit is for what? It’s for a big, solid “me,” isn’t it? So, we think we’ll get some gain from having a clean body, a beautiful body.
Karsten?
Participant: These kinds of things… often I refer to Fromm’s psychological explanation, which is that we always have the urge somehow to verschmelzen. Was heißt das?
Dr. Berzin: Meld or merge.
Participant: Meld, yeah. To meld with other things. It can be like an artist who melds with his art. We always have this urge to meld into it. If you have big festivals and everything, there’s this urge to meld, to lose the ego, actually. I think that when I’m attracted to a woman, it’s this kind of natural urge that is there.
Dr. Berzin: But why to a beautiful one, is the question. Why to a clean one?
Participant: I don’t know. I think, also, maybe it’s just a concept. I think, actually, that the urge is to get enlightened and that, actually, is what we want. But from our Buddhist point of view, we have this kind of Ersatz.
Dr. Berzin: Substitute.
Participant: Yeah, like substitute. Because actually, this urge to become enlightened is because that would be very blissful, very nice. You know?
Dr. Berzin: So, what you’re saying is that you think that, in terms of the psychological teachings of Eric Fromm, we have this urge to meld with something else, whether it is with another person or whether it’s with a work of art or to meld, in a sense, like when you become drunk or intoxicated with a drug or something like that. This, then, is eventually leading to wanting to meld into enlightenment. You are saying that there is a drive to lose the self, a drive toward annihilation of the self. I really wonder if that fits in very well with the Buddhist teaching – that what we want is to affirm and establish a solid “me.” You were saying that if we wanted to meld into something, we would want to meld into something that is clean and nice, not something that is dirty.
Participant: Yeah, something like this.
Dr. Berzin: But why “meld”? I think that this urge, from a Buddhist point of view, is to identify, to enlarge the sense of the solid “me” rather than to lose the sense of a “me.”
Participant: That’s the question: is this urge a manifestation of the ego, or is it transcending it?
Dr. Berzin: Well, there are several possibilities. Melding, or merging, with someone could be expanding the ego, it could be losing your ego, or it could be taking on the other person’s ego. Three possibilities.
Participant: You know, it’s sometimes this, sometimes that. I don’t know.
Marianna?
Holding the Aggregates to Be Clean Refers to Grasping at Them as Being Inherently Clean, Not Physically Clean
Participant: But couldn’t one feel that it’s just very simply that it’s nicer for the others when one doesn’t smell? You know, when one smells nice and looks clean?
Dr. Berzin: Well, yes. But I think you are confusing the level that we are speaking at. What you’re saying is, isn’t it just simply that we would like to be nice-smelling, clean, and so on, out of consideration for others. We are talking here about grasping at the body as being inherently clean. We are not talking about whether or not we wash and brush our teeth.
Participant: We can think very simply how all our problems arise from my concept of “me” – the grasping at it – and feeling, “Oh, if not me, then who else could have the right to have such a clean body? I’m the center of the universe.” Then, we feel as though we have the right…
Dr. Berzin: Right. This is what I think as well, actually. To repeat, we tend to think, “Since I am so important and the center of universe, I have the right. I deserve to have a clean body, an inherently clean body. Why would I, who am so important and so wonderful and the center of the universe, deserve anything less? And since I am bound to having a body, and given that I am so great, the body must also be so great and clean. And if I am going to have a partner, then I would want a pretty-looking person. I don’t deserve an ugly, smelly partner. I deserve a Hollywood movie star.”
Participant: I think it’s perhaps basically a biological urge. That’s how nature functions, actually – that it looks for the strongest or nicest partner because a healthy partner will give rise to nice babies.
Participant: Are you talking about Darwinism?
Dr. Berzin: OK. So, now you bring in Darwinism here, that: isn’t it a biological urge that we would seek out a superior partner, a strong one, healthy one, good-looking one, in order to produce stronger babies? Well, biology is part of the whole samsaric trip, isn’t it? That just makes this whole syndrome that we are talking about even stronger because biology supports it. From a Buddhist point of view, you wouldn’t say biology is causing this urge: you would say biology supports it; it’s parallel to the whole process. Because actually, what we want to do in gaining liberation is to overcome biology, to gain liberation from biology. Which is a funny idea, isn’t it?
Participant: We can’t escape.
Dr. Berzin: Well, that is one of the wrong views – that we can’t escape this, that we can’t escape biology, that there is no liberation.
Participant: But Buddhas also breathe air and need sunshine.
Dr. Berzin: Buddhas have bodies of light.
Participant: But they still eat. I mean, the historic Buddha ate.
Dr. Berzin: OK, so Buddhas eat. A Buddha associates with elements in order for others to be able to see and relate to him or her. That gets into a whole other level of the question: is the body of a Buddha clean when it’s associated with elements? I don’t really want to go into that because I don’t know a good answer to it. So, let’s not go there.
Not Understanding That the Aggregates Are Devoid of a Static, Monolithic “Me” Causes Us to Grasp at Them as Clean
The point of making this correlation is that if we don’t understand this third aspect of true suffering – that the aggregates are devoid of a static, monolithic, separate “me” – it causes us to grasp at the aggregates, primarily the body, as being clean. I think what you are saying, Katia, which seems to accord with my own feeling of why that is so, is because we think, “Ah, I deserve that, of course. How could I enjoy, how could I make use of a dirty body? I am such a wonderful thing. How would I fit in with a dirty body? It must be clean.”
If we don’t think in terms of a solid “me,” what difference does it make whether the body is clean or not clean? If we understand that there is no solid “me,” does it matter whether the body is clean or unclean, whether it is filled with excrement or not? Does it?
Participant: Still, there is the experience of a clean smell.
Dr. Berzin: Well, there is an experience of a smell. It’s just a smell. And if it is offensive to others, then you use some sort of deodorant or clean yourself after you go to the toilet or whatever. There’s no big deal about it.
Participant: It depends on the bystander.
Dr. Berzin: Not really. We have to understand how the understanding of the absence of this gross, impossible self would help us to overcome this wrong concept that the body is inherently clean. I think that with this understanding, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be an issue.
Participant: One can see these kinds of saints. Like there was a Rinpoche who ran around like a beggar. He seemed not to care very much about his body making a clean impression or not.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, we can look at Dza Peltrul Rinpoche and other great lamas who are sort of in that category of the “mad yogis” who don’t really care what type of impression they give to others. Well, then we get into the whole issue of whether or not it is compassionate to wash and to present yourself cleanly. That’s another story. But not caring about whether the body is clean or not – I think that you can have that on two levels. You can also have completely schizophrenic, crazy people who just smear themselves with feces and like that. So, that’s not the same thing as what we’re talking about. You can also have people who are totally dissociated from their bodies, who don’t take care of themselves.
I think that, here, we have to understand a basic, basic principle which is that voidness and dependent arising mean the same thing. Just because there is no solid “me” that owns and enjoys this body, it doesn’t mean that you don’t take care of it and clean it. Sure, you take care of it and clean it, as Mariana would say, out of compassion, to be friendly to others.
Participant: Out of dignity also.
Dr. Berzin: Out of dignity. That gets into the whole ethical question of self-dignity. You just have to be careful that it’s not an ego trip.
OK. So, this is the first incorrect view. I think you get the idea that one could really explore and go deeper and deeper with these types of incorrect views.
What’s the second one?
[2] Holding what is suffering to be happiness.
Although the five tainted aggregates are in the nature of the all-pervasive suffering, this mistaken view entails incorrectly considering them to be in the nature of happiness.
Remember, what is the nature of our tainted aggregates? The nature is that they are all-pervasive suffering. They act as a basis for the suffering of suffering and the suffering of change. It all constantly goes up and down and is self-perpetuating.
When we talk about holding what’s suffering to be happiness as an incorrect view, we are certainly not talking about considering pain to be pleasure. So, what does this really mean? How do we hold this view? I think this has to do with being attached to having a body, a human body, and thinking, “If I could live forever, or if, in every life, I could come back and be with my friends and loved ones – this would really be happiness,” or, “The longer I live, the more I will continue to be happy.”
So, by holding this wrong view, we consider this state of the aggregates that perpetuate the ups and downs of samsara as being happiness, whereas, in fact, this is not happiness: it’s suffering; it’s what we want to renounce. I think that’s what this wrong view is talking about. The correct view that overcomes that is the second aspect of true sufferings, which is that the aggregates are miserable phenomena. Think about that for a moment. How do we consider life? Don’t we consider it as happiness? Actually, it’s our samsaric life that we are talking about – having more adventures, more entertainment, more friends, more, more, more. Any questions or comments?
Participant: I think that this leads to the understanding of the voidness of the “me” – that we consider this “me” to be the biggest treasure that we have. We think the self-existent “me” is our biggest treasure, but that’s actually our biggest suffering.
Dr. Berzin: What she is saying is that thinking like this leads us to realize the importance of understanding the voidness of the “me” that is the cause of our suffering. We grasp at a solid “me” that makes us think that this life and continuing to have these tainted aggregates is happiness. Well, yeah. That’s going into the cause. But, here, specifically what this second distorted view is saying is that we need to understand this aspect of true sufferings – namely, that they are miserable phenomena. This refers to the fact that our aggregates are subject to the all-pervasive suffering. And if we really understand all-pervasive suffering, then we won’t consider the aggregates to be happiness. Well, that’s a bit of jargon sentence, but if we think about it, what does that mean?
If we understand that going on living, on and on and on, is just going to perpetuate the whole samsaric situation the way it is, then we would realize that, “Every moment of my existence is just continuing my samsara. That’s all it’s doing. So, how could I consider it happiness? If it were happiness, then that would be the goal; that’s what I would want. Is that really what I want – just to continue forever with the ups and downs of samsara?” So, all of this is leading toward renunciation.
Participant: In a way, the motor of all this striving is always the idea to gain the ultimate happiness. So, even when one wants to become enlightened, one does that with the idea, “Then I’ll be ultimately happy.”
Dr. Berzin: Yes, this is true. This wrong view is based on thinking that samsara is ultimate happiness. Within samsara, we can even grasp at enlightenment as being ultimate happiness, and therefore, “me,” a solid “me,” wants to have that ultimate happiness.
Participant: Or one wants to attain nirvana because one thinks this is ultimate happiness.
Dr. Berzin: Right. We want to attain nirvana because we think “This is ultimate happiness.”
Participant: But what’s wrong with that?
Dr. Berzin: What’s wrong with that? It is based on grasping at ultimate happiness. But nirvana is a state of happiness. That’s one of our sixteen aspects. It’s a state of peace, actually. One could, of course, grasp at a state of peace. You could grasp at “samsara is so horrible,” and make that into a solid, horrible thing. You grasp at nirvana as being such a wonderful thing. But if we are grasping at samsara and nirvana as being solidly existent or truly existent, we are also, at the same time, grasping at the “me” to be solidly existent. So, there is no way that we could possibly get out of that truly existent samsara and get a truly existent nirvana with a truly existent “me.” It’s not going to work.
Participant: Maybe, for the beginning, it helps.
Dr. Berzin: For the beginning, maybe it helps. Well, this is exactly true. That’s why we start with the Hinayana schools that only talk about the voidness of the self and not the voidness of all phenomena. When we start with that, we don’t really think in terms of the voidness of existence established from its own side and all of that. We just think of the voidness of a self that is static and monolithic and all of that, and we think that’s enough. So, we are still grasping at a truly existent “me,” and we are certainly grasping at a truly existent samsara to get out of and a truly existent nirvana to attain. So, yeah, that’s the way that one starts. But, as we have seen, we need to progress through the various tenet systems.
I just recently mentioned that the Tibetans tend to study these tenet systems in a graded order, one level to another. I found the source for that. That’s in the Kalachakra tantra, actually, where it speaks about progressing through the tenet systems in a graded order.
Participant: But isn’t it also logical in itself?
Dr. Berzin: It is logical, but I was just looking for a scriptural reference for it. So, it is there.
OK. So, that was the second wrong view, distorted view.
The third distorted view concerning true suffering is:
[3] Holding what is non-static to be static.
Although the five tainted aggregates are non-static and change every moment, and the continuity of them in one lifetime lasts only for that life, this mistaken view involves incorrectly considering the aggregates to be static in the sense of being unchanging and lasting forever. To counter that wrong view, we have to understand the first aspect of true sufferings, which is that the aggregates are non-static phenomena.
Certainly, this is a very basic incorrect view that we have. We think that we are not changing from moment to moment. If we are in a bad mood, we think it is going to last. If we are standing in a queue, we think that it’s going to last forever, that we’ll never get our turn. If we are sick, we think it’s going to last forever.
Participant: Ich habe daß nicht.
Dr. Berzin: You don’t have that. It’s very wonderful that you don’t have that. But most people do think that. It doesn’t matter how old you are, most people still have an image of themselves as being young and attractive. So, you are saying that you were taught, even as a child, that things are impermanent. Well, you’re very fortunate if you were taught as a child that everything is impermanent.
But, certainly, most young people think that they can do anything they want to their body and it’s always going to be strong and healthy. They can get as drunk as they want, take as many drugs as they want, drive as fast as they want, and they are impervious.
Participant: Even older people.
Dr. Berzin: Even older people are like that. And certainly, nobody, unless they are really, really sick… but even if you are really sick, you don’t think you are going to die in the next hour. You think you are going to last. And when you get up in the morning, you certainly feel, “Here I am again – same me.”
Participant: When there’s a bad mood, I notice I really think, “This is it.”
Dr. Berzin: Right, definitely. With a bad mood, we think, “This is how I am.”
Participant: If the thought popped up in the moment, it would help, but even the thought doesn’t have the power to show up – even this small thought to say, “It’s OK. In one hour, it’s over.”
Dr. Berzin: Right. This thought doesn’t even arise, Karsten says, and it would help if it did arise, even in just a weak way – that “In an hour, this bad mood will change; my mood will be different.”
I think that most people are not trained to think in terms of everything being in the nature of change. We have set ideas like, “I’ll never be able to learn that,” for example, or, “We are going to live happily ever after as a couple.”
Right. There are some people, Renada says, who hold onto things very tightly and others who deal with life in a more superficial way and let things pass. It’s like when people get angry. Some people get angry, but it passes very quickly; other people get angry, and they hold onto it. But the question, really, the one that we are dealing with here, is when you are feeling angry, do you feel that it’s going to last forever?
When you are in love… here’s an even better one! When you’re in love (you have to sing that), don’t you think that that’s going to last forever? We certainly would like for it to last forever.
Participant: Das ist die Illusion.
Dr. Berzin: That’s the illusion.
Participant: One knows it’s not true, but one really clings to it.
Dr. Berzin: Right. You know it isn’t true, but you don’t want to accept the truth that things change. And, here, by the way, we are not talking about the “me”; we are talking about the aggregates. We are talking about the body, the mind, the emotions, the feelings, and these types of things. Certainly, as you get older, you think you can still do what you could do when you were much younger. It’s very hard to accept that you can’t do those things anymore. That’s not an easy one.
Participant: But I think that when one gets older, one sees that it doesn’t last, that things don’t last.
Dr. Berzin: One sees that it doesn’t last. But I tell you, Mariana, when you are sixty (I am sixty-one), you also think that you’ll stay like that forever and not become an eighty-year-old in a wheelchair. You don’t think in terms of what’s going to happen ten or twenty years from now. You think, “OK, even if I accept the fact that I’m not twenty-five years old anymore, I certainly want to imagine and hope that I am going to stay like this.” So, I think no matter what age we are, even if we can accept that we’re not the younger age anymore, we don’t really want to look at that degenerating, do we?
Participant: I was just thinking that to really understand that you’re not permanent takes a situation where you really have face your own not lasting – for example, if you get very ill or if you have an operation or things like that. Then you can really see, I guess, how deeply you’ve understood impermanence or not. I mean, it’s very easy to sit here and have this conversation and to have some jokes about it, but if it’s right in front of you, then you really know how much you’ve understood it.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, Dirk is saying that to really understand impermanence, we probably need to face some sort of crisis in life in which some real loss takes place. Or it could be a real gain. There’s a big impermanence to life before you have a baby and after you have a baby, for example. That’s a big change. But it could also be when you lose an arm that you realize that it was impermanent. However, I still think that even if you lose an arm, you certainly think you are going to keep the other arm forever. Don’t you?
Participant: If you learned a lesson with the left one.
Dr. Berzin: In other words, I think it’s easier to accept that the past has changed, that it’s no longer the same way as it was in the past. I think it’s more difficult to accept that what we have now is not going to last and that that’s going to change. I think the direction of understanding impermanence has to go in both ways, past and future, for it to really sink in. And, yes, crisis helps us to understand it – hopefully. Hopefully. I mean, we could also just understand it as, “This was bad luck. This was some kind of punishment,” and not understand impermanence at all.
Participant: I think it helps when one looks at the past. When one really looks at the past, one sees that nothing stays, that nothing has lasted.
Dr. Berzin: Yes, when we look at the past, we can see that nothing has lasted. Everybody was born in the past… I think it was Shantideva who said, “Everybody who was born long ago is dead already.” But we don’t think it’s going to happen to us. We see all the other people around us being slaughtered like buffalo at the butcher’s, and, yet, we don’t realize that we, too, are heading toward the butcher. I forget if that was Shantideva or Aryadeva. One of them has a lovely verse like that – “Can’t you see that he is slaughtering every member of your species? And you think that you are immune.”
Participant: I think it was Shantideva.
Dr. Berzin: I think it was Shantideva.
Participant: I also think that’s the point. I think we have to differentiate between the two levels of understanding – understanding it intellectually or knowing experientially how it feels. Also, it’s to see beyond arrogance, to see how, when I take it on an intellectual level, I think that I understand it, but I didn’t understand it.
Dr. Berzin: Right. We have to differentiate an intellectual understanding from an understanding that has really sunk in. This is true not only with impermanence; it’s also true with seeing suffering as happiness. Don’t we think, “Ah, what a good meal! This is really great. It’s happiness. If I could just get another good meal, I would continue to be happy. Let’s find a good restaurant. That will be happiness.” Intellectually, we can understand that it’s in the nature of suffering, but still, we look forward to the good meal… or good sex or good whatever. It’s difficult for this to really sink in on a “gut level,” as we say in English.
Participant: That’s why it’s good to remember not to start the meditation on the intellectual level but to start the meditation with what it feels like and then to work on it.
Dr. Berzin: So, the way that you recommend doing meditation is not to start with the intellectual level but to start with what it feels like. This is actually very good in terms of what Tsongkhapa, for instance, says about having to recognize the object to be refuted before actually refuting it. To recognize the object to be refuted – especially when it is a wrong view – we first have to identify it in ourselves and identify it in terms of what we actually feel. Sure. We feel all these things, all these incorrect views. That’s why it’s very important to identify them in ourselves. We all have these in one form or another.
“Wow, I have a hand! That’s really great! I like hands. What a useful thing. It’s really a beautiful item – having a hand.” If we think about it, we’re really quite happy that we have these things. We wouldn’t think of it in terms of it being suffering or being dirty. Then we get into weird thinking… then I get into weird thinking, like, “How wonderful that I’m not a chicken and don’t have hands. Poor chickens.” However, we tend to think the human body is so wonderful, so clean. Yes, from a certain point of view it is pretty amazing, but the more complicated it is, the more easily it breaks.
Participant: I think that’s maybe the balance. One needs to have that – a sense of feeling happy that one has such a well-functioning body. The gratitude for…
Dr. Berzin: Right. Gratitude for this precious human rebirth is an important point, definitely – but without grasping at it, without exaggerating it. That’s the whole point: not to exaggerate, not to add something that isn’t there, and not to take something away that is there. This is always the tricky thing.
OK. So, the nature of the body, mind, feelings… everything is non-static. The incorrect view is to think that the aggregates are static, that they will last forever.
Then, the last incorrect view regarding true sufferings is:
[4] Holding what is not established as an impossible soul to be an impossible soul.
Not Understanding That the Aggregates Are Devoid of a Self-Sufficiently Knowable “Me” Causes Us to Hold Them as Having Such an Impossible Soul
This refers to the fact that, although the five tainted aggregates are devoid of being established as a self-sufficiently knowable “me,” this mistaken view entails considering them to be such an impossible “me.” So, as the antidote, we need the discriminating awareness of the fourth aspect, which is that the aggregates lack this type of impossible soul, the self-sufficiently knowable “me.”
Remember what a self-sufficiently knowable “me” is. It is a “me” that you could know just by itself, independently of it being labeled onto anything. “I know Karsten. I see Karsten,” or, “I don’t like this person,” as if you could know or even think of somebody independently of at least thinking of their name, let alone thinking of their body and other aspects of them. That’s a type of incorrect view that rises automatically. It doesn’t have to be taught to us; it arises automatically. We think we are self-sufficiently knowable: “I want to find out who I am, to discover the real ‘me’”; “Now I am expressing myself…” What are you expressing? As if there were a “myself” that could be expressed independently of a way of thinking or… I don’t know what.
Participant: Die Angst dahinter – daß man sonst verrückt wird.
Dr. Berzin: So, there is an anxiety that you will… what? Not exist? I didn’t quite understand your comment.
Participant: That you go crazy.
Dr. Berzin: That you go crazy.
Participant: Ja, weil daß… die denn die Tät hätte ein.
Dr. Berzin: This is a very good point – that there is a fear that you will go crazy if you don’t have this. This is why a very wise person mentioned to me that it’s not really skillful to teach voidness to teenagers. Teenagers need to establish their conventional identity first, and only then is it helpful to teach them about no true self. If you teach them about no true self before they’ve established a conventional identity, they can fall into nihilism very easily.
Participant: But in the monasteries, don’t they teach it?
Dr. Berzin: Nay, nay, nay, nay. In the monasteries, don’t they teach it? No. In the monasteries, at thirteen, you start studying logical pervasions, then ways of knowing, then lines of reasoning, and then five years of Abhisamayalankara, which is the Svatantrika point of view. The Svatantrika view is that there is still something on the side of the object that makes me, “me,” in connection with labeling. You only get to Madhyamaka after that. So, by the time you get to Madhyamaka, you are in your twenties already.
Participant: And if the monk enters the monastery at six years?
Dr. Berzin: They still don’t start debating till they are around thirteen. The first years are spent memorizing – memorizing the texts.
So, yes, there is a big danger. That’s why there is such an emphasis in the bodhisattva vows not to teach voidness to those who are not ready to understand it – because one could go crazy. One first needs a sense of the conventional “me” that takes responsibility for doing things and so on, that basically feels responsible for the results of one’s actions. Then one needs to overcome the exaggeration of that “me,” the projection of it being a solid “me.” We certainly have this in terms of our aggregates. We think that there is a solid “me” that can be known by itself, and there is no such thing. Understanding that there is no such thing overcomes this incorrect view.
So, these are four distorted ways of relating to, understanding, or embracing the first noble truth: true sufferings. These are things to really work on.
The Four Distorted Ways of Understanding True Origins
Shall we go on to true origins? The first distorted view actually has two parts to it.
The first aspect is:
[1a] Holding that suffering has no cause.
This is the incorrect view of the Charvaka School of Indian philosophy – that suffering happens for no reason at all. This is the school that doesn’t accept karma.
Participant: Excuse me. Now, it’s the fifth one?
Dr. Berzin: Yeah.
Participant: The fourth one was what again?
Dr. Berzin: The fourth one was holding what is not established as a self-sufficiently knowable “me” to be a self-sufficiently knowable “me.”
So, here we think that suffering has no cause. “That’s just the way it is” – that there is suffering. “Why did I have an accident? Well, bad luck, or no cause.” Do we think like that?
Participant: Getting cancer without a cause.
Dr. Berzin: Getting cancer without cause. Why did the baby die? We can’t think of any reason why they should have died. I mean, I don’t think that this is talking about there being no cause that the baby got sick and then died. I think it acknowledges that there are those types of causes. This is specifically referring to there being no such thing as karma, which is what the Charvakas believe – that our experiences have nothing to do what we have done.
Participant: It’s an Indian school, so they believed in rebirth, no?
Dr. Berzin: Not the Charvakas. They believed in no karma, no rebirth – just have a good time. They are the hedonists. Can you relate to that?
Participant: Sometimes I think Buddhism has a certain kind of hedonism in it. If you say that you want to be happy and that you want to become a Buddha… isn’t there a touch of hedonism in that?
Dr. Berzin: Isn’t there a touch of hedonism in our saying that everybody wants to be happy and that we want to have the happiness of Buddhahood and so on? Hedonism would have to be grasping at what is suffering to be happiness. Wouldn’t it?
Participant: If we define it like that.
Dr. Berzin: Everybody wants to be happy. It’s one of the basic premises of Buddhism. Nobody wants to be unhappy. The problem is that we don’t recognize what happiness is and what unhappiness is, and we don’t recognize what the causes of happiness and unhappiness are.
Craving and Karma Are the True Origins of All Suffering, But the Deepest Cause Is the All-Pervasive Suffering of Samsara
So, do we think that things happen for no cause? “It’s only what the other people have done.” Surely, we have that. “Why is there a difficulty in our relationship? It’s because of you.” Of course, it’s because of the other person; “It has nothing to do with me.” Or, “Why do I have the problem of not being able to go to sleep easily at night? It’s because the neighbor is noisy. It has nothing to do with me.” I think this attitude also falls in the category of believing in no karmic cause and, therefore, in no responsibility from our own side. And what helps us to get over that is understanding the first aspect of true origins – that craving and karma are the causes of all suffering. I want to be happy and don’t want to be parted from that happiness, and I am attached to that. I think of a solid “me” – that activates karma. And I am miserable.
What do you think of that?
When we look at the cause here, I think we have to look deeper than what we were just discussing now. It’s not only that there is something on my side that’s caused this problem. What has caused the problem? The cause of the problem is that I am continuing to have these tainted aggregates, and I continue to perpetuate them with craving and karma. So, of course, there are going to be ups and downs; things don’t happen without any cause at all. So, I think it’s not just looking at the level of “because of my destructive or constructive karma.” It means looking even deeper. The deeper reason for all the samsaric problems that we experience is the all-pervasive suffering of samsara, that of continuing to activate, to build up and activate, karma.
So, things don’t happen from no cause.
The second aspect of this first distorted view is:
[1b] Holding that suffering has a discordant cause.
This means that we think that suffering comes from unrelated or irrelevant causes, such as (what they say in the text), “chili coming from sugarcane seeds rather than chili seeds.” An]example of this is believing that suffering comes from the transformation of primal matter as asserted by the Samkhya School. The Samkhyas assert that we have primal matter and that it changes – there are all sorts of transformations of it – and that the transformations are the actual happiness and unhappiness that a soul experiences and, also, that happiness and unhappiness are inherent in certain situations. This is the example of an irrelevant cause.
So, this would be pretty much attributing all of our troubles to external things: “Why am I feeling so bad? It must be because of the weather. It’s because this time of year is so dark.”
Participant: Therefore, I have my winter depression.
Dr. Berzin: “Therefore, I have my winter depression.” Exactly.
The reason for the winter depression is actually craving and karma and the fact that we continue to have these aggregates that can be affected by the weather. Of course, we’re not independent of the weather, but that’s not the cause, the true cause. Or the economy – “The state of affairs in the world depresses me so much. That’s why I am unhappy.” Those are irrelevant causes in the sense that they are not the actual, true causes.
So, either we think that our problems come from no cause, or we think that they come from irrelevant causes. And that is gotten rid of by the first aspect of true origins, which is that craving and karma are the causes of all suffering.
Let’s think about that in terms of our own experience.
OK. I think that the more we think about this, the more strongly we are led to renunciation – namely, that what we really want to get out of is samsara, which means getting rid of the causes of samsara, the all-pervasive suffering of samsara, the whole process of building up and activating karma and rebirth, all the disturbing emotions, and the grasping for a solid “me,” which is behind the whole, self-perpetuating samsaric mechanism… on and on and on. We develop renunciation because we see that this is ridiculous and that it’s just going to go on if we don’t do something about it. So, we can see how this could be the basis for what one thinks of all the way up to liberation. Remember, this is what we think of on the shravaka, pratyekabuddha, or bodhisattva way of progressing through the five pathway minds.
So, how would you make this a bodhisattva path? How would you make this a bodhisattva method? I ask because, at first sight, this strongly leads toward just developing renunciation. Anybody have any idea? The answer is tonglen, giving and taking: “This is not just my problem; this is everybody’s problem. Everybody has these same incorrect views. Everybody is suffering from the same problem. Everybody has the same origin of the problems. So, rather than thinking just of myself, I think of everybody because we’re all interrelated and everybody’s been my mother,” and all of that stuff. So, let’s work on this and try to understand this for the sake of everybody, not just for our own limited sakes. That’s how to make this a Mahayana practice. OK?
Then it leads to bodhichitta. It reinforces bodhichitta because to really be able to help everybody to overcome all of this, I have to become a Buddha. I have to be able to see the interdependence of everything so that I know all the karmic causes for somebody being the way they are and what the consequences will be if I teach them this or that. So, we have to become omniscient so that we can really know how to help everybody without making mistakes. OK?
Let’s end here, and we’ll continue with this discussion. I am going through it a bit slowly because, actually, I really feel that this is important material.