We are studying this very important early text in the Mahayana literature by the great master Nagarjuna, called Letter to a Friend, in which he outlines the major points of the Mahayana path to his friend the king. We saw that the text has many different types of outlines that can be given to it but that we have been following just one of those outlines. And In that outline, which is by Mipham, the text is divided, first, into the introductory material and, then, into the six far-reaching attitudes, or six perfections. We’re in the discussion of far-reaching discrimination. Within that, there’s the detailed explanation, within that, there’s the main explanation, within that, there’s the actual path, and within that, there’s the explanation of the training in higher discriminating awareness.
The actual path is divided into the three higher trainings: higher ethical discipline, higher concentration, and higher discriminating awareness. And within the section concerning higher discriminating awareness, we’re in the section called “How to Extract Ourselves from the Disturbing Emotions,” in other words, how to gain liberation. And for that, we are in the discussion of turning the mind from things of this life.
Nagarjuna speaks of turning our focus away from the things of this life, which means turning our attention to improving future lives (which in the lam-rim, would be equivalent to the initial scope of motivation), and then turning the mind from the whole of samsara, which means renouncing samsara itself (which in the lam-rim would be equivalent to the intermediate level of motivation). For turning the mind away from things of this life, we are in the detailed explanation. And that detailed explanation speaks, first of all, about death and impermanence and, then, about the precious human rebirth.
What we notice in this text is that it covers pretty much all of the basic material that is later organized into the body of teachings of lam-rim, the graded stages of the path. This is one of the earliest sources of that material. Of course, everything derives from the sutras, but texts like this put all the points in that material together in a more condensed fashion.
What we also noticed was of interest or noteworthy here was that, although in the later lam-rims, we find that the explanation of the precious human rebirth comes before thinking of death and impermanence, the order is reversed by Nagarjuna – that first we think of death and impermanence. Then, when we realize that death can come at any time, that it will come for sure and that nothing’s going to be of help except the Dharma, we are motivated to take advantage of the precious human lives that we have. So, it’s only then that we take note of what that precious human life is, whereas in the lam-rim, it’s presented the other way around – that first, we recognize the precious human lives that we have, and then, we realize that it’s not going to last forever, so we want to take advantage of it.
If one does a study of all the basic literature in Tibet from the four traditions and the various authors in these traditions over the centuries, we find that there are many, many different ways of organizing the same, exact material that we find in the lam-rim. There’s a slightly different ordering of it, slightly different outlines of it, but all of it covers the same material. And there’s a lesson to be learned from that, which is that we shouldn’t be attached to one way of organizing this material, how to make an outline of it, because there are so many ways of doing it that equally help.
Karsten, you have a question?
At What Stage Do We Engage in the Three Higher Trainings?
Participant: You mentioned the three higher trainings?
Dr. Berzin: Yeah.
Participant: It was ethical discipline, discriminating awareness…
Dr. Berzin: No. Ethical discipline, concentration, and discriminating awareness.
Participant: At which point do we engage in these trainings?
Dr. Berzin: Well, the way that you go through the lam-rim is that you go through it once in order to learn all the points in a sequence. Then you go back and apply the whole thing to each of the points in sequence. So, in the outline of lam-rim itself, where we have the presentation of the three higher trainings is in the intermediate scope of motivation as the method for reaching liberation. When the method for reaching liberation is referred to as the training in higher discipline, it’s referring to taking one of the so-called vows for individual liberation, the pratimoksha vows, which are the lay vows, or the novice or full monk vows, or the provisional, novice or full nun vows.
Of course, we have ethical discipline in the initial scope in the discussion of refraining from negative behavior and engaging in positive behavior – so, the whole discussion of karma. Of course, that’s there. But this is the higher training in ethical discipline. And that refers to taking and keeping the vows – obviously, not just taking the vows.
The trainings in concentration and discriminating awareness are, in the higher sense, for the attainment of shamatha and vipashyana, zhinay (zhi-gnas) and lhagtong (lhag-mthong), which we need for gaining liberation. Shamatha is the stilled and settled state of mind, and the exceptionally perceptive state of mind is vipashyana. So, basically, perfect concentration and the ability of the mind to understand anything – these are the trainings that we do for that. But these are practiced in common for gaining liberation and for gaining enlightenment.
In the lam-rim, the trainings in higher concentration and discriminating awareness are not discussed very much in the intermediate scope. The fuller discussion is left for the advanced scope where the aim is reaching enlightenment and where it is discussed in connection with the six perfections, the six far-reaching attitudes.
Now, the thing to bear in mind, I think, is that ethical discipline (even in terms of taking vows), and shamatha and vipashyana, these stilled and settled states of mind in the various realms of absorption and so on, and vipashyana – these are not exclusively Buddhist practices. You find all of these in Hinduism. And vows, ethical vows, you find in almost every religion. Almost every religion has ethical vows. What makes them Buddhist, as I’ve emphasized before, is that you’re doing this in order to get rid… you know, you identify what suffering is, what the cause of suffering is, what a true stopping of it would be, and you use these trainings as part of the pathway mind to achieve that stopping. So, they’re applied to achieving liberation and enlightenment, to removing suffering and its causes – true suffering and its true causes. It’s not suffering the way that some other systems would identify suffering and its causes. So, these are the higher trainings in that, the special, exceptional trainings in that. OK?
I can’t underline enough that so much of the practice that we identify as Buddhist practice is not exclusively Buddhist; you find it in all the Indian religions, all the Indian systems. So, what makes these practices Buddhist is applying them within the context of refuge (safe direction) and renunciation and the four noble truths – aiming to achieve liberation and enlightenment. That’s what makes them Buddhist practices. Everybody develops love and compassion, for example. Those aren’t special Buddhist practices. OK?
The Precious Human Rebirth
Now, last time, we finished our discussion of death and impermanence, and today, we are ready to go onto the discussion of the precious human rebirth. So, that’s where we are in our outline. This is divided into reflecting on the difficulties of finding a precious human rebirth with the eight respites and ten enrichments. The respites are freedoms, temporary freedoms, that we have from the states of no leisure to practice the Dharma, and the enrichments are things that enrich our lives with opportunities to practice the Dharma – to reach liberation and enlightenment, that is.
So, we reflect first on the difficulties of finding such a precious human rebirth. Then, we reflect in particular on the basis that is endowed with what are called the “four wheels” (like the wheels of a chariot or a cart), which are just a condensed version of the ten enrichments into four main things. Tthen, we reflect on how to be free of the eight states of no leisure. So, in other words, we reflect on:
- The difficulty of finding the precious human rebirth
- The ten enrichments
- The eight respites from the states of no leisure
Participant: What does respite mean?
Dr. Berzin: A “respite” means that you have a break from something, a pause, an intermission.
Respite… Geshe Dhargyey always used to give a very nice example of that. He said that we should consider ourselves on a short holiday from the lower realms, that we are here for just a very short time, and that we’ll go back if we don’t do something about it. So, we have to become asylum seekers in the human realm of precious human rebirths and to consider it like a respite. It’s a holiday. I think that gives the flavor much more nicely in terms of the actual connotation of the terms and the context with which they’re used.
Verse 59: The Rarity of a Human Rebirth and the Difficulties of Finding It
The first verse here about the rarity of the human rebirth is verse fifty-nine:
[59] Since even more difficult than the meeting of a turtle and the hole in a solitary yoke located on the ocean is the attainment of a human state from that of a creeping creature (that’s an animal), make that (attainment) with human faculties be fruitful through practicing the hallowed Dharma.
So, here is an image that comes from one of the sutras. The commentaries just say, “from a sutra,” so I don’t know which sutra it comes from. But we have a similar verse in Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior (Skt. Bodhisattvacharyavatara), in chapter four, verse twenty:
[20] Because of just this, the Vanquishing Master has said rebirth as a human is so difficult to attain, just as it is for a turtle to stick its neck through the hole in a yoke adrift on the vast sea.
This image is repeated over and over again.
Now, in the order of this text, first, we think of the difficulty of finding the precious human rebirth, and then we get into identifying what the precious human rebirth is. In the standard lam-rims, it’s the other way around: first, we recognize what it is, and then, we appreciate the difficulty of finding it. But each way of ordering it has a benefit, obviously.
The way that it’s presented here is that if we realize how difficult it is to attain a precious human rebirth, we will be interested in finding out what it is. Just as was said in the larger section that this section is part of, if we realize that, at any time, we can lose what we have with death, we then take interest in seeing what we have now – namely, the precious human rebirth. So, this is the logical reasoning here for the order being the way it is.
In the Gelugpa lam-rims, however, Tsongkhapa always emphasizes – particularly in his discussion of voidness – that we have to recognize the object to be refuted in order to be able to refute it. In other words, we have to recognize what the impossible ways of existing are in order to realize that they don’t exist at all, that they don’t refer to anything real. So, with that same flavor, first, we recognize what the precious human rebirth is; then, we realize that we could lose it. Similarly, first, we recognize what the precious human rebirth is; then, we realize how rare it is. So, there’s consistency in the way that Tsongkhapa makes the ordering.
I must say I haven’t reviewed the literature to see where exactly in the various lam-rims of the other traditions they place this material, how they order it. In any case, we have these two ways of making the order.
The difficulty of finding the precious human rebirth can be looked at from three points of view:
- The point of view of how difficult it is from its causes
- The point of view of analogies
- The point of view of its nature (which refers to numbers, actually)
Difficulty from the Point of View of Its Causes
[1] Ethical Discipline
So, what are the causes of the precious human rebirth? “Precious” means that we can use it for achieving liberation and enlightenment because we have all the possibilities and freedoms to be able to do that. The causes for the precious human rebirth, the most basic one, is observing pure discipline of ethical self-control. So, ethical self-discipline is the main cause for the precious human rebirth.
I think this is to be understood in the context of refraining from destructive behavior in general and, if we think in a broader sense, refraining from the type of behavior that animals have. Animals tend to just follow their strong instincts. If an animal is in heat, it doesn’t care who the other animal belongs to or anything like that and doesn’t care about the circumstances or anything. It will just jump on top of another dog or whatever at any time, in any place. So, it has no self-control over its basic, instinctive drives – that is animal behavior. Similarly, an animal, when it is poked with a stick or anything like that, it gets angry and starts to bark and growl and so on. So, that is no self-control over the basic, disturbing emotions that are so strong and instinctive with animals. Or when it’s hungry, it goes out and kills (if we talk about a carnivorous animal).
Participant: As an animal, you cannot gain ethical self-control in order to become a human.
Dr. Berzin: So, an animal can’t gain the ethical self-control to become a human? Well, no, actually. An animal can gain a certain amount of ethical self-control. There are tamed animals like, for instance, a seeing-eye dog, which is trained, basically, not to run after another dog and so on but instead, to really take care of the master. Obviously, some animals can be trained to act in a very constructive type of way. Or you can train an animal… you know, you can stick your head inside a lion’s mouth, and it doesn’t bite you and stuff like that.
But in general, ethical self-discipline is only one of the causes for achieving a precious human rebirth. And I don’t think an animal is capable of developing the type and strength of ethical self-discipline that a human can.
Participant: So how can animals ever become…
Dr. Berzin: If you think about it – how is an animal trained? How do you train a seeing-eye dog? I have no idea. I have no clear idea. But for a human being, in order for the ethical discipline to be well-founded… It’s not like teaching a rat in a maze – that you give it an electric shock so that it doesn’t go over there, and you give it a piece of cheese if it goes the other way. In that way, you train it to not go to one side but to go to the other side. So, there’s that type of training.
But as human beings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama always emphasizes, the main characteristic that we have is our intelligence – our ability to discriminate between what’s helpful and what’s harmful based on reason, not just based on punishment. And when we understand and are convinced that this is beneficial and that’s harmful, nobody has to force us to follow rules or discipline. So, the type of discipline that an animal can get when it’s trained is not the greatest.
Serkong Rinpoche used a wonderful example. He said, “If a bear can be trained in a circus to ride a bicycle, as a human being, you could train yourself to do anything.” So, we shouldn’t just be at the level of a circus animal that can be trained to perform some tricks – to work a computer, to drive a car and things like that. That’s not the best use of a precious human life. That, actually, is always quite helpful – an animal example. The Tibetans tend to use animal examples. They stick in your mind and remind you that “I don’t want to achieve in life just what an animal can achieve. There’s much more that I can do.”
[2] Prayers – The Two Types
And, so, the first cause for the precious human life is keeping pure ethical self-control, or discipline. But in conjunction with that, we have to offer stainless prayers to have a precious human rebirth in all our future live. That is something that an animal doesn’t do very well. In fact, it doesn’t do that at all. So, prayer (we had a question about prayer the other week) in Buddhism is basically a strong wish.
There are two types of prayers:
- The aspirational prayer is a strong wish that directs our energy, our intention: “This is what I really want to do, what I really want to accomplish.” It’s not that somebody else is going to grant it to us if we’re a good girl or good boy; instead, we are aiming our intentions: “May I always continue to have precious human rebirths all the way to liberation and continue on to enlightenment.”
Once we achieve liberation, we get a different type of birth; it’s not a samsaric type of birth. A precious human rebirth is still within samsara.
- The other type of prayer is the dedication prayer, which we do when we have done something positive, something constructive, and there’s a certain amount of positive force built up from it. We then direct or dedicate that positive force to ripen into having (in this case) a precious human rebirth. It’s important to have this type of prayer.
This is a difficult thing – precious human rebirth – because when you proceed through the lam-rim, these graded stages, for the first time, you don’t really know what’s going to come next, which is the classical way to study lam-rim. In fact, I studied it that way. I was very fortunate because when I studied lam-rim for the first time, when I first went to India, there were no translations of any of the lam-rims available. This was before Jewel Ornament of Liberation was available in English. So, I didn’t know what was in the lam-rim. And when I studied this with Geshe Darghyey, he certainly didn’t tell me what was coming next. That is the classical way, and that’s the way that it should proceed.
Nowadays, of course, that’s pretty much impossible because there are so many books and translations that are available. So, it’s a bit different. And Western people have – many of us – the terrible tendency to pick up a book, look through different parts and to read a page here and there, instead of starting at the beginning and proceeding straight through. So, we miss the benefit of the traditional way of studying the teachings.
In any case, when you go through the lam-rim for the first time, aiming for a precious human rebirth could be mixed with attachment: “I would like to continue with my precious human rebirth so I can be with all my friends, loved ones and teachers in my next lifetime because I’m so attached to them.” That is not the type of aim that we want to cultivate. The precious human rebirth is a stepping-stone, something that we need in order to be able to continue on the path. But our goal is liberation and enlightenment. That is very difficult.
Each of the levels of motivation in lam-rim are not trivial. I speak about this a lot – that there are Dharma-lite versions and Real Thing versions, like Coca Cola Lite and the Real Thing Coca Cola. It’s not that, instantly, you want to benefit and help everybody. Then you practice Buddhism as just a regular Western, humanitarian type of practice. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not really Buddhism. It misses the profundity of Buddhism. Buddhism is not just to be a nice person and to do Buddhist therapy to minimize your emotional problems and to help everybody. It’s much, much more than that.
So, we want to gain this precious human rebirth. And that’s difficult – to really take future lives seriously. We have to take future lives seriously in order to aim to continue having precious human rebirths and not to have your main focus be making a lot of money in this lifetime or accumulating as many toys as we can. As the American expression goes, “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” That’s not the point – to get so many DVD’s, so many electronic gadgets, so many new computer things and so on. That’s not the point of having a precious human rebirth… or so many friends or so much fame or this or that.
We want to use our lives and the opportunities that we have to make progress on the path to liberation and enlightenment. And we want to be able to continue doing that. How we will be able to continue doing that? Well, what are the causes for the precious human rebirth? They’re pure ethical discipline, prayers… in other words, we really sincerely have interest. It’s not just saying our prayers at night and “blah, blah, blah. Now I lay me down to sleep” – this type of thing, like a child’s nursery rhyme and without any meaning. We don’t make prayers like that. Instead, “I take my future lives really seriously. And I really don’t want to be reborn as a cockroach – that anybody who sees me just wants to step on me.” That would not be very nice.
So, we take future lives very seriously, and we actually do something to benefit them. This also means building up some strong connection with the Dharma, a strong, positive connection with the spiritual teachers, prayers, ethical discipline.
[3] Supplementing Higher Ethical Discipline with the Remaining Far-Reaching Attitudes
The third cause is supplementing these things with the other far-reaching attitudes – so, generosity, patience, strong joyful perseverance, concentration, or mental stability, and discriminating awareness. That combination will bring us a precious human rebirth.
Yeah, Lydia.
The Six Realms of Existence
Participant: Can a human being be born as an animal?
Dr. Berzin: Yes, most certainly. In Buddhism, we speak about six different rebirth realms and that anybody can be reborn in any realm. You can go up or down.
These different realms, the first one, is sometimes translated as “hell creatures,” “hell beings.” That’s not a very nice way of translating it, I think, although it is the most common way. But if you look at the etymology of the words, you see that the Sanskrit word for this realm is naraka, which means “no joy.” The Tibetan way of translating it, nyelwa (dmyal-ba), means “difficult to get out of.” Those are much more descriptive of the state of existence that one has. There’s no joy, and you’re trapped; it’s difficult to get out of. So, sometimes I call it the “trapped beings of the joyless realms.”
Then there’s the realm of the so-called hungry ghosts, although that’s the Chinese translation, which puts it in the context of ancestor worship, which is not the original meaning. The Tibetans translate it in such a way that gives the connotation of a mind that is very tight and clutching – so, clutching ghost. The throat is very thin, and it can’t get enough food. It is always trying to get food or other things but is never able to get them. Clutching ghost.
Then animal – I prefer a “creeping creature.” When we think of animal, we don’t want to think of Knut, the polar bear baby in the Berlin Zoo that everybody goes, “Oh, how cute,” and that gets all the attention in the world. That’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about an animal rebirth… or Fifi the poodle with pink toenail polish in an apartment. The image that one should have for this is a cockroach or something like that, something that creeps. The Sanskrit word (in Tibetan as well) is something that moves bent over along the floor – a creeping creature. It’s some horrible thing creeping, crawling on the ground. You want to be horrified by this and to think, “I really don’t want to be reborn in this form.”
Then there are the human and god realms. These gods are not gods in our Western sense. I prefer calling the beings in these realms “divine beings.” These are realms where everything is just “so divine, darling” – this type of situation in which everything is really nice but totally trivial and meaningless. They just spend their time (if we can use a facetious analogy) around the swimming pool, playing cards, and drinking nice drinks, and like that. Completely boring and going nowhere. So that’s the divine realms.
Then there are the anti-gods. “Demi-gods,” I think, is probably the better word from mythology in the West. I sometimes call them “would-be divine.” These are the ones that are in a semi-divine situation. They’re very jealous and are always fighting with the gods. They’re the ones that want to sit around the swimming pool but aren’t able to. So, they’re always attacking those who are in the divine situation.
These are the six realms. And again, it’s not fair to reduce them to just the human experience, to the different levels of suffering or happiness that humans have. The way that I understand it or like to explain it is that, if we look at experience… and here, we’re talking about a mind, a mental continuum, a mental activity. Mental activity has as part of it, what accompanies it, is feeling. And feeling, here, is defined as feeling some level of happiness or unhappiness – so, some level on the spectrum of happiness and unhappiness. That is a mental state, a mental factor. Often, it’s associated with a physical sensation of pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain are physical sensations; happiness and unhappiness are mental states. Anyway, when we talk about feeling, we’re talking about happy/unhappy. And just as it’s possible for the mind, for a mind, to perceive… let’s say, we’re talking about senses like sight and sound. It’s possible for a mind to perceive sights, sounds, smells and so on beyond the range of what the human apparatus is capable of.
For instance, dogs have a much subtler sense of smell than humans have, eagles can see much further, and dogs can hear sounds that we can’t hear, and so on. So, we can think in terms of there being a larger spectrum of what can be perceived with any type of sense perception (and also we could think in a mental sense of happy and unhappy). And if we look at what the human apparatus can experience in terms of pleasure or pain, we see that when we get to a certain level of pain, we just go into shock and go unconscious. So, there’s a limit to how much pain we can experience before we go unconscious.
Similarly, with pleasure. When pleasure becomes too intense, we destroy it. We’re driven to destroy it. I think the best example of that is an itch. An itch is intense pleasure (if you actually analyze what the sensation is). But it’s so intense that we have to destroy it by scratching it. It’s the same thing as the bliss of orgasm: the closer we get to it, the more we rush to destroy it. So, the human apparatus has its limitations of what it can experience on the spectrum of pain and pleasure – same with happy and unhappy. But that’s no reason why a mind couldn’t experience further in either direction of pleasure and pain.
So, it’s through that type of reasoning that these realms of hell creatures, divine beings and so on become a little bit more understandable – that, “OK, I could accept that I could be reborn and others could be reborn,” (we’re just talking about a continuity of mental activity, the mind-stream), “with a certain type of physical apparatus, the hardware of the body, that would be capable of experiencing different ranges of pleasure and pain. Why not? If I could be born with a physical apparatus that could smell better or hear better than a human can, why couldn’t I be born with an apparatus that could feel more pain than we do as humans without becoming unconscious?”
So, like that, I find it makes these other realms a little bit easier to accept – that it is possible to be reborn like that. And it’s possible for me to be reborn like that. And I really don’t want that. Too much pain. There’s no way of really following spiritual practices unless we’re super, super trained already and can transform it. But ordinarily, we’re overcome by the pain and suffering; we can’t do anything except to be overwhelmed by the pain. Similarly, with super intense pleasure, unless we’re really, really trained – there’s nothing that we can do; we’re going to become completely absorbed in that.
So, we have these causes for the precious human rebirth: ethical self-discipline, prayers for it, supplemented with the other far-reaching attitudes – generosity, patience, joyous perseverance, mental stability, or concentration, and discriminating awareness, or wisdom.
OK. Now, that is the difficulty of obtaining a precious human rebirth from the point of view of its causes. Why don’t we take a moment to reflect, one, on how seriously we take human rebirth and, two, on how seriously we take rebirth (which is a whole other question about the logic behind why there is rebirth and why an individual mental continuity has no beginning and no end, basically, which has to do with the whole discussion of the voidness of causality, so it gets very complex). But how seriously do we take it, and what are we doing to ensure that we continue to have precious human rebirths? Are we actually doing anything, or are we just building up the causes for a much worse type of rebirth?
OK. Any questions?
Participant: In the precious human rebirth, is there no karma?
Dr. Berzin: No, that’s not the case. In a precious human rebirth, there certainly is karma. The rebirth with all the opportunities and freedoms and so on, the so-called precious human rebirth, is the result of positive karma. Of course, with a precious human rebirth, we can build up further karma, both positive and negative karma, to perpetuate our samsaric existence. But with a precious human rebirth, we also have the ability to gain liberation from karma and rebirth. But it depends on what we do, on our level of understanding of voidness, and on our aim. That’s why the dedication is very important. If we don’t dedicate positive force to our liberation or enlightenment – toward the enlightenment of everybody – then, automatically, it will just contribute to improving our samsara. And that’s not the goal. We want to improve our samsaric situation only to the extent that it’s more helpful for benefiting others and going further in one’s spiritual development.
But the aim is not to be the richest person in the world. If we were the richest person in the world, if we were born into that, then, of course, it would be important to use that wealth to benefit others. So, in addition to the list of what makes a human rebirth precious is a list (you find this in lam-rim) of the eight further factors that make a precious human rebirth even more useful. One of those is being born into a wealthy family – having wealth. Doesn’t mean that a poor person can’t follow the spiritual path. Most people who follow the spiritual path are very poor. But if we’re born into wealth, then we can use it to benefit others. We can sponsor things – sponsor Dharma events, sponsor monks and nuns. There are a lot of good things one can do if one has wealth. But one’s aim isn’t to increase one’s wealth. OK? And His Holiness always says that we need to be realistic – so, sort of fifty-fifty: fifty percent working for this life and fifty percent working for future lives. One still has to live, of course.
Difficulty from the Point of View of Analogies
OK. So that was the difficulty of obtaining a precious human rebirth from the point of view of its causes. Then there’s the difficulty of obtaining such a rebirth from the point of view of analogies. The standard analogy is what we have in the verse. Remember, the verse was, “Even more difficult than the meeting of a turtle and the hole in a solitary yoke located on the ocean.”
The ocean represents the ocean of samsaric rebirths. And the yoke – that is something you put over oxen in order to connect them to a cart. So, it has a hole in it, and you put the head of the ox through it. “Solitary yoke” means that there’s only one. That represents how very difficult it is to find this. So, you’re a turtle that is deep down in the ocean – in other words, in lower rebirths, worse rebirth states, in samsara – and this yoke is floating all over the top of the ocean and being blown by the wind. That represents the winds of karma. So, to be reborn with a precious human rebirth is as rare as a turtle that comes up to the top of the ocean once every hundred years and happens to come up at just at the point where it sticks its neck through the hole in the yoke – in other words, is reborn with a precious human rebirth. The hole in the yoke represents the mother’s womb for a precious human rebirth. So, that’s the analogy that is used.
Another common analogy is, “It’s as difficult to attain as it would be for mustard seeds poured onto a needle to stick to its point,” or “for peas thrown at a standing mirror to stick to its surface.” These are the classical examples that you find in the texts. So, it’s pretty rare. We shouldn’t think that it’s so easy to attain.
Difficulty from the Point of View of Its Nature
The difficulty of attaining a precious human rebirth from the point of view of its nature refers to numbers.
The Buddha once picked up a pinch of sand from the bank of the Ganges River and said, “This is equal to the number of wandering samsaric beings who rise from one of the three worst rebirth states and are reborn in one of the three better states or who are reborn once again in one of the better states after dying from a better state.” So, this represents the number of beings who will take rebirth in one of the three better rebirths – as a human, a divine being, or a would-be divine being. “The number of grains of sand on the rest of the bank along the whole Ganges River is equal to the number of those who fall from one of the better states to one of the worst states or who, after dying from a worst state, are again born in a worst state.” So, there is quite a big difference in numbers.
As it’s explained, the number of trapped beings in the joyless realms (the hell creatures) is much, much larger than the number of clutching ghosts. And the number of clutching ghosts is much larger than the creeping creatures, or animals. Just think of how many tiny creatures, living beings, are in a small pond of water in the summer, or the number of insects that there are, the number of ants that there are. The number of hungry ghosts is a much larger number than that, and the number of hell creatures is even a much larger number than that. And although there an awful lot of human beings (what is it now, four billion or six billion?), it’s still a very small number compared to the number of ants and other insects that there are. So, it’s very rare from the point of view of the numbers to be a human being, let alone a human being with precious human rebirth.
Buddhist Cosmology – The Four Island-Worlds Where Humans (Humanoids) Live
Then there’s a whole discussion of when the Buddhas come and so on. But within the presentation of human beings, human beings can, from the Buddhist point of view, be born on each of the four so-called continents.
There is, in Buddhist cosmology, a presentation of various world systems, countless universes, and each of these universes goes through cycles. These cycles are not in sync with each other, so when one universe is forming, another is falling apart, and so on. And in each sort of star system with a sun and so on, there’s a Mount Meru and four of what are usually called “continents,” but actually, they’re islands (if you look at the description of them), island-worlds, or island-continents, where humanoids are found. They’re not human beings as we know them. They’re Klingons and Cardassians and all these other species that we find in Star Trek. They’re something similar to that – different humanoids.
In each of these four island-worlds, there are four different types of humanoids. The description of them is quite interesting. It says that we live on the Southern Continent. Southern Continent – the word for it is “Jambudvipa” – is the island-world where there’s a rose apple. It’s a certain sort of fruit that, when it falls into the water, it makes a sound. Anyway, it’s the name of the continent. We live in what’s called “The Land of Actions.”
In the other three island-worlds, the humanoids live in “The Lands of Luxury,” it’s called. It’s very interesting. Their lives are much more affluent than ours, but within each group, there’s not much variety of lifestyle or experience. For instance, in the Northern Continent, the humanoids have a fixed lifespan of a thousand years. So, it doesn’t matter what you do; you’re going to live for a thousand years. Everybody’s extremely comfortable. Food comes from a constant harvest of wild crops that require no cultivation, so you don’t have to do anything. And there’s no private ownership, so it’s sort of like living in an ideal, socialist, collective state. But one week before a person’s death, a voice comes from the sky and announces that their time is up. So, the literal translation of the name of this world, the Northern Continent, is “The Island of the Voice of Doom,” where you hear, “Your time is up. One more week left.”
They always tell the story of how Nagarjuna, the author of our text, once went to one of these northern continents. He undressed, took off his clothes, and went to bathe in a pond. When he came out, his clothes were gone because there’s only collective property; there’s no private ownership on the Northern Continent. So, they give this as the example to explain how this is. That’s the Northern Continent.
The Western Continent is called the Continent of “Wealth from Cows.” There, they enjoy an endless supply of gold that drops from the cows. That’s their dung. There, the majority of them live to be five hundred years. And the people of The Eastern Island are giants who have bodies twice the size of ours. They have a lot of wealth that comes from jewel mountains, and the majority of them live to the age of two hundred and fifty.
Now, in all these worlds, these worlds of luxury, life is so comfortable that people’s minds are very dull. They don’t have to work for anything. Regardless of what they do, their present life remains the same. That’s why I sometimes think that this is quite an interesting description of the former Communist states – that it didn’t matter in your job whether you worked well or you didn’t work well: you got the same anyway, and everybody got the same.
Participant: So, is there actually suffering in these realms?
Dr. Berzin: Is there suffering? Well, when you hear the voice of doom, it’s not very nice!
Participant: But until nine hundred ninety-nine?
Dr. Berzin: Well, sure, there’s general suffering. It’s not as pleasurable as a god realm. But there’s the suffering of change. They have some suffering, of course. Whether they get sick or not, I have no idea. But the main point of it is that they don’t know how to set about accomplishing anything they want or eliminating anything undesirable because everything is so easy. So, they have no initiative to practice the Dharma. They are also poor in mental ability, and they are unable to retain the meaning of any teaching or to discern any specific points in it. So, although they’re humanoid, they don’t have precious human lives because they lack any ambition to achieve any spiritual goal and are mentally too weak to pursue any intense spiritual training.
It’s very interesting from a sociological point of view of situations in which everybody is equal and everybody gets the same that it doesn’t matter whether you work hard or not. Therefore, there’s no incentive to do anything. It’s very challenging, very difficult. I used to teach in many of the Eastern European countries when they were still under the Communist regimes. One of the things that I always emphasized when I taught there was cause and effect because many people there didn’t really feel that they could accomplish anything – because it didn’t really matter. You couldn’t travel anywhere, you couldn’t change your job, you couldn’t move very easily. So, what difference did it make what you did? So, this was a big issue that many people needed to work on. Some people instinctively did have the feeling, “OK, externally, I can’t do anything, but internally, I can try to improve myself.” Some people had that, but some people didn’t. So, this is quite an interesting analysis.
On the other hand, they say that those who live on the Southern Continent (where we live) are known as the people who live in The Lands of Action, which also means that they differ very greatly in their circumstances and abilities. And we can see the results of our actions in this lifetime. That wouldn’t necessarily be true from a karmic point of view, but if get a good education and are able to figure things out, maybe you’ll get a better job. It’s not necessarily that you will get a better job. That, of course, is part of our degenerate times. But people have the incentive to try, at least, to work hard, to gain more education, to learn more skills, because many people, at least, do see the results of their actions in this lifetime. It’s in that type of situation where people have the incentive to follow a spiritual path and have the feeling that they can get somewhere with it. So, this is an important point.
One of the aspects of having a precious human rebirth is being born on a Southern Continent. We are born in a land of action, meaning that we each have different abilities, different circumstances, and that it’s up to us to try to improve them. And actually, we can improve them.
Now, I don’t think this is a big advertisement for capitalism. I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that if you train yourself, you can see some results. And because you can see some results, it gives you the incentive to train yourself further. And I think that if we do some spiritual practice, some meditation practice or whatever, that, although we might not get dramatic results… and certainly, Dharma practice goes up and down all the time. It’s the nature of samsara that it goes up and down. So, sometimes things go better in our practice; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we like practicing; sometimes we don’t. It’s absolutely natural. That’s according to the laws of samsara, basically. So, nothing special about that.
Being Realistic about Our Own Spiritual Progress
But if we look on a longer-term scale… as His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says, “Look at yourself five years ago and now,” if you’ve been doing steady Dharma practice in those five years, “that’s where you will notice a difference. If there’s some improvement – if you are calmer, if you don’t get upset so easily, if you don’t get angry so easily, if you’re not so greedy, not so nervous, and so on, and you get along better with people – that’s an indication that you’ve made some progress.” This is how you chart yourself. And the biggest indication, usually, is if you’re calmer – that you don’t go flying off into fits of anger or fits of greed and attachment.
But sometimes, you will get upset. Again, one has to be realistic. It’s only when you are an arhat, a liberated being, when you’re at that point, that you’re not going to get angry any more or be greedy any more. Before that, you still have disturbing emotions, so don’t be shocked when they’re still there. Don’t be disappointed. Don’t be disillusioned and discouraged when you see that they’re still there.
The main thing is to recognize them quickly, like in the practices for gaining concentration: you need to recognize quickly when you have mental wandering – more and more quickly – and then correct it. So, similarly (and Shantideva mentions this as well), you need to notice as quickly as possible when you have come under the influence of a disturbing emotion and then to correct it, to apply all the various opponents that you learn in Dharma practice. That’s the real key. If you get angry, can you not get so angry? And are you able to get over it very, very quickly, apply an opponent, and it’s finished?
It’s those tendencies, those habits – they’re the last to go. The tendency is still going to be there. So, even if it doesn’t manifest in a shouting and screaming episode of anger, the energy of anger will still come up. So, this is something that we need to be patient with.
It’s very interesting. As you progress with the Dharma, you find that, “OK, some really difficult situation comes up, and mentally I’m able to handle it. I don’t get upset and so on, but my energy is disturbed.” So, you find that the energy is upset. That’s because the tendency is still there. That is also a good indication of why, when you gain the skills, you really do need the highest class of tantra and the tantric practices in order to work with the energies of the body. That’s where the subtlest disturbances, which are the most difficult to get rid of, are going to be found.
OK. So, we have this precious human rebirth that is very difficult to find from the point of view of its causes, from the point of view of analogies, from the point of view of numbers. So, let’s think about that for a little while and try to recognize that if we have a precious human rebirth, it is really rare. Then, on the basis of that, perhaps, we will develop interest to see, “Well, what is this precious human rebirth, and how can I best make use of it?
It’s funny. It’s sort of like when you hear a description in commercial advertising about something being so precious and so wonderful that you develop a lot of interest in getting it. “Special, new, supercomputer that goes ten times faster than everything that’s available!” Look at when this new computer operating system, Vista, came out recently – “How special!” And everybody… not everybody, but some people who didn’t even know what it was had to have it. So, this is the thinking here – that when you appreciate how difficult the precious human rebirth is, you will take interest in finding out, “Well, what is it, and how can I get it?” So, let’s think about it for a moment.
There’s one more example. I don’t know if it’s in any of the texts, but again, Geshe Darghyey used this example. He said that if there’s only one open position in a company, and a thousand people were competing for it, you’d realize how rare it would be to get it – much more than if only three people were competing for it. So, similarly, you look at the precious human rebirth. You look at the number of insects and hell creatures and stuff like that and then at the number of human parents in a situation into which you could be reborn with a precious human rebirth – it’s a little bit similar to this example of so many people competing, trying to get that position.
And when we think of the rarity of this precious human rebirth – just the general idea of it – what are we talking about? We’re talking about being reborn as a human being that has interest in spiritual development, particularly in the Buddhist path, and that has the opportunities to pursue it. And if we compare the number of humans who have that with the number of humans in general, we see that, even among humans, that’s very rare.
Thank you.