We are discussing and studying the text Letter to a Friend by Nagarjuna, the great Indian master, in which he outlines the basic features of the Mahayana path, most of which are brought together in the graded path teachings, the lam-rim teachings, that came to Tibet with Atisha. Here, Nagarjuna goes into a great deal of detail about what would be in the initial and intermediate scope teachings in lam-rim, whereas Atisha goes into great detail about the advanced scope.
In any case, the way that Nagarjuna presents his material is, first, to give a general introduction with some of the essentials for Dharma practice, and then, to give a presentation of the six far-reaching attitudes. In terms of these, he has the presentation of far-reaching discriminating awareness (the perfection of wisdom), which is where we are now, and that includes the trainings in higher ethical discipline, higher concentration, and higher discriminating awareness, or wisdom.
The training in higher discriminating awareness, which is talking about the understanding of voidness, he divides into two levels of motivation for gaining this understanding: (1) how to turn the mind from being concerned about just this lifetime and the disturbing emotions of this lifetime, which is equivalent to the initial scope in lam-rim, and (2) how to turn the mind from being concerned about the whole of samsara, which is equivalent to the intermediate scope in lam-rim where we develop full renunciation.
We have finished covering the faults of samsara. Now we are up to the section in which Nagarjuna explains the huge extent of the sufferings of samsara. This is where he goes into the sufferings of the specific realms. He already spoke about the sufferings of humans, and now he will speak about the sufferings of the other realms. These include the hell realms, or joyless realms with the trapped beings. Then he presents the animal realm, the realm of the creeping creatures who eat each other, who get used for work and so on – so, not so much about house pets that are taken care of nicely. Then he presents the pretas. These are the clutching ghosts, the ones that are terribly constricted in the sense of not being able to eat and so on (“pretas” is what they’re called in Sanskrit). And then he presents the sufferings of the gods. These are the divine beings in the divine realms. Finally, he presents the sufferings of the asuras, the quasi gods, or anti gods. Sometimes I call them the “would-be-divine,” the ones that are jealous of the gods and always are fighting with them and trying to be like them.
I have explained this before, but just briefly, one of the ways that can help us to understand these rebirths in these different realms is to think in terms of how a mind and body are, in general, capable of experiencing the entire spectrum of any sense area or realm and the entire spectrum of happiness and unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness are how we experience seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling a physical sensation and some sort of thought or emotional state, like anger or patience, that could go with any of these sensory experiences.
As humans, we are limited as to the range of what we can experience within any specific sense field because of the limitations of the hardware of the human body. But we know that dogs, for example, are able to hear things beyond the range of the human ear, that other animals are able to see at night because they can see levels of light that humans are not able to see, and so on. So, if we think in terms of that, then we could, by analogy, think how it could be possible to experience a larger range of pleasure and pain and how the mind could experience that in terms of feeling greater levels of happiness and unhappiness. But in order to experience a greater range, we would need a different set of hardware – so, different types of bodies, which are the bodies we find in these different rebirth states.
I believe very strongly that it is unfair to Buddhism to reduce these various realms and rebirths in them merely to being analogies of various types of human experience. Although, of course, in the teachings on karma, they do explain that a being who gains rebirth as a human after having had rebirth in one of these other realms will have a little bit of leftover of what they experienced in that previous life. So, as human beings, we could experience something similar to a hellish rebirth, a clutching ghost rebirth, an animal rebirth, a god rebirth or something like that, though we wouldn’t experience the full extent of what we’d experienced in those rebirths.
If we want to get out of having uncontrollably recurring samsaric rebirths, then we basically want to get out of having any type of hardware that could experience anything on this spectrum from extreme happiness to extreme unhappiness because cognizing some object with a particular sense. When we talk about gaining liberation, we are talking about no longer being reborn in any of these life forms with the hardware that supports the ups and downs of suffering and happiness. They are constantly changing, and happiness never satisfies, etc., all of which was outlined already in the general sufferings of samsara. So, we want to get out of that.
When looking at these various types of rebirth states, we would want first of all, as an initial scope motivation, to avoid the worst states, the ones with the most suffering and the most pain. They are certainly less preferable than the pleasurable ones. To do that, we need to avoid destructive behavior and to act constructively. But if we act constructively on the basis of grasping for true existence, a truly existent “me” and so on, or on the basis of self-interest, which derives from this grasping for a solid “me,” then, of course, we continue to perpetuate samsara. We don’t get out of samsara by doing that; instead, we just generate one of the better rebirth states. But as we saw with the general sufferings of samsara, none of these better rebirth states last, and one needs to fall from higher states to lower ones and so on.
Now we get into the rather lengthy discussion of the suffering of the hells. Nagarjuna begins this with Verse 77.
Verse 77: The Hell Realms
[77] For limited beings who commit faulty acts there’ll be the constant suffering in joyless realms: (known as) reviving, black thread, intensely heating, crushing, howling, pain unrelenting, and the likes.
In enumerating the hells, Nagarjuna lists six of them, but there are actually eight hells described in the lam-rim. We’ll go through them in brief.
Now, where these hells are located is a certain distance below Bodh Gaya in India. This is stated in the traditional texts. But His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said quite clearly and quite explicitly that, according to the Buddha’s teachings himself, if certain teachings are contradicted by valid perception, valid cognition, there is no reason to accept them. This pertains quite clearly to the geographic descriptions that are found in the ancient texts. His Holiness says he is quite willing to throw them out or just to look at them as examples for learning to work with numbers and figures and things like that, that you have in the abhidharma texts. It trains the mind after all. But there is no reason to accept them literally.
How Can We Relate to the Hell Realms? Can We Accept That They Exist?
Now, just because we don’t need to accept literally the geographic location of these hells doesn’t mean that we don’t accept the existence of hellish rebirths. For there to be a hellish rebirth, there has to be an environment for that. There has to be a location for that, whether or not those locations and environments are perceptible to the human eye. One has actually to think about that quite deeply to see, “Well, what in the world could that mean, and how could I possibly accept that?” Actually, that’s a good point to start with before we go into the list of these various hells.
The first question is: how do we deal with the existence of them? As I outlined, we could, I think, accept fairly logically the fact that the mind itself could experience all levels on the spectrums of the various sense faculties, including pleasure and pain (in terms of tactile sensations) and including happiness and unhappiness (in response to physical or mental objects).
Then the question is, what kind of body would support that, and where would that body be? You can’t have a body without an environment to support that body. That’s quite clear, isn’t it? So, let’s think about that for a moment – how in the world we relate to these hell reams.
OK. Any thoughts on them? What were you thinking about?
Participant: I could imagine that the hells could be right here and that one has, for example, a subtler body or something. We cannot see them, but they experience the same environment totally differently than we do.
Dr. Berzin: Mark says that the existence of these different realms could be right here where we are because it is possible to imagine a mind with a subtle body experiencing the same environment or the same place in a completely different way, in a hellish way. Well, that, I think, is really the point. But one has to refine that a little bit.
Shantideva wrote in the fifth chapter of Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior (verse 7), and I am paraphrasing, “Who created all the molten fire ground and so on? Who created the siren women? Who created all the guards of the hells? They are all created by the mind.” So, they are created by the karma, the aftermath of destructive karmic impulses and actions that we have committed in the past. They cause the mind to project experiences, certain situations, in certain ways.
I think we can understand this in terms of, let’s say, living in a big city. You live in a big, crowded, noisy city. Some people could experience that as like a heaven (we’re talking just about humans). “This is the most wonderful place! It’s exciting and interesting. So much is going on, and so much is available.” They love it. Other people could experience the same environment as a hell. “It’s so noisy and polluted and crowded. The people are unfriendly and always in a hurry. And I hate it! It’s a hell.” So, the way that we experience a situation is certainly created by the mind.
Remember, happiness and unhappiness are defined as the way in which we experience the ripening of our karma. So, as a result of negative karmic tendencies and karmic force, we experience whatever object it is with unhappiness, and as the result of positive karmic force, we experience it with happiness. Likewise, what we encounter, the circumstances that we get ourselves into, is affected by previous karma.
Avoiding the Two Extreme Positions
But of course, we have to qualify this – saying that it is created by the mind – because it’s not that we go to the extreme of saying that everything just exists in your head. Nor do we go to the extreme of saying, “Well, there is a truly existent environment sitting out there by its own power. People label it differently and experience it differently, but objectively, there is something sitting there, out there.” Those are two extremes that are avoided by the actual, deepest Prasangika view of voidness.
Of course, that is not so easy to understand. But I think it’s important at least to keep in mind that these two extreme positions are not the deepest understandings of how it works. That requires a great deal of thought and contemplation. You can’t say, from a Prasangika point of view, that everything that we experience, the source of it, is just karma. You have to say that things also arise from their elements, various physical causes and so on. That’s accepted. But you can’t establish the existence of any of these things by something being on the side of these things by their own power. You can only establish its existence in relation to mind, basically – mental labeling, valid cognition and so on. Things are neither totally illusionary and nonexistent nor totally solidly existent.
I think that when it comes to these hells, we can at least get a little bit of understanding that an environment can be experienced in many, many different ways according to karma. Are the hell beings here and projecting a hell realm with its own physical reality here? And are we, as humans, projecting this reality that we see here? Mind you, the physical world, as we experience it as humans, exists in the same way as the hell realms exist. I don’t think that it has a different type of existence. The hell realms are just as real or just as unreal as the human realm. So, this becomes very interesting, very interesting, and not so easy, actually.
There are some very, very small creatures that live inside trees or something like that. For them, the whole universe is a tree. And we can’t really perceive that universe because it is too small. Or they live inside a drop of water.
Participant: Or your stomach.
Dr. Berzin: Or your stomach. That’s right. Their environment certainly exists. And they experience it as having a size proportionate to their body size. So, some things to them are big and some things are small. Some things are very far away, and some things are close. Just like any universe. I think thoughts like this can help us start to relate to these different realms and what is experienced in these different realms. What do you think?
Participant: There exist bacteria that live in an acid environment.
Dr. Berzin: There are bacteria that live in acid environments. They live in boiling water.
Participant: But I can’t imagine that they suffer living there.
Dr. Berzin: I don’t think that they necessarily do. We are not saying that a rebirth as a bacteria (if a bacteria has a mind – that I don’t know; let’s assumes that it does) is a hell rebirth – a bacteria that lives in some acid boiling volcano or something like that. One can’t say that that’s a hell rebirth. That’s an animal rebirth. They have the suffering of animals – of being eaten by other bacteria, for example. One has to be careful not to confuse the realms. That’s why the analogies with the realms that we are familiar with – the human and the animal – aren’t precise. Those are just analogies; they’re are not equivalents. OK?
Even the images that are used (we’ll have them in the descriptions of the individual hells), like being in an acid river or in a red-hot house or having red hot pokers and tridents stuck up your anus, and stuff like that… I really wonder if we need to take those literally in terms of human experience. Or are they more analogies for incredible, painful experiences? I don’t know. That I don’t know.
I think the point of describing these hells and thinking about them is, first, to think, “I sure don’t want to experience this,” and then, to think, “Nobody else wants to experience this” – so, there are two levels of that. But it is important to take this seriously; otherwise, one is too limited in one’s scope of compassion and renunciation. Or maybe it’s renunciation first and then compassion – that would be the more appropriate situation. It’s hard for many of us even to relate to horrible human conditions like what’s going on in Baghdad or Darfur nowadays. That’s hard enough to relate to and to imagine what it’s like, let alone these other, nonhuman realms. It requires opening up one’s heart and not being afraid.
Not Being Afraid by Opening One’s Heart and Taking on the Suffering Voluntarily – Tonglen
This is a very, very interesting aspect. His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks about this quite a lot. He says that if you think about these horrible situations that you yourself might be in or are about to face – let’s say, you learn from your doctor that you have an incurable cancer or that you have Alzheimer’s Disease, and you know that you are going to face some horrible suffering – and you think of that just in terms of yourself, you have a great deal of fear and are very weak because you feel hopeless and that you have no control over this. You just have to take the suffering.
But if you think in terms of compassion by thinking of all the other beings in the universe who have a similar type of suffering and take responsibility to help them with that, and even further, if you do a tonglen practice of giving and taking and really imagine taking on their suffering and giving them some solution to this, you change the whole situation completely because now you are accepting suffering voluntarily. It’s not that you have no control over it; you accept it voluntarily. And to accept it voluntarily means that you have a great deal of courage. And if you have a great deal of courage, you have a great deal of self-confidence. Then you don’t have fear. You are not afraid of the suffering because you are willingly accepting it, willingly taking it on.
This, he says, is one of the greatest benefits of compassion. We can face very difficult situations without fear and without depression or without self-pity if we have compassion for everybody else who’s experiencing something similar and voluntarily take the responsibility on ourselves to deal with their suffering. This is a very amazing point, isn’t it?
Think about it for a moment. His Holiness repeats it over and over again when he gives his general talks on compassion. Very important.
Dreading, Rather Than Fearing, Rebirth in Lower Realms
I don’t recall Nagarjuna saying this specifically, but in many of the later texts, they speak about dreading rebirth in the hells. Why do you go for refuge, put a safe direction in your life? One of reasons is sometimes translated as “fear” of the lower rebirths, but I think that this is not a very good way of translating the term. You dread it: you really don’t want it to happen. Then you see that going in the direction of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is a way to avoid that happening. Specifically, not committing destructive actions will be a way of avoiding that. So, then you take refuge.
But here, we are talking about a Mahayana point of view. If we are thinking just of ourselves experiencing these horrible rebirths, then, although one could say in nice way that we want to dread them, not fear them, not be afraid of them, fear will still be there. Buddhism isn’t stressing fear as a motivation. This is something that many people object to in other religions that present hells – that we are supposed to be afraid and to fear that. Well, maybe I am whitewashing Buddhism by saying Buddhism doesn’t say that. I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t say that. That’s why I translate the word that could be translated as “fear” as “dread” – we really don’t want it to happen.
But if we’re thinking only of ourselves, there is weakness there and some fear, even if dread is our primary motivation. That’s why it is important to go beyond a self-centered, so-called Hinayana view toward this type of suffering and to think in a Mahayana way – of everybody having these types of sufferings and how we would like everybody to overcome that, and “I take on the responsibility for everybody to overcome it.” Then we don’t have fear; then we have a great deal of strength. It’s not from a position of weakness that we are dealing with these issues.
Participant: Leaving this weakness behind also means to leave this feeling of guilt behind.
Dr. Berzin: Right. If we leave the fear behind, that also gives the opportunity to leave guilt behind.
I think that leaving guilt behind and leaving fear behind come from two different things, actually. Leaving fear behind comes, as His Holiness says, from voluntarily taking on the suffering and dealing with it for the sake of others. So, we have courage and self-confidence. That’s part of the bodhichitta aspect, the relative bodhichitta: “I am going to take responsibility to reach enlightenment and to help liberate everybody.”
I think that overcoming guilt comes from the understanding of voidness, understanding that there is no solid, findable “me” who could be guilty and that there are no solid, findable destructive actions that we have done that are so horrible, which with guilt, we just hold onto – “I’m so bad for having done them.” The understanding of voidness, I think, is the real opponent for dissolving guilt. As in all Buddhist teachings, we need both aspects: the compassion and the wisdom sides.
Questions
Is Tonglen a Realistic Practice?
Participant: I’ve always had a bit of a problem with this taking on suffering voluntarily. For me, it’s very easy to comment on something that’s realistic and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s realistic. It’s more realistic than what I normally think.” So, that’s one point about taking on the suffering that seems to me a bit like a fantasy. So, my mind always starts wondering about these points. I think, “It’s actually impossible to take all the sufferings because I can’t actually take it. I can’t experience their suffering.” So, in this way, my mind always freaks out at this point.
Dr. Berzin: Mark is pointing out that he tends to approach things in a very realistic way. So, with this taking on the suffering of everybody and the tonglen practice, the giving and taking, he is reminded of the fact that, of course, objectively, it is not possible to take on the suffering of others and, therefore, the whole exercise seems to be a bit pointless or fruitless.
Well, whether or not we are able to successfully take on the suffering of others is not the point here. After all, we need to meditate without hopes and expectations or fears of failure and disappointment. It’s not a matter of success or failure. The thing is that it gets us away from thinking just about ourselves. And we appreciate that there are tons of others who have the same problem or something very similar and that their suffering is as terrible and as painful as my suffering. So, we expand the scope of this pain.
It’s like Shantideva says, “Pain and suffering have no owner. Pain is to be removed not because it is my suffering or your suffering but simply because it is suffering and it hurts.” So, in a sense, by broadening the scope of our concern, it gets us out of this self-cherishing attitude of thinking only of me. And what we develop is the willingness: I wish I were able to take it on. Also, on a very practical level, we can deal with people who might have that same problem. “I am not the only one who has cancer or who lost a love one,” or whatever. This type of thing.
I was just reading about the woman Cindy Sheehan. Actually, she has just given up, but this is the one who was protesting the Iraq war, camping out for a couple of years by President Bush’s ranch in Texas, trying to get him to actually speak to her. Her son was killed in Iraq. Now, you could sit at home, having lost your son in a war that seems to you totally senseless, and be very, very unhappy and depressed and feel sorry for yourself. But look at the courage that that woman developed going out and protesting. Thinking of all the parents who lost loved ones in this war gave her a great deal of strength.
Now, whether she succeeded or not, I don’t know. She got a lot of hate mail and terrible things said about her and done to her. And she was totally ignored by the administration. But one wonders what her state of mind was during all of this. Was she bitter that she was being ignored, or did she develop more confidence and more courage? As I said, I read today she has given up, which is sad. I would imagine, having given up, her suffering might increase actually.
Participant: But that is an example when somebody deals with a problem. But it is another thing when you can’t take the suffering from others.
Dr. Berzin: Here, Mariana says, we are dealing with it just on a more theoretical level because we can’t actually take the suffering of others from them.
Well, in a sense that is true. But in another sense, when oppressed people know that somebody is fighting for their cause, that, I think, helps them know that there are other people that care and that are trying to help them. I think that helps, as opposed to the feeling, “Nobody cares at all about my suffering. Here we are, being completely devastated in refugee camps in Darfur, and the world doesn’t care.” Or the people in Rwanda during the massacres… which the UN just left.
Participant: What can I do? I can send some money.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, what can we do? We can send some money. That’s a little bit of engaged Buddhism.
Participant: But we can’t stop this.
Dr. Berzin: That’s true.
Participant: I feel a bit helpless.
Dr. Berzin: That’s true. We feel a bit helpless. But the thing is to wish and imagine to be able to help. It certainly gets us out of the “poor me” syndrome and our little problems. You know, I have a leak in my ceiling. Well, these people don’t even have a ceiling.
Anyway, I think this is something that we need to work with in our own meditation experience when we actually are having a problem, whether it’s a medical problem or a problem with a person, like with somebody who did something very unpleasant to us. We could spend all our time being really angry and bitter about this person, blaming them and accusing them of being so horrible. Or we could think of everybody else who has experienced something similar from someone that they loved. That takes us out of our self-obsession with this whole thing and our obsession with blaming the person, the loved one, that did something nasty to us and allows the room for forgiveness. It’s irrelevant whether or not we can actually take the suffering from other people.
Participant: Yeah, but then it is a selfish thing.
Dr. Berzin: Is it a selfish thing? It can be if you’re just using them in order to help yourself.
Participant: Look at the suffering of others for myself to….
Dr. Berzin: Right, it could be done in a selfish way, in an egotistic, self-centered way. But it doesn’t have to be – if you are sincere. “I really wish that I could help them,” not just, “I’m doing this in order to make myself feel better.” There are people who volunteer in hospitals and nursing homes just to make themselves feel useful; they feel better because “I’m being good.” That’s very different from people who try to help because they’re actually concerned about the other people. There is a difference. The same thing, even if we are not doing anything physical, even if we’re just sitting in our meditation. I think so. But again, this is something that you have to deal with in your own experience and see.
Participant: My problem was actually not so much about dealing with them, with all these things. That’s based on a more realistic view. But then you’re just saying, “Ah, it’s not like this, like I see it as if there is nothing I can do.” That works. And that also goes to an emotional level where it works. But the point about just imagining that one takes on all the suffering – that’s, actually, the most difficult point. That they are suffering – that’s easy to see. And with this, I can build up some sort of artificial compassion or something. But the next step of imagining that you take it on – that’s not realistic.
Dr. Berzin: Mark points out that thinking with compassion about the other person’s suffering and having the wish for them to have that suffering removed – that is something that one could be sincere about. But to actually imagine that we take it from them and take it on ourselves – that’s unrealistic. And because it is unrealistic (since it’s hardly likely that it could possibly happen), it’s difficult to be sincere in that practice.
Participant: To have an emotional aspect.
Dr. Berzin: To have an emotional aspect to it other than just being an exercise in visualization, basically.
Well, again, I think that one of the issues here is perhaps the word “really.” Can I really take it on? I don’t know. I’m just speaking off the top of my head now. But to think that the suffering is something solid in them and that you can cut it out and put it inside you is, I don’t think, an accurate way of imagining it. One needs to deconstruct this type of thing.
I don’t really know because, in my own experience of it, which is fairly limited, this issue of whether or not I could really take it on from them doesn’t arise. It doesn’t matter. Whether or not you can do an analysis of the voidness of the suffering and all of that…. Well, you need some analysis of the voidness of it in order not to keep it as some heavy rock inside of you. So, that you need. But I think that as soon as you start wondering, “Can I really take it in?” and so on, you destroy any emotion that’s there. In other words, that’s not the point. The point is developing sympathy, courage, and realizing that as much as my suffering hurts, the cumulative suffering of the world is much greater.
Participant: That’s not the problem. The problem is…
Dr. Berzin: The problem is, can you really, really take it on. And as I say, I think that that is making a problem by concretizing the whole thing. It’s not the issue. In other words, don’t worry about it. Otherwise, the practice is not very effective – as you have noticed: there is a block there. So, what is the answer? Is the answer that the whole thing is a ridiculous practice and that you should throw it out? Or is the answer that whether or not you can really take it on or not is not the point?
Karsten?
The Point of Tonglen Is to Reduce Self-Cherishing and to Develop the Wish to Take on Others’ Sufferings
Participant: I’m just wondering how far this taking on of suffering aims to psychologically reduce ego-clinging. Maybe this also is the point of it.
Dr. Berzin: Exactly.
Participant: I think what it does is to really put you down a little bit. So, I think this is the reason you take it personally on you.
Dr. Berzin: Right. This is exactly what Karsten is saying. Where does tonglen come in? It comes into the bodhichitta practice of equalizing and exchanging self with others in order to overcome self-cherishing. So, the point of it is that it smashes self-cherishing, the ego-clinging attitude that “I don’t want to take on anybody else’s suffering. I don’t want to deal with your suffering. I have enough by myself.”
Participant: It’s not about this. It’s the point of having to imagine something that doesn’t fit with reality. Till this point, everything fits with reality.
Dr. Berzin: Ahh, now it’s interesting. Now he is saying that he finds this difficult because it doesn’t fit with reality. So, every other Buddhist practice that you do fits nicely with reality – like imagining that you have eleven heads and a thousand arms and are surrounded in a rainbow of light and can multiply into a million forms? That has more reality to you?
Participant: Actually, I could imagine it is more real.
Dr. Berzin: I see. You could imagine that that is more real.
Well, what can a Buddha do? Look at the teachings. It says a Buddha can’t pull out the suffering of others like pulling out a thorn from a foot. So, Buddha can’t eliminate the suffering. A Buddha would like to be able to eliminate the suffering; therefore, a Buddha teaches how to do that. So, does a Buddha or a bodhisattva imagine that they can actually remove the suffering? Or would they say, “Well, there’s nothing I can do anyway, so why bother.”
Participant: I think a Buddha would be realistic about the situation.
Dr. Berzin: Yes, but does a Buddha still have… I mean what’s bodhichitta?
Participant: It’s a wish.
Dr. Berzin: It’s a wish to be able to reach enlightenment to be able to benefit everybody by helping them overcome this suffering.
Participant: As much as possible.
Dr. Berzin: As much as is possible.
Participant: When it is not possible?
Participant: Sometimes you see it’s not possible. You see somebody suffering. You are full of anxiousness. And you see it’s just….
Dr. Berzin: Yes, you see that it is hopeless. Yes, there are things, situations, in which it is hopeless. What about when your child is sick? You are with your sick baby and you wish that you could take on the sickness so that the baby…
Participant: But you can’t.
Dr. Berzin: You can’t. But does that mean that you don’t wish to be able to do it and that you say, “This is ridiculous. So, tough luck baby”?
Participant: But you can’t…
Dr. Berzin: You can’t. But so what? Whether you can or not is not the point. This is what I am saying. It doesn’t matter whether you can or not.
Participant: I must say, to a certain degree, one can engage in helping others. When you have the feeling of “I’d like to take away something,” especially with the example of a sick friend or whatever, you can go there, make some soup or whatever. You can do something at least. Though you can’t take away the virus or whatever that has initiated the illness, you can take action to alleviate the pain or affliction or whatever that is there.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, Andrea says that there are some things we could do to actually help others. That’s true. Even though we couldn’t take the sickness away, we could go to a sick friend and make some soup, or we could comfort our sick baby. This is more like engaged Buddhism – actually doing something.
Now, we may not be able to help all the starving people of the world. That we may not be able to do. But we try to do whatever we can based on our talents and abilities and our current situation with the wish – bodhichitta – to be able to help them more. Sure, we are not ever going to become Omnipotent God and be able to just snap our fingers and take away everybody’s suffering. But the wish is there. So, we imagine being able to do it: “How wonderful it would be if this were possible.” Sure, it’s not possible, but “I wish that my teaching you or helping you would actually work and that you would learn something and reach enlightenment through it.” Surely, a Buddha wishes that, but without hopes, expectations or disappointments. Otherwise, why bother? So, there is an aspiration there.
Participant: It’s more about the wish.
Dr. Berzin: It’s about a wish, an aspiration.
Participant: I just have to remember to do meditation on the wish and not get caught up in my intellectual…
Dr. Berzin: Well, some people have an obsession with precision. That can occasionally be useful and can occasionally be a problem.
Participant: I think it’s helpful in closing the emotional circle during the taking, to relate it to myself, to blame it on the self-cherishing thought, with the teachings in the background in the mind – what I learned and my experience from the meditation. Then I can relate it to the self-cherishing thought. Then it gets smaller. So, it gets to be an emotional thing again when you take the suffering on; it’s not something artificial. It goes back to the cause of my suffering, so I have an emotional relation to it.
Dr. Berzin: You’re saying that it’s important to close the emotional circle (to use your own words), which means to relate the suffering to the self-cherishing attitude and to use it to get rid of that self-cherishing attitude in oneself. This I could imagine happening at the level of the self-cherishing attitude that says, “I don’t want to deal with your problem. It’s your problem, not my problem.”
But also, I think that what you say can be understood in another way. I don’t know if this is what you meant, but I think this is really the point, which is that… look at immeasurable compassion (the four immeasurable attitudes): “may everybody be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.” It’s not just the suffering itself that you want to get rid of because if you don’t get rid of the causes, the suffering will come back.
So, what is the cause? (The Wheel of Sharp Weapons goes into this very, very nicely.) On one level, it is destructive behavior. So, you can change that behavior. On a deeper level, it’s self-cherishing. And on a deeper level still, it’s grasping for a solid “me.” Yes, it is emotionally more relevant if you relate it to yourself – “my destructive behavior, my self-cherishing, my grasping for a solid ‘me’ – I want to change that.” Then that’s what you want to give to others. And this you can teach them. Whether or not they learn that and put it into practice is something else, but by teaching them that, they will avoid future suffering – maybe not the immediate suffering that’s already ripened; that you can’t change.
Participant: I don’t know which teaching I got it from, but the second level that you mentioned, the self-cherishing thought, you can completely destroy it and, in doing that, you realize that the real “I” is empty of inherent existence.
Dr. Berzin: She says that in doing this, one imagines that one smashes one’s self-cherishing attitude and eliminates the false conception of the solid “me.” That’s exactly what the Wheel of Sharp Weapons says in all its verses.
How Tonglen Practice Works When It Works
Participant: It’s also a possibility that it is actually possible to remove the suffering of others. I remember a book that talked about a rinpoche who could actually take on some sicknesses of other people.
Dr. Berzin: Right. As Karsten says, isn’t it possible sometimes to do this? Yes, it is. But how it is possible is that, by doing this practice, you provide the circumstances for the positive karma in the other person that wouldn’t normally ripen so quickly to ripen more quickly so that they overcome the suffering. In doing so, it also acts as a circumstance for negative karma in yourself to ripen – which you are willing to do in order to help others, like a bodhisattva being willing go to a hell in order to help others. In that sense, it works. You can’t literally take the suffering from somebody onto yourself; instead, the practice acts as a circumstance. That’s how it actually works when it works. But there has to be a fantastic karmic connection with the other person.
And, yes, there are examples of the old Serkong Rinpoche and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It worked. But they are pretty, pretty advanced practitioners. And Serkong Rinpoche always used to say, when doing the tonglen practice, that you should be totally willing to die in doing it. He always said that, every time he taught it. That was, in fact, how he did die. So, one has to be really, really sincere as a bodhisattva. That’s very rare.
Participant: Can you explain this with Serkong Rinpoche?
Dr. Berzin: His Holiness was flying to Geneva in Switzerland. Yasser Arafat was also going to be landing at Geneva airport at the same time, and the authorities said that they couldn’t guarantee His Holiness’s safety. Of course, there were a lot of concerns about a bomb threat or something like that against Arafat.
Serkong Rinpoche had been teaching Shantideva’s text Bodhicharyavatara in Spiti. He stopped at a certain point and excused himself. He said he had to leave, and he went to a certain place – he chose somebody’s house in Spiti. He stopped at the monastery on the way and collected one old monk that he knew and told him what he planned to do – to take on this obstacle from His Holiness. Then, he went to another monastery and made offerings and did all sorts of things. When he got to this other person’s house, he asked the attendant to put down a white sheet rather than the yellow one that he always slept on and to help him go outside to the toilet (it was night). Then he put his arm on the attendant, which he never really did, and sort of, in a sense, said goodbye to him. Then he laid down in a special position, which he normally didn’t go to sleep in. The other old monk was in the room with him. And he went into this meditation, and he just died – like that.
At exactly that same time, His Holiness was in the air flying to Geneva, and Arafat was also in the air. For some reason, Arafat just decided to change his plans, and he didn’t go to Geneva. He turned back. His Holiness landed in Geneva. There was still some chaos at the airport, and the motorcade got lost in Geneva – so, a little obstacle. But nothing major happened to His Holiness. Serkong Rinpoche did exactly what he told the monk that he was going to do – take on the obstacle from His Holiness – because, obviously, Serkong Rinpoche, as I knew from many other instances, certainly had the clairvoyance to know such things. But he was a very, very special case. Very unusual and very amazing.
When he taught tonglen and said that you should be willing to die in the process, he always cited Kunu Lama Rinpoche as the source. Kunu Lama Rinpoche was the only one that I ever heard of that all the Tibetans accepted as a real bodhisattva, as the real thing. He was the one that taught Shantideva’s text to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
He used to stay in Bodh Gaya most of the time in the latter part of his life – even in the summer when it is like forty-eight degrees centigrade in Bodh Gaya. He stayed in a room, usually with the door closed, and it was really very, very hot. Serkong Rinpoche wanted some teachings from him. Kunu Lama Rinpoche said, “Yes, but you have to come to Bodh Gaya in the summer to receive them,” which, of course, Rinpoche did.
Here in the West, we make everything so easy. Maybe some Dharma centers make it difficult by charging a lot of money, but we make it so easy, basically because we want to get the money to pay the rent or to feed the monks back in India. But the real thing is for the teacher to make it very difficult for the student so that the student really develops the perseverance, the patience and the strength of character that “I don’t care how much suffering is involved, I have to get this teaching in order to be able to reach enlightenment and help others.” It builds character.
A real bodhisattva doesn’t make it easy for the other person but, instead, makes it a situation in which the other person can really advance spiritually. Most Westerners, though, can neither take that nor, if they are in the position of being a teacher, give it out to others. Look at what a difficult time Marpa gave to Milarepa. That’s another good example of this.
Participant: But he said, “Don’t do it to your disciples.”
Dr. Berzin: He said, “Don’t do it to your disciples”? Well, he probably saw that his disciples couldn’t take it. Serkong Rinpoche gave me a pretty hard time. I don’t do that to my students.
OK. So, the hells…. We only have seven minutes left. Shall we start going into this or leave it for next time and just finish up in case there are any more thoughts on what we have been discussing?
Participant: Maybe we should start a bit; otherwise, next time, we won’t make it.
Dr. Berzin: OK, we’ll start a bit. We had in this verse seventy-seven,
[77] For limited beings who commit faulty acts there’ll be the constant suffering in joyless realms: (known as) reviving, black thread, intensely heating, crushing, howling, pain unrelenting, and the likes.
The Eight Hot Hells
Let’s look at the descriptions of these hells. As I mentioned, there are two more in the standard list of the hot hells. These eight are:
[1] The Reviving Joyless Realm, or Hell. This is where beings fight and kill each other five hundred times a day and chop each other up and stuff like that. Then a voice comes from the sky and says, “Revive.” Then they all revive and go back to fighting and killing each other. That happens five hundred times in each one of these hell realm days. This is, they say, usually, the result of having killed others in wars, murders and this type of thing. They’re constantly killing each other.
[2] The next one is Black Thread Hell. Here people are laid down flat and there is… starting with this hell, there are guards (in first hell, there aren’t any), and they lay a black thread on the bodies – like making a line – and they chop the bodies along these lines. Then, once again, they are put back together. This is done over and over again. This is for those who sadistically torture others or insects and this type of thing.
[3] Next comes the Crushing Hell (the order is slightly different in the lam-rim). The Crushing Hell is where you are crushed between two mountains that are shaped like the heads of the rams (male sheep). This happens five times a day. This hell is for those who liked to step on insects, to just smash them – this type of thing. So, you get smashed.
[4] There is the Howling Hell. Here, you are chased into a house that is made of flaming metal, and you are trapped inside this flaming metal house.
[5] Then there is Loud Howling Hell in which you are trapped inside an inner room within a burning house that is even hotter.
[6] The next one is Heating Hell. In the Heating Hell, you continuously either have a burning hot trident stuck up your anus or are boiled alive – this type of thing.
[7] The Intense Heating Hell. Here, the heat of the trident or what you are boiled in, such as molten copper and so on, is twice as hot.
[8] The Unrelenting, or Avici, Hell is the most intense in terms of pain. Here you are burned by fire in ten directions all around you as well as an internal fire. So, eleven fires.
These are the descriptions of the hot hells.
There are also cold hells, which Nagarjuna doesn’t list here. These are, again, varying degrees of cold in which you basically freeze over and over again and the skin peels off from frost bite, etc. They are quite awful.
Likewise, there are neighboring hells that one has to pass through as part of any rebirth in one of these hells. There is a pit of hot coals that you have to walk through, and then a swamp of decomposing quicksand that you are stuck in and it eats away your body. Then there are three realms of weapons: there is a plain of razors that you walk through and it cuts your feet; then there is a certain type of tree in which the leaves are swords, and when you go to it or try to climb it, the leaves fall down and cut you; and then there is…
Let me just finish.
Participant: Because of this tree… this is the one when we are attached to women too much?
Dr. Berzin: This is the next one.
The next one is the thorn tree where you see loved ones or women that you are attracted to and so on on top of the tree, and you climb up and, of course, the thorns cut you all the way. And when you get to the top, these loved ones turn out to be ravens that peck out your eyes and eat them. Then you see your loved ones on the bottom, so you go back down, and the thorns pierce into you on the way down, and the loved ones turn into wild dogs who eat you. Then you revive and you go up and down again.
The final neighboring hell is the acid river that eats up and decomposes your body.
These are the hells that are there. And, obviously, one could take them quite literally.
Participant: They would make a good movie.
Dr. Berzin: They would make good movies. I think the point… is it here? Yes. Nagarjuna makes the point in one of the later verses that if just thinking about this or seeing movies (he doesn’t say seeing movies) or seeing paintings and so on make you really, really uncomfortable and give you nightmares, just imagine how you’d feel to actually have these things happening to you. Whether they happen literally or not I don’t know.
Participant: Some sorts of torture are similar.
Dr. Berzin: Right. There are many tortures that are similar. That would be a leftover from one of these rebirths because you don’t go through it five hundred times a day and then revive, and then experience it happening again and again and again.
Participant: They nearly drown you and they…
Dr. Berzin: Right. Sometimes they nearly drown you and then take you out. Yes, there are plenty of tortures. And probably, we don’t really want to hear or read about them because they would give us nightmares. But they are for real. They are for real.
The point is, if we don’t want to hear or read about them or see movies or pictures about them – why is that? That’s the point. Why? Fear, self-cherishing, weakness, clinging to a solid “me,” and so on and, basically, being closed-minded, closed-hearted – we don’t want to think about it. But think about those who experience those things or even see them, who watch somebody else like that.
Actually, there are many, many things to think about in terms of these hells. But we’ll continue next time. Basically, in these twelve verses, Nagarjuna just illustrates these hells and says a little bit about each of them.