We have been studying this text written by the great Indian master Nagarjuna, who lived in around the second century of this era. In it, he writes about the basic points of the Mahayana Buddhist path to his friend the king in South India as specific advice to the king and also as a general teaching. This text later became the source for so many of the basic points of Mahayana Buddhism, particularly as they are presented in Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior by Shantideva, a later Indian author, and especially as they are presented in the lam-rim tradition in Tibet, the graded stages of the path. It’s a source of many of these teachings and a source of many of the quotations.
The text begins with a short introductory discussion of some of the most important basic points that are needed for spiritual practice. Then the main body of the text discusses the six far-reaching attitudes – at least, that’s one way in which the outline can be arranged and is the outline that we are following here. The six far-reaching attitudes are the practices of far-reaching generosity, far-reaching ethical self-discipline, far-reaching patience, far-reaching joyful perseverance, far-reaching mental stability, or concentration, and far-reaching discriminating awareness, or wisdom.
We are in the discussion of far-reaching discriminating awareness (the perfection of wisdom). In that, Nagarjuna speaks about the three higher trainings, which are necessary for developing far-reaching discriminating awareness. First, we need higher ethical discipline to be able to refrain from destructive, negative behavior, particularly the destructive behavior of body and speech – how we act, how we speak – though destructive ways of thinking are there as well. Basically, from gaining the discipline of restraining our bodies and speech from doing negative things, we gain the strength to develop higher concentration with which to discipline our minds – namely, stopping them from going in destructive directions, not only in terms of destructive ways of thinking but in general, in terms of mental dullness and flightiness of mind where the mind flies off, particularly to objects of attachment and desire. Once we have gained that tool of higher concentration, we can apply it to the higher discriminating awareness of not only what type of behavior is to be accepted and what’s to be rejected but also, much more deeply, the view of reality – of what exists and what doesn’t exist, of what the actual way in which everything exists is and what our projected, imagined way is, which is false and doesn’t correspond to reality at all. To be able to stay focused on that, we need concentration. And in order to be able to maintain that concentration, we need ethical discipline. So, he presents these three higher trainings and then discusses this main aspect of discriminating awareness.
We need the discriminating awareness of voidness, of reality, which is basically that there is no such thing as the impossible ways of existing that our minds project. Those projections don’t refer to anything real. We need to gain that understanding because not having it is the basis for all our disturbing emotions and all our impulsive types of karmic behavior that cause all our problems. We need that understanding to gain both liberation and enlightenment. It’s the same understanding for both, according to Prasangika.
In order to gain liberation, Nagarjuna speaks about how it’s necessary to have the motivation for gaining liberation. It’s called “renunciation.” Renunciation is the determination to be free, recognizing the various types of suffering and the causes for those sufferings. We are willing to give all of that up with a strong determination to be free of all of that. That is the motivation. Then with that motivation, we need to see reality in order to cut through the actual, deepest cause of our suffering.
In order to attain enlightenment, on the other hand, we need, in addition to renunciation, a mind that has intense love and compassion for everybody – the wish for everybody to be happy and to have the causes for happiness (that’s love), and the wish for everybody to be free of their suffering and the causes for their suffering (that’s compassion). Based on that, we take the universal responsibility with what’s called “exceptional resolve” – “I am going to do it. I am going to help everybody, not just in a trivial way, but I’m going to help them all the way to enlightenment” – and then develop bodhichitta, which is a mind that is focused on our future enlightenments, which we haven’t gained yet but which we are convinced that we can attain on the basis of Buddha-nature. We want to attain that because that will be the best way to benefit everybody. So, we have these two levels of motivation.
We are now still in the discussion of gaining the discriminating awareness in order to achieve liberation. That is divided into (1) turning away from our obsessive concerns with things of this lifetime and (2) turning away from wanting just to improve future lifetimes, in other words, turning away from our concern about samsaric rebirth altogether.
In that first discussion, turning our minds away from being obsessed with this lifetime, there was the discussion of death and impermanence and, therefore, wanting to take advantage of the opportunities of the precious human lives that we have now because they’re not going to last forever. Therefore, we think about future lives.
Now we are at the very end of the discussion of the determination to be free from samsaric rebirth all together, to be free from it in any future life. For this, we first had a discussion of the sufferings that we experience in a human rebirth. Then, we went into the discussion of the sufferings in the other rebirth states.
Review of the Sufferings in the Three Lower Realms
We have covered the three worst rebirth states. Those are rebirth states are as a trapped being in a joyless hell realm, as a creeping creature or an animal crawling on the ground, and as a clutching ghost that is so tied up that it’s unable to get any food or drink or anything like that and is always living in paranoia that others are going to take things away from it.
We have seen in our discussion that there are remnants of these types of experience that we could have as human beings. We certainly can see human beings who are living in a type of hell – undergoing torture, concentration camps, starvation, wars and stuff like that. We can see people who basically live like animals, being completely ruled by their passions and instincts or being used as slave labor and so on, like a horse pulling a wagon. There are humans who also have the aftermath of a ghost-like rebirth in which they are just completely miserly and tight and can’t enjoy anything. And anything that they put in their mouths, because of ulcers and so on, just turns to acid and, like this, they are in a terrible state.
But we also discussed that it’s not fair to the Buddhist tradition to reduce these types of experiences to their aftermaths in a human life and that we need to expand our way of thinking to realize that a mind is not inherently a human mind or an animal mind or anything like that. A mental continuum is capable of experiencing far further on the spectrum of pain, unhappiness and suffering and far further on the spectrum of pleasure, bliss and happiness than the hardware of a human body will allow.
The human body, when the pain is too strong, becomes unconscious. If the pleasure is too intense, we tend to rush to destroy it – like scratching an itch. An itch is basically intense pleasure that is so overwhelming that we have to destroy it. From that way of thinking, we can appreciate that there can be rebirth states in which the mental continuum has a basis, has the physical hardware (a body), that would be able to support more intense suffering and pain or more intense pleasure and happiness than we can with a human basis.
We have covered all of that. Now we are ready for the discussion of the so-called better rebirth states as heavenly beings, or celestial beings, or gods (however we want to call it) and as so-called anti-gods, or quasi gods (there are many different terms for referring to them), which I call the “would-be divine,” the ones who are jealous of the gods and always fighting with them.
In discussing these so-called gods, or celestial beings, we have to realize that the conceptual basis for our discussion here goes far beyond our Abrahamic concept of a Supreme Being, or God, that we find in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We could include such a god in these celestial realms; Buddhism wouldn’t deny that such a god exists. But it would consider such a god, still, as a samsaric being with a limited life span. Any being can be reborn as such a god and be worshipped by everybody.
Here, the Buddhist discussion is always in terms of Brahma, the creator god in the older forms of Upanishadic or Hindu thought. And because such a creator god is the first being to appear in a particular universe and the last one to go, that Brahma believes that he is the creator of everything that comes after. And a lot of people, who come after, think that Brahma was their creator. So, it basically is based on a limited understanding or perception of the extent or span of time that causes the belief in a creator god to arise.
So, we can include creator gods in these celestial realms. We can also include all the Hindu gods in them as well as all the ancient Greek gods… and a lot more.
The Celestial Realms – Three Planes of Existence
There are gods on three different planes of existence, as discussed in the Buddhist teachings.
[1] There is the plane of desirable sense objects in which the various beings have the different senses. As you go higher in these realms (there are many, many different levels), the beings no longer have the faculties of smell and taste – those go fairly soon. The consciousness gets more and more refined.
[2] Then there is the plane of ethereal forms, which is a plane of existence in which there is no sense consciousness. The beings there don’t have any sense consciousness, so there are no gross sense objects. But there are very subtle objects that the mind still has attachment to. As one goes higher in this plane of ethereal forms, the various experiences of feelings of happiness – physical happiness, mental happiness etc. – goes. Eventually, as the mind gets deeper and deeper into certain types of absorptions, or trances, one is in a state of complete equanimity with just neutral feeling – no feeling at all.
[3] Then there is a plane of formless beings, which is a god realm in which the beings are extremely refined; their minds are extremely refined, and even their bodies are extremely refined. They don’t have any type of gross body. Mind you, the types of bodies that the other, lower celestial beings have are not as gross as a human body, but here, on the plane of formless beings, they’re made up of only the subtlest energy. And their minds are absorbed in meditations like the infinitude space or the infinitude of the mind – these very, very abstract things.
The main cause for being reborn in one of these celestial realms is attachment to deep meditative states of absorption in which your mind becomes so absorbed that you’re no longer aware of sense objects or have feelings of happiness or pain or anything like that. The mind gets more and more subtle. If you are very attached to the type of mind and experience that you get from such deep meditation, you create the causes to get stuck for a long time in that type of state, which would be a rebirth state after you’ve died from a human realm.
This is, in general, what’s discussed with these god realms.
Usually, the discussion of the gods, as here in Nagarjuna’s text, is given in terms of the gods on the plane of desirable sensory objects because that’s the one that, for most people, is the most attractive. That’s because, there, they still have physical and mental pleasure, and it’s more intense than we would experience in the human realm. It’s only special meditators that would be so interested in these deeper states of absorption that would create the causes for a rebirth in the two higher plane of existence, the planes of ethereal forms and formless beings.
We have the discussion here of the celestial beings in the plane of desirable sensory objects. Verse 98 is where we begin.
Verse 98: The Sufferings of Celestial Beings
[98] Even though higher status (celestial beings have) great bliss, the level of suffering at their death and shift-down is much greater than that. Having considered like that, respectable people would never crave after exhaustible higher status rebirth.
This is saying that the beings in this realm experience a tremendous amount of physical and mental bliss. They have very happy, easy lives. But when it ends, it ends very abruptly (the next verses give the signs of what happens when it is about to end), and their suffering is very, very intense when they are about to fall from their position.
As we had in our discussion of the worst rebirth states, we could look at this whole discussion as a discussion of basic Indian mythology because we find the same type of thing in all Indian systems, not just in Buddhism. This is a very common worldview in Indian thought. But just to study it as mythology, anthropology, or whatever, in a very removed type of way – at the end of which we could say, “How interesting,” or if we are less polite and less nice, we could say, “How primitive” – doesn’t have very much benefit for us or enable us to help anybody else.
Examining the Disadvantages of Being Born in a Celestial Realm
What we need to examine here is what the causes for such a type of rebirth are and what it would be like to have such a rebirth – “Is this what I am aiming for? Is this what I would really like to have? Is this what my value system is aimed at?” We also would want to think of others who are experiencing this type of life and to examine what our attitudes toward them is. Do we admire them, and think, “Oh, how wonderful this is. I wish I could be like that”? Then we would be like the jealous quasi gods, or anti-gods, the ones who want to be like the gods. Or can we develop compassion for them, realizing that what they are experiencing is actually a form of suffering, what is known as the suffering of change – that it’s never satisfying, it’s never enough, and it is going to end?
And when it ends, it’s going to get worse. Seeing that, the celestial beings really freak out and have a tremendous amount of suffering. So, is this what we are aiming for – some sort of temporary pleasure that maybe will last fairly long but that definitely will come to an end? That’s not something that we can fool ourselves about, although we might try to do that. So, we want to develop renunciation. That’s the whole aim of this type of goal – that this isn’t what we are aiming for, that we see it for what it is. We also develop compassion for those who are either aiming for this or who are experiencing this.
What is the main image that we have of this type of life, this type of experience? It’s one of intense involvement in happy but ultimately trivial situations. If we look at remnants of this in human life, we might look at someone who is a super celebrity. These days, there is so much publicity about this Paris Hilton. Here is somebody who is famous basically for being stupid but sexy and unbelievably wealthy and who is an absolute egomaniac for publicity with a mastermind publicist who manages to get her in every newspaper in the world. What does she do? She parties her entire life, buys clothes and acts. She’s basically, completely childish and spoiled. Then she lands in prison for drunk driving. You see this type of fall and the type of suffering. Of course, she’s turned it into tremendous publicity stunt in order to get even more publicity in this quest to be recognized and to satisfy her enormous ego. Nevertheless, it gives us an example of a fall. Or like in America – President Nixon being in this high position and then, basically, in order to avoid an impeachment, resigning and falling. Or it could be people who are in very high positions in business who get laid off, and then they fall and have to file for unemployment or something like that. These types of situations.
We look: what, basically, is behind a quest for pleasure? And what else do these gods have? Publicity. You don’t get better publicity than being god, and everybody worshipping and praising you all the time. Is this what we would really like – to be as famous as a god? Some movie stars and some athletes are like that. What happens when you are like that? You are haunted by paparazzi who are constantly around you like mosquitoes, trying to take your picture in order to make money. And people are constantly after your money, so they are nice to you in order to get your money.
I know a lot of very, very rich people and some movie stars and people like this. It’s a terrible life because you never know who is really your friend and who (this is very un-Buddhist) “likes me for me” (as if there were a separate “me”) “and not for my money or my fame.” But for these people, this is very real because they have so many people that just hang on. It’s really terrible. And they live in this party circuit with all the clothes, all the food, all the drugs, all the sex, and whatever. Is that really happiness? Is that what we would like? That’s something to think about.
I think particularly of those who are into recreational drugs like marijuana and so on. You get into a state in which your experience of physical pleasure is heightened, your attachment to sense objects is increased, and although you think your mind is so sharp and clear, actually, it’s quite dull and wanders constantly. And you tend to be obsessed with yourself. “Don’t bum me out. I’m on a good trip. I don’t want to be disturbed from my good trip.” So, it’s a very ego-based type of situation. Is that what we would want forever and ever and ever… for a real long time, thousands and thousands of years, sitting, listening to blasting loud music and stuffing our face with food? After a while, that becomes very boring. Boring! It’s going on and on, over and over again. And it is ultimately trivial and unsatisfying.
This is the suffering of change. It’s ultimately unsatisfying because you always want more, and you are deceived into thinking how wonderful this is. Then the drug wears off, particularly if you are on speed or something like that, and you have “the crash,” which is similar here to a human type of situation of crashing down from this high state and experiencing the suffering that is involved with that. And if you entered into a crash after a very long drug high and you saw that there was no way to get high again – that now you are going to be crashing for the next ten thousand years or more – how would you feel? This is the type of experience that is being discussed here.
Whether or not there are actual beings that experience it that way is not the point. The point is that a mind is capable of experiencing that. Any mind is capable of experiencing that. We need to think of mind as not being limited to one particularly type of body. Mind can experience anything. So, within the sphere of anything that can be experienced, is that what you would like – to be really high and blissed out on something that is ultimately totally trivial and boring but that seems so nice, and then to have a horrible crash? Is it worth it? That’s something really to think about, particularly if you are drawn in that direction. If you’re into these types of recreational drugs, that’s basically how you come off of them – it’s by seeing that this is going nowhere. Then you get bored, and you get tired of it. That’s when you are eventually able to stop. It’s only when you get to that point of being bored.
That, in fact, is true of renunciation in general. “I am so sick and tired of being in unhealthy relationships and messing them up over and over again. I’m tired of being disappointed, being frustrated, etc. Enough already.” It’s not simply that you are disgusted with it because disgust can easily degenerate into being angry with yourself. That doesn’t help. “I’m so stupid for getting involved again!” – this type of thing in which you start beating yourself up. That’s not a very helpful state of mind because then you just continue beating yourself up.
It’s when you go beyond being disgusted and angry with yourself to being completely bored… that’s the state of mind, actually, that is necessary for renunciation. “Enough already. This is stupid! Why do I want to continue like this?” That is a more stable state of mind. It’s not coming out of a state of mind that is so upset, like the one that says, “I am so stupid for doing this all the time.” This is what we are aiming for here. Having looked at the terrible suffering and pain that we could experience in the animal and hell realms, we are looking here at the other extreme, that of extreme bliss and pleasure, etc., good friends, good music, good wine, good whatever… entertainment, beautiful people. And then what?
Let me give a different example. I don’t have the example being a beautiful person with all the other beautiful people. I have some friends who have that experience, but my experience was at Harvard where everybody was number one in their class. Everybody had perfect or almost perfect scores on the entrance exams, and nobody was impressed with that because everybody was like that. When you are in a situation in which what you had based your pride on is no longer special because everybody else is the same, it comes as quite a shock. Then you have to start relating to people in a very different way.
You know our friend in Mexico, Fernando. He is a very, very good-looking guy. He was working at arranging various types of fashion shows. Nobody could deal with these top fashion models who were so beautiful and so arrogant and proud of themselves, but he could because he was also at that level of being good looking. So, they could relate to each other, in a sense, and feel at ease. They didn’t have to compete; they didn’t have to feel arrogant.
In any case, the Harvard situation as well was one in which you couldn’t feel arrogant. You had to somehow relate to the other people as regular people because nobody was special. But still, if you are in a situation (and we’ll get this with the anti-gods) in which everybody else is jealous of you – jealous that you’re in Harvard or jealous that you’re at the top level of the fashion model world and so on – that also is not a very comfortable situation. Not very comfortable.
Look at these paparazzi going around taking photos. Don’t you think that most of them wished that they were on the other side of the camera? A lot of jealousy there, I think; there is a longing to be like them. Or those who are in very powerful positions – there are other people who want to take their position, to take over. This is a very difficult situation to live with – other people being jealous of you. This is what these gods experience, what a mind can experience.
So, on the one hand, you could experience so many people worshiping you, which can be really boring, or on the other hand, you could experience people being very jealous of you and just waiting for you to fall. Plus, inevitably, you are going to fall. Look at these movie stars who get old and who then they have to do all these face lifts and things to try to look young. Those face operations, by the way, in case you were never told this, are extremely painful. It hurts very much for quite a while afterwards. They make all these cuts and stretches and stuff on your face. So, they endure a great deal of suffering just to make themselves look like they are wearing a mask. It’s very, very weird.
I remember going some years ago to the fortieth-year reunion of my high school graduation. So, forty years – everybody is almost sixty years old. I recall that there was this one girl in the class, who was obviously a mature woman now, who had had one of these face operations. Her face looked very similar to when she was in high school, but she looked absolutely ridiculous. It was so bizarre her being there with all her old high school class friends looking like she looked and everybody else looking their age. Is that what you want? That’s pretty weird. Very weird, actually.
When looking at the description of these gods, I think it is very important that we not trivialize it as an exercise in the study of mythology, of alien mythology, as it were, but to think, “Really, what is behind this? What is the benefit? Aryadeva, in his Four Hundred Verses, said, “Buddha didn’t teach anything that wasn’t for the benefit of others.” The only reason why Buddha taught these things was to benefit others. There is no other reason why Buddha would teach about this. It wasn’t to entertain others or to make an anthropology or zoology report about the various types of life forms that there are. He didn’t make up this stuff. As I said, all the Indian systems assert this in one form or another. Maybe a tiny detail is different, but it is basically the same.
He taught about the gods because we need to try to overcome having that type of rebirth as our ultimate aim. So many religious systems have being reborn in heaven as their ultimate aim. So, then the Buddha looks: “Well, you got your wish; now you are reborn in heaven. Now what?” Do you want to sit at the feet of some higher god and praise that god from now till the next twenty million years from now? Won’t that become a bit boring? Would you like to be that god that just sits there and hears everybody praise them? Boring. You get tired of that after a while. And it goes nowhere. And it just go on and on and on. So, those are the things to think about.
Discussion
Sufferings of Humans Who Have God-Like Existences
Participant: I was just thinking of Nepal. In Kathmandu, you have this young, young child…
Dr. Berzin: Right, the Kumari, the living goddess.
Participant: In photographs, you can see she looks absolutely sad and…
Dr. Berzin: Miserable.
Participant: Not happy at all. Once, I went to her house and started calling her, “Look out, please! Kumari, look out the window.” She came, totally bored, to this window and looked out. Then everybody started shouting and taking photos. This is a similar situation somehow. And she was totally unhappy.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, there is this situation in Kathmandu with the Kumari, the living goddess, who is a young a girl. It goes until she’s… what? When she has her first menstruation.
Participant: The first time she loses blood, even with the hands.
Dr. Berzin: Oh, even just cutting her hand?
Participant: Once she loses blood, then it’s finished.
Dr. Berzin: Usually, it goes till she is about twelve, thirteen, something like that. She is basically worshipped and leads a horrible life.
Participant: She is supposed to be the reincarnation of a goddess?
Dr. Berzin: I believe so, an incarnation of a goddess. I don’t really know the details.
Participant: There are some priests who look for some young children, maybe two- or three-year-olds. They collect them, maybe ten or twenty of them. It’s really weird, actually. Then there is a temple, and they put chopped heads of cows in.
Dr. Berzin: Buffalo, I would imagine.
Participant: Buffalo heads they put in. Then they send some of the children in, one after another, and they observe. And the child who doesn’t show any feeling…
Dr. Berzin: Doesn’t freak out.
Participant: Doesn’t freak out – that’s the one.
Dr. Berzin: I see. So, the way that they choose the new living goddess is that they choose a group of two- or three-year-old little girls. They have the temple floor filled with the heads of water buffalo, and they sent the little girls in one at a time. And whichever one doesn’t freak out at seeing the chopped off heads and blood, etc., is the real goddess. OK, different customs.
Participant: What does that say about their god?
Dr. Berzin: What does it say about the god? I don’t know. Or the goddess. That’s hard to say. I think it is associated with Kali or Durga or something like that. And you have the creator Brahma as the sustainer, and…
Participant: Shiva is the destroyer.
Dr. Berzin: Shiva is the destroyer. Brahma is the creator. And who’s the sustainer? Vishnu is the sustainer. Associated with Shiva is Durga, the female wrathful one that brings things to an end. I know that in the Hindu pantheon, there is a god called “Kumara.” It means the “young one” in Sanskrit. Kumara is the young boy, and Kumari is the young girl. That is a goddess in the Kalachakra mandala. There are two – a god and a goddess – by those names, for example.
Anyway, as my teacher Serkong Rinpoche would say, that’s not strange; it’s just different. Different.
The Example of Rinpoches
In any case, it sure wouldn’t be fun to be one of those or, as I know very well, one of these young rinpoches, the Tibetan incarnate lamas. I have been very close to many of them from early childhood. That’s not an easy life either. You can’t play with other children; everybody else is considered dirty. Everything has to be special for you. And you can’t go outside (it’s basically in house arrest most of the time) without having people crowd around you and having to bless them, which is incredibly boring to do, especially if you are a child.
Serkong Rinpoche is now twenty-three. He has never been outside by himself. Never. He is not allowed to walk by himself. He always has to have an attendant with him. Now, he is a bit more relaxed because he is not so strict about the old customs. But he was not allowed to answer the door in his house, not allowed to answer the telephone because only an attendant is allowed to do that. And when these rinpoches are really little, they’re carried; they’re not even allowed to walk. So, they’re carried around. And until he was about seven or eight, Serkong Rinpoche never washed himself. There was an attendant who bathed him and washed him. This is really quite awful. Then, just strictly, you have to study. You have to memorize, and you have to recite. And there are no other children to play with. The Dalai Lama was raised that way. It might seem very glamorous from the outside, but when you actually live it, it’s not so easy. And everybody worships you. Big deal – everybody worshipping you. That’s the thing: do you want to be worshipped? It sounds good from the outside, not from the inside.
I remember the old Serkong Rinpoche. I spent many, many years with him as my teacher. He was one of the teachers of the Dalai Lama. We’d go to this place in Spiti, which was this area up in the Himalayas that he had reformed. He had restarted the whole Buddhist tradition there. So, he was like the saint of the valley. All the villagers would come whenever he was there (I was there with him once) to see him and pay their respects. So, he would have this long line of people, and he had to just sit there. What he would say to me was, “Isn’t this ridiculous? Rather than do their prostrations before they come into the room so that it’s quicker, each of them waits until they come into the room in front of me and then does the prostrations.” Then you get this mountain of white kata scarves at the end of it. What are you going to do with them? It really is boring. It takes hours and hours. And you have to sit there and, obviously, try not to look bored because everybody is looking to you for inspiration and a blessing.
Could you imagine having to bless lots of people? Well, it might be fun for the first day or two, but if you had to do that as your sort of profession, very quickly, you would get very, very cynical. Very cynical. So, the reality of a god-like rebirth is not so attractive. Look at these movie stars! They can’t go out to the store, can’t go out to anything without wearing a disguise because if people recognize them, they go crazy.
Participant: How is Jesus viewed in the Buddhist conception?
Dr. Berzin: How is Jesus viewed? Generally, he is viewed as a bodhisattva, someone who is obviously totally concerned with alleviating the suffering of others and willing to sacrifice even his own life in order to be able to help others. This is straightforward bodhisattva type of behavior.
It’s interesting, when you look at a synonym for a bodhisattva, a bodhisattva is called an offspring, or child, of the Buddhas – a child of a Buddha in the sense that they are the ones that will grow up to become Buddhas. They are born from a Buddha’s inspiration. So, one could start to think “Son of God.” Is that similar or not similar? What does that really mean? Obviously, that comes from a completely different conceptual framework. But from a Buddhist point of view, it doesn’t seem so strange. It’s just a different way of understanding that type of terminology.
Participant: Is there a link between Buddha and Jesus?
Dr. Berzin: Is there a link between Buddha and Jesus? That would be difficult to say because Buddha lived about six hundred years before Jesus – if you look at the historical Buddha.
Participant: I mean the teachings.
Similarities and Differences Between Buddhist and Christian Approaches
Dr. Berzin: There are certainly some things that are in common, particularly the emphasis on love and compassion. But there are certainly major differences in the philosophical view of reality. There is basically a different approach to love in Christianity. I have been to these conferences where the Dalai Lama speaks with other religious leaders, and they point out and discuss the differences. In Christianity, you open up and let the love of Jesus, the love of God, flow through you to all of creation. In Buddhism, the issue of love has nothing to do with a god. Love is based simply on the fact that everybody wants to be happy, that nobody wants to be unhappy, and that we all have an equal right to be happy, basically. Therefore, you love others – wish for them to be happy, try to help them be happy – based simply on that fact of reality. So, the approach to love is different.
Also, one of the Christian leaders said that, in Christianity, through loving God, you learn to love all of God’s creatures, all of God’s creations The Jewish leader said that, in Judaism, it was just the opposite – that through loving man, you learn to love God. Then the Dalai Lama replied, saying that in Buddhism, love didn’t have any sort of intermediary, such as God. So, there are those differences even within love.
There are some interchanges and dialogues between Buddhists and Christians, particularly the Catholics. They are the most open, actually, of all the Christian sects or aspects. What the Dalai Lama is very interested in about Christianity is the greater emphasis on service – actually working in the community, such as in orphanages, in old age homes, in hospitals and schools and this type of thing, which one doesn’t have, really, in the Tibetan form of Buddhism. We’re starting to get engaged Buddhism, which started, basically, in Thailand, a Theravada country. But this is something that is very helpful.
From the Christian side, what they are most interested in from Buddhism are the methods to gain concentration, various meditation methods that could be applied in Christian contemplation. Buddhism is very rich in these types of methods. I attended a conference recently in Salzburg, which was on the Buddhist attitudes toward other religions. One of the things that someone mentioned that Buddhism could also learn from Christianity was a little bit more emphasis on the historical figure of Buddha. There is, in Buddhism, an emphasis on lineage masters as sources of inspiration, but it’s not directed so much at Buddha Shakyamuni himself. That could be a bit more helpful – like you have the emphasis on the historical figure of Jesus as an inspiring figure, also Mary and so on. So, there are certain similarities, but certainly, the philosophical views are quite different.
Also, the approaches used at this conference come from a discipline called “theology of religions.” That discipline developed from the missionary movement within the Catholic Church, actually, to discuss how to relate with other religions. In that analysis, within that academic discipline, there are different ways, three main ways, of relating.
The Christian “Theology of Religions” – Three Approaches for Evaluating and Relating to Different Religious Traditions
Exclusivism
One is called the exclusivist approach, which says, “We have the exclusive way to salvation. Salvation is only through Jesus, and anything else, you go to hell.” That’s exclusivist.
Inclusivism
Then there is the inclusivist approach, which says, “We have a common core of teachings that we share, but mine has the supreme goal. Yours is OK, but it leads you only up to a certain point. If you want to go further, you have to follow our religion.” That’s very, very common. There, the Christians could say, “OK, Buddhism – be a nice person, discipline, concentration etc. You can start like that, but for salvation, you really have to turn to Jesus and Christianity.” The Buddhists could say as well, “Well, the basic Christian teachings – love, devotion, charity, etc. – are very good. But if you want to achieve enlightenment, you have to gain the understanding of voidness and bodhichitta – so, the Buddhist path.” That’s inclusivist.
Pluralism
Then there is pluralism. The pluralist approach is that each of them leads to an ultimate goal. Within that view, you could have a favoritist view, which is, “They all lead to ultimate goals. But I favor mine, so I’ll try to understand you in terms of my concepts.” Or it could be a pluralist view, which is, “I totally respect everybody. I won’t try to understand them in my own terms; instead, I’ll try to understand them in your terms,” which actually shows the most respect for each other. That’s very rare. But what it means is that (I think it was the Dalai Lama who said this, but maybe it was Serkong Rinpoche) if you pray to go to Christian heaven, you’re going to go to Christian heaven, not a Buddhist heaven; if you pray to go to a Buddhist heaven, you’re going to land up in a Buddhist heaven, not a Christian heaven. That simplifies it, but, I think, makes it quite clear: you follow your own path, you’ll to get to your own goal.
Within the Buddhist Traditions, Two Basic Views
One has this type of thing in the development of Buddhism as well. So, this conference also looked at the relations within Buddhism between the different Buddhist traditions and the different views. Within Buddhism, there are two basic views that have developed.
The Three Ultimate Vehicles
One, is the three ultimate vehicles – shravaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva vehicles. So, these are as:
- An arhat, a liberated being, in the shravaka style, which is when other Buddhas are around you, so you can learn from them
- A pratyekabuddha arhat, a liberated being, which is during the dark ages when no Buddhas are around, and you have to rely on your instincts from past lives
- Or a bodhisattva who becomes a Buddha
These are final goals. You cannot go on, after becoming an arhat, to become a bodhisattva. When you die, the mind-stream ends; it finishes. This is what you have in basic Hinayana (all the various Hinayana schools, Theravada, Sarvastivada, etc.) – three ultimate vehicles.
Ekayana, “One Vehicle”
But then, with the Lotus Sutra in Mahayana, they start this whole teaching of Ekayana, “One Vehicle,” which is that (this you find in Mahayana, in all the tenet systems) even if you become a shravaka or a pratyekabuddha arhat, a liberated being, you’ve still not attained the ultimate goal: you can go on to become a Buddha. So, there is only that one, final goal. So, all of the other goals are just temporary goals on the way to enlightenment (this is the inclusivist view). And the basis for that is Buddha-nature. Everybody has Buddha nature, so everybody can become a Buddha.
Now, a very important point, which has to do with a question that so many people ask, is: what happens when everybody achieves enlightenment? Then what? Also, of course, there is the cute question: “If you are the last person to achieve enlightenment, and in order to achieve enlightenment, you have to develop compassion for other beings and bodhichitta, how can you develop bodhichitta and compassion if everybody else is a Buddha already?” That’s sort of a fun question in debate. The answer, of course, is that the Buddhas will then compassionately appear as suffering beings to allow you, the last being, to develop compassion and bodhichitta.
Anyway, to put the cute part aside, there is a difference, one that is usually not pointed out. There’s a difference between everybody can become a Buddha and everybody will become a Buddha. Just because, on the basis of Buddha-nature, everybody can become a Buddha, doesn’t, by any means, mean that everybody will actually build up the positive force, bodhichitta, and motivation and do all the hard work to become a Buddha – no matter how much you try to help them and teach them. That, I think, is a very sobering thought.
There is nobody… and this was a very important point in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra (and it is a refutation of a point that you get in one of the Chittamatra sub-schools). There is nobody that has what’s called a “broken Buddha-nature” (icchantika, I think it’s called in Sanskrit), a broken nature – meaning that their “roots of virtue,” all their positive force has been severed, or cut, by doing some horrible thing like really hating bodhisattvas, hating Buddhas and stuff like that – such that they could never become a Buddha. That was refuted in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. So, there is no way that you could completely eliminate the possibility that you could become a Buddha, but that doesn’t mean that you will.
Bodhisattvas and Buddhas are willing to help and are willing to go to a hell in order to help, but others have to be receptive. And there is no guarantee that others will be receptive, no matter what you do.
We have gone far off from the text, but I think these are interesting… not only interesting (that’s a terrible word) but important points. In America, the worst criticism that you could give to a new television show, for example, is to say, “Well, it was interesting.” That means it was terrible!
Participant: “Weird” is better.
Dr. Berzin: “Weird” is better. But people are more polite. “It was interesting.”
So, we get back to Verse 98. “Even though higher status (celestial beings have) great bliss,” so everything is great in this type of state, “the level of suffering at their death and shift-down” to a lower rebirth state “is much greater than that.” So, the intensity of their suffering when they are about to fall is much greater than the intensity of happiness and bliss while they were in that state. “Having considered like that, respectable people would never crave after exhaustible higher status rebirth.” So, when you think about their situation (and we have indicated a little bit how you would think about it), you would never crave having that type of higher status rebirth which will exhaust; it will end.
Then Nagarjuna gives the signs that happen when you are about to die.
Verses 99 and 100: The Five Remote Signs of Death
[99] “The color of your body turns ugly; there’s no delight in your seat; your flower garlands wilt; your clothes become smelly; and sweat comes out on your body, which it never did before,”
[100] (These) five early signs that herald your death and shift-down from a higher status appear to celestials in higher status rebirth states, just as signs of death (appear) to humans on earth, heralding impending death.
So, there are the five remote signs. Also, there are five imminent signs of death in the god realms that are similar to the signs in the human realm (which we’ll cover shortly) when death is about to come.
“The color of your body turns ugly.” So, you no longer have a nice complexion and so on; you become very pale, or whatever. “There’s no delight in your seat.” I’m thinking here of the Tibetans who are able to sit cross-legged for fifteen hours a day in a puja without moving; they don’t fidget or move around. But now the gods are not delighted to sit. They have to fidget; they are uncomfortable and can’t sit on their thrones. Their “flower garlands wilt.” Like with the Indian custom, they always have these beautiful flower garland around them, but now they start to wilt.
And the “clothes become smelly; and sweat.” You start to sweat, and it becomes a little bit disgusting to the other gods. What described is that the other gods and goddesses who were so happy to be with you before, no longer want to get close to you when they see this. Nobody wants to visit you. If they do, they stay at a great distance and maybe wave and then go on. This type of thing. And that is horrible.
It reminds us of being in a nursing home (called a Pflegeheim here in Germany). You have turned ugly. All your skin is hanging, and you are drooling. You don’t wear your false teeth anymore. And you are sitting, drooped over, in a wheelchair with a towel in your lap, and you are wheeled out into the hall and are just forgotten. And there you are. You don’t really know what’s going on. You just sort of mumble because your mind isn’t all there, and nobody wants to visit you. How lonely that is and how horrible that is.
My mother had Alzheimer’s Disease and died from that. She was in a place like this for five years. When you’d visit, this was the scene: people sitting in wheelchairs in the hall or wandering around aimlessly, not knowing where they were or what they were doing. You’d walk down the hall and all of a sudden this really old person in a wheelchair would grab your hand, just to have human contact. And what was the usual response from everybody? Completely freaking out, being frightened and pulling their hand away, not knowing how to deal with this type of old person. Can you imagine what it feels like to be like that? Nobody wants to see you again. Nobody wants to visit you because it’s frightening, and they don’t know how to relate to you.
In the case of my mother and so many other people, she couldn’t get more than three words out of her mouth that were connected to each other. Just random words came out. This was terrible suffering because she couldn’t relate to anybody. She couldn’t talk to anybody, so nobody wanted to talk to her. I remember one of the last sentences that she said that I could understand was, “Look what’s happened to me. Look what I have become.” So, you are aware of what you have become. And there you are, sitting in your wheelchair, drooling. You’ve gone to the bathroom in your pants, and you have to wait until somebody notices you to change it. Awful.
This is what they are talking about here. You can relate to it in terms of that type of example. You start to sweat, your clothes become smelly, your body turns ugly, and nobody wants to be with you, and nobody misses you. Those are the five remote signs.
The Five Imminent Signs of Death
The five imminent signs (the five close signs) of death:
- “The radiance of the body diminishes,” so, you really lose all your life force.
- “When they wash themselves, the water clings to their body.”
- The third one, “their clothes and jewelry give off unpleasant sounds,” which they never did before. I think we can relate to this a little bit when old people walk, they make sort of funny sounds, “unh, unh, unh” sort of like that, and their bones creak, and these sorts of things.
- “Their eyes begin to blink,” which they never did before.
- “Their minds become narrow and rigidly fixed on one point.” You certainly see that with older people; they become stubborn and so on.
We have these five imminent signs. And it says, “These are like the signs of death that appear to humans.”
The Imminent Signs of Death for Humans
The signs for a human, they are very interesting signs:
- “You become very calm” just before you are about to die.
- “Your breathing fluctuates unevenly”; so, you are not breathing evenly – sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly.
- “When you place your right hand on top of your head and look up at the sky,” (it’s hard to hear this and not actually do it and see), “you see a broken empty space and not a narrow strip of flesh.” So, when you look at your wrist, do you see a narrow piece of flesh, or do you see just the ceiling? So, watch out if you see the ceiling and don’t see a little piece of flesh! (How in the world they found this out, I don’t know.)
- Then, “when you stare at the moon on a full moon night and quickly look back at your own shadow, you see it having no head.”
That sounds like out of a horror movie, doesn’t it?
Participant: Straight out of a horror movie.
Dr. Berzin: Straight out of a horror movie.
These are the imminent signs of death for a human.
[Background comment]
Renata, you are not impressed or convinced that if you see that, it means that you are about to die? That was your doubt.
Participant: On a full moon night, there’s a shadow?
Dr. Berzin: Of course. If there’s a full moon, there’s a shadow. Maybe not in the city here, but if you are out in the countryside with no electric lights, you could even read by the moonlight. It’s incredibly bright. I lived most of my life in India, in the countryside. There, my goodness – a full moon night is very, very bright.
So, these are the signs. And they produce a tremendous amount of suffering, obviously, because the gods know what is going to happen. Usually, the gods have an image or a vision of the type of rebirth they are going to have. The classic one is a god totally freaking out, seeing that he is going to be reborn as a pig in the next lifetime. Just intense, intense suffering.
Verse 101: The Consequences of Having No Remainder of Positive Force
[101] If, at the shift-down from the celestial worlds, they’ve no remainder left at all of constructive force, they transform, thereafter, without control, to a rebirth state as a creeping creature, a clutching ghost, or a being trapped in a joyless realm, whichever it may be.
The positive force that landed them in a celestial type of rebirth is finished, and what awaits them is the ripening of the negative karma that they had built up from before.
One has to be very careful not only about being attached to pleasure and to these deep meditations and so on but also about something else that results in getting this type of rebirth, which is being very kind and helpful to others as a big ego trip – being nice to others in order for them to praise you, to like you, and to give you things. Then you are a god whom everybody praises. They worship you and give you things. And supposedly you are nice. You bless the people and you make the crops grow and this sort of stuff that gods do. That we have to watch out for – that if we are going to be kind, nice and helpful to others, not to do it as a big ego trip, just to get something in return and to show how wonderful we are. That’s quite important.
Then there is only one verse concerning the suffering of the asuras, what I call the would-be divine, the so-called demigods (that was the word I was looking for, “demigod”), the ones who think that they are like gods, but they aren’t really. And they are completely jealous because they want to be like that.
Verse 102: The Sufferings of the Would-Be-Divine (Asuras)
[102] The would-be divine also have great mental suffering because of hostility, by nature, toward the glory of the celestial ones. although having intelligence, they cannot see the truth because of obscurations of (their) rebirth state.
In the human realm, these would be the ones who go out and buy designer clothes and attempt to look like some fancy movie star. But it doesn’t work. They are jealous. They are angry at the glory of the celestial ones. They try to defeat them and are always making war with them out of extreme jealousy. It’s a state of mind obsessed with jealousy. Although they have intelligence, they can’t see the truth. They can’t see that a god realm rebirth is pointless, that it’s nothing.
We see this type of mentality in its aftermath in many, many humans who imitate movie stars and want to be like them. They are basically jealous. Then, with all the gossip things… they are always interested in gossip. Look at the stuff that goes on in politics, particularly in American politics, where people are intensely jealous of the people in power, and they want to bring them down by finding out some obscure thing that they did thirty or forty years ago – smoking a marijuana joint or going to a prostitute or hiring some immigrant who didn’t have official papers or something like that. They try to make a big scandal to bring them down so that they can get the position of power instead. That’s classic asura behavior, this demigod behavior. Absolute classic. So many people are caught up in that and applaud that. They think that’s great and are entertained by that (look at how many people actually read all these scandal newspapers) and are always looking out for that, looking out for naughty things that famous people did.
This also is a type of obsession that, although you may be intelligent, totally clouds your mind. You can’t do anything.
Participant: Would a dictator be like a god, or would they be like demigods?
Dr. Berzin: What would a dictator be?
Participant: Yes, Hitler, Stalin?
Dr. Berzin: Hitler, Stalin? They could be examples of having the aftermath of a god type of realm – being, in a sense, worshipped by so many people as humans. They certainly were worshipped… and obeyed. Most gods want to be obeyed. It’s a little like that.
Participant: Demigod?
Dr. Berzin: Well, no. A demigod would be jealous of others. Were they jealous of somebody else? I don’t know that any one of them wanted to be god.
Participant: Hitler did.
Dr. Berzin: Hitler wanted to be a god? Well, maybe. Maybe.
Participant: [Inaudible]
Dr. Berzin: I don’t know because that gets you into a whole different thing of these wrathful, jealous gods – an Old Testament type of thing – that if you don’t worship them or you worship somebody else, then they smite you, send a plague and these sorts of things. That’s a little different. But probably, you could just make another floor in the house of the gods that would have this type of god or something like that. You get the feeling that most of these gods aren’t terribly involved with what’s going on in the human realm; they’re just having a good time.
But I must say, I have not done a deep anthropological study of all the characteristics of these god realms. I am sure you can find that somewhere. There are various divisions of them. Some are on Mount Meru and some above Mount Meru. The asuras are on the bottom of Mount Meru, trying to fight the gods on the top. It’s true that some of the gods have to fight against the asuras because some of them are fighting. But it’s a slightly different view here.
Anyway, we have this one verse concerning asuras, and that finishes our discussion of the six types of rebirth states.
What will come next is basically a summary of all that, which puts it in the framework of renunciation. We see that all these possible types of compulsive rebirth just go on and on uncontrollably, just by the force of the positive or negative karmic acts that we have done on the basis of thinking of a strong “me, me, me” – either being destructive, lying, killing, smashing others and being cruel or being so nice to everybody and sort of tricking them into getting my way. We see that if we operate in either of these two ways and that we get (our minds experience) a rebirth state in which there is either a lot of suffering or a lot of happiness (or somewhere in between as humans), it’s all basically garbage, unsatisfying, and boring. It’s been going on with no beginning, and it’s going nowhere. Finally to wake up and realize that and to have the determination to be free of it – that’s what renunciation is all about.
It requires thinking not just about these individual rebirth experiences but also about the general sufferings of samsara that we had in the beginning of this discussion – that there is no satisfaction; that you constantly go up and down in your positions and that other people change their positions up and down; that there are no lasting friends; that there is no security; that even though you try get what you want, you don’t get it; and that all sorts of things that you don’t want are constantly happening to you. All of these things are just… enough already. Enough already. Is there some alternative?
Now, that’s the really difficult part – to become convinced that there is an alternative to this because, of course, we could say, “OK, that’s the nature of reality. That’s it. It’s boring and horrible, but let’s make the best of it.” That, from a Buddhist point of view, is a defeatist attitude. “Well, let’s just make the best of it and live with it.” A lot of people have that attitude. “Life is crappy. It’s filled with all sorts of garbage, but I’ll just make the best of it.” But Buddhism says that it is possible to gain liberation. And that’s quite difficult to understand – to understand why, first of all, and then to understand what it would mean to actually be liberated from this. But that will come in the next classes.