Recap
We have been looking at this text, this first attitude training text, or lojong, or mind training, Wheel of Sharp Weapons by Dharmarakshita. We’ve seen that bodhisattvas – people who are trying to reach enlightenment, who have this aim of bodhichitta to reach enlightenment to benefit others as much as is possible – are like peacocks in the sense that they thrive on poisonous emotions and poisonous attitudes, just as peacocks thrive on poisonous plants. In this context, what it’s referring to basically is this tonglen practice. When they have the various disturbing emotions and so on, and they are with other people who have disturbing emotions, they don’t run away. They don’t want to just be where everything is nice – a sort of escapist type of Buddhism where you just want to go to a Pure Land and everything is wonderful and nice – but they want to involve themselves with difficult people, with difficult situations. They want, in those difficult situations, to practice this tonglen practice of giving and taking – taking on the sufferings of others, and adding them on – let’s say, if they have that same type of problem themselves, in order to overcome whatever it is that is causing that problem.
On the one hand, the self-cherishing attitude with which we think, “I don’t want to be involved with other people’s problems;” but also, we don’t want to look into whatever the source of that problem might be in ourselves. If we have a problem – let’s say we are always hurt by others – and so we think in terms of karma, and this is what’s known as the wheel of sharp weapon coming back to us from the fact that we have harmed others very much as well. So now, what is the motivation for overcoming that karmic cause? Obviously, if we want to get rid of experiencing the result, we have to get rid of committing the cause and so it’s hurting others. If we are focusing on just stopping hurting others, just for our own liberation – aside from the fact that it hurts others and thinking about the effect on others – and if our aim is to get free of the suffering that it causes for ourselves, our motivation can be fairly weak. But if we are considering everybody else who gets hurt, and everybody else who is hurting others, then we tackle that problem or deal with that problem for everybody. Our motivation is much stronger because we’re thinking in terms of everybody who has that problem and being able to help everybody to overcome that problem. We have a much wider type of scope, which means that we’re not mixing this approach here with feeling sorry for ourselves – “Poor me, I have this problem, oh I want to get rid of it.” Because when we have that attitude of, “Poor me, I have this problem, I want to get rid of it,” we’re very much clinging to a solid “me” and self-cherishing, which then defeats the deepest solution to it, which is the understanding of voidness. So if we can overcome that self-cherishing, that limitation of thinking only of me, then when we are dealing with a problem, that helps us to understand voidness, basically – a lack of true existence of me and of everybody else, which is the ultimate solution to the problem. Does that make any sense?
I think this is one of the main ideas here behind the big emphasis on this giving and taking process. Bodhisattvas thrive – in other words, they make progress – by working in this way with the disturbing emotions of others, and their own disturbing emotions, facing them straightforwardly rather than running away from them. It’s very interesting; when people have many problems, how do they deal with them? Some people run away and try to escape with drugs, for example, and so just feel good and get in a different mindset so that you don’t really have to face your problems. But there are others – I am thinking of some examples of people that I know who use the Dharma like a drug. They look at Dharma and think, “Oh, how wonderful, it’s so beautiful, the Dharma is so fantastic,” and they just go off into a never-neverland of fantasy with how beautiful the Dharma is, and don’t really apply it. This is I think basically using the Dharma as a drug. When we look at the Dharma in a realistic way, it’s not nice because what the Dharma is asking us to do – what Buddhism is asking us to do – is to look at our most difficult problems and our darkest sides, and actually face them, and try to get rid of them, work with them. That is not a very nice process – not at all – to deal with our own personal hells, as it were, and honestly admit to them. If we have this sort of Disneyland attitude toward the Dharma – that it’s just so beautiful, and just be nice to everybody, and everybody has been our mother, and they are so kind, and everybody is wonderful – then we have to really examine more carefully: are we using the Dharma just as an escape, like a drug, or are we really being sincere with it?
Equalizing and Exchanging Self for Others
We’re up to verse 7. Verse 7 reads:
Uncontrollable wandering through rounds of existence is caused by our grasping at egos as real. This ignorant attitude heralds the demon of selfish concern for our own welfare alone: we seek some security for our own egos; we want only pleasure and shun any pain. But now, we must banish all selfish compulsion and gladly take hardship for all other’s sake.
This and the next two verses basically summarize the method that we learned in our introduction here of equalizing and exchanging self for others. It says here that our uncontrollable wandering through rounds of existence – that’s samsara – is caused by our grasping at egos as real, so that’s basically grasping for a solid me that is autonomous, that is independent of anything. We think that it’s some entity which is never changing. It just sort of jumps into a body and uses it, and then jumps out into another body, but is completely independent of the body and the mind, which it either inhabits like a house, or it uses like some sort of tool – like using a computer. It’s going from one rebirth to another rebirth, to another rebirth, uncontrollably, with all the problems and limitations that are part of that trip – having to be shut up in a womb for a certain period of time where we can’t move and so on. We shouldn’t idealize that.
What the teachings often say is imagine if we were locked in a closet for nine months in which we couldn’t move – a little tiny room in which you are just stuck in a very small space, and in the darkness, and couldn’t move for nine months. Think how horrible that would be, so don’t idealize how lovely it is to be in the womb. Then being a baby is not very much fun either. Going to school and being a child is not much fun. Having to learn everything again, and as a baby, for instance, not being able to express ourselves, not being really able to indicate what we want, and so on. This is not a fun trip. Then the whole puberty trip, and adolescence, and figuring out what we are going to do with our lives, and finding a partner (if we want to find a partner), and finding a profession, and sickness, and then old age, and dealing with death. This is not terribly nice, and with that of course there is the constant theme of attachment and anger, and so on. All of that comes from conceiving ourselves – or misconceiving because it’s a mistaken conception – that we are this autonomous unit inside that we somehow have to protect, we have to defend, we have to assert, we have to get things to it in order to make it secure. We have to get more and more possessions, and people, and power, and money, and love, and all these sorts of things. We have to get away from anything that we feel that’s threatening it, that we don’t like. We are naive about the effect of our behavior on ourselves and on others. We’re naive about how we exist, how others exist, how the whole world exists, and because of that we just perpetuate this round of problems.
The verse says that our samsaric existence, or “our uncontrollable wandering through rounds of existence, is caused by our grasping our egos as real.” Then, “This ignorant attitude heralds the demon of selfish concern for our own welfare alone.” So because we have this ignorant attitude – that means that we are unaware of how we actually exist, and we’ve actually gotten it wrong; we think in just the opposite way of how we actually do exist – then it heralds the demon. It brings on the demon of selfish concern for our own welfare alone. This is a self-cherishing attitude because we conceive of ourselves as some sort of solid, findable entity, independent of everything else, then we get selfish concern, that we want to benefit only ourselves and we think only of ourselves. Obviously, if we think of ourselves as a solid unit, independent of anything else, then would want just the welfare of that unit itself. If, on the other hand, we see ourselves interconnected with absolutely everybody else and this whole interdependent network of everybody, then we think of the welfare of everybody. We’re not thinking of the welfare of one isolated unit from that whole network – that whole matrix or whatever you want to call it – of interconnectedness.
This a very fundamental point to understand – this relationship between grasping for a solid “me” and self-cherishing attitude. The text calls it a demon – mara, a demonic force. A demonic force or a demon is actually coming from the word in Sanskrit which means death – mara. What it kills or murders – “murder” comes from the same root – is our chance to be free. It kills our chances for liberation and enlightenment. This is what we were speaking about of the Lord of Death in the beginning of this text – that it kills our chances to be liberated, the more and more that we have selfish concern, and the more and more that we have grasping for a solid me. The text calls it a demon. “We seek some security for our own egos” – this is what I said: when we think of a solid me then we want security for that, because actually there is no such thing as a “me” that is independent of everything else and solid, autonomous, and so on. Because such a thing doesn’t really exist – it’s an inflation of this interdependent “me” – then we feel insecure about it.
That actually is a very profound point of why do we feel insecure. Most of us do feel insecure. What is that really based on? Here it’s saying that it’s based on this grasping for a solid “me” and the selfish concern; and based on that we feel some, we feel insecurity for ourselves. “We want only pleasure and we shun any pain” – that’s what I was saying before: in order to try to make ourselves – that solid “me” – secure, we want only pleasure. We think that the more pleasure we get, that will make us secure. We want to get rid of as much pain as possible because we think that’ll make us secure – that’ll make the solid “me” secure.
Then the last line of the verse suggests how we need to deal with this. The way that we deal with this is to “banish all selfish compulsion” – in other words, get rid of this concern for just ourselves and our own pleasure – and “gladly take hardship for all others sakes.” We take on suffering of others with this giving and taking, this tonglen practice. This is very fundamental actually to the whole philosophy which is behind this text.
Grasping for a Solid “Me”
First let’s think about how this grasping for a solid “me” is what perpetuates all our problems that we have, rather than being relaxed about how things happen in life. Well, how do things happen in life? Causes and conditions – an enormous amount of causes and conditions, because the more we think about it the more we realize that absolutely everything is interconnected causally. History, economics, personal things, psychology – everything is interrelated. That’s how things happen. These causes and conditions come together in “me;” but the point is that they don’t come together to “me” as the center of the universe, and this is the only thing that they come together at – that this is the exclusive focal point of cause and effect. This is because everybody is affected by cause and effect. Obviously, personal factors come in there as well, but most personal factors are related to the people that we interact with during our lives, even just in terms of genetic material. But when we think just of a solid, autonomous “me” that’s independent of all of that, then we get into some trouble, don’t we? So, the question is how: how do we get into trouble?
When we’re interacting with each other and somebody hurts us, then if we think of this solid “me,” we really suffer. But if we think in terms of causes and effects – this has arisen for many different causes – then we don’t react in this chain reaction of just getting hurt and then hitting back or trying to get back on the other person in some sort of way that will hurt him or her. These things go hand in hand here: one that everything has arisen in terms of causes and conditions – why the person is trying to hurt me and so on; but also, the big other side that has to be emphasized here is that there is no solid “me” that can be hurt, in a sense. Sure, I could be injured, there could be physical pain; but when we feel emotionally hurt, why do we feel emotionally hurt? Because of thinking very strongly of “me:” “You just insulted me,” “You just abandoned me,” “You just left me,” “You just hurt me.” Whereas if we ask, what is “me?” “Me” is what can be imputed on an ever-changing continuity of mental factors, and body, and so on. Conventionally there is “me,” and I experience things: I experience hearing you say these words or experience you leaving, going away, or dying, or saying nasty things to me, and so on. That is just one moment of the ever-changing factors that make up each moment of my experience. So we respond in whatever way might be appropriate, but there is certainly no reason to think in terms of “me, me, me:” “You just left me, “You just hurt me.”
In other words, in each moment, what we need to do is to just accept the reality of the moment: this person just left; this person just said that they didn’t love me anymore. Well, first of all, that might change the next day as well, so you take things like an illusion, like a dream, like I was telling you about my trip to Columbia. One day it was on, then the next day they say it’s off, then the next day they say it’s on again. I don’t think at all in this situation about me and “Oh my god, and they don’t love me anymore, they don’t want me and oh, I told you so” – it only gives you aggravation. I just simply went to the travel agency and found out what the consequences are of cancelling the plane ticket, and then told them that, of the penalty that they would have to pay. This is just the reality of the situation – you want to call the trip off? This is the consequences of calling the trip off, now deal with it – without taking it in any sort of personal type of way. I didn’t feel hurt about the whole thing – no big deal. I mean, I must say I found it amusing, but no big deal. So I didn’t suffer through that. If I was thinking of a solid “me” in that process, I would have been very upset.
This uncontrollably recurring problem after problem – it’s like we set up the target of imagining that we’re the solid “me,” and then life just constantly is punching it; one event after another is punching this solid “me.” If you don’t set up a solid “me” for this ever-changing stream of causes and conditions to punch, then it just flows. We try as much as possible to add causes to the soup, as it were, so that we can possibly try to affect things to go a little better, but realizing of course that we are not the only cook. Everybody else in the universe is adding things into the soup, aren’t they? But when we think of the solid “me” and we think “I’m the only one that’s adding into the soup of causes and conditions of what happens,” then obviously we’re going to be incredibly frustrated because things will not work out the way that we want them to, inevitably. Even if they do work out the way that we wanted to, then we get on such an ego trip of being so proud that then we fall even worse. The prouder and more arrogant you are, the more horrible it is when you fall. This is this point of uncontrollably recurring samsara. It comes from grasping for a solid “me” as real.
Now let’s go on to the next point, which is that because of this grasping for a solid “me,” we get self-cherishing: we become selfish, we think only of my welfare. That’s a very important connection. What do you understand about the relation between grasping for a solid “me” and the self-cherishing attitude or being selfish, thinking only of my welfare? How do these connect? They are part of the same syndrome, but it’s important to understand the relationship so that you know where to attack it, if you want to get rid of it. If we just say, “Stop being selfish, don’t be so selfish, you’re really stupid” – does that work? No, that doesn’t work. You can’t just attack selfishness by saying it’s bad. You have to go to the root, obviously. The root of it is this solid “me,” thinking of a solid “me.” It’s only on the basis of thinking of ourselves as that that you can slowly get rid of selfishness. It’s very interesting, when you think of this tonglen practice – many of us are a little bit familiar with this from previous courses. Now, you imagine the suffering of others coming into us in all sorts of horrible forms of insects and dirty substances and things like that, and you imagine that it eats away this self-cherishing inside us, this selfishness that says, “I don’t want to deal with that, I don’t want to get my hands dirty” and so on. There is this resistance, and so you use a very powerful punch to punch that solid “me.” The question is, would that work if you didn’t have already some understanding of voidness – that there is no such thing as this solid me? I don’t know that you would have so much success, because what I think you would have is a battle, a fight. You put up more and more resistance and think, “I don’t want to do this” and, “Okay, I’ll play that I’m doing it.” It does have certainly an emotional effect, an emotional response, within you if you do it seriously – imagining these dirty substances and so on and – of “I don’t want to deal with your crap, with your problem.”
You do get an emotional response. The emotional response is usually resistance. Either that or eventually you just surrender, but then there is the solid “me” surrendering and giving up. But I think that to really be effective, you have to have some understanding that there is no such thing as the solid “me.” Remember, when we had it in the sensitivity training course, we said that all this suffering stuff dissolves into the clear light ocean of the mind. We didn’t emphasize so much the understanding of voidness – we did it from another point of view, the other voidness point of view – but it dissolves into the nature of the mind. Then you calm down, and then with Buddha-nature thoughts, the natural warmth and happiness of the mind comes up. On that basis, you can give happiness to others because here we were dealing primarily, in the sensitivity training, with the feeling aspect of it. Thinking about the sadness of others’ problems, how do you feel being able to give happiness to others? When somebody comes to you with a terrible problem – today I was at a funeral, somebody’s mother had died, and they are really sad – how do you somehow deal with their sadness and somehow give them some calmness, some peace of mind, without being an idiot and just sort of smiling and saying, “Oh, let’s be happy?” It’s totally inappropriate at a funeral.
Here it’s dealing with feelings, in the sensitivity training – not to be afraid of sadness, grief, and the crying, and not be afraid of that, and to sort of try to absorb that and just give some stability, some calmness, some strength. That’s dealing with the feeling side, but here we need to deal with the understanding side. I think that if we have some understanding of voidness – doesn’t have to be so profound, but just some, then the foundation that’s supporting this concept of a solid “me” is weak. If that ground underneath the solid “me” is very weak, then the attack of “I’m going to take on the suffering of others” and so on, I think, can be more successful because that concept of a solid “me” can’t give so much resistance. It has no defense, there is nothing that it can rely on. That’s why what it says here in the text is so important – that the grasping for the true “me,” the solid “me,” is what brings on self-cherishing, selfishness.
So, we’ve seen that this grasping for a solid “me” is what’s behind the selfish concern and because of that, because we have this selfishness, we want to make this self secure. This is the real problem behind insecurity. Why do I feel insecure? “Poor me, I won’t be able to handle it;” “Poor me, nobody is going to like me.” What is insecurity? What is it that we’re insecure about? We want a “me” that will be in control. There is a me that feels insecure that should be in control. That of course is a complete myth if we think in terms of the millions of causes and conditions that affect what happens. How can you possibly be in control? Even in control of ourselves – as if there was a solid “me” separate from the “me” who is trying to control it, and “I’m going to control that me.” “I will control my emotions;” “I will control my actions so that I don’t act destructively;” “I will control my selfishness” – that doesn’t work. Because usually there is a rebellion somewhere down the line against that. A rebellion either by the controller who gets tired of controlling, or the one that’s being controlled. That other side of ourselves just gets more defiant like a teenager. The more you try to control the teenager, the worse they’ll act – that’s not a good idea. So we seek some security for our own egos.
How do we try to find security? We want only pleasure and shun any pain. I’m going to get secure if I can have more and more pleasure, more and more money, more and more possessions, more and more friends, more and more love, more and more sex, more and more whatever, more and more knowledge, more and more prostrations that I have done – if I just get a certain number, then I will feel secure. That’s spiritual materialism.
So, “We want only pleasure we shun any pain” – we try to avoid any pain. Now we have to “banish this selfish compulsion” – that means that we act out this selfishness compulsively – “and gladly take hardship for others sake.” “Gladly” doesn’t mean like a martyr; it doesn’t mean thinking, “Oh how wonderful,” but very willingly. “I’m going to do this because this is a way in which I can help hopefully the others, but at least I can help myself to overcome this selfishness by taking it on myself and broadening my scope.”
Selfish Concern as the Cause of Our Suffering
Then verse 8:
All of our sufferings derive from our habits of selfish delusions we heed and act out. As all of us share in this tragic misfortune, which stems from our narrow and self-centered ways, we must take all our sufferings and the miseries of others and smother our wishes of selfish concern.
This is the point that we had made in our introductory discussion, where we saw that all of our suffering – everything that goes wrong, everything we don’t like – comes from our habits of selfish delusion. The disturbing emotions that we act out selfishly – we follow them and we act them out. This is the disadvantage of cherishing oneself – that it makes us act selfishly out of greed, out of desire, out of envy, out of anger, out of arrogance, out of laziness, and all of our difficulties come from that. We can understand that just in the straightforward way of destructive behavior and the ripening of karma, which is one of the themes that’s discussed here so much in the text. But we can think of it just in everyday situations as well.
Why don’t we reflect for a moment. We had thought about this before, but let’s just remind ourselves of, when we are miserable and unhappy, how is that coming from our selfish concern, from our selfishness? I’ll give an example. There was a lunch after the funeral today, and they served little sandwiches. Now, there are many things that I don’t particularly like to eat, and in that buffet of sandwiches there were only two kinds of sandwiches that I liked out of maybe eight different kinds of sandwiches. So as soon as I started thinking about how I really hope that nobody else takes the ones that I like, and how can I take the one that I like quickly without looking completely like a greedy pig – what is the result? You’re unhappy. You suffer, because you’re worried that I’m not going to get the kind of sandwich that I like, and I may be stuck with the embarrassing thing of saying, “I don’t like what’s there,” and so I don’t take anything or just eat something that I don’t like particularly. Fortunately, nobody took the one that I liked. But I must say that I was one of the first people to take a sandwich; I was one of the first to take a sandwich. This is the thing of the conventional “me” – that you refute the false “me,” the solid “me,” but you don’t give up the conventional “me.” In other words, what I resolved was that, well, if everybody took the one that I liked, it’s not going to kill me to eat one that I don’t like. So I wasn’t so uptight about that, but nevertheless I did prefer one that I liked, and when I had the opportunity after one or two people had taken a sandwich, I took the one that I liked. You act with a conventional “me” but without that uptightness of thinking, “My god, what’s going to happen if I don’t get the one that I like.” It’s not the end of the world. That was the way that I basically was thinking. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t get the one that I like, but I try to get the one that I like. I think that’s the way to deal with it in a balanced way.
The verse says, “All of our sufferings derive from our habits of selfish delusions we heed and act out. As all of us share in this tragic misfortune,” – so we’re not the only one like that. A lot of think that “I’m the only one who has this problem,” and then they really suffer. But when they understand that so many people have the same problem – you’re not alone with that – then it becomes something that’s not such a disaster. Just the fact that other people have it as well gives you some strength to be able to deal with it. This is very true. This, I think, most of us know from our own experience. As it says, “All of us share in this tragic misfortune, which stems from our narrow and self-centered ways.” Everybody suffers because of selfishness, and then the disturbing emotions that come from that, and then acting them out. Because of that, “We must take all our sufferings and the misery of others and smother our wishes of selfish concern.” We take on our own suffering, take on the suffering of others, and in this tonglen practice, smother our wishes for selfish concern. We try to wipe out this selfishness with both taking on that suffering, which obviously the self doesn’t want to do; but underlying that, first we have the understanding of no solid “me.”
Introducing Tonglen
Then the ninth verse:
Should the impulse arise now to seek our own pleasure, we must turn it aside to please others instead; for even if loved ones should rise up against us, we must blame our self-interest and feel it’s our due.
Actually, we can discuss this more next time because this gets into the more specifics of the tonglen practice. But this is how the text gets into tonglen. It says that because of all that, if the impulse arises to seek our own pleasure, we must turn it aside to please others instead. Instead of thinking of ourselves, think of others, basically. It’s not talking about thinking, “Well, I just want to please everybody and so I’ll just do what everybody asks me to do and be a good girl or good boy.”
“If loved ones should rise up against us, we must blame our self-interest and feel it’s our due” – in other words, feel that it is coming as a ripening of karma. It’s not that we deserve it or anything like that, because that then it gets into a solid “me” – “I deserve it because I’m bad and I messed up” – but see that the fault is on our selfishness. That is what’s behind it. This is the sort of the transition verse into the main part of the text now, which is talking about specific types of karmic ripening and specific practices of tonglen that we do with that. This is very much the type of thinking that is so central to the lojong tradition – this attitude training or mind training tradition – which is to give the victory to others and take the loss on ourselves. We think of others and not of ourselves.
“Should loved ones rise up against us” – that’s because of my selfishness that someone has opposed me. If we ask somebody to do something for us, and they say no, or they say yes but they are completely lazy, and they don’t do it, they keep on putting it off and off and off – well, whose fault is it? Why do we get angry? If we’re going to get angry, it’s our own fault for being so lazy and not doing it ourselves. Or if we ask somebody to do it, and they do it not the way that we wanted, whose fault is that? It’s our own fault. That’s due to our selfishness that I was lazy and didn’t want to do it myself. I’m being very selfish and very self-centered – a control freak – by insisting that it has to be my way in which it’s done. So rather than “seek our own pleasure” and want to get our way, “turn it aside to please others” and, in a sense, think what will make them happy. But as I say, we have to keep on thinking of this balanced sensitivity as well. Don’t go to the other extreme of totally negating the conventional “me” and not taking care of the conventional “me.” One could misuse this type of practice to really just be very abusive to oneself, punish oneself. That’s not what is intended here at all.
Dedication
Let’s end here, and then we’ll get into the whole long section that will follow here about various examples of wheels of sharp weapons returning upon us. We think whatever positive force has come from this, may it act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.