Recap
We’ve been going through this text by Dharmarakshita (Skt. Dharmarakṣita), Wheel of Sharp Weapons or Weapon Wheel of Blades, which is in the genre known as lojong, the training of our attitudes. It’s a Mahayana (Skt. Mahāyāna) text, and what we want to do is to cleanse away our attitudes of self-cherishing – just thinking only of ourselves and grasping to ourselves as if we existed in some impossible way – so that we can follow the Mahayana path fully and purely all the way to enlightenment. The first part of the text is speaking about how we change our attitudes and transform a difficult situation into a positive situation, and this is referring to various situations in which terrible things happen to us. We need to understand, when these things happen to us, that they’re happening not because of no cause, not because some external being separate from everything is causing that to us. Rather, what happens to us is the result of our karma, of our previous actions. Of course, we have to not go to the extreme of thinking that everything that happens to us is only because of what I did, because obviously we live in this world with everybody else, and it’s everybody else’s karma that is ripening as well, and so we’re all interacting. But the fact that we get into situations is the responsibility of our own karma.
When we understand that, then in order to be able to avoid similar things happening in the future, the first thing that we have to do is to stop continuing to cause this type of suffering result. Each verse speaks about a difficult situation, and then it speaks about the karmic cause for it, and it recommends stopping that type of action and doing something constructive or positive instead. That’s one level in which we understand the verses, and it is obviously very good advice in terms of avoiding or stopping acting destructively and acting instead in a constructive type of way.
Another level in which we work with this material is with the method known as tonglen, which is taking and giving. When we practice that method, we start first with ourselves. We want to take on or accept all the suffering – all the difficulties that we ourselves are experiencing now and we might experience in the future as well. We think, “I’m going to take responsibility for that” – and take responsibility for stopping it in the future, not just stopping it right now. So, we do this taking and giving. We imagine that we accept all of that suffering comes into us in the form of dark substances, dark light. It comes to our heart and dissolves there in our heart. We have some sort of strong lump of selfishness that says, “I don’t really want to deal with it.” It’s not only selfishness but just basically confusion and close-mindedness: “I don’t want to accept the fact that I have problems, I don’t want to accept the fact that I may continue to have these problems,” and then just perpetuating them. We want to smash that with this dark light – or there are many visualizations that we can do – and dissolve that. The suffering, the problem, quiets down into the nature of the mind. Then from the nature of the mind, the basic calmness and happiness that’s there, we calmly give to ourselves the solution – of going to, in the future, stop acting in a negative way and act instead in a positive way. So, we do this tonglen with ourselves.
Then we extend this practice to everybody else. We think of everybody else who has the same type of problem, and we want to remove that problem from them and give them happiness as well, since after all that’s what we want to do as a Buddha. In order to remove it from them, obviously we have to teach them or give them something to remove it, which would be stopping acting in this negative way that’s causing it and indulging as well in the positive action. The practice maybe gives the false idea that we can just save everybody and remove all their suffering. We imagine doing that because we want to do that, but actually all we can do is show them the way. They have to actually stop acting negatively and act constructively themselves. We can’t do that for them; all we can do is give them the advice and imagine that they are going to follow it – or at least hoping, wishing that they will follow that advice. The best way to get them to follow that advice, of course, is to inspire them by our own example that we follow that as well. That of course is very important.
In the process of extending the giving and taking to everybody else, what we’re doing is also overcoming this self-centeredness with which we feel, “I don’t want to deal with everybody’s problems.” Just as we can think of ourselves as an individual person and – “I have this problem” – we can also think, “I am a Berliner, and people in Berlin have a certain problem;” or, “I’m a German, and people in Germany have a problem;” or, “I’m a Latin American, and Latin Americans have this problem.” The general problem that the larger group has is also my problem. If we think in those terms, then we don’t think just in terms of “me” and “I don’t care about anybody else.” Here we’re talking about the problems of everybody: “I am a limited being like everybody else,” and so here is a problem of all of not only humanity but all of living beings. In this way, we practice taking on the problem that everyone has, dealing with it, dissolving it, having that process smash through the selfishness that would say, “I don’t want to have to deal with everybody else’s problem.” We give them the solution by imagining white light going to the other person and giving them the discipline and the type of behavior that would be the most beneficial for them.
So, this is the type of practice that we’ve been doing. We are now up to verse 34; we are slowly approaching the end of this section. We’ve worked with two translations here: the earlier one that I did many years ago, which is a more poetical translation; and then the literal translation, which I have done more recently.
Karmic Causes of Having No Home of Our Choice
Verse 35:
When we lack all control over where we must travel and always must wander like waifs with no home,” – waif is just a word for homeless people – “this is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done. Till now we’ve disturbed holy gurus and others and forced them to move from their homes or their seats; hereafter let’s never cause others disturbance by evicting them cruelly from where they reside.
The more literal translation is just simply:
At times when we have to wander about, like people not under their own control, this is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they are staying. Now, let’s never expel (anyone) from any place.
This is speaking about situations in which we don’t have any control where we live or where we’re staying. We’re always forced to move because of various types of circumstances. You can’t afford the rent; it could be circumstances of war, it could be circumstances of family. We don’t have control ourselves in terms of deciding where we are going to stay. It could be because of our partner insists that we move somewhere else, and we have to move. We wander about without any real home of our own choosing. This is the difficult situation. It says here that, “This is the sharp weapon of negative karma coming back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay.”
This can be – as it says in the more poetical form – kicking out people from their home, like if we own a house or something like that and we kick the people out and take it for ourselves or kick them out by raising the rent so high that they can’t stay there, which happens to some people. Maybe we don’t have that type of property, but it certainly can happen. It can also be forcing people out of their seats, it says – not letting them have the place where they rest and so on. Actually, it’s interesting if you think about it, because you could drive people away from where they are, from where they’re staying – either living or just temporarily resting or staying – by being very loud or very unpleasant. In other words, it doesn’t have to be actually that you tell them, “Get out,” but we make it so unpleasant for them that, in a sense, we force them to move because we don’t like them, or we don’t like what they’re doing. It doesn’t have to be only with people; it’s an interesting thing if we start to extend this to situations that are not so easy. For instance, you have mice living in your house, or you have bedbugs living in your furniture, or cockroaches. Do you kick them out of their home and send them wandering about or do you give them a home? That’s certainly not an easy one. What do we do in that type of situation? You can try to give them another home. In some situations, it really is quite impossible. Obviously if you have to move, and you can’t bring your dog or your cat with you, you don’t just throw the dog or the cat just out of the house and let it be on the street. You try to find another home for it – that is fairly clear. I had to do that with my dog, for example, in India, when I moved to the West. But when your house is full of bedbugs as my house was once – obviously there are examples from the literature of somebody taking all the worms and little insects off with the tip of their tongue and putting them somewhere else but, if we’re not at that level, which I doubt that most of us are, what do you do?
One of the important points is the motivating emotion that we have. When we speak about motivation in Buddhism, we’re talking about two aspects: one is what is the aim, the purpose of what we’re doing; and then the accompanying emotion. The aim might be to save the house, because I can’t really afford to move, and I need to be able to work and continue whatever beneficial things I’m doing. That would be the aim, the purpose. Then the accompanying motivation: it’s important to try to have compassion for the cockroaches – wish them better future rebirth – rather than have anger and hatred toward them. Now, there are two levels of this motivation. One is one that brings us into the action, the causal motivation, what starts us into this whole process. The other one is the contemporaneous motivation – in other words, what’s going on in our minds when we actually are killing them. That’s much more difficult, and that is much stronger, actually, in terms of determining the result. I noticed it in myself when I had to kill the bedbugs that were completely living in everything in my house. I tried to have a positive motivation as my cause for getting rid of them, but when I was actually doing it and killing them, then what was my aim? My aim was to really kill them; there was one running around and then you think, “Hah! I really want to kill you, stop running around.” So, all of a sudden, the aim of what you’re doing is really to kill it rather than to have the house be available for my own use.
Although I wasn’t really angry with the bed bugs that were there, another factor is whether or not you rejoice in what you’re doing – you feel happy about it – or you regret what you’re doing. You can regret what you’re doing beforehand, but when the thing is running around, and you get, it it’s quite easy to feel quite happy: “Ah, I got it.” It’s not so simple. In theory, if you have a positive motivation, it will certainly make it much less negative, but that’s hard to sustain when you’re actually in the act of killing them. From the karmic point of view, whether you do it yourself or you have somebody else to do it for you, the result is the same. Now, we can’t really control what the other person is going to have as their attitude toward doing it. That becomes actually a very interesting issue if you call in some professional exterminator. They usually just have a very neutral attitude; they’re just doing their job in order to make money. I don’t think that they, if they’ve been doing that job for a long time, particularly enjoy it unless they’re really a bit strange. They just sort of do it. I don’t know if that’s better or worse; in a sense we’re contributing to the negative karma of somebody else by hiring somebody to do that for us. That’s very true. These are difficult issues.
I think another important point here, in terms of karma – what makes karma heavy or not heavy – is the actual status of the being that we’re kicking out from where they’re staying. In other words, to kick out a human being is much heavier than kicking out a cockroach. This is in terms of how much benefit that being is doing to others in this particular lifetime. In theory, the cockroach could be reborn as your mother, but putting that aside, in this lifetime a human being is able to do much more beneficial things for others than a cockroach; and a great spiritual master can do far more to benefit others than a murderer. If you have to make a choice between kicking your family out of the house or kicking the bedbugs or cockroaches out of the house, then it’s quite clear that the family takes precedence over the cockroaches. These are not so easy issues. But there’re other examples that come up. The example that I’m thinking of is a very modern one, where they kick people out of their houses in order to build a shopping mall, in order to develop the land and make a lot of money off of it. It happens in so many places around the world. I think these are much better examples of what it’s talking about.
Or destroying the environment on a larger scale, where you exploit the national parks to build vacation homes in them, and cell phone towers, or cutting down the trees of the Amazon in order to have more farms or exploiting the wildlife parks in Alaska to drill for more oil. This certainly is not only committing this type of negative action of evicting others from where they live, but also it’s breaking one of the bodhisattva vows. One of the bodhisattva vows is not to destroy places, environments, or cities, or areas, and that’s certainly destroying it. So, these things are quite negative, and it produces a collective karma as well. Often you will see many people experiencing the same thing of becoming refugees, having to leave their homeland, as it happened with the Tibetans. When you look at collective karma, the people who are experiencing this type of thing weren’t necessarily Tibetans in their previous lives when they built up that karma; they could have been anywhere and anything. There’s one explanation that they had to have built it up together at the same time; that could be the case.
We can think of many beings that experience this problem either now being refugees or who are building up the karma to experience that in the future. It says, “At times when like people not under their own control we must wander about.” “Wander about” doesn’t mean that you just move to another home, and then that’s your home. Wander about means wandering around and not having any home. Having to go here and there and being moved from this refugee camp to that refugee camp and so on. “This is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay.”
Obviously the heaviest is to kick your teacher out of his room or her room because you want that. I’m thinking of some of these Dharma Centers where the teacher might have a very quiet room in the back, and you’re running the center, and you want that room for yourself, so you throw the guru to the room that’s right on the street so they have all the traffic noise. It “comes from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay. Now, let’s never expel anyone from any place.” Another interesting example could be when there’s reserved seats or seats in the front, and some kids come and they sit in those seats, do you kick them out? This happens at teachings all the time, doesn’t it? There’s always a reserved section in the front for the VIPs, and people invariably sit there who’ve shouldn’t be sitting there, and then somebody comes along and kicks them out. In a sense it’s they’re taking what was not given, and they’re not in their own place, but what is somebody’s own place? Obviously, there are a lot of points that could be analyzed.
Or the window seat in the airplane: somebody is sitting in your seat. Or at these teachings – this happens very often – there really aren’t reserved places but you think, “This is my place, I have been sitting there every day.” Then you come, and somebody is sitting in your place. Do you kick them out and make a big scene, which usually involves a great deal of anger because the other person doesn’t want to leave; or do you just give the victory to the others and sit somewhere else? That I think is a common example that happens to many of us who go to these large public teachings. Or if we have a regular seat – “You always sit there, you always sit there, you always sit there” – what happens if you come in and somebody is sitting in your place? Sometimes it’s a very good exercise when people have regular places. I’ve seen this with some Dharma teachers: they come in and then they insist that everybody move their place and sit somewhere else so they don’t get so attached to where they’re sitting. We feel as though “it’s my place” and become very possessive about it. I think from this point of view most of us have probably experienced this type of thing. Or somebody takes our parking place; I’ve seen people get into big fights over somebody taking their parking place.
Let’s do this exercise, thinking in terms of if we ourselves this type of situation. We take on ourselves having to wander about. We think in terms of the cause of kicking others out of where they’re staying and decide not to do that anymore. Then we think to take on their problem from others and give them the same solution. Again, it says that this is not under your own control. For instance, I travel a lot – that is under my own control; that’s not like a homeless person. Or being in the diplomatic corps, you have to move around a lot, but that’s by choice. It’s by choice that you joined the diplomatic corps and put yourself in that type of lifestyle.
There’re many examples that came to my mind that are quite interesting. What about when you have a dog or cat that likes to sit or sleep on your favorite chair or on a good piece of furniture – do you kick them off? That’s a common example, isn’t it? Another example is that I don’t want the dog on my bed where I sleep, especially not on my pillow. The other example that I was thinking of is that I have a very loud neighbor. I’m not about to kick them out of living next door to me – I don’t have the power to do that – but certainly sometimes I wish they would move. That’s going in that direction because, obviously, if I had the power to kick them out and find a quieter neighbor, I certainly would choose that. So, I think it’s also what one wishes or what one thinks: “I’ll try to make a lot of noise myself so that’ll disturb them so maybe they’ll move”. There are a lot of variants on this particular situation.
Karmic Causes of Unwished Things Happening
Verse 36 in the poetical version:
When the crops in our fields are continually plagued by drought, floods and hailstones, insects and frost, this is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done. Till now we have failed to honor our pledges; hereafter let’s keep all our moral vows pure.
The literal one is:
At times when unwished-for things happen, like frost, hail, and the like, this is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from not having safeguarded properly the morality of our spiritual bonds. Now, let’s keep our spiritual bonds clean and so forth.
This is referring specifically to things that usually are disasters for farmers: frost, hail, and these sorts of things that destroy the crops. Most of us are not farmers but I could imagine other situations when things like this happen to us. This means we can’t have our vacation, or whatever it is that what we wanted to do, gets destroyed by either natural disasters or bad weather; or – as it says in the more poetical version with more examples that Geshe Dhargyey put in – by drought, and insects, and all sort of stuff.
These are unwished-for things that happen. “This is the sharp weapon of negative karma coming back on us from not having safeguarded properly the morality of our close spiritual bonds.” We had a verse earlier on about the close spiritual bonds. There it was talking about committing actions that caused them to decline. We spoke there about the bonds to our teacher, the bond to our practice, and doing things that would make that bond more and more distant by acting negatively. Here, we’re talking about not safeguarding the morality: when we have bonds – for instance, of doing a certain practice, or keeping a certain set of vows like not killing, or not stealing, or not lying, not taking intoxicants – and we haven’t safeguarded properly, we haven’t kept it properly. The morality here is to restrain from these things. Basically, we haven’t kept things in order, by not following the rules and the morality that we had promised that we are going to keep. That causes everything around us to be out of order.
Close spiritual bonds, of course, is referring in this context to things that have to do with Buddhist vows and Buddhist practices. But I think that we can probably extend that to a larger situation in which, if people haven’t kept the order of the society, and so it’s completely lawless, and chaotic, and there’s a lot of corruption, and things like that, then the environment likewise is going to be out of order, and you get a lot of natural disasters. That’s the result of that. The Chinese always thought like that: that was part of a certain branch of Confucian thinking – that the environment reflected the morality of the emperor, basically, and the government. If the emperor wasn’t ethical and moral, then you had all these disasters. If disasters, particularly earthquakes, happened that was an indication that something was wrong with the government and the emperor.
I think this is a similar type of thinking here: if we want the environment, and our lives, and everything to be in order and not have natural disasters affect it, then we need to keep our own lives in order in terms of following what we promised to do – the order that we have promised to bring into our life, for instance with keeping vows. What we want to do then is to keep clean our close bonds and so forth; in other words – this is the expression that’s always used of these bonds – not dirty them by neglecting them, by ignoring them, by not protecting them. The example that they always use is to protect them like you would protect your eyes. These are the boundaries within my life, certain principles that I’m not going to transgress – whether we’ve made a vow or not, whether it’s within the Buddhist context or not – and as long as it’s a positive vow. That is, as long as it’s not a vow that every time that somebody annoys me, I’m going to shoot them – that’s a negative vow.
I think the problem here, if we want to extend it to a larger context and not just the Buddhist context, is what about when a society has an order which is totalitarian, and which is not at all a benevolent society? Do we try to keep everything in order? For instance, the country where I come from, the United States, likes to keep in order dictatorships because economies under dictators are stable. You they make a lot of money, and so they support totalitarian governments. Is that proper here that if you follow that order, then everything will go okay in your society, or not? This was one of the things that was not so easy for the Buddhists to accept in Chinese philosophy. There, it says that if it’s a time of war, then you need to go to war. If you don’t go to war, then you’re out of harmony, so you’re acting wrongly. Whereas if it’s a time of peace and then you go to war, then that’s wrong. You need to follow the order of the time, and you see this in Chinese history and Chinese politics all the time. They change their policies every several years to the exact opposite, and then everybody has to follow that, and then everything stays in order. Buddhism said, “No, there are certain principles that are ethically sound, and these are things that one has to follow regardless of the times.” It’s because of that, I think, that one has to take this verse more strongly in the direction of spiritual bonds with things that are at least beneficial.
When hail comes and destroys our crops, or it smashes the windows on our car, or whatever – at that time, rather than getting angry at it, change that negative situation into a positive one by saying, “Okay, this has happened, I accept that it’s happened.” This is the accepting or taking on it; we’re not going to get angry about it. “This is the situation, and I see at least from my side what the karmic cause for this is, and I will change that, and not repeat it.” But also, don’t think that just because I keep my vows, it’s never going to hail again. The hail is the result of many factors, not just karmic ones, and certainly it’s not just my karma that is affecting it. Many people are involved here, plus just physical causes in terms of the elements and whatever it is that affects weather. It’s quite complex, but all of this is really intended, as you point out, to help us to deal with negative situations and see how you change your attitudes. As I keep on emphasizing, when we look at this in terms of karma, we shouldn’t think that it’s my fault and then feel guilty. That doesn’t help at all; that’s not the intent here. The intent is to accept it and, as you say, not get angry, not put the blame on anything, and think, what can I contribute in the future that will help to prevent such things? It is, in this situation, doing what I promised to do: whatever beneficial, positive things that I’ve promised to do – to do them and guard myself against ignoring or breaking them; and to think on a much larger scale than just ourselves.
I think that when we’re working on a Mahayana level, the main emphasis needs to be on everybody: “I’m just one of everybody who has the same problem.” This means to think of it on a much more global or universal level than just “me.” Of course, I’m included in that global or universal level, but the point here is to make it into a Mahayana practice through the wish for the solution to go to everybody and not just me. Because obviously when we’re thinking of some sort of larger scale natural disaster, it doesn’t affect just me; it affects a huge number of people – especially things like the tsunami. It’s not just my problem; it’s everybody’s problem. We take some sort of responsibility to think on that global level, and when we think on that global or universal level, then we’re not so preoccupied with “me,” and feeling sorry for myself and so on. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says, it gives us great courage to then try to work for the larger good. If we think just of ourselves, you tend to get discouraged because you feel sorry for yourself.
It’s very funny because one might think it’s just the opposite way around – that if you think just of yourself, you say, “Well, okay, I can deal with it,” but if you think of everybody, it’s discouraging because there are so many people. But His Holiness says, it’s exactly the opposite to that: when you’re just thinking of yourself, then you get discouraged because your outlook is very small and very limited, and you get into this “poor me” attitude. Whereas if you’re thinking on a much larger scale, then you stop worrying about “me,” and because you have concern for everybody else, it gives you more courage and more strength. It’s interesting; one has to really look in terms of one’s own experience to see if that’s true or not. Let’s take a look at this practice then.
Karmic Causes of Feeling Needy
Verse 37, the poetical one:
When we are poor, yet are filled with much greed and desire, this is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done. Till now we’ve been misers, reluctant to share. The offerings we have made to the Three Jewels were meager; hereafter let’s give with a generous heart.
The literal is:
At times when our desires are huge, but we’re poor in our wealth, this is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from not having made donations or offerings to the Supreme Gems. Now, let’s make efforts regarding offerings and donations.
This is referring to a situation like the clutching ghosts or the hungry ghosts; we have tremendous desire and greed for a lot of things, but we’re very poor, we never have anything. This can be in a material way, or it could be in any sort of way, and this always is explained as coming from being miserly, of not wanting to give anything to others. If we want to not give to others, we clutch and hang on to our own. We don’t want to share what we have and, as a result, we don’t get anything. We’re not able to even enjoy what we have, let alone get anything from anybody else, and so we’re very poor. The thing that we need to do then is to make proper offerings and gifts. We haven’t been willing to give gifts to others. Especially with gifts or offerings to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, to the spiritual teachers – either we haven’t been willing to give any gifts, or we give gifts of very poor quality. For instance, we’re very wealthy, or we’re not that wealthy but we enjoy wonderful food and nice things, but on the altar you only put water, and you don’t put anything nice.
When you do put things on the altar, by the way, as offerings to the Triple Gem, it’s not that you leave it there until it rots or the mice eat it, but you leave it there for a while. A lot of people have the wrong idea you just leave it there and then you throw it in the garbage, but that’s not the case. You leave it there for a few hours or something like that, and then you eat it yourself, or you give it to others. But it’s not that it should go rotten or be just thrown in the garbage. When making gifts to others or making a meal for others or something like that, you try to give as good a quality as you can and not be cheap. This is important. Of course, one needs to not go overboard and give more than we can afford and then go into debt – that also is a little bit improper. There are all sorts of teachings on how to practice generosity, what is appropriate to give and what’s inappropriate to give. You don’t give an alcoholic money that they are going out and buy more alcohol with; if you’re going to give them something, give them food or something that they can’t turn into alcohol.
The verse then is:
At times when our desires are great, but we’re poor in our wealth, this is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from having not made gifts or made offerings to the Supreme Gems. Now, make efforts regarding offerings and gifts.
If we’re going to give, give something which is nice and don’t be stingy. Geshe Dhargyey quoted somebody and that actually is very nice here in this commentary. Geshe Potawa (from the twelfth century) said: “Don’t offer the yellow part of the green vegetable nor the green part of the butter.” Offer the good part, not the bad part. Let’s think about this, do a little bit of tonglen, and then we’ll end for tonight.
Dedication
Let’s end with the dedication. We think whatever understanding, whatever positive force has come from this, may it go deeper and deeper, and act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.