WSW 26: Calling Yamantaka to Smash the Demon of Self-Grasping

Verses 51-52

Recap

We’re looking at this text called Wheel of Sharp Weapons or Throwing Star Weapon, more literally. This text is speaking about overcoming our grasping for a “true self” – a solid “me,” an impossible “me” – which causes us to act in a selfish way, to think only of ourselves. It is speaking about the Bodhisattva path, which is to transform the various types of suffering and so on that come from grasping for a “true self” – to transform that into a path that’s going to help us to enlightenment. The analogy which is used for that is peacocks eating poison. Peacocks supposedly eat poisonous plants or plants that would be poisonous to other species, but they thrive on that; whereas if other animals, like the crow that they mention here, were to eat it, they would die. The poisonous plants are analogous then to the disturbing emotions. The actual transformation that they’re talking about in the text is the transformation that’s done with the practice of tonglen – giving and taking. In it, you take on the various sufferings and problems of others – for instance, their disturbing emotions – and imagine that in taking them on from others and adding it on to our own disturbing emotions and various problems, we deal with that problem; resolve it; find the antidote to it; and give that not just to ourselves but to everybody. That’s the basic idea here.

We’ve gone through the first part of the text. In the first part of the text, the actual practice of tonglen is given. The author goes through many different types of suffering situations that we might experience and points out the karmic cause for it. It’s very much a teaching about karma, about the type of negative or destructive behavior we have done that causes the various problems that we experience to happen on us. These is the throwing star weapon that we throw out ourselves and, like a boomerang, it comes back to us. These verses then instructs us that when we have this type of problem, and we understand what the cause is, what we want to do is to stop repeating the cause. This is the standard form of each of the verses. The meditation with it is that, first, we think to solve that problem in ourselves in terms of changing our basic behavioral patterns; and then we do this in the tonglen fashion of taking on the same problem from everybody and giving everybody the same solution.

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