Recap
We have been looking at this text, Wheel of Sharp Weapons or, more literally, Throwing Star Weapon. This is probably the earliest text in this style of lojong – attitude training or mind training. The basic theme is to overcome two things: the self-cherishing attitude with which we think only of ourselves and the grasping for a “true self” – a “true me,” a solidly, independently existing “me.” This underlies and is the cause for our selfish concern and is the root of all our various problems. In the text, the author speaks in the first half about all the various karmic problems that ripen on us as a result of acting under the influence of self-cherishing and grasping for this “true self.” He gives the good advice of what to avoid in terms of the karmic causes for it and what to put into practice that would be the antidote or opponent to it. The way in which it is presented is in terms of, first, thinking about our own experience with this type of problem. Then we think in terms of everybody else who experiences this type of problem, take that on ourselves and give to others the solution and happiness etc. in the manner of tonglen: giving and taking.
The second half of the text (after some transition verses), which is where we are now, is speaking more specifically about this grasping for a “true self.” In order to overcome that, we need to invoke the image of Yamantaka, which is the forceful form of Manjushri. Manjushri is the embodiment of the wisdom or clarity of mind, the discriminating awareness and understanding of all the Buddhas. Yamantaka is the very forceful form of that, which we invoke in order to be able to cut through the confusion, cut through our selfishness, cut through our grasping for a true solid “me” – a true, “solid self. This second part of the text speaks in terms of various examples of what we would usually want in life but we’re not able to get. Why are we not able to get it? It’s because we’re under the influence of this grasping for a “true self.” The text gives various examples of that, and it goes through many verses – probably more than 40 – which give various examples of how our grasping for a “true self” basically jeopardizes, sabotages and makes it impossible for us to get the happiness and success in practice and in life that we want.
Happiness, Unhappiness and Desires
We are up to verse 56 in the new version. We are looking at two versions of the text. The old one is the loose poetical translation that I had done in 1973, so it’s quite old and quite different in the sense that it incorporates a lot of the commentary from Geshe Dhargyey. What we actually explain from is the new literal translation which I prepared. In the old translation, it’s verse 58:
Our wish to be happy is strong at all times, yet we do not gather merit to yield this result. We have little endurance for hardship and suffering, yet ruthlessly push for the things we desire. Trample him, trample him, dance on the head of this treacherous concept of selfish concern. Tear out the heart of this self-centered butcher who slaughters our chance to gain final release.
In the new translation, that’s verse 56:
Our wish for happiness is enormous, yet we fail to build up a network of its causes. Our tolerance for unhappiness is little, yet our ambitious desires and greed are great. Crash, really crash down, right on the head of (this) ruinous concept! Deal the death blow to the heart of this butcher, a “true self,” our foe.
That’s the more literal translation. The text is speaking here about how we want to experience happiness. Everybody wants to experience happiness and our longing and wishing for that is really enormous. We want to even have happiness in our dreams, let alone in our ordinary life. Yet, as it says here, we don’t build up a network of its causes. In other words, we don’t do the various types of positive actions or constructive actions that would bring about happiness as its result. In the general teachings on karma, constructive behavior is what results in happiness and destructive behavior is what results in unhappiness. Constructive behavior can be of two types. The main type that is referred to in the text is, when we have the strong desire to act in a destructive way, to refrain ourselves and not act that way. When there is a mosquito buzzing around our head and we feel like killing it, the constructive action is not to kill it. If we don’t want it around our head, we can catch it in some peaceful way and take it out of the room, or use a mosquito net, or insect repellent, or something like that. There are nonviolent ways of dealing with insects that we don’t like, for example.
This is what is the main emphasis in constructive behavior is: when that situation comes up and you feel like acting destructively, not to do so because you think of the negative consequences that would come from that, either to yourself or to others. Primarily it’s to ourselves because you never know what the effect is going to be on somebody else but, nevertheless, we try to avoid hurting somebody. When the impulse is there to say something nasty or cruel to somebody, keep your mouth shut, don’t say it, because you realize that it’s going to just cause a lot of trouble. Then of course the other type of constructive behavior would be to speak in a kind way in this type of situation. But although these are the causes for happiness, we don’t do that. This is what the verse is referring to: we think that happiness is going to come for no cause at all.
This is due to this “ruinous concept,” it says: this concept that we have of a “true self,” of “me, me, me,” of “I deserve to be happy.” We think that “me” deserves to be happy regardless of cause and effect; that “me” exists independently of cause and effect. We think, “Here I am. I deserve to be happy, why is this unhappiness coming to me?” We don’t think in terms of the actual causes for it. We may think it’s a punishment from some external being or who knows what – bad luck, “I’m inherently a loser,” or whatever. This is the first part of the verse. What do you think of that? How do we approach happiness or harmony in relationships, for example? Do we look at it in terms of cause and effect or we just think in terms of, “Well, we should be happy” and “I want to be happy,” but we don’t think of what really would be the cause for that happiness? Or we blame the unhappiness on somebody else: “They have to change in order for me to be happy.” That’s quite common, isn’t it? “It’s all the neighbor’s fault that I can’t sleep at night because they play the music loudly and so it’s up to them to change. That would be the cause of my happiness.”
Ultimately the cause for happiness would be to not just build up a positive force through doing good but basically overcoming the confusion of grasping for a solid “me,” because that really is the cause of our unhappiness and our problems. That’s very difficult when you’re in the midst of that grasping and so it could contribute to low self-esteem when we have these strong statements of “Crash, really crash down, right on the head of (this) ruinous concept!” To overcome low self-esteem, basically you have to reevaluate who this “me” is that I think is so terrible. Obviously, that’s the false “me” – this truly existent solid “me” – that’s so inadequate. That “me” is the basis for the low self-esteem. So, what do we do in the meantime? We need to think on another level of the causes for happiness, which are doing positive things.
That is something which psychologists have found as well: one of the best ways of helping somebody with very low self-esteem who’s very rebellious – a difficult teenager, for example, who is into all sort sorts of unwholesome things – is to let them do something for you. Giving them the opportunity to give is one of the best ways for increasing your self-esteem. You feel, “Hey, I actually do have something to offer,” and even if what they offer is not really what you wanted, you need to show appreciation. It’s like when your three- or your four-year-old child draws a picture: it’s not a Picasso, it’s not a masterpiece, but still, you praise the child very much: “Wow, this is really nice, thank you!” If it’s a teenager or an adult, you try to do that in a way which is not condescending. This is about building up more and more positive force by doing positive things and helping others to do positive things by giving them the opportunity to do that – not in the sense of making them your slave and saying, “Do this, do that!” but in a skillful way. That positive force that they build up will bring temporary happiness and also builds up the force for being able to cut through the confusion with which you grasp at the solid “me.”
That’s the way to deal with low self-esteem on a temporary level, provisional level and then on a deeper level. Provisionally, we build up some positive force, do positive things, help others. Even if you feel that “I can’t, I have nothing to offer” you have to think, “Well, what is it that I’m able to do?” If we are someone who’s trying to follow the bodhisattva path, we can help others in that situation. Then the deeper level is the understanding, correct understanding. It’s not easy, of course; low self-esteem is a really difficult and a very prevalent problem, in the West particularly. In the West, it comes with perfectionism. It comes with capitalism, for example –the idea of competition: “I’m not good enough, the others are better.” You have to compete so that contributes to it: the pressure of a capitalist society in which, if you’re not perfect and you don’t beat out the other people, you’re not going to make a living; and if you don’t have the latest car and the latest cell phone, you won’t be happy. So, that’s the first part of this verse: “Our wish for happiness is enormous, yet we fail to build up a network of its causes.”
The second part is: “Our tolerance for unhappiness is little, yet our ambitious desires and greed are great.” This is speaking about the flip side: we don’t want to be unhappy. We have very little tolerance and patience for that, yet what do we do? We have these ambitious desires and greed to have more and more and more things. That’s based on thinking of the solid “me” – “I have to have more” – and on the basis of ambitious longing desires and greed. What does that do? It causes you to act in destructive ways that are just going to produce more unhappiness. We have to have more possessions; we have to have more money; we have to have a better figure. We have to have more and more and more, yet we are not tolerant of the unhappiness that this brings, so it’s contradictory. This is going to be the basic structure of all these verses.
Again, it gives us a lot to think about: “I don’t like to be unhappy, but do I have all these disturbing emotions that drive me to act in ways that are just going to produce more unhappiness?” What do we do about it? Do we say, “Well, that’s just my nature and so everybody should learn to live with it?” Or do blame it on my upbringing? “I come from a war zone and so therefore this is the way I am. I’m very high-strung, I’m very tense, so everybody has to live with that.” It’s an interesting issue, isn’t it? “Accept me for what I am” – that’s based on the concept of a false “me,” isn’t it? But there is the conventional side: thinking, “Okay, this is the way my personality is.” It can change, of course, but this is the reality of what we who we’re dealing with. I think that one has to make quite a distinction here. There’s the conventional “me:” In this lifetime, based on cause and effect (and on past lifetime causes as well), I have this type of personality, but this isn’t the true solid “me” and you have to live with it because it’s permanent. You do have to interact with it – that’s true; but all of us – ourselves and others – have to realize that we’re constantly in a state of flux, constantly in a state of change and there’s nothing solid there that’s remaining the same throughout, although there is continuity.
You can gain a little bit of a glimpse of that in meditation when you are outside of a confrontational relationship or situation. The real goal is to become so familiar with that that you can actually still keep that in mind when you’re with somebody else and there is confrontation and argument. That’s not so easy because we keep on doing this whole number of “But you should be like this” – there is big emphasis on “you” – rather than seeing a combination of all sorts of causes and conditions and parts. We make the big thing about “you:” “Why don’t you give me more time?” “Why don’t you give me more space?” “I need more time of you,” “I need more space from you.” There’s this whole concept of “I need,” and on the basis of that you make demands. Conventionally, there are certain things that we do need: we need food, we need sleep – basic things.
Let us look at this verse again and then give a little bit of thought to it from our own experience.
Our wish for happiness is enormous, yet we fail to build up a network of its causes. Our tolerance for unhappiness is little, yet our ambitious desires and greed are great. Crash, really crash down, right on the head of (this) ruinous concept! Deal the death blow to the heart of this butcher, a “true self,” our foe.
The strong lines in the end are saying basically, “Straighten out! Stop acting selfishly like a baby and just do it. Don’t give excuses,” and so on. You need this forceful energy of Yamantaka to just get yourself together.
Neglecting Spiritual Practice
Now the next verse, which is 57 in the old translation:
We have high expectations of speedy attainments, yet do not wish to work at the practice involved. We have many fine projects we plan to accomplish, yet none of them ever are done in the end. Trample him, trample him, dance on the head of this treacherous concept of selfish concern. Tear out the heart of this self-centered butcher who slaughters our chance to gain final release.
In the literal translation, it’s also 57:
Our expectations for speedy success are high, yet our perseverance in spiritual practice is low. The projects we engage in are abounding, yet we never bring any of them to their end. Crash, really crash down, right on the head of (this) ruinous concept! Deal the death blow to the heart of this butcher, a “true self,” our foe.
The first part of this is that we expect to get speedy success in our practice, yet we don’t actually persevere in the hard work of meditating and going to class and listening and thinking about the teaching and doing the preliminary practices, prostration – all these sorts of hard-work things that we have to do. We just want instant, speedy success in our practice: instant enlightenment. His Holiness refers to this as “Dharma propaganda,” where various teachers – and this is a fault of some – will advertise, “This is the speedy method! You don’t have to do great effort; just relax and be natural and then you’re enlightened.” This type of thing is propaganda because no matter what type of Dharma practice you follow, at least in the Tibetan tradition you have to put in an awful lot of hard work and perseverance. We often get very frustrated in Dharma practice, especially if you’re doing it for a long period of time – a number of years – and you say, “Well, I haven’t gotten anywhere.”
When we talk about perseverance, His Holiness always says that what gives him the most courage is the sutra model, which is that you have to work for three countless eons or three zillion eons – 10 with 16 zeros after it – in order to build up enough positive force to actually reach enlightenment. That gives the courage to just go on and on and on and not worry that you don’t have dramatic success in this lifetime or in a certain number of years. His Holiness also says that you shouldn’t evaluate your progress just on the basis of a short period of time. Look at how you were five years ago – if you’ve been practicing Dharma for five years – and how you are now. Then you can evaluate, is there some progress? You find it in the list of the disadvantages of samsara: samsara goes up and down and that is not just in terms of better rebirths and worse rebirths but in terms of everyday. Sometimes we feel happy, sometimes we feel unhappy; sometimes you feel in the mood to practice, sometimes you don’t. Until we achieve liberation as an arhat, we’re still going to have disturbing emotions and they’re still going to come up. It might be much less, and the force might be much less, and it might be more infrequent, but it’s unrealistic to expect that they’re going to go away just instantly like that. It requires perseverance: sticking to it, patience, not giving up. Even when you don’t feel like doing, let’s say, your daily practice, do it anyway. Even if your heart isn’t in it, it doesn’t matter; do it just for the continuity so you don’t have a break, because it will go back up – that’s the nature of samsara.
You brush your teeth whether you feel like it or not; the same thing with sitting and doing your daily practice, whatever that daily practice might be. That’s why one needs to establish a bare minimum and make it short. There are various practices – for instance, Vajrayogini – in which you promise to say a certain number of mantras each day. Serkong Rinpoche always used to say, “Don’t promise to do more than three.” There are people who, out of pride, say, “I’m going to do 100 every day, I’m going to do 300 every day.” But this is ridiculous; what happens if you’re sick? Who knows what’s going to happen. Just set the absolute basic minimum. If you do more, that’s great. That’s also for when you do mantra retreat: in the first session of the retreat, which is done at night, you say the number of mantras that are going to be the absolute minimum that you’re going to do every day. It’s the same thing if you’re going to do a prostration retreat: set the basic minimum at only three – no more. Then you take care of the event of being very sick, which is important because if you’re doing a retreat strictly, then if you miss a day, you have to start all over again.
If we sit every day at a certain time – let’s say when you first get up in the morning or when you’re about to go to sleep (those are the better times because in the middle of the day, it’s almost impossible to do it regularity) – then it becomes just part of your natural routine. You would never even think not to do it; it’s just what you do every morning. It’s like going to the toilet, brushing your teeth, getting dressed – whatever you always do every morning –– it’s just part of your routine. So, “Our expectations for speedy success are high, yet our perseverance in spiritual practice is low.”
The second part of the verse: “The projects we engage in are abounding, yet we never bring any of them to their end.” We always are engaging in new things – taking on new projects, new things to do, whether at work or with friends: “I’m going to help this one, I’m going to help that one.” Yet we never bring any of them to their end, we don’t see them through. Again, both of these are based on belief in this grasping on to the concept of a true solid “me:” “I should have success without having to do anything;” or it’s ambition: “I can do everything,” “I can do this,” “I can do that,” “I can undertake every single project.” We’re just thinking of the solid “me” – “How wonderful I am that I do all of this” – but then you don’t see it through. Again, it has to do with cause and effect. You say that you’re going to undertake something – well, consider how much work it’s going to involve. What is it going to involve in seeing it through to the end? Shantideva said very clearly: in the beginning, examine very well before undertaking something; can I complete it or not? If you can’t, it’s better to not even to start. Better to say no from the beginning than to do it and give up in the middle and disappoint everybody, because he says that it builds up a habit and you never finish anything. This is very difficult when our society or our education demands multitasking: doing a lot of things at the same time. Again, one needs to be realistic of what one can you accomplish and do that; don’t just take on more and more and more that you can’t actually deliver.
These are the two aspects of this verse, 57. I think with all of these, if we examine ourselves, we find that they apply to all of us, don’t they? Let us think again of this verse:
Our expectations for speedy success are high, yet our perseverance in spiritual practice is low. The projects we engage in are abounding, yet we never bring any of them to their end. Crash, really crash down, right on the head of (this) ruinous concept! Deal the death blow to the heart of this butcher, a “true self,” our foe.
Let’s think about this, examine ourselves and try to recognize this grasping for a “true self” that really is behind all of this and causes these problems.
Dedication
Let’s end with the dedication. We think whatever understanding we’ve gained, whatever positive force has been built up, may it act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.