Recap
We have been discussing this text, Wheel of Sharp Weapons, ascribed to Dharmarakshita, a teacher of Atisha. This is the earliest text probably in this genre of lojong, or cleansing of attitudes, or attitude training – however we want to call it. It it has to do with changing our attitude from a negative one to a positive one, particularly from cherishing ourselves to thinking of others – cherishing others through the practice of tonglen, giving and taking; and going deeper than that as well to see that the root of the problem of self-cherishing is grasping onto ourselves to exist as some independent, solid “me.”
We can understand it on many levels. The first level would be a “me” – I’m talking about an impossible “me” – that is some sort of static soul that doesn’t change, that is either one with the universe or some tiny little spark of life that doesn’t have any parts. It’s a “me” that is independent of a body and mind and just sort of goes into a body and mind from one lifetime to another and uses it. It lives inside the body like somebody living inside a house and uses that body and mind like somebody using a computer or something like that. This is impossible. Deeper than that would be the type of “me” that can be self-sufficiently known. We imagine that there is a me that can be known independently of knowing a body, or a mind, or a name, or something like that. We could say, for instance, “I know Anna,” but when we know Anna or we think of Anna, how can you know Anna or think of Anna without also thinking of either what she looks like, or the sound of her voice on the telephone, or the name, or something. You can’t just see “Anna,” but we imagine that there is a “me” or another person that can be known all on its own. That also is impossible.
The whole point is that on the basis of thinking of this type of independent, solid “me” that we act selfishly. This “me” has to get its own way and has to always be the most important one, the center of attention and we try to push away anything that threatens that “me,” with anger; or we grasp onto and have something that we think will give security to that type of solid “me.” Such an impossible “me” is a myth. On a deeper level, the impossible “me” would be one that somehow is established from its own side, independent of anything else. That means that we think that there is something inside “me” which is findable and which makes me “me.” What makes me “me” and what makes you “you?” We think that there is something actually inside – findable on the side or “me” or findable on the side of “you” – that makes us who we are. Then, on the basis of that, we think “I know you” or “me,” and “I have to find myself,” “I have to express myself, the real me” – as if there is something findable inside that makes “me” something special or someone special. This also is a myth. We do exist, however. How do we know that we exist? There is nothing on the side of “me” that establishes it, or makes it exist, or proves that it exists. All we can say is that there is a word or concept of “me,” and that word or concept “me” refers to something; it’s not that it refers to nothing and that’s what establishes that there is a “me.” We have a word and a concept for it and we feel it and it can be validated by other sources. It’s not just having a word or concept of “turtle hair,” or “chicken lips,” or something like that that can’t be validated. But “me” can be validated because I sit here, I do things and so on.
These are some of the points that are involved with voidness. When we talk about voidness, we’re talking about an absence of something, an absence of impossible ways of existence – impossible ways of establishing the existence of something. The opposite of that is unawareness: when we’re unaware of how we exist, or we just don’t know, or either we just don’t know how we exist, or we imagine it to be in an opposite way from the way that we actually do exist. Then we have grasping for a solid “me” – that word “grasping” means to perceive, because of our projection, that impossible “me” and then believe that it’s true, that it corresponds to reality. That’s what the word grasping here means. It doesn’t have anything to do with attachment, actually. This is a very difficult word to translate because sometimes it means just to cognitively take an object, so to perceive an object; and sometimes it means, in addition to that, to believe it.
Without being able to come up with a better term, we use “grasping,” but we need to understand what the problem is. The problem is that it feels as though there is this solid “me,” and that’s how we imagine ourselves. There is this voice going on in our head and we think “that’s me” because it feels like me and we believe it. That’s this grasping for this solid “me.” Then, we have to look more and more deeply: how do we imagine that it exists? Do we think just in terms of “me?” “I’m eternally young,” “I will eternally be the same.” Then if we see ourselves in the mirror as we get older and we say, “That’s not me!” and we still have the concept of ourselves as being 25 years old when we’re 60 – that’s a problem. Or do we think, “Well, I know me,” “I know you,” independently of “I know your personality, I know your body, I know the sound of your voice,” but “I know you.” Or we think, “You are not doing what I want,” as if there is a “you” that we can know who’s not doing what I want. Is it their body that isn’t doing that? Their mind that isn’t doing that? What isn’t doing that? “You, you are not doing that.” This is the problem.
What is the Difference between “Me” and “You?”
There is a question from one of our listeners: is there no difference then between “me” and “you?” Yes, there is conventionally a difference between “me” and “you,” because when I eat something, it doesn’t fill your stomach and when you eat something, it doesn’t fill my stomach. When we talk about “me” and “you,” we’re talking about what can be labeled onto a continuity of experiences on the basis of a body, mind, personality, emotions and so on and that continuity is individual. The continuity follows by the laws of cause and effect and, more specifically, by the laws of karma. This is in terms of what comes next and how experiences unfold one after another, affected not only by karma but affected by the environment and everybody else that we meet and so on – so affected by many things. But there is an individual continuity for each living being – what’s usually called a “sentient being.” “Sentient being” actually means a being with a limited mind and a limited body, because a Buddha is not a sentient being.
But in any case, there’s nothing special. What makes me “me”? Well, conventionally you could say, well, there is the stream of continuity of what we experience, but we are not just the sum of that; we are what can be labeled on that. The sum of that would be if you just put together a movie and put together all the memorabilia from somebody’s life and say, “Here’s the person.” But it’s not the person; it’s not just a collection of these things. It’s what can be labeled on top of that, how you refer to a person on the basis of that. We are individual, but there is nothing that makes us a special, isolated thing. Here we always have problems with the words: “individual,” “unique” – what do we mean by that? I think we have to define them. By “unique” I mean sort of isolated, special, something that has a big, solid line around it. But things are individual.
Let’s go to our text. We’re in the portion of the text in which we are speaking about smashing down on this concept that we have – it’s called here a “true self:” the one that we think is truly, solidly existent even though it doesn’t exist at all. It’s just an inflation. We are invoking or calling upon Yamantaka, which is this forceful aspect of Manjushri who represents the wisdom, or clarity of mind, or discriminating awareness of all the Buddhas and therefore represents that aspect of our Buddha-natures as well. We need a forceful aspect of our understanding and clarity to smash through this grasping, through this confusion, in order to wake ourselves up, in a sense.
Flattering Others and Being Stingy
Verse 59 – in the old poetical translation, that is verse 60:
We are experts in flattering others for favors, yet always complaining we are sad and depressed. The money we have gathered we cannot bear to part with, like misers we hoard it and feel we are poor. 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 literal translation, it’s verse 59:
We’re experts at flattery and indirect pressure, yet the gloom of our dispositions is thick. We’re hard-working to gather and accumulate (wealth), yet despite what we have, we stingily clutch it. 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.
What is this talking about? “We’re experts at flattery and indirect pressure” – this is referring to two means of making an inappropriate or distorted livelihood. There is a whole presentation of making a livelihood in a distorted, or wrong, or improper way and that’s referring to, basically, various ways of cheating or deceiving – dishonest ways of making a living. Often this is explained in terms of monks or nuns who try to impress others so that they will give them something or give a small gift so that they give something big in return. But it can also, obviously, refer to anybody: you bribe somebody, or you threaten them in order to get them to give us something. It can also be not only to get material things but also to get love from them, to get attention. Let’s say you want to impress somebody; you want to, in a sense, seduce them so you can get their love and attention – whether that’s sexual or just friendship, or a business deal from them – and so you flatter them. You say all sorts of nice things to them in order to get something in return. Or we use indirect pressure which can be trying to make them feel guilty – “What’s the matter? Don’t you like me anymore?” – which is a difficult situation because it’s very awkward for somebody to say, “No, I don’t like you anymore.”
We use indirect means in order to win the favor of somebody else. These are dishonest type of ways, not straightforward. The text says that we’re experts at that: we’re quite successful in gaining what we want through these devious type of ways. And “yet the gloom of our disposition is thick” – we always feel that still the other person doesn’t love me, still the other person hasn’t given me enough and so we use these means even more. That’s a funny situation, isn’t it? It’s based on this concept of a solid “me” – that “I’m poor.” I think that to make it a little bit more universal, we don’t have to speak of it in terms of money but think that “I’m poor” in terms of “nobody loves me,” “I don’t have enough of attention from you,” “I don’t have enough of your time,” “I don’t have enough of your affection.”
We try to get that love and attention from the other person by indirect means – flattering them, saying, “Oh, but you’re such a lovely person and I love you so much.” We try to make them feel guilty if they don’t give us enough attention: “I waited all night for you to come,” “I sat by the phone the whole evening and you never called,” “I’ve given up so much for you and why don’t you pay more attention to me,” “Why am I the lowest one on the priority of your list of who you spend time with? After all I’ve given you so much, I’ve done so much for you.” Or, “Look I cooked this meal for you, but you didn’t come home and now it’s getting cold and I gave it to the dog” – it just goes on and on and on; we’re experts at that. Of course, sometimes it works so the other person stays with us, but their heart really isn’t into it and we feel even more poor, even more insecure.
Our friend here is asking, is it justified sometimes – let’s say we cook a meal for a friend, and they don’t show up – to remind them that they didn’t show up, that we put so much effort into making the meal? First of all, one would have to consider that there could be many other causes for them not showing up besides the fact that they don’t love me. It could be that they were held up in traffic; it could be that something happened at home, and they couldn’t come; it could be that they simply forgot. We need, in that situation, to first of all know the person and know what their habits are, what their tendencies are. There are some people who are always late. There are some people who never ever will call you; you always have to call them if you want to speak to them and they’re not going to change. Of course, you can’t say that everybody is permanent and static, and they’ll never change, but this is their basic way of relating. There are others who are just so spaced out that they forget that they have appointments and there are others that have so much work so that they’re busy and sometimes they can’t get away.
We have to take that into consideration and say, “Okay, if I’m going to be close friends with such and such a person who has such and such a personality and history, I shouldn’t really expect that they’re going to live up to what I want from them. I can try, but...” Sometimes you learn your lesson, so you don’t cook them a meal, or you remind them, if they are a forgetful person, a half hour before – you use some skillful means. But the point is here that our action if it’s based on grasping for this solid “me” – that “It’s all my fault,” “They don’t love me,” “This really proves that they think nothing of me,” and then I feel very hurt by it, what does that produce? It produces a lot of suffering. Then if we try to make them feel guilty about that, they’re likely to come even less. So, when those thoughts come up in our mind, this is the whole practice, because those thoughts are going to come up. You’re sitting there, you’re waiting – “Where is my friend?” – then you have to really crash down right on the head of this concept that is saying, “They don’t love me,” “You are such a terrible person,” and so on.
Of course, there is a difference between saying something to the person afterwards on the basis of this ego-grasping, this self-grasping and saying something to them afterwards in terms of, “What happened last night?”– not trying to make them feel guilty but just, “What happened? I thought you were coming; I prepared a meal.” There are different ways of saying it. The problem often is when we expect something from the other person which is based purely on a projection of what I want and isn’t really in accord with the personality of the other person – either their abilities, their personality, their work situation, their marriage situation. Maybe they have a baby; they can’t come when they say they’re going to come because the baby didn’t go to sleep, or was crying, or something like that.
There is no point in getting offended by anything – exactly! Who is being offended? It’s the solid “me.” Now, you could go to a further extreme, which is, “Poor me, why do I always have to be the good guy? Why do I always have to be sensitive one? Why do I always have to the one who doesn’t get hurt, who forgives? When is it going to be my turn that the other person does this?” That’s a further amplification of this self-grasping. That’s really when you have to smash the head of this self-grasping because that’s all it is. The result of the self-grasping is that you’re miserable. It is our foe, and it causes us to say things and do things that just get us into trouble with the other person and chase them away rather than bring them closer. Of course, it’s easy to talk about this when we’re sitting here. When you’re actually in the situation, it’s more difficult, but just bear in mind: what is it that is the real enemy here? Is it the other person or is it really our self-grasping?
We don’t get terribly excited when something good happens or something bad happens and we get terribly depressed – exactly, that is how we deal with the eight transitory things in life, the eight worldly Dharmas: when people praise us or criticize us; when we gain things or we lose things; when things go well or they don’t go well; or when we hear good news or bad news – the point is not to get too excited and not to get too depressed but to have equanimity. In a sense, it’s same-same – just ride through it. It’s nice when things go well – you can feel happy about it; and it’s not nice when things don’t go well or you lose something, but what do you expect from samsara? It goes up and down. Now, does that mean we have no emotions? No. Does it mean we don’t feel happy or sad? Well, the thing is to not go to extremes. We try to have positive emotions. There is a difference between getting excited about something and being enthusiastic. We can have enthusiasm and perseverance for helping others, working toward enlightenment – this sort of things. To get all excited about it – I don’t know, that sounds like a fairly unstable state.
That all might sound as though it becomes very boring, but I don’t think so. One has to then look at examples of people who are like that. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not a boring person; but he gets the medal of honor from the American congress and then the next day the Chinese declare him public enemy number one – and he stays the same. No big deal. There’s nothing special about me, nothing special about what happens.
So, “We’re experts at flattery and indirect pressure, yet the gloom of our dispositions is thick.” Why don’t we think about that for a moment. Are we actually like that, do we use indirect pressure to get other people’s love and affection and time and all these other things and then we feel poor, and we have to have more and more? “Our disposition is gloomy” is what it says – we feel depressed. Try to see how that’s connected with grasping for the solid “me.”
Then the second part of this verse: “We’re hard-working to gather and accumulate (wealth), yet despite what we have, we stingily clutch it.” That means that we’re always trying to get more and more wealth – whether that’s money, whether it’s possessions, whatever it might be in a material sense. Even if we have quite a bit, we’re stingy, we don’t spend it, we hold on to it and – as it says in another verse – we still feel that we’re poor. That’s an interesting syndrome, isn’t it? There are a lot of people that just want to get more and more and more, yet they don’t use it. They don’t spend it, they just hold on to it. Well, why would you hold on to it and not spend it?
We feel that we if spend it, we won’t get any more. We lack confidence in ourselves and underlying that is thinking of a solid “me” – insecurity about the “me:” “If I spend it, what’ll happen to me? So, I have to get more and more and more to make me secure” – to make that solid “me” secure. If spend it, then I’ll be insecure. But what about the concept of saving for our old age? The problem for a lot of people is never acknowledging that old age has come. What have I been saving it for? Somebody is 85 or 90 years old, and they still are not spending any of their money because they want to save it for when they get old – when they really might need it. I learned a very good lesson again from my mother. She was not stingy by any means. She didn’t have a lot of money, and she didn’t have any grand tastes for expensive things or spending money frivolously. She never had a car, she never drove; she lived very modestly. She didn’t have a lot of clothes, didn’t like a lot of clothes; her home was always very simple. But anything that she wanted, she bought. But the lesson that I learned from here was that it didn’t matter how much money she had in the bank. She spent the last four-five years of her life in a nursing home and the nursing home took everything. Every penny that she had the nursing home took and it didn’t matter if she had more or less than what she had, because once she ran out of money, they kept her, they didn’t throw her on the street. She kept on getting social security from the government and that money went to the nursing home and they didn’t take any more because there wasn’t any more in her bank account and so it didn’t matter. If she had spent another thousand dollars on this or that, it would have made no difference whatsoever.
That I always found was a very good lesson. Particularly now, at this stage in my life – I’m 61, almost 62 – whatever I’ve saved during my lifetime, what am I saving it for now? I might as well use it to make life a little bit more comfortable. If I have a lot of luggage and I have to get to the train and it is a real hassle to change the U-Bahn (subway) twice in order to get to the train station and go up and downstairs and through the station – well, for ten Euros I can take a taxi and it’s going to make zero difference on the quality of my life, or my retirement, or if I’m in a nursing home. That will make zero difference, so I take the taxi, having worked hard my whole life. I think that this is a helpful point: we work hard to accumulate things, but are we stingy with it or do we actually use it? It’s different, of course, if you have children: then you need to save money for their education, especially if you live in a country where the education is very expensive.
But this verse is based on the strong grasping for “me:” this fear and insecurity that makes us afraid to spend anything. It’s not always to spend it on ourselves but to be generous to other people – to give to a homeless beggar or to help others who are in need. Do we always wait for the other person when we go out to the restaurant to say, “Oh, it’s on me” and let them pay, or do we sometimes take the bill ourselves and pay for the other person? That really is the issue. Now, of course, there is frivolous spending your money and throwing your money away – that’s not recommended for anybody. But when things are necessary, are we going to be stingy? Are we going to work and work and work and never feel that we can make use of what we’ve earned?
Boasting about Our Hardships
Verse 61 in the old translation:
We have done very little to benefit someone, yet always remind him how much we have done. We have never accomplished a thing in our lifetime, yet boasting and bragging, we are filled with conceit. 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.
Then in the new translation:
What we’ve done for everyone is little, yet our boasting about our hardships is great. What we’ve been responsible for (accomplishing) is nothing, yet our imposing posture is grand. 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.
These two aspects here are talking about something quite similar. What we’ve done for everyone is little, yet we boast. So, we haven’t really done very much to help others, whether it’s to some specific person or to people in general, yet we always boast and brag about how our hardships are great, how hard we work, how difficult it was and so on. We do that obviously because we’re thinking of a big “me:” “How wonderful I am that I have done anything and how much I paid for it and how difficult it was.” We want appreciation, we want to be thanked, we want to get something back for even the little thing that we’ve done. Again, we’re in a sense using a devious way to try to get appreciation by telling others how difficult and how much hardships we went through.
The second aspect is, “What we’ve been responsible for accomplishing is nothing” – so we haven’t actually done anything, we haven’t accomplished anything. “Yet our imposing posture is grand” – we hold ourselves in a way that’s very proud and arrogant as if “I’ve done so much, I’ve accomplished so much, I’m so grand.” Again, this is this arrogance. Both aspects are speaking about the arrogance based on thinking of a solid “me” that is so wonderful: “I’ve done so much and look what I’ve sacrificed to help you.” We may not do this on a grand scale, but we might do this in our personal relationships. We’ve done very little to help the other person and yet we say to them, “Oh, how much I’ve done for you, and you don’t appreciate it” or “how much I’ve sacrificed for you,” and “I waited up all night,” and all this sort of stuff. Some of us do that. We do very little and think we’re so great, compared to somebody who really does a lot. We can think of great leaders like His Holiness the Dalai Lama: compared to what they do, what we do is nothing.
It’s difficult to recognize these things in ourselves: maybe on a gross level we can see it, but not on a more subtle level. We need some sort of mirror to help us to actually see these. Well, a mirror can come from somebody else pointing this out to us who knows us very well, but often we don’t even want to hear that from somebody else. I think it was one of the verses here that points out our faults we take as an enemy, but somebody that flatters us we take as a friend. But that’s the purpose of verses like this. The purpose is for us to go through and think about ourselves, examine ourselves in light of these various faults that are pointed out, to analyze our own behavior. This might take quite a while for us to do because sometimes it’s painful to look at ourselves and often we’re in a state of denial. Often, we don’t even know that we’re acting in these sort of ways. Often, we don’t even connect it with the source of the problem, which is this grasping for the solid “me.” That’s why this type of text is called a mind training, an attitude training and why it’s a Mahayana training – it helps us to discover these things in ourselves.
We examine these things in ourselves so that we can change them because they really prevent us from helping others. Even if we do a lot for others, there is no benefit in bragging about all the hardships that I went through and how difficult it was. What do we gain from that? What do we want, a pat on the head and then we wag our tail, as Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey used to say? You do something for someone and then you wait around there for them to thank you or something. This is the example he always used: “What do you want me to do? Pat you on the head like a good doggie?” That’s not the point. You just do things because they need to be done. That’s the way a bodhisattva helps. He helps or she helps just because things need to be done, you need to be helped. People need to be helped, animals need to be helped, anybody needs to be helped. If we can help them, we help them. We don’t brag about “how wonderful I am and how difficult it was and what hardships I went through for you, because you’re special.”
Let’s think about this verse:
What we’ve done for everyone is little, yet our boasting about our hardships is great. What we’ve been responsible for (accomplishing) is nothing, yet our imposing posture is grand. 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.
Dedication
That brings us to the end of our session. We end with the dedication. We think whatever positive force, whatever understanding has come from this, may it go deeper and deeper and act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.