Recap
We are studying this text, Wheel of Sharp Weapons or Throwing Star Weapon, which is in the genre of lojong – attitude training or mind training. It was written by a great Indian master, Dharmarakshita and is the earliest text of this tradition. It was brought to Tibet and studied in all the Tibetan traditions. It speaks about how to overcome or smash through what is causing all our various problems: basically, our self-cherishing attitude and, underlying that, the false concept of a solid, findable “me” that would grasp to as being the true “me.” This is what we call grasping for a true self. This text uses various methods for overcoming these two disturbing emotions and attitudes. One of the main methods that is uses is tonglen: the giving and taking meditation in which take on all the sufferings of others and give them happiness. That helps us to overcome the selfishness with which we cherish only ourselves and want to help only ourselves. It also helps us to get the courage and energy to smash though this false concept of the true self, true “me.”
The text has several parts. The first part is dealing with overcoming the self-cherishing attitude. We looked in many verses at the various types of sufferings that we experience and their karmic causes, and we see that they have risen basically because of self-cherishing. We want to change our behavior in order to stop that type of cause of our suffering. We take on the same problem that everybody has and give them happiness or the solution or the change in our behavior, which will be the change in their behavior. That’s the first of the text: overcoming self-cherishing.
The second part of the text speaks about overcoming the false concept of the true “me” – grasping for that, identifying with that – which is underlying and causing our self-cherishing. It’s the foundation of it. Here, we think about how we have very noble plans, but they get sabotaged because of this grasping for a solid “me,” so we want to smash that false attitude. We call upon the inner strength of the mind, of Buddha nature, which takes the form of Yamantaka – this very forceful Buddha figure which is the forceful aspect of Manjushri: the embodiment of all the wisdom or discriminating awareness of the Buddhas. The text speaks in rather forceful, strong language – to smash through this false concept and the believing in it. It requires very strong energy to smash through it, because we have such a strong habit, so we call upon that inner strength.
Then the text reaffirms the tonglen practice – this giving and taking practice – as a main practice that we can do for overcoming this self-cherishing, grasping for a solid “me.” Then it goes on to a deeper level of practice, which is to gain the understanding of voidness. With that understanding of voidness, we realize that although we might have this false concept of a solid “me,” this concept is not referring to anything real. It’s not referring to something finable. That is what is absent when we talk about voidness: voidness is speaking about a total absence of something that never existed at all.
We were speaking about how there are two phases on voidness meditation. The first phase is totally absorbing on that complete absence of anything findable – this false concept. There is no actual solid “me,” although we imagine that there is one. Then subsequent to that, we focus on how, nevertheless, appearances arise dependently on causes and conditions and arise dependent on words and concepts. They are what words and concepts refer to – that’s how we can communicate. So, the false appearances are an illusion – that false appearance of a solid “me;” and the conventional “me” that does exist is like an illusion. It’s not the same as an illusion. It’s like an illusion in the sense that it appears to exist in a way that it doesn’t: it appears to be something which is solid and real, but that appearance is an illusion and not referring to anything real.
Understanding How Things Appear and How They Exist
In the last verse that we spoke about, it says that these false appearances are like a whirling firebrand. In other words, when you have a torch and you turn it around very quickly, it looks as though there’s an actual ring of light, but in fact there isn’t, so that it an illusion. Then, the verse goes on with more examples of things that appears in a deceptive type of manner. This is verse 105 in the new translation, the literal translation; and 106 in the old poetical translation. Let’s read the old poetical translation first, verse 106:
There is nothing substantial to anyone’s life-force: it crumbles apart like a water-soaked log; and there is nothing substantial to anyone’s lifespan: it bursts in an instant like bubbles of foam. All the things of this world are but fog-like appearance: when closely examined, they fade out of sight. Like mirages these things at a distance seem lovely, but when we come closer, they are not to be found.
Perhaps we can do the second verse as well, as they fit together. Verse 107:
All things are like images found in a mirror and yet we imagine they are real, very real; all things are like mist or like clouds on a mountain and yet we imagine they are stable and firm. Our foe: our insistence on ego-identities truly our own, which we wish were secure and our butcher: the selfish concern for ourselves – like all things these appear to be truly existent, though they never have been truly existent at all.
Then the more literal translation:
Like a plantain tree, our life force has no core. Like a bubble, our lifespan (too) has no core. Like a fog, having descended, they’re things that disperse. Like a mirage, they’re things that are beautiful (just) from afar.
Verse 106:
Like reflections in a mirror, they seem so real, so real. Like a cloud or a mist on a mountain, they seem to stay and to stay.
This is referring to the fact that things appear to be solidly existent, like our life force, but it doesn’t have some core on the inside that by its own power is making it stand. Like when you think of a trunk tree, you have something solid inside and that core or findable thing inside allows the tree to stand. Here it’s saying that the life force doesn’t have anything like that: it’s like a plantain tree – a type of banana tree that grows in India that is just hollow on the inside. It’s made of many layers of bark and on the inside there’s nothing, sort of like an onion.
Like a bubble, our lifespan (too) has no core.
These are things that are very important to think about in terms of so many different aspects of Dharma and spiritual practice. We tend to think that our life force and our lifespan are things which are very solid. Especially when we are younger, we think that life force, our vital energy are going to be there forever. Particularly teenagers – in the later teens and early 20s – tend to think that they are supermen and superwomen and can engage in all sorts of very dangerous sports and drive their cars really quickly and are impervious to any type of harm. Their life force is strong; they will always be healthy, strong, good-looking and in the prime of their youth. But this of course an illusion: there’s no core to that; there’s nothing finable inside that’s making that stand up. All we have to do is get very sick and you find that it’s not like that at all. A lot of young Westerners go to India, for example, or Nepal, to study Buddhism and although they are very strong and very healthy and think of themselves in a very strong and healthy way, they get hepatitis or very severe diarrhea and dysentery and things like that. They realize very quickly that their life force can be very small and there’s nothing definite about it. It helps to lessen one’s arrogance of youth that thinks, “I am impervious.” The life force doesn’t have anything solid to it.
The same thing with our lifespan: we tend to think that we’re going to live forever or at least live for a few more years. Nobody ever really thinks that they’re going to die tomorrow, and nobody really considers themselves really old. A friend of mine used to have a joke about that: he said that everybody considers the people older than them as “the old ones; I’m not old.” If you’re 100 years old, still you don’t think of yourself as old; it’s the people who are 101 – “They’re the old ones!” That’s very true, I must say. Now I’m in my early 60s – I’m 62 – and I certainly don’t consider being that age old; whereas people in the 70s and 80s – okay, they’re the older ones. But when I was 20, I would consider people in their 40s or even in their 30s as old; now I look at them as very young, almost like my children. One’s perspective on what is old is very relative. It’s based on feeling that our lifespan is just going to go on and on and on. We always have plans more and more. Even if we are very sick, we also think that we’re going to continue living – that we somehow are going to overcome this cancer or going to overcome whatever and continue to have a long lifespan. It’s important to realize that there is no dependable core or essence to our life force or our lifespan.
The text goes on:
Like a fog, having descended, they’re things that disperse.
A fog comes, it descends, it falls down, but there’s nothing solid to the fog. Even though it seems sometimes to be very solid – you can’t see through the fog – it’s something that will disperse. The wind comes or the weather changes and it just disappears. Our life force and our lifespan are like a fog: they appear to be solid, they appear to be something substantially there, but the winds of karma blow and, all of a sudden, it’s gone, so they disperse.
Like a mirage, they’re things that are beautiful (just) from afar.
Our strength, our energy, our youth seem so beautiful to us, and we might look – especially when we’re older – at other people’s youth and life force and energy as something very beautiful and attractive. We wish we still had it. But it’s only beautiful from afar. When you actually examine it, again there’s nothing finable that is there. Even if we think we have a very strong life force and energy and so on, of course it goes up and down. It’s not always there: we get tired, we get sleepy, and our energy sometimes can be quite low. There is really nothing solid there. We make it into something special, we think it’s so beautiful, so wonderful. When we fall in love with somebody or are attracted to somebody, again we might think that they have such wonderful energy and it’s so wonderful to be with them. We don’t really think in terms of the times when they are tired and they don’t feel like seeing us and don’t feel like seeing anybody and just want to stay asleep in bed or not do anything – that’s not the attractive part, is it? We tend to forget about that and deny that. It’s only from a distance that we make them into something very attractive and wonderful. This is quite important to understand with respect to ourselves and respect to others.
Not Making a Big Deal
What does that leave us with, though? If you have that attitude, what consequence does that have on how you lead your life? What are you left with? Is it just a completely nihilist type of situation, where you’re left with nothing? The point is that when you understand this, it doesn’t leave you with nothing; the consequence of understanding this is that you don’t make a big deal out of anything. You don’t make a big deal out of your energy or your lifespan or all of these sorts of things – you don’t become obsessed by it. But, nevertheless, they do conventionally exist – so you eat well, you take exercise, you take care of yourself and so on. It doesn’t leave you with nothing. You enjoy your relations with others, you can enjoy the energy of somebody else, but don’t make a big thing out of it and don’t think that it’s permanent.
The point in the text is about voidness; the verse specifically was talking about lifespan and life force, but also language and how everything is like an illusion. It appears as though it’s solid and real. We have these words like “life force,” we have these words like “lifespan,” we have these words like “love” and “jealousy” and “happy” and “me” and “you” and so on and they refer to something but it’s not some solid thing that everybody is referring to. It’s not like an elephant sitting in the middle of the room and everybody is looking at it from a different point of view, but there’s actually an elephant there – everybody’s just describing it differently. It’s not like that. Yet although there isn’t a findable elephant, everybody’s talking about something and there is elephant in the room. This is what’s so tricky. It’s not that there’s something solid and findable that looks like a mirage that is appearing in a way in which it doesn’t exist. There is the conventional “me,” and the conventional “me” appears to exist as the false solid “me;” the conventional “me” that’s appearing to exist as the false solid “me” isn’t something findable. It becomes very strange, very difficult to even express it. So, we’re left with something very amorphous here.
But on that basis, when you understand that, how do you live with that? The easiest way to explain it is not making a big deal out of anything: taking everything seriously but not overly seriously, not making a big deal. “I take seriously that you feel hurt by what I say or what I did,” for example. “I take that seriously and I respond, but I don’t make a big deal out of it” – like, “Oh what I said is so terrible” and “You’re feeling hurt, it’s so terrible” or, “I don’t care what you feel.” That’s making a big deal out of this “solid” thing. Or you take a decision – don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s making a big deal out of it that gets you into trouble: then you’re worried about it, you worry about a “me:” “How am I going to deal with that?” There is a decision – well, you call it a “decision”. But is there a decision sitting there like some solid thing? There isn’t, is there? There was a verbal agreement based on discussion and thought, but it’s no big deal, it’s no big thing. You take it seriously; it’s not a nothing. But it’s not a solid something either. Then you just flow with it: see what happens, based on responding to what happens in each moment, without too much planning.
As they say always in meditation instructions, “Meditate without hopes and without worries:” hoping that it will turn out this way and worrying that it won’t; hoping that the meditation will go well and worrying that it won’t; hoping that I’ll do the right thing and worrying that I won’t and what will happen if I don’t. Well, that applies not just to meditation, it applies to life. It’s not saying, “Hope for the best but expect the worse” – which is also sometimes a useful piece of advice – but just do. Just do, based on your general cultivation of yourself as a good person, with consideration and caring and so on. Based on that, you have confidence. It’s not confidence in a solid “me” who can deal with everything: “I’m superman,” “I’m superwoman who can deal with every situation.” But self-confidence just in a conventional sense. “I’m working on developing positive qualities in general, not just positive qualities for you – a special you, so I can have this special relation with you.” It’s in the Mahayana sense of, “I’m developing these positive qualities to relate to everybody in a positive way.”
Then in each relationship, in each situation – no hopes and no worries. There’s an intention – that’s different. The intention is of course to do something that’s of benefit – the general Mahayana intention: what’s of benefit to you, what’s of benefit to me, what’s of benefit in general and not just short-term but long-term, for your development, my development, etc. There is the intention. Then you just act. In a sense, it becomes like an adventure, which then makes interesting. It’s not really an adventure if you spend hours and hours involved with hopes of what’ll happen and worries about what might happen and think, “What do I do then?” Of course, you make preparations: if you’re going to take a trip to a difficult place, of course you might want to make the preparation of taking a medical kit with you or something like that, but not on the basis of worry, just on the basis of, “Well, this is general preparation.”
Buddhist View on Relationships
So, is this Buddhist attitude leading to Buddhists not having any close friends or close relationships? There are two situations. One is that in the context of working to get single-minded concentration, all the great meditation masters recommend living in isolation, by yourself. This is because you get distracted by other people and most people that you associate with – to use Shantideva’s term – are infantile. No matter what you do, you can never please them and you’re always upset by them. Now, we’re talking about gaining single-minded concentration so that you can then go back and be with people and deal with them in a much healthier, more beneficial way.
But if we are not working to gain single-minded concentration and therefore wanting to go off into the woods or cave or some sort of retreat and just meditate, then I think there’s a difference between saying “close relationships” and “clinging relationships.” Buddhism certainly is not encouraging – it’s discouraging, in fact – clinging dependencies on other people and getting into relationships that are based on quarreling all the time. A lot of relationships are based on that and sustain themselves on bickering about this or that thing, which is usually quite trivial. That type of “close” is not encouraged at all. The image that Shantideva uses is the image of a bumblebee: the bumblebee or the honeybee goes form flower to flower; it’s very close with each of the flowers but doesn’t cling to it, it doesn’t get caught up in it and is able to go to the next flower. That doesn’t mean to be promiscuous and go from one lover to another – it certainly doesn’t mean that. What it means is that we can be close to everybody without clinging and without being exclusivist: “I want to be with you, you’re my favorite and I don’t want to be with you – the other one.” This becomes very difficult when you have a family, of course – when you have a partner and children, especially. That can be very disastrous, if you don’t pay sufficient attention to them. The problem is if you close yourself off to everybody else – to other friends and social engagement.
So, Buddhism does encourage relationships that are not based on big ego trips. They can still be very close. In fact, they’re closer than relationships that are based on big ego trips: “What pleasure I can get from you and what pleasure I can give you?” I always describe my relationship with my teacher, Serkong Rinpoche, as personal impersonal. It was extremely close, but not at all clinging and not based on having detailed knowledge of everything in each other’s life. I saw him when he travelled: whomever he was with was his closest friend, in terms of the different Tibetans that we stayed with in our travels. Or you see His Holiness the Dalai Lama: everybody that he meets, he’s just filled with joy at meeting another human being. There’s a tremendous feeling of closeness then. But for His Holiness, absolutely nobody is special. If you want to have any type of associated with His Holiness, that’s the first thing you have to realize: if you think that you’re special, or you are aiming to be the special one, forget it. His staff are very good at detecting when somebody has that attitude; then the door is closed.
Nobody is special, everybody is close. No clinging. As I said, that becomes a little bit complex when you have a marriage partner or a life partner and children; are they special? Well, there can be a different kind of “special.” There’s special in terms of solidly existent, therefore special; or special in terms of special responsibility. There is certain special responsibility to your parents. Buddhist does teach to try to recognize everybody as having been your mother in previous lifetimes, however one does take care especially of one’s own mother and father of this lifetime. These aren’t terribly easy things to translate into daily life. But as the young Serkong Rinpoche always used to say – in fact, we used to joke that this was his special personal mantra – “nothing special.” No matter what you showed him – now he’s 23 but I’m talking about when he was a child – no matter what you brought him, no matter what you showed him, his response was “nothing special.” I accompanied him on that big tour of the United States, when he was 20 and his response at the end of it was “nothing special.” How did you like America? “Nothing special.” He enjoyed himself but there was nothing special about it.
You’re not jumping up and down in the air – “whoopy!” – which can be very infuriating for a lot of people. I’m thinking now of my sister. My dear sister is coming to visit me. My sister is an overly enthusiastic person, and she had the airline send also to my email address the itinerary, so I have the itinerary for her flight is a year from now, in May of next year. Then I spoke with her on the weekend and she said, “Did you get that email?” and I said, “Yes I got it,” and then she said, “Well now you’re supposed to say, ‘Wow that’s great, I’m really looking forward to your visit, we’re going to have such a good time.’” She gets annoyed that I don’t react in that way. It is true that the “nothing special” attitude could lead to you to not show enthusiasm. Enthusiasm you sometimes do need to communicate it to the other person if they really want to hear it.
Not Making a Big Deal (Continued)
There is the discussion of the eight worldly dharmas – the eight transitory things in life, more literally – these are things that go up and down: praise and criticism; hearing good news, hearing bad news; things going well, things not going well; receiving things, losing things. These are the eight. The point is not to make a big deal out of any of them, because it goes up and down and this is the result of the various karmic causes and social causes and stuff like that. “There are people who praise me, there are also people who criticize me” – so you don’t get very excited about anything, but you appreciate it.
I’m thinking now of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his response to getting the Nobel Peace Prize. For him it was nothing special, he didn’t get enthusiastic or overly happy about it. He was interviewed about that and of course the interviewer found that rather unusual. His Holiness said he was happy about it because it’s an acknowledgement of the difficulties that the Tibetan people are facing and the struggle that they’re facing to preserve their culture. But is he excited? “Me, me, me, I got the Nobel Peace Prize” – not in the slightest. I think there’s a different between getting excited or depressed – which is what’s involved with these eight transitory things – and feeling happy about certain things. You can feel happy about it. I’m happy that my sister is coming, I’m not jumping up and down and whoopy! I’m not spending all my time thinking, “How wonderful it’s going to be” and planning it and I’m so excited and looking forward to it and stuff like that; it’ll be nice, but one lives in the here and now and many things can happen before then. I’m sure I will enjoy her visit.
This “nothing special” attitude – not making a big deal out of anything – doesn’t mean that you don’t appreciate things and you’re not happy about things or sad about things. When you lose somebody in a relationship or somebody dies, it’s not the end of world. When a close friend or a relative dies or you grow apart or something like that – well, what did you expect of samsara? That the person was going to live forever? That the relationship was going to be eternal? That people don’t grow apart? That people don’t have different things happening to them in their lives? It’s nothing special in the sense that it’s not out of the ordinary in terms of what happens in samsara. If you understand that, that helps with renunciation: to realize that this has just been going on for countless eons for everybody and there’s nothing special that this person has died or this relationship ended. There’s nothing special about that: this has happened a million billion times to a million billion people. Does it hurt? Sure, it hurts. Is it sad? Sure, it’s sad. But there’s nothing special about it.
It helps you to develop compassion for others and eventually renunciation of the whole syndrome. It also helps with the tonglen practice of taking on the suffering from others, when you realize that it’s a universal thing that’s been going and will continue to go on and how wonderful it would be if everybody could overcome that. So, this “nothing special” attitude can lead to many positive things and in fact you feel much closer to everybody else who has the same problem. There’s nothing special about my problem. You must face this all the time in your work: so often people feel, “I’m the only one who had this problem,” and then you recommend group therapy and they that there are a lot of people who have anorexia or whatever the problem might be.
If you let go of this feeling of being special, it allows you to be much more relaxed because you don’t have to live up to some standard that you or society or your parents have set for you, and you’re much more relaxed. I’m thinking of a problem that one of my cousins explained to me. She’s a school psychologist in America and she was saying that there was a whole generation of children in America who were raised with this attitude of “you’re special.” “Everybody is special,” “We’re all special in different ways” – it’s politically incorrect to say that anybody is slow or this or that. “Everything is special.” Then a big problem happens when these children get a little but older and they go out into university or they go out into the world and, all of a sudden, they find that they’re not special. Nobody treats them as special and they are really very devastated by that, they have a lot of trouble with that. It is not gift to the child to keep telling them how special they are. On the other hand, you don’t go around and say, “I’m ordinary, I’m plain” and “You are plain and ordinary, how boring.” That’s going to the other extreme. So, what do you say? I can only think of the example of how His Holiness the Dalai Lama relates to people: nobody is special, but His Holiness is absolutely delighted to meet anybody: “Here’s another human being.” Everybody’s an individual; it doesn’t mean they’re special but they’re an individual and so there’s a possibility for an interchange, getting to communicate with somebody else.
Understanding How Things Appear and How They Exist (Continued)
So, that second verse that we read:
Like reflections in a mirror, they seem so real, so real. Like a cloud or a mist on a mountain, they seem to stay and to stay.
Again, all these that we are referring to here seem so real. It’s like a reflection in a mirror. A reflection in the mirror does seem quite real but it’s not; there is a reflection but it’s not the actual thing, is it? But it appears to be the thing; if you didn’t know, you could think that it was. This is a very frequent occurrence: how many times have you been in a room where’s a full wall-length mirror and then the room seems to be twice the size that it is? It really looks like that and it’s quite believable that it is double the size, but it’s not. There are helpful examples. Or the mist on the mountain, or the cloud on the mountain – “they seem to stay and to stay,” the verse says. I lived in India for so many years, in the foothills of the Himalayas and certainly sometimes the mountains were in clouds, and you couldn’t see them. It seems as though they’re always going to be in the clouds – that the cloud is actually solid, but it’s not. It passes and it changes.
These are examples of deceptive appearances and that’s something that we need to train ourselves to be able to recognize. In fact, all appearances that we see or hear and so on are deceptive, because they appear to exist in a way that they don’t exist. They appear not only to be permanent, but they also appear to be solid, findable, existing from their side – with something that establishes it, like a core inside it, making it real, making it into something, like a “problem.” “A problem in our relationship,” as if it were actually sitting there, like some demon – findable. It seems real: “We have such a problem, how are we going to overcome this?” “You’re not relating to this problem, you’re ignoring it.” Poor demon – it’s sitting on the floor and being ignored it doesn’t like that. “You’re ignoring the problem, you’re not relating to it” or “Ah, now we’re taking the problem seriously,” as if it were some sort of thing. Well, conventionally, what do we have? We have moments of interaction – that’s all – and each person’s experience of it was different, in a relationship. That’s all that happened. How we experienced it at the time and how we remember it could also be quite different; and how the other person experienced and is remembering it. And, how I experience remembering it today is not the same as I experienced remembering it yesterday: I remember something slightly differently and I feel slightly today that I did yesterday, when I thought about our argument or our problem.
These are all conventions – there’s the word “problem,” the concept “problem.” What can we say about this problem? Well, it’s what we’re talking about when we talk about problems: what the word or concept refers to. We have to deal with it, but that problem being like a demon is like an illusion – the demon itself is an illusion because there is no demon, but the appearance of it is like an illusion. There’s nothing special to it but you deal with it. You don’t get upset about it. There are no hopes that the demon will go away and worries that the demon won’t go away; you just deal with it. Otherwise, you waste so much mental and emotional energy. That is very painful. Even worse, it prevents you from being able to help anybody else, because you’re so preoccupied with your own problem. From a Mahayana point of view, that’s what’s the worst about it: it prevents you from being of any help to anybody else. So, one needs to smash through this. Remember, we were talking about Yamantaka: it represents this wisdom in a forceful way, because it requires a great deal of strength and courage to see that these false concepts are ridiculous.
There are many different ways of smashing this. You could see that it’s just an inflation: we’re making a big deal out of everything, like blowing up a balloon. So, here we use a forceful way: it’s like a pin and you just pop the balloon. It’s no big deal. It’s not that there’s nothing but there’s no big deal; you burst the inflation. That’s one way. Or all these concepts and thoughts and worries and hopes – you just see that this is the churning of the ocean of the mind, it’s just waves on the ocean. You just recognize it for what it is. That’s all it is: it’s just mental garbage, bubbles going out of these silly thoughts. And relax, which doesn’t mean just allow it to go on forever, but don’t get into it. Don’t follow it out: “This is just mental garbage going on,” and then allow it to subside. It will subside by itself by just relaxing and calming down. That’s one method, which is not so easy for many people.
Another method is – if there’s so much verbal energy going on in your head with all these worries – to do a type of mental judo and turn that verbal energy into saying a mantra. Rather than going, “Oh, I have such a problem, what am I going to do?” and “You didn’t do that” – this chattering going on in your head – use this energy for “om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum” and just channel it into that. It’s the mantra for compassion; it’s means literally “the jewel and the lotus,” jewel being wisdom and lotus being compassion. There are many ways of dealing with these false concepts and all the worry and hopes that go on with that.
Dedication
It’s time to end the class. We end with a dedication. We think whatever positive force or energy has come from this, or understanding, may it go deeper and deeper and act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.