You have mind and you have problems; therefore, you can train yourself. In other words, if there were no potential for failure, there would be nothing to train. You can’t train someone who has been trained already, and if there is no potential for success, there is also no way to do so. Therefore, the basic logic is that you are trainable. We have both potential success and potential failure in our state of mind; therefore, we can develop ourselves. But before we discuss the training itself, we need to try to understand our mind. We need to see that we have sugatagarbha in us already, and that because of that seed, we can work with ourselves.
The five aspects of mind seem to be a slightly once-removed expression of alaya. They are not fundamental alaya, but the product of alaya consciousness, or alayavijnana.3 They are active, so they are more like the limbs of the body than the body itself. Nonetheless, those limbs have a connection with the alaya principle and how to get back to it. So they act as intermediaries, like a fuse as opposed to an actual explosion. The five aspects of mind are the thinking or watching process, or semjung, which is the idea that the mind is actually relating with the phenomenal world. However crude and heavy-handed the five aspects of mind may be, they could still connect with the root, the basic alaya principle. Although they might be nasty and have their own little tricks to play, nonetheless they came from the original nature. They have their origin in absolute bodhichitta.
1. Alaya is the basic ground that gives rise to both samsara and nirvana.
2. The Kadam tradition of Tibetan Buddhism was founded by a disciple of the great Indian Buddhist master Atisha (982–1054), and is known for its teaching on bodhichitta, mind training, and stages of the path.
3. Trungpa Rinpoche distinguishes alayavijnana, or alaya consciousness, from alaya, which is the fundamental ground that gives rise to both samsara and nirvana, or the basic split. Alaya consciousness is the base, or storehouse consciousness, which is the basis of duality and of all mental activities. It is also referred to as the eighth consciousness. For a discussion of the eight kinds of consciousness, see volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, chapter 37, “Rediscovering Your Own Mind.”
Part Three
PREPARING THE GROUND
6
Cultivating Wholesomeness
If you have awareness in whatever you do, you always have a sense of basic decency. You do not cheat. You do not do things just because they are traditional, and you don’t just do something this year simply because you did it last year. You always try to practice your discipline as genuinely and honestly as possible—to the point where the honesty and genuineness begin to hurt.
IN THE mahayana there is a quality of wholesomeness, which comes from shamatha, vipashyana, and the union of the two. Shamatha leads to freedom from aggression; it brings gentleness, maitri, and kindness to yourself. Vipashyana leads to freedom from ignorance; it brings clarity and intelligence. The combination of the two produces wholesomeness. That is how to develop an enlightened person.
Shamatha-vipashyana practice is utterly important in all three yanas, so you should not drop it. Otherwise, you might find yourself behaving calmly in the hinayana, kindly in the mahayana, and then freaking out in the vajrayana. With mindfulness practice, you do not behave differently in each yana. It is not that you graduate from the first grade and then get into the second grade and the third grade. It is more like making butter out of milk. In the hinayana, when you make butter from milk, you find that you have something called buttermilk left to drink; in the mahayana, you drink the milk; and in the vajrayana, you enjoy the butter itself.
Joining shamatha precision and calmness with vipashyana awareness brings the realization that the world is not attacking you. The world is no longer an obstacle; in fact, the world is actually helpful to you. This is the beginning of entering into the mahayana, which brings the possibility of egolessness. Instead of hanging on to yourself, trying to grasp “me” and “my-ness,” you could let go by means of shamatha and vipashyana. You could begin to loosen up a little bit more.
MINDFULNESS: FREEDOM FROM AGGRESSION
When you practice mindfulness at the mahayana level, instead of simply trying to be mindful, you also have to tame your aggression. The more you tame your aggression, the more mindfulness you develop. If you are so energized that you are unable to concentrate or have difficulty paying attention to details, those problems are a result of underlying aggression. Generally speaking, aggression tends to come up in the form of boredom. Because you are bored, you want to find some way of occupying yourself other than what you are doing on the spot, whether it is watching your breath, eating your food, or whatever you are doing.
Aggression is an obstacle to mindfulness. If you are pushed to follow your breath or to watch your thoughts, you are bound to get angry. Such aggression is completely inevitable. Aggression affects your span of attention; it is the reason you cannot sit still for more than a few minutes, why you fidget, why you are irritated, why you have to bring up the pain in your back or your knees. Triggered by aggression, the intelligence of boredom is manifesting itself. Your subconscious gossip tells you, “Don’t obey any of those rules. You should be an individual. Do anything you want.” That is the voice of aggression, manifesting through impatience and boredom. But with mindfulness practice, you can develop gentleness and nonaggression.
AWARENESS: FREEDOM FROM IGNORANCE
Vipashyana is trickier than shamatha because in order to pay greater attention to more details, you need to expand yourself further. To be aware of what is around you, you have to become less self-centered. The conventional approach to awareness is based on the idea that if you do your best, you can win a gold medal. But in the mahayana, we don’t think of awareness in terms of having a particular purpose. You are simply trying to pay more attention to the environment around you. For example, in oryoki practice, you learn to be fascinated by your napkin, your bowls, your spoon, and your chopsticks. Paying more attention to them is better than paying attention to yourself, to good old Joe Schmidt. You do not have to handle two things at once. Hopefully, while you are cleaning your bowl, Joe Schmidt is completely forgotten. While you are eating in that way, there is no ego of self. At least on a simple level, that is one way of realizing egolessness.
If you have awareness in whatever you do, you always have a sense of basic decency. You do not cheat. You do not do things just because they are traditional, and you don’t just do something this year simply because you did it last year. You always try to practice your discipline as genuinely and honestly as possible—to the point where the honesty and genuineness begin to hurt. In fact, such hurting is regarded as good. If you begin to get hurt by being genuine, it is the beginning of warriorship. It is the level at which you are capable of exchanging yourself for others.
7
Expanding Your Practice
At the mahayana level, there is greater vision. Dedication becomes not just dedication to yourself and your own liberation, but an expansion of openness, love, and compassion. There is a quality of dignity, which is not especially localized, and the path begins to expand beyond one’s own individuality.
THE HINAYANA journey is travel oriented or achievement oriented, but in the mahayana, you view the journey less as traveling and more as a way of life. So your attitude toward the path begins to change, and there is less emphasis on striving to achieve something. At the same time, I would like to make it quite clear that you cannot reach the level of mahayana teachings without first having realized and understood the hinayana. But having done so, you take a completely different approach. You feel that you no longer have to roll along the road in an airtight coach, but you can be more exploratory.
You could describe the difference between hinayana and mahayana as the difference between being a Boy or Girl Scout and a real soldier. When you are in the Scouts, you obey orders and try to do the right thing. You learn how to make a fire, how to cook food, and how to conduct the business of basic survival. That training i
s very useful, because when you actually become a soldier, you still need to know how to make a fire, how to tie your shoelaces, and how to respond to emergencies. The same kinds of problems still take place, and that training continues to apply. But when you become a soldier, you use real guns instead of toy guns.
At the mahayana level, there is greater vision. Dedication becomes not just dedication to yourself and your own liberation, but an expansion of openness, love, and compassion. There is a quality of dignity, which is not especially localized, and the path begins to expand beyond one’s own individuality. The mahayanist attitude or outlook is based on immense prajna, or knowledge, and immense compassion. Due to immense prajna, you are able to see through twofold ego completely, and due to immense compassion, you want to work with other sentient beings, and you do not get tired of doing so.
In the mahayana, your compassion is not based on desire. You do not want to save somebody because you will get a gold star or win The World’s Kindest Person Award. Instead, compassion is a natural instinct without concern for the end product. When you do not work for personal achievement and are not solely dedicated to yourself, you begin to develop a more expansive vision and more natural communication. You realize that working on yourself is not the biggest project of all. You see that relating with others is more important and real.
BASIC TRAINING
To work for others, you first have to develop composure. If you have no basic stability, when you try to help others, they will not benefit from your help. If you are trying to prevent someone from falling out of a window, you will both go out the window together. To prevent that, you have to stay inside so you can pull them back. In order to do this, training in shamatha and vipashyana is absolutely necessary. With that basic training, you are able to maintain yourself properly. This is why it is so important to develop hinayana self-discipline first, before going on to mahayana vision. You can then learn how the whole thing works, and watch yourself progressing.
Shamatha and vipashyana, or mindfulness and awareness, allow you to be stable and precise. Mindfulness allows you to become stable, to develop tranquillity and peace; awareness allows you to be precise, to be able to pay attention to details. Out of that stability and precision, there naturally arises a quality of gentleness and kindness, an attitude that you will never cause harm to others or create the basis of such harm. When you carry that attitude slightly further, you begin to develop the mahayana view that not only will you refrain from creating harm for others, but you will actually try to benefit them. You try to create a helpful attitude in yourself, and at the same time perform helpful actions for others. So the ground of mahayana comes from training in shamatha and vipashyana.
Through shamatha and vipashyana, you become like a young thoroughbred horse, somewhat responsive and well trained. You have an understanding of egolessness and the four noble truths,1 and you have achieved a relatively good state of control over mental distraction. But it is possible that you lack real conviction, so you are unable to fulfill the practice completely. You do need to have mental discipline and control over your mind, but in the mahayana, it is necessary to develop a greater level of commitment. No matter how contemplative the practices of shamatha and vipashyana may be, there is still an element of mechanicalness. Therefore, it is absolutely important to be awakened and to be encouraged to join the mahayana path. Shamatha-vipashyana experience and treading on the mahayana path are complementary to one another and equally important.
As a result of shamatha and vipashyana, you are shinjang-ed, or flexible. You can climb rocks, you can swim—you are capable of doing anything. When you are no longer rigid and tough, when you stop trying to hold on to things, when you stop trying to make everything meaningful to you, when you no longer want to do everything in your own original samsaric style—when all that has fallen apart—you become very soft, gentle, and pliable. In fact, you are so soft that you become almost wormlike. Once you are soft, there are many ways to connect with sentient beings, and there are all kinds of sentient beings you could work with. You could work with very tough ones or very mushy ones.
Hinayana discipline, the inspiration of taming the mind, never dries up. It has been around quite a long time, twenty-six hundred years, and it is still going on. You have to work with your own training first. If you want to become a professor, you must first learn to read and write. Even someone like Mozart had to go to school to learn about music in order to wake up his talent. Likewise, although tülkus, or “incarnate lamas,” may be very highly developed, they still have to go through an extremely excruciating, painful training—even more so than other people. That was my personal experience as well.
Sitting practice is important, but attachment to sitting practice can become a danger. There can be too much emphasis on the heroism of sitting practice and on the idea that there is nothing to do but meditate. Basing your life on sitting practice alone may be a true approach, straight from the books and the experience of your teachers. Nevertheless, you cannot just look at practice in that way. There is a greater world than your little meditation world, your little meditation hall, and your little meditation cushion. There are other seats—there are saddles and chairs and green grass you can sit on. Everywhere you sit does not have to be a meditation cushion.
In the hinayana practice of taming the mind, you are working with the various forms of unmindfulness. In the mahayana, since your mind has already been tamed, you can work on training the mind. Having domesticated your mind, you can make further use of it. It is like capturing a wild cow and domesticating it to the point that the cow becomes completely willing to relate with its tamer. In fact, the cow likes being domesticated; it becomes a part of your household. So first you tame the mind by means of shamatha discipline, and then you train the mind by means of mahayana contemplative practices such as tonglen,2 or exchanging oneself for others, as well as by the actual fieldwork of helping others.
PUTTING YOUR TRAINING INTO ACTION
When you have been thoroughly tamed by the practice of shamatha and when you have developed vipashyana insight, you know how to hear the teachings. You have begun to develop a complete understanding of the dharma. You also have begun to develop an understanding of how, in your particular state of being tamed, you can relate with others. You have a sense of sacred outlook and are willing to work honestly, without being egocentric. Therefore, genuine practice is taking place. You may also have encountered teachers who show you by their example that you do not need to lock yourself in a closet and hide, but you can actually expand out. You can walk out and relate with others, who are in tremendous need of help.
The confirmation of your training is in your actions. It is like the saying, “The proof is in the pudding.” But first you have to be willing to eat the pudding! It is necessary to get your hands dirty before there is any possibility of being confirmed. You actually have to do something: you have to follow the example of your teacher and work for others. When you do that, both you and other people benefit. On the mahayana path, the wheel of your chariot must always touch the road, otherwise it would be impossible to travel.
In the mahayana you need to work with others, but the desire to help can be problematic. It gives you gratification, a personal recognition of your ego. You might go so far as to think of yourself as the next world leader, or a great savior like Jesus Christ. You might think of yourself as the sole hope for the world, if only everybody would listen to you. People have all sorts of crazy ideas like that; this sort of personal gratification is exactly what people are looking for. Therefore, it would be very helpful to work on the side of inconvenience, to sacrifice your pleasure and your desire to be private. You cannot shy away from discomfort; you have to be willing to work with inconvenient situations. You should not preserve your privacy, but be willing to open constantly, to be exposed. That attitude is the factor that will destroy any temptation to build yourself up. On the whole, you always have to refer back to your basic hinayana discipli
ne. That is a tremendous saving grace, the greatest saving grace, in fact.
When you feel that you need a break, not just for the sake of taking a break, but because you are tired of working for others, at that point you have to extend yourself a little bit more. You have to be a completely steady person, and at the same time a completely energetic person. Once you are able to bring those two things together, once you join the essence of hinayana and the essence of mahayana, then you are about to do something very good. You are about to bring about the vajrayana, which comes next on the path.
When you realize that not only can you achieve individual salvation, but you can be awakened further, you are joyous and you look forward to such wakefulness. You realize that you can awaken from the need to put so much emphasis on the preservation of your own ego, and you can develop greater compassion. Wakefulness is the loss of ego. It is the loss of your self—the “me-ness” of it, the “I-ness” of it. When you lose that ego-centeredness, you naturally and automatically develop an awareness of others; and when you are more aware of others, you develop a more sympathetic attitude toward them. You have a keenness for others, a liking for other people. Therefore, you do not feel that you need your privacy, or that you have to lock yourself in a room alone to enjoy yourself. Instead, you prefer to enjoy yourself by being with others and by helping them. You are not helping others because you feel sorry for them or to confirm that your existence is important, but because you have developed a quality of upliftedness.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 7
