LYWA Monthly e-letter Archive
No. 30: September 2005
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Dear Friends,
Welcome to our latest e-letter and, as ever, thank you for
reading it.
 Thank
you so much for your extremely positive feedback on our latest
free book, Teachings
from Tibet. We’re in the process of sending
copies out to our members and benefactors and to FPMT centers
around the world. If you are not in one of these groups and
would like a copy, please visit
our website or email us at info@LamaYeshe.com.
We have added some more teachings to our Web site, such as
the Diamond
Cutter Sutra and Lama
Zopa Rinpoche's special dedication to it. We have also
added advices to existing sections of Rinpoche's online Advice
Book and added a new section titled "Non-harming",
where Rinpoche gives advice about benefiting and protecting
life in all its forms.
Speaking of which, I’d also like to draw your attention
to Tibetan Volunteers for Animals (www.FreeAnimal.org),
whose tag lines include “Stop Eating Animals,”
“Animals Need Your Love,” “Animals Are Not
Our Food” and—especially—“Don’t
Kill Animals: Kill the Animal inside YOU.” Many of us
who have been studying with lamas for years have long been
puzzled by the dissonance between Tibetans’ espousal
of universal compassion and their love of meat (eating it).
So, here are some Tibetans, mainly young, trying to put their
hearts where their mouths are. Check out some of their heart-breaking
links. Thank you so much.
We’ve had three excellent Dharma weekends, as mentioned
in our previous e-letter. Our LYWA in-house staff went to
Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Guhyasamaja
Center teachings in Virginia, Wendy Cook and I went to
His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Bodhicaryavatara
teachings in Arizona, and a big group of us from Kurukulla
Center just attended His Holiness’s Avalokiteshvara
teachings and initiation in New York this past weekend.
 To
see and hear His Holiness speaking to around 40,000 people
at Rutgers University last Sunday, you can visit the
Rutgers University website.
If you would like to listen to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s
Arizona teachings, go to Lam
Rim Radio or FPMT
Radio, where, of course, you will also find many other
audio teachings.
And if you’re interested in online audio Dharma in
general, please also remember LYWA's
online recordings library and Kurukulla
Center's live broadcasts and recordings library.
If you would like to see His Holiness in America later this
year, please try to get to the Mind and Life Institute’s
“Investigating
the Mind 2005: The Science and Clinical Applications of
Meditation” in Washington DC November 8–10. His
Holiness will attend all sessions and it’s going to
be a wonderful event.
And below, we offer you a continuation of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s
teaching from Australia last year that we’ve been serializing
these past few e-letters.
Thank you for your kind interest in and support of the Lama
Yeshe Wisdom Archive. We couldn’t do it without you!
Much love,
Nick Ribush
Director
The Root of Samsara, the Actual Cause of Suffering
The Heart
Sutra says, “No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue,
no body, no mind.” If fear arises when you recite these
words, that’s positive; a good sign. It’s good
because it shows that your “no” is hitting its
intended target—the object of ignorance, the object
of refutation, the real I in the sense of its being independent,
existing from its own side, as ignorance believes. So when
you strike that you feel afraid—I don’t know how
other teachers might say this, but that’s what I think.
You focus on the object of ignorance, it’s not there,
and fear arises.
If you miss the point of the “no” when you meditate
or think about emptiness, if you don’t hit the object
of ignorance, the false I, the I existing from its own side,
if instead you negate the I that exists, that which is merely
labeled by the mind, fear won’t arise.
Why do you not feel fear when you miss the target and fall
into nihilism? What I think is that, even though you can’t
find the general I, the merely labeled I, at the same time
your ignorance is continuously holding on to the real I—the
independent I, the I that exists from its own side. The real
I that’s meditating is still there; there’s still
a real I doing the meditation—that target hasn’t
been hit. So as long as there’s still a real I meditating
on emptiness, if you fall into nihilism, I don’t see
how fear can arise.
Now, if you’re a person for whom all the causes and
conditions have some together—there are strong imprints
from past lives, you’ve heard and studied teachings
on emptiness and meditated on them, you have received many
blessings in your heart and accumulated much merit through
strong guru devotion and have done extensive purification
through practices such as prostrations to the Thirty-five
Buddhas and Vajrasattva meditation recitation—you don’t
need to hear many words. Because you have pacified the obstacles
to realization and gathered the necessary conditions, great
merit, your mind is ready, and just by hearing one or two
words you instantaneously recognize the gag-cha,
the object of refutation, the false view.
The false view has always been there. We were born with it;
we got up with it this morning. It’s been there throughout
our beginningless rebirths but we’ve never recognized
it and have always believed it to be true, and that has prevented
us from seeing the truth.
So, when all the causes and conditions come together like
that, all you might need to hear is just a few words of your
guru’s experience of, for example, the vase on the vase
or the I on the I or something like that, and it all suddenly
clicks for your mind. You hear a few words on the vase on
the vase, something like that, and then use that example to
look at your I and you also see the I like that…merely
labeled.
What I’m saying is that there’s a merely labeled
I—the I that actually exists—and a false I projected
onto that by the negative imprints left on our consciousness
by past ignorance. In other words, the merely labeled I is
decorated by the appearance of true existence projected onto
it by the imprints of past ignorance left in our mental continuum.
Ignorance leaves negative imprints on our mental consciousness.
When our mind focuses on our aggregates, just by virtue of
their being there, in the first second it merely imputes an
I upon them. For example, if your body is engaged in the action
of sitting, if somebody asks you what you are doing, your
mind looks to see what your aggregates are doing, sees that
your body is seated and imputes “I’m sitting”
or whatever it is that you’re doing. It could also be
something you’re doing verbally or mentally—speaking,
listening, thinking and so forth—but whatever it is,
it’s a merely imputed action…that function also
exists in mere name. So, the first second, by thinking of
the aggregates, the mind merely imputes the I, and the next
second, this merely imputed I appears back to the mind as
not merely labeled by the mind.
To repeat how this happens: ignorance, the concept of true
existence, leaves a negative imprint on the mental continuum.
In the first second of the mind’s thinking of the aggregates
[finger snap], that negative imprint merely imputes the I,
like a projector projecting an image from a film onto a screen…the
mind is like a roll of film and the imprint is like the images
the film contains. So right after the mind merely imputes
the I, that projects this decoration, this hallucination,
this appearance of true existence. Then immediately after
that [finger snap], right after the mind merely imputes the
I, the hallucination of true existence is projected there,
on the merely labeled I. After the mind thinks of the aggregates
and merely imputes the I like this, when it appears back it
does so as not merely labeled by the mind—the
I appears back as not merely labeled by the mind but as a
real one existing from its own side, independent.
Then, the same continuity of that thought—the first
moment of thought imputes, the second moment, which is the
continuity of the first thought that merely imputed the I—believes,
holds onto, apprehends this inherently existent, truly existent
I, this I that appears not merely labeled by the mind, to
be true. It does so because we’re not aware or have
forgotten that our own mind, our own thought, has just merely
imputed the I on the aggregates.
So, we allow our mind to hang onto this projection—the
way the I appears, not merely labeled by the mind, truly existent,
real—thinking, apprehending, it to be true. At this
time, then, this thought becomes ignorance. The second moment
of thought, that which we allow to hang onto the I that appears
as not merely labeled by the mind as true, is what receives
the label “ignorance” [finger snap]. At this very
moment we create ignorance [finger snap], that very specific
ignorance that becomes the root of samsara.
According to the four schools of Buddhist philosophy there
are different kinds of ignorance. The schools beneath the
Prasangika Madhyamaka have their own connotations of ignorance,
the root of samsara, but in fact they’re not
the root of samsara. The root of samsara is just one—it’s
this particular ignorance, when the I appears back as not
merely labeled by the mind, as true. The very moment we let
our minds believe that [finger snap], we create the ignorance
that is the root of samsara, the root of all the other delusions,
all the negative emotional thoughts and karma, and all the
suffering results—the general sufferings of samsara
and the specific sufferings of each of the samsaric realms.
This is the very beginning, the creator—our own mind,
the hallucinated mind and the ignorance holding true existence.
This is the ignorance that is the first of the twelve links
of dependent arising, which show the evolution of samsara.
To be continued next month.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave this teaching at the mahamudra
retreat, Adelaide, Australia, April 2004. It was excerpted
and edited from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive by Nicholas
Ribush. Excerpts of the teachings from this retreat
can be listened to on the
audio section of our website—see Day 23 for
this teaching.
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