10. Continuing Your Practice at Home

Today I just want to thank you all for attending this course and to express my gratitude to the organizers for their hard work. We are all very fortunate that His Holiness Zong Rinpoche has been able to come here and give us real Tibetan-­style teachings.³⁷ So I’m sure you’re satisfied.

Now, when you go home, it’s very important that you engage in right livelihood, continue your studies and try to develop your awareness of human consciousness. That’s the most important thing. But when we talk about practicing Dharma, it doesn’t mean you adopt some kind of narrow, concrete philosophy or doctrine: “Now I’ve found this profound, esoteric philosophy; the rest of the world is garbage.” It’s not good to think that way. It just becomes another samsaric trip and produces more symptoms of delusion. Be comfortable; be practical.

For example, the lamrim explains the teachings simply and is therefore very practical. It doesn’t contain too much philosophy but it’s the heart of how to live and enjoy life in the best way and avoid confusion and dissatisfaction. So when you leave here tomorrow you will begin preparing for the rest of your life and gaining higher consciousness and realizations. In order for all that to work out you need to live properly from now on, keeping it as practical as possible.

In his teachings here, His Holiness often mentioned bodhicitta. It’s a very simple thing. Just open your mind as much as you possibly can to the people around you and try to help them to the best of your ability. Whether it’s your brother, your sister or anybody else, we’re surrounded by others and involved with them, so be as nice to them as you can and show them a warm heart. Sometimes young people who take up meditation aren’t all that practical and live in a kind of fantasy world. They think that working at a job, eating, even offering somebody a cup of tea is samsara and that only meditating is nirvana. That’s a problem. Don’t act that way. 

Therefore, when you get home, be practical. If somebody needs something, give it to them if you can. Act; be reasonable. That’s the way to practice Dharma. Don’t think you’re special. You’re not. If you haven’t got it yet, my point is to be practical. Otherwise you’ll have many problems.

Everything here at the course is integrated into the Dharma. People are sitting cross-­legged, there are organized sessions, prayers, teachings and discussion groups. When you get back home you think, “Oh, now I can’t do anything. I have no prayer room, there’s no lama, there’s no this, there’s no that. . . .” You interpret things that way, so of course, there’s no Dharma either. It’s true. That’s what young students do.

The thing is: what is Dharma? It’s wisdom. It’s knowing how to deal positively with each situation you encounter and how to remain peaceful and tranquil and not become a disaster when things change. You say that now there’s no Dharma in your life, you believe that there’s no Dharma in your life and as a result you become totally samsaric. But Dharma and samsara are not concretely existent. They’re expressions of mind. You can’t say, “This is samsara, this is nirvana”—there are no absolutes like that. They are interdependently related phenomena, expressions of mind. It’s your mental attitude that creates samsara, nirvana and liberation. So, practically speaking, what you need to check up on is your attitude. 

It’s when you observe and check out your attitude toward life, your relationship to the sense world and so forth that you can progress and continuously develop your understanding of the mind, Dharma and the teachings in general. This is how your practice becomes practical. If you think that there’s no Dharma without the rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, that’s no good. The purpose of studying and practicing karma, for example, is that it’s extremely valuable in helping you integrate and better understand the teachings and improve your life. That, in fact, is the purpose of the entire Dharma.

Kyabje Zong Rinpoche also talked about the most profound subject of universal reality, emptiness, shunyata. But you don’t need to worry that shunyata is so profound that you’ll never understand it. Instead, simply observe your own wrong attitude—how you interpret your thoughts, the world around you and yourself. From my point of view, this is shunyata. You don’t have to engage in tremendously sophisticated analyses of shunyata being this, shunyata being that. Just observe. It’s so practical, so practical. How does your mind interpret the entirety of your reality? How does your mind interpret the objective sense world? By checking, observing and investigating in this way, you’re learning about shunyata. In that way you can solve your daily problems. When you solve your daily problems, you really become Dharma. You become wisdom. If you can’t apply Dharma wisdom to whatever arises in your everyday life, studying it doesn’t make sense.³⁸

“I don’t have the right environment, so I can’t make prayers or do prostrations; I can’t practice Dharma.” That attitude is wrong. First of all, you don’t have to make physical prostrations. Prostration is attitude. If you constantly respect inner wisdom, you’re always taking refuge and making prostrations. Prostration is not necessarily physical. So when you get back to your normal home environment with your parents or whatever the situation, if doing physical prostrations would make those around you uncomfortable you don’t have to do them. Don’t agitate your family and friends by engaging in various rituals. Ritual and custom are not the main thing; the main thing is the essence of Lord Buddha’s teaching. That’s what you take into your heart: “This is the real teaching on universal reality. I can really take advantage of it if I keep it in mind every day. This is the path that will elevate my consciousness into enlightenment.” You can see some kind of confidence grow within you. My opinion is that that’s enough.

It’s the same with taking refuge. We do have the ritual chanting of Namo Buddhaya, namo Dharmaya, namo Sanghaya in Sanskrit or Tibetan, but you can take refuge without words. Refuge doesn’t depend on words. So then why do the words exist? Every Buddhist country has this ritual. Why are there these words? Because some people need words, I tell you. There’s a need, therefore they exist. 

Also, when we do prayers with the concentrated energy of a group, we feel them very strongly. When we do rituals with understanding in this kind of setting it helps unify the feeling within the group. This in turn provides mutual support and helps each person in their spiritual growth. But when the group breaks up and people go their own way, with each of us living moment to moment in different situations, we do different meditations. For example, the lamrim contains many meditations. We choose the one appropriate to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Certain environments may be problematic, and because our minds are so conditioned we are easily influenced by environmental changes. I mean, look at the difference between being here and being in the middle of London. So, according to the time and space we’re in, we choose different lamrim meditations. That’s the way to become a skillful practitioner.

Otherwise we find the lamrim too vague: “Oh, it’s so big. I’ve studied it but I still don’t know if there’s anything worthwhile in there for me.” Many people think that way. At first they learn a lot, but there’s no integration. The thing is that each lamrim meditation is specifically purposed to stop a particular problem. You have to know that and when it’s needed. When we take breakfast, lunch and dinner we eat according to our need. Similarly, lamrim is the real wisdom medicine and we have to know how to apply it; how to recognize the various aspects of the lamrim and how they act as antidotes to particular negativities.

Also, I sometimes advise students leaving courses to make a one-­month program. For the first morning session choose a lamrim topic and finish with a glance meditation over the whole outline, then choose the next topic for the next day and so forth. Create a one-­month program that covers the entire lamrim. If you don’t have time to go deeply into each topic every day, at least read the outline and contemplate that for a while. Even that kind of brief glance meditation is very helpful.³⁹

Buddhism isn’t just some new trip. It’s to help you understand your own true nature. Each human being has a weak side and a progressive side. We need to develop our weak side. We’ll all have weaknesses until we reach enlightenment. By recognizing our strengths and weaknesses and knowing what we need to do to develop our mind through meditation, we can do it, we can do it.

That’s all I need to tell you at this time. I don’t need to talk that much because His Holiness Zong Rinpoche has already explained most of what you need to know at this point. Still, if you have any questions, if anything is still unclear, please ask now so that you can go back home with a clean-­clear mind rather than one that’s still confused. I will try to answer any questions that you might have.

Q. I am still not happy about the issue of animal suffering, where an animal can be suffering a great deal of pain, yet we cannot assist in its death and have to let it linger for a long time.

Lama. Well, if you truly understand the exact situation and have great compassion for that animal, killing it can be acceptable. But you have to be certain that that animal is terminally ill and that if you leave it, it won’t recover. If you are certain that there is no hope and you are acting purely out of compassion, assisting in its death can be an act of Dharma wisdom. There are other instances where killing can be positive too. For example, let’s say you know that I’m coming to London with an atomic bomb, planning to blow up as many British sentient beings as possible. Out of your great compassion you can kill me before I destroy all those sentient beings. 

The thing is, we are practicing Mahayana Buddhism, which has a kind of liberated explanation of such situations. In the Hinayana, you are never allowed to kill, no matter what. A monk who kills completely loses his vows and is considered to be totally negative. In the Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, which is characterized by great, universal compassion, great understanding and penetrative insight, rather than being negative, killing can become positive.⁴⁰

Q. Do you think it’s a good thing to kind of plan your meditation, like what you want to do on a certain day and so forth; to make a schedule? 

Lama. Yes, as I just said, make a program. That would be very good. Why? Because we are so samsaric. We love chocolate, we love ice cream, we love Coca-­Cola, we love coffee, we love talking garbage, we love eating and we love sleeping. It’s true; that’s how we are. We spend our time uselessly. By making some kind of schedule we put our mind into the right channel. That’s obviously much better.⁴¹

Let me tell you something from my experience. When our students do group retreat they are much more successful than those who try to retreat alone. After a couple of months, students doing solitary retreat can really become a disaster. They space out, can’t finish the commitment and just give up. That shows to some extent how much our mad elephant mind needs discipline. But discipline has to be applied in a very skillful way. Otherwise, if we pump too much, our baby mind is liable to reject it. And that’s what I tell young students when they go back home: “Don’t pump; don’t pump. Don’t take it all too seriously.” All sorts of different situations arise and each demands a different way of practicing. Say you have a job washing dishes all day. You can’t say, “Now I’m a dishwasher. How can I practice Dharma?” Washing dishes is washing away delusions. Thinking like that makes it a Dharma practice. Studying or meditating on Dharma means looking at things in a different way and with a different attitude. That’s what makes it Dharma.

I might be sitting here in the perfect seven-­point meditation posture of Vairochana⁴² looking like a serious meditator, but if inside, my mind is grasping at chocolate or wandering around London in search of a good time, then what’s really happening? You can’t tell just by looking at external appearances. The most important thing is what’s going on in the mind, the so-­called meditator’s attitude. That’s why Buddhism always emphasizes the importance of motivation: the mental impulse or energy force that drives the actions of our body and speech. In the West, people think that humans act instinctively, independent of any underlying mental action. That’s wrong. Every action, anything you do, even if you think you did it unconsciously, has a mental impulse behind it. That’s karma. 

Q. Do you mean we should attempt to do everything with the whole of our awareness, our intention?

Lama. You already do; that’s what you normally do. You do everything with intention. The issue is that you have to observe what kind of intention or attitude you are doing any particular action with. Even if you say, “I’m doing it without intention,” that’s not true. Check up scientifically. No action exists without some kind of mental energy force behind it. So you have to check. 

We’re always talking about moral and immoral actions, positive and negative karma. What makes actions positive or negative? That determination is made by the energy force of the attitude with which they are done. In Tibetan, we call it kun long.⁴³ Our attitude, or motivation, determines whether the action it causes is positive or negative. One is like medicine, the other is like poison, and the results they bring are happiness or confusion, respectively. 

Q. Is it possible to integrate other philosophies into the Buddhadharma? 

Lama. Definitely. Check right now how many scientific or Western theological philosophical terms can be integrated with Buddhist philosophy. There are many instances of similarity. 

Q. Couldn’t that be confusing?

Lama. Not necessarily—if you have wisdom. When you come to teachings you can understand Buddhist philosophy because you have a grounding in Western philosophical thought from earlier in your life. You can relate to what I say. If you were kind of a philosophical blank slate when you came here or opened a Dharma book you’d be, “What is all this garbage? It’s irrelevant. None of it has anything to do with me.” But that doesn’t happen because a similar pattern of wisdom already exists within you and therefore you can grasp much of what’s being said.

I think it’s important that Westerners coming into Buddhism don’t do so exclusive of their Western education and that you try to see the similar patterns that exist within each. That way, you become strong; something solidifies within you. Otherwise, if you come into Dharma completely cold, it’s a new philosophy, a new world, you’re a different person and it makes you tremble. But there’s no reason to tremble. Dharma is not for trembling. The purpose of Dharma is to liberate you from trembling, to make you secure, not insecure. 
Another thing is that many people, when trying to learn new philosophies, run here and there grasping at this and that, and, as a result, get confused because they can’t integrate their previous knowledge with the new stuff they are trying to comprehend. Even Tibetan texts warn readers not to read too many different interpretations of the one subject. As you probably know, one topic can have many Indian and Tibetan commentaries, and if you try to read them all without an essential understanding of the topic you can get lost and confused. 

Q. Say there’s a castle you want to enter but you’re not sure how to get in, so you wander all around it until you find the right gate. Is it like that, where you have to look at your life from different angles and study different philosophies before you can find your way in?

Lama. Well, yes, you can do that, but what I’m saying is that if you first have a clean-­clear understanding of a topic, doing a comparative analysis of different views can be helpful, but if you don’t, studying all those views is more likely to lead to loss rather than profit. A solid concrete basis of understanding can help you integrate the topic; without it, all your reading around it just pollutes your mind and you finish up with nothingness.

Q. Lama, how did our mind become obscured and ignorant originally?

Lama. That’s a good question. It’s because for countless lives, our mind has been a very close friend of ego. Since they are best friends, ego influences mind such that we have an unclear projection of ourselves and the sense world, and reality is obscured from view. 

Q. How did the ego come about? How did the ego arise from the clear buddha mind space? 

Lama. The natural instinct of the human mind, of the ego, is to want to identify itself somehow. Take, for example, people in the West. Everybody wants to be able to properly identify who and what they are. If you can’t label yourself a nurse or a professor or something, it can be hard to get a decent job. Similarly, psychologically, the human mind wants to be able to identify itself like that, so the ego jumps up strongly, “I am this!” Ego is part of your consciousness. When your mind wants to do something, your ego manifests saying, “Yes, I am this, the world is that, therefore that-­this.” The entire dualistic samsaric trip starts from that. 

[Someone elaborates on this question to Lama.] Oh, come on! He’s giving a commentary on your question, telling me that you’re saying that you were a buddha in the past but then your ego arose and you were back in samsara. Is that what you’re thinking?

Q. What I was really after was a definition of the clear buddha mind state and how it originally became obscured. We meditate on the graduated path to free ourselves from obscurations, but if we attain liberation, how do we get obscured again?

Lama. Well, don’t think that first your mind is enlightened and then it somehow gets obscured and you become ignorant. It’s not like that. Clear buddha nature exists within you even now, along with all your obscurations, just as the nature of the sky has always been clear, yet clouds appear within it. Your mind has always been obscured.

Q. Lama, what is the borderline that separates plants from animals? Some people say that plants feel pain and respond to vibrations.

Lama. Well, that’s partly true, in that if plants are battered by heavy rain they kind of hang down as if they’re unhappy because their elements are out of balance. When the elements—water, heat, earth, etc.—are in balance, equalized, plants grow well and bloom. If there’s a preponderance of even one element, a plant won’t grow. The human body is similar. If our nervous system is in balance, we’re tranquil, peaceful and can communicate clearly, but if our mind is blocked by anxiety or anger, we can’t flow and get sick with headaches, stomach aches and so forth. But just because plants are affected by the environmental conditions doesn’t mean they have consciousness. That’s the dividing line. Consciousness is formless and possessed by humans and animals, but not plants. 

Sometimes it can be hard to decide what’s a plant and what isn’t. For example, some ocean creatures look like a flower or a piece of wood. Sometimes we call them “plant animals” because their shape is that of a plant, but they have a mind; they’re sentient beings. Of course, most plants are not like that, and just because they are organic doesn’t mean they have consciousness. 

Q. Are plants part of samsara?

Lama. Yes, you can say that.

Q. Do they evolve into higher beings? 

Lama. No. If they are not plant animals they cannot evolve to a higher state of consciousness. If they are, they can.

Q. If somebody gets amebic dysentery can they take medicine to kill the amebae?

Lama. You mean to kill the germs? [Yes.] Well, in Buddhist terms, germs are not necessarily animal.

Q. Do they have consciousness?

Lama. Yes, some germs have consciousness, some don’t. But you don’t necessarily have to kill them. There may be a medicine that will paralyze them so that they come out without being killed. 

Q. Lama, could you please explain the time scale when you speak of the hell, deva and human realms? Is there a certain length of time that we stay in each of these realms? Modern physics has this concept of relativity of time; can we say that the view we have of the hell realms as a human being might be only a short space of time? 

Lama. When we talk about time and space, when we notice it, it’s there, but when the human consciousness doesn’t notice it, it’s infinite. Who creates time? It’s our relative samsaric mind that creates these distinctions: “This is today, this is tomorrow; that is a month, that is a year.” We make it up. But I don’t think you can measure the time in those realms in the same way. Even a short period of suffering can seem like a year. When we’re depressed, a morning can seem like a month. Time is in the mind. On the other hand, if we’re having an enjoyable time, a month can seem to go by in a week. Experiences like that show the nature of time. 

In this regard, Western physics and Buddhist philosophy have some similarities. On a recent trip to America I visited Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center. They did these identical experiments where every result had an entirely different prospect, which led them to conclude that when the mind looked at it, it was there, but when it didn’t, it wasn’t. They called this phenomenon quantum theory. They could not discern what was real. In Buddhism, we say that the mind is constantly changing. When we look at the same object at different times, it appears differently. 

Q. Does every karma produce rebirth, and if not, how can we check our daily life actions to know whether or not we are creating the cause for further rebirths?

Lama. Well, you can check at the gross level, but to be able to check at the subtle level takes time. For example, this morning your mind is agitated and dissatisfied, others easily aggravate you, and you can see that if you continue like that, you’re going to be more and more unhappy. That’s the simple, gross level way of checking. What we need to do is to refine our mind so that we can check at increasingly more subtle levels. The entire purpose of meditation is to become more sensitive and aware. People who don’t check themselves don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, they hurt other people without even noticing. A couple living together might unconsciously hurt each other even though they don’t intend to. Through meditation you can bring your mind to subtler levels and as a result see things more clearly. That’s the entire purpose. 

Q. Could you please say something briefly about making confession?

Lama. We confess when we notice that we have done a negative action with a negative attitude and feel, through our own experience, that by doing such actions repeatedly, the result will be dissatisfaction, more suffering and the likelihood of doing it again and again. With understanding, we think, “I can’t keep doing this. It just brings suffering to me and those around me. With great determination, from now on I will control my mind and avoid doing that as much as I possibly can.” That is confession.

This great determination comes from our understanding of karma: cause and effect. This is very important; it helps us to stop accumulating negative imprints in our consciousness. Take alcoholics, for example. Many of them are unable to stop drinking. If you ask them if they’d like to stop they’ll say that they really want to, they don’t like it, but they just don’t have enough willpower to make the determination. They hate drinking, they get more and more unhappy, and that just makes them drink more. Nevertheless, Buddhism teaches that as human beings we do have the great potential to put our lives into a different channel simply by changing our mind. 

Q. Does making confession affect the karma of previous actions? 

Lama. Yes, very much so. Say you put a seed in the ground but don’t water it and it dries out from the heat. It is not going to grow into a beautiful plant because the cooperative causes—the water and so forth—are missing. Similarly, when you confess a negative action, you’re depriving the seed, the karmic imprint [Tib: pag cha] of the conditions it needs to ripen. If we don’t confess and just keep doing that action repeatedly, we’re continuously imprinting our consciousness with negative seeds, more, more, more and more, like a newspaper coming off a printing press. That energy accumulates and the tendency to repeat that action keeps manifesting all the time. Even though we mean well, if we try to meditate with all that inside us, all our old garbage keeps coming up, uninvited. Why? Because karmic imprints are so powerful. Even though we don’t want to keep having those garbage thoughts, they just keep on coming. 

Willpower is important. Tibetan Buddhism teaches the five powers at the time of death⁴⁴ that can affect how our consciousness transfers to the next life. If, for example, we strongly generate the enlightenment attitude of bodhicitta at the time of death, there’s no question that our passing will be a blissful experience and that we’ll be reborn in the upper realms. So even at the time of death it is important to have confidence in the compassionate attitude dedicated to others that we generate at that time. Even in a couple’s relationship, if they are not dedicated to each other there will definitely be ego problems. The same is true for any human beings involved with each other. We should dedicate ourselves to the happiness of others. Then our relationships will take on a kind of divine quality. Without that, just grasping at each other can only lead to problems and conflict. Dedication is important. 

Q. Lama, are you saying we can be blissful at the time of death?

Lama. What I’m saying is that if, at the time of death, you generate great compassion for all the universal sentient beings rather than the self-­concern of “I’m dying, I’m afraid, I’m dying,” if you can think sincerely, “I wish that all universal sentient beings could reach the everlasting blissful state of enlightenment right now,” your death will be a blissful experience.

Q. Can we be reborn in a different solar system than this one?

Lama. Yes. There are billions of solar systems where you could find a perfect human rebirth with every opportunity to practice Dharma. Even scientists have now discovered all these countless other galaxies. It’s not only Buddhism that talks about this.

Now we’re out of time. Thank you so much. Sure. Very good. And if when you get back home questions arise about what we’ve done here, you can write to us and we will try to answer. It’s good if we can continue to communicate about the Dharma.

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Notes

37. Lama Yeshe gave this talk to students at the end of a course with His Holiness Zong Rinpoche at Manjushri Institute, England, August 1978. [Return to text]

38. In the early days, a student once asked Lama Yeshe why he doesn’t teach more on shunyata. Lama looked surprised and said, “I’m always teaching on shunyata. But if you want a very simple explanation of it: don’t believe what your senses tell you.” [Return to text]

39. See Lamrim Year for how to practice the lamrim daily over the course of a year. [Return to text]

40. See Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s take on the subject of euthanasia. [Return to text]

41. Again, see Lamrim Year. [Return to text]

42. See LamaYeshe.com/glossary for details. [Return to text]

43. On page 30 of Ethics for the New Millennium His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, “Translated literally, the participle kun means ‘thoroughly’ or ‘from the depths’ and long (wa) denotes the act of causing something to stand up, to arise or to awaken. But in the sense in which it is used here, kun long is understood as what, in a sense, drives or inspires our actions—both those we intend directly and those which are in a sense involuntary. It therefore denotes the individual’s overall state of heart and mind. When this is wholesome, it follows that our actions themselves will be (ethically) wholesome. 

“From this description, it is clear that it is difficult to translate kun long succinctly. Generally, it is rendered simply as ‘motivation,’ but this clearly does not capture the full range of its meaning. The word ‘disposition,’ although it comes quite close, lacks the active sense of the Tibetan. On the other hand, to use the phrase ‘overall state of heart and mind’ seems unnecessarily long. Arguably, it could be abbreviated to ‘mind-­state,’ but this would ignore the wider meaning of mind [Tib: lo] as it is used in Tibetan.” [Return to text]

44. The power of the white seed, the power of intention, the power of blaming the self-­cherishing thought, the power of prayer and the power of habituation. [Return to text]