Echoes: The Boudhanath Teachings

1 · Same Taste

I am very happy to be here today. I’ve recently returned from the West, where I met a lot of different people and in general received a very positive impression. There was no special reason for me to feel that way, but perhaps as a result of habits from previous lives, I liked the West and Westerners.

I have spent the greater part of my life in the East and so have always been involved in Eastern social customs, which are very rigid and restrictive. I have also been involved in the tradition of Dharma, which is also in its own way quite rigorous. Some of the people I met in the West were involved in Dharma and some were not. I found that a lot of the people not involved in Dharma are simple people with very good minds. I also found that some Westerners practicing Dharma are actually being harmed by it—their minds are deteriorating. A lot of people I met who are not involved in Dharma are very direct and straightforward, without many thoughts, doubts, or worries. Many people involved in Dharma, on the other hand, have a lot of doubts and worries and are not exactly straightforward. This made me think that perhaps in some ways it’s better not to practice Dharma. Buddha Shakyamuni said that the source of all Dharma is directness, and in my experience people who know nothing of Dharma often tend to be very direct. Having learned a great deal about Dharma, people tend to become involved in the artificiality of mental fiction and so become much less direct. The teachings of Dharma have in fact taken them away from Dharma.

In the tantras and in Dzogchen it is said that one must leave awareness alone, naked, without doing anything to it, and without creating anything artificial whatsoever. A great many people who have heard a lot about Dharma can never do this; they are always creating a lot of artificial conceptions. But people who have heard nothing of Dharma do not tend to create artificial conceptions, and I think it would be easy for them to leave their awareness alone and as it is, because they have not created anything to obscure it.

I do not consider myself a Lama and so I am not [currently] wearing robes. I do not feel that I should adopt the role of a master. My father, Dudjom Rinpoche,¹ is a very great yogi with supremely accomplished qualities and has no pride about them whatsoever, but merely being the son of a great yogi doesn’t make one special. Buddha Shakyamuni himself was the greatest of teachers, and Devadatta was certainly his cousin, yet it did not benefit Devadatta to be the cousin of Buddha Shakyamuni; he was simply a demon. Merely having a great father doesn’t make me anything special. I’m approaching these talks as your friend. I enjoy talking with friends about Dharma, and this way may even be useful. A friend’s qualities are not particularly relevant or important. In his previous lives, Buddha Shakyamuni even took teachings from hunters.

While I was in the West I noticed that Dharma is being spread there quite a lot. Many people are practicing Zen, and many others are involved in the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism—the Sakya, Gelug, Kagyu, and Nyingma. I am worried that Westerners will experience many obstacles in their Dharma practice. Although it’s good that Dharma spreads, if Westerners are not capable of practicing it very well, Dharma will primarily become an obstacle for them. So if we persevere in our practice, we will further the spread of Dharma.

Teaching Dharma is not easy. We must recognize that there are many different kinds of people, and different people have different faculties. This leads to different approaches to Dharma and to inclinations toward different types of practice. There are Hinayana types, to whom one should teach the Hinayana; Mahayana types, to whom one should teach the Mahayana; and Vajrayana types, to whom one should teach the Vajrayana. There are people who are capable of having a good relationship with primordial wisdom, to whom one should teach wisdom; there are people who have philosophical inclinations, to whom one should teach philosophy; and so on. I am not capable of seeing what kind of people you are and what kind of faculties you have, so I would like to ask what particular interests and aspirations you have in Dharma.

How can Dharma be practiced without such exterior signs as wearing robes and doing prostrations? You seem to have implied that these things are not necessary.

I did not mean that these things have no purpose. The point is that Dharma is intended to benefit the mind, so whatever one does in Dharma is likewise intended to benefit the mind. If a particular practice is beneficial to the mind, then it is positive. Therefore, if practices such as doing prostrations and setting up an altar and making offerings and repeating the Dorje Sempa [Vajrasattva] mantra benefit the mind, one should definitely do them. They can all benefit the mind. Buddha Shakyamuni said that all phenomena are an expression of the mind. The mind is the most important thing to work with in Dharma. So one’s basic frame of reference in any Dharma practice is working with and transforming the mind, and whatever furthers that intention is an appropriate activity in Dharma.

Rinpoche, what kind of people did you meet in the West other than Dharma people? When you say simple people, do you mean, for example, people who work on buses, farmers, and so on?

Yes, I met people like that. I also went out into the countryside and met country people, and I found them very direct and simple. In this way they had very good minds.

I’m not in any way formally educated, but it seems to me that education may be an obstacle to Dharma practice. Prolonged formal education may tend to reinforce your attachment to your own mind.

No, no; the obstacles are in the nature of the people who are studying Dharma. We find almost the same syndrome in both East and West. The qualities of Dharma are quite difficult to develop, but if one has a lot of merit and practices very hard, one can eventually develop outer qualities for the benefit of others, and inner qualities of understanding. If we develop both of these, we will be able to benefit others, but this is quite difficult.

When people are involved in Dharma, they often try to learn and understand things. They come to know more than other people and are finally called scholars. Then they acquire a reputation for knowing something, so they become proud. These individuals may go on studying and may even become extremely learned. If one continues in this fashion, one will eventually acquire a lot of intellectual understanding about Dharma and will be able to explain it precisely and make accurate judgments. This approach may lead to a greater tendency to intensify one’s pride. This makes it difficult to train the mind and attain understanding. Without developing inner and outer qualities through recognizing the nature of mind, and attaining understanding from that, one will not really be able to benefit other people no matter how learned one may have become. This is a problem one finds equally in the East and in the West.

Could you give some teachings on the essence of the mind—how to understand it, see it, and meditate on it?

What I’m going to say doesn’t really have much to do with the practice of the Dharma, but I think it’s important anyway and I’d like to talk about it. When we begin to practice Dharma, we have a choice about exactly how to approach it, and this is a very important choice. Whenever we set out to do anything, we always have a choice right at the beginning about how to approach it, and how we make that choice will determine how we work through the situation. In approaching Dharma, one might decide to study and gain a strong intellectual comprehension of it. An approach like this would concentrate entirely on study. If one sets out to do this, one can actually achieve one’s aim and finally understand a great deal about Dharma. However, in the final outcome, this will not really be of any great benefit.

The other choice is to try and integrate a certain amount of learning with the practice of Dharma. In this approach one would receive a few instructions on Dharma and practice them. This is called mintri in Tibetan.² Min means to bring to fruition in the same way that a plant or fruit is brought to fruition, and tri means teaching; therefore, the word mintri means the teachings that bring one to fruition. Here one attempts to receive those teachings that are relevant to one’s practice, and one is determined to practice those teachings constantly in order to attain realization.

All the vehicles [yanas] are very important: the Hinayana definitely constitutes the teachings of the Buddha, the Mahayana is the source of full realization, and the Vajrayana is a special branch of the Mahayana concerning method.

Some people may have aspirations to monkhood, while others prefer to practice unordained. But however we aspire to practice, it’s very important not to get rigid about it. We should not be too worried about what we are doing and should not have a judgmental attitude in practicing Dharma, but should be quite relaxed and open in our approach. There is a vast expanse within Dharma. There are many, many different kinds of teaching, and there are many, many different kinds of people for whom those teachings are intended. If we are heavily judgmental and rigid about vehicles, we will tend to cut ourselves off from a lot of Dharma. Whether we are meditating, listening to teachings, or thinking about Dharma, we should always try to maintain an open and nonjudging attitude.

In Dharma practice it is important to know about the five extreme attitudes. These are not philosophical views but attitudes that confuse people, and which should be avoided. The first of these is wrong beliefs, such as holding that Dharma is not beneficial or that there is no such thing as karma or rebirth. The second is the attitude of grasping at fictitious absolutes—ideas such as This is really it, this is the ultimate experience, this is the ultimate truth. I have understood. This should be avoided. The third is fascination with the five skandhas: one’s physical form, feeling, perception, intention, and consciousness. The five skandhas have no objectifiable reality at all, so both magnifying their importance and attributing any kind of real nature to them should be avoided. The fourth is regarding our own ethics as something to be proud of. We might feel that it is very good to keep precepts and that we are improved or benefited merely by keeping them. This might lead us to become proud of our own ethics, and it would prevent them from being useful. The fifth is related to the fourth: we should not consider the mad actions of a yogi to be exemplary in themselves. There is certainly something unique in the behavior of a realized being, but this behavior has no more inherent value than keeping precepts. If people think they are virtuous just because they observe precepts, they are making a mistake. On the other hand, if they think that being a yogi exempts them from ethical behavior, that is a mistake, too. These are both self-defeating and should be avoided.

Mind itself has no objectifiable reality, but for countless lifetimes we have not recognized this. As a result, we have given rise to the notion of self, or I. This notion of I is the ego. It creates its own projections, an entire sphere of its own. This sphere is nothing but the projection of the ignorant ego, but we don’t recognize this and think it is something else. From this arises the duality of subject and object: the object is the world or environment we find ourselves in, and the subject is the individual or ego that regards itself as perceiving the field. This perception of otherness gives us the feeling of being in a multifarious environment that is external to ourselves. The relationship between the ego and its realm causes us to discriminate between what benefits and what harms. As a further result of these discriminations, we develop notions of aversion and desire. We desire things that we think are good for us, and feel aversion toward things we consider harmful. So, by not recognizing the essentially non-objectifiable nature of the mind, we have created defilements and our own confusion.

It’s not particularly important whether we assume the role of a monk. What is crucial is to trust that actions have inevitable results in accordance with the working of karma. The source of all conditioned events is attachment to duality, the basic duality of an ego and the field in which the ego is structured. As long as there is duality, there are causes and results, samsara and nirvana, demons and gods, bad and good, birth and death and rebirth. Without attachment to duality, there is no cause and result, no bad and good, no samsara and nirvana—also no Dharma, no teachings, no path, and nothing whatsoever to do. Basically what we must do in Dharma practice is transcend duality. When we recognize the ego to be a fallacy, the duality of realm and ego disappears and everything becomes a field of total evenness.

We will inevitably feel that we have been improved by practicing Dharma, and that we have learned something or developed some kind of positive qualities or understanding. This may lead to feelings of pride. At the moment of feeling pride, the field of observation is that pride itself. We are caught in the dual structure of pride and ego. At that moment we should examine the nature of that pride; it could not be anything in itself. No matter how long one examines pride, one will never find anything that is pride, nor will one find any source for its arising. Furthermore, one will see that pride is not permanent, and will be less inclined to trust it. Eventually one will recognize the emptiness of the prideful conception and understand the meaning of emptiness through pride itself. On the other hand, if one allows pride to take control, one will lose the sense that there is anything wrong with dual structures. Having been caught in duality, one will assume the existence of an individual as an entity. Due to pride, an idea will arise such as I am very learned and he doesn’t know anything, and one will be insulting or aggressive. One will thus create a lot of bad karma and make others unhappy, creating difficulties for oneself and ultimately isolating oneself from the world. In this way, one will become more entangled in the web of samsara.

When feeling aversion, we should look to see where it is and why we project an object of aversion. An object of aversion is no more than a formulation of the mind. We become angry with our own projection, a projection of the ego ignorantly created through a failure to recognize the nature of mind. Therefore, we should look at the nature of the mind creating these projections. Strong tendencies to objectify and solidify a particular reality will then drift away. We will feel very relaxed, light, and happy, and we will become calm about everything.

Sometimes we feel pain and are unhappy, sometimes we meet friends and are happy, sometimes we are separated from our friends and are unhappy. Sometimes we become involved in a close relationship with someone and feel happy in that relationship, and when it breaks up we feel unhappy again. We feel sad and depressed, we can’t eat, we can’t sleep, and we cry, so we try to do something about it; we go out and get drunk and perhaps this makes us feel a little better. Then we come around in the morning and feel depressed again. In this way, we get involved in a cycle of suffering and happiness. When involved in such feelings, we should constantly observe the nature and condition of the mind. So when we are happy, when a relationship breaks up, or when we are separated from our friends, we should observe the nature and condition of the mind. Although we will still feel those emotions, we will also feel an evenness running through unhappiness and happiness. When happy, we will recognize emptiness through happiness, and when unhappy, we will recognize emptiness through unhappiness. This practice is called the same taste of happiness and unhappiness.

We all travel from one place to another and find ourselves in varying circumstances, some unpleasant and some pleasant. The Buddhist view is that these conditions are due not to external forces, but to our own karma. So whether involved in bad or good circumstances, we should watch the nature of the mind. We will experience the evenness running through bad and good conditions, and we will be able to recognize emptiness through them. This practice is called the same taste of bad and good conditions.

A good number of people who practice Dharma are able to overcome bad conditions, to avoid being controlled by them and work through them. But it’s much more difficult to use good conditions and much easier to be controlled by good conditions than by bad ones. There are relatively few people who can work with good conditions and continue in their pure practice of Dharma.

When people become rich, when they are in comfortable circumstances and everybody considers them to be good and praises them, at those times it is difficult to feel that everything is a manifestation of the mind and mere appearance. Appearances are neither beneficial nor harmful. No appearance, however bad it may be, ever harms anything; no appearance,