(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So let me make a few preliminary remarks. It's very good to see quite a lot of people turning up. You know that I and some of my colleagues in the Madhyamaloka community and some of the other communities connected with Madhyamaloka have been exploring the idea of what I'm thinking of as an urban vihara. It's very vague idea and I'm not sure whether anybody's going to buy it. But anyway, I'm going to explore it and see what happens. And that is that a collection of people around some communities who come together to meditate and to listen to and discuss the Dharma without any other project in mind and who try between them to develop a strong atmosphere of Dharma practice. And I'm interested in this as a sort of alternative approach to a center rather than thinking in terms of a center as a sort of blank space at which activities are put on, thinking more in terms of a collection of people who are practicing together, especially practicing meditation together, but also listening to and studying the Dharma. So I see this as a contribution to that exploration to see whether anything does come of it, whether enough of us sort of begin to cohere across our different communities and non-communities for it to really constitute something in itself. I think that's probably sufficiently vague for me to leave it and talk about something else. I wanted to explore as a contribution to that some Dharma themes and texts that have been especially important and interesting to me. And if this works and if it's what people want, I'm quite happy to go on doing it and take up a number of texts and a number of themes over the year and years. Of course, if nobody's here, well, it'll stop. But if people keep coming, then I will continue to do it. I prefer to do it in sequences rather than one night, a week or whatever. I prefer just to spend time over a number of days just exploring deeply a particular text. So I realize it's not gonna suit everybody and if you can't come every night, that's okay. It's a free Vihara, Sara, her and I decided that if this urban Vihara idea comes about, its membership is everybody who turns up if you see what I mean. But I wanted to start with this text because it's been one I've been exploring a lot in India. And which, to my mind, brings together an important perspective which has underlained my approach to the practice of the Dharma for many, many years under Vantis inspiration. And which I believe has underlained the creation of the institutions and the community that is our order and movement. And insofar as all of that is a bit up in the air and up for discussion, I'd quite like to revisit those very fundamental approaches which have inspired me, do inspire me now and will inspire me until enlightenment is reached. The text is called "The Eight Verses for Training the Mind." It's in the Lo Jean tradition of Tibetan Buddhism which almost certainly goes back to the monastic universities of North India. They came into Tibet, these traditions came into Tibet, with a teacher who was lived in the 10th century. It was an Indian teacher who spent a lot of time in Indonesia with the famous logician, so it's called, Dhanama Kiati, and then went to Tibet where he really reestablished Buddhism after it had gone into decline, having been initially founded by Pabmasambava, or established by Pabmasambava. So these traditions probably go back to the Indo-Indian tradition. He was at Vikramashila, which is in Bihar, I think. What the tradition does is bring together three lines of approach, which in Tibetan Buddhism is spoken of as view, practice, and action. So, the view that underlies this text is the straightforward view of Shunyatta. It's not a fancy view, so to speak, of Shunyatta. It's the straightforward understanding that all things, all appearances, not to put too find a point upon it, are devoid of inherent existence. They have no substantial reality, and that they're all part of an ever-changing flow of dependently arising conditions. Basic, standard, Buddhist doctrine. That's the view that everything is impermanent, insubstantial, devoid of inherent existence. The practice is especially the Bodhicitta practice, in which you deliberately cultivate an attitude of identification with all living beings, an appreciation that you're intimately inter-involved with every other living creature. And especially, you consider that all other creatures in the course of beginningless time will have been your mother and father many, many times. Not an easy attitude for many of some of us, at least, to take up. But what it's getting at is that you recognize your complete identity with all other beings. Then, having struck that identity, you consciously breathe in all their pain and suffering and unskillfulness, and transform it through the power of your own dedication and realization into pure white light, which you then breathe out into their hearts. So it's what's known as the practice of giving and taking. You take all the sufferings of others, and you give all your own skillfulness, all your own merit, all your own punya, all your own spiritual realization, or at least spiritual dedication. You give that to others, and then take in their suffering and their unskillfulness. So it's a very refined and powerful extension, if you like, of the meta-practice with a very strong and deliberate attempt to sense your interconnectedness with all beings. There's a lot more that can be said about that, and I will try to say that a little bit more about it over the course of the next few days. So that's the practice, in the sense of the meditation practice, that this set of teachings brings and is connected with. The action is to do with the moment by moment set of reflections and efforts you make in order to act in a way that's much more skillful, in a way that gives expression to the view and the practice, so that through the action you put into effect your realization that all beings are ultimately empty, and your experience of interconnectedness and your desire to take on the sufferings of others and to give them all happiness. So it's a combination, it's the union, the junction of all these three aspects, the view of Shunya Taa, the practice of the bodhicitta and the action of the consistent application of reflections and actions that give expression to the other two. The main body of the text is concerned primarily with the action, and that's why I find this particular text especially powerful. It's offering a number of different sort of attitudes that you can take up and put into effect in your daily interactions with other people, so that moment by moment, whenever you're meeting somebody, you can be watching your own responses and applying one or other of these reflections in order to overcome your selfish clinging and your failure to realize the ultimate interconnectedness and avoid nature of all things. So we'll be mainly dealing with the action aspect of it, but as the text goes on, I hope that we'll come to understand the relationship more to the view and to the practice. And we may, if there's enough interest and enthusiasm for it, we may begin to look at the practice itself and perhaps even do it, because the form of each evening will be that I will talk for 40 minutes or so. And at half past eight, for those that want it, we have our meditation downstairs, which you're welcome to join us for. Tonight, I think, we'll just sit. But if there's an interest in it, we could start to do the body to the practice and just to try to sort of explore how that relates to the text itself. I need to try and do this in four days. So I've got-- we've got mapped out tonight and tomorrow night and then Sunday night and Monday night. But knowing myself, it may not get done in that time. There are eight verses. Should mean two a night, but let's see. So the text is by the Kadampa Geshe-Langretungpa, who is a kind of great grand disciple of Atishas. There are some things known about him, but they're not particularly relevant here. But he is putting together the traditions that he gets from a teacher, which bring together these two, these three, really, streams. It's spoken of particularly in terms of the views, stream, and the action stream, the practice being the embodiment of the two. And I-- there are many, many different versions of this Lozong teaching. But this one is particularly appealing to me, because it's very spare. It's quite stripped down. And it's quite doctrinally economic, as it were, in terms of doctrine. It doesn't have a lot of extraneous bits and pieces of metaphysics or belief hanging onto it. And so one can immediately begin to relate to it and immediately begin to put it into action, because that, don't forget, is what it's all about. It's about action, about from now on, trying, in every situation, to apply the perspective that the text is looking at. The bodhicitta practice in the Tarape Di-Lang version begins with the words, "In order to develop a new mind." So that's what the text is about. It's about developing a new mind. In other words, the bodhicitta, a mind that's free from ego clinging, that fully recognizes the emptiness of all things and the interconnectedness of all things, and is powered only by compassion. So what you're doing and engaging, what we are doing and engaging with this text, is beginning to see a way in which we can develop a new mind, the mind of the bodhicitta, which is, of course, the transcendent mind. So we'll take it verse by verse. I'll try and do two verses tonight, but there may be quite a lot to go into. It's very, very simple, but I think the more you look at it and the more closely you look at it, the more profound it becomes. So the first verse goes, "May I always cherish all beings with the resolve to accomplish for them the highest good that is more precious than any wishful filling jewel." So that's the fundamental approach. "May I always cherish all beings with the resolve to accomplish for them the highest good that is more precious than any wishful filling jewel." So "May I always cherish all beings." Well, there's a rather lot sort of writing on the term "cherish" itself. And perhaps the best way of getting at what the word "cherish" is implying is to, related, as it were, to its counterpart. This is "cherishing all beings." The counterpart, or even contrary in some ways, is self-cherishing. And so what the text is saying that, in the way that we usually cherish ourselves, we need to try to-- we're aspiring-- to try to cherish others. So that's important to kind of feel out, if you like, the extent to which we all of us quite spontaneously and even naturally, you could say, are fundamentally cherishing ourselves. According to Abhidharma philosophy, particularly the Yogachara version of the Abhidharma philosophy, we're born into this life with fundamental attitudes, which we carry over from the past. These are known as the artima clashers, the four artima clashers, or sometimes mula clashers. Clashers, in the sense of emotional, come a cognitive knot, if you like, which are afflictive. They are disturbing insofar as, in acting from them, we bring suffering to ourselves. And of course, others, too. So at the basis of our whole structure of being are these four fundamental clashers. They're not clashers in the ordinary sense, like anger, or craving, or attachment, or something like that. They're much, much more fundamentally. You can't really see them. There's so much part of who you are, who we are. But you don't see them. And they're considered to be sahaja, which means inborn, or innate, or connect, I think strictly speaking. So that as a consequence of the way in which we've acted, and especially the way in which we've seen things in the past, we come into this life with a predisposition to see them in that way again. To see them from the point of view of ourselves being the most wonderful thing, ourselves being the central point of it all, ourselves as being what we are most concerned about. And this is what's known as Atma Sneha. Sneha means attachment cherishing. So Atma Sneha means self-cherishing. The other four, by the way, are Atma mana, which we'll deal with a little bit in the next verse, which is to do with our attitude of pride about ourselves. We'll see what that means later on. The other two are more cognitive. There's Atma drishti, which means a view about self, an attitude, an understanding that there is a real, independently-existent self. And Atma mohar, which means just not really understanding what the self is. So there's the sort of passive and the active aspects of ignorance. Atma mohar being the passive aspect of ignorance and Atma drishti being the active aspect, where we produce views about who we are and I'll play some things. I said, OK, you, with me so far, are too much material. So Atma Sneha is one of those four Atma clasheas, those four fundamental sahaja or sahati clasheas that we come into this life with that are kind of the foundation on which our whole personality is built. A whole being in this time is built. So from a Buddhist point of view, clearly, we need to be attacking, so to speak, those four Atma clasheas. We attack the views through reflection on Shunya Ta. And we attack the cherishing and the pride through these sorts of practices, these sorts of actions, let's say, and the practice of giving and taking in the Bodhicitta practice. So we come in with this fundamental attitude of kind of feeling about ourselves that we are extremely important and desirable. What I find quite helpful about realizing that they're innate is that it's in a way not culpable. It's said at that level that the clasheas are cognitive obscuration. In other words, they do hide the truth of things from you. They're a mistaken view about the way things really are, but they're morally neutral, which is, I find, rather reassuring and gets away from a sort of almost an original sin notion. It's if you've got these attitudes that you've just acquired from the past, that are deeper than you can really see in yourself, as it were, and that are not necessarily going to lead you to act unskillfully, because you can have those art mclashes and still be a good person and act fundamentally skillfully, even dwell in jhana, much or even most of the time. But still, there's that cognitive obscuration underlying it. So the self-cherishing is not something kind of bad, in, as I say, an original sin sense. It's not some sort of moral blot that you're born with. It's a cognitive knot with an emotional consequence, which obscures the truth from you, and leads to suffering your own and others. So what we're trying to do is to change that, so that not only do we cherish ourselves, because, after all, it says, cherish all beings, and we are a being, but cherish others, too, in the same way, to have the same sense of concern for and identification with others that we have for ourselves. I think it's very, very important to recognize that the text is not saying that we should just sacrifice ourselves in a, perhaps, even quite guilt-ridden way. This, the ex-Catholics amongst us, we need to reassure ourselves of. And just from the point of view of being able to put it into effect, we need to realize, because we can't sort of do away with our own spontaneous feeling of concern for our own well-being. But what we want to do is to expand that feeling of concern for our own well-being to include others, to include all others, ideally to the point at which it's felt as strongly for others as it is for ourselves, because we no longer see ourselves in the same sort of separate, isolated way. So in saying, may I cherish all beings, all of that is implied. It's changing our immediate and spontaneous identification with ourselves, and concern with ourselves, interest in ourselves, even love of ourselves, expanding that so that it includes all others. And this is the active dimension of insight into the empty nature of Atman, of self. Yeah, so far, so good. Just to pause anything that I've said that's not clear or needs amplification, because I'm winding my way in, so I'm not sure I'm being as clear as I could be. Maybe it's pretty obvious. The main point I'm picking up is that the attitude that requires a sort of extension of one's estu-- [INAUDIBLE] Not a negation of the attitude that we naturally have to ourselves. You could think of it in a number of different ways. In a way, you could say it's negation, because it's so different from the way in which we normally go about it. There's not a negation in the sense that you hate yourself. Those chilling words, unless a man hate himself, he shall not inherit life everlasting. That is not what Buddhism is saying. If it is, I am not a Buddhist, I assure you. It's saying that just as you love yourself, you want to learn to love others. And you take even in a way your love for yourself is the model for the love that you want to have for others. That's in a way what the text is saying. Whether when that's taken place, what you're left with is precisely an extension of your love for yourself is debatable. But that at least is a way of approaching it, that probably a better way of approaching it than thinking in terms of negating yourself and cutting yourself off, especially from the culture that some of us come from. [INAUDIBLE] The mula clasius, the art mula clasius. Well, let's start with a cognitive side. There's artmo moha, which is ignorance about self. Artmo drishti, which is views about self. Well, artmo moha is more like kind of blindness. You don't know who you are or what you are, as it were. Artmo drishti is that you think you do know. So as I say, the passive and active aspects of ignorance. It would be all right if we just didn't know and knew that we didn't know. But we don't know and we don't know that we don't know. In fact, we think we do know. So we've got all sorts of ideas about what it is to be a self. Fundamentally, we believe that we are an independent, self-existent, self-interacting with an independent, self-existent world. So that's the cognitive side. The effective side is artmo sneja, which means, well, in any modern Indian languages, it means affection or even just love, even romantic love, it can mean. But cherishing is, I think, a really good translation, because it's got very positive connotations as well. And artmo marna, which means pride in self. So your attitude of having identified yourself and caring deeply about yourself of comparison of yourself with others. The fundamental position is that we all believe that we are really the most important person and that everything revolves around us. At this level, that's what it really means. It means considering that you are uniquely important. And we all do it. And in a way, this approach of thinking of them as innate relieves one of the feeling that it's a terrible sort of guilty secret, something we all do, quite naturally and spontaneously, and that if we use it correctly, rightly, can be the basis for our going beyond it. In a way, what we're doing in the metabhavana is, first of all, identifying and accepting our artmo sneja. You could almost say that the first stage of the metabhavana is taking your natural love of yourself and beginning to make it more rational, more effective by recognizing your real interests, your real benefit lies for you. But you're taking something that's quite natural and spontaneous. You're not trying to force something on yourself or force something out of yourself. And then you're beginning to learn to extend that to others so that you include them more and more in your field of concern. So again, I think this is very, very important to recognize in any discussion of the need for self-transcendence and of learning to cherish others that you're doing that by taking your natural self-love and raising it up, making it more subtle, more effective, more reasonable, directing it in a way that's more truly in your interests and benefit. And I think that a quite important sort of thing for us all to do in trying to practice spiritually is to keep in touch with that basic self-love and not to allow ourselves to fall into, especially us with a Christian background, to fall into the idea that suppressing ourselves or doing away with ourselves in some sort of sense is transcending ourselves. It's just a kind of perverted self-love. Even self-hatred is a form of self-love. You think you're uniquely important enough to hate, if you saw what I mean. I mean, after all, why hate yourself if you don't think you're important? That famous line in Casablanca, isn't it, where the little creep comes up to Johnny and says, you hate me, Johnny, don't you? No, you despise me, Johnny, don't you? And Johnny says, no, I don't despise you. If I thought about you, I might. Even our bad feelings about ourselves are based upon our real strong feeling about ourselves, if you see what I mean. And again, that's quite a helpful thing in teaching and talking about Metabarvna. That there's nobody who does not primarily love themselves, even those who appear to hate themselves. You wouldn't bother if you didn't love yourself. Anyway, you see why I'm making a little bit of this. That you take the words, may I always cherish all beings. And you can very easily start to think in terms of self-negation in what I consider to be a very unhealthy sense. And really, in a way, I'd say that cherishing all beings is a completion of self-cherishing. And depends, first of all, on a healthy self-appreciation and a healthy self-love. But it does go beyond it. And that is what the burden of the text is. That's what the text is trying to educate us in and give us tools for doing. And yes, it does seem to me that the way in which you cherish all beings lies through cherishing yourself. And because, in the first place, you cherish yourself, you begin to be able to cherish others. Cherish, I think, is a very beautiful word. It comes presumably by a French from a Latin root to care. And yes, it suggests a very sort of tender and particular help, not a sort of a vague or generalized love for others or benefit of others. It means really looking after them at paying attention to their specific needs. And that, I think, is also perhaps a danger of the language of the Bodhicitta practice and discourse generally. That it can seem so general that you lose the particularity in small acts of kindness and attention to others. I read something recently that suggested when you're doing the Bodhicitta practice and you're doing the exchange of the giving and taking. Of unskillfulness from them and your own happiness and benefit. You start with particular people. Don't just sort of have a vague image of golem-like blobs out there. But think of particular people who are suffering and who suffering touches you. And start with that. And through that, you can include more and more people. You can reach out to more and more people. So when we're talking about cherishing all beings, what that means is cherishing those who are immediately in front of you. And so that means that this practice is offering us-- this text is offering us a daily practice, minute by minute. So we cherish all beings with the resolve to accomplish for them the highest good that is more precious than any wishful-filling duel. Well, I thought I find this very interesting. The idea of a wishful-filling duel, it immediately connects you with the fact that people are wanting creatures, that all those beings that you're cherishing, they want things. They wish for things. And what, of course, they all wish for is their own happiness and benefit. And this is a very important aspect of the whole bodhicitta practice and discourse that you recognize that all beings seek, like you do, their own benefit. Even the evil that people do, even the monstrous acts that people perform, are done because people believe they will give them the greatest benefit. They will bring about the benefits that they desire. For some reason recently, these acts of terror going on in Iraq have been getting through to me. The unbelievable senselessness of killing 200 people, who you don't know, you don't know what they think or what they believe, but just setting off a bomb to kill people at random. It's really hard to understand how people can do that. But they're doing it because they believe, they will bring about what they value most highly. They believe that it's the best thing that they can do. And this is what the bodhicitta practice is really sort of inviting us to attend to. The fact that nobody ever does anything because they believe it will do them harm. Even if they believe it will do them harm, they think that harm is the best thing that could happen to them, if you see what I mean. But everybody does things because they believe that they will bring them the best. And everybody's seeking their own best interests, their highest value, which for me, of course, connects up for those who've been looking at NVC with the NVC idea of needs. Nobody does anything except as an in fulfillment of deep universal needs. That's where this practice connects up, I think, with NVC, by the way. We may return to that theme. But yeah, the wish-fulfilling gem immediately brings us to attend to the fact that everybody's out for their own benefit and happiness. And everybody's acting all the time because they think that that's going to fulfill them. That's going to get them what they value most highly. And I think immediately if you can start to attend to the world around you and the people around you in that sort of way, your attitude begins to change. If you can immediately begin to sense that behind the little acts of unskillfulness, that people perform, and even the big acts of unskillfulness, the gross and almost incomprehensible acts of unskillfulness lies their belief that this will fulfill. This will bring them their greatest fulfillment. You begin to already begin to be able to move into cherishing them. So I take this idea of wish-fulfilling as bringing us into the whole realm of people as wish-fulfilling creatures. They're trying to fulfill their wishes. And then when you think about the wish-fulfilling gem, it's a fascinating sort of symbol, isn't it, which you find in all cultures. I remember fairy stories where people are given three wishes. And in the fairy stories, they always waste the wishes, don't they? I was trying to think of one. The only one I could think of was one where an old couple help a fairy. It's probably an Irish story. And the fairy grants them three wishes. So the man sits down and he says, I'd like a really big sausage. And so on his plate appears an enormous sausage. And the wife says, you silly fool. You've wasted a wish. I wish that sausage was on the end of your nose. So immediately, that's where the sausage is. And then, of course, what can they do with a third wish, but get it off the end of his nose. So wish is gone. And there are many, many stories like that. And what that really sort of teaches us and tells us is that we don't know our own interests. If we had the power to get what we wished for, what we wished for would not give us fulfillment. We wish for things. And they may be temporarily satisfies, but they always have a sting in their tail. The sausage always goes on the end of the nose. So those sort of fairy stories and stories where people find the wish-fulfilling gem are all about that, aren't they, the fact that we're not in control of our-- we don't know what our best interests are. We don't know what our highest interests are. This is what Tarkovsky's film Stalker is about. They go into the zone. And in the zone, there's the room. And if you go into the room, all your wishes are fulfilled. But you remember, the porcupine went into the room. And he ended up extremely wealthy. What he'd gone in there to do was to ask for his brother's resurrection. But his own deepest desires were what the room fulfilled. So we're all the time trying to fulfill our own desires. We're wish-fulfilling creatures, so to speak. But we don't know where our highest interests lie. And so this is what's connoted here. Our resolve is to accomplish four beings, the highest good that is more precious than any wish-fulfilling jewel. We want to accomplish for people their real best interests, their real higher interests, not just what they might think they want or say they want. Of course, some of what they want is not unskillful and maybe even necessary to them. But most people, if they were given a wish-fulfilling jewel, would not be able to use it satisfactorily or well. So this implies then, of course, that the cherishing of living beings requires us to understand for ourselves what the deepest interests of beings are, including ourselves and to know how to fulfill them. So it requires us to look at beings in a quite new and different way. To look at ourselves included as self-interested, seeking our own best interests, but not really knowing what those interests are in the text. It says something like, beings seek happiness, but they don't know where happiness lies. What a pity. Of course, what a pity is a vast understatement. It's what a supreme tragedy. That's what tragedy is. It's where we seek great things, but we don't understand sufficiently clearly what greatness is. And in seeking, in even achieving a degree of greatness, we also achieve other things that we didn't expect or want. So when we're saying, may I cherish, may I always cherish all beings with a resolve to accomplish for them the highest good that is more precious than any wish-fulfilling jewel, this is all that's implied. May we care for others the same ways we care for ourselves, but not just caring for others and ourselves as gratification-seeking beings, but as beings who have a high destiny and whose highest interests lie ultimately in a spiritual realization and whose deepest needs and strongest desires only find satisfactory fulfillment in that realization. This is what the text implies. And when we're doing the practice, we visualize all beings around us, and we try to create some identification with them, reflecting that they're like us seeking happiness. That's what they want. They're no different from us. Even the harmful things they do to us are done because they believe that's in their best interests. And if we can sort of identify with others in that way, recognizing that they're like us, just trying to find fulfillment. Well, we can cross that barrier. We can begin to cherish. If we can look around and see others in that way, we can begin to include them in our cherishing. But what we need to add to that is the depth of recognition that what they're striving for is best fulfilled in enlightenment. That's the only fulfillment for it. Short of enlightenment, there's going to be ruffs with the smooth, if you like. There's going to be always negative consequences flowing on from the positive effects, even if it's only binding ourselves further into the system of samsara. Samsara is seeking our happiness without understanding where our happiness really lies. That, if you like, is what samsara is. So we're continuously trying to benefit ourselves, but not really understanding where our benefit lies. And what we're trying to do in this Bodhicitta approach is understand better our own highest interest and the highest interest of others. And see others as wish seeking or fulfillment seeking beings who just don't know where fulfillment lies. As we don't know, we're fulfillment lies. We've perhaps got the benefit of contact with Adorama and maybe some vision. And on that basis, we can try to help others. We go for refuge to the three jewels, and we can try in going for refuge to the three jewels to lead others on that path. So when we say, I always cherish all beings, with the resolve to accomplish for them the highest good, that is more precious than any wishful feeling jewel, this is what we've got in mind. This desire to extend our cherishing of ourselves to others and to see others and ourselves as seeking our highest happiness. Seeking happiness but wishing for us and others the highest happiness were real fulfillment lies. And that's all we've got time for tonight. I thought I wouldn't do very much, but anyway, it's a good start, I think. Yes, I hadn't intended to promote discussion here, as it were. I just wanted to explore the text, and no doubt discussion can take place elsewhere. But if you'd like to, in 10 minutes time, we're going to meditate, some of us are going to meditate downstairs, and you're welcome to join us. You're welcome, not to if you want to, too. OK, and tomorrow night, same time, next verse. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] You You
