The Dharma Teachings Of Venerable Thubten Gyatso
From Dharmaweb
In the Beginning...
To present the Buddhist worldview I have to first draw an outline and then fill in the details. An ambitious project for a short article, but let us see how it evolves.
The Buddhist contribution to the eternal debate about how the universe began is simple: there was no beginning. Before this world there was life on other worlds, before this universe there was life in other universes. Life itself has two forms: sentient beings, those who possess mind and therefore feelings, such as humans and animals, and non-sentient life, the plant world.
We human sentient beings have bodies and minds. Our bodies, dependent upon our genes and the food we eat, are temporary appearances that will soon be reduced to their component parts. The atoms of our bodies, however, are continuums of ever-changing energy states that cannot arise from nothing, therefore matter is beginning-less.
Our minds also are temporary appearances that depend upon our nervous systems, sense organs, and the objects of our experience. Mind itself is the continuum of awareness - our ever-changing states of consciousness with their associated feelings of happiness and unhappiness and emotions of love, hate, patience, anger, greed, generosity, and so on. There cannot be a first moment of mind arising from nothing, the present moment of mind necessarily arises from a prior moment of mind, therefore it is beginning-less. Importantly, although mind depends upon matter, it cannot be created by matter because mind and matter are different entities. And, even more importantly, although mind cannot create matter, the organization of matter into our environment is dependent upon our minds.
One stream of consciousness cannot divide into two separate streams, nor can two streams of consciousness merge into one. Therefore, every sentient being possesses a unique stream of consciousness that has been flowing since beginning-less time and will continue endlessly into the future.
Although a Buddha is a being with mind, a Buddha is not a sentient being because the term is reserved for those who are trapped within the wheel of life or those who have escaped but still have impairment to perfect awareness of all things, omniscience. A vast number of beings have attained Buddhahood and every one of them was once a sentient being caught in the wheel of life until, following the guidance of a Buddha, they divested themselves of all impairments to perfect wisdom and, through compassion, completed the accumulation of causes to attain the physical qualities of a person who works effortlessly and forever to guide other beings out of the suffering wheel of life and into the state of perfect bliss. To maintain our presentation of beginning-less-ness, there was never a first Buddha.
Although there was no original creator, life must still have a cause, so what is the cause of the world? A famous Buddhist text begins one chapter with the statement, "This multifarious world of sentient beings and their environment arose from the karma of sentient beings."
The literal meaning of karma is action, specifically; it refers to the intention or purpose behind our actions. For everything we do, say, and think, we have an intention and, apart from the direct external effect of our behavior, there is also an internal effect - the creation of a seed in our mind that has the potential to connect our mind-stream in the future with a similar experience to the intended action we have just performed. Unlike the body, the mind-stream survives death and passes through a dream-like intermediate state into a future birth, carrying with it the enormous collection of un-ripened karmic seeds from many previous lives. Actions motivated by harmful attitudes create seeds that ripen as harmful experiences for oneself, and actions motivated by benevolent attitudes create seeds that ripen as pleasant experiences.
Driven by desire for pleasure and aversion to pain, but ignorant of the actual causes of pleasure and pain, sentient beings are born again and again into six realms of existence that reflect their own minds. The three worst rebirths are in the hells, as a hungry spirit, or as an animal. The three better ones are as a human, a demi-god, or a divine being, but all six are pervaded by dissatisfaction or complete frustration in the pursuit of pleasure and they inevitably end in death and rebirth somewhere else.
The reflection of a Buddha's mind is a Pure Land. Sentient beings can be born there in a paradise where, with guidance from the Buddhas, they complete their own paths to Buddhahood. For those without the cause to be born in a Pure Land, Buddhas, such as the historic Buddha Shakyamuni, appear on earth to teach the path.
In my future articles I shall expand upon this brief presentation of the Buddhist worldview.
Suffering
My cat, absorbed in the pleasure of sunshine on the window ledge, is an example of how all humans and animals are equal in that our fundamental purpose in life is to experience pleasure and avoid pain. If we take an honest look at the reasons behind our behavior, our daily activities are mostly directed towards gaining the experience of sensory pleasure and happiness, or towards avoiding unpleasant experiences and unhappiness.
There is nothing wrong in experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain, the problem is that we are not very good at achieving these goals. And, even when we do gain some degree of happiness, we are extremely skilful at screwing it up and turning the party into a great big flop.
Upon achieving enlightenment, the Buddha remained for a long time without saying anything. It is said that his hesitation in spreading the good news was due to a thought which went something like, "I have discovered the profound truth of existence; they (you and I) will never be able to understand."
Fortunately, Buddha was persuaded by the great beings, Brahma and Indra, to reveal his knowledge. "You are not going to like it," he warned. Well, I just made that up, but look at what he did say: "Life is utterly miserable and it's your own fault."
We may reply to that, "Hey, just a minute, change the politicians, give me a great, well-paid job, a beautiful family, and a house by the seaside and I'll show you whether life is miserable or not."
When I was on the road in the early seventies, I once stayed with the owner of a Norwegian shipping line who, with his beautiful wife, had built a dream house on a quiet beach on the island of Crete. But she had died just before the house was completed, and he was very, very lonely. Although I had attended a course with Tibetan Lamas, I had not yet accepted the teachings to be true and I was still chasing the dream of a perfect partner, a great job, and unsullied happiness in this life. But my Scandinavian friend's situation made me think.
To clarify his initial statement, Buddha described three levels of suffering. First, there is "suffering of suffering," the experiences that we all accept to be suffering, such as the physical pain of sickness and the mental pain that occurs with a death in the family. These need no elaboration, but the second level of suffering, the "suffering of change," is more difficult to recognize.
Suffering of change refers to what we ordinarily call happiness. Every happy situation leads to unhappiness because, externally, it depends upon the gathering of causes and conditions that cannot last forever and this inevitably leads us to experience the melancholy of "the party's over." Why else does merely the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" universally produce tears in our eyes?
The internal reason why our happiness inevitably leads to unhappiness is that we cling to the object of happiness and the happy experience itself with great attachment, and this inner agitation destroys the pleasure of the moment. Attachment irrationally refuses to accept that we cannot remain in the embrace of our lover forever. It will not accept that things and people change, and so, not only does our mind destroy the happiness of the present, it also becomes lost in nostalgia wanting to relive past happiness, or in futile clinging to impossible dreams of future happiness.
Another mental problem is that we believe that pleasure exists as an intrinsic quality of the object of pleasure, and the mere acquisition of that object should automatically bring happiness. Our garages, attics, and address books, however, are full of discarded possessions and people who we were convinced would make us happy. They did not work out because our expectations were simply wrong. And also because of a deeper, more sinister internal reason called karma. Just as those who are paranoid with delusions of self-reference can never be happy because every event is seen as a threat to their person, when non-virtuous karma, the echoes of past actions when we have hurt others, ripens in our mind, it is impossible to be happy no matter how much wealth or how big a circle of friends we have gathered around ourselves.
The third level of suffering is "pervading suffering" - we are always under the control of karma, mental afflictions, and death. Death can and does occur at any time, and is rarely welcome. One moment of anger can cause us to drive too fast, crash the car, and ripen the karma to be consumed in an inferno of flames.
So, look out pussycat, the clouds are coming to deprive you of your sunshine. Cleanse your mind of karma and mental afflictions before it is too late.
Renunciation
My last article on suffering may have been depressing, but that was only the beginning. Buddha taught that if we do not open our eyes to the reality of life we will never gain the courage to break free from our pathetic belief in the lie they told us in the nursery - that the prince and the princess would kiss and live happily ever after. We have been chasing that impossible fantasy ever since we saw the difference between boys and girls.
Our child-like faith in the world to provide us with perfect happiness is eagerly exploited by the advertising and entertainment industries. We swallow their presentations of perfect people living perfect lives with perfect possessions just as we take medicine with its bitterness disguised by sugar. Similarly, we sugar-coat the imperfections of our bodies with make-up and perfume, and our minds with a jovial manner fabricated to conceal our real thoughts and innermost worries. The universal neurosis of self-importance causes us to compete with each other and pretend, both to ourselves and to others, that we are happy because we are afraid to admit we have failed in the pursuit of happiness.
Now, before you lose heart, I must tell you that the experience of perfect happiness is possible. It is the state of mind free from superstitious beliefs about ourselves and the world. This is called nirvana.
Nirvana is not some paradise in the sky, that idea is just an extension of our superstitious belief that happiness is acquired from the outside world. Nor is the experience of nirvana created by anything. To experience nirvana is to experience the natural stillness and bliss of our minds that cannot be experienced now because our mind is always disturbed by self-cherishing, anger, and attachment. To reveal the natural and perfect beauty of our mind, we must cleanse it of disturbing attitudes by first cultivating the attitude of renunciation, letting go our mistaken belief in the world as a source of perfect happiness, and then generating the wisdom that opposes the root ignorance.
Buddha taught six general shortcomings of ordinary life, the first being the shortcoming of uncertainty - no ordinary relationship or pleasure can be trusted to remain forever. Marriage sets us up for the pain of divorce, or separation at death; the birth of a baby sets us up for the eventual parting from our dear child; experiencing any pleasure is a condition for the misery of losing that pleasure. Every situation we create for happiness brings with it the anxiety of trying to keep friends and possessions with us for as long as possible. Fighting the progress of time, however, is a losing battle and the sources of happiness slip from our fingers no matter how hard we cling to them.
The second shortcoming is dissatisfaction. Even when we temporarily acquire friends and possessions, dissatisfaction within our own mind causes us to lose interest, to see faults, and to seek something or someone better. Callously, we discard our sources of happiness, very often with later regret, but that is too late. Our dissatisfaction has ruined our lives.
The next shortcoming is having to abandon our bodies repeatedly. No matter how attractive are our bodies as humans or divine beings, they let us down; we die and are reborn with ugly bodies in horrible places. There is no essence to our bodies, nor to the pleasure we gain from them, and yet, especially in the West, we see and worship our bodies as temples of pleasure. How much time and energy have we spent in cleaning, feeding, exercising, grooming, and dressing our bodies? How much unhappiness have we experienced because our bodies have not measured up to the socially acceptable? Ultimately, it is all to no avail. Our bodies will grow ugly with age, become racked with pain, and will have to be abandoned at death, no matter how much we have cared for them. And where have all the pleasures gone, the pursuit of which has occupied our entire life, and for which we have created so much negative karma?
The fourth shortcoming is having to be reborn again and again. In this degenerate age, more and more people seek suicide as the answer to their woes, but this is no solution. Whether we want it or not, our karma forces us into a new life and, if we die with despair or anger, the next life cannot be better than this one.
Then there is the shortcoming of losing our status again and again. In life, all collections are inevitably dispersed, whatever is born will die, the high become low, and friends are parted. Human history and our own lives repeatedly illustrate the rise and fall of the mighty, and yet we still strive for power, perfection, and the impossible goal of living happily ever after.
Finally, there is the shortcoming of always being alone. We experience the pain and fear of both birth and death alone - nobody can comfort us or come with us. And the suffering of loneliness is with us throughout our life. It is impossible to share our inner experience with anyone else, no matter how close they are.
Contemplation of these six shortcomings will give us the courage to renounce our mistaken belief in the outside world as a reliable source of happiness. And it will give us the energy to meditate and light the torch of wisdom that reveals the eternal garden of bliss in our own mind.
Birth, Life and Death
With the gradual loss of our faculty of conversation, and easy access to information about everything in this age of the Internet, one question is probably never asked anymore: "Mummy, where did I come from?"
From the Buddhist perspective, the standard answer culminating in a description of how the sperm and egg are introduced to each other is insufficient. There is a third factor - the stream of consciousness itself. The mind, bearing all its karmic potentials and positive and negative propensities from previous lives, also joins with the egg at conception. Furthermore, mental energy is the primary organizing factor behind the transformation of the fertilized egg into the vastly complicated form of our human body. The description of how this happens is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this article.
It is said that, at about twenty-five weeks of gestation, we awaken from deep sleep into a state of clarity where, intuitively, we are aware of the connection between our past and present lives, and we experience a sense of melancholy, thinking: "Here we go again."
The memory remains with us even after we are born, but we are unable to say anything because we cannot talk. The immediacy of our new life takes over, and we forget the past life. Even if we do talk about it, we are probably told not to speak nonsense and hurry up and finish our cornflakes. But there are fascinating stories of how some children were listened to, and how they were able to recognize homes and relatives from their previous life.
Life, the period between birth and death, is when our mind uses its body to experience as much pleasure as possible. But our body cannot keep pace with our mind, and we die.
Death, the gradual disassociation of the mind from the body, occurs in five stages. As the mind withdraws from the body, the first stage is characterized by physical weakness and loss of our most dominant sense faculty - our vision becomes blurred. There is a physical sensation of pressure, like being buried beneath sand, or a sudden loss of support, we feel as if we are falling. Many experience this when falling asleep, a similar process to death. There is an inner vision like a shimmering mirage on the desert sand.
In the second stage we lose the intensity of our feelings of pleasure and pain; secretions stop and we have dry eyes and a dry mouth. Our hearing fails and relatives have to shout for us to hear them; the inner vision becomes like a room full of smoke.
The third stage brings a loss of discrimination, we can no longer recognize our friends and relatives, or remember their names. Starting at the periphery, our body becomes cold, breathing is weak, we lose the sense of smell, and the inner vision is of red sparks dancing in a black background.
Then the fourth stage brings a loss of volition, we forget our purpose in life, taste and touch sensations cease, the inner vision becomes a pinpoint of light in the dark, and we stop breathing. But we are not dead until the consciousness separates from the body. In ordinary people, this can take up to three days. One who has developed clairvoyance through meditation can tell if death has actually occurred or not, and that is why Buddhists request a qualified Lama to observe and say when the body can be disposed without disturbing the mind.
With the fifth stage of death, all thought activity, virtuous and non-virtuous, ceases as the mind becomes more and more subtle. The inner vision changes from white, like the light of the full moon in a clear sky, to red, like the redness of a sunset, to black, to the clear-light vision, the most subtle level of mind, likened to the first appearance of light in the eastern sky before dawn.
When the mind does separate from the body, it is like going from deep sleep to dreaming. This is called the intermediate state, or Bardo. We have a subtle body with all sense faculties and thoughts. When we think of a place, suddenly we are there. Initially, we may see our old body with our relatives standing around crying. We try to communicate but they cannot see us. In distress, we lose contact with the past life and spiral into a pleasant dream or a nightmare according to the state of our mind during the death process.
The shape of the Bardo body is that of the next life, the karma for which was ripened during the third stage of death. If human karma ripened, we eventually come across our future parents in the act of intercourse. Physical desire for the parent of opposite sex draws us irresistibly towards our mother's womb, and hostility towards the parent of same sex causes us to die. Our mind, once again in the clear light, enters the egg within the mother's womb. If conception does not occur, we awaken again, still in the Bardo. After seven weeks the vast majority of Bardo beings have taken rebirth.
And so our personal wheel of life has turned one cycle, as it has been turning since time without beginning.
Transforming Problems into Happiness
You may have noticed that things tend to go wrong in life, or, at least, things do not happen exactly as you wish. Despite being repeatedly hurt, we continue fighting with the world, trying to overcome problems and achieve the elusive happiness we have been pursuing ever since we can remember. But, take a look around; it is a bit like fighting Mike Tyson. No one has succeeded in eliminating the problems of sickness, ageing, death, having enemies, and so on. There is a method, however, that can remove the word "problem" from our vocabulary.
Instead of being obstacles to happiness, the things that go wrong in our life, which we call problems and react to with sadness, anxiety, and anger, can become a source of happiness. The key to this magical transformation is knowing that it is our subjective experience that determines whether something is a problem or not. If we continue to blame the external world alone for our troubles, things will always appear to us as our enemy, and we will never be free from suffering and anger.
To transform problems into happiness, we must first reject the attitude of not wanting things to go wrong. Things are always going wrong, and it is utterly useless to be unhappy when they do so, because, if the problem can be fixed, we do not need to be sad. And, if the problem cannot be fixed, being sad cannot help, it only rubs salt into the wound. Modern psychology thinks grief is "natural" and therefore good - if we do not grieve there is something wrong with us. Buddha did not equate natural with good. He said that virtue, the true source of happiness, is good, and non-virtue, the true source of sadness, is bad. Virtue comes from wisdom and loving kindness, and non-virtue comes from self-centered ignorance, desire, and anger. It is true that if we suppress grief we may create extra problems, but if there is no grief at all we cannot have the problem of suppression, nor will we have the sadness of grief itself.
Also, we must abandon aversion to problems because fear and anxiety only increase harm by sapping us of our courage. There is a world of difference in the experience of an injection for a child who fears needles compared to a child who has no fear. Anxiety makes even small sufferings intolerable.
Secondly, to transform problems into happiness, we must cultivate the attitude of being happy when problems arise - because they give us the opportunity to cultivate virtue and abandon non-virtue. We do not have to go to the extreme of seeking problems by wearing hair singlets etc., problems will find us. When they do, we can deal with them in the following ways.
To recover from his addiction, an alcoholic must remove the illusion that intoxication is happiness and see the reality that the addiction only brings misery to himself and others. To free ourselves from the illusion that external objects are the true source of happiness, we should use the inevitable loss of a prized possession, or the death of a loved one, as opportunities to see reality and break our addiction to the world of ephemeral pleasures.
Secondly, to experience suffering is a powerful means for developing compassion towards those who suffer in a similar way. If you want the best treatment, find a doctor who suffers from the same disease as yourself - that doctor will have empathy.
Pride is one of our biggest problems. If we make a boo-boo, laughing at ourselves and pointing out our mistake to others will destroy pride and will prevent us from falling into neurotic concealment of our failings. Instead of ridiculing us, people will like and trust us more.
Finally, as patience is the antidote to anger, our worst enemy, we need problems in order to practice patience. People who harm us are actually our best friends because they are giving us the opportunity to overcome, that which hurts us more than anything - our own anger.
By practicing these and other positive attitudes towards problems, we will find that our mind becomes lighter and lighter and our confidence and happiness will be unaffected even by big problems which, instead of causing unhappiness, will become a source of bliss.
In this disturbed age we need the protection of a happy mind. If we are always discontent and anxious, our physiology will be disturbed and physical illness will make us even more unhappy. If we are able to ride the bumps of life and even extract happiness from them, our body will be healthy and our mind will be even happier.
Knowing that all happiness and suffering come from the mind, we cannot be hurt by external events. If we seek happiness in external objects, we will be controlled by the world, and even a little criticism will send us into despair. It is far better, and easier, to be in control of our own minds.
Reality
Often we hear the parents of teenage children complaining, "I can't communicate with my kids, they live in a different world."
And at the same time, their children are saying, "My parents have completely lost the plot, they cannot see beyond their own narrow lives."
According to Buddhism, both complaints are true in a sense that we have never imagined. Buddha taught that all troubles stem from our mind. He also said that all happiness comes from our mind. If we think about this, it seems that the entire world comes from our mind, and, yes, Buddha said that too.
The general assumption that there is a solid world existing out there, independent from our minds, the same for everybody, and within which we move as passive observers, is incorrect. There is no external world independent from our minds. Each one of us exists in a world that is a projection of our own mind: no two people can ever have exactly the same experience. There are enough things in common in the way we project things to enable us to talk about "our world." But "our world" is only a generalization. If we closely examine our lives, each of us has a particular pattern of projections that creates a unique world for ourselves alone.
For example, when we are in love, flowers become incandescent temples of color, birds sing the sweetest songs, and the world is full of promise and happiness. But when we are depressed, color drains from the world and everything seems wrong and meaningless. When a depressed person and a person in love walk along the same street, is there an independent reality that exists apart from their two quite different worlds?
Buddha explained that the houses, trees, and gardens in the street have no self-existence. They are nameless entities with the potential to appear to mind in many different ways. According to our state of mind, we see only one of these potentials, this becomes our reality, and we name the object according to the way we perceive it. Someone who sees a different potential appearance through a different state of mind sees another reality. An illustration of this principle is the appearance of a flower. To a bee, whose eye is sensitive to different wavelengths of light than a human eye, a flower appears completely differently to the way it appears to a human. Which of us sees the real flower? There is no real flower existing in its own right independently of an observing mind. There is a base with many potentials, but it only becomes a flower-for-a-human when it is observed by a human. At other times it is a flower-for-a-bee, a flower-for-a-bird, and so on.
Furthermore, those of us with the preconception that the flower is a weed will feel displeasure and see the flower as an enemy. Non-gardeners, however, will see it as a pretty thing and will feel pleasure. The appearance of the flower as friend or enemy comes from the mind. There is no real flower that can be independently established to be friend, enemy, neither friend nor enemy, or both friend and enemy.
Scientists pride themselves in presenting an objective picture of the world, but even they have to admit that, ultimately, the very act of observation is a determining factor in establishing what is observed. There is no absolute reality; Newtonian physics must give way to relativity.
Carl Jung showed that paintings gave insight into the minds of his patients, and later psychiatrists used acting, sand play, and other methods to learn about the inner world of the mind by assessing our external expression. This is in harmony with Buddha's teaching that the entire way we live our lives, not just our artistic expression, reflects the way we see the world to exist. In our pursuit of happiness and our attempts to avoid suffering, we are constantly trying to physically transform the world. Such behavior is extreme human folly; all we have to do to achieve peace and happiness is change our mind.
Contrary to what many think, Buddha did not say the world is an illusion. He said it is like an illusion. Apart from the normal dependence of things upon our minds, ignorance, anger, and attachment distort the entities of our world, including our own self, as inherently good, bad, or indifferent. Like an illusion, we then react to these false appearances as if they are true and have nothing to do with our minds. Enclosed within this world of deluded projections, we become more ignorant, attached, and angry until someone finally points out our mistake.
Now you can begin to communicate with your children by remembering that pop-music-for a-kid is an entirely different phenomenon to pop-music-for-a-parent. Abandon your subjective discriminations, remember your own childhood, and treasure the precious opportunity to enjoy life with your kids, before it is too late.
Trust
From sibling rivalry to international relationships, our society is pervaded by conflict, with temporary periods of peace characterized by artificial smiles concealing the inner thought, "I don't trust you."
Even when our thought is pure, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion, or the outright paranoia, of others. But a pure thought is hard to come by because the conflict in our lives is a reflection of the conflict within our mind - where the devil abides. This demon does not have horns and a tail; it is infatuation with our self-image born out of ignorance. In our blindness as to what we are, we fabricate a self that appears to exist in its own right, independently of everything else. Believing this false self to be true, we cherish our self-image above all else, and immediately fall into neurotic modes of behavior to protect it in our own eyes and in the way we want others to see us.
Gross disturbing emotions of attachment, grasping at things that please or enhance our self-image; hatred, pushing away all that displeases or harms our self-image; and pride, a swollen-headedness that makes us aloof from others, are obviously related to self-centeredness. There are, however, more subtle disturbances such as pretension and dishonesty.
Pretension is when, through seeking material things or the approval of others, we fabricate some good quality about ourselves and try to convince them it is true. We do this so often that we soon believe our own lie, and move further away from reality. For Buddhist monks, pretension leads to the five wrong livelihoods: contrived behavior such as false humility, flattery, hinting, threatening others, and giving something small with the hope of a large return. Buddha instructed his monks to beg openly, whereas each of these wrong livelihoods has a hidden message that obliges someone to give. It is not only monks who behave like this.
Dishonesty is when, through seeking material things or the approval of others, we confuse them by concealing our faults. This too can go from conscious concealment to the situation where we believe our lie to be true. The ultimate result of both pretension and dishonesty is that we cheat ourselves, and we turn others away from us because we cannot be trusted.
Life is hard enough, and if there is nobody we can trust, it becomes intolerable. For our own sake, we have to realize that being deceitful places us in a situation where we will not trust anybody else, and so we will cut ourselves off from the comfort and security of good friends. In terms of our responsibility to others, we will be unable to provide them with the comfort and security they need. The best gift we can give to our family, to anybody else, and even to ourselves, is to be trustworthy. So we have to observe our mind closely and abandon our instinctive responses to pretend we are something that we are not and to conceal our mistakes. Living a falsehood eats away at our peace of mind like cancer devouring our body.
Being honest, admitting our mistakes, and apologizing brings instant relief and happiness. It releases us from the solitary isolation of pride, and diminishes our tendency towards anger and attachment. I am not talking about major lies, although they may be included. Mostly I am referring to our ignorant compulsion to exaggerate or invent good qualities of our body, mind, and possessions, or to hide their faults. This creates the Annie Get Your Gun mentality of, "I can do anything you can do, better…" and sets off an endless spiral of competition against everyone, even one's own partner.
By incorporating our body and possessions into our self-image, we are laid wide-open to exploitation by the advertising and fashion industries, experts in the arts of exaggeration and concealment, who do not waste a moment in taking advantage of our foibles. When a person's worth is judged by their possessions and physical appearance, society is in a sorry state. Here in Mongolia the movement towards capitalist-style consumerism is rapidly accelerating and traditional Buddhist values, almost destroyed by politicians and still under attack by evangelists who stupidly parrot communist propaganda, are quickly disappearing.
The Buddhists themselves are not helping, with some defying the basic teachings by wearing the robes of monks and yet living as lay-people with wives, drinking alcohol, and reciting scriptures as their means of livelihood. Young people no longer trust their parents, teachers, or politicians, and the degenerate behavior of these non-monks removes the last opportunity for them to have trust in someone. Thus they are exposed to the great danger of falling into the nihilistic state of apathetic meaninglessness now manifest amongst young people in the West. There is nobody they can trust.
The best hope for Mongolia and the world is that we parents, teachers, politicians, and religious practitioners fulfill our responsibility to society by abandoning our self-cherishing, pretension, and dishonesty, and become trustworthy.
Karma
Good public speaking depends very much on the ability of the speaker to recognize and make use of feedback - the visible and audible reactions of the audience. When signs of approval appear, the point may be pressed home firmly, when disapproval is evident, the speaker must adjust the presentation to clear away doubts and objections. A good speech is an organic event that follows unplanned directions according to the response of the audience.
In a similar way, our entire life should be an organic event where the intentions behind our actions are wisely selected according to the feedback of pleasure or pain that we experience from similar actions in the past. Theoretically, our lives should be getting progressively happier as we learn from our mistakes and our intentions become more skilful. But the reality is that we do not get happier with age; Buddhism says this is because we have no real control over our impulsive intentions.
We wake up early and decide to make pancakes, motivated by the thought of a happy family at breakfast. Even if we are a terrible cook, and provided our children are not totally ungrateful little wretches, everyone will express delight, real or fabricated, at our efforts. On the other hand, we could get up early, make pancakes, and then greedily eat them all, hiding the evidence before the family wakes up. The pleasure derived from the first action far outweighs the pleasure of eating many pancakes, it will make our whole day go well, whereas the second action has already set our mind in an attitude of competition against the world and we are in for trouble at the office, not to mention a serious case of indigestion and yet another layer of cholesterol in our arteries.
The result of the first action will be rebirth in pancake heaven where exquisitely flavored pancakes, dripping with cream, honey, and strawberries, will instantly appear whenever we think of them. In later lives, when reborn as a human, our family will lovingly wake us up every morning with fresh pancakes. The result of the second action will be rebirth as a hungry ghost in an excellent restaurant where our greedy eyes will observe humans delighting in pancakes of all types but, starving and emaciated, we will be unable to share in their pleasure. In later lives, when we are reborn as a human, nobody will ever make us pancakes and our breakfasts will be a continual misery of burnt toast, curdled milk, and moldy cornflakes.
The key elements in these two actions were the intentions behind them. The first intention was supported by the virtuous attitude of love, the second by the non-virtuous attitude of longing desire. Intention is the activity of the mind that moves our attention to objects of interest and initiates our verbal and physical actions. New intentions arise every split second, coming from various immediate causes as well as from seeds laid down by virtuous and non-virtuous behavior in past lives. The only way we can control our intentions, and therefore our lives, is through discriminating wisdom knowing the value of virtue and the faults of non-virtue.
The stream of consciousness, the mind itself, is the vehicle that bears the seeds of past intended actions which bring about future results in this life, and from life to life. These seeds bring about future happiness or unhappiness by again producing a mental intention, which will connect us with a particular pleasant or unpleasant experience. We have untold billions of seeds in our mind-streams that, moment-by-moment, are responsible for the continual unfolding of our life. Virtuous seeds ripening and connecting us with happy experiences depends upon our maintaining a virtuous mental attitude. Non-virtuous seeds ripening and connecting us with unhappy experiences depends upon our having a non-virtuous mental attitude.
Thus our life and lives are reflections of our ever-changing intentions. If we do not cultivate intelligent behavior and follow virtue, we will continue to suffer in the Wheel of Life as we have been doing since beginning-less time. With every action we must be watchful and alert for the intention behind our action and the effect it could have on our life. Discriminating wisdom gives us the opportunity to make a choice whether to follow non-virtuous impulses or not, and whether to cultivate virtuous intentions or not. We alone are capable of determining our future; it is in our own hands. Faith in virtue is not enough. To free ourselves from suffering we must also act with love, compassion, and wisdom.
We have been to pancake heaven many times, yet we still crave strawberries and cream. The only intention worthy of our status as intelligent human beings is to abandon non-virtue entirely and attain Buddhahood, whereby we can most eloquently teach discriminating wisdom to our universal family forever.
Meditation
My nephew, a promising young footballer, once tried to impress his monk uncle by telling me that his team meditates before the game.
"Excellent," I replied, "upon what do you meditate?"
"On hatred," he said, with enthusiasm.
It probably worked, but perhaps this is not the most skilful application of the powers of meditation. The purpose of meditation in Buddhist practice is to first reduce the noise of uncontrolled thoughts and emotions, and then turn one's mind to fine analysis of how we exist. This culminates in direct realization of our ultimate nature, and such wisdom eliminates the self-grasping ignorance that is the root of all suffering. Meditation is also used to train our mind in positive attitudes such as loving kindness. This will not win many football games, but it will make our lives a whole lot better and it provides the support of self-confidence and happiness through which we are able to persevere and achieve that wisdom.
We all want to be attractive and liked by others, so we spend our time and money grooming and decorating our bodies to make them appear as beautiful as possible. But most of us simply do not have the genetic potential to even approach the physical prowess or the bodily perfection of our field, screen, and catwalk idols. On the other hand, every one of us has the mental potential to attain the exquisite beauty of patience, loving kindness, and wisdom. These qualities are real signs of beauty. Even the most seriously physically challenged person brings warmth and joy to our hearts when their mind is full of loving-kindness. The most handsome and athletic people, however, become ugly when they are angry, disgusting when they are greedy, repulsive when they are arrogant, and terrifying when they preach distorted views such as racism.
So, if we want to be liked and be happy, and if we want to ensure that in our future lives we go from happiness to happiness, we must spend more time on the meditation cushion and less in front of the mirror. Meditation requires instruction from an experienced person, a quiet and comfortable place, and more determination than an athlete intent on Olympic gold. Don't worry, that degree of enthusiasm will grow as you begin to taste the benefits of meditation. Initially, results come slowly and are often imperceptible to the meditator, who thinks his or her mind is as crazy as ever. But you know something is happening when people start asking, "How come you are so calm these days? What are you taking?"
Such is the depth of our self-centeredness, it is better to not tell anybody we are meditating, otherwise pride will take our mind in a wrong direction, and external obstacles will arise as well. But I can stick my neck out and tell you about my experience, because that's my job. Before deciding to become a monk, I meditated alone for three months in the Australian bush, accompanied only by animals and birds that had no fear. While sitting at night, a marsupial mouse would curl up and sleep in the warmth of my hands, and during the day small birds would hop from my lunch bowl to my head, enjoying their first taste of lentils and rice. I followed a strict daily regime of eight one-hour sessions, two meals, and not going beyond the perimeter of a mental fence around the cabin I had built in a week from timber-mill off-cuts. I had plenty of books on Buddhism to read, but made no contact at all with the outside world.
As thoughts of my immediate life died away, memories of past events came vividly to mind, together with their associated emotions. Sometimes tears flooded down my cheeks; sometimes I could hardly restrain myself from bursting out laughing. As Buddhism is essentially a system of psychology, this experience provided me with ample material to test the framework of Buddhist teaching. The system held, and, on top of that, my personal experiences confirmed ever more strongly that what the Buddha taught is as true for us modern humans as it was for the people of India 2500 years ago.
At the end of the retreat, I climbed to the top of the ridge where, to the right, an old logging track disappeared into virgin rain forest. To the left, the track ran down to my friend's farm. I was tempted to turn right, but I had to see the world again. Speaking after three months silence was a novelty; open fields of sunshine with grass and springtime flowers after the dark enclosure of the forest were a touch of paradise. That evening, the bush-hippies congregated at the farm for a full-moon party. Without the aid of any substance, I was higher than them all, and soon left the noise of the party to return to the sound of silence in my cabin.
A month later, at work in a hospital in Melbourne, I was telling a young doctor about my experience in retreat. He looked at me in astonishment, "Three months! How could you? What about your career?"
I felt so sorry for him, already locked into a system that would slowly devour him. Such an experience is the best thing anybody can have for their career, and for their life.
Growing Up
Newborn babies are the center of attention in any family and, with our every requirement being lovingly provided, we can hardly be blamed for assuming we are the center of the universe. It comes as a shock, however, when, as we get older, we are subject to parental discipline and sibling jealousy. We then realize that we have to fight for ourselves. And fight we do - knowing full well what "I want" and what is "mine."
In hospital emergency departments I have seen babies murdered by elder siblings desiring to regain their status at the center of the world. But most of us leave physical violence behind as the means for obtaining our own ends, and we cultivate more subtle strategies of flattery, false smiles, and so on. This progressive sophistication of selfish behavior is called "growing up." As adults, however, we retain in our psyches an impression of the time when we were loved and entertained by everybody, and we have an inner craving to rediscover the lost paradise we cannot remember but we feel exists somewhere. Forever in pursuit of this elusive memory, we compete with each other for material possessions, sensory pleasures, praise, and fame. When frustrated in achieving these four aims, our sophisticated airs are lost, and we revert to infantile behavior patterns, as the great Bodhisattva, Shantideva, said:
When their sandcastles collapse,
Children howl and despair;
Likewise, when my praise and reputation decline,
My mind becomes like a little child.
Knowing no alternative, our lives of conflict and unrealized dreams drain us of hope, and appear meaningless as old age and death approach ever more rapidly. First we transfer our hope onto our children, wishing them to be happy, but they grow up just like ourselves, or even worse. Then we hope for our grandchildren, but we probably die before they too have the opportunity to disappoint us.
The truly mature person, a rare flower in this world of thorns, is one whose mind is at peace, free from the pursuit of selfish dreams; who craves no wealth, pleasure, praise, or fame, and is unmoved by loss, pain, criticism, or ignominy. Such maturity is the goal of the Buddhist path and is achieved through elimination of the self-centered attitude, rooted in the false conception of self, and the cultivation of universal love and compassion. To "grow up" in a Buddhist sense is to achieve our potential of becoming a Buddha, a path upon which we all must eventually embark if we want real happiness for ourselves and others.
The most profound method for achieving this aim is the practice of tantra, where one takes a male or female Buddha as one's role model and, through meditational methods, transforms one's physical, verbal, and mental powers into the aspect of enlightenment. The plethora of tantric deities is not a polytheism as some people mistakenly assert. Each deity is a fully enlightened Buddha whose form represents a particular aspect of the enlightened mind, which, according to our personality, we can choose as the central theme of our growing up.
In general, the enlightened mind is the unification of exalted wisdom and bliss born out of great compassion. The perfection of the masculine part of our psyche is great bliss; the perfection of our feminine aspect is exalted wisdom, and the combination of these two is symbolized by tantric deities in sexual union. This has nothing to do with mundane sexual activity - another mistaken belief held both by non-Buddhists and those Buddhists who have failed to abandon their childish pursuit of self-gratification.
In previous articles I have slated parents, teachers, politicians, and stars of the field, screen, and catwalk as unsuitable role models. I have not mentioned rock stars, they can speak for themselves. Many religious figures have depressingly tragic life-stories, or have been exposed as hypocritical frauds and are not acceptable by most people as models to live by. So, what is left? Buddhahood is not a state of omnipotence, such a state is considered to be impossible. But it is a state of perfection of both wisdom and compassion, and the only suitable models for perfection are perfection itself - the deities of tantric practice, supreme in every aspect, whose bodies, voices, and minds exude universal love, bliss, wisdom, and power.
In his human aspect, the Dalai Lama is not seen as a role model, but in his aspect as the tantric deity Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, he is indeed a perfect guide. The profundity of his special situation is ridiculed by the absurd title "God-King" which the Western media so often give to him. It reminds me of the mocking title "King of the Jews" written upon the cross of another great Bodhisattva in the past. Buddhas constantly appear in the world as "ordinary" beings and, as my teacher once said, "If anybody on this earth today is a Buddha, it has to be His Holiness the Dalai Lama."
The Lama
In March 1974, two and a half weeks into my first meditation course, the word went around that Lama Yeshe was coming to talk. I, and 200 other young westerners, had been following an intense program of meditations, lectures, and discussions, during which we were not allowed to leave the grounds of Kopan monastery. That posed no particular problem. Kopan is on a ridge overlooking the entire Kathmandu valley. The view of terraced hillsides, rice paddies, and giant bamboo waving in the breeze, with the snow-covered Himalayas in the background, can be admired forever.
We had heard stories about the remarkable Lama Yeshe, but most of us had not yet seen him, and our interest was intense. While waiting his arrival in the huge tent; there was a slight disturbance as a monk slipped beneath the rear flap of the tent and, with a corner of his robes over his head, took his place amongst the western monks sitting on the ground in the front row. As time passed, the air of expectancy grew stronger; all eyes were on the main entrance when, suddenly, there was a high-pitched laugh, almost a shriek, from this tardy monk. It was Lama Yeshe. Still laughing, Lama Yeshe took his place on the teaching throne, and immediately won my admiration for his brilliant entrance that had deceived us all.
I had almost left the course several times. Karma and reincarnation did not fit my scientific world-view, and I suspected that Buddhism was just another superstitious attempt to make sense of life. Charles Darwin, physics, chemistry, and biology were good enough for me. But something had kept me there, and it was not the food. There were some interesting things the Lamas had to say about the mind - what it is and how it works. During his talk, Lama Yeshe's answers to my many questions did not resolve my problem with karma and reincarnation, but they further whetted my appetite for Buddhist psychology.
My next meeting with Lama Yeshe was in Australia, at the University of Melbourne. As Lama Yeshe arrived to give a public talk, I went to open his car door, but he reached through the window, grabbed my beard, and pulled my face down towards his. With a ferocious expression he said, "I remember you, you're the one who asked all those questions at Kopan," and once again he broke into that high-pitched laugh.
I mumbled some sort of an apology; in those twelve months I had realized karma and reincarnation did not contradict my scientific understanding. In fact, they were complementary, and I had become a Buddhist. A week later, at a five-day retreat by the seaside, in the privacy of his caravan, I said to Lama Yeshe, "I want to practice the teachings as much as I can, and there are two possibilities. The first, which I prefer, is to live with someone and practice together. The second is to become a monk."
Sitting up and wiping the tears from his eyes after laughing his beautiful laugh and rolling on the bed, Lama Yeshe became suddenly serious and said, "Possible dear, possible. You can live with a lady and both practice Dharma. But it is difficult: instead of one crazy mind, you have two crazy minds," and again he collapsed into laughter.
Defensively, I asked, "What's the advantage of becoming a monk?"
Lama Yeshe instantly replied, "You can practice twenty-four hours a day," challenging me to live up to my original statement.
Six months later, back at Kopan, after giving novice ordination to myself and ten others as monks and nuns, Lama Yeshe told us, "From now on, I am your mummy, your daddy, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. I will give you everything you need."
Lama Yeshe lived up to his promise. Apart from the 100 Tibetan and Nepalese monks at Kopan, there were 25 Western monks and nuns, and Lama was constantly supervising our formal education as well as every aspect of our lives. Observing that we were trying to live simply, as Buddhist monks and nuns are supposed to, Lama Yeshe once asked someone what Westerners usually ate for breakfast. The next morning, we discovered Lama Yeshe in our kitchen. On the table was a feast of cornflakes, fried eggs, cheese, toast, and jam.
"You must eat properly, your bodies cannot take ascetic trip," he said, and walked out.
Another time, high in the Himalayas, at the beginning of a strict meditation retreat, I was sitting on my bed looking dejectedly at the breakfast that had been brought to my room. One greasy fried vegetable. As I was thinking, "How can I possibly do retreat with such awful food?" the window to my room was pushed open and Lama Yeshe's hand came inside, holding a piece of Tibetan bread covered in Vegemite, something that Australians crave. Without saying a word, Lama gave me the bread and went away. I was never bothered by the food again (it did not improve).
In Tibet, "Lama" means virtuous friend. Not all monks are Lamas, as very few have the precious qualifications. For us pitiful beings lost in the quagmire of ignorance, such friends are as essential to following the spiritual path as is the air to remaining alive.
Loneliness
In Kathmandu, Nepal, there is a custom where a young girl is selected as the representative of a Hindu goddess and kept in a palace, unable to go outside. All her needs are taken care of, but her hair is never cut and her feet are not allowed to touch the ground. She is finally released from this prison when she begins to menstruate - the "curse" becoming her savior - and another luckless victim takes her place. People believe these little girls are fortunate, but my godless Buddhist mind is saddened by thinking of the isolation and loneliness they are forced to experience.
Some think that being a celibate Buddhist monk is an equally perverse situation. When I finished work, and was about to leave Australia to become ordained, I followed the hospital tradition and went to the local pub with many of the doctors for a farewell drink. There I was, the prospective Buddhist monk, sitting at a table with a cigar in my mouth, a jug of beer in front of me, and my arms around two young lady doctors ... and one of them asked, "but, won't you feel lonely?"
"I don't know," I replied, "but I am determined to give it a go."
Loneliness was no stranger to me. A few years before, I had left my love in Australia and gone to England for further experience and post-graduate study in medicine, and, let's face it, for adventure. I found it all - adventure, friends, interesting work and study - but when her letters came, and memories invaded my mind, swinging London became the loneliest place in the world. I yearned for her to be with me and share my happiness.
My willingness to risk such loneliness and become a monk was based on the inspiring example of the Lamas, and on insights I had gained into the Buddha's teachings. Nobody I had ever met could even approach the level of sanity, happiness, and humor of the Lamas, and I knew that, in London, when I was not thinking of my girlfriend, I was not lonely. If the loneliness were due to her absence, I should have felt it all the time, but I did not. Therefore, it seemed reasonable to presume that loneliness comes from the mind. I had seen the intense loneliness of my father when my mother died at a relatively young age, and I knew that having a close friend only sets one up for a terrible loneliness when the inevitable separation occurs. If I could learn how my mind functioned, I could gain control over it and abandon unhappiness and its causes, and that is what Buddhism is all about.
We all experience loneliness in varying degrees throughout our lives, and we tend to blame the non-caring attitude of other people or society in general for our isolation. It is true that external conditions for loneliness exist, but the primary cause of loneliness is that we lock ourselves in palaces of our own creation. A working definition of neurotics is people who build castles in the air, and of psychotics is people who live in castles in the air. With our self-centered attitude that craves to be loved, recognized, and appreciated, we are all verging upon a loneliness-producing neurosis.
I have mentioned before that mothers are so important in our lives because, when we are babies, they nourish our bodies with milk from their breasts and our minds with love from their hearts. We are weaned from the breast, but mothers do not wean us from their love. As we grow older we feel the need to be independent and so we distance ourselves from maternal concern, and we even blame our mothers for our troubles. The fault, however, is in our own minds, in our craving for the lost love of our mothers.
Our emotions are so terribly unstable; we are elevated to the greatest heights of happiness by the words, "I love you," and we can be driven to the depths of despair, even suicide, or murder, by the words, "I do not love you," or, "I hate you."
As long as we feel the need to be loved, recognized, and appreciated, we are always in danger of loneliness, and the more we demand these of others, the more likely they will be to withdraw their affection. This need is dreadfully exploited by the commercial world interested only in our money, by sexual predators interested only in their pleasure, and by religions interested only in their numbers of adherents and their coffers.
I am not saying we should reject love and so on, we should receive and give them equally, savoring the happiness of the moment and not solidifying our castle in the air with the impossible thought, "This must remain forever."
The best happiness in life comes from giving love, rather than from receiving it, and, paradoxically, giving love without wanting anything in return makes others love, recognize, and appreciate us more than anything else.
Attachment
Among the three poisonous mental attitudes that bring unhappiness and spoil our enjoyment of pleasure, ignorance is difficult to recognize as a problem but when it is we are inspired to discover reality, anger is easily recognized as a problem that we want to abandon, but attachment is different. Even if we recognize attachment as a problem we are reluctant to give it up because we fear missing out on the pleasure to which we are attached. Attachment, however, only pushes pleasure away, it is a disturbing mental attitude that exaggerates the qualities of ordinary objects of pleasure and does not want to separate from them.
Attachment arises towards every object of pleasure, but the attachment that causes us most suffering is attachment to another person. At a party, when we meet and become interested in an attractive person, attachment exaggerates their good qualities - their body, their mind, their voice, their personality - so that they appear more attractive than they actually are. We believe this exaggerated appearance to be true, not realizing it comes from our own mind, and despite our friends asking what we see in such a person we become obsessed and desire to be with them.
One thing leads to another and we find ourselves living with them and, inevitably, finding out that they are not as perfect as we had thought. Unfairly, either consciously or subconsciously, we blame them for not living up to our expectations and discord arises in the relationship. We too are unable to meet the projections of their attachment towards us and the relationship becomes progressively worse.
Attachment also clings, we see our partner as our permanent possession or as an extension of ourselves and, again, either consciously or subconsciously, we manipulate or coerce them into conforming with our projections of how my partner should look and behave, thereby suffocating them, allowing no space for them to be an individual, and unrealistically demanding them to be what they are not.
Disharmony increases until, at another party, we meet the next attractive person, the fire of our attachment is lit and we abandon our current partner and embark on the whole miserable journey once again, like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick, forever pursuing an unattainable goal.
It is not just with our partners; attachment exaggerates good qualities, or superimposes non-existent good qualities, upon our possessions, our children, our parents, and our friends. Not only do we believe attachment's projections to be true, attachment blinds us to our friends' negative qualities. Anger operates in a similar way; it blinds us to good qualities and exaggerates negative qualities or superimposes non-existent negative qualities upon those who displease us.
With anger and attachment we believe the good or bad appearance of our friends or enemies to be true, we do not realize it is a projection of our mind. Satisfaction and peace in life are impossible to achieve because we are always blaming others for our problems and driving them away. Believing the fault to lie with others, we abandon our partner, trade-in the car, get a new job, move to another neighborhood, on and on until we die, still dissatisfied.
The paradox of experiencing the heights of pleasure and the depths of despair when we are "in love" occurs because attachment poisons love. Love, unconditional delight in the happiness of another and the wish to give them pleasure, is an emotion to be cultivated. It is the opposite of anger and, by nature; love always makes our mind happy. It is impossible to be unhappy when we are loving another, the unhappiness in our relationships comes from attachment, a totally different emotion that we confuse with love because the two come together, not at the same time, but one quickly following the other. They can even be distinguished physically: attachment is an unhappy longing associated with a feeling of constriction in the throat and chest whereas love is a delightful effervescence of openness and warmth arising in those regions.
When we are in love and our physical sensations indicate that attachment is manifesting, we should apply its antidote. Cultivate detachment by first contemplating the folly of attachment, its exaggeration, superimposition, and clinging, and then seeing the object of attachment as it is in reality - a transient phenomenon that is empty of our projections. Only when detachment frees our mind from the fog of attachment can we be free to experience the bliss of love.
Romantics may complain that this clinical approach to the experience of being in love is a dispassionate destruction of a true and spontaneous emotion whose pleasure is necessarily inseparable from its pain. But the cemeteries are full of frustrated romantics; there is no fault in consciously cultivating love and detachment simultaneously. This is, in fact, the only way to have truly spontaneous love, the vehicle that takes us beyond suffering and death.
Compassion
Compassion, sympathy for the misfortune and suffering of others and the wish to help them, is a virtuous quality admired and advocated by all great religions. It is one of the two foundations of the Buddhist life-style; the other is wisdom understanding the origin of suffering and how to achieve temporary and ultimate relief. As all sentient beings are seen to participate in the Wheel of Life, sometimes born human, sometimes an animal, a denizen of hell, a hungry spirit, or a divine being, and nowhere in this Wheel is there total relief from suffering, all beings throughout the universe are recognized as objects of compassion.
One of my first teachers, Lama Thubten Yeshe, upon observing the bickering, competitiveness, jealousy, anger, and so on among his western students, said, "You people amaze me, it seems that you have more compassion for animals than you have for each other."
I still struggle with this problem: the difficulty in having compassion or concern for the welfare of those who are hostile towards oneself or whose attitudes oppose one's own values. We all have a worldview based upon the morality of the society in which we grew up and molded into shape by our collection of experiences, beliefs, and adopted values. Naturally, we think our own values are best, otherwise we would not have them, but, when combined with our innate self-centeredness, the scourge of the universe, we become blinded to other views, our thinking becomes ossified, we turn into conservative bigots, and compassion is left far behind.
As much as I try not to be, in my heart I see that I am a conservative bigot, but maybe not totally ossified, there is still a chance that I can emulate the way of Lama Yeshe who had the ability to observe and learn the attitudes of others and communicate with them at their own level. This may sound like, and could well be, a condescending attitude, but whether it is or is not condescending depends upon the sincerity of one's compassion and its supporting wisdom.
With the sole purpose of helping another, one can play the role of a redneck or whatever color of the social spectrum one wishes without having to identify with any particular color as one's own.
This is real freedom from self-centeredness, to choose any role that is useful for others, and write our own script. Life can be enjoyed and we can help people without making the mistake of being too serious. Once we have fixed attitudes about right and wrong, we feel obliged to seriously defend our own and attack opposite attitudes. Then we lose our ability to communicate with others. It is not that we should not see things as right or wrong, it is that people are more important than principles, and people can change whereas principles cannot.
The first step in the practice of compassion is to give immediate support of food, shelter, medicines and so on. But that is not enough; we must prevent the root cause of suffering, explained by Buddha to be actions motivated by self-centeredness, greed, and anger. To inspire people to abandon habitual self-destructive behavior we must be able to communicate with them and, to communicate with them, we must meet them at their own level.
As long as we retain awareness that we are actors, we will be free from worrying about loyalty or the fear of betraying our own principles. We do not need principles to be compassionate; many times they are an obstacle to compassion. Compassion supported by wisdom is a complete and pure purpose for living, a universal reality that nobody can deny. Compassion brings relief and happiness to others and, at the same time, the subjective experience of giving love and compassion is sublime happiness and peace.
Now the path is open for compassion but, still, why should we have compassion for very harmful beings? Shouldn't we rejoice in their suffering as being their just reward? The answer is emphatically no. Whether suffering is viewed as God's punishment or the ripening of bad karma, we must have compassion because all beings are exactly the same as ourselves - simply trying to be happy - and, in our confusion about the real causes of happiness and unhappiness, we all make mistakes. Just as we forgive the mistakes of our children and still love them, so we should forgive the mistakes of others and keep on loving them.
Why should we love everybody else? Because in past lives we have had every relationship with every living being many times, they have been infinitely kind to us, and it is only natural because all beings ARE our own family.
I received these words from Lama Yeshe, a consummate practitioner of compassion, and repeat them to you, but still I struggle with my self-centered attitude, which imposes restrictions on my practice of compassion. It is clear, however, that bad habits cannot change overnight and so I indulge in a little compassion for myself.
The Warm Heart
When old friends meet and exchange stories, they delight in each other's happiness and commiserate with their misfortunes. Such delight, with its associated feeling of warmth in the heart, is the meaning of love. Love precedes compassion: when the person we love is unhappy, we want their troubles to cease. According to Buddhist teaching, loving kindness, the combination of love and compassion, is the source of all happiness in the universe.
Loving-kindness is an essential component of life; just as mothers nourish their baby’s bodies with milk from their breasts, they nourish their baby’s minds with the warmth of loving kindness. Medical science recognizes that babies deprived of loving attention become emotionally retarded and even the development of their nervous system is impaired. It is not only babies, throughout life we all depend upon loving kindness for our happiness and mental and physical security.
In the mid-seventies, before I became a Buddhist, my interest in Tibetan medicine took me to northern India where I met Dr Drolma, a Tibetan woman practicing at Dharamsala where His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives with a community of Tibetan refugees. I could not help but compare her medical office with the outpatients department of the hospital in Australia where I had been recently working. There was no comparison. Not to mention her diagnostic techniques of taking the pulse and observing the bubbles on urine, the great difference was in her relationship with her patients. She loved them and they loved her, the room was filled with the warmth of loving kindness, so different to the impersonal attitude in my outpatients department where the patients were more often seen as diseases rather than as human beings. Whatever the merits of her diagnostic method and her fascinating herbal remedies, I became convinced that the renowned therapeutic efficiency of Dr Drolma was due to her power of loving kindness.
I felt embarrassed. With the attitude of arrogant superiority of being a Western doctor, I had asked Dr Drolma to teach me about Tibetan medicine. She explained to me the method of pulse diagnosis and urinalysis, but she did not say a word about loving-kindness, she simply demonstrated it. Later, I was to study Tibetan medicine in more detail, the chapter on ethics in the medical text is only about loving kindness. In medical school, the only ethics we had been taught was how to avoid being sued in court; there was nothing about loving-kindness.
A Buddha is simply a person who has overcome the obstacles to pure, unconditional, loving-kindness. These obstacles are rooted in the confused, mistaken idea of self that is innate in us all and manifests in our disturbing emotions of selfishness, anger, greed, pride, and so on. The wisdom that understands the true nature of the self is the antidote to all these obstacles. Thus the inner attainments of wisdom and loving kindness are the actual objects of Buddhist worship and aspiration.
To gain the inspiration and courage needed to overcome selfishness and train their minds in wisdom and loving kindness, Buddhists use external symbols such as the magnificent twenty-six meter statue of Chenrezig at Ganden Monastery here in Ulaan Baatar, just as a Christian is inspired by the crucifix, a symbol of loving kindness and self-sacrifice for others. From the Buddhist point of view, the self that is sacrificed is not the person who exists, it is the self that we mistakenly believe we are. The meaning of self-sacrifice is, in fact, the destruction of an illusion.
In Chenrezig's right hand is a vase containing the elixir of life - loving-kindness. In his left hand is a perfect mirror that reflects things as they are without distortion, symbolizing the wisdom seeing reality. These two ideals are also contained in Chenrezig's mantra: OM MANI PADME HUM. OM encapsulates all the qualities of Buddhahood. MANI is the jewel of loving-kindness and PADME is the lotus flower of wisdom. When people recite this mantra, they should be thinking, "I shall attain Buddhahood, the jewel of loving kindness in the lotus of wisdom."
Buddhists worship the inner attainment of wisdom and compassion; they are not idol-worshippers in the sense of those who seek protection and happiness from material objects such as a golden calf, or a fat bank balance. Accusations that Buddhism is a manifestation of such human folly are the height of ignorance and prejudice, and a terrible condemnation of the truth of wisdom and compassion that is a universal reality and not the sole possession of Buddhism or any other religion.
It is so sad, however, that the Mongolian people today are in danger of losing their magnificent heritage; instead of the elixir of life in Chenrezig's right hand, some see a bottle of Russian vodka.
Aggression
As a child I was often puzzled by anger, wondering why parents so frequently hurt each other through their nonsensical arguments. Later, I was dismayed to observe this destructive emotion within my own mind. Then, as a medical officer in a psychiatric hospital, I saw depths of anger, both manifest and suppressed; that I had never believed could exist. I remember suggesting to the psychiatrist in charge that we set up a gym with punching bags to allow our patients to give vent to their feelings.
Resentment, grudge bearing, hostility, hatred, and even fear, all derived from anger, lay behind many of my patients' problems. My scientific view was that, as anger is acquired through evolution, it is necessary and must be allowed to arise and be expressed because suppression of this natural emotion would lead to all manner of psychological problems. Evidence supporting this was right there before me in my patients.
At the end of the sixties, The Territorial Imperative by the biologist Robert Ardrey presented studies of animal behavior showing that intra-species aggression is present in the animal world as much as it is within human society. Aggression thus gained a scientific status that, at the extreme of materialism, could be taken to justify even war. Another view prevalent at that time was that male aggression matched female submissiveness as an appropriate means for propagating the species. No wonder there was, and remains, debate as to whether the study of human and animal behavior belongs to the realm of science or not.
By simply observing the behavior of chemicals and bodies in motion, science can deduce fixed rules for the material world without worrying about the feelings or true motivations of the elements - because they do not have any. For the animal and human kingdoms, however, behavior is not necessarily an indication of the real reason we do things, and therefore it is impossible to make fixed rules based on the observation of behavior alone.
The difference between this cold, amoral aspect of scientific thinking and religion is not the difference between faith and knowledge. There is only one reality and correct faith and knowledge are essential components of both systems; it is mistaken knowledge and beliefs that lead to prejudice and human conflict, and these can pollute both science and religion.
Unconstrained by the need to justify behavior in order to support the theory of evolution, Buddha stripped down our emotions to their bare essentials and showed what was useful and what was useless in terms of satisfying the two fundamental urges that humans and animals equally experience - the desire for happiness and the need to be free from pain. Equal rights, a sanctified political expression today, was presented by Buddha in his teaching that no individual, human or animal, has a greater right to happiness and freedom from suffering than any other individual.
Buddha then explained his observation that in our pursuit of happiness and freedom from suffering we inadvertently push these goals away by assuming that our personal right is greater than anybody else's. Our aversion to pain results in instinctive anger and hostility towards whatever frustrates our selfish desire for happiness, but in acting out our anger we actually destroy any chance of happiness. This observation is truly scientific in that, from it, fixed rules can be deduced regarding human and animal behavior and its results. For example: anger, the agitated, irrational urge to inflict harm upon or destroy things that displease us, never achieves peace, not to mention the happiness it seeks.
We can verify this by observing our own experience in life and seeing the reality of how anger is utterly useless and only brings trouble; then we will want to overcome our anger and achieve the peace and happiness we crave. We will also discover another fixed rule of human and animal behavior: love - delight in the happiness of others and their freedom from pain - is by nature a happy state of mind and spreads peace and joy wherever it manifests.
Some think that social and personal injustice cannot be opposed without anger, or that not expressing anger is a sign of weakness. This is absurd. Anger is the real sign of weakness; it is the coward's way out. It takes far more courage to resolve a conflict with love than with anger; if we allow the flame of anger in another's mind to ignite our own anger, we and the world are lost.
When anger is stopped by its antidote, patience, and replaced by its opposite, love, there is no danger of suppression of emotions and subsequent psychological imbalance, there is only one result - happiness.
The Schwarzenegger Factor
In the flower-power days of the sixties, love was the in-word and hugging became an obsession: we wrapped our arms around everyone, even those of the same sex as ourselves, and everything - trees, rocks, whatever. Our interpretation of the meaning of "love" was unrestricted sex, and freedom for people, especially children, to do whatever they wanted as long as it made them happy.
But soon we realized that some people were pains in the neck, our children became hyperactive demons, and friends, even partners, became hated enemies. The love, love, love credo required serious revision and was replaced by the central tenet of new-age philosophy, "love yourself," poorly justified by the assertion that you cannot love others if you do not love yourself. In effect, our self-cherishing became our worst enemy, driving friends further away as self-indulgence reached the extremes of arrogance, miserliness, and intolerance.
Buddhism takes us back to the sixties. Love, love, love is a valid philosophy based upon one essential reason: every living being is worthwhile loving because each one has been our mother countless times in past lives. I am not talking about free sex and doing whatever we want, the love that Buddha spoke about is the warm, joyful feeling in our heart when we think of, or see, our mother, especially when she is happy. Now, I know that some of you hate your mothers, but bear with me, okay? Every living being has also been our father, our husband, our wife, and so on countless times, but the special relationship with our mother is that she gave us her body and her love when we were helpless babies. Wishing for our happiness, she taught us how to talk, to walk, to enjoy our senses. Our laughter was the only reward she wanted for her self-sacrifice. It is not her fault that she made mistakes later on; she, like ourselves, also suffers from the sickness of ignorance and self-cherishing.
If, for her kindness in this life, our mother is worthy of such heart-warming love, how much more should we love her when we know that she has been our mother countless times in past lives? Equally, our partner, our children, strangers in the street, and even the pains in our neck and the cockroaches in our kitchen, have all been our mother countless times in past lives. When we deeply understand this reality, every living being we meet becomes an object of heart-warming love, and a source of great happiness for ourselves. Doing the slightest favor for anyone becomes the joyful experience of giving a small treat to one's mother multiplied a billion times over. Don't worry, you do not have to hug trees, they are not sentient, they were not our mothers when we were baby tulips - we have never been tulips. Protect trees, yes, because they are the homes and the food of so many of our real past mothers.
But our mothers are not always happy. There is so much suffering of sickness, old age, and death; there is so much loneliness, mental confusion, and unhappiness. Those whose karma has taken them to animal, hungry ghost, and hell rebirths are suffering things that we, temporarily born as humans, cannot even imagine. So, whose responsibility is it to help them? If our mother of this life is trapped in a burning house, do we ask somebody else to rescue her? Just as it is our natural responsibility to brave the flames and lead our mother to safety, it is our natural responsibility to rescue every living being from suffering. This is the Schwarzenegger factor.
Hollywood has run out of plots where the hero rescues the lady in distress, or the Marshall saves the township. Nowadays, heroes and heroines rescue the entire world from the baddies, braving flames, explosions, and evil of more and more fantastic varieties. Where does their altruism come from? People have been conditioned by Hollywood into believing that naturally-good guys always turn up at the right time. How else could Ronald Reagan have been elected president? And what a farce that turned out to be, not to mention the present pathetic saga of personality politics happening in Florida.
The only cause that can give us the courage and the determination to take personal responsibility to rescue all living beings from suffering, the Schwarzenegger factor, is universal compassion born from heart-warming love for all beings, having recognized their vast kindness towards us in past lives as our mothers.
As the sufferings of our mothers are self-induced through selfishness, anger, and attachment, the only means by which our heroes can rescue them is by overcoming the flames of their own anger, the explosions of their own attachment, and the evil of their own self-cherishing. Then they will be perfectly qualified guides to show their mothers the way to safety. Such heroes are called Bodhisattvas, who think nothing of giving their own lives for the sake of others.
So, hero, next time you feel disgust at your cockroaches, think again.
The Mind
Our mind is something that we change, keep things in, and sometimes go out of. But what is our mind? We cannot discuss mind unless we define it. If we ask ten psychiatrists to define mind we will probably get ten different answers. My dictionary, a good friend but not a psychiatrist, defines mind as "the ability to think, feel emotions, and be aware of things." If we ask our psychiatric friends what are thoughts, emotions, and awareness, they will start talking about activity in the brain; they cannot distinguish between the mind and the body.
According to Buddhism, mind and body are mutually dependent but different entities. The substance of mind has nothing to do with atoms and molecules it is awareness itself. Thoughts, emotions, and awareness are mind. Buddhism defines mind as that which is clear and aware.
"Clear" refers to the nature of mind: it is non-physical and it takes the aspect of its object like a mirror takes on the appearance of whatever it faces.
"Awareness," synonymous with consciousness and knowing, is the function of mind. We have six types of awareness - our five senses and our capacity to think. A mirror may reflect things, but it does not know what it is reflecting. A computer may calculate things, but it does not know what it is calculating. Can a computer ever be made to think? His Holiness the Dalai Lama answered that question by saying, "Perhaps, if they can make a computer that is a suitable support for consciousness."
His Holiness was implying that a computer cannot create consciousness and could only gain the capacity to think if a pre-existing mind could take residence within it. Similarly, our mind cannot have been created by our body because awareness is not a material phenomenon, present awareness can only arise from past awareness, therefore our mind had to exist prior to our body and only took residence within it when there was a suitable support for consciousness - a fertilized egg in our mother's womb.
"But," say the scientists, "mind is a product of evolution."
"No," say the Buddhists, "evolution is a product of mind."
Prior to the condensation of our world from a swirling mass of gas, our minds inhabited subtle bodies in an ethereal realm of mental happiness but, as our karma for such bliss began to wane, more base desire for physical pleasure arose as a result of seeds from past lives. Primitive organisms began to evolve and some became suitable bases for consciousness. After dying in the ethereal realm, our minds were reincarnated in bodies that became progressively more complex instruments for experiencing sense pleasure. The difference between animals and plants is that the bodies of animals are for indulging in the pleasures of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and, especially in the human animal, thinking. Whereas the bodies of plants grow and reproduce without any mental involvement from their side.
Even though plants do not have mind, they have a connection with the collective karma of the humans, animals, spirits, and gods who make use of plants. Even the condensation of the earth from hot gas was influenced by our collective karma, and certainly the appearance of the first primitive organisms was connected to our collective karma. Thus mind is the prime mover of the entire universe.
So, what went wrong? Our human bodies are designed to experience pleasure, why is life so miserable? Why do we experience pain, the inability to find pleasure, dissatisfaction with whatever pleasure we do find, and the terrible sadness of being separated from people and objects of pleasure? The problem is that the designer, our mind, is flawed by ignorance.
Unaware of the subjective role played by the mind in our experience of life, we ignorantly believe ourselves to be passive experiencers of a "world out there." When we are in love, the person we love is the most beautiful person in the world. When we are divorcing them, they are the most ugly person in the world, but the person with whom they ran off sees them as most beautiful. Beautiful and ugly come from the mind, not from the side of the object. The primary source of happiness and sadness is our mind, not the outside world, and our problems arise from the impossible belief that we can rid our world of ugliness and fill it with beauty. The Garden of Eden exists in our mind, not out there, and the key to that garden is wisdom and compassion.
Without that key, we shall forever be chasing illusions and running from our shadows. While this world endures, a few will enter the garden, the remainder will continue to experience the highs and lows of the Wheel of Life. At the end of this world, we will again be born in the ethereal world of mental happiness, only to born once more in the realm of sensory desire on a new earth when that karma expires. And so the wheel has been turning since beginning-less time.
Self Esteem
We cannot remember our birth; but I am pretty sure our thoughts were something like: "What the hell's happening? Get me outta here!" But because our speech apparatus had not yet matured, we were unable to express our indignation other than by screaming loudly, which only brought smiles to the faces of those standing around - adding insult to injury and convincing us that we had been born into a world of sadists. From that moment on it was "me versus them," and our demands were simple: the world owed us pleasure, praise, love, and possessions.
Throughout our life, the rise and fall of our self-esteem has been directly related to the fulfillment or frustration of these four demands. We crave pleasure, praise, love, and possessions, not only for the immediate experience they bring, but also for the self-confidence they engender: "I won that round against the world." And we fear pain, criticism, dislike, and poverty not only for their suffering, but also for the crash in our self-confidence: "I lost that one."
If we are honest with ourselves and take a good, hard look at the way we have lived our lives, we will see that we have selfishly pursued these aims from the time we received our first toy in the cradle until this year when we bought a new car, or from the time we competed with our siblings for parental attention until the time we stole another person's partner or cheated on our own partner. Our adult behavior is just a sophisticated version of our infantile wants and don't wants; our bodies have matured but our minds have not. And what has been the result of our relentless pursuit of pleasure, praise, love, and possessions? Dissatisfaction, separation, loss, and an empty future.
So that's the bad news. I could go on, but I want you to finish reading this article.
Self-esteem has two factors - the self that is esteemed and the fulfillment of the four demands that is the basis of our esteem. Firstly, if we look at the objects we desire, they are unreliable because they are transient by nature, and even the pleasure they bring is transient and impossible to maintain. We are not cast into despair when the beauty of a sunset is absorbed by the darkness of night because we know it is temporary, but as children we screamed when it was time to go home from the beach because we imagined the pleasure would never stop, and as adults we wept at the loss of a loved one because we thought they would remain with us forever.
It is our grasping at pleasure and the objects of pleasure conceived as permanent fixtures in our life that causes us so much pain. The solution is to remember the transient nature of things and to enjoy pleasure without pining for it when it has gone.
With regard to the "self" that we esteem, our self-image is based upon our body, our current state of mind, and our personal history of achievement or failure in the pursuit of those four basic demands. Sometimes our self appears attractive and sometimes unattractive, always bearing the decorations or scars from past competition with the world, and so we like or dislike our selves according to the way we project our self to exist. Herein is our greatest mistake: incorrectly, we believe our self-image to be our true self, and our chance for future happiness is limited by thoughts such as, "I can't do this because I failed in the past." And so we join the billions who fall by the wayside of life without courage to continue.
Buddha showed that the self-image is not the true self. There is, in fact, no true self. Just as "beautiful sunset" is a label given to a transient combination of disparate conditions, "I" is a label given to the temporary combination of our body and mind, neither of which is the self. There is no self beyond this label. Anorexics and body-builders obsessed with the physical aspect of their self-image are flogging a dead horse. Academics competing with each other in the pursuit of fame and glory are chasing shadows. Business tycoons accumulating vast wealth are walking on clouds. They are all destined to failure because the "I" they are attempting to please, and the objects through which they seek pleasure, do not exist in the way they are imagined to exist.
Invincible self-esteem and true happiness can only be achieved when, through the power of realizing that we are empty of existing inherently - as we have always believed ourselves to exist - we have the courage to engage in the practice of giving pleasure, praise, love, and gifts to others without seeking reward.
Pride
Buddha emphasized again and again that all our troubles stem from our own minds. And the source of our problems is our mistaken belief in what we are as a person.
In reality, our person is nothing more than a mere convention established by our name labeled upon the combination of our body and mind. No substantial, self-existing person or soul exists on the body and mind, and yet we all have the innate misconception that we do exist as substantial, self-existing individuals. This misconception is the source of all problems because mental obsession with our false self-image leads to anger, attachment and pride, through which we harm ourselves and others.
While riding a low point in the emotional roller coaster of making and breaking relationships in my younger days, in a flash of insight I once declared that pride was my greatest enemy because I recognized that my unhappiness was connected to an overwhelming self-consciousness about the way I perceived myself and the way I wanted to be perceived by others. This left no space for spontaneity in my relationships, and no opportunity for what I thought was the "real me" to break out of the cocoon of my mind. I was too afraid to admit failure or weakness, and too proud to remain with women who did not measure up to my expectations, and the resulting loneliness was difficult to bear.
Pride was explained by Buddha to be a puffed-up sense of self-importance that compounds the original mistake in our self-image by projecting and then believing that we are superior to others. Pride strongly clings to this inflated self-image and disrespects others, thus creating a tense and hostile atmosphere within which neither we nor the people around us can relax. With our self-image at stake, we are always defending ourselves or attacking others.
Among the seven aspects of pride, the first three arise in relation to our wealth and social standing: towards those of lower status than ourselves we feel superior and see them as lowly; towards those of equal status to ourselves we think we are special and superior; and towards those of higher status we arrogantly point out their weaknesses and believe that we are superior to them as well.
The fourth aspect of pride sees our own body and mind as perfectly "me." This pride gazes at our reflection in the mirror and tells us we are so beautiful. The next aspect is seen in meditator’s who, through an extreme sense of self-importance, become convinced that they have attained high spiritual realizations and act as if they are God's or Buddha's right-hand person.
False humility is the sixth aspect of pride: we may behave with humility in the presence of a great person, but in our mind abides the arrogant thought: "Here am I, so important, in the presence of this famous person."
The final aspect of pride is wrong pride where, for example, we commit morally degenerate acts believing that we are endowed with special qualities and are above normal ethical restraint. There is great danger of this pride arising in the minds of those who hold positions of trust, such as doctors, priests, and monks.
Because pride exaggerates our good qualities and then believes its fabrications to be true, and because there is no self that can be found to exist either upon the body and mind or as a separate entity that possesses the body and mind, the solution to pride is immediately obvious: recognition of the fundamental non-existence of a "real me."
Such a thought can be frightening because we cling to our self-image like a child holds on to its security blanket, and the very thought of being "selfless" can induce a nihilistic tailspin into the vortex of meaninglessness. Nevertheless, it is essential that we dismantle our mistaken belief in a real me because it is wrong, and because that is the only way we can liberate ourselves from the cocoon of our mind and experience the unrestrained happiness that we instinctively know is possible.
Another mistake we can make when contemplating selflessness as the antidote to pride is that we can abandon responsibility for others. Selflessness, however, is only half of Buddha's recipe for happiness; the other half is love for all beings. Universal love is not diminished by the fact that others only exist as merely labeled identities. In fact, universal love requires the understanding of emptiness because without that wisdom we cannot free our minds from negative discrimination of others through attachment, anger, and ignorance.
Humility is not a sign of weakness; it takes great strength to stand up to our own negative minds, to reject the distorted projections of self-importance, and to focus instead on the good qualities of others, sincerely rejoicing in their happiness and good fortune.
Morality
For those without religious beliefs, such as myself, traditional Western morality received a battering during the sixties when to do good and avoid evil was seen as an unreasonable imposition preventing us from enjoying ourselves. Seeing the apparent miserable lives of our parents, teachers, politicians, and religious identities, we rejected the idea that society could judge what was good or bad for us and we invented our own anti-authoritarian law of behavior: "If it feels good, do it."
Indulgence in pleasure, however, proved difficult to maintain, and when confronted by the misery of broken relationships and the horrors of ill health, addiction, mental instability, and death, the love, love, love generation began to question its ethics. The attraction of Buddhism to many Westerners in those days was the teaching that suffering is a natural result of selfish behavior; this was our direct experience and we could not deny it. Also, within Buddhism, there is no authority saying that one must do this or not do that. Buddha simply explained the way it is and left the decision to modify one's behavior up to oneself because true morality is a pure state of mind that must come from within, it cannot be imposed by law or force.
In Buddhism, the essential meaning of morality is behavior free from actions that harm humans, animals, or any other sentient life form. Killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct are the common physical actions that harm others. Most frequently, the harm caused by sexual misconduct is to the third person when, through selfishness, we knowingly break up a committed relationship. Lying, slander, abuse, and idle gossip are the main verbal actions that hurt others; and all seven of these actions stem from the three mental actions of covetousness, maliciousness, and holding mistaken ideas.
Self-centered ignorance, attachment, and anger are deeply rooted in our minds and we cannot transform them into virtue overnight, so Buddha taught various ways of attaining pure morality through self-restraint from harmful actions. The foundation of Buddhist morality is to see these disturbing emotions as illnesses and to see the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha as the doctor, medicine, and a nurse. Just as a good doctor accurately diagnoses the problem, Buddha explained how suffering comes from actions motivated by the three disturbing emotions. Just as one must take the medicine prescribed by the doctor, the Dharma cures the problem when one abandons harmful actions through cultivating wisdom, loving kindness, and renunciation. And just as one relies upon nurses to recuperate from an illness, one relies upon the Sangha for support and inspiration while practicing Dharma.
Thus the beginning of morality is the intention to avoid these ten non-virtuous actions. The next step is to make a promise to avoid them, either for a short period or for the remainder of one's life. Buddha gave five vows for lay-people to take if they wish: to avoid killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and intoxicants. The first four are naturally non-virtuous actions. Sexual relations with one's own partner, in moderation, is not naturally non-virtuous, nor is taking intoxicants, but one is given the opportunity to avoid intoxicants because when one loses judgment through drunkenness one easily performs the naturally non-virtuous actions. A good indication of our minds is that, initially, most Western lay Buddhists only take the first three vows. Over time, however, they add the next two.
The next level of voluntary restraint from non-virtue is the various levels of ordination. The vows of monks and nuns include complete celibacy and abstinence from alcohol. There is no such thing as a married monk as is commonly supposed, especially here in Mongolia. The word "Lama" means teacher and, in Tibet, it properly refers only to those who are qualified spiritual guides, and Lamas can be either ordained or lay people. Thus Lamas are not necessarily ordained, and ordained people are not necessarily Lamas.
The vows of monks and nuns are mainly to abstain from physical and verbal non-virtue, which is relatively easy compared to abstaining from mental non-virtue. Nevertheless, pure morality must be free from even the thought to do harm, and to achieve this, Buddha gave special instruction to the few who, at the time, were capable of doing so. These teachings are called the Mahayana, the Universal Vehicle. "Universal" refers to bodhicitta, the altruistic attitude of universal responsibility to rescue all living beings from suffering, which is the basis of the next two levels of voluntary restraint.
Bodhicitta vows involve restraint from physical, verbal, and mental non-virtue and are the means by which one emulates the path to enlightenment followed by the Buddha himself. Finally, there are the Tantric vows, mostly to abandon mental non-virtues, the hardest of all to maintain, and the most secret because tantric practice is easily misunderstood, again I have to say, especially here in Mongolia. The secrecy is not a manifestation of selfishness; it is to protect those who are not yet ready to understand from mistaken interpretations that could be extremely harmful to themselves and others.
If any group of people, any society, is to be at peace, there must be the morality of not harming each other. Buddhism is not a doctrine for society; the teachings are aimed at the individual because pure morality can only come from within. Nevertheless, if enough individuals are cultivating pure morality there will be peace and happiness no matter what the economic situation. Wealth, economic growth, and technological advance are not shunned by Buddhism, just as long as our priorities are in order - the inner growth and wealth of morality, wisdom, and altruism must come first.
