1. For a discussion of the four noble truths, see volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, part 4, “The Four Noble Truths.”
2. Tonglen, or sending and taking practice, is the practice of breathing in the suffering of others (taking), and breathing out to them your own healthiness (sending). It is also referred to as exchanging yourself for others. Tonglen practice is described in detail in chapter 37, “Point Two: Training in Relative Bodhichitta.”
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Cutting Ego Fixation
By understanding the implications of egolessness, you develop a quality of genuine sympathy and softness. . . . That combination of sympathy and egolessness makes you a perfect candidate to enter the bodhisattva path.
REVIEWING THE LOGIC OF THE HINAYANA
In order to realize the meaning and purpose of the mahayana, it is necessary to review the logic of the hinayana. Going back and finding out more about what you have already studied helps a lot. It is like combing your hair: when you comb your hair, you don’t comb just the ends of your hair, but you start from the beginning, from your scalp. So going back again and again and again is very important. It makes a thorough job. In turn, you begin to realize the basic geography and logic of the whole situation.
When you enter the bodhisattva path, you become a more hinayana person, and when you become a vajrayana person, you become a more mahayana person. That is how the whole thing works. Everything complements everything else. Each time you think you are ahead of yourself, you find that you are behind yourself. So the best vajrayana practitioners could be at the most pure mahayana level, and the best mahayana practitioners could be at the best hinayana level. That is how it works.
The hinayana approach of individual salvation is the ground that prevents you from relating with the wider vision of the mahayana purely as egotism or as the excessive emotionalism of trying to help everybody. Hinayana also provides you with the necessary ground for understanding the meaning of nontheism. If you follow the sequence of the five skandhas and the twelve nidanas, it becomes absolutely crystal clear that the world is not made by someone else, but is of your own making.1 It is also clear that when a group of individuals influence each other and create a society, their world begins to take shape in a particular way—with growing passion, aggression, and ignorance. You realize that the world is in chaos, and in order to control or work with that chaos, you have to begin by working on yourself. There is no other way. Having worked on yourself, you can then begin to branch out into the greater vision, expansion, intelligence, and cheerfulness of the mahayana.
The bodhisattva path is the path of the warrior, the fearless path. This highly disciplined lineage has been handed down from generation to generation, up to the present. You take up the bodhisattva path with the attitude of working for others first, which means that you begin to give up your own personal struggle to survive and maintain yourself. Beyond that, you can expand further and develop into an ultimately genuine and good person. The reason you can do so is because you do not put your own situation first; you put others first. Therefore, you become more reasonable.
The transition from hinayana to mahayana is an evolutionary process. When you enter the mahayana, you have already abandoned the notion of taking refuge in external gods. You have understood that nontheistic discipline is based on working with yourself. At the same time, you have also begun to realize that you need further input and further vision, but this further vision also comes from you. You can’t ask anybody else to give you that vision; you have to work on it yourself. So in the mahayana, there is still a quality of individual salvation. You can’t ask for any support, but you can make friends with someone who has done it already. You can rely on the kalyanamitra, or spiritual friend, as an example rather than a savior.
In approaching the mahayana, we are trying to work with the theoretical level and the practical level at the same time. We are taking an approach of practical realism. There are certain things I can describe or tell you how to do, but there are other things that you have to experience yourself. My obligation, my vow, is that certain experiences in your practice have to be your own discovery. By definition, a spiritual friend is someone who will push you, but who will not push you too much. They will let you experience what is happening.
THE NATURE OF EGO
As a would-be bodhisattva, you are expected to be an ideal hinayanist already. You are expected to understand egolessness. But in order to develop your understanding of egolessness, you first have to understand the notion of ego altogether. In the hinayana, you dissect your ego and divide it into its components. You divide the ego into five skandhas, and study the case history of ego in the form of the twelve nidanas and the notion of interdependent origination.
But there is a problem with that approach. Even though you could become proficient in the logic of the five skandhas and know the nidanas inside out, your ego could continue to function as usual. So simply learning about the five skandhas does not particularly help; you have to work on each individual skandha, step-by-step.
You are also taught that in order to free your mind of desire, you should reflect on the different parts of the body. You reflect on your lover’s body, thinking of it in terms of flesh, bones, mucus, hairs, internal organs, and so forth. However, although that approach might have worked at one time, in modern times it is problematic. Highly accomplished physicians know the body inside out; nonetheless, they do not stop falling in love. So working with desire is not all that simple.
The question of what ego is all about can only be solved by understanding the mahayana view of ego. According to the mahayana, and buddhadharma in general, ego is the tendency to hold on to your own survival and to defend it against anything that might interrupt it. Ego or egotism is known in Tibetan as dagdzin. Dag means “oneself,” and dzin means “grasping,” or “holding”; so dagdzin is “holding on to oneself.” In the English language, we do not usually use the term egomaniac to refer to ourselves; we use it to refer to somebody who is extremely egocentric. But from the Buddhist point of view, whenever we are holding on to ourselves, we are expressing egomania. So we are all egomaniacs; we are all holding on to ourselves.
Ego is an instinct that we share with the animals, but on a slightly more sophisticated level. Instead of barking, we talk, and instead of perching, we sit, but there is not much difference beyond that. Ego is a kind of basic crudeness that exists in us. Usually it is the very first thought that arises. Whenever there is any challenge, any incomprehension or dismay on a smaller or larger scale, we always think, “How am ‘I’ going to deal with this?” We always begin with “me.” It doesn’t have to be large-scale warfare. Even if it is only a small inconvenience, like running out of hot water or running out of toilet tissue, our first thought is, “How am I going to wipe my bottom? How am I going to take my bath?” That is the first thought, but it is not particularly the best thought. In fact, it is the worst thought. Whenever the slightest edge occurs in our life, we think of ourselves first. We think “me.”
This does not mean that we should stop taking care of ourselves. The point is to recognize that there is a quality of psychological panic, which starts with “this,” “here,” “me,” “my-ness.” It starts with apprehension, with bewilderment or confusion, and quite possibly leads us to resort to aggression. When worse comes to worst, that is our only choice. Aggression is what we resort to, even in the most sedate situations in our lives. When we find that things are not convenient, when things don’t happen according to our expectations, we complain to the manager, or we make a phone call, or we write a letter of complaint. We would like to just jump up and strangle somebody, if we could. We have preconceived ideas of how things should be, and when things do not happen as we expect, we begin to feel doubtful. Roughly speaking, that is what is known as the survival mentality of ego.
With that mentality, you see the idea of compassion as a threat to your personal territory. You think, “If I follow the mahayana, will I have enough fre
edom? If I give up my privacy and surrender my whole being for the benefit of others, it might be like joining the Salvation Army, or even worse.” You question how far you are willing to go—and your first thought is about how to preserve your own comfort. But once you become involved in the mahayana path, you should not be thinking about comfort at all. In the hinayana, there may be some comfort in the precision of shamatha and vipashyana. But in the mahayana, your own comfort is out of the question. You do not actually have such a thing as privacy or personal comfort, but you are purely dedicated to the welfare of others.
Your parents, psychiatrist, and other responsible people will say that you should be careful, that you should try to build up your ego and have self-respect. In fact, Buddhism has received complaints and criticism from people who say that it is a nihilistic religion, and that you have to give up your self-respect. But we still continue to teach about egolessness, which is more respectable than self-respect, if I may say so.
TWOFOLD EGOLESSNESS
When you enter the mahayana, you are expected to have already developed an understanding of what is called one-and-a-half-fold egolessness. The first fold is the egolessness of self. Having understood that, you go on to the second fold, the egolessness of external phenomena, or dharmas. But at this point your understanding is only partial, so it is referred to as one-and-a-half-fold egolessness. You have realized the egolessness of external phenomena, but not the egolessness of the perceiving itself. So you have not completely cut your belief in the world’s crude manifestation. At the mahayana level, you need to be willing to open up and work with other sentient beings much more vividly than is prescribed in the hinayana. You need to be willing to take a step further into twofold egolessness.2
At this point, we are talking simply in terms of inspiration, which plants a seed. There may not be a one-hundred-percent experience of egolessness. Perhaps just tokens of such a possibility are happening. But talking alone does not help, even though you might have theories about it, and sitting practice does not help all that much either. You need to have the experience of dealing with day-to-day life situations in the world. The point is that in entering the mahayana, a good understanding of twofold egolessness goes a long way, because then you could teach yourself and hear the teachings at the same time.
FUNCTIONING WITHOUT EGO
In the hinayana, you are provided with the idea of shamatha and the merits of mindfulness. Once you have developed mindfulness, then you are able to go further, to the development of vipashyana, or awareness. The combination of shamatha and vipashyana brings you greater intelligence, or prajna. With that intelligence, you begin to realize the hideousness of believing in your self. You see how your habitual patterns make you thick and stupid, and you realize the problem of ego.
The problem of ego even shows up in our language. In the English language, you may be about to say something intelligent, but your first word has to be I, as in “I am about to say something intelligent.” In order to be grammatical, you have to use this word I, so at the grammatical, verbal level, your intelligence is already obscured. If you say, “I have a good idea,” where did that good idea come from? Should there be “I” in it at all? Why can’t you just say, “There is a good idea”? So the problem of ego seems to be inherent in our English language and our grammar.
In the early stages of human linguistic life, we are also taught to say “me” and “mine.” That may be all right in terms of learning to speak the language, but beyond that there are continual problems with the notion of possession. The point of mahayana is to overcome that notion of possession and the ongoing impulse that things should belong to you first, and only afterward to others. According to the mahayana, things do not have to belong to you in order for you to enjoy them.
When you realize the obstacles that arise from the belief or habit of ego, you also begin to realize the opposite possibility of overcoming those obstacles and working with them. You realize that you actually possess a state of being that is not centralized in “me,” in “my” beliefs, in “my” profession, in “me” as an ego-person. You see that there is another side to you, that you have the potential to experience gentleness and peace. You begin to discover your soft spot. That discovery comes from the experience of vipashyana, or awareness.
We could quite safely say that everybody possesses a soft spot, and everybody can function without ego. We all possess a basic soft spot, which is not ego. Some people might think it strange if you tell them that you are practicing a discipline known as egolessness. They probably think you are on your way to becoming a vegetable. But according to enlightened vision, it is possible to live fully without ego. Ego is, in fact, stupidity. It is fundamental thickness. It sets up obstacles or veils that prevent you from developing any form of intelligence at all.
By understanding the implications of egolessness, you develop a quality of genuine sympathy and softness. You begin to feel relaxed and easy. That combination of sympathy and egolessness makes you a perfect candidate to enter the bodhisattva path. Why? Because at each and every step you are losing your ego, and as you shed more layers of ego, you realize that there is something beyond that. So your fixation on ego, or ego-clinging, no longer plays an important part in your life. You have no idea why or how it happens, but further intelligence and greater possibilities are taking place in you.
With the understanding of egolessness and the help of the spiritual friend, you experience a feeling of great sadness. You feel humbled and sad that something has been lost. In ordinary life, you may have gained all sorts of charisma, but now all that charisma is gone because it was based on aggressively conquering territory. It was an expression of twofold ego. When you begin to lose that, you develop depression and a feeling of loss. You begin to panic, thinking, “Now what? Where am I? What am I?” When you have lost your grasp on the ego of dharmas and the ego of individuality, you begin to feel empty.
When you have understood the first egolessness, the egolessness of self, you are said to have understood grasping but not fixation.3 In terms of twofold egolessness, when “you” begin not to exist anymore, you are halfway through; and when you realize that, there is a yearning for the egolessness of dharmas. There is a yearning to go beyond struggle—to go beyond hunger, thirst, duty, and the idea that some kind of relief or letting go will take place. Although you may not yet have a complete understanding of twofold egolessness, you have expanded beyond the level of individual salvation. You realize that the individual salvation you have experienced so far has become tenuous, and you have developed greater sympathy for other people. Where did that come from? It came from realizing that fixation on dharmas does not help.
When you begin to lose the ego of self and the ego of phenomena, you start to feel that you are not professional at anything. You are not a professional con man and you do not need to sell yourself, but you transcend salesmanship. You could still have your little business ventures, but the salesmanship of selling your ego is impossible. As a student of the maha-yana, or a would-be bodhisattva, you take the bodhisattva vow because you have a yearning to go beyond such salesmanship and charisma.
The approach of individual salvation is very simple. You know what you are, and you know how to save yourself. Your only dependence is on an elder, a learned person who tells you what to do. But that is only a little help; you can do most of it yourself. Shamatha-vipashyana can be conducted in years of solitude. You can just keep doing it, with occasional references to that wise person. Your relationship with the elder is like consulting your grandfather about your business, or paying respects to your grandmother. There’s not much surrendering involved.
If you tried to carry the approach of individual salvation into the mahayana, it would be like immigrants who keep taking care of their families back home. When you enter the mahayana, grasping and fixation are transcended, and you go beyond the hinayana attitude of individual salvation. From the clarity of individual salvation, you develop further, so although
you are getting into completely new territory, you are no longer dealing with such immigration problems. Instead of clinging to the past, you develop a better, healthier problem, the problem of having expectations.
RENUNCIATION AND FAITH
Having understood the egolessness of dharmas and the view that there is nothing to hang on to, nothing to work on, nothing to grasp, you begin to understand the notion of simultaneous openness and fullness. With that understanding, you begin to develop faith. You are going beyond the business-deal mentality of trying to get a return on your investment. You are developing simple faith or trust. You have trust in something without expecting anything in return. In the crude world of spirituality, faith is based on some kind of return, but in the bodhisattva path, genuine faith is faith without any expectations. Such faith brings about a quality of loneliness. You begin to feel alone and lonely, not knowing whether you are giving or whether you are gaining. Quite possibly you are both giving and gaining, but it is also possible that you are neither giving nor gaining.
The day-to-day problems and complaints that individuals manufacture come from not being able to work with twofold egolessness. In order to develop true faith, you have to become less aggressive, less demanding, and less involved in justifying your ego fixations. You need to develop renunciation, including renouncing the notion that you were going to get something out of following the path of dharma. Renunciation is particularly pointed toward giving up aggression. When renunciation has begun to occur in your system, there is a possibility of developing indivisible emptiness and compassion in your heart.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 8