1
First, train in the preliminaries.
Point one includes just one slogan. The idea of first training in the preliminaries is that when you are practicing the slogans as well as when you are going about your daily life, you should always maintain an awareness of the four reminders.
The first reminder is the preciousness of human life and the particular good fortune of living in an environment in which you can hear the teachings of buddhadharma.
The second reminder is the reality of death, which comes up suddenly and without warning.
The third reminder is the entrapment of karma. It is the realization that whatever you do, whether virtuous or unvirtuous, only further entraps you in the chain of cause and effect.
The fourth reminder is the intensity and inevitability of suffering for yourself and all sentient beings.
With that attitude as a base, you should call upon your teacher with devotion, inviting into yourself the atmosphere of sanity inspired by their example, and vowing to cut the roots of further ignorance and suffering. In the mahayana, you relate to the teacher as someone who cheers you up from depression and brings you down from excitement, a kind of moderator principle. The teacher is regarded as important from that point of view.
Furthermore, in terms of the spiritual path, it is traditionally considered that the only pure loving object is somebody who can show you the path. You could have a loving relationship with your parents, relatives, and so forth, but there are still problems with that: your neurosis goes along with it. A pure love affair can only take place with one’s teacher. Your connection with that ideal sympathetic object is used as a starting point, a way of developing a relationship beyond your own neurosis. So the relationship with the teacher is tied in very closely with the development of maitri, or loving-kindness.
This slogan establishes the contrast between samsara, which is the epitome of pain, imprisonment, and insanity, and the teacher, who is the embodiment of openness, freedom, and sanity as the fundamental basis for all practice. As such, it is heavily influenced by the vajrayana tradition.
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Point Two: Resting in Ultimate Bodhichitta
An understanding of ultimate bodhichitta can only come about through compassion. A purely logical, professional, or scientific approach does not bring you to that understanding. . . . But to realize how to be compassionate, you first have to know how to be. . . . So ultimate bodhichitta is preparation for relative bodhichitta. That is why the slogans are presented in that order.
POINT TWO includes five ultimate, or absolute, bodhichitta slogans, and four relative bodhichitta slogans. It begins with the ultimate bodhichitta slogans. These five slogans are very simple, actually, just another perspective on the practice of meditation. They provide reference points for familiarizing yourself with ultimate bodhichitta and are connected with the paramita of generosity. In fact, generosity is the foundation of both ultimate and relative bodhichitta. The paramita of generosity is based on not holding back, but giving constantly. It is self-existing, complete openness—and the best way to open yourself up is to make friends with yourself and others. The opposite of generosity is stinginess. It is holding back and having a poverty mentality. With generosity, you go beyond your poverty attitude and develop a sense of richness and self-sufficiency.
An understanding of ultimate bodhichitta can only come about through compassion. A purely logical, professional, or scientific approach does not bring you to that understanding. A lot of us, seemingly, and very shockingly, are not particularly compassionate. Therefore, we have to develop compassion. But to realize how to be compassionate, you first have to know how to be. Learning how to love your grandma, or to love your flea or mosquito, comes later. So ultimate bodhichitta is preparation for relative bodhichitta. That is why the slogans are presented in that order.
In ultimate, or absolute, bodhichitta practice, you are not trying to tell yourself why things are as they are, but you are simply coming back to a basic state of existence. It is like coming back to the breath in shamatha. The ultimate bodhichitta slogans are purely confirmations or ways of recognizing experience. According to Jamgön Kongtrül, slogan practice is known as an analytical approach to practice, but it is also a yogic practice. The slogans are experiential as well as analytical.
Absolute bodhichitta is similar to absolute shunyata. And whenever there is absolute shunyata, you need an understanding of absolute compassion at the same time. Shunyata is basically the realization of nonexistence or emptiness. The more we realize nonexistence, the more we can afford to be compassionate and giving. Usually we would like to hold on to our territory and fixate on that particular ground, and once we begin to fixate, we have no way to give. But when we begin to realize that there is no ground, that we are ultimately free, nonaggressive, and open—and when we realize that we are actually nonexistent ourselves—we can give. We have lots to gain and nothing to lose at that point. We are not—we are no, rather.1
The experience of shunyata is also related to devotion. You begin to feel loneliness and aloneness at the same time. With shunyata, what you have heard and what you have experienced become part of your conviction.
THE OPEN WOUND OF COMPASSION
Slogan practice is a way of training the mind toward compassion. It is based on a feeling of softness or sore spot. Compassion is said to be like having a pimple on your body that is very sore, so sore that you do not want to rub it because it hurts. Why? Because even in the midst of immense aggression, insensitivity, or laziness in your life, you always have a sore spot. You always have some point you can cultivate, or at least not bruise. Every human being and every animal has that kind of basic sore spot. It is always in you, whether you are crazy, dull, aggressive, or egotistical.
That such an open wound is always there is very inconvenient and problematic. We don’t like it; we would like to be tough. We would like to fight, to defeat our enemies on the spot and come out strong so that no one attacks us and we do not have to defend any aspect of ourselves. In that way, even if somebody decides to hit us back, we are not wounded—and hopefully nobody will hit us on that sore spot. But without exception, there always will be a sore spot.
That sore spot has nothing to do with Buddhism or with Christianity. It is just an open wound, a very simple open wound. With such a wound, at least we are accessible somewhere. We are not completely covered with a suit of armor all the time. Such a relief! Thank earth! Because of that particular sore spot, even cosmic monsters such as Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, or Hitler can still fall in love. Because of that sore spot, we could appreciate beauty, art, poetry, or music. We could be covered with cast-iron, but there is still that sore spot in us, which is fantastic. That sense of sore spot is known as embryonic compassion. We have some kind of gap, some discrepancy in our state of being that allows basic sanity to shine through. Our level of sanity could be very primitive. Our sore spot could be purely the love of tortillas or the love of curries, but that is good enough. It is an opening. It does not matter what we love, as long as there is a sore spot of some kind. That sore spot is good. It is where germs could get in and begin to take possession of us and influence our system. It is precisely how the compassionate attitude begins to take place.
Not only do we have an external wound, but there is also an inner wound, which is called tathagatagarbha, or buddha nature. Tathagatagarbha is like having immeasurable slits in our heart. Our heart is wounded; it is being sliced and bruised by wisdom and compassion. When the external wound and the internal wound begin to meet and to communicate, we realize that our whole being is made out of one complete sore spot, which is called bodhisattva fever. At that point, we no longer have any way to defend ourselves. That cosmic wound is gigantic—it is both an inner wound and an external wound.
That feeling of vulnerability is compassion. It is the living flame of love, if you would like to call it that. But we should be very careful what we say about love. Before puberty, one cannot unde
rstand sexual love affairs. Likewise, since we have not broken through to an understanding of what our soft spot is all about, we cannot really talk about compassion, we can only talk about passion. It may sound grandiose to talk about compassion, but actually the word compassion does not say as much as love. Love is very heavy, whereas compassion is a kind of passion, which is easy to work with. Compassion is like a slit in our skin; it is like a wound.
ULTIMATE BODHICHITTA
2
Regard all dharmas as dreams.
Regarding all dharmas as dreams is an expression of compassion and openness. The reason you can regard all dharmas as dreams is because of your training in shamatha and vipashyana. You can do this because you have experienced that your basic existence is questionable as an ego entity. According to this slogan, love and hate, pain and pleasure, aggression and passion—whatever comes and goes in your life—could be regarded as dreams. Nothing ever happens. But because nothing happens, everything happens. When you want to be entertained, nothing seems to happen. But in this case, although everything is just a thought in your mind, a lot of underlying percolation takes place. That “nothing happening” is the experience of openness, and that percolation is the experience of compassion.
Basically, everything we experience is a dream. We have been sleepwalking; we have been sleeping and dreaming for a long time, and are doing so right now. According to the abhidharma, nothing going on in the mind is registered properly and fully. Our mind has been working haphazardly, so we are really not good thinkers. According to this slogan, everything should simply be regarded as not real. We realize that thoughts of love and hate are just profiles of the things we see, and do not in themselves provide any benefit or harm.
The practice of this ultimate bodhichitta slogan seems to be primarily oriented toward the mind-only philosophical school of yogachara. According to yogachara, the phenomenal world is not to be regarded as solid, but as a dream. You can experience that dreamlike quality in sitting practice. When you are focusing on your breath, suddenly discursive thoughts begin to arise. You begin to see things, to hear things, and to feel things. But all those perceptions are none other than your own mental creation. In the same way, you can see that your hate for your enemy, your love for your friends, and your attitudes to money, food, and wealth, are all discursive thoughts. If you did not have a mind, you would not be able to perceive anything, but since you do have a mind, you perceive things. Therefore, what you perceive is a product of your mind, which uses your sense organs as channels for the sense perceptions.
Regarding dharmas as dreams does not mean that you become fuzzy and woolly, or that everything has an edge of sleepiness about it. You might actually have a good dream, vivid and graphic. Regarding dharmas as dreams means that, although you might think that things are very solid, the way you perceive them is soft and dreamlike. You realize that whatever you experience in your life—pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, grossness, refinement, sophistication, crudeness, hot, cold, or whatever—is just memories. Your memories may be very vivid, but they are not regarded as invincible. Everything is shifty. So things have a dreamlike quality, but at the same time the productions of your mind are quite vivid.
3
Examine the nature of unborn awareness.
Because you could get caught up in the fascination of regarding all dharmas as dreams and perpetuate unnecessary visions and fantasies, it is important to contemplate the nature of unborn insight. The reason insight is known as “unborn” is because we have no idea of its history. We have no idea where this mind, our crazy mind, began. It has no shape, no color, no particular portrait or characteristics. It flickers on and off, off and on, all the time. Sometimes it is hibernating, sometimes it is active and all over the place.
When you look at your own mind beyond the perceptual level alone—which you can’t actually do, but you pretend to do—you find that there is nothing there, and you realize that there is nothing to hold on to. So your mind is unborn. At the same time, your mind is insightful because you still perceive things. You should contemplate these things by looking into who is actually perceiving dharmas as dreams.
In mindfulness practice, you are mindful of something: you are mindful of yourself, you are mindful of your atmosphere, and you are mindful of your breath. But if you look at why you are mindful—beyond what you are mindful of—you begin to find that there is no root. If you look further, you will find that your mind has no color and no shape. Your mind is, basically speaking, somewhat blank. There is nothing to it. When you try to find out why you see things, why you hear sounds, why you feel, and why you smell, you find a kind of blankness, and everything begins to dissolve. By looking in this way, you are cultivating the possibility of shunyata.
In examining the nature of unborn insight, you look at your own mind, just basic simple mind, the thinking process that exists in you. Just look at that! See that! Contemplating does not mean analyzing or dividing things into sections; it is just viewing things as they are in the ordinary sense. Looking at your mind in this way goes along quite well with hinayana mindfulness training. When you sit, your mind fluctuates constantly. Look at that. Just look at that!
Insight is unborn because you have not manufactured it, which is a relief. And you are further relieved, because you can contemplate it. Insight is crystal clear; nobody has made it up, nobody has manufactured it. It is not the product of any philosopher’s thinking—it is right here. First thought is best thought, precisely on the spot. Unborn insight is pure consciousness with no defilements and no anger. It has an element of buddha nature because it is so pure, so basic, and so ordinary.
Realizing the nature of unborn insight is the first discovery of künshi ngangluk kyi gewa, the “natural virtue of alaya.” Sometimes it is timid; therefore, it is good. With such timidity, you might begin to meet your own mind. That quality of timidity is fine; it makes you very sweet and gentle. Then you rise up a little bit. You begin to get into künshi ngangluk kyi gewa, which is slightly less timid, and finally you get to bodhichitta. You are still timid and meek, but you are also slightly perky. You are meek and perky put together, which is excellent. It is so pure, genuine, and real.
4
Self-liberate even the antidote.
The antidote referred to in this slogan is the realization of emptiness. By examining the nature of unborn insight, you see that your mind is colored by phenomenal experiences, that it has no root. Realizing that your discursive thoughts have no origin is an antidote or helpful suggestion. But you may begin to develop a twist of logic, thinking that if nothing has any root, why bother? What is the point? So you need to go beyond that antidote. You should not hang on to that so-whatness or naiveté of it.
Because of the nature of shunyata experience, and the occasional glimpse in your mind of nothing being existent, you may think nothing great or small really matters very much. It is all a kind of backslapping joke: ha-ha, yuk, yuk, yuk. Nothing matters, so let it go. All is shunyata, so who cares? Since everything is empty, you may think you can murder, you can meditate, you can perform your art, you can do all kinds of things.
You may think that you can do whatever you want, that as long as you are meditative, everything is going to be fine. But there is something very tricky about that approach. In meditation, we are not particularly seeking enlightenment or tranquillity—we are trying to get over our deception.
Some people view meditation as the simple experience of tranquillity. They may regard going to the movies every evening as their meditation, or watching television, grooming their horse, feeding their dog, or taking a long walk in the woods. They may even regard hunting as their meditation. Other people claim that they do not have to sit because they have always “understood.” I do not trust such people.
Dwelling on emptiness in that way is a misinterpretation called the poison of shunyata. You have to work with that antidote, but not dwell on it. However, thinking that the point is not to dwell on it could a
lso be problematic. In fact, the idea of this slogan is that antidotes of any kind are not regarded as appropriate.
5
Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence.
According to Buddhist psychology, there are eight types of consciousness. This slogan is about transcending the first seven consciousnesses and resting in the eighth, or alaya consciousness. The first six consciousnesses are connected with sensory perception, or the meeting of a sense organ, a sense object, and a corresponding sense consciousness. The six sense consciousnesses are sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, and mind consciousness, which is the basic coordinating factor governing the other five. The mind consciousness uses those particular instruments to perceive mental objects, or thoughts. Beyond all that is the intention of doing so, which is the seventh consciousness, or nuisance mind. The seventh consciousness puts energy into all those perceptions and brings the whole thing together. It has a quality of fascination or inquisitiveness. Going further, beyond all that, you find a level of experience known as the alaya consciousness. There is a resting place, which could be called primitive shamatha.
Resting in alaya means that you do not follow your discursive thoughts, but you try to treat yourself well. Basically, you do not follow fixed logic, discursive thoughts, or conceptual ideas of any kind. Generally when you look out at someone or something, you tend to check back on yourself, but you could look further, beyond yourself. When you do so, you are brought back to that resting place, where the orders and information are coming from.
Starting from basic alaya, you develop alaya consciousness, which makes distinctions. You begin to create a separation between this and that, who and whom, what and what. That is the notion of consciousness, or self-consciousness. You begin to distinguish who is on your side and who is on their side, so to speak. But basic alaya does not have any bias. That is why it is called natural virtue. It is neutral, neither male nor female; therefore, it is not on either side, and there is no question of courting.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 33