The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  Strong determination is almost like falling completely in love with your practice. When you are in love, you long to go to bed with your lover and you long to wake up with your lover. You have appreciation and joy. With this strength, your practice does not become torture or torment. It does not become a cage, but it becomes a way of constantly cheering up. It might require exertion, a certain amount of pushing yourself, but you are well connected, so you are pleased to wake up in the morning and you are pleased to go to bed at night. Even your sleep becomes worthwhile, and you sleep in a good frame of mind. Strong determination is based on waking up basic goodness, the natural goodness of the alaya. You realize that you are in the right spot, in the right practice, so there is a feeling of joy.

  Familiarization

  Because you have developed strong determination, everything becomes familiar and natural. If you are mindless and lose your concentration or awareness, situations naturally remind you to go back to your practice. In the process of familiarization, your dharmic subconscious gossip begins to become more powerful than your ordinary subconscious gossip. When discursive thoughts become bothersome, you substitute dharmic thoughts. When you reflect on dharmic themes, such as the four noble truths, you are not producing passion, aggression, or ignorance. So your ordinary thinking is suspended, and beyond that, you might even begin to understand something about the topic. That is why we recite chants. While you are chanting, you don’t say, “I hate my parents. I don’t like my world”—you say something better than that. So at least at that point you are suspended. During meditation, when discursive thoughts arise, you could replace them with dharmic thoughts—but having noticed that you are thinking, you should always come back to your breath.

  As with strong determination, the process of familiarization is also like falling in love. When somebody mentions your lover’s name, you feel both pain and pleasure. You are excited by that person’s name and by anything associated with them. In the same way, once the concept of egolessness has evolved in your mind, the natural tendency of mindfulness-awareness is to flash on that, to familiarize yourself with it.

  Familiarization means that you no longer regard the dharma as a foreign entity. You begin to realize that the dharma is a household thought, a household word, and a household activity. Each time you uncork your bottle of wine, or unpop your Coca-Cola can, or pour yourself a glass of water, it reminds you of the dharma. Whatever you do becomes a reminder of the dharma. You can’t get rid of it. The dharma has become natural, and you have learned to live with your sanity. At the beginning, that may be very hard to do, but once you have realized that your sanity is a part of your being, there should not be any problem.

  Of course, you may occasionally want to take a break. You may want to run away and take a vacation from your sanity, to do something else. But as your strength becomes more powerful, your wickedness and insanity is changed into mindfulness and realization. Through the strength of familiarization, your wickedness is changed into wakefulness.

  Seed of Virtue

  The next strength is seed of virtue. In this case, virtue means that your body, speech, and mind are all dedicated to propagating bodhichitta in yourself. With the seed of virtue, you have tremendous yearning all the time, so you no longer want to take a rest from your wakefulness. You don’t feel that you have had enough of it, or that you have to do something else instead.

  At that point, however, your neurosis about individual freedom and rights might come up. You might think, “I have a right to do anything I want! I want to dive to the bottom of hell. I love it!” When that kind of reaction happens, you should pull yourself back up for your own sake. You should not just give in to the feeling that your sanity is claustrophobic but continue propagating the seed of virtue. You should not be content with what you are doing, and you should not take a break.

  Reproach

  This strength is based on reproaching your ego. You are encouraged to say to your ego, “You have created tremendous trouble for me, and I don’t like you. You have caused me so much trouble by making me wander in the lower realms of samsara. I have no desire at all to hang around with you. I’m going to destroy you, this ‘you.’ But who are you, anyway? Go away! I don’t like you.” If you ever want to talk to yourself, you should talk in this way. In fact, sometimes talking to yourself in that way is highly recommended and very helpful. It is even worth talking to yourself in that way while taking a shower or sitting on the toilet seat. When you are driving, instead of turning on the radio, you could turn on your reproach to your ego. If you are accompanied by somebody, you might feel embarrassed, but you could still whisper to yourself. That is the best way to become an eccentric bodhisattva.

  Aspiration

  Because you have experienced joy and celebration in your practice, it does not feel like a burden to you. Therefore, you aspire further and further. You would like to attain enlightenment. You would like to free yourself from neurosis. You would also like to serve all other sentient beings throughout all times and all situations and at any moment. You are willing to become a rock or a bridge or a highway. You are willing to serve any worthy cause that will help the world. This is the basic aspiration in taking the bodhisattva vow. It is also general instructions on becoming a very pliable person—a person that the rest of the world can use as a working basis for their enjoyment of sanity.

  As an expression of your aspiration, when you practice meditation, you should end each session with three aspirations: to save all sentient beings by yourself single-handedly; not to forget twofold bodhichitta, even in your dreams; and to apply bodhichitta in spite of whatever chaos and obstacles may arise.

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  The mahayana instruction for how to die is the five strengths.1

  The second slogan of the fourth point of mind training has to do with the future—your death. Like the previous slogan, it is based on the five strengths. The question of death is very important. The realization of the truth of suffering and impermanence is an essential first step in realizing the Buddha’s teaching altogether. All of us will die sooner or later. Some of us will die very soon, and some of us might die somewhat later, but that is not a reason for relaxing. Instead, we need to learn how to make friends with our death.

  According to the tradition of ego-oriented culture, death is seen as a defeat and an insult. Theistic disciplines teach us to believe in eternity, but the Buddhist tradition, particularly the mahayana, teaches us that death is a fact. Because we have been born, we have to die. That is a very obvious and sensible thing to say. But beyond that, we can make friends with our death and see how we can die as we are.

  People usually try to ignore their death completely, particularly if they have incurable diseases. Even healthy people ignore their death. If you say to somebody, “Do you realize that you could die tomorrow?” that person will say, “Don’t be silly! I’m okay.” That attitude is an attempt to avoid something within us that is seen to be fundamentally ugly. But death need not be regarded as ugly. It could be regarded as a way of extending ourselves into the next life. Death could be seen as an invitation to allow this thing we cherish so very much, called our body, to perish.

  On the whole, we try to take very good care of this pet called our body. We shave, we take showers and baths, and we clothe ourselves quite beautifully. It is like having a little puppy. We don’t want our puppy to die, so we feed it with the very best food we can come up with. When I was in England, I even heard a story about a rich person who left lots of money in their will for their little Pekingese, so that when they died their Pekingese would be well housed and well fed. But this little pet called our body will leave us sooner or later!

  We have to realize that anything could happen to any one of us. We could be very healthy, but we might not die from ill health—we might die from an accident. We might die from a terminal disease, and sometimes we die without any reason at all. We have no external or internal problems; we just suddenly perish. We run out of breath
and drop dead on the spot. So the point of this slogan is to familiarize ourselves completely with our own death.

  You may find that you are unable to relate with the dharma because you are trying so hard to hang on to your life. Any attack that comes to you, even a little splinter in your finger, means death. You immediately become alarmed. Although it is not at all reasonable to get emotional about a splinter, somehow you associate it with the destruction of your body and the idea of your death. You want to live so much, and in order to live, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You take certain medications, follow certain programs, eat certain diets, or even follow certain ways of clothing yourself. Your fear of death is so strong that you can’t even sit on your meditation cushion properly because you think the circulation in your legs might be cut off. You are so afraid to die.

  We have to make a big transformation in our approach to death. To begin with, we have to get rid of the idea that death is ugly, that it has bad connotations. Then we will be able to establish a new ground for relating with death. Relating with our own death is very individual and personal. It is connected with how we relate with our life, how we relate with the gap between that and this. In many vajrayana texts, it is said that the moment of orgasm is the same as the moment of death. It is said that in both cases, a twist takes place in your state of mind, and you leave your body and enter into another world. It is very helpful to realize that the moment of death is the same as the moment of orgasm, because we see that death is not necessarily a condemnation.

  Usually we regard death as the final threat. We have been trying to build ourselves up all along, but finally we drop dead. You may think, “What happens to my shampoo? And the razor blades, hundreds of thousands of them? What about the drink and food that I have been taking into myself for fifty years? The whole thing is going down the drain. I’m dropping dead!” That is not the best attitude. It would be better to appreciate that death is not a condemnation or a final negation of anything. Instead, it is continuity, going further. Your mind still exists; it is continuous. You can’t get rid of your mind so easily, even though it might cause you trouble. Pain continues, unfortunately, and pleasure continues, fortunately. So death is just another transition, the same as the transition from one moment to any other moment. There is really no difference. But it is an interesting transition—you might end up as a dog.

  The point is to realize that death is imminent and that you should talk about death freely. You should realize or imagine that you are dying and reflect on that. That would be very helpful. Doing so is like rehearsing a trip to Europe by going to Berlitz and learning how to speak Spanish or French. In this case, you are trying to learn death language. You have to prepare for death—you already booked your flight when you were born!

  The instruction on how to die is not only about how to die when death comes to you. It is also a question of realizing that death is always there. One of the Kadampa teachers always put his drinking bowl upside down on his table when he went to bed. Traditionally, that means you are not going to be at home. You put your cup upside down so it won’t get dusty, to keep it clean and pure so that somebody else can use it. That teacher always thought he might die that night, so he turned his bowl upside down.

  You might think that is rather an eccentric way of going about things, but you should think twice or thrice when you say good night to somebody. You don’t really know whether or not you are going to see them tomorrow. That may sound somewhat grim, if you view death as a disaster. But saying good night nicely to somebody is a great way to get out of your life and your body. It is a very glorious and humorous way of ending your life. You don’t need to die filled with remorse. If you have practiced as much as you can in this life, with exertion and joy, you could die happily. When you are about to die, if somebody says, “Look here, it is going to be very difficult for you to go on. May I pull the plug for you?” you are able to say, “Yes, of course.” Plug pulled out.

  Death is not that grim. It is just that people are embarrassed to talk about it. Nowadays, people have no problem talking about sex or going to porno movies, but they have difficulty talking about death. Although we may have seen all sorts of gory things in the movies, we are still embarrassed. Thinking about death is a big deal for us. We have never wanted to reflect on death, and we have chosen to disregard the whole thing. We prefer to celebrate life rather than to prepare for death, or even to celebrate death. We try to block the message of death by beautifying ourselves, entertaining ourselves, and following this and that diet. We refuse to relate to death, and we try so hard to protect our health and our body that we become like living corpses. The idea of a living corpse may seem contradictory, but if we don’t want to die, that is what we become. In contrast, this slogan tells us that it is important to include death as part of our practice. Since we are all going to die, we are all going to relate with death in any case.

  Applying the five strengths to dying is very simple and straightforward. In this context, strong determination means taking a very strong stand to maintain your egolessness and sanity, even in your death. You should concentrate on twofold bodhichitta, repeating to yourself: “Before death and during the intermediate state, or bardo, and in all my births, may I not be separated from twofold bodhichitta.”

  Familiarization means developing your mindfulness and awareness so that you don’t react with panic because you are dying. You remind yourself repeatedly of bodhichitta.

  The seed of virtue means not resting or taking any break from your fear of death. When you are facing death, you need to overcome your attachment to your belongings.

  Reproach is based on realizing that this so-called ego does not actually exist. Therefore, you could ask, “What am I afraid of, anyway? Go away, ego!” Recognizing that all problems come from ego and recognizing that all death is caused by ego, you develop revulsion for the ego and vow to overcome it.

  With aspiration, you realize that you have tremendous strength, and you desire to continue to open yourself up so you have nothing to regret when you die. You have already accomplished everything that you can accomplish. You have become a good practitioner and developed your practice completely. You have realized the meaning of shamatha and vipashyana and of bodhichitta.

  When you are dying, if possible you should practice the seven maha-yana exercises: prostrations, offering, confession/acknowledging what you have done, rejoicing in the virtues of others, asking your teachers to turn the wheel of the dharma, requesting your teacher to remain and not pass into nirvana, and dedicating the merit of your practice for the benefit of all beings.2 If you cannot do that, you should make this aspiration: “Throughout all my lives, may I practice the precious bodhichitta. May I meet a guru who will teach me. May the three jewels bless me so that I may do that.”

  Pith Instructions

  Beyond all that, there is an interesting twist. The key instruction on death is to try to rest your mind in the nature of ultimate bodhichitta. You should rest your mind in the nature of alaya, and continue in that way with every breath you take until you are actually dead.

  1. This is an earlier translation of this slogan. A later and more literal translation is “The mahayana instruction for ejection of consciousness at death / Is the five strengths: how you conduct yourself is important.”

  2. If you are not capable of doing so yourself, it is also possible to have another person chant this sevenfold service for you as you are dying.

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  Point Five: Evaluation of Mind Training

  Whether teachings are based on the hinayana or mahayana, all of them agree that the purpose is simply to overcome ego. Otherwise, there is no purpose at all. . . . All the sutras, scriptures, or commentaries on the teachings of Buddhism you read should be understood as ways of taming your ego.

  THE FIFTH category of mind training, known as the evaluation of mind training, contains four slogans. The paramita of meditation, or dhyana, permeates this section of lojong. Meditation is
a somewhat futuristic practice. Although you are sitting on your cushion as a regular person, you have the potential of sitting on the vajra throne as an enlightened one. The possibility of being fully realized is always there.

  Through meditation, you are beginning to catch a possibility of prajna. You have the fever of prajna already; therefore, you begin to develop tremendous awareness and mindfulness. It has been said that shamatha-vipashyana protects you from the lethal fangs of wild animals, which represent the kleshas or neuroses. Without mindfulness and awareness, you have no way of protecting yourself from those attacks. Without them, you also have no facility to teach others or to work for the liberation of sentient beings. So intelligence is a guard against the kleshas. You are ready for them, ready to deal with them.

  19

  All dharma agrees at one point.

  Whether teachings are based on the hinayana or mahayana, all of them agree that the purpose is simply to overcome ego. Otherwise, there is no purpose at all. In fact, this is one of the main differences between theism and nontheism. Theistic traditions tend to build an individual substance of some kind, so that you can then step out and do your own version of so-called bodhisattva actions. But in the nontheistic Buddhist tradition, we talk in terms of having no being, no characteristics of egohood. Therefore, we are able to perform a much broader version of bodhisattva action. All the sutras, scriptures, or commentaries on the teachings of Buddhism that you read should be understood as ways of taming your ego.