Point Three : Four practices are the best of methods.
Commentary :
This slogan is a rather difficult one, actually, but it makes a lot of sense. It refers to special activities, or anecdotes, for how to go about your daily life, translated as "best of methods." These best methods consist of four categories: accumulating merit, laying down evil deeds, offering to the dons, and offering to the dharmapalas.
Accumulating Merit
The first application is accumulating merit, not in the sense that we are accumulating anything for our own ego trip, but from the point of view of trying to relate with what is sacred or holy. We are making a connection with sacred areas of reality: the very idea of the teachings, or dharma, and the existence of basic sanity, which is represented by works of art, images, statues, paintings, books, all kinds of symbols and all kinds of colors. We associate ourselves with that kind of thing. Creating merit is working with such situations and putting in as much of our effort and energy as we can. A sense of veneration becomes very important.
The accumulation of merit is also based on complete trust in the three
types of encouragement. These three are not slogans; they are lines of
encouragement for the slogans, so to speak. The three lines of
encouragement are:
Grant your blessing if it is better for me to be sick.
Grant your blessing if it is better for me to survive.
Grant your blessing if it is better for me to be dead.
That is the ultimate idea of creating merit. That is to say, we cannot have
a succession of merit completely filling the whole area absolutely. Before
we beg, our begging bowl has to be emptied; otherwise nobody will give us
anything. In order to receive something, there first has to be a sense of
openness, giving, surrendering. It is not being concerned with yourself, it
is simply letting things be. Whatever comes up, be grateful to it. It is
not that you are not talking to anybody; instead it is like saying, "Let
the rain fall," or "Let the earth shake." It is a magical word simply.
Something actually might happen when you do that, but you are not talking
to anybody in particular. I don't know how I can say that linguistically:
"Grant your blessing," or "Just let it happen."
Traditionally one creates merit by making offerings to the sangha - donating our money and encouraging that kind of establishment. But we are not only surrendering our green energy. We are also trying to let go of our possessiveness altogether. For instance, if it is better for us to get sick, we let it be so. "Please let that be our blessing."
We might regard this approach as that of a very naive person who will go along with absolutely anything all the time. But in this case, the approach has to be an extremely intelligent one which lets us go ahead and open ourselves completely to the situation. That seems to be a very important point - that we cannot just have the blind faith. We have to have the intelligent faith of letting go of our holding back. Holding back creates a kind of business mentality: "If I don't get this, then I have to sue the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha - metaphorically, realistically, or whatever. If I don't get my money's worth in return, then I have been cheated." But in this case it is not so much tit for tat, but letting things be in their own way: "Whatever has happened, I would like to let go of this problem of holding back." It is very simple. It is extremely simple and realistic. That is precisely what is meant by creating merit.
We cannot accumulate merit if we have a macho sense of pride and arrogance that we already have enough truth and virtue collected and now we are going to collect some more. The person who collects merit has to be humble and willing to collect. The more a person is willing to give, that much more effective, in some sense, is the accumulation of merit. That is why there are those three subslogans or reminders. We could actually call them incantations, that might be a better word. The slogans themselves are reminders; so these incantations are reminders for the reminders.
When we talk about merit, we are not talking about collecting something for your ego but about the basic twist of how to punish your ego. The logic is that you always want pleasure, but what you get is always pain. Why does that happen? It happens because the very act of seeking pleasure brings pain. You always get a bad deal - all the time. You get a bad deal because you started at the wrong end of the stick.
The point of this practice or application is that you have to sacrifice something rather than purely yearning for pleasure. You have to start at the right end of the stick from the very beginning. In order to do that, you have to refrain from evil actions and cultivate virtuous actions. In order to do that, you have to block out hope and fear altogether so you do not hope to gain anything from your practice and you are not particularly fearful of bad results.
Whatever happens, let it happen - you are not particularly looking for pleasure or pain. As the supplications that go along with this particular practice say: "If it is better for me to be dead, let me be dead; if it is better for me to be alive, let me be alive. If it is better for me to have pleasure, let me have pleasure; if it is better for me to have pain, let me have pain." It is a very direct approach, like diving into an ice-cold swimming pool in the middle of winter. If that is what is best for your constitution, go ahead and do it. It is the idea of having a direct link with reality, very simple, without any scheming at all. In particular, if there is any desire or any fear, you act in the opposite way: you jump into your fear and you refrain from your desire. It is the same approach as taking on other people's pain and giving your pleasure to them. It should no longer be any surprise to you that we have such a strange way of dealing with the whole thing - but it usually works. We could almost say that it works 100%, but I'm not sure about 200%.
Laying Down Evil Deeds
The second of the four practices is laying down your evil deeds or neurotic crimes. As a result of accumulating merit, because you have learned to block out hope and fear altogether, you have developed a sense of gentleness and sanity. Having done so, the basic idea of laying down evil actions is psychological: you look back and you say, "Good heavens! I have been so stupid, and I didn't even realize it!" Such an attitude develops because you have already, at least somewhat, reached a certain level of sophistication. When you look back, you begin to see how sloppy and how embarrassing you have been. The reason you didn't notice it before is because of stupidity of some kind. So the point is to look back and realize what you have been doing and not make the same mistake all over again. I think that is quite straightforward.
We have translated the Tibetan term dikpa as "evil deeds" or "neurotic crimes" rather than "sin." The word sin has all kinds of connotations. Particularly in the world of dead or living Christendom, and theistic traditions generally, it is all-pervasive. Dikpa literally means "sin," but not in the same way as we refer to it in the Christian or Judaic traditions. "Neurotic crimes" has psychological implications rather than being purely ethical. When neurosis begins to surge up, you begin to go along with that process and begin to do something funny. It may seem fantastic and far out, but it results in frivolity from that point of view. So neurosis is the backbone and frivolity is the activities.
The crime itself can end up as all kinds of crimes and destruction. What we are discussing is that basic principle of neurosis which creates all kinds of frivolous activities. We are confessing that. We are not talking about confession as going to a priest in a little box saying, "Father, I did a terrible thing yesterday, what should I do for that?" And the father would say, "Say this twenty times and we could let you go." Then you can come back next time saying the same thing and he might say, "You have been bad in the past, so this time you should say it fifty times, your father is keeping a record of you." Everything depends on red tape from that point of view. But in this case it is a more personal situation. In the Buddhist style of confession, shall we say, there is no church or particular building to go into to confess your evil deeds or neurotic crimes. There is a fourfold style of doing the whole thing, which is not so much confession as relieving the sin or the neurotic crimes.
The first step is getting tired of one's neurosis. That is the first important thing. If you were not tired of doing the same thing again and again - all the time - if you were thriving on it, you probably would not have a chance to do anything with it. But once you begin to get tired of it, you say: "I shouldn't have done that," or "Here I go again," or "I should have known better," or "I don't feel so good." These are the sort of remarks you make, particularly when you wake up in the morning with a heavy hangover. That's good, that is the sign that you can actually confess your neurotic crimes. You come back and tell what you did last night or yesterday or what you've done previously. All these things are so embarrassing, it's terrible. You feel like not getting out or your bed. You don't want to go outside the door or face the world.
That real feeling of total embarrassment, that totally shitty feeling, for lack of a better word, that sense that your gut is rotten, is the first step. That sense of regret is not purely social regret - it is personal regret. And that shameful feeling begins to creep through our marrow into our bones and our hairs. The sunshine coming through the windows begins to mock us, too. It is that kind of thing. That is the first step. And having it is regarded as a very healthy direction toward the second.
The second step is to refrain from that or to repent. "From this time onward I am not going to do it. I am going to hold off on what I have been doing." Repentance usually takes place in us when we begin to feel that we have done such a shitty job previously: "Do I still want to do it? Maybe it is fun, but I still better not do it." As we think more and more about it, it does not seem to be a hot idea to do it again. So there is a sense of refraining from it, preventing doing it again. That is the second step to confessing or relieving our evil deeds or neurotic crimes.
The third step is taking refuge. We realize that having done such things already, they are not particularly subject to one person's forgiveness. This is a difference from the Christian tradition, seemingly. Nobody can wipe out your neurosis by saying, "I forgive you." Quite possibly the person you forgave would not attack you again, but he or she might kill somebody else. From that point of view, unless the whole crime has completely subsided, forgiving does not help. It not only does not help, it may even encourage you to do more sinning. From the Buddhist approach, the fact that a person has already wiped out your neurotic crimes, has created a good relationship with you, and understands and forgives you inspires you to commit further crimes. So in this case, forgiveness means that one has to give oneself up altogether. The criminal has to give up altogether rather than the crime being forgiven.
Actions alone are not particularly a big deal; The basic factors which a person puts into the act of committing a crime are more important. People have begun to realize this, even in the modern world. We have begun to realize that we have to reform people in the jails and give them further training so that they do not go back to their crimes. Often people simply get free board and lodging, and once their sentences are over they could have a good time because they have served their sentence, they are forgiven, and everything is fine. If they are hungry again without any food, money, or shelter, they could come back. So the idea of reformation is very tricky. According to history, apparently Buddhists never had jails, not even Emperor Ashoka. He was the first person who denounced having jails.
The idea of taking refuge is completely surrendering. Complete surrendering is based on the notion that you have to give up the criminal rather than that the crime should be forgiven. That is the idea of taking refuge in the Buddha as the example, in the dharma as the path, and in the sangha as companionship - giving up oneself, giving up one's stronghold.
The fourth step is a further completing of that surrendering process. At this point a person is surrendering, giving, and opening completely. A person should actually engage in a supplication of preventing hope and fear. That is very important. "If hope is too hopeful, may I not be too hopeful. If fear is too fearful, may I not be too fearful." Transcending both hope and fear, you begin to develop a sense of confidence that you could go through the whole thing. That is the power of activity to relieve one's evil deeds.
So the first step is a sense of disgust with what you have done. The second one is refraining from it. The third is that, understanding that, you begin to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha - offering your neurosis. Having offered your neurosis or taken refuge, you begin to commit yourself as a traveler on the path rather than as any big deal or moneymaker on the path. All those processes somehow connect together. And finally there is no hope and no fear: "If there is hope, let our hope subside; if there is any fear, may our fear subside as well." That is the fourth step.
Offering to the Dons
Number three is traditionally called "feeding the ghosts." It refers to those ghosts who create sickness, misfortune, or anything like that, called dons in Tibetan. The idea is to tell them: "I feel so grateful that you have caused me harm in the past, and I would like to invite you to come back again and again to do the same thing to me. I feel so grateful that you have woken me up from my sleepiness, my slothfulness. At least when I had my attack of flu, I felt much different from my usual laziness and stupidity, my usual wallowing in pleasure." You ask them to wake you up as much as they can. Whenever any difficult situation comes along, you begin to feel grateful. At this point you regard anything that provides you with the opportunity for mindfulness or awareness, anything that shocks you, as best, rather than always trying to ward off any problems.
Traditionally one offers the ghosts torma, or food. Torma is a Tibetan word meaning "offering cake." If you have watched a Tibetan ceremony, you may have seen funny little cakes carved out of butter and dough. Those are called torma. They represent the idea of gift or token. A similar concept in the West is the birthday cake, which is designed and planned in a certain way, with artwork on it and completely decorated. So we give offerings to those who create harm to us, which literally means those who are creating an evil influence on us.
The first practice, the confession of sins, is just natural tiredness of one's continual neurosis. One's neurosis is not particularly a landmark, it is just a natural thing which comes up, not a big attack. But a don is a big attack or sudden earthshaking situation which makes you think twice. A sudden incident hits you and suddenly things begin to happen to you. So something remarkable is taking place. The first one is just sort of a camel's hump rather than a sheer drop. It is simply relating with ups and downs, pains. The second application talks about getting tired of your particular problems. You have a sense of your neurosis going on all the time. It is like somebody with a migraine headache: it keeps coming up, again and again. You are tired of that. You are tired of doing the same things again and again. The third practice or application says that we should give torma to those who harm us, the dons.
Dons are very abrupt, very direct. Everything is going smoothly, and suddenly an attack takes place: your grandmother has disinherited you, or there is a shift of luck. Dons usually attack much more suddenly; they possess you immediately. "Possession" is actually the closest word for don. They are equated with possession because they attack you suddenly and they attack you by surprise. Suddenly you are in a terribly bad mood even though everything is okay.
This subject is a very complicated one, actually. We are not just talking about trying to feed somebody who spooks us, those little fairies who might turn against us: "Let us feed them some little thingys and they might go away." It is connected with the whole Tibetan concept of don, which comes from the Pon tradition but also seems to be applicable to the Buddhist tradition. The word don means a sense or experience of something existing around us that suddenly makes us unreasonably fearful, unreasonably angry and aggressive, unreasonably horny and passionate, or unreasonably mean. Situations of that kind occur to us throughout our life. There is some kind of flu or fever that goes on all the time in our life, that possesses us. Without any reason we are suddenly terrified. Without any reason we are so angry and uptight. Without any reason we are so lustful. Without any reason we are suddenly so proud. It is a neurotic attack of some kind, which is called don. If we approach that from an external point of view, certain phenomena make us do that. To extend that logic, we could say that such spirits exist outside us: "The ghost of Washington hit us, so we are inspired to run for the presidency," or whatever.
That feeling of some hidden neurosis which keeps popping up all the time is called don. It happens to us all the time. Suddenly we break into tears, for absolutely no reason. We cry and cry and cry and break down completely. And at a certain point we would like to destroy the whole world and kick everybody out. We would like to destroy our house. If we have a wife or children, we could knock them out as well. We go to extremes, of course. And sometimes the don doesn't go along with that. As we go along with what we have started, the don doesn't want to be a complaint, so it pulls back. We go ahead with our fists extended in midair on the way to our wife's eyes - and suddenly there is nobody to encourage us, so our hands just drop down.
Dons are like some kind of flu that takes us over and is usually unpredictable. It happens to us all the time, sometimes to a lesser extent and sometimes to a greater extent. The idea is to understand and realize that such things are taking place in us, that neurotic processes are beginning to pop up in us. We can be thankful for that. We could say that it is great that it takes place: "It is great that you actually snatched back the debt I owe you, that you confiscated the debt I owe you. Please come back and do the same thing again and again. Please come back and do so." We do not regard the whole thing as playing trick or treat, that if we give them enough, they are going to go away - they come back again.
And we should invite them back, the ups and downs of those sudden attacks of neurosis. It is quite dangerous: wives might be afraid of getting black eyes again and again, and husbands might have fears of being unable to enter their home and have a good dinner. But it is still important to invite them again and again, to realize their possibilities. We are not going to get rid of them. We are going to have to acknowledge that and be thankful for what has happened. Usually such an upsurge coincides with a physical weakness of some kind, as if we were just about to catch the flu or a cold.
Sometimes you are careless. You don't eat the right food and you go out without a coat and you catch cold. Or you do not watch your step and you slip and break your disk or you break your rib. Whenever there is a little gap, dons could slip in, in the same way that we catch cold. Things always happen that way. You might have complete control of the whole thing, but on the other hand, the problems have complete control also, which creates a loss of mindfulness. So a lot of dons can attack you. The idea is that if you are completely working with mindfulness twenty-four hours a day you do not have dons, you do not have a flu, you do not have a cold. But once you are not at that level, you have all kinds of things happening. You have to face that fact. It could be said that at the level of mindfulness, such problems can be avoided absolutely. That is an advertisement for being mindful.
You welcome such attacks when you lose your mindfulness. They are reminders and you are grateful because they tell you how much you are being unmindful. They are always welcome: "Don't go, please come back." But at the same time, you continue with your mindfulness. It is the same as working with your teacher. You don't try to avoid the teacher all the time. If you are okay, you will always have some kind of reference point to the teacher. But at some point the teacher might shout at you, "Boo!" and you still have to work with it. The reason why you welcome them is that their presence means something to you in terms of your direction, what's going on.
Usually what happens with us is that we have a schedule and everything is going along smoothly and ideally, hunky-dory, everything is fine and nothing is problematic - and one day we are suddenly uptight, one day we are so down. Everything is smooth and ordinary, and then there are those ups and downs, those little puncturing situations in our lives. Little leaks, little upsurges take place all the time. The idea is to feed those forces with torma.
If we are trying to do that literally, probably we will still have the same fits all the time. The idea of offering torma is somewhat symbolic in this case. I don't think we can get rid of our ups and downs by giving them some little Tibetan offerings. That would be far-fetched. Forgive me, but that is true, actually. It needs more of a gesture than that. If we have a real feeling about offering something which represents our existence and put it out as an expression or demonstration of our opening and giving up, that could be okay. But that comes at a higher level. In particular, people in this environment are not trained in that kind of ritualistic world, so people have very little feeling about such thing. Ritualism becomes more a superstition than a sacred ceremony. That has become problematic. Few people have experienced anything of that nature and had it become meaningful. It means that we actually have to commit ourselves rather than just having somebody sprinkling water on us, trying to make us feel good and happy. We have not experienced the depth of ritualism to the extent that we could actually put out cakes for the dons so that they will not attack us again. In order to do that we need further suitability of our own state of being as well as a sense of immense sanity. So I would not like to suggest that you put our substitute doggy bags for anybody - although it might be good for the local dogs and cats.
Offering to the Dharmapalas
Number four is asking the dharmapalas, or "protectors of the teachings," to help you in your practice. This is not quite the same as praying to your patron saint, asking him to make sure you can cross the river safely. Let me just give you a very ordinary, basic idea of this. You have your root guru, your teacher, who guides you and blesses you, so that you could become a worthy student. At a lower level, you have protectors of the teachings, who will push you back to your discipline if you stray into any problems. They are sort of like shepherds: if one sheep decides to run away, the shepherd drives it back into the corral. You know that if you stray, the protectors will teach you how to come back. They will give you all sorts of messages. For instance, when you are in the middle of a tremendous fit of anger and aggression and you have become a completely nondharmic person, you might slam the door and catch your finger in it. That teaches you something. It is the principle of corralling you back to the world where you belong. If you have the slightest temptation to step out of the dharmic world, the protectors will herd you back - hurl you back - to that world. That is the meaning of asking dharmapalas, or the protectors, to help you in your practice.
The dharmapalas represent our basic awareness, which is not so much absorbed in the meditative state of being but which takes place or takes care of us during the postmeditation experience. That is why traditionally we have chanting taking place toward the end of the day, when it is time to go to sleep or eat dinner, and when it is time to wake up in the morning. The idea is that from morning to evening, our life is controlled or secured purely by practice and learning all the time. So our life is sacred.
Toward the end of our day, quite possibly we have possibilities of taking a break from sacred activity and meditative activity. At that time, quite possibly all kinds of neurosis beyond measure could attack us. So that is the most dangerous time. The darkness is connected with evil in some sense, not as the Christian concept of Satan, particularly, but evil as some kind of hidden neurosis which might be indulged and which thereby might create obstacles to realization. Moreover, our practice of meditation may be relaxed - so in order not to create a complete break from sitting practice or discipline, in order to continue, we ask these protectors of the dharma to work with us. They are no more than ourselves. They are our expression of intelligence of mind, which happens constantly. And their particular job is to destroy any kind of violence or confusion which takes place in us.
Usually confusion is connected with aggression a great deal. It is adharma or antidharma. Dharma does not have a sense of aggression; it is just simple truth. But truth can be diverted or challenged or relocated by all kinds of conceptual ideas. Truth can be cut into pieces by one's own individual aggression. There is also the possibility that our individual aggression is regarded not as dirty aggression but as very polite aggression, smeared with honey and milk. Such aggression is known as an ego trip, and it needs to be cut through.
According to this particular application, it is very necessary to work with that kind of energy. To do so we have developed all kinds of chants here in the West as well as in Tibet. We have whole huge sadhanas of various mahakalas whose job it is to cut through bloodthirsty subconscious gossip which does not allow any sense of openness and simplicity and peace or gentleness. The idea is to relate with gentleness at this point. And in order to bring gentleness into effect, so to speak, we have to cut through aggression at the same time. Otherwise, there would be no gentleness. Traditional chants represent the idea that anybody who has violated the gentleness has to be cut through by means of gentleness. When gentleness becomes so harsh, it could become very powerful and cut right through. By cutting through, it creates further gentleness. It is like when a doctor says that it is not going to hurt you, it is just going to be a little prick. One little prick and you are cured. It is that kind of idea.
A further understanding of the mahakalas or the dharmapalas that we are inviting is connected with the presentation of the teachings and how it can be handled properly in an individual's mind. That is one of our biggest concerns - at least my biggest concern. If the teachings or not properly presented or are presented in the wrong way or in a somewhat cowardly way - if true teaching has not been presented, we all could be struck down by that. So we are asking the protectors give us help and feedback through teachings, through bankruptcies, through organizational mishaps, through being millionaires, or through work in general. It is all included. We are taking a lot of chances here. We are not physically taking chances as much as we are taking spiritual chances. That seems to be the basic point of what we are doing. And giving offering to the dharmapalas is what we have been told to do according to this commentary of Jamgon Kongtrul.