1. How I found myself in a room one Sunday, January 2014 in Ulaanbaatar… How I’d found an Australian nun there to introduce me to a text embodying the entire path to enlightenment is a mystery. Well, it’s not that mysterious, really: now I know being there was a result of my karma over infinite embodiments/lives blowing me there (in India and in Nepal, twenty years earlier, Id never so much as visited a Buddhist temple even while I was in Bihar for a week and in Kathmandu for a month and in Dharamsala for several days- the golf ball dancing around the hole, without falling in).
2. It was “suffering” though that had brought me to Ulaanbaatar and into that room that Sunday morning. Only afterwards, was I to discover awareness of the truth of suffering is the first of the Buddha’s “four noble truths”; the first teaching normally given to aspiring Buddhists.
3. Two aspects of this “Morning” text immediately drew me in: the first was the claim in the preface that it contained the entire path to enlightenment, if one truly understood the meaning of the words. And, second, the linguistic formula on the first page ’… from the two types of motivation -the causal motivation and the motivation in the moment- this motivation is causal…’: I was, like, the moment I read it: “Is this a typo? What can it mean?” It intrigued me. It either was a typo or here was a new signification -potentially layers of signification- for the all too common signifier “cause”. Still now my reading about the Law of Karma reveals to me new meanings underpinning this phrase. Maybe other phrases in here will intrigue you enough similarly to draw you in. All I’ll say is that there are no mistakes in that text (A Daily Meditation Practice/How to Meditate on the Graded Path to Enlightenment: Lama Zopa Rinpoche (Wisdom Publications, Boston)), no typos, no unresolvable apparent contradictions yet that I have found in that text. I’ve read it now every single morning (or recited most of it) and I’ve done the same each evening (or almost every evening) with the “Evening” text which the nun also gave me since that Sunday in Ulaanbaatar. So far I have not found any typo or unresolvable apparent contradiction which other texts haven’t explained -particularly Tsong Khapa’s Great Treatise on the Path to Enlightenment. That moment, in that room in Ulaanbaatar, twelve of us, only one other Westerner there, and a cat, who scratched the nun, too, was the first time I began to realise that the path I had begun traversing would lead me towards a whole new understanding of words in the English language which I already knew or had not yet known as I would read the carefully translated core texts, such as The Great Treatise…, which underpin the “Morning” and “Evening” texts.
4. What I have learned: Ignorance is what conceals our inherent Buddha nature from us human embodiments (delusion and the incapacity to read and practise the Dharma is what prevents animals accessing it; pride is what prevents Gods accessing…;…). Ignorance in this sense has a technical and quite specific meaning: it means both “ignorance of selflessness/emptiness/suchness/ignorance that everything is “dependently arisen”; nothing itself did not even arise out of nothing and what this means…” - the concept of ‘emptiness’ is indeed consistent with quantum mechanics’ latest insights, that even on the level of the quarks of which our material embodiments consist the most part of us is space; is empty space and it is consistent with neuroscience’s “best current theories of how we store new memories without overwriting old ones suggest that each synapse needs to continually reintegrate its past experience (the patterns of activity in neuron A and neuron B) to determine how fixed or changeable it will be in response to the next new experience. Take away this synapse-by-synapse malleability, current theory suggests, and either our memories would quickly disappear or we would have great difficulty forming new ones.” (Kenneth D. Miller (NYT: Oct 10, 2015)) and, the second technical meaning, “ignorance of the Law of Karma and its contents; its codes.”.
5. What I have learned: If you insist on using the essentially empty concept of essence and ask of what does our mental continuum’s essence consist: then the answer is: the harmony of emptiness/suchness/selflessness and luminescence/light.
6. What I have learned: Mindfulness has a technical and very specific meaning: “mindfulness of death”. Such mindfulness has a consequence: studying and practising the Dharma in order to prepare for what happens as and after the embodiment of your mental continuum dies.
7. What I have learned: As we die it gets tremendously confusing: hallucinations, devils, regrets, dreams, noises, screams, fear, lights of all kinds, paths opening, closing, embodiments beckoning us to follow them or to leave them alone, images of land of sea of lakes, of beauty and of pure terror… But, basically, as the wind of your mental continuum’s unneutralised/unexpiated karma (its actions throughout infinity, including your most recent life) will propel your mental continuum through these confusions towards rebirth in one of the six realms… If (and this is very important), as you are dying you can’t remember what the fock to do; if you panic… Try, at least, to remember this: follow the blue light (but, this will be hard because there’ll be lots of other lights, whose colours meld into one, and distracting forces). By constantly repeating daily this “Morning” and this “Evening” text until they form a constant murmur underpinning your awareness (this will take years and years and years, so I’m told, which is why I started in January 2014 and continue to learn them…); until you have learned them off by heart and can recall any part of them to meditate on as a matter of will or karma… Until, that time, then, you can only hope you will remember even a tiny part of them amid all of the confusions as you die. If you can recall them, then, at that moment then the hope is that their ideas will infuse your mental continuum sufficiently to help you to control your mental continuum’s journey, as the winds of your karma following you from this life and infinite previous live batter you off (or on?) course, at least somewhat. When the Austrian army pretend-kidnapped me in late January 2015 and I was blindfolded for hours I muttered as much of the “Morning” text as I could remember: “Stop fucking praying. Stop fucking praying” was what the army chaps kept on screaming at me in their scary WW2 German movie accents. And I had trouble recalling in those moments even the parts of the “Morning” texts I’d thought, then, I’d known perfectly off by heart. Beware, pride… Therefore, start now to prepare to die. This is what it is all about.
8. What I’m learning: Both the “Morning” and the “Evening” text follow the same structure: preliminaries (generating Bodhichitta or the Will to or the Spirit of Enlightenment (this has a technical meaning best explained by Tsong Khapa and elucidated in modern meaning by Robert Thurman in the Jewel Tree of Enlightenment))… The Generation stage (generating an image in your head of buddha which after years of practice will eventually just be there always a presence in your mental continuum’s conscious consciousness (so I’m told: if I keep up the practise and follow carefully and fully the instructions). And once this image is implanted always in your consciousness (to prepare you better for the confusions as you die) that will help signify all of the Dharma these documents are shorthand for…)… and finally Dedication stage. This stage distinguishes Tibetan Buddhists from others. Tibetan followers of Lama Tsong Khapa constantly dedicate any merit they accumulate to their enemies and to their friends for the sake of all sentient beings, including all humanity. This is their purpose: to help liberate everyone, and not just themselves from the sufferings of being embodied. Dedicating merit, of course, earns you merit, which is further dedicated and in that endless cycle begun as soon as you, first consciously, dedicate the benefit accruing to you of any good or virtuous action goes on infinitely; it’s tantric; and it’s in itself a jewel of immense power, value and beauty.
9. What I’m learning: Tantra means, basically, “continuity”. The human embodiment is not able to know when or how the billions of universes (as many as there are grains of sand on the banks of the Ganges, apparently) began or will end. So, rather Buddhists can opt for the middle-way Madhyamāpratipad between the two extremes. They have to work hard continually not to lapse into or be seduced by the extreme of Nihilism, on the one hand, or the extreme of Reification/eternalism, on the other hand. And to do this, too, while acknowledging that there is no essential self, that everything is without an essence and that everything, even these words are empty of any essence or selfness… To do this while keeping that in mind, and without going mad, well, that’s a task a modern highly educated Western person finds themselves particularly well trained for.
10. What I’m learning: The extreme of Nihilism: “Nothing matters ultimately. Therefore, fuck everything. When you die you simply disappear. Act morally, sure, for the sake of itself (if you can even work out what is moral and not moral), but don’t act morally because you’ll get some reward in heaven…”: that kinda thing…
11. The extreme of Reification/eternalism: “I don’t know for sure how the universe begun so I’ll guess it was started by a God; I’ll make a bet; I’ll wager this, and if there is a heaven: great. And if there is nothing, well, at least I concocted a organising fiction by which I could live. Or, I know rationally I am just a bundle of empty quarks moving around a quantum universe which composes me. Or, I know, rationally, the “me” which exists today, contains no cells that existed in the “me” that existed two years ago or a decade ago. I know all of this rationally, I know I am simply empty of any continuing self, but I’ll pretend that there is a “me” continuing eternally through time-space; or that there is a God that created all of this and that when I die I’ll go to hell, or heaven, maybe…”: that kinda thing.
12. What I’ve learned: The modern mind has little problem understanding that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Once I saw this poster for a brilliantly titled conference “Mind: the gap”! This encapsulates the acceptance, too, that there is more to consciousness than mere matter, even if most people can’t put their fingers on what it is. The tantric view sees consciousness, our mental continuum, as continuing from a time before when “we” selfless beings received this particular embodiment going backwards into infinity (if you have no evidence of a beginning why reify this ignorance into a beginning myth or despair that since it can’t be known, there is “nihil”? Why not simply accept that it cannot be known, and concentrate on what can be known: there was something before this embodiment of “me”, there is something “now” and there will be something “afterwards; after now”?) and that after this embodiment of matter our matter will become flowers; stardust; and leaves and maybe miraculously the embodiment of another sentient being in one of the six realms of samsara and that, likewise, our consciousness, which once was embodied by it, will continue too – our mental continuum? The nihilist says: “No way.” And the Reifier/eternalist says: “I prefer to think of me as having a soul which will live forever, after I am gone.”
13. What I’m learning: Developing ones mental continuum’s own compassion/will to or spirit of enlightenment/bodhicitta is an essential perquisite for progressing along the path. Robert Thurman is brilliant at explaining to Western minds this core concept. In it is contained the central idea of Buddhism: I have been a mother to all sentient beings going back into infinity and they have been my mother too and bore me and nurtured me, going back to infinity (it’s particularly fascinating, in this context, that modern genetic science tells us that “in 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people. Basically, everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh. Quel dommage.” And, that Joyce wrote, too, famously: “Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive- the only true thing in life”). This genetics stuff, empty like everything else, will help me find compassion for them, even if now today they appear to be my enemy they were once my mother. Deciding to repay this love they once gave me is a necessary condition for arousing ones own will to enlightenment or spirit of enlightenment. It’s in the “Morning” text, too. Look for it!!! It’s also incredibly hard, especially when we feel wronged by bastards. But then of course, who is this that is feeling wronged? Why it’s a selfless being; it’s a being without essence; it is our mental continuum, which is empty of any inherent being; empty of essence. Nothing wronging nothing equals no one wronged equals no reason to feel bad or to decide to wreak revenge. But be tough. Exercise skilfulness, and remember you may an instrument to help neutralise some other beings negative karma. It’s complicated, and hard, and no one says it is easy. The Dalai Lama emphasises that we must exercise discernment, otherwise one will end up on the two extremes, and/or mad as a brush. So, in actuality, and upon reflection, literally nothing is wronged by anyone, it is just our pride or our ego or ultimately our ignorance which blinds us to this and persuades us: “I must bear a grudge against this person, etc.”:-)
14. What my direct guru Lama Tsong Khapa has taught me: In order of increasing importance the six perfections, development of which (each is given in great detail by Tsong Khapa) leads to Buddhahood and can be practised every day of ones life: 6. Generosity; 5. Ethical discipline; 4. Patience; 3. Joyous perseverence; 2. Meditative equipoise; and 1. Wisdom.
15. What I have learned: you can meditate while walking down the street; in fact you already do! Analytical meditation (what one does as one meditates on the stream of thoughts running through our minds as we, for example, walk along the street) is just as important to achieving Buddhahood as that which we generally assume to be meditation, like sitting still and trying to empty ones mind. In years to come we all might be able to empty your minds of the random musings which stream along them in our ignorance and incapacity to control that stream. But, to think “oh, I can do this now if I just sit silently and without learning the Dharma and understanding the point of mindfulness” (the proximity of death and how to try and exert control over your mental continuum as you die) is not that helpful. It will lead to failure or, if you do succeed in emptying your mind without understanding the Dharma, potential madness. Today, Guardian articles warn us of this risk, just as Tsong Khapa did in the fourteenth century! “Emptiness [of mind] without understanding emptiness can equal insanity, which is no good for any one or any mental continuum”. By learning the “Morning” and “Evening” texts off by heart and other core texts one can then analyse them any time any where so that their different levels reveal themselves to you and to me.
16. What I have learned: Don’t make a devil/a cage/a prison/ from something beautiful, the Dharma. To miss the joy is to miss all. When your cat pounces on you in the middle of your daily practice or the phone rings or your partner calls you or you’re interrupted while trying to maintain meditative equipoise or while you are practising analytic meditation: don’t get angry or do indeed please try hard to overcome that spark of frustration. Engage with the interrupter and then revert to the practice as soon as possible. The purpose of all of this to bring happiness to all sentient beings; to free them from suffering. And making them unhappy for, for example, interrupting your “me time” is, given that you are completely empty of all selfness, perfectly ridiculous. The emotions which rise up to spark anger at such interruptions, well, they’re the result of negative Karma and they create further negative Karma which projects into our future like a mould.
17. To be a Buddhist all one has to do is to take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha six times a day. One takes such refuge simply by saying “I take refuge” in those (empty) words six times. This is the only essential practice. The rest is a luxury. The rest (e.g. reading the “Morning” text all the way through or meditating on its contents) helps to power ones refuge. The two or three times (no more, I swear) I have been unable through tiredness or being at a party, for example, to read the “Morning” or the “Evening” texts, I have still taken refuge by saying those words at least six times in every twenty-four hour period since encountering the Australian nun in Ulaanbaatar that Sunday morning in January 2014.
18. When I began meditating, I simply read the “Morning” and “Evening” texts out loud to myself. It took me around an hour to read the “Morning” text to myself that first morning after receiving it from the nun in Ulaanbaatar. I soon realised I would have to wake up earlier, if I was to practise. Then, I realised, I would have to go to bed earlier. I didn’t understand even on a rudimentary basis very much of the texts at all. One morning on a run along the sea shore near Ulcinj Montenegro in May 2014, I suddenly tried and almost succeeded to run through the text in my mind, not word by word but sufficiently to divide it into a twelve part structure, ending with the dedication of merit. Now in the last quarter of 2015, I recite most of both texts by heart. The “Morning” text takes me around twenty minutes each morning, instead of an hour. Many days, one single sentence hidden in amidst the twenty one pages will occupy my mind at different times that day; sometimes it will even enter my mind at precisely the right moment to solve a question about how I should act or motivate an act that I am contemplating. When I am reading another Buddhist text -say, “Words of My Perfect Teacher” I can recall clearly the sentences containing the same ideas in the “Morning” text, even when they are using different language, as I read through the book. Only now I know parts of the “Morning” text off by heart, can I begin to meditate on it properly! This meditation can occur while I am daydreaming or walking down a street thinking of something from twenty years before or that very moment or, as I said, as a result of some incident during the working day which throws up a moral quandary about how I should properly act or how I should properly have acted, in its wake.
19. What I have learned: Tsong Khapa is really clear on this point-It is a really bad thing to set out on the path to enlightenment and then to abandon that path. It is much better never to start, rather than to cease taking refuge in the three jewels (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) after a month or two. Therefore, read all of these texts for sure. Read the books, too, by Tsong Khapa and by Robert Thurman. But if you are not yet ready to spend the rest of your life taking refuge six times daily, don’t yet start to practice. To do so, is a non-virtuous action (bad karma) extraordinaire. Maybe your next embodiment or an embodiment in millions of years will be the right time for it. Reading the documents now will, though, project into the future and help you then. I was lucky. I just started reading the “Morning” and “Evening” texts and have continued to do so (they, as I mentioned, both contain the refuge words). Only after doing so every day, some days do I have time too to explore the other texts recommended in this document as being the texts that I have most found helpful. What I am saying is (for the avoidance of all doubt): all you need to do is read the “Morning” (The first chapter in the Rinpoche text referred to earlier in this text) and “Evening” texts and even if you never read all of the other recommended texts you are on the path. But if you’re not yet sure whether or not to embark (I was lucky enough to be 100% certain), read around first.
20. Lama Tsong Khapa is my direct guru in this life time. He lived from approximately 1360-1410. For the previous five or six centuries the best minds in Tibet had put their energies into the Dharma. The same happened for the few centuries following Tsong Khapa’s embodiment. Tsong Khapa was able to synthesise the Buddha’s teachings, and the seventy thousand odd sutras or scriptures/interpretations of those teachings, into the three volumes of the Great Treatise on the Path to Enlightenment. We are almost the first generation since then to have access to this in the English language. I have found all the answers I have so far sought to questions provoked by meditating on the “Morning” and “Evening” texts within it. It is a lifetime’s work however to know these texts. Actually, I guess it is many lifetime’s work: start now? Tsong Khapa is considered to be on basically the same level as the Buddha himself.
21. What I’ve learned: You can neutralise the effects of non-virtuous actions (negative karma) by your mental continuum in this incarnation/embodiment and of your previous incarnations/embodiments stretching backwards into infinite time through two processes (both of which are inherent in the “Morning” and the “Evening” texts): purification and accumulating merit. The effect of virtuous and non-virtuous actions projects far, far into the future and can never be destroyed. It can only be neutralised, either by fruition or purification/accumulating merit. The good thing about this is: when bad things happen to you – you know it’s your fault, ultimately; it’s only karma coming late. And the second good thing is that you know that that bad action’s result is now extinguished. So dust yourself off, and get on with life. When good things happen to people who in this life seem like the most unconscionable scoundrels, take solace in the idea that, well, they earned this from previous lives’ good actions and now they are receiving their just desserts, just as you will. This is why some undeserving people are rich in this life, while many virtuous people starve to death. That’s karma. It’s immensely complicated. I only know a tiny part of it. For hundreds of years thousands of the most clever human minds that ever were embodied occupied themselves with elucidating and debating its intricacies. Tsong Khapa summarises the product of this labour. Before reading him, most people (well, me) only have a very bare bones idea of an echo of the law of Karma. Peeling off this ignorance is an immense pleasure and helps you in every day circumstances the moment you start learning about it - when you feel jealous for a moment when you see or hear something that at first sight or sound does not “feel” right or just; whenever, apply it and you’ll see, it helps in the here and now, and of course it will help you later.
22. Robert Thurman’s teaching in the Jewel Tree of Enlightenment book; the teaching embodied in the nineteenth century book, as newly translated into English and published by Yale University Press, “Words of My Perfect Teacher”; the teaching in the Great Treatise on the Path to Enlightenment; and the teaching in the recent and for the first time ever in the English language full translation of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin edition by Gyurme Dorje and Graham Coleman) have been particularly helpful to me. Each of them is introduced by the current Dalai Lama, which is a mark of quality and consistency with Tsong Khapa’s teaching. Of course, the greatest external influence on my thinking is the “Morning” and “Evening” texts. It is these texts which sparked the investigations that have started me on the path of relentless and continuous re-reading and re-studying and meditating on those recommended books’ contents.
23. It’s a long and lonely path, like life and indeed like death itself. I hope to achieve Buddhahood in this embodiment. My mental continuum may not be as lucky as it is to be given such an embodiment as it has been given in this life again, ever. I can only hope that I live long enough to practise enough to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings (the Greater Vehicle/Mahayana) rather than simply to avoid being reborn (the middle vehicle for people with middling potential) and rather than simply to achieve an equivalent or better rebirth/embodiment for my mental continuum (the lesser vehicle) (Tsong Khapa with exquisite clarity delineates all of this in Volume 1 of the Great Treatise). Of course, I cannot know yet if I have great, middle or lesser potential. All I can do is to continue along the path and to continue to practise as hard as I can without making an enemy out of the gift which is the freedom I have been given by this embodiment.
- Practise skillful means; the middle way; assiduously; and with as much joyous perseverance at all times as you can.