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Advice to Three-Year Retreatants
This
is addressed to those staying in three-year retreat in Those
of you who live in The
students of my teacher, Kangyur Rinpoche, in particular have come to regard me as their own root teacher and have a sincere
desire to practise Dharma throughout their entire lives. Through the inspiration and assistance of Tsetrul Pema Wangyal Rinpoche,
they have established a retreat centre at Chanteloube. The real purpose behind this centre is that those who remain there
in retreat establish themselves firmly on the path to liberation. If they do so, they will fulfil the enlightened vision of
Kangyur Rinpoche, serve their own teachers, and make the very best use of the many profound teachings they have received. With
this in mind, all who commit themselves to remain in retreat should ensure that faith, renunciation, compassion and looking
into the nature of mind lie at the very heart of their practice. Faith ‘Faith’
means complete trust in, and reliance upon, the Three Jewels in general, and our own teacher in particular, as well as in
the Dharma we are practising. If we practise for a long time, after a while we might think, “I still haven’t gained
any signs of progress! The teacher can’t have given me the most profound instructions. It would be better for me to
do the main practice, rather than the preliminaries, because it’s more profound!” Or if we are doing the main
practice we might think, “I think it would be better for me to set aside this simple generation stage practice and do
some dzogrim instead.” Or even, “Dzogchen would be more profound than these completion stage practices like tummo.” You
might think that once you have received the Dzogchen teachings you will have all kinds of profound lofty experiences, even
after just a few days. If you have such high expectations, then when things don’t work out that way, you will begin
to doubt the instructions and relax your diligence. Or, if you do develop the slightest hint of renunciation or gain some
minor experience or realization, you will only develop pride and think, “The Kagyü, Sakya and Gelug schools have nothing
to compare with these Nyingma teachings!” You must avoid developing wrong views such as this and arrogantly supposing
that you have gained some special experience or realization. No matter who you are, the ordinary mind is always prone to change
and transformation, so you should try never to get carried away. Even
if you were to practise day and night with unflagging diligence for a full twelve years and still fail to have even one good
dream, you must never lose heart. Recognizing that this is due simply to the strength of your own obscurations, you must be
confident that neither your teachers nor the teachings will ever let you down. On
the other hand, even if you were to make such swift progress that in just a single day you reached the level at which there
is nothing further in samsara to be abandoned nor anything further in nirvana to be gained, you should feel no pride, because
to do so would only be to invite the demon of obstacles. That is why Jetsün Milarepa said: When
you are approaching the end of the Dharma, Continue
ceaselessly, without any highs or lows, And
without hopes for signs of swift attainment, Ensure
your practice endures as long as you do! This
is marvellous advice. Renunciation ‘Renunciation’
means that while in the retreat centre, every single time you recite the Seven Line
Prayer or complete a single mala of mani mantras, you must dedicate it towards
the attainment of buddhahood for yourself and all other sentient beings. While in retreat, you should not waste even a single
moment in idleness or frivolity, and you must avoid any form of insincerity or duplicity, such as pretending—for as
long as you are in other people’s view—to practise perfectly. Do
all that you can to bring your own stubborn mind under control and to develop your faith, diligence and renunciation. Never
think that the Dharma you are practising is for your benefit alone. To recite even a single mani mantra is of inconceivable
benefit, so dedicate it for the sake of all who live. Again
and again, develop compassion for all sentient beings in general, and particularly for those who dislike you. It might be
difficult at first, but you will never attain enlightenment as long as you continue to feel ill-will towards your enemies.
Those who are now your enemies were in former lives your parents, and there is nothing fixed about the status of an enemy
or friend. To feel hostility towards enemies and affection towards your friends is nothing but a deluded form of perception.
If you train your mind to recognize everything as insubstantial like a dream, hostility towards enemies will lose its meaning
entirely. This is crucially important, because ordinarily our lives are driven by the yearning to acquire food and clothing,
possessions, partners, status and acclaim. We put a great deal of thought into devising the cleverest, most efficient ways
to obtain them, and we think, “So-and-so has this much money, my friends have this much, so I need more.” Or:
“In the past, I stayed in this kind of house, in this part of town, but now I shall move to a better place.” We
must put a stop to all such thinking. With
ordinary work, the more you do the more suffering you create for the future. But now that you have found a human existence,
met an authentic teacher, and received the Dharma teachings, your situation is even better and more fortunate than that of
Indra, king of the gods. If you now put the teachings into practice with steadfast determination, you are sure to find happiness
in all your future lives. So be content with only the most basic food and clothing. Let me put it simply: do all that you
can to renounce and minimize the ordinary affairs and activities of samsara. Noone
should stay in the retreat centre without taking the vows of refuge. Even if you are a layperson, for the three years that
you are in retreat you must avoid sexual relations, and, while in retreat, it is enormously significant and beneficial to
wear the robes of a monk or nun. The Buddha himself said it is permissible for anyone who has taken the vows of refuge to
wear the monastic robes. Compassion Generally
speaking, you have been practising the teachings of the Mahayana ever since you first entered the door of the Dharma, and
this is really nothing other than compassion. Without genuine compassion there is simply no possibility of reaching buddhahood.
In
their delusion, all the beings of samsara cherish only their own selfish interests and neglect others’ welfare. At the
moment, no matter how well off we may be in terms of food, clothing or material possessions, and no matter how much happiness
we may experience, we can never be satisfied. At the same time, if we give away even just a tiny fraction of what we own,
it feels as if we are losing something enormous. We must let go of such attitudes, and, instead of caring for ourselves alone,
learn to cherish others. Previously we neglected others, but now we must neglect our own selfish goals. Whenever we perform
any virtuous deed with body, speech or mind, we must first remember that we are doing so as a means to bring about the enlightenment
of all. In
Dharma practice, the most important thing is motivation. If it is motivated by the wish to benefit all beings, then even a
single prostration or a single recitation of the hundred-syllable mantra will yield inexhaustible merit—merit that will
remain until we have reached enlightenment and there are no beings left in samsara. Whereas if we do not have this motivation
of universal benevolence, even a hundred thousand prostrations, or a hundred thousand recitations of the hundred-syllable
mantra, will bear fruit only once before the merit is exhausted, and a single burst of anger will be enough to destroy our
entire stock of virtue. It is crucial to understand this. If we consider that our practice is for the sake of all others,
then because sentient beings are infinitely vast in number, our own merit will be equally vast. No
one is entirely free from suffering, so consider all the major and minor sufferings that befall others, and imagine them happening
to you instead. How would you feel? Surely you would do all that you could to find a way to avoid the pain. So reflect continually
on all the sufferings that other beings undergo and develop the compassionate wish that they may be free from pain. Once you
have true compassion, you will naturally feel the wish to benefit others. Our teacher, the Buddha, while still a bodhisattva,
had such vast and overwhelming compassion that he made five hundred prayers of aspiration for our benefit, and, as his followers,
we too must make compassion the very core of our practice. The
immeasurable benefits of generating true compassion are described in detail in The
Words of My Perfect Teacher and the Bodhicharyavatara, so please study them.
Looking into the Nature of Mind To
look into the nature of the mind we must understand how all its ordinary thoughts about anything and everything imaginable
are just empty and insubstantial. Until now, we have been the slave of what we call ‘mind,’ forced to wander helplessly
through samsaric existence. Now we must reverse the situation, and take control of our own mind. It will be easy to do this
if we have some real understanding of how the mind is empty, but just entertaining some vague notion of mind’s emptiness,
by thinking, “Well, this is what the masters say,” or “This is what it says in the texts,” will not
help us to recognize the insubstantiality of our own deluded perception. Turn
your attention within then, and allow your mind to relax. You will notice not just one thought or idea, but many. For example,
if you think of your mother, that is one thought, but then it in turn evokes all kinds of other thoughts, such as memories
of the kindness she showed you. If she is still alive, you might think about going to visit her, and if not, you might feel
sad. These are thoughts of attachment. If you think about your enemies, reflecting on the ways they have hurt you in the past,
how they are sure to do so again in the future, and how you must find some way to be rid of them, these are thoughts of aversion.
You might wonder where this attachment and aversion come from. In fact, they come from the deluded belief in the existence
of what we call “I.” Where
is such an “I” to be found? Is it in the body or the mind? If you really look into the body, examining each of
its parts—flesh, blood, bones and skin—you can not find anything at all called ‘body,’ so how could
this be the location of the “I”? The mind, on the other hand, is insubstantial, so how could the “I”
abide within it? In fact, the “I” is merely a concept or a thought. There is no location within a thought, and
nothing could remain there, but still the power of one thought, such as the thought of our mother, causes us to think another
thought, about her kindness to us, and that in turn inspires the thought of wishing to see her. If
we look into this process in more detail, we can see that while we are thinking about our mother’s kindness, the initial
thought of our mother is no longer there—it has already gone. And the thought that we must visit her has not yet occurred—it
is still in the future. As soon as we look into it, the present thought of our mother’s kindness is no longer there;
it has already turned into the future thought of wanting to visit her. This means that the thoughts of the past, present and
future can not exist at the same time, and we only use these terms for the sake of communication. The past is gone, like a
person who has died, and the future (or ‘that which is yet to come’) does not exist at all. In fact, there is
no such thing as a ‘present thought’ existing somehow independently of past and future. Before we thought of our
mother that ‘present thought’ was still in the future. Then, as we thought of her, it was present. Finally, as
we brought to mind her kindness, it was already in the past. For
one thought to pass through these three phases of time is a sign of its impermanence, and whatever is impermanent is empty.
It is because a thing is empty that it can change over the course of the past, present and future. Consider
the surface of a mirror: because it is empty [and not fixed in a particular way], reflections can appear within it. When a
person’s likeness appears in a mirror, the reflection resembles the real person, but the person’s face has neither
entered the mirror nor been transferred to its surface. The image of the face appears because of certain causes and conditions,
including the clarity of the mirror and the presence of the person’s face before it. The reflection of the face and
the face itself are not the same. The reflection is inanimate, and when the reflection disappears the real face does not.
A face can be burned if it is touched by fire, but you can not burn a reflection. Nevertheless, the reflection and the face
are not completely different either, because the reflection can not appear in the absence of the person’s face, and
if the person adopts a particular expression, such as a smile or a look of anger, the reflection also appears that way. For
these reasons, thoughts and reflections appear to be real only when we fail to examine them or look into them in any detail.
If we do pause to consider them, we find that although they appear, they do not really exist. And this is true not just of
these phenomena. It applies to all the appearances of our deluded samsaric experience: they seem real enough as long as we
do not examine them too deeply, but when we do, we find that they are not real. This is why we refer to them as “unexamined,
seeming reality.” If
the understanding of this point develops and takes hold, so that it becomes self-sustaining, that is what we call ‘experience.’
When we become more and more familiar with this, so that the mind is no longer swayed by thoughts of aversion or attachment,
that is what we call ‘realization.’ When
we examine thoughts again and again in this way, we come to see that although they have no real existence, still they appear,
and although they appear, they are insubstantial. At the same time, we understand how the thoughts of the past, present and
future exist only as mere names or labels, and have no more reality than that. If
we have this understanding, then whenever we think of our mother and remember all the kindness she showed us, we need not
succumb to thoughts of attachment. We will think, “Even if I were to go and see my mother, what good would that do?
She has managed to provide food and clothing for herself, and even to provide for my material needs as well. If I were to
take on this role, I would need to find work in some trade or business, and that would provoke all kinds of attachment and
aversion and produce lots of distractions, which would only come in the way of my Dharma practice. Instead, I should put my
energy into practising the Dharma, straightaway as much as I can, then dedicate all my sources of merit to my mother, to help
relieve her sufferings of birth, death and the bardo states. It would be better for me to forget about ordinary worldly feelings
of attachment to my mother. She has other children who can take care of her material needs, but there is no one but me to
offer her spiritual assistance.” If we think this way, it will prevent us getting caught in the ordinary patterns of
thought which can come up whenever we recall our mother. This
also gives us some clues as to how we can give up our thoughts of aversion towards our enemies. At first it might be a little
difficult to overcome our attachment and aversion, but by practising again and again, it will become easier. If
you can overcome attachment and aversion, you will no longer accumulate karma. Morevoer, if you look into the unaltered state
of mind that follows whenever feelings of attachment or aversion have subsided, you will find the nature of mind. As long
as there are not too many thoughts arising, look undistractedly into the mind itself. Whenever there are lots of thoughts,
examine them in the way I just described. If you become really familiar with this by training in it again and again, recognition
of the nature of mind will occur naturally and spontaneously. The mind will no longer be caught up in thoughts, and even if
thoughts do arise, they will not have any real strength and there will be no need to analyze or examine them. It will be sufficient
simply to maintain an unaltered state of mind. If
ever you can not counteract a thought of attachment or aversion, repeat the process of investigation. When you have thoughts,
don’t react with anxiety, thinking, “I shouldn’t have thoughts during meditation! Now lots of thoughts are
going to come.” Simply look straight into the nature of any thought—be it positive or negative—and it will
lose its strength and disappear. Without letting go of the state which follows, look gently into the nature of mind, and thoughts
will vanish by themselves. When thoughts no longer occur one after another in swift succession you will gradually be able
to liberate them. When
looking into the nature of mind, don’t expect to gain some exceptionally high or profound realization, or to see anything
new. Nor should you hesitate or doubt your ability to meditate. Just trust that the nature of mind is simply the mind itself
left in an unaltered state, and do all that you can to sustain this, without distraction, at all times, during and between
the meditation sessions. Don’t expect to gain realization in just a few months, or even years. Whether you develop any
of the qualities that come from the practice or not, remain steadfastly determined and resolve to continue the practice with
diligence, day and night, throughout this life, future lives and the bardo state. Understand
this: it is more important to take to heart the key instructions than to receive a great many teachings. In
general, you should look at the instruction manual Words of My Perfect Teacher,
and check whether or not your practice accords with what it says there. If you notice something that does not correspond,
change it; and if there is something that is only partially in agreement, see whether or not it can be improved. Aspire
to practise the Dharma authentically, and never do anything that might upset your Dharma brothers and sisters. In
short, devote yourself to the Dharma as much as you possibly can, with body, speech and mind. I
will certainly come and visit you, and I will always remember to pray and practise for your protection, so that all your wishes
in accordance with the Dharma will be accomplished. | Translated by Adam |
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