Gyalwang Karmapa’s teachings on “Living the Dharma”    (12th - 14th January, 2009)

January 12, 2009, Tergar Monastery, Bodh Gaya, report by Jo Gibson, photos taken by Karma Lekcho

This teaching, organized by the Kagyu Monlam Organising Committee, was the first teaching in India directed specifically at Westerners.

The doors opened shortly after 7.30am when people began moving through the security checks. Inside the hall, people sat in organized rows on mats and cushions or plastic chairs for those unable to sit on the floor for extended periods. His Holiness was scheduled to start teaching at 9.00am and 3.00pm, and the final quarter of an hour before each teaching began was designated as “silent meditation”. The audience complied and so before each session there was a hushed, peaceful atmosphere of quiet introspection and expectation.

Not everybody sat inside; those who chose to sit outside, on the veranda around the assembly hall or on the lawns in front were able to hear clearly.

His Holiness began by welcoming everyone in English and then continued in Tibetan. He said he viewed everybody in the hall as his friends, and reflected on how they had come there from all over the world, from different countries, environments, cultures and conditions, to hear about living the dharma, so, in spite of his youth, he would try to share his own experiences.

First he tackled the question, “What is dharma?”

Practising Dharma is more than performing rituals which require a special place or a special time, or special equipment. At a deeper level, the Dharma is something that transforms our minds, an ongoing process whereby we examine our minds, checking the afflictive emotions and the three mind poisons, and slowly try to become less angry, less attached and so forth. The practice of Dharma leads to a slow change in body, speech and mind from within, hence, it could be done anywhere, even while you are at work; it doesn’t require a special time. Indeed, the kind of dharma practise where you reflect on your aspirations, your way of thinking, how you relate to other people, and how you react and connect with other people is very important. Drawing on experience, Karmapa said that his own life seemed to be getting busier and busier, so that he felt that the time he had to work for the benefit of others and the time to meditate was shrinking. Thus his dharma practice these days involved trying to help the many people who he came across daily, being very aware of his thought processes, and attempting to live his life with the intention to benefit sentient beings. His priority was the happiness of others, and he examined his actions, what he said, and his mind to check the fit. That in essence was his practise. When he was young he had had time for formal prayers and recitation, about an hour each morning and evening. These days, with little time for formal prayers, he kept all the people whom he met in his thoughts, whether he was working, eating or sleeping. This seemed to be a very live, real and practical form of dharma practice.

It was an important foundation for practice, keeping other sentient beings in the forefront of our minds, as if they were there before our eyes in a real and very present way, otherwise we might lose contact with the people we wanted to benefit, and become lazy in our efforts.

Another important support for practice was to use others to reduce our own self-interest, by thinking deeply about their suffering and happiness, which would lead us to develop a feeling of responsible concern for their welfare. This would not only help counterbalance our self-cherishing attitude, it would also mean that our constant preoccupation with our own welfare would diminish, and we would feel more inclined to transform ourselves.

This led to the next important aspect of practice: transforming ourselves by working on our negative mental and emotional states. It was often difficult to truly see the negative aspects of these mental and emotional states, but when you did, it was as clear as daylight that you had to do something about them. It was like falling in love. People have many different relationships, but there may not be a great commitment or there might be some confusion. Then one day you fall in love. All the earlier relationships fade into insignificance, and there’s never any question about it. You are in love with this one person and you want to spend your life with them. It’s as clear and simple as that.

The experience of Bodhichitta was also like this – a wish-fulfilling gem. When we develop bodhichitta our hearts fill with joy but until we find that wish-fulfilling gem in our hearts it can be difficult; afterwards dharma practice becomes easy and the purpose of life becomes clear.

There were many parallels between life and dharma practice. In everyday life if our goals are unclear or confused, we do not achieve what we want to achieve. Similarly, dharma practise needed a clear objective too. Thinking too much about it was not beneficial and only produced more conceptual thoughts! The crux was to work for the benefit of beings!

People often asked His Holiness what they should practice and he usually suggested the Chenresig or Tara Saddhanas, but then if they asked,

“How many arms?” or “Which colour?” it showed they’d missed the point completely, failing to comprehend the core meaning of these practices which is meditation on loving kindness and compassion in order to transform our minds. Without this understanding, any practice becomes blind faith not living dharma. Therefore when we practice dharma it has to be strongly related with our minds; it has to become one with our life.

His Holiness then suggested a different tack, which beginners might find more useful, which was to start instead from the point of our lives, look at the difficulties we are experiencing, and see if the Dharma could shed some light on them. This would certainly be less disruptive and less disturbing to our families than suddenly bringing home vajras, damarus, bells etc. and doing strange things! If we lived with the intention of being useful and helpful to other people, the dharma in our lives would become stronger, and our lives would become dharma practice.

But in order to transform our minds through dharma practice we needed to receive the pith instructions, and we needed to receive them from a genuine lama. This was someone who had realized the Dharma in their lives, someone who was a genuine refuge. There were also people at a lower level of realization with whom it was possible to study. It was said that anything that appears can be a lama - and His Holiness illustrated how the seasons could be our teacher. On a superficial level, winter meant cold weather and warm clothes, but it was also a paradigm for impermanence. If we used our eyes, there was a lot to be learned about the Dharma in life itself.

His Holiness concluded the morning session by launching the booklet he had produced on protecting the environment: Environmental Guidelines for Karma Kagyu Buddhist Monasteries, Centers and Community

In the afternoon session, Gyalwang Karmapa clarified the advice on integrating Dharma into daily life he had given in the morning session. He had not meant that formal practice or retreat were unimportant, but wanted to show how it was also not absolutely necessary to do formal practice, in the context of the many Westerners who came to see him who had so much work to do and very little time for meditation. It would also be wrong, he added, to give the impression that those engaged in formal practice, retreat and meditation were the ‘real thing’.

He then went on to discuss how to integrate formal practice into daily life.

Generally speaking dharma practice was not restricted to the temple, monastery or retreat, or the shrine room at home. It can be done anywhere, on a picnic, in the office, in prison; some great masters had said we could even practice dharma in our sleep, if we knew how to do it, which was useful as life was half-awake and half-sleeping. If possible, we need to set some time aside each day, in the morning, for formal practice, and then the day can become worthwhile.

Then at work, if we make the commitment that our work will be useful and beneficial for society then the work we do can become a form of giving – and hence the practice of generosity. When we finish work and return home, if we can bring up our children in a way that will be beneficial to the world that is also a dharma practice. If we reflect on the love we have for our partner or for our family, it is possible to transfer that loving kindness to other sentient beings. His Holiness gave the example of someone who is in love – even when they water the plants; there is a loving quality to the action.

In the hectic schedule of our day-to-day lives we needed to create a time and space in which we could rest our minds, otherwise they became too turbulent and disturbed. This was the role of meditation. Through meditation we could develop a peaceful, calm, and joyous mind.

Gyalwang Karmapa returned to a theme he had introduced during the pre-Monlam teachings, that of building a home for our minds, a place to come back to, where our minds could rest and de-stress. These days he himself had limited time for formal practice, but when he did practice, he did it one-pointedly. Nothing else was allowed to intrude. Mahamudra practice describes a state free of conceptual thoughts, and it was important to aspire to this.

Too much clinging and attachment to things was a great obstacle to finding peace of mind, because it was impossible to separate the mind when we were attached. Anger is present sometimes but not all the time, whereas attachment is there all the time, making it very difficult to separate ourselves from it. As the Tibetan saying goes: If we hold it, it burns our hand. If we don’t hold it, it breaks.

Gyalwang Karmapa then explained how attachment arises and the difficulties it causes.

The first problem was that when we were attached to something we only saw the positive never the negative. Something that we are attached to appears very good, and the object of our attachment is seen as something desirable. Attachment deprives us of our freedom. We see something we want, for instance, and feel compelled to buy it. In a way we are overpowered by the object that we are attached to. We are trapped by it. His Holiness described how, as a child, he was taken to shops in Beijing which stocked the most amazing toys. At that point he understood why people might steal. What we see as desirable or undesirable is the product of our own minds, perhaps sometimes through cultural conditioning, and we often overvalue something, like someone being fooled by a fake diamond, thinking that it is 100% desirable when it is worthless.

Could compassion be viewed as a form of attachment? His Holiness agreed that it could be similar but the difference was that we had a choice whether to be compassionate or not. Furthermore, the grounds for compassion were genuine- not to abandon sentient beings, whereas with attachment it was “I want”.

Gyalwang Karmapa told a story to illustrate how attachment led to suffering.

There is a rule that monks cannot touch women. So, one day two monks came to a river, and there they met a pretty young woman who asked for help because the water was so deep. The younger of the two protested, “No,no! We are monks. We can’t touch you.” But the older monk just picked her up and carried her across. The young monk was quite outraged by the older monk’s behaviour, and after a while, he challenged him about his action.

The old monk replied, “I carried her across the river, but you are still carrying her.”

Returning to the question of the role of formal practice, His Holiness warned about some pitfalls to avoid. Particularly, going into retreat required correct attitude and motivation. The purpose of retreat was to pacify body, speech and mind, but some people seemed to regard retreat as a tradition or something that had to be done saying, “Oh, I have to do a three year retreat.” In which case, there would be little benefit.

Finally, the principal thing in the Dharma is the union of wisdom and compassion. These two should also go together in our lives. We needed to know what the sources of suffering were, and what would bring true happiness, so that we could understand what was to be abandoned and what to be adopted.