Buddhist Hour
Script No. 403
Broadcast live on Hillside 88.0 FM
on Sunday 16 October 2005CE 2549 Buddhist Era
This script is entitled:
Atisha’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, Part XI
Thank you for joining us. Today’s program is part eleven of our series, Atisha’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. Atisha Dipamkara was a notable Buddhist Master from India, and upon the request of his disciple, Byang-chub-oe, he composed a text called “A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment.”
In Tibet, the teachings of the Buddha had begun to decline. “Masters and Spiritual friends were arguing back and forth about things they themselves did not comprehend.” Any person who was seeking the true Dharma understood that this was not beneficial.
Atisha, who was of incredible power, came to Tibet and untangled the tangle, so to speak. With his concise manner of teaching, he was able to clarify the misconceptions of Buddhist philosophy and practice that had begun to pervade Tibetan practitioners.
The founder of our Temple, the Master John David Hughes, gave an oral commentary on “A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment.”
Master John Hughes gave this teaching to his students in 1989, during a five-day meditation course.
The teachings were recorded on audio-cassettes and have recently been transcribed.
On last week’s program, John D. Hughes explained how mindfulness, or sati, is a fundamental training in Buddhism. Without moment to moment awareness of your own mind, you will not be able to change your habits and you will just continue in the way you always have. In our case this can be hate, greed and ignorance, which all are causes of our own suffering. If we remain vigilant in our practice of mindfulness, we will be able to remove our mental defilement’s and attain peace of mind.
On today’s program, Master John D. Hughes begins with an analogy for restraining the six senses. He began in the following way:
Suppose you had a big bird, say a big eagle, that could fly in the air and you put a rope around the neck of that big eagle. And then you say you had a big alligator that liked to run to the water, you put a rope around the alligator. The eagle wants to go up in the air, that's it's natural habitat. The alligator wants to go to the water. Say you had a big rabbit that likes to burrow in the ground. You put a rope around rabbit, then you might have say, a big turtle that likes to get in the mud. You put a rope around the turtle. And then you, you know you can produce other ones for your mind.
Now you join the ropes together. They're all tied together, but they haven't got a stake, so they're all roped together, these animals. Now sometimes, say the eagle, say if the eagle was the seeing consciousness, it wants to fly up in the sky. It drags the other things up in the sky, and then it flaps its wings and gets tired. And then maybe the alligator feels strong and it drags the others to the water. Then maybe the rabbit gets strong and burrows underground, drags them into the ground. And then the turtle pulls them into the mud. So you can see that, you know, there's five senses. There's actually six players in this game, your five senses and the mind.
Now that means you're always in competing stresses, you never know which, you never know what your going to see next. You say, ah, I'm gonna go there and it pulls you away. So, that, they can, they can do like a random walk, statistically, that assemblage can end up anywhere on land, sea or air at any given minute. The Buddha says, how do you deal with the senses? You drive a bloody big stake in the ground, like a telegraph pole. You rope each sense, each animal, to that telegraph pole so one can go out and then it reaches the limit of the rope, like a choke chain. But it doesn't disturb the other ones when it flies, or runs out of the body.
And then the, each are roped. Now that stake is mindfulness. That is mindfulness. This is why Buddhism talks about being mindful, being mindful. You put that stake in. What you do then, when you get used to meditating, gradually there's a ..., you put a limit, a constraint. I'll make the rope for the eagle so long. It can only fly so high and that's it. You put constraints on the system.
Later on you pull the ropes in a bit, but that's after you've tamed the seeing consciousness, the hearing consciousness, like you tame a wild horse. So the mind, the mind is difficult to tame because it's got these five consciousnesses of the five senses plus the mind itself. So there's, you've got six players and they've all got different agendas. They've all got different targets of what they want to grab hold of.
Now the, until you actually meditate enough, meditate on hearing, seeing, and so on and you've had enough experience, you don't realise that there is dukkha of uncertainty of what happens next. Because, you see the, the seeing consciousness can come on strong, unprompted, and then it dies. Another day it might come on unprompted, weak. So your seeing isn't a torment. But the hearing consciousness might be strong. You want to, you want to run to the objects of hearing.
So by this turmoil, you know, the point is you've been in human birth, you're so bloody used to it. Now what logic system do you use to accommodate those six competing desires or drives? Well obviously you, not only do you get these five senses plus the mind, but you, the minute you get human birth you get some sort of logic system, some, you know, central processing unit that switches but that central processor unit is only good for dealing with turbulence and if it overloads one of the senses with, and it drags you along so you're, you're being buffeted. You're in dukkha. You're always in suffering.
Now when you practice correctly it's like the analogy with the, that you tame those animals, and one day you say to the six animals sit, and they all sit down together. There is no tension on the rope and then, they're still alive, you haven't killed your seeing, you haven't killed your hearing, you haven't killed your taste. See, people who have wrong view say "Well it's such a big problem the only thing is I wish I was dead and then I'll have no seeing, no hearing, no thinking". They go towards nihilism, nihil meaning nothing. Nihilism. It is a wrong view! When you die that's not the end of your seeing, hearing and so on. They form up again depending on conditions and you take rebirth.
Now, you could try a long time by yourself, but if you wanted to train a horse, and you've got no skill, it's better to go and get a horse trainer and say look, I've got this bloody stroppy horse. Can you train it? Tell me what to do, and the horse trainer will tell you what to do. If you've got a mad dog, you go to a dog trainer and it subdues the dog. If you got a mad eagle, you go to a falconer or something, a person who knows how to train the eagle. You got a mad crocodile, I suppose you get Crocodile Dundee or someone to tame the crocodile. And if you've got a mad rabbit, I suppose you'd get Bugs Bunny or someone, I don't know.
Now the Buddha, one of the epithets of the Buddha, is tamer of men. You can read that as men or women. Now what is he taming? He tames the minds! Now the mind is chief as the Dhammapada says, whatever is the most powerful signal on the mind, that is what you will act on.
Now, if you've got a defilement on your mind, and it's strong, you'll act in a dumb manner. So if you want to play cops and robbers, the robbers have, you know, the strong thing, rob, rob, rob. Stick up a bank. The cops say lock up the bad men, lock up the bad men. The doctors say cure the patient, cure the patient. The typers say type the typewriter, type the typewriter. The student says study the subject, study the subject, you know. The painter says paint the picture, paint the picture.
But whatever the, whatever the desire to do anything, whatever it is, wasn't made in this present life, it was made in a past life and then it was either attenuated or accentuated in this life. So I'm sure everyone in the world says, ah, I think I'll paint a painting, and then for some people it's weak, it dies. For other people they paint, they paint, they paint. They paint more. Everyone says oh, I'll do this. If it's powerful it will drive you. I wrote an article for one magazine once on Right Livelihood, it said you don't have to worry mums about your first kid’s choice, its probably karmic anyway what they go to.
So, there is not, ...yet everyone says I think I will become this, I think I will become a painter. I think I will become a typist. There's this delusion I think. There are mental events appearing and disappearing and when they're strong and repeated that's what you do. So you haven't really got, if you could think properly, you would have perfect life. Because if your, if you have, could think properly and had wisdom everything you did with, like you'd have the midas touch. Every action you did would bring happiness to you.
Now there's no pleasing others, like childish people, no matter what you give them. They never say thank you, they just ask for more. If you don't give them what, what they want, they'll abuse you so you can't please stupid, childish people. There's no, so if you're in birth and you meet childish people they are going to bitch at you. So consequently you get praise and blame. So the minute you get in human birth some people will praise you, other people will blame you. That goes with the territory. Now there are minds that sit above, reacting, they're like proactive minds. Can hear praise, can hear blame and just say ah, worldly conditions. Gain and loss ... worldly conditions. Happiness and unhappiness ... worldly conditions. If unhappiness comes it had cause in the past, you did dumb action, caused unhappiness. If happiness comes, good action, caused happiness.
Now, you can't make ...., your logic system, if you study, is on the pursuit of happiness or something. But happiness, if happiness comes its impermanent. Unhappiness will come. The criteria for Buddhism is not happiness. That's not what you're after. That's a by product. That your target is wisdom. Your mind is to target wisdom. As an accidental by product of pursuing wisdom you get happiness. But that's not what gives you your buzz, if you want to talk about buzz. Actually you don't have any buzz. You just have peace.
So there's a hierarchy. When you're practicing correctly you get gain, gain gain, every day. People who know me, who've been around me see everyday things come in, great things happen. People give me this, people give me that. Some days people come and abuse me, they change their mind in one or two minutes. Sometimes people want to kill me. They can't get here. So I have good conditions. Now they are, I am working on exactly the same systems as you are. There's no difference.
I am in human birth, you are in human birth. I am not a deva or some god or something. I'm just human being. Except the difference is I trained my mind in the past lives which I can remember. Whatever you're doing I've done it before you. You have trouble with your mind. I've done it before you. Now how do you find the way to train your mind? If you put it on your system. Your system brought you to this, some happy, some unhappy. If you keep repeating, like if you've got a system, for example, and it makes you a thousand dollars a week, you can't increase your income to ten thousand dollars a week because that's the limit of that system. You've got to alter that system. You've gotta' change something, because if you run the same system you get the same result.
Now if your logic systems were superior to mine, in reality, you would have more peace than me, more goodies than me, more everything than me. But if you start to measure my day, you start to measure your day, you see there's a difference.
Now, you could, do trial and error. You could say there's something sus with your system, your logic system and try and tinker it. However, you don't have to, just like you don't have to re-invent the wheel, you don't have to invent gas or electricity. It's already been done for you. The method of training the mind has already been done for you by the Buddha, and then the Buddha's successors, and that's been field tested for the last two and a half thousand years. So hundreds of thousands of people, in the last two and a half thousand years, have attained enlightenment by requesting to be taught. But on the other hand millions of people have got screwed up because they mistook, they thought they were going to get a good teacher and they got some con.
So in the text here is this part which it describes the properties of the Guru and if your Guru doesn't meet these criteria run away. So it takes a while. So the qualities of the Guru are this, hear it from the Guru, hear how to do by the Guru. I mean the kind of Guru that causes one to beget the thought of enlightenment and if he is that then he is also a Guru in the lineage of the Sangha as well as Shantideva. So, one of the texts say, "Noble youth, a Bodhisattva, rightly guided by a spiritual friend, does not fall into bad destinies. A Bodhisattva protected by a spiritual friend makes no mistakes in his training. Motivated by a spiritual friend he transcends the world. Showing reverence to a spiritual friend, he perseveres in not forgetting his practice. Adopted by a spiritual friend he is unassailable by any deed or corruption. It is the spiritual friend who impresses on him the things that need to be done. He turns his indifference aside and drives him forth from the city of samsara, the worldly buzz. Therefore, noble youth, since this is so, you must walk continually in the presence of spiritual friends".
With mind like earth, not sinking under the burden of all things, with mind like diamond, you know, diamond is hard. It's not easy to scratch, not changing in that sense. With mind like a pup, little puppy. Not a mad dog, not easily provoked. With a mind like the Chakra-vala range, unshakable by any suffering. With a mind like a servant, uncomplaining in any work. Like a sweeper sweeping the streets, dismissing over-weening pride. Like a wagon, carrying heavy burdens. Like a ship, unwearied in it's coming and goings. With a mind like a wise son, every studying the face of the spiritual friend. With such a mind give reverent service to the spiritual friend. Noble youth, you must see yourself as a sick man and the spiritual friend as the doctor. His instructions are the medicine and the cure of your sickness is taking to heart the prescriptions.
So in another text, if the Bodhisattva has learned to read and recite any four line stanzas about giving, conduct and patience, zeal, meditation or insight, and about accumulating the equipment on the Bodhisattva path, he must then give reverence to that doctrine. So he could either give reverence to the Guru, like the Sangha, or to the Doctrine, the Dharma. But the Doctrine was written for human beings by Gurus, by teachers. So whether you take a line of text and make sure you get a right text, and make that your guide, the Dharma your guide, the written Dharma your guide or you sit hearing the same text read by a Guru is irrelevant. It depends on your temperament.
But, of course, if you've just got a text, they're very profound, these texts, they're not subtle. They are subtle. So even if you reverenced and attended and supported the Acariya, the teacher, for many world cycles, as those stanzas have names, and letters and words, the reverence due to the teacher O householder would still not be enough, much less the reverence due to the Doctrine itself.
Now the order of power is Dharma, the teachings, the Buddha says this. The highest power is the Dharma, the Buddha teachings. We call em' Buddha teachings, they don't belong to anyone. It's just the Buddha discovered them. Then Buddha, then Sangha. There are other pertinent accounts of relying on a Guru and then they give examples. There are certain, this is the commentary by Atisha, there are certain questions one must ask about this matter. What qualities make a Bodhisattva a spiritual friend? You must ask these questions. What qualities make him effective as a spiritual friend? What qualities make him stand out as inspiration for faith or confidence if you like to translate. Remember, this was written by a Christian, this translation. He uses Christian word faith. Better word for saddha is confidence.
What functions does he perform in acting as a spiritual friend? What are the qualities of reliance on a Guru? What ideas should one have in mind for listening to the Doctrine from a spiritual friend. What things should one avoid thinking about when listening to the Doctrine from a spiritual friend. So there's a seven-fold analysis to get the right attitude. Now, if you say, "ah, I like his garden, I'll make him my Guru, then I can sit in his garden". Incorrect, cause there's probably better gardens somewhere. So if you see better gardens you'd run there. So, certain characteristics which your worldly mind grabs as precious is inappropriate to decide who is going to be your teacher.
Now if you mess it up and you get the wrong teacher you'll get bad teaching. So you better siv to make sure the teacher knows what he's on about. He's not gonna teach you dumb things, because if you hook on to a teacher and he teaches you dumb things, so if you got onto a crook and he said I'll teach you what to do, go and rob banks, or another teacher might say go and kill a hundred men, that'd be bad teacher.
So it's very important. Like it would be better to have no teacher than a bad teacher. But it's your responsibility to check out your teacher. So the commentary says about the eight qualities of a Bodhisattva who is suitable to be a teacher. He must keep the discipline of the Bodhisattva vow without fault or failing. The eighteen Root Vows of the Bodhisattva. He is very learned because his mind is pure. He has a comprehending mind and has acquired all possible virtue arising from contemplation, that means meditation. In other words he's done a lot of meditation himself. His loving heart, his metta heart; not only knows loving-kindness but also is endowed with compassion and Brahma world qualities. He puts aside his own happiness in this life and works for the good of others. He gives you his time freely. That means he, as I keep pointing out to you, if you're sitting here practicing Buddha Dhamma you're giving up your life because there's a million things you could be doing but instead you sacrifice your life to give this leisure time to Dhamma.
He's aware of the terrible fear others may have when the Doctrine is being taught. So he's aware of the terrible fear that others may have when the Doctrine is being taught and displays unfailing confidence and fearlessness himself. You don't scare him. He might scare you, but you don't scare him. He is patient in the face of contempt, censure or flattery. Patient. Not susceptible to slander or great flattery. Not susceptible, patient in the unpleasant malicious gossip and all the other devious ways creatures have. His mind does not tire in his strong and incessant teaching of the Doctrine to the four assemblies of the community. He has the gift of clarity and does not obscure the reality behind words.
So there is a set of criteria. If someone doesn't meet that criteria, you've got to check carefully because remember these qualities are only displayed by the teacher in action. If the circumstances don't arise the teacher won't display the quality. The second point is a Bodhisattva will be affective in acting as a spiritual friend if he has five qualities. The first quality is his eyes. The happiness and benefit of others right from the start, from first meeting. Now, the others are you. He wishes you to be happy and have benefits from the first second he meets you. He knows what happiness and benefit consists of because he has experienced them himself. He has unerring judgment. He knows what is what. Using every method and means in teaching the Doctrine, he has the power and ability to convert any creature capable of it and his mind doesn't tire, he doesn't get worn out in his mind.
That conversion thing is what's called skillful means, you can adapt it. So although the Buddha taught two and a half thousand years ago we can talk about cars, planes, aeroplanes, anything you like, and use those as an example. Impartial in compassion, he's not compassionate to someone and not to others, like even. He doesn't take sides with any person, whether inferior, mediocre or superior. So he, he doesn't back one of you against another. And then the third thing, he presents himself as an inspiration for confidence, faith. He's got five qualities.
May all beings create the causes to have an authentic spiritual guide.
May you be well and happy.
May all beings be well and happy.
May all beings see the Buddha, hear the Dharma, and join the Sangha.
This script was prepared and edited by Alec Sloman, Frank Carter, Leila Igracki, Anita Hughes, Melba Nielsen, Leanne Eames, and Amber Svensson.
References
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