Formal practice and cultivating attention mixed with activity

[Students were not recorded]

Ken: If you look at it in the four ways of working: first verse is about power, the second is about ecstasy, third is about insight, and fourth is about compassion. Everybody’s going to look at that and see if that’s of those four verses. Now you’re going to show up in the situation. What is the situation? Dilgo Khyentse once said when asked, “Why do we meditate?”

“To make the best of a bad situation.” And life is our situation. So the first bit is to show up in life. And the second is you’re going to open—open to what is. And the principal method of opening is using the emotional relationship with spiritual practice, particularly in the Tibetan tradition, the relationship with your teacher as a way of opening.

And then you’re going to be with what is, which is roughly comparable to insight, or, putting it another way, serving what is true. And when you do that, there is a result. And the result is you experience being nothing, which requires a great deal of acceptance, which is the essence of compassion. So all of this is in the context of how experience releases itself naturally in the right conditions. And this is how you create those conditions.

This is the overall context for Vajrayana practice. And what I’m going to talk about this afternoon is transformation, which is the particular method of a yidam practice. But before going there, I just want to tidy up a loose end about formal practice.

Most Buddhist traditions have a bias towards formal practice as opposed to life practice. I think this goes back right to the origins of Buddhism, based on the theme of renunciation and leaving life. So in many traditions you have the feeling that you’re only really living when you’re in retreat, and you’re only really doing anything meaningful when you’re meditating, doing formal meditation. And this is reflected right in the Tibetan language. You have the word for formal meditation practice, which is thun (pron. tün), which means meditation session. It actually just means a period of time, but it’s used to mean meditation session. But the only word for practice outside of that is thun mtshams (pron. tün tsam), which means between periods of meditation. So you can see there’s a little bit of bias here.

Earlier this year, I came across a friend of mine who works with a Burmese teacher who doesn’t teach any formal sitting practice. One of her forms of training was mindfulness in daily life. That is the practice. So when you go to her center, you don’t do any sitting practice for a retreat. What do you do? Well, you do various forms of work, fixing up things, and cleaning things, and things like that, which involves interaction with other people. But every day, or maybe even more often, you have this interview with her.

And she starts off by saying, “Your practice is to be mindful of sensory perceptions.” So you have this interview, “What did you experience when you were cleaning the toilets?” And you’d better be able to tell her exactly what you experienced when you were cleaning, what you experienced when you were sweeping the kitchen, or doing the dishes. And you have to know exactly what was arising sensorially, which is quite tough. And then you move on to likes and dislikes. So, every sensation that arose—did you like it, or did you dislike it, or were you indifferent to it? You have to be there with it.

My own approach to teaching, as most of you know, is to find a way to work with this very rich body of material in the Tibetan tradition, in a way that people could actually use in contemporary, largely urban life in America. Los Angeles kind of forces that path on you. Nothing else is going to work.

And one of the things that I’ve always been concerned about is this tension that many people in some traditions experience because of this prejudice. That is, “I need to have more time for practice.” And they regard their daily life and the demands of work and their family as the enemy of their practice. And so they inevitably get torn in half here. I think this is very, very detrimental, a very harmful way of looking at things.

And so what I’ve tried to encourage, those of you who’ve worked with me, is to view the practice as the practice of attention—cultivation of attention. When you’re doing formal meditation, which I think is very valuable and very helpful, you are cultivating attention, unmixed with any activity. You’re not doing anything else, you’re just sitting there. So, you get to do that. The rest of your life—work, family, eating, sleeping—you are cultivating attention mixed with activity. And if you take this approach then there is no tension. It’s all about cultivating attention and you have these two different venues to do it in.

The three seals

Ken: That being said, there is a way of framing formal practice, which is very traditional and also very helpful, and is known as the three seals. Buddhism is the religion of lists. We have lots of lists, and the lists are very important, I encourage you to learn and memorize them all. I’m serious. Why? Because if you do, then you have these teachings available to you all the time.

All of the lists—well I won’t say all of them, a good 75 percent of them—are lists that have been developed over a long period of time, and they are powerful condensations of a great deal of wisdom and experience. And the order of the lists is also important, not just the number of items in it, but the actual sequence in most cases is also important. And you actually learn these things. I know memorization is totally out of fashion as a pedagogical method these days, but it’s immensely valuable. I get away with murder in my talks because I have these lists memorized.

[Unrecorded question] Not all of them are useful, but an awful lot of them are. And here’s one that is—three seals. Seal of preparation or groundwork, whichever way you want to consider it, which consists of refuge and bodhicitta. So, when you start practice, you renew your orientation, which is refuge, taking refuge in: buddha, dharma, sangha, or: guru, yidam, protector, bodhidharma sangha, whatever. But it tells you, “This is the direction I’m going in,” which ultimately is the direction of awareness.

So, it’s orientation, and then intention, which is bodhicitta. Why am I doing this? I’m doing this to wake up in order to be able to help others. And so, when you do this at the beginning of the practice session, you know where you’re going and why. And any time you know where you’re going and why, it makes what you’re doing much more effective.

Then there’s the seal of the main practice, the practice itself. It’s been translated in a couple of ways, non-conceptualization or no reference, and very much refers to just what I’ve been talking about. That is, the practice is done in the context of direct awareness, where experience is allowed to release naturally. Now, how do you actually do that? I’ll get to in a minute.

This came up in the July retreat where we were doing taking and sending. How do you do taking and sending non-conceptually without reference? Well, easiest way is to imagine that you’re dreaming. And when you imagine that you’re dreaming, then you don’t attach the status of existing to anything that you experience—no reference. You can still experience it totally vividly, but you’re not attaching the projection of existence.

And then the third seal is the seal of conclusion, which is dedication. At the end of a practice session, you’re often feeling like, “Oh, I’ve done something good. This feels good,” etc. And there’s a natural, a habituated tendency to say, “Ah, I feel good about this,” all kinds of people want to hold on, etc. But that counteracts everything that Buddhism is about. So what the dedication is, as soon as you finish, you give it away. Doesn’t matter how good you feel, you just give it away. That’s called dedicating the goodness to the welfare of all beings.

It’s said that if you have a thought of pride, anger, or regret, then it undermines the benefit of any virtue that you have done. And the Tibetans, being wonderfully spiritually materialistic–I mean they’re really good at it—they justify the dedication as, you dedicate immediately before any of those thoughts can come up. But basically, the idea is you just give it away.

[Unrecorded question] Yes, of course. No, these are just three seals. That’s a different word. You’re thinking of the great seal, yes, that’s a different word in Sanskrit. That seal is mudra. These are not mudras. Mudra means seal. Well gesture, but mudra also means seal. And, so, mahamudra is great seal. The Tibetan is dam pa (pron. dam pa), which means to bind. And the kind of seal we’re talking about is the seal with which you seal something, what’s it called? The plastic, Saran wrap. Yeah, seals it, keeps it. Right? [Laughs]

So, by these three seals, when you sit down to practice, the first step is to orient yourself, and be clear about your intention. And that’s the preparation. Then the main practice is to let go of all of the habituated reference points. That’s why like a dream is a good way of doing it. And then at the end you seal the practice. You conclude the practice by giving it away. And these are the three things. So there’s a beginning, middle, and end to your practice; so you know what you’ve done.

[Unrecorded] After you sit for a period with a very quiet, peaceful mind, how do you feel towards other people? [Unrecorded] This is not mysterious stuff.

[Unrecorded] So yeah, all that this is doing is defining a framework for practice. And the reason for this is often people don’t know what to do when they sit down to practice, and they sort of wander into their practice and wander out of it like that. But this defines, “Okay, I’m doing formal practice now. I think about this, I do this, and I end with this. And I go on about my life.”

[Unrecorded] Let me come back to that later. Okay?

[Unrecorded] This is the traditional framework that’s used in the Tibetan tradition and I found it’s very effective.

Purification or refinement

Ken: Okay, now on page 43 in Bokar Rinpoche’s book he talks about purification: the basis of purification, object of purification, purifying agent, result of purification. And I’m going to talk about this section because it’s key to yidam meditation—key to many forms of meditation really—but I want to change the vocabulary a little bit for certain reasons. Now, the standard metaphor here is a lump of gold ore. And unfortunately, because of the strange confluence of Victorian grammarians and mindless translators, we’ve ended up with various idiocies in English and the way purification is used is one of them.

When you have a lump of gold ore and you purify it, what are you purifying? The gold, right? So to talk about purifying unwholesome karma is an idiocy in English. They aren’t purifying unwholesome karma, we’re getting rid of it. So that’s why I don’t like to use the word purification; it comes up with that. Now, in the mahamudra prayer, which you don’t have in your chant book, but many of you know it, you find the same thing.

The ground of refinement is mind itself—indivisible luminosity and emptiness.
The refining—the great vajra composure of mahamudra;
What is to be refined—

(and it really should be what is to be refined away)

—the incidental stains of confusion,
The result of refining—the unstained experience of being.

Aspirations for Mahamudra


And it’s the same here. The basis of the practice, what we’re working with is actual experience, what actually is. It’s very simple. But there’s a problem because we don’t experience what actually is. What actually is, is clear empty awareness, in which appearances arise that are not different from or separate from the awareness. They’re expressions of awareness or emptiness itself, and they arise and subside. That’s what actually is.

What we experience is me against the world. All of these things out there, and they exist. And there’s me here, and I don’t like this, and I want more of that, and so I’m engaged in a constant struggle. That’s how we actually experience things, but that’s not how things actually are.

So, the basis of the refinement is pure experience. What is to be removed, refined away—however you want to put it—are the habituated tendencies, which cause us to experience things other than they are. Now, these are termed incidental stains of confusion, because they do not affect in any way actual awareness, no more than clouds affect the sun. When clouds appear in the sky, we don’t see the sun, but they don’t stop the sun from shining, just prevent us from experiencing the sunshine.

So, these incidental stains, they arise and they prevent us from experiencing how things are. And they cause us to experience things differently, particularly in terms of subject-object. But they don’t affect in any substantial way the actual awareness, which is the core of our being.

Yidam practice

Ken: Now, the method in yidam practice, the method is transformation. This is what I’m going to elaborate on. And when you do this, when you practice this method, what is the result? You experience things as they are. So it is through this that the basis of refinement—that is things as they are—becomes one’s actual experience. Everybody follow this? This is a framework for discussion, or description, that is commonly used in Tibetan Buddhism.

Now, let’s talk about the method of transformation. This morning I gave you the instruction: imagine or feel that you are the embodiment of awakened compassion. When you do this, what happens? [Unrecorded answer] There was an opening, right? And? Describe it. [Unrecorded]

When you really feel you are the embodiment of awakened compassion, what does the world look like to you? [Unrecorded] Okay, so you noticed that you didn’t judge things the same way. And that’s true, but how did the world appear to you? [Unrecorded]

This is transformation. That’s what we’re talking about. Now, Avalokiteshvara is the embodiment of awakened compassion, and that is the principle of awakening that we’re working with this weekend. But just to get a clear idea about transformation, let’s have a little fun. Suppose you are meditating on Manjushri. Manjushri is the embodiment of awakened intelligence.

So just right here, right now, imagine you are the embodiment of awakened intelligence. How does the world appear? [Unrecorded] The world appears asleep. Interesting. Anybody else? [Unrecorded] So, the world becomes clearer. Okay, anybody else? [Unrecorded] Okay, but I want to focus on the differences right now. They all end up in the same place in one sense, but it does have a different flavor to it, doesn’t it?

Okay, let’s take another one. What if you take Vajrapani? You’re the embodiment of awakened power. How does the world appear to you? [Unrecorded answer] The world appears vulnerable? Just say a bit more about that. [Unrecorded] You’re the embodiment of the awakened manifestation of initiative and action. How does the world appear? [Unrecorded] You’re the embodiment, you get to decide that. How does it look? How does the Zen center look, Kathleen? You’re the embodiment of awaked power, how does the Zen center look? [Unrecorded response] Right, but it transforms your perception, doesn’t it?

Okay, let’s get a little juicier. Hevajra first. You’re the embodiment of awakened anger. How does the world look? [Unrecorded response] You’re the embodiment of awakened anger. It’s not organized around a sense of self. The world looks in need of purification. And what’s your attitude to this? [Unrecorded response] Yes, but you’re awakened anger, what’s your attitude towards this need for purification? Yes. You’re going to do it, aren’t you? Anybody else for awakened anger? [Unrecorded response] Yes, no holding on. And it destroys whatever needs to be destroyed, like that, right? To cinders, burns it up completely. What would it be like to be that way in the world? [Unrecorded]

What about awakened sexuality? [Unrecorded] Awakened passion.

So, this is what all of these yidams are about, and you can just touch into them the way that we’ve been touching into them here. And you can feel the transformation. Now, working with energy like anger, or sexuality, or passion, it’s a little tricky. [Unrecorded] Chakrasamvara, Vajrayogini, Hevajra for awakened anger.

Now, working with those kinds of energies is a little tricky. Why? [Unrecorded] They are very powerful, but why is it tricky? [Unrecorded] No, because you’re awake. They’re seductive. The problem is if you go to sleep for a moment, what have you got? That’s why it’s tricky. So when you’re working with those kinds of energies, you’ve got to be totally awake. You cannot go to sleep for an instant.

That’s why when you’re working with these kinds of practices, you usually start off with something like awakened compassion. What happens if you go to sleep in awakened compassion? Well, you kind of make a mess of things, but at least your heart’s in the right place. It’s a little bit safer, but you can feel the transformation. This is not intellectual at all, is it?

You engage the energy and there it is. You experience things differently. Essentially, what you’re doing in these kinds of practices is entering into that transformation intentionally until it becomes how you relate to the world. It’s not just something you dip into. You are going to make it the way that you relate to the world.

Needless to say, this requires a little bit of commitment, which is why commitment is such an important theme in Vajrayana work. Examples are given, Vajrayana is like a snake entering a bamboo pipe. It can only go up or down. You’re either there or you’re not. And because you’re working directly with the transformation of experience, the onus is very, very much on you to be engaging it. You can build up momentum in this. But in Vajrayana, you tend to run into much more serious problems if your effort is not consistent than you do with Sutrayana methods.

[Unrecorded] Well, you and I had dinner with, or lunch with, Lobsang recently. He described one there. This is an old story from the Tibetan tradition. There is a very terrific—in the old sense of terrific—yidam called Vajrabhairava, who has 32 arms and 16 legs, and I can’t remember, at least four, but maybe more heads, and they’re all big bull’s heads. He’s a very, very big form, and it’s a manifestation of Manjushri. So its basis is intelligence, but there’s a very close relationship between intelligence and anger. So this is really identifying with this really incisive quality of intelligence, which just cuts through everything that arises, just straight through. That’s why you have all of the arms, each one holds a different implement, and they’re all things which just cut through. So, it doesn’t matter what arises, just right there.

Well, I talked earlier about how this is done in the context of no reference, no conceptualization. You’re transforming your experience here, and that’s the key. If you take the actual deity to be something real, what do you end up as? This horrific form, what do you end up as? Or to put it in Trungpa’s words, “You end up as a cosmic gorilla.” He had a good turn of phrase. And so you actually become this transformative quality if you make it something real. That’s what I mean about making mistakes, okay?

On a much less dramatic level, some of you noticed this in the interviews, and others haven’t had a chance to see it, it may very well appear. I gave you the instruction, imagine that you’re the embodiment of awakened compassion. Well, when you really do this, what do you experience? All of those parts of you that weren’t really comfortable.

As you were saying, Catherine, reactive patterns come up. Because this is very direct, how intensely do the reactive patterns come up? [Unrecorded] Well, they are. And so if you do not have a capacity in attention to be able to meet those reactive patterns that come up, what happens? They take over. And, they use all the energy of your practice, so they’re actually amplified. That’s another thing that can go wrong.

And if you try to push them away and not deal with them, what happens to them? They grow stronger, they go into your body and they weak havoc there. [Unrecorded question] You learn how to work skillfully, which is what we’re trying to do this weekend. [Laughs] It’s all right, I’ve got a bunch of ambulances and medics lined up. Got psychiatrists and psychologists, it’s all right, it’s all in place, Leslie. It’s a risky path. But then all practice is risky. This is just because of the directness of the techniques, this just amps it up a bit. It’s too late now.

Question about wisdom vs. intelligence

Ken: [Unrecorded] Well, in English, you can make a distinction. I assume you’re referring to the original concepts in Tibetan, and there we get into all kinds of translation stuff. The Perfection of Wisdom, as in the Heart Sutra, isn’t really wisdom as we understand it in English. It is actually a very special kind of intelligence, or to put it slightly differently, a certain kind of understanding. And wisdom is a strange word in English—and I’ll point out something about that in a minute—but we have many different concepts here.

Intelligence in Buddhism is the ability to make distinctions. That’s the formal definition. I find it very useful. So people can be very intelligent about some things, and not very intelligent about others, and it rests on their ability to be able to make distinctions. So, a carpet merchant, very intelligent about carpets, but not be able to do math, or something like that, at all.

When we talk about wisdom, we’re usually talking about a more complete knowing. But wisdom is a very interesting word in English. How many of you are wise? How many of you know someone who is wise? So what does this mean? Wisdom is somebody that something else has, but you never have? One has to look at how words are actually used. That’s why I don’t use wisdom very often anymore as a translation because it has that particular word game.

There’s another word in English which has the same word game: promiscuous. How many of you are promiscuous? How many of you know somebody who is promiscuous? So what does this mean, somebody who sleeps with more people than you do? [Unrecorded] But when you were promiscuous from your perspective now, did you regard yourself as promiscuous then? [Laughs]

I am awakened compassion

Ken: So the basis of the refinement is what we actually experience. The basis of refinement is what we experience, is experience itself. What is to be refined away is the distortion that causes us to experience things as different from how they are. [Unrecorded] I’ll try. What is to be refined away are the distortions which cause us to experience things as different from how they are.

The method of refinement—for our purposes this weekend—is identification with awakened compassion. “I am awakened compassion.” It’s identification. And when you really let yourself feel that, you notice how your experience of how things are is transformed and becomes much closer to how they actually are than they were before. Everybody with me on that?

The result is experiencing things as they are. That’s putting it as simply as I’m currently able to. Now, you’ll read all kinds of things about the five skandhas and the six sense fields, or the twelve sense fields, or whatever. These are what are to be purified. The five skandhas are going to be become the five buddhas and the twelve sense fields are going to become the six bodhisattvas and their consorts, etc. And what is all this? These are metaphorical ways of describing this transformation.

So, for instance, if you—as vividly as you are able to—imagine that you are the embodiment of awakened compassion, which means you have all of the intelligence, wisdom, awareness, etc., of all the buddhas, and so forth. Just imagine that right now. How do you regard your own body? [Unrecorded] What else? How solid does it feel? How vivid is it? [Unrecorded] So it’s vivid, it’s not solid, and it’s this extraordinary resource. That’s what Ratnasambhava, Buddha of the South, represents. I think that’s the right one. This is why I say these are metaphorical.

And we go through them all that way, all the skandhas. But that’s going to load you down with a lot of verbiage, I just wanted to illustrate the principle. No, that’s enough, you get the idea. So don’t get caught up with all of this technical stuff at this point, it’s probably just going to be confusing. Work in your practice, and when I say in your practice, I don’t just mean our formal meditation sessions. I mean when you’re eating, when you’re walking, when you’re looking at things, when you hear things.

For instance, I walked up to the falls, and on my way back there was a little squirrel with an acorn in its mouth, hopped off on the bank and we just looked at each other. Things like that. “I am the body of the awakened compassion,” and how does your experience of the world arise right there? You just keep doing this, instant by instant, over and over again. I am the embodiment of awakened compassion. How am I experiencing this?

And when as many of you describe, the internal material comes up and says, “No, we don’t want to be here.” That’s part of your experience. You are the embodiment of awakened compassion. How do you experience what’s arising as the embodiment of awakened compassion? All of that reactive stuff, just because it arose, it doesn’t change what you are. You are the embodiment of awakened compassion.

So how do you relate to that reactive material as the embodiment of awakened compassion? What happens when you do that? There you are and saying, “Oh, it’s so threatening to be this way.” How do you view it? [Unrecorded response] As the embodiment of awakened compassion, how do you view the reactive material? What comes up when you look at it that way? [Unrecorded response]

What does that mean? [Unrecorded] Differently from how you would normally? [Unrecorded] Explain the difference. [Unrecorded] So, when you accept it, you just run with it? [Unrecorded] Okay, go on.[Unrecorded] Right.

So in other words, you really work with it very mindfully. It’s there, you aren’t trying to change it, but it’s in attention. And, this is very important, by holding being awakened compassion, you actually create the conditions in which your reactive material can release naturally. And that’s the connection between these two approaches. Follow? This is very, very important. So it transforms your experience and simultaneously creates the conditions in which things can release naturally. So it’s a neat method.

[Unrecorded] By holding yourself as awakened compassion, being awakened compassion. [Unrecorded] Yeah, they’re two different ways of saying the same thing. Because they’re not ultimately real, they can’t affect basic awareness.

[Unrecorded] Yeah. All right, but the incidental stains are as real as everything else we experience. None of it is ultimately real. Other questions.[Unrecorded question] You try it you tell me. Yeah, they collapse.

[Unrecorded] Chenrezei, Avalokiteshvara. We’ll get around to talking about the terms. Right now I just want to stick with awakened compassion, because that is the yidam, that is the deity. It’s not the form. It is awakened compassion and being awakened compassion. And I don’t want to clutter it up with other concepts at this point.

But what is awakened compassion? The union of compassion and emptiness. If it doesn’t have the emptiness in it, it’s not really awake, so it’s not awakened compassion. And emptiness devoid of compassion is actually quite a nasty beast.

Okay, let’s close here and we will have dinner and then have the evening sitting. What I’d like to suggest is that we start using a bit more silence. How do you feel about that? Okay. I’m not sure that I want to do everything in complete silence, so let’s have dinner in silence. That lays a good basis for meditation this evening and then until we’re finished lunch tomorrow. So have the afternoons open a little bit because may be doing other things there. But we’ll have dinner in silence, silence after dinner into the evening meditation, so forth, okay? And after the meditation too. This means everybody, even couples.