Constant effort in attention

Announcer: This question is from Lobsang in California. “For lay Western students with limited resources and busy lives, is the Vajrayana path recommended if one can’t do the three-year retreat, is unlikely to get to the completion or self-initiation stages, or has very limited access to his or her root Lama? In other words, one hears a lot about the higher tantras being the fastest path to enlightenment, but can one accomplish very much in this life given the limitations mentioned above?”

Ken: There are many aspects to this question. Sometimes when we hear about the Vajrayana, we tend to forget about the point of Buddhist practice. My own teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, used to say, “the Hinayana is like a car, Mahayana is like a train, and Vajrayana is like a rocket ship.” Of course, everybody wants to be on the rocket ship but one forgets that the point of the car or the train or the rocket ship is to go from A to B. It doesn’t matter what the means of transportation is, as long as one gets from A to B. That’s very important because in this question there are several conditions being set up, lay Western students with limited resources and busy lives.

In India, where Vajrayana was developed, it wasn’t practiced by people with busy lives. They devoted their life to this practice, and even when you look at the 84 mahasiddhas, there might be a cobbler or an arrowsmith, these were crafts, and they would just work at their crafts, using their craft as a symbol for some aspect of practice so they would be doing it all day long. Whether one is practicing Vajrayana or any other form of Buddhist practice, as long as one’s practice is limited to just meditation periods, one is only going to progress at a certain rate. It only really becomes an effective practice when you’re making an effort at attention throughout your day and, if you are able to, even in your sleep and in your dreams, which is what some of Vajrayana practice is about. There’s a constant effort in attention.

The three-year retreat is a way of being trained in all of those practices, but is it necessary to do a three-year retreat to get that training? No, there are other forms of training.

“Is unlikely to get to the completion or self-initiation stages.” That part of your question refers to yidam practice, or deity practice, in the Tibetan tradition, and I’m not quite sure what’s behind that “is unlikely to get”. Generally speaking, one practices the creation phase and the completion phase. A monk can do them together. To me, this speaks to, possibly not a complete understanding of the ins and outs of yidam practice, and I’d have to talk with Lobsang in person to be able to respond a bit more to that.

The function of a root lama

Ken: The third one , “has limited access to his or her root Lama.” This is a very important point. The root Lama in Tibetan practice serves several functions, but one of the main ones is being a source of inspiration and a focus for devotion. Those are important because it’s through the development of devotion that one is able to transform emotional energy into attention, which makes Vajrayana practice viable, but a second function that one’s teacher serves is to be able to provide one with training and feedback on one’s practice. For that, one actually needs regular access, not necessarily weekly but monthly or several times a year, and you need to be able to sit down and actually talk with your teacher about what you’re experiencing with your practice.

So it may or may not be one’s root Lama, the source of one’s faith and devotion, but one needs to have that kind of interaction with somebody I’ve found. It’s just tremendously helpful because without that you can be struggling with a practice point and not even know that you’re doing it the wrong way, where a short conversation with someone who’s knowledgeable would help you through it.

Practice depends on quality of attention

Ken: So, the last part of your question. “You hear a lot about the higher tantras being the fastest path to enlightenment. Can one accomplish very much in this life given the limitations mentioned above?” How much you accomplish in your practice is really entirely dependent on the quality of attention you bring to the practice. Some people can meditate for years in retreat and do nothing. Other people are able to bring a great quality of attention to practice in the course of relatively complex and busy lives.

One can accomplish really whatever you want to do. It’s about how you bring your attention to the practice, how you develop the abilities. You need to seek out instruction and guidance from someone who you can have regular interaction with so that you aren’t left wondering about these questions and the viability of your practice. Because if you’re questioning the viability of your practice, then you really aren’t going to be able to throw your full energy into it. The first step here is for you to find someone that you can really discuss this with on a regular basis.

The pragmatics of practice

Lobsang: I’d like to ask one more follow-up question to that, about choosing my path. A more general question might be, “Should mundane considerations, personal, social, financial, logistical, and so on, influence one’s choice of dharma path or lineage?”

Ken: The fact is they are. When you say “mundane considerations, personal, social, financial, logistical, and so on,” these considerations are going to influence one’s choice. I’m not quite sure what it would mean to say, “Well, I’m not going to let those influence one’s choice”. We have personal proclivities, some people find the elaborate forms of practice in the Tibetan tradition draws their interest and energy and they can just pour themselves into it. Other people much prefer some of the simpler approaches in the Theravadan tradition. These are personal proclivities, and what speaks to you and what doesn’t.

Social: a lot of the time, what we practice is a function of who we actually meet and how we meet them. People come to me in very different ways, sometimes through friends, sometimes through reading a book. All of these are social aspects. I know people who’ve overheard people talking in restaurants, and that’s how they found out about me, and so forth. So taking it a bit further than that with social considerations, you need to be practicing with people that you respect and who share a similar intention. So, the social considerations will play a factor.

Financial: yes, people often say, “Oh, I’d just love to stop and devote myself purely to practice.” But we have mundane things like food and shelter and clothing and so forth. I remember way back, in the seventies, Dezhung Rinpoche used to say to us, “No food no body, no money no food, no job no money.” If you don’t have a body, then you can’t practice. So, in order to practice, you need food, in order to have food, you need money, in order to have money, you need a job. Just get this idea out of your head, that you can practice the dharma without working. Some people have the resources that they can fly to India or other countries like Thailand or Japan and explore various other teachers.

Logistical: some people have very demanding jobs or very demanding lives, other people have much more space in them. All of these are going to be considerations, so you have to look at what actually works in your life, or what you can let go of in your life to make room for practice. And that’s a very fruitful exploration.

In Wake Up to Your Life, in chapter three, there’s a section called “The Six Supports” and that is something that’s really useful to look at, as to how you create a life that allows you to practice. But there’s another question in here and that is “influence one’s choice of dharma path or lineage.” They’re all good, basically find one that speaks to you very powerfully, I like to say, “Find one that speaks to you even when you’re completely insane.” That’s the right path to practice for you.

Go deeply into practices that really speak to you

Announcer: This question is from Rich in Buffalo, New York. “I started a daily meditation practice of 20 to 30 minutes, now 30 to 40 minutes, last May. These meditations have been focused on the cultivating attention material from Wake Up to Your Life. I was about to start the impermanence and death meditations, when I listened to the first podcast on the four immeasurables. After listening to the podcast, I was inspired to start meditating with the equanimity material. The four lines from the podcast. My question: Is it okay to stay with the four immeasurables meditations, or should I start on the death and permanence meditations?”

Ken: There are many facets to this question. The first is there are many different meditations in Buddhism, and it can be difficult to know which meditation I should do now or what should my practice be and so forth. This is one of the reasons why it’s very helpful to have someone with whom you can talk about your practice on a regular basis, a teacher, who knows what is helpful and can guide you. That’s not always possible. And so many people are left to their own devices, so to speak.

One of the things that I found helpful was written by a 12th or 13th century teacher in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition, a person called Kyergongpa. He said, “There are really only three things you need to cultivate in the practice of Buddhism, the understanding of impermanence, compassion, and devotion, as a way into insight.” We can call these the three great doors.

We find this going right back to the very roots of Buddhism. In the Theravadan tradition, we have the three marks of existence; impermanence, suffering, and non-self. These three doors correspond exactly to impermanence of course. There’s an intimate relationship with cultivating compassion and opening to the suffering of the world and understanding that life, ordinary existence is suffering. It’s a constant reaction to experience.

And devotion, insight, non-self, are all connected. It is by developing a high level of emotional energy through such practices as devotion that we come to be able to see that there is no thing which we are. There are other approaches, of course, but that’s one of them. In this sense, those are the three important elements.

What I’ve also found is that, if you practice any one of these deeply enough, you find yourself cultivating the other two. For instance, with impermanence, as we cultivate a deeper and deeper appreciation that there is nothing which doesn’t change, that we ourselves are going to die, and we don’t know when that’s going to happen. We come to understand that we’re not the only ones in that situation. Everybody else is in exactly the same situation. And we begin to see how much energy we pour and other people pour, into what are really not very important things in the light of death and the end of our lives. So, we cultivate a natural relationship with compassion by contemplating impermanence.

And if you go deeper into that, we begin to enter into the mystery of being itself. There isn’t anything which is constant, and yet all of this experience keeps arising. And yet there seems to be nothing to it. So we begin to open to insight and an appreciation, which often takes the form of devotion, begins to arise for the teachings, which lead us into this wonderful experience of the mystery of being.

Or we can start with compassion, and as we relate more and more deeply with compassion, which is what the practice of the four immeasurables naturally leads to. As we relate more deeply with compassion, we begin to see that everybody is caught up in suffering and people are caught up in suffering because they try to hold onto what is by nature impermanent.

So, our meditation on compassion, our cultivation of compassion, leads us into an understanding of impermanence. And it also leads us into an understanding of non-self because we come to see that the only thing to be, the only thing that we are in the end is an ongoing response rather than a reaction to the suffering that arises in the world.

And we can start with non-self or devotion. Because as we come to see that there is no thing that we are, we naturally see that everything is impermanent. Everything is constantly changing. And we naturally see that people are caught up in holding on to things that they don’t need to hold on to. So these are the three great doors in Buddhism.

If you go deeply enough, any one of them will take you through all of them. So, as we’ve discussed a couple of times in these questions, Buddha said, “We have to work out our own freedom.” We find the practices which really speak to us, which really help us to become more present, to bring more balance into our experience. And those we work very deeply. That, I find, is the best way to approach things.

Learn first and then decide how you will practice

Announcer: Leslie in Alberta, Canada asks, “I’m about to do a metta retreat with a Theravadan teacher who teaches loving kindness as a concentration practice. My main practice is to rest in awareness and include all experience. I’m wondering if it’s possible to rest in awareness and fill it with loving kindness so that there’s no need to exclude anything. This then becomes a transformative practice rather than a concentration practice. Also, do you have any general advice about mixing these traditions?”

Ken: If you’re going to do a retreat with a teacher who teaches a certain practice and teaches a certain way to work with that practice, then I suggest you go and do the practice as the teacher teaches it.

You have, it seems, experience of other ways of working with material, but you’re going to deny yourself the benefit of the teacher if you practice in your own way rather than learning from the teacher who’s teaching the practice.

After that, you can decide, just from your own experience, how these different approaches work. A lot of people are doing this as they train in one tradition or another, but the key point here is to learn how these are practiced in their respective traditions, and then make decisions about how you yourself practice, based on the knowledge and experience you’ve accumulated.