Background to the 37 Practices text

Ken: If it’s okay with you, I’m going to give a certain amount of background to the text. Not a lot because frankly, I don’t know a lot, but there are a few bits and pieces that I’ve learned from various sources. Tokmé Zongpo lived in the 13th and 14th centuries in Tibet. This is approximately 200 years after the New Translation school started, which was the middle of the 11th century with Atisha. The school that traces its origin back to Atisha is called the Kadampa school. It basically petered out a little bit after Tokmé Zongpo. He is one of the latter Kadampa masters.

It basically took shape in a somewhat different form than what is now known as the Gelugpa school or the Gadenpa school, coming from Tsongkhapa, who is a very great teacher of the late 14th century, if I remember correctly. So, it’s very soon after Tokmé Zongpo. The Kadampas preserved, to a considerable extent, the scholastic tradition of Indian Buddhism, which from our vantage point—and depending on your approach to practice—seems like such a lot of work.

When I was working on the Heart Sutra commentary, one of the books that I referred to for how such and such a passage was viewed, was a book by Donald Lopez called The Heart Sutra Explained. This book consists of a compilation from five Indian masters and two Tibetan masters, their commentaries on the Heart Sutra. I also looked at Taranatha’s. And these guys were so scholastic in their approach. There was a whole language and approach and it’s actually very difficult. You have to learn all of that language and approach in order to be able to understand what they’re doing.

From time to time, teachers would just write stuff in very simple, plain language. That’s what this is, very straightforward, almost colloquial. But things like this text, the Thirty-Seven Practices, are informed by that very, very rich, scholastic codification of Buddhist teaching and practice that took place over hundreds of years in India. Just a really, really long time.

Those of you who are studying the Bodhicaryavatara, Shantideva was very much in this vein, even though he lived many hundreds of years earlier. But the ninth chapter, which we were discussing last month or a few weeks ago, was the same kind of thing. It’s actually presenting very important points, but in a very scholastic and philosophical language, which makes it a barrier for many people.

I tried to locate a biography of Tokmé Zongpo. I did have one in Tibetan a long time ago but I can’t find it now. The few things I know about him is that he had a propensity for compassion from a very, very early age. That’s probably what propelled him into a spiritual life and the life of a monk. He also took compassion as his main practice and had developed it so profoundly that his pet, which was a pet wolf, was vegetarian. Some of you may be familiar with the story of one of Buddha’s previous lives in which he offers his body to a tigress. Well, apparently Tokmé Zongpo came across a similar situation and said, “Well, you know, if I was a reaI bodhisattva I would do this”. And then he went, “Yeah, I can’t quite do this, this is too hard. I guess I’ve got more work to do on compassion.” He took this pretty seriously.

The actual source of the material that he presents here comes from three sources apparently. Shantideva, the Bodhicaryavatara, and those of you studying it, I’m sure will recognize many things. From Nagarjuna, in particular there’s a text by Nagarjuna which has been translated into English, and usually titled The Precious Garland. This is very straightforward, practical advice and teaching that Nagarjuna gave to a king. The third source—I imagine this has been translated into English, but I haven’t seen translations of it—is one of the texts from the collection known as The Five Teachings of Maitreya.

Don’t ask me what all five are I haven’t studied any of them in any detail. But this particular one is called the Sutralamkara or something like that, in Tibetan mdo sde rgyan (pron. do dé gyen). I imagine it’s been translated, but The Five Teachings of Maitreya were written by Asanga presumably out of the direct inspiration of his encounter with Maitreya.

You may have heard the story about the person who was meditating in a cave to meet Maitreya. After three years he gave up. He went and saw this person brushing a cliff with a feather, and thought, “What are you doing?” He said, “Well, this cliff’s in the way. It casts a shadow over my house, so I’m removing it.” He thought, “Oh, this guy’s really diligent. I better go back and work a bit longer.”

There are similar stories, and eventually he has this encounter with Maitreya. The story I know is in The Words of My Perfect Teacher. But after this, he received all of these teachings from Maitreya, and these he wrote down in these five texts. They are still very central texts in the study of Mahayana teaching in the Tibetan tradition. Virtually in every tradition you study those, particularly in the Gelugpa. You basically memorize everything that’s in them. So, that’s the source of this material.

Ken: Yes, and thank you Michelle. Please feel free to ask questions at any point. I do not mind that at all. Having a discussion is very good.

Michelle: The proofreader in me just wanted to point out that on your version, Tokmé Zongpo was 124 years old.

Ken: Mm-hmm.

Michelle: I looked up a couple of other sources, and they had him as 50 years younger. I believe he was born 50 years later. I believe he was born in 1295 rather than 1245.

Ken: Oh, maybe I took a four as a nine or nine as a four. Thank you.

Michelle: That makes him 74.

Ken: Okay. We can correct that on the website. Thanks.

The pattern of composition

Ken: Most Tibetan liturgical texts follow a very set pattern of composition. There’s a Sanskrit invocation, which is followed by a formal homage or honoring, which is then followed by a declaration of intention. Those three parts usually comprise the introductory section. Sometimes there’s a list of contents, too. Then there’s the main text. And then there’s the conclusion, which is basically saying, “I did all this and I may have screwed up in the process so be patient with me.” Then some kind of signature usually in the form of a colophon.

It’s helpful to recognize those parts of a text, because they’re somewhat important and also somewhat not important, in that one can get confused because they’re usually done in very formal language. And then they get into the actual subject matter. The formal language is poetic; it can be a little difficult to understand. At the same time, they’re very important guidelines to the subject matter and the function of the text and how to approach it.

So, here we have Namo Lokeshvaraya which is …

Do you have a question, Judy?

Judy: Yes, right before you start. When you say it’s a liturgical text, could you …

Ken: Well, I’m using that in a very broad sense. Liturgy is usually something you chant. A lot of people would memorize this and chant it as part of their daily practice, because it’s a very effective reminder of a lot of points. But I was using liturgical in an even broader sense, I should have said religious texts.

Judy: Okay. Thank you.

Ken: Any other questions? Yes, Peri.

Peri: What do you call that apology at the end? What do you call that?

Ken: Well, it comes under the term conclusion. There are usually several parts to it. One is dedication of merit. One is apology for errors made, or confession. Another part is aspiration of good to come from writing and reading the text, and so forth. Okay?

Student: Ken? I think you’re gonna go to Lokeshvara right now. But before you do, could you focus on the first line?

Ken: Namo Lokeshvaraya

Student: Oh, up there?

Ken: Yes.

Student: Okay. I was on the second line.

Ken: Most Tibetan texts start with a Sanskrit invocation, because it was their way of acknowledging the source of Buddhism. Buddhism’s advent into Tibetan culture, as far as the Tibetans were concerned, this is what made them civilized. Now, one can debate whether they were civilized or not, but that’s another matter. As far as they were concerned, it constituted their becoming a civilized culture. They now had a solid religion and they felt eternally grateful to India because that was the source of this gift for them. So, they acknowledged the Indian origins of their teachings by the Sanskrit invocation.

The invocation or the homage—because namo is the word for I bow, or I pay homage in Sanskrit—the figure to whom that is directed is actually a code for what the subject matter of the book is about. So, this is to Lokeshvara, which is a shorter form of Avalokiteshvara or Chenrezi, that literally means one who looks over the world.

Those of you who are familiar, the 1,000 armed form of Chenrezi has 1,000 eyes, looks and sees everything. These are the eyes and hands of compassion. So, Lokeshvara is, in Indian and Tibetan culture, the embodiment of awakened compassion. So, this tells you that the text is going to be about compassion primarily.

If on the other hand, it was going to be a logic text, or a text dealing with philosophical matters, it would quite likely start with an homage to Manjushri. If it was a text on guru devotion, it would start with homage to the gurus. If it was a text on the monastic code, it might very well be an homage to Shakyamuni Buddha, because that’s where the monastic code started. So, to whomever the homage is directed, tells you something about the subject matter of the book.

The homage

Ken: Then the first verse is the formal homage:

You who see that experience has no coming or going,
Yet pour your energy solely into helping beings,
My excellent teachers and Lord All Seeing,
I humbly and constantly honor with my body, speech and mind.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo

Now, just to be devilish, here’s an alternate translation:

I prostrate always respectfully,
Through my three gateways
To my guardian Avalokiteshvara,
My supreme gurus,
Who seeing that all phenomena have no coming or going,
Make efforts singly to benefit wandering beings.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, Berzin Archives

It certainly wasn’t the worst translation I came across. This is Tibetan poetry. It’s all a metered verse. One of the facets of Tibetan language is it’s a monosyllabic language, that is, every syllable has a meaning. When Tibetans first started learning English, they didn’t understand that English didn’t work this way. So, I remember Rinpoche’s secretary, when he learned that a certain phrase in Tibetan meant precious human birth, he would say, “Now that we have prehum …

And people would go, “Prehum, what’s that?” Well, it was a contraction of precious human birth. And in Tibetan, you can take a phrase like that and contract it down to a couple of syllables. And everybody knows what you mean. [Laughs] But English doesn’t work that way. So, when these things are being written, they’re often using that very contracted language, which makes it impossible to translate into English with the same conciseness. So, things tend to get amplified a great deal because you can’t just say it in two syllables the way that they could boil it down in Tibetan. So, that’s one challenge that exists in translation.

Another challenge is that there were very formal ways of saying things. A third challenge is that everything was expressed in a high honorific language. English effectively lost its high honorific language around the beginning of the 20th century. That was the Edwardian era, and the First World War basically did it in. I mean, there are still vestiges of it around here and there. But if you use a high honorific language in English, particularly in America, everybody thinks you’re being a snob and wonders, why are you putting on airs and so forth? It’s actually a bit of a loss because it allows a formal way of saying things, which carries a certain energy. But we don’t have it anymore and that’s that.

So, when one’s translating one has to translate it into something very different from the way it’s originally presented. Then there are other problems. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to look at the alternative translation. Many of you will know from your reading that there’s this expression, all phenomena or all dharmas. Well the word dharma officially has 10 different meanings, which makes it a great word to use. But some of those 10 meanings are really, really distinct.

One is somewhat comparable to the Chinese word tao, but the root meaning really is instruction, how to do things. So, if you pick up a package of fast food in India, the dharma would be the instructions of how to do it. What do you do with it? That way, when you’re referring to Buddhism as the dharma, it’s a set of instructions. If you use the full Tibetan phrase, it’s a set of instructions for awakening internally, which is a very different feeling from what has become the English term Buddhism, which sounds like a belief system.

But another very significant meaning for the word and the way I like to translate this—though people do take issue with it—is a unit of experience. Now, those of you who’ve had any acquaintance with the Abhidharma and formal Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, know that in the earlier schools of Buddhism, to explain experience they thought, “Okay, there are a number of different kinds of experience, roots of experience, atoms of experience.”

This is actually really what Democritus—where the word atom comes from in Greek—was driving at. He wasn’t talking about just external phenomena. There are these atoms and we create these experiences when a number of different atoms of experience come together. So, when you have an atom of blue, an atom of round, an atom of seeing, and an atom of consciousness, that comes together to create the experience of seeing a blue circle. There’s a whole theory constructed out of this, but the idea is that dharma in this sense refers to what we experience.

In trying and understanding and figuring out how to translate that idea into English in the 19th Century, translators were really left with two choices: to use the Sanskrit word dharma, which a lot of them elected to do, or to use what seemed to be the closest in English, which was phenomenon. But the trouble with phenomenon is that it’s the objective pole of experience. It doesn’t include the subject. And atoms includes the subjective pole as well as the objective pole. So, you introduce a distortion in expression just by the word you’ve chosen to translate.

As my own understanding of what was being talked about developed here, I thought, “There’s a problem with this. What are they talking about?” They are talking about these units of experience. So, now I translate dharma by experience. I don’t say unit of experience because that would be more cumbersome than necessary. So, all phenomena becomes all experience. Everybody with me? Okay.

The reason I’m belaboring this is that what I’m trying to do is give you some idea of the stuff that’s going on behind the text or in the text, which you wouldn’t normally know from just reading it, reading a translation. Part of that is so that when you encounter other translations, you’ll be able to understand better what they’re trying to convey. So, having said that, the first statement is Avalokiteshvara, which I translated as Lord All Seeing, “sees that experience has no coming or going.” What does that mean?

Student questions

Student: Well, I think that you’re talking about coming into existence or not coming into existence.

Ken: Okay. Well, it seems to me that things come into existence and things go out of existence all the time.

Student: But it’s a product of your own internal experience and whatever appears to be outside in the moment is one thing. We’ve discussed many times about how you cannot say what’s going on is inside of you or outside of you. You’ve talked about that many times. But I think that’s the idea, that in a certain sense everything comes together as a composite of different elements.

Ken: See, you’re saying it. Things come into existence. Things go out of existence.

Student: But you can’t put your finger on any one particular thing because by the time you do, it’s already something else.

Ken: Ah, so you think “experience has no coming or going” means that you can’t point to any one thing?

Student: No, because it’s so impermanent. It only seems to be coming and going.

Ken: Anybody else?

Student: Does it refer to the fact that no phenomena are discrete or separate from anything else?

Ken: Okay. Anybody else?

Student: The empty nature of things.

Ken: How do you get there? So, how do you get to the empty nature of things?

Student: There’s no beginning and no end. It has no inherent nature of its own.

Ken: George?

George: I’ve got another one, but I can’t claim originality. It’s from the commentary on this by Lama Garchen Triptrul Rinpoche.

Ken: Oh, Lama Garchen is very good. It’s great.

George: And he said, “For those who dwell in the state of buddhahood there is no concept that one is going somewhere out of samsara or going back into samsara.”

Ken: That’s a nice dzogchen interpretation. Where did you you get that?

George: From the internet.

Ken: Okay.

George: Simhanada Sutra.

Ken: Can you just email it to everybody?

George: Yeah, I’ll do that.

Emptiness allows you to act freely and meaningfully

Ken: Okay. Well, basically what everybody’s saying are valid interpretations of this. The nature of experience cannot be defined. That’s what we mean actually when we say it’s empty. If we say things are, we’ve defined it in some way. If we say things aren’t, we’ve also defined it in some way. One of the things that Nagarjuna and Shantideva and the Bodhicaryavatara point out is that any such categorical statement about reality, about experience, is self-contradictory. What this line refers to is Avalokiteshvara knows that experience is just what is, and is simultaneously present, and no thing. If you want, form and emptiness as in the Heart Sutra.

Now, in the scheme of things, it is not all that difficult to have that experience. You just have to be pushed a little bit. But to stabilize that experience, as Milarepa says, that’s a lot of work. That’s basically why we practice so much. Because as long as you regard things as really existing, then you act in your life in a certain way. And everything gets really serious, and you take everything seriously and things become very complex and difficult. And we all know this.

To act as if things didn’t exist at all, well, that’s kind of crazy and wouldn’t get you very far. But to be able to stay in the apparent paradox of this dual nature—things appear, but seem to be nothing—that allows you, or leads you, to approach life practically and freely.

Student: Could you repeat that sentence?

Ken: It leads you to approach life practically and freely. Because when we know that things don’t exist in the way that we ordinarily think they do. Well, there’s a very important corollary to that. It means that we don’t exist the way that we think we do. In other words, going back to one of the fundamental Buddhist concepts, there is no “I”; there’s no identity. And if you don’t have an identity then you are free to act in any situation as the situation requires. Do you follow? That’s really important. So, freedom from a sense of “I” or understanding of emptiness allows you to act freely.

Then the next line is:

Yet pour your energy solely into helping beings.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo

This is the other side of the coin. What is there to do when you’re free to act in any way that you wish? Well, if you sit with this long enough, you realize that there is only one thing to do, respond to the suffering that is arising in every moment of experience. That’s the only thing that’s actually meaningful.

These two lines capture the two aims: aim for oneself and the aim for others. They capture the two truths: what is ultimately true and what is apparently true. They capture the two understandings: emptiness and compassion, and so forth. You’ll find that kind of pairing runs through all of the Mahayana literature, and it’s very good to become conversant with it so you can recognize it whenever it arises.

In the mahamudra prayer, which many of you’re familiar with. Rangjung Dorge says:

The basic ground consists of the two truths,
free from the extremes of eternalism and nihilism,
(which I would now translate as order and chaos)
The excellent path, the two accumulations,
free from the extremes of assumption and denial,
The result obtained the two benefits,
free from the extremes of existence and peace.

Aspirations for Mahamudra

So, you see you have this pairing going on at the ground, path, and fruition. How is experience? Well, it’s neither order nor chaos. And it’s not correct to say really, “It’s both order and chaos.” It’s more that, by not falling into the extreme of either order or chaos, you’re able to experience form and emptiness as not being contradictory or mutually exclusive. You’re able to experience the world and ourselves and our lives in a different way.

Then on the path level the two accumulations are basically virtue or goodness through the cultivation of compassion, and understanding and insight through the cultivation of the experience of emptiness. “Free from the extremes of assumption and denial.” Assumption is to say things are, denial is to say things aren’t. So, you’re able to work with that, blending those two or … blending isn’t the right word.

Student: Holding.

Ken: Pardon? Holding them, so that again, attention, or your understanding, arises to a different level. When you work at that as path then you have the result, which are the two benefits. That’s the benefit for oneself, which is the understanding of emptiness, and the benefit for others, which is the arising of non-referential compassion. We’re benefited by emptiness because we’re freed from any sense of identity. Others benefit when a non-referential compassion arises because now we pour our energy into helping or responding to the suffering of others.

And that’s free from the extremes of existence and peace. Existence is attachment to the sense of this is all real. Peace is the idea that you can get away from it all forever, which is unrealistic too. When you stop hankering after the reality of this or trying to get away from it, you hold both of those. Then again, you can be present in your life. You follow? So, those two lines are actually pregnant with meaning, shall we say. Yes.

Student: The word yet to me meant something that he’s… so this is this, yet you were doing that.

Ken: Well, that’s how I translated it. And the construction in Tibetan would certainly support interpreting it is yet, but when I was reading it in preparation for this evening, I thought, you know, that word could just as well mean and.

Student: Yeah, because yet gives it a different meaning.

Ken: It does. You’re quite right. And so I thought, you know, maybe that should be just and.

Student: You’re associating nihilism with chaos.

Ken: Yes.

Student: It seems like it’s much more negative.

Ken: Yes, the English word is. But the Tibetan words, and presumably the Sanskrit words, have very specific meanings and eternalism and nihilism aren’t really the correct translations of those. The word rtag pa (pron. ta(k) pa) is that everything has a predictable consequence, that is everything is ordered. And the word which has been translated as nihilism is that actions have no consequence. It’s random, so it’s chaos. So, that’s why I’ve moved to order and chaos, because I don’t think the English translation, eternalism and nihilism, actually points to what the Tibetan is pointing to. Okay?

Now, who are these people who see that experience has no coming or going?Another small point, you will see over and over again that they use such words as see that experience has no coming or going. They actually won’t necessarily use the word understand. What’s the difference there?

Student: It’s not a thought. It’s an awareness.

Ken: Seeing is a direct experience. Understanding can be interpreted as a cognitive process. This is not a cognitive process. It’s not that you understand that all experience has no coming or going. It’s that you actually experience it that way. And that’s a very, very different phenomenon.

Homage to teachers and Avalokiteshvara

Ken: So, who are these: my excellent teachers and Lord All Seeing? Now, you’ll see in translations that sometimes there’s simply the equation of excellent teacher and Lord All Seeing. Different translators interpreted this differently. But here I’ve chosen to say that there is the mythical figure, Chenrezi or Avalokiteshvara, which is Lord All Seeing, and then the people that Tokmé Zongpo has had actual experience with, which are his own teachers. To all of them:

I humbly and constantly honor with my body, speech and mind.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo

Now, in the Tibetan, it just says sgo gsum (pron. go sūm), which means the three doors or three gates.You’ll see that in other translations, it’ll just say the three gates. What the three gates are, are body, speech and mind. I came across one other translation, which came up with the English equivalent of body, speech and mind. Any guesses? It’s a phrase every one of you has heard: thought, word and deed. That’s quite nice. And that would make actually a more English translation: I humbly and constantly honor you through thought, word and deed. That would be actually real English. Any questions on this? Yes.

Student: I have one other question. So, the order of the four lines, because I noticed in other translations they were in a different order.

Ken: Mm-hmm.

Student: What is that in your interpretation? The one I have is, I started with, “I pay homage in my three doors.”

Ken: Yeah.

Student: And you start with you. So, you’re doing the invocation too, in the beginning.

Ken: Well, I followed the Tibetan.

Student: So, you followed the Tibetan. That is how it is in the Tibetan? So, somebody else then takes that, changes it to …

Ken: Well, if you’re putting it into prose, one has to understand that Tibetan works backwards compared to English. So, in Tibetan, if you want to say, “I went to the store.”

Student: “You remember the store I went to?”

Ken: No, “store to went”, no, “I store to went,” or “store to I went.” Actually, usually they just say “store to went” and it’s understood that it’s “I” who went. Okay? So, everything works backwards. So, to turn it all around is perfectly legitimate.

What I tried to do in this translation was to give a flavor because what happens in the Tibetan is there is a kind of build that can happen. I try to not necessarily generate the same build but generate a similar build in English. So, what I chose to do here was to say, “You who see experience has no coming and going,” I put the qualities first, and then describe it. Because otherwise you get the action first and then everything gets added to it, and it doesn’t have the same dramatic quality. But those are individual choices of translators. Okay?

So, this is the homage. And Tokmé Zongpo is paying homage to the embodiment of awakened compassion and his teachers who have taught him about awakened compassion. And in doing so he honors the essence of the Mahayana thing, which is the fusion or the union of emptiness and compassion. The very first line is about emptiness, and the second line is about compassion.

The statement of intention

Ken: The second verse is his statement of intention. This was a little difficult to translate in a satisfactory way because it used the word practice, or used two different words in Tibetan, which would normally both be translated into English by practice.

The fully awake, the buddhas, source of joy and well-being,
all come from practicing the noble way.
Because practice depends on knowing how to practice,
I will explain the practice of all bodhisattvas.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo

That doesn’t work very well. So, I had to come up with a second word, and the one I chose was integrating which is a fairly free choice in this case. Okay?

The fully awake, the buddhas, the phrase in Tibetan there is: complete buddhas. So, in a sense what I’ve translated here is redundant because buddha means fully awake. I use the repetition as a way of getting the flavor, the sense of the Tibetan, of complete buddha. So: The fully awake, the buddhas, source of joy and well-being.

Now, Buddhism is about bringing an end to suffering. And the basic tenent of the first noble truth is: there is suffering. Bring an end to it. When we start off practice, at least if you’re anything like me, you think you’re actually going to get rid of something. You’re going to come to an understanding, and it’s going to end all your problems in the world. Everything will be nice and hunky dory after that. Did anybody else come to Buddhism with that idea? Was It was just me?

What I’ve learned is, that isn’t how it works. What I’ve actually learned—I won’t say what you actually learned because I don’t know what you actually learned—is that suffering comes from fighting experience. Through my practice of Buddhism, I’ve learned a little bit about not fighting experience. Now, when you absolutely stop fighting experience, everything changes. But we constantly fall back into fighting experience because it’s not going the way we want it to. Anybody else recognize this one? I’m here all alone. I can tell. [Laughter]

Student: You know, that first line made me think that too, where it says “that experience has no coming or going.”

Ken: You can’t do anything about it. Right? So, there are ways of learning not to fight experience. One is through understanding emptiness, which stops you from taking experience so seriously. And the other is through compassion, which is the ability to be present with pain and suffering. Which is a profound way: one’s own pain, other people’s pain, actually just being present with it. And when you stop fighting it, then you have this understanding that it is just experience. It’s not either the beginning or the end of the world. It’s just experience. And out of that comes a sense of joy and well-being. So, that’s my understanding of that phrase: The fully awake, the buddhas, source of joy and well-being.

Okay. How do buddhas come about? How does being fully awake come about? Well, unless you’re one of these natural people who just awaken, it comes out through some actually pretty solid hard work, because we have these ingrained tendencies which cause us to fight experience. Everything that crops up around the corner, we just say, “No, that’s not exactly what I wanted. I want it just this way, not that way.” Now we’re into the old struggle again.

Stay in experience but stay soft

George: Can I ask you a question?

Ken: Of course.

George: In terms of practice here, when one sees or experiences that arising within oneself—that resistance, that icky feeling—I think we’ve been talking about experiencing that consciousness; that is, being present with that feeling and not trying to ditch it, run away with from it, change it, but to be able just to be there. Is that correct?

Ken: Mm-hmm. That’s all? Okay. I’m going to expand on your comment a little bit, George, because there are some potential dangers I’ve discovered in it. One of the potential dangers I see in saying “just be in it,” is that it can give people the idea that practice consists of a grin and bear it attitude. This is counterproductive because a grin and bear it attitude is actually fighting experience. You stay in the experience, but you have to also stay soft in the experience. Once you start to harden up, you’re fighting.

So, being able to detect within oneself when one is hardening or when one is just open, that’s really important. As soon as one hardens you need to shift, stop making that effort, because now it’s solidifying into something, and then return again. So, this is why, at least in the mahamudra and dzogchen traditions, working with very short periods of time is often suggested. You’ve heard me talk about experiencing 1/10th of the feeling or 1/100th of the feeling. The point of all of those ideas is to be able to stay with what is arising in experience without hardening. As soon as you harden, drop it, start again. Peter?

Peter: Another form of not hardening is keeping a sense of humor.

Ken: Yeah. That really helps. I mean all of you know that you can’t possibly practice shamatha without cultivating a sense of humor, because it just becomes so absurd. “Yep. There I go again.” [Laughter] What I say to people when they’re learning meditation, there are three things you’ve got to cultivate here. One is gentleness, or actually patience first, then gentleness, because people get really hard on themselves. “I’m not going to have a thought now.” You know how well that works. And then a sense of humor, like, “Okay, that’s just how it is.”

As one cultivates those three qualities with respect to one’s own practice, then it becomes much easier to tolerate the perversity of other people. [Laughter] Because you see they’re just caught in the same thing. It’s through understanding through our own experience the process of suffering that we come to compassion. Yes, Kate?

Kate: Is one taste the result of not fighting experience, another way to put it?

Ken: Definitely. It doesn’t mean that everything has the same flavor. It actually indicates a profound level of not fighting experience. Yeah.

So, being fully awake, which is what buddha means, comes from integrating—or you can read that as practicing—the noble way, working at it.

Because integration depends on your knowing how to practice,
(that’s just logic, common sense)
I will explain the practice of all bodhisattvas.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo

So, he is saying, “I’m going to explain how you become awake”, or “how the bodhisattvas practice so that they become buddhas.” It’s a simple declaration of intention. Any questions on this? This is fairly straightforward. So, now that completes the introduction. And now we start into the actual 37 practices and you see they’re numbered.

The 37 Practices: verse 1

Ken: So, the first one:

Right now you have a good boat, fully equipped and available—hard to find.
To free others and you from the boat of samsara, day and night, fully alert and present, study, reflect and meditate—this is the practice of a bodhisattva.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 1

Now, there are a number of translation points here. I’m not going to go into those too much. Just to say, there’s a lot of choice about how one constructs a sentence. In the Tibetan he goes through these lines and ends up with “this is the practice of a bodhisattva.” So, that’s why I chose to put it at the end. Whereas you see some translations will be: “The practice of a bodhisattva is da, da, da, da, da.” But that’s purely a matter of choice. To the extent that I could, I tried to retain the poetic quality of this, and you can judge whether it’s successful or not.

A second thing is that I cheat all over the place when I translate. Pardon? Yeah, I cheat. I cheat. Yes, because in Tibetan, there’s a very well constructed sentence: dal ‘byor gru chen rnyed dka’ thob dus ‘dir (pron: dal jor dru chen nyé ka tob du dir). “At this time that you have obtained this difficult to obtain great boat, which is fully equipped and available,” which I’ll come to in a minute. But that’s a terribly difficult sentence. You’ve got so many things going on in it. So, I cheated, “Right now you have a good boat, fully equipped and available—hard to find.” I didn’t even try to put it into a sentence. That’s what I mean by cheating [laughs]. Whereas all the other translators were more honest. They tried to put it into a sentence which sounded good.

So, one of the reasons I translated this as boat, rather than ship, well, how many ships do you think they saw in Tibet? None. At best it was going to be a big boat, so I just kept it as boat. But the operative words in this are fully equipped, available, and hard to find. Now, where’s the other translation? Yeah. This is a much more traditional translation: “Endowed with full leisure and an excellent vessel.” There are many, many different translations. I used to translate it as: “leisure and resources.”

What’s going on here? The phrase dal ‘byor in Tibetan is a contraction of dal ba brgyad ‘byor ba bcu (pron. dal ba gyä jor ba chu), which means the eight leisures and the ten resources or good stuff. It’s a general term. Wherewithal: so, what are the eight leisures? Well, the eight leisures are freedom from the eight unrestful states, you see? What are the eight unrestful states? Well, this goes back to Nagarjuna actually. They’re: the hell realms, the pretas, the hungry ghosts, the animals, barbarians, long-lived gods, dark age. Damn, I used to know these by heart.

Kate: It’s okay. There won’t be a test.

Ken: Yes, there will be. Heretics, dark age, and disabled. Now, why are these unrestful? They’re regarded as unrestful because they don’t afford you the ability to rest the way you need to to practice. There’s too much going on. You’re always caught up in something, so you can’t bring your attention. Now, here we have the mythical presentation here. This was presented in terms of different ways of existing: as a hell being, as a hungry ghost, as an animal, as a barbarian, people who are beyond the pale of civilization, the gods who live for very long times “adrift on the currents of desire”. That was from another translation I did many years ago. Heretics who have set views and aren’t open to different ways of understanding or knowing experience. People who are born in a dark age, that is, where there isn’t any religion or any Buddhism available. Being disabled, not being able to speak or hear, so that you couldn’t actually take in or articulate your own understanding of the dharma.

So, those were called the unrestful states. I think it’s helpful to think about these the way that I’ve talked about, not so much as states where you’ll be born in future or have been born in previous lives, but where we are now. Okay? When you’re consumed by anger, how active is your dharma practice? What about greed? What about when you’re focused totally on survival? Any of you ever behave in an uncivilized manner? What about when you’re caught up by your desires and you’re just like, “Oh, this is what I’ve always wanted, this can go on forever. I’m not going to worry about the dharma now. This is what I wanted”. You know, pop some ecstasy or something.

Ever run into or encounter situations where you just don’t believe the dharma? I’m not advocating that you actually believe it, but at certain points you just don’t believe it. You just don’t. “No, this is not the way it is. This doesn’t work for me.” Ever run into that? Do you ever encounter areas of your life or areas in you, which no understanding of the dharma has penetrated? [Laughter] Okay, that’s dark age. Are there any areas in you that you can’t communicate with? Okay, it’s difficult there, isn’t it? So, another way of understanding these lines is to interpret this very internally. That if one’s in any one of those states—or areas of our psyche, if you wish— where you can’t practice. You know, it’s not there. So, if we take that interpretation, what proportion of your life is available for practice?

Peri: A half hour maybe. [Laughter]

Ken: You getting the point here? So, now this is possibly a nontraditional way of thinking about it. But I think it’s very helpful, because then you realize, “Oh, the actual opportunities that I have to practice are pretty small.” Yeah. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. Peri’s exceptional. She gets a whole half hour. Yes?

Student: I was just going to say on that, I’m really glad that you had us read it in several different translations. Because when I first read that line with the “—hard to find” in it, I interpreted it completely the opposite way that you meant it. When I first read it, I interpreted it as “this boat is here, it’s everything you need, but you can’t get to it.”

Ken: Aha.

Student: And it wasn’t until I read it in other translations that I realized no, no, it’s saying “you’ve got it. It’s already here.”

Ken: And it’s a very difficult thing to find.

Student: Yes, but from your translation, right, the interpretation is just the opposite.

Ken: Yeah. You’re pointing out an ambiguity there, but I didn’t know any other way to construct it.

Student: I mean, just as an example from one of the others I read, it said, “having gained this rare ship of freedom and fortune,” which was a completely different way of looking at it.

Ken: Right. Yeah, that’s fine. It just doesn’t have the same flow to me. That’s all. Okay. Is that Garchen?

Student: Yeah.

Ken: Yeah.

Student: You mean who did it?

Ken: Yeah. Its Garchen’s group.

Student: He gave the commentary. It doesn’t actually say if he translated it.

Ken: Yeah. It’s his people. That was one of the better translations that’s in that little yellow book.

[Unclear crosstalk about the origin of the commentary]

Ken: When I was translating, I tried to get words which actually fit with a boat. I mean, we don’t talk about “a rare boat of good fortune.” We can understand it, but it’s not English. Well, a boat is “fully equipped and available.” So, those were rather free translations. “Fully equipped” is like having the eight leisures. And now we get to the wherewithal, and that’s what I translated rather freely as available. Well, okay, what makes this boat available?

And here you have a list of ten things, five which have to do with you personally, and five which have to do with the environment in which you’re born. And they are respectively: you have a human body, you’re born into the central country—these are literal translations, I’ll explain this in a minute—you’re sound in body and mind, you weren’t swept away by bad karma—although there’s some karma momentum available to you—you have some propensity for faith or confidence.

Now, again these were originally qualities of human existence because you could have been born as an animal, that put you out of the running immediately. Even if you were born as a human being, you could have been born somewhere where Buddhism wasn’t available. The central country means India, or more broadly, any country where Buddhism is practiced. You could have been born a human in the central country but had some disability which prevented you from understanding. You are blind or deaf or what have you. Certainly if you’re blind or deaf that would have made it very difficult for you to practice in previous cultures, because you would generally be pushed to the edge of society anyway.

You could have had all of those three things, but been born a butcher’s son, which means you’re going to be a butcher. And that would make it difficult for you to practice. Or being born the son of a pickpocket, which meant you’re going to be a pickpocket, [laughs] and so forth. Even if you’ve been born a human being in the central country, you are sound in mind and body, and you aren’t being carried away by your own karma, you can say, “Well, Buddhism doesn’t mean anything to me. Practice doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t have any faith in this.”

In 1974, I was translating for Rinpoche and we flew to Edmonton where there was a geshe and I think he’s still there. He must be quite old by now but he’s just a wonderful person. Geshe is learned, like a PhD in Buddhist studies in Tibet in the Gelugpa tradition. And he had a young Tibetan wife who had never been interested in the dharma until Rinpoche showed up. There was something about Rinpoche’s character or whatever, which just shifted something in her. She actually took refuge with Rinpoche and it awakened something in her. From that point on, she had some faith or something to work with, some interest or confidence, however you want to talk about it. So, that’s a very important quality. And there are many, many people, and we all know many people who have everything it takes but just have no interest or think that this isn’t important.

So, those five qualities are all necessary. They make the dharma available to us, but there are another five qualities which come from our environment. One is buddha has to have appeared. There has to be a buddha that’s come into the world. Not all buddhas teach, so the buddha has to have taught. Not only does he have to have appeared and taught, but the dharma had to endure until we came along, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to practice it. There have to be people who are practicing it, because otherwise we wouldn’t know how to practice it. So, not only does it have to come down to us but there have to be people who are practicing it. Finally, there have to be people who are going to support us. This is of course oriented towards monks who depend on alms from people. But there has to be a way of being able to support ourselves while we’re practicing the dharma.

So, again these are the literal or the traditional way of understanding these 10 factors. But it would be also useful to look at them internally. When am I human? When am I in the central country? Do I have some awareness of dharma, of Buddhism and its importance in my life? When am I all here in body and mind as opposed to being disabled in some way, deaf or blind? We all encounter that, you know. What we need to do can be right in front of us, and we will just ignore it. We just literally won’t see it. When am I being swept away by my own karma, the momentum of my own reactive patterns which makes it impossible for me to practice? When do I have no faith, no confidence and so no inclination?

You can do the similar things for the other five, which are again: the buddha appearing, actually teaching, dharma has lasted, there are followers, and the support of the faithful. Now, all of those you’ll find in numerous texts. One that I was reviewing this in is The Torch of Certainty, which is a commentary on the foundational practices. It has this at the beginning. They’re also in Words of My Perfect Teacher. And there are many other interpretations. But the point in this is that it’s very difficult for all of this stuff to come together. The fact is for all of us here now, it has come together. So, there’s a tremendous exhortation here that because all of these things have come together and it’s very rare that it does all come together—that’s the difficult to find part or hard to find—then it’s kind of stupid not to make use of it.

I don’t know, I think I’ve related this to you. There’s a teacher who was once asked to write his biography by his students. He sort of looked at them, and said, “If you insist. Come back tomorrow.” So, the students gathered around and he said, “Take out a pen and paper. I’ll dictate.” He said, “For the first 20 years of my life I didn’t know about the dharma. For the next 20 years I knew about it but I didn’t practice it. For the last 20 years I practiced it but have had no result. This is the story of a wasted life.” [Laughter] They had subtle ways of making their point.

So, we have this opportunity now “to free others and ourselves from the sea of samsara, day and night, fully alert and present, study, reflect and meditate.” This is what a Bodhisattva does with his or her life. Okay? Is this understandable? Susan.

Study, reflect and meditate

Susan: I really was thinking about the instruction to study, reflect and meditate because it seems to directly relate to what you’re asking us to do as we progress through the text. Can you kind of discuss it? I’ve also heard study as listen. So, to me, it’s like receiving the text in some way or another. And then reflect, it goes beyond just intellectual understanding. And then meditate, does one meditate with what one has learned upon reflection, or can one reflect in a meditation?

Ken: Okay. You’re asking about the meaning of study, reflect and meditate, and what you actually do there. Okay. The phrase in Tibetan is thos bsam sgom (pron thö sam gom). Thos as you correctly noted is the word to listen. That comes from a time when there were very few texts, and your only opportunity to study was to listen really carefully when the teacher read you a text and commented on it. For instance, it would be something very similar to this, except you wouldn’t have the text in front of you. Because very few texts would have been written on palm leaf manuscripts, which are very fragile and they all had to be handwritten. This is going back to Indian times.

So, I’d be sitting here reading the text and then giving commentary on it, just the way I am now. Except your only way of absorbing this would have been to listen very acutely. So, that’s why it said listen, but it really means study. We have more study tools available to us and more ways of studying now. We can look stuff up on the internet and read books. We can do all kinds of things and really get a lot of different perspectives. And it’s much easier, much more available, because quite literally in India you might hear a text read once and you’d be expected to know it. Yeah, there were people who literally memorized everything they were told after hearing it once. It’s quite extraordinary.

Now, reflection. The purpose of study is to get an intellectual understanding. Reflection takes you a bit further. In reflection you work it out for yourself. You think about it and you test it through, you know, “Does this make sense? Yeah, it sounds reasonable, but what about this?” You’re going through this process of integrating it into your own understanding. So, it’s a bit more than just intellectual understanding. You’re actually making sure it makes sense to you. There’s a shift that occurs through that. Okay?

And then meditation. We could also use the word cultivation there. That is, now it makes sense to you, but you may or may not be living it. So, cultivation or meditation is the process by which we make that understanding something that we actually are not only living, it’s more than just living by, it becomes the way we live.

In another text, a text I’m translating from Rinpoche, he doesn’t say this very strongly. He says, “If you haven’t really assimilated the four thoughts,”—and this is the first of the four thoughts, precious human birth—”then it doesn’t matter how much practice or meditation you do. You’ll never get to the heart of the dharma.”

Unless you really are approaching this as, “Yeah, I only have these few moments that I’m actually present enough to practice. I’ve got to make full use of this, and really work at it, and really take that to heart.” So, you’re going to find that as you study, you’ll start to engage some reflection. And as you reflect, sometimes it’ll be more like cultivation, and you’re gonna go back and forth between these. Sometimes when you’re cultivating, you’ll just naturally move back to reflection because a part of it won’t actually make sense, so you need to think it through again. But as you do this over and over again it sinks deeper and deeper into us. That’s basically what I was trying to get people to do—in the chapter on impermanence, and in the chapter on karma—is to take this kind of material and really get it in. So, it makes a difference in motivation. Okay. Does that clarify?

Susan: Sometimes there’s like a reciprocal relationship between reflection and meditation. I took meditation literally to mean when I was on the cushion, not in the broader sense of cultivation that you were talking about.

Ken: Right.

Susan: I mean, it kind of naturally goes out there. So, I thought this was also supposed to be like a reflective meditation practice that we take into our meditation practice.

Ken: Yes, that is, during your meditation time, you’re going to start thinking about it. But as you think about it over and over again, it’ll make sense to you. And that’s when the meditative process starts in earnest. “Okay, now it makes sense. Now I’ve got to instill it in me.” Because the word for meditation actually means to make familiar or to become familiar with. So, you become very familiar with this so that it actually becomes the way you live. Okay. But you do it. In the three-year retreat, the first week we spent on precisely this meditation, 10 hours a day.

Student: Which one?

Ken: Precious human birth. The equivalent of this stanza with all of those categories. You just think about it day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. That was the meditation. Then the second week was all death and impermanence. The third week was karma. The fourth week was the sixth realms. That was the first month. Michelle?

Michelle: One of the things I found on the web—the source of all information, although not necessarily knowledge or wisdom—was a commentary by a woman named Thubten Chodron.

Ken: Thubten Chodron. Yeah. She lives up in Seattle. Okay.

Student: And she did about 15 pages on this verse alone, most centered just on this line. And how to study and how to reflect and how to meditate. And what the relationship between those things is. And it was actually very accessible and quite interesting.

Ken: She’s a Gelugpa nun. I’ve met her a couple of times. Very traditional, very orthodox, but quite sound in what she’s saying. This is stuff she’s learned through her study and it’ll be a very traditional way of doing it. Mikel?

Find what works for your practice

Mikel: To follow up on Susan’s comment, I guess I’m still trying to figure out too, more broadly speaking about this text, is like the balance. I know this is probably really subjective, but just sort of thinking about the balance of reading, reflecting, and meditating. And reading a lot of different interpretations and translations and things. It seems, I don’t know, are there any pitfalls in going overboard with all the translations? Does it make any sense to maybe just read it once, not look at many translations at all, sit, see what comes up for you on your own, and then look at all the translations? It just seems like a lot of busyness to me.

Ken: Well, everybody has approaches which work for them, and you have to find yours. Jamgön Kongtrül the Great, on study, reflection and meditation said: “When you study, study everything under the sun. When you reflect keep an open mind. When you meditate, meditate on one thing.” So, getting different versions, and you don’t have to get 500, you know, two or three or something like that, so you get different perspectives. That’s going to round out your understanding. That can be a good thing.

When you reflect, you’re going to come up with all kinds of arguments. “That doesn’t make sense to me for this.” That’s why you’ve got to keep an open mind. Just, okay, that way, this way. The pitfall that I want to warn you against is, rather than trying to convince yourself that what is being said in here is true—which is like adopting somebody else’s agenda a little bit, if you see what I mean—really think it through for yourself. “Does this make sense to me?” If it doesn’t make sense, then you go from there. But you keep saying, “Does this make sense to me?”

Because it’s really your practice, not mine, not the tradition’s, nothing like that. It’s your practice that’s important. You’ve got to find your own way of making it make sense to you. If it doesn’t make sense to you, if you take issue with it, then bring it up, question it. You may want to read some other interpretations but it’s got to make sense to you. You’ve got to figure that out. It’s not a case of just believing it because somebody else wrote it. You’ve got to work through it. “Is it this way for me?” You may come up with a somewhat different interpretation, but it’s the one which motivates you. That’s fine. You follow?

Then when you’ve come up with an understanding that makes sense to you, then you drill into that, and really take that in as deeply as you can. You start making it the way you live. That’s what Jamgön Kongtrül means by you do one thing. Did that help? Yeah. But a lot of people will just end up studying everything and they’ll be able to give you what every tradition said about one line but they haven’t instilled any of it into themselves.

So, you need to read or study enough so that you understand it. You don’t have to understand everything about it, but you understand it. Then you need to reflect on it so that understanding actually becomes your understanding. Then you need to cultivate so that your understanding becomes the way you live. Okay?

Now we’re almost at 10:00. I’ve gone a little bit late here. So, we’ve got the first three verses done. We can look at the next three or four verses for next time. Let’s do the next three verses. That’s verses two, three and four, because verses five and six go together. These don’t have as much traditional material embedded in them in the way that the first three verses did. They’re fairly straightforward but I think from the discussion today you may be beginning to get a feel of how to work with this material. So, any questions about that? About how to work with this material over the next week? Good. Okay.