The structure of the retreat

[Comments about logistics]

Ken: So, the focus this weekend is the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. How many of you are aspiring bodhisattvas? [Laughter] Is the operative word there aspiring or bodhisattva at this point?

I never know what the word ancient means. Can anybody tell me what the word ancient means? When does something officially become ancient? Is it 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years, or 5,000? Can anybody tell me?

Student: Older than you?

Ken: “Older than you,” okay. Now I know where we are. That’s good. So I don’t know whether this qualifies as an ancient Buddhist text. It was written in the 14th century by an individual whose name is Tokmé Zongpo, which means, or at least one way of translating that name is unobstructed or unrestricted good.

My own relationship with this text is somewhat interesting. When I was in the three-year retreat, in France, our retreat director gave us this text. He said, “It’s a good text.” And we were studying a lot of texts. And I took a quick glance at it and I thought, oh, not another one of these things, you know, endless lists of what you should do and shouldn’t do, etc.

So I said, “Okay, thank you very much.” And put it aside. Unbeknownst to me, I had already had a previous contact with Tokmé Zongpo but didn’t know that it was Tokmé Zongpo when I had translated a prayer, which goes something like: “If it’s better for me to be ill, may I be ill. If it’s better for me to recover, may I recover. If it’s better for me to die, may I die.” It’s kind of an interesting prayer, isn’t it? I learned actually only relatively recently that Tokmé Zongpo was the author of this. He wrote it for a student who was struggling with a very serious illness.

Now in the three-year retreat, I encountered my own difficulties. They were somewhat non-trivial. I found myself reduced to that prayer, because I didn’t know whether I was going to get any better. It sure didn’t seem like it at the time. And so, what do you do? It was very much a day-to-day process. I was ill physically and also quite seriously emotionally as well, for a very long period of time in the retreat. It was very difficult.

And then many years after the retreat, I went to listen to a teacher, a very, very good teacher named Garchen Rinpoche. He’s goes back and forth between Tibet and Arizona, which is where his main center is, and he teaches around the states a bit. If you have a chance, I do suggest that you go. And this is a person who knows a thing or two about suffering.

He was in prison in China for 20 years or so. And one can only imagine how harsh those conditions are. In the same prison, there was an extremely respected and renowned dzogchen teacher. And he said that he studied with him 20 years in jail, perfect situation, except it’s not quite perfect, because they weren’t allowed to talk with each other. So meditation instruction consisted of grunts consisting of a single word or a single sentence as they passed each other in the corridors. Still, a lot can be transmitted in the right word or the right sentence.

Anyway, Garchen Rinpoche just radiates love and compassion. It’s quite extraordinary, particularly when you have that kind of harshness in your background. And I noticed that he would just hand out these tiny little booklets with the Thirty-Seven Practices translated, to absolutely everybody who came to his talks. And I went, “Okay, I think I better take a second look at this text.” And as is usually the case with me, not something I’m terribly proud of, is that, everything I do is always motivated by intense anger. So, I looked at the various translations of the Thirty-Seven Practices and I said, “Oh, these are all hopeless.” And I retranslated it myself. And that’s what we have here today. So, this has come from a very, very impure motivation.

Now Tokmé Zongpo himself—what we’re going to do today, just to finish the structure—the book, this practice, is the best known of Tokmé Zongpo’s hundred-plus works. He was a quite prolific scholar. It’s the one that has exerted the most influence over the centuries.

And it really divides itself up quite neatly into four parts, which is very convenient, because we have four parts to our program. This morning we’re going to focus on the foundations of practice. And then the second is all about me. It’s, what do you do about anger? And there’s five verses there, which is only to do with what you do when people wrong you. And if you’re an angry person, then you feel all the time that people are wronging you. Then, tomorrow morning we’ll talk about six perfections, which is another section of it. And then the last section is, how do you actually live this stuff?

About Tokmé Zongpo

Ken: But it will be helpful to get an understanding about Tokmé Zongpo, who’s an interesting guy. I asked one of my students whose background is research librarian. I said, “Could you dig me up a little bit of information about his bio? Because I’m putting the commentaries into book form.” Tokmé Zongpo lived in the 14th century in Tibet. He was an orphan. His mother died when he was three. His father died when he was five. He was raised by his grandfather until he was about nine, at which point he was put into a monastery.

So that’s kind of a difficult beginning. Once in the monastery, he was recognized as having quite exceptional intellectual abilities, and became a master scholar by the time he was in his early 20s, and recognized as such. And his practice and mastery was such that he ended up being appointed as an abbott in his early 30s, which is rather young. After nine years of that, he said, “I’m done. You need somebody better for this position.” And relatively little is known about the rest of his life because he’d produced his 100 works by then, something like that. He just spent the next 20, 30 years in retreat, practicing. And that’s the basic structure of his life.

But then there are all these stories about him. He seems to have taken compassion somewhat seriously. I mean, really seriously. After a certain point, beggars were very reluctant to ask him for alms, because the beggars knew that he would give them his last cup of barley, or literally the shirt off his back if they asked him. So they got uncomfortable with this. Wolves and sheep were said to play in front of him. And if you’ve been to Tibet, you know wolves and sheep don’t play [laughs]. It’s a pretty one-sided conversation when it comes to wolves and sheep. He was just renowned for how he really lived this life of compassion.

The actual genesis of the Thirty-Seven Practices was an occasion, apparently, when he didn’t have any money, and he was trying to figure out how to make ends meet. He had difficulties even as a monk. And somebody said, “Well, why don’t you do what everybody else does?” Namely, give empowerments so you get lots of offerings and you make a bit of money in the process. Very old practice and tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. It certainly goes back to 10th, 11th centuries. Marpa the translator used to do the same thing, as did Kyungpo Naljor. But Tokmé Zongpo, this stuck in his ethical craw, so to speak.

So, he just sat down and wrote this book instead. And he says at the end of it that he wrote it for his own and for others’ benefit. He used it, as many teachers did, they would write these things basically to encourage themselves to reconnect with the practice. It was something that they would do often for their own, and equally often I suppose, at the request of teachers. So, this book comes down to us. It’s all about compassion. It’s about how to live and cultivate compassion in your life. And then the question is, why is that so important? Well, my own experience with this is that compassion is the definitive spiritual quality.

Compassion is the definitive spiritual quality

Ken: A lot of people, particularly in the Tibetan tradition, think of wisdom or insight as the definitive spiritual quality, realization of emptiness, and so forth. I labored under that illusion for a very long time, until a few years ago—some of us are really slow getting the message—when I did a short retreat, which was an absolute disaster. I wanted to prepare for a retreat I was teaching later that summer. I needed to go back and work on some practices, because I was going to teach those practices, but I’d had a certain difficulty with them in the retreat, my training retreat. Well, I ran smack into those difficulties again. Strange how things stay the same. And my inability to practice effectively over these four or five days was so profound that I almost gave up teaching right then and there.

But fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I’d arranged to meet an old colleague after the retreat. I was very shaken by this experience. This is a very well-trained person in Tibetan Buddhism, lives in Santa Cruz. And, so we met over a cup of coffee. I told him my experience and how shaken I was. And he had absolutely the appropriate response. He almost fell off his chair laughing. [Laughs] And then he said something which has been so helpful to me. His teacher was a person I never met but I I’ve heard so much about, was an individual named Lama Yeshe, or one of his teachers anyway. And Lama Yeshe apparently had said to him, “The reason that we study or want to know emptiness is so that we can be compassionate.”

And it just turns everything the other way. I’d come to appreciate that the purpose of compassion, why it is so important is, through compassion, you can become an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world. But the piece that I hadn’t put together, until that time, is what enables you to be an ongoing response to the pain and suffering in the world is the experiential knowledge that you aren’t anything. So now you can just be a response. So emptiness—and those of you who are familiar with Tibetan Buddhism will appreciate the irony here—isn’t the end, it’s the means to a different end. Even when it’s always talked about, you have a means and wisdom, emptiness being the wisdom and compassion being the means, it’s actually the other way around. So everybody else is wrong.

Now, Tokmé Zongpo covers all of this very well. And I’d like to start our time together with a period of meditation. Before we actually start meditating, I want you just to sit for a couple of moments and feel in your heart what brings you here today, what you would like to get out of this program in terms of your own understanding or ability or whatever. And, this all is very much connected with what spiritual practice means to you. So just take a few moments right now and just feel that in your heart, just breathing. What brings you here today? What would you like to get out of our time together? And what role, or place, does this practice actually have in your life? [Pause]

When you do this, you may or may not be able to put it into words. It doesn’t matter whether you can put it into words. What is important is that when you entertain these questions, probably there is a feeling which comes up, an emotion. It may be some kind of yearning, or it may take a different form in you. And what is important here is that you allow yourself to touch that feeling. That feeling has a physical expression. It manifests in your body in some way. So feel how that yearning, or feeling, or motivation, whatever you want to call it, actually manifests in your body. And again, you may very well not be able to put words to it, and don’t bother even trying, just how does it manifest in your body? What is the emotional quality of it? And it may be something quite rich. And it may feel very raw, very tender, very intense. I don’t know. It varies from person to person. Don’t be afraid of it. Many of us, many people are sometimes afraid to really touch that. Don’t be afraid of it, because it is what brings you here, and it is what is most important right now. So just take a few more moments and allow yourself to feel it in your body and in your heart. [Pause]

Now, without letting go or dismissing the physical and emotional sensations you’re experiencing right now, gently move your attention to whatever form of meditation practice you’re used to doing. For most of us, it’s some form of meditating on the breath. Rest attention in the experience of breathing. But let that motivation persist in your experience and just meditate. Begin your practice in that feeling.

[Gong]