Emotions don’t alter awakened compassion

Note: Students were not consistently recorded.

Ken: Any questions about the meditation instruction that you’ve been working with over the last little while? [Unrecorded] Okay, this is a perfect question, goes right into what I was going to talk about. You’re going to get a very long answer. Okay, Kathleen.

Kathleen: My question has to do with emotions in the meditation. I noticed that if I’m feeling calm and serene then the meditation feels more real. When I’m feeling things other than that, then I think I’m into reactive patterns. And one of my questions is—just even more specifically—when you say, “Well, put that emotion and regard it with awakened compassion.” I don’t quite know how to do that.

Ken: As you feel awakened compassion? Or feel the emotion in your body?

Kathleen: Emotion.

Ken: Okay. This also works into what I was going to talk about, but I will answer you directly, briefly, first. The approach that we’re taking here is not the way this material is usually taught. And I’m really combining, very intentionally, two perspectives, which I talked about. One, transformation of experience, and the self-releasing nature of experience. And you’re working with both of those simultaneously.

In order to do this—and this is why we spent the first almost two days of the retreat on just this topic, in your meditation—is that there has to be as deep as possible confidence that you are awakened compassion. And that is what you actually are. And nothing can change that. The worst emotional disruption doesn’t alter that any more than the most violent tornado doesn’t alter the nature of the sky.

That’s very important. And that’s the bedrock, if you wish, that you keep coming back to. So, whenever you feel crazy, and torn apart by what’s arising, or carried off into totally blissful, joyful states—which is just as problematic, a little more enjoyable, but just as problematic—become I am awakened compassion. And as you keep coming back to that, it’s going to gain power. And this is way beyond an intellectual idea. It’s actually very much beyond an emotional idea. This is what is, and you approach it that way. And that’s what the transformation of experience is about. It’s by approaching it that way—that this is just how it is—you set up the possibility of the transformation of experience. Okay?

So don’t even think about putting awakened compassion beside the emotion. No, no, no. We’re going much further than that. “Oh, there’s an emotion, and it’s arising in awakened compassion.” It changes then, like a hurricane in the sky. And the element of faith or confidence is just that—nothing that arises can alter, change …

You heard me talking about the Vajrayana. The essence of human spirituality has the capacity to destroy all reactive patterns and is unaffected by any of them. And that’s the principle here. And you carry that kind of confidence. And I don’t mean any kind of arrogant, dismissive, or suppressive way at all, because it’s not about any of those. You carry that kind of confidence into whatever you experience. It’s a little different kettle of fish.

And one of the themes that has come up in several of the interviews is, “Can I experience the pain of the world? Can I open to it? Do I have that kind of capacity?” And in a couple of cases I’ve responded, “Well, if you think you have difficulty experiencing the pain of the world, what about everything that awakened compassion sees? Or Chenrezi sees?

Thich Nhat Hahn tells a story of a Mrs. Fong who lived in a village. And she was a horribly bad-tempered woman, and it just seemed that she was waiting for an excuse to chew anybody out over anything. And as a consequence, she caused a lot of disruption in the village, a lot of ill feeling. Yet at the same time she had this extraordinary faith in Amitabha Buddha. And she was constantly praying to Amitabha Buddha, praying in a very loud and jarring voice, something like a peacock. You know what a peacock is. But that was her form of devotion.

Well, she continued to manifest this horrible temper and create disruption in the village to such an extent that the village elders at one of their meetings said, “We really have to do something about this. This is not good for the village and for the atmosphere here.”

And one of them said, “I will pay a visit to her.”

And so at the hour that everybody knew Mrs. Fong was doing her devotions, calling on the name of Amitabha, he went and knocked on her door. And she just went on with her devotions. So he knocked again a bit louder, said, “Mrs. Fong, I need to see you.”

She yelled, “I’m praying to Amitabha, leave me alone.” She went back to praying to Amitabha.

And he waited a few minutes and he knocked quite loudly and said, “Mrs. Fong, please come down. I need to talk with you.”

And he heard this crash of her rosary hitting the table, and the slam of the door and, down the stairs, opened it. “What do you want?”

“Oh, Mrs. Fong, I’m so sorry you’re so upset. Here I’ve been knocking on your door just three times over a few minutes, but you’ve been calling Amitabha’s name for the last half hour. I wonder how he feels.”

One of the reasons for reading the biographies of teachers and the stories—myths really—about how Chenrezi, and other of these figures, came into being, or stories about them, is that through these stories, you get a feeling for just how far-reaching the intention of this practice is. It’s completely absurd.

In the Zen tradition you have the four great vows, which starts with: Sentient beings are infinite, I vow to save them all. So, the intention here is to move into total and complete knowing. There’s no stopping short and Chenrezi represents just that. So when you’re feeling a little discouraged in your practice, and you’ve got the black thunderstorm of reactive emotions here, and the tornado there, and the hailstorm here, think, “Well, this is about right.”

The structure of Vajrayana

Ken: This afternoon I want to talk a little bit about what might be called the structure of Vajrayana. And this is some technical material, which you’ll undoubtedly come across in other circles. And I want to give you some ways of understanding it, so that it’s kind of immunizing you against confusion from other sources. Hope that’s not too arrogant.

In India there are four classes of tantra, and they’re known as: kriya tantra, upaya, yoga tantra, and anuttara yoga tantra—anuttara means supreme. Now if you translate these, you get something like—we will just leave tantra in Sanskrit—tantra of action, and then tantra of action again or method sometimes, then tantra of union—yoga is the word for union—and tantra of supreme union.

I think it’s fair to say that the essence of tantra is transformation of experience. And so, in tantra of what’s called tantra of action, it largely consisted of observing specific actions. So you would only eat the three white foods, which were yogurt, milk, and cottage cheese. And the three white and three sweet foods. And the sweet foods were honey molasses, cane sugar, and I can’t remember, it was another kind of sugar. Palm sugar? That’s right. Yeah. And you’d wash seven times a day, you’d only wear white clothes, etc.

And there’s a great deal of kriya tantra practiced in Hinduism, for instance, everybody wears white, all of these things. What I want to suggest is that this is tantra as ritual. And by adherence to ritual, you purified, you got rid of all the unwholesome actions. You did things very purely. The body became very pure; the mind became very pure; everything became very pure.

And the meditation practices on these are described as relating to the deity as a ruler or as the lord. So you regarded the deity as something superior to you, whose power you were invoking, and you invoked them by the proper performance of the ritual. You follow.? So you imagined the deity in front of you and, strictly in kriya tantra, you only imagined the deity in front of you. You perform all of these rituals, and make these invocations and, if you did things exactly right, then you received the energy, and experience was transformed.

Then, the second kind of tantra, I would like to offer the translation of tantra as behavior. And this is less about ritual, and more how you act, just in the course of your life. And there were all kinds of suggestions and guidelines, and things you were meant to do, and not meant to do. It covered all aspects of life, but not in this ritual form. And at this level of tantra, you regard the deity as an equal, as a friend, as someone you could get to know. And when you visualize the deity or imagine the deity in front and you imagined yourself as the deity, you are peers. And by acting appropriately with your peer, then you receive the energy and things move forward.

In yoga tantra, the external forms now become much less important, and you regard the deity as an expression of your own mind. So you imagine you are the deity and this is an expression of your own mind. And when that’s really clear and vivid, then you receive the energy, things move forward.

And in anuttara yoga tantra, or supreme union tantra, you regard the deity as an expression of what is. And so everything is a manifestation of the deity. And now the external forms are really not that important, even though there are very elaborate rituals with anuttara yoga tantra. But it’s that quality of this is what is.

Now, when you study Tibetan Buddhism, you will hear that certain deities are this class of tantra, and certain deities are that class of tantra. For instance, Chenrezi is generally regarded as a kriya tantra deity, and Green Tara as an upaya tantra, and some forms of Vajrasattva as a yoga tantra. And then there aren’t very many yoga tantra deities around actually; it kind of got left out. But then you got the supreme yoga tantra of things like Chakrasamvara, Vajrayogini and all the heavy-duty yidams with that level. And there’s extraordinary amounts of energy have been exerted over the years, classifying the tantras and getting all of this very, very precise.

They didn’t have a lot to do in Tibet, so they did a lot of academic bookkeeping. And Ingrid, my ex-wife, has just translated this section of a Tibetan encyclopedia that deals with all of this classification—boring. She’s looking forward to the next section, which has more juice in it.

Your changing relationship with Chenrezi

Ken: That being said, and that’s why I want you to have that background so that if you come across this from other sources you know, more or less, what they’re talking about. There is an inner interpretation to this, and that is as the maturation of your relationship with the deity. Now, when you came here, how did you regard Chenrezi?

Student: Weird.

Ken: Weird. Something out there. “Awakened compassion. Wow, I don’t know how to relate to this. This sounds pretty impressive.” So, it was something you couldn’t possibly be. It was out there, you didn’t know how to relate to it, kind of a kriya tantra. And what do you focus on when you aren’t quite sure what to do or how to relate to things, and it seems very superior, and you’re intimidated, and awestruck, and all of that? What do you focus on? Doing everything just right. But then you get to know this, it becomes somewhat familiar. You follow?

And as you get to know it, “Oh, it’s still pretty impressive, but this might just be in the realm of possibility.” And so now a whole different relationship starts to develop. And you continue with this and you think, “I understand something about compassion and it’s just, that’s an expression of my mind.” And now you’re moving into much more of a relationship. And the perspective that I’ve been teaching you from is, this is the nature of being awakened compassion.

Now, in reference to your original question, Pat, in ordinary tantra’s ritual, you would meditate the deity in front. And tomorrow after the empowerment ceremony, we’ll go through the formal method of practice that is used and you’ll see that there is this element. You start imagining Chenrezi is on your head. You may have already read this in Bokar Rinpoche’s book. So it’s very much external, so it has that element, but then you become the deity. Deity becomes you, whichever way you want to work.

So in the way that I’m suggesting you do the practice right now, you don’t imagine the deity in front. So don’t try to see the deity in front and then absorb it in some way. That is a method of practice, but it’s not what I’ve been suggesting to you. And that’s an actual method of practice, particularly at the upaya tantra level. What I want you to do is just, I am awakened compassion, and then let yourself assume the form.

So there’s no sense of in front first and then becoming, it’s straight expression of what you are right from the beginning. This is why I’ve been deemphasizing the sense of visualizing it, and emphasizing the sense of being the deity. You have four arms, what does that feel like? You’re sitting in vajra posture, and you’re sitting on a moon on a lotus, and there’s a moon behind your back, clothed in all of this silk, and jewels, and is extraordinarily rich, and really enter into that experience. Okay, questions? That’s a lot of material I’ve just thrown at you.

[Unrecorded] Or just let it go. It’s just stuff that’s arising. This is not the method of practice. There are methods of practice where you visualize everything, and a mirror image of what you’re visualizing is arising in front of you, and you do both these simultaneously. But that’s not what I’m teaching here.

[Unrecorded] You’re talking about the sadhana practice? Yeah. You do it over and over again. It’s a way of deepening your experience. So if you’re a baseball player, you know how to catch a ball. But if you want to be a really good baseball player, what do you do? Cal Ripken, every day, 1,000 ground balls. Every day that he was playing, 1,000 ground balls he fielded. That’s why he was a good shortstop. Chinese expression: if you want to learn something, do it 10,000 times.

So when you do this practice, yeah, it’s very good to have that experience, but by imagining Chenrezi, developing a deep feeling of faith and confidence in that, then imagine this coming in. Then it just renews, refreshes and enlivens. That experience makes it alive and vivifies it. And so you do this again, and again, and again, and eventually something gets the message. Because the point here isn’t to have an experience of it. That’s just the starting point. The point is to be it. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

Buddhism in general is rather uncompromising. Vajrayana is extremely uncompromising. And it’s said that you form a relationship with your yidam; you have a relationship with your teacher. What they don’t tell you is that the teacher and the yidam have a pact, and they’re like two parts of a sandwich and you are the meat. And basically, their idea is to squeeze you out so there’s nothing left. Okay. Any other questions? Yes.

Difficult obstacles revealed

Student: Were you told that your patterns would come up, and what practice was, and what you could discover? Is this what Tibetans do?

Ken: Or is it what happens to Tibetans? Were we told? Only indirectly, in the often coded language of Tibetan Buddhism, “You do deep dharma, deep obstacles arise.” [Unrecorded] Well, yes and no. After you’ve run into an obstacle, 10, 15, 20 times, you begin to connect the two, but you don’t usually connect them at first.

Speaking personally, I never understood what to do with the mess that arose when I do these kinds of practices, because we actually weren’t given any instruction about what to do with them. Just “Here’s the instructions of how to do the practice.” And so you do the practice, and you find yourself going nuts in one direction. As soon as you hauled yourself back into sanity, you go off in another direction. And basically, most of us were quite young. We were in our 20s at this point. We just kept going. And sometimes in not very good ways.

We just did it without, often, a clear idea of how to work with this stuff constructively. And certainly the case for me, I fought everything, which is actually not the best way to work. I just fought everything. It took many years before that fighting was ground out of me. And it really is ground out. There was no enlightenment there.

Do Tibetans or did Tibetans experience this kind of thing? I can only assume so. I have relatively little actual evidence to base it on. But there are a couple of things. So I’ll mention two. One was an experience I had in 1986, when Situ Rinpoche was visiting Los Angeles, and I set up a program for him at the Dharmadatu, which was sitting program, and then he’d interview people. And during this program a student of mine couldn’t sit. She was too churned up with what was coming up inside.

And I was not in the meditation. I was sitting with Situ Rinpoche’s lamas. He had two or three lamas with him and we were just chatting about stuff. And she came out. And so I excused myself from them, and they saw that she was upset. And I sat down with her and talked with her a little bit, and gave her some advice about how to work with the meditation. She said, “Okay.” And then she went back into the meditation hall. And two of Situ Rinpoche’s lamas looked at me with just shock on their face and just said, “Oh, you really are a lama.”

And so from that I learned that the ability to work with people’s emotions was some kind of mysterious thing in Tibetan lore, how you actually did it. There was nothing particularly mysterious or magical. I just walked with her, helped her with meditation instruction. But that was regarded as a special thing. So, how to work with the emotional material clearly was not something these guys knew. And how to work with somebody else’s material—they didn’t know how to do it.

The second thing that I’ll mention, in the second retreat, a monk from Rinpoche’s monastery from Palpung came to visit him. He came out of Tibet, and this would be in the early ’80s when it was still very difficult to get out. And he’d been the lead chanter at Rinpoche’s monastery, at the main Kagyu monastery in Palpung.

And at the same time, Rinpoche had asked us to do a series of Mahakala rituals, which involved basically doing ritual from 4:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, just straight through, every day for a week. It was a lot. And I was in charge of the shrine, which meant 150 tormas a day plus everything else. It was a huge thing. And my closest friend in the retreat was the lead chanter, which is great because he and I got along very well. And so we had this dbu mdzad (pron. umze)—because he knew this ritual—come and teach us all of it: what prayer went here and all of this stuff, and it is very, very complicated, and what stuff had to happen on the shrine at this point, etc.

And we basically spent about a week with him just going over the ritual and getting very clear about it. And so we had lots of time to talk as well. And he was a great guy. I mean, “What happens if you don’t play the cymbals correctly here?”

“You go to Vajra hell.” This is old-school Tibet. But we asked him a bit about his practice and he was very forthcoming. He said that he’d had a very, very difficult time in the three-year retreat himself.

At Palpung, when you did the three-year retreat, at the end of the three-year retreat, towards a certain point in the three-year retreat when you’d been practicing gtum mo (pron. tum mo)—gtum mo is generating this inner heat—and all of the monks who were in the retreat would process around, but they’d be clad in wet sheets. And this would happen in the middle of Tibetan winter. And it was meant to demonstrate their ability to generate heat and stay warm.

He said, “I froze. Oh, how horrible.” So, after that he did a one-year retreat on Vairocana. And Vairocana is a purification deity; it’s actually a kriya tantra practice. And he said he started into this practice. And it’s a four-headed deity, brilliantly white, I mean whiter than Chenrezi. And he said, “As I practiced this, I just got sick, and sicker, and sicker, and I couldn’t eat anything. And eventually all I could get down each day was a few balls of tsampa,” which is roasted barley made with some tea, “and a cup of tea.”

“And there were several months, that’s all I could eat. Just a couple of those each day. And my hair fell out and my nails fell off and I just kept to the practice, just kept doing it. And then I didn’t know whether I was going to die or not. And I just kept going. And then after about six months, my hair started to grow back, and my nails grew back, and all my digestive problems went away. And then after that, then I was able to do two more very easily.”

So yeah, I think they went through some things too. [Laughter] Those are the two really concrete pieces that I have. Yeah, emotional stuff does come up in meditation, and one has to know how to work with it in a constructive way. And yeah, not everybody had an easy time in retreat, or in meditation in Tibet. It wasn’t clear sailing. They had really, really difficult obstacles to work through too. And it has to be that way. It’s inconceivable that it wouldn’t be.

So even people like Kalu Rinpoche and the Karmapa, I’m sure when they do intensive retreat, they had difficulties. And actually in one of them, Rinpoche described one, he got this terrible toothache. And you didn’t have dentists in Far Eastern Tibet, they have heard of dentists. And he was in retreat anyway, and I think he prayed to Hayagrīva, who is actually a manifestation of awakened compassion. But this one’s very definitely for bashing demons, bright red, and very wrathful, a lot of energy. It’s great practice. And so he prayed to Hayagrīva, and then had this series of dreams, and his toothache went away.

So there are all of these kinds of things that happen. You have to experience this stuff, because the only way we become clear is by experiencing the unreleased emotion that is at the core of every reactive pattern. And when we’re very heavily defended against those, then we are going to be going through those defenses. And when you go through those defenses, you experience the operation of those defenses.

You know how you shut down when something comes up? And that’s a defense. So when you go into that, you experience the mechanism of shutting down, you experience the operation of shutting down in awareness. This is very different from just shutting down. Shutting down is a piece of cake compared to experiencing the operation of shutting down in attention.

And it has to be that way. So, this is what I was saying earlier this afternoon. Because of the way we’re approaching this practice, because of the inherent power of this practice, it generates energy. And the more that you can experience all of the reactive patterns, so you experience them more vividly, which is part of the genius of the Vajrayana. You cannot miss your own emotional confusion. It’s just right in your face. And usually you’re going, “Oh, go away. I don’t want to deal with it.”

But this is where the perspective of being awakened compassion comes. “Okay, there it is. I am awakened compassion.” Whatever is arising, cannot in any way fundamentally alter what is. And it’s that kind of confidence, or courage, or faith, or whatever you want to call it, which is the heart of this practice. Questions, or I can give you another story.

[Unrecorded] No, it’s just the way thangkas are painted. He’s resting on a lotus. You have lotus, moon, and he’s sitting on that.

Valuable and worthless

Ken:

A certain king one day called a counselor to him and said, “The strength of real thinking depends upon the examination of alternatives. Tell me which alternative is better: to increase the knowledge of my people or to give them more to eat? In either case, they will benefit.”

The Sufi said, “Majesty. There is no point in giving knowledge to those who cannot receive it, any more than there is point in giving food to those who cannot understand your motives. Therefore, it is not correct to assume that in either case they will benefit. If they cannot digest the food, or if they think you give it to them as a bribe, or that they can get more—you have failed. If they cannot see that they’re being given knowledge, or whether it is knowledge or not, or even why you are giving it to them—they will not benefit. Therefore, the question must be taken by degrees. The first degree is the consideration. The most valuable person is worthless, and the most worthless person is valuable.”

“Demonstrate this to me, for I cannot understand it,” said the king.

The Sufi then called the chief dervish of Afghanistan, and he came to the Court. “If you had your way, what would you have someone in Kabul do?” he asked.

“It so happens that there is a man near such-and-such a place who, if he knew it, could by giving a pound of cherries to a certain necessitous man, gain a fortune for himself and also great advancement for the whole country and progress for the Path,” said the chief dervish, who knew the inner correspondence of things.

The king was excited for Sufis do not generally discourse upon such things. “Call him here and we will have it done!” he cried. The other silenced him with a gesture. “No,” said the first Sufi. “This cannot work unless it is done voluntarily.”

In disguise, in order not to influence the man’s choice, the three of them went straight to the Kabul bazaar. Divested of his turban and robe, the chief Sufi looked very much like an ordinary man. “I will take the part of the exciting cause,” he whispered, as the group stood looking at the fruit. He approached the greengrocer and wished him good day. Then he said, “I know a poor man, would you give him a pound of cherries, as a charity?”

The greengrocer bellowed with laughter. “Well, I have heard some tricks, but this is the first time that someone who wanted cherries has stooped to ask me as if it were for charity!”

“You see what I mean?” the first Sufi asked the king, “The most valuable man we have has just made the most valuable suggestion, and the event has proved that he is worthless to the man to whom he speaks.”

“But what about the most worthless person being the most valuable?” asked the king.

The two dervishes beckoned him to follow them. As they’re about to cross the Kabul River, the two Sufis suddenly seized the king and threw him into the water. He could not swim. As he felt himself about to drown. Kaka Divana—whose name means Insane Uncle—a well-known pauper and lunatic who roamed the streets, jumped in and brought him safely to the bank. Various other more solid citizens had seen him in the water but had not moved.

When the king was somewhat restored, the two dervishes intoned together, “The most worthless person is the most valuable.” So the king went back to his old traditional method of giving whatever he could—whether education or help of any kind—to those whom it was decided from time to time were the most worthy recipients of such aid.

Valuable—and Worthless, Tales of the Dervishes, Idries Shah, p. 122

Okay? [Laughter] What are your thoughts? [Unrecorded] Well, as with most of these stories, there are many, many ways that they apply. But, one I will suggest to you. How many have found yourself up against a blank wall in your meditation, just when you thought you had it mastered? And how many of you have found a door opens when you remember some stupid little thing somebody said, once upon a time? Okay, that’s all for this evening.

Meditation practice: continue with letting yourself be Chenrezi, awakened compassion, not only feeling it, but also letting yourself take this form. In Bokar Rinpoche’s book on page 16, actually leading up to 16, he talks about this:

On one hand Chenrezi, as a manifested deity, is charged with and transmits the power of the grace and compassion of the mind of all buddhas;

On the other hand, our own mind is endowed with a potentiality of love and compassion;

Thirdly, the ineluctable interconnection that links everything causes the first factor to necessarily act on the second one and reveal it.

Chenrezig, Lord of Love: Principles and Methods of Deity Meditation, Bokar Rinpoche, p. 16

This is a very nice explanation of the principle in yidam meditation. So the form of the deity brings out the experience of what you actually are. Okay? Have a good dinner and see you at seven.

Oh, with respect to the interviews you may have noticed, I’m falling behind. This is really an indication of the effectiveness of your practice. Many of you are hitting some issues in ways that you’re not used to hitting them. So it’s taking a little longer in the interviews to provide the guidance, and how to work with some of the mind states that are coming up. So my apologies for not making good on my intention, which was to see everybody every day. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do that, but the work that is happening here is very good. So please keep making these efforts.