The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (12 page)

The dharma should really be taken to heart, not just used as a way to get cozy and secure or to continue your habitual pattern of self-denigration or your habitual pattern of striving for perfection. Initially you may find that you use the dharma as
you’ve always used everything else, but then, because it’s the dharma, it might occur to you that you’re using it to denigrate yourself or to become a perfectionist – ‘Oh, my goodness! I’m using this to make the world into love and light or to make it a resentful, harsh place.’

Trungpa Rinpoche told us that like most
tülkus
,
^*
he was brought up extremely strictly. He was hit when he did things that weren’t considered proper for a tülku to do, and he had to study very hard. He said he was a difficult boy and so he was punished a lot, but he was also smart and was quite proud of himself. His tutors never praised him; they always scolded him and told him he should work harder. Nevertheless, he could tell they were quite impressed with his brilliance. When it came time for him to start visiting his guru, Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen, to review his studies, he couldn’t wait to display his knowledge and intelligence. It was early morning and the light was shining through the window onto Jamgon Kongtrul’s face. Rinpoche sat down next to him. Jamgon Kongtrul was very quiet for a while, and finally he said, ‘Well, tell me what you know about all the six
paramitas
,
^†
’ and Rinpoche confidently rattled
it all off with all the references and all the different things that different teachers had said. When it was all finished, Jamgon Kongtrul was quiet again, and then he said, ‘But what do you
feel
about all that?’ Startled, Rinpoche said, ‘What does it matter what I feel about it? This is the way it’s always been taught and it’s been taught this way since it was first presented and this is how it is.’ Jamgon Kongtrul said, ‘It’s all very well to know it intellectually, but how do you feel about it? What is your experience of this?’ Rinpoche said that was how Jamgon Kongtrul always taught him. He always wanted to know what his experience of generosity or of discipline was, and so on. That was what Jamgon Kongtrul nurtured and cultivated in him.

In terms of the dharma that is taught, Trungpa Rinpoche heard it very well and very clearly. His own life had a tremendous amount of learning in it, and he always wanted us to learn and study as well. But he cared most that one should find the true meaning and not just accept another person’s view without questioning it. When Rinpoche talked about the precepts, for example, he said it’s all very well, you could know all two hundred and fifty or three hundred precepts by heart and all the references, but the crucial point was to get the true meaning of the precepts. For instance, you might know that the first precept is not to kill, and you may know all the stories of how that precept came into being, and you may know the logic of how killing increases ego-fixation and how
working with the precepts cuts the chain of cause and effect – you may know all that, but the question really is, when the desire to kill something arises, why is it that you want to kill something? What’s really going on there? And what would the benefit be of refraining from killing? What does refraining do? How do you feel when you refrain? What does it teach you? That’s the way Rinpoche was trained, and that’s the way he trained us.

The dharma that is taught and the dharma that is experienced are descriptions of how to live, how to use your life to wake you up rather than put you to sleep. And if you choose to spend the rest of your life trying to find out what awake means and what asleep means, I think you might attain enlightenment.

^*
A tülku is the incarnation of a previous enlightened teacher, manifesting the spiritual qualities of that teacher.

^†
The six paramitas, or ‘perfections,’ are generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and knowledge.

sixteen
sticking to one boat

I
n traveling around and meeting so many people of so many different traditions as well as nontraditions, what I have found is that, in order to go deeper, there has to be some kind of whole-hearted commitment to truth or wanting to find out, wanting to find out what the
ngedön
, or true meaning, is. Therefore, if you want to hear the dharma, you can hear it from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you actually encounter a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it. Then you make a connection with that particular lineage of teachings and that particular body of wisdom. Each religion or philosophical belief or New Age group has a kind of wisdom that it carries and explores. The point is that it’s best to stick to one boat, so to speak, whatever that boat may be, because otherwise the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or you’ll look for something else.

Recently I was asked to give a weekend program in a kind of New Age spiritual shopping mart. It was like a mall, with about seventy different things being
presented. I got the first hit when I came to give my first talk. There was this great big poster, like a school bulletin board, that said. Basic Goodness, Room 606; Rolfing, Room 609; Astral Travel, Room 666; and so forth. I was one of many different things being offered. The people that you would meet in the parking lot or at lunch would say, ‘Oh, what are you taking this weekend?’ It was very interesting because I hadn’t encountered anything like that for a long time. Once I had been doing that myself; in order to stop, I had to hear Rinpoche say that shopping is actually always trying to find security, always trying to feel good about yourself. When one sticks to one boat, whatever that boat may be, then one actually begins the warrior’s journey. So that’s what I would recommend. I particularly want to say that because as you may have noticed, I myself am at this point somewhat eclectic in my references and the things that inspire me, which might give you the impression that you could go to a Sun Dance one weekend and then to a weekend with Thich Nhat Hanh and then maybe to a Krishnamurti workshop. Basically it doesn’t seem to work like that. It’s best to stick with one thing and let it put you through your changes. When you have really connected with the essence of that and you already are on the journey, everything speaks to you and everything educates you. You don’t feel chauvinistic any longer, but you also know that your vehicle was the one that worked for you.

The way that Trungpa Rinpoche trained his students was a combination of the Kagyü and the Nyingma lineages of teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. When he first came to North America and began to teach, he really liked what he found here. He found that the students didn’t know anything. He compared them to a herd of wild ponies or a kennel full of playful Labrador puppies. They were wide open, energetic, naive young people, most of whom had ‘dropped out’ and had long hair and beards, no shirts, and no shoes. He liked that because it was very fertile ground. In England, where he had first encountered Western students, the people who were attracted to Buddhism were Buddhist scholars who couldn’t hear the dharma because they couldn’t let go of their preconceived ideas of how it fit in with preconceived scholarly notions. That was their obstacle, which he, I’m sure, enjoyed working with. The obstacle in North America was spiritual materialism. He gave many talks in the early days geared to this question; the first few chapters of his book
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
address it very directly. I would say that for four or five years practically the only teaching Rinpoche gave, in many different forms, under many different titles, was, ‘Stop shopping around and settle down and go deeply into one body of truth.’ He taught that this continual dabbling around in spiritual things was just another form of materialism, trying to get comfortable, trying to get secure, whereas if you stuck to one boat and really started
working with it, it would definitely put you through all your changes. You would meet all your dragons; you would be continually pushed out of the nest. It would be one big initiation rite, and tremendous wisdom would come from that, tremendous heartfelt, genuine spiritual growth and development. One’s life would be well spent. He stressed that his students should stop just dabbling in spirituality to try to feel good or get high or be spiritual. He was very cynical and knocked all kinds of ‘trips,’ as he called them; you can imagine the trips in North America in 1970. Many of us, we don’t have to imagine that. We remember well – we’re laboratory specimens!

seventeen
inconvenience

T
oday I’d like to talk about inconvenience. When you hear some teachings that ring true to you, and you feel some trust in practicing that way and some trust in it’s being a worthwhile way to live, then you’re in for a lot of inconvenience. From an everyday perspective, it seems good to do things that are kind of convenient; there is no problem with that. It’s just that when you really start to take the warrior’s journey – which is to say, when you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, when you begin to feel this passion for life and for growth, when discovery and exploration and curiosity become your path – then basically, if you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it’s often extremely inconvenient.

When you take refuge and become a Buddhist, you become a refugee. That is to say, you leave home and you become homeless in the absolute sense. Of course, you can still be living in a very nice place, surrounded by family and loved ones, or at least by your cats and dogs or squirrels or horses or the wind. Nevertheless, in your heart of hearts, once you start this
journey there’s the sense of leaving home and becoming homeless. Another image for that is the
bardo
:
^*
you’ve left the shore, but you haven’t arrived anywhere yet. You don’t know where you’re going, and you’ve been out there at sea long enough that you only have a vague memory of where you came from. You’ve left home, you’ve become homeless, you long to go back, but there’s no way to go back. That’s called the bardo, in-between. In some sense, I think, right now that’s where we all are with this dathun. Even though we’re still here, people are thinking about leaving and there’s some sense of bardo, not quite here, not quite there, just hanging out in this sort of uneasy space and having to sit with it hour after hour. Your mind keeps going back and forth, but basically the instruction is just to leave home, label it ‘thinking,’ leave home and remain homeless with that sort of in-between feeling of, ‘It was so cozy here for a while. It will be cozy again when I get back, I think. Won’t it? Will it?’

Since the day before yesterday, I myself have been feeling this bardo. We’re still doing the dathun, and yet there’s another program about to happen. I find myself getting jumpy and edgy and thinking I’m catching the ’flu and wondering why I’m dizzy and irritable. It’s just bardo. We’re still here, but where are we? It’s so inconvenient. It’s
much more convenient to be home. This particular boat that sails out is no luxury liner. It’s more like the boats that the boat people from Vietnam were on – the pirates might come at any moment, and you don’t know if you’re ever going to reach the other shore or if the food or the water is going to last. The situation doesn’t have to be grim, but it definitely has that feeling of, ‘Is this where I was or where I’m going? Where is this?’ If you do shamatha practice properly – I don’t know what it means to do it properly, but let’s say if you do it for a while – sometimes you have that feeling of having left home totally and being homeless. The breath goes out and where are you? Or sometimes there’s this nice, cozy, or possibly uncomfortable but nevertheless solid reality in your mind, and it’s filling up all the space very successfully, and then you wake up out of that dream and say, ‘Thinking,’ and you may wonder where are you and who are you and what is it today? I can’t remember, is it 1978 or – I know it’s not 2000 yet, but what year is it? With this weather, what month is it, is it June? It feels a little more like November – maybe it’s August. What, where, when? Refugee, you’re called a refugee.

In
Born in Tibet
, Trungpa Rinpoche tells the story of how he left Tibet at the time of the Chinese Communist invasion. It’s a vivid illustration of what being a refugee is like. This great group of Tibetans, maybe three hundred, including old people and babies and everyone in between, left eastern Tibet – Kham – with
their guides. When they got to central Tibet, the guides didn’t know the way any longer, because they knew only eastern Tibet. As a result, there weren’t any guides to take them to India. Furthermore, the snow was so deep that it was up to their armpits, so the biggest monks went in front, prostrating their whole bodies in the snow and then getting up and prostrating again to make a path. At times they would go all the way up to the tops of mountains, only to find that they had made a mistake and would have to come all the way back down. They didn’t have much food, and not only that, had they been discovered, they would have been shot by the Chinese. At one point they had to go through a river, and their clothes froze on them. Rinpoche said that if they tried to sit down, their
chubas
(dresses) and their robes cut their skin because the ice was so sharp. Not very convenient. Rinpoche said that as they walked along, they made a kind of clinking sound. He joked, ‘Oh, I hope the Chinese don’t hear us, they might think it’s some kind of code: clink, clink, clink.’ He said nobody else thought it was funny. (He tells stories again and again of making jokes about what was going on, and then he always says, ‘But nobody else thought it was funny.')

When this journey was finished, the refugees found themselves in India, homeless, in a completely alien climate. Many of them got tuberculosis right away from moving from a high, cold, clear place to a low, hot, dry, dusty place. Eventually Nehru’s government was very
kind to the Tibetans, but when they first came and even when the people were hospitable, the refugees were still homeless. Nobody knew who they were. There was no difference between a tülku or the head of a monastery and an ordinary person. Everyone’s identity was somehow leveled.