by
Chamgon
Kenting Tai Situpa
Palpung Zhyisil Chokyi Ghatsal Publications
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Pema Donyo Nyinche, Tai Situpa XII, 1954-
Ultimately perfect / by Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa.
1. Dharma (Buddhism) 2. Conduct of life.
I. Title.
294.3420425—dc 22
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The Purpose of Life
Dharma in Daily Life
Stress Management
Dharma for the Urban Professional
The Essence of Dharma is the Essence of Dharma
Ultimately Perfect
Notes
Glossary of Terms
About Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa
I have been requested to talk about the purpose of life; therefore it is very important for us to define life and the purpose of life to begin the whole subject.
So, what is life? Are we talking about this breathing, eating, sleeping, walking, and talking life? Are we talking about this as life? If so, then what about when we are not eating, not talking, not breathing, not walking, are we alive or not? So we have to define this very clearly. Then when we say purpose we have to define, why we are here, or what we are here for. Why we are here means looking back and what we are here for means looking forward. Or just, what is this? Why do I look like me and why do you look like you?
The purpose and our life, the subject itself, have to be defined very clearly otherwise we will be talking without knowing what we are talking about. Let’s put it this way: we have to make this life meaningful and we have to make this life purposeful. That is good. Why, because we are already here and we want this life to be purposeful and meaningful. But it is absolutely in our hands and it is absolutely our right to make our life meaningless and purposeless if we want to, which is not hard to do. But if we make this life meaningful and purposeful it is good for us and good for everybody else.
One thing which we have no control over is, regardless of whether we make it purposeful or not, is that our life will go on; that we can’t do anything about. There is no such thing as ending our life. Nobody can end their life. Many people think they can end their life by taking poison or by jumping off the thirtieth floor of a building, but that is not true; they end their body but not their mind. What makes our body a live body is our mind living in it—it is an occupied house, and when the house becomes unliveable, then it becomes an unoccupied house; the person who was living in the house checked out. So when our body becomes such that it cannot sustain our mind, then our mind leaves the body. Our body is like a cage and our mind is like a bird, so a bird in a cage. Some people like their cage and some people don’t like their cage. I like my cage very much. That is my problem, but maybe it’s not really a problem; I’d rather like myself than hate myself.
So, for the definition of life we should look a little bit beyond the mind and body together in this form. For example, if we are not breathing anymore and we are deteriorating by the minute, people then put us in a very nice box and make it airtight—actually some people may want to make us up and have a glass top on the box so they can look at our face; lying there, very nicely made up and very peaceful surrounded by flowers—but even in that situation our mind goes on. Our mind goes on with an invisible body. Our body is visible so it cannot go through walls; it has to find a door. But our mind is not obstructed by walls and nor does it have a speed limit; it is faster than the speed of light and slower than the slowest of the slowest. It is slower than a mountain and faster than the speed of light, at the same time; here and there at the same time. In India some of us like to be precise in English, so hither and thither at the same time. Are we alive at that time? Yes, of course, we are alive, all the time. We are primordial. Our body can be dead but our mind is alive.
Now when we say ‘the purpose of life’ in a very casual sort of manner, not thinking deeply, not trying to define it, then we are talking about the purpose of us functioning in this body and living through childhood, being a teenager, adulthood and getting old; all of this life. What is the purpose of this? That is a very simple, superficial, casual perception of the purpose of life. Why am I born here? What am I supposed to do? Why do I have two hands and two legs? Why am I able to talk and listen? Why do I have to eat three meals a day? It will come to that, and if we talk about that, then the purpose of life is to work out the causes and conditions that we have created in the past, because we are the production of our own doing in the past. We are not an accident. We are not somebody’s experiment. Each one of us is a unique masterpiece of all of our actions and intentions of countless lifetimes of the past.
So what is the purpose of life? In that context, one way we can ask ourselves is, “Why did I do that so that I became like this?” That is one way to look at it, and if you look at it that way, then the purpose of life is to undo all the bad things that we have done in countless previous lifetimes, and to enhance all the good things that we have done in all of our past lives. That is the purpose of life in that context. Otherwise, what will happen to us are exactly the same things which have and are happening to us; it will go on. In this life we are like this as a result of all of our past, and in the next life we will be something else according to what we do in this life, and the next life will be something else according to what we will do at that time. It is a continuation. It is like the river Ganges—in some places it is very loud and ferocious and in other places it is very calm and peaceful. In some places it is moving very fast and in other places it is hardly moving at all. Also in some places it is very, very clean and in other places it is very, very dirty, but it is the same river Ganges from the beginning to the end. Similarly in one life you may be called Peter, in another Jennifer, in another Sharma Ji, another Suraswasti, Mr. Gupta, Mr. Armstrong or Mrs. Smith etc. Also in another life we might be a dog and called Kujo or something.
So it will be just like all of those things. And if we don’t do anything about it then it will go on and on and on. But if we use this life to do our best—our best to undo all the negative aspects of it, purify all the negative aspects of it by using all the positive aspects of it, and improve all the positive aspects of it—then we will improve from one life to another. Then we can call this a meaningful life. Otherwise we call it a meaningless life, we lived and died, that’s it. Also there is no such thing as a purpose of life that is something solid. We have to make this life purposeful and meaningful.
I will give you an example, which for me is the highest example, which is Buddha Shakyamuni. Because of all of his countless past lives’ good karma and everything he was born as Prince Siddhartha. He was not born as Buddha Shakyamuni. So he was born as Prince Siddhartha, the bad aspect of which was that his father, mother and everybody wanted him to be the most powerful king. They meant well—you cannot find anybody who cares for you more than your mother and your father. Sometimes they care for you more than you care for yourself. That is what I call ‘mothers’ worry’; all mothers worry, worry, worry about their children because they care too much, and it becomes more than children care for themselves.
Anyway, it was a good thing for his father and mother to want him to be the king because he was already a prince. But also they wanted him to be a very big king—from being a king to a very big king what you have to do is the same thing; you are a king of one place and then you want to be a very big king means you have to work to become a very big king. It doesn’t mean you have to put on a lot of weight though. But you have to do things so that your kingdom will become bigger. And there was only one way to do that in those days, even today I think. Today there aren’t that many kingdoms but there are many countries and they want the same thing. So that was the negative aspect of Prince Siddhartha’s life. Then everything was provided for him so that he didn’t really have to do anything to get anything; because he was born to a very, very important royal family everything was provided for him.
Also for Prince Siddhartha, every aspect of life that was unpleasant was hidden from him. He was just one person, he had only two eyes, two ears, two legs and two hands, just like all of us, so he could not be everywhere, so wherever he went had to be made perfect. Also whoever was going to be around him was made perfect. Therefore he had no idea of what was going on. I am quite sure if his mother had lived maybe she would have wanted the same thing, but his mother passed away when he was very young. Anyway his father didn’t want him to see anything that was unpleasant, so that was one negative aspect of Prince Siddhartha’s life.
But negative becomes positive if you have good karma, because your good karma is more powerful. For example, if your good karma is a hundred kilos and your bad karma is only five kilos, then a hundred kilos will be very heavy and five kilos will be tossed around like nothing. So that is what happened to Prince Siddhartha—he wanted to see what was out there and this became the most important motivating factor in his life. Although the king had done his level best to make everything perfect, somehow Prince Siddhartha came to see birth, old age, sickness and death in his journeys outside the palace. Prince Siddhartha asked his faithful chariot driver sincere questions about what he saw, and his chariot driver was very sincere and loyal so he told him the truth. Prince Siddhartha asked, “What is that?” “That is a sick person,” his driver replied. Then Prince Siddhartha said, “Can I be sick?” The driver said, “Yes of course your Royal Highness, of course you will.” Then he saw somebody who was dead being carried away by people, while others were crying and some playing music. Prince Siddhartha then asked his faithful chariot driver, “What is this?” The driver said, “Somebody is dead.” Then Prince Siddhartha asked him: “Will I die?” His driver told him, “Of course you will die, one day you will die.” So Prince Siddhartha saw this very simple basic truth, which had been concealed from him. Until then he didn’t know he would get sick or that he would die—he didn’t know there was such a thing as sickness and death. That was all kept away from him.
Why the king was so careful about this was because after Prince Siddhartha’s birth, special priests were invited to read his life. The priests told the king, “If he remains king he will be a very good king, a very big and powerful king, but if he leaves the kingdom, if he renounces it, he will become very highly enlightened.” The king was devastated by this and didn’t want his son to renounce the kingdom. He also became a little greedy because he saw there was a chance for his son to become the biggest king in the world. For those reasons he did things in quite a neurotic way actually—the way he tried to protect his son and build him up was quite neurotic. And if he had succeeded it would have been terrible I think, because a king who doesn’t know there is death and sickness and all of these things, if he doesn’t know that, then he is a very ignorant king. But that was not able to happen because of Prince Siddhartha’s karma. Prince Siddhartha took the bodhisattva aspiration three trillion eons ago and since then was born again and again to benefit beings as a bodhisattva.1 So that merit would not allow the king’s selfish wish to succeed. He saw the truth and as a result of that, then he renounced everything and left the palace, because he wanted to make his life meaningful. He wanted to find a way to be free from all of the suffering so that he could free everybody else from that.
Some of my friends who are not very serious Buddhists, who I call ‘friends of Buddhism’ said to me, “It is a very, very selfish thing to do, leave everything behind, your father, your wife, your son, and run away. That is terrible, that is very selfish.” But that is because they don’t understand what bodhichitta is. Buddha left his family and everything, not because he doesn’t like them or doesn’t care for them or doesn’t love them, but because he cares for them limitlessly. His care for his father, his late mother, his wife, his son, all of the people in his kingdom and all sentient beings, he cared for them limitlessly, therefore he sacrificed everything for them. How could he free them if he himself was not free?
So he wanted to make the best use of his Prince Siddhartha life to reach the highest possible realization. It took him many years—he sat on the bank of the river Niranjana with a rock for a cushion for six years, not thinking and not day-dreaming but meditating, and finally he moved from there to Bodhgaya under the bodhi-tree, and there he attained enlightenment at the dawn of the day. So overnight, at the dawn of the day, he became Buddha Shakyamuni from Prince Siddhartha. He made that choice, he made that sacrifice, and he made that effort, then he became the Buddha.
I cannot say the purpose of our life here is to become Buddha, I wouldn’t say that, because that’s up to each individual. That is what you choose. You choose to be the best designer, the best architect, a sort of happy yogi, or you choose to be worldly, living a practical life but practicing dharma sincerely. So whichever way you choose, whatever you achieve will be according to that. You will not achieve something unless you wish to achieve it. There is no accidental enlightenment where you are enlightened by mistake, you know, “Oops, I am enlightened!” That won’t happen; enlightenment by mistake won’t happen. Everything is cause and result, and everything is intention. But the final enlightenment is of course not by cause and result, it is beyond cause and result. Cause and result applies until a certain stage, then you are beyond cause and result because you become what you are. It is not that you become something else. If you are becoming something else then it needs a cause and result. But becoming what you are, then cause and result make no difference, it is non-duality.
I believe that doing anything is ‘not doing’ that. ‘Not doing’ anything is doing ‘not doing’ that. I don’t know if you get it, it is hard to explain. It is not that important but if you sit down and think about it, it is very simple. For example, if I am talking then I am not doing not talking. Get it? This way enlightenment is beyond duality—this is the cause, this is the result, you do this then you get that, it is beyond that. Until a certain stage it is like that, but after a certain stage you just evolve and become. It is not cause and result.
Enlightenment is not düche, a Tibetan word which means the result of a cause and conditions and so many things. Anything that is düche is impermanent. If enlightenment was düche then enlightenment would be impermanent; you could be Buddha today but tomorrow you would not be Buddha. Then what is the point? So it is not düche, it is above and beyond that. As long as it is düche then you can lose it. For example, you can be a very, very good person, which is very good, but if you have not reached a certain level of realization that is above düche, if you are below the threshold of düche, then even if you are quite enlightened, even if you are quite good, some situations, some cause, some things can ruin everything and you can fall back to square one. I think we can see a lot of that within ourselves and within others, some at arm’s length actually, not that far. I think you can understand what I am talking about.
This way, the purpose of life, how do we make it purposeful? We should say, basically, the purpose of life is to work out all the karma that we have accumulated. But that is not really a purpose, that will happen anyway. So we go to the next stage, the way to make this life purposeful is to make everything meaningful, useful. We can talk, so make our talking useful, say prayers. We can see, so we can use our seeing purposefully, read texts. We can hear, so make that purposeful, listen to the dharma. We can walk, so make that purposeful, go on pilgrimage. We can do things, things that are good for others, good for ourselves and good for others. We can think, so think positively, think straight, don’t waste time by thinking negatively or over complicating things. For example, I drink water very simply, and then I put the cup down and put the cover on the cup, very simple. Then no flies fall in and drown and I don’t get sick and have to go to hospital, and I don’t break my cup. But if I do it otherwise it is very complicated. I can sit upside down and try to drink water... but I tell you many times we do that. If you sit upside down and try to drink a glass of water it will come out your nose. But we do that, sometimes by mistake and sometimes by ego, we think, ‘Oh, everybody doesn’t know how to drink water. They are stupid they just sit up and drink. This is how to drink water.’ So we try to be smart but only find out better after doing it. That is wasting our life, doing meaningless things that are counterproductive to a meaningful and purposeful life.
We can also understand this by listening to three very short sentences of the Lord Buddha’s teachings: “Don’t do anything that is non-virtuous and negative. Do everything virtuous, good, and positive. And tame your mind.” These three things summarize the huge one hundred available volumes of teachings of the Lord Buddha, the direct words of Buddha, the hundred volumes for which the lineage is available. If we translate those into English I guarantee it will be three hundred volumes, if not five hundred. For example, one volume was translated, the Sutra of the Excellent Kalpa, and it became, I don’t know exactly how many, but I think four huge volumes. Tarthang Rinpoche and Dharma Publishing from California translated it and it became huge. So the essence of all of that put together are these three sentences, these three points.
So to make our life purposeful we try to remember these three points. That is the beginning. Then of course there are so many sadhanas, so many studies and so many meditations, some of which involve sadhana and some which don’t. Sadhana means one deity and its prayers, offerings and visualizations, so many things that are sadhana. Another aspect of practice is not really visualization and ritual but directly practicing, which is harder actually. The involvement of rituals and prayers and all of that is much easier because you have something to do, you do this first, this second etc, it occupies your body, it occupies your eyes, it occupies your ears, it occupies your speech, it occupies all your thoughts, you are so totally engaged in it that you say, “I am busy with my sadhana. I have no time,” which is good.
So the aspect of practice—which is very, very noble, and very, very sacred and does not involve any kind of sadhana, if we can do that, which is very, very good—is just simply allowing our ultimate destination and our potential to develop and mature by itself; just allowing it to happen. That sounds wonderful but is very difficult to do because we have to do nothing—we have to be able to do nothing so that the naturalness manifests by itself. For example, we do nothing and the sun comes up and goes across the sky and sets and we have a very quiet, peaceful night, and then the sun comes up, a very bright day, and then again a very peaceful night. It all happens without doing anything; we don’t have to do anything. So if we are able to not do anything, just rest in our nature, in our primordial essence, that is the best meditation. But that is very hard to do. Therefore all of the rituals and all of the sadhanas are very, very beneficial for most of us.
People often say to me, “I can’t meditate. I have a very hard time meditating.” When I ask them what the problem is, they say, “So many thoughts come into my mind, and my feet hurt, my back hurts and it is boring,” All of that. Then I say, “Okay, I have something for you; do this practice two hundred thousand times and this other practice ten thousand times, then there is no time to get bored. Then if you get pins and needles by sitting, just stand up and do prostrations. You will never get pins and needles and you will never fall asleep.” You see?
So there are lots of things up the sleeve, lots of teachings and lots of methods. Actually there is a general saying that Lord Buddha taught 84,000 different methods which lead to enlightenment. That is a pretty good number, but actually it is more than that because each one of them is according to each person. Right now there are five thousand million human beings on Earth and if they are all practicing the 84,000 methods, then each one has to practice according to their capacity. You can’t expect them to do better than their best, so they do their best and then it will become five thousand million times 84,000. That’s a pretty good number.
So this is how we can make our life meaningful, beneficial and purposeful. Now with that being said I will go back to the original title, ‘the purpose of life’. There is no purpose, we have to make it purposeful because all of the karma that we have created to manifest as this life, we have done that all by mistake. We are limitless in potential but we have mistaken that as ‘I’. You cannot find anything in the whole universe more limited than ‘I’. But also you cannot find a bigger problem in the whole universe than ‘I’. If there is no ‘I’ then there is no problem, because all problems come from ‘I’, and all the karma that is created is based on ‘I’. ‘I’ is ignorance—because we don’t understand that we are limitless, therefore we are limited. And I want to be ‘me’, ‘I’, and all of you are not me. ‘I’ like to hear these things. ‘I’ don’t like to hear those things. ‘I’ want to see these things. ‘I’ don’t want to see those things. So on and so forth.
All this comes because there is ‘I’ and ‘I’ is a mistake, a very big mistake. But what can we do? From our hair to our bone marrow everything is soaked in ‘I’. As long as we have a single drop of blood running in our veins we will call ourselves ‘I’. As long as there is a single breath left in our body we will call ourselves ‘I’. So what can we do now? We cannot avoid that by deciding not to say the word ‘I’; that will only complicate things even more. In this way, the purpose of life, if you look at it that way, there is no purpose, it is all illusion. But then we have to make it meaningful otherwise it will go on like this forever. We will be human, that’s wonderful, but sometimes we can become a very bad human being and that’s not very nice. Then we will become a cockroach. I don’t know exactly how cockroaches feel, maybe they think they are good, because there must be good cockroaches and bad cockroaches. But I don’t want to be a cockroach; that is very clear. Also we can be born in hell, or we can be born in heaven and become a god, which is wonderful. I mean, if I am born in heaven and become a god that is wonderful, I would like it. But the problem is that as it is a result of my good karma, when my good karma finishes then I will have no place there, I will die. I will leave there and be born as a cockroach or a human being.
Compared to a god, humans are cockroaches; a human birth would be really bad for a god. If a god imagines that he will be born a human, it will be unimaginable. We have to shower every day, but in Delhi in the summer we have to take three showers a day! For a god that would be like us having to eat two hundred times a day. But still, gods are not free from samsara. The highest we can reach in samsara is to become a god, and there are three levels of gods. The highest gods actually have no form, they are formless gods. Their lifespan is billions and billions of eons, not billions and billions of years, but eons. They live long and they have super powers. Each one of the gods has their own kind of different powers. That is wonderful, but then a god can make his or her life meaningful or just enjoy it there and be the boss of the universe, then it comes to an end. It will be a very long time compared to our life span. We don’t live for more than a hundred years, most of the time, some people live to a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty, but most of us will not go over a hundred. But gods can live for billions of eons. Just one eon is a very long time. The lowest of the gods, called gyal chen zhi (four great kings), I think five hundred years of our time is one day for them. I don’t remember exactly, but it is in the texts that they live several thousand of their years, not our years, but their years where our five hundred years is their one day. That is quite something.
Anyway, we have to make our life meaningful and purposeful. The entire teachings of Buddha are to make our life meaningful and purposeful, otherwise he calls it samsara—samsara means going in a circle; becoming better, becoming worse, becoming better, becoming worse, becoming better, becoming worse... just like a wheel. Right now this spoke number one is up and spoke number ten is down. Then the next spoke, number nine will be down and spoke number two will be up. Like that, life will be up and down, up and down, it goes on and on and on forever. That is endless samsara. Samsara will not end by itself; it will not end unless we want it to, that is what we call bodhichitta; that is intentionally.
I have spoken enough about the meaning and purpose of life in this way, so now I will try to entertain you by being superficial about the meaning and purpose of life. That is being very honest, so now I will be a little bit dishonest: the purpose of life is to do our best to enjoy this life without hurting anybody, without causing any suffering to anyone, and on top of that, happily, joyfully, doing everything we can to help others, to make them happy and make them enjoy life. That sounds good, so I will end here and let you ask questions. I am sure you have plenty of them.
Question: Rinpoche, you said that if you haven’t broken through the threshold of düche, you can always go back, you can lose it?
Rinpoche: Yes.
Same Student: Then you pointed out the obstacle of ‘I’ in which we are so involved, would you say that threshold has to do with this ‘I’, could you tell us how important that is?
Rinpoche: Absolutely. When our ‘I’ becomes no more than just a reflection and when our essence manifests in such a way that as far as we are concerned there is no duality—it doesn’t mean everybody has become non-dualistic, because Buddha has reached that but we are still here playing games. So Buddha reaching non-dualistic realization doesn’t mean we have reached it. So from our side, from the practitioner’s side, when you are free of this dualistic ‘I’ and when you reach the level of realization, not just understanding—I understand non-duality very well and I could write volumes on it, I could talk for days on it, but realizing it is another thing, so realization of non-duality, when you reach that level—then that is the threshold which you have crossed.
Same Student: Then you will not go back?
Rinpoche: Yes, that will never happen. It is like learning how to ride a bicycle, once you have learnt to ride, then you can always ride. It is natural. Right now ‘I’ is so natural for us; ‘I’ and ‘other’. Everyb...
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