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A talk on devotion by
Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, given in 1996 in Boulder,
Colorado at the commemoration
of the death of His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse
Rinpoche.
To tell you the truth, I think I am the
wrong person to talk about guru devotion, because I don’t have it.
This is not because there is any deficiency in my teachers; it is
entirely because of something lacking in me. Believe me, I have so
much ego, and devotion is bad news for the ego. On the other hand, I
have studied devotion, so I may have some theoretical knowledge
about it.
Why devotion?
Why do we need devotion? Generally
speaking, we need devotion because we need enlightenment. In one
way, enlightenment can be understood very simply as a release from
certain obsessions and hang-ups. Until we are free from these
obsessions and habits, we will wander endlessly in samsara, going
through all sorts of anxiety, suffering, and so on.
The cause of all these sufferings is our
fundamental insecurity. We are always wondering whether we exist or
not. Our ego, or rather our attachment to the idea of self, is
completely insecure about its own existence. Our ego may seem strong
but it is actually quite shaky. Of course, we do not ask such
questions consciously, but we always have a subconscious feeling of
insecurity about whether we exist.
We try to use things such as friends,
money, position and power, and all the everyday things that we do,
like watching television or going shopping, to somehow prove and
confirm our existence. Try sitting alone in a house and doing
absolutely nothing. Sooner or later your hands will reach for the
remote control or the newspaper. We need to be occupied. We need to
be busy. If we are not busy, we feel insecure.
But there is something very strange in
all this. The ego searches constantly for distraction, and then the
distraction itself becomes a problem. Instead of helping us to feel
reassured, it actually increases our insecurity. We get obsessed
with the distraction and it develops into another habit. Once it
becomes a habit, it is difficult to get rid of. So in order to get
rid of this new habit, we have to adopt yet another habit. This is
how things go on and on.
In order to undermine this kind of
habitual pattern, Lord Buddha taught us many, many different
methods. Some of these are very skillful methods, such as overcoming
the emotions by making friends with them. Even a single word of the
Sakyamuni Buddha can liberate us from all these obsessions and
habitual patterns. Take, for instance, the teaching on impermanence.
When many of us, including myself, hear teachings on things like
impermanence, the precious human body, and love and compassion, we
tend to dismiss them as very simple and preliminary. But this is
because we do not
actually understand them.
Training the Mind
The quintessence of the path is to have
the wisdom that realizes egolessness. Until we have this wisdom, we
have not understood the essence of the Buddha’s
teaching.
In order to achieve this wisdom, first we
have to make our mind malleable, workable—in the sense of being in
control of our own mind. As Shantideva said, if you want to walk
comfortably, there are two possible solutions. Either you can try to
cover the whole ground with leather—but that would be very
difficult—or you can achieve the same effect by simply wearing a
pair of shoes. In the same way, it would be difficult to train and
tame every single emotion that we have, or to change the world
according to our desires. In fact the basis of all experience is the
mind, and that’s why Buddhists stress the importance of training the
mind in order to make it workable and flexible.
Yet a flexible mind is not enough. We
have to understand the nature of the mind. This is very difficult to
do, precisely because it involves the wisdom of realizing
egolessness. We have been in samsara from beginningless time. Our
habitual patterns are very strong. We are completely deluded. For
this reason, it is very, very difficult for this wisdom to
appear.
So what is to be done? There is only one
way to obtain this wisdom—by accumulating merit. How should we
accumulate this merit? According to the general vehicle of Buddhism,
the method of accumulating merit is by having renunciation mind, by
contemplating impermanence, by refraining from all the causes and
conditions that will strengthen the ego, by engaging in all the
causes and conditions that will strengthen our wisdom, by refraining
from harming other beings, and so on. In the mahayana school, the
merit is accumulated by having compassion for sentient
beings.
To cut a long story short, if you want
enlightenment you need wisdom. If you want wisdom, you must have
merit. And to have merit, according to mahayana, you must have
compassion and bodhichitta, the wish to establish beings in the
state of freedom.
Blessings of the
Guru
The vajrayana is renowned for its many
methods and techniques, some of which are quite easy. The most
important one, however, is to have a “sacred outlook.” And guru
devotion is the essence of this sacred outlook. It says in the
commentary to the Chakrasamvara Tantra that, “Through the blessings
and kindness of the guru, great bliss, the realization of emptiness,
the union of samsara and nirvana, can be obtained instantly.” This
quotation talks about buddhanature.
Generally speaking, the ultimate message
of Buddhism is that you possess buddhanature. In other words, you
already and quite naturally have within you the qualities of
complete enlightenment. But you need to realize this. The fact that
you don’t have this realization is the reason why you are wandering
in samsara. According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha didn’t say that you
need to abandon samsara in order to gain enlightenment. What he said
was that you need to see that samsara is empty, that it has no
inherent existence. This is the same as saying that you need to
recognize your essential buddhanature.
There are many different methods for
recognizing this Buddha within. Of these, the quickest and easiest
is to receive the blessings of the guru. This is why guru devotion
is necessary.
For example, you may be having a
nightmare about monsters. But then suddenly, somebody throws a
bucket of cold water over you and you wake up. The cold water
doesn’t really make the monsters disappear, because there were no
monsters in the first place. It was just a dream. But on the other
hand, when you are having a nightmare, your sufferings are real, and
the person who throws the bucket of water over you is indeed very
kind and special. If you have a lot of merit you are able to meet
such a person, a person who can throw the water. On the other hand,
if you don’t have merit, you may never wake up from the
nightmare.
The guru lineage originates with someone
called Vajradhara or Samantabhadra. Our masters tell us that he is
our own mind, the nature of our own mind. This means that when we
trace back through the lineage, we actually end up with our own
minds, the essence of ourselves. The guru is not some kind of
almighty sponsor that we have to worship or obey. The most important
thing to understand is that the guru is the display of our
buddhanature.
On the ordinary level, one can say that
the guru is someone who tells you what to do and what not to do. A
small child may not realize that hot iron burns, so his father tells
him that it burns and saves him from getting hurt. The guru is doing
this for you when he tells you what is right and what is
wrong.
In Vajrayana, though, the guru does
something even more important. You must have read many, many times
that your body, speech, mind and aggregates have all been pure from
beginningless time. But we don’t realize that. As Kyabje Dudjom
Rinpoche said, it is precisely because the truth is so simple that
people don’t understand it. It’s like our eyelashes, which are so
close that we can’t see them. The reason why we don’t realize this
is our lack of merit. The guru’s role is to grant us empowerment and
introduce us to this purity—and finally to point out directly the
mind’s nature.
Putting the Guru to the
Test
The great vidyadhara Jigme Lingpa said
that it is very important to analyze the guru first. As I said
before, we are naturally very insecure people. Because of this we
are easy prey. We make all sorts of mistakes that are difficult to
clear up later on.
Before you start to follow a guru, you
should have a good understanding of the dharma. I don’t mean that
you have to understand it completely, but at least you should have
some understanding. You should analyze, and you should be skeptical
and critical. Perhaps you should argue, and try to find fault by
using logic and reflection.
But while you are doing this, you should
not have the journalist’s approach of looking for faults. The aim
here is to find the path, not to find faults. So, when you study
Buddhism, you should try to see whether this path suits you or not,
whether this path makes sense or not. This is very
important.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that we want
to go to New York, and we are hiring a guide. We need to have at
least some idea where New York is. To take a guide without knowing
whether New York is in the east, south or west is what I call the
“inspirational disease.” It’s not enough just to find the guide
attractive—to like the way he looks, talks and behaves. You should
have at least some knowledge where New York is, so that if in the
middle of the trip he begins to act a little funny, you feel okay
because you know that you are heading in the right direction. He may
lead you through strange or rough roads, but that doesn’t matter if
you know you are heading in the right direction.
On the other hand, if you don’t know the
way at all, you are obliged to place all your trust in this one
guide who claims that he can do anything. Maybe if you have lots of
merit, you might accidentally find an authentic guide and actually
reach New York. But if I were you I would not trust this kind of
accidental success all the way. It is good to analyze the path
first, and then you can have one or a hundred or thousands of gurus
if you like.
Approaching the
Guru
What should we do next? One of the great
Sakyapa masters, Jamyang Gyaltsen, said, “First you have to think
about, contemplate, and manufacture devotion.” You need fabricated
devotion, which is to consider that the guru is the Buddha. Make
believe, so to speak. After a while, at the second stage, you will
really start to see him as the Buddha, without any difficulty. And
finally, at the third stage, you will realize that you are the
Buddha. This is the unique approach of the
vajrayana.
As I said at the beginning, I personally
don’t have real devotion. I don’t see my guru as the Buddha, but I
try to contemplate and think that he is the Buddha. This is what we
call created or fabricated devotion. In the beginning we consider
that all the faults we see in him are nothing but our own
projections. But the truth of the matter is that the guru has all
the qualities of the Buddha. He is the Buddha, he is the dharma, he
is the sangha; he is everything.
We think like this again and again. This
may strike you as nonsense, but actually it’s very logical—after
all, everything depends on the mind. It is because of our delusions
that it is initially very hard for us to see the guru as the Buddha.
We have to practice and get used to it again and again, and then it
will definitely work.
Shantideva has said that if you get
accustomed to something, there is nothing in this world that is
difficult. Let’s say this is the first time in your life that you
are going to a bar. You are introduced to someone and, due to some
past karmic connection, this person proceeds to give you all the
initiations and oral instructions and teachings on how to mix
various drinks. Tequila with lemon, martinis dry and sweet—all sorts
of details about drinking.
Being a very devoted and diligent
student, you practice drinking. In the beginning, it burns your
throat, it hurts your stomach, and you get drunk. You vomit and you
get up the next morning with a headache. With lots of enthusiasm you
keep doing this. This is what we call foundation practice. You keep
going to this person, and even though he occasionally gives you a
hard time, it doesn’t matter. You are a very diligent student. Then
one day your mind and his mingle: you know everything about alcohol,
you know how to drink. At this point, you are a perfect lineage
holder of alcohol drinking. You can then begin to teach others.
The Universality of the
Guru
We think that the guru is only good for
giving teachings, that the guru is only good for special things but
not good for headaches or other problems. This is not the way to
think. For every problem that you have, pray to the guru, receive
his blessings and you will be free from it. In one Tantra, it says,
“Years and years of doing meditation on the development or
completion stages, or years and years of chanting mantras, cannot
compare with one instant of remembering the guru.”
How should you behave with a guru? As an
offering you can think of things like dress code, etiquette,
politeness, but it doesn’t really matter. However, there are two
very important things that you should never forget. The first is
that you should never have pride. This is because you are there to
learn, to receive teachings, to find enlightenment. As Tibetans say,
“A proud person is like a stone.” No matter how much water you put
on it, it will never get soaked. If you have pride you will never
learn. So it’s very important to adopt an attitude of
humility.
The second important thing is never to
waste an opportunity to accumulate merit. Having merit is so
important. When you watch a movie, if you don’t know that it’s a
movie and think it’s real, you will go through all sorts of
emotional trauma. But if the person next to you says, “This is just
a movie,” from then on you will be free from this kind of delusion.
On the other hand, if you don’t have merit, then just at the moment
when the person next to you says, “Look, this is just a movie,”
someone behind you might cough very loudly, and you may not hear
what the person next to you says. So you miss the opportunity of
realization—all because you don’t have merit.
Also, if you don’t have merit, your ego
is always there ready to interpret everything in its own way. Even
though the teacher gives you the most important teaching, you will
always interpret it according to your own agenda.
So at this point, instead of trying to outsmart the ego, the
most important thing to do is to accumulate merit. How? There are
lots of different ways. You can wear a tie and look handsome and
think “This is an offering to my teacher.” If you are driving at
night, when you see the street lamps, you can immediately visualize
them as lamp offerings to the guru. If you can’t do this yourself,
and if you see somebody else doing it, at least rejoice in what they
are doing. There are so many things we can do. Kyabje Dudjom
Rinpoche said, “Accumulating merit is so easy, in fact much easier
than accumulating non-virtue.”
We need to have a grand, magnificent attitude. Devotion
should be grand. I think if you have true devotion, everything can
be taken as a manifestation of your
guru. |