The Tantric Distinction

A Buddhist's Reflections on Compassion and Emptiness

Jeffrey Hopkins, Anne C Klein

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780861711543
• eBook ISBN: 9781614291817
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

"The ideas, concepts, and methods of various religions must be tried on for size, must be lifted above museum displays, must be confronted and allowed to resonate with one's own character. It is in this spirit that I present here a personalized account of central Buddhist practices."--from the author's preface.Widely recognized as one of the West's leading scholars of Tibetan Buddhism, Professor Jeffrey Hopkins is renowned for his textual translations and original scholarship. For ten years he served as the principal English translator for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Tantric Distinction is his effort to make accessible the complexities of this highly sophisticated philosophy by sharing his personal, individual experience with Buddhist thought and practice. It lays out the entire Buddhist path as a living experience.

PART ONE

The Basic Path

Based on

Tantric Practice in Nyingma

Compassion in Tibetan Buddhism

Cutting through Appearances:

The Practice and Theory of Tibetan Buddhism

Meditation on Emptiness

and

Emptiness Yoga

1. NIRVĀṆA

Nirvāṇa is an extinguishment of desire, hatred, and ignorance that is often likened to the dying of a flame. Since ignorance is the fuel or source of both desire and hatred, the primary task in achieving nirvāṇa is to remove ignorance. Nirvāṇa was translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan as “passed beyond sorrow” (mya ngan las ’das pa), and sorrow is identified as the afflictive emotions of desire, hatred, and ignorance, as well as the sufferings produced by them. In that the chief of these is ignorance, the essential meaning of nirvāṇa is “passed beyond ignorance.”

Ignorance is a consciousness that conceives inherent or pointable concrete existence in persons and other things. It is not a mere lack of knowledge about reality but an erroneous conception about the way phenomena exist. A lack of knowledge would be, for instance, a governor’s not knowing how many people live in his or her state; an erroneous conception would be the conviction that the state contains three hundred and fifty thousand people when it actually contains two million. The latter is quite different from a simple lack of knowledge.

The ignorance that is the root of suffering is a conception discordant with reality, held with enormous conviction. We are convinced that persons and other phenomena exist as solid, concrete, or self-propelled units because that is how they appear to us. Yet this appearance is thoroughly deceptive, for people and things do not exist this way at all. Nonetheless, through our own ignorance we assent to their false appearance and base most of our lives on this misconception.

In order to attain nirvāṇa, we must first understand how things actually exist and then become accustomed to that understanding so that neither the manifest nor dormant forms of ignorance remain or can reoccur. The mind must be transformed, and transformation of such a magnitude requires great effort and meditation.

According to the Mind-Only School (sems tsam pa, cittamātra), one aspect of the false appearance of things is the appearance of subject and object such that the subject seems to be utterly cut off from the object. In a sense, looking at another person or object is like looking across a chasm. The subject “I” seems to be distant and cut off from the object “you” or “it,” as if the two were irrevocably separate and independent entities. It is correct to say that subject and object are different, but incorrect to conceive of them as different entities, or, as is said in the Middle Way Consequence School (dbu ma thal ’gyur pa, prāsaṇgikamā-dhyamika), to conceive of them as inherently established. Of course, we do not actually say, “I am a different entity from you,” or “I am a different entity from that desk,” but such words are certainly descriptive of our experience. By bringing about a slight change in our thought it is possible to begin experiencing subject and object as not solidly separate entities.

Consider the following. A feature of our misconception of phenomena is that things seem to exist by way of their own character or inherently, almost as if they were not composed of parts. For example, this shape A appears to be the letter “A” in and of itself. The force of its appearance as the letter “A” is so strong that we feel it is foolish even to mention that it appears to be a letter “A” in and of itself. We feel that it simply is the letter “A.” No one (at least no trained English reader) can deny that “A” does appear to exist right there with or among those three lines. Yet, are these shapes actually the letter “A” in and of themselves, or is the letter “A” something we impute to them? Is “/” the letter “A”? Or “-”? Or “\”? Certainly not. But if you begin to move the three lines together in the right way, at a certain point they seem to become the letter “A” in and of themselves.

Of what significance is this? When you have all the materials for building a house laid out on the ground, no one points to it and calls it a house. You begin to arrange the parts, and one day it comes together; after that it is house. The proponents of the Middle Way Consequence School assert that if you were to search for that house or for the letter “A,” you would not be able to point to anything and say of it, “This is the house,” or “This is the letter ‘A.’”

The process of searching for such things is not intended to lead to the nihilistic view that since they cannot be found they do not exist; rather, its significance lies in uncovering a gross misconception that has great influence on our behavior and to which we are addicted. However, our conception of inherent or pointable concrete existence is so strong that not finding a pointable object may cause us to feel, “If it does not exist in and of itself, it must not exist at all.” We look at the shape “A” and think, “If that is not the letter ‘A,’ what is?” “If that is not the letter ‘A,’ there is no such thing as the letter ‘A’!” These thoughts come from our conviction that the letter must be right there, that we can point to it with our finger.

What lies at the end of our finger? It is something that goes up, down, and over the middle. But the right slanted line is not the letter “A,” the left slanted line is not the letter “A,” and the crossbar is not the letter “A.” Is there a fourth thing that encompasses all three of these lines that is the letter “A”? When you build a house, is there a thing in addition to all the parts that spreads through those parts and is the house?

Look at a cement block. You think, “If this is not a cement block, what is it?” But look at it carefully. The little grain of sand you see in the corner is not the cement block, this one on the side is not the cement block, and this one over on the other corner is not the cement block either. You can come to the same conclusion with regard to every single grain of sand in the block. In that case, is there something other than all these grains of sand that encompasses the entire block? Can you find such a thing? You cannot.

This type of inquiry makes sense only when we recognize that we base our lives on the supposition that wholes exist spread over their parts, like mayonnaise smeared over a piece of bread. It is undeniable that when we are not questioning, when we are just living our lives, it does seem as if there were just such a whole, solid cement block. You do not say to yourself, “This cement block is different from all the grains of sand composing it.” Nor do you say that it is the same as all the grains of sand. You do not enter into such analysis but simply think, “This is a cement block.”

Proponents of the Middle Way Consequence School search carefully for this thing that is pointed to. They understand that the objects appearing to the mind and senses are like illusions in that they appear one way but exist another—they appear to be concretely pointable, they appear to exist in their own right but do not, just as an illusion appears to be something but is not. Analysis shows that this seemingly inherent existence is a misconception. There is a discrepancy between how things appear and how they actually exist.

The same unfindability applies to people, bodies, faces, and so on. Your head may feel ready to burst open when you realize that even though you usually feel there are such things you cannot find them when you look for them. This is one of the central topics of wisdom.

This does not imply a nihilistic view. One is merely washing away a misconception. This Buddhist position is that the information gained through our senses is false with regard to the status of the object and that by taking things at face value we assent to erroneous sense data. Our mistake is not a matter of having intellectually superimposed a false notion on correct experience; rather, our conditioning is such that phenomena appear to us wrongly from the very first moment of perception. We are deceived and, in addition, even build philosophies and systems of practice that fortify this deception.

It may be convenient to imagine that there is a cement block encompassing all those grains of sand. But does this view lead us into trouble? There is no question that we are often shocked by the events of the world; we would, for instance, be surprised to return home and find that our house had collapsed or had burned down. Buddhists say that such surprise is due to our mistaken view that the house exists by way of its own entity, by way of its own being. We have endowed our house with a false sense of solidity, which so deceives us that we are startled when its seeming substantiality is betrayed.

Due to our exaggerated image or reification of phenomena we generate attachment to houses and other items to the extent that we would fight viciously in order to possess them. Therefore, desire and hatred are said to be based on ignorance. When someone understands that things do not exist in and of themselves, afflictive desire and hatred are impossible. It is not a matter of suppressing desire and hatred; rather, they can no longer arise because the ignorance that is essential to their generation has been eradicated. Prior to attaining nirvāṇa, however, some conscious suppression is necessary.

Buddhists generally identify two types of nirvāṇa. One is the nirvāṇa of a foe destroyer¹⁰ (dgra bcom pa, arhan), who no longer assents in any way to the appearance of inherent existence. He or she has destroyed the foes of desire, hatred, and ignorance and thereby achieved liberation from cyclic existence. The other is the nirvāṇa of a buddha, who has thoroughly annihilated both the ignorance that assents to the false appearance of inherent existence and the false appearance itself.

The false appearance of inherent existence is like an illusion created by a magician who has cast a spell on the eyes of the audience. If such a magician created a beautiful man or woman in front of us, we might easily feel, “What a lovely person this is! Perhaps we will meet and marry. We could have such a wonderful life,” and so on. We, like a magician’s audience, base all sorts of vain speculations on the assumption that appearances are true. The magician also sees the beautiful man or woman, but does not entertain any thoughts or feelings about such. He or she knows what created its appearance, that there is no man or woman there, only a pebble or a twig that magic has caused to appear as such. While the audience sees the false appearance, believes in it, and therefore enters into afflictive emotions with regard to it, the magician is like a foe destroyer, who fully understands that the appearance is false and, therefore, is incapable of being deceived by it into vain speculation. A buddha is like a person who enters the room after the spell has been cast and does not even see the illusory snake but rather sees the pebble. A buddha’s perception is totally correct.

Shākyamuni Buddha said that all his teachings flow toward nirvāṇa. Everything he taught and everything that present-day, fully qualified teachers maintaining his traditions teach is for the purpose of helping students overcome ignorance and understand reality. A teacher wants a student to become capable of remaining in meditation on reality so that by directly perceiving the truth of the emptiness of inherent existence and growing accustomed to it, the student will be able to cleanse the mind of all desire, hatred, and ignorance. His or her mind will then be transformed into a wisdom consciousness that in meditative equipoise remains continuously fused with emptiness. Eventually, it will be possible to manifest different types of bodies fashioned from the very substance of the wisdom that realizes emptiness itself; these bodies will then be used to help other beings.

A teacher presents the path in such a way that students are able to acquire the appreciation and motivation necessary to complete the path. Instructions are given on hearing, motivation, and the value of leisure and fortune in order to provide students with the information and background necessary to assure that they will actually practice what they learn. Teaching is not given for the sake of mere scholarship or curiosity. Its purpose is to help. The present Dalai Lama has said that if you determine that it does not help, put it aside and find something that does. If it does help, practice it.

2. THE JEWEL OF LEISURE

Life is extremely short. If we wish to hear about and realize the meaning of emptiness, the meaning of suchness, where will we find the time? Certainly it will not be easy, for our lives are so busy. Moreover we underestimate how quickly time passes and do not know how soon our opportunity for practice will be lost. We need to be taught that an opportunity to practice is infinitely valuable, for unless we learn to recognize this situation for the jewel that it is, we may neglect to use it.

As long as our bodies and minds are not incapacitated by sickness or stupidity, we have a good chance of success if we apply ourselves to the task. Yet, we do not realize the unusual possibilities that possession of a human mind and body provides. A Buddhist teacher carefully explains the possibility of being reborn as any one of the six types of transmigrators in cyclic existence—god, demigod, human, animal, hungry ghost, or hell being—in order to convey an appreciation of our own good fortune as humans.

Even within a single galaxy, the types of beings and the sufferings they encounter are extremely various; if the entire universe of cyclic existence is considered, the variety is inconceivable. Thus, the classification of the six types of beings is, if anything, a simplification rather than an exaggeration, but the accuracy of this teaching is not the crucial element. It may be that Buddhism is wrong in some aspects but right in others that are more important. For example, Buddha is reported to have said that the hells are located at a depth in the earth such that, if measurement were taken in accordance with what we now know the planet’s dimensions to be, the hells would be located in the sky above North America.

When the present Dalai Lama was lecturing on the hells to a large audience of lay people and monastics in India in 1972, he asked the younger among them if they felt badly when they discovered that Buddha did not measure correctly. He said that such unease was out of place. We do not celebrate Buddha as a land surveyor or maker of maps. Moreover, a physical journey is not required in order to reach the hells; they can be experienced right here as one is dying. The Dalai Lama said that what matters is whether Buddha was right about the four noble truths, the two truths, and the like.

Among the six types of transmigrators, humans are in the best position to learn and achieve the paths leading to nirvāṇa. Students are taught to recognize clearly the features of non-human rebirth and the overwhelming difficulties that such rebirth entails in terms of successful practice. It is not simply that the suffering experienced by hell beings, hungry ghosts, and animals is great; for if one falls into a low rebirth, it is difficult (though not impossible) to attain a higher rebirth afterward. One does not acquire much new non-virtuous power as an animal, or as a hungry ghost or hell being. The force that has caused one to be reborn thus, like the force that impels a dream, is eventually consumed, and one is reborn elsewhere. Thus, just as a beautiful dream may follow a nightmare, it is not impossible to achieve a favorable rebirth after an unfavorable one. Also, although it is difficult for beings in a lower transmigration to engage in virtue, it is not impossible. It is said that there have been cases where animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings have newly generated love and compassion.

If you perceive your fortune in having attained a human birth but do nothing about it, you are like a miser who, knowing the value of his or her gold, counts it and gloats over it but does not use it. If you pride yourself on having the qualities of leisure and fortune but do not engage in practice, you are wasting your greatest wealth.

You may prefer to think of the six types of transmigrators simply as metaphors for varying human conditions, but though this thought is helpful, it is not the Buddhist teaching. Students are meant to understand the hells and other transmigrations literally; they are taught to reflect on these sufferings as if they themselves were undergoing them. One meditates on them in great detail for the sake of incorporating specific typ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Technical Note
• Part One: The Basic Path
• Part Two: Tantra
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Wisdom Publications