When the Chocolate Runs Out

Thubten Yeshe, Nicholas Ribush, Josh Bartok

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780861712694
• eBook ISBN: 9780861718795
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

To know Lama Yeshe was to know he loved chocolate; it was his favorite metaphor to describe the nature of our attachments.This funny and trenchant little volume answers the question of how we can be happy even after the "chocolate" has run out. By cutting the cords of attachment, we discover the indestructible happiness that has always been--and always will be--available to us.Capturing the remarkable personality of Lama, who played an integral role in introducing Tibetan Buddhism to the world, When the Chocolate Runs Out will delight both readers who have known Lama Yeshe for decades and those who have never encountered this timelessly inspiring teacher.At once lighthearted and profound, this delightful book of wisdom is a perfect companion to How to Be Happy by Lama Zopa Rinpoche.

The Indisputable Fact
of Karma

Our ego grasps at our uncontrolled perception, and our mind just follows along:
that entire out-of-control situation is
what we call karma.

KARMA is nothing more or less than your experiences of body and mind. The word itself is Sanskrit; it means “causes and their effects.” Your experiences of mental and physical happiness or unhappiness are the effects of certain causes, and causes of yet more effects.

One action produces a consequence; that is karma. Both Eastern philosophies and science explain that all matter and energy are ultimately interrelated; if you can understand that, you will understand how karma works. All existence, internal and external, does not come about accidentally; it comes about because of causes and conditions.

The energy of all internal and external phenomena is interdependent.

YOUR BODY’S ENERGY is related to the energy of your parents’ bodies, minds, and circumstances; that energy is related to their parents’ bodies, minds, and circumstances — and so on infinitely back, as well as out in all directions. That sort of evolution is karma.

As you go through life — every day, everything you do, all the time — within your mind there’s a constant chain of causes and reaction, causes and reaction; that’s karma too.

THE WAY KARMA WORKS is ultimately not a question of belief. No matter how much you say, “I don’t believe I have a nose,” your nose is still there, right between your eyes — whether you believe it or not.

Karma is not theoretical philosophy:
it’s Buddhist science.

YOU CAN GET a clear understanding of karmic action and reaction simply by analyzing your everyday experiences. When you act from greed or anger, what happens? When you act from kindness, what arises?

The laws of karma function whether
you believe in them or not.

IF YOU ACT IN A CERTAIN WAY, you are sure to experience the appropriate result, just as surely as taking poison will make you sick — even if you deeply believe that the poison is medicine. Once you’ve created the karma to experience a certain result, the causes and conditions that give rise to it, that outcome is inevitable. Karma is a natural law governing all physical and nonphysical phenomena in the universe. It is extremely important for you to understand this.

You can’t outsmart karma.

COWS, PIGS, AND SCORPIONS have no ideas about karma — no beliefs one way or the other — but they must still live out their karma.

SIMPLY PUT, the uncontrolled body, speech, and mind are manifestations of karma.

PURIFYING KARMA INVOLVES watching your body, watching your mouth, and watching your mind. Try to keep these three doors as pure as possible.

EVERY MINUTE you perform hundreds of karmic actions, yet you are hardly conscious of any of them. In the stillness of meditation, however, you can listen to your mind, the source of all this activity. You learn to be aware of your actions to a far greater extent than ever before. This self-awareness leads to self-control, enabling you to master your karma rather than be mastered by it.

You can be truly open
only if you are disciplined.

IF THE NEGATIVE EMOTION has already bubbled to the surface, it’s probably better to express it in some way, but it’s preferable if you can deal with it before it has reached that level. Of course, if you don’t have a method of dealing with strong negative emotions and you try to bottle them up deep inside, eventually that can lead to serious problems, such as an explosion of anger that causes someone to pick up a gun and shoot people.

What Buddhism teaches is a method of examining that emotion with wisdom and digesting it through meditation, which allows the emotion to simply dissolve. Expressing strong negative emotions externally leaves a tremendously deep impression on your consciousness. This kind of imprint makes it easier for you to react in the same harmful way again, except that the second time it may be even more powerful than the first. This sets up a karmic chain of cause and effect that perpetuates such negative behavior. Therefore, you have to exercise skill and judgment in dealing with negative energy, learn when and how to express it, and, especially, know how to recognize it early and how to digest it with wisdom.

EVERY EXPERIENCE WE HAVE in our lives manifests from our mind. Because you interpret your life and your world through your mental attitude, it is important to have the right motivation. And not all motivations are equal.

In Tibet, we have an expression: “The boy who kills his father always has a reason.” He can give you a reason for why he killed his father, but that doesn’t make it worth doing.

Morality is the wisdom that
understands the nature of the mind.

THE KEY TO KNOWING whether an action is good or bad is the motivation behind it, not the action itself. If you are motivated by concern for others and not self-attachment, the action can be pure, or positive. If you are motivated by attachment, it becomes impure, or negative.

IT’S YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to know whether something is right or wrong.

Never act without knowing whether your motivation is wholesome or unwholesome.

IN MOST CASES, killing, even in self-defense, is still done out of uncontrolled anger, and the karmic effects of this are always bad for you. In an extreme circumstance, you should of course protect yourself as best you can — but please try to do so without killing. Speaking for myself, if you were attacking me and the only possible way I could stop you would be if I killed you, then I think it would be better that you kill me.

When you take refuge in the Buddha,
Dharma, and Sangha, you commit yourself primarily to steadying your karma.

THE METHOD FOR STEADYING karma is meditation. I think this is a far better and more powerful way of developing awareness of your actions than by becoming obsessed, as so many people these days are, with the cultivation of single-pointed concentration or mindfulness meditation. It’s ridiculous to imagine that trying to gain single-pointedness of mind is the only way to practice Dharma.

YOU SHOULD CONSTANTLY TAKE CARE of every aspect of your life — waking, working, eating, sleeping — with wisdom. Take care of your karma as best you can. In this way your entire life can be used to bring you closer to the wisdom of egolessness.

Guarding your karma day in and day out is
also meditation and can be a powerful way
to develop insight.

IN ANCIENT INDIA there was a king who killed his father. When he realized what he had done, he was overcome with remorse, completely depressed, and almost unable to think. Finally, he sought advice from the Buddha, who told him, “Killing your parents is worthwhile.” Somehow, the king was jolted awake by these words, and his mind started functioning normally again. He thought deeply about what the Buddha had said, and he finally realized that he should kill the attachment and deluded mind that give birth to the suffering mind that led to the murder. Ultimately, spurred by this very realization, this man who had killed his father realized total liberation.

No past misdeed is so great that we
cannot still do the work to find lasting
peace in this life.

THE KARMA that Buddhism talks about is moment-to-moment reaction, a minute-by-minute phenomenon. The same is true for rebirth. Rebirth is not something that happens in the future, sometime after you die of old age. Rebirth is always happening, continually — even right now.

EVEN IF YOU PERSONALLY KILLED everybody on Earth, there’s no permanently existing hell waiting for you to come and suffer in forever. There’s no such thing, even if you kill all sentient beings. There’s no permanent suffering.

WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT EVIL, they always make it sound as if it comes from outside of themselves. There’s no such thing as outer evil. Evil is nothing other than the manifestation of ego and attachment. If you want to know the Buddhist words for evil, they’re ego and attachment.

Actual evil is the negative mind
that projects evil outside.

EVIL IS A PROJECTION OF YOUR MIND. If evil exists, it’s within you. There’s no outside evil to fear. Things always change; permanent evil is totally nonexistent.

THERE IS NO MISERABLE PLACE waiting for you, no hell realm, sitting and waiting like Alaska — waiting to turn you into ice cream. But whatever you call it — hell or the suffering realms — it is something that you enter by creating a world of neurotic fantasy and believing it to be real. It sounds simple, but that’s exactly what happens.

Hell does not exist from its own side;
the negative mind makes it up.

NIRVANA ALSO DOES NOT EXIST from its own side. It’s not a place you can go or a prize you can win. Everlasting happiness is within you, within your psyche, your consciousness, your mind. That’s why it is so important that you investigate the nature of your own mind.

YOU DON’T NEED TO GRASP at some future resultant joy. As long as you follow the path of right understanding and right action to the best of your ability in this very moment, the result will be immediate, simultaneous with the action.

“My Enemies Disappeared”

THERE ONCE WAS A TIBETAN YOGI who used to say, “When I was a thief, I went about armed to the teeth with knives, spears, and arrows, robbing by day and stealing by night, taking whatever my ego and attachment wanted. At that time, enemies were everywhere and I was always questing after sensory pleasures. Then I became a monk and changed my life and the way I use my mind, and now sense pleasures have to fight among themselves to get my attention and my enemies disappeared — I saw everyone as my friend.”

Nobody cheats you but yourself.

WHATEVER YOUR REASONS, your feelings of “I like him, I don’t like her” are totally illogical. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the true nature of either subject or object. By judging people the way you do, you’re like a person who has two extremely thirsty people coming to the door begging for water, and then arbitrarily choosing one — “You, please come in!” — and rejecting the other — “You, go away.”

There’s no reason to make the psychological distinction between friend and enemy, wanting to help the friend with extreme attachment, and wanting to give up on the bothersome, conflict-generating enemy with extreme dislike.

Your conflicts with others are the result of
your fanatical, fixed ideas of good or bad.

IF WE HAVE DEVELOPED the necessary mental discipline and are sufficiently aware of what is happening inside us, there is no reason why we cannot choose to express only those thoughts that will bring happiness to ourselves and others. The whole world might rise against us, but if the ability to choose how we use our mind were well developed, we could still view everyone as our friend rather than cower with fear and hatred.

The best way to meet anger is with love.

YOU KNOW HOW ANGRY YOU ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Salvation Through Chocolate
• Sources of Dissatisfaction
• The Origin of Our Problems
• Attachment and Release
• Ego Barges In
• Angry Interpretations
• The Heart of the Dharma
• Inner Psychology
• Qualities of Mind
• Why Meditate?
• Effort and Expectation
• Checking Up with Your Own Experience
• Sleeping and Waking Up
• The Indisputable Fact of Karma
• “My Enemies Disappeared”
• Embracing All Beings Equally
• Equilibrium
• True Charity
• The Meaning of Emptiness
• The Mind of Wisdom
• Taking Refuge
• How to Meditate
• Leading an Inner Revolution—Exchanging Self with Others
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Copyright