Practice Instruction

A Thangka of This Kind is a Handout for Learning

Posted on June 17, 2021October 12, 2021 by Lama Lekshe

This a traditional Tibetan diagram illustrating nine stages of progress in Shamatha. The painting brings together several teachings related to Shamatha, namely the Nine Ways of Resting the Mind, the Six Powers for Shamatha, the Five Faults of Shamatha, the Four Mental Engagements and the Eight Antidotes.

Nuns sit in a teaching hall where the thangka is displayed and the teacher gives the lecture. The images help in tracking the lecture, and in memorizing the teachings.

In the painting, the monk progressively chases, binds, leads, and subdues the elephant-like mind (whose colour progresses from black to white)—the same way we subdue mind when we meditate.

At the end of the path, single-pointed concentration is attained and the ‘purified elephant’ of the mind is completely settled.
The flying monk represents bodily bliss and his riding of the elephant represents mental bliss.
Riding the elephant back triumphantly across the rainbow, wielding the flaming sword of perfect insight having attained the flame of clear understanding and mindfulness represents the uprooting of Samsara by the unity of Shamatha and Vipassana. (That would make a good movie, right?)

To do this, the ‘Six Powers’ are needed. They are

Study
Reflection
Mindfulness
Awareness
Diligence
Total familiarity

This tells the monk or nun how to accomplish Shamatha: Through conceptual learning, so one knows what one is doing and aiming for, and then through formal mediation practice.

Here are the symbols used in the thangka as mnemonics:

The elephant is the symbol of the mind because a wild elephant is very dangerous to all other animals. Likewise, an untamed mind harms others. However, a tamed elephant is said to obey its master better than any other animal. The tame mind can perform any action, no matter how difficult. This symbol works, because elephants were (and still are) used as work animals in India and other places where these teachings were given.
The monk in the drawing is the meditator.
The dark colour of the elephant signifies feebleness and fogginess, a common obstacle in beginning mediation.
The monkey’s dark colour symbolizes scattered attention; its presence symbolizes distraction and scattering of focus caused by both inner turbulence and outer attraction. The monkey leads the elephant everywhere, always to different objects—also an easy to relate to reference if you’ve ever seen a monkey.
The rope held by the monk symbolizes mindfulness and the hook symbolizes awareness.
The fire is the energy and zest for meditation. The progressively diminishing flame, along the path, represents a lessening of the effort needed to cultivate understanding or mindful concentration.
Cloth (touch), fruit (taste), perfume conch (smell), cymbals (hearing), and a mirror (seeing) are the distractions of the five senses and their objects because in the early stages of cultivating meditation, these sense experiences distract the meditator.
The rabbit represents a more subtle aspect of scattering and dullness, which dilutes the zest for practice and diminishes clarity.

This thangka, just for an extra bit of information, is done in Karma Gadri style. Here you can see other examples of paintings in this style, and a few contrasting styles.

Practicing in Sickness

Posted on May 22, 2021October 12, 2021 by Lama Lekshe

A Dekeling student, David McWherter, is going in for surgery soon. He and I met this morning and we chatted about how he can carry his practice to this experience. He agreed that I could share the gist of our chat with you:

Almost every practice has some utility when you are sick or receiving treatment. It’s best to choose one or two and keep it fairly simple. From among David’s practices, we looked at the following. He will choose on his own.

Awareness of all experience arising. For this practice, simply notice every experience of body (sensations, etc.) and mind (thoughts, emotions, memory, etc.). Let it arise and see both the experience and its nature (transient, dreamlike, etc.) If you are having a general anesthetic, notice the changing mind state as you ‘go under.’
Relative bodhicitta. Set the intention to benefit all beings every step of the way in your travel to the hospital, your time there and your journey home. Each time someone comes into your room or interacts with you, however briefly, ask yourself in what small way you can benefit them. This is particularly good practice during the pandemic, when many frontline workers are stretched thin.
Mantra. If you are familiar with mantra practice, recitation of mantra may help calm the mind and more during illness. If you are chanting a mantra like Chenrezig’s mantra, for example, be aware of yourself as the embodiment of that quality of awakened compassion.
Gratitude practice. As time goes by, find things to be grateful for. This turns the mind from the tendency to complain or worry, which tend to increase fear and agitation. Gratitude balances experience by filling the mind with what’s working, antidoting the natural tendency when ill to focus on what appears to not be working. Gratitude, a form of the practice of contentment, keeps the mind in balance and strengthens equanimity.

When we can practice in the face of potential adversity, we transform difficulty into awakening. This is one of the Seven Points of Mind Training.

As a side note, Dave has a good system of support in place for the surgery, but it’s always appropriate to include community members in your practice. If you have a challenging time, let’s talk about how to apply practice all along the way! We’re in this together.

The Four Forces for Overcoming Destructive Patterns

Posted on May 19, 2021October 12, 2021 by Lama Lekshe

The Four Forces are a traditional Buddhist practice sequence that provide a structure for overcoming the influence of patterns of thought, speech and behavior that cause suffering. The four forces are

Regret
Reliance
Remedy
Resolution

Regret requires that you acknowledge a habit-pattern, at the very least to yourself, and that you become clear about the harm that was done, to yourself and others when the pattern played out. An example of a pattern would be a flash of jealousy that caused an angry comment.

Regret need not activate shame or guilt. The pattern is not evaluated through the lens of what your culture deems ‘appropriate behavior’. It is more simply evaluated as leading towards suffering, or away from it.

You may think, say, or do harmful things for a long time without understanding or even seeing their impact. Consider unintentional racism. In that case, guilt is not required to undermine the pattern. Regret is.

Finding sincere regret raises the energy of intention needed to notice and stop the pattern. You recognize that it is causing harm, intended or not, and like a person who discovers that their poor posture brings them neck pain, you take action to stop creating the causes of suffering. Maybe you overcome the habit of slouching. Regret alone is not complete, the other steps are required to disrupt a pattern, and most likely the steps will need to be repeated over time, along with mediation and other practices.

The practice of regret is simple: notice how allowing this pattern to play out creates a habit in which the pattern plays out on autopilot, without awareness, and see how it plants the seeds of future suffering. If you ate cheese and it made you sick, you’d regret having eaten it, and the habit of eating cheese will be easier to break as long as that understanding is present.

Reliance is the process of reconnecting and recommitting to the practices that help you keep this harmful pattern in view. Most any practice that inspires you and helps you see the pattern clearly will do this: mindfulness, shamatha, confession practices—there are many. Experiment and use the ones that work best for you.

Think of Remedy as a balancing mechanism for your tendency to repeat the harm of a pattern. For example, as a remedy, you might do something positive, even if seemingly unrelated, thereby strengthening the positive qualities or habits that you already have. This is an indirect method, but it usually helps. As the positive patterns increase and strengthen, they vanquish their opposites. While continuous awareness is even more ideal than creating positive habits, replacing negative habits with positive ones is a great stepping stone. Again–keep in mind that ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ here do not refer to social norms, but to whether a habit leads to suffering or to freedom from suffering.

The efficacy of balancing a negative action with a positive one does not mean that you can ‘buy’ your way out of wrongdoing. If you destroy rainforest and create a food shortage for local indigenous humans and animals, it may not remedy your tendency towards selfish action to build a library in your hometown with the profits. Choose carefully.

Remedy commonly includes a heartfelt apology, making amends and even restitution. Again, the intention is to undermine the pattern. The most powerful remedies help us see the impact and intention of our thoughts, speech and actions more clearly and more consistently. They help us honestly connect with the harm we have caused, and they help us see how our actions are the basis for our future actions, otherwise known as karma. They also help us repair and strengthen our connections to others, so we gain a felt sense of our interconnectedness. Those connections help us notice that our intention and impact may not necessarily be the same.

Resolution—sometimes called ‘resolve’–is the process of strengthening the intention to not let the pattern play out unintentionally again. It’s a sense of determination to do whatever it takes to free yourself from this form of self-harm. If you lie, for example, having seen and felt the suffering it causes you and others, and acknowledging that openly, you build intention, awareness and supports to help you immediately notice the pattern arising, and to disrupt that habit.

If you cannot find the resolution to disrupt or uproot the pattern yet, then you are not clear about the extent of the suffering it brings you. You may still be confusing some temporary pleasure it brings with the longer-term consequences. Or you may not yet personally connect to the pattern’s impacts, and may not yet be aware of how the harm you do to others harms you, too.

Expand your understanding the pattern’s dynamics by increasing the timeline of impact further into the past or future, and by contemplating your connections to a wider circle of people, places and things.

To practice the four forces is to take ownership of your own mindscape. It is to bring discipline and common sense to your habits and their impacts. It is to train consistently and deeply in uprooting the causes of suffering in your life, one event at a time. In that way, even the mistakes you make when propelled by negative habit-patterns become a cause of awakening.