Geshe la began his teaching today with an introductory talk on meditation (Tibetan: "gom," to become familiar with). Meditation has been on the American horizon for a long time, but Geshe la's Gelugpa tradition uses it in very specific ways that are often a little different, for example, from the Zen tradition of zazen. The Gelugpas have a saying: "Trying to meditate without a basic understanding of the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy is like trying to climb a snow mountain with no hands." Geshe la has been gradually giving us our hands, and now just as gradually, he's introducing us to the fundamentals of meditation.
Geshe la also spoke of "prana" today, a Sanskrit word that is often translated simply as "life force," but however we translate it, it is activated and controlled in many yogic systems by working with the breath. Associated with a vital movement up and down the central nervous system, prana is the force that fuels and stabilizes the mind as well. From counting breaths to the sophisticated breathing exercises of tantric yoga, meditation rests on our familiarity with the fundamental power of the breath: tracking it, following it, becoming aware of it. Meditation begins with our becoming aware of our breath. And becoming aware of our breath, beginning to monitor prana, we are beginning to stabilize our minds. Even the Buddha recommended that we return to the breath continually.
The problem we all face--and Geshe la began today what I hope will be a long teaching on this subject--the problem we all face is how we carry the insights gained on the cushion into a productive encounter with the "daily disasters," as Geshe la calls them, of our daily lives. By the way: In Infinite Life, the book recommended this month, Robert Thurman addresses this problem specifically in the chapter entitled, "Wisdom." It's a very helpful take on this perennial problem. Geshe la's intention here is to remind us that the meditation session is not something isolated and separated from our lives, but a rather an introduction to it, a way of transforming our habitual responses to the phenomena whirling around us into responses that directly and efficiently alleviate both our own and others' suffering.
You probably noticed that Geshe la spent very little time today talking about the specifics of the text we are reading. Instead, he spoke at length about the three root delusions--ignorance, attachment, and anger; or, the pig, the rooster, and the snake--and how we cannot free ourselves from suffering until we break the hold that these delusions have on us. By continually studying these delusions, and by understanding how extensively they permeate our daily lives, we can begin to understand how difficult and how necessary this task actually is. Once we see how thoroughly these delusions control us, once we see how central they are to our continual suffering, we can then begin to feel how necessary it is that they eventually be vanquished. The more we begin to feel this necessity, the more we embrace what Geshe la called today the "mind of renunciation." This feeling is cultivated during our meditation sessions.
It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of the "mind of renunciation" in Buddhist philosophy, and as Geshe la showed us, it is intimately connected to The Wheel of Life.
This is the perspective that understands, at the gross level, that the material world and its pleasures are in the process of deteriorating, giving us nothing of permanent value, and at the subtle level, of understanding that even pleasurable thoughts vanish as quickly as they arise, leaving us as hungry for happiness as we ever were. So, logically, gradually, seeing that these solutions--material prosperity, mental enticements--solve no problems permanently, we begin to renounce them as unsatisfactory solutions. But our reliance on these faulty solutions are old habits, fueled by ignorance, attachment, and anger, and so we develop this mind of renunciation gradually.
The Wheel of Life offers ample evidence and motivation for developing this particular mind. In fact, The Wheel represents a dramatic genealogy of what happens when our lives are directed, not by the mind of renunciation, but by the mind of ignorance, attachment, and anger. Geshe la mentioned again the five aggregates, and they too are very important in understanding The Wheel of Life. The three root delusions can helpfully be seen to exist as a result of our understanding the self as independent entity--because we see the self as an independent entity (ignorance), we wish to protect it (attachment), and when this self seems at times to be threatened, we react vehemently (anger). Geshe la's point was that one of the ways we can begin to dislodge our false sense of the self's solidity and permanence is by studying and understanding the five aggregates: once we see that the self is simply a composite of these inter-dependent aggregates, our entire notion of the self's coherence begins to change.
And when that happens, our ignorance begins to clear away just a bit, and with it goes a measure of attachment and anger as well. And so we are addressing the central circle of The Wheel of Life by understanding the five aggregates.
That was Geshe la's point, and by addressing these fundamental points of Buddhist philosophy, he was also giving us a clear introduction to The Wheel of Life.
Sidney Burris, Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas
