aggression, attaining liberation through dullness, and so forth. In this way there are many profound methods in Vajrayana. The Vajra Vehicle of Secret Mantra is extremely profound and extremely effective.
When you apply the Vajrayana teachings, do so with clarity, free from any misconceptions about what is what. We must know clearly the purpose and the significance of the symbolism, so that we don’t form distortions about the profound nature of the Vajrayana teachings. It is very, very hard to find anything in this world more profound or more precious than the Vajrayana teachings. This is my personal opinion.
Why is this so? In order to overcome emotions, not to get caught up in them or be overtaken by them, there is no method more profound than recognizing mind essence. You may want to smash a painful emotion to bits, but you can’t blow it up with a nuclear bomb. Even hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs detonated at the same time will not stop dualistic mind from creating more emotions. If someone were to kill every single human being in this world, dualistic mind would still continue making emotions. Through the power of karma, all these minds would take rebirth in some other world and continue in the same way as before.
No matter what drug one takes, there is no way to stop dualistic mind from churning out selfish emotions. It’s not like in the movie The Matrix, where you take a pill and wake up to reality. It doesn’t happen this easily; there is really no way to do that. Of course there are pills to eat. There are pills to make you feel less, to make you unfeeling, or to make you feel nothing, to become totally oblivious—no emotions, no wakefulness, no nothing.
However, there are not any pills to make you genuinely more compassionate and less aggressive, to make you wiser and less caught up in negative emotions. There are no pills like that that I know of right now. In the future, who knows? But it certainly doesn’t help to wait for that pill to come along someday. Much better to use the realistic approach of practice right now!
What we need first of all is to recognize mind essence and to develop the strength of that. As we continue to develop the strength of this recognition, one day we will attain stability.
Can I have a few questions now?
STUDENT: I don’t want to question the Dharma, but I have some problems in combining the Dharma teachings with modern psychology.
RINPOCHE: I don’t feel that there’s any real conflict between the psychological method and the Buddhist method. The vital point is whether the method works or not. If it works, great; there is no conflict. If there’s still a remnant of anger or resentment left behind, then it didn’t really work and so it’s not that good a method. The real test is whether the psychological method is truly effective.
For example, one discovers there’s a reason one feels aggressive again and again, and one starts to investigate: “Why am I getting so angry? There doesn’t seem to be much reason in this. It’s irrational.” And then one finds out that it has some earlier cause, that something was done to me that wasn’t really resolved from the past; maybe Mom and Dad mistreated me as a child, or somebody else abused me. Because of understanding this, one can step away from hating oneself. One understands oneself better; there is more self-knowledge. But still there is some resentment toward Mom and Dad or whoever the perpetrator was. That part of the problem hasn’t really been resolved. One’s anger at oneself has gone, but there is still some other anger remaining. This means that sort of therapy didn’t really work that well in terms of eliminating anger altogether.
But let’s say the therapy goes a little deeper, so that one is actually able to forgive the target of one’s resentment and totally relinquish it. This means it worked: the anger is given up and resolved. In other words, when the method works, it’s wonderful. One experiences a kind of liberation through that. One is free of that type of emotion. Then it is a genuine therapy, a real cure.
I must admit to having one criticism of a certain type of Western therapy. Even though it can solve a lot of problems for people, there is the tendency to blame Mom and Dad, or early childhood problems, for everything: “You’re fine, there’s nothing wrong with you, but you have problems because of how your father treated you. Therefore your father is no good.” Temporarily there is a certain release in this, because you take the focus of the problem away from yourself. Also it’s logical in its own way; there’s some reason in it. But it creates the basis for another emotional problem, which is resentment toward one’s own parents.
Buddhist psychology attempts to solve the whole issue from a different angle. You begin with accustoming yourself to thinking of all sentient beings, countless as they may be, as your own fathers and mothers. Other beings are the first objects of compassion. If you instead build up resentment toward your mother and father, there is no way you would want to regard all sentient beings as your own fathers and mothers. If you are trained in regarding Mom and Dad as your enemy and then are told to regard all sentient beings as Mom and Dad, basically this will mean, “All sentient beings are my enemies!”
The point here is that honestly, you don’t have to blame anyone. You don’t even have to blame yourself. Just understand this very important point: everything you experience is empty form, an unreal presence of empty form. Realizing emptiness solves every problem right there.
Buddhism has many methods. There are two major ones that can be applied in this situation: one is analytical, the other is just letting be. Analytical meditation involves trying to track down where the anger actually is, where it comes from, what it is made out of, and so forth. If one discovers—as one can also discover in psychological therapy—that there is actually no real anger to find anywhere, that it doesn’t consist of anything, then this method actually solves the problem.
In the other method, called resting meditation, or “training in letting be,” you simply drop all involvement in a conceptual frame of mind. This too can solve the problem from its very core. Sometimes analytical meditation is not enough, because a conceptual attitude still lingers on. That is why I usually emphasize the second method, the training in letting be. In Tibetan it’s called jo-gom, literally, “release training.”
In the analytical training, one may try to find the reason a situation happens and to resolve the problem by figuring it out. For example, I examine why I feel a certain way: “What made me feel this way? Was it Mom or Dad or some event in early childhood?” If the me is still held to be real, and the analyzing mind, the me who is trying to investigate, is still believed to truly be there, then it is hard to genuinely forgive, because the hurt was really done to me. No matter how much one tries to tell oneself, “They couldn’t really help it; you can’t really blame them because they were also caught up in what they were doing, so why not just let it go,” it’s difficult to actually do so. Because of the holding on to me, it’s not so easy to let go of the one who received that hurt.
On the other hand, when we discover through the training in letting be that this me actually doesn’t really exist, it can just be dropped. Then it’s much easier to resolve the whole problem. The technique here is mainly to let go of this me. I understand it’s not necessarily easy. But I also know that it can be very useful if we succeed. Please trust me on this.
1 Translated by Nalanda Translation Committee.
Well, here we all are in the Kathmandu Valley. There is pollution, life is difficult, and all our programs and plans are continually
