news, especially if we have to admit to ourselves, “I have really been fooling myself all along. Why did I do all this practice? Am I completely wrong?” What can you do to pretend this isn’t true? Facing the truth is not pleasant.
The real help here lies in continually correcting and improving our motivation: understanding why we are practicing and where we are ultimately heading. Work on this and bring forth the noble motivation of bodhichitta. Then all methods and practices can be used to help you progress in that direction.
Again I must emphasize this point: if we want to approach ultimate truth, we must form a true motivation. This includes compassion for all other sentient beings who delude themselves continuously with the contents of whatever arises in their minds. Compassionate motivation says, “How sad that they believe so strongly in their thoughts, that they take them to be so real.” This deluded belief in one’s own thoughts is what I call the “granddad concept.” First, we hold our thought as true. Next, we accept that delusion, and it becomes our granddad. You know what it’s like to suffer from this delusion yourself, in your own experience. Bring to mind all other sentient beings who let themselves get caught up in their granddad delusion and, with compassion, form the wish to free them all. That’s the true motivation: please generate it.
Unless we have completely pure and true motivation, the practice of Vajrayana and Dzogchen doesn’t turn out well. Paltrul Rinpoche was a great Dzogchen master. He did not have any major monastery, but he had an encampment of thousands of practitioners that was called Paltrul Gar, Paltrul’s Camp. Over and over again, he taught those gathered around him the importance of having pure motivation. He created a situation named the Three Opportunities to improve the motivation of these practitioners. The first opportunity was at the sound of the wake-up gong in the early morning. Upon hearing the sound, people had the opportunity to think, “Yes, I must improve my motivation. I must put myself into the service of others; I must get rid of negative emotions and assist all sentient beings.” They would repeatedly bring that to mind in order to adjust their aim.
The second opportunity arose at Paltrul Rinpoche’s main tent. To get into it, you had to pass by a stupa, and at the opening to the enclosure, you had to squeeze yourself by to get through. The entranceway was deliberately made narrow so that you paused for a moment and thought, “This is the second opportunity to adjust my motivation.”
The third one occurred in Paltrul Rinpoche’s teaching itself, at the times when he would say directly, “You must correct and improve your motivation”—just like I am telling you now.
If these Three Opportunities did not work, then for the most part, Paltrul Rinpoche would kick you out of the encampment. He would say, “You are just fooling me and I am just fooling you. There is no point in that, so get out. Go away and become a businessman, get married, have children, get out of here! What’s the use of being neither a spiritual practitioner nor a worldly person? Go and be a worldly person! Just have a good heart occasionally.” What he meant was, it is not all right to dress up as a Dharma practitioner and merely pretend to be one. To act in this way is not being honest with others, and especially not with oneself.
Motivation is easy to talk about yet sometimes hard to have. We always forget the simplest things, partly because we don’t take them seriously. We would rather learn the more advanced, difficult stuff. And yet the simple can also be very profound. When a teaching is presented as a brain teaser and is hard to figure out but you finally get it, then you may feel satisfied. But this feeling of temporary satisfaction is not the real benefit. To really saturate yourself, your entire being, with the Dharma, you need the proper motivation. Please apply this thoroughly, all the time.
In Vajrayana teachings, we find many instructions on how to improve our motivation. In fact, if you really learn about how this motivation should be, the whole bodhichitta teaching is contained within that. Cultivate the correct motivation within your own experience, and it turns into bodhichitta all by itself.
I have been teaching now for fifteen years. To teach on the view, on emptiness and so forth, all of that is of course great, but when I look through the whole range of teachings, the real dividing line between whether one’s practice goes in the right direction or the wrong direction always comes down to motivation. That is the pivotal point.
Without pure motivation, no matter how profound the method is that we apply, it still turns into spiritual materialism. To train in being a bodhisattva and cultivate bodhichitta so that “I can be happy” means something is twisted from the very beginning. Instead, embrace your practice with the genuine bodhichitta motivation.
Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, who is one of my root gurus, would teach on motivation over and over again. He talked about it so much that, frankly, I sometimes felt a little bored, thinking, “He talked about it yesterday, he talked about it today, and he will probably talk about it tomorrow. This is a little too much. I’ve already heard it.” This kind of resistance is actually very good proof that ego doesn’t like teachings on pure motivation. Right there, at the moment one feels resistance against the altruistic attitude, that is the precise spot to work with, touchy as it may be. To admit this and be willing to deal with it right at that point is very practical, very pragmatic. I think that the whole point of practice is using Dharma teachings at the exact point of resistance. Otherwise, we just end up practicing when we feel good, and we avoid it when we feel bored or restless. At the very moment of feeling depressed, restless, or unhappy, take these moods as a really good training opportunity, as a blessing, and put the Dharma to use right on the spot. Think, “I am so glad I have this opportunity to practice meditation. I am deeply delighted. Please come here, unhappiness, depression, every type of suffering! Please come closer, I am so happy to see you!” When we train in this type of “welcoming practice” on a daily basis, we can progress and become truly transformed. Otherwise we are just postponing the main problem until some indefinite future time, tomorrow and then again tomorrow. We postpone it again and again, until the doctor says, “Sorry, your time is up! No more tomorrows.”
I can promise you that the Dharma works well if you use it well. I have a great deal of trust that the teachings of the awakened Buddha are extremely profound and precious. Their practice can solve our basic problem permanently and completely. All our confusion, all our emotional obscurations can be completely undone. Not only can we achieve liberation for ourselves personally, but we can expand our capacity to benefit others at a deep and true level, not just superficially. All these tools and insights are presented in the Buddha’s teachings. To use them only for temporary, shallow purposes, as is often the case with therapy—approaching practice as a bit of self-improvement—degrades the Buddha’s teachings to the level of a self-help book. There is no need for that. There are already more than enough of those—stacks of them, mountains of New Age self-help books suggesting this or that kind of therapy. If this is all we want out of Buddhism, we can turn to the easily understood self-help books that already exist. They are actually very useful. But if the future of the Buddhist tradition is no more than another self-help variation, I feel somewhat sad. Someone who simply wants a stronger ego to face the world, make more money, influence people, and become famous maybe doesn’t need Buddhism.
This sort of Dharma talk was probably not heard in the past in Tibet. It wasn’t necessary then, because the country was full of true practitioners. You just had to look up the mountainside and somebody was sitting there practicing. You could see the dwellings of hermits from wherever you were, scattered all over the sides of mountain ranges. At any given time throughout history, the Drukpa Kagyu tradition abounded with great practitioners who had given up all material concern. These people were happy to just get by on whatever came along, happy to let whatever happened happen; they were free of all emotional baggage and worry for themselves. Maybe they did worry somewhat in the beginning, let’s say the first six months of practice, but then they went beyond petty worries. They did not spend their whole lives trying to deal with emotional issues. They dealt with them and went on to the real practice. They did not remain inside the cocoon of spiritual materialism. Wouldn’t it be sad to die like
