taking inferential valid cognition as the path

today i found an interesting and short commentary - if you’re a geek about meditation like i am - about why tibetan vajrayana buddhism uses logical analysis (e.g. madhyamaka) to realize the nature of reality, but also why it is not used as the primary path. this commentary was from venerable khenchen thrangu rinpoche, one of the leading current teachers in the kagyu (black hat) lineage of tibet.

my favorite quotes:

The reason that you cannot find anything when you look for your mind is that the mind is not a self. The mind has no true or inherent existence, which is what the Buddha meant when he talked about selflessness and when he talked about emptiness; this is it, exactly.

and then

And the first thing you need to understand about this is that this is not some kind of doctrine or belief; it is not something you should take on faith or on authority… This has nothing whatsoever to do with what you have been told about the mind, because this is something that you can see as an individual for yourself… So please look at your mind.

glossary of some terms used:

• dharma - can be ‘truth’, ‘teachings’, but used once in the commentary to mean ‘a moment of experience’
• dharmata - phenomenon
• lama - a teacher, more generally anyone who has completed a three year solitary retreat in the kagyu lineage
• mahasiddha - greatest realized masters. often 84 of these masters are mentioned in indian history

not a new comparison of course

my jedi and tibetan buddhist tradition comparison is not new of course, in fact a zen practitioner named matthew bortolin wrote an entire book about this comparison titled the dharma of star wars.

he writes from a zen perspective though. all dharmas lead to the same kind of enlightenment they say, but i think the references to the force in star wars are more of a tibetan buddhist presentation. the tibetan form of buddhism uses the idea of subtle energy below thought and emotion that is the root of pre-conceptual wisdom, and some tibetan lineages also say that it is truly existent. that last part about existence might be where they are most critiqued by other buddhist sects and other lineages in tibet, who feel that goes too far toward hinduism - by claiming existence they say that the subtle energy below thought and emotion would then be an undying form of soul or atman. these sects would then defend their view by saying that it is not soul or atman, but treating that energy as existent is less about absolute view and more about relative training to avoid the trap of nihilism when studying the impermanent nature of all phenomenon. it therefore leads to a skillful route to the direct experience of phenomenon without elaboration for some people. but that debate rages on…

i suspect though my mapping of “the force” to the five wisdom energies in buddhist tantra is perhaps too much of a stretch, but the way the force is depicted in the movies is somewhat consistent. luke is told, “reach out with your feelings” and the subtleness of the feelings in general are discussed. we often see yoda in meditation to connect with it, or the jedi must relax or stop to contemplate their feeling of the force. ok, i’ll stop with the comparison there, but it’s been a fun contemplation.

CORRECTION: No Tibetan lineages actually say “truly existent” I’ve discovered, for the subtle energy below existence. Some do discuss that as a stepping stone to going beyond the extreme of existent and non-existent. But ultimately they seem to agree that nothing has been found to be truly existent.

more evidence of a jedi and tulku link

an article at tibet.com claims that the language spoken by the ewoks in episode VI is tibetan!

plus the name “padme” is a really popular sanskrit name for lotus, and the name “skywalker” is very close to a tibetan term for dakini energy which is “sky dancer”.

also, the name “yoda” is a short form of the sanskrit name yodhrin meaning warrior. guess what the modern hindi word is for yoda? it’s “jedi”, according to exoticnames.com

UPDATE: I’ve studied some more tibetan now, and the tibetan word for dakini is khandro, which literally translates to “sky goer”. and “sky walker” would be a reasonable rendering of that, as well as “sky dancer”.

jedi inspirations

i’m somewhat convinced that lucas took inspiration for the jedi knights from the tibetan tulku tradition. here are some comparisons between the jedi and the tulkus.

of course they differ in that tulku’s as far as i know don’t use weapons or try to keep the peace. not sure what tibetans have done historically about policing, violent neighbors, and the like though. that armed spiritual warrior aspect might be more of a chinese shaolin priest or christian knight mythology?

flash and fancy

i think the tibetans would be envious of these decorated buses in pakistan. (thanks spot!) i wonder if they have the same view of richness in decoration. the tibetan view is perhaps pre-buddhist shamanic influence and tantric influence. in the tantric aspect the view would be that apparent phenomenon is infinitely rich, but our conceptual mind narrows things until we live primarily in a world deadened from our own senses, solely relating to everything through our reference points of conceptualization. so decorating like this remind us to open to the inherent richness of ordinary experience, that all moments and places are sacred, and if we relax our conceptualizations to see the sacredness then we’ll be free from the suffering caused by being out of sync with reality. or something like that…

sangye

so the tibetan word for buddha is “sangye” (spelled sangs rgyas in romanized tibetan dictionaries), which is simply two words glued together: the word for “decrease” and the word for “increase”. it was explained to me that it simply means to increase virtuous qualities and to decrease negative afflictions and habitual patterns, or purify in other words. that explanation bothers me as still confusing, how does that relate to “buddha” exactly?

today i was thinking about the idea of ‘right effort’, which is one of the eight fold noble path to the cessation of suffering. this comes up often for me, i usually have too many projects going at once and buzz between them all feeling usually somewhat behind in them all. or at least i’m spending cycles always evaluating if i’m behind or not, even if that sense of on time is completely a fabrication. so ‘right effort’ seems like something i should contemplate. it is sometimes described as ‘walking like an elephant’, meaning take it steady and slowly and survey where you’re going from a higher perspective. hard to remember to do that.

so back to the word “sangye”. in sanskrit we use “buddha” which just means awake. the gautama buddha didn’t refer to himself that way actually, he called himself at first tathagata, “one who sees things as they are”. but everyone else called him “buddha”. so why do the tibetan’s instead move to this increase and decrease idea to refer to buddhahood?

my guess now is that it has to do with ‘right effort’ and reference points. to say that we are awake or not is a conceptual judgement and is also a way to fabricate some sort of measuring stick of awakeness. how awake is awake? it immediately implies an aggressive comparison between our experience and some conceptual idea of what it means to be awake. if however the term for buddha drops that idea of absolute comparison, what do we have left? just the idea that we’re always moving in a direction toward awakeness without having an absolute reference point. in this case, we could say that we’re decreasing the obscurations to awakeness and we’re increasing the qualities of wakefulness. we’re always moving in that direction. any attempt to say we’ve made it or not would only be conceptual, so we can never really say that we’re ‘awake’, just that we’re increasing and decreasing. at least that’s my novice theory today about this tibetan word…

visualization practice

this weekend i’m taking my first class in visualization based meditation practice. so why meditate with visualizations? what are they? good questions.

meditating on a visualization involves building an image from nothing in your mind, and relating to it in a certain way. in vajrayana or tantric buddhism, usually we visualize first a person who we relate to as a friend, sibling, teacher or similar. we then visualize ourself as that person. lastly, we dissolve the visualization back into emptiness. visualizations can also be of just a symbol or a scene. each visualization has a precise set of symbolism and a process of how we construct it. usually we first imagine the seat that the person sits on, then a symbol that represents the personality or quality of that person, then some insignia or instrument the person is holding that represents something about them, then we imagine what they look like, what they’re wearing, in some cases even the room they are in and their retinue of attendants and friends even. each aspect we visualize represents some aspect of inherent wisdom that people possess - like discrimination, accuracy, knowing what to do, etc. - and as we visualize these components we recall those aspects of wisdom. when we visualize ourself as that person, then we also connect to how those aspects of wisdom our inherent to ourself.

this isn’t that different as a process to dreaming. sometimes i dream and wake up first thing in the morning and can recall the visualization of my dreams. often they have a subtle affect on me even though they are dreams. i wake up irritated or fearful or whatever the dream left me with. the main difference between visualization practice and our dreams is that in the practice we are aware that we are visualizing, and also we have a specific set of metaphors that we’re using in the visualization that represent aspects of our own inherent wisdom. but otherwise you could say that visualization practice is just like dreaming, or day dreaming. in fact, much of our life involves creating a mental model for the world around us and relating to the world by reference point and using that mental model. so you could say that we’re visualizing all the time. so this meditation practice is really just intentional visualization, with awareness of what we’re doing, and practicing seeing the world for it’s symbolism and inherent wisdom instead of simply as ordinary.