Bodhisattva ethical restraints: Auxiliary vows 26-29

• Auxiliary vows 24-26 are to eliminate obstacles to the far-reaching practice of meditative stabilization. Abandon:

• 26. Seeing the good qualities of the taste of meditative stabilization and becoming attached to it.

• Auxiliary vows 27-34 are to eliminate obstacles to the far-reaching practice of wisdom. Abandon:

• 27. Abandoning the scriptures or paths of the Fundamental Vehicle as unnecessary for one following the Mahayana.

• 28. Exerting effort principally in another system of practice while neglecting the one you already have, the Mahayana.

• 29. Without a good reason, exerting effort to learn or practice the treatises of non-Buddhists which are not proper objects of your endeavor.

One of the greatest fortunes we have with the precious human life is having a human mind whereby we can think about things instead of just react, and we can have a sense of moral judgment or ethical discrimination—however we want to say it. We can consider the welfare of others and the disadvantages of our self-centeredness, and we can think about the nature of reality. 

Sometimes you look at our kitties, and they’re so cute, but if you look in their eyes, it’s like there’s a person in there but the brain won’t let them think and understand and learn because of the limits of having that rebirth, that kind of body. So, for this short period of time with a human body and human mind, we have great possibilities as well as great fortune. It’s important that we really treasure this opportunity and make good use of it. Of course, one of the best ways to do that is to think of the faults of our self-centeredness, the benefits of cherishing others, and really train ourselves in that—no matter how long it takes, no matter how difficult it is. Because it’s something noble and worthy of a human mind to do something valuable for ourselves and others that will lead to meaning and purpose and benefit for everybody. With that kind of intention we’ll learn about the ethical conduct of the bodhisattvas.

The difference between bodhisattva and monastic precepts

It’s easy to understand why you can study the bodhisattva precepts without having taken them, whereas with the monastic precepts in general or at least in the Tibetan tradition, you’re not supposed to study them before you’ve taken them. And you can see why—because the bodhisattva precepts are really talking about being a good human being and doing something with our self-centeredness and opening our hearts to others. The monastic precepts are teaching the same thing, but there’s a lot more detail there that corresponds just to the monastic way of life that doesn’t necessarily concern people that don’t have that way of life. You can see there’s some kind of difference there. 

We are still on the precepts that have to do with practicing the far-reaching meditative stabilization. We just finished talking about not learning and practicing the antidotes to distraction. 

26. Relishing the Pleasant Sensation of Concentration

Number twenty-six is “Relishing the pleasant sensation of concentration.”

When you’ve overcome all the hindrances, your next hindrance is that you get attached to how good you feel when the mind’s fully concentrated.

This misdeed is known as a ‘subsequent fault’ because it implies having achieved meditative serenity which gives rise to intense pleasure induced by the attainment of physical and mental pliancy. 

When you’ve done the nine levels of sustained attention, after that you have to develop physical and mental pliancy which lead to developing mental and physical bliss. Then after that you attain serenity; the serenity is actually just the access, the preceding stage, to the first jhana, the first meditative stabilization. So, while serenity is really praised a lot, you’re not quite at even the first meditative stabilization. But it’s still quite good and you can use that access concentration to do a lot of good things in your mind.

The fault consists of craving the pleasurable feelings that occur in meditation and considering them to be goals unto themselves.

So, in this case, you’ve attained serenity or you’ve attained one of the jhanas, and instead of seeing it as a concentrated state of mind that you can apply to meditate on all the other stages of the path, you see the concentration as the goal in itself and you become quite attached to how pleasurable it feels to be in that single-pointed state. That’s a hindrance because when you have that attachment you just stay in the single-pointedness, but you don’t necessarily meditate on bodhicitta or renunciation or wisdom. You’re just kind of enjoying your single-pointed bliss, but you’re not using it for a really good purpose. It’s like having a million dollars and then just sitting there in your own house enjoying the million dollars without doing something really good with it. 

Because the practice of serenity and also the meditative stabilizations are not a specifically Buddhist practice, many non-Buddhists can actualize them and some of them even mistake it for liberation.

Especially as you get into the higher meditative absorptions, sometimes people think, “Oh, I’m liberated,” whereas they haven’t developed wisdom at all and when that level of absorption ends, they kind of freak out. Or what they do is stay immersed in that and by doing so create what’s called the immovable karma. When we study the twelve links we come across that. 

If you’ve attained, let’s say the first jhana, and you just stay in that, you create the karma to be born in the first jhana in your next life. When you’re a human being you have a human body, but your mind can be in the first jhana. Then after you die, because of that you create the cause to have a body and mind where you are an actual form realm being of the first jhana. I’m translating jhana as meditative stabilization—dhyana is the Sanskrit word, zen is the Japanese word and chan is the Chinese word.

Non-Buddhists can have that happen and it’s a big shock. It’s either, “Oh, I’m not liberated,” or “Oh, there’s the lower realm.” Or getting born in one of those states, you stay in that for a very, very long time; then at the end, you come out of it and you’re born again in the desire realm. So, you’ve had a nice kind of vacation in the upper two realms, but you haven’t really accomplished anything by it. This is why our teachers really emphasize the importance of developing renunciation, bodhicitta, and the correct view of emptiness, so that we always have that in mind as we cultivate concentration and we don’t get like, “Oh, that feels so good,” and just want to do concentration meditation. 

Audience: When a person is born in that realm, the first jhana, are they burning up their merit?

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): If a person is born in the first or second jhana, are they burning up the merit? Well, they’ve created that karma when they were in the desire realm as a human being. When that karma ceases they fall out of that realm.

Audience: So they’re not accumulating merit when they’re there?

VTC: In the formless realm definitely you’re not accumulating merit. In the form realm, I think sometimes they can. Because you hear stories of different gods in these realms who will come and listen to the Buddha’s teachings. Some of those devas in certain realms may meet the Dharma and have faith in the Dharma. Still, it’s said that a precious human life is better because we have a balance of suffering and happiness. They don’t have a lot of suffering, so when you don’t have a lot of suffering, you often don’t have the “oomph” to practice the Dharma. You just get complacent. Whereas we have more suffering in the human realm, so it keeps us on our toes a bit more. 

Of the four afflictions that prevent us from maintaining and furthering the quality of our states of concentration, the first is attachment to the joy that they produce.

When you study the different kinds of attachment in the Abhidharma, there’s one that is attachment to being born in the two upper realms. There’s desire realm attachment, because we desire all these desirable objects, but there’s attachment to being born in the form realm and in the formless realm, too. It’s still something to be eliminated because those are still states within samsara. Although it does happen that on the hearer and solitary realizer path, as you’re progressing, you may take rebirth in the form realm for certain lifetimes and be able to continue practicing, but you’ve done that after you have first realized emptiness, so you’re not going to get stuck just in the meditative bliss.

The first is the attachment to the joy of the concentration.

The second is pride, such as the inflated feeling that we are far superior to those who have not gained similar experiences.

This is a big danger if you attain states of concentration, that you get kind of arrogant, “Oh, look what I’ve done” and “I’m a better meditator than you” and “I’ve accomplished this and that, hum, hum, hum.” 

The third is ignorance, such as mistaking the high state of concentration that we have achieved for liberation from samsara.

That’s what I was saying before. 

The fourth is holding wrong views.”

Because you can be born or have actualized in the human body those states, and still hold many many wrong views. Remember when the Buddha first renounced and he went to two other teachers before he went under the Bodhi tree? Those two teachers were teaching him the form and formless realm absorptions and he accomplished all of those, but he realized he still hadn’t overcome the ignorance and the wrong views. That’s why he tried doing the ascetic trip and found out that didn’t work; he experimented doing a few different things that didn’t work before he crossed the river and went and sat under the Bodhi tree.

Giving in to any of these disturbing factors in concentration is a misdeed associated with afflictions.”

Clearly, attachment, pride, ignorance, wrong views, those are afflictions.

However, when we try and counter negative responses such as attachment to the pleasure experienced in meditation, even if we do not immediately succeed, we do not commit a secondary misdeed.

As in the others, when we have attachment to desire realm things or anger, as long as we’re trying to overcome it we haven’t committed a transgression, although it’s not karma-free. That wraps up the section that has to do with attaining meditative stability and now we’re moving into the section of the precepts on the eight misdeeds contrary to far-reaching wisdom. 

27. Rejecting the Hearer/Listener Vehicle

Chandragomin says number 27 is “Rejecting the Hearer Vehicle.” He translates it here as “Listener Vehicle,” but often its Hearer Vehicle. What’s very interesting is that the term is Śrāvaka—which is the same root as Sravasti—and Śrāvaka can mean to hear or to listen to. The Tibetans say that they’re called hearers or listeners because they listen to the Buddha’s teaching and then they can explain the teachings to others. Also when they have attained nirvana they cause others to hear when they say, “I’ve accomplished what there has been to accomplish,” and “The holy life has been fulfilled,” and “This is my last rebirth.” So, that’s why they’re called hearers. 

But actually at the time of the Buddha, the word Śrāvaka was a term that was in common use even amongst non-Buddhists, because there were so many different spiritual teachers and all those spiritual teachers had disciples who listened to their teachings. Every teacher had his own Śrāvakas, so sometimes it’s translated as disciples and thus it’s called the Disciple Vehicle. Like in the Theravada they don’t say hearers; they usually say disciples, they translate it that way. This refers to rejecting that vehicle.

The first four misdeeds that conflict with the practice of wisdom—[this is the first one]—are committed in relation to a lesser object.

Here we’re getting into the Mahayana/Hinayana terminology, which I will give you my take on. From the Tibetan viewpoint, the Buddha taught the Mahayana also during his lifetime, but in a different form, and it wasn’t prevalently known in society during that time. If you go to Vulture’s Peak it’s a small place; you can’t fit all those people in there that the Heart Sutra, the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, says actually came. It says, “A great assembly of bodhisattvas” came, but it’s a kind of small place. They say that the Buddha taught there but the teachings weren’t prevalent in our human world and then later on when people’s minds had become more receptive to that kind of teaching, the teaching became more popular. 

So, at the beginning, when you first find the Mahayana scriptures becoming more popular, they were just talking about one way of practicing amongst many ways of practice. Then as time went on, instead of just being a way of practice, the word Mahayana came to mean a set of scriptures. Then as time went on after that,  Mahayana came to mean a whole school. There was a development in the meaning of the word Mahayana. In the early Mahayana sutras that became popular earlier, you don’t find the word Hinayana.

As you come to the Mahayana sutras that became popular later on, that’s where you find the word Hinayana. You’ll even find in some of the sutras the difference between the arhats and the Buddha being very, very clear and distinct. That the arhats lack certain qualities that a fully enlightened buddha had. Then this terminology of Hinayana and Mahayana got passed down. Hinayana literally translated means, lesser vehicle and Mahayana is greater vehicle. 

His Holiness realizes that that terminology is highly offensive to our Theravada brothers and sisters, so he often says Fundamental Vehicle instead of Hinayana, which I think, is definitely a step in the right direction. Although one of my Theravada monk friends pointed out to me that calling it Fundamental Vehicle also to him was a little bit offensive because that made it seem like “This is just the basic vehicle,” not like it was a respectable path in its own right. So, the terminology is a little bit difficult. 

What Samdhong Rinpoche suggested when I wrote him about this regarding writing I’m doing was to maybe just use the term Śrāvakayana which is very clear: the people who are following the Śrāvaka path. And then use Bodhisattvayana for the people who are following the bodhisattva path. In some ways, that seems to be a little bit clearer. Then it’s people’s decision what path they want to follow, but there aren’t these kind of value or pejorative words. I think it’s very important, especially because we go to monastic conferences and other gatherings with people from other Buddhist traditions, that we absolutely do not use the term Hinayana because it’s really very offensive. In a way, if you want to talk about the motivation for becoming an arhat and compare it to the motivation for becoming a buddha, you can draw differences between that, but to criticize somebody is a whole different ball game, I think. Or to appear arrogant in terms of the tradition that we follow, I think is not conducive to the kind of harmony that the Buddha would like to see amongst his disciples. 

You’ll hear it all the time when you go to teachings by Tibetan teachers, the word Tekmen in Tibetan, the translators say Hinayana and nobody thinks twice until somebody from that tradition is there listening to the teaching. They just get really offended, which is a pity because there’s so much in the Mahayana teachings, in the Bodhisattvayana, that is so beautiful, but they’re turned off from listening to it just by being offended at the language.

The first of these precepts consists of thinking that as a follower of the Great Vehicle—[that’s the Mahayana]—we have no need to listen to teachings of the Listener/Solitary realizer Vehicles. It is the belief that studying them or training in them is unnecessary and the expression of that opinion holding this view and voicing it constitutes a secondary misdeed associated with afflictions.

So, right there, associated with afflictions when you’re saying it’s not necessary as a bodhisattva practitioner to study and practice and learn the trainings of the Śrāvakayana. I must say there’s a lot of people who hold that view. I’ve met a lot of people in the Mahayana tradition who just kind of dismiss it as, “Well, it’s a lower vehicle, we don’t need to learn it.” Actually they say that because they don’t understand things very well, because so much of what is in the lamrim is straight out of the Pali canon.

It may not have been translated from Pali, it may have been translated from some of the early sutras into Arya languages, but the meaning is the exact same thing. Like the whole example in the precious human life with the turtle, that’s straight out of the Pali sutras. And the same is true for teachings about renunciation and many, many other things. To say that we don’t need to learn those teachings or practice them is really ridiculous because how are we going to generate renunciation? And if we can’t generate renunciation, we can’t generate bodhicitta. Because bodhicitta is not just renunciation for ourselves, but renunciation for everybody. We have to train in those.

His Holiness once said, when we were talking about The Thirty-Seven Harmonies with Enlightenment, one of the basic practices that’s taught in the disciple’s vehicle, and he said he feels that a lot of people in the Tibetan tradition miss out because they don’t really do that practice. We did the whole four mindfulnesses, didn’t we? It took us quite a while to go through that. You can see there’s a lot in that practice. It’s very, very rich. And we talked about how a bodhisattva practices it and how a person who’s a Śrāvaka practices it. There’s some difference there but still, within so much of the basic practice, it’s the same. 

If you look in the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, they all go through The Thirty-Seven Harmonies with Enlightenment, which include the four establishments of mindfulness. It’s quite interesting really, when you read The Sutra of the Ten Grounds, which is one of the Mahayana sutras, some of it, they talk about The Thirty-Seven Harmonies, and it’s almost the exact same wording as in the early sutras. There it is, right smack in the middle of The Sutra of the Ten Grounds, which is a very popular Mahayana sutra. 

And when you study The Ornament of Clear Realizations, the Abhisamayalankara, it goes through that whole practice, too, of The Thirty-Seven Harmonies. It’s quite important to learn those things. It’s important for two reasons. One is that part of it forms what we ourselves need to practice for our own spiritual advancement. The second reason is that if we want to become buddhas so that we can really help others and teach others according to their disposition and their interest, which means we have to know all the different things that the Buddha taught, because we’re going to meet people who want to practice that kind of teaching. We have to know it in order to teach it to them—and not just know it intellectually but know it through our own practice.

Audience: If you didn’t want to bother with the Śrāvaka vehicle, where would you start? 

VTC: Some people might just start with bodhicitta, like with The Lotus Sutra, or something like that, and just study that, generating bodhicitta, and go on from there.

Audience: So that the initial and middle scope are pretty much left out?

VTC: Yes. This is one of the beauties in the way Lama Atisha and Je Rinpoche after him, arranged the topics in that order. This was a way of arranging all the different teachings that happened later. Some traditions may be centered around a particular sutra and so they really just study mainly that sutra, maybe a little bit of other stuff from other sutras. They may not get this whole progression of how you take all these different things and put them into a system that is for one individual’s practice. Because remember, one of the strong points of the lamrim is that it shows how all the teachings of the Buddha can fit together into a path for one individual. When you really learn, that’s very special. Sometimes, since we’ve learned it from the beginning, we take it for granted. But if you walked in, maybe the first sutra you learned was The Lotus Sutra and that’s what most of the people around you taught and practiced, then you would have a whole different view of things.

Audience: The Lotus Sutra is mostly about bodhicitta.

VTC: It’s a Mahayana sutra and it talks some about bodhicitta, but it talks a lot about how skillful the Buddha is in leading disciples of different mentalities. But one of the big things is the Śrāvaka vehicle is lower. It makes that a strong point in it. 

Audience: What does that mean, lower?

VTC: Lower in the sense if you follow the Śrāvaka vehicle, your aim is to become an arhat, not to become a buddha. That’s the difference in motivation between aspiring for your own liberation versus aspiring for full enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

You can see in the lamrim, our first motivation is just to get a good rebirth, then to aspire for liberation, then finally bodhicitta. That’s such a skillful way of leading people and showing how all the teachings can be set to form a path that makes a lot of sense but not all the traditions have the amrim in that way. So, we’re kind of fortunate.

Audience: Exceptionally fortunate.

VTC: Yes, exceptionally fortunate. 

We need to be careful because some followers of the Mahayana tend to neglect the Hearer Vehicle teachings and imagine that there is no need to study, contemplate, and meditate on them.”

It’s true, many people think that.

This is a grave error, for followers of the Mahayana need to master all aspects of the Buddha’s teachings, including those of the Hearer and Solitary realizer Vehicles so as to be ready to use them to help living beings to whom they are most suited. For the sake of others, they must master these teachings even more thoroughly than someone who practices them exclusively.

Even for our benefit, on our own path, you can see the value of the four establishments of mindfulness. It’s quite incredible and it’s there in the middle-capacity being of the lamrim. It’s just usually they don’t explain it a lot, they just teach it and then go on, but they don’t necessarily explain how to meditate on it. Although Jetsun Chökyi Gyaltsen wrote a very beautiful commentary. That was one of the things I used when I was explaining it.

I’ve heard other people say that actually, as a Mahayana practitioner, we should practice everything in the Śrāvaka vehicle except the idea of attaining liberation for our own sake. But everything else we should practice and actualize for our own path, just not the motivation of renunciation for our own sake.

The only occasion on which we should ever express the above opinion is when we are dealing with practitioners of the bodhisattva path who are tempted to abandon the Great Vehicle in favor of the Hearer Vehicle. To dissuade them, we may say that followers of the Great Vehicle do not need to study the teachings of the Hearer Vehicle.

So in a thing of skillful means to stop somebody who may give up their familiarization with bodhicitta, we might say that. But I don’t think that would come very often.

28. While you have your own Tradition, devoting yourself to This

Number twenty-eight is “While you have your own tradition, devoting yourself to this,” meaning the Hearer Vehicle. So, it means that while you’re a Mahayana practitioner, you’re devoting yourself to the Hearer Vehicle or the Disciple Vehicle.

The second misdeed contrary to far-reaching wisdom is devoting oneself exclusively to this, in other words, to the Hearer Vehicle teachings. While we have the perfect opportunity to study the Mahayana scriptures, if we give it up entirely in favor of studying the Hearer Vehicle teachings, we commit a misdeed associated with afflictions. The idea is that as a follower of the Mahayana, we should give priority to studying, contemplating, and meditating on its scriptures and the study of the works of other vehicles should come after. On the other hand, there is no fault in studying the scriptures of the Hearer Vehicle parallel to pursuing our efforts in the Mahayana.

I think if you look at the lamrim, it has you definitely practicing the Hearer Vehicle before you get to the Mahayana vehicle, if you take the lamrim as something that you do one step at a time without knowing anything about the further steps. But usually in the lamrim we’re encouraged to know all of the steps in the whole broad picture. Then with that broad understanding, we might go back and reflect on precious human life, on death, the four establishments of mindfulness and so on, but you are reflecting on all of those with the bodhicitta motivation. So, even though those topics came from the Hearer Vehicle, when you’re doing your meditation and the whole context in which you take that topic is automatically getting put into a bodhisattva perspective.

For example, you can meditate on precious human life on just being my precious human life, or you can think of all the other beings have precious human lives and care about other beings who have precious human lives and want them to be able to really learn the teachings in a deep way.

Similarly, with taking refuge, you can take refuge in the Disciple Vehicle way, where you have concern about your own lower rebirth and faith in the Buddha. Or you can take refuge in a Mahayana way where you, in addition to those two, have compassion for other sentient beings and you’re following the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, so that they can lead you to Buddhahood so that you can be of greatest benefit to others. The idea is when we’re practicing the lamrim, by knowing the whole big picture, then even though we may start at the beginning, we’re bringing in the bodhisattva perspective all along.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC:  Yes, you just say, “It’s not necessary, and I’ll just do the six far-reaching practices and no need for the rest.” To what extent somebody needs to practice one thing or another, that’s a different ball game. But definitely we should be familiar with all these teachings. Like I told you before, we want to know and practice everything except the motivation for our own enlightenment alone.

The thing is, when you study the scriptures that are explaining principally the Śrāvaka Vehicle path, the way the path and stages is set out is a little bit different. And the way some of the teachings on selflessness are a bit different in the Pali scriptures. I think one of the things that they’re trying to get us to see here is keep studying the Madhyamaka view. So, it’s not just about the motivation, but it’s also about the view.

They say when we’re studying tenets, that there’s two ways in which you can be, either Fundamental Vehicle or Mahayana Vehicle, here I have to use those two terms. One is according to motivation, one is according to view. According to motivation, you’re a Fundamental Vehicle practitioner if you are aspiring for your own liberation and you’re a Mahayana practitioner if you’re aspiring for buddhahood for the benefit of all beings; that we know. In terms of view, from the Tibetan perspective that talks about the four schools—Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Chittamatra, and Madhyamaka—the first two schools, are called Fundamental Vehicle schools according to the view, while the Chittamatra and Madhyamaka are called Mahayana schools according to the view.

You can see that you can be somebody who has the Fundamental Vehicle motivation but practices the Mahayana view; or you can be somebody with Fundamental Vehicle motivation who practices Fundamental Vehicle view; you can be somebody with a Mahayana motivation who practices Fundamental Vehicle view or you can be somebody with a Mahayana motivation who practices Mahayana view. There are four points in there.

I think part of it is emphasizing to us that, not only in terms of motivation but in terms of view. Again, this is the whole thing, and we talked about that when Guy Newland was here. A lot of what’s said in the early sutras was interpreted in a certain way by the early commentators and Nagarjuna really protested against a lot of those interpretations, so he set forth many things. But a lot of the terminology Nagarjuna used, a lot of the arguments he used, are the same arguments found in the early sutras. So, it’s hard to know. 

The Tibetans usually say, “Oh well, there’s a few places in the early sutras where they taught selflessness of phenomena.” Actually I think there’s more than a few places but it’s usually interpreted in a certain way. Nagarjuna really protested against that way of interpreting things. Like the argument that we use for refuting emptiness—the fact of something not being one or different—that same argument’s in the Pali canon. Nagarjuna’s, the first verse in the Karikas, that things are not produced by self, other, both or causelessly, that same argument is in the early sutras. It’s not necessarily applied extensively, I found a place where it talked about suffering, and it talked about feelings in that way. But certainly you could extrapolate from there to other phenomena as well. So, it’s quite interesting. This is something that I’m just thinking about.

Then other times you read it and you see how the Pali commentators interpreted things and you can see, “Oh yes, there’s a difference here between how the Madhyamakas see things.” But then, what a tradition says due to its commentators and what the Buddha really meant in those sutras can differ. That’s why you have so many traditions and so many commentators. Even in the Mahayana, different people will interpret different statements. The way the Chittamatra interpret things and the way the Madhyamaka will interpret the exact same statement in the sutra, it’s different.

So, if you really want to practice in the bodhisattva vehicle but instead of studying it and practicing it you’re mostly studying and practicing in the Hearer Vehicle, then you’re transgressing this precept for the obvious reason. Don’t give up your bodhicitta.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: What do you mean when you say two people have a direct experience of the same thing.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Once you’ve had direct experience of emptiness, no, you’re not going to have any wrong views or false views. Because once you’ve had that direct experience all your doubt is cut off, all your wrong views.

29. Applying Yourself Excessively to Non-Buddhist Treatises

Chandragomin says number 29 is “Applying yourself excessively to non-Buddhist treatises.” So, the first one is not paying any attention to the Hearer Vehicle, and the second one is paying too much attention to it. This one is paying too much attention to non-Buddhist teachings.

This fault is described as applying oneself exclusively to the tritika.

The tritikas are the non-Buddhists. It’s sometimes called forders and I can’t remember why they were called forders. There’s a reason but I can’t remember it.

Here it says that “They will promote certain extreme views of Hinduism.” Actually, Hinduism didn’t exist at the time of the Buddha; Hinduism came later. You had the Vedas at the time of the Buddha, and other things, the Upanishads, but you didn’t really have Hinduism as we know it at the time of the Buddha.

Applying oneself exclusively to the tritika works. When we have the opportunity to study Buddhist scriptures and instead devote all of our energy to the works of tritikas and other non-Buddhists, it is a misdeed associated with afflictions.

Think about why it’s associated with afflictions. 

There is no misdeed in doing this if we have an excellent memory and clear and sharp understanding, are quick to learn and do not easily forget what we have studied. For example, we need to read a text only once to grasp its meaning.

If that’s the case, then studying these non-Buddhist scriptures is not a downfall because you already have such a good foundation in the Mahayana.

Nor is there a misdeed if we already have a very good grip on Buddhist principles and firm convictions regarding them, for in this case, there is no danger of our deviating from them.

But if we don’t have firm conviction and we have doubt, not so good.  

We must not interpret this to mean that we cannot read non-Buddhist philosophy. On the contrary, we need to know as much as we can about other views if only to better our understanding of people. We can and should study them, but not to the extent that we spend more time on them than on the Buddha’s teachings. In fact, in a day, we should spend twice as long on Buddhist treatises than on non-Buddhist works.

What he’s saying here is that there’s a middle way. We should learn about other traditions so that we understand those people and how they think. Then if we meet them and we’re in the position of teaching them, we’ll be able to skillfully lead them. Also when we learn those views, sometimes, we see it makes more apparent our own wrong views that we’re holding on to that we aren’t really aware of. Because, “Oh, there it is talking about God, that feels kind of familiar and inspiring.” You see that come up and then you go, “Oh-oh, this is my wrong view of thinking there’s an independent creator. So it’s not just the tritikas that have this, I have it too.” Then you think, “Well, how am I going to refute my own wrong view?”

The danger is that if you don’t know the Dharma very well and you don’t have a lot of conviction in the Dharma, you read these non-Buddhist things and you start reading The Bible or something like that and all these old imprints surface. It’s like, “Oh, this is so familiar; it feels so comfortable and God who is going to protect me and save me,” so you wind up following that tradition and giving up your Buddhist studies. That would be a great loss if you’re trying to get enlightenment to do some study the Madhyamaka teachings and then completely give it up because you believe in an independent creator. That would be a real kind of tragedy, so that’s why there’s this precept of “don’t spend too much time studying those kinds of things.”

By tritikas we don’t need to think of just the non-Buddhists, like the Samkhyas or whatever in ancient India. We can think of Christianity, Judaism, new-age stuff, even psychology. There was a time in the development of Buddhism in the West, I think at the beginning, a lot of people thought, “Oh, we’re just going to get enlightened instantly and Dharma is going to cure all of our psychological problems.” 

Then at a certain point that wasn’t happening and all these people got so interested in Western psychology. All the Buddhist magazines were filled with articles about psychology and you could tell that all these people were spending a whole lot of time studying psychology and not so much the Dharma anymore. I think that maybe part of that came because people, when practicing the Dharma, part of their motivation was to deal with their psychological issues, it wasn’t necessarily to become liberated.

I personally think that if you really learn the Dharma very deeply you’ve got to deal with your psychological issues. But there are ways in which people can practice and not deal with them, skip over them and then—whammo!—they come up and smack the person in their face. They thought they were really getting somewhere on the Dharma path and then it’s like, “I’m falling apart psychologically.”

I think that that kind of thing happened because there were people who instead of using mindfulness or using thought-training or whatever to look at our mind, they were using it to block out things. I think it’s a situation of all of a sudden dropping Buddhism and getting involved in psychology or something like that. Or you’re so interested in the Buddhist-science dialog that you’re reading all these neuroscience books because “Wow, maybe my anger is just my synapses, and this is really explaining how I get angry because this synapse is connecting with dendrites, connecting to this axial and shooting this chemical and that’s happening. That makes so much more sense than because I have wrong views.” [laughter] So, you’re just getting so interested in how this works and then if we can develop the correct pill so that my dendrites and axials do what they’re supposed to be doing, then I’ll get there. And that becomes your main topic of interest instead of learning the Dharma. That’s what this precept has to do with. 

Audience: I was wondering about when Guy Newland was here. It seems to me like a lot of the things we talked about was like a “buddhologist” kind of approach. It talked about the history and it depended upon when these scriptures showed up. I have in my mind that if the Buddha taught these when he was here, that there were people just practicing this all the time. There’s like a conflict in my mind about how a lot of the Western scholarship around this thinks about the history and how they put the whole thing together. It seems like it doesn’t take into account that there were just practitioners and lineages of practitioners. I can’t even formulate the question well; it’s just this sense of it felt like we’re missing a piece here. 

VTC: Who is missing a piece?

Audience: When you try to do the scholarship and think “This text showed up so this couldn’t have happened,” it loses the whole oral history and the whole level of individual practitioners who had these same words of the Buddha that later commentaries interpreted in certain ways, but maybe they didn’t.

VTC: You’re saying that there’s a difference between how practitioners view the history of Buddhism or at least how the traditions view the history and how Westerner or academic scholars view it who are practitioners. And that when you view it from a Western scholarship viewpoint it has a very different flavor in it. That’s very true because the Western scholars can’t take into account rebirth; they can’t take into account these more mystical things that happen because they’re in a Western university where you’re only supposed to talk about what you can see and hear with your senses. So, all of that part of the teaching—like The Perfection of Wisdom sutras being taught on Vulture’s Peak—they’re going to go to Vulture’s Peak and say, “Well, that many people can’t fit here, so that teaching just wasn’t taught here.” 

They’re looking at things through that perspective of “It’s only real if I can see it with my senses” and not taking into account that there’s a lot of things that we can’t contact with our senses, that our senses are very limited and that even animal senses can see many things that we human beings can’t. You watch, even the cats, and you can tell they’re seeing things that we’re not seeing. So, our senses are quite limited. But in a Western university, you have to toe that line because that’s the perspective. 

Also, in a Western university to be “objective” means you’re supposed to criticize. If you can’t criticize, you’re not being objective. I know for some friends I have who have a great deal of faith in the Dharma but are also in Western universities, that brings them some really uncomfortable feelings because they don’t want to criticize the tradition just because that’s what academia requires. 

On the other hand, then you go to people who say ,“Well, let’s just learn how the tradition presents it.”  Personally speaking, I feel like I’ve gained a tremendous amount by studying Buddhist history because then I can see how things that were going on in society influenced the development of Buddhism. Because from the traditional viewpoint it’s like Buddhism is not influenced by culture, economics, politics, climate or anything; it’s just pure Dharma. But when you really study the history, then you see, “Why does this tradition emphasize this?” Well, this is the thing that was going on in the society at the time. And this is what the people were doing. So, this kind of teaching really helped them deal with the situation they were facing in society at that time. It helps me understand more the different traditions to have that historical perspective. 

Audience: It seems to me too, Venerable, that the scholastic approach just has doubt built into it and it’s part of that whole skeptical, objective, view. So for a practitioner with doubt issues, that may not be a place to hang out until they have conviction in things because that’s the whole perspective.

VTC: Yes. Whether you’re studying Western history or Western science, if you have a lot of doubt about issues it can really push those buttons.

Audience: My other question is more specific. The four destructions are in the Pali canon, but they’re also in the lamrim?

VTC: Oh, yes. They’re in there.

Audience: So, I think my question is tagging on to this when, Lama Tsongkhapa tried to pull all this together, were these kind of traditions like Pali and Mahayana even existent? I don’t understand how it would even fit, wasn’t it just different countries and people coming from India bringing all those teachings?

VTC: This was one of the big challenges when Buddhism went from India to other countries. In India and certain places in India, you have the early sutras that were quite popular in all the different locales. In Sri Lanka you did get some Mahayana influence but at a certain point, they stopped that. 

But when Buddhism went into China, for example, there’s a whole section in the Chinese canon called the āgamas, that is so identical to four of the five nikayas in the Pali canon. It’s really just because Buddhism went into China much earlier than it went into Tibet. So, all those sutras were really around and really popular, they all went into China. They weren’t translated from Pali but they may have been translated from a central Asian language or from Sanskrit or Prakrit or from some of the other languages. 

Also Buddhism went into China when the Mahayana was becoming more public, so those scriptures went in. Tantra wasn’t very popular in India in the early years when Buddhism was going into China; in later years it was. But already, they had so many of the early sutras and the Mahayana and the tantra didn’t jive so well with the mentality of the people in China. Also, not so many tantras went in because tantra didn’t become so pervasive in India until a long time after Buddhism started going into China. Whereas when Buddhism was going into Tibet, that’s the heyday of Nalanda University and so Mahayana was very popular, tantra was very popular. 

Audience: But would there have been this sense of this higher/lower?

VTC: This was a challenge in both China and Tibet. They received so many different scriptures, not only sutras but also different commentaries and different treatises, and sometimes they didn’t say the same thing. How do you take this whole array of teachings and make it into a system that makes sense? One of the ways the Tibetans did it was in the late years of Buddhism in India, maybe like eighth, ninth, tenth century. Already at that time they were talking a little bit more about different philosophical schools, not a whole lot but a little bit, it was mentioned in some Indian texts. 

When Buddhism came into Tibet they really started formulating a lot of these scriptures, classifying them according to the four philosophical tenets. Because that’s how they could make sense of all these different scriptures that were saying different things. 

When Buddhism went into China, it went into China earlier before they had so much talk about the tenet systems, but the Chinese masters started categorizing things according to the levels of the Mahayana scriptures. So different masters between The Avatamsaka Sutra and The Lotus Sutra and the Prajnaparamita, some of these talk more about Chittamatra tenets, some more about Madhyamaka tenets. Then they started classifying those according to different sutras in a different system and saying, “First you should study this sutra, then this one, then this one.” Of course they would say different things according to whichever thing they thought was higher. But it was just the natural human way if you get so much material, how do you put it all together to make it make sense without being contradictory? 

In Sri Lanka they did it by just going to the very orthodox Pali tradition and kicking everything else out at a certain point. One of the kings said, “I’m backing the Mahavira interpretation and we’re sticking by this.” So, some of the monks who were in the Abhayagiri Monastery, where they had a lot of Mahayana influence, were told either you become Mahavira monks or to become lay people. That’s how they dealt with it; it got dealt with in different ways.

Audience: Was The Abhidharma to try to organize all the different teachings?

VTC: The Abhidharma came first. It was an attempt to organize all these different teachings but more in terms of the Buddha talked about different topics and to show the relationships between the topics, not so much the path part. It was the relationships between the different topics.