EXTRACT
Gates to Buddhist Practice
by Chagdud Tulku
Chapter 1: Turning the Wheel
Why do we need a spiritual path? We live in a busy age, our lives overflow with activities—some joyous, some painful, some satisfying, some not. Why take time to do spiritual practice?
A story is often told about a man from the northern region of Tibet who decided to go on a pilgrimage with his friends to the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s home in Lhasa, a very holy place. It was the trip of a lifetime.
In those days, there were no cars or vehicles of any kind in that region, and people journeyed on foot or by horse. It took a long time to get anywhere, and it was dangerous to go very far, as many thieves and robbers preyed on unsuspecting travelers. For these reasons, most people stayed in their home area all their lives. Most had never seen a house; they lived in black tents woven from yak hair.
When this particular group of pilgrims finally arrived in Lhasa, the man from the north was awed by the multistoried Potala Palace with its many windows and the spectacular view of the town from within. He poked his head through a narrow slit window to get a better look, craning it left and right as he gazed at the sights below. When his friends called for him to leave, he jerked his head back, but couldn’t get it out of the window. He became very nervous, pulling this way and that.
Finally he decided that he was really stuck. So he said to his friends, “Go home without me. Tell my family the bad news is that I died, but the good news is that I died in the Potala Palace. What better place to die?”
His friends were also very simpleminded, so without thinking much about it, they agreed and left. Some time later, the palace shrine keeper came along and asked, “Beggar, what are you doing here?”
“I’m dying,” he answered.
“Why do you think you are dying?”
“Because my head is stuck.”
“How did you get it in?”
“I put it in like this.”
The shrine keeper replied, “So pull it out the same way!”
The man did as the shrine keeper suggested, and he was free.
Like this man, if we can see how we’re caught, we can break free and help others to do the same. But first we need to understand how we got where we are.
Throughout life, though each of us seeks and sometimes finds happiness, it is always temporary; we cannot make it last. It’s as if we keep shooting arrows, but at the wrong target. To find long-lasting happiness, we need to change our target: to focus on eradicating the suffering of ourselves and others, not only temporarily, but permanently.
The mind is the source of both our suffering and our happiness. It can be used positively to create benefit or negatively to create harm. Although every being’s fundamental nature is beginningless, deathless purity—what we call buddha nature—we don’t recognize it. Instead, we are controlled by the whims of ordinary mind, which leads us up and down, around and about, producing good and bad, pleasant and painful thoughts. Meanwhile, we plant a seed with every thought, word, and action. As surely as the seed of a poisonous plant bears poisonous fruit or a medicinal plant a cure, harmful actions produce suffering and beneficial actions, happiness.
Our actions become causes, and from causes naturally come results. Anything put into motion produces a corresponding motion. Throw a pebble into a pond and waves flow out in rings, strike the bank, and return. So it is when thoughts move: they flow out, then return. When the results of those thoughts come back, we feel like helpless victims: we’re innocently leading our lives—why are all these things happening to us? The answer is that the rings are coming back to the center. This is karma.
Ordinary mind is vacillating and full of turbulence. Without any power to control it and its effects on body and speech, we’re up, then down, then back and forth; we’re riding a roller coaster of reality.
It is as though we start a wheel turning, give it another spin every time we react, and find ourselves caught in its perpetual motion. This ever-cycling experience of reality, in all of its variations, continues lifetime after lifetime. This is the endlessness of samsara, of cyclic existence. We don’t understand that we’re experiencing results that we ourselves have brought into being, and that our reactions ceaselessly produce more causes and more results.
Because we have created our own predicament, it’s up to us to change it. Someone with matted, greasy hair looking in a mirror can’t clean himself up by wiping the mirror. Someone with a bile disease will have a distorted sense of color and will see a white surface—whether a distant snow mountain or a piece of white cloth—as slightly yellow. The only way to correct that flawed vision is to cure the disease. Trying to change the external environment won’t do any good. Some people think the remedy for suffering lies outside of them, with God or with Buddha. But that’s not the case. The Buddha himself said to his disciples, “I have shown you the path to freedom. Following that path depends on you.”
The mind, when used positively—to generate compassion, for example—can create great benefit. It may appear that this benefit comes from God or Buddha, but it is simply the result of the seeds we’ve planted. And although from the Buddha’s teachings we receive the key of knowledge that allows us to change, tame, and train the mind, only we can unlock its deeper truth, exposing our buddha nature with its limitless capacities.
Our current experience is one of relative good fortune. There are many who suffer far worse than we. Ravaged by the relentless pain of war, sickness, or famine, they see no way to change their situations, no way to escape.
If we contemplate their predicament, compassion arises in our hearts. We become inspired not to waste our fortunate circumstances, but to use them to create benefit for ourselves and others, benefit beyond the temporary happiness that comes and goes in the endless cycles of samsaric suffering. Only by fully revealing mind’s true nature—by attaining enlightenment—can we find an abiding happiness and help others to do the same. This is the goal of the spiritual path.
