From a public talk in Plummer Park, L.A. CA by
LAMA YESHE. 1975.
What is Buddhism?
Although different people have different views of what Buddhism is, I
think it’s difficult to say, “Buddhism is this, therefore it should be
like that.” It’s difficult to summarize Buddhism in a simplistic way.
However, I can say that Buddhism is different from what most Westerners
consider to be religion.
First of all, when you study Buddhism
you’re studying yourself—the nature of your body, speech and mind—the
main emphasis being on the nature of your mind and how it works in
everyday life. The main topic is not something else, like what is
Buddha? What is the nature of God? Things like that.
Why is it so
important to know the nature of our own mind? Since we all want
happiness, enjoyment, peace and satisfaction and these things do not
come from ice-cream but from wisdom and the mind, we have to understand
what our mind is and how it works.
One thing about Buddhism is
that it’s very simple and practical in that it explains logically how
satisfaction comes from the mind, not from some kind of supernatural
being in whom you have to believe.
I understand that this idea
can be difficult to accept because, in the West, from the moment you’re
born, extreme emphasis is placed on the belief that the source of
happiness lies outside of yourself in external objects. Therefore your
sense perception and consciousness have an extreme orientation toward
the sense world and you come to value external objects above all else,
even your life. This extreme view that over-values material things is a
misconception, the result of unreasonable, illogical thought.
Therefore,
if you want true peace, happiness and joy, you need to
realize that happiness and satisfaction come from within you and stop
searching so fanatically outside. You can never find real happiness out
there. Whoever has?
Ever since people came into existence they
have never found true happiness in the external world, even though
modern scientific technology seems to think that that’s where the
solution to human happiness lies. That’s a totally wrong conception.
It’s impossible. Of course, technology is necessary and good, as long as
it’s used skillfully. Religion is not against technology; nor is
external development contrary to the practice of religion—although in
the West there are religious extremists who oppose external development
and scientific advancement, and we also find non-believers pitted
against religious believers. It’s all misconception.
First let me
raise a question. Where in the world can we find somebody who doesn’t
believe?
Who among us is a true non-believer?
In asking this I’m not
suggesting some kind of conceptual belief.
The person who says “I don’t
believe” thinks he’s intellectually superior but all you have to do to
puncture his pride is ask two or three of the right questions:
“What do
you like? What don’t you like?” He’ll come up with a hundred things he
likes. “Why do you like them?” Questions like that immediately expose
everybody as a believer.
Anyway, in order to live in harmony we
need to balance external and internal development; failure to do so
leads to mental conflict.
So Buddhism finds no contradiction in
advocating both external scientific and inner mental development. Both
are correct. But each can be either positive or negative as well. That
depends on mental attitude—there’s no such thing as absolute, eternally
existent total positivity or absolute, eternally existent, total
negativity. Positive and negative depend on the background from which
they arise.
Therefore it’s very important to avoid extreme views
because extreme emotional attachment to sense objects—“This is good;
this makes me happy”—only causes mental illness. What we need to learn
instead is how to remain in the middle, between the extremes of
exaggeration and underestimation.
But that doesn’t mean giving
everything up. I’m not asking you to get rid of all your possessions.
It’s extreme emotional attachment to any object—external or
internal—that makes you mentally ill. And Western medicine has few
answers to that kind of sickness.
There’s nothing you can take; it’s
very hard to cure. Psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists…I doubt that
they can solve the problems of attachment. Most of you probably have
experience of that. That’s the actual problem.
The reason that
Western health professionals can’t treat attachment effectively is that
they don’t investigate the reality of the mind.
The function of
attachment is to bring frustration and misery.
We all know this. It’s
not that difficult to grasp; in fact it’s rather simple.
But Buddhism
has ways of revealing the psychology of attachment and how it functions
in everyday life.
The method is meditation.
The real culprit, however,
is a lack of knowledge-wisdom.
Too much concern for your own
comfort and pleasure driven by the exaggerations of attachment
automatically leads to feelings of hatred for others.
Those two
incompatible feelings—attachment and hatred—naturally clash in your mind
and, from the Buddhist point of view, a mind in this kind of conflict
is sick and unbalanced in nature.
Going to church or temple once a
week is not enough to deal with this. You have to examine your mind all
day long, maintaining constant awareness of the way you speak and act.
We usually hurt others unconsciously.
In order to observe the actions of
our unconscious mind we need to develop powerful wisdom energy, but
that’s easier said than done; it takes work to be constantly aware of
what’s going on in our mind all the time.
Most religious and
non-religious people agree that loving kindness for others is important.
How do we acquire loving kindness?
It comes from understanding how and
why others suffer, what’s the best kind of happiness for them to have,
and how they can get it. That’s what we have to check.
But our emotions
get the better of us.
We project our attachments onto others.
We think
that others like the same things we do; that people’s main problems are
hunger and thirst and that food and water will solve them.
The human
problem is not hunger and thirst; it’s misconception and mental
pollution.
Therefore it’s very important that you make your mind
clear.
When it is, the ups and downs of the external world don’t bother
you; whatever happens out there, your mind remains peaceful and joyous.
If you get too caught up in watching the up and down world you finish up
going up and down yourself: “Oh, that’s so good! Oh, that’s so bad!” If
that world is your only source of happiness and its natural
fluctuations disturb your peace of mind, you’ll never be happy, no
matter how long you live. It’s impossible.
But if you understand
that the world is up and down by nature—sometimes up, sometimes down—you
expect it to happen and when it does you don’t get upset.
Whenever your
mind is balanced and peaceful, there’s wisdom and control.
Perhaps you think, “Oh, control! Buddhism is all about control. Who
wants control?
That’s a Himalayan trip, not a Western one.” But in our
experience, control is natural. As long as you have the wisdom that
knows how the uncontrolled mind functions and where it comes from,
control is natural.
All people have equal potential to control
and develop their mind.
There’s no distinction according to race, color
or nationality.
Equally, all can experience mental peace and joy.
Our
human ability is great—if we use it with wisdom, it’s worthwhile; if we
use it with ignorance and emotional attachment, we waste your life.
Therefore be careful.
Lord Buddha’s teaching greatly emphasizes
understanding over the hallucinated fantasies of our ordinary mind.
Emotional projections and hallucinations due to unrealistic perceptions
are wrong conceptions. As long as our mind is polluted by wrong
conceptions it’s impossible to avoid frustration.
The clean clear
mind is simultaneously joyful.
That’s simple to see. When your mind is
under the control of extreme attachment on one side and extreme hatred
on the other, you have to examine it to see why you grasp at happiness
and why you hate. When you check your objects of attachment and hatred
logically, you’ll see that the fundamental reason for these opposite
emotions is basically the same thing: emotional attachment projects a
hallucinatory object; emotional hatred projects a hallucinatory object.
And either way, you believe in the hallucination.
As I said
before, it’s not an intellectual, “Oh, yes, I believe.” And by the way,
just saying you believe in something doesn’t actually mean you do.
However, belief has deep roots in your subconscious, and as long as
you’re under the influence of attachment, you’re a believer.
Belief
doesn’t necessarily have to be in the supernatural, in something beyond
logic.
There are many ways to believe.
From the standpoint of
Buddhist psychology,
in order to have love or compassion for all living
beings, first you have to develop equilibrium—a feeling that all beings
are equal.
This is not a radical sort of, “I have a piece of candy; I
need to cut it up and share it with everybody else,” but rather
something you have to work with in your mind.
An unbalanced mind is an
unhealthy mind.
So equalizing sentient beings is not something we
do externally; that’s impossible.
The equality advocated by Buddhists
is completely different from that which communists talk about; ours is
the inner balance derived from training the mind.
When your mind
is even and balanced you can generate loving kindness for all beings in
the universe without discrimination. At the same time, emotional
attachment automatically decreases. If you have the right method, it’s
not difficult; when right method and right wisdom come together, solving
problems is easy.
But we humans suffer from a shortage of
intensive knowledge-wisdom.
We search for happiness where it doesn’t
exist; it’s here, but we look over there.
It’s actually very simple.
True peace, happiness and joy lie within you; therefore, if you meditate
correctly and investigate the nature of your mind you can discover the
everlasting happiness and joy within. It’s always with you; it’s mental,
not external material energy, which always fizzles out. Mental energy
coupled with right method and right wisdom is unlimited and always with
you.
That’s incredible! And explains why human beings are so powerful.
Materialists think that people are powerful because of their amazing
external constructions, but all that actually comes from the human mind.
Without the skill of the human mind there’s no external supermarket,
therefore,
instead of placing extreme value on the normal supermarket we
should try to discover our own internal supermarket. That’s much more
useful and leads to a balanced, even mind.
As I mentioned before,
it sounds as if Buddhism is telling you to renounce all your
possessions because extreme attachment is bad for you emotionally, but
renunciation doesn’t mean physically giving up.
You go to the toilet
every day but that doesn’t mean you’re tied to it; you’re not too
attached to your toilet, are you?
We should have the same attitude to
all the material things we use—give them a reasonable value according to
their usefulness for human existence, not an extreme one.
If a
boy runs crazily over dangerous ground to get an apple, trips, falls and
breaks his leg, we think he’s foolish, exaggerating the value of the
apple and putting his well-being at risk for the sake of achieving his
goal. But we’re the same.
We project extreme attachment onto objects of
desire, exaggerating their beauty, which blinds us to our true
potential. This is dangerous; it’s the same as the boy risking his life
for an apple. Looking at objects with emotional attachment and chasing
that hallucinated vision definitely destroys our own nature.
Human potential is great but we have to use our energy skillfully; we
have to know how to put our lives in the right direction.
This is
extremely important.
