Animal Realm | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Faults of Cyclic Existence

July 10, 2017 by Holly

[Adapted from an oral commentary given by His Holiness Penor Rinpoche in conjunction with a ceremony wherein he bestowed the bodhisattva vow upon a gathering of disciples at Namdroling in Bozeman, Montana, November 1999. —Ed.]

Of all worldly phenomena, whether great or small, nothing is permanent and nothing endures. Therefore, when you find yourself attracted to or attached to the happiness of existence, you must bring to mind the faults of existence. Consider that not even a single phenomenon is permanent, no matter how great, wonderful, or powerful it may seem. Consider especially how once that phenomenon [you associate with a happy existence] changes, you will experience nothing but suffering as the result. That way you can move your mind away from having strong attachment to impermanent phenomena and begin to change your habit of always following apparent phenomena based on [experiencing] temporary pleasure and attachment.

Think, for instance, about sentient beings that, due to anger and aggression, have accumulated the negative karma to fall to the hell realm. Those beings have accumulated tremendous negative karma that will keep them in the hell realm indefinitely. In that realm, unable to establish any positive causes at all, they will experience nothing but intense suffering. Think about the eight hot hells, the eight cold hells, as well as the peripheral hells surrounding them. Although it is inconceivable, think about the suffering that sentient beings in those hells must endure.

Then consider the deprived spirit realm. Think about the beings that accumulate an abundance of negative karma through the passions of avarice and strong desire. The result of such accumulation is rebirth as a deprived spirit. There are different categories of deprived spirits, such as outer and inner ones, but essentially they all endure inconceivable hunger and thirst that is insatiable. Furthermore, they never die from that; they just continue to suffer indefinitely, without ever being satisfied.

Next, consider the animal realm. Negative karma accumulated through the passion of delusion produces the result of animal rebirth. Animals suffer from basic delusion and ignorance, mistreatment by humans, and being preyed upon by one another. From the largest to the smallest, those who are as large as mountains to those smaller than the tip of a needle, all suffer from basic stupidity and ignorance, so they are unable to escape and are unable to do much more than just endure the karma in that rebirth until it is eventually exhausted.

Then consider the rebirth that is so difficult to obtain: that of a human being. Compared with the three lower realms of existence, human life seems very blissful; nevertheless, there is great suffering in the human realm. Human beings suffer from confinement in the womb and from the processes of birth, illness, disease, and growing old and the decline in their faculties, until eventually they experience the suffering of death and of leaving everything behind. Humans are subject to all kinds of indefinite circumstances and situations throughout the course of their life. Some die at birth, some die as infants, some as adolescents, and some as adults. Some die alone and unwanted or in an untimely manner.

In addition to the four great rivers of suffering, human beings experience—birth, old age, sickness, and death—humans experience compounded suffering. For example, humans suffer mistreatment at the hands of their enemies, and they suffer when they lose their loved ones. In fact, they suffer from fear that precedes the actual events themselves. Humans also suffer from not getting what they want and from having to accept what is not desired. They even suffer from acquiring what is desired, because then they have the fear of losing that. Against their will, humans endure all these unexpected consequences.

Many people think that after they die and leave this life they will easily return as a human being. Many believe they will just be able to return to a happy state of existence, such as the one they might now be accustomed to. That is a mistake. I can guarantee that unless you have the specific karma to do so, you will not take another rebirth as a human being. Without the karma that creates the causes for it, the result of human rebirth is impossible. Make no mistake about it.

Next, consider the god realm. Gods remain in their realm where they experience immeasurable bliss and happiness for long periods of time. They all have their own palace and gardens, wish-granting trees, and celestial food; everything in their external environment is inconceivably wonderful. Internally they experience only happiness and bliss throughout the entire course of their life. Eventually they exhaust their karma for that rebirth. Prior to that, the dying clairvoyant gods see the place of their future rebirth, which in most cases happens in the hell realm. They take such a rebirth due to having exhausted all tainted virtue that brought them rebirth in the god realm, and then nothing remains for them except an abundance of weighty negative karma. The vast storehouse of merit they once possessed is spent, and they have nowhere to go but to the lowest hell realm. Seeing the irreversible fate that awaits them, and knowing it is too late to reverse that, they experience tremendous suffering. They are powerless to reverse their karma of having to fall from the celestial realm of the gods to the lowest realms in existence.

Buddha therefore taught that there is not even a needle point’s worth of true happiness in samsara. Now you can understand the meaning of that teaching. Even if there is happiness, it always changes because it is impermanent. Happiness in samsara occurs as the result of the karma produced to cause it. Once that cause and result are exhausted, that happiness becomes something else, which is why the term cyclic existence is used to express the nature of life in the six realms. Sentient beings pass from rebirth to rebirth, revolving on this endless wheel of changing realms in dependence on their own karmic accumulations.

If your hair were to suddenly catch fire, you would immediately, without hesitation, try to put out that fire. Likewise, by understanding that cyclic existence is by nature permeated with suffering, and by understanding that it can never be anything other than that, you should immediately, without hesitation, focus on putting out the fire of cyclic existence. Focus totally on effort to extract yourself from this endless suffering of cyclic existence, so that you can achieve the state of permanent bliss and happiness, the state of fully enlightened buddhahood.

Thus it is taught that in order to be successful in reversing strong attraction and attachment to cyclic existence, we must practice dharma. Through the practice of dharma we can reverse attachment to existence and gain more momentum toward liberation, to the point where we realize the state of permanent bliss and cease to return to samsara.

From “THE PATH of the Bodhisattva: A Collection of the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva and Related Prayers” with a commentary by Kyabje Pema Norbu Rinpoche on the Prayer for Excellent Conduct

Compiled under the direction of Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche Vimala Publishing 2008

Cultivating Awareness

April 21, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “The Habit of Bodhicitta”

Another method that we are given is to think about the plight of sentient beings. We should think, for instance, that in the animal realm, some animals are whipped and beaten as beasts of burden. I saw some of that when I went to India: the bow ox that pull huge carts, literally four times their size. These are huge animals. They have a great deal of muscle and yet they were carrying so much that they could only barely move. And they were constantly whipped; and actually painted up and decorated in this terribly hot climate under terrible conditions. Think about oysters that are harvested for their meat and their pearl, that they live only for that. Some of them were born in cultivated areas, you know, cultivated oyster farms, just to be eaten for their meat and pearl. And we think about all the different animals that are completely victimized. Think about the animals that are food for predators and are constantly being hunted and killed, that live in fear. Their main instinct is this highly inflamed and developed fear instinct, simply in order to preserve their lives. So we develop a kinship with other forms of life by understanding what their suffering is.

And then we look at the plight of human beings: How human beings are basically taught by their authority figures and parental figures and by their culture. It is dictated to them what they should do. Here in America, for instance, we are told that material values are of the utmost importance. And we spend a great deal of time in school, and then we spend a great deal of time in different kinds of preparation in order to become materially successful. And if you don’t become materialistically successful and comfortable in a certain way, you’re not considered to be an adequate human being, quite frankly. There is a problem there. You never quite feel good about yourself, and there’s an innate dissatisfaction.

For those of us who do succeed and do well in our lives, towards the end of our lives, we have a great suffering. We realize that we’ve gone to school and we’ve practiced, and we’ve worked, and been work-a-holics and done what we thought was the right thing—supporting our families, and caring for our families and just doing the very best that we can,. Then we realize at the end of our lives we have nothing. Nothing! All that we worked so hard for we cannot take with us. We look around us and the people to whom we gave whatever we worked for, too, also have suffering. How come it didn’t heal them? Why didn’t the money and the cooking and the housework and everything that we gave them, why didn’t it do them any good? They’re still crying.

We look around at our lives and we go, what was that? And we realize that the only thing that we can take with us into the bardo, the intermediate state that prepares us for our next life, is the habit patterns of our mind. And the habit pattern of our mind under those conditions is only intense grasping.

And that’s a great suffering that we human beings experience together.

Do We Know How to Be Happy?

January 4, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Faults of Cyclic Existence”

When we broaden our view and look out, we see that this is happening to a greater or lesser degree to all sentient beings. All sentient beings are striving to be happy. They wish to be happy, but in varying degrees, they do not understand the causes of happiness. We see this also in our own lives. See, we’re the good guys, we’re the Dharma practitioners. But even in our lives we see that we engage in compulsive, neurotic habitual tendency time and time again. Cyclically actually. We’ve noticed this and we talk about this and we laugh about it. You know, women get together and we have girl talk. We know this one really well;. And men are in the same situation. We repeat patterns that are nonproductive. Is that a light-weight way to say it? We literally put ourselves through the lowest of the realms. We put ourselves through hell, literally. We are not our own best friends. And we only see it when we are coming out the other side of the compulsion and it didn’t bring us what we want. Then it’s like, “Well I knew that! Why didn’t I think of that! I knew that! How ridiculous!” And then you know, six months later there we are, going down the pike again.

In one way, then, our compassion is increased because we see that the serial killer is busy bumping off everybody else in order to get happy, and we are busy bumping off ourselves to get happy. And the confusion and habitual tendency is there. It’s there. We have that in common. So we look out and we say, “Wow, if this is the case for myself and I am a Dharma practitioner, how much more so the case for those beings who have had no information on what produces happiness? We are the children of a materialistic society. We were told that if you have two good cars, a chicken in your crock pot and several more in your freezer and a good husband or wife, good children, all these good things—everything that’s good has been labelled, you know, we already know what’s good—and an ongoing prescription of Prozac that we could be happy.Aand an occasional face lift. It gets more complicated as you get older. Did you notice that? I mean, at first it was just finding the right man andyou’re home free. Now it’s find the right man and make sure once you’ve got him, these things don’t drop. And it’s beat gravity and beat the clock and all that other stuff.

So we are, in our way, almost as clueless. We still engage in these funny things that we do. And every time that we do them, we think they’re going to make us happy. And then we come out the other side of it with open eyes—like whoops, that didn’t work! But you know, we’ve noticed for ourselves how limited our capacity is to learn. Is that not the most astonishing thing? How really intelligent people cannot learn? Is there a button we’re supposed to be pushing that we don’t know about.? I mean, where is the input button? We just don’t know. So this is the condition of sentient beings.

Now I know, as you must know, how much I want to be happy. You know how much you want to be happy, right? I mean, if push comes to shove, you’re pretty motivated by this. Isn’t that right? Of course you want to be happy. You’d be a maniac if you didn’t want to be happy. Are you a maniac? So we want to be happy. I certainly want to be happy. And there are days, are there not, when the yearning to be happy and the feeling that you are very distant from that happiness is so strong that there’s a lot of grief, isn’t there? A lot of upheaval and grief. There are times when it’s just so difficult and so very far away. It’s funny how it happens.

Now if we were to take that grief and that feeling and project it outward and think, “Here I am with all the understanding that I have about what makes happiness, and all the skill that I have and all the intelligence that I have and all the good fortune that I have that makes it possible for me to get a grip here and really see what’s going on, and still I can’t manage it. How much worse must be the condition of other sentient beings who are completely out to lunch about the subject?” Now if you think about the animal realm, they don’t even have the capacity to take in the information about cause and effect, an extraordinarily limited capacity to learn cause and effect. Have you ever watched a dog that has the habit of chasing cars? No matter what you do to them, they will chase the car. They are terrified because they are so close to getting killed and somehow they know it, but they can’t learn! They can’t learn that not chasing that car is going to make them feel much more relaxed. They simply can’t learn that.

So how much less is the capacity for other sentient beings to be free of that kind of suffering? Now we look out and we really see that all around us is this terrible, terrible grief and suffering and disappointment that is masked in certain ways, is covered in certain ways, is disguised, is transmuted, is rearranged, is redirected, is re-routed, is lied about. And yet underneath it there is that grief, there is that loneliness, there is that difficulty that we have in understanding what makes us happy, and how to be happy.

So this then becomes a causative factor when we engage upon the path. It’s one of the reasons why we practice refuge so sincerely. We use this idea not only as a practice in itself, but as a way to motivate ourselves. Literally, as practitioners we should come to the point where we look around and we see for ourselves that all sentient beings are wandering in this confusion and we develop a profound sense of compassion. If we really were to study and look around and emphathize and see beyond ourselves how others are suffering even more than we are, that feeling of great love and great compassion would well up within our hearts, and this feeling that enough is enough! Enough! There has been enough suffering in the world. Enough!

So by that compassion and that love, we become motivated. And the times that we are feeling undisciplined or feeling dry or off-track on the path, we can rely on that love to come up and nurture us. It’s happened even on an ordinary level within our lives. We make a determination to take a more difficult route to accomplish something, even not so much concerning the path, but a difficult route to accomplish something in our lives. Then to accomplish that requires such a great herculean effort like changing, that after awhile, somewhere in the process, we lose focus. We ask ourselves, “Now why am I doing this again? I really can’t remember today!” Then we look at someone else near us who is suffering terribly, just suffering terribly, and we vow to organize everything around us to make it better so that the person next to us is not going to suffer so much. We’re motivated by that and it brings us back into focus.

The same kind of situation happens on the path. We utilize the suffering of others, the understanding of that suffering, to center us, to motivate us, to keep us nourished on the path. At the same time, and here’s where the double blessing comes in, at the same time, we are also giving rise to the Bodhicitta which is the awakening mind, the mind that is in its essence the very display of compassion.