The teaching series over at Buddha Center on Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara is nearing the end. We’ve gone through chapters one to eight in the last months and have now come to a standstill in chapter nine, “on wisdom”, progressing verse by verse. I remember in retreat, it took me a weekly class of 2 hours, for eighteen months to get through chapter nine. This was aimed at those of us who were particularly intelligent of course, so much of the famous chapter nine eluded me. Much of the Bodhicaryavatara is eminently practical and aimed at observable everyday conduct, but chapter nine grabs you by the neck and shakes you up and makes you face what it is all about, ultimately. Just like Montaigne states that the end goal of all philosophy is “to regard death calmly”, so chapter nine is the full stop, the period to the sentence Shantideva started writing when he wrote his ode to Prajnaparamita, the Queen of wisdom. The meaning, in chapter nine, is between the words. Not even behind them, but between. It’s in what’s not being said, in the “this” and “that” of Shantideva’s pronouncements, the “not this, not that”. What are we asked to do here? Simply to understand things as they really are, in all our relationships with everything and everyone. And why is that? So that we’ll be able to be truly compassionate without harming anyone. More hurt is caused by good intentions than by bad ones, because the hurt goes both ways and reflects back on the compassionate one as well. Arya Shantideva pulls us deep into the philosophy of the Middle Way. This middle way is the way of being on the razor’s edge, as we learn that balance is always dynamic, never static, nothing ever firm and solid under foot, except for our conviction that nothing can ever exist from its own side. The path to getting there is one of intellectual reasoning. Spiraling in, from our knowledge about the existence of things, persons, and finally our own mind, we gain – by reasoning – the conviction of the voidness of all phenomena. But once we get there, Shantideva pushes us even further off the edge by putting to us that we need to gain conviction even of the voidness of Voidness, of the voidness of Method and even of the objects of refuge. Shantideva demonstrates to us that it isn’t even enough to understand the Mahayana sutras to be non-conceptual. This will still leave craving intact. Even Buddhas lack true existence. And with this we circle back to our point of departure, because, do we not maintain that we are Buddhas, that Buddhahood is our natural state? The “pushing off the edge” that Shantideva does is only this: even craving to be a Buddha is craving. Even that craving brings samsaric rebirth. A Middle Way understanding of Voidness is vital and that means we will be on the razor’s edge regarding all phenomena, none excepted.

After a time of practice and being devoted to a spiritual teacher, you’ll notice you’re in a one way street. There’s no turning back, so you might well ask yourself why you started this journey in the first place. Because after you’ve passed through the first few gates of practice you notice that instead of it bringing you peace, and instead of your teacher being a figure who brings peace to your life, the opposite is true. Every certainty, every thing you thought you held dear about this idea of you as your self must go. And your teacher is there to block the way out and focus you to the task at hand: becoming a buddha by resting in the natural state. That sounds easy, but your teacher is a healer with a knife who cuts you right open, top to bottom, to show that that self is an impossible existence. The teacher, from his or her own side know this of course and rejoiced in the joy and mad love at the start of practice and must now also rejoice in the development of great anger and disgust. That’s what you’ll develop after some time and it will direct itself against yourself, but that is not sustainable and so it must attach itself to the objects of practice, precisely those objects you take refuge with every day: the buddha, the dharma, the sangha, the guru. It depends on your circumstances who will get hit hardest by your disgust. Teachers from their side also rejoice in waiting it out, this despair of continuing. It’s easy to say to yourself that you’re grateful for all the teaching and that this is the measure of your devotion to your teacher. This is an illusion that may seem sustainable as a mental stance for quite some time. But eventually it too must go. The saying is that if we see our teacher as an ordinary sentient being, we see every sentient being as such. But if we manage to see our teacher as the Buddha, then all sentient beings will be buddhas to us. And that’s how it must go. If you can be thoroughly disgusted with your teacher but see him or her as the Buddha nonetheless, you see all sentient beings as a Buddha. Teachers will ask of you to make that concrete: it’s not only a mental attitude; it needs to be converted into acts, into gestures. It may be, that feeling thoroughly disenchanted, because of time restraints or a sense of guilt, you feel your relationship with a teacher cannot be repaired. But this is never true. A teacher will rejoice in your next step of practice too and exclaim “emaho!” at your every step forward.

Beloved students of mine, by now you may wonder where I’m going with all this. Disconnected musings about death and going in circles and doing away with improvement. What has all that to do with anything you may wonder. Let’s leave aside all thought of practicing formally for a while. Digging down deep and ever deeper, what is there except two voices calling to each other in the dark. That I say at some point: a teacher will appear to you in your moment of dying, and this moment will seem to go on for years, may be taken as a joke at the time. But this moment of dying is all the consciousness about our present life we may ever experience, unless we are able to pull ourselves up by our own hair and look at our conduct and actions in every living moment. In truth, our usual state of mind is such that we can only look back on our lives. We’re presented, in the bardo, with the actions, good and bad, with the consequences, good and bad, on the people around us. This can induce ecstatic happiness and deepest regret and fear both. What is to be learned? Simply that this experience of having acted well or not is present in our waking moments as we live them. I said: when I met my teacher I started to get convinced that the stories of siddhas – miraculous powers – are all true. Stop and think: having this experiential knowledge of the consequences of every act in every waking moment in life as it unfolds, is the siddhas. It implies having knowledge of cause and effect in the lives of others and in our own. What I’m describing you might well call “enlightenment”. Yet it is nothing else but conduct towards others in daily life, as we are living it. Teachers appear in the bardo. Everything we experience can by its own nature only ever be in transition. Why a teacher is essential and teaching isn’t is because only another human being has the capability to shock us from our conditioning, and make us wake up sufficiently to see how we act from moment to moment. At first, this is like being inside a dream, and we may actually think that this is a dream, that none of it is “real”. But after some time, as we get used to this new way of being and the new clarity it brings to how we act, our scope widens. In this new light it turns out that we have knowledge of cause and effect in how it impacts others through our actions. This is when our actions start to be completely free and unencumbered by our own conditioning of only considering what the effect of them will be in our own lives. That freedom comes from knowing their consequences in the lives of others.

A straight line, from A to B fools us in thinking we go right to the heart of it. That we have a direction, a goal and a place to go to. That’s the expectation many people have when they take up the practice. Having that expectation is something that must be un-learned. The idea of improvement, of progressing towards a pre defined goal of “having improved”, is an obstacle to any learning in the path. I think  that as western practitioners we run up against a greater obstacle here, because the idea of linear progress is built in to all of western philosophy and religion. It is the fabric of what we breathe, are and do. There’s a goal to be reached and we’re going to reach it. Much has been destroyed, many lives were lost due to the pursuit of that notion. In the practice it has no place. Here we set out on a journey that will -eventually – take us back to the beginning to ourselves and to the place we left. The process of unlearning progress is a painful one. The way teaching present itself, it is cloaked in the disguise of improvement and promises rest, an end to stress, more peace, less disease. There are many stories about the old teachers’ conduct, free from convention, completely uncontrived. An ideal to strive for. How did they arrive there? The simple and difficult answer: by giving up every notion of attainments, of improvement, of progress, of ever reaching the destination. It is not there, it cannot be reached, the idea that’s there, a beacon on the horizon, forever stable and guiding us must give way to the journey, along the perimeter of the palace, forever spiraling in, to the centre. And yet the centre will never be reached. Magnified, it is yet another perimeter, another zero with nothing in it. And our journey continues, just until we learn to stop moving and sit down.

It’s the Buddha’s Paranirvana day approaching, the day of his death and enlightenment. Legend has it that the Shakya wise man died of a piece of spoiled pork, or something else, that made him ill for quite some time, before he finally died. With a couple of people we’re preparing something for this day. Usually the Mahaparanirvana Sutra is read, and contemplation focuses on the death and mortality of ourselves and of the people who are dear to us. The week before I taught extensively on the Hell Realms. Needless to say, as much as we want to deny it, these realms are real in our lives. They’re not in some parallel universe, or something symbolic we’ll think about only after we’ve died. Instead, the hell realms exist in our daily lives in an infinite number of ways. I heard stories by a reputable source, well versed in the subject, how people usually die nowadays, in our culture. All stories of hell. Hell needs bodhisattvas, compassionate warriors who will intervene on behalf of the helpless and the suffering. There aren’t many who consciously choose to be in those worlds. The dying themselves are obliged to do so, bodhisattvas ultimately have no choice. Compassion drives them there. The question was how progress on the path toward the natural state, toward buddhahood can often be so painful. Our conscious memory is of a Self, equipped with language to make sense of experience and sensory input. Our earliest moments of consciousness concern a speaking of the world. We teach ourselves to be lingual on account of our experiences. And it is a difficult and painful process to lose this ability, because language, as act, language as gesture is all we seem to have. We say “self-grasping”. This isn’t another word for egotism, it means that we tend to believe most easily that our own Self is an immutable, fixed entity. Something like a watchtower we find ourselves in to survey our experience. The grasping for a self also means we are the center of our universe. If we die, our universe dies with us. The way the dharma works, we are kindly invited to the edge. This is not the edge of a precipice, but edge as periphery. We’re invited to step aside and leave our watchtower. Instead we need to engage actively, from the edges working inwards. The first thing we encounter is a cremation ground and a wall with a gate. Obviously we need to acquaint ourselves with death and dying first. Then we can start our journey.

The ground of all secret mantra practice is exchanging perception by sight for perception by pure sound alone. How does this progress in such a way that we are pushed over the edge of seeing? First of all by relying on a teacher. I come across a lot of self directed groups lately, and a lot of people who maintain they think that self directed practice in groups will actually take them forward on the path. Not so. No one can pull himself from the swamp. A teacher who has already done the work, and who has already realized that sight fragments and sound unifies is needed to steer you in the right direction, to bring you to the edge, your edge, swiftly. Anyone’s edge is different from anyone else’s. Everyone has the magic trigger word that will set off the chain of events that will lead to the break down of everything sight/language related. Sight equals language or at least semantics, because it brings the distinction between this and that. Not from bare perception, but in how our brain processes what we perceive. It does this by fragmenting and dividing, by introducing the specific and language is what makes the output of this fragmentation intelligible to us. And through language we condition the brain to distinguish more finely, more nuanced. When we practice on our own we may actually think that this nuancing is in fact the way things should be. We will lead ourselves to believe, that the finest nuance is in itself a kind of wholeness, because it will be so finely tuned that it may be superficially perceived as being universal. But this cannot be true. Yet it is not ourselves who will make us discover this, because at this stage of the practice we have only language at our disposal, and language will not help us here. So this is why we need a teacher. Not because we don’t have the knowledge and the teacher has. Anyone can read books on the vajrayana, on dzogchen, on mahamudra and have access to the knowledge every teacher has access to. Yet this is not what the teaching is about. Teaching and being taught is direct transmission beyond language, aside from any sensory input. A teacher knows how to awaken and channel this “mad love” and will make this very specific so that we may approach our particular edge.

The formal practices we learn are all set-ups, mind games, language games, to undermine our reliance on semantics. And we learn to cut our reliance on sight and its connection to language, to the meaning we attach to what we see. This is a chair, but not a table, this is a real person, but this an imagined person, what i “see” now is real life and solid, inherently existing, and what i “see” in my dream is a mirage and vapor-like and unreal. We learn, in short, that training the mind is not a matter of applying ever finer nuances to our distinctions. Rather we learn that we can attain the view only when we cut at the root of perception-meaning itself, disabling it in one stroke. Liberation will come when we realize that all our mental stances are the View and not only some of them. When I invoke emptiness at the start of an initiation, I often say: imagine a realm of pure potential, a space where everything is all the time only in the process of becoming, never fixed, never solid, but forever being born from itself in itself. Only process, never fixed. The experience of that is the view.

Tonight was teaching night and we discussed chapter 8 of Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara. In my experience, Shantideva is never afraid to kick some ass. Of course he is the devious monk, pretending to be loading around, while in reality he was busy writing his manuals on training and the conduct of a bodhisattva. Every so often I say that Shantideva is addressing novices here. And novices in his age were often very young. So I imagine that the ideal audience for the BCA is boys under harsh discipline of about 15. That’s an age when it’s tempting to want to impose discipline, but it’s useless. Shantideva offers them the perfect model: divine service, meditation on compassion, practice generosity, make offerings, consider how fortunate you are. He really kicks into gear in chapter 8: If you are holding and kissing a girl, he tells his wayward adolescents, realize that you’re really kissing a corpse. And likewise she, when embracing you, is kissing a corpse. So that’s what we are, corpses. I think the main thing is that to see everything as one taste, we need to overcome our fear of dying, and more specifically we need to overcome our fear of being with death also, especially even perhaps, when it strikes others. The way this is done in the dharma is a kind of insensitization therapy. By becoming familiar with death in concrete form, we overcome our aversion, our phobia. And that’s what the fear of death is, a phobia, seen from buddhism. Or as Shantideva says: if there is a medicine, there is nothing to worry about. And if there isn’t a medicine, there is nothing to worry about either. Until we become entirely familiar with death, we will not attain the View, because self-preservation will get in the way and we will forever avoid the issue of death.

The trouble with buddhism is that it is an incredibly simple idea. And there the difficulty begins. Apart from having a connection with the dharma that can be very deeply felt, the gate that gives access to formal, or at least systematic teaching is refuge. This can be something that is thought of as a goal in its own right. “Taking refuge”. Someone contacted me, just prior to taking refuge with a lama who was on a teaching tour in Germany and expressed both his delight and his misgivings. It seems such a big thing, taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, let alone the lama. And yet, it’s a mere moment in time. A gate or a door are ways of entering, nothing more, it’s what happens after entering that evokes the dread. Because, what are we to do after we’ve gone through the door? It’s easy to say to yourself that a journey of a 1000 miles starts with one step. It’s true, but it’s useless. It’s at this point that I tell all my students that the entire dharma will eventually turn out to have been a set up. The practicing we do, the love and devotion we feel towards our teachers, the pride in the deity that we develop, all that will turn out to be a mere crutch, nothing more. Something to be discarded after it has served its purpose. So it is with teachers: no matter the devotion and the gratitude we feel towards them, they will be discarded after they have served their purpose. Everything we have invested in the relationship will be there to serve us and be our ally, but in a different form. And hopefully our teachers’ example is something that we have internalized to such an extent that in every matter, every gesture, every act, we are a continuation of the lineage.

As a personal note: being discarded is no easy thing, but it has to happen, and wise teachers will not be afraid to have themselves discarded by their students.