What to Do during This Life
In order to take full advantage of our precious opportunity to progress along the bodhisattva’s path, we need to have instructions that give us clarity and confidence in what we’re doing. We need a structure for our lives. There are many excellent texts on how to live a life based on bodhicitta, including Shantideva’s unsurpassable Way of the Bodhisattva. The instructions presented in the Seven Points give a more concise structure to support us from day to day, from year to year, and at the end of our life. Both of these slogans (17 and 18) describe five “strengths,” which are reliable methods for living and dying like a bodhisattva.
The first strength is motivation. In the beginning, a strong, clear motivation drives us to get involved with some kind of activity. Then it keeps us on track, helping us triumph over laziness and inner and outer obstacles. Ultimately it brings us to fruition, to accomplishing whatever we hope to accomplish. Motivation is like having a strong, accurate arm when you want to throw a baseball. Your arm is what sends the ball far across the field, exactly to where you want it to go.
If at a young age you have a vision and a strong urge to become an Olympic gymnast, your motivation can eventually take you there. It’s almost laughable to see how young and tiny aspiring gymnasts can be. Some still need help eating and getting dressed. But if they have the right disposition and circumstances, even five-year-olds can develop a strong enough motivation to overcome all sorts of challenges: physical, emotional, and mental. By keeping their motivation close to their heart, by keeping their passion burning inside them, they can develop all the necessary skill and understanding to become an Olympic gymnast. But it’s not as though children become Olympic gymnasts just as that thought first enters their mind. To fulfill their vision, their motivation must persist over many years. The same is true for anything. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer, you need to maintain your motivation over many years. If you want to be president of the United States, your motivation must be strong and clear enough to get you past all sorts of obstacles. Barack Obama has said that he wanted to be president from the time he was in elementary school. That shows the power of persistent motivation.
To overcome self-importance and fully develop our bodhicitta also requires a very strong and clear motivation. Just as the young gymnast has a vision of reaching the Olympics, we can have a vision of the peace we will experience when we come out of our absorption in the small self. We will never enjoy this peace as long as our naturally altruistic heart is hemmed in by self-cherishing and self-protecting. How relieved we will feel when we are free from our painful self-centered emotions! We can also foresee the great joy of loving and caring for others, as we grow to regard all sentient beings as our bigger self. And we can imagine how much more effectively we will benefit the world, once we have developed the nondual wisdom of absolute bodhicitta.
If we feel passionate about this vision for ourselves and others, if we clearly see that nothing is more important than developing our bodhicitta to higher and higher levels and eventually attaining complete enlightenment, then before we know it we will get there. And I don’t think it will be as hard as becoming an Olympic gymnast, or even a doctor or lawyer. That is because the Buddha’s wisdom and methods don’t require working with external circumstances beyond our control. Just having our very own mind and following the instructions on internal practices such as tonglen, we can transform ourselves into bodhisattvas. The methods of lojong are intended to work gradually and peacefully. They are a gentle means of making inevitable progress along the bodhisattva path. Once we get the hang of exchanging self and other, once we get a feel for its ease and simplicity, we can make progress in a state of delight, ever motivated to learn whatever we need to learn.
What makes the path especially joyful is that as we step out of our small self, we begin to fall in love with sentient beings. When we fall in love, we can’t stop thinking about the person we’re in love with. We think constantly about how to make our lover happy. If we see our lover in pain, we can’t stop thinking about how to clear away that suffering. We forget about ourselves, which makes us feel so incredibly high, like we’ve eaten an aphrodisiac. This decreased self-centeredness also gives us tremendous courage. We feel that we can do for our lover things that we never imagined we were brave enough to do for ourselves.
Bodhisattvas are like us ordinary people when we fall in love, but unlike us, their love goes out impartially to all sentient beings. Their love also differs in that it doesn’t depend on how their lovers meet their expectations. Their love never waxes and wanes. They are always thinking of others, to the extent that they don’t even see a point in thinking of themselves. My teacher Khyentse Rinpoche was incredibly happy whenever he could do anything for others, whether it was small, medium, or large. But when people praised or served him, he was far less delighted. Great bodhisattvas like Khyentse Rinpoche exude joy. You can see it in their presence, in their face, in their eyes. This is the result of their having fallen deeply in love with sentient beings.
The second of the five strengths is familiarization. If you’ve decided to become a gymnast, you have to go through training that involves a lot of repetition. It doesn’t matter what your background is or how special you are. You can’t say, “I’m a prince, so I shouldn’t have to go through rigorous training.” You have do what it takes, including accepting feedback. You can’t say, “To hell with you, coach. My father is the richest man in the world.” If you want to be able to do ten consecutive flips in the air, you have to keep repeating the exercises, more times than Buddhist practitioners say their mantras. Even if all your friends are having fun together, hanging out at the mall or smoking pot, you have to be practicing on those bars and rings. To be able to stick the landing without leaning forward or backward, you have to practice for many, many years. You need familiarization to gain ability, to develop confidence, to learn how to perform under pressure.
To become an Olympic gymnast, you also need to have some innate athletic ability and the right body type. To become a doctor, you need to be strong academically. To become a lawyer, you need a certain level of wits. But to become a proficient lojong practitioner, all you need is determination. Recognizing the cause of your suffering, you are determined to reduce your self-centeredness; and recognizing the cause of joy, you are determined to cultivate an altruistic state of mind. The wisdom and skillful means of these practices are universally applicable, no matter who you are. They are right there to help you fulfill your motivation. All you need to do is practice over and over, gradually acquiring familiarity.
When we practice tonglen, we eventually have to make it our own. It’s not enough just to follow instructions from a book but then have our mind go blank as soon as the book is shut. Using self-reflection and contemplation, we need to integrate tonglen into our experience and thereby develop confidence. In the beginning, we develop confidence through working with our mind during formal practice. But eventually, our confidence has to extend to how we are in the world. This is not just a general confidence; it must relate to specific contexts, especially in how we handle the arising of disturbing emotions. When our anger comes up, as it inevitably will, how do we handle it with our practice of exchanging self and other? When we feel insecure, or jealous, or confused, how confident are we in our lojong antidotes? If we apply the strength of familiarization to each of our neuroses, repeatedly, we will develop a stable, unshakable confidence.
Third is the strength of virtuous seeds, or merit. In order to fulfill our bodhisattva aspiration to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, we will need a lot of merit to propel us along the path. The basis of this merit always has to be our motivation to benefit others. The clearer our intention, the more merit there is. The intention is more important than the size of the deed or even the seeming benefit to others. For example, if we have a shrine and make an offering of water bowls to the buddhas and bodhisattvas, we can accumulate great merit right there. The enlightened beings have no need of our water bowls, but our pure motivation to step out of our small self makes the act significant. Then, if we have the intention that the merit of this offering bring benefit to beings, that merit increases exponentially. Similarly, any practice we do, such as calming our mind or exchanging self and other, can generate a lot of merit if done with a mind that aims toward enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Right now, as we are evolving toward enlightenment, these actions may not seem like much, but we should remember the significance of what we’re evolving toward. When we practice with bodhicitta in our minds, we are aiming to become an asset to all the sentient beings in the universe, just like all the buddhas of the past. This kind of asset is much greater than the sun and the moon, even greater than the elements. The sun and the moon and the elements are important to our lives, but what exactly are they doing to liberate beings from suffering? When we become enlightened, we can lead others along that same path, just as the Buddha of our world has done for us. So when you practice, it’s important not to think you’re just hiding in your room, isolated on your cushion. Enlightenment is greater than anything in this world, and you are determined to achieve that state for the benefit of beings. This attitude can bring so much merit to your practice.
You can accumulate merit in all areas of your life. When you go to work, you can think: “May I practice bodhicitta with everyone I work with and talk to and see. May I serve my employers sincerely and honestly in exchange for the wage I earn. May I use this wage to support others, especially those who would be helpless on their own. May it help bring comfort to others, such as my spouse or my parents.” If you have any money left over, you can accumulate merit by donating to charities. A small donation to the Red Cross or an animal shelter can earn you all the merit of what those organizations do as a whole. You can also donate to spiritual centers. Nowadays the education offered by the great universities focuses on skills rather than philosophy. They are producing more effective businesspeople rather than people with wisdom and compassion. Our “higher education” isn’t doing much to bring the world out of the darkness of ignorance. Therefore, to contribute to dharma centers, which can’t subsist without the support of donors, is incredibly meritorious. Instead of using our earnings exclusively to cherish our small self, we can contribute to vast and profound purposes, thus gaining the joy of both earning and contributing. This can give supreme meaning to having and accumulating wealth.
If you eat nourishing food and do exercise, you can have the intention not just to have an ordinary long, healthy life, but to have more years to practice bodhicitta. Traditionally it is common for practitioners to do longevity rituals, such as prayers to deities like White Tara and Amitayus. In addition, since now we know that good diet and exercise improve health, we can take care of our bodies with the same intention and big vision to lengthen our lives in order to develop our bodhicitta practice. In this way, eating and exercising can be full of merit.
If you have children, you can think, “May I take care of these fine human beings so that they become wise and compassionate and able to benefit others. May I help them in any way I can to remove their ignorance, so that they become assets to the world.” If you are kind and compassionate in your social interactions, you can increase your merit by setting the intention to use every situation to develop bodhicitta.
Almost any daily activity offers you a chance to plant virtuous seeds. Even watching TV can be meritorious if done with the right approach. You can think, “May I watch this program to increase my understanding that I, and my whole world, and all my stories, are just as illusory as a TV show. May this show remind me that all the events of my life have no essence, like the images projected on the screen.” In this way, while watching TV, you can also watch your mind. You can observe how you get sucked into the “reality” of the program, even though you know that it’s just a play of light. Without losing the fun of watching, you can maintain some awareness of the show’s illusory quality.
If you watch a nature show, you can witness how much suffering animals go through. As the salmon is about to go into the bear’s mouth, after working its way upstream all the way from the ocean, you can feel touched in your heart. You can then extend that compassion to all the animals on this planet who are eaten by other animals and people. You can observe the relationship between predator and prey and contemplate the workings of karma. Watching TV, reading the newspaper, and other ways of taking in the stories of samsara can become a great source of merit.
Before you go to sleep each night, dedicate all the merit you have accumulated throughout the day for the benefit of beings. Then you can set the intention to practice bodhicitta in your dreams. If you do a little tonglen before falling asleep, it will influence your activities in your dreams, and even they can become seeds of virtue.
Fourth is the strength of remorse. Sometimes you have a hard time practicing bodhicitta and accumulating merit. You’re not able to be kind to others with your body, speech, and mind. At that point, it’s easy to get caught up in judging yourself. That is not productive. As we have discussed, guilt is not a useful emotion. It doesn’t help you change for the better. So what should you do instead? To whatever extent you’re able, you should openly analyze what is happening. Analyze it objectively, as if it’s not even about you. Connect the dots: see what leads to what, how one experience leads to another. Analyze the subtleties of your own and others’ ego dynamics, how they play out in your mind and emotions, and how the cure is bodhicitta. Learn from your mistakes, your confusion, your impulses. Learn from your own ignorance. By doing this, you’ll be able to see how everything negative happens because of clinging to the self. Then you’ll naturally conclude that this clinging is something you should always be vigilant about.
We need to keep observing and reflecting on the destructiveness of self-importance, rather than think we’ve “got it” after seeing it once or twice. This is a hard lesson to learn. It takes time. We can learn very quickly from physical pain. You can tell a toddler not to touch a hot stove, but the toddler probably will get curious and try it. But as soon as the child feels the sharp pain of the heat, the lesson is learned. With physical pain, it’s easier to connect the dots of cause and effect. Emotional pain is different. Unless we meet with teachings that impart genuine wisdom, it’s very difficult to figure out where disturbing emotions come from and how to address them.
Many people with a high IQ would fare badly on a test of “EQ,” emotional intelligence. Even longtime dharma practitioners can fall short in EQ. Everyone else can see that they’re making fools of themselves by clinging to and trying to promote their small self, but to them it’s not so obvious. They keep missing the link between cause and effect, between self-importance and grosser manifestations of confusion. Fanaticism, fascism, and cults come from surrendering to the small self without analyzing it critically. These and all other faults come from giving the small self absolute authority over our minds. Our self-cherishing tricks us into thinking it’s working for our welfare. But deep reflection proves to us that this is not the case.
The strength of remorse is about increasing your emotional intelligence. When you observe your mind objectively and come to understand the source of all your suffering, you can talk to your self-importance the way Shantideva does: “In the past I was unaware of how you did me so much wrong. But now that I can connect cause and effect, I am different. You can’t fool me anymore!”
The fifth strength is aspiration, which involves making sincere prayers. What we pray for is to reduce our self-importance and increase precious bodhicitta. We can think about the love and compassion of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, marveling at them and trying to fully understand their strengths and freedom. Then we can pray for those qualities to blossom in our own hearts. In order to help us make aspirations, they have written many prayers that we can recite. We should do our best to say each word sincerely, seeing it as a way to connect with the mind of these enlightened beings and have their qualities grow within us. Even if we use language written by someone else, by contemplating the meaning and speaking sincerely, we make it our own.
Making aspirations in blessed places can enhance their power. If we say prayers at sacred sites, such as the places in India where important events in the Buddha’s life occurred, we will see our bodhicitta developing by leaps and bounds. Saying prayers in front of our own personal shrine, or outdoors in a location we feel is blessed by nature, makes our aspirations stronger. Finally, whenever we have done anything positive, anything directed toward the benefit of others, we should dedicate the merit for the growth of our bodhicitta in this and future lives. Dedication is what channels all our beneficial actions into a source of positive energy that can make all our aspirations come true.
What to Do at the Moment of Death
This slogan applies to the end of our lives, when we know that death is near, such as when we are terminally ill. Perhaps our doctors have given us a year or a month to live, or perhaps we have only a ten percent chance of survival. The five strengths are the same as above; however, the order is different.
The first strength to apply to our dying process is that of virtuous seeds, the accumulation of merit. At the end of our life, we may have money and possessions. Most likely we’ll be attached to these, and our attachments will be a hindrance to a peaceful death. Even in the bardo, the intermediate state between this life and our next, our minds can become uneasy about our assets. We may worry about what’s happening with them. So what should we do with our money and possessions? Rather than just putting everything in our will, it will benefit us more to relate to them precisely and intentionally, to tie up these loose ends while we are still alive. This will turn a source of attachment and ego-clinging into a source of merit.
As is recommended in the previous slogan, we can give our money to causes that we believe in, such as charities and spiritual centers. We can sell our possessions and donate the proceeds to these causes as well. This will accumulate great merit, both for ourselves and for anyone who has left us money in the past, such as our parents or grandparents. The general recommendation in these teachings is to give at least half of your assets to causes outside of your family because they are likely to benefit more beings, thus accumulating more merit.
What about leaving money to our loved ones? Of course we feel very close to our family and would like to leave something for them. But we want to be intelligent about how we do this. If we leave money to our children but think of them as extensions of our attachment to ourselves, then we will not be letting go of our attachments. This will make it difficult to move on from this life in peace. It is said that beings in the bardo often see their children fighting over an inheritance, or becoming so attached to it that they forget about the person who has passed away. This causes the bardo being tremendous heartache and disappointment. Therefore, if we give money to our loved ones, we should do so with a less attached attitude. If you see your children simply as sentient beings who long for happiness and freedom from suffering, then you can give to them cleanly, with no strings attached. You are leaving your money to them—as opposed to other people—because of the karmic bond that you have, but you are not seeing them as extensions of yourself.
Another way of sowing virtuous seeds at the end of life is by going on a pilgrimage, if you are in any condition to do so. The physical effort of making a journey to sacred places can create tremendous merit and purify many of our hindrances and obscurations. Also, doing short retreats—a week, a weekend—will help you get your mind clear about how to approach this last phase of your life. What will not be helpful is to become overly desperate with medicine and treatment after treatment, clinging on until the very end. This will only increase the pain and fear of dying. There’s nothing wrong with being reasonably hopeful and doing what we can, but it’s more important to develop confidence to let go if the time has come. With confidence, we can rely on the inner strength of our practice and prayers for the comfort and resources that will make our transition smooth.
The second strength is aspiration. When we leave this world, we will go like a hair being pulled out of butter. All we will have is this naked mind. So at the end of our life, we should aspire for our mind to be in the best possible condition, full of bodhicitta, suffused with love, compassion, and the noble attitude of tonglen. It is said that the moment just before death will make a great difference in how we travel from this life into the next. If we make aspirations to remember and increase bodhicitta during our dying process and continuing through our journey to the next life, where we hope to meet the teachings and practices of bodhicitta, then we will be creating favorable conditions for this transition.
Third is the strength of remorse. The dying process will have a big impact on you, but try not to take it so personally. This is the life cycle of all sentient beings. Virtually everyone who was alive one hundred years ago is gone from this world. So try to take this less as your own tragedy, and more as a universal process and a time to devote yourself to the practice of dharma. If you have any grudges, now is the time to let them go. Even if you can’t make peace with everyone, at least let all grudges go from your side so that they don’t follow you. If you feel depressed, fearful, or anguished, that is of course normal, but try to recognize that everyone in this position experiences the same things. See how these natural emotions are the result of our attachment to a small self, and try to use this opportunity as a means to step out of ego-clinging. Make the wish that your current suffering will enable you to destroy your self-importance and go completely beyond it. Since much of your suffering at the end of life is related to your attachment to your body, make the wish that this suffering will help you let go of this attachment. Confess all the activities of your self-centered mind and ask the buddhas and bodhisattvas to help you so that you don’t carry this small mind into the next life.
The fourth strength is that of motivation. Having established bodhicitta during your life, try to increase it even more at the end of your life. Generating a strong motivation will protect you from being so distracted and scattered by your suffering. It will help you get over the shock of being in the predicament of dying. Recognize that the practice of bodhicitta is your only true friend at this point, the only thing you can rely on. With bodhicitta in your mind, there is nothing to be afraid of, since every other aspect of the mind is merely illusion, merely deception and insecurity.
Finally, there is the strength of familiarization. At the end of our life, it is too late to learn new practices. We must take advantage of what we’ve become familiar with already. If we’ve learned to work with difficult circumstances, with lojong and especially tonglen, now is the time to put these practices to their greatest use. When we are sick in bed and facing the unknown, we will suffer a lot of anxiety and groundlessness. All our attachments to life, to people, to the world, will show their faces. All our unfinished business will come up, all those mental and emotional issues that we haven’t related to in our lives. We will experience many strong feelings, such as loss, doubt, self-pity, anger, discouragement, depression, fear, confusion, and disconnection. These feelings are not the sign of a weak practitioner. They are interdependently originated phenomena, which means they arise when the right causes and conditions come together. The question is, how do we relate to these feelings?
What you shouldn’t do is reject or suppress them. If you close down to these phenomena, they will get even stronger. Instead, include them on your spiritual path. Don’t spend your last months or weeks running away or distracting yourself. Just lie down on your bed, or wherever you feel comfortable, and open yourself up to feel these emotions.
And then open up even more by thinking about how many beings are suffering in this way. How many have gone through this in the past and how many will go through this in the future? Before you were dying, this kind of suffering was a distant idea. Now you are aware of what others go through. You can see what your loved ones and every other sentient being will experience during the passage of death.
Think about how many people, just in your area, say within one hundred miles, are dying in hospitals. How many people are dying right now in this country, on this continent, in the world? How many are dying in far worse circumstances, such as in wars or epidemics? And how few of the beings who are dying have the support you have, the external support of those who care for you, and the internal support of the dharma? Think about the countless animals dying in slaughterhouses just today. Imagine how great their suffering must be.
Then summon the courage and joy to start the practice of tonglen by mentally taking on all this suffering and adding it to your own. If you are in a state of fear, take on the similar fear of others. Try to locate the “fearer” in your body. You may find a tightness in your chest, which comes from your self-importance, from protecting your ego. This fearer is none other than your small self. It is the one who is anxious, paranoid, angry, confused. Instead of suppressing these emotions, take on the painful emotions of others who are dying. Load them directly onto the fearer, the sufferer.
When you do so, you will find that the sufferer begins to shrink. Your self-importance melts. Before you did this practice, your small self was tightly holding on, desperately thinking about how to rebuild this life, dreaming up hopes of the impossible. Now that you have opened your heart to others through your practice of compassion and tonglen, you can enjoy the tremendous relief and joy of letting go.
To practice giving, the other half of tonglen, touch in with the love and compassion that your pain and fear have brought you. Since your suffering has enabled you to sympathize with what others are going through, it is natural to want to bring them happiness. To the countless others who are dying, give them any peace and joy you have gained through your practice of bodhicitta. Envision them becoming free from suffering, and finding tremendous ease in this transition. To help bring about this vision, make prayers for all beings who must go through death—in other words, every sentient being, without exception—to come to a state of complete peace and joy. Supplicate the buddhas and bodhisattvas to ensure this will come true by the strength of their compassion and power. Then, to fulfill your vision and prayers, offer all your merit for this supreme cause. Offer not only your own merit, but all the merit that has ever been accumulated on behalf of others. You can think of yourself as the enlightened ones’ bursar, helping them distribute their infinite merit to those who need it.
The only way to get free from suffering is to remove its condition, self-importance. If, during our dying process, we reduce our self-importance by means of tonglen, our pain and fear will be reduced greatly. It will only flare up again when we start grasping tightly to a small self. At that point, we have to apply tonglen once again.
By practicing tonglen in such a potent time as our approaching death, we can make tremendous progress in a short period. We can make headway against our self-clinging habit, thus removing the conditions for much of our suffering in the future. We have no choice but to depart from this life. But if we go in this way, removing the ground of our suffering and transforming our ordinary mind into bodhicitta, we will make the best use of this time. But it is crucial to become familiar with these methods now, so that we’re not jumping into this practice for the first time while on our deathbed.
Toward the very end of our life, we will probably become too tired to do any conceptual practice. We won’t be able to think or visualize very well. At that point, we need to rely more on our absolute nature, connecting to it to whatever extent we can. If we have any experience of recognizing and resting in the absolute nature, as described in the second point of mind training, now is the time to put that into practice.
When His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa was about to pass away in 1981, he said, “Nothing happens.” He was referring to the unborn absolute nature, which is always present, unchangingly. A master such as the Karmapa has no fear of death because he recognizes that both death and life are mere illusions. They have no objective reality; they are just projections of our subjective mind, which gets caught up in what it projects. The absolute nature is the ground for all these illusions, but it itself never changes.
For those who do these practices, the death process doesn’t have to be painful or fearful. It can be peaceful and joyful, the opening of a new door and the beginning of a new chapter of bodhicitta practice. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. For example, when I saw the teacher Lama Urgyen soon after his death, he had a genuine smile on his face, a sign of his joyful bodhicitta. Many others die this way as well. There is no trick to it, other than following the suggestions in this slogan.
In his commentary, Jamgon Kongtrul says, “There are many great instructions for the time of death, but none more wonderful than this.” What could be more effective and relevant at a time when you are forced to work with the nitty-gritty of your mind? If you use another method, even from the “highest” Buddhist teachings, but fail to address your self-importance, your clinging will produce continuous suffering. If you don’t confront your attachment to the small self, no other method will lead you to peace.
Even if death seems far off, we can familiarize ourselves with the practice of dying by going through this process right now. His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that he does an exercise seven times every day, as if he’s really in the situation of dying. If we practice now, then when we approach death, it will seem familiar and natural to us. We will be ready to die peacefully and joyfully.
This slogan gives instructions on how we should conduct ourselves to prepare for the “transference of consciousness” from our mind’s current home to the home it will inhabit in our next life. However, if we don’t believe in the continuity of life, it is hard to see that our final actions will make any difference. Many people, especially those who are younger and healthy, think it’s easier to be an atheist. We’re here on Earth for this finite time and then when we die, that’s the end. There is nothing more. I find this way of thinking very depressing. It also makes it much more painful to grow older. If you approach the end of your life thinking there will be nothing more, you will feel much more desperate to cling to this life. Your attachment and fear will be much greater. But if you believe in the continuity of life, you can make aspirations to be reborn in favorable circumstances for making further progress along the bodhisattva’s path. Even though we have had the incredible fortune to meet the dharma, perhaps we have not had all the conditions to fulfill all our wishes for this life. Perhaps we have often found ourselves in a rut, unable to move forward in letting go of our self-importance. If we make aspirations for our next life, we are likely to find that more doors will be open to us. We will be able to pick up where we left off and go further along the path to enlightenment. This life may be the end of one chapter, but the next life is the beginning of another, even better, chapter.
Once we’ve begun traveling on the road of increasing virtue, we can feel confident about our next life. There is no reason for us to fear. How do we know if we’re on the road of increasing virtue? When we embark on the practice of exchanging self and other, and begin letting go of our habitual self-clinging and replacing it with altruism, our mind becomes more virtuous with each passing day. We create more and more positive karma and less and less negative karma. We may feel like it’s too late, that we’ve already done too many negative things earlier in this life, that we have too many negative habits. But this is not true. Even if we have been self-centered our whole lives and have ignored the inevitability of death, with these instructions we can turn things around very quickly. I would think that our final six weeks could make up for a whole life. Remember the story of the Buddha’s past life when he was pulling the cart in the hell realm. With a single altruistic thought he was able to turn his entire karmic situation around, 180 degrees.
Your connection to the dharma in this life is evidence of your karmic evolution. Out of seven billion people on this planet, you are one of the very few who has met these lojong instructions. Even fewer are taking these teachings to heart and sincerely attempting to practice them. Why are you in this rare and precious situation and not others? Unless you believe that things just happen at random, it has to be because of your connection from past lives and the merit you have created because of that connection.
Of course, believing in past and future lives requires faith. This faith, however, is not something foreign to us. It has always been part of the human mind. Even before the religions we know came into this world, people engaged in rituals that related to the continuation of the deceased’s consciousness. They prepared the soul to continue on to its next stage. The funerals of the modern world also reflect this deep psychological belief in a future for the deceased. If we didn’t have this belief, why would we go to the trouble of having a funeral? Why would we treat a corpse in a particular way if we really had no belief in a continuing mind? Why wouldn’t we just dump it in the garbage? Because we feel that treating the body in this way would somehow prevent the soul from being in peace. Do you think that even the strictest atheist would dump his loved one’s body in the garbage? Different cultures and people may have their own explanations about death and the afterlife, but this deep emotional belief in continuing consciousness is something all human beings share.
But even though we have this level of faith, having an even stronger and more stable conviction in rebirth will benefit us greatly in the end. A future life is not something we can see with our eyes. All we can see is that the body has been destroyed. Whether it is buried or burned, the body is no longer a body. But neither does it vanish completely into nonexistence. Every atom continues into the future, combining with other atoms to create new forms and shapes. It is said that the atoms of the Buddha’s body are still among us, 2,500 years later. Some of these atoms may be part of our own body. So if atoms, which are made of matter, don’t just evaporate, why would we think that our intangible consciousness just vanishes into nonexistence?
Many people think that there is no such thing as consciousness separate from the brain. But what is meant by “consciousness”? Consciousness implies self-awareness. A brain cell is not aware of itself, but your mind is aware of itself. A scientist can put a strange cap on your head and see what areas of your brain are active, but a scientist can’t use these methods to find out what you’re thinking. But you know what you’re thinking. So if you believe that your mind is just made of matter, you are going against your own experience of self-awareness. The brain and the mind do interact with and affect each other, but they are not one. Therefore, the end of the body does not mean the end of the mind.
It may take a lot of effort to contemplate this and other reasonings about rebirth until you feel convinced, but it is a worthwhile endeavor. And whether or not you make this effort, it is a profound thing just to lean your openness to believing in rebirth. Especially if you are older and coming to your final years, I hope you will lean your openness to making aspirations you feel comfortable with. Otherwise, your life may add up to some version of this: “I fed myself, clothed myself, I brought up my kids and sent them to a good college, I laughed a lot, drank a lot, belonged to this or that political party, visited this or that place, had this or that hobby . . .” Even if we’ve enjoyed a rich and vivid past, at the end of life it seems no more substantial than a dream. And the future is a blank. All we have to look forward to is the loss of everything we hold dear. But if we lean our openness to following the instructions in this slogan, and we make aspirations for our future lives, we can have much to look forward to: having more and more meaningful accomplishments until we reach the ultimate accomplishment, enlightenment.
Even if you are not completely open, but you have doubt or anxiety as you approach death, you can still benefit from the practice of tonglen. Without rejecting these thoughts and emotions, you can take on the suffering of all those who are in a similar position and state of mind. You can breathe in others’ insecurity and pain of skepticism and use it to melt the tight grasping in your heart. Feel the relief from your own self-importance and give your peace to others. Offer to others whatever openness and confidence you do have, along with that of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas. Make this offering part of your vision for yourself and all beings to attain complete enlightenment.
One of my teachers, Khenpo Rinchen, used to say that our death will come today. When it happens, it will not be “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” It will be today. The more we contemplate this crucial topic and prepare our minds, the better off we will be when that “today” comes. We never know when that will be.