19. THE DEFECTS OF CYCLIC EXISTENCE IN GENERAL

AS IN THE case of the earlier meditations, this meditation on the defects of cyclic existence should be preceded by the preliminaries.

As Lama Tsongkhapa said in his Lamrim Nyamgur:

If you do not contemplate the truth of suffering—the fallacy of samsara—

The wish to be free of samsara will not arise.

If you do not contemplate the source of suffering—the door to samsara—

You will never discover the means of cutting samsara’s root.

Base yourself on renunciation of cyclic existence; be tired of it.

Cherish knowledge of the chains that bind you to the wheel of cyclic existence.

Reflect upon the faults of true suffering and then the faults and destructive nature of true origins of suffering, and thus develop the wish to be free from the cycle of existence. And, as Lama Tsongkhapa explained in Lamtso Namsum (The Three Principal Aspects of the Path), you should overcome the attraction to this life and then rise above preoccupation with future lives. It is best to develop the wish to gain freedom from the cycle of existence by understanding the method of doing so, since a wish to be free from cyclic existence not based on a knowledge of method is not likely to be firm and stable. Such an understanding can be developed by recognizing sufferings as sufferings, identifying their origins, and seeking the path which will lead to their cessation. When you see the possibility and certainty of such cessation, by engaging in a path that leads to it, you should develop the strong wish to achieve liberation.

The training of the mind in the stages of the path common to the middling scope, as discussed earlier, is preceded by a loosening of the force of grasping at self-existence of the person. Eventually, by totally eliminating the self-grasping attitude within your mind, you will be able to achieve the permanent state of peace which is called liberation. Without liberation, even though you might attain temporary relief from the obvious sufferings of the lower realms of existence, thus enjoying worldly perfections, this attainment is only a temporary postponement of the sufferings of the lower realms; the moment you meet with the right or appropriate circumstances, you will again take rebirth in the lower realms of existence. The temporary relief from the lower realms afforded by taking rebirth in favorable states of existence is not only unstable but unreliable as well.

Furthermore, when you probe deeply you will find that no matter how high an existence a realm may be, even though it may be the highest state of existence, as long as it is in this cycle of existence the beings there are in the nature of sufferings, because they have the sufferings of pervasive conditioning and are therefore under the influence or command of contaminated actions and delusions. As long as one is not able to be free from such an influence, there is no place for permanent peace or happiness.

The obvious sufferings that are known as the sufferings of suffering are manifest sufferings that even animals will be able to recognize as suffering and have the desire to be free from. Generally, the experiences that you normally regard as pleasurable and happy, such as having the physical comfort of good facilities and so forth, if they are examined at a deeper level, will be revealed to be changeable and therefore in the nature of suffering. They provide you with temporary satisfaction; because of that temporary satisfaction you regard them as experiences of happiness. But if you keep on pursuing them, they will again lead to the experience of suffering. Most of these pleasurable experiences are not really happiness in the true sense of the word, but only appear as pleasure and happiness in comparison to the obvious sufferings that you have. Thus, all experiences of suffering can be categorized into three classes or levels of suffering: (1) manifest suffering; (2) suffering of change; and (3) the pervasive suffering of conditioning.

Even though you have attained existence in a higher realm, still you are not totally free of the potential suffering of the three lower realms, and as long as you are under the influence of contaminated actions and delusions you will never have independence or freedom. The very fact that you are under the grip and influence of such negative factors is a suffering enough and a state of misery. If the factors that influence you are positive, it is okay, but the factors that command you and determine and influence your life are negative delusions. The very name delusion is frightening—its etymological root is the term afflictive emotion. The very name suggests that the moment delusions arise within your mind they afflict you and destroy your happiness and calmness. Therefore, delusions are the genuine enemies—you should never hesitate to deal forcefully with them. Delusions reside within your mind in such a manner that they do not feel any threat from you. As long as you totally entrust yourself to their command, there is no prospect for happiness or goodness.

If the enemy is external, there is a possibility of avoiding it; there are also methods of overcoming that enemy by seeking others’ help. But if the enemy is within, it is quite difficult to overcome. There is no way that you can avoid it, so it is only by taking the initiative yourself and making the effort that you will be able to combat it. You should therefore determine that taking the initiative is important on your part, and that there is no chance of freeing yourself from the grip of delusions if you do not seek the means to combat and overcome them.

If association with delusions could give you happiness, you should now have the best and most satisfactory form of happiness, because of your long association with delusions. But this is not the case. All of us are always under the sufferings of dissatisfaction and anxiety. The very start of our lives is marked with suffering, our lives end with suffering, and during our lives we go through all sorts of problems and miseries. Such is the nature of samsara, cyclic existence. The underlying cause of all this is that we are under the influence of contaminated body, actions, and delusions.

You should make it a point to free yourself from this yoke of delusions. Your feeling should have such urgency that you do not have time even to breathe before you mount your attack on them. When you only talk about the destructive nature of delusions, your attack on them is almost like mere backbiting, because it does not affect them directly.

First it is important to recognize the nature of the delusions and their destructive character, to discover what are the actual opponent forces that can counter them, and then to eliminate them. By applying the right opponent force you should be able to hit the target in the right way—that means employing the right opponent force to destroy the ignorance that is at the root of all the delusions. This ignorance refers to the misconception of reality that apprehends things as existing truly or inherently.

The root of all these sufferings is firmly based in the mind. As long as suffering is firmly based and has deep roots in you, any temporary relief that you may gain from the sufferings of lower existence is unstable and unreliable. The relief is like that of a criminal destined to be executed, who gains a temporary postponement of his execution—there is nothing much about which to be delighted.

Thus it is very important to reflect upon the suffering nature of life in this cycle of existence in general: the sufferings of uncertainty, the sufferings of lack of contentment, and the sufferings of having to discard the body again and again. If one were to make a pile of the heads of those whom one has killed in one’s successive lives, it would far exceed the height of mountains. If one were to collect the drops of tears that one has shed for the loss of relatives and friends in the past, it would far exceed the vastness of oceans.

As the Buddha said in the sutras, in this cycle of existence which is like the tip of the needle there is no place for happiness. For instance, we Tibetans suffer on a national scale. In particular, the people inside Tibet live with great anxiety, while those who are scattered in other countries suffer the difficulties of migration. Suffering is present also for people living inside independent countries such as India: before they gained independence they had a lot of sufferings, and then even after independence has been attained they still have sufferings. In very powerful and developed countries such as the United States—although they are regarded as superpowers and are materially developed and superficially appear to be quite successful—at the level of the individual you find a lot of anxiety to the degree that many people have to live on sleeping pills and tranquilizers. When you reflect in such terms, you will find that right from birth we have many sufferings to which are added cultural pressures such as competitiveness and lack of contentment—if you have a thousand you need a hundred thousand, and if you have a hundred thousand you want a million dollars and so forth. There is always this suffering of want and lack of contentment. Suffering is limitless. Just as the Kadampa master Potawa said, “The never-ending chain of sufferings that we face in this cycle of existence is the true face of the cycle of existence.”

In our lives there are many circumstances for suffering both from within our bodies and from external causes. Right at the time of birth, when our lives on this planet first begin, we create problems and sufferings, not only for ourselves, but also for our mothers. With great difficulty we are born; and even after birth, for months and years, we remain extremely fragile and vulnerable, always depending upon others’ protection. We have to survive under all sorts of circumstances and hardships.

Our bodies, on their own, are composed of impure substances and therefore are nothing to be really attached to. Each of us regards our own body as most precious. Not only that, even others find it attractive. On this basis, many negative emotions arise within ourselves and others. Let us consider whether or not this body deserves to be so well preserved and examine its nature, its different components: skin, bones, blood, flesh, and so forth. As an example, let us take a piece of skin from a finger: when we take it off and keep it, after a while we find it very repulsive. The same would be true of our bones, marrow, blood; it is because of our misconceptions that we apprehend them as most precious and beautiful. We feel attached to our own body and attracted to others’ bodies as well. So we live under illusions. If we probe deeper, we will never find, on the part of the body, anything that can be regarded as attractive. Compared to it, other living species, such as plants, flowers, and so forth, look more clean. We find that the bodies of humans and animals are really very impure and unclean.

Now let us inquire as to the function of this body. If we consider the body on its own, we find that it appears almost as though its main task is to produce human waste. Daily we take food and then release it as waste; it is almost as though the purpose of taking food and nourishment is to produce these wastes. If we were to heap up all the flour, rice, and so forth that we might have consumed over the last several years, it will be really a very large quantity. Such reflection is quite frightening. It is as though we live in this world just to protect and preserve this composite of impure substances. So, the body per se is not precious.

Our consciousness resides within this body through a karmic force, and as our consciousness is karmically linked with such a body it is also under the influence of karmic contamination. Reflections upon the six and eight types of sufferings¹ mentioned in Lamrim Chenmo as the general aspects of cyclic existence are indeed very effective in generating a genuine aspiration to attain freedom from this unsatisfactory state of existence. We undergo our lives in this cycle of existence through such a process of suffering. Right now, due to the kindness of our previous lives we are not thrown into the abyss of the lower realms and as a result have obtained this human form. Now, the important point is to examine and judge whether or not there is a possibility of terminating this vicious cycle of birth and death. It is by the force of our attachment and attraction to objects that we spin around in the cycle of existence. Attachment is a negative state of mind induced by the misapprehension of the true mode of existence of phenomena. Such an ignorance is a distorted mind that misconceives the nature of phenomena. If we are able to see through the deception of this ignorance, we will be able to put an end to its arisal; thus the possibility of attaining liberation appears. This is because then only will we be able to put an end to our accumulation of negative karma and at the same time cease activating the imprints of past karma.

Judging by our own experiences in this life and those of others, it is very obvious that consciousness is a phenomenon susceptible to change and transformation. Due to the force of bad companionship and different conditions, people change for the worse, becoming very aggressive. Likewise we see human beings changing for the better, becoming more gentle, kind, and so forth. This is an indication that an impermanent phenomenon is changeable, and therefore is subject to transformation.

The effect of consciousness even upon the body is very obvious. There is no need for a spiritual teacher to point that out to us—even the doctors tell us to keep our minds calm and to be happy, and that because of our anxieties we suffer. Emotional disturbances result in physical illness.

There is no possibility that meditating on love and compassion could cause mental disturbances. Although it is possible that a feeling of unease could arise when one is meditating on strong compassion, this is very different from the mental disturbances that one has as a result of delusions. In his Bodhisattva­caryavatara, Shantideva says that generating a strong compassion can, in a way, increase one’s anxiety, for one is concerned about not only one’s own suffering but also that of others. However, I can say that there could never be a case of losing mental balance or having a nervous breakdown as a result of meditating on compassion.

On the other hand, there is definitely the possibility of having a nervous breakdown as a result of being under the strong influence of hatred, anger, desire, and so forth. Since the very purpose of one’s life is to live happily, it is important to recognize the negative states of mind and put an end to them and to identify the positive states of mind and try to enhance them. Doing this is a natural right that we all have; if we utilize that right, we stand to gain.

As I remarked earlier, delusion is a state of mind that is very obvious: when it arises within the mind, it causes mental disturbances and anxieties in the individual, and furthermore causes many problems and difficulties in society, often on a national scale. We find that, right from the beginning of human civilization, delusions are the real causes of problems, trouble, and conflict within society. It is delusion that forces one to be attracted and attached to one’s own side and to feel hatred and anger toward the opposite side. With such an outlook, one creates the many divisions within the human community. All of these come about through the underlying force of the attachment to one’s own self. When one totally disregards the happiness of others for the purpose of one’s own happiness, all these conflicts, wars, and so forth come about.

The negative emotions such as hatred, anger, and desire are the real enemies that disturb and destroy our mental happiness and cause disturbance in society. Therefore, they are to be totally abandoned; they do not have even the slightest potential for yielding happiness.

There are sometimes situations in which painful surgery is necessary to remove an unhealthy or diseased part of the body. Similarly, we should cut away the negative emotions and delusions. Suffering from these negative states is like suffering from a chronic disease: there is no possibility of happiness or healthiness as long as they remain.

If we are able to see the destructive nature of delusions we will naturally develop the deep conviction that as long as we are under their influence there is no possibility of happiness or peace. Right now, even while we are alive, we have all sorts of sufferings and anxieties and so forth. The contemplation on the sufferings that we have right now is enough—there is no need to contemplate the acute and intense sufferings of the lower realms. The question of whether or not it is possible to put an end to such sufferings becomes very important and relevant now.

Since it is the ignorance misapprehending the true nature of phenomena that is at the root of all the delusions, it is very important for us first of all to identify this ignorant mind. This should be done by first analyzing how things appear to us and how they actually exist. If the appearance that we have of phenomena is true and accords with their reality, then analytically seeking them should bring us closer to that of which we have the appearance, but this is not the case. When we analytically investigate, we find that there is a disparity between our perception and the way things exist.

When something appears to us as good, it appears to us as one hundred percent good, and when something appears to us as undesirable, it appears as though it were totally undesirable in its own right. As a result of such appearance we misapprehend the object, and then on this basis we misconceptualize its nature. At the moment that we have very strong anger toward an object, we experience the person toward whom we feel extremely angry as totally negative—right from the top of his crown to the bottom of his soles. When the force of the anger diminishes, then the person begins to appear to be a little better. A similar sequence of experiences is true in the case of desire. Aryadeva says in Chatu-shataka Shastra that when one is under a very strong influence of negative emotions, one is almost at the point of insanity. No sane person would like to be mad. If we live insanely, we stand to lose. When we lose our mental balance under the influence of negative emotions, we will not be able to work for our own benefit, let alone work for others’.

Although we have incarnated so many times within beginningless time, we have nothing substantially positive to show from having done so. If we continue in the present style, there will never be an end to the cycle of birth and death. There is not even a single person that we can totally rely upon in this cycle of existence, in the suffering of being subject to repeated fluctuations and having to undergo birth, sickness, old age, and death again and again. When we take birth in the cycle of existence we do so alone; when we have to die at the end we also do so alone.

If there is a possibility of putting an end to this senseless cycle, then seeking the means of doing so is definitely a worthy venture for us. First, by employing the appropriate methods we should reduce the force of the delusions and then eventually get to their root and eliminate them. As I usually remark, I used to feel that if I ever gain a state of cessation, I shall really take a good rest. Once we have attained such a state, we could take a good rest and a real holiday, in the true sense of the word. Until we get to such a state, it is foolish for us to be complacent. When we have attained the state of cessation, we have truly reached a very secure ground.

We should reflect: “Why do I undergo this vicious cycle of life and death, tormented by all these sufferings? It is because of my not recognizing the delusions and eliminating them. At this point, when I have the opportunity to engage in the right practice due to the kindness of the spiritual master, may I generate genuine renunciation within my mind, and impelled by such renunciation may I be able to engage in the practices of the three trainings, thus leading myself to the attainment of liberation.”