Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche Speech for Frostburg State University Students

Speaker: His Eminence Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche is an imminent scholar, respected throughout the world in the areas of Buddhist philosophy, science, and politics. A teacher, a philosopher, and a life-long campaigner of non-violence, Samdhong Rinpoche is a close confident of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and today we have this opportunity to listen to him talk on “Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and non-violence.” Thank you very much! One of our students will give a brief introduction about the group.

Student: We are students from Frostburg State University which is located in Maryland, USA. We are a group known as the President’s Leadership Organization. We work closely with the President of our University and we are doing a cultural immersion project right now where we have been learning about Tibetan culture and we’ve been in Dharamsala for a few days now and we’ve learned a lot about Tibetan culture and its relation to Buddhism but we haven’t learned about Buddhism itself. So we were wondering, it would be extremely grateful if you could teach us some things on Buddhism and meditation.

Samdhong Rinpoche: Welcome to Dharamsala, all friends. The weather is not so friendly but I hope its okay for you. Mr. Ngawang Rabgyal insisted that I should talk with you about Buddhism, and non-violence. But I feel it will not be very useful due to a number of reasons. The first and foremost is, we are meeting for the first time with each other. We are all strangers. I do not know your background and understanding on the study of Buddhism and non-violence. I do not know which level you are at and what kind of questions you entertain in your mind. So, that is the difficulty of not having an understanding of each other.

To have a meaningful dialogue without this understanding is very difficult. And secondly, because of my own limitations, like, not knowing the English language, also makes it difficult for me to communicate in this language. Without having this knowledge, often times I feel like I have a shortage of vocabulary. And then thirdly, Buddhism is one of the most vast subjects among the different religious traditions. It has numerous volumes of teachings, and comprise of diverse fields: Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist science, and Buddhist dharma or practice. So one life is not enough to learn this dharma (Teachings), and thus within a few minutes or 40 minutes or an one hour to talk about this subject is really difficult. Nevertheless, I will say a few words. It maybe be useful to you by chance or it may not be useful to you because as I mentioned, we don’t have the basic understanding of each other.

Buddhism has so many different layers, and so many different schools, and so many different approaches. As such, one approach may not be comprehensive to introduce Buddhism to anyone who does not have any background knowledge about it. Yet I will talk from the historical viewpoint. When we talk about the subject of dharma, the teachings, the historical part and the mythological part and then the [factual] part—they are all quite different. As a common person, I will try to say a few words which are directly related to the historical part. We can look back to the life of Siddhārtha. Siddhārtha the prince of king Shudhodhana (Śuddhodana), of the kingdom of Śākya, at Kapilavastu. Kapilavastu is geographically located between India and Nepal. If you haven’t visited Nepal, half of Kapilavastu where Siddhārtha was born lies in India and the other half, including Lumbini Garden, is in Nepalese territory.

Siddhārtha was born as a prince and after his birth, the fortune-tellers and the astrologers gave a prophecy that if the prince remained in the household, he would become a king of kings, in Sanskrit its called “Chakravartin” (Cakravartin), a universal monarch. Chakravartin means an emperor ruling over many kingdoms. But, the prophecy said, there was also a strong likelihood that Siddhārtha might renounce the worldly pleasures and become a monk, a sage, and lead on a spiritual path. So, concerned with that, Siddhārtha’s father took all kinds of precautions to ensure that Siddhārtha did not renounce the worldly affairs or the pleasures and in the attempt all kinds of good things were made available and visible to the prince. And all things which might bring Siddhārtha sorrow or pain, were kept away from him. Siddhārtha was supervised very strictly and was not allowed to mix with the common people. Nevertheless, as much as the king tried to keep Siddhārtha away like a person in a prison, Siddhārtha went out when he was around 28 or 29 years old.

He went out to see around the township of Kapilavastu with his horse-chariot and Chanda (Canda), his charioteer, who was quite friendly with him, since both of them were of similar age. So they conversed quite frankly.

And then, all of a sudden, on a visit around with Chanda, the prince saw an old person, an old man. The body was so weak and the old man was unable to move without a stick; he was moving with a great difficulty and so Siddhārtha asked, “What happened to this person?” Chanda, the charioteer, replied, “He is old because he lived for a long time. Now he is 80-plus and therefore his body is old.” Then Siddhārtha said, “What is old? Does this kind of thing happen to everyone or are a few people selected to go through this kind of experience?” Chanda replied, “Whoever experiences a youthful body is bound to get old. It is inevitable, and so everyone must go through this.” Siddhārtha asked, “Do I also have to go through this?” Chandareplied, “Yes, yes, your highness. But you are still very young. It is far away. For the next 20, 30 years you need not worry; thereafter you might also have to experience this kind of thing.”

A little more ahead, Siddhārtha saw a diseased person in pain with a lot of discomfort, experiencing much misery. And then again, Siddhārtha asked what that was, and Chandareplied, “This is a man suffering from a disease as a patient.” Similar questions followed from the prince.

Finally, Siddhārtha sees a dead body being taken away for cremation, and he was told that it was a dead person. Siddhārtha asked, “What is death?” Chanda told him that because he was born he too shall one day die and that death is the final destination of every person; what happens after that, nobody knows—different religious teachers talk differently about that, so one has to find out for oneself. Then Siddhārtha returned back to the palace on his chariot.

That whole night, he was not able to sleep and he thought about the misery of humanity and the misery of not only humanity, but how it is also pervasive for all sentient beings. Whoever has a consciousness and a body has to go through decay, disease, death, old age, and unpleasant experiences. And what is the essence of temporary pleasure? Whatever pleasure we have at this moment, it is not permanent. It is transitory and bound to be a past thing; when the pleasure and the comfort disappears, it brings displeasure and discomfort. So, Siddhārtha thought that the whole world was full of misery and pain and felt that he must find out the remedy, a permanent remedy for this pain and suffering.

He realized, that the world is full of suffering and the worldly affluence or wealth does not have the potential or the power to free us from all these kinds of suffering and pain. Someone must find out what is the reality of suffering. What is the real cause of suffering and whether or not the cause of the suffering can be eradicated.

The prince thought about all these and then the next day, he asked his father to allow him to go and search for the truth, to find the cessation of all kinds of misery which are inevitable to all living beings. His father did not allow him, but Siddhārtha nevertheless escaped that night. He went far away from Kapilavastu, traversing a distance of 250 kilometers, and went to Gaya (in present-day Bihar state), where he met many spiritual masters. There he had dialogues with five or six masters. Nobody was able to give Siddhārtha a very satisfying answer to his questions and so he finally went to river Nērajana, near Bodhgaya, and sat for meditation with great efforts for six years. Thereafter he was able to get enlightened to Buddhahood, the perception of the ultimate truth.

The perception of the ultimate truth is the direct opposite of the basic ignorance, the ignorance which perceives and clings to the view that the entire phenomena existing by their own nature or by their own characteristic, without depending on anything. Actually, in reality, everything exists interdependently and are designated on the basis of interdependence. Due to not knowing this reality, the people have misconception of self. The misconception of self means, to view that I do exist by own nature, without depending on any other things. And this misconception is the basic ignorance and due to this basic ignorance, we have a division in our mind: me, mine, he, they, theirs. This division creates attachment and hatred. And attachment and hatred are the basic defilement of the ordinary mind. Due to these basic defilement of the mind, we accumulate many of karmic forces. Karmic force means an action which gives some kind of seed in our mind to produce results. And due to that we have to be reborn into this world and go through all these kinds of misery.

In seeing this ultimate reality and the complete cessation of the ignorance, the complete cessation of the misconception of the division between me and the other, there then is an end to attachment and hatred. And thereby you can remove all the mental defilement. And if you can remove the mental defilement, you can get freedom. That is enlightenment.

Siddhārtha, now enlightened, realized this and then he talked about this to his first five disciples atSārnath. From his whole experience of meditating for six years and with his realisations, he talked about the Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths are the basic frame of the entire Buddhist Dharma, the entire Buddhism. Buddha says suffering is a fact and everybody in the mundane realms experiences it. The truth of misery is the first factual thing. All sentient beings are experiencing this, and we have to understand this.

And this misery does not come to you without any cause nor is it given to you by any external force. It has its own cause. The cause is the mental defilement and the action which comes from mental defilement. There is thus the cause of misery and that is the second reality, the second truth about the factual things.

And then, the third is, the cause is not a permanent thing. If you put in effort, you can eradicate the cause. The eradication of the cause of misery is the truth of the path, the true path, the path to freedom, and if you practice that path, you can eradicate the entire causes of sufferings and sufferings. And if you practice that path you will attain freedom—the cessation of sufferings and their causes—and that freedom is the fourth noble truth of the cessation.

These four truths are the four basic realities: there is suffering, there is a cause of suffering, the cause of suffering has an antidote, to eradicate it, and if you practice that antidote you eradicate the cause of suffering, you will achieve the freedom from suffering. And that is Nirvana (Transcending Sorrow, the peace) in Buddhist terminology. Or freedom from all bondage is the real peace, serenity—the permanent cessation of misery. These were the things that Siddhārtha taught to his disciples which later on developed in many different philosophical schools and different ways of thinking.

Now the most important thing is, what is the truth of the path through which the cause of suffering can be eradicated? This path consists of threefold trainings. The first is śīla, which means moral conduct. The second is the stability of the mind, stability of a concentrated mind, that is called samādhi, the meditative mind. And the third thing is the wisdom, prajñā.

If you have righteous life, a good moral conduct, you will achieve the ability to develop your mind into a state of complete concentration and attention. And through that you can awake the inner wisdom. Inner wisdom means the perception of the ultimate reality. If your inner wisdom is awakened into the form of the perception of the ultimate reality that eradicates all ignorance and the products of ignorance: attachment and hatred. As such, thereby, you can attain freedom. This is a very preliminary, nutshell introduction, about what the Buddha was talking about, his way to achieve the freedom from suffering. Not only for oneself, but for the entire sentient beings. If you are able to teach this to any sentient being, each one of the sentient being has the potential to awaken the Buddha nature, the potential to achieve enlightenment, and to get freedom from suffering.

Now the philosophy of interdependence and the philosophy of non-existence of independent existence makes it necessary to behave non-violently. What is morality and what is immorality? How to differentiate which is doable and which is not? That division is demarcated on the basis of whether the action is violent or the action is non-violent. Whatever action is violent, which harms others, that is unwholesome, that is a negative action, and whatever action is non-violent, that is wholesome, because if someone does some harm to you then you do not like it. And similarly, if you do some harm to others, then others will not like it. All sentient beings are totally equal in one sense, that no-one looks for or likes any kind of misery, pain or discomfort. And everybody looks for peace, happiness, and comfort. This is not different for any sentient being. A behaviour of a sentient being, particularly the behaviour of human beings shall have to be compassionate, non-violent because each one of us do not want to be harmed or to be caused any discomfort. As such, the basic immorality is to cause any kind of harm to any sentient being. This is how the teachings of non-violence becomes very important in the Buddhist sphere, the Buddhist practice.

A non-violent conduct will give you the ability to increase the power of concentration. And the power of concentration is needed to practice through the meditative methods. Through meditative methods you will achieve the complete ability to concentrate the whole mind on one object and that is the basis of how to awake the inner wisdom, the perception of the ultimate reality. If that perception of the ultimate reality is awakened in your mind, then you are on the path and you eradicate the ignorance and thereby you can achieve liberation. This is the very gross level of information I can sum up.

Now I would like to leave more time for your comments and questions. Because that would be more useful to address your curiosity or your doubts. Otherwise, I am talking many different things, which might become a monologue without addressing your requirements. So, I would welcome from any of you if you have any particular thing I should explain, or if you have any doubts or comments. We can thereby proceed a little bit with a more useful interaction. Okay.

Question: Could you explain in more detail how meditation plays a huge role in Buddhism?

Samdhong Rinpoche: You have some basic knowledge about Buddhist meditation or are you just fresh with it?

Question: I have basic knowledge about meditation.

Samdhong Rinpoche: Do you meditate?

Question: No.

Samdhong Rinpoche: Okay. Are you intending to meditate?

Question: I would like to learn more about it. So maybe in the future I can try.

Samdhong Rinpoche: The word meditation becomes a kind of modern attractive aspiration. It is being used by everyone. Each religious tradition has its own system of meditation and they are quite different from one another. To just accumulate some information may not be very useful and can sometimes be dangerous. So that is why I am asking you if you meditate and whether or not you intend to meditate. Just for accumulation of information it is okay but for anyone who has some serious intention to meditate it is absolutely necessary to learn the full course of meditation. Just a reading from a book or hearing from a talk is sometimes harmful to the mind, so they need to be careful.

In the Buddhist tradition, generally meditation means the practice, or training, of the mind. The mind at this moment is very heavily completely conditioned by many external as well as internal hindrances. Our mind is first of all, not under the control of ourselves and secondly, our mind does no have the capacity to remain attentive and concentrate. If you try to concentrate on one object, it will not stay there. After a few seconds, it goes away. That is the biggest hindrance to achieving stability of life. And similarly, we are not able to attend to one object. We are not able to see the things in-depth. It is just like a birds’-eye-view where we can see many things, but we are not able to go in-depth of the subject. Meditation is to restore the mind’s ability to concentrate, attend, and to have mindfulness and bring to control in a way to use and command our mind according to our own choice or our own wish. That requires a long process of training.

Having said that, generally the way of meditation can be classified into three categories. The first category is the practice of concentration. The practice of concentration means you will have to choose an object of concentration and after choosing that object, you keep your attention on that object. This is like seeing the object through a subject and trying to achieve the stabilisation between the object and the subject and to remain the mind equally on the object. That is one category of meditation.

The second category of meditation is to cultivate the mind. If you are so unhappy, how to remove the unhappiness feeling and to bring happiness to the mind. Or your hatred and anger and how to reduce the anger and to convert it into love and kindness. This kind of practice is not concentrated on the object but to alter, to cultivate, to improve the nature of your mind. This is a second nature of meditation.

And the third nature of meditation is a kind of concentrating, which we call visualisation, in which you are sitting on a meditation and you visualise a kind of beautiful Buddha embodiment, Buddha statue. Or you yourself is visualised as a Buddha or as a deity or the entire universe into a mandala, which is a house of deities. This is just imagining and with that imagination you can develop your mental practice through which you can achieve some improvement of the mind.

The entire Buddhist tradition of meditations will include into anyone of those three different categories.

The next category, from another perspective,comprise of analytical meditation and concentrative meditation. This is also a general gross classification. Analytical meditation is not trying to concentrate on one thing but to analyse a context thing. That means you encourage the process of thought, dialectically probing, reasoning, rationalising and searching, questioning all through your mind. That is analytical.

Concentrative meditation is when you avoid, you stop, all arising of thought process and only one object you have to choose for meditation, choosing for concentration and to put your entire mind on that one object and find some stability; not scattering, rather maintaining mental concentrative stability on that. That is, trying to find concentrative meditation practice.

When you actually go into meditative practice, the sequence is first to find a stability, concentrative meditation. And when you achieve the highest level of the concentrative power, then you switch on to the analytical. The first is called śamatha (calm abiding). śamatha means that you can concentrate at least for about four hours’ duration without any disturbance, without any wavering from concentration, at which point it is preceded by achieving some kind of unexplainable sensation to your body and then thereafter it is considered śamatha, which means the concentrative stability of the mind.

Following that, you move to analytical mind and with that earlier achieved force of the stability, śamatha, you search into the ultimate reality. Your search will be so powerful. That is Vipaśyanā (Special Insight). Śamathaand Vipaśyanā conjoined is the highest level of mind training, or mental development, and if you have achieved these two meditative capacities then you have complete control over your own mind. If you wish to concentrate, then you can concentrate for hours and hours. If you wish to analyse, you can analyse without any distraction for hours and hours. Thereby, you can achieve calm abiding and special insight unified. You can achieve the highest level of wisdom.

For practice of such meditation, you need consistent guidance; learning without any qualified guide, to make changes by oneself, might achieve some kind of improvement in your mind but it will not be, you may not be, in the position to reach to the highest level of meditative results. As such, you first learn how to begin to meditate, what are the hindrances to the meditation and how to remove those hindrances and how to improve the meditative stability. There are some symbolic illustrations of calm abiding meditation by way of analogy to an elephant, elephant trainer and a monkey—I don’t know whether the Tibetan monasteries these days use these type of paintings; on the doorway at Norbulingka this painting was on the wall. The illustration depicts how one goes through the nine stages of śamatha (calm abiding) meditation, pointing out what are the hindrances and how to encounter the hindrances.

For your basic information, if I try to mention very generally how to move through the concentrative meditation, the first is to find out the object of meditation. The object need not be seen for everybody. People used to spend months on ends to find a suitable object for meditation, object of concentration. This object shall have to be visualised: for example, the feature of this cup (here on the table) can be my object of concentration. I will look at the cup through my eyes, and my eye-consciousness has a feature of this cup and it goes to my thought. Then it is not the cup but an image of the cup and the image of the cup becomes clear in my mind. And then I can use it as my object of concentration.

Then you shall have to find out which size is suitable? Which colour is suitable? Many people have different approach, different liking/disliking to the colours and sizes. With guidance and with ones own practice one has to find out what is more suitable as regards the size, the shape, the colour, the brightness—all have to be found out and then finally you will decide on one object. This is the object of mind’s concentration.

Then you will start to concentrate your whole mind on that object and then remain concentrated on that. In the beginning, there is no concentration. You may not lose the image but the mind has many other different features and many other different scatterings which you need to reduce gradually and gradually. And at that stage, the basic hindrances are two: scattering (mental scattering) and sinking (mental sinking). Scattering means sometimes you lose the object of concentration. Sometimes you may not lose the object of concentration but you have many other thought processes which take many parts of your mind out of the concentration. So at that time you have to keep a watcher that is called “mindfulness” these days. Mindfulness is the awareness that “Yes, my mind is scattering, I must bring my mind back to the object.” After some time, after a few months of continued practice, you might achieve some ability to concentrate on the object and at that time the second kind of hindrance comes, the hindrance called sinking. Your mind becomes dull, you are concentrating on the object but your grasp towards the object is very loose, then you become drowsy and you may just sleep over it or your mind is just sinking in that object and the mind loses its clarity and the force. That is a more dangerous hindrance. At that time, again you have to increase the force of the concentration and the clarity of the object. So on and so forth. Through this way you are able to understand the hindrances and you are also able to apply remedies to remove those hindrances and come back to the concentration mode again and over again. This way, after a long period of practice, you will achieve a fully concentrative mind. Makes sense?

Question: Yes, thank you.

Samdhong Rinpoche: Any other comments?

Question: Would you be willing to guide us through that first style of meditation at all today? You mentioned that we need a guide in order to meditate and I was wondering if you could guide us.

Samdhong Rinpoche: There are many meditation masters and meditation centres and particularly in India, there are Vipaśyanāmeditation centres started by the late Acharya Goenka. And also in Dharamsala, there is a centre but it is closed for the winter. Acharya Goenka has developed a new method. That new method is, you can attend a 10-day course in the ancient Buddhist tradition. Meditation means life-long practice that cannot be a periodical practice. But due to the need of the modern people, the Goenka’s teacher in Myanmar, Mr. U Ba Khin, has devised this 10 days, 20 days, 40 days course of meditation and the first is 10 days meditation. What they think is that if you attend the 10 days of the meditation course you will be able to practice by yourself. And approach the guide periodically or occasionally, not to be remaining with a guide. That may be true, I have not gone through this practice but I know many practitioners who are good meditators. So 1, or 2 or 3,or 10 days course will empower you to continue the meditation.

Then also in India there are many different ways and methods of meditation teachers. There are transcendental meditation course and also of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar; another spiritual teacher is also giving a Sudharshan (perfect insight) practice of meditation. I think these are even smaller, not even 10 days. Three to four days training gives you empowered transcendental meditation.

You have to choose one method, one tradition, and then stick to that and before choosing you might do some experiments, a comparative study, which are more suitable to you and then you choose one and then you should attend a proper course with the proper guidance, and once you have a proper course, then you may do it by yourself.

Question: This is another subject. One of the main reasons why we are actually in Dharamsala is about education and literacy. And so, I guess, just people educate themselves, so that they can go on and challenge themselves to do different things and make changes. So what is your take on education? Especially for younger people.

Samdhong Rinpoche: That is another difficult question. Actually education and literacy are different things. Many people might be literate but uneducated. Literacy does not necessarily bring education. And then, particularly the concept of education differs from one system to another system. The system of education in India, as a nation, was designed by someone, a person, a British person, Lord Macaulay. He designed it to indoctrinate Indian people to remain an obedient subject to the British rulers. So until now, even after independence of India for the last 65 years, they have not changed the system and, by and large, the educational system in India is a brainwash or indoctrination. Not trying to awake the inner wisdom but on the contrary, to condition the mind of the student to make the student as useful for the rulers or for the employers.