Four Great Wishes Meditation
March 11, 2003

Teaching by Venerable Domo Geshe Rinpoche

 

I have had a new choegu made recently, and it has a brocade patch sewn to the back. In the early days, the gurus were very richly adorned. We did not wear gold and fancy earrings like the noblemen. The Tibetan ministers and hierarchy who were laypeople all wore elaborate jewelry such as long turquoise earrings and gold. We were not wearing jewelry like the Tibetan government officials did; however, some of our gurus wore brocade. I do not feel so bound by what I did before, so I chose this brocade patch of a Dharma wheel with a conch above it. I always thought, "I'm not going to wear brocade, or anything fancy". I never even wore ulen, the inner shirt. For those of you who are not monastics, this hardly matters, but since it has significance to my life I want to talk about it.

When my Geshe degree was completed I was still very young and the next step was to enter Gyuto Tantric University. I was very conscientious about my appearance so I adopted the Gyuto style of clothing, which was only the color maroon. I did wear the gold and maroon tonga, outer shirt, because that was the monastic dress of Sera- Je. But when I was on my own, I never wore it. I never wore the brocaded fancies underneath. There might have been a special occasion such as my enthronement but even that I cannot remember.

This traditional outer choegu that I am wearing pays special respect to the teachings. I sit on a special seat and wear a special robe to signify that the precious and rare dharma is being given in the traditional respect manner. In my generation of gurus that have just passed away and in this new generation of traditional gurus who are disseminating the dharma now I will not be the one to abandon the traditional methods of showing respect to the teachings. Homage and praise to the tradition.

After receiving the teachings on the four great wishes, you may choose to or I may direct you to do a private retreat on arising one or more of the great wishes. The benefit is that your sadhana will be stronger and you gain enlightenment more quickly. While you are practicing your sadhana only twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, it is not that easy to gain that mind unless you have practiced it intensively. You begin by doing the sadhana in the usual manner to begin. When you come to the first great wish take time on the first of the wishes reviewing the teachings that I gave and reviewing your understanding and then go through the others great wishes as usual.

The sadhana continues in the usual manner with all of your understandings of the various sections as comprehensive as possible. Do your sadhana in this way emphasizing the powerful motivations of the wish, "May all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness" for a few days or a week. The sign of success will be that you will begin to arise in your understanding of the first without stopping to review. Then go on to the rest of the great wishes. Go ahead and work on the second wish, reviewing the teachings and thinking strongly, creating this energy arisal on the second of the great wishes. In that way, you move through doing small retreat, like a mini retreat within your sadhana. You will incrementally arrive in a more powerful motivation.

You can sometimes take a separate meditation session when you have free time such as on a weekend. Do refuge and prostrations as usual and when you arrive at the four great wishes, that is what you spend on your entire meditation session. That is more like what you would do in a retreat. You would also do mantra recitation, but in this case, you would have nearly your entire meditation session in the single wish followed by the simple sadhana recitation and then dedication.

Have you ever taken a sip of cold water and a tooth goes like this? Every fiber of your whole being - not just the tooth, but everywhere down to your toes shouts "OH WOW!" The sensation is immediate and everywhere. Like that, once you have gained that realization, "May all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness," you arise in a gestalt - like poom. You do not need to have specific linear thinking "Now I do this, and this is point A and point B," because you have done all of that work previously in your mediation and now you are arising in that state of mind. Are you with me? So it goes for all of the various points of the practice. Your careful understanding of each and every point comes as an entire Dharma education within your sadhana.

As you are gaining understanding you are recreating yourself as a competent practitioner. From our Lam-rim system, foundational understanding is like constructing a house. The foundation must be very stable, which is your basic understanding of the wish to be free and renunciation of ordinary, small small pleasures in order to gain something larger as well as profound appreciation of wisdom. This is like a stable, smooth and firm foundation. Then you begin to construct the timbers, the uprights, of this structure, and the wood must be carefully selected. The timbers must be straight and clear wood, and they must be placed in and nailed in very carefully. This is like the conviction that you have, placing the four great wishes, for example, upon your foundation. These upright timbers are placed in there with a strength of conviction.

In that way, you begin to arise from your foundation. What you are constructing is an entirely new you. Who invented you?

Student: Me.

Rinpoche: You invented you? Are you sure?

Student: No.

Rinpoche: No, now you are not sure?

Student: I have been asking myself that question lately. Who invented me, anyway?

Rinpoche: Good. Who invented you?

Student: Ordinary circumstances and conditions.

That is where I was going. Who invented you is a conglomeration, like making a Frankenstein, of pieces of this and pieces of that, and training from society that says you must behave in this way, and so on. You are a pastiche, a collage of many, many different efforts by others and by you yourself from your previous actions - not just from this lifetime. So, some of these unexamined opinions and closely held beliefs are in fact erroneous when comparing them to the light, to actual reality. Like holding up a piece of colored glass in front of your own face, your beliefs color your perceptions of reality. And these beliefs are like a virus that has attached itself to your life force. It has no life of its own because a virus is not alive unless it is attached to a living organism. In that way, it begins to grow and take on a life force, but it itself is not alive.

These beliefs are like a virus that has infected you. Mostly, you did it yourself from the mass of activities that you have performed, not just in this lifetime but also in previous lifetimes. I am sure there were marvelous things you accomplished in some previous life or in this life, and yet there were slight errors that were accomplished along with that activity because it is virtually impossible to perform an activity that is 100% pure. Even that virtuous activity was slightly polluted. And which part was polluted?

Student: The motivation?

Rinpoche: You do not know, you do not know which part was polluted.

Student: Ignorance?

Yes, it has to do with the primal ignorance, the fundamental ignorance. When you are analyzing it this way, you have a method for constructing yourself in the way you want to be. All successful people, whether they want to be a movie star, whether they want to be a high financial businessman, whether they want to be a spiritual practitioner, they reconstruct themselves, they reinvent themselves in the mold to accomplish something grand. Now, are your wishes small or are your wishes grand?

I hear about guys in their thirties who skateboard. They are the top skateboarders in the whole world. They are enthusiastic and their whole life is dedicated to skateboarding. I say, such a small benefit from such a huge effort. As marvelous as the Olympics are, if they put that tremendous effort into reconstructing themselves in the spiritual sense, they could probably become enlightened.

So, these various timbers are your personal Dharmic confidence in various basic principles that must be built upon a solid foundation. As the uprights being nailed in place begin to resemble a structure your confidence level rises. For those of you who know construction techniques, it is good to go back and check how firm your first upright is. These must be hammered in, must not loosen, and must remain firm. So keep checking in your arisal of the correct state of minds. Do not think of yourself as a finished work of art. You are sometimes checking what you already know. However, at the beginning of your meditation career and for a very long time you are simply doing the sadhana with as much faith and trust and understanding as you can.

When you are beginning to construct the walls one of the first things you do even before putting on the wallboards is what? You have to refer to the plan that you are following, isn't that right? Whether you are constructing a house or whether you are trying to attain enlightenment you must have a plan. You must have it, and you must have confidence in the plan. The plan is the Holy Dharma, the enlightenment process. But you cannot just say, "I want to be enlightened," and expect it to happen just like that. You have to actually do something about it. And when you begin to lay in the electrical, this is equivalent to the higher practices where your actual energy, the power, is beginning to come alive in a new way, Your energy system, the electrical system of your new practitioner body is not the same as the electrical system of an ordinary being. Further on in the sadhana, we talk about requesting blessing of the energy channels. This is very strongly about the electrical system of the practitioner body, not an ordinary body.

Request inner guru to give you the strength. The teachings, transmissions and techniques have been given. Everything that goes into your foundation and your uprights is new, fresh, and unpolluted materials. The practitioner you are becoming will not be a Frankenstein of unknown qualities. You can refer to the Holy Dharma, to the teachings of Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, the vast commentaries and the teachings you have received here, to verify that indeed this is the correct method. When you have any doubts, or when you are studying, you have a method to verify.

The electrical system, your energy channels, which is a vast network that runs through your entire physical and mental body, is where the practice energies are located. That is why, when you go into the heart center, you have a physical plexus of nerves utilized to a certain extent in the beginning. Then, when this actual electrical system starts to come alive you are plugged in to higher spiritual energies. Bit by bit, your understanding of the sadhana, how to do the motivations, how to do this work very carefully, begins to fill in each room. For example, you enter a room that we might call understanding karma, and that whole room is your understanding about reincarnation, and that whole room is your understanding about the four great wishes. You add understanding like wallboards and plaster going up bit by bit. You might enter your karma room and find it seriously lacking in décor. It is not very attractive. In this way, when you start thinking and studying karma you do not have too many places to go because your understanding is small. So try to gain enthusiasm not by thinking how much you do know, but become enthused to do something about it when you realize how little you know. In that way, each understanding becomes like a handful of plaster added to the wall. None of your rooms are finished.

I tell you here the story of the thirteenth monkey. There are two islands. On one of the islands was a monkey that would take the food down to the ocean and wash it before it was eaten. He did that for quite some time, while other monkeys watched. Eventually another monkey took food to the shore and washed it. Soon the monkeys on this island all washed their food. Now, there was no communication between islands, yet spontaneously one day, a monkey from the other island took food down to the shore and began to wash it. In that way, happenings in your karma room might appear as beautifications in your four great wishes room.

These teachings of Lam Rim are given in systematic order the way I studied in the monastery. "What do I know about karma? What do I know about the four great wishes? What do I know about this kind of motivation?" means that you can think about a particular subject instead of having to think about everything, and get it scrambled. Without a systematic method to study it is easy to scramble it all together. Some people get the strangest reactions from traditional teachings, and that is why I am teaching it in the Lam Rim method.

I have given a number of teachings now and in the past on the subject of four great wishes. You have also studied them in the Lam-rim and other places. You are examining your understanding. Did you understand correctly? You might think "Mmmm, that doesn't match. It doesn't look right." This is the inner guru guided logical process which helps you look at what you understanding is and to gain insight nonverbally. Sometimes it even has a physical effect - you feel the hair rise on the back of your neck and you feel electrified. When that happens authentically, especially when you are working with strong reliance on inner guru, something happens. Your dynamic interaction with inner guru within this hyper aware state has repercussions. The polarity of this room, the polarity of all of the molecules and everything you put in there undergoes change. Something begins to happen and the walls begin to (shakes arms). Suddenly, your electrical system is involved and the walls, every molecule begins to line up correctly. What was foolishness and misinformation disappears. That understanding has now become clarified. In that way, you could say that you have a realization of the meaning and the concept of the great wishes. Revisit that room very soon in order for that to stabilize into your very being or it can fade away.

Continue to beautify that understanding. Your room is very spare, but you could beautify it with continued understanding. This is the difference between having a realization and having authentic deep knowledge and deep understanding. There are those, especially in the Orient, who get this first understanding and say, "I have made it," and allow themselves to stop there. There is a beautification process that goes on with your understanding. This is the treasure within. How marvelous when your room is filled with the Dharma jewels of deep understanding.

Now, something has happened in your karma room while you were in the other room. You do not know how much your understanding of karma was interrelated with your understanding of the wishes. In any case, something has happened. This is the enthusiasm that we as scholar-meditators had. I have often felt the hair rise all over my body, or at the back of my neck or on the top of my head. This has to do with the realignment, and it also has to do with the deep inner process that I have given you, the awakening of your energy channels. It is not enough to have the electrical wiring there - you need power running through it.

This understanding can come as a nonverbal nonlinear knowing or it could come as the logical conclusion such as A + B = C. Usually, it comes as a combination of the two. For those students of mine that I have given deep transmission, your inner guru process gives you a nonverbal knowing. Whether that is translated into outer understanding depends upon whether you have the language outside, and whether that is coming together with the inner process. You will definitely have points where you and your interior process come together as a strong knowing and understanding flows. Until you have the language, it remains as a knowing. Is that ok? 

For some, it is probably easier to attain the enlightenment experience through that process rather than trying to find all of the words. It just depends upon the person. Some people are just not as verbal. Does that mean that they will not attain enlightenment? Not at all! Do not think it is the smartest people who are the ones who are going to attain enlightenment. We tend to think that highly educated people are better at communicating. So are they the ones gaining enlightenment? That is not necessarily so. Are they the ones that have a tendency towards scholarship? Usually. Will they have their practice? Some smarty-pants will collect information and never get to the actual meditative absorption. If you had the choice between being an interior practitioner or an external scholar, which would you prefer? I think you would rather be the inner practitioner. That is what I always thought. 

All of my students from before were inner practitioners, and they were outer practitioners to the extent that they could learn. Being busy busy busy people, and since my English was not 100%, I was worried about giving them misinformation and confusing them so I allowed them to be the inner practitioners. So if anyone is listening who was my student from the old Rinpoche before, please be aware that the consensus among the students here is that, given the choice of being an inner practitioner or an outer scholar, they would choose to be an inner practitioner. However, if the choice comes between being and inner and outer practitioner or an inner practitioner, they will choose to know as much about their process as they can and be conscious practitioners.

In my just previous life I worked very hard in preparing for my work in the West. When I arrived in this form, I was able to retain everything that I already had, and in addition I am able to explain things through the American context. And in addition to that, I have students who are able to understand. I am not talking to the wind, I am talking to students who are able to understand and to put it into practice. If I do not have that, then I am going back to vacation in Jamaica, and I am just going to sit on the beach, and that is all I am going to do, I am not going to talk to anybody.

But in fact, that is not the truth. I have students who are anxious to hear the teachings, and not just anxious to hear because they think, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if I could sit in front of some Rinpoche somewhere and receive teachings," but in fact they are putting them into practice. If the teachings of the Holy Dharma, and the reason why I put on my choega, my ceremonial teaching outer robe, are not met, then there is no use. But in fact, you are all putting them into practice. I have seen careful practice, but I do not want any of you to get proud. 

In the sadhana section on making offerings, do not forget that the teachings you have received and put into practice make a marvelous offering. It also gives you cause to reflect on which teachings you have not put into practice, and do not make an offering of those. But the ones that you have listened to and actually done something about, you have actually begun construction correctly. In that way, this kind of offering allows your realizations in general to be offered internally to your inner guru. This comes as a very powerful dynamic during offering because it also allows at that time for those teachings to be clarified, clarified clarified clarified.

Student: When we are working with our interior and we wish to benefit all sentient beings. We see people doing so many things on all kinds of levels. Sometimes it seems that wishing for their enlightenment and putting aside our own, wishing that you could take on their karma. Is this a practice that helps nurture that wish?

Rinpoche: Ok, there were a number of different issues that were received by me here. What you were describing was an early version of the practice called tong-len, which is taking and giving, which is actually absorbing all of their difficulties, and through interior process transforming it, clarifying it, purifying it into absolute pure clear energy of the enlightened interior and then returning that clarity to them. Can you do that?

Student: I do not think so.

I do not think so either, so do not try yet. What happens is, to the extent that you are able to take away their difficulty, where does that difficulty remain untransmuted? Within you. Now are you arriving at perfect clarity? This is one of the problems with that impure practice.

What you do not want as a practitioner is to be able to absorb the difficulty, the pollution, the interior wealth (not) of ordinary beings who are more than willing to shovel shit upon you. They are happy to do it and they have it in abundance because their factory is pouring out pollution. Since their factory has not yet been shut down, it is not much use to work with the outpouring pollution, because they are continuing to spew it out, and they are not ready to give up. If someone says definitively, "I will make a break with my delusions. I am ready and prepared to divest myself of the pollution factory. I want right now to shut down this pollution factory," and was able to do that, a guru would immediately appear. Their factory would be shut down, and that person would be liberated.

However, I think this is not what you are talking about. You are talking about a compassionate practice, like a tong-len on the ordinary state. I have heard teachings on tong-len never taught in Tibet that left my mouth hanging open in surprise. It had nothing to do with actual tong-len, it was psychological niceties. The great wish does not happen towards individuals. Remember this huge towrope attached to the great ship of the actual great wish. 

Rinpoche: When you are pulling on the rope of your own wish capacity and transferring energy, what are you trying to do in this great wish?

Student: Save all sentient beings?

No. You are trying to awaken the great wish in your own mental continuum. That is what you are trying to do and yet the great wish is so vast that you cannot hold it in your mental continuum. For a very long time you pull on your capacity transferring your mental efforts to the actual huge ship of the actual wish. Physics teaches how energy is transferred, even to what seems to be an immovable object. This vast wish that you are trying to bring into being is so huge that you might wonder how could it possibly fit into the mind. Whatever amount of energy that you are passing through this channel will have some effect. Again I remind you all that his vast wish is not somewhere out there, but is inner. It is not outside, it is inside. You are trying to pull this vast wish into being, and whatever effort you give will not be wasted. Whatever you give sincerely will not be wasted. In that way, the ship slowly comes toward you. You are able to move that ship.

When you contain and hold this vast wish within your continuum that is the energy and power of the bodhicitta motivation. That bodhicitta motivation is what you are trying to awaken within you. You are not trying to save all sentient beings, and the wish does not talk about actually saving sentient beings. Is there anything in there that actually talks about saving sentient beings? No. It says, "May all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness. It remains in the vast wish, and in that way it allows your own mind to experience the events that will lead up to your entry into skillful enlightenment states.