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Liberation occurs through recognizing just by that which you are bound.

—THE NINTH GYALWA KARMAPA,
Mahamudra: The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, translated by Elizabeth M. Callahan

WHEN I'M TEACHING in front of large groups, I often confront a rather embarrassing problem. My throat gets dry as I talk, so I tend to drain my glass of water pretty early on in the teaching session. Invariably, people notice that my glass is empty and they very kindly refill it. As I continue to speak, my throat gets dry, I drink the entire glass of water, and sooner or later, someone refills my glass again. I go on talking or answering questions, and again someone refills my glass.

After some time-usually before the teaching period is scheduled to end-I become aware of a rather uncomfortable feeling, and a thought crosses my mind.- Oh dear, there's an hour left for this session and I have to pee.

I talk a little bit more, answer some questions, and glance at my watch.

Now there's forty-five minutes left and I really have to pee...

Half an hour passes and the urge to pee becomes intense...

Someone raises his hand and asks, “What is the difference between pure awareness and conditioned awareness?”

The question goes to the heart of the Buddha's teaching about the Third Noble Truth. Often translated as “The Truth of Cessation,” this third insight into the nature of experience tells us that the various forms of suffering we experience can be brought to an end.

But now I REALLY, REALLY have to pee.

So I tell him, “This is a great secret, which I'll tell you after a short break.”

With all the dignity I can summon, I get up off the chair where I've been sitting, slowly pass through rows of people bowing, and finally get to a bathroom.

Now, peeing may not be anyone's idea of an enlightening experience, but I can tell you that once I empty my bladder, I recognize that the deep sense of relief I feel in that moment is a good analogy for the Third Noble Truth: that relief was with me all the time as what you might call a basic condition. I just didn't recognize it because it was temporarily obscured by all that water. But afterwards, I was able to recognize it and appreciate it.

The Buddha referred to this dilemma with a somewhat more dignified analogy in which he compared this basic nature to the sun. Though it's always shining, the sun is often obscured by clouds. Yet we can only really see the clouds because the sun is illuminating them. In the same way, our basic nature is always present. It is, in fact, what allows us to discern even those things that obscure it: an insight that may be best understood by returning to the question raised just before I left for the bathroom.

TWO TYPES OF AWARENESS

The essence of every thought that arises is pristine awareness.

—Pengar Jamphel Sangpo, Short Invocation of Vajradhara, translated by Maria Montenegro

Actually there's no great secret to understanding the difference between pure awareness and conditioned awareness. They're both awareness, which might be roughly defined as a capacity to recognize, register, and in a sense “catalogue” every moment of experience.

Pure awareness is like a ball of clear crystal—colorless in itself but capable of reflecting anything: your face, other people, walls, furniture. If you moved it around a little, maybe you'd see different parts of the room and the size, shape, or position of the furniture might change. If you took it outside, you could see trees, birds, flowers—even the sky! What appears, though, are only reflections. They don't really exist inside the ball, nor do they alter its essence in any way.

Now, suppose the crystal ball were wrapped in a piece of colored silk. Everything you saw reflected in it—whether you moved it around, carried it to different rooms, or took it outside—would be shaded to some degree by the color of the silk. That's a fairly accurate description of conditioned awareness: a perspective colored by ignorance, desire, aversion, and the host of other obscurations born from dzinpa. Yet these colored reflections are simply reflections. They don't alter the nature of that which reflects them. The crystal ball is essentially colorless.

Similarly, pure awareness in itself is always clear, capable of reflecting anything, even misconceptions about itself as limited or conditioned. Just as the sun illuminates the clouds that obscure it, pure awareness enables us to experience natural suffering and the relentless drama of self-created suffering: me versus you, mine versus yours, this feeling versus that feeling, good versus bad, pleasant versus unpleasant, and so on.

The Truth of Cessation is often described as a final release from fixation, craving, or “thirst.” However, while the term “cessation” seems to imply something different or better than our present experience, it is actually a matter of acknowledging the potential already inherent within us.

Cessation—or relief from dukkha—is possible because awareness is fundamentally clear and unconditioned. Fear, shame, guilt, greed, competiveness, and so on, are simply veils, perspectives inherited and reinforced by our cultures, our families, and personal experience. Suffering recedes, according to the Third Noble Truth, to the extent that we let go of the whole framework of grasping.

We accomplish this not by suppressing our desires, our aversions, our fixations, or trying to “think differently,” but rather by turning our awareness inward, examining the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that trouble us, and beginning to notice them— and perhaps even appreciate them—as expressions of awareness itself.

Simply put, the cause of the various diseases we experience is the cure. The mind that grasps is the mind that sets us free.

BUDDHA NATURE

When you are living in darkness, why don't you look for the light?

—FW Dhammapada,
translated by Eknath Easwaran

In order to explain this more clearly I have to cheat a little bit, bringing up a subject that the Buddha never explicitly mentioned in his teachings of the First Turning of The Wheel. But as a number of my teachers have admitted, this subject is implied in the first and second turnings.

It isn't as if he was holding back on some great revelation that would only be passed on to the best and brightest of his students. Rather, like a responsible teacher, he focused first of all on teaching basic principles before moving on to more advanced subjects. Ask any elementary school teacher about the practicality of teaching calculus to children who haven't yet mastered the basics of addition, subtraction, division, or multiplication.

The subject is Buddha nature—which doesn't refer to the behavior or attitude of someone who walks around in colored robes, begging for food! Buddha is a Sanskrit term that might be roughly translated as “one who is awake.” As a formal title, it usually refers to Siddhartha Gautama, the young man who achieved enlightenment twenty-five hundred years ago in Bodhgaya.

Buddha nature, however, is not a formal title. It's not a characteristic exclusive to the historical Buddha or to Buddhist practitioners. It's not something created or imagined. It's the heart or essence inherent in all living beings: an unlimited potential to do, see, hear, or experience anything. Because of buddha nature we can learn, we can grow, we can change. We can become Buddhas in our own right.

Buddha nature can't be described in terms of relative concepts. It has to be experienced directly, and direct experience is impossible to define in words. Imagine looking at a place so vast that it surpasses our ability to describe it—the Grand Canyon, for example. You could say that it's big, that the stone walls on either side are sort of red, and that the air is dry and smells faintly like cedar. But no matter how well you describe it, your description can't really encompass the experience of being in the presence of something so vast. Or you could try describing the view from the observatory of the Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, hailed as one of the “seven wonders of the modern world.” You could talk about the panorama, the way the cars and people below look like ants, or your own breathlessness at standing so high above the ground. But it still wouldn't communicate the depth and breadth of your experience.

Though buddha nature defies description, the Buddha did provide some clues in the way of signposts or maps that can help direct us toward that supremely inexpressible experience. One of the ways in which he described it was in terms of three qualities: boundless wisdom, which is the capacity to know anything and everything—past, present, and future; infinite capability, which consists of an unlimited power to raise ourselves and other beings from any condition of suffering; and immeasurable loving-kindness and compassion-a limitless sense of relatedness to all creatures, an open-heartedness toward others that serves as a motivation to create the conditions that enable all beings to flourish.

Undoubtedly there are many people who fervently believe in the Buddha's description and the possibility that, through study and practice, they can realize a direct experience of unlimited wisdom, capability, and compassion. There are probably many others who think it's just a bunch of nonsense.

Oddly enough, in many of the sutras, the Buddha seems to have enjoyed engaging in conversation with the people who doubted what he had to say. He was, after all, only one of many teachers traveling across India in the fourth century B.C.E.—a situation similar to the one in which we find ourselves at present, in which radio, TV channels, and the Internet are flooded by teachers and teachings of various persuasions. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, the Buddha didn't try to convince people that the method through which he found release from suffering was the only true method. A common theme running through many of the sutras could be summarized in modern terms as, “This is just what I did and this is what I recognized. Don't believe anything I say because I say so. Try it out for yourselves.”

He didn't actively discourage people from considering what he'd learned and how he learned it. Rather, in his teachings on buddha nature, he presented his listeners with a kind of thought experiment, inviting them to discover within their own experience the ways in which aspects of buddha nature emerge from time to time in our daily lives. He presented this experiment in terms of an analogy of a house in which a lamp has been lit and the shades or shutters have been drawn. The house represents the seemingly how tightly solid perspective of physical, mental, and emotional conditioning. The lamp represents our buddha nature. No matter the shades and shutters are drawn, inevitably a bit of the light from inside the house shines through.

Inside, the light from the lamp provides the clarity to distinguish between, say, a chair, a bed, or a carpet. As it peeks through the shades or shutters we may experience the light of wisdom sometimes as intuition, what some people describe as a “gut level" feeling about a person, situation, or event.

Loving-kindness and compassion shine through the shutters in those moments when we spontaneously give aid or comfort to someone, not out of self-interest or thinking we might get something in return, but just because it seems the right thing to do. It may be something as simple as offering people a shoulder to cry on when they're in pain or helping someone cross the street, or it may involve a longer-term commitment, like sitting by the bedside of someone ill or dying. We've all heard, too, of extreme instances in which someone, without even thinking about the risk to his or her own life, jumps into a river to save a stranger who is drowning.

Capability often manifests in the way in which we survive difficult events. For example, a long-time Buddhist practitioner I met recently had invested heavily in the stock market back in the 1990s, and when the market fell later in the decade, he lost everything. Many of his friends and partners had also lost a great deal of money, and some of them went a little crazy. Some lost confidence in themselves and their ability to make decisions; some fell into deep depression; others, like the people who lost money during the stock market crash of 1929, jumped out of windows. But he didn't lose his mind or his confidence, or fall into depression. Slowly, he began investing again and built up a new, solid financial base.

Seeing his apparent calm in the face of such a terrific downturn of events, a number of his friends and associates asked him how he was able to retain his equanimity. “Well,” he replied, “I got all this money from the stock market, then it went back to the stock market, and now it’s coming back. Conditions change, but I'm still here. I can make decisions. So maybe I was living in a big house one year and sleeping on a friend's couch the next. That doesn't change the fact that I can choose how to think about myself and all the stuff happening around me. I consider myself very fortunate, in fact. Some people aren't capable of choosing and some people don't recognize that they can choose, I guess I'm lucky because I fall into the category of people who are able to recognize their capacity for choice.”

I've heard similar remarks from people who are coping with chronic illness, either in themselves, their parents, their children, other family members, or friends. One man I met recently in North America, for instance, spoke at length about maintaining his job and his relationship with his wife and children while continuing to visit his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. “Of course it's hard to balance all these things,” he said. “But it's what I do. I don't see any other way.”

Such a simple statement, but how refreshing! Though he'd never attended a Buddhist teaching before, had never studied the literature, and didn't necessarily identify himself as Buddhist, his description of his life and the way he approached it represented a spontaneous expression of all three aspects of buddha nature, the wisdom to see the depth and breadth of his situation, the capability to choose how to interpret and act on what he saw, and the spontaneous attitude of loving-kindness and compassion.

As I listened to him, it occurred to me that these three characteristics of buddha nature can be summed up in a single word, courage—specifically the courage to be, just as we are, right here, right now, with all our doubts and uncertainties. Facing experience directly opens us to the possibility of recognizing that whatever we experience—love, loneliness, hate, jealousy, joy, greed, grief, and so on is, in essence, an expression of the fundamentally unlimited potential of our buddha nature.

This principle is implied in the “positive prognosis” of the Third Noble Truth. Whatever discomfort we feel—subtle, intense, or somewhere in between—subsides to the degree that we cut through our fixation upon a very limited, conditioned, and conditional view of ourselves and begin to identify with the capability to experience anything at all. Eventually, it's possible to come to rest in buddha nature itself—the way, for instance, a bird might rest in coming home to its nest.

In that moment, suffering ends. There is nothing to fear, nothing to resist. Not even death can trouble you.

This point was driven home very clearly to me as I sat with my father during the final days and hours of his life. I was twenty-one years old at the time, and my father was seventy-six. He was a great meditator who had spent his entire life deepening his recognition of the immensity of the mind and the transience of perception as he'd been taught, and passing his understanding along to thousands of students from around the world. Scores of people came to visit him during the final days of his life: monks, nuns, family members, other teachers, former students, and ordinary people from surrounding villages. Sometimes he would sit up to meet them and at other times he would have to lie down. To every visitor he offered a gentle smile and a softly murmured “thank you.” There was no trace of fear in his features, no evidence of struggle in his thin frame. The only sign that he was undergoing an extraordinary transition was the expression of mild curiosity that sometimes crossed his face, and of course, the quiet finality with which he thanked each and every visitor, as if to say that they had been his teachers rather than the other way around.

In the final few moments of his life, he felt an urge to urinate. Because the bathroom was far down the hall, there was a portable sort of toilet in his room, and as someone brought it toward him, he began to stand up from his bed. “Maybe you'd better just stay lying down,'' one of my brothers suggested. “We can put this thing under you.”

“No. no", he laughed, waving our concerns aside.

When he'd finished, he sat back on his bed in meditation posture — legs crossed, spine straight, hands resting comfortably in his lap, and eyes focused straight ahead. Very gradually, his breathing slowed and finally stopped. We didn't even realize that he'd died for several moments. He remained in that meditative posture, which in Tibetan is known as tuk dam (which could very roughly be understood as “death meditation”—a process of consciously experiencing the separation of consciousness from the physical body) for three days before his body began to slump.

During that period, his body wasn't stiff with rigor mortis, and his complexion remained bright pink, and even slightly radiant. I can well understand that these are conditions that many people in the modern world would find difficult to believe. I'd find them hard to believe if I hadn't witnessed them myself—and I was raised in a tradition in which it is considered possible that a person can experience death with full consciousness and equanimity. But the signs were there. My father died with full awareness, looking calmly at what most people consider the most dire form of suffering as a luminous expression of his buddha nature.

BUDDHA MOMENTS

Every sentient being has the potential to improve and become enlightened.

—The Twelfth Tai Situpa. Awakening the Sleeping Buddha, edited by Lea Terhune

Most of us don't recognize our buddha nature until its pointed out to us.
Not long ago, I heard a story about a man in India who was given an expensive watch. Having no experience of what a watch is or does, he thought of it as nothing more than a pretty bracelet. He had no idea that it was an instrument that told time. Consequently, he was always late for work, was ultimately fired from his job, and lost his home. Although he made appointments with various prospective employers, he was either too late or too early for the interview. Finally, out of frustration, he asked a man on the street, “Can you tell me what time it is?”

The man looked at him in surprise. “You're wearing a watch,” he said. “That will tell you what time it is.”

“A watch?” the fellow replied. “What's that?” “You're kidding, right?” the stranger said, pointing to the instrument the guy was wearing on his wrist.

“No,” the man answered. “This thing is a nice piece of jewelry. It was given to me by a friend. What does it have to do with knowing what time it is?”

So, exhibiting a good deal of patience, the stranger on the street taught him to read the hour and minute hands on his watch, and even the swiftly moving hand that swept over seconds.

“I can't believe this!” the fellow exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that I've always had something that would tell me the time and I never even knew it?”

“Don't blame me,” the stranger said. “Whoever gave it to you should have explained what it is.”

After a moment, the man replied in a quiet, embarrassed voice, “Well, maybe he didn't know what it was, either.”

“Be that as it may,” the stranger replied, “he gave you a gift that you didn't know how to use. Now, at least, you know how to use it.” And with that he disappeared into the swirl of pedestrians, beggars, cars, and rickshaws that crowd the busy streets of India.

Who knows whether this fellow was a buddha or just a random stranger encountered by chance, who happened to know the difference between a watch and a bracelet. In any case, the man was able to make use of his watch, show up on time for interviews, eventually get a good job, and reestablish his life. The lesson I learned from this story is that we're endowed with capacities that we frequently fail to recognize until they're pointed out to us. These reminders are what I like to call “buddha moments”— opportunities to wake up, so to speak, from the dream of conditioned awareness.

I experienced one such buddha moment during my first teaching tour in California, when people urged me to swim as a form of exercise. I didn't want to go, but my hosts had already set up an appointment at a local club, which was outfitted with an Olympic-sized pool. I jumped in and was immediately a success—at swimming underwater: which is to say, I sank like a stone. I kept trying to push myself along underwater, but I couldn't last for more than a minute. My arms and legs got tired and I couldn't hold my breath. “Okay”, I figured, “you're being too tense, trying to accomplish something.” So I let my muscle relax completely, floated up to the surface, and again was successful - at sinking.

Then I remembered something: As a child used to swim in a small pond near my home. It was not a very deep pond, and my swimming style wasn't exactly what you'd call elegant-just flapping along dog paddling.

The people who'd brought me to the club were amazed. "One minute you were sinking,” they said, “and the next minute you were swimming. How did you do that?”

“I remembered,” I answered. “For a few moments I was confused by the size of the pool. Then I remembered that I could swim.”

This experience is similar—perhaps on a small scale—to the recollection of the power and potential of buddha nature. Deep within us lies the capacity for boundless wisdom, capability, and compassion. We tend not to remember our ability until we're thrust into sink-or-swim situations.

SEEING THE GOOD

I rejoice with delight at the good done by all beings.

—Santideva, The Bodhicaryavatara,
translated by Kate Crosby and Andre Skilton

In talking with many psychologists during my travels I learned of an interesting quirk of human nature: If we have ten qualities-nine of them positive and one of them negative-most people will tend to focus almost exclusively on the one negative quality and forget about the positive ones.

I saw this for myself not long ago when I received a late-night phone call from a friend of mine who is a rather popular performer. She was in Europe at the time and had just returned to her hotel room after appearing before thousands of enthusiastic fans. Imagine appearing in front of that many people and hearing them shout how much they love you and how wonderful you are!

After the concert, she returned to her hotel room to work on her laptop. Unfortunately, the battery was dead and she didn't have the proper adapter to plug in and recharge her computer. She called the front desk for assistance and they promised to come up right away. Minutes passed, no one showed up, and she started to get rather upset. All sorts of feelings emerged: anger, resentment, and loneliness over not being able to connect with the outside world through e-mail or the Internet.

Finally, she called me—I was teaching in Paris at the time—and asked, “What can I do? Just appearing on a sidewalk makes thousands of people happy, but alone in my hotel room I'm miserable. This stupid little problem with the computer has ruined my night.”

We talked for a bit about accepting impermanence and the challenges of fixating on relative reality. I remember telling her, 'You tried your best to do something about your computer, but if the problem isn't solved as quickly as you want it to be, you can use the frustration and anger you feel as a focus of meditation. Don't run from those feelings. Don't try to shove them away. Look at them directly. If you do that, you might be able to see the awareness that enables you to be conscious of these feelings. If you can even touch that awareness, you'll start to see the problem you're experiencing now in the context of all the good qualities you have: your talent, for example, and the capability of giving joy to thousands of people. There is so much good in you and so much that is good about your life. Why let one difficult situation blind you to all the positive things you bring to the world?”

We talked a bit longer until she calmed down and realized that one unfortunate incident didn't really have to ruin her night, and it didn't undermine her capacity to bring joy to other people.

“I feel better just talking to you,” she said. “Thanks for reminding me that one little problem won't ruin my life.”

After I hung up the phone, I thought a bit about our conversation. Moments later, I realized what I had wanted to say, but hadn't had the time to formulate as a complete idea. Wisdom, capability, loving-kindness, and compassion are what we're born with. Frustration, jealousy, guilt, shame, anxiety, greed, competitiveness, and so on, are experiences we learn, often through the influences of our culture, our families, and our friends, and reinforced by personal experience.

The “positive prognosis'' of the Third Noble Truth is that the limited or limiting ideas we hold about ourselves, others, and every other experience can be unlearned.

STONES

Oneself is one's own refuge; what other refuge can there he?

— The Dhammapada,
translated by Ven. Dr. Rewata Dhamma

In order to offer people of various temperaments and backgrounds the opportunity to taste the immense possibilities of their buddha nature, the Buddha taught a number of different practices. One of these involves taking a kind of “inventory” of our qualities and characteristics. In the Tibetan tradition we conduct this inventory by making piles of colored stones. Black stones represent our negative qualities and white stones represent our positive qualities.

At first, perhaps, the pile of black stones may be bigger than the pile of white ones. But then we take a moment to consider, “Well, I said something really nice to someone today, which made that person smile.” So we add a white stone to our pile. “I said or did something nice to someone I don't like or with whom I've some difficulties.'' Exercising loving-kindness and compassion is certainly worth a couple of white stones. “I have a mind capable of making choices.” That's worth at least a few more white stones. “I'm using this mind to recognize its capacity to make choices.” Add at least another five white stones to the pile. “I want to use my mind to recognize the capability of my mind to make choices.” Ten white stones, at least. “My mind is free to choose a means of experiencing peace and happiness that offers others the same experience of peace and happiness.” A landslide of white stones!

You don't have to use stones to carry out this exercise; they're just easy to find in rural parts of Tibet. You can use slips of paper, coins, shells, or whatever comes in handy. You can even use a sheet of paper to make a list of your qualities and characteristics. The point of the inventory is to enable yourself to recognize your positive characteristics, which you exercise sometimes without even thinking.

This type of personal examination is a simple and quite effective means of connecting with your essential nature. It's especially useful during those times when under the sway of a strong emotion : anger, jealousy, loneliness, or fear. In fact, if we begin “counting stones” during moments of strong emotion or while facing a difficult situation, then that emotion or situation in itself becomes a powerful incentive to actively practice recognizing our boundless capacities.

The circumstances and conditions that define material life are always relative, always changing. Today we might feel healthy and whole; tomorrow we may have the flu. Today we might be getting along with everybody; tomorrow we might have an argument. At this moment, we may enjoy the leisure and opportunity to read a book; a moment from now, we may find ourselves in the midst of dealing with some sort of personal or professional difficulty.

With practice, any experience can become an opportunity to discover our essential wisdom, capability, loving-kindness, and compassion. Doing so, however, involves cutting through certain entrenched beliefs and attitudes—”the treatment plan” the Buddha prescribed for the relief from suffering. This plan is laid out in the Fourth Noble Truth, often referred to as the “Truth of the Path.”

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