Advice for Realizing the Lamrim
Introduction: The Mind Can Be Trained
In this short, and very inspiring, excerpt from "The Heart of the Path: Seeing the Guru As Buddha," Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains why our minds can be trained to achieve the realizations of the path to enlightenment.
It is the basic nature of our mind that we can train it in any way we wish. As Shantideva says, there is nothing that the mind cannot be trained to become.[1] In other words, the mind is a causative phenomenon, dependent on causes and conditions. Our mind is like a child: what it becomes depends on how we guide, or direct, it.
In his thought-training teachings, Geshe Chekawa said,
This mind, which has many faults, has one great quality. What is that? Whichever way you train it, that’s what it becomes.
Compendium of Valid Cognition, a teaching on logic, explains that with a physical activity such as jumping, we need to apply effort every time we jump; however, the more we train our mind in mental phenomena, such as in generating compassion, the less effort we require to generate compassion. After some time, we effortlessly feel compassion. It is similar with seeing the guru as a buddha. At first we need to apply effort to generate devotion through using logical reasoning and quotations; then after some time our mind will effortlessly be in the nature of devotion.
Seeing the guru as a buddha has all to do with mental training; it has all to do with the way we train our mind. What we perceive depends on the way we train our mind. All the things around us are impermanent, changing within every second, but if we don’t put effort into training our mind to see these things as impermanent, the realization of impermanence won’t come. Seeing things as impermanent doesn’t come from the side of the objects—it has to come from our own mind. If we train our mind to be aware of the impermanent nature of life by meditating that it changes within each second because of causes and condition and that death can happen at any moment, we see our life as being very short, and our wrong conception of permanence, our fixed idea that we are going to live for a long time, is stopped during that time. To realize the reality of impermanence we have to put effort into looking at things as impermanent.
In a similar way we can transform our mind from self-cherishing into bodhicitta, which is also a dependent arising. Depending on one set of causes and conditions, our mind is selfish, and depending on another set of causes and conditions, that same mind develops bodhichitta. Because causative phenomena depend upon causes and conditions, they can be changed and developed.
Similarly, all phenomena are empty by nature, but just knowing this fact is not enough for us to realize emptiness. We have to train our mind to recognize the ignorance that believes in true existence and the objects of this ignorance, the truly existent I and truly existent phenomena, which don’t exist. With this knowledge, we then need to put effort into not following this ignorance and into looking at things as they are, which means as dependent arisings, empty of existence from their own side. In this way, the realization of emptiness will come.
It is the same with the tantric practice of seeing everything as pure. If this had to come from the side of the object, it would never happen. Even though we see ourselves and this place as ordinary, through training our mind in tantric practice, as we achieve realizations of the generation stage and especially the completion stage, we will gradually come to see everything as pure; we will see ourselves and other beings as deities and the place as a mandala. This pure appearance doesn’t come from the side of the object; it has to come from our side, from our own mind. We have to put effort into training our mind to look at everything as pure.
If we just wait for the realizations of impermanence, emptiness and pure view to happen, they never will, even though in reality objects are by nature impermanent, empty of existing from their own side and pure. If we don’t put effort into looking at the I as impermanent or as empty, we will never realize its real nature. It has to come from our own side, not from the side of the object. We can’t realize the impermanence and emptiness of the I without meditating on them.