My Spiritual Journey, Dalai Lama [best short books to read .TXT] 📗

My monk’s vows

IN TIBETAN MONASTICISM, there are 253 rules for monks and 364 for nuns. By observing them as scrupulously as possible, I free myself from useless distractions and everyday concerns. Some of these rules have a lot to do with etiquette—stipulating, for instance, how far a monk should walk behind the abbot of his monastery. Others have to do with conduct.

The four root vows correspond to four simple prohibitions: a monk must not kill, steal, or lie about his spiritual realizations, and he must also observe strict chastity. If he breaks one of these four vows, he is no longer a monk.

I am sometimes asked if it’s really desirable to maintain the vow of chastity and if such a vow can be kept. It should be said that this practice does not amount to suppressing sexual desire. On the contrary, it is necessary to accept fully the existence of such desire and to transcend it through the exercise of reason. When you manage to do this, there results a mastery of the mind that is very beneficial. Sexual desire is blind, and that poses a problem. When you say to yourself, I want to have sex with that person, you are expressing a desire that the intelligence does not direct. On the other hand, when you think, I want to eradicate poverty from the world, that is an intellectually controllable desire. What’s more, sexual gratification represents only an ephemeral satisfaction. As the great Indian sage Nagarjuna said: “When you have an itch, you scratch yourself. But not having an itch at all is better than scratching yourself for a long time.”

The daily meditations of a Buddhist monk

ISPEND AT LEAST five and a half hours a day praying, meditating, or studying. I also pray during all the idle moments throughout the day, during meals or traveling. As a Buddhist, I don’t see any difference between religious practice and daily life. Religious practice is a 24/7 occupation. There are also prayers prescribed for every activity, from waking up to bathing, eating, and even sleeping. For tantric practitioners, exercises performed during deep sleep and dreaming are some of the most important, since they prepare us for dying.

My main meditation concerns emptiness and consists in concentrating on interdependence on the subtlest level. Part of this practice involves “deity yoga,” in which I use different mandalas, visualizing myself as a series of deities. (I don’t mean by this beings that exist externally or independently.) As I do this, I focus my mind on a level where it is no longer solicited by the data that sensory awareness transmits. It is not a trance, since I remain fully lucid, but rather an exercise in pure awareness.

It is hard to realize what I mean by this, as hard as it is for a scientist to explain through words what he means by space-time. Neither language nor everyday experience can translate the experience of pure awareness, mastery of which is acquired over many years.

One important aspect of my daily practice concerns the idea of death. In my opinion, there are only two things to do in life on the subject of death. Either you choose to ignore it—in which case you might be lucky enough to chase the idea away for a while—or you confront this prospect, you try to analyze it, and by doing so you try to diminish certain inevitable sufferings it causes. Neither method can fully achieve its goal.

As a Buddhist, I accept death as a normal process of life. I accept it as a reality that will occur for as long as I remain in samsara. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I don’t see the point of worrying about it. I think that dying is a little like leaving behind used old clothing. It is not an end in itself.

As a Buddhist, I also believe that the experience of death is essential. It is at that moment that the most profound and beneficial experiences can manifest. For this reason, there are many great spiritual masters who take leave of earthly existence during meditation. When that occurs, their bodies don’t decompose until long after clinical death.

Living as a bodhisattva

AS FOR MY PERSONAL RELIGIOUS PRACTICE, I try to live my life by following what I call the “bodhisattva ideal.” In Buddhist conception, a bodhisattva is a being who is engaged on the path toward Buddhahood and is completely devoted to helping sentient beings liberate themselves from suffering. The word bodhisattva is easier to understand if the two terms that make it up, bodhi and sattva, are translated separately. Bodhi stands for the wisdom that understands the ultimate nature of reality, and sattva is a person motivated by universal compassion. So the bodhisattva ideal amounts to an aspiration to practice infinite compassion with infinite wisdom.

Spiritual practice in order to become better human beings

DO NOT EXPECT extraordinary things of me, like omnipotent blessings that could transform your life miraculously and instantaneously. You would be wrong to entertain such thoughts—they have nothing to do with reality. I am a simple Buddhist monk who has been practicing since the age of ten and who tries to live according to the Buddha’s teachings.

As a simple monk, I am an interpreter of that sublime master before whom I prostrate with humility. When the Buddha was alive, he looked like an ordinary monk; he traveled on foot, holding his beggar’s bowl. After him, many great practitioners have had that same outer appearance, which might seem contemptible if one didn’t look beyond appearances.

We share in common with the Buddha the same potential for goodness and serenity. But we don’t always know this, and sometimes we manage to destroy both the happiness of others and our own inner peace. We all want to avoid suffering and be happy. We have an intimate experiential knowledge of