Searching For Happiness Is Poison
Excerpt from a teaching by Drupon Rinpoche on mind training on 27th January 2015, Sekar Retreat Center, Nepal
In your practice you have to pay special attention to whether you are looking for a pleasant and peaceful state. This is our nos.1 enemy! To search for everything to be quiet, peaceful and easy, hoping for happiness now or in the near future, is poison. Always remember this.
It is important to know the reason why searching for happiness is poison for us. As long as we cannot understand this we can’t do anything against it. But when we are clear about this fact and realise that our thoughts are going in this direction we can immediately call on ourselves: I have to abandon these thoughts, they are the cause for my practice not taking off.
The attitude “MY happiness, MY wellbeing” is the view of common sentient beings. This attitude is common to all. Think about it yourselves whether this is true.
Whichever view we hold will bring a corresponding result. Here it is the view of a common sentient being and the result is to be born as a sentient being and have the experience and suffering of a sentient being. As long as we are holding this view, we will never go beyond this. It is simple logic.
Then there are beings with lesser or middling capacities – those who practice with the aim for a better future life or who strive for their own liberation from samsara. They all have the view “my well-being” but it is not the same because they think of the future, of future lives. They can endure hardship and difficulties in this live to ensure that future lives will be better and they will not be born in the lower realms. The wish for happiness is still there but looking toward their future lives they can forsake happiness in this life. If we imagine that there were just 100 sentient beings in all, then only 10-15 maximum would have this outlook on future lives. That is why they are un-common sentient beings. Common sentient beings only consider this life.
Then in the next step there is a fundamental change of the view and that is what we call Mahayana. Now the attitude is totally different from the view of sentient beings we call it the best of views and that is: whatever happens to me is fine as long as others are ok.
We are ready to go to the hell realms, be born as yidaks or cut our own flesh off if it helps somebody. We totally go beyond the view of sentient beings
It is said that shravakas (Hinayana practitioners) cannot become Buddha, because they still have the view of sentient beings. For Mahayana practitioners there is no speck left of that. Since we completely forsake ourselves we enter bodhicitta and bodhicitta is the cause of Buddhahood. If we do not have the view of a sentient being, we will not have the body of a sentient being.
What I explained here is the development of our view according to the Yanas (vehicles) in an everyday language. In the scriptures it is much more detailed and complicated with various categories and subdivisions etc. If it is explained in a simple way like here we can apply it to ourselves. We have heard so much about what the mahayanists do or what the shravakas do, but are we really clear about what that means and why they are doing it? If we understand the way the view develops in our own mind, our practice will not remain a custom, something we do because that's what we've learned, but we can actually apply what was taught to our practice,
So we need to ask ourselves what we want to chose.
The view of sentient beings or the view beyond that of sentient beings? We need to think about this.
But even if we chose the best we still can't just do it. Although we might think "from now on I will think of others and not of myself anymore and then I will attain Buddhahood" We will not be able to apply it. Already by thinking "I will become Buddha" we've chosen the other view because we are thinking of our own benefit.
The only option we have, is to remind ourselves every time we catch ourselves thinking of our own well-being and our own benefit and tell ourselves to stop it and think of others instead. This has to become a habit so that eventually our thoughts will naturally turn towards others and their well-being. If that happens we will have attained the view that makes us different from sentient beings, the view, "whatever happens to me is fine as long as others are ok". And then we receive the title 'Bodhisattva'.
Summarised and transcribed by Ani Yonten