37 Practices of a Bodhisattva

The last part of Drupon Rinpoche’s summer of Lojong teachings was dedicated to Gyalse Togme’s text The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. It is a text seen to be crucial by all four lineages.

Rinpoche showed us how to bring the text back to our own experience and how to use the verses for our own progress.

Through the initial praise to Chenrezig, we are reminded how important it is at the start to give rise to faith. In terms of our own experience, this means we need to see that appearances are our own mind. In order to do that, we need to investigate what it is that reduces dualistic clinging: loving kindness and compassion.  This is what Chenrezig symbolizes and therefore we start by generating faith in him.

Through the pledge of composition, we are invited to check our own motivation. Did we come to Buddhism out of aspiring to excellence, seeking protection from fear or in search of happiness? It seems that most of us gear our thoughts and activities towards tomorrow’s happiness, which is why ultimate happiness does not arise as it needs renunciation as its cause.

This shows us how imperative it is that we know very clearly where we are at. We need to know the true extent of our not knowing and our non dharmic views. We need to know where we are going wrong and how we can transform.

The seven verses of preliminaries take us through what is needed for becoming a Buddhist. It isn’t Dharma yet. It prepares us for being concerned with future lives. It invites us to think: ”What am I doing?”

We need to go through each of the freedoms and advantages and see whether we’ve got what it takes to practice. Once they are in place, it gives rise to a confidence that will allow us to practice, day and night, in the presence of a genuine Lama.

Gyalse Togme teaches that the preliminary practice for an aspiring Dharma person is to abandon one’s homeland, concern for this life and bad company. Such circumstances stir up the kleshas and we should therefore stay with and take refuge in a genuine lama. We can see for ourselves how attachment and aversion causes us to lose awareness of what needs to be adopted and abandoned. It is the very cause of our future suffering.  

Through the preliminary practices we try and protect ourselves from the three poisons. At the moment they throw us around like a ragged doll! Rinpoche explained how we first need to gain some control through adhering to the Hinayana view of what needs to be adopted and abandoned. Then we naturally proceed to the Mahayana view where kleshas are sometimes enemies, sometimes friends. When these negative emotions are almost conquered, they can be seen to be primordial wisdom. Rinpoche warned us that we might think we can practice Vajrayana but we are totally and instantly at the mercy of our kleshas. We are not worried about the enemy within, we think we can deal with them but they destroy us instantly. We approach Vajrayana like a buffalo unwittingly drinking from a pond full of crocodiles. When overpowered and dragged down, where is our primordial wisdom then!?

Rinpoche stressed again and again how we need to be very careful and clear about what we need in order to progress. We can’t skip our own view. We have to start where we are, work it out and in the meantime do our utmost to abandon the kleshas to the best of our abilities.

Verse eight, nine and ten describe the correct motivations for a lower, middling and greater Dharma person. Through settling the mind within the correct motivation, one actually enters into the Dharma, and thus the path of the three kinds of dharma person. We try to wrap the Dharma around our view to make it look nicer. We need to change our view according to Dharma, make the Dharma view our own. For this to happen, we need to correct our motivation.

The following verses mainly focus on the greater Dharma person, their cultivation of relative and ultimate bodhicitta.
How can we relate to these practices? 

It is important not to see the greater Dharma person in terms of someone else, but as a progression that our own mind can make on the path.
Presently, our view is the eight worldly dharmas. The seven or three points of mind training and the four immeasurables give us the methods and the view that we need to cultivate and take on.

Rinpoche explained how we see appearances to be separate, distinct and true. We have solidified this habit over many lifetimes and that is what needs to be remedied.

How can we correct this view of a separate ‘I’ and ‘you’?

It is through relative bodhicitta that ‘self’ comes to accept ‘other’. As I feel closer to you, the habitual tendencies of duality are being reduced and the understanding of non-duality increases. Right now, we see some people to be our friends, some our enemies. Seeing them all as equal increases happiness and decreases suffering. Through the view of impartiality, we can practice exchanging self and other. Relative bodhicitta is thus being cultivated in meditative equipoise. When this becomes quite stable, its application of taking suffering onto the path will happen naturally.

Again our wrong views are highlighted. Adverse conditions, in Dharma terms, are things that enhance our kleshas, that block our ability to study, contemplate and meditate. We fail to see that. We don’t like criticism. We dislike people speaking ill of us, even if it’s true. We love people speaking of our qualities, even if it’s a lie. We fail to see how helpful criticism is for a Dharma practitioner. It counters pride, the mind grows and matures and can cope with whatever it’s faced with. With praise, the mind becomes childish, immature and unable to forebear.

It shows that our view is in direct contradiction to the view of a greater Dharma person. For such a person, adverse conditions brought onto the pathis the practice, nothing else is needed.

The practice of ultimate bodhicitta in meditative equipoise is training in simplicity free from fixation. Its application is giving up fixation on objects of attachment and aversion as being real.

Meditation is not about feeling nice and peaceful! It is about being free from hope and fear, attachment and aversion. In absolute bodhicitta, subject and object, appearances are not the problem, they are known not to be truly existing. It is the clinging to their existence, to holding them to be true that needs to be abandoned.

As for us, the main words of advice  are that we need to be very clear in our mind about what is to be abandoned (harming others, Hinayana view) and adopted (benefitting others, Mahayana view), and thus we need to practice accordingly. We need to carefully examine our own faults and set about correcting them.