The Double Dorje: Looking at Modern Vajrayana Buddhism.
The Four Revolting Thoughts
Wed, 28 Aug 2024
More often called the "Four Thoughts to Turn the Mind": precious human birth, impermanence, karma and suffering. Something to think about Approximate text at the Blue Sky blog Words or phrases you might want to look up: Gampopa Milarepa Rechungpa Kagyu Vajrayana Tsong Khapa Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen Herbert v. Guenther Jewel Ornament of Liberation Lam Rim In the early weeks of this podcast I included an approximate script, not particularly well edited, on a blog page. For the episode dropped on 4 September entitled “Bad gurus, tosh gurus and good gurus” and for episodes due to be dropped from 18 September onwards, starting with “Jyekundo / Yushu: travelling in East Tibet” there is a transcript file which is much closer to the actual words used. Note that other distribution platforms do not necessarily pass this on, and if you want to read it you may need to listen on podbean. YouTube has been making its own transcript, which was an unholy mess. I think I have now deleted all of these "auto-generated" scripts, but it will not be possible to retrospectively add properly edited transcripts to episodes prior to September 2024.
Hello and a truly warm welcome to whoever has come to sit down in the Double Doge virtual restaurant and to listen to this episode about the Four Revolting Thoughts. This podcast isn't very old, but I have several times had occasion to mention the foundation practices or the preliminary practices, the ngendro, as we say.
When we speak of them, the thing that usually comes to mind is what we call the special preliminaries, including all those prostrations, refuge and bodhicitta prayers, purification mantras, mandala offerings, guru yoga, and so forth. Lots of color, lots to enjoy.
But today, I think it's time to look at the four ordinary or common preliminaries, called that because they are not specific to any particular tradition, preliminaries for Buddhist practice as a whole. And it's only on the basis of these preliminary practices, these common ones, that the special preliminaries make any sense.
So let's today take a quick look at these four, namely the precious human birth, impermanence and death, action and fruit, which is also just called karma, and fourthly, suffering. Let me say right here at the beginning, it would be great if you would pause to like this podcast, to subscribe to it on whatever channel you use, to tell your friends and to generally support it. That would be great.
Thank you in advance. When these four thoughts have sunk in, the student should be ready to genuinely take refuge in the three jewels. That's the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, as you probably already know. The four thoughts are supposed to make us turn away from the cycle of suffering and towards the Dharma, which is why they're called the four thoughts to turn the mind.
They are intended to bring us to a state of revulsion at the endless suffering and bondage in which we find ourselves, which is why I like to call them the four revolting thoughts. The four repulsive thoughts might also be quite a good term. But there is something that is preliminary even to these four very basic level thoughts.
Sometimes this point is just somehow understood, but coming from a non-Buddhist background and culture, as many listeners like myself will be, it might be worth pointing this one out. It's something that was made clear by the very structure of an important text written by Gampopa. I'm referring to the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, or the Dagpog Tajin.
Gampopa flourished around the turn of the 12th Common Era century, and he is widely looked on as the main disciple of Milarepa. It must actually be said that Nevertheless, that his style of teaching and life was largely very different from that of Milarepa.
Milarepa had been a wandering yogi, living on alms and dwelling in caves and such places, while Gampapa represented the monastic side of Tibetan Buddhist life, the institutional side. He founded the Khaju monastic order, a large part of which would become the Karma Khaju of today, as well as other important branches of the Khaju.
Gampapa did only stay with Milarepa for a fairly short time, and there are those who feel that Milarepa's long-term and very close disciple, Rechongpa, is more deserving of the title of Milarepa's chief disciple. Rechungpa, however, did not found any large or wealthy institutions, so power and money have largely given Gampopa that title.
Be that as it may, Gampopa did wonderful work, and one of the fruits of that work was the text I referred to before, the Jewel Ornament. This was one of the first major texts of the class known as the Stages of the Path, or Lamrim.
Some three centuries later Tsongkhapa, who founded the Gelug school, of which the Dalai Lama is the best known representative, if not technically the head, made his own version of the Lamrim genre into a major pillar, a flagship teaching, if you like, of that school.
But to return to Gampapa's version, it's worth giving some thought to the fact that before getting into the four revolting thoughts, he points to the main thing behind all of this, the, in Sanskrit, something like Tathagatagarbha, or in Tibetan, something like Sanjin Yingpo, the Buddha essence. Texts may not necessarily refer to this at an early stage,
because it would be so easy to mistake it for some kind of substance, or perhaps for a little golden Buddha living maybe inside our heart. In other words, to make it into an object of conceptual thought. But without it, the whole path would be pointless.
Any kind of Buddhahood that was achieved, if that's the word, by following all the philosophical, ethical and meditational practices would necessarily be something constructed and would therefore be temporary and illusory. But even if only in a vague way, we know or sense that there is something infinitely wonderful and valuable, even though deeply covered in all our karmic habits and crap,
then it starts to make sense to wonder if our crap can be removed. We begin to get our thinking in order by means of the four revolting thoughts. Before we leave Ganpapa, let me say that anyone who feels like obtaining and studying this great book will first have to choose between the various versions. I would recommend the version translated by Kenpo Konchog Jeltsin,
And I would definitely advise against the version that people of my age had to start on, translated by Herbert Günther, who overlaid his translations with a thick covering of German existential philosophy. Unless you want to spend a year or two studying that stuff in preparation for Günther's works, you may find there are better uses of your time.
Because this whole podcast is not a Teach Yourself Buddhism project, I will leave it up to you, if it is your wish, to do the work of learning and studying these teachings. But not to leave you totally in the dark, let's go for a very quick rundown. Firstly, precious human birth. Before we go any further, this is not the idea that human life is precious.
Well, human life certainly is precious, but only very few human lives are precious human births in the sense that's intended in this teaching. This kind of precious human birth has to have an interest in the Dharma, the capacity for studying and practicing, the resources of time that are needed, the availability of the teachers and of the teaching.
It has to happen in a period of history when the Dharma is available to be studied, and so on and so forth. It is indeed something very rare. Secondly, impermanence, and in particular death. We need to let it sink in that absolutely everything is impermanent, and that absolutely everyone dies. The time, well, of course, that's uncertain, but the fact is entirely certain.
We're also advised to think about changes that occur in every moment, cycles of day and night, the seasons, historical epochs, geological time and cosmic time. The opportunity of this precious human birth is a very, very brief flash in the pan. Thirdly, action and fruit or karma. Here we learn about the 10 virtuous deeds and their opposites.
The point that I would really want to stress here is that while karma is said to be infallible, this is absolutely not the same as the idea that everything we experience is a result of karma. That idea is logically nonsensical And, on top of that, it's insidious. People who adopt that, really, if I may say so, foolish view, find in it an excuse for victim-blaming.
Oh, that person's disabled, it must be their fault because of things they did in a previous life, and so on and so on. Picking that bad idea apart might be a subject for another episode. Fourthly, the fourth revolting thought is suffering. Suffering is everywhere.
Even in paradise, or the most wonderful circumstances we could possibly imagine at the height of wealth and fame, there is suffering if only because it will pass and deep down we know it. The image of the six worlds, that's to say the gods, the semi-gods, the human beings, animals, the hungry ghosts and the hell realms, is often used to illustrate this way in which suffering is everywhere.
You can find extensive descriptions of this in other sources. Just like in medieval Christendom, where there was a certain tendency to explore with gleeful horror the torments imagined in the Christian hell, some Buddhists have been tempted to elaborate on the various forms of suffering to a possibly disturbing degree. So you can look that up.
The main teaching to be taken is that the magic state in which everything finally is perfect forever and ever after simply doesn't exist. This brings us back to the Buddha essence. Its presence means that there is in fact a way out, so although we do need to be earnest, we don't have to be depressed.
For the reasons I've mentioned often enough now, on the one hand that I am not your teacher, and on the other hand that there are plenty of places to find material on this, such as the books I mentioned above, or of course these days simply by internet searching.
Memorising all the details may perhaps not be necessary, but I think it is well worth at least getting familiar with these things if you want to set out properly on the path. You may even want to memorise a set of such things, because the teachings of the Four Revolting Thoughts can, to a large extent, be reduced to a few lists, covering, for example, the Eighteen Factors,
of the precious human birth, the various signs of impermanence, the ten skilful and unskilful acts, the three types of suffering in the six worlds. In a list that I once drew up, and that I in fact still refer to from time to time, there are 40 points. Learning something of that size does, of course, take a little bit of effort, but it's not ridiculous. Anyone pretty well can do it.
And of course, even if you don't memorize them, it's more than a little bit valuable to at least be familiar with them. Now that's the hard bit. It's actually one of the hard bits of the whole path. We really have to rub our noses in it, get down to the dirty ground. And once we're really totally clear about what a shitheap, if I may say so, pardon my language, Samsara is...
we can start to relax and enjoy it for what it is, but not for a fairy tale about what it isn't. So there's the message for today. Just a quick reminder to like, to share or subscribe and be revolted.