Three Principle Aspects to the Path of true Happiness (Lesson Four)
--- Wen Tang, Jan 20th, 2007In our previous classes, we have introduced why we need to study these three principle aspects, how it will help us with the pursuit of our spiritual path and meditation practice. Also we used the theory of “Four Noble Truth” to conclude that Renunciation which means to renounce from the Samsaric pain and suffering in life such as death, disease, aging, dissatisfactions and negative emotions, is the only correct motivation of our practice.
Today, we are starting to discuss the most important issue that many want to know, that is how to cultivate Renunciation and how to establish Renunciation as the motive to our practices? I want to really spend some quality time to discuss this issue with you. A concept usually isn’t very hard to absorb, but the really hard part is how to do it?
We cultivate Renunciation by using what we call Wisdom Insight – this means you use the wisdom you gain from your learning experience and meditation practice to observe and analyze life in you, around you and far from you.
We say through this process to look into the true nature of all phenomena instead of just simply being driven by it and fooled by it.
In Buddhist tradition, we use our Wisdom Insight to observe three main fundamental establishments in the Buddha Dharma:
- The nature of the Samsaric life is pain and suffering – human life, compared with any other life forms in different realms, is exceptionally precious when we set our path in life to pursue the ultimate happiness
- The world is constantly in change, all phenomena are impermanent
- Self-attachment is the source of all human suffering
We will go through details of those three establishments in our next class. Today I want to put emphasize on the word “Wisdom Insight”. We first need to truly understand about “Wisdom Insight” in order for us to apply it into our observations and analysis for life.
We gain our wisdom by learning from knowledge, life experience and meditation. The type of wisdom we gain from meditation cannot be found in our books and library. It is the kind of wisdom that arises from our purified and non-defiled deep conscious and needs to unfold through practicing meditation. Meditation itself will not bring happiness to your life, but by meditating you let your heart become wide open and let the wisdom arise; once you realize this wisdom and implement it into your life, that is what makes the difference. (SO it is very important to uphold and keep practicing meditation all the time in your day-to-day activities. But not to leave it in the meditation room and become a different person once you finish your meditation session)
I believe many of you have heard of many different names of meditation such as: mindfulness, insight, vipassana, zen, calm abiding and samantha and now TWDD and so forth. It is quite confusing, isn’t it? As a matter of the fact, no matter what types of meditation you practice, they all have to go through two steps: tranquility and insight. Now you probably will say, well if that’s the truth, I should just start to practice tranquility meditation and insight meditation. Hold on a second; let me explain this to you.
Please don’t be fooled by the name of any kind of meditation. Tranquility means to get to the peaceful state of mind, to calm down; and insight means once when you are in peace, you can start to observe the nature of all arising in your mind. It is as if you want to see what’s under the water, you have to let the water sit or calm down first; you won’t see the true picture through rippling or choppy water. When we jump into insight stage with a scattered mind, what would you see? A deluded insight! Therefore, even if you get to start from learning vipassana meditation, and insight meditation, without to first reach the peaceful state of mind, you are wasting your time. This is absolutely true! Many people practiced meditation for many years, but do not understand what exactly should be obtained; it only shows that their mind is still in chaos.
Nobody in this world can really get to the insight and vipassana stage of meditation practice without reaching the state of calm abiding – tranquility. No matter what the driving school advertises: we train Ferrari drivers or we train truck drivers, they all have to start from learning how to drive. Otherwise the consequence is to lose or waste our lives.
This is the reason why so many people meditate but so few really neither gain benefit from it in their lives nor improve their quality of life on the qualitative level.
TWDD meditation very intelligently resolved the issue of people having a hard time to reach calm abiding. If you can recall in the first two hours of practice, many of you have never meditated once in your live, were able to not only complete the two hours of quality meditation, but established the connection to the Dharma nature – which is the key factor a typical professional practitioner would have taken years to achieve.
In TWDD meditation, Master Haikong combined three high level yoga techniques: prayoga, three-mystic-yoga and guru yoga together and leading us seamlessly through the progress from tranquility to insight. So I often refer TWDD meditation as pushing you into the driver seat by the hands of the masters from generations of this lineage tradition.
People like to look for the best solution to solve our problems instantly. That’s why even many know how smoking and taking drugs will harm your health in the long run, to chase after the momentarily relief, they still do it and become addicted to it. In Master Haikong’s book he addressed many times that the reason why he broke the traditional Vajrayana rule that is one cannot teach those ultimate yoga techniques to the general public is because he felt people nowadays need something that can make sense to them faster, and see faster results. Now we have gained this great way of meditation, and this is the boat that can ferry us over to the shore of real wisdom insight.
Wisdom insight is using the wisdom we have gained from our meditation practice and Dharma study to analyze and observe all phenomena in our lives. Any insight we gain from our practice, we need to uphold and protect it. We meditate on negative things on a secondly basis, so it is important to overwrite those negativities with the calm and positive wisdom insight. In Buddhist tradition, those phenomena include:
- Understanding that the nature of Samsaric life is pain and suffering – human life, compared with any other life forms in different realms, is exceptionally precious when we set our path to pursue ultimate happiness.
- Our world is in constant change all phenomena are impermanent.
- Self-attachment is the source of all human suffering.
We will go into further discussion about these phenomena in our next class. Now let’s start our today’s meditation practice. Thank you very much.