Longchenpa: Thirty Pieces of Sincere Advice (Stanzas 1 & 2)

[Bill Gardner]

From the infinite sky of your pristine awareness, the totality of experience, and the great clouds of your aspirations and prayers
Warm rays of compassion and showers of elixir stream down,
Ripening the three forms in the fields, your students' minds.
I bow to you, my teacher, my protector, supreme among the Three Jewels.

With stronger aspirations I might have joined the practice lineage.
I didn't make the effort and now enter the twilight of a meaningless life.
I intended to follow the ancient masters, but I've given up and I see others like me.
So, I'll outline these thirty pieces of sincere advice to evoke some determination in me.

(Ken's translation)

[John]

I'm agreeing with all these interpretations of "meaningless life". Another one: objects and events in the 'outside' world have meaning because we project it from habit patterns. All those things have no meaning apart from my attributing meaning to them---before we know it. Meditation is about knowing the meaning is coming from me. To be out of my shell is to step into emptiness, where there is no meaning. And this meaninglessness feels so free, and refreshing.

When we read "meaninglessness" today I think our negative understanding comes in part from a kind of pessimistic existentialism and modernity--the negative spin. Buddhism and spiritual practices put the positive spin on it.

[Loren Enders]

"twilight of a meaningless life" Could he be referring here to the object of refutation?

"When the I appears to us, we believe that there is something slightly over and above what is merely labelled by the mind and that this is how the I exists. Then we believe that this is one hundred percent true and let our mind hold on to that. It is this specific, particular ignorance that is the root of all delusion, karma and suffering."
- Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Trying to give meaning to the I when that is ignorance?

[Valerie]

After reading everyone's comments this morning, then reading the whole piece, I was feeling confusion, grasping on to "meaningful = success" "meaningless = failure" (and then the converse!) as my conceptual mind tried to wring some logical sense out of it. I came back to Bill's response. His answer puts the dramatic scene in a context that works. Beyond a definition of success and failure, Longchenpa seems to be taking stock of his life at that moment.

As John wrote, the meaning comes from our side. Meaninglessness can be gut-wrenching or blissful and all the places in between.

[Janet]

This is such a fascinating line of discussion -- thank you all.

I find John's point wonderful:
Meditation is about knowing the meaning is coming from me. To be out of my shell is to step into emptiness, where there is no meaning. And this meaninglessness feels so free, and refreshing.
When we read "meaninglessness" today I think our negative understanding comes in part from a kind of pessimistic existentialism and modernity--the negative spin

Meaninglessness is threatening if we insist that our lives must be able to be summed up, wrapped with a tidy bow. A dear friend's father died yesterday, and she told me his greatest anguish was that he kept trying to identify a meaning to his life -- and he couldn't. Very few people could die in peace if in order do so we must be able to distill a coherent meaning from all the countless experiences -- mundane, magical and horrendous -- which constitute a life.

Insisting on finding a meaning to something as vast and open-ended as a human life crushes the beauty and wonder out it. What's the meaning of a tender hug? Of a child's smile? What's the meaning of sitting with a friend in grief? The meanings we assign to experience can be highly limiting and distorting. It can be freeing to just experience -- to "Stop Making Sense." A dogged insistence that experience must fit into a conceptual category can reinforce habits of ignoring what doesn't fit a certain frame -- or of distorting experience to fit our views.

I find there is be something freeing -- deeply -- about seeing life as meaningless. I assign values and meanings to particular experiences, but that's just how my minds hums along. Life itself isn't tied down by my reductive tendencies.

[Bill Gardner]

I'm looking at the beginning of Longchenpa's The Jewel Ship: A Guide to the Meaning of Pure and Total Presence, The Creative Energy of the Universe. It begins,

Naturally serene, seamless like space,
Embodying wholeness, the unity of ever-fresh awareness and its field,
Unchanging, impartial, not biased toward being or non-being,
I salute the supreme universal creativity.

Not the writing of a depressed man! By the way, this writing is published under the title You Are the Eyes of the World, which works for me, and the translator did in fact take it from the Grateful Dead.

[Bill Gardner]

And thinking of eyes, check out Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes live with Natalie Merchant and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

[Janet]

Beautiful Peter Gabriel song, performed magnificently! And the quotation from The Jewel Ship fits so well here. Thanks, Bill.

[Valerie]

Thanks to everyone for keeping the pot simmering!

Reading Janet's and Bill's, recent posts, it seems fitting that Janet describes the intense search for meaning that is experienced by many at death and around the dying. For me, that is the moment when the ache to find the answer, to know how it all fits together, is the most intense. The thought "we die, and that's it" pushes me into the lower realms: "then what is it for!" An expression of struggle: it must be for something!

Bill's post of this line of Longchempa's "not biased toward being or non-being" is the crux of it, isn't it?

Perhaps my practice has opened me more to the glory of the present and greater equanimity in the face of the big mystery. May it be so for me and for others!

[Roger Noble]

Thank you Janet for your great post. I am enjoying this discussion.

Meaninglessness is threatening if we insist that our lives must be able to be summed up, wrapped with a tidy bow. A dear friend's father died yesterday, and she told me his greatest anguish was that he kept trying to identify a meaning to his life -- and he couldn't. Very few people could die in peace if in order do so we must be able to distill a coherent meaning from all the countless experiences -- mundane, magical and horrendous -- which constitute a life.

For me, meaninglessness is so threatening because of all the words and phrases in my head and uncomfortable sensations in my body that come up when what I am doing or where I am or who I am with seems meaningless. Permission to sit still with all of that and go one more step, to the experience of freedom, is very precious. And yet, I don’t need permission, really, do I?
It is because the conditioning is so old and entrenched that I cling to the old ways of being; also, because it is so non-stop and incessant and instantaneous.
Knowing even for a moment that it is OK to rest in what is without doing the slightest thing to change it or make it “better” or “meaningful” can be…..well, I don’t really know and can’t really say what that is or can be, but I have a sense that it is a direction.

[Janet]

Two segments from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets leapt off the page the other day as I was letting this conversation seep into me. [The first from "Burnt Norton," and the second from "Little Gidding."]
Words fail us, we drop "sense and notion", in the silence of the timeless moment.

"Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. . . ."


"If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always."