Milarepa's Song on the Six Perfections: Verse 6 (Wisdom)

For wisdom, nothing to do,
Other than know directly how things are.

This is like staring at a 10,000 meter peak (hint: there aren't any). I do not see a path to this way of knowing.

Still, from time to time I can see how invested I am in seeing things in ways they are not (my stories of exclusion and doom). Maybe "nothing to do" can mean "do nothing": stop feeding the demons, and just deal with what's in front of you.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rob MacLachlan on April 15, 2009 at 1:14pm: Well said Dr. Gardner. What would happen if each of us completely accepted every arising thought and emotion, as in choice-less capitulation? I've noticed how perhaps 80% of my sitting practice boils down to sheer resistance, the underlying 20% so relatively benign. Can resistance be conquered through "surrender"? I think so, but I'm the wrong person to ask. When faced with that closing door called life (ahem, lyrics from the Days of Wine and Roses), my failures have become the best teachers.

Practise seems so much easier when feeling utter "old dog" exhaustion, but perhaps that's just my personal take. Twenty-six years ago I briefly hosted a 1959 Tibetan lama survivor making his rounds throughout the U.S. selling Tibetan hand-woven carpets in support of a Tibetan orphanage in India. One day he looked me square in the eye and without speech, my mind received "don't worry, let the phenomena play out, there's no way out".

I love Ken's advice such as "return and rest", but what is "rest" for a compulsively active mind? You can't tame a wild horse in a corral-- but open the gates to a vast meadow, and he'll naturally settle down. In that sense, isn't the power of meditation magnified when we discover our own internal mantra, our unique personal means to overcome resistance? Personally I remind myself "no way out".; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bill Gardner on April 15, 2009 at 3:10pm: "don't worry, let the phenomena play out, there's no way out"

Wow, what was the emotional tonality of "no way out"? It fits the first dharma of Gampopa well.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Rob MacLachlan on April 16, 2009 at 8:30am: Very gentle, compassionate. We were having a light hearted discussion (the monk's English was excellent) about how hurried and distracted Americans seemed to the monk. I started whining about how busy my life was with little time to practise, when he decided to, ahem, interrupt my thought process.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bill Gardner on April 20, 2009 at 12:42pm: When I think about "no way out", I think of a family member with end-stage bladder cancer who just attended his daughter's wedding -- in a chair, tubes feeding bags coming out of each kidney. That's really no way out. It must feel like you have already left the lived reality of the rest of the species, and entered a transitional stage. The emotional tonality of that is, I think, something like what it would be like to feel your airplane start an unrecoverable dive.

Do I want to see that I am even now on an unrecoverable dive?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Rob MacLachlan on April 20, 2009 at 10:59pm: Good question Bill, such an excellent family analogy. Consider living the rest of your fragile life as if you were indeed in an unrecoverable dive. We're entering the age when health unexpectedly fails--life closes the door--friends lost to unexpected illness--how much time left? So many teachers remark about dying before you die.

His Holiness Karmapa the Sixteenth died at age 48 from stomach cancer. One of his four regents, (who gave me Boddhisattva vows), Jamgon Kongtrul, died in a car accident during his mid-thirties. Trungpa died from cardiac disease, hypertension and alcohol abuse at age 47. The successor to Ken's primary teacher, Bokar Rinpoche, died at 64, not to mention Suzuki Rinpoche's lineal descendent.

The monk I spoke of (who was Penor Rinpoche's English translator and chief administrator) died at age 50 from tuberculosis. It was personally unnerving to speak to such a living (now deceased) person about life and death as a progression or sequence. He saw everything as a continuum--how strange! But at my young naive age I attributed this to Buddhist myth and didn't have the guts to explore further.

His emotional tone was a somber simple statement of Buddhist fact, as if Fall (fruition) is followed by Winter (silence), Spring (potential) and Summer (growth). Good cheer, tempered by incredible presence, humility and deep acceptance. Nothing tragic, but nevertheless, nothing negotiable. No way out.

suzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bill Gardner on April 25, 2009 at 2:07pm: Good cheer, tempered by incredible presence, humility and deep acceptance. Nothing tragic, but nevertheless, nothing negotiable. No way out.

Thanks, Rob. "Nothing special", as they say in Zen.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Leslie on May 2, 2009 at 8:48am: Wisdom develops both quickly and slowly. We have glimpses and even reveries, and then conditioned patterns arise, obscuring our capacity to see directly. We get lost in reactivity. This perfection truly takes eons. It's last in the list because it requires the development of all the others, generosity, honesty, effort, patience and meditative stability.

Breaking through the conditioning is very challenging. It consumes a lot of time and energy and change seems to arise very slowly in our complex world of relating. And yet, there really is no other choice but to do it.; ▶ Reply to This