The Message of Dhardo Rimpoche — part 2
‘Cherish the doctrine.’ The doctrine is of course the Dharma, or in Tibetan chur. And the word Dharma, chur, has two principal meanings, as many of you know. In the first place, very briefly, it means law, principle, truth, reality — as in the term dharmakaya, the third and highest of the Buddha’s three bodies, as they’re usually called in English. And secondly the word Dharma means the teaching or the doctrine as enunciated. In other words, it means the teaching of the Buddha. And this teaching or doctrine represents the systematic expression in terms of concepts and symbols of the Buddha’s experience, his Transcendental experience of the ultimate reality of things, his vision of things as they really are. And this expression, this communication as we may call it, is for our benefit, it’s intended to help us realize what he, the Buddha, realized before us. It’s — we may say — a raft, helping us across the stormy waters of samsara to the other shore.
Now obviously there’s no question of our cherishing the Dharma in the first sense, cherishing it in the sense of law, principle, truth, reality. The Dharma in this sense doesn’t need to be cherished or protected by us. We can only worship it. We can only take refuge in it. It’s the Dharma in the second sense that Rimpoche is asking us to cherish — that is to say, the Dharma in the sense of the teaching or doctrine of the Buddha. How then do we, how then are we to cherish the doctrine?
We cherish it, we may say, in three ways. In the first place we cherish it by studying it, by studying the sutras and shastras. The sutras contain the word of the Buddha, or what tradition regards as such. The shastras contain the explanations of the word of the Buddha given by Enlightened masters who lived at a later date. The sutras and the shastras constitute a very vast literature, and we don’t of course have to study the whole of this literature. In any case, it hasn’t all been translated into English. But we should have a thorough knowledge of a reasonable number of key texts. These texts may of course be of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese or Tibetan origin, because in the FWBO we seek to draw freely from the riches of the entire Buddhist tradition. We do not seek, we do not wish to confine ourselves exclusively to any one tradition, however ancient.
If we don’t have a knowledge of at least a few key texts — sutras or shastras — we shall really be unable to understand the Buddha’s teaching. Not only that. In the absence of such knowledge our thinking about Buddhism, our reflection on Buddhism, will be muddled and confused, and we may even in extreme cases fall victim to wrong views. And falling victim to wrong views is something that in the Buddhist tradition, in the Buddha’s teaching, is taken very seriously indeed. When we speak of studying the sutras and shastras, it doesn’t mean just reading them. It means also reflecting on them, turning them over and over in our minds. It means also discussing them with our teachers and with our fellow students.
In the second place, we cherish the doctrine by practising it. Of course, we can practise it if we have at least some knowledge of it. We practise the doctrine by going for refuge, and by trying continually to deepen our going for refuge, our going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. We practise the doctrine by observing the precepts — five, or ten, or more. We practise it by engaging in right livelihood, something about which we hear so much from time to time. We practise it by cultivating spiritual friendship, of the supreme importance of which we are sufficiently apprised. We practise it by meditating and performing puja. We practise it by living in a spiritual community. We practise it by helping to run a Buddhist centre. We practise it by going on solitary retreat. In all these, and a hundred other ways, we practise, we can practise, we should practise the Dharma. And to the extent that we practise the Dharma, we cherish it, we help to keep it alive.
Of course, we know very well it is not easy to practise the Dharma. In order to practise the Dharma we have to go against the stream. We have to go ultimately against the whole weight, the whole superincumbent weight, of our mundane conditioning. But if we don’t practise the Dharma, it will not be cherished. And if it isn’t cherished, it won’t really live, and we shall have in its place only ideas, only concepts, only words.
In the third place we cherish the doctrine by propagating it. Obviously we can propagate the doctrine only if we understand it and practise it, or only to the extent that we understand it and practise it, only if we experience it ourselves and realize it. And of course there are many ways in which we can propagate the Dharma. We can propagate it by ourselves actually teaching the Dharma, by giving lectures or taking meditation classes, by writing books. But not everybody is in a position to do this. Most people, even most people in the FWBO in fact, will have to help propagate the Dharma indirectly, by for instance transcribing and editing the tapes of lectures, by publishing books, by providing facilities for the giving of lectures and the taking of classes, and by donating money.
I need hardly tell you that people in the world nowadays need the Dharma. Many of them know that they need it, but they don’t always know that what they need is what we call the Dharma — hence, very often, their surprise and delight when they happen to come at last in contact with it, perhaps after many years of searching enquiry. And sometimes when they come in contact with it in this way, they really feel quite overwhelmed. And I must say here that nowadays I get quite a number of letters, from people not only all over the UK, but from many different parts of the world, people who have recently made contact with the FWBO. And invariably their letters express relief, joy, thankfulness, gratitude, and kindred emotions.
We should therefore do all we can to propagate the Dharma in every possible way — because if we propagate the Dharma people will come to know it, will come to understand it. And if they understand it, they’ll be able to practice it. If they practice it, it will be cherished by them too. And if it is cherished, it will survive. Nowadays there are many obstacles to the survival of the Dharma. The Dharma is, in fact, we may say, threatened on every side. It’s threatened by materialism. It’s threatened by pseudo-religious fundamentalism. The Dharma therefore needs to be propagated more vigorously than ever.
But — and this is very important — it is the Dharma and only the Dharma that must be propagated. We mustn’t mix the Dharma with -isms and -ologies which are in reality quite foreign to the spirit of the Dharma, even quite inimical to it. And this means that in our work of propagating the Dharma we need to watch our language. So far as possible we should use traditional Buddhist language. The message of the Buddha, we may say, cannot be delivered in the language — or in one of the languages, because he has many languages — of Mara, not even by Bodhisattvas. Though we may also say, we have to admit, that Mara himself can on occasion use, or appear to use, the language of Buddhism. But that is another story.
So we should cherish the doctrine: cherish it by studying it, cherish it by practising it, and cherish it by propagating it.