The body is one aspect of that experience. He comes to the conclusion that is associated primarily with a number of relatively small movements around the neck and jaw-that’s what we associate with I. And in one of the lectures he explores what is the actual sense of I. It’s a series of lectures he gave at Harvard. William James, who was a Harvard academic around the turn of the century, once wrote a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, which continues to be a classic to the present day, which is 100 years later-no small achievement in American culture. But I think it’s worth going a step deeper. What is the body? That may seem like a completely idiotic question, but I can look and here I have two legs, and two arms and a torso and I say this is my body. The actual Tibetan is precious human body. In the Konchog Gyaltsen translation this begins on page 59.įirst thing you’ll notice is that Konchog Gyaltsen translates this as the precious human life and Guenther translates this as the precious human body. So I’m going to work from the Guenther translation principally. So in keeping with the way that we’ve been talking about this material, rather than think about this in terms of past lives and future lives, it may be interesting and worthwhile to look at this chapter in terms of a description of how often and when in our lives are we actually capable of some kind of spiritual practice. When you’re in the grip of greed you’re in the hungry ghost realm, and so forth. When you’re in the grip of anger or hatred you’re in hell. The six realms are the way that we experience the world when we are in the grip of one of the six reactive emotions. And this is the way the Indian mind, and when it was imported to Tibet, or exported to Tibet-the Tibetan mind-looked at the world and understood themselves. Hell realm, hungry ghosts, animal, human, titan and gods, and many layers of god realms-with two very different kinds of gods: the gods who have high states of existence because of their good works in previous lives, and the gods who have high states of existence or experience because of their stability in meditation, essentially where they sit for eons in bliss.Ī colleague of mine once said that a culture’s cosmology is a reflection of the culture’s psychology. That is, the cosmology of the six realms. And in particular the description of the conditions is based very, very heavily on a certain cosmology. By the time these teachings came about-they’re present in Shantideva, which was written approximately 1,000 years after Buddha lived-there was plenty of time for things to be thought and rethought. Now, once again we find ourselves totally immersed in a tradition that has existed for a very long time, and this is probably about the twenty-third or twenty-fourth reformulation of Buddhism. This chapter describes the conditions that need to come together to make spiritual practice possible. I think all of these are good possibilities. Randy: How does Buddha’s nature manifest or realize itself? Ken: Okay, anybody else? Susan, then Randy. Student: What is actualized when you have faith supported by interest, dedication and capacity? And then the other one is kind of different but-when is our one opportunity? I’d like to consider the question: what is the question that the precious human birth or the precious human body or the precious human existence is an answer to? Anybody give thought to that one?
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