u/Gnome_boneslf

Just the title basically, we've killed millions of people in our past lives through samsara and Vajrasattva purifies that quickly. But Bari Lotsawa killed a sorcerer and now he has to do Vajrasattva for a year which is probably 3x - 5x the amount of Vajrasattva ngondro for one murder. Karma that is immediately addressed should be easier to purify too, it should be quicker not longer (but is longer in practice).

Anyone know what causes this discrepancy?

A bit of a beautiful still of life from Tibet, hopefully this is on-topic enough since it kind of gives a glimpse into the life of Vajrayana practitioners growing up.

It's good to know that the path has an element of the perfection of wisdom, that this element is the coalescence of rays of light, and that those rays are expressed via inconceivable thoughts.

This sutra on the perfection of wisdom in particular strikes me because of the way it describes the limit of reality and inconceivable thoughts in an affirming way instead of a negating way, which helps me be mindful of them.

I think most people will not read this, so let me share one of my favorite parts from this sutra:

> Lord, if the Lord has taught the true dharmic nature of dharmas and explained dharmas with words and signs in order that others will comprehend, why, Lord, have you given an explanation in words and signs of dharmas that have no names and have no signs?

> “Subhūti, conventional language is not to do with settling down on names and signs; otherwise, Subhūti, conventional language would be simply just suffering. There is no settling down to do with names and signs. Subhūti, a tathāgata and a tathāgata’s śrāvakas do not settle down on names and signs. Subhūti, were a name to settle down on a name, or were a sign to settle down on a sign, then emptiness would settle down on emptiness, signlessness would settle down on signlessness, wishlessness would settle down on wishlessness, and suchness too would settle down on suchness; the very limit of reality would settle down on the very limit of reality, the dharma-constituent would settle down on the dharma-constituent, and the uncompounded would settle down on the uncompounded. Subhūti, all dharmas are thus simply mere names; they do not persist as mere names. Subhūti, bodhisattva great beings should thus practice the perfection of wisdom standing in a mere name and sign, without settling down on it.”

The root of the intoxication translates into the word <alcoholic beverages that cause intoxication>. That intoxicated state's extremely close immediate-order interconnectedness with heedlessness is why intoxication is part of the precept.

However, what did the Buddha really mean by intoxication? Well, back in India during his time, in the local language that he used, Magadhi if I remember right, the word in his spoken dialect originated from the symbolic pointing-out of "a pot boiling over," it inherited from that root. If a pot boiled over, that was the symbol for intoxcation.

Who is the pot? Your mind. It means that something that makes your mind wild, uncontrolled, <uncivilized in the sense of lacking grace, not lacking worldly civility>. Uncontrolled, just like when water boils over it is uncontrolled in the pot.

I believe it was also used to describe the madness that elephants went under, when black liquid started running from the temples of the elephant's heads, when they entered an uncontrollable mating lust. This was also connected to that meaning back in the Buddha's time, with that word, in his dialect.

So the core meaning is <a wildness of the mind>, and a wildness of the mind is a lack of heedfulness and self-restraint. It is not the intoxication that's the problem, it's how interconnected the intoxication is with problematic states of mind, and how inseperable and also how close the order of relation is, it is immediate.

This wildness of the mind is the direct cause of heedlessness, so the Buddha banned the cause as well.

However for a Buddha or one close to him, if he drinks alcohol, his perfect mindfulness overcomes that cause, which is why you see mahasiddhas for example in India, they are able to drink and not lose their clarity. However for everyone else it is a big issue, and apparently the karmic ripening of this wildness is actual insanity.

Because as the mind is constructing reality, it sees you intoxicating yourself, so that reality the mind is creating in that moment is created in an intoxicated way, since the mind watches and learns from what you do.

I made this because I saw another post on what exactly is the 5th precept, and I had recently really dived deep into this. It is also a very hard topic if you are not familiar with the symbols of the Buddha's language.

This teaching is really excellent, it shows a common problem we have nowadays where we separate ourselves from our practice. This is how you get really mean Dharma practitioners or even teachers, they consider their practice to be outside of themselves and never get to the heart. Because as the monk said, those people consider their practice "external" so whatever wrongdoing they confess never affected them to begin with. This is the wrong way to practice. Even though there's no self, and nothing to separate from practice, still putting a practice outside of yourself creates this problem where you have no shame in acting however you like. But when you really practice to the depths of your mind, that shame becomes authentic, and confession becomes possible and effective.

Really great watch that popped up on my feed, been watching it this past hour.

Dilgo Khyentse's Yangsi talks about how to find authenticity and what really matters in Dharma practice.

So for me money is a huge obstacle personally, I'm someone that spends hours and hours meditating and doing mantra but isn't quite ready to ordain as a monk and leave behind a money-based support.

This means that I need to sacrifice those very same meditation hours and spend them in complete waste getting money instead. It's very shocking to me that there are no good support systems (for those not yet ordained) for money for laypeople.

I know that there's a lot of potential for abuse (avoiding practice and getting lazy) which is probably why the Buddhas do not lay out a guaranteed method for actually getting money.

I also know that the Buddhas don't emphasize the external obstacles, but there's definitely a point at which you're not advanced enough to be monastic yet advanced enough to kind of be forced to choose survival or Dharma.

I have tried tantras and while they are effective at increasing generosity (and in a supernatural and powerful way), they are not effective at giving money immediately, which I suppose makes sense as all the commentaries on the tantras explain that you need the karma of generosity in the past. However this is the problem right now, it's a question of money immediately, not money in the future which present generosity ripens-as.

I also looked at suttas and sutras and oral commentaries, but a lot of these were in the time before modern global capitalism. For example in one sutta the Buddha says to separate money into 4 segments, except there's just not enough money to separate it 3 segments, much less 4.

Does anyone know of any Dharma teachings that give money immediately? I'm really surprised it's this difficult even for advanced practitioners, I always treated it as such a minor and meaningless obstacle which is easily overcome by dedicated practice but it has only gotten worse and worse.

>From now until the ends of future time throughout uncountable eons I will use expansive expedient means to help beings in the Six Paths who are suffering for their offenses. Only when they have all been liberated, will I myself become a Buddha

Original Vows of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra

Whatever you do now is arising as the outskirts of your consciousness, like a little circular piece of paper charred yet burning with flames all around its edges. That fire at the edges of the paper is just the karma of your actions, and eventually the fire reaches the middle and is experienced by you. But even if the fire never reaches the middle, it's still your radiance, it's still how you can identify virtuous vs unvirtuous people, by that flame of being and becoming at the edges of their consciousness.

We usually identify with our lives, but it's better to identify with this being & becoming, because that's how it actually is, we go every day in our lives engaging in being & becoming and are unaware that it's a real thing that exists right now, not some theory. It's that fire at the edges of your consciousness, slowly making its way to the center until it's experienced. But even though the results of the fire make their way to the middle, there is a constant being & becoming at the edges, at every moment in your life.

When it's purified and wise, it becomes something so special, like a radiance that goes through all of existence. But when that fire is unrestrained, it burns you.

I wanted to share this as inspiration from my personal practice, so that more people would wake up to their being and becoming in this very moment.

I notice this comes up sometimes and some people think we've done it all before. That in past lives we have ordained, practiced Dharma (really well too), and it's merely that we haven't pireced the threshold of liberation so we are reborn, but this seems wrong. For example if someone ordains and practices as a monk/nun their whole life, their rebirth is almost certainly a higher heavenly realm:

> The lifespan of the gods of the Divinity’s host is one eon. An ordinary person stays there until the lifespan of those gods is spent, then they go to hell or the animal realm or the ghost realm. But a disciple of the Buddha stays there until the lifespan of those gods is spent, then they’re extinguished in that very life. This is the difference between a learned noble disciple and an unlearned ordinary person, that is, when there is a place of rebirth.

Anathapindika for example was someone who entered this first Jhana by way of the four brahma abodes as a layman. Monks have it a lot easier, and most monks who practice well will end up with at least this result.

There's also a very basic faith requirement to attain the first step leading to stream-entry:

> “Yo bhattāni dhammadassino... sa yāva sotāpattiphalasacchikiriyāya paṭipanno... Abhabbo taṃ kammaṃ kātuṃ yaṃ kammaṃ katvā nirayaṃ vā tiracchānayoniṃ vā pettivisayaṃ vā upapajjeyya. Abhabbo ca tāva kālaṃ kātuṃ yāva na sotāpattiphalaṃ sacchikaroti.”

> "One who has conviction and belief that these phenomena are this way is called a faith-follower... He has entered the fixed course of rightness, entered the plane of people of integrity, transcended the plane of the run-of-the-mill worldling (puthujjana).

This applies to every monk and many laypeople, that if you practiced Dharma in the past and especially if you were a monk that you would have been liberated already, at the very least through faith.

Now on the flip side of this it makes a lot of sense in an infinite samsara that we have done almost everything. We've done both good and bad things, but according to causality it's not really possible that we've practiced Dharma before. Because if we merely had faith we'd already have been liberated.

This is without reaching into Mahayana where you have texts like Kuntuzangpo's prayer for example, which also guarantee liberation if you've heard them, or Vajrayana.

https://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/gyalse-thogme-zangpo/37-practices-all-bodhisattvas

This one stands out to me a lot:

> Even if others, equal or inferior to me in status, Should, out of arrogance, disparage me, To honour them, as I would my teacher, By bowing down my head before them—this is the practice of all the bodhisattvas.

I've noticed that if you are helping other beings and this happens, it helps the other person more if you don't do this. Whenever someone fights you for example, and you concede that to them, you can not help them any more. But if someone fights you and you don't concede that to them, then in some cases you can still help the person, sometimes the mood changes. But this advice (and it's found in a lot of texts, not just this text in particular, it's often found as "taking the loss upon yourself"), it shuts the door on being able to help a certain group of people. Because once you take the loss upon yourself, that's basically it, that person is no longer receptive to help because they see you a lesser and unfit to help them.

Anyways I see this advice a lot and this has been exactly my experience. I'm never able to help beings when i take the loss, and contrast that to sometimes being able to help beings if I don't accept the loss. Yet following this advice would kind of shut the door to all those beings i've been able to help in the past.