Realizing Emptiness: Madhyamaka Insight Meditation

134 Pages·2002·2.028 MB·English

by  Gen Lamrimpa

R
e a l i z i n g
E
m p t i n e s s
MADHYAMAKA INSIGHT MEDITATION
G L
e n a m r i m p a
TRANSLATED BY B. ALAN WALLACE

Realizing Em ptiness
Madhyamaka Insight Meditation
Gen Lamrimpa
(Lobsang Jampal Tenzin)
Translated by
B. Alan Wallace
Edited by
Ellen Posman
Snow Lion Publications
Ithaca, New York
Boulder, Colorado
Snow Lion Publications
P.O. Box 6483
Ithaca, New York 14851 USA
[phone]
www.snowlionpub.com
Copyright © 1999 and 2002 B. Alan Wallace and Gen Lamrimpa
Second Edition USA 2002
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be repro­
duced by any means without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
Printed in Canada on acid-free, recycled paper.
This edition ISBN 1-55939-180-4
The Library of Congress catalogued the previous edition of this
book as follows:
Gen Lamrimpa, 1934-
Realizing emptiness : the Madhyamaka cultivation of insight /
Gen Lamrimpa (Lobsang Jampal Tenzin); translated by B. Alan
Wallace; edited by Ellen Posman.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55939-118-9
1. Sunyata. 2. Meditation - Madhyamika (Buddhism)
3. Vipasyana (Buddhism) I. Wallace, B. Alan. II. Posman, Ellen.
III. Title.
BQ7457.G46 1999
294.3'4435-dc21 99-31832
CIP
Contents
Foreword 7
A Contented Mind: The Life of Gen Lamrimpa 9
1. Introduction 17
The Significance of Compassion and Insight 17
Suitable Teachers and Students for Teachings 21
on Emptiness
Provisional and Definitive Teachings within Buddhism 23
The Lineage of these Teachings 24
Scriptural Sources for these Teachings 28
2. How Phenomena Are Established as Being 31
Conceptually Designated
The Fusion of Word-Based Ideas 32
with Experience-Based Ideas
The Fusion of the Object with 34
the Generic Idea of the Object
Conventional Agreement 41
Can We Establish Things without Referring to Them? 44
3. How One Grasps onto True Existence 47
Two Types of Ignorance 50
Three Ways of Apprehending an Object 54
The Ignorant View Concerning a Transitory Assembly 57
4. The Four Essential Points 61
The First Essential Point 61
The Attended Object and the Attributed Object 61
Conventional and Ultimate Analysis 67
The Second Essential Point 69
The Third Essential Point 71
Valid and Invalid Ways of Postulating the Self 73
Single and Multiple Phenomena 76
The Fourth Essential Point 77
Simple and Complex Negations 77
Review of the Meditation on Emptiness 78
Personal and Phenomenal Identitylessness 86
5. The Prasangika View of How Phenomena Exist 87
Three Criteria for Designating the Existence 88
of Phenomena
How All Phenomena Appear Like Illusions 94
The Dependence of Phenomena 95
The Criteria for Realizing Emptiness 99
Appendix I: Dzogchen 105
Appendix II: Madhyamaka and Dzogchen 117
Foreword
In January 1989, after leading a one-year retreat for the culti­
vation of meditative quiescence in the state of Washington,
Gen Lamrimpa was asked by his students to give practical
instructions on the cultivation of insight into the nature of
emptiness. The following teachings are a record of those lec­
tures, which were transcribed by and originally edited by Gen
Lamrimpa's devoted student Pauly Fitze. At my request, the
major work of editing was later done by Ellen Posman, who
joined two versions of Gen Lamrimpa's narrated biography,
one of them originally written down by Steven Wilhelm, into
the version presented in this volume. For their invaluable con­
tribution, I offer them my deep thanks.
After the retreat, Gen Lamrimpa also presented two lec­
tures, one at Stanford University on the Madhyamaka view,
and the other at the San Francisco Zen Center on Dzogchen.
These are included here as appendices.
I was the interpreter for all the above teachings, and I have
done the final editing of all these lectures, so any errors that
may appear in this version are entirely my own. All of us who
have worked to make these experiential teachings available
to those who did not have the fortune to receive them directly
from Gen Lamrimpa himself pray that this book may be of
benefit to all sentient beings.
Gen Lamrimpa
A Contented Mind:
The Life of Gen Lamrimpa
The Venerable Jampal Tenzin, Gen Lamrimpa, teaches that a
contented mind is within our grasp, no matter how difficult
the conditions of our lives. Genla, as he is affectionately called
by his students, is one of the small number of Tibetan monks
who spend most of their time in solitary meditation. He makes
his home in a forest hut in Sikkim, where he lives simply and
engages in spiritual practices.
A visitor to the small apartment where Genla stayed dur­
ing a three-month visit to Seattle was struck by the way his
peaceful mind had transformed his room into a facsimile of
his mountain hut. When he was not meditating or taking visi­
tors, he would sit by the window, wrapped in a robe, study­
ing one of the Tibetan religious texts he brought with him.
"Happiness depends on the mind," Genla says, his kind, twin­
kling eyes looking intently at the visitor. "If we work on this,
increasing the positive mind and reducing the negative mind,
then we can achieve ultimate peace." But if Genla's state of
mind is the embodiment of his teachings, it is not because he
has led a protected or insular life—in fact, he has lived through
tumult and tragedy.
10 Realizing Emptiness
Bom Lobsang Jampal Tenzin in 1936 in the western Tibetan
town of Shekar, in the Tingri region, Genla was groomed for
the monastic life from the start. In Tibet, there are two tradi­
tions that dictate how and when one becomes a monk or a
nun. The first custom is for a boy or girl to make his or her
own decision after he or she has grown up. The other tradi­
tion says that when there are two boys in a family, one of them
should become a monk In accordance with this latter tradi­
tion, Genla became a novice monk at the age of seven. His
father looked for a good lama at Chusang Monastery, and Lob­
sang Sangye became his spiritual mentor. Genla received
teachings from him and received full ordination as a monk of
the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism at the age of thirteen.
He was given the name Lobsang Jampal Tenzin.
When Genla became a monk, he was very happy about the
decision. Even as a little boy he remembers playing and sit­
ting on a throne like a lama, with children sitting around him
receiving teachings. At that time he was called Lama-la, and
some people regarded him as tulku, or incarnate lama. Even
adults would come to ask him questions, and he remembers
saying strange things at times. Still, he does not remember
now whether or not he remembered any past lives at that time.
Genla remembers his years at the monastery as a happy
time of study and prayer. "Once I entered the monastery," he
says, "I learned to read the scriptures, to read them very
quickly in fact, and I memorized many root texts. I also learned
to perform all the various rituals, make the ritual cakes for
the prayers, and play the big temple horn. Since deep study
was not very common in the small monasteries in Tibet back
then, I learned these other things." At that time, he notes, "I
didn't understand the true meaning of Dharma, particularly
the purpose or reason of Dharma," and he says that he did
not really comprehend the texts he was so skilled at memo­
rizing. Like many young Tibetan males, he had been swept
into his life as a monk by tradition, "like grass carried along
by a river," he says.