Homework Master 5: The Yoga of Knowledge 1) What are three different actions which Lord Krishna lists as leading to wisdom?  Please also list the Sanskrit and Tibetan words for these three. Here are the three actions which Lord Krishna lists as leading to wisdom.  In truth, they all relate to how we interact with our spiritual Teacher.  Without this Teacher, there can be no gaining knowledge; and with them wisdom, and all knowledge, are possible. The first of the three is “bowing down.”  The Sanskrit for this is pranipata (pran%ipa#ta), and the corresponding Tibetan is chaktselwa.  The Sanskrit root here is √pat (pat), which means to fly or to fall.  The idea is that we fall (pat) down (ni) before (pra) our Teacher, meaning that we prostrate to them, or honor them, for being so kind to teach us. This is perhaps the most important element of all spiritual advancement: to respect the Teacher who guides us.  The more special we can see our Teacher, then the more we can learn from them.  An important practice here is to sit frequently in quiet surroundings and simply make mental lists of the wonderful qualities that our Teacher possesses.  We’re likely to come up with more than we were aware of at first, and thus gain greater and greater faith for them. The second of the three is pariprashna (paripras*na), which means constantly asking questions; the corresponding Tibetan is yongsu driwa {YONGS SU ‘DRI BA,}.  We constantly see this word in the names of famous sutras, which are often named from the person who first asked the question or made the request for teaching that led the Teacher to explain a particular subject; for example, the “Sutra Requested by the Lady Sumati Darika, or Excellent Wisdom.” The point here is that we recognize that our Teacher has knowledge that will help us, and that we must have the humility to ask them to teach us, especially since by tradition a Teacher is not encouraged to speak unless they are specifically asked for help, three different times—which indicates that the disciple is serious and considers the teaching something of high value. The third of the three is seva (seva#), which many modern-day yoga practitioners will recognize as the Sanskrit word for service.  The corresponding Tibetan though is tenpa {BSTEN PA,}, which has a very specific meaning of taking oneself to a spiritual teacher in a respectful way, asking them for teaching, and then serving their needs.  The idea here is that a really qualified teacher will always be engaged in a serious mission to serve others, and we are facilitating this mission by lending every aid we can. 2) Lord Krishna says that—if we are able to take ourselves to a Teacher in the proper way—then “Those who have seen suchness will show you what wisdom is.”  Explain this statement in terms of the ideal qualifications of a teacher, including an explanation of the Sanskrit for the term, “those who have seen suchness.” The original Sanskrit for a “person who has seen suchness” is tattvadarshina (tattvadars*ina).  The corresponding Tibetan is de-nyi tepa {DE NYID BLTAS PA,), or sometimes de-nyi tongwa {DE NYID MTHONG BA,}.  Tattva means just that, or suchness, and it is a common synonym for ultimate reality, or emptiness. Darshina means the one who sees; this is an extremely important element in the expression darshana marga, which means the path of seeing, or the direct perception of ultimate reality. All this is a reference to what in Sanskrit is called an arya, meaning someone who is extraordinary by virtue of having seen ultimate reality directly.  The process here is that first we work on recognizing, intellectually, the fact that the people and things in our world are empty; that is, they don’t possess any nature of their own.  Whatever we see in them is coming from ourselves, from our own mind.  And that’s coming from seeds that we planted there, by being nice or unpleasant to others. Once we have an intellectual grasp of how this works, we work hard on devoting some major meditation time focusing on this lack in things of any quality that’s coming from their side.  In time this triggers a direct perception of what the verse calls suchness, which refers exactly to this void of a quality that resides in things, rather than coming from us. This direct experience of suchness—or voidness, or ultimate reality—lasts about 20 minutes the first time.  This experience, which can only happen in deep meditation, has a profound and lasting effect upon our very being.  Within a given amount of time then we will reach a place where we are permanently free of negative emotions like jealousy or anger.  And shortly after that our yoga will transform us into a being of pure light, a being who can travel to countless planets, to help countless living creatures. The point then here in the verse is that—if we can locate one of these rare people who has “seen suchness”—then they are someone who can truly “show us what wisdom is.”  And then we go through the three steps of honoring them, constantly asking them for guidance, and devoting ourselves to their service—all of which brings us too to the direct perception of ultimate reality. 3) Lord Krishna states next that the understanding of suchness will bring you to see “all beings within yourself.”  Explain why an understanding of ultimate reality would have such a direct connection with ultimate love. There are two senses in which a deep appreciation of ultimate reality would have a direct connection to ultimate level. One relates to the inner body.  During the direct experience of ultimate reality, the knot related to the heart chakra especially is released.  On one hand this has the effect of allowing inner wind or prana to flow directly through the central channel in the area of the heart, which is what actually triggers the direct perception of ultimate reality. At the same time though, the release of prana to flow freely in the area of the heart causes us to undergo the direct experience of ultimate love—an experience which the Buddhist tradition refers to as bodhichitta.  During this experience, the true capacity of the human mind is fully released.  We are able, still with our eyes closed, to see directly the face of every living creature in the entire universe, all within the space of only a few minutes. Along with this experience comes the absolute knowledge that we will—because of our experience of ultimate reality, and our experience of ultimate love—now devote ourselves, for the rest of our life and lives, to the service of the beings whom we have seen: we will become, without any question, the person who comes to each planet to help each living being escape their pain, and reach perfect enlightenment. From a different point of view too we see all beings within ourselves, when we reach an understanding of how all things really work.  We can use the example of seeking a promotion at work.  We understand by now the basic principle of all action, true action, that we must provide first to others whatever it is that we want for ourselves.  This means that—if I want a promotion—then I will have to watch out for opportunities to help one of my officemates get a promotion. Now in our old way of thinking, the person that we’re trying to get the promotion for and the person trying to get the promotion to happen are necessarily the same person.  And in fact this is a pretty good way to describe what “me” is in the first place: “me” is the person I’m trying to get the promotion for, and “me” is the one who’s trying to get them the promotion.  The border of my self-interest, in effect, is the very border of “me.” Now if it’s the case that I have to help arrange a promotion for you in order to get a promotion for me, then the “one” that I’m trying to get the promotion for is really the two of us.  In this sense then, in a perfect world—or a world that is working perfectly—you actually do exist within me, as does everyone else as well.  And it’s an understanding of suchness, along with the deeply related understanding of the karmic seeds that make everything work, which helps see how this is already the case. 4) In this section of the Gita, Lord Krishna also says that—even if we were the most evil of all evil people—then we could “cross over the vast sea” of this evil if we employed the ship of understanding.  Explain. We are here getting into the question of the old karmic seeds that we still have in our karmic “pocket.”  That is, we know now that we are creating our own future reality with the karmic seeds that we are planting now, and certainly we are going to be careful about not planting new bad karmic seeds. We still have though vast stores within our mind of old negative karmic seeds.  If we can’t find a way of “short-circuiting” these seeds on a massive level, then we have many years to problems to look forward to.  It is the question of how we do this short-circuiting that Lord Krishna is addressing in this verse: How to we cross the sea of our old bad karmas? For this we need the “ship of understanding.”  Let’s go back to the example of the promotion.  We may succeed in planting the seeds for the promotion by helping an officemate win their promotion, but old karmic seeds might delay it from ripening.  If we do see that seeds we’ve planted aren’t ripening quickly, then an old negative seed is holding it up, and we need to short-circuit it, with understanding. And it is raw understanding that allows us to stop old karmic seeds.  The most powerful weapon for destroying these seeds is to resolve never again, in this example, to stand in the way of someone else’s promotion—because we can determine by deduction that this or something very similar is what we must have done to delay our promotion. The “tattva” understanding here is that we understand that the qualities of karmic seeds themselves are not “in” these seeds.  These qualities also are created and sustained by our own ignorance; if we understand that the potency of seeds is also a creation of our misunderstanding, then we can remove this potency.  And in fact it is the act of working to understand these seeds which does the most to help remove this potency.] 5) Lord Krishna states that “every single action there is” is “reduced to ash by the fire of wisdom.”  What is the basis of this comparison?  (Include two key Sanskrit words here, and their Tibetan equivalents.) This is, first of all, a comparison to how a sacred offering fire reduces the wood used for its fuel to ashes.  This wood itself here in the Gita is called edha, where the corresponding Tibetan is yamshing.  This last will be familiar to those who have participated in a Tibetan jinsek, or fire offering, as the specially cut branches with a carving of a lotus flower at the base. The verse describes how this wood is “reduced to ash.”  The Sanskrit original here is bhasmat kuru, and the corresponding Tibetan is telwar lok.  These expressions are often used not only to describe the way that wood is reduced to ashes, but also how a boulder might be pulverized to dust and—most importantly—how a certain mistaken way of viewing the world is utterly obliterated by correct understanding. We have already explored a number of angles from which what we normally consider an action might not be an action at all, simply because a crucial element of the action doesn’t exist at all.  We saw this with regard to the goal of our action, and also to the object of an action.  In both these regards, what we always thought was an action dissolves before our eyes when considered from an accurate view of reality. This time let’s consider the reality of an action from the point of view of our original intention, or motivation.  There are some schools of Indian thought which say that, even though objects and people in the world around us might be coming from our side, this is not the case with our own thoughts.  That is, since my thoughts are what I use to perceive all these other things and people, my thoughts in themselves must be coming from their own side.  At least the one who “hears” my thoughts during a given action should exist from their own side, since in a sense they are at the end of the line. Even this view of an action though is mistaken, and if we were to consider an action by this final agent to be a real action, we would be so wrong as to have this idea pulverized to ash by a deeper understanding. The way this deeper understanding goes is that we see that even the thoughts that we “hear” in our own mind, and more subtly even the one who hears them, are both the same as every other object in the world: all coming from us, from how well we have taken care of others.  Say for example that we are taking a class in the Bhagavad Gita from a teacher, who has asked that we be careful to listen closely and take good notes, so that we can pass the class on to our own students later.  And then say that we fail to do so. Since we have then failed to provide understanding to others, we plant a seed in our mind for the same: for we ourselves not to being able to understand important ideas.  We have pieces of ideas or understanding coming up in our mind at any given moment, and then the mind itself synthesizes these pieces together into some form of understanding.  The quality of this synthesis is itself a ripening of karma: just another tiny picture in the back of our mind. And so even the thoughts that we hear in our mind are not strictly thoughts themselves; even as we listen to them in our mind we are creating them, as if we were walking along a path made of stepping stones that we toss down in front of us as we go—we really do, literally, create the pages of a book in our own mind as we turn these pages.  Our old idea of how things “come” to us in a progression, and the action of thinking a series of thoughts in a row, is reduced to ashes. Where the “witness” state of mind is really coming from is crucial in understanding what a “true” action is, since we depend upon this “end-of-the-line” state of mind to confirm what is going on in any action we undertake. It’s important here to realize that even this “witness” mind is also an object, an object synthesized by the mind of the next millisecond.  That is, the way that we are even aware that we are having an “end-of-the-line,” witness state of mind is that we are observing it in the same way as a thought: by the time we are fully aware of it, it is because the mind of “we” who are observing is watching something that has just happened.  We are always a millisecond behind what we see, simply because of the time it takes to see it. The “witness” then is always a millisecond behind, out of date, and not a true witness at all.  Here on the most subtle level of an action our idea of what an action is is demolished. 6) In yet another verse of this section, Lord Krishna makes the statement that “there is nothing in the entire world that can purify things the way that wisdom can.”  Give the word for “purifier of things” here in the verse, including the Sanskrit root and related English words.  Then explain the two senses in which wisdom does purify things, with special attention to one that we haven’t covered here in this part of the class yet.  Include the special Tibetan word for this special practice. The Sanskrit word for “purifier” here is pavitra (pavitra), which comes from a root √pu (pu#), meaning to cleanse.  Related English words, through an Indo-European root √peuh, are pour, pure, and purge.  The corresponding Tibetan is dakje {DAG BYED,} where dak means pure and je means to make. We’ve already seen how wisdom can purify past negative karmas waiting in the karmic storehouse, waiting to go off in the form of—for example—as something that really irritates us, or cancer or a car accident.  But wisdom is also the trigger behind a very important form of purification that the Tibetans call daknang:  training ourselves to see everything that ever comes to us as completely pure, or divine; every person around us as a teacher.  How does wisdom help us do this? Wisdom as we’ve been describing it here is, as Lord Krishna himself says, wisdom about what we call tattva, or suchness, or emptiness: the fact that nothing has anything about it which really exists “in” it, as opposed to being “laid” on it by our perceptions, forced upon us by how well we have taken care of others in the past. How this applies here is that the people and places around us are neither bad nor average nor perfect from their own side.  Every person we meet, and every place we go to, has the potential to be any of these, depending upon our own perceptions.  Seeing the world as special or divine then—purifying the world—isn’t something that depends on some kind of pretending that the world is alright, when we can see that it’s not. Rather, we understand in a complete way how we really could be seeing the world and everybody in it as completely pure.  We simply have to do it in the way we perform any other true act: we collect the karmic seeds to see things this way.  As usual, we first provide for others what we seek for ourselves.  Since we seek to see a perfect world around us, we make our best effort, day by day, hour by hour, to provide others with all their needs—every kind of beauty and happiness that they could hope for. If we sustain this type of behavior over a length of time, we begin then to experience the world as perfect: as the mandala that we offer before every class we ever attend.  Our raw understanding of the world has enabled us to purify it.] 7) Lord Krishna next says that “the practice of yoga leads a person, in time, to find wisdom within themselves.”  Explain, with reference to yoga asanas and the inner body, being also sure to state the most basic principle for the interaction of inner wind (prana) and wisdom. We can in one way understand “yoga” here as referring to our daily asana practice.  One of the original purposes of this practice has always been to help move prana, or inner wind, flow smoothly through the inner channels of our body.   There are three primary channels: the central channel (commonly known as the sushumna in Sanskrit), and the two side channels (the ida and pingala).  There is a basic principle of all inner-body work that the Tibetans refer to as lung sem jukpa chikpa.  The word lung means prana, or inner wind; while sem in this case refers to our thoughts.  Jukpa chikpa means that they ride in tandem.  The entire expression then means that the inner winds and thoughts always ride in tandem. Now ancient tradition says that good thoughts—thoughts of compassion, understanding, and wisdom—travel within the central channel.  Thoughts of disliking things in the wrong way, in an ignorant way, travel within the channel to our own right, while thoughts of ignorant desire travel in the left-hand channel.  All of these thoughts, good or bad, are riding in tandem with the inner winds of the body. Our practice of asanas then was originally designed as something that would promote the passage of wind from the side channels into the central channel.  The prana moving this way would then automatically carry along with it some number of our thoughts.  When the wind moves into the central channel, these thoughts automatically shift into thoughts of kindness, and understanding. We can thus say that a regular practice of yoga asanas brings prana to enter the central channel, which then triggers a higher degree of understanding than we have ever had before.  That is, as Lord Krishna himself says, our practice of yoga leads us, in time, to find wisdom within ourselves. 8) In another verse in this reading, Lord Krishna says that “a person who possesses faith reaches wisdom.”  Explain, with reference to the three classical forms of faith presented in Eastern literature.  Give also the Sanskrit and Tibetan for “faith,” along with any English cognates. The Sanskrit word for faith is shraddha (s*raddha).  Ultimately this is related to the word hirdaya, which means heart, and is of course related to this word, as well as to the words cardiac and creed.  It is in this last word that we see the connection to a belief held in the heart, or faith. Three types of this faith are detailed in the Eastern traditions.  The first in Tibetan is called dangway depa, which literally means “faith which is clear as crystal.”  This is a particularly important form of faith, since it separates this emotion from what we normally think of as belief.  In India and Tibet, a form of faith which is restricted to belief—blind faith, which simply trusts something that someone says without examining or checking it—is inherently weak and undesirable: if we just believe whatever anyone says, then we will also believe it when we are told to do something useless, or even harmful. “Crystal faith” then is defined as a form of faith in which we believe or have faith in something only after we have seen the good qualities in it.  For example, it’s important for us to examine a teacher’s qualities before we take them as our Teacher, given that our responsibilities towards our spiritual Friend are so grave.  The faith that we have in our teacher then will not be easily shaken. The second form of faith is called, in Tibetan, yiche kyi depa.  This is a kind of faith which is closer to the idea of “belief” as we usually think of it: the translation of the Tibetan would be literally “faith based on belief.”  It is said, for example, that only a fully enlightened being is capable of perceiving all the details of karma and its consequences; able to tell us, for example, the particular deeds that we performed in the past that are now causing us to see certain seemingly random patterns in the grain of a piece of wood. Even before we become enlightened though we can come to a point of belief in these principles of karma and its consequences through a kind of reasoning, or logic.  We first establish through our direct observation that a particular person—such as our Teacher, or a Buddha—is someone that we have had every reason to trust up until now, even in difficult situations.  We basically establish then that, according to everything we now know, they are the kind of person who simply doesn’t lie.  When this kind of person then goes on to make a statement about something that we simply don’t have the capacity to confirm with our own direct experience, then we believe them.  In this case, we have a faith in the principles of karma and its consequences because we believe someone to be an unerring source. The third type of faith is called ngundu kyi depa, or “the faith of aspiration.”  This refers to a faith or belief in something that we have not yet achieved, but which according to our best knowledge is something highly desirable to achieve: we aspire, for example, to be able to be in multiple places at the same time, because we believe that this ability really is possible, and something that each person can it time achieve. These different kinds of faith then all lead to what Lord Krishna refers to as “wisdom.”  If we believe in a Teacher because of their good qualities, their ability to understand things, then we will take ourselves to them in the proper way and be granted wisdom by this “seer of suchness.”  We will be able to attain some level of faith in things they say that we can’t yet experience directly ourselves, because of faith based on how they have proven themselves so far to be believable.  And then finally we can have the faith in them where we want to achieve what they have achieved: wisdom, in its ultimate form.] Coffeeshop assignment:  Please meet with one other member of the class (preferably someone you didn’t know before the course started) to talk a bit about this class, before the next one. Meditation assignment:  15 minutes per day, on @@@. Meditation times and dates (homework without this section completed will not be accepted): **