Tricycle | Awake in the World

Yet the journey itself was absolutely necessary. It was necessary to leave your familiar environment and venture through various trials and tribulations. It was necessary to deal with many unexpected things, to grapple with your inner demonic forces. It was necessary to go through the spiritual struggle and engage in vigorous disciplines. Spiritual struggle is valuable for the purification of the mind. Your mind has to be cleansed of the delusions and conflicting emotions that are the product of your karma, the product of the negative thoughts and actions that have accumulated in your mindstream over a long period of time.

After a point, however, you have to ease away from that struggle. As progress is made on the path, the positive qualities required for further advancement will become part of you, and you will gradually learn how to assimilate and become these positive qualities, rather than regarding them as something to be attained and possessed. So after the initial focus on learning how to replace vices with virtues, we must learn to let go of our fixation on virtues. We have to stop thinking about accumulating virtues, spiritual qualities, experiences, and realizations as if they were a form of wealth. We do not require spiritual wealth; moreover, spiritual wealth can only be accumulated by not fixating on it. All fixations lead only to all manner of trouble—envy, possessiveness, and egotism, for example. It is then that we really go astray and wander from the spiritual path.

As our virtuous qualities of love, compassion, joy, courage, determination, resolve, mindfulness, awareness, and wisdom develop, we progress further along the path. At some point, we have to accomplish one final act of detachment, which is to let go of reifying concepts altogether. Even the concepts of virtue and vice, redemption, karma, and liberation have to be relinquished. By way of illustration, I’d like to share a story from the Zen tradition.

It is not uncommon for Zen meditation students to keep in regular contact with their teachers concerning their spiritual progress. In this particular story, a Zen student has a penchant for writing to his teacher monthly with an account of his development. His letters began to take a mystical turn when he wrote, "I am experiencing a oneness with the universe." When his teacher received this letter, he merely glanced at it and threw it away. The next month the student wrote, "I have discovered that the divine is present in everything." His teacher used this letter to start his fire. A month later, the student had become even more ecstatic and wrote, "The mystery of the one and many has revealed itself to my wonderment," at which his teacher yawned. The following month, another letter arrived, which simply said, "There is no self, no one is born, and no one dies." At this his teacher threw his hands up in despair. After the fourth letter, the student stopped writing to his teacher, and after a year had passed, the teacher began to feel concerned and wrote to his student, asking to be kept informed of his spiritual progress. The student wrote back with the words "Who cares?" When the teacher read this, he smiled and said, "At last! He’s finally got it!"

At the end of the journey, you will be able to engage in everything on both the material and the spiritual planes without being tainted by them, because a spiritually realized being is no longer affected by the world in the same way an ordinary person is. Without going through the trials and tribulations of this journey, however, you will never find your home. You cannot simply stay at home and say, "I am already where I want to be." It is only the journey that makes you realize your true potential, and only at the end of the journey will you understand that the goal is not to separate from the starting point. That is the attainment of buddhahood, the natural state of your own mind.

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche is the president and spiritual director of Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. From Mind At Ease: Self-Liberation Through Mahamudra Meditation, © 2004 by Traleg Kyabgon. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

Images: "Transcendent Machine." © Lisa Young. Digital Print