The Lama of Appearances

[Michael Erlewine]

by Michael Erlewine
It is written that there are four kinds of lamas or teachers, appropriately called:

The Four Lamas

The Lama of the Lineage
The Lama of the Scriptures
The Lama of Appearances
The Lama of Dharmadhatu

The Lama of the Lineage includes all lamas in your lineage who carry that lineage in a complete and authentic (unblemished) manner, the chief among this for any student being the Root Lama (tsawi lama), the lama who points out the true nature of the mind to you.

The Lama of the Scriptures refers to all of the dharma to be learned from studying the Buddhist scriptures and teachings, and the Lama of the Dharmadhatu refers from learning from the mind itself. Here we are concerned with the Lama of Appearances.

We may or may not be fortunate enough to find an authentic dharma teacher in this lifetime. We first have to even want such a teacher! And then we have to actually find a teacher and test him or her to see if we can work together. It is written that the Buddha taught 84,000 dharmas, paths, or methods, each tailored to fit a particular kind of student. So it should not be surprising that there are many styles of dharma teachers and we may not match or synch with all of those out there that we meet. We don’t need them all, but we do need at least one.

And while you are looking for a personal dharma teacher, there is at least one outstanding and flawless teacher always at hand and that is Mother Nature, the Lama of Appearances. Next to the personal bond with an authentic human dharma teacher, nature is (in my experience) the very best of teachers. And she comes highly recommended.

One of the most suggested preliminaries or approaches to Buddhism in fact is called just that, the “Common Preliminaries.” These are the familiar “Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind toward the Dharma,” and they are not only recommended for beginners. In the study and practice of Mahamudra mediation, perhaps the most advanced form of meditation taught in the Karma Kagyu lineage, students are taught that the Four Thoughts are indispensible to keep in mind to fuel your Mahamudra practice.

What does it take to “turn the mind” and what do we turn away from? We will get to the four thoughts that are capable of turning the mind in a moment, but as to what the mind is turned away from, well that is easy. These four thoughts are capable of turning the mind away from the endless day-to-day goings on we are all always involved in, and it takes something to do that, so let’s list the four thoughts.

The Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind toward the Dharma

(1) This Human Life You Have is Precious
(2) Life is Very Fragile and Impermanence is a Fact
(3) Karma – What You Do Affects You
(4) This World is Inherently Undependable

When I first heard these four, all I could do was nod my head in agreement. I had some trouble with that last thought, but I will get to that in a moment.

Let’s go through the Four Thoughts:

(1) The Preciousness of Human Life

The first thought is that for each of us this human life we have been given is precious. I doubt there is a human being on the earth who has not wished at some time in their lives that they be used up in a meaningful way, for their life to have true purpose and value.

The Tibetan teachings go on at great length about how difficult it is to even obtain a human birth. Remember, Buddhists treat all sentient beings (every last worm and ant) with the same respect as human beings. All sentient beings have Buddha nature and all, every last being, seeks to be happy and avoid suffering

Buddhists believe that we can be born not only in human form, but equally as an ant, a microbe, or a wombat. It all depends on our karma and the amount of merit we are able to accumulate in this life we are now living. So their point here is that this precious human life is not to be wasted and the human being is the only life form where learning and practicing the dharma is really facilitated. If you have ever wished to be put to good use, then you have held the first thought. There is a lot more to all of this, but let’s move on to the second thought.

(2) Impermanence

Not only is life precious, it is also very, very fragile as well - impermanent in nature. Impermanence is all around us. Every thing that is born reaches some kind of prime or perfection and then wears itself out of existence. For example, we don’t know how long we will live. As the Ven. Bokar Rinpoche (the meditation master of the Karma Kagyu Lineage) once said to me when we were saying goodbye to him. “Tomorrow or the next life, whichever comes first.”

It does not take much to be reminded of impermanence. A walk on the tarmac early in the morning as thousands or worms and slugs are trying to get across the road as the fierce sun comes up. The fragile luna moth in the early dawn fluttering in the air and snatched up in a flash by a bird. Impermanence is all around us all the time. However, many of us agree to forget what we find so hard to remember. We ignore it, which is what ignorance is all about.

There are events in all our lives, like the loss of a loved one or a family member, when we wake up at least for a moment from our busy distractions and ponder something more profound than our electricity bill. As I like to say, a whiff of impermanence is the smelling salts of the dharma. It wakes us up to our mortality and provides a gap in our day-to-day routines through which we can perhaps see something more. We all know about impermanence.

(3) Karma – Cause and Effect

Karma is as simple as the fact that whatever we do, whatever acts we make, our actions bring a response, for good or for ill. As the old blues song “Further on up the Road” says, “You gonna’ reap just what you sow… if you mistreat someone, someone is gonna’ mistreat you.”

And the accumulation of karma does not apply just to large acts, like killing or stealing. Perhaps more devastating is the constant accumulation of low-level karma that, like white noise, gradually obscures our whole mindstream. For example, if you say something to me that is hurtful, it can stick with me for days. I may go over and over what you said, each time digging a deeper and deeper track in my mindstream, a track that will be increasingly difficult to remove.

If we multiply that by all the slights that we may perceive in even a single day, we are accumulating layers and layers of obscuration, each layer making it harder for us to ever see the true nature of our own mind, what is called Buddha Nature. This is a brief view of karma - cause and effect.

(4) The Undependability of Samsara (this world)

This fourth thought is difficult for many of us, at least for me this has been true. Here is how I understand it:

We all have a bit of the schemer in us. We believe that given the right conditions and a little luck, this world we live in can work to our advantage. In other words, we imagine that we are just maybe a day or two short of getting all our ducks in a row or that we can set ourselves up and things will stay that way. This is what the Buddhists call ‘hope’. And they say that hope and fear are not our friends, for they take up far too much of our attention and time, hoping for this and fearing that.

We all think we can win the lottery of life, just as casinos thrive on the hopes of their customers. The Buddhists tell us that even if we win, what goes up must come down. Scientists have made it an absolute law. We won’t (and can’t) win forever and, sooner or later, we will be brought face to face with that fact. In the Buddhist view, this world has defects that can’t be remedied by hoping and this life is by its very nature inherently undependable. It is not bad or evil, just undependable. You cannot rely on it forever.

Holding the Four Thoughts

If I inspect my life history in terms of when it has been easiest for me to hold or keep the Four Thoughts (or some of them) in mind, it is very clear that one key avenue is the loss of a friend or loved one. This kind of life-stopping event almost assures me of some break in the rhythm of my daily cyclic existence, however short that gap may be. Otherwise I tend to be caught up in what is called Samsara, 24x7. However, when someone close to me suddenly is gone, there is a gap in the endless distractions of my life, a gap sometimes big enough to drive a truck through.

At those times, I just tend to drop whatever I have been juggling and just let the pieces fall where they may. I suddenly just don’t care. A great personal loss takes the wind out of me and puts me into a different space, at least for a time. And it does not only have to be the loss of a loved one. It can be the loss of a job, a career, or the direction I have been headed toward. Gone!

At these times I get a whiff of the impermanence that is always all around me and the preciousness of my life or an opportunity I had gradually taken for granted, not to mention my realizing graphically the result of cause and effect, how what goes up must come down, what is born must die, even for me. And last, this kind of event or gap can spoil my appetite for whatever direction I was busily pursuing until interrupted.

Well, the above paragraph contains (literally) the “Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind,” so each of us gets our mind naturally turned from time to time, but look what it takes! If it takes someone close to me dying to get my mind ready to be serious about the dharma, that is a scary thought. I must be a hard case.

There is another and less-drastic way to sober up to reality and that is the natural world. Nature can be our dharma teacher and she does not pull her punches. With nature, there is no need to try and keep these four thoughts in mind. They are literally there in a flash whenever impermanence strikes. And what happens to catch our attention every once in a while through our life events is always ready and waiting for us out there in nature, in the fields, streams, and woods nearest our home. All we have to do is to walk outside, and spend some time.

I had a conversation with someone my age who was telling me how lovely and peaceful it was to be with nature. My comment was that I am not sure which nature he was referring to. The nature I know defines words like ‘frankness” and “direct,” not to mention “merciless.” Nature is awesome, terrific, and moving, but anything but peaceful most of the time.

And I Am the Only Exception

The lives of all sentient beings, from the mighty whale to the all-but-invisible microbe, are filled with suffering, with fear for their lives, and with almost arbitrary impermanence thrust upon them.

Impermanence! It is hard to impossible for me to believe that all living (sentient) beings suffer this way, except one – humankind. Human beings have trouble seeing the impermanence and fear around them that all other creatures suffer from. Is that probable? That is not probable.

The odds that one species among the estimated hundred million species in the world is different from all the countless others just does not make sense. Far more probable is that our species may be better at ignoring everything except what we want to see. It is against all the odds, and the odds are 100 million to one! Think about it.

It is far more probable that we somehow manage to keep the Four Thoughts as far from us as we possibly can. It is only once in a great while that impermanence leaks into our consciousness, that is: unless we happen to live in a third-world country or something similar. In that case, we get a regular dose of impermanence.

Suffering

My point? It is going to be difficult if not impossible to develop any real dharma practice without ready access to the “Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind.” How is the mind going to get turned if we insist on ignoring the very means open to us that can turn the mind? How can we turn away from our day-to-day distractions if we ignore the natural means to do so? That is my question.

It is my belief, after decades of meditation experience, that progress with meditation and “the dharma” is only as successful as our ability to hold in mind the four thoughts that actually turn the mind. Otherwise, the mind doesn’t get turned and many of us seem to like it that way.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I was first introduced to the concept of the “Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind” and how important it is to keep them constantly in mind by the Ven. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I had the good fortune to spend a few days in his presence in 1974, to act as his chauffeur, and to design a poster for a talk he gave in my home town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The main image I chose for his poster was a flying dragon with four pearls, one pearl held in each claw:

When Trungpa Rinpoche saw the poster, he walked over to it and, turning to me, said: do you know the story behind this dragon? I sheepishly acknowledged that I had no idea of what it represented, and that I just liked the image.

He then went on to explain that as long as the dragon held on to the four pearls, one in each hand, it could fly. But if it dropped even one of them, it would fall to the ground. As I understood it, he was talking about the “Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind,” and the importance in dharma practice to somehow manage to hold all four of these thoughts in mind at the same time. If we could do that, we would progress in our practice. If we could not, we would sink. Nature is a very convenient and sure way to be reminded of these four thoughts.

Putting It Together

There has to be some way for the rubber to meet the road here, some way for us to get serious enough about our practice to actually generate some results that would begin to drive our practice, and so on. Without something to bring us down to earth on a daily basis, we can float on with our hope to someday practice until our life runs out.

There are countless dharmas and dharma paths, and some of them take eons to traverse, we are told. So the only fire and brimstone hurry here has to do with what we intend to accomplish in ‘this’ life, and not with those who prefer to take their lifetimes by eons.

If you are hungry for the dharma, then you need the gas to get there and the Four Thoughts are one tried and true method to do that. That is why they are called the “Common Preliminaries,” the first and necessary step. So, if life is not offering up enough impermanence just now for you, allow mother nature to assist.

Mother Nature

Of course, Mother Nature can’t be of any use if you have no compassion or don’t care for beings other then yourself, if you have no concern for their lives and suffering. If you don’t like animals, critters, and bugs, you are just plain out of luck.

However, if you do care about other beings, then there is no better teacher than nature to meticulously and constantly show you the Four Thoughts, help to keep them in mind, and serve to ground you. Where is nature to be found?

The answer of course is everywhere, as near as your backyard, the neighborhood park, or edge of town – anywhere you can just sit down and take a look. If you live in a city, you have parks or if all else fails a nearby alley that is overgrown or ever a basement with bugs and spiders. But it may not always be as easy as a quick glance around. You have to sit down and take the time to actually observe, but it is relatively painless.

Observing Nature

And all is not doom and gloom in nature. Nature is beautiful and it is that very beauty cut short, dashed, or lost that can give us pause and serve to turn the mind. It is all there before our eyes in plain view – the whole story. All we have to do is to get out in the midst of it, sit down somewhere, and look around us, let what is already going on everywhere show itself. But as mentioned, it does take some time.

First, we have to slow down, relax, and learn to look around. Usually within a few minutes, what at first glance seemed empty of life is not. Things on all sides begin to stir, to move about, and present themselves. And you get the whole story right off, not just the cosmetically correct parts. It is all right before our eyes, the Four Thoughts in live action.

It could be a herd of tiny aphids on a plant stem cared for by some ants on one side and being eaten by ladybugs on the other. Or a dragonfly or butterfly struggling to emerge from a chrysalis. And the huge Luna Moth that has only a few days of life after half a year in a cocoon. The flower that blooms for but a single night only to fade as the dawn comes, etc. Of course some of this is beautiful; awesome might be the better word.

And we might ask “What is beauty”,” but that would be another article. Whatever beauty is, it is fueled by impermanence and the preciousness of life, in other words: the Four Thoughts. In nature, life and death are on display at the wholesale level for all of us to see - entire colonies of creatures wiped out by a single wave or rainstorm. Countless worms and slugs crawling on the tarmac as the fierce sun comes up and threatens to fry them to a crisp before they reach the other side of the road. And some of the worms are crawling in the direction of travel on the road. Good luck!

The baby bird fallen from the nest or in the beak of a marauding crow, with the mother bird screaming behind. It is all always there and never is there a break in these appearances. In all that nature has to show us, there must be some scene that touches even the hardest heart and begins the thaw that leads to some form of compassion. We don’t break nature’s laws; nature breaks us down, sooner or later.

The point here is that in nature we can experience the Four Thoughts not just conceptually, but actually acted out for us personally to see and react to, a perpetual reminder of impermanence only a meadow away.

This is a reason that for centuries meditators have be encouraged to seek out wild and solitary places, and it is not only to be alone. Being alone with nature brings the added advantage of having the Four Thoughts That Turn the Ming always with you.

If you have trouble getting serious about dharma practice or lack the motivation, observing nature and the laws of nature can provide the insight and impetus to persevere in your practice. This is the Lama of Appearances.