YouTube is a miracle. Right now you are just a few keystrokes from seeing some of the most precious spiritual teachings, taught directly from their authors. For a thousand years people have given up all their possessions, left their countries, undergone intense hardship, just to sit at the feet of a great master. Now you can sit at the feet of a great master while sitting on the toilet.
What happens to devotion in such a context? Devotion is currently not in fashion. We regard the word itself with one raised eyebrow – devotion sounds perilously close to zealotry which we’ve seen produce all sorts of confusion and suffering. Better to be skeptical than devoted, we contend.
But devotion is a tricky word to get to the heart of. It takes time. Is there anything you’re devoted to? It could be anything – a person, a craft, a sports team. A rock band. Call it to mind, and rest in that feeling for devotion for a while. Once you are settled, consider these questions:
Does devotion come from your head, your heart, or your gut?
Does devotion feel narrow, or expansive?
Does devotion feel flat, or richly textured?
Does devotion feel like something you have, or like something that has you?
The kind of devotion I want to talk about moves in the direction of wonder, openness, heartfelt appreciation. It is anything but a simple, blinding, or a mind-numbing sensation. The object of devotion is not important at all; it’s about entering the devotional mode.
In fact devotion doesn’t require an object at all. Have you ever spent a magical day at a museum? If you haven’t, stop reading this and go spend a magical day at a museum. When I have a magical day at a museum I am in a continuous state of devotion. Take the Met, here in New York, where devotion stirs in you from the moment you start climbing the stairs, grows as you pay for your entrance fee – or opt not to pay, as is your right as a New Yorker, either way clipping the little button, which is a different color every day, to your shirt. Individual objects of art may stir you more or less than others, but it’s not that they are the sources of your devotion. You are in a devotional mode, you are in church, you are in a holy place and you are suffused with its holiness.
- The Temple of Dendur, which occupies a giant room in the Met, is a microcosm of this: a temple inside a Temple.
- The more you know about it, the more your appreciate it.
- This is played out in small scale next to any painting: name, time period, materials.
- Devotion as the “conclusion of Buddhism” via Suzuki
- The magic of YouTube is not that you can watch anything you want whenever you want. It’s the possibility of you finding exactly the teaching you need to find, and then being able to watch it over and over again wherever you are.
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This is how I came to discover the infinitely precious and totally complete teaching entitled “Examining the Nonsense Mind - Lama Zopa Rinpoche,” to be found on the YouTube channel of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. My family came to Park Slope in August 2022 and shortly thereafter I started taking classes at Yogis & Yoginis, a yoga center on the corner of 6th Avenue and 9th Street. Around the same time, my teacher Kenneth Folk introduced me to the yoga of inner heat, and in doing so referenced the book The Bliss of Inner Fire, by Lama Yeshe. I immediately acquired it – as I usually do with any work that Kenneth mentions – and listened to it on Audible over the course of a weekend.
The next time I walked into Yogis & Yoginis, I noticed that one of the books on display was written by Lama Yeshe, and I soon came to understand that the spaced was shared with the Shantideva Center, itself part of the global Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, or FPMT, which had been founded by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche in 1975. One of the teachers, Venerable Robina Courtin, had been a student of Lama Yeshe’s, and I started attending her monthly “The Workshop is in the Mind” talks. Once I was sitting in such a position that I could see a straight line from the picture of Lama Zopa Rinpoche on the wall to Robina to me, and a thin ray of intelligent light beamed from him, through her, into my being.
But that was much later. At first I was primarily interested in Lama Yeshe, who has many talks available on YouTube. Dead since 1984, Lama has a wonderful charisma that pours out through the screen; his face is delightful to look at, and his teaching style is vivacious, informal, cheeky. It wasn’t until Zopa Rinpoche unexpectedly died in 2023 that I became somewhat aware - basically through the massive outpouring of love and mourning – of his own greatness. In a brief conversation with Lelung Rinpoche at a retreat in upstate New York, I could feel his enormous reverence for Zopa Rinpoche. I was also struck by his unusually public dying process – you can find videos of his final meditation, which in the tradition is the opportunity to enter paranirvana and occurs after what Western medicine considers to be the event of death. I started searching YouTube for his teachings and eventually found the incomparable “Examining the Nonsense Mind.”
As Venerable Robina documents in her obituary of Rinpoche, he tirelessly worked to serve others. Tirelessly as in: he never went to bed. He never took a day off. After a life-threatening stroke,
he showed not the slightest interest in finding out what was wrong with him, never asked the doctors a single question. For Rinpoche, it was as if nothing had changed. He was relaxed and calm, effortlessly adjusting to his new situation, the right side of his body paralyzed, his speech impaired. He was joyful about his physical limitations, happily experiencing them for the sake of others. In fact, to [his attendant] Ven. Roger it seemed that Rinpoche’s wish to serve, to benefit, was even more intense, his compassion even more extraordinary.
I share this very brief information as context for the video you are about to watch. The production value is modest. Rinpoche has a subdued presence – he presents little of the contagious charm that Lama Yeshe was famous for. He clears his throat often, which might be distracting or even unappealing to some. What I would encourage is for you to discover a view from which these factors are not considered limitations, and are rather woven into a deep appreciation that arises from a more complete understanding of the context behind the video.
There are a few essential points to watching a dharma talk on YouTube that sets it aside from watching other videos. First, one should set the conscious intention to watch one hundred percent of the video with one hundred percent of one’s attention. This requires only a little setup: you should ensure that you have enough time to watch it, potentially blocking off time in your calendar if need be. You should turn off all notifications and set the video to full screen view. You should occupy a space that would appropriate for on-cushion meditation, where you are alone and won’t be bothered.
What does it mean to give something one hundred percent of your attention? Here we brush against some of the confusion around what it means to concentrate. Without attempting any sweeping definitions, let me just be clear about what I mean in this context. You should concentrate on the video not at all like a focused laser beam connecting your forehead to the screen, boring a hole into both. Instead, you should concentrate on the video the way that after a fierce storm that blows all the trees in the forest and sends animals scurrying in all directions, everything gradually starts to settle and converge; the branch comes to rest and the butterfly comes to rest on it; the ground absorbs the rain and mushrooms flower from it, everything becomes calm and in the calmness there is a gathering of peaceful activity. So in this context what I want you to do is be in a receptive mode; not like you’re listening to a lecture in a university hall but more like you’re taking in the sun. Don’t have a notebook, don’t write anything down. Don’t pick and choose, tuning out the boring parts and tuning in for the exciting parts. Just rest in an open, curious, appreciative state that takes as its object not just the teaching, not just Zopa Rinpoche, not just YouTube, not just your access to technology, not just your good fortune for finding this talk, but the totality of experience, the whole enchilada, just like I did on that school trip to the Met where I lay down on the bench in the Temple of Dendur and closed my eyes and thought, Wow!
A excellent way to watch the video is with others on a big screen. You could invite friends over to a viewing party. You could light a few candles to start and go around in a circle, sharing one or two things about your practice or just how you’re doing. You could have a short discussion after. That would be wonderful.
But it’s also fine to watch the video in bed, and even close your eyes and just listen to the audio as you are going to sleep. I do this frequently. In some ways, an audio-only experience is more conducive to that mode of open attention I was just talking about.
The trickiest form factor is watching the video on a small screen like your phone. Your eyes will naturally narrow and your vision will tunnel to zero in on the visual information on the screen and block out the irrelevant visual information like the room you’re in, or what’s happening inside your body. If you must watch on your phone, be sure that your attention does not actively block out anything. This is actually a wonderful practice and one that is likely to arise spontaneously as you watch.
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Before I share the video and my commentary on it, I should say one or two things about what the dharma is, or at least what I think the dharma is. Spiritual traditions can have two orientations to scripture. Either an open orientation or a closed orientation. Judaism, the tradition that my mother was born into but that I have not yet studied, has as far as I can tell a closed orientation. The holy book has been written, and it is finished. It is a holy object worthy of further study, further interpretation, further translation, but there is nothing holy left to write. There may be marginal or secret texts like the Kaballah, but those are considered apocryphal, marginal, non-canon.
In contrast, the family of traditions that constitute Buddhism has an open orientation. The dharma has been written, continues to be written, and will in the future be written. Dharma is not limited to just what’s been written down; conversations might be dharma, interactions might be dharma. Some dharma is famous, some remain unknowns, some is lost forever. There is no central authority that blesses or authenticates dharma as canonical; the canon is continually being added to.
To understand the thinking behind this, it’s helpful to consider the Buddhist cosmology. Earth, known as the “saha world,” is just one of thousands or millions of worlds. As our imagination will affirm, ours is not the best of all worlds. For example, there is a paradisiacal world described in the Vimalakirti sutra as the Fragrant Land. How, Vimalakirti asks, is the dharma taught in the Fragrant Land?
The Tathagata of our land does not use word and speech to preach but uses the various fragrance to stimulate the devas in their observance of the commandments. They sit under fragrant trees and perceive how sweet the trees smell thereby realizing the samadhi derived from the store of all merits. When they realize this samadhi, they win all merits.
So in the Fragrant Land, the dharma is transmitted from the flora of that land through the olfactory senses of its inhabitants, who instantly and effortlessly come to a complete understanding of how things are.
How, one of the beings from the Fragrant Land asks Vimalakirti, is the dharma taught in your land? Vimalakirti responds:
Living beings of this world are pig-headed (stubborn) and difficult to convert; hence the Buddha uses strong language to tame them. He speaks of hells, animals and hungry ghosts in their planes (realms) of suffering; of the places of rebirth for stupid men as retribution for perverse deeds, words and thoughts, i.e. for killing, stealing, carnality, lying, double tongue, coarse language, affected speech, covetousness, anger, perverted views (which are the ten evils); for stinginess, breaking the precepts, anger, remissness, confused thoughts and stupidity (i.e. the six hindrances to the six paramitas); for accepting, observing and breaking the prohibitions; for things that should and should not be done; for obstructions and non-obstructions; for what is sinful and what is not; for purity and filthiness; for the worldly and holy states; for heterodoxy and orthodoxy; for activity and non-activity; and for samsara and nirvana. Since the minds of those who are difficult to convert are like monkeys, various methods of preaching are devised to check them so that they can be entirely tamed. Like elephants and horses which cannot be tamed without whipping them until they feel pain and become easily managed, the stubborn of this world can be disciplined only with bitter and eager words.”
At this news the beings bow their head in great respect to the buddhas of the Saha world and the incredible skill of teaching the dharma in so many ways to such confused beings.
And we can relate to this, can’t we? Consider the organization Doctors Without Borders, in which doctors travel to dangerous and impoverished regions to administer aid to those in need. Maybe the doctors have very limited resources, have to work in primitive ways compared to what might be available in a well-appointed hospital. Does this make us appreciate the doctors less or more?
So too with the dharma. As Zopa Rinpoche says in the talk, legend has it that Shakyamuni Buddha gave 84,000 teachings, one for each of the 84,000 earthly obscurations. Some numbers are very precise in Buddhism; I think it’s safe to say that here 84,000 is mainly meant to mean: very large. Now consider all the cultural changes that have occurred in the two thousand years between the time of Shakyamuni and our 21st century. How many new obscurations have emerged? How many new teachings?
So we can simultaneously hold in great reverence the dharma of the Heart Sutra, which at a thousand years old is the best-known teaching and whose staying power and dispersion point to its immeasurable potency, and the dharma of “Examining the nonsense mind,” a talk given in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2008 and at time of writing seen about 2500 times on YouTube.
The word “sutra” itself points directly to the open nature of the dharma. It literally means “thread,” a usage that persists in the English word suture. New threads of the dharma are always being woven in. Q&A sessions themselves can be sutras, and in fact the Heart Sutra is an example of a Q&A session between Aviloketshvara and Shariputra (punctuated by Shakyamuni). Commentaries can also be dharma; one such commentary is Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentary on the Diamond that cuts through illusion sutra. We could call this the “Nonsense Mind Sutra.” What follows is a commentary on the Nonsense Mind Sutra.