From the Mahayana Buddhist point of view every single person, every single mind possessor has the potential to become a buddha.
The etymology of the word “buddha” tells us very simply what that means: it’s very clear: “Budh” implies the eradication of all the nonsense in the mind: the delusions, all the voices of ego: ego-grasping, attachment, aversion, and the rest that we’re so familiar with.
Buddha has found from his own direct experience that these are not at the core of our being, they’re not intrinsic to the mind, they’re not oneness with our mind, and that we can therefore rid the mind of them. He’s done this job himself and shows us his methodology.
Why would we want to do this? Because they’re the cause of our suffering.
But not only can we do that. “Dha” implies we can develop to perfection the positive qualities, the virtues, which are at the core of our being. These are the cause of our happiness.
Buddha’s psychology is almost deceptively simple in the way it divides all of our thousands of states of mind into three categories. There are the neurotic, deluded, ridiculous, nonvirtuous, negative ones that are the source of suffering, the cause of our pain, and the cause of why we harm others. Then there are the virtuous ones, the good ones, the positive ones, the source of our happiness and our ability to benefit others.
Our key job, then, is to identify all the neurotic states of mind, that Buddha says we can get rid of, and distinguish them from the virtuous states of mind, which we can develop to perfection.
You could say that this is the central job of being a Buddhist. Many of those in the third category – I like to call these the “mechanics of the mind” – are what we use to do this job: concentration, mindfulness, attention, intention, discrimination. Interestingly, they are neither virtuous nor nonvirtuous, but they’re totally necessary: they enable us to function. Whether we’re a murderer or a meditator, we need good concentration, good discrimination.
If you can’t learn to identify your various states of mind and know what to do with them, you’re not being a Buddhist. You can wear nice fourteenth-century Tibetan robes like mine, and have a bald head, and live in vows, all these things we do – these are being Buddhist, yes, but they’re not the central job. The central job is knowing your mind and changing it.
To do this job, we need to understand Buddha’s model of the mind, which we often don’t study, unfortunately. We know the words attachment, anger, jealousy, love, compassion and the rest – we’re super familiar – but we have to go deep into the mind to identify them.
Buddha doesn’t own these, you know, but he has a very specific way of identifying and analyzing them.
If you’ve read even one Buddhist book, you’re going to, guaranteed, have found this term called the “three poisons” to describe the negative states: ignorance, attachment, and aversion.
Ignorance is the root: a primordial misconception in the mind that totally believes in a real, solid, independent, pointable, findable me – and a real, solid everything else. This is the root problem, the root mistake.
Before we begin to identify this root delusion, we need to identify the branch delusions: attachment and aversion and then all the others.
Buddha talks about 84,000 neurotic states of mind, and he has 84,000 solutions to the problems, but all those 84,000 can be summarized into these three poisons. And, as Ling Rinpoche says, 21,000 are rooted in ignorance, 21,000 are rooted in attachment or have the character of attachment, 21,000 are rooted in aversion, and the fourth 21,000 have the character of all three. It’s a very fascinating way to put it: all these voices in our head, the neurotic ones, can be divided into these 84,000 different ones, and they all come down to these three.
There’s an intimate relationship between these three – and a hierarchical one. Beginning to understand these, which is in the middle stages of our practice, is absolutely vital in order to do the job that Buddha’s suggesting we can do, which is to unpack and unravel our mind and to begin to lessen the neuroses and grow the goodness – and then to eventually rid the mind utterly of all the rubbish, the misconceptions.
All the things we do as Buddhists – taking vows and abiding by the laws of karma and having faith in the holy beings and doing this practice and taking an empowerment and doing this and doing that –they’re not the main job of a Buddhist: they’re the practices that prime our mind to do the job – that’s what the lamas mean by purification and creating merit – enabling us to do the main job of ridding the mind of the rubbish and developing the goodness.
This is the job of being a Buddhist.