A question came up recently at a teaching: if when you become a buddha, you can manifest in thousands of ways and help sentient beings, where are all the buddhas when a disaster happens? Could they prevent it?
First of all, remember that there are countless beings who’ve become buddhas, and they’re unceasingly manifesting in all kinds of forms in all the realms of existence wherever there are sentient beings, unceasingly helping. That’s their job! They can’t do anything but help! We just don’t see them as buddhas, that’s all.
But we have to understand that we play a role: we need to create the cause to be helped. This is why we need to think about dependent arising. Things have causes: they can’t just happen out of the blue.
When you hear “all-powerful” and “omnipotent” – and you hear that about the Christian creator, and I suppose Muslims talk about all-powerful as well – then immediately, on the face of it, it sounds like, well, if they’re all-powerful, how come they don’t stop all the bad things?
This is the commonest question. I’ve heard many people – Jews, Christians, Muslims – who give up God when really bad things happen. They blame God: well, how come he didn’t intervene and use his power? Which seems on the face of it quite reasonable.
Of course, the Christians talk about free will, how there’s more to it than that – I don’t know the logical reasoning of the creator view –basically God leaves it to us: he makes us and then he gives us this chance to choose. So it’s up to us, you know – that’s a way of saying it.
The Buddhist one is very similar to that in the sense that you have to play a role: you don’t just sit there passively waiting to be helped.
Let me tell you a story, a perfect example of how the holy beings help. Some of you might know Harry Sutton: he’s an American guy, a yogi, he’d been meditating up in the caves for years and years and years. I always think he looks like Father Christmas – we call Santa Claus Father Christmas in Australia. Father Christmas is all fat and jolly, and Harry looks fat and jolly.
Harry’s this big guy with a big beard who kind of roars with laughter – ho, ho, ho – and whenever you’d see Harry, he’d be in the back row at the teachings, he’d be sweeping the floor, he’d be doing the dishes, and everybody who ever met Harry was convinced that he was their best friend, because Harry just loved everybody and was adorable to everybody.
So there’s Harry, spent years and years meditating. Even this is interesting: in the West we think, “Oh, he’s up in the cave meditating. What’s he doing, watching his navel? What’s he doing? Why isn’t he out there doing something?”
Well, he’s in training. Basically, these great yogis, when you go into meditation retreat for years and years, you’re training: you’re training to become a bodhisattva, you’re training to realize emptiness, you’re training to become a buddha. It’s serious, intense, full-on, 100% training. That’s what he’s doing, right? That’s what he’s doing. Harry had this cave for years, way up in the mountains, up above where Lama Zopa’s cave is in the Sherpa country.
This event occurred in the early ’90s, I remember it was after Lama Yeshe had passed away and Lama Zopa was at Kopan in Kathmandu. Harry was at Kopan and he was getting ready to go to his cave. You pack your bag and you either walk up for ten days or you get the plane to Lukla and then you walk for four days or something.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche told someone that he’d had a dream that Harry would die and to please tell him not to go. Well, my comment here is Lama Zopa never slept, so he was just being humble: he had clairvoyance and could see clearly that there was danger.
But it was too late: Harry had left. This was before cell phones, so he couldn’t get the message, right? It was too late. So then Rinpoche asked this amazing yogi at Kopan – Geshe Lama Konchog, the one who lived up in the mountains, naked, meditating for years and years and who, as Rinpoche put it, “lived in Vajrayogini’s pure land” – he asked Geshe Lama Konchog to pray for Harry. That’s the first part of the story.
Meanwhile, Harry’s walking up there, and I think there was a nun with him and she must have first told the story. Since then, I’d hear the story and then I verified it with Harry and this is what he told me.
He’s going up the mountains, and at some point on the walk up, the normal path had been blocked by rocks or something, so they took a side path which was extremely treacherous, you know? And if you’ve been up on those mountains, even the regular paths are treacherous. I mean, I got knocked by a yak one time and nearly fell off the mountain, and that was just the regular path. I remember the yak herder who got mad at me because I must have upset his yak – I didn’t fall off, but I could have.
Harry’s up there with his pack on his back, and suddenly, there are four Sherpas walking down – these porters with their fifty-kilo packs on their back – and of course, they’re bent over double and all they can see is their feet, you know?
It’s really intense: the path is so narrow, really treacherous, and they’re so close. The first thought Harry had was: “Four of them, one of me.”
Now, if you’ve done any of the bodhisattva teachings and meditations, one of the practices to try to get the ridiculous ego out of the way is you use logic to argue with ego: one is only one and even two is more than one, therefore two are more important – of course ego doesn’t want to hear that.
So immediately he said to himself, without effort: “Oh, four of them, one of me,” and stepped to the edge of the cliff automatically. The next second, because it’s all so close and intense, he then says to himself, his second thought: “If they knock me, I won’t hold on.”
Now you listen, you think about that. If you’re sitting there watching tennis and you see someone hit an amazing ball back to Federer, then you know he’s trained for years, don’t you? It’s not just accidental. Well, if you see a person without a second thought step close to the edge of a cliff and think “I won’t hold on” – excuse me, that can’t come naturally!
Obviously he’s trained his mind in bodhichitta! Those years and years of training in the cave. This response is the proof of the pudding, you with me? It really is powerful. No drama: he’s not going, “Oh, I’m a bodhisattva, I’m going to let you go, I will fall off the mountain, it doesn’t matter, blah, blah!” He steps to the side of the cliff to allow them to pass, that’s it.
And of course they knock him – it’s so close! And of course he’s falling! And he doesn’t hold on. Basically, his feet are still on the mountain, he’s falling back, his pack is pulling him, and he said, “I had a psychic vision of the entire fall, and I saw my body crash to the ground.”
And then he said he felt the hands of Geshe Lama Konchog pushing him forcefully, and he reversed direction and fell onto the path.
Now that’s a buddha!
That’s not just Harry’s mind having a vision. That actually in reality is this person called Geshe Lama Konchog – who looked like a grumpy old grandpa but in fact was obviously a highly realized being – who was able to effortlessly cause his own mind to be right there to save Harry. Even the lowest level arya bodhisattvas can manifest their minds in a hundred bodies simultaneously for the benefit of beings. Can you hear that?
Then the next obvious question is, well, how come they’re not doing it for everybody? That’s the obvious question, isn’t it? Well, this is the part that feels difficult: we have to create the cause to be helped. It’s not a one-way street. It’s a dependent arising.
Let’s say you’re the best herbalist on the planet: you’ve learned every imaginable herb and every person you see, you know how to heal them – that’s a possibility in the world, isn’t it?
You are qualified, you are capable, you have power, you know how to heal people – but you can’t force those herbs down people’s throats, can you? A person has to first even think about herbology or whatever it’s called, they have to learn to know about you, they have to find their way to your door, and then they knock on the door, and they have to request: “Please heal me.” That enables you, literally, to heal them.
You can’t walk around the street, dragging people by the ear into your room, and force feed them with herbs. You know you could heal them, but it’s a two-way thing, it’s a dependent arising: you have the power to heal them, but they have to have the merit, the courage, the karma to know you and meet you and be healed by you. Do you understand me?
It’s the same with the Buddha. Harry, obviously, was a highly evolved being: he had the karma to be helped. He’d practiced so much – he had this incredible bodhichitta, to the point where he was happy to give his life for four people. That amount of merit he had, that created the cause for him to be helped by Geshe Lama Konchog. Can you get the concept there?
It’s a two-way street. It’s simply dependent arising: the Buddha has the power to heal, but we have to want to be healed, we have to be ready to be healed, we have to have created the cause to be healed – there’s many things we have to do from our side.
But remember, this is just one instance of one holy being helping one person. Remember all those countless buddhas unceasingly helping! So perhaps think about how appalling the world would be if they weren’t helping all the time!
So let’s not only create the cause to be helped, supported, guided, and taken care of by the buddhas but never stop creating the cause for ourselves to become buddhas so we can do the helping!