THE SNOW LION BUDDHIST NEWS & CATALOG

Nonetheless, the Buddhist tradition has never promoted tranquility meditation as the way to deal with our emotional disturbances and negativities. We need to understand that our disturbing emotions will never go away through this kind of meditation, because calming the mind and emotions is not the same as transforming the mind. We may become better at handling our negative emotions when things are not too bad, but when we experience some kind of crisis, our meditation practice won't stop us from being thrown into deep states of depression, despair or total confusion. We might even doubt the efficacy of meditation itself, feeling it does nothing more than a band-aid job if it only works when things are going moderately well.

However, people only come to this conclusion if they have a wrong understanding of meditation. If we don't equate calming the mind with mental transformation, we won't make the mistake of thinking tranquility meditation is the aim of Buddhist practice. We need to think about the mind in terms of transformation, because that is the real aim of Buddhism.

This doesn't mean that calming the mind is discouraged by Buddhism; on the contrary, tranquility meditation is promoted in Buddhist practices. However, it is only emphasized at the beginning of our practice and solely as the basis for our efforts to transform the mind. If we are going to transform the mind, we have to understand the mind. The only way to understand the mind is to understand our mental and emotional life. We need to understand how our emotions arise, why those emotions arise and what to do about those emotions once they do arise.

Buddhists promote the transformation of the mind because they believe that the ultimate aspiration of a human being is to attain enlightenment. Enlightenment is equated with the state of ultimate happiness. It's important to understand that to attain ultimate happiness, we first need to attain relative happiness. Westerners sometimes misunderstand, because Buddhist discourses seem to emphasize suffering. They understand Buddhism to be saying we have to realize that everything is really suffering if we want to attain enlightenment and that we should therefore forego our concerns with everyday because only enlightenment equates with happiness. This is a misconception. Buddhism does make a distinction between the attainment of ultimate happiness and the attainment of relative happiness, but it values both.

Buddhism says that the human mind is negatively geared to think in a critical way. A negative person will always manage to spread their negativity around. Such a person manages to bring down his wife, kids, and friends so that they become negative people as well. This process of infection may apply to positive people as well. If we are positive and happy, that energy is also contagious and other people are going to be affected by it.

Transformation begins with the mind. What does Buddhism say about the mind? It says the mind is not just a unitary thing. One of our fundamental misapprehensions is the compulsion to lump disparate things together and see them as one thing. That fixation produces all kinds of distorted thinking, which in turn compels us to direct strong feelings and emotions toward whatever we have reified. The same process of conflation, reification and fixation is occurring when we think about the mind.

Human beings don't just have one consciousness; they have many different kinds of consciousnesses. Different consciousnesses do different things and collectively bring about the kinds of conscious experiences we have as human beings. We need to understand that negative and positive emotions are 'mental events.' Mental events are connected to our 'primary consciousness,' which consists of the five sense-consciousnesses: the visual, nasal, audial, olfactory and sensation consciousnesses. These factors are very pertinent to our emotional life because we can only experience emotions when they are all functioning. All of these things are called dharmas in Buddhism, which means 'physical and mental entities.' How we see, smell, touch and taste are all very relevant to our emotional lives, because they determine whether something is going to attract or repulse us and therefore they elicit the emotions of disgust or extreme craving.

As well as the five sense-consciousnesses, we have what is called the 'consciousness of consciousness,' which means the thinking consciousness that remembers, conceptualizes, structures, plans and so forth. The 'primary mind' consists of these five sense-consciousnesses and the thinking consciousness. The thinking consciousness determines what we perceive, whether we like it or not, whether it's in our favor or not, whether it's threatening or comforting to us, and so on. These things determine the emotions we experience. For example, if we direct anger toward someone, the object of our anger may be a particular person, but the anger only arises if we think that person has done something disrespectful or demeaning to us. This shows that our emotional experiences are not simply caused by the arising of anger or jealously and so on, there has to be a thinking component as well.

If you wish to find conditional happiness by overcoming emotions such as anger, you need to create some kind of support system for your mind. That requires understanding your existing support system and seeing how it makes your mind function improperly. You have to gradually dismantle that faulty support system and replace it with a one that can make your mind flourish in a positive way. For example, it's not easy to get rid of anger, but if we gradually learn to take out the mental support system for our angry responses and replace it with a support system that will cause the opposite of anger, our anger will lessen. Buddhism lists emotions such as spite and resentment as the mental events that act as support systems for anger. It may be difficult to rid ourselves of anger, but if we can learn to be less spiteful and resentful, our anger will diminish. We need to reclaim the ground that has been overrun by our negative emotions rather than trying to eliminate those emotions altogether.

A very important aspect of Buddhist meditation practice is the emphasis on mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness and awareness are both listed as mental events. Awareness is listed as a support system for a positive state of mind and emotions, while mindfulness is listed as a neutral support system, because it simply means having the ability to focus our minds. It can support both positive and negative states of mind because what we choose to focus on may be good or it may be bad. The Buddhist form of meditative awareness that can only promote positive forms of emotions and the cultivation of mindfulness and awareness is therefore used to make positive emotions flourish. The distracted mind, the resentful mind, the mind that is given to lethargy and lack of motivation are all listed as mental events. They support negative emotions that lead to negative mood swings, depression and despair because they promote the negative thoughts that go with these negative emotions. Negative emotions are always preceded by negative thoughts. With the practice of mindfulness and awareness, we'll begin to notice how we constantly feed our negative thoughts about people, situations and ourselves.

Proper thinking can be the antidote to all kinds of disturbing mental states, including negative emotions, mood swings and so forth. What we say to ourselves determines how we experience things, so analytic thinking is quite useful for meditation practice and the reason meditation is effective. Buddhism says that we make ourselves unhappy every day by thinking unhappy thoughts, so why can't we use the same logic to make ourselves happy by thinking happy thoughts? The mind works from a positive perspective as well. That's the point.

Ven. Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche teaches at E-vam Institute, and is the author of . . .

• The Benevolent Mind: A Manual in Mind Training
• Essence of Buddhism: An Introduction to Its Philosophy and Practice
• Mind At Ease: Self-Liberation through Mahamudra Meditation
• The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training the Mind