I’m currently studying the Fourth Council with my Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima. This is a contemplation on the following excerpt.

 

The flawless, with qualities complete, is the Krtayuga Dharma. When a quarter then degenerates, it is the early Tretayuga. If half has degenerated, it is the late Tretayuga. The remainder, when three-quarters have degenerated, is the Dvaparayuga. If there is not even one-quarter, it is the Kaliyuga Dharma, the dreadful doctrine of the impious outsiders.

 

 

 

What does this mean to me?

You know those five year plans? The ones where you plan out your life, and if you stick with it, you’ll be a success, and sublime happiness will be yours? I never found sublime happiness. Although, to be fair, I never stuck to the plan. It was hard. The plan kept changing. Year one’s goal was never year two’s goal, and by the time I got to year two, I’d changed, and I never knew if I should start a new plan or what.

Our friends at Dictionary.com tell us a plan is, “a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance.” It didn’t feel that way, though. It felt like I had a plan for reality, and reality had. . . well, its own plan. A doctrine on the other hand is, “a particular principle, position, or policy taught…”. When I first started studying the Dharma, I kind of treated it like an Infinity Year Plan for Enlightenment. I thought if I could just plan my life right, and do this Dharma thing, I’d wake up on a golden lotus in the Pure Lands, Ami Deva would be there (maybe with an iPad) and I’d have my i-Notebook, and I’d swiftly attain enlightenment.

This is what I thought the Dharma was…a plan. A way of doing things. But now, after years of study, I see the Dharma for what it is: a principle. Gravity is a principle. It always sucks. No five year plan needed for getting old, it’s gonna happen. Aging, gravity – they’re principles that apply in a world of conditioned existence. The difference between a plan and a principle? A principle is unchanging. A principle doesn’t depend on causes and conditions. The Dhama’s like that. It’s a principle, a proposition, if you like: if we see reality as it is, we will permanently end our suffering.

But there’s another key element to a principle – it is taught. The act of teaching can lead to misunderstandings, a kind of decay. Imagine a 2600 hundred year game of telephone. Then imagine groups splintering off because their way of telling the message was the right way, the only way.

The Dharma as doctrine is like that. It’s come down to us in a disciplic succession, yes, but two and some thousand years is an awful long game of telephone. Mistakes, misunderstandings, misinterpretations are bound to slip in. When they do, the Dharma remains the same, but the doctrine that is transmitted can become woefully distant from the original principle. It can become a dreadful doctrine, a teaching that leads only to increased suffering, increased unhappiness, and delusions that veer off the Eight Fold Noble Path.

Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?

When I first thought about this, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of how the idea of doctrine applied to my past. But then I thought…love—isn’t that a doctrine we’re taught from earliest childhood? Isn’t it something Hollywood lures us with: find love and you’ll find everlasting happiness. Never mind the crying babies, the mortgage, the love life you’re too damned tired to deal with, and the husband (wife) who just isn’t the fairy tale you’d hoped for. You found love. You’re happy, right? Right?

A long time ago, in this very lifetime, I thought not only that I understood the doctrine of love, but that I’d found someone I could love. Imagine my delight with those first six months. Sadly, the entire affair dragged on for nearly nine years of my life. Those six months were just a blip on the radar of Love Found.

It’s only years later, after studying the Dharma that I realize those nine and half years arose from a dreadfully decayed doctrine of love that I had internalized wholly, and without question. My understanding of love was sophomoric, to be kind; delusional, to be truthful. I truly believed that if I loved someone, not only would they love me back, but they’d love me back just the way I wanted them to. As might be expected, this led to some hellish life lessons. My misunderstanding of the doctrine we call ‘love’ was a thing far removed from the actual meaning of love. Love is simply the desire that someone else be happy. My idea of love was all about me: I was supposed to be happy because I loved.

If I had understood that simple difference all those years ago, I would have realized that the person I was with could not possibly be happy in a relationship based on fantasy, lies, and delusions. Neither could I.

Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The Good Neighbor. There’s a doctrine for you. Do you even know your neighbor? I’ve lived in cities all my life. Neighbors are like sunsets at the beach, you see them, marvel at them, then you move on. Okay. I’m an introvert. That doesn’t help. But still.

Again, back to our friends at Dictionary.com. A neighbor is:

• a person who lives near another.
• a person or thing that is near another
• one’s fellow human being
• a person who shows kindliness or helpfulness toward his or her fellow humans

These definitions were taken sequentially from the dictionary. So it’s safe to assume this is a snapshot of how the idea or doctrine of ‘neighbor ‘ has changed over time. So, a neighbor goes from being the guy/girl next door to Mother frikkin’ Teresa. That’s a heck of a game of telephone.

How did this happen? Why did it happen?  I’m not sure why, but I’m pretty sure about how. As we moved from villages to towns to cities to suburbs to weekend commute bedroom communities, our doctrine or principle of what it means to be a ‘neighbor’ expanded. We could even go so far as to say, if they can get to Paypal or Zelle, they’re a neighbor. . .amiright?

Is this expansion a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to you philosophers out there.

I work for a company that defines itself with the doctrine of being a “Good Neighbor”. They take this seriously. It’s painted on the walls like graffiti–only tidy, corporate, and dull. The idea is that on each phone call (I work in Customer Service), you’re to treat every single person as though they were your neighbor and they’re knocking on your door because they need help.

Applying this doctrine of  “Good Neighbor” to my work each day makes my job an opportunity to treat each call as a field of compassion to be cultivated. Of course, I have to do this in twelve minutes or less, because time is money, and this Good Neighbor ain’t trying to hear your problems all day long.

But seriously, this doctrine of being a good neighbor has made my job part of my practice, and I’m glad for it.

Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

In all honesty, I have to say being a good neighbor sometimes makes me long for a little arsenic and lace. They’re yelling, they’re asking why they have to pay out of pocket, they’re mad at you (because I run the company), they accuse you of ripping them off, and of course, they’re going to sue you.

When this happens, I take a step back, and I turn my mind to the Dharma. I see things as they truly are. I don’t believe there’s really no one on the other end of the phone because everything is empty. I don’t tell them to man up (or girl up) because this is all they’ve got. I don’t tell them (as one Dharma teacher says), Samsara is the fifth world from the bottom in a cosmology of a hundred and five worlds. What do you expect?

When I turn my mind to the Dharma, I hear the echoes of my own profound suffering in this lifetime and countless others. I hear the ‘if only’ mind, if only my car was fixed for free, then I’d be happy. I hear the lifetimes upon lifetimes they’ve taken rebirth, and have not yet found the path to the cessation of suffering. I hear that they’re caught up in the dreadful doctrine of happiness in Samsara. I hear that beneath it all, they believe there is no way out of their suffering.

When I hear this, when I see reality as it is, compassion is inevitable. I yearn to do all I can to relieve their suffering. Sometimes it’s as simple as a sincere, “I’m sorry to hear that’. This is the power of the pure Dharma. When we see reality as it is, we can speak to the suffering of another with clarity and sincerity, and with the wish that they would be free of suffering.

Dolpopa wrote of the ‘dreadful doctrine of the impious outsiders’ hundreds of years ago. Perhaps today he may have written of the hollow promise of happiness in Samsara. He may have written of the need to recognize a decayed hollowed out promise. Only with this recognition can we hope to return to a true, pure doctrine, the Krtayuga Dharma.