What Samsara Is

By Michael Erlewine

What’s unique to me is my own experience of the dharma and whatever in that experience I have managed to realize from it. I don’t have to be shy or apologize for that. We each have a unique history. You do also.

Trying to fit my personal experience and dharma insights into a traditional dharma pattern or mold as told in the dharma texts I find impossible. The dharma teachings themselves say there are 84,000 dharmas. Whether that is just a high number and how the dharma scholars came up with that sum, I’m sure I don’t know, yet it suggests a lot of leeway — different dharma paths for different folks.

Aside from Samsara, this cyclic live of ups and downs, everything else in this universe is dharma or dharma compliant. It is just Samsara (our attachments) that runs counter or is not dharma, an opaque dam of graspingness that holds back the waters of our own liberation. It keeps us from full immersion of the mind’s nature and realization.

Aside from Samsara, we can take any part of our mind and this world, and it becomes another direct path to enlightenment. So, what’s the holdup?

Well, of course, that would be Samsara itself that is holding us back, aside from ourselves. Same thing. And perhaps we have to keep reminding ourselves what Samsara is. What is it?

Samsara amounts to everything that we are attached to that resists change, whatever we try to grasp or cling to because we insist that it must, should be, or is permanent, like that we have an eternal “Soul” or some kind of permanent Self that continues on at the next rebirth, and around which everything revolves from lifetime to lifetime.

The pith dharma teachings say that such a soul just

does not exist and that it is untrue, a simple miss-take. Everything is fluid, changes, and is impermanent, not static.

Our own clinginess, grasping, and attachments are an attempt to stop the wheel of dharma, the wheel of change itself from turning as it naturally does. We insist and resist, yet we don’t have that power because that entire View (Samsara), as mentioned, is a mistake.

And by that same frozen grasp or grip, that insistence, we are thereby dragged along, banging ourselves against the walls of time as we go. Instead, all we have to do is to let go, relax, yet we can’t seem to manage that. It is we who keep the show static and in stasis, and it’s killing us, so to speak. Learning to let go is more than just good advice; it is imperative.

Pliancy, flexibility, and suppleness are what we need, the ability to let go and allow ourselves to enter the flow of change. And to stop damming ourselves up against change. That’s a bad idea and we are doing this to ourselves. Only we can stop it.

And the great dharma Mahasiddhas, who were not monks, but just lay people like ourselves, yet also astute dharma practitioners, have written volumes of suggestions, and perhaps the chief of those come from the Mahasiddha Tilopa, who ground sesame seeds during the day and ran a brothel at night, and he wrote as words of advice to us:

Don’t Prolong the Past,

Don’t Invite the Future,

Don’t Alter the Present,

Relax, Just as It Is.

Also added in some versions are two more suggestions, which are subtexts of “Don’t Alter the Present,” and they are:

Don’t Analyze or Examine.

Don’t Intend or Control.

These six words of advice have been passed down and commented on innumerable times, and in essence they say:

Relax, be fluid. Bend with the wind.

As for a samsara story, I have one and will share it. Many years ago (mid-1980s), when many of the great rinpoches had fled Tibet and were temporarily homeless (they had left their ancestral monasteries), they sometimes toured our dharma centers, including our center here in Big Rapids, Michigan, the ’Heart Center KTC (Karma Thegsum Choling).

And one of those Rinpoches was one of the four ‘Heart Sons” of the 16th Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, came and spent a week with us at our center with his attendant.

One of the things we did was take His Eminence to a nearby virgin pine forest, where there still were original growth pine trees, huge trees reaching into the sky. Their lower branches didn’t even start until about forty feet up, and the forest floor beneath was covered with moss and soft grass. We had a picnic there on the grass.

And His Eminence remarked that “Someone could become enlightened here” and later said “This is very nice Samsara.” Of course, sometimes Samsara is nice. As we left the pine forest and were driving home on back roads of a 900,000 acre national fores, a miniature almost-tornado came up. It was pouring rain, and the windshield wipers could barely keep up, with dust-devil whirling winds pushing the car around in the road.

Margaret was in the front seat with me, and His Eminence and his attendant were in the back. My knuckles were white from trying to control the wheel and we were struggling against the storm. I happened to look back at the lamas, and they were sound asleep, completely out and relaxed.

That was a lesson right there.

[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]

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As Bodhicitta is so precious,

May those without it now create it,

May those who have it not destroy it,

And may it ever grow and flourish.