The Questions of Gangpa Muksang
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“For practitioners in the Chöd tradition, this should be just the opposite. Your loving and affectionate friends and relatives tell you how unreasonable it would be to go into mountain retreat and practice the Dharma, that by yourself you’ll be destitute of food and wealth, and that once suffering and illness come there won’t be any support or loving care and you’ll become neurotic. ‘Stay at home!,’ they say. ‘We’ll provide all the excellent conditions. We won’t abandon you.’ Thus they act as the devil on the path to freedom and make themselves a demon that interferes with virtue. You should know that loving and helpful people are devils or demons. “As for those who hate and hurt you, meditate on them with compassion and reflect on how they must be collecting on some previous karmic debt (lan chags). Meditate joyfully, thinking that those beings are gods to convert you to the path of enlightenment. And don’t be attached to worldly gods. If you are attached to them, you make them into demons [that cause you to] wander in cyclic existence. Don’t place even a hair’s tip of hope in these worldly gods. Fix on the eight classes of gods and demons and the others with firm compassion in mind. Keep them around and guard them dearly. You have been instilled with virtue because of them, so they are gods. Thus, to meditate with love on those who cause harm, and give away your own living body without hesitation for their benefit, and to always have a compassionate attitude is the ideal way to relate with gods and demons in this system of Chöd. “Both the gods and the demons by essential mode of being are merely designations on a relative level. That is, they are such according to how they function. Being as they are mere appearance, don’t fixate on them as true, but understand that on the absolute level they are inherently unreal. Gods and Demons Superimposed on Observable Phenomena 15 “These are worldly beings, such as the celestial mentsun,16 that are somewhat inclined to virtue and move the spirit of ordinary women and men, inspiring them to report on all the profits and problems of the world.17 Also, when many paranormal things of different sorts occur, such as flowers and crops suddenly sprouting in the unseasonable wintry cold, or nonhumans practically displaying their forms openly and making many predictions, or visible rainbows and figures, people say that it’s spiritual powers, or it’s sacred, or it’s a god, or it’s glory. They superimpose [these ideas] and make it into a god.