The Three Ways to Rejoice your Masters

Series: How to practice the Dzogchen path?

The Three Ways to Rejoice your Masters

How should you behave with a master? After the first few encounters and the initial reaction, it’s a question that comes up sooner or later. The ‘Three Ways of Rejoicing the Masters’ or ‘Three Types of Service’ (zhabs tog rnam gsum) are a useful traditional guide to structuring our thinking and actions in this area.

If you are a student ‘endowed with the three qualities’ (with a sharp intellect eager to learn, a measured speech, and respect for the master), you will use your qualities according to the following three methods:

1. The offering of practice (sgrub pa’i mchod pa)
2. Service through body and speech (lus ngag gi zhab tog)
3. The offering of material goods (zang zing gi ‘bul ba)

 “So it’s a question of providing optimum conditions for the handover to take place and for clarity to emerge in people’s minds. Not so easy when everyone is running around like headless chickens! Keeping a cool head **is of the utmost importance.” 

1.

The first way to rejoice the masters is to practice their teachings. This may sound like nothing, but these days, with our overloaded schedules, our perpetual saturation and our legendary procrastination (frenzy and apathy being two sides of the same coin), it’s not so obvious. Remember that procrastinare comes from akrasia in Greek, which means ‘to act against one’s better judgment’ – interesting, isn’t it?

Anyway, when you think about it, what else can you do? Carry out the Master’s instructions. Tradition says that the Master’s compassion is such that he takes birth in the garb of a human to teach beings who are wandering in the endless cycle of suffering existences. So to come to the teachings without retaining anything, without revising anything, without applying anything in your daily life and in your retreats, in short, to remain speechless with your back to the chair, would be a bit silly, wouldn’t it?

Moreover, the Tibetan sgrub (‘practice’) can also be read as ‘realization’: traditional biographies (‘namthar’, Tib. rnam thar) thus present cases where, after many years, the disciple comes to rejoice his master by offering him the realization of the instructions. Such was the case with Jigme Gyalwai Nyugu who, after exhausting labor that almost cost him his life, returned to see the Omniscient Jigmé Lingpa to describe to him the characteristics of the fourth vision of Thögäl (Tib. thod rgal), the end of the Dzogchen path. And the Master rejoiced: ‘Son, that’s exactly it. You have reached the level known as the exhaustion of phenomena within reality (chos nyid du ‘dzin pa zad pa’i snang ba).’ [1] 

So to ‘offer one’s practice’ means acting according to the instructions so that the precious existences of Master and Disciple become a meaningful connection, a wonderful encounter.

2.

The second way of rejoicing the Masters is to serve their activity: through the body, by organizing everything necessary for the smooth running of the teaching. This ranges from booking rooms to serving coffee, from thinking about meals to hotels; from building the temple or retreat center to driving the vehicle when traveling (oxcart or turbo car, thoroughbred or coracle, jet or yak), from preparing together the menu to keeping the accounts – in short! It’s about organizing all the logistics so that the Master can concentrate on the essential part of his or her job: passing on the message.

In other words, it’s about creating the best possible conditions for the handover to take place and for clarity to emerge in people’s minds. Not so easy when everyone is running around like headless chickens! Keeping a cool head is of the utmost importance.

As for ‘serving through words’, it means knowing how to ask the right questions at the right time to request the teaching (and to do this, you have to study first. cf. https://dzogchentoday.org/a-time-for-observation/), as well as knowing how to answer the questions asked by the teacher to check whether the previous teaching has been integrated (and to do this, you have to… yes, I insist. cf. https://dzogchentoday.org/the-traditional-qualities-of-a-disciple/). More traditionally, it also means praising and asking for long life, and making all the prayers and wishes that will help the activity to develop and preserve a lineage of authentic realization, dedicated to the benefit of the beings who encounter it.

Ideally, this would mean knowing how to speak in the service of the enlightened ones, restating their teachings without adding or subtracting anything, while adapting them to the changing conditions of life and thought.

3.

The last way is undoubtedly the most misunderstood: the giving of material goods. This is not almsgiving, it is not charity.

On the one hand, for those of us who are obsessed with our attachment to material support, it is a matter of letting go. It is said that the great Dzogchen master Patrul Rinpoche left behind the heaps of offerings he had received. Traditionally, offerings were made of livestock, horses and anything else that provided labor-power in a world with very little machinery.

But in this age of the proliferation of material objects, where everything seems within reach and easy to buy, what we really need to work on is the ‘god of money’; its falsely reassuring power and the feeling of unbridled protection it gives. Just to be sure: all it takes is to believe that we are out of money for panic to set in – as if having money makes us immortal. It’s a highly illusory ‘refuge value’.

The ‘gift of material goods’, on the other hand, is support for the establishment of places of refuge for spiritual practice, whether digital (website) or geographical (retreat center). These are the places that help us to study and integrate our practice, in our daily activities or in retreats to deepen our understanding. Helping to build, sustain and maintain these places is fundamental to the continuity of spiritual teachings that are in danger of being dispersed. They need to be places of strength where their breath remains alive, palpable and present, where the people committed to the path can live it to the fullest. It is said that Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche himself laid the foundation stones for the great temple in Tenerife.

As we can see, these ‘three ways of serving the Masters’ overlap with the three types of generosity (gift of a spiritual teaching, gift of protection from danger, gift of what is necessary) as well as with the triptych of listening, reflecting and meditating.

They are also called, in a single expression, ‘the way of following the Master by application’ (sbyor bas bsten tshul): to apply oneself (sbyor ba) is then to enter into action (sbyor ba), into union (sbyor ba) with the Master’s blessing; this is the principle of yoga (sbyor ba).

[1] Merveilleuse Danse Illusoire, Autobiography of Khenchen Ngawang Palzang Eusèl Rinchèn Nyingpo Péma Lédrel Tsal, Padmakara. BACK