Quote of the day

“How you act when you’re alone affects the rest of your life.”

– CTR

Ye tang che — The hope dilemma

“If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be
exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the
groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path.“

– Pema Chödrön

According to Buddhist teachers like Pema Chödrön and others, one of the first real steps on the buddhist path is a state called “ye tang che”. “Ye” means “totally” or “completely”, “tang che” means “exhausted”. So “ye tang che” describes a state of total exhaustion. In the buddhist context, this primarily means exhaustion of hope, the hope of ego to gain profit from the spiritial teachings, to gain security. Terms like “Exhaustion of hope” or “Giving up hope” may sound strange, funny and totally depressing when we use them without context, but they make sense nevertheless when we look at the deeper meaning in reference to buddhist practice.

When the buddhist teachings — or spiritial teachings of any kind — are first perceived, there is quite a big chance that we approach the teachings as a method to gain something, to develop into a better version of ourselves, to improve, to repair ourselves and so on. We could also say that we use the teachings to find security and comfort, the security and comfort that everything is alright, that we’re on the right track and that in our glorious future to come we’ll enter a state of total fearlessness and great peace of mind. Things sound promising to us, so we have great expectations.

There is a fundamental problem with this approach. It is called “Spiritual Materialism“, a perfect term for this sort of approach to spiritual teachings of any kind.

After we have for a certain timespan hoped as much as we could to reach some certain stage of development or state of mind that seemed desireable to us, maybe through meditation or another practice, after we tried to get wiser, better, sharper, it seems that there is no way at all that we will get any of that. We might have created some sort of pseudo-experience of the things we hoped to attain, but after a while it went away or we had a feeling from the beginning on that something was not complete. Even though we thought we had achieved a tiny bit, in some corner of our head we knew that it wasn’t real, that something was still missing. Slowly it went away even though we tried to grasp it. Or, maybe there was no special “experience” but we wished so bad that some day we will achieve some of the great things we read about in buddhist books or heared about in various teachings, all the peace of mind, the wisdom, getting rid of our sufferings, fear, jealousy. Great things, no question. Very delicious, very attractive. Desirable. But we wanted them so badly that we got into big tensions, we put a lot of effort into our little project. We worked hard on us, we had the feeling that we have to get past our current state of being, we felt that we have to reach some better state, peace, bliss!

Somehow all our effort is in vain, somehow our dreams don’t work out the way we wanted them to. The teachings don’t mix with us, they don’t sink into our minds the way we hoped. For some strange reason we’re not capable of getting it, of developing really. We seem to make some steps forward, but it doesn’t feel real. Then we might get depressed, but we don’t give up. Maybe we didn’t try hard enough! Maybe our discipline wasn’t good enough. That must be it, maybe if we hold up with our discipline a bit better, then we will achieve something, we will get to the next “step”, whatever that might be. We do not take the time to actually check what the path really looks like, we just run as fast as we can in the direction we assume to be the right one. But then, dispite our highest hopes, we bump into the next wall and bounce back. Maybe we weren’t running fast enough? We try more speed, more cleverness, more effort. Nothing. Again, nothing works.

Maybe after a while we get used to our game a bit, somehow we already know that our next engagement to achieve something will again end up in a big mess of nothing, in a great disappointment. Maybe then we decide to give up the whole thing, give up trying, give up hope of achievement of any kind. We might say: “Whatever, I don’t care”. “I give up”. We have sort of a feeling of disgust with all hope and ambition, we have seen and experienced too many times that it doesn’t work at all, so we just give in. We surrender. As Trungpa Rinpoche writes in “The Lion’s Roar“:

“We have completely tired ourselves out, exhausted ourselves beyond our hopefulness. We realize that life is hopeless and that any effort we put in to gain further experience is also hopeless.“

This state of mind is propably what “ye tang che” means.

Total exhaustion, total abandonment of hope of attainment. Suddenly things look like as if they fall into their place, very strange.

We were finally able to relax ourselves a bit, to let go a bit, to allow space a bit. All the dreams and hopes don’t matter now, we simply let them slip away and vainsh. For a moment, ego has lost part of it’s influence. Since we don’t invest in hope, there is also absense of fear, which is nothing but the opposite side of a coin called ‘hope’. So finally, a feeling of peace of mind is allowed in, a sense of freedom, a fresh breeze that whiffs in and removes the stale air in our room. This experience does not feel artificial anymore, somehow we just know that this is what we have been looking for all the time. We might feel renewed for a few days, nourishing from our experience.

The problem is that we can’t give up our habits that easliy. As soon as the first flash of surrendering and peace of mind is over, our mind begins to sort the experience, to judge and value it. We think “Wow, that’s a real experience now. I’ve been looking for this the whole time. Amazing!”, or “I have to make sure I won’t loose it, this is too precious.” Also doubts mix in immediatly: “Was this real? Was I just daydreaming?”. All these symptoms look like they are indicators that the bureaucracy of ego gets back into business. As usual, it uses everything it can grasp to secure itself. And even though only a moment ago we clearly saw with our own eyes that it is impossible to get anywhere by wanting and hoping, by attempting to get any gain out of a given situation, we get back into our old habbits. Like an alcoholic, we know that we poison ourselves, but we simply can’t help doing it. At some point we have to admit to ourselves that we lost touch with the “real thing” and are back to where we came from.

When the honeymoon is over, we might try to recreate our “precious” experience, which is also ego-instinct. We value it so much, we would give everything to get it back. On the other hand we know that the last time we “achieved” it, we had to give up hope completely, so we really should know that we won’t get there by simply hoping and whishing to get there. We feel completely paranoid about the whole situation. Actually it is quite funny from a distant point of view, it is real irony: Trying totally hard not to try at all. Hoping with all our heart not to hope anymore. We feel like a spinning top or a dog trying to catch its own tail. If the situation wasn’t totally serious and paranoid, we might actually be able to laugh about it.

Anyway, the experience of “ye tang che” looks as if it is very important, even though we might not able to stay with it and experience it continually. According to Pema Chödrön, it marks the beginning of a real sense of understanding of some fundamental buddhist teachings and we should rather calm down and approach it in a slow and easy way instead of getting paranoid about it.

Of course, hopelessness here is not to be confused with dispair. According to Chögyam Trungpa in “The Lion’s Roar“, dispair is still hopeful. It is sort of an angered point of view, there is a sense of ritaliation involved, whereas hopelessness is “a very genuine, beautiful, simple act. [..] There’s no trips about it. It’s clean-cut.“

As Pema Chödrön says: “Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. We may still want to hold our trip together. We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and ground just keeps moving under us. Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can’t be done. Turning our minds toward the dharma speeds up the process of discovery.”