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“Knowledge and Experience”

An edited excerpt from oral teachings given by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, 2003.

There is a big difference between knowledge and experience. It is possible for one to have knowledge without any experience, or one might have experience without having knowledge. Knowledge here is referring to intellectual knowledge, not absolute knowledge.

One might observe, “Everything is happening to me,” experientially, but then not have any knowledge about those experiences. For some lucky people, they have no problem with that. They would say, “Fantastic, it's all happening, and I don't care to know what it is.” Others who have not gotten rid of the grasping mind want to know something conceptually about the experiences and they ask, “What is that experience?” And those who have even more grasping mind want to know more about their experience, asking questions like, “Why is it happening? Why is it happening to me? Why now?” And then those who have even more grasping than that want to know, “Why did it NOT happen until now? Why did it take so long? How long will it stay?” You can get worse and worse and worse.

So it's always a question of how much grasping mind you have and then also how much space you have to contain these experiences without necessarily judging, analyzing, and putting them all into boxes and labeling them. If you can minimize the boxes and labels, that is wonderful. But when you maximize the boxes and labels, you are just giving yourself a hard time. It is especially true within the spiritual domain that we ask these kinds of questions too much.

If, for example, you wanted to know conceptually about the function of your eye, it might take you 10 or 15 years to study it thoroughly enough to actually be able to know the way the eye functions and the way its one billion pieces or mechanisms work together as the eye. But I am happy not to know any of that so long as I can see things clearly, right? Or would you want to take issue with that and say, “I don't care if I see or not, I just want to know conceptually how the eye works to see when I see?” No, you wouldn't say that; it's enough just to be seeing clearly, to be able to see the light; it's not necessary to know everything.

But when we do need to label, we have to have compassion for that part of ourselves, too. It's like there is someone inside you who wants to know all about something. You've heard the term “inner child?” This is more like our “inner professor” who wants to know about everything intellectually with all the labels and categories.

So, one's knowledge and one's experience are both very important.

In dzogchen teachings we always say: you listen, you hear, you reflect, you know, you experience, you let it go. This is a great cycle.

To begin with, if you don't hear, then it is hard to be able to reflect on things. And then when you reflect on something, do you reflect on it your whole life? No. At some point, you have to have some conclusion, right? Can you say that as a teenager you are reflecting on something and then in middle age you are still reflecting on it and then when you are dying you are still reflecting on the same issue? This would not be very good, right? As a result of reflecting, naturally there comes some kind of intellectual conclusion.

This intellectual conclusion is so important. You conclude a certain meaning from what you initially heard and then reflected upon. The metaphor for this intellectual understanding is one of lighting a candle in a dark room. Prior to your concluding, you may think, “I heard that in this room all these objects exist, but the room is still dark so even if I've been told of all that is in here, I haven't seen it yet.” But then the moment you light the candle, you finally see everything; you know where everything is compared to where you expected it all to be; that's called an intellectual discovery.

Once you know that intellectually, then the next step is that you experience it. Experience is a deeper kind of connection; like when you taste chocolate. The moment you have a taste of chocolate, do you have a doubt about chocolate? No, you don't have a doubt about chocolate. So discovering something through your experience is like tasting chocolate. That's the metaphor.

When you taste the chocolate, how do you taste it? You taste it fully, enjoy it, be with it, feel it; you allow the experience to last. You live fully with that taste, rather than thinking that the experience is going to end, or where the next chocolate will come from, or if there is still any chocolate left, or whether someone else has it now, or how I am going to get it again. You don't have to go through all the samsaric reactions, right? You can just be fully with that chocolate.

So once the chocolate is finished, what do you do? Well, the chocolate is definitely free from you now so you should be free from the experience of the chocolate, too! The chocolate might say, “I have given myself fully to this person, even though he didn't really enjoy it so much because he was worrying and thinking about something. Now I'm happy to be out of here.” This last step is the notion of letting go - letting go of experience. And for us that’s very very very difficult here. Because when we first have the experience, we say, “Well, good! Finally. After all this time! I thought it would never happen!” Now when it happens, you jump and grasp. We even grasp non-grasping mind. The moment you do that then you are right back to your old habits.

In the Zhang Zhung Nyen Gyu, there is something called, “No action, no trace.” What it means is that in this action you don't leave traces behind. Like drawing in the sky. You can draw something here in space, and what do you see? Nothing. Or, it's like a bird flying away from a rock or a bird flying through the sky. You see the bird flying, you see the bird moving, but you also see that behind the bird there is nothing there. What it leaves behind itself is just clear space. Where it moves through is just clear space.