Riding The Dragon - a short talk by Kaspalita

I wanted to say something about dragons this evening. We have lots of myths about dragons in the West. There's, um, usually the dragon is guarding some gold, like Smaug in The Hobbit, or a princess, or just generally causing trouble. So a knight is sent for, a hero is sent for, and the gold is recovered, or the princess is rescued, or the trouble is stopped, and along the way the dragon is killed. I guess that's what happens in the story of Saint George as well, the dragon gets killed. And what a waste, what a waste of a dragon. Kuan Yin— excuse me— Kuan Yin has a dragon, a sea serpent, a great huge thing, and she rides on it, she uses it to take her wherever she is needed. Plenty of other bodhisattvas have dragons and use them in the same way as well. Some of them have fierce lions and all sorts of things, but some of the dragons become Dharma palas, the protectors of the Dharma, and they ward off evil. If we're going to have dragons, we should use them wisely. We should make the best possible use of them. Don't kill your dragons. In the Anthill Sutra, which is the story where the Buddha interprets a dream that one of the monks has had— I won't go into detail because it's a great sutra, go and read it, and maybe I'll do a long talk on it sometime— but the monk has a dream about an ant. Hill, or maybe a termite mound, anyway, some huge thing, and he digs up various things from this anthill, and then there's an angel floating around, and each time he gets to something, he says to the angel, "What shall I do with—" The first thing he finds is a fork, not an eating fork, it's a fork in the road. It's a dream, so don't worry too much about how a fork in the road is buried in an anthill. And the angel says, "Throw it away." And there's an anvil. Oh, there's a gate, and he throws the gate— the angel says, "Throw the gate away." And there's an anvil, and they throw the anvil away. And there's a lump of flesh, "Throw the lump of flesh away." And the Buddha interprets the dream. He says, "So the fork represents indecision, the gate represents stuckness, the anvil represents anger." piece of flesh represents lust, and the angel's telling you, 'Throw these things away.' And the final thing at the bottom of the anthill is the naga serpent, which is a kind of dragon, this huge mythological serpent, like a basilisk maybe in Western mythology. And the angel says, 'Don't throw away the naga serpent, keep the naga serpent.' And the Buddha says, 'This is your creative energy. Don't throw the naga serpent away.' Or we could say, 'Don't kill the dragon.' Underneath everything that moves us, there is a dragon. Whether that energy gets transformed as it comes through us into something else that's in one of these layers, into lust or indecision or stuckness or greed or anger. At the bottom of all of that, there is a dragon, there is creative spiritual energy. And we like to, uh, You know, that can feel a bit dangerous. It's the fuel of all those other things when it gets, you know, when it comes out in unskillful ways, it fuels all those other things. But the danger can be when we're dealing with greed or hate or delusion or indecision or lust or whatever, that we don't just throw those things away, that we also throw the dragon away, that we get rid of the naga serpent. Perhaps because we're frightened of where it might lead us, or we put it behind a gate. Even if we don't kill it, we put it into a cage. We try and domesticate it, put a little bow on it. We need to learn to ride the dragon like Kwan Imtas. We need to engage with this creative energy. This is the fuel for the dharmic life, for the spontaneous life, for a life well lived. Meditation can help because as we sit still, we can just allow this energy to rise in us without acting on it, and in this way we can get to know it, and then, you know, it's like putting a harness on it. We can choose then. That moment, that pause that meditation introduces can allow us to direct the dragon to the left or to the right rather than just being taken where it wants to go, or even just to go where it wants to go gracefully. Sometimes that's the right thing to do. I guess to even begin riding the dragon, you need to start trusting it a little bit and trusting that it has good intentions. And in reality, actually, if you start riding the dragon, it can take a while to get to know its movements and to get to know its currents and where it wants to take you and how to use it skillfully. And sometimes when you unlock the cage or you take the, you know, you take the lead off the dragon, actually, maybe it does go where you don't want it to go to start with, or it does come out as greed or hate or delusion or stuckness, because it's just finding its feet for the first time. That's just part of the process. If you stay with it, eventually it will sort of go, "Yeah, actually, I'm okay. I can, uh, we can learn to work together." But that can be a frightening phase to go through, and that's where having the Buddha on your side really helps, because actually if the harness isn't quite on the dragon properly, if it doesn't quite go where you want it, if you start using that energy creatively or compassionately and things don't go as you expect because you're new at this, after all. The Buddha is still there, smiling on us. He smiles on the expert dragon riders, but he particularly smiles on the people who are just learning to ride the dragon, the people who are falling off the dragon. Maybe next week I'll talk about hobbits. Momo, meet again.