4 Buddha Activities: Karma of Enriching & Magnetizing

The karma or Buddha activity of Enriching is seeing self and other as the same and knowing all beings possess infinite Buddha qualities. Then bring those innate qualities forth.

The karma or Buddha activity of Magnetizing is bringing in what is needed to benefit beings or gathering disciples.

I’ve been doing a magnetizing and enriching practice recently – involving Jambhala. It’s been a bit more difficult that most practices. The offshoot is to attain some level of bliss, but also material abundance. For me, the hardest part is maintaining the view. Money is fundamentally meaningless in the dharma as all wealth is temporary.

Still, there is a need to survive and take care of the family, so it’s a necessity. I see money not as evil, but as an easily degraded substance. Along with sex, it tends to bring forth the worst in people. However, that is part of the magic of Vajrayana. If we can find purity in the seemingly degraded, we can travel the path quite rapidly. With Enriching and Magnetizing, you can “have it all’ while seeing that it is fundamentally fruitless.

You let go of any attachment or any outcome. Then the essential energy arises as equanimity and bliss. Easy to say, hard to do.

4 Karmas / Buddha Activities of Tantric Buddhism

Karma of Enriching / arthakarana

The Sanskrit word for creativity is Pratibhā. It comes into play with enriching and the other karmas. Pratibhā allows for the flow of the 4 karmas to arise spontaneously, without restriction. It’s important to not have the Buddha activities be a codified situation, ie, if this happens, do that. That is not a fruitional state.

With enriching, the ground is seeing that there’s some sense of not believing in the neurosis. The neurosis is specific. It is a sense of poverty or wantingness or lackingness, especially about a person’s own self – which generally most wantingness ultimately is. Clearly, this can be subtle, and difficult to spot.

Many times arrogance is really a sense of self-poverty, inflating oneself because a person feels so badly about themselves, but not always. Perhaps it could be a person who says, I always buy the best of everything. Only the best for me, which is a sort of hungry ghost approach if you think about it because how will you ever know if you’ve got the best? You’ll always be comparing it to something else and wanting something else. You’ll always be finding subtle faults with things.

Enriching here is somewhat bringing out the sense of, highlighting the sense of poverty mindset, of never having enough. Then show the person they have everything they need in their basic character.

This person, by the way, can be you in any of these situations. The four karmas can be self-applied. And frequently this is the best. In fact, if they’re not self-applied, if the sword does not cut both ways, it’s questionable whether it’s even being correctly applied.

From that perspective, the four karmas are not really directional. They are not applied to someone or at someone, but generally just pervade the situation. It’s more the communication is the karma rather than something happening at someone. This goes along with the idea that the highest level of Buddha activity is non-action, being beyond action.

See also: Tibetan Buddhism Beginners Guide

Essence of the 4 Karmas

The essence of the four karmas is to wake someone up to their own nature. Enriching from that perspective is seeing the virtues of someone, the deepest Buddha, what are called the Buddha qualities. The unchanging, abiding best that a person has from the Vajrayana perspective, these qualities, the six paramitas for example, are self-existing fully developed and merely covered over by the so-called temporary stains. If a person could simply access them, they would be there in their full and complete measure.

From the Mahayana perspective, it’s more about developing these traits so that they grow. One develops exertion, meditation, and wisdom. From the Vajrayana perspective, the Buddha qualities are self-existing completely in the person. This is why we see everyone as enlightened Buddhas.

All the four karmas can have other manifestations than is being described here. This is no one way to apply them. It’s a very important point. Do not narrow things down, do not overly tighten on these concepts. Keep them as wide open as possible.

Applying the 4 Buddha Activities

Look for ways to pacify in a completely intuitive manner, in a non-conceptual manner. Contemplate them in a conceptual manner as well. How would pacifying manifest in this situation or in another situation? It’s not only helpful, it’s fun.

The path, therefore, is seeing those inherent self-existing qualities in everyone. The fruition is introducing them to the person, giving the person the confidence of their own nature, making the person feel that they have inherent richness. This richness, since it goes with one in an unchanging manner from lifetime to lifetime, has always been there and always will be there, is infinitely more valuable than any of the material things you could want in the world.

The great bodhisattvas speak of the temporary things of this world as offal and worth less than dog feces or spittle. Developing this feeling in oneself that you have infinite good qualities, and extending to others that they have infinite good qualities is a source of profound happiness.

Seeing that we all have that, the only thing to be unhappy about would be that people don’t see it. The only thing to be unhappy about for ourselves is that we forget it so often. So the fruition of enriching is showing the other person that they have inherent wealth in their own being, really introducing them to their basic goodness that is their essential nature.

The four karmas and the five wisdoms.

Pacifying associates with the mirror-like wisdom of seeing clearly.

Enriching is associated with the wisdom of equanimity. Equanimity can also be called equalness. In a sense, all things are equal in being empty in essence and being pure in nature. Emptiness is the back end of pride.

Enriching can also work with pride to pop it as it were, to overcome it by exposing it so thoroughly and by inflaming it so it becomes highlighted and it becomes almost grotesque and comical and then it can simply dissipate on its own, burst like a balloon.

So you might apply the destroying of enriching when someone is really proud of something by saying, I don’t know why you’re so proud of that, you’re already a great person. You already really have these amazing fundamental qualities. You already have basic goodness.

4 Karmas: Magnetizing

The ground of magnetizing is seeing that someone is so caught in desire, where in enriching someone be caught in poverty not having anything. They might not be wanting anything in particular, they just have a general sense of having nothing and or being worth less as a person.

With magnetizing, the perspective is flipped. The person doing enriching practice is focused outward towards others and getting others to focus on their own basic goodness.

With magnetizing, it is somewhat reversed. Others are drawn to oneself. They’re drawn to the Magnetizer through the expansion and demonstration of Buddha qualities. These qualities are mesmerizing.

Technically magnetizing is about acquiring students, teaching the person what is the Dharma specifically. Practicing magnetizing, you would use your Dharma qualities to interest people in you and in the Dharma. It would also be perfectly legitimate to magnetize people towards the wonders of the Dharma and this would be safer.

Dangers of the Karma of Magnetizing

The dangers of magnetizing should be relatively clear. It can become like any other karma, an ego trip. But if someone becomes good at a sort of unenlightened magnetizing, they can become a cult leader, a Jim Jones, someone who leads people off the cliff of sanity and into the ocean of sort of euphoric madness, a willingness to do almost anything. Leaders like Adolf Hitler or Alexander the Great were superb at magnetizing. They created a centrality of personality, a cult of personality around themselves.

This is the dark neurotic side of it. It’s just so very important to be able to see that. It’s so easy even for a skilled practitioner to fool themselves into thinking they’re legitimately magnetizing and maybe even to begin that way and then it becomes their own personality, their own ego takes over.

Ego is very skilled at insinuating itself into any situation at all. If when practicing these it is absolutely essential to keep a close watch on one’s ego. Innumerable ways exist to work with magnetizing and even to work with this problem of ego arising. Ego will always be there until a person is enlightened.

The idea here is that magnetism should be working both ways. The idea that it is centralized onto oneself is a little bit of a false idea. That’s where the others or another in a situation has their focus. You should be equally magnetized to them. You should be magnetized by their virtues, their character, their struggle, their pain, their suffering, their joy, all the things that make them who and what they are.

If you’re feeling that magnetism for them, this softness and warmth and openness to them, that is a very, very good sign. If you can feel genuine love for them and genuine compassion, the four immeasurable, you’re safe. These are the Buddha’s thought processes as well as a check against ego.

Another method would be to simply supplicate the guru so that you can be a good person. Ask the guru that this ego problem doesn’t happen to you, that it becomes so clearly highlighted that you can let it go at that moment. You would obviously supplicate the guru in your own meditation practice.

If you see it happen in yourself, then later recall it, remember that, and notice it. Make the absolute, very strong aspiration to notice if ego is beginning to centralize back onto itself and magnetize in an ego way. Supplicate so that does not arise in your being or that it is instantly seen through and overcome as it arises.

The path of magnetism is to transform the sort of greedy, slightly debased energy into a desire to benefit others. Even sexual desire, but any sort of desire, transforms into longing for the dharma, for truth, for connection with other beings at the deepest level – which in a sense is dharma.

Fruition of Magnetizing Activity

The fruition is an almost mystical feeling one can have in communication with others, and even by oneself of course, in communication with nature and so forth, where desire becomes desireless desire, just the sheer absolute immersion into the situation, into just being there when you really are having the most deep heartfelt and open conversation with someone. It’s simultaneously exhilarating and warm and full of love and exciting and playful and humorous, and it combines all those elements into the dance and the space, the sort of unrestricted communication.

In that space even negative feedback can be playfully administered and helpfully given.The fruition of magnetism is magical communication. Communication is not restricted to words. Words are almost secondary to the feeling of flow between each other, and flow can be accomplished through skillful communication. For more on how to create flow see this.

In a more general sense magnetizing is bringing people to the dharma so that they want to learn the dharma. From you if that happens, but from anyone really. If you want everyone to be your student, that’s probably a problem. If you want people just to become practitioners of the dharma because it will help them and benefit them, because you ultimately want them to be liberated from suffering, then it’s not a problem.

If they just learn a few things from you and then find a real teacher, and it is dangerous to consider yourself a real teacher, then that’s great. You’re just magnetizing them to try this thing out because you found a lot out of it. You found a lot of benefit, joy, and amazement in it.

Flow, the profound mental state, also called Peak Performance, can be attained with meditation and can be ‘triggered’ at will, with enough discipline. Guide to Flow Mastery will teach you how.

Learn about Flow Here

4 Karmas of Tantric Buddhism: Part I – Pacifying

4 Karmas of Tantric Buddhism: Part II – Destroying

May all beings be happy

May all beings be peaceful

May all beings be safe

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature

May all beings be free