Many of us tend to feel like victims in our lives. I know that I do! We may feel victimized by other people, by our bad luck, by evil spirits, or by “the system.” But whatever we blame, the experience is similar. We feel deeply hurt and helpless, which can make us frustrated, angry, and jealous. In such a state, we can’t be productive in worldly life. All our time is taken up with these emotions. And of course, as victims we can’t be productive in our spiritual life. So life in general becomes unproductive as our victimhood makes us withdraw into our pain. So the question is, how do we summon the courage to live productively when faced with adverse circumstances?
First of all, it helps to know that there may be more going on in our situation than meets the eye. We may be at a plateau in our spiritual path, not progressing because nothing is really challenging us. We may be stalling and getting lethargic. In times like these, difficult and painful situations often arise to incite us, to test how much we have overcome our attachment to a small self. Furthermore, it is said that those who have come onto the bodhisattva’s path, who are devoting much of their time and energy to attaining enlightenment for the benefit of others, could possibly face more suffering in this life than they ordinarily would. Because of our aspirations to purify our self-importance sooner than later, the karmic seeds from our negative past deeds bear fruit more quickly. If we ignore these possibilities and just think of ourselves as victims, we will miss great opportunities to go forward on the path.
Difficult times, for ourselves and for the world as a whole, give us the ideal conditions for practicing tonglen. Say you are doing what you would really like to do, perhaps lying in a deck chair on the beach, beholding the shimmering blue Mediterranean Sea. The glorious sun is shining and a cabana boy has just brought you your favorite drink with one of those little umbrellas. Go ahead, try practicing tonglen in that situation.
At this moment, you may be far, far away from that sunny beach and that little umbrella. You may be facing the darkness of your mind: fear, confusion, a contracted state of being. You may be at your wit’s end. But now you have this incredible opportunity to practice the exchange of self and other. And in these circumstances, tonglen has a lot more power to purify our self-importance than it does on the deck chair. Since self-importance is the true cause of all our pain, we can take delight in this chance to sow seeds for future happiness. And that happiness will be far more fulfilling than the fleeting pleasure of being on a vacation. Happiness based on pure, ever-flowing love and care for others is the deepest, most stable form of happiness there is. So instead of feeling like victims, we can take charge of our minds and move in that direction.
This slogan is an introduction to the basic attitude of Point Three, “Transforming Adversity into the Path of Enlightenment.” The slogans that follow show us in more detail the relative and absolute methods for carrying out this attitude.
Relative Bodhicitta
Our lives are made of countless events, involving infinite causes and conditions that flow from past to present to future. In order to make sense of so much information, we tend to simplify complex events into stories: “So and so did this to me. Such and such happened to me. As a result I’m this way and am behaving like this.” When we feel like a victim, we have a story about who or what is causing us to suffer. We see how a person or a situation is bringing us suffering from the outside, and that is where we place all the blame. When we’re entrenched in our victimhood and want to justify our feelings, we feel we know the story, the whole story, behind it. We don’t even think this is a story. But is our interpretation of events accurate? Or is there a more truthful and helpful way of looking at things?
One of the functions of the lojong slogans is that they help us discriminate among our stories. They teach us how to think about our lives in both the most honest and most favorable ways. Stories are helpful to us when they are in line with how things naturally function in the world—with the laws of cause and effect. Such stories lead us to greater harmony and happiness. Unhelpful stories merely perpetuate our confusion.
The idea of victimhood is one of the most unhelpful stories. But unless we are open and inspired to see things another way, we can’t practice this slogan. What compounds our problem here is that when we feel bad about ourselves, when we feel victimized, or even when we’re just having a bad hair day, we tend to feel less interested in looking into the truth. This is a sign of not really being ready to get over our suffering. If we are truly inspired to transform our mind, to go from victim to bodhisattva, the only way is to be open to a new story.
Here is a more truthful story that will start to lead us out of our suffering. All the suffering that we and others experience, that every being in the whole world experiences, comes from one source: clinging to this small self. Every suffering has come from self-importance gone out of control, leading to attachment, aggression, jealousy, arrogance, and stupidity, which in turn have led to all the actions of body, speech, and mind that have harmed others. And the results of this harm we’ve inflicted on others have come back to us as the difficult situations we face in this life.
Less ego equals more peace. More ego equals more tension. The harmony of every relationship in the world, whether between countries, between religions, within communities, or within families, depends on whether there is more or less ego. Less ego means understanding each other’s experiences better, being able to step into each others’ shoes. More ego means more self-absorption, more undermining each other with negativity. Our self-importance is the source of all our interpersonal problems. It increases our jealousy, our competitiveness, our arrogance. It makes us pushy, demanding, grasping, hard to please, hard to get along with, hard to communicate with. We’re not satisfied with an equal share; we want more of everything than anyone else.
Ego and its attendant emotions are contagious. But however you catch the flu, you end up with the same symptoms. You may not start off very attached. But if you spend a lot of time with someone who is attached, sooner or later you may feel the need to become attached, for the sake of self-protection. Similarly, if you’re not aggressive but spend a lot of time with someone who is, you may naturally feel drawn into a more aggressive mind-set as a means of self-defense. This natural result of interdependence causes tension to build within relationships. You may feel like you don’t always need to get your way. But if you’re with someone very demanding, you start to think, “Why am I always surrendering to this person’s demands? Am I totally spineless? What about my needs?” In this way, self-importance sets up walls between people.
To reduce our ego, we need to contemplate how it is the cause of all these problems. We need to be inspired to look into our own experience, both of suffering and of causing others to suffer. We need to examine this from all angles and see the truth of this slogan. We don’t have to be able to remember our past lives and trace all our misfortunes to remote times. Just in this life, we have mountains of evidence about how our self-importance has led to our own and others’ suffering. But when we feel like a victim, when we’re in that state of helplessness and frustration, it takes a lot of strength to put the blame on our own mental habit of cherishing the small self. We have to go through many layers of resistance to get deep into our heart and acknowledge the true cause of our suffering. Sometimes we summon up our courage to penetrate these layers, but after getting through one or two, we give up. We start to make excuses and go off on tangents. We think, “I’ve practiced enough today. I’m done.” And then we can easily get back into feeling like a victim.
It takes mindfulness to keep penetrating these layers, and to realize, as we get deeper and deeper, that we are already feeling some relief from our victimhood. We are not blaming outer people and circumstances as much, and that feels good. What happens when we get down to our raw attachment to the self and admit that it is the sole cause of our suffering? Again, we have the practice of tonglen. We take on the suffering of all who are plagued by self-importance, so that they may be free of it. We load it onto our boxcars. This brings about a deep shift within, and we feel released. Our self-clinging, the cause of all our suffering, has become transformed into a source of increasing care for others. We feel so enriched that we almost want more suffering and even more ego!
Our intention in practicing tonglen, however, should not be merely to alleviate our own pain. If we aren’t mindful of such a motivation, our self-centeredness can sneak in and hijack our practice. This self who wants to be healed can be tricky, so we need to be wary of it. Healing can only come about by decreasing our self-centeredness. Instead of making our pain or misfortune go away, this process works against our habitual reactions to those things. It works against our wanting them to go away so badly. It works against our rejection of difficult experiences, which is an action we take to protect our small self.
Lojong isn’t just a trick, a twist of psychology. It is based on empirical evidence: knowing where suffering and happiness come from. We aren’t trying to fool ourselves here. When we feel relief from our self-importance and realize that it has always been our only problem, we challenge our habit of unquestioning loyalty to this small self. For the first time, we see with our own eyes that this self may not deserve our blind and unconditional protection and cherishing.
Shantideva says to his self-importance: “You have caused me suffering for hundreds of lives in samsara. Now I remember all my grudges and will destroy you, my own evil mind.” This is not just an emotional outburst coming from frustration. Great bodhisattvas such as Shantideva have arrived at their altruistic mind-set by filing an intelligent case against self-centered attachment. They have examined the subject thoroughly and come up with solid reasons for not clinging to the small self. Having seen what binds them to perpetual suffering, they are able to overcome that ignorance and become free of the cycle of samsara.
I feel that applying our intelligence in this way is especially important for practitioners in the West, where people really like to think things through. The key is discerning between our true foe, self-importance, and our true friend, bodhicitta. With such discernment, we can see clearly, for the first time, the source of all our troubles. Then we are like a soldier fighting in a war who suddenly realizes his king is a crook. Without a second thought, the soldier’s inspiration to be loyal and risk his life for this cause automatically falls away.
When things go wrong in our lives, we tend to place all the blame on something outside ourselves, which only compounds our root problem of self-importance. “Realize all faults spring from one source” is the antidote to that confused and unhelpful mentality. “Meditate upon gratitude toward all” works with another distorted way of looking at things. This slogan and the problem it addresses are the mirror image of the previous one.
We tend to think that everything good in our life comes to us because we deserve it, either thanks to our efforts or simply because of who we are. We’re entitled to our good fortune. Good things are meant to happen to us. That’s just the way things should be. But this attitude has nothing to do with reality. Our being and all the circumstances in our life are deeply interconnected with others. Anything that happens to us, good or bad, comes about because of that interconnection.
Everything positive in our lives has been a gift from other sentient beings. This is what we need to meditate upon until it is clear in our mind. First of all, without others being involved in your life, you wouldn’t even be here. You have a body that you generally identify with. You say things like “I go” and “I sit.” But this body was just an egg and a sperm that your parents donated to you, giving you a place for your consciousness to enter. It’s not inherently yours; it’s just a borrowed home. Another woman and another man, your so-called parents, gave you the gift of this seed, and all the body parts and functions that developed from it were the result of that gift. Before receiving the gift, you had nothing. There was just a homeless consciousness being driven helplessly by karma.
After conception, this kind woman, now known as your “mother,” gave you a place in which to survive and grow. She fed you with her own food. She never asked for rent. And when you were ready to be born, she went through so much pain to bring you out into the world. Then, once you were out of the womb, you wouldn’t have survived for even a few hours if you’d been left alone. But this woman held you to her body, kept you warm with her heat, and fed you with her milk. And from then on she did everything for you. At every moment, she was concerned about your well-being. Without the love and affection of your parents, you wouldn’t have developed into a functioning adult. If your parents and teachers hadn’t taught you, you wouldn’t even be able to say the most basic words, like house or table. You would have no way of communicating with the world.
By contemplating further along these lines, we can see that everything we have, everything we think of as “me” or “mine,” is actually the gift of others. All the parts of our body and brain; all our possessions, food, clothing, shelter; all our knowledge, wisdom, skill, personality traits, talents, morals, ethics, positive intentions—everything is the gift of others. Without others, we would have nothing. We wouldn’t even be able to think or feel. We can’t take any of this for granted. Let’s not think this has all appeared for us spontaneously. That would be a false story, based on self-importance and delusion. Everything in our lives comes from the kindness of others.
This is not only true in our ordinary, conventional life; it’s also true in terms of our path of awakening. We will only go beyond our confusion and become fully at ease with our lives if we receive the kindness of others. Our innermost enlightened nature is free from all flaws and rich with wisdom, compassion, and the power to benefit others. But without buddhas, bodhisattvas, and our teachers, we would have no hope of realizing this enlightened nature. We wouldn’t even have an inkling that we have such a nature to realize.
You may think, “But doesn’t all my good fortune come from my merit, the results of my own positive actions in the past?” Yes, that’s true. But where did that merit come from? It came from others. Your health, attractiveness, and good physique are the results of your patience in past lives. But without others to irritate you, how could you have practiced patience? Your wealth came from your past generosity, which required others to be poor. Your fortunate human birth came from doing positive deeds and avoiding negativity in relation to others. Without others, there is no way to accumulate merit.
Our ability to progress along the path and our prospect of enlightenment depend on cultivating bodhicitta. In order to do that, we need to develop love and compassion, which requires other sentient beings. We need to practice the exchange of self and other. We rely on enlightened beings as guides on the path. But in order to do this path, we need our fellow sentient beings. Therefore, buddhas and sentient beings are equal in terms of how much they help us.
Also, if we care about pleasing enlightened beings, we have to serve sentient beings, because the welfare of beings is their greatest concern. When we harm beings, we’re also hurting the buddhas and bodhisattvas. Because we feel deep respect and appreciation, we may wish to make offerings to the enlightened ones. But since they have gone beyond all attachment, the most welcome offering we can make to buddhas is to benefit sentient beings. We could offer an entire world full of gold to the buddhas, but they would be more touched if we offered a handful of coins to a homeless person. As Shantideva says, we shouldn’t see sentient beings merely as sentient beings. We should see them as the cause of our enlightenment.
Even after attaining enlightenment, you still need the presence of sentient beings. Without them, enlightenment would be very boring. What would you do? With all your understanding, your compassion, and your ability to work skillfully with others, what would you do without sentient beings? Most of the point of becoming enlightened would be gone. So even once you’re enlightened, no one is kinder than sentient beings.
We should contemplate sentient beings in these ways and develop genuine gratitude and love for them, never forgetting that we’re walking the path to enlightenment in order to free them from suffering. Our expressions of gratitude should be more than eloquent words spoken without feeling. To say “I appreciate this, I’m grateful for that, thank you for this, thank you for that” without any feeling is just hypocrisy. So we have to work on stripping away this hypocrisy until we really start to feel things in the heart. The great masters have so much care in their hearts that they can give anything, even their very lives, to others without hesitation.
Meditating upon being grateful to everyone also radically alters our ideas of what is helpful and harmful in our lives. For those who have been obviously helpful, such as our parents, we develop greater appreciation. We stop taking credit for everything positive that has happened to us. This lessens our self-importance, which is the main point of practicing lojong. But if liberating ourselves from the prison of ego-clinging is important to us, then the so-called harm doers in our lives may help us even more.
In the nineteenth century, the enlightened teacher and wandering yogi Patrul Rinpoche traveled all over eastern Tibet, spreading Shantideva’s teachings far and wide. One of his favorite sayings was that the outcome of suffering is better than the outcome of happiness. In happy times, we become forgetful and indulge more in our self-centered emotions. But in painful times, we develop renunciation toward suffering and its causes and conditions. We appreciate the spiritual path and our opportunity to work with our mind internally. Therefore Patrul Rinpoche’s preference was for suffering. The irony is that for people like him who have completely rid their minds of self-importance, suffering doesn’t occur even when it’s wished for! But for people like us, other beings will continue to bring us harm, and as lojong practitioners we can make good use of it.
We can start by changing the habitual story of harm to a more helpful one. Rather than lament all the harm that beings are doing to us, we should consider all the harm we’ve done to them. The only reason these beings are harming us now is because of what we’ve done to them in the past. It’s a simple boomerang effect. When you throw a boomerang, it comes back to you, not to someone else, right? And not only have we harmed them in the past, we’re still causing them harm by inciting their negativity. Everything they do to hurt us creates negative karma, which will bring them suffering in the future. Following this improved story enables us to convert resentment into compassion.
We can also reflect on how our relationships with these harm doers have been entirely different in the past. In past lives, every one of them has been a parent to us. Every one has loved us, cherished us, delivered us so much joy, protected us from so much pain. The intensity of our present experience blinds us to these truths, but when we take the time to contemplate, we can see things in this more productive way. We should contemplate these beings’ past kindness to us until we feel so much affection that we could swallow them up and bring them into our hearts.
Once we’ve cultivated love and compassion for our “enemies,” we should practice tonglen. This pacifies much of the tension that both parties feel. If you consider someone an enemy, they will consider you an enemy, and treat you as such. If you consider someone a friend, they will consider you a friend. If you consider someone to be your mother, they will consider you to be their child. This is how karma and interdependence work. When the Buddha was about to attain enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the demonic forces known as maras came and threw weapons at him. These didn’t distract the Buddha; through the power of his compassion, he turned the weapons into flowers. When Gandhi used nonviolence to achieve independence, even most of the British people eventually supported him. There are similar stories about Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Being grateful to our “enemies” and practicing tonglen go against our habits. In our daily interactions with others, we have to be continually alert to our tendencies. But if we do give way to habit, we should look at ourselves honestly and confess our mistake. Until our minds are completely transformed, we will keep falling down. The choice is between getting up and starting to walk again or giving up and staying on the ground. If we keep lying down, nothing will result but greater depression and hopelessness. As Shantideva says, a powerful cobra can’t be harmed by large birds of prey, but if it’s lying on the ground as if dead, even crows will peck at it.
The antidote to such low self-esteem, as Shantideva suggests, is to bring forth a sense of positive, courageous pride. This pride, though it may have a tinge of self-importance, works effectively against our neurosis. After we have remedied our low self-esteem, we can then transcend our pride as well.
We can develop this courage by practicing tonglen, and especially by focusing on subjects that bring up strong clinging to the self. For example, we can think about illnesses that we find especially repulsive, filling us with fear and disgust. If we imagine taking these illnesses from others and bringing them into our heart, that will help lessen the self-grasping. We often think of our body as “me,” so focusing on the body in this way is powerful. Don’t worry—it won’t actually make you get the disease. All it will do is make you stronger and stronger in your practice of bodhicitta.
We have so many phobias about illnesses and other forms of suffering. Phobias are a weakness of the mind, brought about by our self-importance. If we genuinely do tonglen with all the diseases and other situations that horrify us—the very things whose names we can barely mention—it will frighten our self-centered mind. Why would we want to do this to ourselves? By deliberately frightening our ego, we bring it closer to the surface, exposing our own weakness. Ordinarily we hope and believe that protecting our small self will keep us from suffering. We can only overcome this misconception by shedding light on it with the practices of mind training.
Great practitioners like Shantideva and Patrul Rinpoche have this mental attitude toward troublemakers: “Come here and take everything away from me! If you want my flesh, go ahead and take it! If you want my blood, you can have it! If you want my bones, my skin, my organs, I give them to you gladly! Relax and enjoy the feast!” They see the arrival of harm doers in their lives as a chance to purify past negative karma. Since these acts need to reckoned with one way or another, this harm speeds up our process of purification. This is a tremendously courageous attitude, but if we are interested in letting go of the attachments that imprison us, there is nothing better. Confronting our negative karma head on is a highly evolved practice of patience. Patience is much more than putting up with irritations. When intentionally cultivated in this way, it becomes a source of incredible power and confidence.
Every Buddhist teaching we read or listen to is ultimately about getting liberated. The path of liberation is to abandon grasping to the self and to cherish sentient beings. If you aren’t understanding this in the teachings, then you are probably misunderstanding something. We can look at our spiritual path as a battle between our selfish mind and our altruistic mind. Since our selfish mind is the greatest enemy of our own and others’ happiness, we want to do everything possible for the altruistic side to win. We need to keep the enemy always under scrutiny. We need to disempower it with our wisdom and skillful means, exposing its faults and reprimanding it. At the same time, we need to boost our altruistic mind by increasing and deepening any thoughts and emotions that are in line with bodhicitta.
Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of a Brahmin who kept track of his mind by using two piles of pebbles. For every positive thought he would add a white pebble to one pile, and for every negative thought he would add a black pebble to another pile. In the beginning, the black pile was much bigger than the white pile, but as he kept observing his mind, the white pile got bigger and bigger in relation to the black one. Eventually he stopped adding black pebbles altogether. This transformation came about through his power of observation, along with his understanding of the effects of altruism and selfishness.
Since everything that happens in our lives is our mind’s experience, if we train our flexible mind with such methods, it will get used to positive actions and naturally transform itself. When our mind is left alone to follow its habits and manifest its neurosis, it tends to be more selfish and unreasonable than the most spoiled brat. As Geshe Ben said, “There’s nothing else on my daily schedule than to be alert to the devil of self-importance inside me. When it wakes up, I have to wake up. When it is asleep, I can also be at rest.” Meditating on gratitude is one of the best practices available for getting our mind used to focusing on others and reducing our clinging to the small self.
“Realize all faults spring from one source” and “Meditate upon being grateful to everyone” show the relative ways of turning difficult situations to our advantage. Jesus advised his disciples to “turn the other cheek.” A more modern saying goes, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Our resilience and our ability to rebound strictly depend on how we work with crisis. Every time we face difficult circumstances, we have a chance to increase our bodhicitta and purify much of the negativity we have created in the past.
As I said in the commentary for Point Two, absolute bodhicitta refers to direct insight into the empty nature of all phenomena. To call something “empty” does not mean it doesn’t appear or function. Emptiness is not a nihilistic void. The emptiness teachings only say that we can’t grasp or pin anything down—not the outer world, not our “self,” not even our own mind.
Practitioners who have realized the absolute truth of emptiness have the ultimate antidote to difficult situations. Confident that all phenomena are nothing but a dream, and knowing their own ungraspable minds to be indestructible, they realize no harm can truly be done to them. All “harm” is illusion. When adversity does arise in their lives, they are happy for the chance to test their confidence. For this reason, they regard all harmful beings and situations as their teachers.
Most of us, however, are not there yet. As Jamgon Kongtrul states in his commentary, “Authentic absolute bodhicitta will not arise in the mind streams of beginners. But relative bodhicitta, should they train in it, will surely be born.” Relative practices such as gratitude are like narrow, winding country roads. The absolute view of emptiness is like the highway. If we have a genuine experience of connecting to the absolute, it is very powerful and efficient.
But if we misunderstand emptiness, we may be fooling ourselves. We may imagine that we’re traveling on the highway, but this may be a daydream, and the fact is we’re not getting anywhere. So it’s important to use our critical intelligence here. The country road is much more grounded and tangible. We can feel every bump and turn. And eventually, when we are ready, it leads to the highway. Jamgon Kongtrul continues: “With the development of relative bodhicitta, absolute bodhicitta is naturally realized.” So with this caveat, I will go into the slogan.
When we examine our minds we find that we are constantly protecting ourselves from threats. Inanimate objects and circumstances threaten us, and sometimes people seem to wish us harm. Sometimes threats come from outside us, other times they appear to come from within. But all of these appearances are nothing but our own mind’s projections and elaborations. This slogan is about developing a firm conviction that all these threatening phenomena are actually delusions.
Even though threatening phenomena appear vividly to our perceptions, when we investigate closely we can find no moment when they truly exist or have time to cause us any harm. This book seems to stay the same from moment to moment, but that is just our mind’s conception. Every instant, every particle of this book is changing. We can’t see this change at a subtle level, but we can know it through our understanding. If these subtle changes didn’t happen, then how could this same book, years from now, appear “old”? If an image of this book appeared in a movie or on our computer screen, that image would be made of many flashes of light per second. In reality, each instant there is a subtly different book, a new book that only resembles the ones before and after it.
This is true for all things. Just as something arises, it immediately disappears. Threatening phenomena are mind’s delusion because nothing lasts long enough to be a threat. When we examine what appears to be a threat, we can’t say anything definite about it. How could we say anything definite about something that changes every instant? When we talk about this book, which instant’s book are we talking about? The past is gone, the future has not arrived, and the present moment dissolves as soon as it arises, so there is nothing to pinpoint.
By contemplating this reasoning for a long time, we can eventually see there are really no phenomena “out there.” Everything that appears is simply the product of mind’s awareness. It is no more tangible than space. This includes what we take to be our body and mind—all the components that we take to be our “self.” We ourselves are no more tangible than space. This self is nothing but the product of mind’s awareness. How can anything threaten space? How can awareness that is like space be harmed? Whatever we perceive as a threat is also made from spacelike awareness. How can space threaten space? If we divide space into “eastern space” and “western space,” can either of these threaten the other?
In this way, we can eventually understand that all the experiences we go through are dreamlike delusions. Your self, and the threats you perceive—such as illnesses and their so-called causes—are nothing but thoughts. If we try to pinpoint our thoughts or find any characteristics in them, we can’t find anything. Our thoughts are empty of any reality. These empty thoughts lead to emotions, which also seem tangible. But again, when we look closely at our emotions, we can’t find anything to put our finger on. Therefore our mind, which most of the time feels burdened and bewildered by thoughts and emotions, is ultimately free of them. Just like the mind of the buddhas—and the mind of all sentient beings, for that matter—our absolute mind can’t be affected by any thoughts, obstacle makers, or diseases. It is like the blue sky, which can’t be affected by any clouds that arise within it.
In order to experience the spacelike nature of our mind, we need to let it be. If we have a jar of muddy water, the easiest way to make it clear is to let the mud and sediment settle to the bottom. Instead of stirring it up, we let the water clarify itself. Our disturbing thoughts and emotions aren’t worthy of so much fascinated attention. If we take them too seriously, we only stir them up more. We can simply forget about them and rest in our spacelike awareness. Our thoughts and emotions are also nothing but space. They can’t tie us up in knots. They can only harm us if we solidify them ourselves, with our misunderstanding. Can space be tied into knots? Can you tie yourself up with a rope made from the hair of a turtle? Of course not. These things are impossible. So if we realize that our thoughts and everything they pertain to are as insubstantial as space and as unfindable as turtle’s hair, what harm can they do us?
The teaching on the “four kayas” is a way of talking about this subject from an enlightened being’s point of view. The four kayas are aspects of our mind’s experience. As we have seen, our mind and all phenomena are like space, empty of any characteristics that we can pinpoint. The Sanskrit word for this emptiness aspect is dharmakaya. The empty dharmakaya is the nature of all things. But this emptiness is not a void: appearances manifest out of it. This manifestation is known as the nirmanakaya. We can think of the empty nature as a movie screen and the appearance that manifests on it as light from a film projector. There is no way to separate the projected appearance from the screen. Similarly, emptiness and appearance are always together. They are like two sides of a coin: whatever appears is empty, and whatever is empty appears. This inseparability aspect is called the sambhogakaya. Finally, though we use these words to distinguish aspects in language, from the awakened point of view, the mind doesn’t have three distinct natures. In reality, all the kayas are just one experience of mind. This aspect of union is called the svabhavikakaya.
A thorough explanation of the four kayas is beyond the scope of this book. The essence of this instruction is that if you can rest your mind in its absolute nature, following this slogan or the previous slogans on absolute bodhicitta, there is no better way to work with whatever threatens you. Yet it is not so easy, when our minds are so habituated to viewing all appearances as real. Therefore, we should always work with the relative methods as well.
Special Practices
In addition to the relative and absolute practices mentioned above, there are four special practices that we can use to work with our difficult situations. The first practice is accumulating merit. As we have seen in Point One, “First, train in the preliminaries,” we accumulate merit through any actions that are in line with bodhicitta, the wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Through the law of cause and effect, positive deeds bring about happiness. This is a simple, straightforward approach to dealing with difficulties. When misfortune befalls us, we recognize that it is the result of our own negative actions based on self-importance. This motivates us to accumulate merit by focusing on others. If we trust the operation of karma and consciously sow the seeds of happiness, then we can see our current misfortunes as temporary, and therefore less threatening. This will make us feel less stuck, more optimistic.
Any practice oriented toward becoming enlightened for the sake of others generates tremendous merit. Making offerings, reciting mantras, traveling to holy sites, releasing lives, giving aid to the poor, serving the community of fellow practitioners, and contemplating the illusory nature of phenomena are among the traditional Buddhist practices for accumulating merit. But in his commentary, Jamgon Kongtrul highlights one method that goes particularly well with the attitude of fearlessness we try to cultivate through lojong. This is to “make supplications to cease all your hopes and fears.”
We should think and adopt the attitude:
If I am to suffer, bless me to suffer, so that I may learn whatever I need to learn through suffering. If it’s good for me to be sick, bless me to be sick. I may only have to endure this illness for a short time, so may I benefit from it while I can. May this illness keep me from being so caught up in the superficial glitter of life and help me develop renunciation to self-importance. May it help me understand more deeply the teachings of dharma.
If I am to get well, may I get well and make the best use of my health to cultivate altruism. If I am to die, may I die in peace, with my heart full of bodhicitta. To die now with bodhicitta is much better than to live for a long time and accumulate negative deeds. Either way, until I die, may I train in bodhicitta and aspire to continue this path into my next life.
Bless me to experience now whatever will purify my negative karma and the causes of future suffering. Bless me to experience whatever will purify my self-centered mind-set, the source of all my hopes and fears. Whatever happens to me, may I use it to understand better how other beings are suffering and to increase my motivation to take their pain upon myself. May I use any misfortune as fodder for my practice of exchanging self and other.
In short, we can accumulate a lot of merit by having a spirit of trust and surrender. This is a more open and courageous attitude than our predictable, programmed reactions of self-pity and despair. If there’s a cure, why worry? If there’s not a cure, again, why worry? There is something outrageous about this simple approach to our suffering, but it leads to our becoming carefree, released from the bondage of our own self-attachments.
Compared to the external sufferings of illness and so on, the sufferings of hope and fear are far more complex and persistent, creating a shakiness within. For example, when you are depressed, you automatically have such a powerful desire to feel better. You feel this desire for relief in your whole body. Getting rid of your pain is your most urgent priority. But this desperation is exactly what makes the depression dig in its heels. If you can approach your suffering by tackling the very mechanism of hope and fear—and its root, self-importance—then this impossible depression starts to feel less solid. When we don’t battle against it, the painful, disturbing sensation in our chest can begin to melt away.
The second special practice is confessing our negative, self-centered actions. But before confessing, we should first use our critical intelligence to connect the dots of cause and effect leading to our current adversity. This is the connection between our present suffering and acts perpetrated by our small self. Whether we can remember them or they occurred during a past life, these acts are responsible for our current circumstances. Understanding this, we can develop regret. But it is crucial here not to confuse healthy regret with guilt.
Regret is based on honest, objective self-reflection. We acknowledge that our own mind has sown the seeds of our present difficulties, but with the attitude that these seeds are purifiable. If possible, we retrace our steps and see how our confusion and self-centered attachment led to our mistakes. We examine the chain of events objectively, scientifically. We value whatever information we glean, and use it to change for the better. We can regret our actions based on self-importance, but there is no reason to feel bad about them. We have the same unfortunate but innocent habit as every other sentient being. It doesn’t come from any intrinsic badness or original sin. It comes from ignorance, removable ignorance.
Guilt, on the other hand, is counterproductive. When we identify with a solid, intrinsic self, we feel so guilty that we can’t bear to examine what we have done. Guilt is a mind-set that dwells on the inability to accept what has happened. Rather than regret our past mistakes and accept that they came from our ignorant, confused mind, we painfully solidify the whole event by overchewing our shame. “How could I, who have this fixed, unchangeable character, be so bad? It can’t be true—I can’t bear to look!” Guilt is the opposite of critical intelligence; it is really extra-strength ego. But that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty about your guilt!
Next, armed with positive, productive regret, we resolve to do our best not to give in to the demands of our small self. We can’t immediately halt our habit of self-clinging, once and for all, but we can form a strong intention to keep counteracting it until our care for others becomes greater than our care for ourself. Once we make this resolution firmly in our minds, we then reverse our habits by continually increasing our bodhicitta with practices such as exchanging self and other.
The method of purifying our negativity through critical intelligence and confession becomes even more effective when we invoke the support of the buddhas and bodhisattvas. By asking them to witness our practice and to guide and bless us, we connect ourselves to our own bodhicitta. These enlightened beings are not external figures who are intrinsically superior to us. They are embodiments of our own enlightened nature, which becomes more and more apparent as we let go of our clinging to the small self. We may imagine that enlightened beings who support us are somewhere outside, but in fact they are inseparable from the essence of our own mind.
When we confess our wrongdoing to enlightened beings, they are beyond judgments. Since they already know what we have done and see everything as a product of mental confusion and ignorance, we can feel open to confess, without fear of their judgment or contempt. The practice of confession is getting ourselves to the point of courage to cleanse our mind. The enlightened beings serve as witnesses to this process.
The one good quality of negativity is that it can be purified. Although it temporarily disconnects us from our own altruistic nature, it is not intrinsic. It is no more substantial than the steam that covers a mirror when we breathe on it. By engaging in the practice of confession, we can wipe off this thin layer of steam and allow the brilliance and clarity of our compassionate mirror-like mind to shine forth.
The third special practice is offering tormas to gods and demons. Tormas are a kind of offering cake, which in Tibet are usually made from barley flour. In the West, we can offer cookies. In his commentary, Jamgon Kongtrul says little about the tormas themselves, instead emphasizing the attitude behind this offering, especially when offering to the “demons,” who can be seen as anyone, visible or not, who brings us trouble. He encourages us to have the fearless attitude of asking the demons to bring us even more trouble, so that we can repay all our karmic debts and destroy our habit of clinging to a small self. On top of that, we ask for the sufferings of all beings to pile up on ourselves, so that they may all be free.
This is much like what Jesus did on the cross. For me Jesus shows what it means to take the spirit of tonglen to the highest level. His aspiration to exchange self and other inspired countless people across the globe and resulted in Christianity becoming the most popular religion in history. Right now we probably can’t practice tonglen at such a high level, but we can gradually train our minds in that direction. If we feel it’s too much for us to ask the demons to bring us more trouble, we can at least try to generate love and care for them, and let them know that they are included in our practice of bodhicitta.
Finally, there is the special practice of offering tormas to the dakinis and protectors. These are powerful beings who have committed themselves to help sincere practitioners attain enlightenment. We can think of the dakinis and protectors as members of our spiritual community, as companions on our bodhisattva’s path. Many of us have the “cowboy mentality” of refusing to ask for help because we think we don’t need it. This attitude can be full of pride and arrogance. It doesn’t acknowledge how the world actually works, through the play of interdependence. If your plumbing breaks, you may not be able to fix it yourself. Would you be too proud to call a plumber and instead sit there scratching your head for days? Even more so than a good plumber, dakinis and protectors have tremendous skills and power, which can help us along the path. They have taken on the responsibility of being guardians of dharma practitioners, so if we offer them tormas and ask for their help, they can do things that are truly wondrous.
We may judge whatever comes into our lives as “good” or “bad,” but both good and bad have equal potential to make us confused. How to deal with adversity has been the main subject of the last few slogans. But even when good things happen, we still often react in ways that make us suffer. We may wonder: Do I deserve this? If I do deserve it, what does that say about me? Does it mean I’m special? Unique? So much self-consciousness comes into our mind, causing us confusion.
If we know how to organize our thoughts and bring them into our lojong practice, we can minimize our confusion. When we have good fortune, we can be happy with it, but not get stuck in self-absorption as a result. A simple way to do this is to generate such thoughts as “May others have this kind of good fortune, and even more so. May it bring them true, lasting happiness.” That resolves the main problem right there.
The emphasis of this slogan is to train our minds to apply these practices as quickly as possible. Doing so will nip our confusion in the bud and greatly reduce our own inner conflict, in the case of both negative and positive things. Whatever we face in our lives, our usual reaction comes out of clinging to a small self. We may think we’re not very egotistical because our self-importance doesn’t appear in a blatant way. It can be very subtle, yet it is the cause of all our more obvious problems in life.
Our reactions to experiences are like telegraphs communicating something back to our minds. Although our lives are full of variety, the message is always the same: increase care for others and decrease self-importance. From beginningless time, this message has been coming to us, over and over again, but we have always missed it. We have spent all that time innocently but ignorantly absorbed in self-concern. But now that we are clued in to the root causes of happiness and suffering, all we need to do is pay attention and the message will come through.
Whenever we react to external events with confusion, tension, struggle, and pain, that disturbance is a reminder that we need to overcome our self-clinging. When we feel a lack of joy, satisfaction, or meaning in our lives, that is a reminder to increase our care for others. When we notice that we are reacting, it is a helpful exercise to see where that reaction comes from. If we look carefully, we will most likely see the source in one of two tendencies: to self-cherish and to self-protect.
Once we know how to hear and interpret the constant message, it is easy to follow its urging. There is never a shortage of opportunity to step out of the small self and embrace the universal self of all sentient beings. On our meditation cushion, we always have the chance to practice exchange. And in our lives, there are endless opportunities to benefit others. If we are creative and don’t dismiss any chance as too small or insignificant, we can live like bodhisattvas.
Some people think that the modern world is not a hospitable place for spiritual practitioners. They dream about being like the great meditators of the past, such as the twelfth-century meditator Milarepa, who lived in a cave and subsisted on nettles. Having a job and a family, being part of the social world—these are just pointless nuisances. But for the vast majority of us, such an escape is just a fantasy. If we are to make any progress on the path of the bodhisattva, we have to do it in the situation we have now, in the environment that surrounds us, among the people in our lives, in the time we are on this earth. This is the perfect time and place for all of us. This is our life. It is what we have on our karmic plate, which is everything we need to progress on the bodhisattva path.
Some say the world is getting worse and worse, but on the other hand, there are so many people caring more and more. The good deeds of many people in each country are what keep the world as safe and comfortable as it is. It’s important to recognize this and to rejoice in modern examples of altruism, such as human rights groups, Greenpeace, Doctors without Borders, and animal activists. Whether or not they know they are living the bodhisattva’s way of life, these people are carrying out bodhisattva activity through their deeds of caring for others more so than themselves. We need to recognize this and be grateful for all the positive things that are happening in the world.
As long as we take some time every day to settle our mind and reflect on the pitfalls of self-importance and the benefits of altruism, we don’t need much more of a lojong practice than what’s already going on in our lives. How many times a day do we interact with people, at the workplace, in our family, in our social life? If we have the motivation to step out of our small self, each interaction can be a practice of altruism. We can simply smile, listen, help others feel relaxed, soothed. There is not just one method. We can creatively turn all things into bodhisattva activity. We don’t need to be anything more than a mother, a father, a spouse, a friend, a colleague, a fellow human being. Or if we need a break from people, we can direct our love and care toward nature, the animal kingdom, even the insect world. The bodhisattva practice can start anywhere. We can see the lives of any sentient beings as blessings in our own life, allowing us to direct our love and care for the benefit of those beings.
My teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche never missed a chance to benefit others. He didn’t have to set up a schedule. He didn’t have to plan the perfect times and conditions to extend himself to others. He didn’t wait until the entire row of traffic lights had turned green. Thanks to his creativity and his limitless bodhicitta, every breath in and out was for the benefit of others. We can aspire to live our lives in the same way. Even though we haven’t traveled as far along the path, every situation we encounter can lead us in the direction of greater and greater altruism.
If we want to become bodhisattvas, all we really need is some faith in ourselves and inspired motivation. It’s a challenging path, but we have all the methods and opportunities we need. If you aspire to be a bodhisattva, if you would love to be a bodhisattva, if you dream of being a bodhisattva, then you already are a bodhisattva.