GENERATING OUR MOTIVATION
I HAVE A SPECIAL connection with this poem. It impacted my life in a strong but unexpected way. In 1976 I was living at Kopan Monastery outside of Kathmandu, Nepal, where, as someone new to the Dharma, I was studying and practicing the Dharma. I became sick and weak, my skin turned yellow, and anger percolated inside me. I had contracted hepatitis A, a disease that Western medicine had no cure for. The illness totally knocked me out physically and mentally, and my bad mood was accentuated because hepatitis A affects the liver, which, according to Tibetan medicine, is related to the element of bile and the defilement of anger. Some friends kindly took me to Kathmandu to see a homeopathic doctor, who prescribed some medicine. On the return to Kopan, I was so weak that a friend had to carry me on his back up the hill to the monastery. Taxis were few and far between in those days, and in any case, I couldn’t afford to take one.
At the time, I stayed in a dormitory where the floor was made of irregularly spaced wooden planks. When someone from the upper floor swept their room, the dirt fell through the planks and onto the people in the room below. Instead of toilets, there were outhouses—pits in the ground with two boards across. Grass mats formed the sides of the outhouses. At night, you had to navigate carefully to avoid falling into the pit. I was so sick that walking from my room to the outhouse was like climbing Mount Everest. Exhausted, I just lay in my room all day.
While in my sickbed, somebody brought me a little booklet called The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, published by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India. I had enough strength to turn the pages. Verse 9 stopped me in my tracks. It read:
When my body falls prey to unbearable illnesses,
It is the weapon of destructive karma returning on me
For injuring the bodies of others;
From now on I will take all sickness upon myself.
Until that moment, I had blamed my illness and its attendant discomfort on the cook, who had not cleaned the vegetables thoroughly, and on the kitchen helpers, who had not washed the dishes well. Now Dharmarakshita was telling me that my experience was the result of my own actions! Looking at it from a karmic viewpoint, I saw that the sickness was rooted in my own actions—probably created in previous lives—of physically harming others. Or perhaps the karma was created when, as a young child, I piled up all the snails in the garden and stomped on them with glee, mistakenly thinking I was doing something good by ridding the garden of these pests. Or perhaps it was due to swatting flies in the summer, another activity I took great delight in as a child.
That my misery was due to my own actions doesn’t mean I deserved to suffer; karma is not a ticket to punishment. Rather, it meant I could no longer blame my misery on others. Whatever I had done to others was now coming back to me, and I had to take responsibility for my previous actions, even if I couldn’t remember them or didn’t know specifically which destructive actions were now ripening as my suffering. Actually it didn’t matter because I knew I certainly had not been an angel. The Wheel of Sharp Weapons made it clear to me that karma is like a boomerang. Whatever actions we do return and have a similar effect upon us.
That moment was a turning point in my Dharma practice. Previously I had thought, “Dharma is nice. I should practice it.” But I was lazy in doing so. Seeing that my miserable experiences were the results of my own actions, which could be traced back to the ignorance, anger, and clinging attachment in my own mind, I now wanted to practice Dharma. The difference between should and want is enormous. The latter is supported by wisdom; the other is limp obligation. Looking back on having hepatitis, I am grateful for the experience of being sick because it dramatically changed my approach to life and to Dharma practice. It got me going on the right path, a path that is still benefiting me—and others—four decades later.
In the middle of my recovery from hepatitis, while I was still very weak, the Nepali government decided that it was time for all the foreigners at Kopan to leave and stopped extending our visas. This was in May or June, 1976, the time just before the monsoon rains, the hottest and muggiest months of the year. It was not the time anyone in their right mind wanted to travel overland from Kathmandu to Dharamsala, India—a several-day journey in buses on winding roads and trains packed with people. I was a monastic wannabe, not a nun, then, but nevertheless the monastic community of Westerners took me under their wing as we schlepped up and down mountains and across plains and again up mountains to arrive in Dharamsala, where we could continue our study and practice of the Dharma with compassionate and wise Tibetan spiritual mentors.
The kindness that others gave me then was yet another real-life Dharma teaching. It made me wonder what I possibly could have done in previous lives that created the cause for this. “Why previous lives?” you may wonder. Because now alert to the machinations of my self-centered thought due to having read The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, I was aware that in this life I had not created such causes. Experiencing the kindness of others in this way fortified my confidence in the wisdom of Dharmarakshita’s message to dance and trample on the head of the betrayer of self-centeredness and self-grasping ignorance and to cherish others and take delight in benefiting them in whatever way possible.
MOTIVATION
To fully benefit from reading a Dharma book or listening to teachings, having an open mind is essential. We need to be willing to reflect on the teachings to make sure we understand them correctly and then take them to heart and use them as a mirror to show us the condition of our minds.
In addition to describing the results of our actions, the teachings in this book center on the generation of bodhicitta, the wish to attain full awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. They also explain how to transform adverse circumstances into the path, so that everything we experience will become part of the path to full awakening.
Our motivation is the chief factor that determines the karmic result of our actions. If we act seeking worldly happiness for ourselves in this life, sometimes our aim is fulfilled, but frequently it isn’t. However, when our aim goes beyond the limited scope of this particular life and expands to seeking a fortunate rebirth in the future, liberation from cyclic existence, or full awakening, then the actions done with those motivations will bring those corresponding results. This is the meaning of “karma is infallible”: happiness comes from constructive actions, never from destructive ones, and misery arises due to destructive actions, never constructive ones. Constructive and destructive actions are principally differentiated based on the motivation with which they were done.
In terms of the functioning of the law of karma (actions) and their effects, being hypocritical spells our own doom. While in ordinary activities we may adopt pretenses to make ourselves look good and we may sometimes be successful in deceiving people to get what we want, this strategy doesn’t work when our goal is to purify our mind. The results of our actions are determined principally by our motivation, not by what others think or say about us. Being a spiritual practitioner requires complete sincerity and self-honesty.
To cultivate the courage such self-honesty necessitates, we reflect on the shortcomings of our self-centered attitude, the kindness we have received from sentient beings, and the advantages that accrue to ourselves and others from cherishing others. Seeing the misery of sentient beings, we train our hearts and minds to respond with love, wanting them to have happiness and its causes, and with compassion, wanting them to be free from suffering and its causes. With that heartfelt intention, we then cultivate the great resolve to work for their benefit, and in order to do that most effectively, we generate the aspiration to attain the full awakening of a buddha. This motivation of bodhicitta is the source of all happiness and success for all sentient beings throughout all times.