Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (10 page)

Then, not through any particular effort, you just drop it. To your surprise, there’s a big world there. You see all these little lights glimmering in your empty lacquered bowl. You notice the sadness on someone’s face. You realize that the man across from you is also thinking about breakfasts because he has a resentful look on his face, which makes you laugh because you were there just one second ago.

The world opens up and suddenly we’re there for what’s happening. The solidity of our thoughts becomes transparent, and we can connect automatically with this space—shunyata—in ourselves. We have the ability to drop our story line, to rouse ourselves.

That’s an everyday experience of shunyata. But it’s also a very advanced practice if you can do it when you don’t happen to feel like it. If everything is solid and intense and you’re wallowing in self-pity or something else, if someone says to you at that point, “Just drop it,” even in the sweetest, kindest, most gentle voice, you want to punch the person in the nose. You just want to keep wallowing in resentment and self-pity.

The whole point of the practice of lojong is that you start where you are. The slogan “Abandon any hope of fruition” is also encouragement to just be where you are, with your numbness or resentment or whatever. Just start where you are. Then as a result of doing the practice, to your surprise you find that this week you can drop it more easily than last week; or this year you can drop it more easily than last year. As time goes by, you find that you can spontaneously just drop it more and more.

The same goes for compassion. We all have compassion. When we remember or see certain things, we can, without any effort at all, open our hearts. Then we’re told to have compassion for our enemies, for the Juans of our life, for the people that we really hate. That’s advanced practice. But as a result of doing lojong practice and giving up all hope of fruition, of just relating with who we are now and with what we’re feeling now, we find that the circle of our compassion begins to widen, and we are able to feel compassion in increasingly difficult situations.

Compassion starts coming to us because we have the aspiration to do the practice and to get more in touch with our own pain and our own joy. In other words, we are willing to get real. We realize that we can’t fake it and we can’t force it, but we know we have what it takes to work with how we are right now. So we start that way, and both the ability to drop it and cheer up and the ability to open our hearts begin to grow of their own accord.

“Seeing confusion as the four kayas / Is unsurpassable shunyata protection” is really encouragement not to make such a big deal of things. We can at least entertain the thought that we could drop it and remember what it feels like when we do drop it—how the world opens up—and discover the big world outside of our little ego-bound cocoon.

This particular slogan is meant as meditation instruction. It’s said that only on the cushion can you really get into this one. In general, however, I’d like to encourage you to use the whole lojong and tonglen approach as practice even after you finish your formal meditation period. That’s where it’s most powerful, most real, and most heartfelt. As you’re going about your day and you’re seeing things that touch your heart, or you’re feeling things that scare you or make you feel uptight or resentful, you can begin to think of doing the exchange, breathing in and breathing out on the spot. This is necessary and helpful. After meditation this practice feels quite real, sometimes a lot more real than in the meditation room.

This slogan about the four kayas points out that it’s in shamatha-vipashyana practice that you begin to see the nonsubstantial nature of things. It’s addressed to that part of the practice where we say, “Thinking.” You’re completely caught up. You’ve gone to New York City in your mind, and you’re having that breakfast, and you’re reliving resentments and joys, and then without any effort, you wake up. That’s what happens, as you know, but it’s not like you make yourself come back. It’s that suddenly you notice and wake up, and then you’re told to say, “Thinking.”

That label, “thinking,” is the beginning of acknowledging that the whole drama doesn’t have any substance, that it arises out of nowhere, but it seems extremely vivid. Even though the story line goes away, there’s energy and movement. It definitely seems to manifest in terms of tables and chairs and people and animals, and it seems so tangible, but the moment you say, “Thinking,” you’re acknowledging that the whole drama is just a thought in your mind. That’s a recognition of shunyata, or emptiness. Maybe each of us has had some moments of how liberating that can be.

When the thoughts arise it might occur to you to wonder where they come from. Where
do
they come from? It seems as if they come from nowhere. You’re just faithfully following your breath and—Wham!—you’re in Hawaii surfing. Where did it come from? And where does it
go
? Big drama, big drama’s happening, big, big, drama. And it’s 9:30 in the morning. “Oooh. Wow! This is extremely heavy.” A car horn honks, and suddenly you’re not in that drama anymore, you’re in another drama.

I was once instructed to meditate on thoughts. I investigated the nature of thought for two whole months. I can tell you firsthand that you can never find a thought. There is nothing there of substance, but with our minds we make it Extremely Big Deal.

Another slogan says, “All activities should be done with one intention.” Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention, which is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go. Everything in our lives can wake us up or put us to sleep, and basically it’s up to us to let it wake us up.

11

Overcoming Resistance

T
HE SLOGAN
of the day is “Four practices are the best of methods.” This slogan is about the four things that help us to practice both relative and absolute bodhichitta: (1) accumulating merit, (2) purifying our negative actions—usually called confessing our negative actions, (3) feeding the ghosts, and (4) offering to the protectors, which is sometimes translated as asking the protectors to help you in your practice.

Each of these four practices jumps right into the guts of unwanted feelings, emotions, and situations. Earlier we talked about how the best kind of protection is to see the empty, dreamlike quality of the confusion. Whereas seeing confusion as the four kayas is something we do on the level of absolute bodhichitta, the four practices are about actual things that you can do at the relative level in terms of ritual and ceremony.

However you talk about it, the crux of the matter is to overcome resistance. These four practices are four methods that Milarepa might have used to try to get the demons out of his cave. The punch line of that story was that when the resistance was gone, so were the demons. Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.

Accumulating merit.
The first of the four practices is to accumulate merit. The way to accumulate merit is to be willing to give, willing to open, willing not to hold back. It is described as letting go of holding on to yourself, letting your stronghold of ego go. Instead of collecting things for yourself, you open and give them away.

As a result of opening yourself, you begin to experience your world as more friendly. That is merit. You find it easier to practice the dharma, you have fewer kleshas, and circumstances seem to be hospitable. You might think that the way to encounter circumstances in which you could practice the dharma is to use your same old habitual style. But the idea behind accumulating this kind of meritorious situation is to open, to give, and not to hold back. Instead of encasing yourself in a cocoon, instead of shielding your heart, you can open, let the whole thing dissolve. This is how merit is accumulated.

In Buddhist societies such as in Burma and Tibet and China, accumulating merit is interpreted as performing all kinds of good works, such as making donations to build monasteries or retreat centers. It’s wonderful to fund-raise in Hong Kong and Taiwan because people feel that it’s meritorious to give money to build a retreat center or a monastery. If you give to these worthy causes, and if it’s a gesture of real generosity—if you’re giving without wishing for anything particular in return—then it works.

When we take the bodhisattva vow, we give a gift. The moment we give the gift is the moment we receive one of the marks of taking the vow. The instruction is to give something that you find it hard to let go of, something that hurts a little. If you give money, it should be just a little more than you really wanted to give.

In all of these traditional ways of accumulating merit, the inner meaning is that of opening completely to the situation, with some kind of daring. There’s an incantation that goes along with this, the practice of which is said to be the ultimate expression of gaining merit because it has to do with letting go of hope and fear: “If it’s better for me to be sick, so be it. If it’s better for me to recover, so be it. If it’s better for me to die, so be it.” Another way this is said is, “Grant your blessings that if I’m meant to be sick, let me be sick. Grant your blessings that if I’m meant to recover, let me recover.” It’s not that you’re asking some higher power to grant the blessings; basically, you’re just saying, “Let it happen, let it happen.”

Surrendering, letting go of possessiveness, and complete nonattachment—all are synonyms for accumulating merit. The idea is to open up rather than shut down.

* * *

Confessing evil actions.
The second of the four practices is to confess evil actions, or lay down neurotic actions. In Buddhist monasteries, this is done ceremonially on days of the full and new moons. Confessing your neurotic actions has four parts to it: (1) regretting what you’ve done; (2) refraining from doing it again; (3) performing some kind of remedial activity such as the Vajrasattva mantra, taking refuge in the three jewels, or tonglen; and (4) expressing complete willingness to continue this fourfold process in the future and not to act out neurotically. So the fourfold formula of laying down your neurosis consists of regret, refraining, remedial action, and the resolve not to do it again.

Bad circumstances may have arisen, but we know that we can transform them. The advice here is that one of the best methods is to confess the whole thing. First, you don’t confess to anybody; it’s a personal matter. You yourself look at what you do and go through this fourfold process with it. Second, no one forgives you. You’re not confessing sin; it’s not as if you’ve “sinned,” as we were taught in the Judeo-Christian culture in which we grew up.

What is meant by neurosis is that in limitless, timeless space—with which we could connect at any time—we continually have tunnel vision and lock ourselves into a room and put bolts on the door. When there’s so much space, why do we keep putting on dark glasses, putting in earplugs, and covering ourselves with armor?

Confessing our neurotic action is a fourfold process by which we learn to see honestly what we do and develop a yearning to take off those dark glasses, take out those earplugs, take off that armor and experience the world fully. It’s yet again another method for letting go of holding back, another method for opening rather than closing down.

1. R
EGRET.
So, first, regret. Because of mindfulness and seeing what you do, which is the result of your practice, it gets harder and harder to hide from yourself. Well, that turns out to be extremely good news, and it leads to being able to see neurosis as neurosis—not as a condemnation of yourself but as something that benefits you. Regret implies that you’re tired of armoring yourself, tired of eating poison, tired of yelling at someone each time you feel threatened, tired of talking to yourself for hours each time you don’t like the way someone else does something, tired of this constant complaint to yourself. Nobody else has to give you a hard time. Nobody has to tell you. Through keeping your eyes open, you yourself get tired of your neurosis. That’s the idea of regret.

Once someone who had done something that he really regretted went to his teacher and explained the whole thing. The teacher said, “It’s good that you feel that regret. You have to acknowledge what you do. It’s much better that you see that you harmed somebody than that you protect yourself from that. But you only get two minutes for regret.” That’s a good thing to remember because otherwise you might flagellate yourself—“Oy vey, Oy vey”

2. R
EFRAINING.
The second part of confessing neurotic action is refraining. It’s painful when you see how in spite of everything you continue in your neurosis; sometimes it has to wear itself out like an old shoe. However, refraining is very helpful as long as you don’t impose too authoritarian a voice on yourself. Refraining is not a New Year’s resolution, not a setup where you plan your next failure by saying, “I see what I do and I will never do it again,” and then you feel pretty bad when you do it again within the half hour.

Refraining comes about spontaneously when you see how your neurotic action works. You may say to yourself, “It would still feel good; it still looks like it would be fun,” but you refrain because you already know the chain reaction of misery that it sets off. The initial bite, or the initial drink, or the initial harsh word might give you some feeling of well-being, but it’s followed by the chain reaction of misery that you’ve been through not once but five thousand times. So refraining is a natural thing that comes from the fact that we have basic wisdom in us. It’s important to remember that refraining is not harsh, like yelling at yourself or making yourself do something you don’t want to do. It’s gentle; at the very most, you say to yourself, “One day at a time.”