Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (12 page)

13

Teachings for Life and Death

T
HE FIVE STRENGTHS
are the subject of two of the slogans: “Practice the five strengths, / The condensed heart instructions” and “The mahayana instruction for ejection of consciousness at death / Is the five strengths: how you conduct yourself is important.”

The underlying point of all our study and practice is that the happiness we seek is here to connect with at any time. The happiness we seek is our birthright. To discover it we need to be more gentle with ourselves, more compassionate toward ourselves and our universe. The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction that we think will bring happiness. We are always taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through relaxation and letting go rather than through struggle.

Does that mean you can just sleep all day? Does that mean there’s nothing you need to do? The answer is no. There does seem to be something that we have to do. These slogans tell us to practice the five strengths: strong determination, familiarization, seed of virtue, reproach, and aspiration. The five strengths are five sources of inspiration to trust that we’ve got all that we need in the palm of our hand.

These are the heart instructions on how to live and how to die. Last year I spent some time with two people who were dying. Jack and Jill were both old friends; they each had a very different relationship with their death. They each had the privilege of knowing quite a few months in advance that they were going to die, which is a great gift. Both of them began to fade away. When things began to slip away on Jack, when his body stopped working well for him, he was angry at the beginning, but then something started to shift, and he began to relax. When it was clear that everything was dissolving and slipping away, he seemed to get happier and happier. It felt as if he were letting go of all the things that had kept him separate from his basic goodness, letting everything go. He would say things like, “There’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to want,” and he would start to laugh. Day by day he wasted away more, but that was not a fundamental problem; this dissolving was very liberating for him.

The external situation was the same for Jill, but she got scared, and she began to struggle against the whole process. As her body started to waste away and there was less to hold on to, she became more grim and terrified, clenching her teeth and her hands. She was facing a vast abyss and was going to be pushed over into it, and she was screaming with terror, “No! No! No!”

I understood why I practice: we can discover the process of letting go and relaxing during our lifetime. In fact, that’s the way to live: stop struggling against the fact that things are slipping through our fingers. Stop struggling against the fact that nothing’s solid to begin with and things don’t last. Knowing that can give us a lot of space and a lot of room if we can relax with it instead of screaming and struggling against it.

The five strengths are instruction on how to live and how to die. Actually, there’s no difference. The same good advice applies to both, because if you know how to die then you know how to live and if you know how to live then you’ll know how to die. Suzuki Roshi said, “Just be willing to die over and over again.” As each breath goes out, let it be the end of that moment and the birth of something new. All those thoughts, as they come up, just see them and let them go, let the whole story line die; let the space for something new arise. The five strengths address how to give up trying all the time to grasp what’s ungraspable and actually relax into the space that’s there. Then what do we find? Maybe that’s the point. We’re afraid to find out.

Strong determination.
The first strength is strong determination. Rather than some kind of dogged pushing through, strong determination involves connecting with joy, relaxing, and trusting. It’s determination to use every challenge you meet as an opportunity to open your heart and soften, determination not to withdraw. One simple way to develop this strength is to develop a strong-hearted spiritual appetite. To do this, some kind of playful quality is needed. When you wake up in the morning, you can say: “I wonder what’s going to happen today. This may be the day that I die. This may be the day that I understand what all these teachings are about.” The Native Americans, before they went into battle, would say, “Today is a good day to die.” You could also say, “Today is a good day to live.”

Strong determination gives you the vehicle that you need to find out for yourself that you have everything it takes, that the fundamental happiness is right here, waiting. Strong determination not to shut anything out of your heart and not to close up takes a sense of humor and an appetite, an appetite for enlightenment.

Familiarization.
The next strength is familiarization. What familiarization means is that the dharma no longer feels like a foreign entity: your first thought becomes dharmic. You begin to realize that all the teachings are about yourself; you’re here to study yourself. Dharma isn’t philosophy. Dharma is basically a good recipe for how to cook yourself, how to soften the hardest, toughest piece of meat. Dharma is good instruction on how to stop cheating yourself, how to stop robbing yourself, how to find out who you really are, not in the limited sense of “I need” and “I’m gonna get,” but through developing wakefulness as your habit, your way of perceiving everything.

We talk about enlightenment as if it’s a big accomplishment. Basically, it has to do with relaxing and finding out what you already have. The enlightened “you” might be a slightly different “you” from the one you’re familiar with, but it still has hair growing out of its head, still has taste buds, and when it gets the flu, snot comes out of its nose. Enlightened, however, you might experience yourself in a slightly less claustrophobic way, maybe a completely nonclaustrophobic way.

Familiarization means that you don’t have to search any further, and you know it. It’s all in the “pleasantness of the presentness,” in the very discursive thoughts you’re having now, in all the emotions that are coursing through you; it’s all in there somehow.

Seed of virtue.
The third strength is called the seed of virtue. In effect, this is buddha nature or basic goodness. It’s like a swimming pool with no sides that you’re swimming in forever. In fact, you’re made out of water. Buddha nature isn’t like a heart transplant that you get from elsewhere. “It isn’t as if you’re trying to teach a tree to talk,” as Rinpoche once said. It’s just something that can be awakened or, you might say, relaxed into. Let yourself fall apart into wakefulness. The strength comes from the fact that the seed is already there; with warmth and moisture it sprouts and becomes visible above the ground. You find yourself looking like a daffodil, or feeling like one, anyway. The practice is about softening or relaxing, but it’s also about precision and seeing clearly. None of that implies searching. Searching for happiness prevents us from ever finding it.

Reproach.
The fourth strength is called reproach. This one requires talking to yourself: “Ego, you’ve done nothing but cause me problems for ages. Give me a break. I’m not buying it anymore.” Try it in the shower. You should talk to yourself all the time without embarrassment. When you see yourself starting to spin off in frivolity, say to yourself, “Begone, you troublemaker!”

This approach can be slightly problematic because we don’t usually distinguish between who we think we are and our ego. The more gentleness that comes up, the more friendliness you feel for yourself, the more this dialogue is fruitful. But to the degree that you actually are hard on yourself, then this dialogue could just increase your self-criticism.

Over the years, with encouragement from wonderful teachers, I have found that, rather than blaming yourself or yelling at yourself, you can teach the dharma to yourself. Reproach doesn’t have to be a negative reaction to your personal brand of insanity. But it does imply that you see insanity as insanity, neurosis as neurosis, spinning off as spinning off. At that point, you can teach the dharma to yourself.

This advice was given to me by Thrangu Rinpoche. I was having anxiety attacks, and he said that I should teach the dharma to myself, just good simple dharma. So now I say, “Pema, what do you really want? Do you want to shut down and close off, do you want to stay imprisoned? Or do you want to let yourself relax here, let yourself die? Here’s your chance to actually realize something. Here’s your chance not to be stuck. So what do you really want? Do you want always to be right or do you want to wake up?”

Reproach can be very powerful. You yourself teach yourself the dharma in your own words. You can teach yourself the four noble truths, you can teach yourself about taking refuge—
anything
that has to do with that moment when you’re just about to re-create samsara as if you personally had invented it. Look ahead to the rest of your life and ask yourself what you want it to add up to.

Each time you’re willing to see your thoughts as empty, let them go, and come back to your breath, you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness, seeds of being able to see the nature of mind, and seeds of being able to rest in unconditional space. It doesn’t matter that you can’t do it every time. Just the willingness, the strong determination to do it, is sowing the seeds of virtue. You find that you can do it more spontaneously and naturally, without its being an effort. It begins with some sense of exertion and becomes your normal state. That’s the seed of bodhichitta ripening. You find out who you really are.

Aspiration.
The last strength, aspiration, is also a powerful tool. A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself. The notion of aspiration is simply that you voice your wishes for enlightenment. You say to yourself, for yourself, about yourself, and by yourself things like, “May my compassion for myself increase.” You might be feeling completely hopeless, down on yourself, and you can voice your heartfelt aspiration: “May my sense of being obstructed decrease. May my experience of wakefulness increase. May I experience my fundamental wisdom. May I think of others before myself.” Aspiration is much like prayer, except that there’s nobody who hears you.

Aspiration, yet again, is to talk to yourself, to be an eccentric bodhisattva. It is a way to empower yourself. In fact, all five of these empower yourself. Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.

The five strengths are the heart instructions on how to live and how to die. Whether it’s right now or at the moment of your death, they tell you how to wake up to whatever is going on.

14

Loving-Kindness and Compassion

A
LL DHARMA AGREES
at one point. All the teachings and all the practices are about just one thing: if the way that we protect ourselves is strong, then suffering is really strong too. If the ego or the cocoon starts getting lighter, then suffering is lighter as well. Ego is like a really fat person trying to get through a very narrow door. If there’s lots of ego, then we’re always getting squeezed and poked and irritated by everything that comes along. When something comes along that doesn’t squeeze and poke and irritate us, we grasp it for dear life and want it to last forever. Then we suffer more as a result of holding on to ourselves.

One might think that we’re talking about ego as enemy, about ego as original sin. But this is a very different approach, a much softer approach. Rather than original
sin,
there’s original
soft spot.
The messy stuff that we see in ourselves and that we perceive in the world as violence and cruelty and fear is not the result of some basic badness but of the fact that we have such a tender, vulnerable, warm heart of bodhichitta, which we instinctively protect so that nothing will touch it.

This is a life-affirming view; it starts from the point of basic goodness or basic good heart. The problem is that we continually grab the wrong end of the stick. All practice agrees that there’s some fundamental pattern that we have in which we’re always trying to avoid the unpleasantness and grasp the pleasantness. There seems to be a need to change the fundamental pattern of always protecting against anything touching our soft spot. Tonglen practice is about changing the basic pattern.

Earlier, I referred to ego as being a room where you just tried to get everything on your own terms. To get out of that room, you don’t drive up in a big machine and smash the whole thing to pieces. Rather, at your own speed, starting where you are, you begin to open the door and the windows. It’s a very gentle approach, one that acknowledges that you
can
gradually begin to open that door. You can also shut it as often as you need to—not with the desire to stay comfortable but with the intention ultimately to gather more courage, more sense of humor, more basic curiosity about how to open that door, until you just leave it open and invite all sentient beings as your guests, until you feel at home with no agenda and with groundlessness.

The main thing about this practice and about all practice—all dharmas agree at one point—is that you’re the only one who knows what is opening and what is closing down; you’re the only one who knows. The next slogan, “Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to; there’s some truth in what people say), but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re opening and when you’re closing. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows.