Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (15 page)

Another slogan says, “Always abide by the three basic principles.” The first basic principle is always to abide by any vows you have taken—the refuge vows that you take to become a Buddhist and the bodhisattva vows taken later as an expression of your wish to benefit others. The second principle is to refrain from showing off, or from outrageous conduct. The third is always to cultivate patience. So these are the three basic principles: keeping the vows you have taken, refraining from outrageous conduct, and cultivating patience.

Keeping the vows you have taken.
The first principle, to keep the vows you have taken, speaks specifically to those of us who have taken the refuge vows and bodhisattva vows, but it may be helpful for everyone to hear a little bit about these vows. The refuge vow is basically about making a commitment to become a refugee, which in essence means that rather than always trying to get security, you begin to develop an attitude of wanting to step into uncharted territory. It’s a vow that you take because you feel that the way to health and becoming a complete human being is to no longer hold so tightly to yourself. You long to go beyond that situation. You are no longer afraid of yourself. You can become a refugee because when you aren’t afraid of yourself, you don’t feel that you need a protected place to hide in.

The image of the bodhisattva vow could be, “Not afraid of others.” When you take the bodhisattva vow you open the windows and doors and invite all sentient beings as your guests. Having understood the futility and pain of always holding on to yourself, you want to take the next step and begin to work with others.

You might think that you are working with others because you are much more sane than they are and you want to spread that sanity. But a more profound insight is that you realize that the only way to go further is to open those doors and windows and not protect yourself any more but work with whatever arrives. That’s the only way to wake up further. The motivation for making friends with yourself becomes wanting to help others; these two work together. You know you can’t help others if you’re not making friends with yourself.

* * *

Refraining from outrageous conduct.
The second basic principle is to refrain from outrageous conduct. If you have this ideal of yourself as a hero or helper or doctor and everybody else as the victim, the patient, the deprived, the underdog, you are continuing to create the notion of separateness. Someone might end up getting more food or better housing, and that’s a big help; those things are necessary. But the fundamental problem of isolation, hatred, and aggression is not addressed. Or perhaps you get flamboyant in your helper role. You often see this with political action. People make a big display, and suddenly the whole thing doesn’t have to do with helping anyone at all but with building themselves up.

In the seventies there was a famous photograph in which the National Guard were all lined up with their guns at an antiwar rally. A young woman had walked up and put a flower in the end of one of the guns, and the photo appeared in all the newspapers. I read a report in which the soldier who had been holding that gun—who later became a strong peace activist—said that he had never before experienced anything as aggressive as that young woman coming with her flower and smiling at everybody and making this big display. Most of those young guys in the National Guard were already questioning how they got on that particular side of the fence anyway. And then along came this flower child. She never looked in his eyes; she never had any sense of him as a person. It was all for display, and it hurt. So that’s part of the point of this slogan. You have to question what’s behind your action, especially if it is making a big splash.

Cultivating patience.
The last of the three basic principles is to cultivate patience, which is the same as cultivating nonaggression. Patience and nonaggression are basically encouragement to wait. Sometimes I think of tonglen that way. You are in a situation in which you would normally just yell back or throw something or think of the person you are with in the same old stuck way. Instead it occurs to you to begin to do the exchange for other. This whole solid sense of self and other begins to get addressed when you cultivate patience. You learn to pause, learn to wait, learn to listen, and learn to look, allowing yourself and others some space—just slowing down the camera instead of speeding it up.

It’s a little bit like the old advice to count to ten before you say something; it makes you pause. If you become afraid or angry, there is a natural kind of adrenalin principle, when the camera actually starts to speed up. The speeding up itself can bring you back to the present. You can use it as a reminder just to slow down and listen and look and wait and develop patience.

* * *

“Abandon poisonous food” and “Don’t make gods into demons” are warnings that only you know whether what you are doing is good practice (“gods” or “good food”). Anything could be used to build yourself up and smooth things over and calm things down or to keep everything under control. Good food becomes poisonous food and gods become demons when you use them to keep yourself in that room with the doors and windows closed.

Another slogan that concerns compassionate action is “Work with the greatest defilements first.” Developing loving-kindness for yourself is the basis for compassionate communication and relationship. The time is now, not later. The greatest defilement is what you consider to be the greatest obstacle. This slogan is suggesting that you start where you feel most stuck. Making friends with that will begin to automatically take care of the smaller obstacles.

Because the larger obstacles like rage or jealousy or terror are so dramatic, their vividness itself may be a reminder to work with the practice of tonglen. We may so take for granted the multitude of minor daily irritations that we don’t even think of them as something to work with. To some degree they are the hardest obstacles to work with because they don’t reveal themselves. The only way you know that these are arising is that you feel righteous indignation. Let righteous indignation be your guide that someone is holding on to themselves, and that someone is probably you.

If you begin to work with the greater defilements, or the major stuck places, these little ones tend to become more obvious to you as well. Whereas if you try to work with all of these little ones, they are like your hands and your nose; you don’t even think of them as anything but you, and there is no sense of them as obstacle. You just buy them every time they happen.

Our greatest obstacles are also our greatest wisdom. In all the unwanted stuff there is something sharp and penetrating; there’s great wisdom there. Suppose anger or rage is what we consider our greatest obstacle, or maybe it’s addiction and craving. This breeds all kinds of conflict and tension and stress, but at the same time it has a penetrating quality that cuts through all of the confusion and delusion. It’s both things at once.

When you realize that your greatest defilement is facing you and there seems no way to get out of it because it’s so big, the instruction is, let go of the story line, let go of the conversation, and own your feeling completely. Let the words go and return to the essential quality of the underlying stuff. That’s the notion of the inbreath, the notion of making friends with ourselves at a profound level. In the process we are making friends with all sentient beings, because that is what life is made of. Working with the greater defilements first is saying that now is the time, and also that our greatest obstacles are our greatest wealth. From the point of view of wanting to stay cozy and separate in your room, this work is extremely threatening. Part of the path of compassionate action is to begin to explore that notion of the inbreath and test it, to see if it rings true for you.

18

Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions

W
HAT REALLY HELPS
another person, anyway? What really causes things to evolve in some kind of natural spontaneous way? The next slogans provide some direction. Each begins with the word
don’t.
I like to call them the “naked truth” slogans.

Taking responsibility for your own actions is another way of talking about awakening bodhichitta, because part of taking responsibility is the quality of being able to see things very clearly. Another part of taking responsibility is gentleness, which goes along with not judging, not calling things right or wrong, good or bad, but looking gently and honestly at yourself. Finally there is also the ability to keep going forward. It’s been described before as letting go, but in some sense at a personal level it’s that you can just keep on going; you don’t get completely overwhelmed by this identity as a loser or a winner, the abuser or the abused, the good guy or the bad guy. You just see what you do as clearly and as compassionately as you can and then go on. The next moment is always fresh and open. You don’t have to get frozen in an identity of any kind.

A Gary Larson cartoon shows two Martians who are hiding behind a rock. They’ve set up a mirror on one side of the path in front of the rock, down which are walking a man and a woman. One Martian says to the other: “Let’s see if it attacks its own image.”

It seems that we do attack our own image continually and usually that image appears to be be “out there.” We want to blame men or we want to blame women or we want to blame white people or black people, or we want to blame politicians or the police; we want to blame
somebody.
There’s some tendency to always put it out there, even if “out there” is our own body. Instead of working
with,
there is the tendency to struggle
against.
As a result, we become alienated. Then we take the wrong medicine for our illness by armoring ourselves in all these different ways, somehow not getting back to the soft spot.

So today’s slogans present the great exposé. The first one is “Don’t talk about injured limbs.” In other words, don’t talk about other people’s defects. We all get the same kind of satisfaction when we are all sitting around the table discussing Mortimer’s bad breath. Not only that, he has dandruff, and not only that, he laughs funny; not only that, he’s stupid. There is this peculiar security we get out of talking about other people’s defects. Sometimes we sugarcoat it and pretend that we’re not really doing it. We say something like, “Hi there. Did you know that Juanita steals?” Then we say, “Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. Excuse me, that was really unkind for me to say that, and I won’t say any more.” We’d love to go on and on, but instead we say just enough to get people against Juanita but not enough for them to disapprove of us for slandering her.

Then there’s “Don’t ponder others.” It’s talking about putting down other people to build yourself up. Maybe you only do it mentally. After all, you don’t actually say these things out loud, because people would disapprove, but in your mind you talk a lot about Mortimer: how you hate how he dresses and how he walks and how he stares coldly at you when you try to smile. You say, “Now this is enough. I’ve been criticizing Mortimer since the day I arrived here. I’m going to try to make friends,” but Mortimer just meets your sunny false smile with an icy stare. So you continue to ponder Mortimer’s awful ways as you sit here on the cushion, and you very seldom label it “thinking” or breathe it in. It doesn’t occur to you to exchange yourself for Mortimer, and you certainly don’t feel grateful to him.

The next is “Don’t be so predictable,” which has also been translated as, “Don’t be so trustworthy.” It’s an interesting one. It’s getting at how predictable we are, as everybody in the advertising world knows. They know exactly what to put on those billboards and those ads to make us want to buy their products. Even intelligent people like ourselves are sometimes magnetized by this propaganda because we’re so predictable.

Particularly, we are 100 percent predictable in that if we don’t like something we’ll run the other way, and if we do like it we’ll spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to somehow eat it whole. If someone does something nice for you, you always remember it and you want to repay their kindness. But if somebody hurts you, you remember it for the rest of your life and you always want to get revenge in one way or another. That’s the meaning of this slogan “Don’t be so predictable.” Don’t always react so predictably to pleasure and pain. Don’t keep taking the wrong medicine for the illness.

The next one is very easy to understand: “Don’t malign others.” We put a lot of energy and time into gossiping about others. Perhaps there’s somebody, maybe it’s just one person, that you have a problem with. Maybe it’s Pearl, who is so pitiful. She is always feeling left out, and you find yourself reminded of your mother, who’s also like that. Somehow Pearl and your mother become all mixed up together, and you find yourself continually irritated and disgusted by the pitifulness of Pearl, and it keeps triggering a lot of stuff in you. Yet you don’t have the slightest interest in actually getting to know Pearl and finding out what’s going on there. You have no desire to communicate with Pearl and find out who she is. Instead there’s some kind of satisfaction that you get from not liking her, and you spend a lot of time and energy talking to yourself about Pitiful Pearl, or whoever it might be—Horrible Horatio or Miserable Mortimer.

The next one is “Don’t wait in ambush,” yet another “naked truth” slogan. You have been taught that you should be a nice person; on the other hand, you don’t feel so nice. Maybe you know something about your husband that he doesn’t know you know. You keep it up your sleeve, waiting for just the right moment to spring it on him. One day you’re in the middle of a big argument, very heated. He has just insulted you royally. At that moment you bring the ace down from your sleeve and really let him have it. That’s called waiting in ambush. You are willing to be very patient until just the right moment comes along, and then you let someone have it. This isn’t the path of the warrior, it’s the path of the coward. Not only do you want to “win”; you aren’t even willing to communicate. The aspiration to communicate with another person—to be able to listen and to speak from the heart—is what changes our old stuck patterns.