Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (9 page)

It is good to open your mind so that each situation is completely fresh. It’s as if you’ve never been there before, a completely new take. But even with this approach, you can get trapped. Let’s say you’re a meditation instructor. Your student arrives for a meeting, and because you’re very open and in tune, something magical happens. There’s some real communication between the two of you, and you can see that something has helped, something has gotten through and connected with her own heart. She leaves and you feel great—“Wow! I did that wonderful thing. I could feel it.” The next person comes in and you forget about the freshness because you’re feeling so good about what you just did. He sits down and talks to you and you come out with the same answers that you just gave the last person. But that just leaves this new person cold; he couldn’t care less. You have the humbling experience of realizing that there’s never just one solution to a problem. Helping yourself or someone else has to do with opening and just being there; that’s how something happens between people. But it’s a continuous process. That’s how you learn. You can’t open just once.

What you learn from the Juans and Juanitas in your life is not something that you can get a patent on and then sell as a sure thing that will always work. It isn’t like that. This kind of learning is a continual journey of wakefulness.

A meditation student I was working with whom I’ll call Dan had a serious alcohol and drug problem. He was really making great strides, and then he went on a binge. On the day I found out about it I happened to have an opportunity to see Trungpa Rinpoche. I blurted out to him how upset I was that Dan had gone on a binge. I was so disappointed. Well, Rinpoche got really angry; it completely stopped my heart and mind. He said that being upset about Dan’s binge was my problem. “You should never have expectations for other people. Just be kind to them,” he told me. In terms of Dan, I should just help him keep walking forward inch by inch and be kind to him—invite him for dinner, give him little gifts, and do anything to bring some happiness to his life—instead of having these big goals for him. He said that setting goals for others can be aggressive—really wanting a success story for ourselves. When we do this to others, we are asking them to live up to our ideals. Instead, we should just be kind.

The main point of “Be grateful to everyone”—the “dig”—is that you want to get rid of the situations that drive you most crazy, the Juans and Juanitas. You don’t want to be grateful to them. You want to solve the problem and not hurt anymore. Juan is making you feel embarrassed, or degraded, or abused; there’s something about the way he treats you that makes you feel so bad that you just want
out.

This slogan encourages you to realize that when you’ve met your match you’ve found a teacher. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you shut up and don’t say anything and just stand there breathing in and out, although that might be exactly what you do. But tonglen is much more profound than that. It has to do with how you open in this situation so that the basic goodness of Juan or Juanita and your own basic goodness begin to communicate.

Something between repressing and acting out is what’s called for, but it is unique and different each time. People have the wisdom to find it. Juan and Juanita have the wisdom, you have the wisdom, everyone has the wisdom to know how to open. It’s inherent in all of us. The path of not being caught in ego is a process of surrendering to situations in order to communicate rather than win.

Compassionate action, compassionate speech, is not a one-shot deal; it’s a lifetime journey. But it seems to begin with realizing that when Juan or Juanita is getting to you, pushing every button, it’s not as simplistic as just eating it, just becoming a worm, “Okay, let them attack me.” On the other hand, it’s not as easy as just saying, “I’ll get
him.”
It’s a challenge. This is how the koan appears in everyday life: the unanswerable questions of our lives are the greatest teachers.

When the great Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha went to Tibet, he had been practicing the lojong teachings for some time. Like most practitioners, he had the feeling of being haunted by the fact that there are blind places that you don’t know about. You don’t know that you’re stuck in certain places. So he valued the Juans and Juanitas in his life tremendously because he felt they were the only ones who got through to him enough to show him where his blind spots were. Through them his ego got smaller. Through them his compassion increased.

The story goes that Atisha was told that the people of Tibet were very good-natured, earthy, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn’t be irritating enough to push his buttons. So he brought along with him a mean-tempered, ornery Bengali tea boy. He felt that was the only way he could stay awake. The Tibetans like to tell the story that, when he got to Tibet, he realized he need not have brought his tea boy: the people there were not as pleasant as he had been told.

In our own lives, the Bengali tea boys are the people who, when you let them through the front door of your house, go right down to the basement where you store lots of things you’d rather not deal with, pick out one of them, bring it up to you, and say, “Is this yours?”

These are the people who, when your habitual style is working just fine and everyone’s agreeing with you, say, “No way am I going to go along with what you just asked me to do. I think it’s stupid.” You think, “What do I do now?” And usually what you do is to get everybody else on your team. You sit around and talk about what a creep this person is who confronted you. If the disagreement happens to be in the realm of politics or “isms” of any kind, you get a banner on which you write how right you are and how wrong this other person is. By this time the other person has got a team, too, and then you have race riots and World War III. Righteous indignation becomes a creed for you and your whole gang. And it all started because somebody blew your trip. It all turns into a crusade of who’s right and who’s wrong. Wars come from that. Nobody ever encourages you to allow yourself to feel wounded first and then try to figure out what is the right speech and right action that might follow.

Gurdjieff—a teacher in the early part of the twentieth century, kind of a crazy-wisdom character—knew the meaning of this slogan. He was living not too far from Paris in a big manor house with huge lawns. All of his students came there to study with him. One of his main teachings was to be awake to whatever process you’re going through. He liked to tighten the screws on his students. In fact, it’s said that he would make you take the job that you most didn’t want to take; if you thought you should be a college professor, he would make you become a used car salesman.

There was a man in the community who was really bad tempered. He was everybody’s Juan; nobody could stand this guy because he was so prickly. Every little thing caused him to spin off into a tantrum. Everything irritated him. He complained constantly, so everyone felt the need to tiptoe around him because anything that might be said could cause him to explode. People just wished that he would go away.

Gurdjieff liked to make his students do things that were completely meaningless. One day there were about forty people out cutting up a lawn into little pieces and moving it to another place on the grounds. This was too much for this fellow; it was the last straw. He blew up, stormed out, got in his car, and drove off, whereupon there was a spontaneous celebration. People were thrilled, so happy he had gone. But when they told Gurdjieff what had happened, he said, “Oh no!” and went after him in his car.

Three days later they both came back. That night when Gurdjieff ‘s attendant was serving him his supper, he asked, “Sir, why did you bring him back?” Gurdjieff answered in a very low voice, “You’re not going to believe this, and this is just between you and me; you must tell no one. I pay him to stay here.”

I told that story at a meditation center, and later they wrote me a letter saying, “We used to have two people here helping and there was a lot of harmony. Now we have four and the trouble is beginning. So every day we ask each other, ‘Is somebody paying you to be here?’”

10

Cutting the Solidity of Thoughts

I
ONCE HAD AN INTERVIEW
with a student who began by saying, “This is all pretty depressing, isn’t it? There’s something sort of grim and discouraging about what we’re doing here. Where’s the joy? Where’s the cheerfulness in all of this?” We talked for a while. Then at the end of the interview, she had her own insight, “I guess the joy comes from getting real.”

That really struck me. Whether it’s connecting with the genuine heart of sadness and the messy areas of our lives, or connecting with vision and expansion and openness, what’s real is all included in well-being; it’s all included in joy. Joy is not about pleasure as opposed to pain or cheerfulness as opposed to sadness. Joy includes everything.

There’s a slogan that says, “Don’t wallow in self-pity.” That’s a good one to remember if you find that tonglen practice has you crying a lot. This whole approach could evolve into self-pity easily, and self-pity takes a lot of maintenance. You have to talk to yourself quite a bit to keep it up. The slogan is saying to get to know what self-pity feels like underneath the story line. That’s how the training develops a genuine, openhearted, intelligent relationship with the whole variety of human experience.

We’re so funny: the people who are crying a lot think that they shouldn’t be, and the people who aren’t crying think that they should be. One man said to me that since he’s not feeling anything when he does tonglen practice, maybe he should leave; he felt that he wasn’t getting the point. He wasn’t feeling mushy or warm; he was just kind of numb. I had to encourage him that a genuine experience of numbness is a genuine experience of what it is to be human.

It’s all raw material for waking up. You can use numbness, mushiness, and self-pity even—it doesn’t matter what it is—as long as you can go deeper, underneath the story line. That’s where you connect with what it is to be human, and that’s where the joy and well-being come from—from the sense of being real and seeing realness in others.

The slogan says that when the world is filled with evil, or when the world is filled with things that you just don’t want, that can all be transformed into the path of awakening. Then there are various suggestions, such as “Drive all blames into one” and “Be grateful to everyone.” A third suggestion is that you can transform seeming obstacles into awakening by flashing on the nonsolidity of things—on shunyata or absolute bodhichitta.

* * *

This slogan is quite a difficult one, and it’s on this subject of shunyata: “Seeing confusion as the four kayas / Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.” The part about seeing confusion is pretty accessible to all of us, but the rest of the slogan requires discussion.

The word
kaya
means body. The four kayas are
dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya,
and
svabhavikakaya.
You could say that the four kayas are a way of describing how emptiness manifests and how we could experience it.

First there’s a sense of the basic space of dharmakaya—dharma body. In our morning chants we say, “The essence of thoughts is dharmakaya; nothing whatever, but everything arises from it.” Dharmakaya is the basic space from which everything arises, and everything that arises is essentially spacious—not fixed or clunky.

Sambhogakaya—the “enjoyment body”—points to the experience that space is not really emptiness as we know it; there’s energy and color and movement. It’s vibrant, like a rainbow or a bubble or the reflection of your face in a mirror. It’s vivid, yet nonsubstantial at the same time. Sambhogakaya refers to this energetic quality, the fact that emptiness is fluid and vivid. Sound is often an image for sambhogakaya; you can’t see or capture it, but it has vibration, energy, and movement.

Nirmanakaya—the third of the four kayas—refers to the experience that emptiness manifests in form. Nirmanakaya is the means of communication with others.
The Heart Sutra
says, “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Nirmanakaya refers to the fact that phenomena actually manifest. Trees, grass, buildings, traffic, each of us, and the whole world actually manifest. That’s the only way we can experience emptiness: appearance / emptiness, sound / emptiness. They’re simultaneous. Whatever appears is vividly unreal in emptiness. Emptiness isn’t really empty in the way we might think of it; it’s vibrant and it manifests, yet usually all we see is the manifestation. We solidify it, we solidify ourselves, we solidify what we see. The whole thing becomes like a war or a seduction, and we are totally caught in the drama.

The fourth kaya is svabhavikakaya. Svabhavikakaya means that the previous three arise at once; they’re not really three separate things. The space, the energy, and the appearance arise together.

The slogan says, “Seeing confusion [the sense of obstacle, the things we don’t want, the sense of interruption] as the four kayas / Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.” Shunyata is protection because it cuts through the solidity of our thoughts, which are how we make everything—including ourselves—concrete and separate. It cuts through the way we’re over here and everything else is over there.

As we know from some of the other slogans we’ve discussed, when confusion arises, it is part of the path. When confusion arises, it is juicy and rich. The sense of obstacle is very rich and can teach us. In these practices it’s the necessary ingredient for being able to do tonglen or work with lojong at all. But this slogan is saying that when confusion arises not only do you practice tonglen and connect with the heart, but also you can flash on the nonsolidity of phenomena at any time. In other words, you can just drop it. We all know spontaneously what it feels like just to drop it. Out of the blue, you just drop it.

For instance, on a meditation retreat there are noodles for breakfast. Maybe in the beginning it seems funny, but halfway through breakfast you find yourself—instead of being mindful of the food, the chopsticks in your hand, the other people, and the good instructions you’ve received—talking to yourself about what a good breakfast would be, how you’d like to have a good breakfast like your mother used to make you in Brooklyn. It might be matzo ball soup or tortillas and beans or ham and eggs, but you want a good breakfast: burned bacon, like Mother used to make. You resent these noodles.