The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (13 page)

We aren’t drawing upon a code of conduct and condemning everyone who doesn’t comply. If we draw a line down the center of a room and tell those in it to put themselves in the category of “virtuous” or “nonvirtuous,” are we truly more liberated because we choose “virtuous”? More likely we’re just more arrogant and proud. Bodhisattvas are to be found among thieves and prostitutes and murderers.

There is a traditional Buddhist story about a ship captain, Compassionate Heart, who was traveling with five hundred people when a pirate, Angry Spearman, boarded the boat and threatened to kill them all. The captain realized that if the pirate did this, he would be sowing the seeds of his own intense suffering. Moved by compassion for both the pirate and the people, the captain killed Angry Spearman. In the same vein, we sometimes have to tell a lie in order to protect someone from harm.

There is no act that is inherently virtuous or nonvirtuous. The warrior trains in the discipline of not causing harm, knowing that the way to do this skillfully will change with the circumstances. When we practice discipline with flexibility, we become less moralistic and more tolerant.

As we train in the patience paramita, we are first of all patient with ourselves. We learn to relax with the restlessness of our energy—the energy of anger, boredom, and excitement. Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practice patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.

One man decided to train in patience on his morning commute. He thought he was succeeding beautifully. He was patient when people cut in front of him. He was patient when they honked their horns. When he became anxious that the heavy traffic was going to make him late, he was able to relax with his agitated energy. He was doing great. Then he had to stop for a woman in a crosswalk. She was walking very slowly. The man sat there practicing patience—letting the thoughts go and connecting with his restlessness as directly as he could. Suddenly the woman turned, kicked his car, and started screaming at him. At that point he totally lost his calm and started screaming back. Then he remembered hearing that in practicing patience we see our anger far more clearly. He started breathing in for the woman and for himself. Here they were—two strangers screaming at each other—and he felt the absurdity and tenderness of their situation.

Being ambitious about paramita practice is a setup for failure. When we give up the hope of doing it right and the fear of getting it wrong, we realize that winning and losing are both acceptable. In either case, we have nothing to hang on to. Moment by moment we are traveling to the other shore.

The paramita of enthusiasm is connected with joy. In practicing this paramita, like little children learning to walk, we train with eagerness but without a goal. This joyful, uplifted energy isn’t a matter of luck. It takes ongoing training in mindfulness and maitri, in dissolving the barriers and opening the heart. As we learn to relax with groundlessness, this enthusiasm will emerge. We practice what is called the threefold purity—no big deal about the doer, no big deal about the action, no big deal about the result. This joyful exertion is rooted in no expectation, no ambition, no hope of fruition. We just eagerly put one foot in front of the other and are not discouraged when we fall flat on our faces. We act without self-congratulation or self-censure, without fearing criticism or expecting applause.

Through continual practice we find out how to cross over the boundary between stuckness and waking up. It depends on our willingness to experience directly feelings we’ve been avoiding for many years. This willingness to stay open to what scares us weakens our habits of avoidance. It’s the way that ego-clinging becomes ventilated and begins to fade.

The threefold purity is also the essence of the meditation paramita. When we sit down to meditate we leave behind the idea of the perfect meditator, the ideal meditation, and preconceived results. We train in simply being present. We open ourselves completely to the pain and the pleasure of our life. We train in precision, gentleness, and letting go. Because we see our thoughts and emotions with compassion, we stop struggling against ourselves. We learn to recognize when we’re all caught up and to trust that we can let go. Thus the blockages created by our habits and prejudices start falling apart. In this way, the wisdom we were blocking—the wisdom of bodhichitta—becomes available.

So these are the six activities of the warrior:

Generosity
. Giving as a path of learning to let go.

Discipline
. Training in not causing harm in a way that is daring and flexible.

Patience
. Training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed. If waking up takes forever, still we go moment by moment, giving up all hope of fruition and enjoying the process.

Joyful enthusiasm
. Letting go of our perfectionism and connecting with the living quality of every moment.

Meditation
. Training in coming back to being right here with gentleness and precision.

Prajna
. Cultivating an open, inquiring mind. With these six activities of the bodhisattva, we learn how to travel to the other shore, and we do our best to take everyone we can find along with us.

18

Groundlessness

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

—DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

A
T ONE TIME
the Buddha gathered his students together at a spot called Vulture Peak Mountain. Here he presented some revolutionary teachings—teachings on the wide-open, groundless dimension of our being—known traditionally as shunyata, as unconditional bodhichitta, as prajnaparamita.

The Buddha had already been teaching on groundlessness for some time. Many of the students there on Vulture Peak Mountain had a profound realization of impermanence and egolessness, the truth that nothing—including ourselves—is solid or predictable. They understood the suffering that results from grasping and fixation. They had learned this from Buddha himself; they had experienced its profundity in meditation. But the Buddha knew that our tendency to seek solid ground is deeply rooted. Ego can use anything to maintain the illusion of security, including the belief in insubstantiality and change.

So the Buddha did something shocking. With the prajnaparamita teachings he pulled the rug out completely, taking his students further into groundlessness. He told the audience that whatever they believed had to be let go, that dwelling upon any description of reality was a trap. This was not comfortable news for the audience to hear.

It reminds me of the story of Krishnamurti, who was raised to be the avatar by the Theosophists. His elders continually told the other students that when the avatar manifested fully, his teachings would be electrifying and revolutionary, shaking up the very foundations of their beliefs. This turned out to be true, but not quite in the way they had imagined. When Krishnamurti finally became head of the Order of the Star, he called the whole society together and officially disbanded it, saying that it was harmful because it gave them too much ground.

The Vulture Peak experience was something like that for the Buddha’s students. It wiped away all their existing conceptions about the nature of reality. The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to
anything
blocks wisdom.
Any
conclusions we might draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the bodhichitta teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in the unconditional openness of the prajnaparamita, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.

During this teaching, known as
The Heart Sutra
, the Buddha actually didn’t say a word. He went into a state of deep meditation and let the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, do the talking. This courageous warrior, also known as Kuan-yin, expressed his experience of the prajnaparamita on behalf of the Buddha. His insight was not based on intellect but came through his practice. He saw clearly that everything is empty. Then one of the principal disciples of the Buddha, a monk named Shariputra, began to question Avalokiteshvara. This is an important point. Even though a great bodhisattva was teaching and the Buddha was clearly in charge, the pro-found meaning emerged only through questioning. Nothing was taken complacently or on blind faith.

Shariputra is a role model for us as students. He wasn’t willing just to accept what he heard; he wanted to know for himself what was true. So he asked Avalokiteshvara, “In all the words and actions and thoughts of my life, how do I apply the prajnaparamita? What is the key to training in this practice? What view do I take?”

Avalokiteshvara answered with the most famous of Buddhist paradoxes: “Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.” When I first heard this, I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about. My mind went completely blank. His explanation, like the prajnaparamita itself, is inexpressible, indescribable, inconceivable. Form is that which simply
is
before we project our beliefs onto it. The prajnaparamita represents a completely fresh take, an unfettered mind where anything is possible.

Prajna is the unfiltered expression of the open ear, open eye, open mind that is found in every living being. Thich Nhat Hanh translates the word as “understanding.” It’s a fluid process, not something definite and concrete that can be summed up or measured.

This prajnaparamita, this inexpressibility, is our human experience. It is not particularly regarded as a peaceful state of mind or as a disturbed one. It is a state of basic intelligence that is open, questioning, and unbiased. Whether it comes in the form of curiosity, bewilderment, shock, or relaxation isn’t really the issue. We train when we’re caught off guard and when our life is up in the air.

We train, as Trungpa Rinpoche said, in “not afraid to be a fool.” We cultivate a simple, direct relationship with our being—no philosophizing, no moralizing, no judgments. Whatever arises in our mind is workable.

So when Avalokiteshvara says, “Form is emptiness,” he’s referring to this simple, direct relationship with the immediacy of experience—direct contact with blood and sweat and flowers, with love as well as hate. First we wipe away our preconceptions and then we even have to let go of our belief that we should look at things without preconceptions. We keep pulling out our own rug. When we perceive form as empty, without any barriers or veils, we understand the perfection of things just as they are. One could become addicted to this experience. It could give us a sense of freedom from the dubiousness of our emotions and the illusion that we could dangle above the messiness of our lives.

But “emptiness also is form” turns the tables. Emptiness continually manifests as war and peace, as grief, as birth, old age, sickness, and death, as well as joy. We are challenged to stay in touch with the heart-throbbing quality of being alive. That’s why we train in the relative bodhichitta practices of the four limitless ones and tonglen. They help us to engage fully in the vividness of life with an open, unclouded mind. Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There’s no need to add anything extra.

Imagine a dialogue with the Buddha. He asks, “How do you perceive reality?” and we answer honestly and say, “I perceive it as separate from me, and solid.” He says, “No, look deeper.”

So we go away and meditate and sincerely contemplate this question. We return to the Buddha and say, “I know the answer now. The answer is that everything is not solid, everything is empty.” And he says, “No. Look deeper.” We say, “Well, that’s impossible. It’s either one way or the other: empty or not empty, right?” and he says, “No.” If this were our boss, perhaps we wouldn’t care, but this is the Buddha, so we think, “Maybe I have to hang in here a bit and go further with the irritation I’m feeling at not being given any satisfaction.”

So we meditate and contemplate this question; we discuss it with our friends. Next time we see the Buddha we say, “I think I can answer your question. Everything is both empty and not empty simultaneously.” And he says, “No.” Believe me, we’re feeling very groundless and that means rattled. It’s uncomfortable not to be able to get ground under our feet. But the process here is of unmasking: even though we’re irritated and anxious, we’re moving closer to seeing the true, unfixed nature of mind. Since “no” is all we can get out of the Buddha, we go home and spend the next year trying to answer this riddle. It’s like a Zen koan.

Eventually, we return and say, “Okay. There’s only one other possible answer. The nature of reality is that it neither exists nor doesn’t exist. It is neither form nor emptiness.” And we feel good! It’s a beautiful groundless answer. But the Buddha says, “No, that’s too limited an understanding.” Maybe at this point his “no” is such a shock that we experience the wide-open mind of prajnaparamita, the mind that is satisfied with no resting place at all.

After Avalokiteshvara told Shariputra that “form is emptiness; emptiness also is form,” he went even further, pointing out that there is nothing—not even the Buddha’s teachings—to hold on to: no three marks of existence, no suffering, no end of suffering, no imprisonment, no liberation. The story goes that many of the students were so dumbfounded by these teachings that they had heart attacks. A Tibetan teacher suggested that more likely they just got up and walked out of the talk. Like the Theosophists with Krishnamurti, they didn’t want to hear this. Just like us. We don’t like to have our basic assumptions challenged. It’s too threatening.