• Friday, March 06, 2015 6:24 PM | Anonymous

    Podcast: Play in new window

    We’ve been enjoying studying the great 9th century sage Shantideva’s long poem on how to be a bodhisattva during this practice period. Shantideva’s verses talk about nurturing the deep wish for the happiness and joy of all beings. That we not just kind of hope that might happen sometime but that we root our lives in that wish – called bodhicitta – the thought of awakening. A famous passage is often chanted and we’ve been chanting it at the openings of our study meetings:

    Class Opening Verse (from chapter 3)
    May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
    A guide for those who journey on the road;
    For those who wish to go across the water,
    May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

    May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
    And a lamp for those who long for light;
    For those who need a resting place, a bed;
    For all who need a servant, may I be a slave.

    May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
    A word of power, and the supreme remedy.
    May I be the trees of miracles,
    And for every being, the abundant cow.

    Like the great earth and the other elements,
    Enduring as the sky itself endures,
    For the boundless multitude of living beings,
    May I be the ground and vessel of their life.

    Thus, for every single thing that lives,
    In number like the boundless reaches of the sky,
    May I be their sustenance and nourishment
    Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering

    A beautiful sentiment no? May we really serve others. But how to do this skillfully? We had the most lively discussions when we were examining how to be a guide to beings when things get tough. The chapter on patience opens with a strong statement about how easy it is to screw this up:

    Good works gathered in a thousand ages,
    Such as deeds of generosity
    Or offerings to the Blissful Ones –
    A single flash of anger shatters them.

    This verse seems to make this an impossible task. Who doesn’t feel a flash of anger from time to time. And if it’s not anger exactly it’s something else. One self-awareness tool is to consider one’s tendencies in light of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance. Those three words are a little extreme but let’s think about what they mean.

    Greed stands for desire, for a persistent feeling of lack, a powerful urge to acquire more of something, it doesn’t have to be material stuff either. Desiring things to be other than how they are. Are you a desire person?

    Ignorance stands for confusion, bafflement, not getting it. Just tooling along doing your thing and suddenly someone’s upset with you, huh? You missed it. You feel into a blind spot. I usually put myself in this category although it comes in a close second to greed and desire in me.

    And hatred stands for anger. Fiery emotions. Grief can show up here. Despair. Regret. People in this category can be powerfully passionate and energetic and also overrun by emotion.

    There are positive aspects to all of these of course too. Each of the defilements motivates us to practice and brings us useful qualities which we can learn to use skillfully. Greed and desire people are focused on results and get stuff done. Ignorance and confusion people are stable and often quite kind and pleasant to be around. Hatred and anger people are also powerful, passionate and inspiring.

    And yet Shantideva says, one misstep and so much damage is done. The mind is powerful and the results of our words and deeds are huge. It’s a big responsibility being a person. And yet we can only do our best.

    Does this mean never be angry? Never be greedy? Never be confused? I’m not sure that’s possible. And I don’t think that’s what Shantideva means. He means to take the inner life seriously. To recognize it’s power.

    I was speaking to someone recently who had a great wave of anger pass over him. He lashed out at a few friends while in the throes of anger. He could feel that it was rooted in the pain of the past and only triggered but a few things of the present. He was asking me how to practice with it. I inquired into what happened and it turns out he sat down in zazen and sat with it. He took a break while driving home out of concern that he was so distraught he might crash. He took care of himself at home as best he could and a little later when it had lifted he apologized to the people he’d lashed out at. And then asking me how to practice with it. It was really nice to be able to point out that he already knows how to practice with it, that exactly what he did was a wise, stable and patient response to anger. When we’re in it’s grip, that how it is, but we can cultivate the ability to be mindful of being caught and we can respond wisely. And each wave of anger, or desire, or confusion that washes over us which we meet with patience and skill is a little more of the karma of the past used up. A little less is there to take over next time. Being with our strong emotions and not feeding them is a huge thing. Transformational. Powerful. And no it’s not fun when we’re caught but caught with awareness and wise response is the practice.

    And Shantideva says that we can really appreciate the people that set us off. There’s helping us learn. And when we meet pain and difficult with the vast vow of bodhicitta we realize that it’s not that we just don’t want anger and want happiness, that’s selling outselves too cheap. When there’s difficulty we can feel our way into the radical turning that’s ultimately possible with practice.

    My favorite pair of verses about this:

    Praise and compliments disturb me.
    They soften my revulsion with samsara.
    I being to covet others’ qualities, and
    Every excellence is thereby spoiled.

    Those who stay close by me, then,
    To ruin my good name and cut me down to size –
    Are they not the guardians who protect me
    From perdition in the realms of sorrow?

    In other words getting caught in praise and blame means we’ve put ourself in a pretty small box. Samara is Buddhist lingo for thinking that if we just got what we want and got rid of what we dislike everything will be peachy. We know better of course, but there’s a part of us that’s caught in a very simplistic and unworkable model. There’s a part of us that thinks, or maybe doesn’t think, that reacts to the world on that basis. When something we don’t like happens we get defensive and angry. Sangha life is a great place to study this. When something we’re excited about happens we get too excited, we keep repeating to ourselves how great this is while under the surface the fear that it’ll soon be gone, or we don’t deserve it and so on bubbles up.

    So we can let ourself be a little disturbed by compliments and appreciate of insults. When we have enough support and are in contact with our vow to awaken with all beings we aren’t so caught.

    One of the Lojong mind training slogans is: whichever of the two arises be patient. The two are bad things and good things. When bad things arise, be patient – how can I work with this, what do I learn, can I learn that the category of good and bad, this living in samsara, is ultimately not going to work out? And when good things arise be patient – be patient with getting too excited, be patient with the fear and instability than can co-arise with the good things, and again be motivated. Can I feel the peace and happiness that’s not so contingent on good things and bad things.

    This talk by Pema Chodron was recently re-published, let’s see what she has to say about that practice of patience and I’ll add a few comments.

    The Answer to Anger & Aggression is Patience
    by Pema Chödrön | March 1, 2005

    We can suppress anger and aggression or act it out, either way making things worse for ourselves and others. Or we can practice patience: wait, experience the anger and investigate its nature. Pema Chödrön takes us step by step through this powerful practice.
    The Buddhist teachings tell us that patience is the antidote to anger and aggression. When we feel aggression in all its many forms—resentment, bitterness, being very critical, complaining and so forth—we can apply the different practices we’ve been given and all the good advice we’ve heard and given to other people. But those often don’t seem to help us. That’s why this teaching about patience caught my interest a few years ago, because it’s so hard to know what to do when one feels anger and aggression.

    I thought, if patience is the antidote to aggression, maybe I’ll just try that. In the process I learned a lot about what patience is and about what it isn’t. I would like to share with you what I’ve learned, to encourage you to find out for yourself how patience works with aggression.

    To begin with, I learned about patience and the cessation of suffering. It’s said that patience is a way to de-escalate aggression. I’m thinking here of aggression as synonymous with pain. When we’re feeling aggressive—and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling—there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved.

    So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. Something hurts our feelings, and initially there is some softness there—if you’re fast, you can catch it—but usually you don’t even realize there is any softness. You find yourself in the middle of a hot, noisy, pulsating, wanting-to-just-get-even-with-someone state of mind: it has a very hard quality to it. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the pain of aggression, you create more aggression and pain.

    At that point, patience means getting smart: you stop and wait. You also have to shut up, because if you say anything it’s going to come out aggressive, even if you say, “I love you.”

    Once, when I was very angry at a colleague of mine, I called him on the telephone. I can’t even remember now what I was angry about, but at the time I couldn’t sleep because I was so furious. I tried meditating with my anger and working with it and doing practices with it, but nothing helped, so I just got up in the middle of the night and called him. When he answered the phone, all I said was, “Hi, Yeshe.” But he immediately asked, “Did I do something wrong?” I thought I would very sweetly cover over what I was really feeling and say something pleasant about all the bad things he had done, whatever they were. But just by the tone of my greeting to him, he knew. That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s vibrating.

    Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.

    Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.

    This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.

    Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. It’s like sitting on a wild horse, or on a wild tiger that could eat you up. There’s a limerick to that effect: “There was a young lady of Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They came back from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger.” Sitting with your discomfort feels like riding on that tiger, because it’s so frightening.

    When we examine this process we learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We think we can resolve everything! When we human beings feel powerful energy, we tend to be extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved in some kind of secure and comforting way, either on the side of yes or the side of no. Or the side of right or the side of wrong. Or the side of anything at all that we can hold on to.

    But the practice we’re doing gives us nothing to hold on to. Actually, the teachings themselves give us nothing to hold on to. In working with patience and fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we’re human beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time until the end of time is naturally going to want some kind of resolution to this edgy, moody energy. And there isn’t any. The only resolution is temporary and just causes more suffering. We discover that as a matter of fact joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of the energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid.

    So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy. We don’t have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even for a moment, because we’re just completely typical human beings; the only thing that’s unique about us is that we’re brave enough to go into these things more deeply and explore beneath our surface reaction of trying to get solid ground under our feet.

    Patience is an enormously wonderful and supportive and even magical practice. It’s a way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by going either to the right or the left, calling things right or calling things wrong. It’s the way to develop courage, the way to find out what life is really about.

    Patience is also not ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You wonder, Who am I? Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns? Who am I at the level beyond birth and death? If you wish to look into the nature of your own being, you need to be inquisitive. The path is a journey of investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what’s going on. The teachings give us a lot of suggestions about what we can look for, and the practices give us a lot of suggestions on how to look. Patience is one extremely helpful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand, prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity. Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation into a hard, solid, fixed pattern in which somebody wins and somebody loses.
    When you begin to investigate, you notice, for one thing, that whenever there is pain of any kind—the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain—if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we’re holding on to.

    I say that with such confidence, but you have to find out for yourself whether this is really true. You can read about it: the first thing the Buddha ever taught was the truth that suffering comes from attachment. That’s in the books. But when you discover it yourself, it goes a little deeper right away.

    As soon as you discover that behind your pain is something you’re holding on to, you are at a place that you will frequently experience on the spiritual path. After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you’re there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften.

    That choice is presented to you again and again and again. For instance, you’re feeling pain, you look deeply into it, and you notice that there’s something very hard you’re holding on to. And then you have a choice: you can let go of it, which basically means you connect with the softness behind all that hardness. Perhaps each one of us has made the discovery that behind all the hardness of resistance, stress, aggression and jealousy, there is enormous softness that we’re trying to cover over. Aggression usually begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft, but before we even notice what we’re doing, we harden. So we can either let go and connect with that softness or we can continue to hold on, which means that the suffering will continue.

    It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You’re going to say to yourself, “I don’t want to see this.” You’ll be afraid, because even if you’re starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you’re going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it’s something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.

    On the other hand, sometimes it’s easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking to see if there’s something you’re holding on to, often it’s going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, “It’s too big; you can’t let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go.”

    That was extremely good advice. You don’t have to do the big one, because usually you can’t. It’s too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

    You can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to let go, because there’s a lot at stake. What’s at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity. You’re beginning to move into the territory of egolessness, the insubstantial nature of oneself—and of everything, for that matter. Theoretical, philosophical, distant-sounding teachings can get pretty real when you’re beginning to have an inkling of what they’re actually talking about.

    It takes a lot of patience not to beat up on yourself for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to the fact that you can’t let go, somehow that helps you to do it. Patience with the fact that you can’t let go helps you to get to the point of letting go gradually—at a very sane and loving speed, at the speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It’s a big moment even to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is what you need at that point to just wait and soften, to sit with the restlessness and edginess and discomfort of the energy.

    I’ve come to find that patience has a lot of humor and playfulness in it. It’s a misunderstanding to think of it as endurance, as in, “Just grin and bear it.” Endurance involves some kind of repression or trying to live up to somebody else’s standards of perfection. Instead, you find you have to be pretty patient with what you see as your own imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness, because the speed of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You are developing patience and loving-kindness for your own imperfections, for your own limitations, for not living up to your own high ideals. There’s a slogan someone once came up with that I like: “Lower your standards and relax as it is.” That’s patience.

    One of the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha’s slogans says, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” It means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and fearlessness, and patience and curiosity. We are actually jumping all the time: whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re really happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, in terms of not just filling up the space, going a million miles an hour—impulse buying, impulse speaking, impulse acting.

    I’d like to stress that one of the things you most have to be patient with is, “Oops, I did it again!” There’s a slogan that says, “One at the beginning and one at the end.” That means that when you wake up in the morning you make your resolve, and at the end of the day you review, with a caring and gentle attitude, how you have done. Our normal resolve is to say something like, “I am going to be patient today,” or some other such set-up (as someone put it, we plan our next failure). Instead of setting yourself up, you can say, “Today, I’m going to try to the best of my ability to be patient.” And then in the evening you can look back over the whole day with loving-kindness and not beat yourself up. You’re patient with the fact that when you review your day, or even the last forty minutes, you discover, “I’ve talked and filled up all the space, just like I’ve done all my life, as long as I can remember. I was aggressive with the same style of aggression that I’ve used as long as I can remember. I got carried away with irritation exactly the same way that I have for the last…” If you’re twenty years old, it’s been twenty years that you’ve been doing it that way; if you’re seventy-five years old, it’s seventy-five years that you’ve been doing it that way. You see this and you say, “Give me a break!”

    The path of developing loving-kindness and compassion is to be patient with the fact that you’re human and that you make these mistakes. That’s more important than getting it right. It seems to work only if you’re aspiring to give yourself a break, to lighten up, as you practice developing patience and other qualities such as generosity, discipline and insight. As with the rest of the teachings, you can’t win and you can’t lose. You don’t get to just say, “Well, since I am never able to do it, I’m not going to try.” You are never able to do it and still you try. And, interestingly enough, that adds up to something; it adds up to loving-kindness for yourself and for others. You look out your eyes and you see yourself wherever you go. You see all these people who are losing it, just like you do. Then, you see all these people who catch themselves and give you the gift of fearlessness. You say, “Oh wow, what a brave one—he or she caught themselves.” You begin to appreciate even the slightest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know it’s not easy, and that inspires you tremendously. That’s how we can really help each other.

    From <http://www.lionsroar.com/the-answer-to-anger-aggression-is-patience/>

    [a few comments]

    Let’s close with a poem:
    Naomi Shihab Nye – Shoulders
    Wednesday, October 1, 2014
    9:00 AM
    A man crosses the street in rain,
    stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
    because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
    No car must splash him.
    No car drive too near to his shadow.
    This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
    but he’s not marked.
    Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
    HANDLE WITH CARE.
    His ear fills up with breathing.
    He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
    deep inside him.
    We’re not going to be able
    to live in this world
    if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
    with one another.
    The road will only be wide.
    The rain will never stop falling.

  • Saturday, February 21, 2015 12:40 PM | Anonymous

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Edie leads us in an exploration of patience and how that quality is emphasized by Shantideva.

  • Saturday, February 07, 2015 12:48 PM | Anonymous

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chris leads us in an exploration of Shantideva.

  • Friday, February 06, 2015 1:03 PM | Anonymous

    Revised with new recordings on Feb. 18th, 2015

    Chapter 1 - The Benefits of Bodhichitta

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 2 - Offering and Purification

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 3 - Embracing Bodhichitta

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 4 - Carefulness

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 5 - Attentiveness

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 6 - Patience

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 7 - Endeavor

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 8 - Meditative Concentration

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 9 - Wisdom

    Podcast: Play in new window

    Chapter 10 - Dedication

    Podcast: Play in new window

  • Wednesday, February 04, 2015 6:31 PM | Nomon Tim Burnett (Administrator)

    Podcast: Play in new window

    The third study group meeting facilitated by Chris Burkhart – we covered chapter 4.

  • Wednesday, February 04, 2015 1:26 PM | Anonymous

    The third study group meeting facilitated by Chris Burkhart – we covered chapter 4.

    Podcast: Play in new window

  • Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:25 PM | Nomon Tim Burnett (Administrator)

    The second study group for the Way of the Bodhisattva was facilitated by Bob Penny. We covered chapter 3.

  • Tuesday, January 27, 2015 8:50 PM | Anonymous

    Podcast: Play in new window

    This talk by translator and author Stephen Batchelor (who was part of one of the first efforts to translate Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara into English) is highly recommended. Great overview of who Shantideva was and how the text is constructed.

  • Saturday, January 24, 2015 6:38 PM | Nomon Tim Burnett (Administrator)

    Unfortunately the beginning wasn’t recorded so in case you can make sense of them I’ll include my notes below.

    Compassion and Fears of Compassion

    Last week we talked a little about pathways of training, how do we open our hearts at Bodhisattvas – how do we practice compassion and how can we make the compassion more possible. Let’s touch briefly on a few pathways and then let’s think a little about fears of compassion.

    • HH: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
    • Compassion 6 ways:
      • The first way of cultivating, or allowing compassion, is a naturally arising when the mind is settled – this is what’s emphasized in Zen, once the craziness of our mind settles out what arises is compassion, there are various techniques for inquiring into the craziness that’s swirling around – all of our conditioning – we do get interested in the mind and the process of mind, but not it’s better not to get too interested. Just enough awareness and understanding to dance with it all and let it go. And in that settledness is a grounded acceptance that supports compassion. A famous example of this is a priest named Hakuin who lived in a fishing village in old Japan (tell the story). So the first of six ways to practice compassion is just settle, just let go, just be present, just respond. The practice of zazen is all about this. And the extension of zazen into daily life from this settled place is a one-pointedness. The classic Zen phrases like “when walking just walk” are an expression of this. And we can hold that space in more complex situations too, I’ve really been trying to apply that sensibility more to using the computer. When doing email, just do email. Set a period of time to focus on it, attend to each message mindfully and move on. This first way is a kind of getting out of our own way as wise and compassionate beings.
      • The second way is we study cause and effect. We often have a narrow understanding of what leads to what which can cause us to misjudge what’s really helpful. HH has a nice comment on this: “The view of interdependence makes for a great openness of mind. In general, instead of realizing that what we experience arises from a complicated network of causes, we tend to attribute happiness or sadness, for example, to single, individual sources. But if this were so, as soon as we came into contact with what we consider to be good, we would be automatically happy, and conversely, in the case of bad things, invariably sad. The causes of joy and sorrow would be easy to identify and target. It would all be very simple, and there would be good reason for our anger and attachment. When on the other hand, we consider that everything we experience results from a complex interplay of causes and conditions, we find that there is no single thing to desire or resent, and it is more difficult for the afflictions of attachment or anger to arise. In this way, the view of interdependence makes our minds more relaxed and open. By training our minds and getting used to this view, we change our way of seeing things, and as a result we gradually change our behavior and do less harm to others.” And we become more skillful in helping and supporting ourselves and others in ways that really matter, that really help, that really lead to the way of living we so deeply desire.Here’s a poem by Jane Hirshfield

    I Imagine Myself in Time by Jane Hirshfield

    I imagine myself in time looking back on myself —

    this self, this morning,

    drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year

    and once again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air.

    Perplexed by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal,

    surprised that it was not as he’d expected, what he had asked.

    And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,

    what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,

    I whose choices made her what she will be?

     

    • The third way to bring forth compassion is to put energy into our intention, and Buddhism focuses strongly on the power of intention, or vow, we arise the deep deep wish for all being to be happy and free from suffering. And Buddhism frees up intention from our doubts about it by unzipping it from action, by encouraging us to look deeply at intention before action arises. And even if our actions aren’t as we hope they would be we can turn back to our intention and strengthen and clarity there.
    • This probably should have been the first think I mentioned. Practice vow. You might take on the practice of reciting the Bodhisattva Vows every morning during practice period.In the life of the Bodhisattva the hope or wish or intention to be compassionate and kind is seen as a pivotal  thought – there’s a wonderful term for this thought: “bodhichitta” – the mind of awakening – in the chant we did at the beginning this morning we vowed to awaken “true mind” which is the Zen way of expressing this. Bodhicitta arises both spontaneously from our practice, and the possibility of it’s arising is supported by the first two practices of settling to make room for bodhichitta and understanding karma so that we see it’s a natural and logical thing. Bodhicitta is also cultivated and encouraged. We invite it forth.
    • The forth way of developing compassion is to work actively with mind states that block compassion. This is called “apply the antidote” this is emphasized a lot in the Tibetan tradition. If you’re angry you can’t be compassionate. If you’re withdrawn and depressed it’s hard to be compassionate. These kleshas or afflictive emotions are to be really worked with. They often use military language actually: we see these afflictive emotions as enemies and do battle with them. Each one that arises we respond by fighting back with what they call the antidotes, so they mix military and medical language. When stinginess arises you practice gratitude. When anger arises you practice loving others and seeing yourself in others.  There is a relative, conventional, realm to this work with emotion that we’re quite familiar with. It can feel like such a tempest in the tea pot of the mind when we are in the middle of this relative realm. In the relative realm we are buffeted by desire, by impatience, by wanting things to be a different way than they are. And in the Tibetan system we notice each of these arising and apply the antidote. One antidote to desire, rooted in early Buddhism, is to contemplate how whatever it is we desire won’t really satisfy us in the lasting way we crave – they say to examine it’s essential ugliness, like if you desire someone’s beautiful body you contemplate how it’s really full of phlegm and guts and feces and so on, which isn’t language I find so helpful. But we can certainly all relate to how temporary the satisfaction from whatever it is we’re crazing really is. And how surface level our understanding of objects in the world and in our own mind are. Once we get them close they turn out to be different from what we thought! Another antidote to desire for something for ourself is to practice generosity – go get whatever that is and give it to someone else! The antidote to impatience is to practice patience and so on. So we’re trying to actively dance with our afflictive emotions so we can re-emerge into the field of beneficial conduct for all beings.
    • It’s worth acknowledging that this is a little different from modern positive psychology and the the mindfulness meditation movement which encourage us to accept and befriend our negative emotions. American Vipassana teacher Tara Broch says the Dharma is “radical acceptance.” Here is some commentary from HH that seems to completely contradict that idea: [p.37]. So which is better? To accept and befriend or to neutralize and remove? Well I think both approaches are important and we can learn to discern when to be firm in this Tibetan Bodhisattva Warrior way and when to accept and relax. I think part of what the enemies language reminds us is not to be complacent, to be active in our curiosity about how to respond to our mind states, and most importantly not to identify with our negative emotions. When we tell ourselves I’m an anxious person that’s just how it is that’s a kind of surrender that limits the scope of our life. On the other hand if we refuse to acknowledge the arising of anxiety because we are a fierce warrior of awakening and anxiety is not permitted in consciousness we need to relax and practice honesty and acceptance as the place to start from. So we can see this language of getting rid of the enemy of afflictive emotions as a deep  encouragement to be vigorous and active in our approach when that’s helpful. And, and this is a very important and, we can also look a the whole drama of emotional life from an other angle.There’s also an ultimate realm to this working with afflictive emotions. The difficult emotions are hard on us because we think they’re real. When anger is here we think “she made me angry” or “I am angry” or “this is my anger” which is true enough in the relative realm, but we’re also doing ourselves a real disservice if we stop there. Is the anger real? Is it solid? Is it making me feel in some way or act in some way? Really? What if it’s more like an illusion, more like a shape made out of smoke, not so solid, what if it’s not real at all? And here we practice the ultimate or absolute bodhichitta: [HH p. 38]Another Tibetan system of practice that we’re studied before called the Lojong mind training slogans has a number of suggestions for how to work with this ultimate level, the true antidote. My favorite is the slogan – “regard all dharmas as dreams” – dharmas here means everything that we experience. Can we hold it all so much more softly and relate to it as we would a dream. We participate and are a part of our dreams, they have a reality to them certainly, but they are just dreams, no?

      The Genjo Koan text by Dogen is also all about the relative and the absolute levels. Did you notice that? From the opening lines [read from chant book] If we can learn to dance a bit better between these two aspects of reality we will be so much happier, so much less will grab us and pull is into suffering.

      So this idea of relative and absolute is the deep wisdom thought of Buddhism. Probably the most important teaching that Buddhism contributes to the conversation about being a human being.

    • The fifth way of cultivating compassion I want to mention is encouraging its arising through compassion meditation, using phrases and visualization and encouraging the nascent compassion to manifest and be strengthened. Most of us our familiar with loving-kindness meditation which is popular in the Vipassana world emerging from the South Asian traditions. We can add to that universal wish that others be happy a deeply felt acknowledgment that all being suffer. That we share in common a universal common bond as beings – we do suffer and we do want to be happy. This is such a profound thought and it sounds simple and is easy to underestimate. We can systematically bring up that thought in various ways in meditation. Usually you start with yourself so if you like let’s dip into this practice for a moment and if it strikes you you can continue through the day with this. It’s also great to just rest in simple awareness of body and breath. You start with yourself “May I be free from suffering and the roots of suffering.” [loved one, friend, neutral person, difficult person, all 5, all beings].

     

    • And the sixth and last way to cultivate compassion is to get out there and do something. Actually help someone with your words and deeds. But that help won’t be compassion unless we have a wise attitude. The wisdom piece is essential, you can help others in ways that don’t cultivate compassion. So we have to be a little careful not to wait until we’re all wise and so on but in the Buddhist tradition the inner work is seen as essential training that brings wisdom forward.

    It’s important to acknowledge the deep parts of us that don’t want compassion. That don’t want connection. That are afraid of exposure. That worry about losing control or something.  A really interesting psychologist in the UK named Paul Gilbert has done a bunch of work with people who have pretty several psychological illnesses – scitsophreniza and the like – and he’s found that working directly with compassion and connection to others is a powerful treatment. In other words he’s training them to be bodhisattvas in some way. And what’s interesting is that he’s done research into what blocks people from accepting their compassionate nature; from accepting compassion for themselves, compassion from others, and their ability to be compassionate and connected.

    One way to think about compassion is that it can operate in three directions.

     Compassion from Others – think about how open you are to the help and support of others? Is there resistance to receiving that help or love? Do you deserve it? Do you trust them to give you the right kind of help? Do you not want help from others?

     Compassion for Others – there’s only so much energy to go around isn’t there? I mean we’d give more if we could, right? Well maybe not to everybody. Do they deserve our help? Well, maybe they do but how can we really know what would really help? Can we know how to help?

    Sometimes I don’t  story from How Can I Help?

     Compassion for Self – boy, tough one. Do we take care of ourselves in a way that’s truly nourishing? Why not?

    Paul Gilbert created a list of questions that he uses to measure fear of compassion and I have a selected list here, let’s read this over together and see what strikes us and then have a conversation with a partner. The partner conversation will be pretty structured but we’ll get to that in a minute.

    If time after getting back together Tibetan Medicine story from How Can I help?