The seed contained in the fruit of a mango or similar trees [is possessed of] the indestructible property of sprouting.
—The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra, translated by Rosemarie Fuchs
Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE,
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey
TO CUT THROUGH problems, we need problems.
That may sound a bit strange, even radical. But in his day, the Buddha was a radical who proposed a treatment plan for suffering that differed in many ways from the options offered by some of his contemporaries.
I remember as a child hearing about a tradition among hermit meditators in Tibet—men and women who spent months and often years in isolated mountain caves where they could practice for long periods without distraction. Sounds nice, doesn't it? A simple life without disturbances and a perfect situation in which to develop peace of mind—except for one small detail.
It was too peaceful.
Living alone in a mountain cave doesn't present many opportunities to grapple with disturbing thoughts, emotions, or other forms of dukkha. So every once in a while, these hermit meditators would come down from the mountains, enter a town or village, and start saying or doing crazy things. The townspeople or village would get so angry that they would shout at them, hurl insults at them, or even physically beat them. But for the meditators the verbal emotional, and physical abuse they suffered became supports for meditation. They became opportunities to develop greater mental and emotional stability and to cut ever more deeply through layers of misperception about their own nature, the nature of others, and the nature of their experience.
As their understanding grew, their recognition of the basic situation of suffering and its causes deepened and they developed a more acute awareness of the confusion that rules the lives of so many people: the self-created suffering rooted in a belief in permanence, independence, and singularity. Their hearts broke for these people, opening a deep and personal experience of loving-kindness and compassion. They would sit for hours, using some of the practices described earlier, to send the benefits they'd gained to the people who'd helped them grow by taunting and beating them.
Most of us aren't hermit meditators, of course, and in this respect we're actually very lucky. We don't have to go looking for problems or make appointments to meet with them. We don't have to pay a cent for disturbing thoughts and emotions. Our lives are bounded by challenges of every conceivable variety.
How do we deal with them?
Typically we try either to deny or to eliminate them-treating them as enemies-or allow them to overwhelm us, treating them as "bosses.”
A third option - the middle way exemplified by the hermit meditators of old - is to use our experience as a means of opening to a deeper realization of our capacity for wisdom, kindness, and compassion.
In Buddhist terms, this approach is often referred to as “taking your life on the path.”
Your life, exactly as it is—right here, right now. The radical goal of the Buddha's treatment plan is not to solve or eliminate problems, but to use them as a basis or focus for recognizing our potential. Every thought, every emotion, and every physical sensation is an opportunity to turn our attention inward and become a little bit more familiar with the source.
Many people look at meditation as an exercise, like going to the gym. “I've gotten that over with! Now I can go on with the rest of my life.” But meditation isn't something separate from your life. It is your life.
In a sense, we're always meditating: focusing on emotional turmoil, disturbing thoughts, and drawing conclusions from our experiences about who and what we are and the nature of our environment. This sort of meditation often occurs spontaneously, without our conscious participation.
Taking our lives on the path raises the process of unconscious meditation to a conscious level. Many people, including myself, embrace this approach in hopes of finding immediate solutions to mental and emotional pain. Of course, it's possible to feel some sort of relief right away, but the experience usually doesn't last very long. It’s not uncommon for people to become disappointed when the sense of freedom dissolves and to think “Oh, this Buddhist stuff doesn't work.”
But if we continue, beginning by just taking a few moments throughout the day to look at our experience and then perhaps extending our formal practice sessions, we discover that the Buddha's treatment plan is much more than psychological aspirin. As we examine our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, we discover something precious.
HIDDEN GOLD
A precious treasure is contained in each being's mind.
—The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra, translated by Rosemarie Fuchs
There's an old, old story about an Indian man who, crossing a muddy field, accidentally dropped a nugget of gold he was carrying. The field became a convenient place for people in the area to dump their garbage, scraps of food, and so on, which dissolved into a muddy sort of waste. The gold lay there for centuries, covered by increasing mounds of mud and garbage. Finally, a god peered down and spoke to a man who was looking for gold, saying, “Look, there's a huge nugget buried deep under all that junk. Dig it up, make something useful out of it—a piece of jewelry or something—so this precious substance doesn't go to waste.”
The story, of course, is an analogy for the recognition of buddha nature, which is often obscured by the “mud” of ignorance, desire, aversion, and the various types of mental and emotional turmoil that spring from these three basic poisons.
The Buddha's original teachings and the commentaries written by later masters provide a lot of analogies to help people understand buddha nature, which in itself is beyond description. But the example of gold seems to be the easiest for people to understand. So when I teach on the subject, one of the first questions I ask is, “What is the quality of gold?”
The answers vary.
“Shiny.”
“Untarnishable.”
“Durable.”
“Precious.”
“Rare.”
“Expensive!”
“Perfect.”
All very reasonable responses.
Then I ask a second question: “Is there any difference between the nugget of gold buried in mud and garbage for centuries and the nugget that has been unearthed and cleansed of mud”?
The answer, invariably, is “No.”
Centuries of mud can't change the nature of gold any more than emotional or mental disturbances can alter our essential nature. But just as a thick coat of mud can make a nugget of pure gold look like an ordinary lump of rock, so our misperceptions and fixations can conceal our essential nature. We tend to see ourselves, in a sense, as mud-covered rocks.
Like gold hunters scraping away the coats of mud and filth to reveal even one patch of a nugget of pure gold, in order to catch a glimpse of the “golden nugget” of buddha nature, we have to start scraping away at the “mud” that obscures it.
For most of us it is a slow and gradual process. It takes time to adjust to new and possibly uncomfortable ideas about the nature of ourselves and the reality in which we function. It takes time, as well, to cultivate through practice a more attentive and less judgmental relationship to the myriad forms of self-created suffering that make up the greater part of our experience.
I grew up in a culture steeped in Buddhist philosophy and practice and was fortunate to benefit from the patient efforts of wise and experienced teachers who had received their own training in an unbroken lineage handed directly from teacher to student stretching on the way back to the Buddha himself. Yet even given such auspicious circumstances, it was hard to comprehend my essential nature as free, clear, capable, and so on. I believed what my father and other teachers said was true, but I just couldn't see it in myself—especially when anxiety and other powerful emotions gripped me so tightly I could hardly breathe.
So it comes as no surprise when people ask, “If I'm supposed to have all these great qualities, why do I feel so terrible? Why am I so angry? Why do I feel so anxious? Or hopeless? Or depressed? Why am I always arguing with my husband (or wife, or child, or friend)?”
BUDDHA NATURE BLOCKERS
What is reborn are our habits.
—His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Path to Tranquility, compiled and edited by Renuka Singh
There are a number of ways to answer this question.
To begin with, there's a lot of old, dry mud to cut through. Thrust into a realm in which everything changes—second by second, cell by cell, and atom by atom—we long for certainty, stability, and satisfaction. The three basic poisons of ignorance, attachment, and aversion could be described as a very basic set of responses to this longing. We engender a generalized point of view grounded in dualistic terms such as self and other and subject and object. We define these distinctions as good or bad and pleasant or unpleasant, and invest them with qualities of permanence, singularity and independence.
Of course, the habit of organizing and interpreting experience in relative terms doesn't develop overnight. We don't wake up one morning and decide, “Aha, I'm going to start defining my world dualistically''.
As discussed earlier, our physiological constitution—the relationship between our sense organs, the various structures in our brain, and the automatic responses of other physical systems-predisposes us toward organizing our experiences in terms of distinctions. Our cultural and familial backgrounds, as well as the events that occur in our individual lives, meanwhile, nurture and enhance this biological predisposition. Gradually, a kind of cyclical relationship evolves. As perception influences experience, experience influences behavior; behavior reinforces experience, and experience reinforces perception. Layer upon layer of mud accumulates.
The Abhidharma—a collection of texts that extends the Buddha's teaching in greater detail on the relationship between perception, experience, and behavior—lists eighty-four thousand different types of mental and emotional afflictions that emerge through various combinations and recombinations of the root habits of ignorance, attachment, and aversion. That's a lot of mud! We could spend our entire lives searching through eighty-four thousand combinations to figure out which of them fit our particular situation.
Some of these combinations form close bonds, however. I’ve found over the years that many of the challenges we face in life could be more easily understood through exploring how, on a very basic level, these specific combinations affect our views about ourselves, others, our relationships, and the various situation face on a daily basis. In particular, the Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra, (bảo tính luận) one of the most detailed teachings on buddha nature, offers a short, five-point list of habits of organizing experience that undercut our recognition of our essential nature and underlie much of the mental and emotional turmoil we suffer.
In modern psychological terms, these habits are often referred to as distortions or schemas, cognitive structures that lock us into a limited and limiting view of ourselves, others, and the world around us. I think of them as “Buddha Nature Blockers.”
These are habits of organizing and responding to experience that inhibit us from experiencing our lives with a deep awareness of freedom, clarity, wisdom, and wonder that transcends the conventional psychotherapeutic model of simply becoming okay, well-adjusted, or normal.
The Buddha's plan went far beyond learning to become “okay,” His aim was for us to become buddhas: to awaken our capacity to approach every experience—grief, shame, jealousy, frustration, illness, and even death—with the innocent perspective we experience when looking for the first time, for example, at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, or the views from the top of Taipei 101. Before fear, judgment, anxiety, or opinion intervenes, there's a moment of direct pristine awareness that transcends any distinction between experience and the experiencer.
The Sanskrit and Tibetan description of these combinations, or Buddha Nature Blockers, as described in the Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra, are very long. By way of introduction, I think it’s probably best to condense them in a way that may be more easily understood by contemporary audiences.
On a purely literal level, the first Buddha Nature Blocker is known as “faintheartedness” or “timidity.” On a deeper level, the term points to a deeply ingrained tendency to judge or to criticize ourselves, exaggerating what we may perceive as defects in thought, feeling, character, or behavior. In our own eyes, we deem ourselves incompetent, insufficient, or “bad.”
I remember an incident that occurred during my first teaching tour of North America at the age of twenty-three. My brother, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, had been scheduled to teach, but other obligations prevented him from traveling, so I was sent in his place. Two weeks into the tour, a woman was ushered into a room set aside for private interviews. After preliminary introductions were made, she sat down and, to put her at ease, I asked her a few general questions about how she was getting along in the public teachings, whether she understood what I was trying to say, and if she had any specific questions.
After this initial conversation, she sat silently for a moment. Her whole body became tense. She squeezed her eyes shut, took in a deep breath, exhaled, and opened her eyes.
Then, in a small voice, almost a whisper, she said, “I hate myself.”
Looking back on that confession, I realize how much courage it must have taken for her to say those words. In those early days of my North American teaching, I had very little knowledge of the English language and always needed a translator nearby. So the woman who came for a private interview was not only confessing her deepest discomfort to me but also to the translator seated in the room.
Yet even though the translator accurately interpreted her words, I was a bit confused. Among the eighty-four thousand mental and emotional conflicts discussed in the Abhidharma, there’s undoubtedly that corresponds to “self-hatred.” But the term itself was new to me so I found myself in the awkward position of asking her what she meant.
She became tense again and then started to cry.
“I can't do anything right. Ever since I can remember, people have told me that I'm clumsy and stupid. My mother scolded me for not setting the table right or cleaning the dishes right. My teachers told me I could never learn. I tried so hard in school and at home to do everything correctly. But the harder I tried, the more I hated myself for being so awkward and stupid. I've got an okay job, but I'm always afraid that someone will point out a mistake, and I get so anxious that I do make mistakes. I sing in my church choir, but when people compliment me on my voice, all I can think of is how I didn't hit the note right and that people are only saying nice things because they pity me.
“I feel so helpless, so hopeless. I want to be somebody else. I look at other people around me laughing, going out to lunch or dinner with friends, getting ahead with their lives, and I wonder why can't I be like them? What's wrong with me?”
As I listened, I began to think back to my early childhood: the thoughts, feelings, and often physical sensations of anxiety and panic, as well as the sense of failure that overcame me when I couldn't grasp the lessons my father and other early teachers had offered me. After a few days of looking back on my own experience in this way, I began to catch a glimpse of what self-hatred might feel like. I can't say that I managed to create precisely the same self-critical thoughts and emotions that haunted this woman. Dukkha is a universal condition, but the particular form in which it manifests itself varies from individual to individual. The process of examining this woman's distress challenged me to consider what for me seemed a new language of discontent: words, terms and experiences specific to the lives of people living in different cultures.
In order to assist people in understanding and applying the principles and practices that had been passed down to me from my teachers, I needed to absorb this new language. I had to translate the lessons I'd learned in ways that would be relevant to the issues faced by people living in this new world of personal and cultural expression I'd entered.
Self-hatred is, perhaps, an extreme example of the first Buddha Nature Blocker, the tendency to belittle ourselves. Over the years, I've heard many people express similar sentiments, though in different, sometimes less severe, terms. Some of them were familiar to me: guilt, shame, or anger toward oneself for not completing a goal or saying or doing things in “the heat of the moment.”
A number of people I've met with have spoken, too, about feelings of low self-esteem: a nagging doubt over the ability to achieve anything and the more or less constant habit of putting themselves down or seeing very little possibility of succeeding in whatever activity in which they're engaged.
I've also heard people speak about performance anxiety, a sense that the work they're doing is just not good enough. They drive themselves harder and harder, becoming perfectionists or “workaholics.” The same sort of drive can be seen in such personal behavior as tying ourselves in knots over what we should or shouldn't do in social situations.
Some people I've spoken with simply “freeze up” when confronted with situations in which people they know or care for are experiencing physical, emotional, or mental pain. They don't know what to do and are overcome by what one woman described as “an overwhelming sense of awfulness.”
Hopelessness, helplessness, despair, and other painful feelings are also closely tied to physical disease. For example, depression is a physiological disorder far different from feeling sad or depressed. From my discussions with experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, painful rounds of self-criticism reinforce the potency of the physical disease-which, in turn, enhances the destructive thoughts and feelings that accompany it. Addiction, whether to alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, or other self-destructive behaviors, is another disorder that, according to most of the doctors and psychologists with whom I've spoken, is also biologically rooted. Alcohol or drugs, for example, tend to provide an artificial sense of poise and assurance to people who lack confidence in themselves or their ability to connect with others.
A hurricane of mental, emotional, and physical responses erupts as well when confronted with other forms of natural suffering: the various forms of illness, accident, aging, and, ultimately, death.
Of the five Buddha Nature Blockers, self-judgment is perhaps the easiest to identify. Thoughts and feelings of inadequacy, guilt, shame, and so on, “live” close to the surface of awareness. It's somewhat more difficult for us to recognize our judgmental attitude toward others, which is the essence of the second Blocker.
Often translated as “contempt for inferior beings,” this second impediment represents the opposite extreme of what we might call the dimension of judgment: a critical view of others. A narrow interpretation of this point of view is that everyone else is less important, less competent, or less deserving than oneself. More broadly, it's a tendency to blame others for the challenges we experience: Someone else is always standing in our way, and that someone else is simply wrong, bad, stubborn, ignorant, or manipulative.
While self-judgment represents, in a sense, an inability to empathize with ourselves, the opposite end of the spectrum reflects an inability to see anything good in others or to listen to what they have to say.
Sometimes such judgments are obvious. For instance, when two people fall in love, there's an initial period of seeing their partner as completely perfect—the total fulfillment of their dreams. But after a few months, “imperfections” surface. Arguments arise. Disappointment and dissatisfaction grow. Each partner is overtaken by a strong tendency to define the other as “the bad one,” the source of irritation and pain. This tendency can become especially painful if a couple is married or have lived together for many years, sharing a home and various financial arrangements.
The same sorts of judgments can arise in professional situations as well. Recently, a student voiced a complaint that someone he was working with was always putting him down, saying nasty things about him, and undermining the position he held in the organization within which they both worked. He was angry and had begun to think of this fellow worker as an enemy, someone out to destroy him. He blamed the other fellow for whatever problems he was having at work, thinking of him as “cruel,” “spiteful,” and “deliberately destructive.”
Sometimes, though, our judgments of others can be expressed in subtler ways. For example, one of my students recently told a story about a woman he knew who was grieving over the death of a close family member. She'd received a condolence call from a friend whose sibling had died recently, so in talking with him she began speaking quite openly about her own grief. During the conversation she began to hear the click of the keys in the background and realized that he was checking and responding to e-mail. She felt, as she described it, “kicked in the stomach.” Her friend wasn't really listening. His own interests overrode his capacity to be fully present to the woman's grief, and he wasn't even aware of the devastating effect this disconnection had on his friend or even on himself: not only had he deprived his friend of the compassion she needed at the time, but he had isolated himself as well.
Just as the first and second Buddha Nature Blockers represent extremes of judgment, the third and fourth represent opposing views about the nature of experience, perspectives that could be said to hold the first two distortions in place.
The third could be translated in a variety of ways: “seeing the untrue as true,” “holding what is inauthentic as authentic,” or, more loosely, “seeing the unreal as real.” Basically, all these terms signify an adherence to the belief that the qualities we see in ourselves, others, or conditions are truly, permanently, or inherently existing. In Buddhist terms, this tendency would be known as eternalism—a tendency to hold certain aspects of experience as absolute and enduring rather than as a combination of temporary combinations of causes and conditions. Perhaps a simpler means of describing this perspective is “being stuck.” We are who we are, others are the way they are, situations are as they are, and that's that.
The fourth, “seeing the true as untrue,” represents the reverse perspective: a denial, or perhaps more strongly, a rejection of buddha nature altogether. The idea of fundamentally pure, clear, free nature sounds very nice, but deep in your heart you believe it's pretty much a fantasy - an idea dreamed up by mystics.
Whereas you might describe the third as seeing the mud, so to speak, as a permanent, impenetrable coating, the fourth might be explain as seeing that there's only mud. This perspective is often understood as nihilism: an elementary despair that cannot admit, within oneself or others, the possibility of freedom, wisdom, capabilities, or potential. In more colloquial terms, you might call this a basic “blind spot.”
The fifth and final Buddha Nature Blocker, which might be considered the foundation of the others, is traditionally interpreted as self-obsession. In contemporary terms, we can understand it as the “myth of me”—a desperate longing for stability in terms of “me” and “mine.” My situation, my opinion—whether it involves self-judgment, judgment of others, being stuck, or being blind—at least reflects a still point in an ever-turning realm of experience. We cling to our opinions, our storylines, our personal mythologies, with the same desperation with which we hold to the sides of a roller coaster cart.
WORKING RELATIONSHIPS
The shadow of a bird soaring in the sky may be temporarily invisible, but it is still there and will always appear when the bird comes to earth.
—The Treasury of Precious Qualities,
translated by the Padmakara Translation Group
None of the situations we experience is caused solely by one or another of these Buddha Nature Blockers. They work together, like a group of dictators that form an alliance to assert control - not over geographical boundaries but mental and emotional ones. One may play a more dominant role than another, yet each contributes in different ways to the mode in which we think, feel, and act.
For example, a few years ago during one of my teaching tours, I met a married couple who both had well-paying jobs, a comfortable home, two cars, and a couple of TV sets and stereo systems. Over the years, they'd achieved a standard of living that stood in sharp contrast to the conditions I see in other parts of the world.
But one weekend while taking a drive through the countryside they passed through a neighborhood dominated by large houses and acres of rolling lawns and gardens. And they began to wonder, “Why shouldn't we move to a bigger house? Why shouldn't we live in a richer neighborhood? Wouldn't we be happier?”
The idea seemed quite logical at the time, so they bought a big house in a wealthy neighborhood.
Soon after they moved in, they began to see that their neighbors had very expensive cars. Every time their neighbors came out of their houses they were wearing new designer clothes. Their neighbors' friends also dressed in expensive clothes and drove expensive cars. So the couple bought new, expensive cars for themselves and new, expensive clothes. No matter how much they spent, though, they always felt like they were competing with their neighbors.
The pressure to maintain a high style of living eventually began to cause problems in the couple's relationship. They had to work longer hours to cover their expenses. They argued over money: how it should be earned, invested, and spent. Eventually the stress became so great that they both lost their jobs and ended up angry and frustrated with each other, bitterly fighting over every little thing.
“What should we do?” they begged during a private interview. I gave them a little bit of homework.
“What is the source of your difficulty?” I asked. “Is it your house? Your cars? Your clothes? Your neighbors? Take a couple of days to look at your situation and then come back and let me know what you discover.”
They had already received some instruction in simply looking at thoughts and emotions without judgment, and I urged them to view their situation in this light: not blaming themselves or others, but simply observing the thoughts and emotions passing through their awareness.
When they came back, it turned out that the problem wasn't the cars, the house, the clothes, or the neighbors.
“I looked at those houses, those people and their cars, and I felt I wanted more than what I had,” the husband said.
“I envied them,” his wife added. “But they never invited us to their parties. They never even welcomed us to the neighborhood. I started to think, 'They're not very nice people. Snooty people. Well, I'll show them!'“
“And so we bought more things,” the husband went on, “bigger cars, expensive clothes.” He shrugged. “But it didn't seem to make any impression.”
“All that stuff,” the wife sighed. “We were happy with it for a while, but . . .”
“And when you started fighting with each other?” I asked.
“Oh, it went back and forth,” the wife sighed. “I was right about this.'' "I was right about that.” You were wrong about this.'' "You were wrong about that." Oh, it just went on for months.”
As they laid out each observation, their shoulders relaxed and the tension in their faces, legs, and arms released. They were already beginning to look at their present experience as an accumulation of thoughts and feelings that had built up over years.
But what amazed me was the interplay between the Buddha Nature Blockers. These were the ways in which judgments about themselves and others - deep-seated beliefs of permanence, singularity, independence; a blindness to their inner potential and attachment to a particular perspective based on how I see things as correct and appropriate - acted upon one another.
“So what are you going to do now?” I asked.
They glanced at each other.
“I don't think we're in a position right now to make any big decisions,” the wife replied. “I think we have to take some time to look at the way we look.”
“Looking at the way we look” is the essence of taking life on the path. Certainly, we're all going to experience changes and challenges in our lives. But if we look at the way we look at them, something quite wonderful begins to happen. The layers of mud that obscure our potential become fertile soil, in which the seeds of wisdom, loving-kindness, and compassion begin to stir, take root, and sprout. The Buddha Nature Blockers become buddha nature “breakthroughs.”
How?
Through applying the understanding of our basic situation together with the practices of attention, insight, and empathy.
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