Into the Heart of Life (15 page)

There are various levels through which we can approach the subject of patience, but first we must understand that we can change—we can change our attitude. For example, instead of seeing someone we don’t like as a problem, we could try to see that they are actually a great opportunity for us to learn. We need to have difficult circumstances and difficult people in our lives in order to cultivate patience, and we can’t cultivate this quality if we don’t have anyone or anything challenging us. If we continually meet people who are very kind and loving, friendly and helpful, that is absolutely wonderful, but we can get kind of flabby spiritually.

Patience can be a problem for me because usually people are very nice to me. One can get lulled into a false sense of one’s own niceness because it is very easy to be pleasant to people who are kind. But then, if I walk into an Indian government office, and the officials are obnoxious, then we can see it. Right, there it is. Anger has not gone away. Then we can decide either to be rude in return, or we can think, “Wow, thank you.” This is the opportunity—right now—to transform the situation and not answer back in the obvious way.

We can really value the fact that we can meet people who are being difficult and obstreperous as spiritual friends—they are our spiritual helpers on the path because without them, we could never learn to develop patience and tolerance and loving-kindness. It is easy to be loving toward someone who is lovable. The challenge is to be loving to someone who is absolutely horrible.

In Buddhist cosmology there are many levels of beings. But the human realm is considered ideal because we supposedly have intelligence and we also have choice. We have the balance between pain and pleasure: enough pain to keep us awake and enough pleasure so that we don’t totally despair. We have to appreciate that and not always look for everything to be just lovely. And so when things do go wrong, when we do meet people who are difficult, instead of falling into despair or trying to run away or drug ourselves into not acknowledging it, we make use of that situation. We make use of it through our intelligence.

Patience isn’t something passive—it is very active and very intelligent. It is important, in all circumstances, to have this kind of openness, so that when things go well we can be happy, but when things don’t go so well we can still be okay. We can deal with it. We learn through patience to be as stable as a mountain. We don’t shake, whatever winds are blowing against us. The first book I ever read on Buddhism was called
Mind Unshaken: A Modern Approach to Buddhism,
by John Walters; I started to read it just because I liked the title. It talks about a mind that is unshaken by pleasure, unshaken by pain—a fearless mind. Usually we live our whole lives trying to avoid pain and attract pleasure; we are afraid that we will experience more pain than pleasure. This creates a very insecure and fearful mind, because we know that we cannot have one without the other. But we can face everything within a spacious yet grounded mind. When we deal skillfully with both the pleasure and the pain, where is the fear? There is no hope and fear in that kind of mind. Whatever comes, we can deal with it; whoever comes, we can deal with them.

I want to express this clearly because I don’t want you to think that cultivating patience just means being weak and passive and unable to answer back or stand firm. It’s not that. Someone who is patient and doesn’t hit back is much stronger than the person who hits. Movies unfortunately tend to model a very macho culture where if someone annoys us, we just bash him, or kick him in the face, or blow him up, and that’s the solution. But of course that is not the solution to anything, as we know very well. If something upsets us and annoys us, maybe we should really look into our own mind. In the movie
Star Wars,
there is one scene where Luke Skywalker gets angry as he faces the Dark Emperor. He begins to verbally abuse him, saying that he would always be against him and his evil ways and so on. And the Dark Emperor says, “Yes, go for it. Get angry. Hate me. Work to destroy me because as long as you are angry toward me, as long as you hate me, you are on our side.” Now that was very profound. Of course after that the characters are fighting and blowing each other up again. But what the Dark Emperor said was actually very true.

Patience is a great strength. It is not a weakness. The ability to use anger as an aid on the path is an incredible strength. Instead of becoming angry, instead of losing control, one can transform the anger. There are many ways. One method is to understand that the person who makes us angry is our greatest spiritual benefactor, and far from being upset with them, we should be grateful. Another way beyond that is being able to make use of the anger itself, but that is quite difficult, and so I will not discuss it here.

We miss so much in our lives if we are unable to deal with discomfort. There was a group of devotees who went to visit a high lama who has since passed away in Nepal. He lived up on the hill behind Bodhnath Stupa. The students arrived at his monastery one evening, and the following day they were to begin receiving a full week of teachings. He was a lama especially skillful in pointing out the inherent nature of mind, so they were very lucky.

The next day, when the interpreter went to the monastery to translate for them, the lama said, “Well, actually they have left.”

The translator said, “Why did they leave? Where did they go?”

The lama replied, “Well, they didn’t like the bathrooms.” He sighed and said, “Dharma good, toilets no good!”

The group had left. The students lost this unique opportunity to get teaching because they didn’t have any tolerance. I was there and I can’t even remember the toilet, so it couldn’t have been that bad!

We have to deal with our inability to put up with a little bit of discomfort, to put up with the difficulties of other people around us. Now when we are cultivating the practice of taking the Dharma into our everyday life, where better to exercise this practice of patience than with our family, our colleagues, and people we deal with every day? On the whole it’s easier to be patient and understanding with strangers, but our real challenge comes from the people who are close to us. Some of you, I am sure, get on beautifully with your families. You never have any arguments, everything is complete bliss and joy, and it is as if you were in the realm of celestials. That is wonderful, but for the rest of us . . . .

One of the problems in families is that we do get locked into unhealthy patterns from which we are unable to extricate ourselves. So it is really important to develop the quality of standing back and observing the situation by seeing and hearing ourselves. But to see and hear ourselves accurately we have to take into account the tone of our voice. We may think later, “Oh, but I only said this and this and this.” Yet perhaps it wasn’t what we said but rather how we said it that brought difficulty. We need to be aware of our tone of voice, the way we act, our body language. And we need to pay attention to the way we relate to children, and how we may affect the way children relate to themselves—it is all interconnected. This is our field of practice. This is where we have to transform.

It’s no good having love and kindness for the rest of the world if we cannot deal with those who are closest to us. We have to start where we are. For some reason, we have some karmic relationships—we are interconnected, we are responsible for each other. Sometimes, there are partners who are mismatched and it would obviously be better if they parted. I don’t mean that couples have to stay together forever and ever, just because it is a way of practicing patience. But nonetheless, while one is in any kind of relationship, even if one is going to separate, this is the opportunity to learn and develop, to cultivate and create something more positive, even when a situation has become very negative. We do not necessarily need to ditch the whole thing and say, “Let’s try again somewhere else,” nor just carry on because we are too tired and worn down to think of how to get out of it.

We all have the possibility for change. It does not matter how long something has been going on—our ways of acting and speaking—we can change. When something is not right, when something is negative, when something is out of balance, then this is our opportunity to really try to bring it back into balance again. After all, if there is estrangement between two people, originally there must have been some care involved. So then, what went wrong? This is our area of practice. This is where we can really learn what is going on within us. We do not need to put the blame all on the other, nor do we need to put the blame all on ourselves. We just need to see the situation clearly. Then we can decide whether or not something can be done.

Every situation we meet in life is an area for our practice. It is where we have to work. It is not glamorous. It is not romantic. It is not esoteric and exotic. But it is where we can learn in this lifetime. We are all where we are right now because of causes which we ourselves have created. And so what are we going to do? It is up to us.

Virya paramita, or effort

Contemplating
virya paramita,
or the perfection of effort, leads us to the question of enthusiastic energy. Does the idea itself make you feel exhausted? We never can accomplish anything if we don’t really try, if we don’t have some ongoing perseverance. On the spiritual path, the two qualities most needed are patience and perseverance. For instance, many people who want to meditate do sit down but after only two or three sessions they say, “Oh, I can’t meditate. Too many thoughts.” And they give up. Nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without diligence, without perseverance, without effort. When they train for the Olympics, athletes are completely one-pointed. They change their diet and give up smoking and alcohol. They get up early; they go to bed early. They train the whole day long. Everything else is sacrificed. And for what? To get a medal.

In Buddhism, laziness is described as being of three types. First, there is the laziness that says, “Yes, I like going to the Dharma center, I like meditating, but there is a really good movie on television, so sorry.” It is the kind of laziness in which we have lots of enthusiasm for something that we really want to do, but when it comes to meditation or any kind of serious Dharma reading, suddenly we find ourselves saying, “Oh goodness, I am so tired. I’ll do my practice later when I have time.” It is the kind of laziness in which we remember what a late night we had the night before, and that’s the end of that. We all suffer from this gross kind of laziness, which is easy to recognize.

The second kind of laziness is the laziness that comes when we are unable to practice because we feel so unworthy. The conviction that everyone else but me can practice and meditate and get realizations—“I can’t because I always fail at everything; I did try to meditate but I couldn’t do it because I have too many thoughts”—that is laziness. The sense that we can’t do the practice because of this or that is not regarded as humility but rather as gross laziness. We are shirking. We all have buddha nature; all we have to do is to discover it. Therefore, it is not a question of being higher or lower or unworthy. Unworthy of what? We all have the potential of being enlightened; we all have this human birth; we all have some intelligence.

The third kind of laziness refers to being so busy with mundane activities, even Dharma activities, that we have no time for inner cultivation. Whatever excuse we make to ourselves does not matter. If we find ourselves filling up our days with things to do week after week, month after month, year after year, we never have time to go inside. Even if we are like rodents on a wheel, that is still laziness. We are avoiding the real task. Our task here is first to realize our own innate buddha nature, and anything which takes us away from that is just avoidance.

And this is why it is so important that we use the events of our day as a way of cultivating an open heart and clarity of mind. Outwardly some activities may look very good, like running Dharma centers and things like this, but even they can be an excuse for not really facing what we are here for. A genuine spiritual aspirant is like a marathon runner, not a short distance runner. It is very easy in the beginning to have lots of enthusiasm. We can see people bubbling over with enthusiasm in Dharma centers: they throw themselves into all the practices and into all the activities. They are so bright and starry-eyed and joyful. And we can see them, ten years down the road, still going. Fifteen years along the way, they have begun to slow down a bit. By the time they are twenty to twenty-five years down the line, they are saying, “Wow, I used to be so enthusiastic, but now, somehow, I have lost my interest. How do I get enthusiastic again?” That is a difficult one.

The quality of perseverance beyond the initial spurt of enthusiasm is invaluable. The ability to keep going, even when the going is not exciting anymore and nothing much is happening inwardly, is such an important quality. In old translations they sometimes used the word “manliness” for the Sanskrit word we’re translating as “effort,”
virya
. In Latin, the word for man is
vir
. Sanskrit and Latin are connected, and those donnish scholars were thinking “man” as expressive of carrying on with the task—get on with it! The muscular Christianity type of approach. Then they translated
virya
as determination, perseverance, effort, but as most people probably felt tired just reading about that, later translators started calling it enthusiasm, which sounded a bit more upbeat. What it means is not just enthusiasm, but also this sense of carrying on, like a marathon runner. Marathon runners keep back a lot of their strength so that they can keep going; they don’t expend all their energy in the first thousand meters because they know they’ve got miles and miles to go yet. So they manage their energy very carefully and keep on track and learn how to breathe properly and how to pace themselves so that they can just keep going.