Into the Heart of Life (3 page)

When I went to India for the first time I found work as a volunteer at the Young Lamas Home School teaching young tulkus, or incarnate lamas. After that, I went to live with my lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche. I was ordained and then I worked with him for six years as a nun and as his secretary. Although I didn’t have any money, he always gave me room and of course, food. I was taken care of. Then the community moved to their present site of Tashi Jong. At that time the land was a tea estate; nothing yet had been built on it, and everyone in the community was living in tents. Khamtrul Rinpoche said to me, “During the next year, it would be a good idea if you didn’t come to Tashi Jong yet as there’s nowhere for you to stay. So you go off and do your own thing for a year and then come back after we’ve got some buildings.” The whole community went to Tashi Jong, and I was left behind, in a hill station called Dalhousie. I remember standing on a hill looking out over the plains on one side and the mountains on the other, and for a moment feeling totally desolate. My lama had gone. The community had gone. I had no family there; I had no friends there. I had no money, and nowhere to stay. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, “Oh dear—.” And then I thought, “My whole life is given to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Gampopa said that anyone who practices the Dharma, anybody on a genuine spiritual path, will never starve.” So I told myself, “All right. I’ve handed over my whole life to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, so let them take care of it.” And I felt this tremendous sense of reassurance that it was perfectly all right to be insecure. In that moment, I really got an insight into the fact that real security lies not in clinging to security but in feeling secure within that insecurity.

Just in that moment, there was a tremendous sense that it was okay to just allow things to be. I thought, “Don’t worry.” This was very personal. And I don’t mean to suggest that you all have to do it like this. Many of you have families and friends, so it may be different for you. But there was a very strong sense that if from my side I didn’t worry, if from my side I wasn’t concerned about not having anywhere to live and not having any money, and if I just carried on devoting my life to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, things would work out. And of course things did work out, and things have continued to work out through these past thirty years.

We have very little faith in the universe. Faith here doesn’t mean that we just sit back and don’t do anything, but rather that we understand the scale of things happening. We don’t actually have to do everything ourselves. If we can plug into this—I don’t know what to call it, a kind of universal energy—of itself things will be taken care of. But if we try to do everything by ourselves, then this universal energy sort of backs off and says, “Okay, you get on with it.”

Do you understand?

If we are genuinely directing ourselves from the heart to something truly good and we really have faith in that, then what we need comes. It’s not that we’re going to become Bill Gates. We’ll probably always remain poor, but it doesn’t matter, because life isn’t about getting lots of wealth and possessions, as you all know. But we have to have faith that these things will come to us as we need them if from our side we are doing what we need to do in this world. And this has to do with the question of impermanence, because it means that as things in life change, we are able to change with them.

We have all experienced the ability to be flexible, to be open and to let go of things in order to change direction if necessary. It’s the rigidity which causes trouble. And this brings us to the next important question of our precious human existence. More and more, our commodity-oriented society is trying to convince us that we’re here in order to have a good time, and to get more and more of whatever it is that the big businesses are churning out. It doesn’t matter how junky it is: if it’s this year’s fashion, we’ve got to want it. But we don’t just have to want it, we’ve got to work hard and buy it. We think that will give us happiness; we think that is what happiness means.

Many of us who have inquired into the nature of impermanence have rejected this. Congratulations. Because most of the world hasn’t. Certainly most of the third world is just arriving at this deluded belief that the more material goods one has, the happier one will be. Many people, regardless of their place in the world, believe that the meaning of their life is to be successful and that success means to be comfortable and wealthy. It means to have more or less all the things we want, like nice relationships, with everything going just the way we want: good health, happiness, and enough money to spend on all the things we want. And if we can manage to get that, then it’s a good happy life. But the fact is that we have human potential, which has to do with our intelligence and our ability to have endless compassion for others. Our unfolding human potential allows us to really direct our lives to something meaningful, something more profound, something inner. If we just direct all our energies and activities to being happy, pleasant, and comfortable, we’re no different from the animals.

In the
Life of Milarepa,
the story of Tibet’s great yogi of the eleventh century, we read that once, when he was sitting in his cave, a very frightened deer came running in. Milarepa sings to comfort the deer, and the deer sits down beside him. A while later, a hunting dog runs into the cave, avidly looking for the deer. Milarepa sings to the dog, too, and the dog calms down and sits on his other side. Then a huntsman comes storming in—his name is Gonpo Dorje. My lama Khamtrul Rinpoche is said to be an incarnation of Gonpo Dorje. The huntsman comes in and roars with anger to see the deer and the dog sitting so peacefully side by side. He tries to shoot at Milarepa to kill him. But of course Milarepa is impervious to arrows. After a while, the huntsman calms down a bit and Milarepa sings to him as well. Milarepa declares, “It is considered that the human life is precious, but I don’t see anything precious about you!” Later, Gonpo Dorje becomes one of his greatest disciples.

Isn’t that true of so many people we know? We have this precious human life, and what are we doing with it? Where is it precious? Our human life is only precious if we use it in a way which is meaningful. Otherwise, it’s not a precious life. It is not precious merely because we’re human. It’s only precious and rare if we make use of it in a meaningful way.

We are here. Honestly, I can’t say I know why we are here. Who knows why? But at least, while we
are
here, let’s use what we have as a learning process, because the one thing about a human birth is that we have choice.

According to Buddhist cosmology, there are twenty-six heavenly realms and eighteen hells of various types. The beings down in the hell realms are so tormented by their sufferings they can think only about themselves. The beings in the heavenly realms are so seduced by pleasure that they have no incentive to improve themselves. And the animals don’t have the intelligence to be able to have self-awareness in the same way as human beings. But human beings have this mixture of pain and pleasure. And because of this, we can learn. We have choice. With everything that happens to us, we have a choice as to how we’ll respond; whether we respond skillfully or unskillfully is up to us. Moment to moment we are creating our lives for ourselves. Sometimes people get so caught in ruts that they feel they can’t escape, can’t get out. But of course this is not actually true—we can.

I write to a number of prisoners in America. They are as entrapped as anyone can be. They are in situations where they’re often surrounded by very unsympathetic fellow prisoners and guards. One prisoner in Texas, though, started a small Dharma group of like-minded prisoners. They wanted to sit and meditate and to have a little Dharma discourse. It took them six months of pleading before the guards gave them permission to sit on the floor. Imagine: they had a hard time getting permission even to meet, even to just sit on the floor. “No, you can’t sit on the floor. Why do you want to sit on the floor? That is weird.” But even within seemingly inflexible situations, situations from which they can’t physically escape, the prisoners are inwardly transformed. They are sincerely using these very adverse circumstances to grow, to deepen their understanding, to expand their compassion, and to look into their past and see where they went wrong. They are learning how not make those same mistakes again in the future. This is what being human is about. This is why our human life is so precious. We can do that. And it’s why we should not waste this opportunity by just being mindless. This is a time when we can expand by leaps and bounds, even when things are very adverse—sometimes,
especially
when things are adverse.

When everything is going well, we can be lulled into thinking that we’re much nicer and more advanced than we actually are. When everyone is pleasant to us, when circumstances are all going well, when all our relationships are congenial, then it’s very easy to think, “I’m basically a nice person and everything’s all right and I’m full of loving-kindness and compassion.” But it’s when things don’t go right, when people don’t do what we want, when things don’t work out the way we’ve planned—that’s when we learn. That’s when we really see where we’re at, how far our compassion extends and how much our patience really exists or doesn’t exist. When people are mean to us or rude to us or cheat us or leave us, we have a chance to see this.

We need these things. It’s not that we have to go out and look for painful experiences or obnoxious people—they will come to us! And when they do come, we should have a mind which is able to absorb, understand, accept, and use that, not a mind which runs away or tries to avoid, or just generates more negativities. This is our opportunity.

Shantideva, a seventh-century Buddhist philosopher in India, said in the
Bodhicharyavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva)
that this earth is full of stones and thorns. It is very painful to walk on. So what are we to do? Do we carpet the whole world? That would be very difficult, as there is a lot of ground out there. But we don’t need to carpet the whole world; we just have to put leather on the soles of our feet—shoes—and we can walk anywhere. Likewise, we can’t rid the world of all adverse circumstances and difficulties. There are billions of other people in the world, and there is only one of us. But we don’t need to change everybody. All we have to do is transform our own mind. When our mind is transformed, everything is transformed.

One way of transforming our minds, apart from developing such qualities as patience, understanding, and tolerance, is to really see that this life we have here is very precious. It is very precious because it is our workroom: here we will make advancements if we want to, in whatever station of life we find ourselves.

We can use every moment of this life. Sometimes people have the idea that practice means going to Dharma centers or sitting in meditation or performing rituals and this sort of thing. They think that all this is practice while the rest of the day is a waste of time. People think there is this big split, and they often despair, feeling that their families and their children are obstacles that keep them away from the spiritual life. But the fact is, especially in this present day, we have to accept the situation we are in and use that as our spiritual path. Of course, meditation is very important, but it’s not the only means needed in order to become an enlightened being. We need to develop other qualities also. We need to develop a really open heart, a generous heart, a heart which is accepting and patient. We have to have very clear ethical conduct, living in this world so that we never harm others in any way. Neither do we harm ourselves. We must live a very harmless life, not just thinking of ourselves but caring for others, so that with each being we meet, our first feeling is, “May you be well and happy.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s someone we know or don’t know, or even someone we dislike. May you be well and happy. We can all generate that sense of good will. If we generate that, then slowly, slowly, everything we do in our life is transformed into practice.

We have this lifetime—this is what we have. How are we going to use it? Are we going to use it skillfully, or are we just going to waste it? It’s up to us. We can’t blame our families, our friends, our parents, our upbringing, our social status, or the government. It’s up to us. Happiness and unhappiness depend on the individual. What we do with the circumstances we find ourselves in is up to us. For example, even if we have a very life-threatening disease, we have a choice: either we go under with complete despair, frustration, and anger, or we say, “Well, what a wonderful opportunity this is giving me to realize that we are all finite, that we are all going to die. So what is important and what is not important in life? This disease gives me the opportunity to clear up my relationships, tie up loose ends, and also really focus on that which is important to me.” Instead of feeling angry at one’s disease, one can feel almost grateful. One can use it. One can use anything.

Each one of us is responsible for our own life, and for helping and giving love and understanding to those who are closest around us. Our family, our children, our partners, our parents—they are our practice. They are not an obstacle to our practice. They are the ones who need our loving-kindness, our compassion, our patience, our joyous effort. Our wisdom. It’s not so difficult to sit and meditate on loving-kindness and compassion for all those sentient beings out there somewhere on the horizon. But the sentient beings for whom we really have to generate loving-kindness and compassion are the ones who are right in front of us, especially those for whom we are most karmically responsible. They are our objects of practice.