Into the Heart of Life (7 page)

In the East, no one ever asked me, “Why on earth did you go live in a cave?” Only in the West do people ask that question. To an Asian, it’s obvious. But because our society fantasizes this glamour of success and wealth, having so much and so many possessions, our whole psyche becomes distorted. We are continually creating this outer glittering image which has little connection with what’s going on inside that image. It’s just the external manifestation of success. I have met a number of very wealthy, successful, and famous people, but they were not particularly happy people. They might be the envy of many, but actually they came to talk to me about all their problems.

We live in our mind. We spend so much time buying nice houses, decorating them according to our desires, making everything look very nice. We keep them clean, well-furnished, and beautifully decorated, and we show them with pride to other people. But actually, we don’t live in our houses, we live in our minds. We also spend a lot of time on our physical appearance, always trying to look young and attractive, to wear the right kind of clothes and give people the right kind of impression. We think, “This is who I am.”

If we go somewhere else, we leave our house behind. We don’t carry it with us; we are not snails. But our mind we carry with us everywhere; we live within our minds. Everything we see is projected to us through our five senses organs which impinge on our consciousness and then are interpreted by the mind. The mind itself is considered as the sixth sense: one which is constantly churning up memories, thoughts, ideas, opinions, judgments, likes, and dislikes. We live inside our mind. Where else do we live? If we go to Europe, if we go to Africa, if we go to Asia, we take our mind with us. Whether we are in the middle of Sydney or up the mountain in a cave, we bring our mind with us. This is where we live, we live in our mind.

But how many of us take the trouble to decorate our minds? When we consider the amount of input—television, movies, magazines, newspapers, and all the cacophony with which we live constantly—this junk is being poured into our mind every waking minute, and we never empty it out. It’s like a great big garbage pit in there. Think of it. All this trash is constantly being shoveled into our minds and we never get rid of it: it’s all in there. Sometimes I think it would be interesting to have a loud-speaker attached to our minds so everyone would hear what we are constantly thinking. Wouldn’t we all want to learn to meditate quickly, quickly? We’d all want to learn how to control our wild mind and deal with all the junk in there.

Now, would you invite the Dalai Lama into your home if it was full of junk and garbage and hadn’t ever been cleared out? You wouldn’t. You would clean it first. You would make it nice and have everything beautifully arranged, open all the doors and windows to let fresh air in and then you would invite His Holiness into your house.

So how can we invite wisdom into a mind which is just a cesspool? Seriously. First, we have to do a bit of cleaning up. We have to open up the doors and windows to let some fresh air in. Initially, that’s what this whole question of meditation and learning how to be present in the moment and such practices are all about. They’re about learning how to cleanse the mind, because even if we just cleaned the windows a bit, we could see out. Now, we see everything through our confused, turbulent minds full of the poisons of ill-will, greed, delusion and so on. No wonder we’re confused. As I keep saying, we want to be happy, so why do we keep doing things which create the opposite? Why? We want to be happy, we want to make others happy, we put effort into it, so how is it that we’re not all radiantly blissful?

There is a state of mind beyond suffering, a state of mind which is free. Even in our own way, as ordinary people, we can begin to incorporate some of these qualities—like generosity and compassion—into our life. It’s not as impossible as it might sound. But first, to see how we create our own suffering, we have to understand that opening to such qualities is necessary, and we have to understand why it’s necessary. Our suffering doesn’t depend on what is happening “out there.” It really depends on our own mind, the state of our own mind, and our reactions to what is happening out there.

People who are mentally disturbed spend a lot of time thinking about themselves; they’re obsessed with their own happiness and their own suffering and they spend much time, as many of us do, on wondering, “How can I be happy?” But the irony of the situation is that, if we think less about how we can make ourselves happy, and more about how we can make others happy, somehow we end up being happy ourselves. People who are genuinely concerned with others have a much happier and more peaceful state of mind than those who are continually trying to manufacture their own joys and satisfactions.

We are basically very selfish people. When anything happens, our very first thought is, “How will this affect
me
?” Think about it. “What’s in it for
me
?” If it doesn’t negatively affect oneself, then it’s all right, and we don’t care. This very self-centered way of viewing the world is one of the principal causes of our unrest, because the world is the way it is; the world is never going to fit into all our expectations and our unrealistic hopes.

We have this human potential—our great human potential—to go beyond that to something much more profound which will give us genuine inner calm, not just superficial physical pleasure, but genuine, profound, deep, lasting happiness. It is within us; it is not “out there.” A mind which is more peaceful, more centered, and which is able to hold things lightly, which is not always grasping, which is not constantly churned on the waves of our hopes and our fears; a mind which is settled, which sees things clearly and with a heart which is open toward others, is a happy mind. And that happiness doesn’t depend on external circumstances. That mind is able to ride the waves of our external pains and pleasures. The answer lies within us.

I met a man in Australia who was dying of leukemia; he was like a skeleton. In fact, he died the day after I visited him. He was in his fifties. Before going to meet him, I met with members of his family. His wife said to me, “Could you ask him about his funeral arrangements?”

“Haven’t you discussed this?” I asked.

“Oh no, no,” she said. “We can’t discuss death.”

His mother and father, who had just celebrated their ninetieth birthdays, exclaimed, “How could this happen to us?”

I pointed out the hospital window. “Excuse me?” I said. Crowds of people were going backwards and forwards. “You find me one person out there who hasn’t lost someone that they loved. What do you mean, ‘How could this happen to us?’ Why shouldn’t it happen to you? It happens to everybody else.”

It is denial. We celebrate birth with dancing but we absolutely shuffle our feet when it comes to acknowledging death. Yet all of our life is a preparation for dying. If we were going to die tonight, what would we do now, right now? We’re all of us on a train and that train is going to crash for sure, so how are we going to spend the journey?

At the time of death, do you want to die thinking, “What did I do with my life?” or, “Why have I wasted my life?” So often we plan, “Oh, I’ll start to practice when the kids get older and leave home,” or, “I’ll start to practice when I retire.” Who knows if we’re going to be around that long?

The Buddha said that the one thing certain about life is death. That is true. It doesn’t matter how old or how young we are. I’m sure all of us have friends who were very young when they met with some tragic accident or developed some fatal disease. Who would have expected them to die? Today we are here, and tomorrow we are gone. We can’t think, “I’m going to live for three score years and ten and then I’ll die.” Who knows when we are going to die? Just because we are young and healthy today doesn’t mean we are not going to be dead tomorrow. We don’t know; none of us knows.

Once, not so long ago, I went to a meeting with other participants very early one morning. As we drove along in the early light we saw a crowd of school-children by a school bus. They were all standing around, looking completely dazed. A woman was lying dead in the middle of the street. She had just been hit; she wasn’t covered up. She was a young woman, maybe in her thirties, wearing a gray top and faded jeans. It was quiet and the ambulance had not yet arrived. The accident had only just happened. The bus driver hadn’t seen her as she crossed the road.

If we knew we were going to die tomorrow—and we don’t know that we’re
not
going to die tomorrow—what would we do today? How would we spend our time? What would we do with our body; what would we do with our speech; what would we do with our mind?

The word
buddha
means “to be awake” and is the culmination of ultimate wisdom, compassion, and purity. We go for refuge to that. We go for refuge to our own inner potential for buddhahood. We all possess what is called buddha nature. That means we all possess within ourselves the fullness of wisdom, compassion, and purity. But it is covered over. And it is this which connects us with all beings—not just human beings, but animals, insects and everything that is sentient. Anything which has consciousness has this potential. It might take a long time to uncover it, or it might happen in a moment, but we have it. We also go for refuge to that within ourselves—our own innate true nature.

When we go for refuge to the Dharma, first of all we go for refuge to the teachings of the Buddha. After the Buddha’s enlightenment, he went around northeast India for forty-five years talking to many different sorts of people—the rich and the poor, lay people and monks, males, females, the young and old—and much of this instruction was recorded. In the Tibetan canon, there are one hundred and eight volumes of the Buddha’s teachings. But we also go for refuge to the Dharma in the sense of ultimate reality—to that which is revealed when the clouds of our confusion and delusion part and we see truth face-to-face. That ultimate reality is out there and within ourselves, too. That is the true Dharma, the universal law.

The meaning of
sangha
, or community, is threefold. There are the ordained monks and nuns who are the monastic sangha. Then there is the
maha
, or great, sangha—that means all followers, monastic or lay, of the Buddha. Lastly there is the
arya
, or noble, sangha, who are those, monastic or lay, who have had authentic experience and realizations of the nature of reality. This last category is the genuine sangha refuge.

It is as if we are all sick. Sick with the five poisons of delusion, greed, ill will, pride, and envy. The Buddha is like a physician who says, “You’re sick but you can be cured,” and then he prescribes the medicine. The medicine is the Dharma. And just as with ordinary medicine, it is no good just reading the label or knowing the ingredients: we have to take the medicine; we have to follow the cure. And there is a cure. We can be healed. Those who help us and look after us are the sangha. They are like nurses—they take care of us, they help us to take the medicine in the right doses, they look after us until we are completely healed. When we are healed, we can then take their place and help others.

Genuine happiness comes from the heart. It comes from a mind which has become more stable, more clear, more present in the moment; a mind which is open and cares for the happiness of other beings. It is a mind which has that inner security, a knowing that whatever happens can be handled. It is a mind that doesn’t hold on so tightly any more; it is a mind that holds things lightly. This kind of mind is a happy mind.

Let us take His Holiness the Dalai Lama as an example. He lost his country. Every day people come to him from Tibet and elsewhere with ghastly stories. Truly awful things are happening in Tibet. He sees his people suffering. And not only that: because of his position, people come from all over the world to tell him of oppression in their own countries. He takes it all completely to heart. When people tell him of their sufferings, he weeps. But when you think of His Holiness, you think of him as always smiling and happy. You look into his eyes and they’re dancing. Why?

When people are in the presence of His Holiness they are so happy, and they come out floating. It’s because he has this quality of genuinely caring for others beyond himself. He has this quality of really putting the happiness of others before himself so that for everyone he meets—president or Pope or road-worker, it doesn’t matter—his only thought is that they should be happy. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter whether on one level he might or might not like them. His only concern is for their happiness and well-being. He is concerned with the real person, not the mask, not the glittering image these people are wearing. He is concerned with the real person. When looking at that person his only thought is to wish them well. We can all do this.

The ceremony of taking refuge comes from the time of the Buddha himself. When the Buddha was wandering around in northern India he met so many people seeking his advice. At the end of many of these discourses in the sutras, the questioner states, “From now until life’s end, I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, in the Sangha.” It is a very ancient tradition in all Buddhist countries. It expresses commitment to put the spiritual path in the center of our life instead of just at the periphery. It is a commitment which says, “From now on, I will transform my life into something meaningful.” Therefore, taking refuge is the beginning of the Buddhist path.

Toward every person we meet, starting with those who are the closest to us—our families, our colleagues, people that we meet everyday, and then extending that to strangers and whomever else we meet—our first thought should be the appreciation that they want happiness. They aren’t just anonymous blobs: they’re people with problems, with pleasures and pains. They want to be happy, just as we want to be happy. Cultivating that attitude toward everyone breaks down the ego-centered selfishness which causes us so much pain. So long as we are fixated on ourselves, on how we can be happy, we will never be happy. It is only when we open up our hearts to include all beings that suddenly we discover there is this inner joy within us: it begins like a little spring of water and is without the dryness of our self-cherishing thoughts. As our essential nature is love and intelligence, we are not inherently bad. We are inherently perfect. It is just that this nature has become covered over, like the sun covered by thick clouds. We may identify ourselves with the clouds because we don’t see the sun. But the sun is always there.