Read Into the Heart of Life Online
Authors: Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Tags: #General, #Religion, #Buddhism, #Rituals & Practice, #Tibetan
Into the Heart of Life (8 page)
These qualities will become stronger and stronger once we begin to practice. As long as we rely on things or on other people for our happiness, we will never genuinely be satisfied, because these things are impermanent. They’re transient; they’re insecure.
The only true happiness lies within us. That’s where it is.
QuestionsQ: What was your central motivation for spending so many years in the cave in the Himalayas?
JTP: My motivation? The Dharma in itself is motivating. Once you realize the benefits of practice, then it keeps you going. It becomes more and more central; it takes over your life, as you can see! But in recent years, my motivation has been very much to help young women from the Buddhist Himalayan regions who want to devote their lives to the Dharma. One sees that they have such incredible intelligence; they have such a spark, and one wants to help them. If we don’t help them, who will?
Q: Is it true that nuns are not educated in the Tibetan Buddhist culture? And can you tell us about the nunnery you have started in northern India?
JTP: You know, you are really very fortunate in the West. You are all well-educated and you can read whatever you want. You can study whatever you want to study and if any spiritual teachers come, you can go and listen to them without obstacles. Basically, you’re very free.
I think it’s hard for people in the West to appreciate a society where there are obstacles to being able to study. For example, in the Himalayan regions like Ladakh and Bhutan, there are many monks and nuns. But, there is no education for the nuns. When I lived in Lahaul, I saw this very clearly. While the monks were benefiting from doing the rituals, receiving the teachings, and going into long retreats, the nuns were in the kitchen doing the cooking.
Recently, I saw a video filmed in Ladakh. There was one Ladakhi nun who stated, after a week’s course of teachings on monastic rules for the nuns, “I’ve been a nun for forty years and this is the first teaching I’ve ever received.” You have to understand where these people are coming from. The nuns in these Himalayan regions especially and in Tibet are often basically just servants for their families or for the monks. Previously, the nuns were not very well educated. They often did do some practice, but of course now, with the Communist takeover, even that is very much curtailed. So hundreds of nuns are fleeing into India constantly from Tibet even at the present time.
What we’re trying to do is create opportunities for these girls to realize both their intellectual and their spiritual potential. To me, so many of these girls are like tight little buds. As they grow old and die they’re just withered buds because they’ve never had any sunshine, no rain, no fertilizer, nothing. We’re trying to give them the sunshine, fertilizer, and rain of our approval so they can study and practice. They are already doing that! They are so enthusiastic, so keen; they’re like dry little sponges which hungrily absorb everything we teach them. They can’t get enough.
The thing is, there are hundreds or maybe thousands of girls who have been denied the opportunity of realizing their spiritual potential. Now, we are trying to rectify this by giving them the opportunity to be able to study and practice as the monks have been doing for centuries.
Q: How are nuns formally ordained in your tradition?
JTP: It’s a little bit esoteric. There’s no full ordination. As far as we know, no fully ordained nuns ever went to Tibet from India, so the bhikshuni ordination was never taken to Tibet. Now, they are trying to introduce this ordination via the Chinese tradition but there are some complications. Only a few Tibetan nuns have traveled abroad to receive the bhikshuni ordination, since the Chinese follow a different ordination lineage.
The problem is that at the moment it’s usually the younger nuns who go to take the ordination. When they return to their nunneries as fully ordained nuns, the older nuns who have a lower ordination are nonetheless senior to them. There are a lot of problems in that. What I’m trying to do in my nunnery is ensure that the nuns take their ordination in order. In a few years’ time, when they’re ready, we’ll get the whole first lot ordained together so they’ll be not only senior in age and experience but also senior in ordination. I think that’s the way it has to go.
Q: Can lay people also gain realization?
JTP: Of course, one doesn’t have to be a monk or a nun in order to attain realization. In Tibet, for example, some of the very greatest spiritual masters were lay people. It certainly isn’t a prerequisite to enter the sangha. However, any kind of realization takes great dedication and the lay life is more distracting. It’s much more of a challenge to keep one’s focus. Also, because realization does depend on the question of non-attachment and non-grasping, it’s much more difficult in a lay situation. But nonetheless, the nature of the mind is the nature of the mind whether you’re a monk or a lay person. It’s there to be realized.
Q: What is the role of compassion in the spiritual path, and how can a lay person practice it?
JTP: Compassion is extraordinarily important in the spiritual path. It’s the other side of the coin: we have both wisdom and compassion. The greater the understanding of the inherent pain in beings—the more the mind becomes very clear, as if wiping away dust from the eyes—the more one sees the underlying pain in people’s lives, and the more compassion arises. Even if overtly people don’t look like they are suffering, we see that under the façade there is a lot of pain and many problems. Naturally then compassion arises, and the two feed each other. Compassion without wisdom is sterile; it is blind. It’s like having legs but no eyes. Wisdom without compassion is like being crippled; you can’t go anywhere. So, we need the two, and they mutually support each other because it’s not just that the intellect has to be open, the heart also has to be open. They are indivisible. Wisdom and compassion are like two wings. We cannot fly with one alone.
Q: Many Western Buddhists have family and friends who are not open to Buddhist philosophy when it’s presented within the dogmatic or cultural trappings. How do you bring Buddhist concepts and methods to those who might be put off by an explicitly Buddhist approach to life?
JTP: The point is that we are not all trying to become Tibetans or Japanese. What we are trying to do is become better people. So without any of the Buddhist jargon, if you are becoming a kinder, more thoughtful, more generous, more centered person, then people will look at that and think, well this looks like a good thing. It really works. This person is not nearly as irritable and selfish as they used to be, they are much more thoughtful, they’re much more kind, they’re much more peaceful, this must be a good thing. That’s the best way to teach Buddhism. Not through jargon, but through example.
Q: That’s why many Westerners are attracted to this Buddhist philosophy and these schools of Buddhism. But there are also these very strong religious aspects. You can make a choice if you want to be very religious.
JTP: Yes, but you can do that behind your own closed doors, you don’t have to go around stinking of religion. Private devotions are private. Outside, you should try to blend with your society while remaining centered and mindful and more kind and generous. The practice is bearing fruit once we begin to overcome our negative emotions and cultivate the positive.
Q: There is a lot of work to do.
JTP: A lot of work. And where better to start than with your family and with your friends who don’t believe you anyway! Fortunately, in Buddhism we don’t have to convert people. People respect the Buddhadharma through the examples of the Buddhists that they meet.
The Eight Worldly Concerns
W
generally aware of our appetite for praise and our dread of blame. We are not generally aware of how we yearn for a good reputation and fall anxious at the thought of the bad. We are not generally aware of the urgency of our desire for gain and our fear of loss. We are not generally aware of how much we gravitate toward what we regard as pleasurable, nor how much we try to avoid what we regard as painful. But it is these eight worldly concerns that keep us revolving around and around in this cycle of birth and death, samsara.
The eight worldly concerns condition a great part of what we do and what we plan. They may even condition our spiritual practice. What underlies our reaching out for what seems good and pleasurable and this avoidance of what is not? What are we really looking for? What sort of peace do we hope to gain?
We may hope to gain something, something from all the effort we put into trying to get and trying to avoid, but the very grasping that underlies our effort is precisely what holds us to this whole cycle of birth and death. We may even regard such grasping as pleasurable. This dynamic of motivation, of desire and aversion, hope and fear, keeps our ordinary egoistic preoccupations going. And we are not even conscious of it. We assume it’s natural that we want pleasure and don’t want pain; we assume it’s natural to hope for gain and to fear loss. We don’t question the very structure of this dualistic mindset, which is based on ignorance of our situation.
Buddhism inquires into this underlying ignorance of our true identity. Attending to whatever, even sitting with this book in hand, we may have a very solid sense of
I
around which the rest of the world revolves. It is so habitual, we don’t even notice it.
I
and
mine;
I and
me
; my family; my children; my partner; my
whatever. This sense of
I
is very solid, real, and enduring. It is something that is deeply formed within us, and as our society mirrors this solidity, we don’t question it:
Of course I exist. Here I am. I must exist exactly the way I appear to exist.
We come early to this notion, which from the Buddhist point of view is regarded as
avidya,
deeply ingrained unknowing. In Sanskrit,
vidya
means to know;
avidya
means to not know. This very deeply rooted tendency to not see things as they are is something we share with practically everybody we meet. And we think our viewpoint must be true because it reflects how everybody sees one another.
This solid sense of
I
is what we project onto others; it is what others mirror back to us. It is how we see ourselves when we look at ourselves. It is a very deeply ingrained unknowing.
We identify ourselves with so many things. We identify with our bodies, our race, our nationality, our gender, our profession, our relationships. We identify ourselves as the child of certain parents, and perhaps even as a parent ourselves. We identify ourselves as someone’s partner, or as someone’s sibling.
This is who I am.
And identification doesn’t stop there. We identify with our memories, too. Our memories concretize our sense of self. “Oh no,” we may think, as someone else recalls some shared experience, “it wasn’t like that at all.”
We believe our opinions. We believe our prejudices. We believe in ourselves as a solid and separate individual: me.
I think this; I think that; in my opinion . . .
We do it automatically.
This sense of
I
, of a
me
separate from everything else which is not me, which is other, is an expression of our primordial ignorance from a Buddhist point of view. All Buddhist practices are directed to overcoming such notions so that we may open up to a level of being that is much vaster than this tiny little ego we cling to so desperately. Clinging to this sense of
I
we reach out through our greed and grasping for anything that will give apparent pleasure to this ego. At the same time, we try to push away anything that will give it pain. Aversion finds expression through anger, aggression, and negativity. We do it automatically. Maybe it is stirring in you now.
You sit on your cushion with an aim to have a nice meditation session, and in the beginning it is quite comfortable. After a bit, your knees start to hurt, and your back, and automatically you move to avoid the pain and bring back the pleasure, the comfort. Bringing desire and aversion even to our spiritual practice, we try to avoid anything which is not physically or mentally comfortable. Even though we may seem to be sitting on our cushion, we are tossed by the waves of samsara.
It is the nature of waves to go up and come down. But of course if you go and cling to the idea of going up, you must also accept the fact that you will come down.
Everything is impermanent. From moment to moment change reveals itself. Though we try endlessly to negotiate, something always seems to come along to smash whatever it is that we cling to. Endlessly, frantically, we try to get it back again. Our lives unfold like this. And it is so normal we don’t question it. But until we begin to question it, until we begin to become more conscious of how we engage in this struggle all of the time, we cannot open to inner equanimity.
The eight worldly concerns—maybe we should call them the eight worldly hang-ups! Hung up on them, our mind can’t get free. We hope everything will work out; we fear that so much will not work out. But this kind of security is elusive. Samsara by its very nature is not secure. So long as we try to make everything fit our ideas of how everything should be, how everything should go along, we are caught. And there is always something: haven’t you noticed? The world around you may never seem quite right, or else it is right just for a second, until something else happens.
Everything would be fine, if only...
But there is always an
if only
.
Running a nunnery, I am very conscious of this. Every morning I wake up and wonder, What will it be today? We can spend our lives worrying like this, caught between our desire for things to go as we want and resisting the way they go anyway. Or we can develop the inner ability to know that this process is happening within us: we can become like a boat, just riding the waves of samsara. We can open to equanimity as we deal with situations. However much we want to gain acknowledgment, pleasure, praise, reputation—the fact of the matter is that we gain some and we lose some. Sometimes things are difficult for us. Sometimes we suffer. We experience criticism, obscurity, discomfort, pain. We lose things. We lose people. We lose our health, and eventually we lose our precious life.
We suffer when we live our lives as a form of resistance against things not going as we want. We suffer when we try desperately to make things go exactly as we plan and they don’t. This is the point. The Buddha said there are two kinds of suffering: there is physical suffering and mental suffering. Physical suffering we can’t avoid. Even the Buddha himself had physical suffering. Everybody—as you see if you live long enough—has aches and pains and accidents and sometimes very serious illnesses.
We have a body, and our body is going to deteriorate. It is inevitable. But what is not inevitable is mental suffering, and in this we have a say. We can train our mind so that even if the body suffers the mind does not. When we are sick, or when things go wrong, we can go down in despair or we can maintain our equanimity. It is crucial that we appreciate just why this is important. Because when things go well, we often think everything is fine and that there is no real need to do much. But when things fall apart, what will we do? Today we are fine, tomorrow we may have a serious accident. Today we are with the person we love most, tomorrow they are gone.
In Buddhism there are considered to be many higher levels of rebirth: twenty-six different levels of celestial rebirth where everything goes according to how we want it. The eight worldly dharmas do not really exist through these levels, as you just have to think of something and it appears. Going up to higher and higher levels of being, finally there are just mental levels with no bodies. One has a body of light, and everything is very joyful, very pleasurable. But all of these heavenly levels, which are the result of very good karma, are regarded from a Buddhist perspective as being a spiritual dead end because there is no incentive to practice. And as the length of life is very, very long in such realms, there is no thought of death and impermanence; there is no thought of suffering; there is no thought about anything, really. There is just the enjoyment of good karma’s results. So that might all be very nice, and in many spiritual traditions people aim to get reborn there, but of course from a Buddhist perspective these twenty-six levels of celestial rebirth are impermanent.
And there is the matter of the hell realms, where the suffering is so intense and unremitting that one is totally closed within one’s own fear and pain, unable to think beyond one’s own distress. But the hell realms, too, are impermanent.
Human birth is ideal because we all have this time within which to practice. Nice things keep us going; difficult things act as incentives. The point therefore is that we need to take the life we have—right now—and look at it. Look at how we are living it.
What are you actually doing with your precious life?
You are very well endowed. You are educated; you live in a society in which you can think what you want to think; and you can do more or less what you want to do. If you want to read certain books, not only can you read them, you can understand them. This is very rare in this world.
One of our nunnery’s teachers recently came back from a tour of Europe—eleven countries in nineteen days, and how he loved it! What he especially noticed was how clean everything is, and how all the drivers, although there are so many cars, drive in their own lanes. He was amazed! Nobody constantly blared their horns; no cows wandered the roads. Coming to the West from one of the many depressed countries of the world is really like coming to heaven. This is why people want to come. Because however difficult their circumstances when they arrive, the West is still an incredible place compared with what they have left. There is so much opportunity to go forward. You live in a blessed situation already.
You have the opportunity to work on your mind. You are not endlessly thinking about where you can find the next meal for your children. You have the leisure and the opportunity to think beyond that. You will never get a better time than right now to use this life meaningfully. The eight worldly concerns—praise/blame, good reputation/bad reputation, gain/loss, pleasure/pain—offer us profound questions to explore within ourselves. Accordingly, we can spend our whole lives integrating what we find.
Modern life is stressful. But we add to this stress continually. Most people are consumed by worries, and yet most of these worries are really not necessary. We have anxieties about the future, but the future has not come. What about right now? Right now we are just sitting. We might not be very comfortable, but at least we are sitting and nobody is threatening us and it is fairly okay! So what is there to worry about? Ninety percent of what we worry about doesn’t happen anyway.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t plan, but once having planned for something, the skillful thing is to let it go. And open up to accept whatever happens, because that is simply what is happening in the moment. We have this idea that if things go the way we want them to go and are pleasurable and nice, then that is a good thing for us and proves our success. If things go wrong for us and are painful or difficult, we imagine this as a sign of our failure. Samsara, we think, ought to be happy. But the Buddha said that samsara is unsatisfactory.
The point is not the loss and pain and criticism. The point is our aversion to that. We think we shouldn’t have to experience loss; we think we shouldn’t have to experience pain; we think we shouldn’t have to experience criticism. But the loss and pain and criticism are just how things are. Everybody has some pleasure and some pain. Everybody has some people saying nice things and some people saying bad things about them. But that is not the problem. The problem is that we resent and resist anything which the ego considers to be unpleasant. And we cling to and attach ourselves very strongly to anything that would give pleasure to this sense of
me
. But if we just open ourselves to accept whatever is happening as it is actually happening in the moment, there is no problem. Our anxieties fade.