The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (2 page)

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

We’re talking about loving-kindness again, in a
slightly different way. The ground of loving-kindness is this sense of satisfaction with who we are and what we have. The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything. We know we’re never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life – they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package. This kind of questioning is the journey itself. The fruition lies in beginning to realize our kinship with all humanity. We realize that we have a share in whatever everyone else has and is. Our journey of making friends with ourselves is not a selfish thing. We’re not trying to get all the goodies for ourselves. It’s a process of developing loving-kindness and a true understanding for other people as well.

three
finding our own true nature

I
n one of the Buddha’s discourses, he talks about the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the really bad horse. The excellent horse, according to the sutra,
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moves before the whip even touches its back; just the shadow of the whip or the slightest sound from the driver is enough to make the horse move. The good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip on its back. The poor horse doesn’t go until it feels pain, and the very bad horse doesn’t budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.

When Shunryu Suzuki tells the story in his book
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, he says that when people hear this sutra, they always want to be the best horse, but actually, when we sit, it doesn’t matter whether we’re the best horse or the worst horse. He goes on to say that in fact, the really terrible horse is the best practitioner.

What I have realized through practicing is that practice isn’t about being the best horse or the good
horse or the poor horse or the worst horse. It’s about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty; that’s what other people respond to.

Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana
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practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn’t visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn’t feel natural to me. I was quite miserable because everybody else seemed to be having all kinds of visualizations and doing very well. He said, ‘I’m always suspicious of the ones who say everything’s going well. If you think that things are going well, then it’s usually some kind of arrogance. If it’s too easy for you, you just relax. You don’t make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.’ So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. When you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!

Dainin Katagiri Roshi once told a story about his own experience of being the worst horse. When he first came to the United States from Japan, he was a
young monk in his late twenties. He had been a monk in Japan – where everything was so precise, so clean, and so neat – for a long time. In the U.S., his students were hippies with long, unwashed hair and ragged clothes and no shoes. He didn’t like them. He couldn’t help it – he just couldn’t stand those hippies. Their style offended everything in him. He said, ‘So all day I would give talks about compassion, and at night I would go home and weep and cry because I realized I had no compassion at all. Because I didn’t like my students, therefore I had to work much harder to develop my heart.’ As Suzuki Roshi says in his talk, that’s exactly the point: because we find ourselves to be the worst horse, we are inspired to try harder.

At Gampo Abbey we had a Tibetan monk, Lama Sherap Tendar, teaching us to play the Tibetan musical instruments. We had forty-nine days in which to learn the music; we were also going to learn many other things, we thought, during that time. But as it turned out, for forty-nine days, twice a day, all we did was learn to play the cymbals and the drum and how they are played together. Every day we would practice and practice. We would practice on our own, and then we would play for Lama Sherap, who would sit there with this pained little look on his face. Then he would take our hands and show us how to play. Then we would do it by ourselves, and he would sigh. This went on for forty-nine days. He never said that we were doing well, but he was very sweet and very
gentle. Finally, when it was all over and we had had our last performance, we were making toasts and remarks and Lama Sherap said, ‘Actually you were very good. You were very good right from the beginning, but I knew if I told you that you were good, you would stop trying.’ He was right. He had such a gentle way of encouraging us that it didn’t make us angry with him and it didn’t make us lose heart. It just made us feel that he knew the proper way to play the cymbals; he’d been playing these cymbals since he was a little boy, and we just had to keep trying. So for forty-nine days we really worked hard.

We can work with ourselves in the same way. We don’t have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse. We could be very sympathetic with that and use it as a motivation to keep trying to develop ourselves, to find our own true nature. Not only will we find our own true nature, but we’ll learn about other people, because in our heart of hearts almost all of us feel that we are the worst horse. You might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or you might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you’re the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

In his talk, Suzuki Roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is
one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it’s actually the motivation. When you find yourself slumping, that’s the motivation to sit up, not out of self-denigration but actually out of pride in everything that occurs to you, pride in who you are just as you are, pride in the goodness or the fairness or the worstness of yourself – however you find yourself – some sort of sense of taking pride and using it to spur you on.

The Karma Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in which the students of Chögyam Trungpa are trained, is sometimes called the ‘mishap lineage,’ because of the ways in which the wise and venerated teachers of this lineage ‘blew it’ time after time. First there was Tilopa, who was a madman, completely wild. His main student was Naropa. Naropa was so conceptual and intellectual that it took him twelve years of being run over by a truck, of being put through all sorts of trials by his teacher, for him to begin to wake up. He was so conceptual that if somebody would tell him something, he would say, ‘Oh yes, but surely by
that
you must mean this.’ He had that kind of mind. His main student was Marpa, who was famous for his intensely bad temper. He used to fly into rages, beat people, and yell at them. He was also a drunk. He was notorious for being incredibly stubborn. His student was Milarepa. Milarepa was a murderer! Rinpoche used to say that Marpa became a student of the dharma because he thought he could make a lot
of money by bringing texts back from India and translating them into Tibetan. His student Milarepa became a student because he was afraid he was going to go to hell for having murdered people – that scared him.

Milarepa’s student was Gampopa (after whom Gampo Abbey is named). Because everything was easy for him, Gampopa was arrogant. For instance, the night before he met Gampopa for the first time, Milarepa said to some of his disciples, ‘Oh, someone who is destined to be my main student is going to come tomorrow. Whoever brings him to me will be greatly benefited.’ So when Gampopa arrived in the town, an old lady who saw him ran out and said, ‘Oh, Milarepa told us you were coming and that you were destined to be one of his main students, and I want my daughter to bring you to see him.’ So Gampopa, thinking, ‘I must be really hot stuff,’ went very proudly to meet Milarepa, sure that he would be greeted with great honor. However, Milarepa had had someone put him in a cave and wouldn’t see Gampopa for three weeks.

As for Gampopa’s main student, the first Karmapa, the only thing we know about him is that he was extremely ugly. He was said to look like a monkey. Also, there’s one story about him and three other main disciples of Gampopa who were thrown out of the monastery for getting drunk and singing and dancing and breaking the monastic rules.

We could all take heart. These are the wise ones
who sit in front of us, to whom we prostrate when we do prostrations. We can prostrate to them as an example of your own wisdom mind of enlightened beings, but perhaps it’s also good to prostrate to them as confused, mixed-up people with a lot of neurosis, just like ourselves. They are good examples of people who never gave up on themselves and were not afraid to be themselves, who therefore found their own genuine quality and their own true nature.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It’s who we are right now, and that’s what we can make friends with and celebrate.

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A discourse or teaching by the Buddha.

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The ‘diamond vehicle.’ The practice of taking the result as the path.

four
precision, gentleness, and letting go

I
n meditation and in our daily lives there are three qualities that we can nurture, cultivate, and bring out. We already possess these, but they can be ripened: precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go.

When the Buddha taught, he didn’t say that we were bad people or that there was some sin that we had committed – original or otherwise – that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh than gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share, something that can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was. It isn’t a sin that we are in the dark room. It’s just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. It brightens up our life considerably. We can start to read books, to see one another’s faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to enjoy the little animals that creep in and out of the room.

In the same way, if we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness,
and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we’re doing.

The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.

Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness. Throughout this month of meditation practice, we will work with
cultivating gentleness, innate precision, and the ability to let go of small-mindedness, learning how to open to our thoughts and emotions, to all the people we meet in our world, how to open our minds and hearts.

This is not an improvement plan; it is not a situation in which you try to be better than you are now. If you have a bad temper and you feel that you harm yourself and others, you might think that sitting for a week or a month will make your bad temper go away – you will be that sweet person that you always wanted to be. Never again will a harsh word leave your lily-white lips, The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. Someone who is very angry also has a lot of energy; that energy is what’s so juicy about him or her. That’s the reason people love that person. The idea isn’t to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness. That means not judging yourself as a bad person, but also not bolstering yourself up by saying, ‘It’s good that I’m this way, it’s right that I’m this way. Other people are terrible, and I’m right to be so angry at them all the time.’ The gentleness involves not repressing the anger but also not acting
it out. It is something much softer and more open-hearted than any of that. It involves learning how, once you have fully acknowledged the feeling of anger and the knowledge of who you are and what you do, to let it go. You can let go of the usual pitiful little story line that accompanies anger and begin to see clearly how you keep the whole thing going. So whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression – whatever it might be – the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.