Living Life As It Is: Chapter 6
May All Beings Be Happy, Even Those You Dislike
Chapter Six: May All Beings Be Happy, Even Those You Dislike
If you would like to be selfish,
you should do it in a very intelligent way.
The stupid way to be selfish is seeking happiness for ourselves alone.
The intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others.
~ The Dalai Lama
Intelligently Selfish: Enlightened Self Interest
In the last chapter I wrote that “without others, there is no self.” I lost my ‘self’ through the continuous self-focus I had over the last five years, as I siloed myself from others. It seemed justified. When I wasn’t having a trauma attack, my extreme Covid-consciousness seemed rational. When I was having a trauma attack, I knew for sure I was reacting from past triggers.
I drifted farther and farther away from my North Star, the sense of meaning I found in the Dharma that steered my intentions. Sure, I kept meditating, practicing, podcasting, and leading the sangha, but deep inside I still held fear and suspicion. And, again, I rationalized it as taking care of myself by avoiding known risks to my health. It seemed like wise selfishness, but it was foolish selfish.
In the book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, The Dalai Lama talks about wise selfish and foolish selfish:
Now there is nothing inherently wrong with pursuing one’s own interests. On the contrary, to do so is a natural expression of our fundamental disposition to seek happiness and to shun suffering. In fact, it is because we care for our own needs that we have the natural capacity to appreciate others’ kindness and love. This instinct for self-interest becomes negative only when we are excessively self-focused.
When this happens, our vision narrows, undermining our ability to see things in their wider context. And within such a narrow perspective, even small problems can create tremendous frustration and seem unbearable. In such a state, should genuinely major challenges arise, the danger is that we will lose all hope, feel desperate and alone, and become consumed with self-pity.
What is important is that when pursuing our own self-interest we should be ‘wise selfish’ and not ‘foolish selfish.’ Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone. Being wise selfish means being compassionate.
It's impossible for me to read this without cringing about the excessive self-focus I’ve been confessing in this book. And this part of the quote is the essence of the struggles I’ve had with right view and I believe it’s the essence of how many responded to the upside-down world the pandemic shifted us into:
Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone. Being wise selfish means being compassionate.
Yes, I cringe, recognizing myself in the description of narrow shortsightedness. But I see how someone could read that and apply a foolish rationality that looking out for your own welfare is critical during a severe global threat like a pandemic. We were all freaked at first and some of us took much longer to emerge from that cloud of fear and enter the world again. Of course, those with severe immunocompromised conditions, like those caused by chemotherapy or immune suppressants used in transplant and stem cell and bone marrow replacements, were responding correctly to the continuing threat of a potential Covid infection.
I am immunocompromised by Systemic Lupus and long-term steroid use, but my situation isn’t as critical as those undergoing chemo, etc. My system has always over-responded to viruses, causing me to be more ill for a longer period than others. That fact caused me to be extremely risk averse. Where that seemingly rational response to Covid drifted farther and farther away from right view was when I was subconsciously equating people=threat. Like the quote from the book, “When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers” by Robert Snyder I used in the previous chapter, the story in my head that put down long roots was this:
Would someone’s cough infect you with Covid-19, setting off a catastrophic cascade of events that would lead you to die alone in a hospital bed? There was no way to know.
Now, obviously, with respect to His Holiness The Dalai Lama, I was not an essential worker, those people that kept us alive, fed, and clothed. I could not make a direct contribution “to the welfare of everyone.” But this is where the wisdom of Buddhist teachings, of “taking a broader view” and “being wise selfish” and compassionate, enter.
And as Robert Snyder later pointed out about the people directly looking out for the welfare of everyone in his book:
Small gestures accumulated, direct ties forged larger bonds, and in the work of people as varied as clergy, retail workers, nurses, doctors, EMTs, and restaurant owners, I glimpsed a little-recognized truth of the pandemic: in the days when New York felt abandoned and besieged, it was saved from the bottom up.
He goes on to write that this solidarity “must be remembered and understood if we are to fully fathom the history of the pandemic and grasp what needs to be done better in the next public health emergency.”
I would add another reason why it needs to remembered and who needs to remember it. We all need to remember it, not just public health officials and historians. We need to take this wide view to be able to care about others because they, too, are just as messed up and frightened as we are. Everyone expresses fear and foolishness differently, but it doesn’t mean we aren’t essentially the same.
One of the key teachings in Buddhism is found in the Upajjhatthana Sutta. They are the “Five Remembrances”. These are what we should practice remembering as our anchor to right view. These remembrances are typically recited in the first person but can be recited beginning with “we” instead of “I”:
1. I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape old age.
2. I am of the nature to get sick, I cannot escape sickness.
3. I am of the nature to die, I cannot escape death.
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
5. I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind. My actions are my continuation.
In the article “Buddhism’s “Five Remembrances” Are Wake-Up Calls for Us All” by Koun Franz, appearing in “Lion’s Roar” he wrote:
We shouldn’t pretend otherwise…. We are all going to lose what we have…. We are all of this nature. Some of my most grounded and simple moments in relationship to this practice have taken place in settings like subway stations, moments of being crowded in by hundreds or thousands of people and looking out at so many faces, more than you can process, and then thinking, “Oh, we’re ALL this. Everything that is true to me about this practice is true to them.” It changes the room. It changes the air. Not because something good happened, but because that’s my one brief honest look at where I am.
We shouldn’t forget and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But we do.
Just because people reacted to the pandemic with anger, blame, conspiracy thinking, or denial didn’t mean they weren’t afraid. It was just their way of dealing with it. We’re all somewhat afraid or apprehensive of the things we try to remember in the Five Remembrances. Many (most?) of us are so afraid of impermanence, change, and growing old that we deny the recognition of those facts in our conscious experience and wish not to be reminded of them in the lives of those around us.
We are surprised when we meet with a family member or friend who we haven’t seen for a while, and they look older. News of people in our lives taking ill or dying shock us. The fear of aging, illness, death, and change is so pervasive that our culture is driven by distracting ourselves with work, acquiring wealth and things, and participating in hyper wellness fads and longevity hacks.
But we couldn’t be distracted anymore when the pandemic forced us isolate in our homes, stop working, and stare into the face of illness, death, and massive global change. That is why the pandemic was an opening to see things as they are, a cultural apocalypse, revealing the truth of interdependence and impermanence, to transform the way we see the world and all others in it.
In this book’s Introduction, I wrote:
I read somewhere that it was hard to find journals or personal writing reflecting on the 1918 Spanish flu. Those who lived at the time commented that so many were ashamed of their behavior that they wouldn’t share any writing. I wanted to write about how I was behaving; how I was thinking and feeling. I wanted to use my writing to observe my responses to the pandemic, and the responses of those around me and on social media. I wanted to write truthfully about what I was thinking and feeling.
This is what Robert Snyder wrote in his reflections on an online meeting of historians and other interested professionals, where they realized the importance of documenting the “unfolding disaster for future generations.” He wrote:
We were determined to avoid the unfathomable precedent of the last great pandemic to sweep New York City, the flu of 1918, which took some thirty thousand lives but was not marked by a single memorial and left no long-term impact on public consciousness.
We forgot. And, when the Covid pandemic stormed us, we pretended otherwise. We pretended that we weren’t of the nature to grow old, to get sick, to die. We forgot that we weren’t of the nature to lose all that is dear to us and that everyone we love are of the nature to change.
As Koun Franz wrote in the Lion’s Roar article, “Oh, we’re ALL this. Everything that is true to me about this practice is true to them.” But it takes a broader view to remember this and to fight our instinct to pretend otherwise.
The Seemingly Impossible Bodhisattva Vows & The Five Remembrances
Many Mahayana Buddhists take the Bodhisattva vows. I have taken them. They are:
Beings are numberless; I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.
The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realize it.
Taking these vows is an internal commitment based on embracing the fact that we’re all confused and suffering in some way. Doing this depends on a wider view. Pema Chodron quotes her teacher Chogyam Trungpa, saying: “The essence of the Mahayana is thinking bigger.”
The language in Mahayana texts uses big images and big numbers. It also uses big promises, like in the Bodhisattva Vows, which are—in the conventional view of things—impossible. At least it is impossible for our conceptual thinking to comprehend.
REALLY???!! With our everyday, walking-around conceptual mind we're thinking: "If beings are numberless, how the heck can I vow to free them? If I can't even number them … I can't find them all … And if I can't locate them, I can't free them … And how can I—this individual, flawed "I" free them anyway??? I can't even free myself from my own thinking and mental story-telling that seems to capture me like some alien???"
Bodhicitta is a central part of the bodhisattva vow. Bodhicitta translates to "awakening mind" or "thought of enlightenment," representing the compassionate motivation to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. It's a core concept and the defining quality of a bodhisattva.
Based on the bigness of this task, Bodhicitta begins with imagining. In my podcast episode, Everyday Buddhism 68 - The Buddha's Wife: Yasodhara and the Buddha with Vanessa Sasson, Sasson urged us to see Buddhism with an engaged imagination. And Pema Chodron puts a realistic exclamation point on this. In her book, Becoming Bodhisattvas: A Guidebook for Compassionate Action, she writes:
This is the aspiration of a bodhisattva. Don't worry about results; just open your heart in an inconceivably big way, in that limitless way that benefits everyone you encounter.
As Pema Chodron teaches, even if it seems impossible, we just open our hearts in a big way. It doesn’t matter whether beings are numberless and their delusions are endless, our jobs as baby bodhisattvas is to set the intention to open our hearts to everyone and everything. The only way we can interrupt our habitual, reactive tendencies leading to confusion and pain is to take responsibility for our own minds.
If we meet all the circumstances in life without dancing with reactivity, our experience of life changes. A certain spaciousness begins to reveal itself where there once were ongoing fights with emotional reactions. That spaciousness is equanimity. And with equanimity comes peace and true compassion for ourselves and those around us. This is how we fulfill the second vow of ending the inexhaustible delusions.
That compassion isn’t forced. It isn’t the result of “vowing to be a Bodhisattva” but a natural result of the space we created in our lives when we let the experiences of life and our emotional reactions to them come and go naturally.
Bodhicitta deepens the concept of compassion with the experience of emptiness or sunyata. Bodhicitta, then, is an experience of awakening, awakening to life not bound by emotional reactions but with the freedom to walk through every door, every experience, without being frightened of our reactions, which is entering the boundless Dharma gates. Every reaction opens another door to experiencing life as it is, and not as emotional reactions mislead us.
This is when intention gets supercharged. This ain't no regular intention. :) This is intention charged with wisdom. This is dedication and commitment. With this commitment, we know it is, indeed, up to us to save all beings. We save them by not allowing ourselves to stay asleep in our ignorance but to wake up to everything life throws at us, without reactivity.
When we get practiced at this, we notice a shift in our perception, a shift that doesn't hold on to our own or others' stories, a shift that doesn't depend on words or concepts but on our calm and steady minds. This is the glimpse of Bodhicitta, a glimpse of awakening into our Buddha Nature that allows us to see the peace that can be in our mind rather than our fight with reactions and concepts. This awakening enables us to see ourselves as part of the whole of life without a discrete unchanging self.
Remember Right View is the understanding and active acceptance of impermanence, change, and the emptiness of an inherent or unchanging self, as well as the emptiness of all other phenomena. This is the stuff that supercharges our intentions and supercharges our compassion for others, transforming it from idiot compassion to true compassion.
The concept of "idiot compassion" came from Chogyam Trungpa who borrowed it from Gurdjieff when he said that we are all idiots in different ways. I certainly agree with that, and the awesomeness of Buddhist practice is that it teaches us to recognize that we are idiots in one way or another and be OK about it, while working to be less of one.
Idiot compassion is being nice or being good without truly understanding if it will help or hurt. True compassion is ready to cause pain if necessary. Compassion and wisdom are the two oars in our journey as budding bodhisattvas. With only compassion and no wisdom, we row with one oar, and we go around in circles.
We have been brought up and live in a culture that supports the belief—the fantasy—that we have control over our lives and what happens to us. That is part of the ignorance that is part of our human condition and that causes us to suffer.
The Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana sutra that is part of the broader Prajanaparamita, or Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which in Sanskrit is called the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, translated as the Vajra (or Diamond) Cutter Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra or The Perfection of Wisdom Text that Cuts Like a Thunderbolt. This speaks to the strengths of the vajra, which is referred to as a diamond, thunderbolt, or a powerful weapon, and is a metaphor for the type of wisdom that shatters illusions to get to ultimate reality.
The Diamond Sutra has the Buddha teaching how to grab hold of our minds so that we can watch calmly as our reactions come and go. In the sutra, the Buddha's senior student, Subhuti, asks the Buddha, "How, Lord, should one who has set out on the bodhisattva path take his stand, how should he proceed, how should he control the mind?"
The Buddha answers by saying that a bodhisattva should have the intention that he should bring all beings to nirvana, but he continues to say that after he has brought all beings to nirvana, "no living beings whatsoever have been brought to nirvana."
I know that this seems like nonsense or a Zen koan adventure, but in fact, this is exactly what I've been writing about. If we learn to "control our mind" as Subhuti asked, we are learning to watch reactions come and go, experiences come and go, emotions come and go, knowing that is the suchness or emptiness of life. Things come and go. The trick is to not grasp on to them ‘as things’ or not to reify them, turning them into fixed, permanent things.
As I've shared before in many places, one of my favorite teachings and mantras that I took from my Sensei, Rev. Koyo Kubose and his father, Rev. Gyomay Kubose, is "everyday one thing after another" like a flowing stream.
As we learn to take hold of our minds, each experience and each person becomes less and less a fixed thing because we have the wisdom that sees people as empty of an inherent, unchanging self and not as the "beings" we thought they were. Once we can liberate our minds from this concept of fixed things, we have liberated ourselves from the grasping that leads to suffering and liberated all other beings at that same time.
And this takes us to the fourth vow, vowing to realize the Buddha way. This vow has also been taught as “Ways of awakening are limitless: may I know them all.” The more we practice being with our experiences of life rather than being caught in a cycle of reactions, the more it becomes a natural practice. Once we get the first glimpse of spaciousness when an emotional reaction arises and passes away without our involvement, the more we are determined to experience watching rather than reacting to emotions, again and again.
This is freedom unlike anything else we have experienced. It's like the freedom of a flower who blooms without thinking who deserves to experience its beauty and who does not. It freely offers its beauty and fragrance because that is what it does. The flower doesn't cling to its struggle as a bud under the heavy weight of Spring snow, saying "poor me, look what I've been through." The flower doesn't worry if people walk by without noticing it or if it is growing in a sidewalk crack. The flower doesn't worry about when it will be cut down by the first frost.
When we have glimpsed that peace, we have glimpsed the awakening that the flower naturally has, that our Buddha Nature naturally is. We have the same freedom as the flower, to bloom despite our circumstances. We bring others peace and beauty, naturally, no matter who they are or what they think and do. We respond naturally to whatever arises.
I hope you enjoyed this free offering of Chapter Six of my new book!
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Love so much about this... But I think the flower analogy is my favorite passage!