Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong
Introduction
turn difficulties into opportunities—
proving this assumption false. In fact, our minds, our character, our patterns of thought and emotion, are much more fluid than we thought they were. Our brains are renewed through activity and reflection; they are, as scientists say, plastic. So our minds are trainable. Our basic patterns of thought and feeling can be different. This
Changing the habit of avoiding difficulty to the habit of engaging it creatively may be the single most important factor for training the mind.
When we are no longer daunted by difficulties but are willing to engage and make use of them, we become truly resilient individuals.
1. Resolve to Begin
Here are the four points: First, The rarity and preciousness of human life.
vivid (describing the microbes inside up - alive and vivid)
The next three points are also awesome but less pleasant. Second: The absolute inevitability of death.
you are fifty, is it 95 percent gone. There’s not nearly as much time left as you thought there was.
In Buddhism this is called karma, which is not mystical or fatalistic. Karma simply means that each of our actions produces a result. And this means every action, both large and small. All of our thoughts, words, and deeds have consequences, and we may never know the measure of these consequences though they are extensive and powerful.
every moment so far in our lives, we have been affecting the world in some subtle yet real way; every moment, we have been participating in creating the world that now exists for ourselves and others.
All of us together are making the world. So we have to ask ourselves: “How am I living? What kind of actions am I taking? Am I a force for good in the world or am I just another person doing nothing to help and therefore making things worse?”
Fourth: The inescapability of suffering.
There’s the suffering of loss, of disappointment, of disrespect; the suffering of physical pain, illness, old age; the suffering of broken relationships, of wanting something badly and not being able to have it, or not wanting something and being stuck with it. There’s the inevitable suffering of painful, afflictive emotions, like jealousy, grief, anger, hatred, confusion, anguish—all kinds of emotions
2. Train in Empathy and Compassion, Part 1: Absolute Compassion
Sympathy, on the other hand, is empathy plus caring. When we’re sympathetic to others, we want them to be happy and well, we don’t want them to be upset or unhappy. We actually care about them. Compassion is sympathy for others specifically in the case of their suffering.
Relative bodhicitta is when I roll up my sleeves and get on with the business of actually loving somebody. Relative bodhicitta is when I try to do something, to help somehow, to offer encouragement, support, food, clothing, better laws, improved political systems, and so on. With relative bodhicitta we make efforts that we are successful at or unsuccessful at, we suffer losses and cry over those losses, our hearts are broken and we grieve, or we take delight in our own delight and the delight of others.
In Zen we frequently chant four vows, the first of which is “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” What a commitment! Who in their right mind would make such a vow?
There are many Zen stories whose burden is “Don’t be so fixated on meditation as a means of calming the mind and getting insight. Just pay attention to your life right now.”
This slogan tells us to take these practices into our everyday lives, postmeditation, and introduce an element of childlike delight. Maybe we can cheer ourselves up.
There are many ways to practice this. You can stop every now and then and look out the window. What do you see out there: a tree, the sky, a tall building? Whatever it is, why not take it in for a moment with wonder.
You will feel not only that you are loved but that love is built into the nature of what you are and of what the world is, so that you are never apart from it. Knowing this, you can risk caring and loving. You don’t have to be afraid of it anymore. You will not be hurt. Your love will be received, and it will always be healing. Knowing this is so through the practice of these slogans, you can begin to practice relative bodhicitta.
3. Train in Empathy and Compassion, Part 2: Relative Compassion
Zen meditation is radically simple: just sit still and breathe and see what happens.
Feeling another’s pain as our own is painful. And it turns out that it’s impossible to take in the pain of another unless we are able to take in our own pain. And most of us are not so good at accepting our own pain; we prefer to deny it or distract ourselves from it. We are so intent on making our own pain go away that we don’t allow ourselves to feel it. We can’t take it in. Consequently we are incapable of feeling another’s pain, so we are incapable of actual compassion, although we may think we are quite compassionate.
She had many friends who kept trying to comfort her. Not only did their efforts leave her completely untouched, they actually made her angry. Her grief had given her a deadly accurate insincerity meter, so she felt people’s fear and avoidance much more than she felt the consolation they were trying to offer her with their words and pats on the shoulder.
The practice of sending and receiving has two main purposes: first, to train your heart to do what it usually does not want to do: to go toward, rather than away from, what’s painful and difficult in your own life; and second, to realize that your own suffering and the suffering of others are not different.
We can visualize the pain and suffering as a dark, sticky substance or smoke or some kind of goo that we are breathing in, taking into our bodies. The goo is coming from all around us, and we are taking it in, with all the pores of our body as well as though our nostrils as we breathe in.
As the slogan says, this process starts with yourself. You begin by breathing in your own pain and suffering. Whether it’s your anger or your fear, your confusion, your grief, your loss, your resentment, your disappointment, maybe your hatred of some person, whatever it is, you breathe it in. Or maybe you have an illness. Then you breathe in your illness, your cancer, your pain, your weak or damaged heart, your confused immune system. You breathe in the poison of your illness, and you fully digest it and you send out healing and blissful energy to yourself, you send it back to yourself.
Sending and receiving practice might seem daunting when you first hear about it. It might seem impossible. But keep in mind that the point is not to be able to do all of this perfectly, exactly as described, but simply to try your best to do whatever you can. When
You might find this nearly impossible to do. And it might bring up fear, anger, resentment, even terror. If so, relax and return to openness of mind. You can try again later. It’s important to take the practice slowly and gently and to pay attention to fear and resistance for what it is, to realize that feeling these things is not a barrier to the practice—it is the practice at this stage.
Your fear and resistance are your path right now, so it is important not to back away from them but to engage them.
(something large or small, even a minor irritation: it is a feature of this practice, and of Buddhist practice in general, that small things and large things are both important and to be taken seriously—and lightly).
Three objects, three poisons, three seeds of virtue—
Turn things
The “three poisons” (greed, hate, and delusion) are the emotional activities we indulge in in response to the three objects.
The three objects and three poisons describe basic ordinary daily life. “Objects” constantly arise, and we are constantly trying to grab them and make them stay or push them away as soon as possible, depending on the style of our reactivity and emotion.
We wake up in the morning and feel too cold or too hot or just right. This makes us feel pleasant or irritated or neutral. Our coffee is tasty or not so tasty, and we’re slightly pleased or annoyed. Our thoughts are pleasant or not so pleasant. All day long objects appear to our perception, feeling, and thought, and all day long we are reacting in simple, basic ways to each and every object: wonderful, let’s keep this one; terrible, let’s get rid of this one; neutral, I don’t care about this one. All day long this flows on, usually without much discernable problem. But occasionally our likes or dislikes become strongly activated by objects, and then we become powerfully happy or miserable, overcome with lust or desire or anger or fear. All day long, based on this flow of experience, we are making tiny and sometimes large choices. We never choose the things we don’t like; we choose the things we like. To some extent, we have control over our choices—unfortunately, ultimately, and sadly for us, not enough control. Quite often we cannot avoid losing what we find attractive and having to put up with what we find unattractive. And in the biggest picture of our lives, we always end up losing what we want (our loved ones, our health) and having to put up with what we don’t want (our aging, our illness, our death, and the loss of our loved ones).
Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.” Our suffering, our troubles, our problems, the things that we really don’t like and want to get rid of but can’t, or the losses we feel, the things we wanted to keep and sadly cannot—all of this is a treasure to us if only we can understand it in the right way. Everything painful and difficult has the potential to bring us great joy and deep spiritual riches.
We can practice this slogan by writing it down, contemplating it carefully, and bringing it up when we find ourselves annoyed or upset by instances of liking and disliking that are causing us suffering. This practice might help us to let go a little in that moment. Even if we don’t believe it and are, at this point, only a little intrigued by it, it can be helpful to practice this slogan. It will have the effect of causing us to stop our lamentation for a moment and recall that it might just be possible that there is something potentially good and positive in this agony we are right now enmeshed in.
Suppose you understood all of your pain and suffering as raw material for transformation and healing. Your life would be completely different.
4. Transform Bad Circumstances into the Path
The Song Dynasty poet Su Shih (who was also a government official) once came to visit him and, standing on the ground far below the meditating master, asked what possessed him to live in such a dangerous manner. The roshi answered, “You call this dangerous? What you are doing is far more dangerous!” Living normally in the world, ignoring death, impermanence, and loss and suffering, as we all routinely do, as if this were a normal and a safe way to live, is actually much more dangerous than going out on a limb to meditate.
The practice of Transforming bad circumstances into the path is associated with the practice of patience, my all-time favorite spiritual quality. Patience is the capacity to welcome difficulty when it comes, with a spirit of strength, endurance, forbearance, and dignity rather than fear, anxiety, and avoidance.
The practice of patience is simple enough. When difficulty arises, notice the obvious and not so obvious ways we try to avoid it.
oryoki.
Everything that happens, disastrous as it may be, and no matter whose fault it is, has a potential benefit, no matter how bad it may seem at first. That’s the nature of something happening, that it has a potential benefit, and it’s your job to find out how to turn it into a benefit.
Without hesitation you eat the snake head. You accept reality, you accept responsibility, and you figure out what to do next.
But our dependence on others did not end there. We didn’t grow up and become independent. Now we can hold up our heads, fix our dinner, wipe our butt, and we seem not to need our mother or father to take care us—so we think we are autonomous. We think there is no longer a need to be grateful to others for our lives. But consider this for a moment. Did you grow the food that sustains you every day? Did you till the soil, milk the cow, gather the eggs, kill the chicken? Did you make the car or train that takes you to work? Did you make the road? Extract the fuel? Sew your clothing? Build your house with lumber you milled? How do you live?
We can say “person” as if there could be such an autonomous thing, but in fact there is no such thing. There is no such thing as a person. There are only persons who have cocreated one another over the long history of our species. The idea of an independent, isolated, atomized person is impossible.
Literally every thought in our minds, every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance that we need to get through the day, comes through the kindness of and the interaction with others. And not only other people but nonhumans too, literally the whole of the earth, the soil, the sky, the trees, the air we breathe, the water we drink. We not only depend on all of this, we are all of it and it is us. This is no theory, no poetic religious teaching. It is simply the bald fact of the matter.
Unhappiness and gratitude simply cannot exist in the same moment.
The sixth slogan is: Whatever you meet is the path. Like the final slogan that closes the second point, this one sums up all the others under the heading of the third point: whatever happens, good or bad, make it part of your spiritual practice.
5. Make Practice Your Whole Life
we study the jealousy. We become curious, almost scientific about it. How does it feel inside? How does it cause us to think and want to act? We study the jealousy until we can see it as a kind of entity, as if it were an independent person rather than a part of ourselves. And then we can reproach the jealousy. “Here you are again, my skillful, silly old opponent. Many times you have fooled me and taken me in, but not this time! I reproach you with all my heart! I see you but I am not taken in!” The jealousy is not us, it is not ourselves, it is simply something very disadvantageous that is arising. We don’t have to be so convinced by it and we don’t have to take it so personally .
In his commentary on this slogan, the great Tibetan master Trungpa Rimpoche spoke of making speeches to our various bad habits: To our selfishness, for instance, we could say, “You know, you are a terrible person, you have caused me so much trouble, I’m so tired of you, and you know I just don’t like you anymore! It’s all because of you that I have all of these problems, and you know what? I’m not going to hang around with you anymore! And who are you anyway? I’m fed up, go away! I have absolutely no use for you at all!”
The trick is to keep on making effort in the direction of fulfillment of the aspiration but not to think that you will actually complete the job—and not to be dismayed or discouraged by this but instead to be encouraged by it.
Much more difficult and much more wonderful is to be a bodhisattva. Not someone that many people know about and talk about but someone who has the almost magical power of spreading happiness and confidence wherever he goes.
To think of everything you do, every action, every social role, every task, as being just a cover for, an excuse for, your real aspiration, to be a bodhisattva, spreading goodness wherever you go.
When I train caregivers for the dying in spiritual hospice care, I always tell them that the work they do isn’t about death, it’s about life. You are alive as long as you are alive, and when you are not, you are not. It’s a mistake to think of a hospice patient as “dying.” The patient is alive as long as she is alive.
6. Assess and Extend
Don’t be so stuck on yourself! Open up! Mind training comes down to this. Keeping this slogan close by at all times is a good tool for seeing how you are doing. Whenever you feel upset, unhappy, dissatisfied, in a snit, frozen, constricted, bound—check and see. Probably if you reflect deeply enough, you’ll come to the realization that the ultimate cause of this unpleasantness is that you are in one way or another stuck on yourself, favoring yourself and your own needs, desires, and viewpoint more than
Think of others. Try to do something to make them happy. Anything: something small like “Hello, how are you?” And mean it. This is a way to assess your practice as you go along, a question to ask yourself on a regular basis: Am I less stuck on myself, more available to others than I used to be? Am I thinking positively and generously of others more often? Be honest about your answers to these questions. If you have to admit that no, you are not thinking more of others, you are just as stuck on yourself as you ever were, that’s okay, that’s information.
You know what you have to do. Invite someone out to lunch. Ask someone how she is. Practice more sending and receiving.
To improve this quite accustomed state, imagine you’re in the middle of a crowd, a crowd of good, kind, serious people who like you and inspire you to comport yourself with the same degree of dignity that they do. Surrounded by such people, naturally you feel at your best. You pay attention to what you are doing and you take care of things with appreciation as soon as they arise. Imagine feeling this way when you are alone, inspired and elevated by your own company!
This is an astonishing thing to contemplate: that the person we feel inside is a distortion of some kind, a bad habit. That this person is not actually ourselves; it’s our self-clinging, our self-confusion that we’re experiencing and calling our self. The actual human subjectivity, the true principal witness, is a miraculous experience.
7. The Discipline of Relationship
Regardless of how calm, good, and nice we think we have become, as long as we and others have desires and needs, we will clash, and if we don’t expect this and learn how to deal with it, we will either have to live in some sequestered self-protective way or be embroiled in stressful controversy much of the time.
Gradually we learn that when we are different, others are different too, because without our understanding that we have been doing this, we have been cocreating with others the conflicts and interpersonal hassles of our lives.
the four reflections that we considered under the first slogan, Train in the preliminaries: The rarity and preciousness of human life. The absolute inevitability of death. The awesome and indelible power of our actions. The inescapability of suffering.
Don’t talk about faults. If you were to practice this slogan as an absolute, literal rule, it would do wonders for your relationships. Imagine never, under any circumstances, discussing the faults of others. Try it for a week. You will probably discover with some shock how much of what you say (and hear) involves in one way or another discussing the faults of others. But if you could actually refrain from this kind of speech entirely, you would become an unusually likeable person. Others, without knowing why, would be drawn to you. This is because it is completely normal for people to speak critically, even disparagingly, of one another. Even friends do it to and about friends.
You can always count on the fact that people who behave badly have been injured. If you need to correct them, you can do so with that in mind. With some sympathy. Such people need to figure out how to heal their wounds someday, and very likely your speaking to them or about them harshly and with disrespect will not bring that about. It won’t inspire them, you, or other listeners. In fact, the opposite is probably the case: speaking to or about a wounded, nasty person with kindness and warmth—when the person has been conditioned by almost all of his or her relationships to expect the opposite—may indeed cause surprising transformation. But this is hard, if not impossible, to do if you don’t really see and appreciate the injury in the first place. If you see only the fault and not the injury. So practicing Don’t talk about faults would involve noticing when you are doing this, remembering that there’s an injury behind every fault, softening, and then maybe conditioning yourself, little by little, to speak differently.
Jack Himmelstein, of the Center for Understanding in Conflict, has a very wise saying about this: “We judge ourselves by our intentions; we judge others by the effects of their actions on us.”
This slogan says, give up this strategy. When you find yourself thinking about someone else’s motives, needs, or feelings, catch yourself and recognize that your thoughts and perceptions are probably quite wide of the mark. Catch yourself in midthought and remember that you don’t really know what someone else is thinking or feeling.
Work with your biggest problems first. Each one of us is given our own personal gift of craziness, our own preferred tendency for decompensation. Some get angry, some depressed, some anxious. Some are meddlesome, some lazy, some hyperactive, some distractible. One of the insights of mind training (and it comes as a great relief) is that there is no normal. We are all abnormal, each in our own delightful way. The trick is, first, to accept this, and next, to have some idea of the most important ways in which you are abnormal. Let’s say it’s anger. You anger easily, and when you are angry you are miserable, and you inevitably say and do stupid things for which you later feel remorse and shame—and you’ve been this way all of your life. So good, now you are aware of your personal gift, your treasure. I have already mentioned Suzuki Roshi’s crucial saying, “For a Zen student, a weed is a treasure.” Rather than seeing your problem with anger as a personal defect to be hidden or overcome, you see this weed as a treasure. You don’t resolve to work on other things and save this most difficult one for later. You resolve to pay attention to it now and keep on paying attention until, through your continued attention over time, things begin to change.
It seems that we don’t. Inside, we probably all feel pretty much the same as we felt when we were ten years old: our basic feeling of subjectivity, of being ourselves, is exactly the same, despite all the surface changes it seems we have undergone, decade by decade, year by year, moment by moment.
My thought of what it is going to be like when I arrive in Mexico is never the same as what it is actually like when I arrive in Mexico, even though I have been to Mexico many times and know what to expect. The concrete, visceral reality of the present is never the same as what we imagined, in the present, of the future.
Remember, the point of all of our training is to reduce our self-worry and self-concern and be worried and concerned for others.
Freshness and openness and a capacity for surprise are hallmarks of mind training, which
To quote again our beloved Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind few.” Don’t be so predictable is telling us to cultivate beginner’s mind in relation to ourselves and our own experiences. To stop being such experts on ourselves.
Don’t look for revenge. If you have an enemy, try to engage the enemy with energy and compassion, straightforwardly; don’t be sneaky and hide behind a rock. Learn to identify what it feels like inside to be lurking, become aware of the sorts of thoughts and feelings that arise when you are lurking, because often we are lurking and we don’t know we’re lurking.
she will surely get the message strongly enough, in looks and gestures, in remarks, because there is no way for a person not to know what others are feeling about her. Now the injured person recognizes, “Oh, look at the way everyone treats me. I guess I really am a terrible person. People don’t like me. Well, if I am that way, if people are going to treat me that way, then I will show them something. You thought that was bad so far? How about this!” In this way the person’s bad behavior and bad selfview becomes reinforced, keeps building on itself, and what was bad to begin with becomes worse and worse.
Sharing our stories of suffering with one another is one of the most important ways we have of connecting to one another. We have to do that, and we have to learn how and when to do it.
if someone were to abuse you, and somehow or other you were able to gobble up the abuse and deal with it cheerfully and make your practice stronger, so that by the time he was finished abusing you, you were happier and stronger than you had ever been before, then his abuse wouldn’t have hurt you, it would have helped you. It wouldn’t have been a cause of your suffering, it would have been a cause of your joy.
If you’re not there when an attacker is hitting you on the head, or if you don’t have a head, the attacker is just hitting air or some other object. It’s because you are there and because you do have a head that the harm is happening. I realize this is odd reasoning, but it’s true. All suffering is your own burden, an ox’s burden. Ultimately the burden of your suffering is you own, you yourself are the immediate cause of it, even though the occasion may have been someone else’s misdeed.
although we might suffer at the hands of others, if we blame others for our suffering, if we try to put the burden of our suffering on them, it doesn’t do a thing to them, but it increases our own burden, because now we have become the victim of others, which means now we are completely dependent on them to relieve our suffering and now we are pleading and begging with them to relieve our suffering.
8. Living with Ease in a Crazy World
Maybe the ancient pundits who devised this system weren’t as organized or efficient as we are. Or maybe they deliberately included some redundancy, knowing that when it comes to mind training, you can’t expect perfect efficiency and you’re going to need to go over the same ground many times, in many ways.
And if you can practice grace before meals, you can practice “grace” at other repetitive occasions during the day.
Whatever is going on, always come back to this best and most basic motivation—the wish to care about others and to be of some service to them.
Begin at the beginning and end at the end refers to a very practical and straightforward practice that I recommend to everyone. It’s quite simple. At the beginning of the day, on arising, say to yourself (and you can train your mind to cue itself to the practice as soon as your feet first strike the floor on arising from bed): “Today I want to dedicate
myself, to the best of my ability, to being generous and openhearted and benefiting others.” That’s the point of today. That’s why you are getting up and not staying in bed.
It will change the way you feel about your days and how you view them. You have been going through your life with some underlying attitude. Probably you don’t even know what it is. But it conditions how you feel about your life. Practicing this slogan will ennoble and elevate that attitude. And that change of attitude will begin to affect everything in your life.
But for our purposes we can think of the word observe in a more open sense as simply to pay attention. All vows are included in this one commitment: to be committed to paying attention to our lives, to being honest about what is going on and unflinchingly realistic about how we are behaving and thinking. The heart of mind training is here: don’t go to sleep, don’t deny, don’t make excuses, don’t blame anyone, don’t wish for something else. Live your life with your eyes and heart wide-open. No matter what.
To Train in the three difficulties would be to be able, first, to identify the habitual impulse when it arises; second, to let go of it once you recognize it; and third, to keep going with the first two so that eventually it won’t come up again. This is easiest to practice on your meditation cushion when there’s nothing else going on. You can notice painful or nasty states of mind arising, you can see that they are unnecessary and unpleasant and let them go by coming back to the feeling of the breath and the body as a substitute, and you can keep on doing this.
Take on the three principal causes. Of the three principal causes, the first is Find a good teacher.
The second principal cause is Realize how important it is for you to tame your mind. Recognize that mind training is not optional, it is essential. Everything in your life depends on it. Your job, your family, your relationships all depend on your maintaining a stable, buoyant, and kind mind. If your mind were to become dark and unstable, everything would fall apart.
The third principal cause is Realize you have what you need.
So Don’t expect applause, don’t expect scorn, don’t expect anything except the unexpected, because that is always what happens, even when you expected it. If you look a bit more closely, what happens is not what you expected. It’s always something else.
Appendix 2: Basic Zen Meditation
If it helps, you can count each breath on the exhale, lightly, from one to five, beginning again at one when you are done—or when you lose count. If you don’t want to count, or if you get tired of it, you can just follow the breath as it comes in and goes out at the belly. If you get dreamy or lost, counting again will help. Zazen is, fundamentally, sitting with the basic feeling of being alive. What is the basic feeling of being alive? Being conscious, embodied, and breathing. That is actually what it feels like to be alive. Every moment of your life, and all of your feelings, thoughts, and accomplishments, depend on this, but most of us hardly ever notice it. In zazen our task is just to be present with this and nothing else. Simply sitting aware of the feeling of being alive.
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