|
vajra
Ex Member
|
Digging through some old files I found the following four pages of Tibetan Buddhist teaching on generating compassion in oneself.
Perhaps it may be of interest. Buddhism is often portrayed as somehow not teaching on love, but this could not be further from the truth.
The main point is that none of this is usually a matter of finding and flicking the magic switch - it's more a matter of steady work to awaken what's most definitely there in all of us - buried in beneath many many layers of conditioning over many lifetimes.
How to awaken Love and Compassion
Before you can truly practice Tonglen, you have to be able to evoke compassion in yourself. That is harder than we often imagine, because the sources of our love and compassion are sometimes hidden from us, and we may have no ready access to them. Fortunately there are several special techniques that the Buddhist “training of the mind” in compassion has developed to help us evoke our own hidden love. Out of the enormous range of methods available, I have selected the following ones, and have ordered them in a particular way so as to be of the greatest possible use to people in the modern world.
1) Loving Kindness: Unsealing the Spring
When we believe that we don’t have enough love in us, there is a method for discovering and invoking it. Go back in you mind and recreate, almost visualise, a love that someone gave you that really moved you, perhaps in your childhood. You can think of anyone who had been deeply kind to you in your life. Remember a particular instance when they really showed you love and you felt their love vividly.
Now let that feeling arise again in your heart and infuse you with gratitude. As you do so, your love will go out naturally to that person who evoked it. You will remember then that even though you may not always feel that you have been loved enough, you were loved genuinely once. Knowing that now will make you feel again that you are, as that person made you feel then, worthy of love and really lovable.
Let your heart open now and let love flow from it; then extend this love to all beings. Begin with those who are closest to you, then extend your love to friends and to acquaintances, then to neighbours, to strangers, then even to those whom you don’t like or have difficulties with, even those whom you might consider as your “enemies,” and finally to the whole universe. Let this love become more and more boundless. Equanimity is one of the four essential facets, with loving kindness, compassion, and joy, of what the teachings say form the entire aspiration of compassion. The all-inclusive, unbiased view of equanimity is really the starting point and the basis of the path of compassion.
You will find that this practice unseals a spring of love, and by that unsealing in you of your own loving kindness, you will find that it will inspire the birth of compassion. For as Maitreya said in one of the teachings he gave Asanga: “The water of compassion courses through the canal of loving kindness.”
2) Compassion: Considering Yourself the Same as Others
One powerful way to evoke compassion, as I have described in the previous chapter, is to think of others as exactly the same as you. “After all,” the Dalai Lama explains, “all human beings are the same – made of human flesh, bones, and blood. We all want happiness and want to avoid suffering. Further, we have an equal right to be happy. In other words, it is important to realise our sameness as human beings.”
Say, for example, you are having difficulties with a loved one, such as your mother or father, husband or wife, lover or friend. How helpful and revealing it can be to consider the other person not in his or her “role” of mother or father or husband, but simply as another “you”, another human being, with the same feelings as you, the same desire for happiness, the same fear of suffering. Thinking of the person as a real person, exactly the same as you, will open your heart to him or her and give you more insight into how to help.
If you consider others just the same as yourself, it will help you to open up your relationships and give them a new and richer meaning. Imagine if societies and nations began to view each other in the same way; at last we would have the beginnings of a solid basis for peace on earth and the happy coexistence of all peoples.
3) Compassion: Exchanging Yourself for Others
When someone is suffering and you find yourself at a loss to know how to help, put yourself unflinchingly in his or her place. Imagine as vividly as possible what you would be going through if you were suffering the same pain. Ask yourself:
“How would I feel? How would I want my friends to treat me? What would I most want from them?”
When you exchange yourself for others in this way, you are directly transferring your cherishing from its usual object, yourself, to other beings. So exchanging yourself for others is a very powerful way of loosening the hold on you of the self-cherishing and the self-grasping of ego, and so of releasing the heart of your compassion.
4) Using a Friend to Generate Compassion
Another moving technique for arousing compassion for a person who is suffering is to imagine one of your dearest friends, or someone you really love, in that person’s place. Quite naturally your heart will open, and compassion will awaken in you: What more would you want than to free them from their torment? Now take this compassion released on your heart and transfer it to the person who needs your help: You will find that your help is inspired more naturally, and that you can direct it more easily.
As Portia says in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes…
Compassion is the wish-fulfilling gem whose light of healing spreads in all directions.
5) How to Meditate on Compassion
Yet as I have said, evoking this power of compassion in us is not always easy. I find myself that the simplest way are the best and the most direct. Every day, life gives us innumerable chances to open our hearts, if we can only take them.
Any sight could open the eyes of your heart to the fact of vast suffering in the world. Let it. Don’t waste the love and grief it arouses; in the moment you feel compassion welling up in you, don’t brush it aside, don’t shrug it off and try quickly to return to “normal,” don’t be afraid of your feeling or embarrassed by it, don’t allow yourself to be distracted from it or let it run aground in apathy. Be vulnerable: use that quick, bright uprush of compassion; focus on it, go deep into your heart and meditate on it, develop it, enhance, and deepen it. By doing this you will realise how blind you have been to suffering, how the pain that you are experiencing or seeing now is only a tiny fraction of the pain of the world. All beings, everywhere, suffer; let your heart go out to them all in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion, and direct that compassion, along with the blessing of all the Buddha’s, to the alleviation of suffering everywhere.
Compassion is a far greater and nobler thing than pity. Pity has its roots in fear, and a sense of arrogance and condescension, sometimes even a smug feeling of “I’m glad it’s not me.” As Stephen Levine says: “When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion.” To train in compassion, then, is to know all beings are the same and suffer in similar ways, to honour all those who suffer, and to know you are neither separate from nor superior to anyone.
So your first response on seeing someone suffer becomes not mere pity, but deep compassion. You feel for that person respect and even gratitude, because you now know that whoever prompts you to develop compassion by their suffering is in fact giving you one of the greatest gifts of all, because they are helping you to develop that very quality you need most in your progress toward enlightenment. That is why we say in Tibet that the beggar who is asking you for money, or the sick old woman wringing your heart, may be the Buddha’s in disguise, manifesting on your path to help you grow in compassion and so move towards buddhahood.
6) How to Direct Your Compassion
When you meditate deeply enough on compassion, there will arise in you a strong determination to alleviate the suffering of all beings, and an acute sense of responsibility toward that noble aim. There are two ways, then, of mentally directing this compassion and making it active.
The first way is to pray to all the Buddha’s and enlightened beings, from the depths of your heart, that everything you do, all your thoughts, words, and deeds, should only benefit beings and bring them happiness. In the words of one great prayer: “Bless me into usefulness.” Pray that you benefit all who come in contact with you, and help them transform their suffering and their lives.
The second and universal way is to direct whatever compassion you have to all beings, by dedicating all your positive actions and spiritual practice to their welfare and especially toward their enlightenment. For when you meditate deeply on compassion, a realisation dawns in you that the only way for you to be of complete help to other beings is for you to gain enlightenment. From that a strong sense of determination and universal responsibility is born, and the compassionate wish arises in you at that moment to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all others.
This compassionate wish is called Bodhichitta in Sanskrit; bodhi means our enlightened essence, and chitta means heart.
So we could translate it as “the heart of our enlightened mind.” To awaken and develop the heart of the enlightened mind is to ripen steadily the seed of our Buddha nature, that seed that in the end, when our practice of compassion has become perfect and all-embracing, will flower majestically into buddhahood. Bodhichitta, then, is the spring and source and root of the entire spiritual path. That is why Shantideva could praise Bodhichitta with such joy:
It is the supreme elixir
That overcomes the sovereignty of death.
It is the inexhaustible treasure
That eliminates poverty in the world.
It is the supreme medicine
That quells the world’s disease.
It is the tree that shelters all beings
Wandering and tired on the path of conditioned existence.
It is the universal bridge
That leads to freedom from unhappy states of birth.
It is the dawning moon of the mind
That dispels the torment of disturbing conceptions.
It is the great sun that finally removes
The misty ignorance of the world.
And that is why in our tradition we pray with such urgency:
Bodhichitta, precious and sublime:
May it arise in those in whom it has not arisen;
May it never decline where it has arisen;
But go on increasing, further and further!
Patrul Rinpoche used these four lines to encapsulate the entire training in Bodhichitta, “the wish,” as Maitreya described it, “to attain perfect enlightenment for the sake of others.” Let me briefly outline this training.
It begins by developing within your mind loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity toward limitless living beings. Through a practice of deep contemplation, you cultivate these four qualities to such a degree that they become boundless and immeasurable. And so Bodhichitta “arises where it has not arisen,” for this has brought you to a point where you are impelled by an almost heartbreaking urge to take responsibility for others, and so to pledge yourself truly to arouse the heart of the enlightened mind by training in what are called
“Bodhichitta in aspiration” and
“Bodhichitta in action.”
The former is to train in considering yourself the same as others, then in exchanging yourself with others, which includes the Tonglen practice, and finally in considering others even more important than yourself.
The latter is to develop to perfection generosity, discipline, patience or endurance, diligence, concentration, and wisdom, all of them infused by a penetrating insight into the nature of reality itself. So the Bodhichitta “never declines where it has arisen” and goes on “increasing further and further.”
This, then, is the path of the bodhisattvas, the practice of the compassionate heart of the enlightened mind that, because undertaken for the benefit of all, leads directly to Buddhahood.
|
Home
Pages: 
