The mahayana teachings are based on communication, openness, and being without expectations. When we begin to realize that the nature of phenomena is free from concept and empty by itself, that objects such as chairs, tables, rugs, curtains, and walls are no longer in the way, we can expand our notion of love infinitely. There is nothing in the way. So the purpose of discussing shunyata, or emptiness, is so that we could fill the whole of space with affection—love without expectation, without demands, without possession.
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Cultivating a Mahayana Mentality
What type of personality is suited to the mahayana mentality and approach? It is a personality characterized by four factors: affection for the world, faith in the right situations, compassion for sentient beings, and bravery.
PEOPLE WHO are inspired to take the bodhisattva vow are excited by the possibility of becoming a bodhisattva and working with something other than themselves—the possibility of devoting their lives to sentient beings. Their own involvement and heightened spirituality is not a consideration.
At the time the vow is taken, it is based on, and in a sense caused by, an external agent or spiritual friend. Yet the vow ceremony is purely a reminder, like celebrating your birthday. At a birthday party you need to have a cake and some friends to sing “Happy Birthday.” That makes it official that you have become one year older. Likewise, the bodhisattva vow is a kind of landmark.
What type of personality is suited to the mahayana mentality and approach? It is a personality characterized by four factors: affection for the world, faith in the right situations, compassion for sentient beings, and bravery.
FOUR FACTORS OF MAHAYANA MENTALITY
Affection for the World
The first factor is having a genuine affection for the world. It is based on both developing warmth and seeing through your aggression. The problem with aggression is that there is no genuine affection or sympathy for the world. You favor areas of the world that are in keeping with your own philosophy, discipline, or literature—and everything else is regarded as unworthy. So on the metaphysical or conceptual level, a sense of separation exists. But with nonaggression, there is a feeling of openness and discriminating awareness. Along with that, you have an appreciation and respect for bodhichitta as unconditional sympathy, with no reference to ego or to anything in the phenomenal world that will encourage ego. Such softness may seem somewhat naive, but due to discriminating awareness, it is not.
Faith in the Right Situations
The second factor is having faith in the right situations. You do not have faith in that which is subject to decay, and you do not have faith in that which is subject to eternity. Faith in either is equally the same. Neither is regarded as real faith, because both options are based on having allegiance toward certain situations and experiences, which enables you to gather greater confirmation for your ego. Faith in the right situations has nothing to do with the confirmation of your ego. It is just simple, rightful faith.
Right faith is genuine. It is direct warmth, direct sympathy, direct devotion, and direct openness. It is direct worship, sacredness, respect, awe, and inspiration. Right faith comes from having an attitude of unconditionality, and whenever there is unconditionality, your emotions are always wholesome. In the mahayana, there is lots of room for emotions. At the same time, the mahayana is somewhat unreasonable to the ordinary confused ego because you cannot indulge in your worship or your sympathy. But you could indulge in unconditional emotionality, which is connected to the idea of shunyata. Right faith inspires a vision of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, or community. It inspires a vision of the bodhisattvas. With right faith you develop trust in all sentient beings, who are worthy to be objects of compassion.
With this factor you are awakening as a bodhisattva or would-be bodhisattva. Based on devotion to the Buddha, you feel that you are on the right track. You know that other people have done it the same way, so there is a feeling of comradeship. There is healthiness in your approach, and healthiness in your involvement with others. As a result, you do not become evangelical or dogmatic, and you do not become angry or thirst after power.
Compassion for Sentient Beings
The third factor is a genuine sense of warmth and compassion for sentient beings. By sentient beings, we mean those forms of existence that have intelligence, that function by using some kind of brain, that have love-and-hate relationships with the world, that possess calculating qualities. Sentient beings do not need constant nutrition from the ground like plants, which have their roots in the earth. Insects, animals, and human beings can be independent of the ground, but plants do not have such independence, so plants are not regarded as sentient beings. A sentient being is one who grows up and leaves the nest or home; the equivalent of the umbilical cord is cut. Sentient beings have intelligence and can function independently.
Compassion is not just feeling sorry for somebody. It is not that you are on a high pedestal looking down on some miserable wretch who couldn’t get their life together, and it is not based on trying to bring someone up to your particular standard. True compassion is based on warmth and sympathy, independent of security. You simply work with sentient beings, and by way of that, you work with yourself.
Bravery
The fourth factor is having a brave attitude toward pain, discomfort, and loneliness. There is a quality of bravery and asceticism. You are willing to relate with pain and discomfort for the sake of your practice. At this point in Western society, relating with discomfort is seemingly very difficult. Since everything in the philosophy, psychology, and lifestyle is designed for pleasure, people have problems with that kind of bravery, exertion, and fearlessness. There is an immense attachment to comfort. If you want to take the wax out of your ears, you do not just use an ordinary stick, but you use Q-tips especially designed to make sure that your eardrums do not burst. If you use a walking stick, there will be a rubber tip on the end so that it won’t slip. Little expressions of hospitality of that nature build a whole society of immense comfort.
That level of comfort is amazing and very, very efficient. It is impressive that human beings can come up with such hospitality for their own sake. The problem is that you begin to give in to that comfort, until finally it becomes a way of living. You expect that same kind of comfort and security all the time. In working with sentient beings, this approach puts you in a difficult situation. Things do not usually work all that smoothly, and we expect occasional chaos, but the basic concept is that everything has to be smooth from birth until death. If you are flying, when you leave the airplane, you do not even have to go outside and down the stairs to walk to the gate. You have little tunnels so you are always indoors, whether you are fifty thousand miles up in the air or down on the ground. So you never feel fresh air, or heat or cold. When you arrive you have a car waiting outside, conveniently and precisely placed right in front of your doorway so that you can just dash into it. And that car has lights, and central heating or air-conditioning. Everything is programmed in that way. You can live inside and be completely tunneled. And that same approach applies even after you die. Your body is put into a convenient place and beautified so that your relatives and friends will be impressed with how nice, neat, and dressed up you are. So all along there is immense hospitality.
Recognizing that such extreme hospitality is designed for cowardly or spoiled people, you might decide to go out and live in some mountain cabin for a while. But when you come back and begin to get involved in your daily activities, if your coffee is not as good as you expected, you still complain. This does not mean that one should never complain. It is simply an example of the expectations we have and the hospitality we expect from the regular world, which is very strange and somewhat off-key.
In terms of practice, it is very difficult to work with such a situation. We have been softened and corrupted by that point of view. We have been weakened by that hospitality, and as a result we cannot bear pain properly. That does not n
ecessarily mean that we have to go to the other extreme and become martyrs and heroes, and sleep in sackcloth. We do not have to punish ourselves or think that because we are soft, we now have to tighten up. If we do begin to do that, it becomes a way of trying to gain even higher comfort. It becomes a way for us to not suffer at all.
The bodhisattva way of working with sentient beings is based on dignity and openness. You are not too tired to work with any situation, however challenging or demanding. People taking the bodhisattva vow do not look for hospitality. And once you have taken the bodhisattva vow, the teacher is not going to issue you hats and coats and rubber gloves and boots so that you can fight the world outside. The teacher presents you with nothing, and you can present yourself as you are.
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The Seven Mahayana Exercises
If you are a true mahayanist, you do not gather merit and you do not make money. You are constantly sharing with others.
THE ATTITUDE of a bodhisattva is one of devotion, reverence, and openness. You are willing to purify yourself and to share with sentient beings. That is the point for all mahayanists, whether you are a bodhisattva or not.
To cultivate such qualities, bodhisattvas as well as lay mahayanists practice what can be called the seven mahayana exercises.1 This list provides a set of directions on how to conduct your service, your devotion, and your meditation practice.
Prostrations
You begin with prostrations, with surrendering yourself. This is a well-known practice at the hinayana level as well, such as when we offer prostrations during the refuge vow ceremony. But in this case, the surrendering is greater and more open. You are doing prostrations based on threefold purity, knowing that within the state of shunyata, there is no prostrator, no object of prostrations, and no prostration. At the same time, there is a quality of openness and devotion.
Offering
The second exercise is offering. You might offer incense or flowers to the shrine, which exists as a reminder of awakened mind. You might out of generosity give things to needy people or pick up a hitchhiker. Anything like that is regarded as an offering or a benevolent act.
Confession / Acknowledging What You Have Done
The third exercise is usually translated as “confession,” but actually it is simply acknowledging what you have done. So it is not like the Christian tradition of going to confession. You are simply acknowledging your own weaknesses and proclaiming that understanding.
Adoration / Rejoicing in the Virtues of Others
The fourth exercise is rejoicing in the virtues of others; it is admiration or adoration. You have adoration for the greater vision of the enlightened state of being and for enlightened ones, such as the Buddha and the lineage. People in the past have done a great job and fantastic work; they are very impressive. Keeping that in mind is a very important and powerful thing to do.
Asking Your Teachers to Turn the Wheel of Dharma
The next exercise is asking your teachers to turn the wheel of dharma. Requesting the bodhisattvas and buddhas of the ten directions and the ten stages to teach is an intelligent thing to do. However, you don’t just say to somebody, “Turn the wheel for us, please.” When you are with a teacher, or even without a teacher, a certain temperature and atmosphere takes place in the present moment. So it is important to ask your teachers to teach subjects appropriate to the understanding of what is taking place in the present.
In the mahayana, bodhisattvas traditionally act as spokespeople for laypeople in the presence of Lord Buddha. They ask him various questions, and in response the Buddha expounds the teaching for the sake of the laypeople as well as the bodhisattvas. In the tantric path, it is the consorts of the various sambhogakaya or celestial buddhas who ask questions appropriate to the present situation. In any case, the point is knowing what to ask. You need to know what questions are appropriate in order to give hints or directions about how to elucidate the dharma and clarify confusion. That is really turning the wheel of the dharma.
Requesting Your Teachers to Remain and Not Pass into Nirvana
In this exercise, you express your gratitude, and request your teachers to remain alive in the physical world and not pass away. You request them to remain in samsara and not pass away into nirvana.
Dedicating the Merit for the Benefit of All Beings
Finally, whatever merit you have accumulated is never kept for yourself, but is always shared with others. So you are not really making any profit. If you are a true mahayanist, you do not gather merit and you do not make money. You are constantly sharing with others.
1. This traditional sevenfold practice is also referred to as the “Seven-Branch Prayer” and as the “Sevenfold Puja.”
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Taking the Bodhisattva Vow
When you take the bodhisattva vow, it is very personal and at the same time very public. What you are doing is becoming like one of the objects in a pawnshop: you have pawned yourself. You have sold yourself to others, and you are no longer your own property, but the property of sentient beings.
BODHICHITTA AND THE BODHISATTVA VOW
Bodhichitta has three components: compassion, skillful means, and knowledge, or karuna, upaya, and prajna. However, depending on the context, these three components are usually described in terms of pairs: compassion and knowledge, compassion and skillful means, or knowledge and skillful means. When skillful means are combined with discriminating awareness, you are able to see things very clearly. You know what to do and what not to do. Bodhichitta consists of tremendous gentleness and fearlessness, which enables you to act skillfully and wisely. Bodhichitta is big-mindedness.
On the whole, our mind is made up of basic wakefulness. There is always a level of decency and of wakefulness in humans. That is why the human realm is known as the world of opportunity: it is the only realm in which you are able to practice and attain enlightenment. The other realms are too involved with their own neurosis, so beings in those realms first have to work out their karmic consequences. But all humans possess some kind of decency; they all possess the essence of bodhichitta.
Our level of bodhichitta may be embryonic. We may not yet have awakened our basic genes. We may have been brought up in a ghetto, and become so involved with street fighting that there was no chance to awaken. But even then, we have decency. When we give up our street-fighting mentality and come to terms with our decency, we begin to develop relative bodhichitta. We are actually transplanting bodhichitta in our heart. Taking the bodhisattva vow is part of that process. When we take the bodhisattva vow, we are proclaiming our decency, gentleness, and reasonability. We are offering to serve our fellow sentient beings.
Taking the bodhisattva vow is an expression of commitment to share that decency and big vision. You are willing to give up being petty. You are willing to become a genuinely big person, a person with larger vision and fantastic openness. It is interesting that when you do that, you are not suspended in that bigness, but you begin to get some kind of feedback from the world. The world begins to invite you and welcome you. The tathagatas and bodhisattvas, as well as the people of the samsaric world, begin to see the difference in you. They see the difference between the days when you are tight and the days when you are virtuous. When you actually become a generous person, a vast, large-scale, open person, even cats and dogs and three-month-old babies begin to feel the difference in you. You have become a genuinely soft and compassionate person. The essence of the bodhisattva approach is to become like that.
You could expand yourself without invading anybody else’s territory. This vastness, power, and grandeur come from the pre-split level, before the birth of duality. When you take the bodhisattva vow, you are endorsing your pre-split or ultimate level, but it has to manifest at the relative level. On the bodhisattva path, you are not expanding yourself because of your territory, but because you have no territory. Therefore, you are limitless; you are egoless.
Although you may not yet have touched on the further levels of egoles
sness, you can pretend; you can act that way. When you pretend, you are not pretending something that you are not, but something that you might be, something you already have. For example, you have no problem pretending to be a human being, because you are already a human being. So pretending to be a more decent human being is not a far-fetched idea. Pretending to be a decent human being is not particularly false. In the beginning, you feel that you are pretending because your samsaric emotions are trying to draw you away from any possibility of decency, and make you into a hell-realm or animal-realm person. But you could behave like a lady or a gentleman, which you already are. Even the pretense of sitting like the Buddha is not far-fetched or false. You are just trying to connect to that level, to approach it. So it is not really pretending; it is just pushing yourself slightly further. It is very simple: you could pretend to be Buddha.
As far as we are concerned, the world is a gentle world, an enlightened society. Such a society is not based on just drinking coffee or tea at the right times, or dressing up on the proper occasions. Rather, there is a sense of celebration and basic goodness. It feels good and it feels real, and there is a quality of overall gentleness. Taking the bodhisattva vow is committing yourself to being gentle. You are willing to say that you will give up your personal privacy. Doing so allows you to be a decent person, a good person, and so heroic. The bodhisattva vow is heroic in the fundamental sense that you begin to feel that you can actually do it and that you are actually doing it—and when you do that, you get feedback confirming it.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 12
