The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  You should practice the paramitas in spite of your subconscious gossip, such as thoughts about what you are supposed to be doing or feeling, as opposed to what you really are doing or feeling. Such activity is important, because it stops the nidana flow. Your intention is secondary. When you have actually done something, you may feel that your intention was dubious, but your intention has followed your action. When you realize what you have done, you may wonder whether you can undo it. But you cannot undo the past, and since you have done it already, you resign yourself. As you go on in that way, the whole thing becomes genuine.

  You have to teach your mind. In order to do so, sometimes action is best, because when you are performing an action, your mind follows. At other times, you have a good intention, and your body follows. At the mahayana level, those two approaches are complementary, but when you get to the vajrayana level, action is always the first breakthrough. Action means that you just do it. As an example, many people have difficulty saying “Yes.” If you have that difficulty, you could practice saying “Yes.” When you say “Yes” verbally, your mind says, “I said it halfway, but I didn’t really mean it.” You keep a little corner. But the more you say “Yes,” the more you mean it. That is the whole idea behind reciting aloud. For example, when you take the bodhisattva vow, you say that you aspire to become a bodhisattva even though you don’t really mean it all the way. Having said it, you have to think about it. You follow the words with your mind, and you actually begin to get it.

  Sometimes a physical message is the most direct. It is the best way to deal with a situation like sitting practice. You sit, although you don’t really want to sit; you just assume the posture of the Buddha and do it. Then your mind begins to curve toward it and actually do it. It is that way all along, in all three yanas. The first way to bend your mind is to work with what is there.

  1. The ten paramitas are: (1) generosity, (2) discipline, (3) patience, (4) exertion, (5) meditation, (6) prajna, (7) skillful means, (8) aspiration, (9) power, and (10) wisdom. In Tibetan they are: (1) dana, (2) tsültrim, (3) söpa, (4) tsöndrü, (5) samten, (6) prajna, (7) thap, (8) mönlam, (9) bala, and (10) yeshe.

  2. One way to learn more about paramita practice is by looking at the many ways in which a person’s actions fail to reflect these transcendent virtues. For a listing of contradictions to paramita practice, see appendix 5, “Forty-Six Ways in Which a Bodhisattva Fails.”

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  Applying Emptiness to Everyday Life

  When dharma is theorized, you have no hope of doing anything with it. It becomes merely a decoration, a cosmetic of your ego. But if you apply mahakaruna, if you apply luminosity and skillfulness, you finally begin to know the meaning of peace.

  IF YOU are not shown how to apply shunyata, you will not be able to practice good generosity, good discipline, good patience, and all the other paramitas. In terms of the two madhyamaka traditions of vastness and profundity, the vastness school puts more emphasis on practicality and on how you can apply shunyata, and the profundity school is largely based on theory and on how far you can go metaphysically.

  In the profundity approach, you try to expose and explode your mind by using the dialectic system of questioning yourself and by sitting practice. Profundity is a philosophy that accepts everything. That might be attractive at the beginning, but with such an approach you will not know how to behave as a Buddhist, as opposed to being a good Christian missionary or Red Cross worker. Here we are discussing shunyata according to the vastness tradition. The reason we are discussing shunyata from the point of view of practicality is so that we can actually apply it to our everyday life.

  THREE SUPREME DISCIPLINES

  Traditionally, the way to apply shunyata is by means of the three disciplines of shila, samadhi, and prajna, discussed previously at the hinayana level.1 In the mahayana, the three disciplines are known as the three supreme disciplines. To indicate this, the Tibetan terms tsültrim, tingdzin, and sherap are qualified by the prefix lhagpa, which means “supreme.” This distinction is similar to the difference between the four brahmaviharas and the four limitless ones.

  Shila / Discipline

  The first supreme discipline is shila. It is comprised of generosity, discipline, and patience, the first three paramitas.2 Because you have great compassion, luminosity, skillful means, and peace, you could practice the supreme discipline of shila. To begin with, by giving up ego and territoriality, you develop the generosity to let go. Then, having let go, you develop morality. You begin to let go as part of your daily practice, and you do not give in to the kleshas. Once you have morality, you then learn patience. You learn how to forbear and how to deal with your impatience. When temptations happen, by practicing patience you can quell them. Patience is the absence of aggression, so you do not get pissed off at little obstacles, but you go on with your discipline. With the supreme discipline of shila, you work on all three of these qualities, back and forth.

  Samadhi / Meditation

  The second supreme discipline is samadhi. It contains the fifth paramita, the paramita of meditation. In this case, meditation refers to the careful consideration of situations. You understand the nature of temptations and the fickleness of your state of mind, and you do not give in to them. You work with peace and skillful means, so everything functions harmoniously. You are able to work properly in your world and in your particular state of being. You develop good control over your mind, over your mental events, and over the products of those mental events. Everything is meditatively controlled through mindfulness and awareness practice, through both shamatha and vipashyana.

  Prajna / Knowledge

  The third supreme discipline is prajna, which contains the sixth paramita, the paramita of knowledge. You use luminosity and great compassion, to the point where you are able to discriminate dharmas and perform awakened activities. Acting in accordance with prajna is an act of great compassion, so learning is important. You should be literate and a good grammarian, and you should know how to speak properly and behave properly. Bodhisattvas performing bodhisattva activity in the confused world should not be clumsy, stupid, or uneducated. A quality of intelligence should permeate to your fellow sentient beings, those for whom you are working, whomever they are.

  The fourth paramita, exertion, is missing from these three categories. But it is not quite missing, because it applies to all three supreme disciplines. Throughout the whole process, you take pleasure in work and in exerting yourself. A sense of joy and delight takes place in working with the six paramitas together with the three supreme disciplines.

  By using shila, samadhi, and prajna to practice the teachings of shunyata, you can avoid the problem of theorizing the dharma. It is always a problem when you try to theorize a situation—and theorizing the dharma is the worst of all. When dharma is theorized, you have no hope of doing anything with it. It becomes merely a decoration, a cosmetic of your ego. But if you apply mahakaruna, if you apply luminosity and skillfulness, you finally begin to know the meaning of peace. You actually can get into the nitty-gritty of it. If you understand the brass-tacks level of shila and samadhi, you can act in full accordance with prajna as well.

  1. 1. See volume 1 of the Profound Treasury: part 2, “Discipline / Shila”; part 3, “Meditation / Samadhi”; and part 6, “Knowledge / Prajna.”

  2. The term shila is used in two ways: as the second paramita (discipline or morality), and as one of the three supreme disciplines, in which case it includes the first three paramitas of generosity, discipline, and patience.

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  Generosity

  You can afford to open yourself and join the rest of the world with a sense of tremendous generosity, goodness, and richness. The more you give, the more you gain. But that should not be your reason for giving. Rather, the more you give, the more you are constantly inspired to give—and the gaining process happens naturally and automatically.

  PARAMITA PRACTICE begins with generosity. The paramita of generosity, or
dana paramita, is described as a treasury of wealth.1 Generosity is the starting point of the bodhisattva path, and it is also said to reach to the highest levels of realization. The paramita of generosity only arises when you are trained in shamatha and vipashyana, and you have made a relationship with absolute and relative bodhichitta. At the same time, you should not be dependent on your own practice or discipline alone. You need to be aware of your immediate surroundings, as well as the once-removed surroundings, of whatever situation you might find yourself in.

  In Sanskrit, generosity is dana, which is connected with words like donation in Indo-European languages. The idea of dana is one of giving, donating, opening yourself up. It is the strength to work with others and to relate with other people’s energy as well as with your own. Generosity is free from desire, which means free from desiring for oneself. In Tibetan, generosity is jinpa, which means “letting go,” or “giving away.” Jin means “to open one’s hand,” “to give,” or “to let go,” and pa makes it a noun; so jinpa means “generosity.” It is letting others have joy, and not being stubborn or holding back. With jinpa you are removing stinginess and not hanging on to psychological possessiveness. Generosity takes place in stages. There are domestic, cultural, linguistic, and educational barriers, so it takes some time to give in to generosity.

  In Buddhism, the idea of generosity is giving without expectation. That is the paramita, or transcendental, aspect. When you give something, you transcend the gift and you do not expect anything in return. You are giving away your wealth, giving away your wisdom and understanding of dharma, giving away with daring—and when you give, you feel richer. Jinpa opens up the journey toward wakefulness.

  GENEROSITY AND NONATTACHMENT

  The nature of generosity is nonattachment. It is based on having the personal intelligence and vision that everything is not constantly dependent on what you want. So a key point is that in your activities or in your work, the first message should never be, “I want. Therefore, we should try to work things around me.” There should be other considerations. How about the rest of the world? That seems to be more important. In some cases, “I” should come last—in most cases, in fact! In Buddhism, we make sure that everything else is all right first. We are willing to be the last person, the full stop, the period. That is fine. We do not have to cut ourselves out completely, but we are willing to be the period at the end of the sentence.

  This may be painful because we are used to putting ourselves first. Ever since you were a child, you have been building up your ego. But the Buddhist approach is completely the opposite, so it might hurt. At the same time, you might feel tremendous relief that you do not always have to bring along the “I,” which is like a sore thumb and always embarrassing and painful. If you don’t have to start with that, you can come out into the crisp, clear air. You can speak for the rest of the universe. That is what is meant by egolessness, or individual salvation: “you” don’t have to be there.2 There is tremendous freedom to move around without “you” being there. It feels very good.

  OVERCOMING POVERTY MENTALITY

  In the paramita of generosity, giving is not based on the idea that you have so much to give, and therefore you should give it. For that matter, it is not based on the idea that you have so little to give, and therefore you should give whatever you have. It is being willing to part with anything precious, anything that you want to hold on to. You are learning how to part with whatever you have. Whether you are a beggar or a millionaire, you could still have a mentality of poverty and not want to part with anything. Even if you have nothing material or physical to part with, your basic state of mind is that you should keep what you have, including your aggression or passion. Whatever you might have, you think, “Just keep it, I might need it later on.”

  With dana paramita, you are learning to part with the resources and ammunition you might need to attack the next problem that comes up for you. You might have a brilliance for losing your temper, and you may have had success with it in the past; therefore you feel you should keep your short temper. You might have a way with words, a way with seduction, or a way with salesmanship—and you want to keep that with you. There are all kinds of things you would like to keep to yourself so that you do not feel absolutely resourceless. We all have our usual ways of going about things when we want to get something out of somebody. We do quite well tapping our resources by acting out crying, acting out being jovial, acting out being all kinds of ways, even pretending to be worthless or neurotic. You may be able to dig out such resources pretty well when you need to, but those resources have to be parted with, given up, expended, done away with.

  Generosity is based on both parting with and giving: you are parting with what is precious, and giving what is precious. The nature of generosity is one of not wanting to possess anything for yourself. There is a sense of togetherness, in that you do not have to borrow anything from the phenomenal world or your mind’s phenomenal world, which is wild and confused. You can stick with your own resources completely. You are giving up miserliness and stinginess, and developing a mentality of plentifulness and opulence. What do you have to offer? You have everything that you have learned up to this very minute, everything good that you have ever received. You could share all that and give it away. By letting go, you could transmute the heat of aggression into the cooling quality of bodhichitta.

  By giving, you are giving your basic state of being, or wakefulness. Once you are awake, you are no longer concerned with yourself alone; you would rather contribute something to others. Being wakeful comes from properly carrying out shamatha and vipashyana disciplines at their best, by being completely comfortable with your in-breath and your out-breath and the practice of meditation. With dana paramita, by being wakeful, you can actually convert people who are mindless into mindfulness.

  The best donation you can make is to extend your beauty, smiles, and loving-kindness to others. Generosity is not based on despising others or looking down on them. If you do not respect others, you cannot offer generosity to them. Generosity is conceived out of compassion, tenderness, and benevolence, so respecting others is a very important point. Even though a person might not seem to be worthy of respect, if you can come up with even one respect-worthy quality, you can use that as the ground to work with such a person. People should not be left under the influence of the maras, the evil ones.3

  Generosity is considered to be unshakable. When you possess great generosity, your mind cannot be changed. Your mind is not based on withdrawing help from others, but on exchanging yourself for others, which is one of the first and best attributes of the bodhisattva path. When you extend a sense of generosity, you do not do so in order to gain some kind of relief or to take time off, and it is not based on false comfort or being left alone. You maintain yourself and you are always predictable, like the sun. The sun always rises from the east, it never rises from the west. That pattern is immovable.

  Generosity is based on feeling yourself to be wealthy and rich. You feel that since you are so rich and wealthy, you have enough to give away. But generosity does not mean losing everything and becoming a slave of others. You are not giving away your shareholdings, but your profits. Generosity means becoming a master of the situation so that you can give more and gain more at the same time.

  THREE LEVELS OF GENEROSITY

  There are three levels of generosity: the gift of material generosity, the gift of fearlessness, and the gift of dharma.

  Material Generosity

  The first level is material generosity. Material generosity is straightforward. If people do not have food, you bring them food. If they do not have housing, you put them in a house. You give them clothing and everything they need. To begin with, it is a welfare situation. In expressing your generosity to somebody physically, there is a quality of opulence. Instead of giving a rag, you give good clothes; instead of giving a broken cup, you give good china. Material generosity is an expression of your nonpassion. It is a way
of working with others and expressing your richness.

  The process of giving is extremely subtle. First you have to find out about the receiver. You need to study that receiver and not just act on your impulse to give. You need to know whether they are ready for your gift or not. And sometimes, if they are overready, you have to become powerful and be willing to give them what they need in order to shock them.

  Since the nature of generosity is dispassionate and nonattached, the material gift you give to somebody should be good. If you cannot afford a Cadillac, at least you could give a well-made tricycle. By giving in such a way, a dignified attitude is communicated. The point is not to expand yourself by thinking that what you are giving is the best and the most expensive—it is to assume an attitude of richness and generosity. You might give a notepad that is in extremely good taste; you don’t have to give a gold fountain pen. But whatever you do, it had better be good. You could buy a good birthday card or you could make it yourself. It is as simple as that. You give something decent; you do not need to feel that you are so poor that you have to give any old junk. You could experience real taste, even at the plastic level.

  When panic arises and you have no bank account and no money, you can still adopt the psychology of richness and nonattachment. The magic of generosity is that even though you do not have a full bank account, even though you don’t have abundant wealth, you do not proclaim your poverty, and you can still inspire other people. You can help them to see how they can fill their own bank accounts with their own skillful means; you can inspire them to build richness in themselves. You can help them to see that they too could relate with generosity. It is not a question of buying a cow in the autumn, when it has abundant milk. It is like buying a cow in the spring, when it is lame and has gone through the hardships of winter. You plan to raise the cow throughout the summer so that when autumn comes, the cow will give lots of milk and you can make lots of cheese and butter.