A lot of irritation may come from the practice of meditation itself. This is partly because you are not used to being still for a long period of time, and partly because you have never faced your own state of mind for very long. Irritations also may arise with tonglen practice when you do not want to give away your goodness or to bring in the badness. But irritation that comes up in practice could be met with forbearance. You could apply tonglen when you are irritated, even if only for a fraction of a second. Just remembering that you have that possibility is helpful. It means you are reflecting on the dharma, and once you are reflecting on the dharma, you are liberated to a greater or lesser extent.
By individually analyzing, you develop devotion to the dharma. You understand that dharmas are not, on the whole, problematic. You do not feel the need for a change of theme or subject matter. You accept with patience teachings such as impermanence and egolessness. The dharma demands certain things from you, and you meet those demands with patience. When you have an understanding of shunyata, egolessness, or spiritual materialism, you might get tired of so many ideas coming into your head, since you are soaked in the teachings already. With patience, you do not block out those ideas, but continuously explore your understanding. Discursive thoughts on the dharma should be encouraged.
On the whole, patience means working with any tiresomeness or discomfort brought about by being a Buddhist. By holding a dharmic attitude, you develop patience, and you practice your discipline at its best. You realize that patience is the only means that will carry you through. You could handle all dharmas in that way, as part of your practice of patience. You could act with relaxation, humor, and fundamental nonaggression.
If you tried to practice patience on the spot, without the previous paramitas, it would not work. But if you already have given up territory as an aspect of your practice of the paramita of generosity, and you already have become softer through the experience of the paramita of discipline, there is no problem when you come to the third level, the paramita of patience. It is one continuous process. The tendency toward suppression has already been undermined by maitri and by generosity, which is why the whole thing works. In paramita practice, there are checks and balances, and the way to go about it is all perfectly worked out. It is very amazing.
Patience has the quality of balance and equilibrium. But we need to add to the notion of equilibrium a quality of emotionality, and a desire and longing for the dharma. Some kind of spice has to be added. When that spice has been added, you begin to fully develop the real meaning of patience. Ordinarily, patience means to hold off or to hold on, but in this case it means that you give in and feel the flavor. You might bite your tongue, but that is good. You could taste the blood, swallow it, and use it as nourishment.
Patience and the following two paramitas, of exertion and meditation, always work together. They are like the legs of a tripod: each one carries its own weight. The fruition of patience, or forbearance, is the development of extraordinary protection. The practitioner cannot be harmed by any obstacles. Why? You are not putting out any aggression; therefore, you are not inviting any aggression. Quite the opposite; you are beginning to generate peace and kindness.
The main point of all this teaching is that we should not be overwhelmed by aggression, and just act out and go crazy. There is a pattern to things. Every inch, every moment, every second of samsaric mind has been measured by the Buddha, so we have a complete map. In the dharma, every fraction of a second of a person’s thinking is divided and prescribed and catalogued, so to speak. We are learning to understand samsara altogether, so that we have a comprehensive idea about how things work. But even more important than cataloguing every samsaric situation is how you work with it: what happens before, what happens after, and what happens in the process. That interchange could be based on natural indifference rather than making the situation into a personal attack.
Each situation, each coincidence, has its own peculiarities, but on the whole you should remain patient. You do not remain patient because you are a coward or because you feel that you can get away with it. But when everybody is up in arms, you should sink into patience. That is the message of the paramita of patience. You could be a very basic human being and not join in with the bandits of the occasion, the bandits of life. Somehow, you could just sink; you could just be. You could remain as a seated buddha.
1. A kalpa (Skt.) is an endlessly long period or time, a world cycle.
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Exertion
Exertion means being consistent, continuous, and faithful to the practice. Being consistent allows you to have a sense of joy, rather than seeing practice as a duty that you have to perform. The practice of dharma is getting into your blood. . . . You begin to regard exertion as a part of your basic, natural activity, rather than as something that is imposed on you.
THE FOURTH paramita is exertion. It has been said in the texts that without exertion, all the previous paramitas are hopeless. Exertion is the most important paramita for you to practice in order to achieve the bodhisattva ideal, and awaken absolute and relative bodhichitta. Exertion is regarded as one of the best ways to speed up the journey to enlightenment. The paramita of exertion is tsöndrü in Tibetan, and virya in Sanskrit. Tsön means “hard work,” or “persistence,” and drü means “getting used to,” or “becoming comfortable with”; so the basic idea of tsöndrü is becoming familiar with, or getting used to hard work.
The paramita of exertion, or virya paramita, is described as a good horse, joyful and free from laziness. Exertion is connected with the idea of how to organize our lives as practitioners on the path. The definition of exertion is not giving up, and the nature of exertion is being delighted in the practice. The analogy for exertion is a diamond, which is indestructible. This indestructibility, this hard-coreness, is what allows you to proceed on your path.
According to Shantideva and others, exertion is a way of developing an attitude of delight toward the path. When you feel delighted with what you are doing, working hard evolves effortlessly. At the same time, you still have to encourage yourself further. It is like falling in love: when you fall in love, you have to maintain your love affair, no matter what obstacles come to you. Likewise, when the first splash of delight comes along, you don’t just sit and gaze at it and hope for the best, but you maintain it and develop it.
Although you might have generosity, discipline, and patience, without exertion you do not achieve anything. Without exertion, you lapse into laziness, stupor, and slothfulness. Exertion helps you to destroy the whole range of egohood, of viewing solidity as a big deal. It helps you to transcend, or go beyond, all of that. Exertion is joyful and enthusiastic. It is large-scale enthusiasm rather than small splashes, such as when good ideas come up and you get excited about them.
Exertion is continuing what has happened already in the previous three paramitas and taking delight in continuing. If you put together generosity, discipline, and patience, they amount to exertion. As you go along, you are constantly building on previous paramitas, and collecting new ones in the process. The paramitas begin to pile up in that way. The idea is to remember to practice one of the paramitas, or all of them at once, during your daily life. As long as you remember to handle yourself in that way, then you are practicing properly, and you are completely steeped in Buddhism. If you begin to make a separation between dharmic practice and regular, ordinary life, there is a problem.
One way to look at the paramitas is in terms of what each of them overcomes. Discipline overcomes passion, and exertion overcomes laziness. That is the difference between discipline and exertion. With generosity, you are trying to overcome stinginess and selfishness, and with patience, you are trying to overcome aggression. That is how it works. So each of the paramitas has its counterpart.
Another way to look at the paramitas is in terms of how a paramita is paired up with either shamatha or vipashyana. In the development of the paramitas, shamatha and vipashyana alternate six times. So i
t is shamatha (generosity), vipashyana (discipline), shamatha (patience), vipashyana (exertion), shamatha (meditation), and vipashyana (prajna). In this process, the residues of shamatha and vipashyana from the previous paramitas are not rejected, but the underlying, heightened point of each of the previous paramitas continues. At the level of exertion, we have a lot of residues piled up already, but at the same time we are working on a particular, very powerful point.
The paramitas are mostly postmeditation practices. You cannot practice generosity in the meditation hall; you have to go out and be generous to somebody. You cannot just visualize being generous; that does not really fulfill anything. So paramita practice is postmeditation experience. With paramita practice, the actual sitting-meditation technique does not really change very much. It is more a question of how you deal with the feedback coming to you from the world outside. Your growing sophistication might take the form of shamatha or vipashyana. With shamatha meditation, you have a level of steadiness, and in postmeditation, it is a question of how much you can maintain that steadiness. Shamatha is first thought, and vipashyana is second thought. Shamatha is usually the instigator; it is how well you have been trained, and it is your education. With shamatha, you come across as a good, educated person.
SMILING AT OBSTACLES
The ultimate meaning of tsöndrü is joy in practice. Exertion means appreciating virtue, rather than just working hard. Holding on to seriousness can be a form of self-protection. You do not want to face facts, whatever the situation may be. But when you accept the pain, or obstacle, it is like tonglen: there is the possibility of joy. With exertion, you appreciate virtue because you begin to feel that what you are doing is right and best, and it feels good to do it. For instance, you never get tired of taking showers, seeing the sunlight, or eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You feel that those things are an integral part of your life; therefore, you accept them.
In a lot of situations, there seem to be obstacles trying to push us backward. Nonetheless, with exertion, we do not give up, and we do not expect others to support us as an automatic response. It is quite the contrary. We try to keep going and to become completely fearless, so that our fear becomes fearlessness. We never lose heart and never look for alternatives unless our situation is really, absolutely, fundamentally, totally, utterly unworkable. Otherwise we do not give in or give up.
You cannot expect an easy journey, an easy situation, or easy circumstances. For instance, Milarepa had a lot of problems and difficulties in his life. His teacher would not give him teachings, and when he returned to his home, everything was devastated. There was no easy journey for Milarepa, but he still managed to be a happy person, a happy yogi. In the Kagyü tradition, as well as in the general Buddhist tradition, we try to rejoice whenever there is an obstacle. We try to regard an obstacle as something that makes us smile, and each setback creates a further smile. We keep going in that way, and we never give up.
For instance, I myself had a lot of hard times getting out of my country, and obstacles such as sickness happen to me all the time. But I do not regard those obstacles as a sign of anything—I just keep going. In life, you always have ups and downs. It is like riding on a roller coaster: the more you go up and the more you go down, the more you smile each time.
The more you develop, the more laziness and contentment could cause problems. If you have heard the dharma many times before and have practiced quite a lot, you might feel that dharma is old hat. You think, “I have studied such things before. Why should I go over them again?” With such an attitude, you begin to lose all that you have accumulated, and you begin to lose your joy in the practice. The essence of tsöndrü is to delight in the practice you are doing and the teaching you are hearing, as if it were fresh, as if you had never heard it before. Even though you might have heard a teaching two thousand times before, you still never tire of hearing the same thing again and again. Experiencing the dharma is more of a privilege each time.
The paramita of exertion is free from regarding ordinary activity as just boring. No matter what you do, you do not regard it merely as a replay of something that you have done many times before. The notion that things become boring when you do them again and again is just in your mind. If you look thoroughly and fully into situations, you will see that each situation is unique. It happens on a different date and time, and you are in a different stage of your life, so everything is entirely different each moment. You do not repeat anything. I wish you could do everything twice, but you cannot repeat anything and you cannot go back. So the ordinariness of experience is completely conceptual. Whatever happens is new.
By bringing together patience and exertion, you are working with both the shamatha and vipashyana disciplines. You are always taking a fresh approach to life, and you are not trying to look for new occupations or new entertainments. Although the occurrences of life may be entirely repetitious, your perception or awareness could be fresh and extraordinary. That gives you a sense of joy and cheerfulness.
LAZINESS: THE MAIN OBSTACLE TO EXERTION
The main obstacle to exertion is laziness. In Tibetan, laziness is lelo, which sounds like “lay low.” Laziness feels quite deep-rooted when you are in it, but it is much easier to work with than passion or aggression. Laziness is like sleepiness; somebody can wake you up. But when you are dealing with aggression, you have to apply patience again and again and again and again, which is why aggression is considered to be one of the three root kleshas. Aggression and passion go very deep, whereas laziness is somewhat superficial.
There are three categories of laziness: casualness or slothfulness, losing heart, and degraded laziness. These categories are very simple and ordinary because that is the nature of laziness.
Casualness / Slothfulness
The first category of laziness is nyom-le kyi lelo, or “casualness.” Nyom-le means “common,” “together,” or “even,” kyi is “of,” and lelo is “laziness”; so nyom-le kyi lelo is trying to make everything even or the same. You are too concerned with and attached to comfort. You are tremendously attached to leisure; you do not want to raise a finger. Sitting on a rock or washing your face in a running stream is regarded as inconvenient. You always want to have running water in your bathroom, and you would like to have your seats stuffed so that you always have a soft cushion under you. You fight against a simple rural existence, and regard urban delicacy as the only way to treat yourself well.
Nyom-le kyi lelo includes ordinary laziness or slothfulness. You keep falling asleep and are unable to get yourself together. You have not organized your life properly. Therefore, you begin to feel that you are a victim of your life situation. Students say, “I have this thing to do or that thing to do, and I don’t have a chance to practice.” It is as if they were victims of their lives rather than of their own laziness. Laziness is the problem, although nobody seems willing to admit that.
Tsöndrü is the proper way of relating with your life. It is good scheduling. When it is time to wake up, you wake up; when it is time to eat, you eat. You find time to practice, to work with others, to study the dharma, and to do your business. So exertion is the good scheduling and good organization of your life. In that way, there is time for everything. But most importantly, there is time and space for practice. So the laziness of being casual is an obstacle to the practice of meditation as well as to the practice of exertion. You have an aversion to sitting practice; there are no French settees and no armchairs for you to lean back on. You have to learn to support yourself, like a stalk of corn growing in a field.
Losing Heart
The second category of laziness is called gyi-luk-pe lelo. Gyi-luk means “losing heart,” pe means “of,” lelo means “laziness; since gyi means “weight,” this expression literally means “losing weight.” It is being disheartened; you lose heart because you like samsara so much. You like your old-fashioned games and your good old days, and you do not really want to leave this world. Therefore you say, “How is it possi
ble for someone like me to attain enlightenment? It is impossible. I should never even try. I have been this way for many years, and I will be this way for many years to come. What is the point of trying to attain enlightenment? What is the point of trying to do anything at all?”
Interestingly, the fact that you say this means that you are beginning to have a faint fever of what enlightenment would be like: you realize that the attainment of enlightenment means that you can no longer indulge in your samsaric world. Therefore, you begin to feel panicked, and you say, “I cannot do it. How could I ever do it?” You disguise that as losing heart, but in your heart of hearts, you want to stay in your samsara. You are afraid of losing any of your reference points in the samsaric world because you are very attached to samsara.
Degraded Laziness
The third category of laziness is degraded laziness: mepa lelo. Mepa means “base” or “degraded,” and lelo means “laziness”; so mepa lelo means “degraded laziness.” Degraded laziness is the laziness of being preoccupied. You are preoccupied with dealing with enemies, collecting wealth, and other activities. You are busy with activities other than dharmic ones, and exert yourself in those situations instead of devoting yourself to dharma practice. You couldn’t care less about the dharma. Sometimes you think about practice, but that does not bring up a great deal of exertion. Your effort is spent on other things. Degraded laziness is caused by a feeling of depression: you feel down, you are not cheered up, and you don’t realize the value of the teachings. You do not think the dharma is worthwhile. So me-pe lelo implies depression and laziness combined.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 27
