WSW 3: Equal Attitude toward Everyone (Points 1-3)

Now, there are a number of methods that we can use for developing this recognition of everybody (once we are open to considering everybody): not being drawn to some, and repelled by others, and ignoring others. Actually, there are nine thoughts, or points of view, from which we can see how everybody is equal. Perhaps we can go through these one by one and practice them a little bit in the circle, so that we get a little bit of a taste of how we develop this equal attitude toward everybody. That’s the first step; that we want to help them; we want them to be happy – that comes later. But seeing that everybody is equal – that’s the foundation for wishing them to be happy and not to be unhappy. 

This list is divided; the Tibetans love to make lists, and outlines, and things like that. We can look at things from the relative or conventional point of view or the deepest point of view. In terms of the relative point of view, first we would speak about how things look from our own point of view. From our own point of view, the first thing is in terms of a basic insight that you have in another aspect of the bodhichitta teachings, which is recognizing everybody as having been our mother in some previous lifetime. That is a very difficult insight to have, a very difficult type of realization to have. “Mother,” here, is just in terms of an Asian context: it is assumed that everybody loves their mother and has a good relation with their mother. If we don’t have such a relation in this lifetime, we can use father, we can use best friend, but mother or father actually makes far more sense in terms of logic for proving that everybody has been our mother at some point. Remember, at the beginning I said that an awful lot of the points in the Dharma are based on the fact of rebirth; Buddhism has taken as a fact that there is rebirth. Without accepting past and future lives, it’s quite difficult to really get into some of the things that follow from it in the teachings. 

I think one of the more helpful ways of approaching it – certainly the way that I approached it – is to give it the benefit of the doubt. This means that I will assume, for the moment, that it is true, and then let’s see what follows from accepting it as true. If what follows from accepting it as true is beneficial to me, and helps me very much, then that gives a little bit more strength to believing that rebirth actually happens, that it actually is the case. I think we need that type of open mind to approach it here. If you’re interested in the line of reasoning for demonstrating that everybody’s been our mother in some previous lifetime, it’s as follows. What is assumed here is that there are a finite number of beings – although countless, so a huge number of beings – and there’s no beginning. So, a finite number of beings have taken rebirth, with no beginning. Now, on that basis you have to say that everybody has been our mother at one time or another. This is because if there were one being that was our mother, then because everybody is equal, and there’s a finite number and an infinite amount of time, then everybody at some point has been my mother. Because if you take it the other way around: if there was one being who was not my mother at some point, and since everybody was equal, nobody could have been my mother. You have to think about that. So, if one person was our mother, everybody has to have been our mother. This is because if one wasn’t our mother, since they were all equal, then nobody was ever our mother – including our mother of this lifetime. There is this logic which is used to demonstrate that if you have a finite number in infinite time, at some point everybody’s been our mother. Based on that, then the first point here – equalizing our attitude about everybody – is that if you haven’t seen your mother in ten minutes or ten years, is she still your mother? She’s still your mother. If you haven’t seen your mother in 10 years, or you haven’t seen your mother in 10 lifetimes, is she still your mother? You have to say yes. Based on that, one can equalize one’s attitude toward everybody. It’s just a matter of time, of when they were our mother. This the way of looking at it here. I don’t know how easy it will be to look around the living room and see everybody as equally having been our mother in different lifetimes. The gender of course doesn’t matter. The dog could have been our mother in a previous lifetime as well. So, could a mosquito. It’s just a matter of time, of when they were our mother. They could be our mother in the future again, but if there’s infinite time, they already have been our mother at least once. 

We start by just quieting down, focusing on the breath. Then we look around at each other as equally having been our mother. It’s just a matter of time whether they were our mother 10 lifetimes ago, a hundred lifetimes ago, last lifetime, a million lifetimes ago – they’re still our mother. You don’t really have to visualize anything, unless you want to, but it’s just basically a recognition. Of course, what always goes with that is what follows in this other bodhichitta meditation, which is remembering the kindness of the mother to bear you in her womb, and to give birth to you, and feed you, and so on. Of course, all our mothers have different personalities, so that’s not a problem. I think this exercise becomes a little bit more meaningful if your own mother has died already, as with my own mother who died about 10 years ago. Then one can start to wonder, if one takes rebirth seriously, what type of rebirth she might have now? If I meet somebody that’s the appropriate age, could this in fact be my mother? That’s one way that helps us to get into this. This is not a very easy exercise, I must admit – recognizing everyone as having been our mother. But that’s the first point here.

Eventually, with all of these meditations what we need to be able to do is to use them in our daily lives. In our daily lives we don’t walk around with our eyes closed – we see people, we interact with people, and we need, eventually, to be able to use these practices when we encounter people. For instance, if you are in some sort of social service business or profession, and you’re treating different people, or you’re working in a store, you’re working in a market, or something like that, so many people come to you each day, and this is very helpful to be able to see them all equally and want, on that basis, to help them all equally. So, this is one way of doing that.

The second way is in terms of thinking, “Well, we’re all related to everybody else – that’s true in a sense; and everybody maybe helped us when they were our mothers, but if you look at it, hasn’t each person actually hurt us more than they have helped us? For this, what we need to think is that actually, everything that we use, everything that we enjoy in life, comes from the work of other people, and animals, and so on. We haven’t produced everything ourselves. We can look at everything in this room, everything in our house – all our clothing, all the food – it came from a tremendous amount of hard work of an unbelievable number of beings and people. Not only the people who grew the food, but also the people who harvested it, who packaged it, who transported it, who made the roads that allow for the transport, who made the packages, who made the stores, who work in the stores, who made the gasoline with which the trucks are able to transport the food – all of that. It’s an unbelievable amount of people and beings involved. The electricity – where does that come from? Every tiny little item in the house. This glass – where did that come from? How many people were involved in making this glass, and getting the material out of which the glass is made, and so on? 

A lot of work, for absolutely everything around us: if you think of all the food that we’ve eaten in our lives, and how much work went into producing all of that, then we can see that even when others don’t have any motivation to benefit us, that doesn’t matter; nevertheless, we have benefitted from all the work that they have done. In this sense, everybody in the long term has benefitted us much more than they have harmed us. They have contributed in some way or another to our lives. To accustom ourselves to this, what you do is basically you look around the room, or you look around your house, and you try to gain the appreciation of how many beings have worked to produce all of this so that we can benefit from it. Then one can also start to look at each other in terms of over the course of infinite lifetimes – how much each of us must have done to contribute to our own existence. In that sense, everybody is equal, if you consider infinite time. 

This is the point of everybody’s equal, in the sense that everybody has helped us much more than they have hurt us, because they have all contributed, in one way or another, to our being able to live, to eat, and have homes and have everything. Even when we were living in the Stone Age, if there weren’t animals that we could kill and eat, we wouldn’t have survived. So, they contributed to our being able to be alive, didn’t they? In one way or another, whenever we’ve been alive – which has been always – our lifetime has been supported by others, we have been benefitted from others. Let’s take a moment to think about all the things that we make use of. Think just in terms of how we got here, and who made the streets, and who made the U-Bahn (subway), and who made the bicycle (if we rode on a bicycle), the streets, everything? Or this building.

Actually, for this, it’s quite helpful to look around the room and to focus on each item that we see, and start to appreciate, where in the world did this come from and how much work went into producing this? The cloth in the curtains – where in the world did that come from? The wood of the floor. This book, the paper, and the ink. The food that we’ve eaten today. We recognize that, in one way or another, everybody has been mostly involved in supporting our lives, benefitting us. In this way, everybody is equal. We can look at everybody here in the room as equally having benefitted us over countless lives.

The third point here is about looking at everybody from the point of view of death and impermanence. We’re all equal in the sense that everybody is going to die. Life is impermanent, and you can’t tell when it’s going to end. Anybody that we meet – it could be the last few minutes of their life; and the same thing with ourselves – this could be the last few minutes of my life. If that were the case, if these were the last few minutes of my life, how do I want to spend that? Do I want to spend that being nasty and trying to hurt you? What’s the point? If it’s the last few minutes of your life, why bother trying to hurt you? You’re going to die in a few minutes anyway. In this sense, we can see that everybody is equal from the point of view of death; why not try to benefit them and do some sort of positive thing rather than negative. When we think of this automatically – when we look at people and we think that they could die at any minute – if they were to die in a few minutes, you’d naturally develop a little bit of sympathy, I think. It is true: anybody could die at any time. We could be those people that just the other day were in that building in Poland that collapsed. Something similar happened here in Germany a month ago. That could happen at any time. You don’t have to be old to die. There’s no security from the Lord of Death – he will find you wherever you are. Shantideva says it very nicely: “Whether our work is finished, or half done, or not started, the Lord of Death will not wait.” That’s what he says.

We go on to the next point, which is that there are three recognitions that we can have from others’ point of view, when considering others. First of all is the general one – that everybody wants to be happy, and nobody wants to be unhappy. That’s the most basic recognition that we can have in terms of looking at everybody equally. No matter how horrible a person might be in terms of really being cruel and so on, still everybody does want to be happy and nobody wants to be unhappy, however they might define that. In that sense, everybody is equal. Everybody wants to be liked; nobody wants to be disliked. Everybody wants to be accepted; nobody wants to be ignored or rejected. We would try to see everybody in that light.

I’m going through these a little bit quickly. It would be nice to go through the nine points of view of seeing how everybody is equal just so that we soon get to the text. But I think that the foundation of these points is quite helpful so at least you know the context of the teachings of the text. As I said, this follows from the fact that everybody as a human being has feelings, therefore everybody wants to be happy and not to be unhappy. Everybody here in this circle wants to be happy not to be unhappy – we’re all equal.

Then the next point is that everybody is equal in the sense that everybody has the right to be happy. The example that we could use is, for instance, if we have a group of children in school and we have milk and cookies, all of the children have equal right to have milk and cookies – not just the ones that we like, or the good-looking ones, or the ones who behave nicely. All of them would equally like to have the milk and cookies. In that sense, everybody is equal. (That of course assumes that they all like milk and cookies, but we won’t go into that.) The classic example that’s used is a group of beggars – all of them equally would like to be given some food, but most of us haven’t really encountered large groups of beggars like you would in India.

I remember being in Bodh Gaya – which is in Bihar, the poorest state in India – at the time of a famine. You would walk out to, let’s say, one of these places like where Buddha broke his fast or anything like that, and it was like a swarm of insects. You would have about 30 small children following you and pulling at your clothes, begging – “ek paisa” one penny or “baksheesh” alms – and sort of whining like this, and there was no way to satisfy them or stop them. It was very difficult – I mean you just had to leave. Most people didn’t have 50 coins to give one to each of them, so how can you give to just one or two, or have enough food to give something to each of them? That was quite a horrible experience, I must say. But that’s the point here: each of them is equal in the right to be given something. The milk and cookies example in school is a little bit tamer. Actually, this is quite interesting if you think in terms of being at a meal, at a table, with let’s say eight people or ten people, and there’s there a large dish, and it’s passed around, and each person takes some. How conscious are we with the fact that everybody at the table would like some of this, in terms of how much we take? That’s where this type of thinking would come in: everybody equally would like some.

The next point is that everybody is equal in wanting to be free of their suffering. The point is that if we want to think in terms of everybody being equal, which is how you would want to approach helping others – that we don’t have favorites, that we’re willing to help everybody. If we’re a doctor, we’re willing to help everybody who comes into the office. The first person that comes in in the day, and the last person who comes in the day – all of them equally want our care, and so it’s not fair to just push the last one out very quickly without paying proper equal attention to the last one as the first one. This is what we’re talking about here. Everybody has the same right to good treatment, to be free from their suffering, to be happy, because everybody equally wants to be happy, and nobody wants to be unhappy. This is what we’re talking about: our willingness to help everybody equally, and without being judgmental. Anybody who would like our help – if we’re able to, we give that, and we take everybody seriously. 

I think perhaps we can end here for today with a dedication. We think whatever positive force and understanding has come from this, may it go deeper and deeper, and act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.