WSW 7: Transforming Negative Emotions

We’re up to verse 4 then:

Now, desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here. Only brave ones, like peacocks, can thrive of such fare. If cowardly beings, like crows, were to try it, because they are greedy, they might lose their lives.

The first word of this verse – “now” – is explained, according to the commentaries, as indicating that in order to get to the stage where we could practice like these bodhisattvas, of actually taking on the suffering of others and trying to give them happiness, we have to go through the training of the three scopes of motivation, as we were discussing with the lam-rim. It’s only now, on the basis of the initial scopes of motivation, that one would be ready to be able to actually use this type of practice to help others. That means working on thinking to try to improve future lives, to continue to get precious human rebirths. We do this by basically putting a safe direction in our life; working toward getting rid of our limitations and problems; and realizing our potentials, and the way the Buddhas have done in full and the highly realized community is doing in part. Particularly, we have to restrain from destructive behavior. 

That is very essential. If we’re going to try to help others, obviously we have to refrain from acting in a destructive way that is going to hurt them, or a destructive way that is going to hurt ourselves, which would then limit our ability to be able to help others. For instance, I just had a conversation with a student of mine in North America who is always talking about wanting to follow the bodhisattva path, and is so enthusiastic about Dharma. But then he reported to me that he had an overdose of cocaine and had to go into the hospital. Fortunately, he survived, but here is a very good example of wanting to able to help others, and talking about helping others, but what is he doing? He’s damaging himself and putting himself in a situation in which he can’t help others at all, but he needs a lot of help. So, although it’s not directly steeling something from somebody, or killing them, or anything like that, in terms of destructive behavior, nevertheless, if we act in a very self-destructive type of way, that severely limits our ability to help anybody else. One has to be very stable in this type of discipline. This person, it’s quite clear, would never go out and do something straightforwardly to hurt somebody else, but he doesn’t really see that continuing to take drugs indirectly makes problems for others. It’s a very ignorant thing that he’s doing. 

When we talk about this bodhisattva path, what’s the main practice that’s discussed here? The main practice is tonglen. The whole text is basically about tonglen: taking on the suffering of others and giving them happiness. So here is the situation the guy calls me up, and he tells me this – he didn’t have the courage to tell me it happened two weeks ago; finally, he built up the courage to tell me this – and what would be the best way to help him? Do you do tonglen? Well, tonglen – giving and taking – is actually something that you don’t do when you’re with the person. It’s something that one could do afterwards in terms of thinking of the unhappiness that the guy has, and the frustration, and whatever problem he might have with addiction, and so on. Then you could do that. But actually when you’re speaking with the person, what I thought would be better was to be a little bit strict and speak quite strongly to him. I thought this would be far more helpful than saying, “Oh, it’s okay, doesn’t matter, and blah blah blah.” It’s very interesting when we look at this method here of tonglen – when do you apply it, and how do you actually use it to help others?

The way that you respond to somebody has to be spontaneous, authentic; you have to sensitive to what can help with. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t get it right; and even if we do something, we’re not the only factor which is affecting what this person is going to do next. No matter what I say to him, he may take drugs again. There is no way of saying anything. Even if I say, “All the Dharma talks that you’ve attended are complete bullshit if you are acting like this. Come on, what are you serious about?” The thing that was the worst with him was that he had promised to me some months ago – almost like taking a vow – that he was going to stop. So this makes it even heavier. What I’m saying is that you can be sympathetic afterwards, when you’re not actually speaking to the person. But when you’re with the person, it doesn’t help to be sympathetic and say, “Oh, I understand, it’s difficult, and blah blah blah.” That doesn’t help at all. 

To get back to the point of the text, when we learn about this type of method, I think that, primarily, it’s when we’re by ourselves; and primarily, it’s not going to help the other person. It really isn’t, unless it’s an unbelievable super practitioner and unbelievable karmic connection. The main thing that it’s working on here is ourselves: to overcome the ego grasping of thinking, “I don’t want to have to deal with somebody else’s problems” and “I want to run away from their problems and just be with everybody,” thinking that everything is so nice. We sit in our Dharma center, and just chant, and “May everybody be happy.” That’s fantasy land. 

Let’s get back to the text. As I said, when it says the word “now,” it means on the basis of the training for the initial level motivation, which is basically to refrain from destructive behavior. It’s like in the case of this guy: he can’t possibly think to help others if he doesn’t have any sort of discipline himself to restrain from being either destructive to others or destructive to himself. You really affirm that this is the direction of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha that I want to go into. For instance – and this is very interesting with ourselves – when we’re in a difficult situation, what do we turn to? Do you turn to refuge – “I’m going in this direction?” Or do you turn to drugs? Do you turn to food? Do you turn to sex? Do you turn to television? What do you turn to? A lot of people say that they take refuge, that they go in this direction; but then, when they are really depressed and low or in a difficult situation, they don’t. They don’t have the strength and what you want is a quick fix. The quick fix can be, as I say, distracting yourself with a momentary pleasurable thing – friends, food, sex, drugs, entertainment, etc. There is a compromise here, I think, just in terms of a practical level, because for most people, when they are really depressed and in a difficult situation, to say, “Well I’m going to do prostrations” or “I’m going to go do some meditation” – most people don’t have the strength for that. What I would think is a compromise is that if you know that eating a bar of chocolate is ultimately not going to make you really feel better – to just use a silly example – but it does make you feel a little bit better, and so you take a temporary chocolate fix but reaffirm what your deeper direction is. In other words, you do a little bit of both because sometimes just the Dharma fix is too stark, not sweet enough. I’m speaking on an actual, practical, everyday level, when you’re feeling low – it’s not so easy. 

Then the intermediate level is this determination to be free – this renunciation in which your mind is really made up. You’re fed up with the whole up and down of samsara, and it repeating, and really going nowhere, and you really are determined that you’re going to get out of it. You’re willing to give up the other ways that you’re trying to solve the issue, because it’s only on that basis of really being determined to get out of it yourself that you can be sincere about wanting to help others get out of it. It’s only on the basis of thinking how terrible samsaric situations for yourself are that you can have the empathy for others as well.

What we need is this foundation here of determination to be free,and seeing that it’s basically this grasping for a solid “me” – “I’m feeling sorry for myself” – is the problem here and that we really need to get over that. We also need to think in terms of, when we talk about the samsaric situation, how we’re going up and down, and repeating, and one birth after another birth, then another birth, another life. I think one has to really accept that one is alone. As it says in the teachings, you’re born alone, you die alone. Even if you have the most wonderful partner in life, you can’t really depend on that partner to solve all your problems because inevitably people part. Whether one dies or the other, or one moves to another city, or something comes up and there is a parting – this is just natural, and one has to have the strength to know that you’re born alone, you die alone. You have to face your life, basically by taking responsibility yourself. That I think is very important because if you don’t take responsibility for yourself, then how can you as a bodhisattva try to help others and take responsibility to help others? 

First you have to take responsibility for yourself. Also, seeing that you can’t depend on others for your stability, you shouldn’t try to make others dependent on you when you’re helping them or trying to help them. What one needs to do is to learn to stand on one’s own feet – of course with the realization that we are interrelated to everybody; it’s not that we are isolated from everybody. We try to help others stand on their own two feet. It’s like when you raise up children: obviously you want them be able to stand up by themselves and not be dependent on mummy and daddy their whole lives. Likewise, we need to learn that also as an adult I don’t depend on mummy and daddy anymore, but I can think that I depend on my partner. It’s still a dependence which is not helpful because it actually just brings suffering when that person inevitably goes away, either for a long time or a short time. So, one has to have this determination that “I’m going to be free of any dependency; I’m going to be free of feeling sorry for myself and take responsibility to be strong, and to really get my life in shape, get out of this recurring problem,” whatever that problem might be – feeling abandoned, feeling alone, feeling whatever it might be. It’s on that basis that we can go to the advanced level – the Mahayana level – which is what we have here with the word “now”. That’s the explanation of the first word here in the verse, “now”, which means that we need to have a basis. Now, on that basis of the initial and intermediate scopes of motivation, we can get into this type of practice of a bodhisattva.

It says, “Desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here,” and there is a big commentary of the word “here” as well. That is referring to the fact that we have in the Mahayana path two levels of practicing it. We can practice on the sutra level, and we can practice on the tantra level, which is referring to the highest class of tantra, anuttarayoga. In dealing with things such as desire, it says, “Desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here,” so one of the big issues or difficulties that we would need to deal with is: how do you deal with desire in situations in which you are attracted to somebody? When they talk about desire, they are not talking here necessarily about desire for food; they are talking about, usually, sexual desire. 

In sutra, obviously we can do a tonglen type of practice where, if we have a strong desire – strong attachment to others or to one particular person, or just in general great longing desire for this type of thing – we can think, “May everybody’s desire come on me”. Most people at least – the vast majority of people in this universe – have some sort of sexual desire, and so, “May that come on me and may I be able to deal with that problem universally for everybody.” So, you take it on, and you work with the understanding of voidness and so on, to be able to work through that problem, rather trying to run away from it. Even with people that you find very attractive, that really turn you on, you wouldn’t run away from those people and avoid them, nor would you, of course, go after them and try to catch them. But in that situation, in which your desire comes up strongly, you can then use that as an opportunity to work on it. As it says here “desire is the garden of poisonous plants” so a bodhisattva would want to, in a sense, work with that. 

So that’s tonglen – tonglen is a sutra practice, so one can do tonglen. On a tantra level, when they talk about desire and using desire on the path, they are really talking about something very different. There are different levels here. One can use desire in a sense of transforming it into an offering, in the sense that what one experiences is a blissful awareness. The whole thing with tantra is that when you talk about desire, it is a blissful state of mind, unless it’s very disturbing. If it’s disturbing, then we think it’s blissful, but it’s not really blissful. So if one adds to desire some understanding of voidness – in the sense that “this person doesn’t exist as an independent thing that, if I could have, is going to solve all my problems;” or “the orgasm isn’t this fantastic thing that exists by itself and by its own power is going to solve everything”, and so on – it’s an exhilarating state. We talk about a blissful state: the mind becomes a little bit clear, a little bit uplifted, and so you can use that and make that as an offering. 

You can also use that in a Mahamudra sense, to makes the mind clearer. It tends to make the mind more subtle, and this is what they say also in terms of other disturbing emotions: the stronger the disturbing emotion, the more energy and intensity the mind has. So, if you have some understanding of voidness and so on, so that you’re not following out that disturbing emotion, it helps you to see the nature of the mind. These are very difficult things to practice; it’s extremely difficult. What tantra is pointing to is a much deeper level, which is when you actually are indulging desire. It acts as a circumstance for generating a certain sensation within the central channel in the energy body – which assumes that you have perfect concentration and perfect control over the energies in the body – so that then it helps you to get to the subtlest level of mind, the clear light mind for nonconceptual understanding of voidness. 

Well, there is no way that we are at that level now. I think that the best that we can try to do at this level is to transform that energy, when you have strong longing desire, so that you don’t act it out. You transform it in a sense that you use that blissful state of mind with more clarity to spread joy to everybody. It energizes you. This is one way of using it, of transforming it. You don’t run away from desire. You don’t suppress it in. It is something that you can use on the path. So when it says the word “here,” it’s referring to the fact that here there is also the tantra method for working on it. 

It says, “Now, desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here, only brave ones like peacocks can thrive on such fare.” Only brave courageous bodhisattvas can actually use such a type of situation. When we talk about “brave,” the Sanskrit word bodhisattva doesn’t have any word in it meaning brave. “Bodhi” is here indicating enlightenment, and “sattva” is somebody with a mind that’s obviously aimed at enlightenment. But when the Tibetans translate it, they add a word into it which means “courageous” or “brave.” They translate it with “pa (dpa’)” – a four-syllable word. They add the word “courageous” or “brave.” “Brave only brave ones like peacocks” – “brave ones” means that you have bodhichitta, you have this courage that you are aiming to benefit everybody, and you are aiming to reach enlightenment, to be able to do that. If that’s your aim, first of all you have discipline: you’re not going to act destructively. You’re not going to go over and sexually abuse the person, or throw yourself at the person, or have a one-night affair and just use them for your pleasure. You have the determination to be free from any sort of suffering situation with the person, to be free from the drawbacks that acting out desire has. You’re not going to act it out; you’re determined to be free from all the problems that are involved with it. You are aiming to benefit everybody and to reach enlightenment.

On that basis, only brave ones can actually then use desire or any of these disturbing emotions to try to transform them. This can be done in a tonglen practice in which we think, “May everybody’s desire come on me and I’m going to deal with it. I’m not going to run away from it. I’m going to face it and work through it, and be in situations in which I have desire, others might have desires” – so that it’s a real thing. It’s not just sitting there and not really feeling desire, and just playing around with taking on desire; we do this in a situation in which it has been aroused in me. 

Or on another level of working with it, to gain more clarity of mind, to see the nature of the mind, or using it as an offering to spread joy because you’re energized by desire. When you are turned on by somebody, you’re energized; and if you are not disturbed by that energy, if you have an understanding of voidness, if you have the discipline, you’re not going to act it out. If you have the determination to be free of all the problems and garbage that goes with acting it out, then you can use that energization that it gives you, and the clarity that it gives you, and the joy that it gives you to then spread that out to everybody in your dealings with everybody. This is the way.

The verse says, “If cowardly beings, like crows, were to try it, because they are greedy, they might lose their lives.” “Lose their lives” means they might lose the life of their chance to reach enlightenment. If they are cowardly – it means they don’t have bodhichitta, they really aren’t firm in their path – and they were to try to use desire as the path, then because they are greedy – in other words, they want more and more pleasure and stuff like that – they’ll be grasping for the pleasure rather than using it and transforming it. They might lose their lives; they would really ruin their chance of reaching enlightenment. 

So, that’s the fourth verse:

Now, desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here, only brave ones, like peacocks, can thrive on such fare. If cowardly being, like crows, were to try it, because they are greedy, they might lose their lives.

It’s not an easy point but this is a general introduction to the subject matter; it gives the context with which the rest of the text unfolds. 

Then verse 5:

How can someone who cherishes self more than others take lust in such dangerous poisons for food? If he tried like a crow to use other delusions, he would probably forfeit his chance for release.

“How can someone who cherishes self more than others” – here we’re talking about the self-cherishing attitude, if you’re always thinking in terms of yourself. “Self-cherishing” means that I’m the most important one, and I’m only looking out for what is going to be of benefit to me. That’s self-cherishing. I’m only going to take care of my own needs. Even on a regular level, a non-Buddhist level, in terms of a sexual relationship, if you’re only thinking in terms of your own sexual pleasure, and you don’t care at all about the pleasure of the partner, that’s really exploitation. That’s not at all being a nice person, is it? So similarly here: how could we actually think to take on, particularly in the tonglen practice, these various disturbing emotions from others if we are cherishing ourselves more than others? We could never do anything like that. 

One of the main foundations for this taking and giving, this tonglen practice, is to exchange self-cherishing for cherishing of others – to think of others as the most important, to think of their benefit as the most important and so on – because what prevents us from taking on and dealing with the problems of others is thinking just about me. “I have enough problems of my own, I don’t want your problems, I don’t want to get my hands dirty,” and so how could we possibly think to take on the anger of somebody, or the naivety of somebody, or in this case the desire of somebody, the attachment of somebody, if we’re only thinking of ourselves? When we think in terms of the taking on the desire and attachment of somebody, it is also taking on the suffering and unhappiness that comes from that. I know of an example of somebody who says, “Oh I’m a great, I’m really interested in Dharma, I’m always trying to practice Dharma” and fanatically practices Dharma on one side, but on the other side goes absolutely crazy about women, and absolutely loses self-control with women, and just completely goes off in the wrong direction with that. 

My point here is that when we come across someone like that, the first tendency to do as a Dharma practitioner is to be critical of this person and in many ways to be disgusted with them: “Come on, why are you acting like this? You’re such a hypocrite.” We are judgmental, and we certainly don’t want to feel empathy and sympathy for this person and take on their problem. It’s more sort of scolding them – “You’re a bad boy” – isn’t it? That’s the first sort of automatic response to this. The natural tendency here is to look down on them. When we have that type of attitude, what’s it saying here is that that’s self-cherishing: “I’m so good and I’m not like that.” We’re thinking of ourselves as more important. We’re concerned about ourselves, if anything; “I don’t want to become like that.” That confirms that I don’t want to be like that, but we’re not really thinking about how can we help this person. “This person is hopeless. I don’t really want to get involved.” This is what it’s saying – that if you have this self-cherishing, you won’t be able to do this path of tonglen. 

That’s what the verse is saying – that in the face of somebody like that, we need to have sympathy, we need to have to take on the problem of the other. Now, this brings us back to what I was discussing with this student friend of mine from North America who took this overdose of cocaine. As I said, on the phone I wasn’t so nice to him, although I told him that I’m really happy that he didn’t die. I also told him that it’s not going to help him to just pat him on the head and say it’s alright. But tried to have that not on the basis of being disappointed with him, not on the basis of being fed up and disgusted with him, but on the basis of in order to help this person. If he has some sort of respect for me, which he always says that he does, then that could help him by seeing that I am not amused at all by his doing this. That could help him in a sense – that he doesn’t want to disappoint me again.

But the thing is that afterwards, as I said, one can do this tonglen practice with the person. I look at myself – do I still have attachment? Whatever attachment I have, let me take on this person’s attachment as well and deal with it in terms of really dealing with that problem, and then thinking what the solution to it is, and trying to imagine emanating it to that person. If I’ve really thought about it and taken their problems seriously, related it to my own problem as if it were my own problem, and I come up with what is the Dharma way of dealing with it, then next time that I speak to this person I could suggest this Dharma solution because I really have taken it personally as if it were my problem. That’s what we mean by exchanging self with others. If we have self-cherishing, we wouldn’t want to do that: “I don’t want to be bothered with your problem, it’s a mess”. It’s so easy to fall into that. I have some students who are in psychiatric hospitals. They get depression, and they go into a psychiatric hospital; then, do you really want to take that seriously, what that must be like? Then as a supposed bodhisattva, you’re meeting all the time, all day long, people with problems. The more that you are involved with other people, the more people come to you, and they come to you with all sorts of messy, horrible problems. It really requires courage to be able to deal with all of that and not say, “Oh, I don’t want to have to deal with this problem.”

The verse goes on: “If he tried, like a crow, to use other delusions, he would probably forfeit his chance for release.” And so there are practices in which you’re working not only with desire in tantra but working with the other disturbing emotions. Certainly with tonglen there is no problem in doing tonglen with each of the disturbing emotions. When somebody else has a lot of anger or so on, to try to take that on oneself and dissolve it with our own anger and so on, and give them a loving type of thing. 

In Mahamudra or in tantra, anger is transformed. In Mahamudra it’s a little bit easier in the sense that that really energizes the mind. And if you don’t actually get angry, but that energy – The anger makes the mind so much more intensive that you can then see the nature of the mind more easily, then that’s a very good use of it, but that’s of course very difficult. That requires a tremendous advanced level of practice and discipline and so on. One can also as a visualization use this angry energy – like with Yamantaka, you have all these flames, and the fangs, and really arrhhh type of thing – to again try to have that energy to step out all the disturbing emotions and acting like a baby with ourselves. We have to be very careful to not direct it in such way that we are angry with ourselves in a disturbing type of way, and punishing ourselves, and this sort of thing. Again, it all depends on the understanding of voidness to be able to do that. Also, on a sutra level, as his Holiness sometimes says, one can use anger, in a sense, as somebody who’s trying to follow the bodhisattva path: you are so annoyed with the injustice of a situation that it actually moves you to take action. But you have to careful that you don’t really get angry and follow out the anger and hatred, and then we’re going to go and shoot all these people and throw rocks and petrol bombs. The point is to use this anger to get yourself to move to actually do something. What you do doesn’t have to be destructive; it could be very constructive. “I’m so fed up and annoyed with the lack of medicine in Africa and the people dying that I’m going to volunteer and go there, or I am going to make a donation.” Or, “I’m so fed up with the violence that occurs in the street that I’m going to join the neighborhood watch and volunteer to be somebody that keeps a watch on the street for when there’re any gangs. 

The text goes on to verse 6:

And thus, bodhisattvas are likened to peacocks: they live on delusions – those poisonous plants. Transforming them into the essence of practice, they thrive in the jungle of everyday. Whatever is presented, they always accept, while destroying the poison of clinging desire.

This is summarizing this introductory set of verses – that bodhisattvas therefore are similar to peacocks. They live on delusions; these disturbing emotions, they are normally poisonous plants for others, but they live on them, they thrive on them. How do they do that? They transform them into the essence of practice, and therefore they thrive in the jungle of everyday life. In our everyday life of dealing with others, our everyday life in which the various disturbing emotions come up, they deal with them in terms of tonglen. That’s why it says, “Whatever is presented, they always accept, while destroying the poison of clinging desire.” 

The clinging desire can be understood in several ways. They are taking on desires from others and destroying it within themselves – so that’s a poison. But also they are destroying their own clinging desire in the sense of that being self-cherishing, of saying “I don’t want to deal with your problem. I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to get my hands dirty.” Whatever is presented they accept. That’s not such an easy thing to do. You can also translate the word as “whatever is presented they take on themselves.” But even if we just think of it in an ordinary way of accepting, that’s something that we need to be able to really do. That we accept situations, and accept things like change. Also, of course, we can do a tonglen type of practice of, “Whatever fears anybody else might have of going into a new phase of life, a new chapter that may that come on me – may I have the courage and strength to be a good example for others of how one can move on to the next step.” Life is filled after all with step after step after step, and each one can be a great opportunity for growth. We naturally might not feel so excited to get into the next step, and of course there is attachment and so on, but once we actually make that step, then it’s important to, of course, accept it and deal with it. 

Fear is never very helpful in going into a new situation. If there is fear about it, you have to try to understand, what is it that I’m afraid of? Is it the unknown – that you don’t know how it’s actually going to work out? Is it the fear of not finding friends? Then there are various methods to use to deal with that fear. One has to think always, I think, in terms of what’s the worst that could happen, and be prepared for that. If you have some sort of plan of how you could deal with that, then it’s not so frightening.

So, this is the basic thing for today, and then next time we’ll continue. That was this verse: 

And thus, bodhisattvas are likened to peacocks, they live on delusions – those poisonous plants. Transforming them into the essence of practice, they thrive in the jungle of everyday life. Whatever is presented, they always accept, while destroying the poison of clinging desire.

Why don’t we take a minute or so just to quiet down and digest all of this, and then we’ll end.

We think whatever understanding, whatever positive force has come from this, may it act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.