Verse 35:
When we lack all control over where we must travel and always must wander like waifs with no home,” – waif is just a word for homeless people – “this is the wheel of sharp weapons returning full circle upon us from wrongs we have done. Till now we’ve disturbed holy gurus and others and forced them to move from their homes or their seats; hereafter let’s never cause others disturbance by evicting them cruelly from where they reside.
The more literal translation is just simply:
At times when we have to wander about, like people not under their own control, this is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they are staying. Now, let’s never expel (anyone) from any place.
This is speaking about situations in which we don’t have any control where we live or where we’re staying. We’re always forced to move because of various types of circumstances. You can’t afford the rent; it could be circumstances of war, it could be circumstances of family. We don’t have control ourselves in terms of deciding where we are going to stay. It could be because of our partner insists that we move somewhere else, and we have to move. We wander about without any real home of our own choosing. This is the difficult situation. It says here that, “This is the sharp weapon of negative karma coming back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay.”
This can be – as it says in the more poetical form – kicking out people from their home, like if we own a house or something like that and we kick the people out and take it for ourselves or kick them out by raising the rent so high that they can’t stay there, which happens to some people. Maybe we don’t have that type of property, but it certainly can happen. It can also be forcing people out of their seats, it says – not letting them have the place where they rest and so on. Actually, it’s interesting if you think about it, because you could drive people away from where they are, from where they’re staying – either living or just temporarily resting or staying – by being very loud or very unpleasant. In other words, it doesn’t have to be actually that you tell them, “Get out,” but we make it so unpleasant for them that, in a sense, we force them to move because we don’t like them, or we don’t like what they’re doing. It doesn’t have to be only with people; it’s an interesting thing if we start to extend this to situations that are not so easy. For instance, you have mice living in your house, or you have bedbugs living in your furniture, or cockroaches. Do you kick them out of their home and send them wandering about or do you give them a home? That’s certainly not an easy one. What do we do in that type of situation? You can try to give them another home. In some situations, it really is quite impossible. Obviously if you have to move, and you can’t bring your dog or your cat with you, you don’t just throw the dog or the cat just out of the house and let it be on the street. You try to find another home for it – that is fairly clear. I had to do that with my dog, for example, in India, when I moved to the West. But when your house is full of bedbugs as my house was once – obviously there are examples from the literature of somebody taking all the worms and little insects off with the tip of their tongue and putting them somewhere else but, if we’re not at that level, which I doubt that most of us are, what do you do?
One of the important points is the motivating emotion that we have. When we speak about motivation in Buddhism, we’re talking about two aspects: one is what is the aim, the purpose of what we’re doing; and then the accompanying emotion. The aim might be to save the house, because I can’t really afford to move, and I need to be able to work and continue whatever beneficial things I’m doing. That would be the aim, the purpose. Then the accompanying motivation: it’s important to try to have compassion for the cockroaches – wish them better future rebirth – rather than have anger and hatred toward them. Now, there are two levels of this motivation. One is one that brings us into the action, the causal motivation, what starts us into this whole process. The other one is the contemporaneous motivation – in other words, what’s going on in our minds when we actually are killing them. That’s much more difficult, and that is much stronger, actually, in terms of determining the result. I noticed it in myself when I had to kill the bedbugs that were completely living in everything in my house. I tried to have a positive motivation as my cause for getting rid of them, but when I was actually doing it and killing them, then what was my aim? My aim was to really kill them; there was one running around and then you think, “Hah! I really want to kill you, stop running around.” So, all of a sudden, the aim of what you’re doing is really to kill it rather than to have the house be available for my own use.
Although I wasn’t really angry with the bed bugs that were there, another factor is whether or not you rejoice in what you’re doing – you feel happy about it – or you regret what you’re doing. You can regret what you’re doing beforehand, but when the thing is running around, and you get, it it’s quite easy to feel quite happy: “Ah, I got it.” It’s not so simple. In theory, if you have a positive motivation, it will certainly make it much less negative, but that’s hard to sustain when you’re actually in the act of killing them. From the karmic point of view, whether you do it yourself or you have somebody else to do it for you, the result is the same. Now, we can’t really control what the other person is going to have as their attitude toward doing it. That becomes actually a very interesting issue if you call in some professional exterminator. They usually just have a very neutral attitude; they’re just doing their job in order to make money. I don’t think that they, if they’ve been doing that job for a long time, particularly enjoy it unless they’re really a bit strange. They just sort of do it. I don’t know if that’s better or worse; in a sense we’re contributing to the negative karma of somebody else by hiring somebody to do that for us. That’s very true. These are difficult issues.
I think another important point here, in terms of karma – what makes karma heavy or not heavy – is the actual status of the being that we’re kicking out from where they’re staying. In other words, to kick out a human being is much heavier than kicking out a cockroach. This is in terms of how much benefit that being is doing to others in this particular lifetime. In theory, the cockroach could be reborn as your mother, but putting that aside, in this lifetime a human being is able to do much more beneficial things for others than a cockroach; and a great spiritual master can do far more to benefit others than a murderer. If you have to make a choice between kicking your family out of the house or kicking the bedbugs or cockroaches out of the house, then it’s quite clear that the family takes precedence over the cockroaches. These are not so easy issues. But there’re other examples that come up. The example that I’m thinking of is a very modern one, where they kick people out of their houses in order to build a shopping mall, in order to develop the land and make a lot of money off of it. It happens in so many places around the world. I think these are much better examples of what it’s talking about.
Or destroying the environment on a larger scale, where you exploit the national parks to build vacation homes in them, and cell phone towers, or cutting down the trees of the Amazon in order to have more farms or exploiting the wildlife parks in Alaska to drill for more oil. This certainly is not only committing this type of negative action of evicting others from where they live, but also it’s breaking one of the bodhisattva vows. One of the bodhisattva vows is not to destroy places, environments, or cities, or areas, and that’s certainly destroying it. So, these things are quite negative, and it produces a collective karma as well. Often you will see many people experiencing the same thing of becoming refugees, having to leave their homeland, as it happened with the Tibetans. When you look at collective karma, the people who are experiencing this type of thing weren’t necessarily Tibetans in their previous lives when they built up that karma; they could have been anywhere and anything. There’s one explanation that they had to have built it up together at the same time; that could be the case.
We can think of many beings that experience this problem either now being refugees or who are building up the karma to experience that in the future. It says, “At times when like people not under their own control we must wander about.” “Wander about” doesn’t mean that you just move to another home, and then that’s your home. Wander about means wandering around and not having any home. Having to go here and there and being moved from this refugee camp to that refugee camp and so on. “This is the sharp weapon of negative karma circling back on us from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay.”
Obviously the heaviest is to kick your teacher out of his room or her room because you want that. I’m thinking of some of these Dharma Centers where the teacher might have a very quiet room in the back, and you’re running the center, and you want that room for yourself, so you throw the guru to the room that’s right on the street so they have all the traffic noise. It “comes from having kicked out gurus and others from where they stay. Now, let’s never expel anyone from any place.” Another interesting example could be when there’s reserved seats or seats in the front, and some kids come and they sit in those seats, do you kick them out? This happens at teachings all the time, doesn’t it? There’s always a reserved section in the front for the VIPs, and people invariably sit there who’ve shouldn’t be sitting there, and then somebody comes along and kicks them out. In a sense it’s they’re taking what was not given, and they’re not in their own place, but what is somebody’s own place? Obviously, there are a lot of points that could be analyzed.
Or the window seat in the airplane: somebody is sitting in your seat. Or at these teachings – this happens very often – there really aren’t reserved places but you think, “This is my place, I have been sitting there every day.” Then you come, and somebody is sitting in your place. Do you kick them out and make a big scene, which usually involves a great deal of anger because the other person doesn’t want to leave; or do you just give the victory to the others and sit somewhere else? That I think is a common example that happens to many of us who go to these large public teachings. Or if we have a regular seat – “You always sit there, you always sit there, you always sit there” – what happens if you come in and somebody is sitting in your place? Sometimes it’s a very good exercise when people have regular places. I’ve seen this with some Dharma teachers: they come in and then they insist that everybody move their place and sit somewhere else so they don’t get so attached to where they’re sitting. We feel as though “it’s my place” and become very possessive about it. I think from this point of view most of us have probably experienced this type of thing. Or somebody takes our parking place; I’ve seen people get into big fights over somebody taking their parking place.
Let’s do this exercise, thinking in terms of if we ourselves this type of situation. We take on ourselves having to wander about. We think in terms of the cause of kicking others out of where they’re staying and decide not to do that anymore. Then we think to take on their problem from others and give them the same solution. Again, it says that this is not under your own control. For instance, I travel a lot – that is under my own control; that’s not like a homeless person. Or being in the diplomatic corps, you have to move around a lot, but that’s by choice. It’s by choice that you joined the diplomatic corps and put yourself in that type of lifestyle.
There’re many examples that came to my mind that are quite interesting. What about when you have a dog or cat that likes to sit or sleep on your favorite chair or on a good piece of furniture – do you kick them off? That’s a common example, isn’t it? Another example is that I don’t want the dog on my bed where I sleep, especially not on my pillow. The other example that I was thinking of is that I have a very loud neighbor. I’m not about to kick them out of living next door to me – I don’t have the power to do that – but certainly sometimes I wish they would move. That’s going in that direction because, obviously, if I had the power to kick them out and find a quieter neighbor, I certainly would choose that. So, I think it’s also what one wishes or what one thinks: “I’ll try to make a lot of noise myself so that’ll disturb them so maybe they’ll move”. There are a lot of variants on this particular situation.