WSW 18: Having No Home of Choice, Unwished Happenings, Feeling Needy

Verses 35-37

Recap

We’ve been going through this text by Dharmarakshita, Wheel of Sharp Weapons or Weapon Wheel of Blades, which is in the genre known as lojong, the training of our attitudes. It’s a Mahayana text, and what we want to do is to cleanse away our attitudes of self-cherishing – just thinking only of ourselves and grasping to ourselves as if we existed in some impossible way – so that we can follow the Mahayana path fully and purely all the way to enlightenment. The first part of the text is speaking about how we change our attitudes and transform a difficult situation into a positive situation, and this is referring to various situations in which terrible things happen to us. We need to understand, when these things happen to us, that they’re happening not because of no cause, not because some external being separate from everything is causing that to us. Rather, what happens to us is the result of our karma, of our previous actions. Of course, we have to not go to the extreme of thinking that everything that happens to us is only because of what I did, because obviously we live in this world with everybody else, and it’s everybody else’s karma that is ripening as well, and so we’re all interacting. But the fact that we get into situations is the responsibility of our own karma. 

When we understand that, then in order to be able to avoid similar things happening in the future, the first thing that we have to do is to stop continuing to cause this type of suffering result. Each verse speaks about a difficult situation, and then it speaks about the karmic cause for it, and it recommends stopping that type of action and doing something constructive or positive instead. That’s one level in which we understand the verses, and it is obviously very good advice in terms of avoiding or stopping acting destructively and acting instead in a constructive type of way. 

Another level in which we work with this material is with the method known as tonglen, which is taking and giving. When we practice that method, we start first with ourselves. We want to take on or accept all the suffering – all the difficulties that we ourselves are experiencing now and we might experience in the future as well. We think, “I’m going to take responsibility for that” – and take responsibility for stopping it in the future, not just stopping it right now. So, we do this taking and giving. We imagine that we accept all of that suffering comes into us in the form of dark substances, dark light. It comes to our heart and dissolves there in our heart. We have some sort of strong lump of selfishness that says, “I don’t really want to deal with it.” It’s not only selfishness but just basically confusion and close-mindedness: “I don’t want to accept the fact that I have problems, I don’t want to accept the fact that I may continue to have these problems,” and then just perpetuating them. We want to smash that with this dark light – or there are many visualizations that we can do – and dissolve that. The suffering, the problem, quiets down into the nature of the mind. Then from the nature of the mind, the basic calmness and happiness that’s there, we calmly give to ourselves the solution – of going to, in the future, stop acting in a negative way and act instead in a positive way. So, we do this tonglen with ourselves. 

Then we extend this practice to everybody else. We think of everybody else who has the same type of problem, and we want to remove that problem from them and give them happiness as well, since after all that’s what we want to do as a Buddha. In order to remove it from them, obviously we have to teach them or give them something to remove it, which would be stopping acting in this negative way that’s causing it and indulging as well in the positive action. The practice maybe gives the false idea that we can just save everybody and remove all their suffering. We imagine doing that because we want to do that, but actually all we can do is show them the way. They have to actually stop acting negatively and act constructively themselves. We can’t do that for them; all we can do is give them the advice and imagine that they are going to follow it – or at least hoping, wishing that they will follow that advice. The best way to get them to follow that advice, of course, is to inspire them by our own example that we follow that as well. That of course is very important. 

In the process of extending the giving and taking to everybody else, what we’re doing is also overcoming this self-centeredness with which we feel, “I don’t want to deal with everybody’s problems.” Just as we can think of ourselves as an individual person and – “I have this problem” – we can also think, “I am a Berliner, and people in Berlin have a certain problem;” or, “I’m a German, and people in Germany have a problem;” or, “I’m a Latin American, and Latin Americans have this problem.” The general problem that the larger group has is also my problem. If we think in those terms, then we don’t think just in terms of “me” and “I don’t care about anybody else.” Here we’re talking about the problems of everybody: “I am a limited being like everybody else,” and so here is a problem of all of not only humanity but all of living beings. In this way, we practice taking on the problem that everyone has, dealing with it, dissolving it, having that process smash through the selfishness that would say, “I don’t want to have to deal with everybody else’s problem.” We give them the solution by imagining white light going to the other person and giving them the discipline and the type of behavior that would be the most beneficial for them. 

So, this is the type of practice that we’ve been doing. We are now up to verse 34; we are slowly approaching the end of this section. We’ve worked with two translations here: the earlier one that I did many years ago, which is a more poetical translation; and then the literal translation, which I have done more recently.

Top