 
# TURNING HOMEWARD

The Buddhist Path of Awakening

By

Jampa Jaffe
Text copyright © 2017 Jampa Jaffe. All rights reserved.

turninghomeward.com.au

### Contents

Prologue – Begin Again

Chapter 1 – Facing Being Human

Chapter 2 – Making A Difference

Chapter 3 – Searching Our Hearts

Chapter 4 – The Endless Cycle

Chapter 5 – Losing Good Days

Chapter 6 – The Journey Of Change

Chapter 7 – As Good Belongs To You

Chapter 8 – Rare To Find

Chapter 9 – The Path of Beauty

Chapter 10 – Who, What, And When

Chapter 11 – Blessed Mountain

Chapter 12 – At Last Be True

Chapter 13 – The Cross Of Change

Chapter 14 – Mistaken Lives

Chapter 15 – Beginning

Epigraphs

About the Author

Endnotes
_To my teachers_
Ah, not to be cut off,  
not through the slightest partition  
shut out from the law of the stars.  
The inner – what is it?  
if not the intensified sky,  
hurled through with birds and deep  
with the winds of homecoming.  
—Rainer Maria Rilke, "Ah, Not to Be Cut Off"
If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you convinced him, not with tears, but with your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner!

—Rainer Maria Rilke, _Selected Poems_

### Prologue

BEGIN AGAIN

There's a familiar saying, "Even a journey of a thousand miles necessarily begins with a first step." Which is to say, however long the path, we have actually to begin it, if we're ever to reach its end.

A number of years ago, I lived in a small Buddhist monastery, a _wat_ , on a tiny island off the southeast coast of Thailand. There were three of us there, two Thai monks and myself. Over the many months that I spent meditating, I would at times become lonely and down-hearted and would question just what I was doing so far away from everything that I knew, everything that had any meaning for me—the people who I cared about and who cared about me, my interests, my habitual pleasures and distractions—living isolated, with few physical comforts, and for what I wasn't even sure.

Sometimes, when we came together in the afternoon for a hot drink, I would share these difficult feelings with the English-speaking monk and he would always listen with great attentiveness and patience. And though I was never sure if he understood even half of what I said, when I'd finished, invariably he would smile and say, "Begin again." That was all, just, "Begin again."

Perhaps the point is that we're always free to begin, to start all over again if need be. No matter who we are or what we may have done, no matter what our life-story was up to even a few moments ago, still, we can start from just there, from where we are at right now. From moment to moment we can choose to put one foot in front of the next in the choosing and re-choosing of what it is we want for ourselves, the direction we want our life to take. We can begin now to make a habit of the person we want to be, just as we have in the past formed the habit of who we currently are. We can create a new future for ourselves, go beyond our present selves and what we have or have not done if only we have the imagination and the will for it.

This is perhaps our greatest of human gifts—the capacity for free and conscious choice, the possibility to begin again, and with that the opportunity to transcend our histories, the residue of our chain-like repetitive pasts. What was once true of us and for us need be true no longer if we so choose.

Whoever you are and whatever your real or imagined constraints may be, in some form or another—however limited, however narrowly circumscribed—the chance is always there to stop drifting into the old patterns, to stop yielding to the push of circumstances, and to choose in that moment—and if only for that moment—a new life-story for yourself, to reinvent another version of who you might be and what you might do, the kind of world you want to live in.[1]
I've heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.

You ask me what to do about them.

It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race.

Face that one first.

―Idries Shah, _Reflections_

### 1

FACING BEING HUMAN

How many of us have ever looked pleadingly to the sky, our arms flung open wide, and from the depths of our hearts cried, "Why me? Why does everything always have to go so well for me? Why am I so fortunate, so happy? I can't go on like this any longer. I have to understand just what it is that I'm doing so right!" None of us. If we're unhappy, we want to know why, but it never occurs to us to ask why we're happy.

It's unhappiness, rather than happiness that disrupts our routines, deflects us from our usual preoccupations, and turns our reluctant minds to issues that seldom concern us. It's our suffering or, more precisely, an awareness of our suffering, that makes us stop and think, forces us to question.

This isn't at all to suggest that we're to be unconcerned with happiness. That would be perverse. It's just that happiness isn't the problem, suffering is. Suffering and our persistent struggle against recognizing it as an underlying truth about ourselves. It's just that if a reliable and lasting solution to the problem of suffering is ever to be found, we have at least to begin by acknowledging its existence. We have to face the difficult-to-face-fact that, as ordinary members of the human race, we suffer.

Granted we may never have known the horrors of war, or experienced the devastation of a natural disaster, or endured the miseries of poverty, yet who of us can honestly deny that we suffer too? Wealth, education, fame, beauty, position are no protection. A loving family, good health, a supportive environment all help but offer no guarantee. A few tranquil individuals, with little conflict, suffer less; at the other extreme, tormented beyond endurance, some breakdown. In between are the rest of us, not despairing enough to seriously consider death, yet not honestly able to say that we've come to terms with life.[2]

Don't we all, everyday, if only in brief and minor ways, experience the sufferings of not getting what we want, of meeting with what we don't want, of being separated from what it is we want to hold on to?

How long are any of us free from the self-generated afflictions of anger, attachment, pride, and jealousy, of being ruled by our hopes and fears, torn between conflicting emotions?

For most of us there still remains the unhealed wounds of long ago abuse and neglect, of unresolved grievances, shame-filled memories, lingering guilt about what we did or failed to do.

The view that we have of ourselves as isolated egos leaves us feeling alienated, alone, and afraid. Constantly we struggle to maintain a self-image, re-establish our credentials, guard our territory—always we're driven to be somebody doing something to confirm or defend ourselves.

Then there are the long, drawn-out periods of boredom, times when we don't know quite what to do or where to go, how to be with ourselves—not particularly painful, just dull and aimless, a feeling of tedium.

And, finally, inevitably at the end of it all, there awaits for us all the leaving behind of the loved, the familiar, and the going-forth alone we know not where.

No one asks us if we want to die or not, or for our parents, our partner, our children to die or not. No one asks us if we want our once warm love to grow cold, if we want to be in an accident, or to develop cancer, or watch all our possessions burn in a fire. No one asks us if we want to lose our job, the car not to start, for it to rain over our vacation. None of us chose to be born, none of us choose to become sick, to grow old, and none of us—at least the vast majority of us—will choose to die, yet we all do and will.

Whether our suffering be imposed by impersonal forces as with natural disaster, accident, or disease; human-made as with war, oppression, or environmental degradation; or self-induced by worry, loneliness, or intolerance, still, in terms of the quality of felt experience it's all suffering, differing only in kind and degree.

Whether we are innocent or guilty of complicity with our suffering, view it as deserved or undeserved, worthy or unworthy, still it remains suffering all the same. Regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, see it as intrinsic to life or not, suffering remains a shared fact for us all. We are all open wounds against which life is continually rubbing up against. Life hurts us.

But, none of this is to cynically suggest that there's nothing but suffering, that it's all darkness and despair. We all know for ourselves there are times of love, joy, freedom, creativity, meaning, pleasures of body and mind, and on and on, nevertheless, life still hurts us. Hurts us more than not. And the fact is we don't want to be hurt. That in large part is what it means to be a sentient being, to be human—not wanting to be hurt. No different for any of us.

But what is different, and indeed what makes a difference with regard to our suffering is what each of us does about it—how we understand and respond to it. With regard to that there have always been differences amongst us. There have always been remarkable individuals with the willingness to acknowledge their suffering and the skill to fruitfully question it.

They saw that oblivion and the enhancement of understanding are the two natural options open to us for coping with our suffering, but that succumbing to the first—the urge to ignore and deny the state of our existence—ironically serves only to perpetuate it.

They resisted the temptation to lose awareness in the face of their suffering and, instead, chose to confront it. In doing so they came to better understand it and, with that, better able to respond to it. They found peace.

A stone feels no pain, feels nothing at all, since it is not alive. We, on the other hand, are alive. Alive because we are aware, but normally aware only to the extent that the goal of survival makes necessary. That much and no more. And that much and no more do we ever stop and question our suffering and ask if it can ever come to an end and so change the way that we understand and respond to it. And that much and no less will we continue to suffer regardless of whatever else we may do about it. As long as we are aware and not awake we will suffer—face that one first.

After all the tears and complaining; after all our many strategies to deceive, distract, and numb ourselves have been thoroughly tried; when there is no further gene, germ, chemical, individual, group, or just plain bad luck left for us to blame; and before the next on-rushing wave of the truth of suffering washes over us again, during that brief interval, we're going to have to do something different if there's ever to be a difference in the felt quality of our lives. We're going to have to change just how we understand and respond to our suffering. Not so much this or that particular instance, but how we understand and respond to the greater truth of suffering that pervades our lives, of which any given instance is but a momentary expression of, a passing wave on an ocean of suffering.

Rather than devoting the whole of our intelligence, caring, energy, and time—the fundamental resources of our lives—to merely riding out each wave as it comes crashing in to meet us, we're going to have to find a way to rescue ourselves from the ocean itself.

What are you going to do about the truth of suffering in your life? How are you going to understand and respond to it? Which option are you now going to take?
I shall be telling this with a sigh  
Somewhere ages and ages hence:  
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–  
I took the one less traveled by,  
And that has made all the difference.  
―Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

### 2

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Whenever one of our many erroneous ideas, our mistaken beliefs, our distorted views about the world comes up against the world as it actually is, there occurs dis-ease—a dissonance of mind, an experience of disharmony, of tension. In response our mind will take either of two divergent paths. One proceeds in the direction of ignoring, evasion, and denial—a shrinking of the scope of our awareness, a withdrawal and absorption into fantasy. Our mind will attempt to bring a discrepant world into line with its own inaccurate inner picture in order that the world continue to confirm its expectations and serve its sought for goals. Put most simply, we'll demand of the world that it be other than the way it is and we'll struggle to make it so.

The other path proceeds in the direction of exploration and insight, an expanding of the scope of our awareness and a confronting and challenging of our projected illusory images in the search for finding new ways to interpret and understand our experience. Our mind will attempt to identify its own inaccurate inner picture and reconcile it with what it deems to be the true nature of things in order to more effectively respond to the world as it actually is.

One path leads to the endless repetition of life's mistakes, while the other leads to learning and to change. Still, the latter path is the one less traveled. Less traveled because it's the more difficult. The more difficult because enlarging and revising our inner network of ideas, beliefs, and views—the mental maps by means of which we navigate the terrain of our lives—isn't easy. Some people are too afraid, others just too tired, and most simply have no interest. They don't see the need. They feel that their picture of reality is more or less complete and correct and requires no significant revising.

The point is that when out of attachment or closed-mindedness, laziness or fear , we avoid the difficult path, and from behind the blindfold of continuity and routine and the taken for granted truths we've come to live by, we choose the well-worn path of least resistance, inevitably we circle around to the same places, the same problems and, thus, back to many of the same dissatisfactions in our lives.

The point is that the quality of our life—its coherence, livability, and adequacy, its experience as joyful or joyless, meaningful or meaningless—the whole range of feelings and emotions that constitute the felt impression of our lives—is the outcome of the many choices we are making every day of our lives.

But how many of us are conscious in our choosing? How many of us have chosen to be who we are, doing what we do? Or did we imperceptibly become who we are, doing what we do, simply by our drifting into those ways of being and doing that have now come to define us?

And even at those times when we refuse to take responsibility, refuse to decide just what it is we want and don't want, what's genuinely important for each of us, still, we're choosing nonetheless. We're choosing the default patterns of our thinking and behaving, and thereby sanctifying life's mistakes and condemning ourselves to more of the same.

Everybody wants to lock himself up after having undergone a few transformations in adolescence and perhaps for a few years after that: everybody chooses some state of being, usually without even realizing that he chooses it, and says, more or less explicitly: that is the way I am, or happen to be. Or: I have always said that.... Or: I am the kind who.... Or one takes refuge in heredity and environment. Or, if one has read some of the psychoanalysts, one blames one's parents' mistakes: it is all their fault: "Choose to be changed" is not only a call for continual growth; it is an implicit denunciation of all these myths....[3]

To say, "I'm such and such a kind of person," is at most to describe a current identity, not a destiny. And to go on to say in one way or another, "And that's the way I've always been and that's the way I'll probably always be," is to abdicate our freedom to change, to choose who, in fact, we will be. To extrapolate from the past erodes our sense of responsibility towards the future and makes of us prisoners of myths and forces over which we have little or no control.

The more our life is accounted for by our heredity, by our environment, by what our parents did or didn't do, by what happened to us years ago, the more our biographies become the stories of a victim.

The greatest gift that we as humans have is our capacity for free and conscious choice. Our very genetic make-up, our environment, our culture open a window of opportunity for us to break free of our chain-like repetitive pasts and create a new future for ourselves. None of this is to deny that there are limits on what and how much we can change. It simply means that we are free to change many of the significant things about ourselves and our lives, and among them, perhaps most significantly, the felt experience of our lives.

But, "Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough and one day it will be gone, and we'll not know how or when."[4] Even though we have so little to show for all the blood, sweat, and tears, so little reward for all that we have struggled for over a lifetime of pursuing our life's many goals, still, in our unthinking avoidance of the difficult path we keep choosing more of the same.

It will be our free and consistent choice of the path less traveled; a path conceived in Buddhism to be the awakening of our hearts to others and our minds to the deeper nature of reality—the Path of Awakening, that in years hence, will have made all the difference. Will have brought us that much closer to a reliable and lasting solution to what it means to be an ordinary human being sharing a world with other ordinary human beings just like ourselves, a suffering world that needs each of us—individually and collectively—to help bring it to peace.
The decisive heart-searching is the beginning of the way in man's life, it is, again and again, the beginning of a human way.

―Martin Buber, _Hasidism and Modern Man_

### 3

SEARCHING OUR HEARTS

The Path of Awakening begins from where each of us is at. Begins with a heart-searching, a poignant questioning asking just what each of us is all about: What kind of life do I admire, what moves my heart, what is sacred to me?

So much of our lives is spent in a longing and a search—for what, we do not know. So many of our ostensible "goals," so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide; they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose—something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical—a house, a car, a better job, or a human being—but it doesn't work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the _Sacred_. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.

Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling—but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is the feeling of recognition directed toward what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning, to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective. It is the feeling of reverence. What we call the sacred is ultimately a universe of meaning against which we measure our personal efforts, our personal lives, to see whether they, too, have meaning.[5]

The path begins with a self-enquiry intent on finding out just who we are beneath all our many layers of social and cultural conditioning and religious indoctrination, the taken for granted truths of our ideologies and psychologies, and each of our individual brands of self-deception and self-ignorance.

"Tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized images that drive our wanderings."[6] What is it that drives your wanderings, that you're reaching for, searching for? What compelling ideas and images arise from out of your imagination telling you who you would have yourself be, what you would have yourself do? What is each of us to make of this unique and precious life of ours that will some day end?

Ask, it's important, for the path begins with just such picturing in imagination, the inner metaphors we yearn to live by. Our world, the world-version that each of us inhabits, begins with our own minds.

Buddha is your mind  
And the Way goes nowhere.  
Don't look for anything but this.  
If you point your cart north  
When you want to go south,  
How will you arrive?[7]

Buddha represents the idealized image that drives each of our wanderings, a metaphor for the lived solution to our fundamental problems and the realization of the sacred in our lives. Buddha stands for the experience of the finest story that we can imagine about ourselves in terms of who we could be, what we could do, all that we could ever realistically hope to make of our ourselves and our lives. And, moreover, this Buddha is our own mind, our own inner Buddha—the reached-for image that lies behind and at the end of all our wanderings.

A Buddhist master once declared, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!"[8] That is to say, if we see the solutions to our life's fundamental problems as lying somewhere outside of ourselves—in a person, a thing, in one set of circumstances or another—then we're looking in the wrong place, projecting outside something that can only be found within.

There's a certain dishonesty in demanding of the world that it be other than the way it is, in asking that it give us what it is incapable of giving. No matter how hard and at times futile the search may feel to be, we have to seek the solutions to our life's fundamental problems where they can actually be found, if we're to have any realistic hope of ever finding them. There's really no one else we can look to, nothing outside of ourselves that we can rely on to end our sufferings, to help bring our minds to peace.

For most of us, there's nothing new in this. We'd all probably agree in one way or another about what appears to be an obvious fact of life. At least in theory we would agree, but in practice we behave very differently. In practice, we behave more like the man who's lost his keys somewhere along a dark, unlit street and yet hunts for them beneath a streetlight on the corner, thinking how much easier it is to look for them there. But the reality of his plight is that no matter how long and hard he searches, he'll never find what he's looking for, if for no other reason than he's looking in the wrong place.

Likewise, Buddha is to be found nowhere else but within each of our own minds. And, moreover, the path leading to Buddha, the path leading to the experience of peace, freedom, and the finding of the sacred in our lives begins and ends within our own minds. Don't look for it anywhere else but here.

There's a simple allegory that conveys the meaning intended here. It's about a king in ancient times who took great pleasure in strolling about the countryside of his kingdom. One day, while out walking, he stepped on a thorn injuring his foot. Returning to his palace in great pain, the king called together his ministers. "Look," he exclaimed, "Look at my foot! This must not be allowed to happen again! You must find a way whereby I can walk freely about my kingdom without the danger of hurting myself!"

His ministers thought and thought and, finally, one of the cleverer ones spoke up and declared, "I have it! We'll cover all the roads in your kingdom with leather and in that way your majesty's feet will be protected from thorns and stones and all manner of sharp and rough objects and you'll be able to walk safely throughout your kingdom."

"Excellent idea!" exclaimed the king. But immediately the king's treasurer interrupted, "No, no, it won't work. First of all, there aren't enough cattle in the kingdom to produce that much leather and even if there were, to purchase that amount would bankrupt the treasury. It won't work. It's not practically possible."

There was a long silence and after some time an old and wise minister spoke. She said, "I propose that we cut two small pieces of leather to the shape of the soles of your majesty's feet. These pieces of leather would then be bound with thongs to the bottom of your feet. This, I suggest, would serve the same purpose as covering all the roads in your kingdom with leather. Wherever your majesty went your feet would be protected from sharp and rough objects and you would be able to walk safely throughout your kingdom."[9]

This story is meant first to illustrate a more or less obvious but often overlooked fact of life: we can't control the world. That is, we can't realistically order the world about us to conform to our wishes, demand that it run according to our particular needs, expect that it should somehow accommodate each of our personal agendas. But, nevertheless, we do, and when we do we experience either a sense of rage because the world doesn't follow our wishes, operate according to our needs, accommodate our agenda, or else we experience a sense of impotence and failure because we can't do the impossible.

But, additionally, this story is meant to illustrate a not so obvious fact of life: if we can control one thing—our own mind, then it's _as if_ we controlled the world. All that we can realistically expect to rule in our lives is the inner kingdom of our own minds, and this, as it turns out, is enough to be happy and fulfilled in the world.

In a very real sense, the people and things and circumstances about us are neutral. Like a knife in the hands of a skilled surgeon, they can serve as instruments contributing to our well-being, or like that exact same knife in the hands of a criminal, they can bring us nothing but misery and destruction.

The people we interact with, the things we make use of, the circumstances we find ourselves in, each in their own way has the potential to serve as either a source of happiness or a source of suffering depending on our understanding of them, our attitude towards them, our own mind's skill or lack of skill in relating to them. If we're dissatisfied, the world isn't to blame. It's we who are accountable; it's the inner maps that we're relying on to guide us that are at fault.

But, even then, regardless how reliable or unreliable our mental maps may or may not be, still, we need to go on to further question, Just where are they taking us? and, Is this where we really want to go? Ours is a world filled with just so many people, who for the most part, don't know where they're going, yet seem willing enough to go through hell to get there. Are we going through hell to get us somewhere we don't even really want to go?

Sooner or later we have to stop acting, stop speeding, stop distracting ourselves from ourselves, pause and ask ourselves just where we're headed, for unless we change our direction, that's likely where we're going to end up. What are some of the preferred outcomes to the story that each of us is telling ourselves about ourselves and our life? If we're not heading towards them, that is, if in truth we prefer to go south, but instead are pointing ourselves north, how will we ever arrive?

The path begins with asking ourselves the bedrock question, Does something matter to me; Is there anything I really care about, that I truly value? and if not, Can I find something that does matter, that I do care about, that is important to me? And, then, in the light of whatever answers may emerge from out of imagination, and no matter how uncertain and fallible they may presently appear to us to be, consciously commit ourselves to the forming of a different future for ourselves by virtue of our capacity to freely respond to the new possibilities that these answers represent for us. Resolve to take these life-bestowing images from out of their storage places in our hearts so that they're not lost to us, determine to try them on for size, see how they fit, how they feel, how they act upon us and make us over into the kind of person we would have ourselves be, living the kind of life we would have ourselves live.

In other words, consciously commit ourselves to resurrecting the deeply buried story of what is sacred for each of us, to the work of placing solid foundations beneath the castle of the dreamed-of-life we have all at some time dreamed, to living out our unique answers to these most difficult and meaningful of questions as authentically and as best we can.

But, then, in an even deeper sense, finding answers is perhaps not really the point. The point is more the questioning itself, that such heart-searching is itself the beginning of a way, a guide showing us _our_ way. The point is to begin to live the questions and to bear with the perplexities and tensions they inevitably evoke within us. "Perhaps then, someday far in the future, we'll gradually, without even noticing it, live our way into the answer,"[10] an answer Buddhism calls awakening. The point is to begin.
The endless cycle of idea and action,  
Endless invention, endless experiment,  
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;  
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;  
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.  
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,  
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,  
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.  
Where is the Life we have lost in living?  
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?  
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries  
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the dust.  
―T. S. Elliot, "Choruses from 'The Rock'"

### 4

THE ENDLESS CYCLE

What is here beginning to be described is traditionally termed "going for refuge." Basically, going for refuge contains the idea that there's someone we can prevail upon, something we can do or make use of that will protect us from suffering and aid us in finding happiness. Our refuge is meant to be the means whereby we actualize the conceived possibilities of what it is we want.

In this way, the idea of going for refuge isn't particularly Buddhist or even religious. It's nothing new for any of us. We're all refugees seeking asylum from the human condition and our refuge is supposed to provide a safe haven for us.

Some people go for refuge to their families, to money and material things, to power, fame, science, romance, work, the arts, sports, hobbies.

Some people seek refuge in celibacy, others in having as much sex as they can; some save all their money, others spend more than they earn; some travel the world, others never step out their door.

Some people become scientists, accountants, bricklayers, secretaries, monks, bus drivers, therapists, politicians, artists, criminals, salesmen, rock and roll stars, and others try their best to avoid becoming anything at all. The list is as varied as it is almost endless and in some way or another constitutes most people's refuges most of the time.

But, sooner or later, if we're to lead our lives intelligently, that is, in the light of our own wisdom and sensitive to our own lived experience, we're forced to question whether our particular refuges are working or not. Have they been of real use in getting what it is we want and ridding ourselves of what we don't?

Everybody has problems. Most of us have one sort of problem most of the time, whether a minor irritation or a major tragedy. So, here, when we question the effectiveness of our particular refuges, we're not so much concerned with our day-to-day highs and lows, but more with the impression that we're left with when we step-back and reflect upon the overall felt quality of our lives. Does my life stand for anything, provide me with a sense meaning, of purpose? Is there anything that I sincerely believe in, that I genuinely value, that I'm committed to? Do I feel connected with anything beyond my own ego, with my family, with the people around me and their shared concerns? Are there times of joy, contentment, excitement, peace, the experience of the sacred in my life?

Sooner or later, in one way or another, life confronts us with the troubling question, What am I doing with my life?

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?  
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street  
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?  
What shall we ever do?'  
The hot water at ten.  
And if it rains, a closed car at four.  
And we shall play a game of chess,  
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.[11]

Is this all there is: life reduced to a series of just-so-many-events? We find a new partner, wife, husband, therapist, guru or we try going it alone for a while. We change our course of study, our employer, our career, or we take a break from working-life altogether for a while. We move to a bigger-smaller, more-less expensive house-apartment in the city-suburb-country, or we just give it all up and go traveling for a while. We take up a new hobby, sport, leisure time pursuit. We redecorate the house, build a new one, have another child, another affair, or we've had enough of it all and are beside ourselves trying to figure out what to have next, what to do next. Always another diversion, another project, another auspicious beginning to occupy ourselves with for a while, and all the time waiting for that knock upon the door.

And though at some level we know it's going to make us feel all the more discouraged, all the more critical of ourselves, we habitually resort to the same patterns of thinking and behaving when bad feelings—uneasiness, anxiety, despair—start coming up. We hope that somehow they'll make things better, yet knowing at some level, they never have and probably never will.

We persist in our struggle to manipulate the people, the things, the circumstances about us in the hope of fashioning some kind of permanent refuge for ourselves, where we can at last feel secure from the vagaries of life. But it never seems to work or, at least, not for long.

One day we may be happy, with a good family, a group of friends, sensible political and religious views, and a job. The next day one of our children becomes seriously ill, our political views are shaken by revelations of corruption, one of our friends turns out to be suing us, we discover that we have suddenly lost heart in an artistic activity that has brought us joy for twenty years, or we develop a fear of flying that means we cannot keep our jobs.[12]

Yet, in spite of it all, we cling to our hopes that this time things will be different. That though our thinking and behaving remain relatively unchanged, this time around the story will be better, will turn out the way we would have it. Sooner or later someone or something will come along and bring us the happiness we want, help us get rid of the unhappiness we don't: a caring, sensitive man, a devoted wife, an insightful therapist, a religious experience, some sort of significant achievement in the world, or maybe just that lucky break we've been waiting for. Essentially, something different from what is now. Perhaps so different we can't even imagine what it might be, except that it holds out the promise of "and you lived happily ever after."

So, we look forward expectantly for that letter in the mail, the knock upon the door, the telephone call informing us, "The life you've been waiting for has arrived. Will you come down and pick it up or do you want it delivered?"

What is it that each of us is waiting for? What is it for you: that special person, thing, circumstance, that factor X that's going to turn things around for you, make your life better, what you would have it be—your long awaited refuge? Or, at the very least, occupy us for a while, distract us while we wait for the _real_ it-X to come along.

So we wait with anxious anticipation, with great expectation, never exactly sure just what it is we're waiting for—probably not even aware that we're waiting—but, nonetheless, we wait. And over the course of all our waitings, hopefully looked forward to tomorrows, each in their turn, fade into forgotten yesterdays, always nearer to death but no nearer to Life.
To lose good dayes, that might be better spent;  
To wast long nights in pensive discontent;  
To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;  
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.  
―Herbert Spencer, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_

### 5

LOSING GOOD DAYS

Still, over the course of it all—the cycles of expectation and disappointment, we stubbornly cling to a vague hope that things will get better in time, as if merely hoping were enough, as if hope were all that is necessary to make it so.

With hope—unfounded hope and its mere wishful thinking—there's really no need for us to actually do anything. No need to finally decide, It's time to change. Clinging to our hope prevents us from clearly seeing that it is we, ourselves, who are going to have to knock on our own door, who are going to have to make things better if they're ever to get better. That it's we, ourselves, who are the it, that factor X, that someone or something or other that each of us, in our own way, has been waiting for.

Macbeth asks the doctor:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,  
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,  
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,  
And with some sweet oblivious antidote  
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff  
Which weighs upon the heart?

And the doctor answers, "Therein the patient must minister / to himself."[13]

It seldom occurs to us that we are both the patient and the doctor. That within our minds lies not only the disease, but the cure as well. That our happiness and suffering are the result of our own ways of thinking and behaving and, thus, the responsibility for both is solely our own. No one nor anything apart from ourselves can do it for us. No one nor anything apart from ourselves can minister to the dysfunctions of our own minds and thereby lift the burden of sorrow that weighs upon each of our hearts.

Our persistent hopes for a someone or a something that will bring us a better tomorrow, more than not, become a substitute for our taking responsibility for ourselves today, for getting on with the changes that need to be made. Most all our hopes are hopes for the wrong things, for finding happiness in the wrong places where it can't be found. They're integral part of the pathology of our suffering.

Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us—to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle.[14]

With great hope we can face almost anything except what's in front of us and what we're experiencing inside. As long as we have hope for the future, we'll not be serious about and committed to the present. Hope tends to take us away from what is, and if what is isn't what we want it to be, then we had better do something now to ensure that it will be. But, as long as we have hope there always remains the alternative to the actual doing of making it so—hope itself, that and the deception that things will get better in time.

Time does heal some wounds, cure some of the superficial ills of our bodies and minds, but our deeply rooted and chronic sorrows born out of re-creating the basic grounds of our dysfunctional ways of thinking and behaving will never go away, never be cured by a mere passage of time. Time of itself can never change that.

We've all been recruited into the fiction of time—that time heals all wounds, that things will get better in time. But healing and getting better aren't about time; they're about change. Our thinking, our behaving, our stories must all necessarily change. Nothing less than change can rightly be called cure. Everything else is just another name for just another false hope, another unreliable refuge.

If fear is the mother of cowardice, hope is the father.

Men accept indignities without end, and a life not worth living, in the hope that their miseries _will_ end and that eventually life may be worth living again. They renounce love, courage and honesty, pride and humanity, hoping. Hope is as great an enemy of courage as is fear.[15]

We are afraid of change and habitually avoid the difficult path that taking the cure inevitably entails. But it's just this reluctance to expand our awareness to what is presently unfamiliar and feels so alien to us that is the basis of our continued suffering. That and our unwillingness to bear with the inevitable tensions aroused in the course of reconciling our inaccurate inner maps with an unyielding reality that will not be made over into one of our accommodating fantasies nor will it obligingly just go away.

Though our lives may not be much, to some extent not what we would have them to be, still, they're home. There's some kind of comfort in that, in the familiar, the predictable, the known. There's always the consolation that at least we can presume to know pretty much who we are and what we can legitimately expect out of our life. There's a certain nostalgia for the slums of cyclic existence, a sentimental attachment to the dysfunctional streets we've been down so often, to the pathological haunts we keep returning to. It's the neighborhood we grew up in. It's all that we've ever known. Be it ever so humble and oftentimes so painful, still, there's no place quite like it—it's home.

1) I walk down the street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I fall in.  
I am lost....  
It isn't my fault.  
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I pretend I do not see it.  
I fall in again.  
I can't believe I'm in the same place.  
But it isn't my fault.  
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I see it is there.  
I still fall in...it is a habit.  
My eyes are open.  
I know where I am.  
It is my fault.  
I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.  
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  
I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.[16]

Sooner or later we get sick and tired of being sick and tired, of falling into the same holes again and again. We begin to notice some of the habitual patterns of our thinking and behaving that are just not working for us. And beneath the self-deception of our unfounded hopes and their wishful thinking—that things will get better in time, there begins to develop an undercurrent of anxiety around the unending recurrence of just such a dissatisfactory way of approaching and experiencing our life.

The object of our anxiety though ill-defined is, nonetheless, felt to be a real threat to our future well-being. There's a diffuse sense of unease; something's not quite right. We don't seem to be learning. We keep missing or dismissing the lessons that life is continually bringing us or else forgetting those lessons once learned. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again even against our better judgment, even against our will; we keep going down the same streets and falling into the same holes.

At the back of our minds there's a unsettling feeling that our lives are being lived as if out of our control, a feeling of ineffectiveness, of powerlessness over what is happening to us. And, moreover, even if we could do exactly what we wanted, we wouldn't know what we wanted to do anyhow.

This anxiety is one of the two fundamental causes motivating us towards change, towards alternative refuges in our lives. From a Buddhist point of view, such anxiety is constructive because it's directed at what are, in fact, threats to our well-being—the very real future holes in our lives, and because it acts as an antidote to the psychological inertia of unfounded hope—the wishful thinking that these holes are going to go away all by themselves. Such anxiety and our inability to continue to ignore it testify to just how basically sane we really are.

Anxiety goes with becoming aware of and assuming our potentiality, and potentiality, in turn, becomes actuality by way of anxiety. Simply, when we get sick and tired of being sick and tired we'll find a way to get well. We'll begin to avail ourselves of the resources of our own minds as self-healing systems to solve the problems of our life at a deeper, more fundamental level. We'll finally decide it's time to get better.

I believe that sometimes you just have to decide: decide to stop feeling badly about yourself, decide to stop wanting what you do not (and apparently cannot) have. You must decide to stop believing that your real life (the life you were _supposed_ to have, as opposed to the one you _do_ have, this one in which you have been feeling unfulfilled, unappreciated, and unloved) is elsewhere.

Having come now to this realization, I like to think that I have accepted it gracefully enough. Neither searching nor waiting brought me to the romantic happy ending I had in mind. I see now that neither regret nor anticipation served me well. Now I tell myself that what I am living is my life and I had best get on with it.[17]

It's time we got on with change, with consciously exploring other streets to travel down, with consciously searching out other, more reliable refuges in our life.
God help us to change. To change ourselves and to change the world. To know the need for it. To deal with the pain of it. To feel the joy of it. To undertake the journey without understanding the destination. The art of gentle revolution.

Amen

—Michael Leunig, _A Common Prayer_

### 6

THE JOURNEY OF CHANGE

In addition to constructive anxiety, the second of the two fundamental causes motivating us towards change is faith. Without faith we can't positively wish and the first step in conscious change is to consciously wish that things were otherwise. It's faith that overcomes our inability to genuinely wish and deepens our capacity to do so. Without faith we remain apathetic and impotent.

The Tibetan word for prayer, _mön-lam_ , literally means path of wishing, and for prayer to have any real meaning it must be accompanied with the care and power of faith. Because of our faith what is happening to us matters, makes a difference to us and, moreover, we are moved to actually do something about it, to act in spite of our possible fears and misgivings to the contrary.

Whenever we are confronted with the unusual, the unexpected, the unknown, we become afraid. Normally we cope with such fear by withdrawing and narrowly circumscribing our lives so that we don't come across the unfamiliar too often. We take the path of the familiar in order to avoid the uncomfortable feelings that fear naturally evokes within us. Fear keeps us on our habitual tracks as we go through life. The unfamiliar is never explored and we remain stuck in much the same repetitive patterns of thinking and behaving. Fear not only blinds us to the need for change, but reinforces our resistance to it as well.

It's due to our faith that we're willing to abide with the uncomfortable feelings that naturally accompany fear, that we're willing to act in spite of our fear, act fearlessly though afraid. Through the care and power of our faith we invite change into our lives, deliberately seek it out, systematically cultivate change in order to grow even though the changes associated with growth are often frightening.

To grow is to expand our horizons outwardly in perspective and inwardly in depth, to view ourselves and our world through the eyes of new and different ideas and thereby experience both in more expansive and penetrating ways.

To grow is to change and to consciously grow is to consciously choose a course of change. And though at present we may not know or know only in vague and uncertain terms the details of the eventual outcome of such change, because of our faith we have trust enough—in ourselves, in the means, the process, and its outcomes—to take the risk and deliberately choose the trials of change. Due to our faith we have courage enough to freely enter the unfamiliar territory of change by the power of our own decision and to bear with the inescapable tensions associated with it. It's due to our faith that we're willing to begin the "gentle revolution" of change.

When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory, so to speak. Our self becomes a new and different self. We do things we are not accustomed to do. We change. The experience of change, of unaccustomed activity, of being on unfamiliar ground, of doing things differently is frightening. It always was and always will be. People handle their fear of change in different ways, but the fear is inescapable if they are in fact to change. Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future. On some level spiritual growth...always requires courage and involves risk.[18]

Demanding to know every detail of the outcomes of change before we set out is just another strategy ensuring that nothing will change, just another way we can be safely assured of more of the same in our lives. We can't know exactly all of what will happen if we do change, only what will happen if we don't.

Basically, we need faith enough to courageously declare: _Enough is enough; I want such and such; I wish it to be so!_ , and to trust that on the other side of it being so, we'll be better people leading better lives in a better world. In other words, we have faith in the salutary nature of growth itself.

In trying to grow we're trying to change, trying to consciously direct ourselves along a path of change. It's not a matter of learnedness, or conforming to a particular doctrine or mode of conduct, or being validated by an accepted authority. Above all else, growth is about change and, moreover, change to the whole person—our thinking, our behaving, our stories, all that constitutes ourselves and our relationship with the world necessarily change.

To illustrate what this means in practice, from a Buddhist point of view, growth is associated with the development of altruistic qualities such as love and compassion. Such attitudes are seen as an integral part of the spiritual path both as a means and as an end in themselves. Without love and compassion there's no full awakening. Moreover, they are seen as an indispensable motivation behind our effectively working with others, which lies at the very heart of the path itself. But, even setting aside Buddhist or religious thinking in general, attitudes such as love and compassion are necessary if only to find some measure of meaning and connectedness and thereby happiness in our everyday lives.

Speaking about particular qualities such as love and compassion in just such ways, can easily lead us to view them as isolated mental factors that we are to make effort in cultivating, much like cultivating a particular variety of flower in the inner garden of our minds. There's an unexamined assumption that we somehow stand apart from these mental flowers. That we can cultivate love and compassion while remaining relatively the same person, just as we can, in fact, grow bunches of flowers without ourselves undergoing any appreciable change. Eventually, we'll be able to pick these beautiful inner blooms of love and compassion and give them to special friends on special occasions. In other words, we harbor the mistaken notion that we somehow stand apart from inner change.

A young man who learns to drive a car thinks differently thereby, feels differently; when he meets a pretty girl who lives fifty miles away, the encounter carries implications he could not have felt as a bus rider. We may say, then, that he not only drives a car but has _become_ a driver.[19]

Such a young man has not simply acquired another skill, let alone another skill that he stands apart from. He has become someone other than who he was before he learned to drive and, correspondingly, so has his world. He and his world are different from the way they were before. He and his world have changed.

We are not isolated egos cut off from the rest of our minds, our selves as persons, and the world in which we live. Therefore, it's not just that as part of our Buddhist training we are to intentionally cultivate love and compassion in order to _acquire_ some additional desirable qualities, but more, so that we _become_ loving and compassionate people. People who are aware of, sensitive to, and concerned with the happiness and suffering of others. Love and compassion permeate other areas of our thinking and behaving. They color other qualities too. Love and compassion are in some sense living and operative even when they are not manifest in our minds. They pervade the entirety of our being, alter our perceptions, our experiences, our relationship to the world. They change ourselves and our world.

To grow is to change who we are and to change who we are is to change our world. Both we and our world will be different from what they were before. We'll never be able to go back home again, to the old neighborhood, to the same streets and haunts that we're so familiar with, that are so much a part of us. Our self-identity, our ideals and values, what it is that makes us happy and makes us unhappy, what we're willing to invest our time, energies, and resources in—our relationships, our work, our interests and goals—everything that makes us who and what we are, will naturally have changed in some fashion or other, to some extent or other. They'll be different because we're different. They don't stand apart from who and what we are because we are them. We _are_ the change.

The point in emphasizing growth as change is that cultivating qualities such as love and compassion will inevitably have a real world impact on many, if not most, of the significant areas of our life. And though we may not be able to foresee all the details of that impact, because of our faith in the salutary nature of love and compassion, we trust that our life and our world will be a better life and world for having cultivated them. That the newly evolving quality of our relationships, the type of work that we do and how we do it, our concerns and manner of being in and responding to the world will, in as yet to be fully comprehended ways, all be for the better.

We have faith in all of this. If we don't, the words, the gestures, the practices of love and compassion will all simply float upon the surface of our minds like oil on water, never really becoming who we are.

It's through our faith that we create the nurturing inner ecology of mind necessary for change to occur, that we're actually open to change at all. It's due to our faith that we're willing to take the risk, to forego our fears and at the deeper levels of our being give ourselves over to the process and outcomes of cultivating love and compassion, that we allow love and compassion to carry us where they will, for we trust them. By the power of our faith in love and compassion we're going for refuge to love and compassion themselves.

All of us are continually empowering people, things, and symbols around us and ideas within us such that they, in turn, are able to exert a tremendous reciprocal influence over us. The slight turning upwards or downwards of the beloved's lips sends a lover into bouts of ecstasy or despair; money runs many people's lives; the mere seeing of their country's flag brings tears to a patriot's eyes; and there are rare individuals whose lives are totally dedicated to the idea of world peace.

We empower people, things, symbols, and ideas through the significance that we give to them. An investment of value and life's energies is granted to that something which makes it extremely important to us. When this significance carries a positive charge of attraction, we naturally tend to gravitate toward these objects and what they stand for, we avail ourselves of them, seek to emulate and embody them. We trust that by calling upon this person, thing, symbol, or idea, that by associating with it, making use of it, or simply possessing it, it will enhance our well-being, contribute to the achievement of our goals, is a worthwhile goal in itself. Simply put, we believe that this person, thing, symbol, or idea possesses the power to in some way make life better for us.

So, whether we are religious or not, and whether we're aware of it or not, a great deal of our life is led on the basis of faith. And faith, in turn, is of various types each with its particular capacity to exert an influence over our lives.

For example, there's blind faith—faith lacking any supportive reasoning or evidence, and misguided faith—faith based on faulty reasoning or evidence. Such faiths are readily undermined by sound reasoning or contradictory evidence and by our own personal experience. Their influence for the most part is superficial and short-lived.

On the other hand, there are other types of faith that are based on valid reasoning and credible evidence and, importantly, on our own personal experience. Such faiths are able to exert a deep and lasting influence on the overall direction of our lives. They're the types of faith emphasized as the foundation of Buddhist practice.

Here, faith credits our refuge with the ability to help relieve the anxiety we feel around future sufferings and bring about the changes necessary to flourish in our lives. It's the deep recognition of this fundamental importance and ability of our refuge that endows it with a reality for us. A reality that may not be directly accessible to us at present, but that, nonetheless, plays a formative role in how we lead our lives.

It is said of the Buddhas that in the beginning they ask only to be acknowledged and for a few simple offerings of flowers and fruits, but that in the end they demand our very flesh. Which is to say, that our Buddhist faith asks that we progressively commit more and more of ourselves, our life and life-energies, to that which we are the final transformation—ourselves as Buddhas. The consummation of Buddhist faith lies in a life dedicated to full awakening.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,  
And what I shall assume you shall assume,  
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.  
—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

### 7

AS GOOD BELONGS TO YOU

Buddhist faith is centered on three principal objects: the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—the Three Jewels. Going for refuge to them is to make use of them as a way of practically helping ourselves create a better life for ourselves.

The first of these, Buddha, refers to someone who is awake. To be awake first means a wisdom that knows ourselves and the world as they truly are—a mind that sees things clearly, directly, free of illusions, wrong thinking, and obscurations.

To be awake means to possess an intense, overflowing love and compassion, like that of a parent for their only child, extended equally to all living beings—a heart that feels a deep and burning desire that all beings be free of suffering, that they find lasting peace and well-being.

To be awake means an experience of personal power—an inner strength of will and purpose, the capacity to overcome adversity, the ability to be effective and make a difference.

And, finally, to be awake means to purposefully and creatively participate in the lives of others—these inner qualities of wisdom, love and compassion, and personal power finding outward expression in skillfully responding to the needs of others in the most meaningful of ways with the best possible outcomes.

A Buddha is above all else awake.

It is said that soon after his enlightenment, the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the extraordinary radiance and peacefulness of his presence. The man stopped and asked, "My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?"

"No," said the Buddha.

"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"

Again the Buddha answered, "No."

"Well, my friend, what then are you?"

The Buddha replied, "I am awake."[20]

The Sanskrit word _buddha_ means just that, one who is awake. Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical source of the present teachings of Buddhism, was one such person. Though he was a human being he was not an ordinary one; he was an awakened one. But Shakyamuni Buddha was not always an extraordinary human being, he was not always a Buddha. He became one as a result of his own human effort—an effort to make actual in himself what is potential in all of us.

The awakened person is regarded as the highest being in the universe, a spiritual paradigm, the final outcome of the Buddhist path. For this reason, Shakyamuni Buddha is revered. He is looked upon with immense gratitude for setting an example, for showing the way, for demonstrating what is humanly possible, what each of us is capable of becoming. In other words, Shakyamuni Buddha is honored as teacher, as exemplar, as guide, as an ever-present reminder of what is, in fact, our birthright—the awakened state of being.

It's by appreciating his extraordinariness that we come to better understand just how deceptive our seeming ordinariness really is, and thereby come to better appreciate ourselves and what we, too, are capable of. And by understanding how he achieved what he did, we are better able to understand how we can achieve the same.

The essential significance of Shakyamuni Buddha as the "Jewel of Buddha," and thus as a central object of Buddhist faith, lies in his having fully experienced the same path that we are seeking to follow and experience for ourselves. Having traversed that path to its end, he became a trustworthy guide for showing others the way.

What we have faith in is what we go for refuge to. Where our treasure lies, so there, too, lies our heart. Shakyamuni Buddha as a refuge is looked upon as the "shower of refuge," but the ultimate Buddha-refuge, the ultimate Jewel of Buddha, is the treasure of Buddha lying hidden within each of our own hearts and minds. That is to say, our ultimate refuge is none other than our own Buddhahood, our own individual awakening that each of us will some day manifest. It's only this Buddha—our self as Buddha—who is able to help us in all situations, at all times, in the best of all possible ways.

The second object of Buddhist faith is the Dharma. The "Jewel of Dharma" are the paths leading to the experience of awakening—True Paths, along with the self-sustaining solutions to our problems that are actualized by means of these paths—True Cessations.[21]

The Sanskrit word _dharma_ is derived from the root meaning to hold, and its Tibetan equivalent _chö_ , literally means transformation or transforming power.[22] Dharma can, thus, be taken to mean that which holds us back from the pathologies of life through its power to transform our minds.

In practice Dharma is whatever is able to raise the level of our consciousness; whatever helps us to bridge the gap between attachment and generosity, between hatred and love, jealousy and rejoicing, pride and humility, ignorance and wisdom; whatever assists an individual human being to develop from the state of an ordinary being to that of an extraordinary one, a Buddha.

Such Dharma might take the form of something as deceptively simple as a leaf floating down from an autumn tree, providing a lesson on impermanence, or something as apparently complex as the eighty-four thousand collections of the actual teachings of the Buddha. There's a saying, "At one time, one blade of grass is as effective as a sixteen foot golden Statue of Buddha. At another time, a sixteen foot golden Statue of Buddha is as effective as a blade of grass."[23] Which is to say, Dharma is what is actually effective in changing our hearts and minds and therefore our lives for the better. Dharma is what works for each of us regardless of its outward forms and expressions.

Conventionally, the Dharma appears as the teachings and the various trainings, practices, and meditative techniques by means of which we actualize Buddha. But, in a very real sense, Dharma is simply the truth of things—the reality that lies beyond the set of fictions that our minds are continuously fabricating and projecting onto the world. Dharma is the world as seen by a Buddha, and it is this truth that a Buddha seeks to communicate to the world, and that we, in turn, are to realize within ourselves.

But, when Buddhism speaks of truth, even the exalted truths taught by Buddhas, it lays no claim to an exclusivity or a monopoly on truth presupposing a preeminence of its particular world-view over what may, in fact, be other, equally valid world-views.[24]

Among the many truths that the Buddha taught is that there is no truth standing outside of its frame of reference, no truth corresponding to a reality independent of the terms that describe it or separate from the conceptual schemes out of which it arose. In other words, there is no neutral, objectively existent, self-defining world "out there" standing apart from our own minds that any truth could pertain to, no intrinsic reality that any such truth could ever reflect.

The Buddha was not interested in propagating a truth that is absolute in its nature for he found no such truth to exist. For him the most fundamental truth of all is "it all depends," including truth itself. He stressed the dependent nature of all things, and thus the relativity of any world-view and its truths.

But, none of this is to say that one world-view is as good as another, or that one spiritual path is as valid as the next, or simple-mindedly that there is no truth or else that everything is true. To say that truth doesn't objectively exist isn't to say that it doesn't exist at all or to deny the existence of falsity. Though the Buddha did not teach truth as ultimately or absolutely existent, he did extensively teach on just how conventionally or relatively existent truth is to be found, and he set out exacting criteria for determining just what is true and what isn't.

Buddhism] would modestly maintain that the Buddhist world-view can be verified within a _Buddhist_ frame of reference, and that the world-view thus is "true," for there is no over-arching set of truths that could falsify it. Neither religion nor science may any longer claim universality or exclusivity, yet neither thereby forfeits its claim to truth, for truth means not correspondence to some "objective" reality, but simply what is coherent and effective within a particular community of discourse.[[25]

And Buddhism would go on to assert that that's enough. Not only could nothing more be asked for, but, in fact, nothing more is needed than a coherent and effective world-view that empowers us and imbues us with the skill in how best to lead our lives. And it's just this very truth—the Dharma of the Buddha—that does just that.

It is sometimes said of Shakyamuni Buddha that he essentially taught only two things: suffering and the way to end suffering. In this way the Buddha's world-view can be understood as a pragmatic one. He used the criterion of suffering in setting out his path based on the practical assumption that no one wants to suffer and everyone wants to be happy, however each of us might uniquely define what constitutes suffering and happiness for ourselves.

The root of the Greek word _therapeia_ , which is the origin of our English word therapy, is _dher_ and is related to the Sanskrit word _dharma._[26] As far as Buddhist Dharma is concerned, the truth—the actual nature of things—is therapeutic. Ultimately, there's no therapy leading to the end of suffering other than truth therapy. It's the truth that transforms us, that makes us free. The Buddha's Dharma as Buddha's truth is Buddha's therapy—a Buddha's way of freeing us from the dysfunctional thinking and behaving that presently dominates our minds and lives and, thereby, from the sufferings they produce.

The Subduers—the Buddhas,

neither wash away sins with water,

Nor do they remove sufferings

with their hands,

Nor do they transfer their realizations

to the minds of others:

They liberate by showing the truth—

the actual nature of things.[27]

The Buddha's truth—his Dharma—is above all a therapeutic truth, a means of achieving well-being. It's based upon this pragmatic criterion that the truth of Dharma is ultimately verified. Not only is the Dharma a coherent world-view comprehensively describing the problematic nature of ordinary human existence and the way that it can be transcended, but even more importantly, it's effective in doing so. That is to say, it works.

To go for refuge to the Dharma, then, is to go for refuge to the truth, to becoming a student of the truth—the truth of who we are and the way things are in their actual nature. Ultimately, the Jewel of Dharma in which we seek refuge is not something outside of ourselves. It's each of us as an embodiment of the Dharma—our own realizations and self-sustaining solutions to our own mind's fundamental problems and the way these find expression in the everyday relationships of our lives. That is our Dharma-refuge, our actual refuge.

The third object of Buddhist faith, Sangha or Spiritual Community, are those who form the social matrix in which awakening takes place. The Tibetan word for Sangha is _gen-dün-ba_ , meaning seeker of virtue, and the highest virtue is awakening. Thus, Sangha comes to mean a group related through their shared aspiration for awakening.

At its highest level, the "Jewel of Sangha" refers to the supreme community of those who have directly realized selflessness and are, thereby, uniquely suited to assist us in doing the same.

At another level, it refers to a group of four or more monks or nuns who, because of the ethics by which they endeavor to live, are uniquely suited to advise us on how to implement the Dharma in our daily lives in terms of what is to be practiced and what is to be avoided in traveling the spiritual path.

And, at still another level, and one that is probably most relevant to the majority of us, Sangha broadly refers to a fellowship of like-minded individuals who are committed to the idea of growth. People who understand and respect what it is we're trying to do and are willing to help in what ways they can—teaching, advising, sharing, listening, comforting, encouraging, lending a hand in practical ways, even contributing materially if that's what's needed.

Sangha is like a greenhouse where the still fragile shoots of our developing aspirations and evolving world-view can find nourishment and grow; where we can share and explore our ideas and concerns honestly and openly; where we feel safe to experiment with different ways of being and relating.

Ultimately, the Jewel of Sangha is all of us, individually and collectively, as an integral part of a social environment that fosters growth and supports awakening. It's this therapeutic culture nourishing our innate nature as Buddha that is our Sangha-refuge.

Having faith in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha means having faith in the reality of awakening and these Three Jewels as the means of achieving it. Having faith in the reality of awakening means having faith in ourselves—that we can change and be the best person we are capable of becoming—a Buddha. Having faith in the Three Jewels means practically entrusting ourselves to them—putting into practice the Buddha's Dharma with the help of the Sangha in order to make it so. Faith is an affirmation of basic goodness—the basic goodness of ourselves and of life itself.
...but something that is great is as rare to find as it is difficult to realize.

—Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_

### 8

RARE TO FIND

Of the various types of faith described in Buddhism, the Buddha stressed that at its best faith is gained, "...just as a goldsmith gets his gold, / First testing by melting, cutting, and rubbing."[28] He and countless Buddhist masters since have all said in one way or another "come and see."[29] Come and see for yourself whether what I say is true or not. Once you have, you'll have no need for testimony, revelation, dogma, or blind acceptance out of devotion to me. You'll know for yourself. The truth of your own experience is the truth of the teachings.

This isn't at all to diminish the importance of teachers and the tradition in the development of faith. It is meant to stress the need of looking to and valuing our own experience, which we can so easily marginalize and dismiss. Ultimately, our faith is to depend on our own coming to see for ourselves. That is, faith at its best is based upon our own inner truth, found within our own inner wisdom. Indeed, faith is but a way to greater wisdom, and wisdom, in turn, is but a way to more effective compassion, wherein lies the consummation of Buddhist practice.

There's an allegory that describes the types of faith emphasized in Buddhism, how they arise, and their subsequent increase. It begins with ourselves out on a desert, wandering, without water, and in pain. At this point, we know neither the cause of our pain nor its remedy. There's just the experience of pain and a certain anxiety that it may never go away, that maybe pain and our confusion surrounding it are, after all, just a part of life that we have to learn to accept. No matter what we may do about them, in one form or another, they're always going to be there.

But, from time to time, even in the often arid landscape of our lives, we do meet with remarkable individuals. People who appear to be at peace with themselves and at ease in their world, who have a sense of simplicity, humility, a cheerfulness and kindliness about them. People who evoke within us a deep-felt admiration, not just for who they are, but for what they represent, what they model for us. With that a clear faith arises within us—it's clear what's behind our wanderings, an intuition that we could see ourselves as whole and healthy persons, an urge to find greater meaning in our lives.

Empowered by our clear faith we open to other possible ways we might be and behave and, moreover, we're moved to actively explore them. We set out, for where or what, we're not exactly sure but, nevertheless, we set out—our once seemingly aimless wanderings have become a purposeful journey.

At some point along the way, we hear from the far side of a distant sand dune the faint sounds of running water. We can't see the water yet, we can only hear it, but what we hear sounds like what we're looking for. We move closer, and what we hear describes our own experience so exactly, it's as if what's being said were meant especially for us. It talks about what it means to be an ordinary member of the human race, that is, it talks about us and our pain—its nature and cause, and what we can do about it. What's said speaks to our reason and accords with our own experience. And a longing faith arises within us—a longing to drink deeply from this stream, to implement what's being said in our lives and make it our own.

Empowered by our longing faith we make the arduous trek over the dune—we put into practice what we've heard and, coming down on the other side, we drink of some of the solutions to some of our problems. We begin to cheer up; life feels less problematic, it no longer wears on us in the ways that it did before. What was once merely someone else's words has become, to some extent at least, our own experience.

Again and again we drink from the stream. Again and again we put the teachings into practice, and we experience a still further slackening of our thirst, a lessening of our pain and confusion. And a trusting faith arises within us—a deeply felt trust that we've at last found just what it is we've been looking for all along.

The implication of this allegory is that faith isn't simply a religious artifact or merely for the devotional or simple-minded. On the contrary, faith is an indispensable agent of change and growth. Faith spurs us to practice, and practice leads to new and deeper levels of experience. Though faith alone isn't sufficient, nonetheless, it's due to our faith that we aspire, and owing to our aspiration we make effort, and it's through our efforts that we ultimately attain the goal of what it is we want. It's our faith that finally determines the overall direction and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

The point is that if we genuinely want to change, then it's necessary that we consciously cultivate a deep and abiding faith in the changes that we want to make and in the means of making them. In the arising of an effective faith, that is, an intuitive faith governed by reason and grounded in personal experience, it's necessary that we actively participate in the process. We have to seek out teachers and teachings and listen and study carefully with open minds. We have to reflect upon and critically examine the significance of what we hear and study by means of our reason. We have to experiment with the teachings, immerse ourselves in them, come to terms with their ideas, the messages that they're trying to convey to us. We have to come to new and different understandings and feelings and meditate on them, practice them, allow them to act upon us and change us.

If we genuinely want to change then we have to systematically cultivate faith in something other than what it is we're presently investing our positive significance, energy, and time in, since that refuge is just not working for us in the ways that we want.

In a condition of struggle and of failure we must be able to say "I must try harder" or "I must try differently." Both views are essential; neither must take precedence by principle.... When we say "I must try harder" we mean that the most relevant variable is something within us—intention, will, determination, "meaning it"—and that if this changes, the outcome, even if everything else remains unchanged, will be different. When we say "I must try differently" we mean that the most relevant variable lies in the situation within which intention is being exerted....[30]

Perhaps, our problem in finding the happiness that we want and ridding ourselves of the suffering that we don't, isn't so much a matter of trying harder—more of the same, but of trying differently—going to another refuge.
With a place of hunger in me I wander,  
      Food will not fill it,  
      "Aya-ah", beautiful.  
With an empty place in me I wander,  
      Nothing will fill it,  
      "Aya-ah", beautiful.  
With a place of sorrow in me I wander.  
      Time will not end it,  
      "Aya-ah", beautiful.  
With a place of loneliness in me I wander,  
      No one will fill it,  
      "Aya-ah", beautiful.  
Forever alone, forever in sorrow I wander,  
Forever empty, forever hungry I wander,  
With the sorrow of great beauty I wander,  
With the emptiness of great beauty I wander,  
Never alone, never weeping, never empty.  
Now on the old age trail, now on the path  
      of beauty I wander,  
      "Ahalani", beautiful.  
―Oliver La Farge, _Laughing Boy_

### 9

THE PATH OF BEAUTY

From the point of view of Buddhism, a spiritual journey involves traveling a path as the means to move from where we are at now to where we want to get to. It's the path that empowers us and imbues us with the skills necessary to attain what it is we want.

The Pali word for path, _patipada_ , literally means putting one foot in front of the next, which is to say, turning our minds towards where it is we want to go, one-by-one we consciously take all the many steps that will take us there.

Ultimately, the path of Buddhism leads to an awakening of our hearts to others and our minds to the deeper nature of reality. Thus, its steps are necessarily both affective and cognitive. We're trying to change how we both feel and think, how we both experience and view ourselves and the world. In practice this is accomplished through a combination of indirect and direct means—the many steps that we have actually to take.

The indirect means can take many forms. For instance, simply going out into the countryside and being close to nature can produce a wholesome change in the quality of our minds. The type of work that we do influences our thinking: producing a useful, good product with a healthy sense of pride, or more skillful still, working at an occupation that directly nurtures the growth of or addresses the problems of others: teaching, health care, counseling, social work, and so forth. In practical ways, there's assisting and supporting others, doing volunteer work for a worthwhile cause—activities done out of little or no selfish motive. Also, our daily life style: quality time spent with family and friends, creating and enjoying music, art, and literature, eating nutritious food, exercise, relaxation, and so on, can all have a beneficial effect on our minds.

However, though these various indirect means are an important part of a complete spiritual practice, by themselves they aren't sufficient. In order to awaken, we have to additionally work with the direct means of meditation, involving a three stage training in listening, reflecting and, finally, meditating. Meditating without listening and reflecting is comparable to having eyes but no legs, while listening and reflecting without meditating is comparable having legs but no eyes. In neither case do we get very far.

The first stage, listening, involves studying the teachings with an open, receptive mind—a mind that doesn't unthinkingly reject or distort what's being heard or read. This is the initial stage of gathering information and understanding the terms and categories used and the basic structure of the teachings. This is the stage of learning about new and different ideas.

The second stage, reflecting, involves carefully considering what has been received in order to clarify its true significance. We critically examine what we've heard or read in the light of both reason and our own experience. Are these teachings true or not? Are the ideas presented logical and internally consistent? Do they agree with my own experience? And, too, are my methods of reasoning and evaluating my own experience valid or not? Through such a process of questioning doubts will arise. Doubt is a precursor to true understanding. Through their resolution we gain actual knowledge. This is the stage of forming new and different ideas of our own.

The third stage, meditating, involves integrating the newly acquired knowledge into our being or character. In a way, this is like putting it into practice. It's practice in the sense of actually doing it or being it, as opposed to just thinking about it. This is the stage of experiencing new and different ideas for ourselves.

At the listening stage we gather the bare facts. We see how the information fits together. Then at the reflecting stage, using reason and our own personal experience, creating and clarifying doubts, we gain knowledge and certainty. With this confidence we embark on the third stage, meditating. Our immediate doubts and hesitations having been resolved, we now experience directly the true meaning of the teaching. Through accustoming our minds to this newfound experience again and again, it becomes a part of us, second-nature to us, we change, we grow.

It needs to be emphasized that throughout this process of implementing these indirect and direct means—putting one foot in front of the next, the teachings of Buddhism are not telling us how to live our lives, but how to gain insight into how our lives are being lived. That is, how to understand where it is we are, how we got here, how we might best proceed, and to what ends. The "how to live" flows naturally from that.

Progress on the path shows: calmness and skill in actions are evidence of wisdom, and kindliness and concern of compassion. Through new ideas and new understandings, their experience and integration we'll change and grow, and our lives will naturally reflect that, which is the traveling of the path.

Though at some level we may think otherwise, there's just no getting around the necessity of using our minds and the practicality of changing them. To use our minds is to utilize our intelligence and expand our feelings of caring. To change our minds is to change the ideas within them, and that is to experience new and different ideas and have them affect us.

Our word idea comes from the Greek word _eidos_ , which originally meant both the appearances that are seen by the mind but, as well, the _means_ by which they are seen. An important assumption of cognitive psychology is that cognitive systems are model builders. Perception involves a process of constructing models of the world whereby the world is made intelligible to us. Our ideas are the means—the eyes—by which we see things. We "see" with our ideas. Change your ideas and the way that you see yourself and the world will change. Change your ideas and you'll change and so will your world and, as a result, so will your relationship to it and your experience of it.

Moreover, without them [ideas] we cannot "see" even what we sense with the eyes in our heads, for our perceptions are shaped according to particular ideas. Once we considered the world flat and now we consider it round; once we observed the sun rotate around the earth, and now we observe the earth turn around the sun; our eyes and their perceptions did not change with the Renaissance. But our ideas have changed, and with them what we "see."

Ideas] are not "just ideas" or "just up in the head," and may not be "pooh-poohed" away, since they are the very modes through which we are envisioning and enacting our lives. We embody them as we speak and move. We are always in the embrace of an idea.[[31]

The eyes of new and different ideas are the means to gain in _sight_ into how our lives are being lived and the means to en _vision_ how they could be lived. The more ideas that we have the more we see. The deeper the ideas, the deeper we see. Ideas engender other ideas, bringing with them new and different perspectives for viewing ourselves and our world, and with that new and different experiences of both.

Think of a medical student attending a course in the x-ray diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. He watches in a darkened room shadowy traces on a fluorescent screen placed against a patient's chest, and hears the radiologist commenting to his assistants, in technical language, on the significant features of these shadows. At first the student is completely puzzled. For he can see in the x-ray picture of a chest only the shadows of the heart and ribs, with a few spidery blotches, between them. The experts seem to be romancing about figments of their imagination; he can see nothing that they are talking about. Then as he goes on listening for a few weeks, looking carefully at ever new pictures of different cases, a tentative understanding will dawn on him; he will gradually forget about the ribs and begin to see the lungs. And eventually, if he perseveres intelligently, a rich panorama of significant details will be revealed to him: of physiological variations and pathological changes, of scars, of chronic infections and signs of acute disease. He has entered a new world. He still sees only a fraction of what the experts can see, but the pictures are definitely making sense now and so do most of the comments made on them. He is about to grasp what he is being taught; it has clicked.[32]

We don't see something until we have the right idea, the right metaphor that allows us to see it. The ideas of Buddhism are the therapeutic eyes that allow us to see a world that's no longer problematic. The teachings of Buddhism reveal to us a Buddha's world-view—the way a Buddha sees the world, and we have but to envision that world in order to enter in to it.

We listen to and study the teachings of experts—people wiser, more experienced than ourselves; we critically examine what they're describing; persevering, a tentative understanding dawns, new and different ideas emerge, an alternative view of the world is revealed—something has clicked. Having grasped the significance of the teachings we meditate on them, allow these newly emerging ideas to practice upon us. There is change, we see things differently, our refuges are redefined, alternative pathways of being and behaving open up for us and evolve.

The teachings of Buddhism don't ask us to believe in some dogma or a particular doctrine or even in Buddhism itself. They ask that we take the idea of awakening—the idea of a life centered around wisdom, love and compassion, personal power, and their skillful expression in our daily lives, most simply, the idea of conscious growth—as a priority in our life. They ask us to make an experiment, to try, and to see if in that trying we might find in the actuality of our own lived-experience, more of what it is we truly want for ourselves and less of what we don't. It's this very trying, itself, that is, more than anything else, the going for refuge of Buddhism.
If I am not for myself, who will be?

And if I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?  
―Hillel, _Avoth_ _I: 14_

### 10

WHO, WHAT, AND WHEN

In addition to the two main causes for our going for refuge—anxiety and faith, there remains one additional special cause for a special individual seeking a special goal. The cause is the fear of passive peace from which the bodhisattva, who seeks the goal of full awakening for the sake of others, finds refuge in great compassion.

The nature of the path we travel is determined by where it is we want to go, where we hope to find our refuge. And this, in turn, is determined by our motivation—the _why_ behind our going, why this destination, this particular refuge? Why indeed are we trying to traveling a spiritual path at all?

We can distinguish two overall levels of motivation that lie behind our efforts. The first is deficiency motivation, where we practice primarily in order to maintain or restore our equilibrium. Here, the path is oriented towards the avoidance of anything that lies outside of what for us is an acceptable range of mental and physical well-being;what we more or less think of as normal. We simply want to be as well as the average person is well both now and into the future. Essentially, for deficiency motivation, surviving "well enough" is good enough.

The second level is growth motivation, where we practice primarily in order to go beyond what we've been and done in the past. Here, the path is oriented towards the positive attainment of what we envision as flourishing in our lives. In contrast to the negative avoidance of deficiency motivation, we're willing to step out of our comfort zone, extend ourselves and invite uncertainty, an increase in tension, and even pain if we see it as a route towards fulfilling our potential. Essentially, for growth motivation, surviving "well enough" isn't good enough; we want to flourish, and we're willing to do what's necessary in order to do so.

From within growth motivation, we can go on to distinguish two distinct perspectives from which flourishing, itself, can be viewed: one where we see ourselves as individuals in isolation from the world and the other where we see ourselves as social beings within the context of world. These two contrasting points of view reflect two fundamental aspects of ourselves as persons and what constitutes the dimensions of our being. The first is the private aspect, that side of us inaccessible to others that is lived through our unique inner experiences—ourselves as individuals. The second is the public aspect, that side of us defined in terms of others that is lived through our shared outer relationships—ourselves as social beings. For the growth motivation of a bodhisattva, flourishing solely as an individual isn't enough, we want to flourish as a social being as well, and we're willing to do what's necessary in order to do so.

The implication is that the route towards fulfilling our complete human potential is found neither in disengagement from the world and the solitary acquisition of realizations, nor is it found in rejecting or overlooking our own legitimate needs and self-concerns and attempting to lose ourselves in the world of others. The point is that in order to fully flourish in our lives, we need both individuality and relationship in our lives. We can't have one at the expense of the other. They grow each in proportion to the other: the more I am, the more I have to give; the more I give, the more I become. Practically, this means that the motivation behind our practice is not only to find well-being for ourselves but, as well, to help others find the same for themselves.

A bodhisattva is someone who heroically dedicates his or her life to the goal of full awakening for the sake of others. A bodhisattva is a "hero" ( _sattva_ ) with regard to "awakening" ( _bodhi_ ). There's only one thing that such a heroic individual fears and therefore seeks refuge from, and that is the seduction of withdrawing from the world of others into an isolated sphere of her own passive peace. It's great compassion that protects the bodhisattva from the self-absorbed oblivion of solitary liberation—an awakening, but one that's incomplete.

That said, it's important to note here that even the other-interest of a bodhisattva begins with self-interest. Initially, that's the only reality we're honestly able to recognize, and our practice, to be effective, needs to be grounded in that reality. It's just that it doesn't stop there. Gradually, over time, it extends itself to include others' interests and to actively working for their welfare as well.

From the outset, we can see that how we treat ourselves—any gestures of kindness, generosity, patience, and understanding that we direct towards ourselves, will naturally be reflected in how we treat others. We can develop the overarching intention that what we're doing for ourselves, we're also doing for others, if only indirectly and if only for some presently unforeseeable time in the future. It comes down to our inner motivation—the why behind and the purpose for what we do—and not simply the outward doing.

There's a sequel to the five-part autobiography quoted above that captures the understanding and intent of what is meant here. There the story tells of someone who keeps walking down the same street and is continually falling into the same holes in their life. Initially, they don't see themselves as accountable, but over time they begin to understand the part they're playing in the predicaments they keep finding themselves in. They start taking responsibility and gradually develop the ability to recognize the coming holes in their life sooner and the skill and motivation to climb out of them faster. Eventually, they learn how to avoid many of the holes in their life altogether and, finally, they explore other streets to travel down.

In the story's sequel, again someone has fallen into one of the many holes in their life and is calling out for help. Lots of people are walking by. Some don't hear the man's cry, others, though hearing, choose to ignore it, and keep on walking. After some time, a doctor comes along, hears the man's cry, approaches the hole's edge, and peers down. The man yells up, "Help! Help me!" In response, the doctor pulls out a pad, writes out a prescription for a tranquilizer, drops it down into the hole and remarks, "This should help," and walks on.

Sometime later a clergyman comes along, hears the man's cry, approaches the hole's edge, and peers down. Again, the man yells up, "Help! Help me!" In response, the clergyman pulls out a laminated printed prayer, drops it down into the hole and remarks, "This should help," and he, too, walks on.

Sometime later a stranger comes along, hears the man's cry, approaches the hole's edge, and peers down. And again, the man yells up, "Help! Help me!" In response, the stranger immediately jumps down into the hole. The man in the hole, relieved somewhat but slightly bewildered exclaims, "It was extremely kind of you to jump down in here with me, but now we're both in the same hole," to which the stranger replies, "Yes, but I've been here before and I know a way out."

The significance behind this sequel is that dependent upon the very skills we gain in the course of helping ourselves get out of our own holes, we're that much better equipped to help others out of theirs. And, moreover, in wishing to do that ¾ help others—and developing ourselves in order to most effectively be able to do so, we bring about the welfare of both ourselves and others. It's this understanding and intention that infuses the bodhisattva's practice.

The holism of the bodhisattva's path emphasizes that to be a self-directing, unique individual whose experiences, actions, and concerns are valuable in and of themselves and, at the same time, to be a social being whose life-meaning and fortune are inextricably bound up with the world of others, are not two conflicting ways of being, but two mutually necessary aspects of human existence. Self-assertion and self-integration are the two ways that we naturally do lead our daily lives and both are necessary to lead a wholly successful one.

Individual fulfillment and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Their synthesis is integral to the bodhisattva's path and to a good life in general. This is brought out in a very practical way by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, where he advises us that if we're going to be selfish, then we should at least try to be _wisely_ selfish. That is to say, the greater our genuine care and concern for others, the less problematic and more fulfilling our own lives will naturally be. When others' interests are our own interests, not only is there no conflict between us and them, but in seeking to grow for the their sake, our own potential and, therefore, our own welfare is achieved along the way. Succinctly put, altruism is the best way to be wisely selfish.
You may have heard of the Blessed Mountain.  
It is the highest mountain in our world.  
Should you reach the summit you would have only one desire,  
    and that is to descend and be with those who  
    dwell in the deepest valley.  
That is why it is called the Blessed Mountain.  
―Kahil Gibran, _Sand and Foam_

### 11

BLESSED MOUNTAIN

The goal to which the bodhisattva aspires is the truth and form bodies of a Buddha—the personified inner and outer expressions of awakening. The first of these, the truth body (Skt: _dharmakāya_ ), is the experiential dimension of awakening. It's like space, without beginning or end, beyond any logical determination, and free of all limitations and obscurations. Cognitively, it is experienced as the unhindered realization of the conventional world in all its vastness and complexity while at the same time realizing that none of it ultimately exists. Affectively, it is experienced as an unremitting state of peace. It represents the complete fulfillment of our own welfare.

The second, the form body (Skt: _rūpakāya_ ), is the social dimension of awakening—the way in which a Buddha appears to and operates in the world of others as an expression of compassion, merit, and skillful means. It represents the fulfillment of others' welfare and has two parts.

The first part is the complete enjoyment body (Skt: _saṃbhogakāya_ ), whose domain is a Buddha's own purified realm of existence and which directly communicates the subtle-most intricacies of dependent-arising to those bodhisattvas who have directly realized selflessness.[33]

The second part is the emanation body (Skt: _nirmāṇakāya_ ), whose domain is the world of ordinary beings and which reveals awakening in numberless ways that inspire beings to seek freedom from suffering and skillfully guides them in doing so.

We've said that a spiritual journey involves traveling a path and that traveling a path involves putting one foot in front of the next. For the bodhisattva these steps are the steps of wisdom—accumulating the collection of exalted wisdom, which is the main cause for attaining the truth body of a Buddha, and method—accumulating the collection of merit, which is the main cause for attaining the form body of a Buddha.

The way the bodhisattva accumulates these two collections is through practicing the six _pāramitās_ :generosity, ethics, patience, joyous effort, meditative concentration, and wisdom. These six core practices summarize the path of the bodhisattva. The first five comprise the collection of merit, while the last, that __ of wisdom, comprises the collection of exalted wisdom.[34]

The Sanskrit word _pāramitā_ has two etymologies. According to the first, it can be translated as highest or most excellent, and is usually rendered as perfection. But, according to a second, and perhaps a more meaningful etymology, _pāramitā_ can be literally translated as that which goes beyond, and rendered by the single word transcend.[35] These six core practices of a bodhisattva are said to transcend ordinary spiritual practices through the force of the great compassion and wisdom to which they are conjoined.

Having awakened her heart, the bodhisattva accepts sole responsibility for bringing about the welfare of others. The implication of such a commitment, if it's to have any real meaning, is to develop the skills necessary to be able to effectively respond to the needs of others. But, moreover, to respond not in terms of the ordinary attitudes of the world, that is, not out of attachment, or pride, or one self-serving motive or another, but in ways that transcend them, that is, to respond to others as a primary act of compassion.

Further, when these practices of generosity, ethics, and so forth, are conjoined with the force of wisdom—the understanding that the agent, the object, and the practice itself, all lack independent existence, they then transcend ordinary spiritual practices however altruistic their motive may be.

The first of the six transcendent practices, generosity, isn't simply a matter of becoming more and more charitable in (1) the giving of whatever it is that we may have, be it money, material things, time, energy, and so forth, or (2) the giving of protection from fear, or (3) the giving of the Dharma—the three principal types of generosity. The emphasis here is more on our willingness to give, the intention to give up clinging to _mine_ — _my_ possessions, _my_ knowledge, _my_ privacy and time, and so on. In other words, the practice of generosity lies not so much in the outer act of giving, as it does in the inner act of letting go associated with non-attachment—letting go of holding on to ourselves and whatever it is we feel compelled to identify with and opening-up to a greater world of others as a spontaneous act of environmental generosity.

The second transcendent practice, ethics, isn't simply a matter of adhering to a set of moral principles or observing religious rules of conduct. The emphasis here is on (1) aligning ourselves with our own basic sanity and decency in cultivating positive states and skillful actions. As well, it involves (2) thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that are conducive to pacifying our minds, cooling—the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word _shīla_ usually translated as ethics or morality—the consuming fires of the afflictions and the regrets stemming from acting them out. This entails the discipline of not indulging in and offering some resistance to the dysfunctional patterns that normally dominate our thinking and behaving. And, finally, ethics involves (3) working in ways that bring about the welfare of others.

Basic to Buddhism in general is the ethic of non-violence—the non-harming of others, and to the bodhisattva's path in particular, the ethic of benefiting others. "In this way, the whole of Buddhism can be included in two sentences: 'If you can, help others. If you cannot, at least do not harm them.'"[36] For the bodhisattva this is taken as the root ethic of commitment to altruistic activity and the restraint of self-centeredness.

The third transcendent practice, patience, goes beyond the attitude of gritting our teeth, struggling on, and attempting to over-look what's actually happening or what we're actually feeling so as not to give up on our goal or as a means of holding our temper. Though there may be times when patience comes down to just that, the emphasis here is in developing the coping skills necessary to maintain an undistressed mind in the face of adversity. In the absence of irritation and annoyance, anger and hostility and all the various destructive behaviors that arise from them can't occur. Their main cause, a distressed mind, is absent.

The practice of patience is particularly directed towards developing (1) the ability to tolerate the harm inflicted upon us by others, (2) enduring the hardships undergone in the course of helping others and the difficulties encountered in life in general, and, finally, (3) forbearing in the challenges that traveling a spiritual path often entails.

The skill of patience lies in our ability to reframe problems in such a way that even if the external facts remain relatively unchanged, they're no longer seen as problematic and therefore no longer disturb our minds. We can change the entire personal significance, the meaning that we attribute to them. We have transformed our way of viewing the situation into a more skillful and functional one. What was once a problem difficult to bear finds a natural resolution. For the bodhisattva, there's no person, situation, or task that can't be endured because there's none that can't be skillfully transformed into a contributor to her journey along the path, which is central to her life. For the bodhisattva, all circumstances, both good and bad, assist in her awakening.

The fourth transcendent practice, joyous effort, goes beyond the notion of diligently keeping our nose to the grindstone or valiantly struggling against all odds in seeing our aims through to their end. While there may be times when we might have to exert ourselves in just such ways, the emphasis here is on not only generating the will and energy necessary to achieve our goals, but specifically towards positive ones and with a mind that delights in doing so _._ That is to say, the practice of joyous effort consists in learning to persevere and extend ourselves in doing what is skillful and, moreover and importantly, to be enthusiastic about doing so as well.

It's the eagerness of joyous effort that overcomes our laziness and procrastination, the habit of losing ourselves in distractions, and our self-defeating sense of inadequacy. For the bodhisattva, the delight associated with joyous effort is (1) the protective armor she wears in gladly going into the most hell-like of situations in order to help others, (2) the eager perseverance with which she applies herself to her practice, and (3) the exuberance that lies behind her continuously working with others.

The fifth transcendent practice, meditative concentration, is the way that we remain focused without distraction on what is presently important to us, the way that we can capture, prolong, and integrate the experience of other ways of being and perceiving in meditation and thereby most effectively transform our minds.

Meditative concentration is included in a class of meditative states termed calm abiding—abiding of the mind upon an internal object having calmed its running to external ones. It's the way that we harmonize and unify the various dissonant elements of our mind and temporarily pacify its afflictions. As a consequence, we are able to remain effortlessly focused on whatever object we choose for however long we desire while at the same time experiencing mental and physical well-being.

The bodhisattva cultivates a supramundane concentration that, unlike a mundane concentration that merely suppresses temporarily the disturbing factors of the mind, acts as an antidote that eliminates them altogether. For the bodhisattva, meditative concentration is not an end in itself, a blissful withdrawing from the world. On the contrary, it's an indispensable tool of the mind necessary for gaining the penetrative insights of wisdom that are needed to work most effectively in the world.

And, finally, the sixth of the six core practices of a bodhisattva is the transcendent practice of wisdom. In general, wisdom is an analytic faculty of the mind that allows a probing into the deeper nature of things. Basically, there is (1) the wisdom that knows conventionalities, especially the five traditional areas of knowledge: healing, art, logic, languages, and philosophy and contemplative practices; (2) the wisdom that understands how to bring about the welfare of others through discriminating what is to be adopted and what is to be rejected in order to find happiness and eliminate suffering; and, finally, (3) the wisdom that realizes that all phenomena are selfless, that they are empty of independent existence.[37]

Through the merit of the first five of these six practices the bodhisattva's practice of this third type of wisdom is transformed into a transcendent practice of wisdom. It's the force of her accumulated merit that empowers the bodhisattva's wisdom consciousness to be able to remove the mind's subtle-most obstacles to full awakening.

And, in turn, it's the force of her practice of wisdom that removes the barriers to the limitless deeds of the bodhisattva, transforming her altruistic conduct into transcendent activities. When, for example, in the case of generosity she realizes that the three spheres—the giver, the giving, and the recipient of the gift—do not independently exist, through the force of such an understanding the bodhisattva can without difficulty give all her possessions, virtue, and even her own body in limitless ways for a limitless time to limitless living beings. Through the force of such wisdom the bodhisattva's practices of generosity, ethics, and so forth, are transformed into the transcendent practices of generosity, ethics, and so forth.

Thus, it's the combination of these two, method and wisdom, that totally removes all the barriers obstructing the bodhisattva from achieving her ultimate goal of full awakening and with that the ability to be of greatest possible benefit to the greatest number of others. For the bodhisattva, method without wisdom and wisdom without method are both forms of bondage, but when the two are inseparably joined in practice, they're able to liberate the totality of her being and potential.

Method and wisdom are likened to the two wings of a bird both of which are necessary for it to fly.

The king of geese, spreading wide its vast, white wings

       of the conventional (method) and the real (wisdom),

Comes to the fore of the flight of geese of living beings,

And supported by the powerful winds of its skillful actions,

Reaches the farther-most shore

       of a Buddha's ocean of magnificent qualities.[[38]](../Text/Section0018.htm#_edn38)

The more profound our wisdom, the more effective and extensive our altruistic activities will be. The more extensive our activities motivated by great compassion—method, the more penetrating our wisdom will be. Put most simply, we need the mutual collaboration of a caring heart and a wise mind to be of greatest possible benefit to ourselves and others.
To see if we will poise our life at last,  
To see if we will now at last be true  
To our own true, deep-buried selves,  
Being one with which we are one with the whole world;  
Or whether we will once more fall away  
Into some bondage of the flesh or mind,  
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze  
Forg'd by the imperious lonely thinking power.  
—Matthew Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna"

### 12

AT LAST BE TRUE

If we're to be honest with ourselves, by now we should probably be questioning, Is what we've been discussing thus far—going for refuge, traveling a spiritual path, awakening, and all the rest, is it real or just religious fiction? In describing what amounts to a radically different approach to how we might lead our lives, are we attempting to impose upon ourselves a mode of thinking and behaving that bears little relation to how we actually think and behave? Or, on the contrary, is there something about us that naturally suggests that such a way of life is not only possible, but is, in fact, rooted in our very experience?

For an answer we have to look within our own minds, to little known and often hidden elements of ourselves, to what we more than not refuse to see as parts of ourselves and so get disowned and pushed back into the shadow. The mind's shadow is ordinarily seen as reprehensible, full of dark and sordid qualities that we wish to exclude from conscious awareness. But, within the shadow there lies golden elements as well, qualities we find too difficult to admit even to ourselves, and so they, too, remain hidden in the shadow.

We've all set our self-concept regulator to a range we generally consider "normal." It's roughly a setting where we feel neither too wretched nor too fantastic, neither experience too much failure nor too much success. One would be as difficult to bear as the other. As a result, what is most positive and self-affirming about ourselves is just what goes unnoticed by ourselves, what we find so very difficult to recognize and, therefore, appreciate about ourselves. It's as if we've never had a profound insight, or ever felt a totally selfless concern for another, or ever experienced, even for a moment, a vital strength at the core of being. It's _as if_ none of this has ever happened _for us_.

The point is, in whatever form and however faint and far between their expression may be, these—the very seeds of all that Buddhism means by awakening: wisdom, love and compassion, and personal power—naturally exist in us all. Perhaps unseen, but only so because our attention is continually being diverted elsewhere, back to what we deem normal to be.

Beyond all the various conceptions we may harbor about ourselves, the continually shifting self-identities that we assume and cling to over time, at root we are intelligent, caring, strong people—the exact same golden elements from which all past, present, and future Buddhas are made. There's no intrinsic difference between them and us, no unbridgeable gulf, nothing to which we are not akin. The only difference between Buddhas—happy, healthy, loving, sane human beings—and each of us, is only a matter of degree and not of kind, and that degree is open to change. And, moreover, that change is only __ a matter of nurturing the seeds that presently exist within all of us and their eventual flourishing. Nothing more than that. Put plainly, "Our buddha-nature is as good as any Buddha's buddha-nature."[39]

But, there's another metaphor that we can use in answering our concerns about the reality and relevance of awakening. Here, awakening is viewed not in terms of the cultivation of seeds and their gradual development over time, but rather the making manifest of a perfection that has always been—the image of a lotus, its petals unfolding, revealing hidden deep within itself an ever-present awakened state of being.

It's not because awakening is far away  
      or extremely near,  
Or because it moves here and there,  
But because it lies shrouded in veils  
       of afflictive emotions,  
That it remains unrealized.[40]

Here, there's nothing that needs to be cultivated, nothing that needs to be improved upon, only the dis-covering of an unconditioned dimension of our being that's naturally pure and complete but that presently lies hidden from us.

Although there has been a fundamental transformation (at complete enlightenment), nothing has undergone an actual change. How this is so is demonstrated by the analogies....

For example, intrinsically, the sky is just pure. But it is not considered so when it is beclouded by fog, etc., which are adventitious to it. When it is free of the (fog, etc.), it is then (considered) pure.... The purity is not originated. Rather, the purity is just (newly) seen, when it has become free of what prevented it from being seen. The fact that the sky is (newly) perceived to be pure does not mean that it should be taken as something which has undergone change. Likewise, gold exists simply in its own splendor. But when its luster is hidden by adventitious stain, one does not perceive (the splendor), and when it is freed from the stain, its (splendor) is perceived. That is all. By perceiving (the splendor of gold), one is not creating it. Similarly, water exists simply in its own sparkling clarity. But the water, through its association with mud, is not perceived as (clear). And when freed from the mud, it is perceived (as such). That is all. Perceiving it as such does not cause the substance of the water, which has been continually present, to generate (clarity), nor is that (clarity) created. One should not take the water to be something that has undergone a change just because one (newly) perceives its clarity.[41]

Awakening, then, using the metaphor of an unfolding lotus, is not a linear process of nurturing and maturing—potentiality going over to actuality, but the revealing of an unchanging primordial perfection of being that has always been but that presently lies hidden like,

A Buddha within a decaying lotus,  
    honey covered by bees,  
Grain in its husk, gold within filth,  
Treasure beneath the earth,  
    the shoot [of a great tree] in a small fruit,  
A statue of a Buddha [wrapped] in rags,

A [future] ruler in the womb of an ugly woman,  
A precious image within a clay (mold):  
    in just that way,  
Obscured by the stains of adventitious afflictions,  
The essence of a Buddha lies within all beings.[42]

In our life's finest moments, in a limited but very real way, we experience a glimpse of what awakening must be like: moments of wonder, of awe, of a touching of something sacred; moments of freedom and openness when the world shines with infinite promise, when we sense a basic goodness about ourselves and others and about life, itself; moments of an inexplicable knowing with absolute certainty what's right and true, when we find ourselves speaking and acting with unexpected beauty and courage, feel an unfamiliar strength at the core of our being; creative moments filled with the exhilaration of bringing something uniquely precious into the world;moments of delight like that of a child lost in play; moving moments of communion with another, with nature, the feeling of being a whole and harmonious self;timeless moments when fully present, entirely attending, we feel completely content with the simplest of things, when nothing more is needed, nothing more could be added than just what is around us, within us; moments when within the ceaseless restlessness of our incessant search, we find just what it is that we have unknowingly been looking for all along, we find that perfect place where we feel thoroughly at home.

'It's a very sweet feeling,' he said..., 'very sweet and easy and peaceful. I am grateful to each moment for being itself.... I feel so contented, like I'm at home at last after a long hard journey. Just as warm and peaceful as a cat by the fire.' And this was exactly how he _looked_ at that moment –

Like a cat asleep on a chair, at peace, in peace,

and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,

at home, at home in the house of the living,

sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world

yawning at home before the fire of life

feeling the presence of the living God

like a great reassurance

a deep calm in the heart

a presence

as of the master sitting at the board

in his own and greater being,

in the house of life.[43]

—transcending moments full of deep meaning and vast feelings, intimations of what "Buddha is your mind" might really mean.

We've all experienced such moments, and though rare, still, they do occur, and their occurrence points to something beyond themselves, to a dimension of depth and mystery at the root of our lives, to other possibilities dwelling close beneath the surface of our own minds, to another order of being—awakening.

Aside from the self-validating nature of these peak experiences, the message they hold for us is that awakening, rather than the becoming of something other than who or what we presently are, is in reality the revealing of an innate, pure, luminous essence of our own being that has always been. Awakening is attained like a chest of jewels thrown open, the jewel-like essential nature of our minds as Buddha, ever-present, now revealed.

Acknowledging and responding authentically to the message such moments hold for us, constitutes a journey of growth that needs training and discipline. Using the metaphor of cultivating a flower, we must systematically nourish the seeds of wisdom, love and compassion, and personal power in our minds. And, using the metaphor of the unfolding of a lotus' petals, we must methodically remove the affective and cognitive obstructions preventing the continuous and unimpeded expression of awakened-being.

But, we can go still further in our questioning and ask, Assuming that the state of awakening does exist and that it exists, at least potentially, for all of us, from where does the idea of its incarnate existence come and, too, is it achievable only by an extraordinary few?

The idea of awakening comes from human life itself, from the actual lived history of humankind. There are women and men who have completely overcome ignorance and self-centeredness, gone beyond all their limitations, and realized the totality of their being. Simply, they became happy, healthy, loving, sane human beings. Shakyamuni Buddha was one of them, but there have been others. And, moreover, these others, just like Shakyamuni Buddha, weren't born extraordinary people. They weren't always as they became. They became extraordinary as a result of their own human effort to realize in themselves the same potential that exists in all of us.

Far from being a religious fiction or, though real, attainable only by an exceptional few, awakening is the underlying reality of each and every one of our minds. The question isn't whether awakening exists or not, nor whether we can attain it or not, the real question, the question that each of us is solely responsible for answering for ourselves, is when: When will I awake?
We would rather be ruined than changed,  
We would rather die in our dread  
Than climb the cross of the moment  
And let our illusions die.  
—W. H. Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"

### 13

THE CROSS OF CHANGE

We must change. That's the basic message that the truth of our suffering has always been trying to convey to us. And the first step in change is to challenge our self-perception and experience of reality by questioning whether they are in fact reliable or not. To the degree that they are not, to the degree that they don't approximate what we deem reality to be, we will accordingly continue to experience dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment.

To persist in living a life characterized by ignoring other possible realities is to live not only a frustrated and limited life, but also one that is ultimately misleading. Actions stemming from such a distorted and illusory world, when we look closer, are invariably inappropriate and can only generate more of the same. Like a wheel that grinds on its axle, our actions don't fit properly. They inevitably require corrective actions that are, in turn, inexact requiring still further correction and on and on. Life becomes the perpetual motion of cleaning up the messes that we are continually making—the treadmill of cyclic existence experienced as the unending struggle to again and again find happiness, to again and again rid ourselves of suffering.

Change is necessary, and essentially what must change, what we must fundamentally challenge, are the two dysfunctional mental patterns of ignorance and self-centeredness. Under their influence all our many attempts at solving life's many problems ultimately become part of the problem of life itself. As long as they remain, life remains a problem regardless of whatever else we may do about it.

Most generally, ignorance is an absence of precision and clarity in our thinking from which arises a complex network of erroneous ideas, mistaken beliefs, and distorted views regarding the nature of ourselves, the world, and how they operate. Moreover, ignorance tends to blind us to the absurdity of many of these misconceptions however often they're invalidated by reason and personal experience.

More specifically, the power of thought enables us to construct mental models of things apart from the actual things themselves. We rely on these models in making sense of our experience of the world. But such model building extends as well to ourselves as a self, an I, a person. Our experiences are conditioned by our beliefs in a self, are formed on the basis of a constructed model of a self. Because the model is so much more comprehensible, so much more stable than the fact, we unthinkingly come to identify ourselves with what is, in fact, a re-presentation of ourselves and, moreover, one that is in many significant ways false.[44]

All of us have an innate sense that there is a "thinker" thinking our thoughts, a "feeler" feeling our feelings, a "doer" behind our deeds. We believe in and perceive, an inwardly isolated subject, a solid, fixed, autonomous entity existing at the core of our being that we strongly grasp to as "who I am." This grasping is ignorance and, due to its influence, we act as if we were such a self or possessed such a self, and we regard this behavior as perfectly normal.

Though we are unlikely to be aware that we harbor such a belief, all our afflictive mental patterns of attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride, and so forth, are indications that we do, since they all necessarily arise in dependence upon just such a belief.

When we reflect on our own desire and hatred, we see that they are generated within a conception of oneself as very solid, due to which there comes to be a strong distinction between oneself and others, and consequently attachment for one's own side and hatred for others. Attitudes of desire and hatred have an exaggerated thought of I as their basis....[45]

When we look at the way we suffer and normally think and react emotionally to life, it's as if we believe that we are a self enduring in an unchanging manner, that is a partless whole, and existing independent of both our body and mind and all the many causes and conditions that in fact make us who and what we are. Yet, upon close examination, no such self can ever be found. What we do find when we systematically search for just such a self is its very _absence_. We find the "less" within the term self _less_ ness, denoting the Buddhist doctrine that describes the deeper nature of ourselves.

Believing in the existence of an independent self is like believing a coil of striped rope lying in the grass seen in dim light to be a snake. We automatically react emotionally with fear and aversion. But, if we were to generate a strong contradiction to the belief in the reality of the snake through investigating the object by shining a light on it and looking closer, we would come to understand that all our fears and aversion were totally baseless. There was never really anything there to be afraid of or to feel aversion towards. As a result, all our inappropriate mental and physical reactions, and thereby all the many sufferings that they induce, would dissolve of themselves.

We may argue that we don't think of our self, our I as being an unchanging, unitary, independent entity. This is to miss the point. The self, the I, the person as such is not the problem. It can be analyzed quite rationally into its constituent parts. The Buddhist method of analysis is to talk about the five aggregates or, most simply, the mind and body.[46]

The question is not whether or not the person, [the self, or the I] ... is a changing, composite train of events conditioned by many complex factors. Any rational analysis shows us that this is the case. The question is why then do we behave emotionally as if we were lasting, single, and independent? Thus, when looking for the self it is very important to remember it is an emotional response that one is examining. When one responds to events as if one had a self, for example, when one feels very hurt or offended, one should ask oneself who or what exactly is feeling hurt or offended?

If you are not convinced that you behave emotionally as if you had a lasting, single and independent self, then it is important to address yourself to this issue before moving on to consider the doctrine of not-self selflessness]. Think carefully about pain and suffering and ask yourself who or what it is that is suffering. Who is afraid of what will happen in the future; who feels bad about what has happened; why does death seem like such a threat when the present disappears every moment, scarcely having had a chance to arise? You will find that your thinking is full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes. This is normal. Everyone (except, perhaps, the insane) has a common sense notion of what or who they are which works (more or less) and enables them to function as a normal human being.[[47]

In order to end our suffering, there is nothing more important than to realize that when, due to the influence of ignorance, we think, speak, and act as if the body and mind constituted or possessed an unchanging, unitary, independent self, we are unthinkingly attributing properties to them that they don't possess. They are nothing but a stream of constantly changing, diverse physical and mental processes in dependence upon which we label I, self, person. It's our persistent effort to treat our bodies and minds as if they were more than just this, or possessed something more than just this, that makes our bodies and minds a constant stream of suffering.

The other fundamental pattern of our dysfunctional thinking is self-centeredness. Due to the deeply ingrained tendencies of past ignorance, each of us appears to ourselves as totally separate from and unrelated to everything else—other. Our present ignorance grasps at this false appearance to be true. Self-centeredness then goes on to make of the now misconceived I and other the life-consuming project of "me versus the world" with the welfare of me and mine given precedence over all the rest.

Other beings and our environment are perceived and responded to not as they might exist in and for themselves, but rather as they exist _for me_ and _for my purposes_. All are seen in terms of the constant demand for the gratification of what is, in fact, merely a fabricated self. People are viewed as insentient objects and our environment as a personal collection of resources. Everyone and everything is sacrificed at the altar of the now cherished self of self-centeredness.

But, how many of us ever stop and question, Does it work? Does such a me-first, I'm-number-one, center-of-the-universe approach to the living of our lives actually bring us the kind of life we truly want to live? A life founded upon self-centeredness is a life essentially dedicated to one thing: _me_ —above all else, _my_ wants, _my_ needs, _my_ agenda, _my_ everything. However else it may appear both to ourselves and others, it is _I_ who is to be satisfied, to feel good, not feel bad, and it is you who will do all of this for _me_. And over the course of relating in such a way, feeling beings are reduced to unfeeling things—devalued, objectified, manipulated, and exploited, and in the process we devalue and objectify ourselves, manipulate ourselves, always comparing, always competing, conspiring, defending, and inevitably always alone, unable to trust, to truly love. Basically, we live in fear. Fear, for the most part, runs our lives.

The point isn't that we are somehow to overlook or avoid our problems and the practical necessity of dealing with them. The point is that in the midst of our problems we're not forget about others, that we not lose sight of their reality: they, too, are experiencing problems, they, too, want to be happy just like ourselves, that we're not alone, not unique in that.

There's a saying, "I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." It does hurt to have no shoes and something practical does need to be done to alleviate that suffering. But, at the same time, something also needs to be done to ensure that we don't isolate ourselves in our suffering, that we stay connected to the world of others even in the midst of our suffering, that we not forget that there are others who have no feet, and that we make such mindfulness an integral part of how we live our lives.

We are selfish people, but as mentioned previously, we can be wisely selfish in our seeking to protect and care for others. It's not unrealistic but even compellingly practical that we develop a natural, rational, instinctively powerful altruism. The benefiting intention of altruism is the most readily available remedy for most all of our psychological ills, for going beyond our fears and finding peace and love—mental health—in our daily lives. This is neither some complex philosophic theory nor an emotional flight into sentimentality, but a simple and pragmatic statement about the best way to lead our lives.

Ignorance is the ultimate betrayer of ourselves and self-centeredness ultimately self-defeating. Any world-view, any approach to the living of life, based on them is fundamentally flawed. It's as if we're on a long journey to some distant place and all the while we're relying on an inaccurate map to get us there. No matter what we do, how hard we try, we continually experience dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment. Of course we might change our behavior, become more diligent, and make even greater effort, but that would only get us to the wrong places that much faster. On the other hand, we might change our attitude, become more accepting, more tolerant about always being lost and all the hardships that we're forced to endure but, in the end, we never actually get to where it is we truly want to go. No mental-map drawn by the misconceptions of ignorance and self-centeredness can ever lead us there.

And what changes these two basic dysfunctional patterns of our minds and brings them to an end and, thereby, changes our lives once and for all for the better, are the awakened mind and the awakened heart. Without the awakened mind—the wisdom realizing selflessness—Buddhism would be merely a lofty system of ethics where the bodhisattva, having awakened her heart, dedicates her life to the noble but impossible task of leading all living beings to complete freedom and peace. For without the awakened mind, there simply is no way to remove the fundamental cause of suffering—ignorance, such that it will not return again and, thus, no way for the bodhisattva to ever achieve her goal.

However much effort you make in practices such as generosity, observing ethics, and so forth, without this meditation on selflessness you'll never be able to attain freedom. As the _Four Hundred Verses_ says, "There is no second door to peace."[48]

Without its teachings on selflessness Buddhism could not go beyond psychotherapy. For whilst therapy and much of Buddhism prune the branches of our misconceptions about what it means to be a normal, sane, or worthwhile person, the view of selflessness and its practice aim at cutting the very roots, namely our deep, unexamined, mistaken beliefs about what it means to be a person at all.[49]

It's through the power of the awakened mind realizing the true nature of our self, that ignorance is completely eliminated, all afflictive emotions are stilled, and we experience unremitting inner peace and with that the fulfillment of our own welfare.

And it's through the power of the awakened heart seeking the full awakening of a Buddha for the sake of others, that the psychological center of our life shifts from self to others, that we realize our fullest potential in developing the skills necessary to be of greatest possible benefit to them, and with that the fulfillment of others' welfare.

Most simply, we are describing the cultivation of wisdom and compassion. The two wings by means of which we are can fly across the sea of all our troubles and lead others to that same distant shore. Like that, we can go beyond all the dysfunctional patterns of our minds and self-imposed limits of our lives and realize the boundless possibilities of what it means to be a human being, fully and consciously participating in the purposive evolution of life on its grandest scale—awakening.
In order to be truthful  
We must do more than speak the truth.  
We must also hear truth.  
We must also receive truth.  
We must also act upon truth.  
We must also search for truth.  
The difficult truth.  
Within us and around us.  
We must devote ourselves to truth.  
Otherwise we are dishonest  
And our lives are mistaken.  
God grant us the strength and the courage  
To be truthful.  
Amen  
—Michael Leunig, _The Prayer Tree_

### 14

MISTAKEN LIVES

We said above that a spiritual journey involves traveling a path. In Buddhism, a path is, in part, defined as a clear realization. To realize means to remove the illusory element that we're superimposing upon things; we eliminate the fiction that we're projecting onto the world. It's like seeing a snow mountain as green because we're wearing green-tinted sunglasses and then taking them off. We remove the distorting overlay of green and see the mountain as it truly is, as white. We dis-cover what's really there and as a consequence, we no longer relate to it in some confused and inappropriate manner.

This is what the Greek word for truth, _aletheia_ , literally meaning a clearing, suggests. Truth is sensed as something that emerges as we enter a clearing, when we come to a place where the obscuring overgrowth of our erroneous ideas, our mistaken beliefs, our distorted views have been cleared away. Thus, a path comes to mean both the _means_ used to clear away the obscuring and falsifying patterns of mind in getting at the truth, as well as the _realization_ of those truths themselves.

We embark on a path when we discover a way that opens up our minds, when we are genuinely able to explore other realities and leave behind the fixed, repetitive positions of our thinking and step out onto the fresh ground of a new, liberating perspective.

A fundamental assertion of Buddhism is that knowing is an organizing into the known. What we come to know is inseparable from how we know it, from our own minds and its thinking. In the very first verse of his _Collected Sayings_ , the Buddha says,

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.[50]

If the mental maps that we use in making sense of ourselves and the world—our epistemology—are problematic so, too, will be our experience of them. In other words, the fundamental assertion of Buddhism is that the psychology of our suffering is the dysfunctional ways that we know ourselves and the world and as a result, the unskillful ways we relate to them.

Our ideas, beliefs, and views inform our perceptions. They permeate our knowledge of, our relationship to, and experience of the world. The world that we find ourselves in corresponds to our inner network of conceptions about it. These conceptions "tend to modify what we look for, what we recognize, how we interpret and how we respond to those interpretations."[51]

It's for this reason that traveling a spiritual path—making effort in activities such as reading, listening to, and studying the teachings, reflecting on them, meditating and putting them into practice—is important. It's important because it's a way we learn about how we're creating and perpetuating our problems and how by modifying our inner network of erroneous ideas, mistaken beliefs, and distorted views, we can diminish and, finally, bring them to an end.

Traveling a spiritual path is a way of gaining realizations, a way of coming to know truth as opposed to epistemological fantasy. Thereby, we come to relate with the world in ways that are fundamentally more in keeping with what we want from the world and what the world is, in fact, capable of giving us. The ultimate realization of the path and, therefore, the optimum way of knowing and relating to the world is awakening, and full awakening is Buddhahood.

Though ignorance and self-centeredness are the foundations supporting our dysfunctional world-view, like an archaeological excavation exposing entire civilizations, within our minds can be found layer upon layer of distorted and distorting conceptions, one built upon the next. On the bedrock of ignorance and self-centeredness, we have constructed an entire way of life using the basic building blocks of erroneous ideas, mistaken beliefs, and wrong views. We think, speak, and act according to these deeply entrenched yet largely unconscious misconceptions.

Most all of us harbor ideas about ourselves that we're limited, insufficient, incomplete, as if all that were of value and necessary for life's success lies somewhere outside of ourselves, as if out there in the world we could find what it is we feel we're missing within.

We take for granted our human life, as if it possessed no purpose other than the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, as if the fullness of life and its potential could be measured by what happens only to the body or by what we own or control.

At some level, we believe we're going to live forever, and even when confronted with death's inevitability in terms of others, still, we relegate our own to a future far enough away, where its unpredictability plays no part in how we lead our lives now.

In one way or another we see ourselves as victims of events beyond our control, as if our life were an accident unfolding that simply happens to us, that who we are and how we've come to experience our world, weren't in large part the out-comes of the many choices that we're making everyday of our lives.

We look upon a passing respite from suffering as true happiness; seek a reliable refuge where it can't be found; attempt to reduce the sacred to a person or thing; and view this tiny island of ego of ours as universe, as if there were nothing more beyond its myopic vision.

When such a distorted perception of the world comes up against the world as it actually is, inevitably there's dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, basically a flawed approach to the living of our life. It's like someone who refuses to acknowledge that summer changes into autumn. They dress inappropriately and fall ill. There's a misfit; they suffer.

The realm of psychological fiction our minds create is the virtual world we inhabit, and within it our contact with reality is a very partial one. It's as if we believed a photograph of a chocolate cake to be the real thing. There's a disparity between our beliefs and belief-conditioned perceptions on the one hand and the reality of the object on the other—its true nature devoid of our superimposed illusions about it. No matter how many photographs we accumulate and no matter how many we're able to consume, we never find just what it is that our mistaken beliefs led us to assume we could, what at a deeper level we were looking to the chocolate cake to bring us, what it is we truly desired from it.

"There are two great disappointments in life. Not getting what you want and getting it."[52] In other words, even when we get exactly what it is that we assume we want, we never find—in the photograph, in our projected illusions—the appeasement of our inner hunger that the object was supposed to have brought us. The craving never really goes away, never really ends as it was meant to. The object is never real enough in its own right to bring us the kind of satisfaction that we were looking to it for. The desiring just starts up all over again and we're forced to move on, to search out again, to acquire again, to go on endlessly consuming.

Yet, however much we consume there remains that place of emptiness inside us, a sense of inadequacy—either the object to ourselves or ourselves to the object, a feeling of a misfit between ourselves and the world. In other words, we experience _dukkha_ , the Sanskrit equivalent of a term used by the Buddha in describing the underlying feeling-tone of ordinary human existence. It broadly refers to suffering and dissatisfaction, but originally meant a wheel that grinds on its axle.[53] Our life grinds on its axle. It grates on us, wears us down.

The path leading beyond _dukkha_ , beyond the experience of dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, of having continually to move on in search, of being worn by life, is necessarily a path of change. Our erroneous ideas, mistaken beliefs, and distorted views must all change. We must necessarily look at the world in different ways, through different eyes, the eyes of new, more functional, and skillful ideas. And with that our world will correspondingly appear different. It, too, will have changed and consequently our experience of it. It no longer rubs up against us. The misfit is gone, the interface is smooth, our life flows more freely. We move about our world with "a great reassurance / a deep calm in the heart"— I have what I need; I need no more; I have _enough._

But, if we are ever to truly have enough, we must know what it is we truly need and how actually to get it. The orientation of the Buddhist path stresses that it's our present intentions, our values and goals, and not our childhood experiences and backgrounds that are most important in determining our future. Buddhism is more concerned with the direction we're presently headed, than it is in where we've been or what we've done in the past. Our future is the ideas and images within our minds that are shaping our present, and need to be taken into account in understanding the way the present will flow into the future. It's something we're creating now and not simply predictions emerging from out of our past.

While past experiences definitely influence the present, they don't entirely determine it. In our present moment of experience, we re-member the past in our own way, from our own perspective, for our own purposes, synthesizing a story about who we've been. Most people are bound by their past stories, by their repeating loop of inner self-talk telling them who they've been and, therefore, who they'll be and what they can and cannot legitimately expect out of their lives.

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative – whose continuity, whose sense, _is_ our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a 'narrative', and that this narrative _is_ us, our identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story – his real, inmost story?' – for each of us _is_ a biography, a story. Each of us _is_ a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us – through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives – we are each of us unique.[54]

But, once the causality of the past is recognized the story becomes susceptible to change. By how we participate in the present we can change our future. The emphasis in Buddhism is on who I can be and what I can do now to become that and not on who I've been, or what I've done or didn't do, or what has happened to me. Buddhism asks that we focus on taking conscious possession of our life-story, that we become forward-looking and consciously choose new and different possibilities for ourselves.

It's our faith—the significance and reality that we invest in these new and different possibilities—that inspires us to exercise our freedom to wish, to admit that this attracts me, that I want my future to be such and such, and to begin to purposely orient and occupy ourselves with it in order to make it so. And it's our constructive anxiety—the undercurrent of concern that our past patterns of dysfunctional thinking and behaving and their unwanted consequences will repeat themselves and become our future—that motivates us to change, to choose and commit ourselves, to take responsibility for insuring our future is otherwise.

It's faith that draws us on towards a progressive future and overcomes the paralysis of our irrational fears, and it's anxiety that pushes us from out of a regressive past and overcomes the inertia of our unfounded hopes.

Faith enables us to positively wish, _May it be so!_ , and anxiety moves wish for to the level of __ will to and empowers us to resolve, _And_ _I will have it so!_ It's these two, faith and constructive anxiety, that cause us to go for refuge to new and different possibilities—the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and it's through them that will to is ultimately moved to the level of, _Now, it is so!_ That we find within the actuality of our lived experience, an increasing measure of just what it is we're searching for.

And, for the bodhisattva, due to the additional cause of her fear of the self-absorbed oblivion of passive peace and by the power of her refuge from it—great compassion, will to is raised to the level of transcendent activity. __ That her life and destiny are pervaded by a dedication to the welfare of others and, thus, to the attainment of full awakening for their sake. That the bodhisattva is moved to sound aloud the lion's roar—

According to _Physiologus_ (the traditional lore of animal psychology), the lion's cubs are stillborn. They must be awakened into life by a roar. That is why the lion has such a roar: to awaken the young lions asleep, as they sleep in our hearts.[55]

— _And you, too, shall have it so!_
What we call the beginning is often the end  
And to make an end is to make a beginning.  
The end is where we start from.  
—T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

### 15

BEGINNING

We said at the outset that no matter how long the path, we have actually to begin it, if we're ever to reach its end. There's really no substitute for beginning. However humble, however tentative and faltering our first steps may be, we have at least to begin—perhaps for the first time or again or harder or differently, whichever, but nevertheless we have to begin. And, moreover, we're free to begin. If we're aware, if we're committed and deliberately look for them, there are always alternatives and, with that, the possibility to choose a difference that will make a difference.

Until one is committed, there is a hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no person could have dreamed would have come their way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.[56]

Commitment is the consistent choice of the discipline that a context prescribes. Going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is the consistent choice of the discipline that Buddhism prescribes:what we're willing to commit ourselves to in order to ensure that what we now choose will make a difference in our lives for the better, ultimately, the difference of awakening.

Commitment is a way of saying that certain values and ways of life deserve our support, even though we may find them difficult. It entails working with the deeper causes of our problems and our innate potential to realize our highest ideals. Our commitment is a way of deeply caring for ourselves and honoring our dreams and caring for others and honoring their dreams as well, a way of not giving up on ourselves or them.

We have learned to be who we are; our approach to the living of our lives is a learned experience. Whatever has been learned can be unlearned and new learning can take its place. We can re-learn ourselves and how to live.

And the beginning of any real learning is first to genuinely believe that we can learn, and the primary lesson that we're to learn is what to choose and how to go about effectively choosing it. And our first choice must be to choose to consciously act as if we were free, thereby regaining the freedom that we've lost in its unconsciousness denial. "Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose."[57] There are alternatives and we do have the ability to choose.

The beginnings of genius, power, and magic are in boldly believing we can, for "if you believe you can or if you believe you can't—you're right."[58] Merely wishing it were so isn't sufficient, we have to believe that we can make it so as well. But, even more, not merely believing we can, but resolving, And I will have it so.

We...are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with.... We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against _us._ If it has terrors, they are _our_ terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.[59]

There really is no alternative but to begin—anew, again, harder, differently, whichever, but nevertheless to begin. And there's no time to start but now and no place other than where each of us is at. There can be no substitute for stepping onto and consistently choosing the path that will make of us who it is we would have ourselves be, living the kind of life we would have ourselves live.

The path of Buddhism begins with a realignment of our allegiance from a life primarily lived under the control of unfounded hopes and irrational fears to one centered around consciously choosing to grow. It begins by taking responsibility for how we decide to lead our lives and for the consequences of those choices. It begins by freely and deliberately directing ourselves in the light of our own truths towards new and different possibilities in the future, towards alternative refuges in our lives. It begins with a heart-felt commitment to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

The inner focus of our life becomes Buddha—the embodiment of wisdom, love and compassion, personal power, and their skillful expression in our daily lives; that we actualize by means of the Dharma—the methods, the various trainings and practices, the truth of the way things are;within the social context of the Sangha—the community of fellow practitioners who assist us in implementing the Dharma in our daily lives. And we again and again try to raise the level of our motivation—the why behind and purpose for our doing what we do, so that what we do is done not just for ourselves alone, not just for our own limited needs and narrow self-concerns, but out of a growing commitment to the welfare of an ever widening circle of others. Ultimately, we go for refuge in order to fully awaken for the sake of all living beings.

I go for refuge until I'm awakened

To the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

Through the collections (of merit and wisdom)

     created out of generosity and the other practices,

May I become a Buddha for the sake of (all) living beings.[60]

Beginning is always difficult, and because going for refuge is always at the beginning of all true practice, at the beginning of every authentic attempt to draw near to what is most real about our ourselves and meaningful in our lives, becoming a Buddha is the most difficult thing of all. But shouldn't these beginningless wanderings of ours finally bring us to that place, where at last we see that the easy path has gotten us nowhere. Isn't it time, though reluctant and unsure, we determine to endure just what we presently find so difficult, and with beauty and courage at long last turn our minds towards home.

### EPIGRAPHS

Front piece: Rainer Maria Rilke, _Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke_ , trans. Stephen Mitchell, "Ah, Not to Be Cut Off" (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 191.

Prologue: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter, November 1920, quoted in _Rainer Maria Rilke—Selected Poems_ , trans. and intro. J. B. Leishman (Penguin Books: London, 2000), p. 21.

Chapter 1: Idries Shah, quoted in James Oldham, Tony Key, and Igor Yaro Starak, _Risking Being Alive_ (Bundoora, Victoria: Pit Pub., 1978), p. 101.

Chapter 2: Robert Frost, _Robert Frost_ , "The Road Not Taken," ed. and intro. C. Day Lewis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 78.

Chapter 3: Martin Buber, _Hasidism and Modern Man_ , ed. and trans. by Maurice Friedman (N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 134-135.

Chapter 4: T. S. Elliot, _Selected Poems_ , "Choruses from 'The Rock'" (I: 6-18) (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 107.

Chapter 5: Herbert Spencer, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ , quoted in _Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics_ by R. H. Blyth (N. Y.: E. P. Dutton, 1960), p. 295.

Chapter 6: Michael Leunig, _A Common Prayer_ (North Blackburn, Vic.: Collins Dove, 1990), no page number.

Chapter 7: Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass_ , "Song of Myself," ed. and intro. by Jerome Loving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 29.

Chapter 8: Baruch Spinoza, _The Complete Works: Ethics_ , ed. Michael L. Morgan and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002).

Chapter 9: Oliver La Farge, _Laughing Boy_ (Boston: Mariner Books, 2004).

Chapter 10: Hillel, _Avoth_ I: 14;quoted in Martin Buber, _I and Thou,_ trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:Scribner, 1970), p. 85.

Chapter 11: Kahil Gibran, _Sand and Foam_ (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 78-79.

Chapter 12: Matthew Arnold, _Poems,_ ed. K. Allott, "Empedocles on Etna" (London: Everyman's Library 1974), p. 472.

Chapter 13: W. H. Auden, _Collected Poems_ , "The Age of Anxiety" (Part Six) (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 407.

Chapter 14: Michael Leunig, _The Prayer Tree_ (North Blackburn, Vic.: Collins Dove, 1991), no page number.

Chapter 15: T. S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_ , "Little Gidding" (V: 214-216) (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) p. 5.

### About the Author

American by birth, Jampa Jaffe was a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for seventeen years and studied for over fifteen years in India at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Buddhist School of Dialectics. This was then followed by a year of meditation in the monasteries of Thailand. In 2005 he completed a one year solitary retreat.

He has been teaching Buddhism for the past thirty years beginning in 1987 at Buddha House, South Australia, where he also served as the Tibetan interpreter. In 1997 Jampa was appointed teaching assistant in the seven-year Masters Program of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition at Tsongkapa Institute, Italy. Jampa now lives in Sydney, Australia where he teaches in both the Tibetan and Insight Buddhist traditions.

### ENDNOTES

Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Tibetan are mine.

* * *

[1]. A version of this prologue, "Begin Again," previously appeared in Mandala Magazine, Feb-Mar, 2008.

[2]. This paragraph is in part drawn from Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 6.

[3]. Walter Kaufmann, _From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original Study_ (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 237.

[4]. Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ , p. 27.

[5]. Robert A. Johnson, _We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love_ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 171.

[6]. James Hillman, _The Essential James Hillman – A Blue Fire_ , intro. and ed. Thomas Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 286.

[7]. Ryôkan, _One Robe, One Bowl_ , trans. John Stevens (New York: Weatherhill, 1977), p. 56.

[8]. This quote is attributed to Zen Master Linji, the founder of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism.

[9]. This allegory is based on a verse from Shantideva's _A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life_ ( _Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra_ ), Chpt. 5, v. 13: "Where is there enough leather to cover the entire world? / With just the leather of my sandals, it's as if the whole earth were covered."

[10]. Rainer Maria Rilke, _Letters to a Young Poet_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), pp. 34-35.

[11]. T. S. Elliot, _Selected Poems_ , "The Waste Land" (II: 131-138) (London:Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 55-56.

[12]. Jeremy W. Hayward, _Shifting Worlds, Changing Minds_ (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), p. 49.

[13]. William Shakespeare, _William Shakespeare − Complete Works_ , _Macbeth_ , ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1962), pp. 1023-1024.

[14]. Thich Nhat Hanh, _Peace Is Every Step_ (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), p. 41.

[15]. Walter Kaufmann, _Existentialism, Religion and Death: Thirteen Essays_ (New York: Meridian Books, 1976), p. 212.

[16]. Portia Nelson, "Autobiography in Five Chapters," quoted in Sogyal Rinpoche, _The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying_ (London: Rider, 1992), pp. 31-32.

[17]. Diane Schoemperlen, _Our Lady of the Lost and Found_ (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) p. 320.

[18]. M. Scott Peck, _The Road Less Traveled_ (London: Rider, 1989), p. 131.

[19]. Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ , p. 12.

[20]. Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, _Seeking the Heart of Wisdom_ (Boston: Shambhala Pub., 1987), p. 3.

[21]. These two are the third and fourth of the Four Noble Truths, which constitute the fundamental formulation of the Buddha's teachings. The first two truths are True Sufferings and True Origins of Suffering.

[22]. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, _The Good Heart_ (London: Rider, 1996), p. 100.

[23]. _8th Case of the Hekiganroku_ —"Introduction," quoted in R. H. Blyth, _Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics_ (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960), p. 258.

[24]. This and the following paragraph are in part drawn from Roger R. Jackson's _Is Enlightenment Possible_ (Ithaca: Snow Lion Pub., 1993), p. 143.

[25]. Dharmakīrti and rGyal tsab rje, _Is Enlightenment Possible?_ , intro., trans, and annot. by Roger R. Jackson (Ithaca: Snow Lion Pub., 1993), p. 143.

[26]. James Hillman, _The Essential James Hillman - A Blue Fire_ , p. 73.

[27]. Quoted in Pabongka Rinpoche, _Liberation in Your Hand_ ( _rNam sgrol lag bcangs_ ), (undated woodblocks published in India by _dGa' ldan shar rtse grwa tshang_ ), p. 9a.5-6. Pabongka Rinpoche cites an unnamed sutra as his source for this verse.

[28]. Shakyamuni Buddha, "This verse is known to the commentators as being from the _Vimalaprabhā_ commentary on the _Kālacakra_ , although it appears in the Pali Canon as well. The Sanskrit occurs as a quotation in the D. Shastri, _Tattvasaôgraha_ (Varanasi: Bauddhabarati, 1968), k. 3587...," quoted in Robert A. F. Thurman, _The Speech of Gold_ (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), p. 190, n. 12. The verse in full reads: O Bhikshus, just as a goldsmith gets his gold, / First testing by melting, cutting, and rubbing, / Sages accept my teachings after full examination / And not just out of devotion (to me). Robert A. F. Thurman's trans. in his _Essential Tibetan Buddhism_ (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995), p. 190 _._

[29]. Pali: _ehipassiko_. One of the traditional expressions epitomizing the Dharma.

[30]. Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ , pp. 89-90.

[31]. James Hillman, _The Essential James Hillman – A Blue Fire_ , p. 53.

[32]. Michael Polanyi, _Personal Knowledge_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 101, quoted in Jeremy W. Hayward, _Shifting Worlds, Changing Minds_ , pp. 12-13.

[33]. The "dependence" in dependent-arising means that all phenomena exist contingent upon and relative to other phenomena upon which they depend. Nothing arises independent of other phenomena; nothing is self-arisen or self-established. Everything _arises through dependence_ upon, (1) its proximate and distant _causes and conditions_ , for example, a sprout depends upon the seed, the soil, the moisture, and so forth that give rise to it; (2) its _component parts, attributes, and qualities_ , for example, a car depends upon the frame, the body, the motor, the wheels, and so forth that it is built from and can not be reduced to any of them nor is it equivalent to the mere sum of them; and, according to the Middle Way School of Buddhism ( _Mādhyamika_ ), (3) any phenomenon that we identify depends upon _conceptual designation_ , that is, depends upon the concepts and the conceptual consciousness that uses them, rendering it intelligible within a particular linguistic community. According to the Middle Way School, all three of these modes of dependency apply to all things—our world, our minds, and ourselves.

[34]. Other ways of categorizing the six _pāramitās_ into the two collections are sometimes explained. For example, the first four _pāramitās_ —generosity, ethics, patience, and joyous effort—comprise the collection of merit, while the latter two—meditative concentration and wisdom—comprise the collection of exalted wisdom; and another example, the first three _pāramitās_ —generosity, ethics, and patience—comprise the collection of merit, the latter two comprise the collection of exalted wisdom, while the fourth—joyous effort—applies to both collections.

[35]. This second etymology of _pāramitā_ as transcend, accords with its Tibetan equivalent, _pha rol tu phyin pa_.

[36]. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, _The Dalai Lama at Harvard_ (Ithaca, N.Y.:Snow Lion, 1988), p. 188.

[37]. According to the Middle Way School ( _Mādhyamika_ ), selflessness and emptiness are synonymous. They both apply equally to persons and other phenomena and they both mean the _absence_ , the utter _non-existence_ , of an assumed independent nature of things that objects appear to have but, in reality, don't. It's due to ignorance that phenomena appear and are conceived to exist in such a way. Nothing, nowhere, at any time exists independently (see note 33). The wisdom realizing this is able to eliminate ignorance from our minds.

[38]. Chandrakīrti, _Supplement to (Nāgārjuna's) 'Treatise on the Middle Way'_ ( _dBu ma la 'jug pa zhes bya ba) (Madhyamakāvatāra_ ), VI 226, (Sarnath, India: The Pleasure of Elegant Sayings Printing Press, n.d.), p. 118.

[39]. Sogyal Rinpoche, _The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying_ (London: Rider, 1992), p. 48.

[40]. Nāgārjuna, _Praise of the Sphere of Quality_ ( _Chos kyi dbyings su bstod pa_ ), quoted in Ven. Lobsang Gyatso, _Doctrine of Buddhism—I_ , "A Brief Presentation of the Subtle Points of the Bases, Paths, and Fruits," trans. Jampa Gendun (Jampa Jaffe), (Dharamsala, India: The Buddhist School of Dialectics, 1983), p. 42.

[41]. _Dharmakharmatāvibhāgavritti_ , quoted in John J. Makransky, _Buddhahood Embodied_ (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 91.

[42]. Maitreya, _Sublime Continuum of the Great Vehicle_ ( _Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma'i bstan bcos_ ). vv. 1. 99, 1. 100.

[43]. Oliver Sacks, _Awakenings_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 242-243. The section of the poem quoted is from "Pax," by D. H. Lawrence.

[44]. The Buddha taught in accordance with the level of understanding, capacity, and temperament of his individual students. Thus, on the same subject he taught at many different levels. Like climbing a ladder, it's necessary to rely on the lower rungs in order to reach the higher ones. The Buddhist doctrine of selflessness as briefly explained here is one such rung on a ladder progressively describing the deeper nature of ourselves and the world. According to the Middle Way School ( _Mādhyamika_ ), it does not represent the final thought of the Buddha on that nature (see note 37).

[45]. Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, _The Meaning of Life_ , trans. and ed. Jeffrey Hopkins (Boston: Wisdom Pub., 1992), p. 15.

[46]. An aggregate (Skt.: _skandha_ , Pali: _khandha_ ) is a collection of various component parts or processes. We organize the sum of our experience into the comprehensive categories of the five aggregates: forms, feelings, perceptions, compositional factors, and consciousnesses. They constitute all that we call I or self.

  1. Forms—forms refers most simply to our body or, technically, to the five physical sense objects and five physical sense powers. The five physical sense objects are: colors and shapes, sounds, odors, tastes, and objects of touch. The five physical sense powers are: eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body sense powers. Physical sense powers are clear subtle matter located in the sense organs. They empower their respective consciousness with respect to their specific type of objects. Forms is the only aggregate that corresponds to the material world. The other four aggregates correspond to the mental side of the body-mind complex.
  2. Feelings—feelings are the automatic hedonic reaction to what is viewed as attractive—giving rise to feelings of pleasure;unattractive—giving rise to feelings of displeasure; or neither—giving rise to neutral feelings.
  3. Perceptions—sometimes called discriminations or recognitions, perceptions apprehend the uncommon characteristics of an object. When we experience a color such as blue, for example, we discriminate it as blue; when we hear a car starting-up we might recognize the sound and differentiate it thinking "car" or "my car," and so forth.
  4. Compositional factors—sometimes called volitions or inclinations, composition factors includes all impermanent phenomena not included in the other four aggregates. However, usually it is used to refer to a specific collection of secondary mental factors of the mind, for example, emotions such as anger and faith, etc., and various functions of mind such as wisdom, ignorance, mindfulness, etc. There are fifty-one secondary mental factors, of which forty-nine are included here. The other two, feelings and perceptions, are listed as separate aggregates.
  5. Consciousnesses—the six types of primary consciousnesses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental consciousness.

[47]. Ven. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, _Progressive Stages of Meditation On Emptiness_ , trans. and arranged by Shenpen Hookham (Oxford: Longchen Foundation, 1986), p. 21.

[48]. Pabongka Rinboche, _Commentary on Dzongkaba's "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path"_ ( _'Jam mgon bla ma Dzong kha pas mdzad pa' lam gtso rnam gsum pha phong kha pa gyams pa bstan 'bzin las_ in _bLo bzang dgongs rgyan mu tig phring mdzes deb bzhi pa_ ), (Mungod, India: Drepung Loseling Educational Society Publication, 1995), p. 82. _Four Hundred Verses_ ( _Catuhsataka_ ) is an important Middle Way School text by the Indian Buddhist master, Āryadeva (3rd century CE), a chief disciple of Nāgārjuna.

[49]. This paragraph is in part drawn from: Guy Claxton, "The Light's On But There's Nobody Home: The Psychology of No-Self," in _Beyond Therapy_ , ed. Guy Claxton (London: Wisdom Pub., 1986), p. 52.

[50]. Shakyamuni Buddha, _The Dhammapada_ , Chpt. 1, v. 1, trans. Thomas Byrom (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 3.

[51]. Roger Walsh, _Staying Alive: The Psychology of Human Survival_ , in Jeremy W. Hayward, _Perceiving Ordinary Magic_ (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1984), p. 274.

[52]. George Bernard Shaw, in Jack Kornfield, _A Path of Heart_ (London: Rider, 1994), p. 87.

[53]. Fritjof Capra, David Steindl Rast, with Thomas Matus, _Belonging to the Universe_ (N.Y.: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 42.

[54]. Oliver Sacks, _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_ (London: Pan Pub., 1986), p. 105.

[55]. James Hillman, _The Essential James Hillman - A Blue Fire_ , p. 304.

[56]. William Hutchison Murray, _The Scottish Himalaya Expedition_ , (1951). This quote is often misattributed to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, see: _Faust_ , 214-230.

[57]. Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ , p. 15.

[58]. This is a paraphrase of a quote variously attributed to Henry Ford, the industrialist, and others.

[59]. Rainer Maria Rilke, _Letters to a Young Poet,_ pp. 91-92.

[60]. The first two lines of this four line verse, those of going for refuge, are in one form or another the most often recited in all Buddhist liturgy. The latter two lines, those of generating an awakened heart, are invariably added in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as a means of repeatedly cultivating a bodhisattva's motivation.

The phonetics of the Tibetan version of this four line verse is as follows.

Sang gyë chö tang tshok gyi chok nam la  
Chang chup par du dak ni gyap su chi  
Dak gi jîn sok gyi pä tshok nam gyi  
Dro la phën chir sang gyë drup bar shok.

This verse is traditionally recited three times prior to any formal practice or teaching. Note that in another commonly used version of this verse, in the third line, "collections" (Tib: _tshogs nams_ , pronounced: tsok nam) is replaced with "merit" (Tib: _bsod nams_ , pronounced: sö nam), which then translates: "Through the merit created out of generosity and the other practices..."
