Chapter 6: Motivation

Benefiting Beings

This topic probably should have gone first, since it is the first thing every Tibetan teacher begins with when giving a teaching. The students are asked to set their motivation for receiving teachings, i.e., to listen to the teachings with the aspiration to use them for the welfare and upliftment of all beings.

Chagdud Rinpoche was known as the “motivation” lama. No matter what he was asked to speak about, he spoke on motivation. No matter what the announced topic of his talk, people also got teachings on motivation. I heard that students had begged him to talk about something else, but he confessed that he seemed to always want to give this message to people.

The teaching is simple: the correct motivation, the highest motivation, is to be of benefit to sentient beings. This is the motivation of the bodhisattva, the ideal of the mahayana path. Although he was a great dzogchen master, established in the highest view at all times, Chagdud Rinpoche radiated kindness and compassion. He had the same quality that the Dalai Lama has.

In my estimation, this quality speaks to the human heart more powerfully than any other. The greatest spiritual teachers and saints all have this quality. They are filled with the effulgence of divine love and have eradicated the traces of the tyranny of the small self.

Motivation and Trust

The practice of developing the motivation of compassion has far-reaching effects. In my experience those who practice this are capable of evincing a high degree of trust. I found that I was able to trust my Buddhist teachers more deeply than I had been able to trust any other people in my life – because of their total dedication to benefiting others.

My parents were very loving and were good parents in almost all ways - and they were alcoholics. Even though I was confident of my parents’ love, there was a part of their psychology which was in the sway of their addiction. I could see and feel that this was a constant motivating factor in their lives and as a result, there was some insecurity and lack of full trust.

In a similar way, I sometimes harbored suspicions about Baba’s motivations. I had doubts fostered by his personality. It seemed to me at the time that Baba had personal interests and motivations in addition to the motivation behind his spiritual work. For example, I saw that he was very interested in the numbers of people that attended his programs and also in the numbers of famous people he attracted. Was this just the motivation to serve humanity on a vast scale? I can see now that this was no doubt the case. But at the time, I had issues with it, because it didn’t match my ideals.

One story will give an example of my ideals and my concern with ordinary human feelings. For a time, Baba would give a present every day to a young boy who was the son of the president of Baba’s foundation. He was an adorable child and Baba loved him a lot. But it was painful to see all the other children watch him getting a gift day after day while none of the other kids ever seemed to get anything. I was told that this was mentioned to Baba, but it did not change.

I wondered why Baba did not know or care that others were suffering. On a personal level it was obvious that there were favorites. It is true that this outer play served the purpose of the purification of ego that always goes on around a guru. After all, it was just desire and attachment that caused their suffering, and Baba never pandered to desire and attachment. I understood this and yet at the same time I was pained at the suffering which I saw no need for. I doubted that Baba was consciously providing spiritual lessons to small children.

The Divine Mother

I used to think that my judgments of Baba reflected real flaws in his character. I no longer see it that way. He had a particular personality through which the divine manifested powerfully. In the years I lived with him and the years after this, I overcame my attachment to many aspects of my spiritual idealism. This was positive, but at the same time, there was still some demoralization and cynicism which kept my heart contracted.

In retrospect I see that I was looking for a way to manifest my divinity. I was looking for a model of how I could be and was blinded and side tracked by Baba’s powerful display, which I knew could never be my way. The problem wasn’t my divinity, but how I could manifest it.

Baba gave me a clue when he gave me the name Mother Girija, and told the swamis to call me Mother. I had had inner revelations of my deep connection with the Divine Mother. I think that I was looking for a model for this aspect of the divine. The Indian concept of ishta devata, or chosen deity (yidam in Tibetan) is a key concept in Indian spirituality. I had learned about it from stories of Sharada Devi, Ramakrishna’s wife.

She was said to be able to discern easily and quickly what the ishta devata was for any aspirant who came to her for initiation. Others had to meditate for a longer time to arrive at the correct aspect of the divine into which the aspirant should be initiated. The tradition was that the guru would initiate the aspirant into the worship of a particular deity, or aspect of the divine. This practice would eventually ripen into full identification with the divine, by using the natural propensities or qualities of the aspirant. So the form (the ishta devata) led to the formless (union with the divine) which then manifested in form (enlightened activity or conduct).

I was looking to Baba for a model of the humble and compassionate mother aspect and when I didn’t find it, I felt alienated and found fault. It was a relief to find that I didn’t have this issue at the gonpa for the most part. It appeared to me that my Buddhist teachers were very sensitive to people’s hurt feelings and would always behave in a kind and inclusive way. Although this may just have been a matter of personality, I attributed it to the discipline of holding the benefit of others as the paramount motivation. This resonated deeply with my being.

It was very interesting to watch how the lamas handled difficult people. Generally there was great acceptance and compassion but on occasion, if the negative behavior reached a level where it impacted the stability and harmony of the gonpa, steps were taken to remedy the situation. It seemed to me that the psychological states of the people involved and impacted was the main consideration.

This suited my temperament and provided a model of behavior for me. Most importantly, it allowed me to trust more deeply than I had in my life. This trust was a key to the healing that took place for me while at the gonpa. Here at the Shiva Ashram, I see that Swamiji’s emphasis on people’s emotional states and issues is very beneficial to the ashramites and community members.

How to Be Good

When I was a child, I was fascinated by the stories of saints’ lives. I babysat for a Catholic family and found books containing stories of Catholic martyrs and saints. Some of the stories were quite extreme and even gory, but I was nonetheless captivated. I remember having the despairing thought that I could never be a saint because I could never sacrifice myself in the way that they did and basically, because I could not just be good all the time.

I knew that I had a selfish heart in spite of the aspiration for it not to be that way. Later, when I read the prayer of Saint Augustine: “God grant me chastity, but not yet,” I knew how he felt. The “not yet” demonstrated the unwillingness to really be transformed. I was aware that I didn’t really want to give up my selfishness, my small self - not really and not completely.

All of the despair and praying for self improvement was still only coming from the ego. In prayers like, “I want to be good. Please make me good,” the emphasis is still on the small self, on “me.” The teachings on motivation take one out of this realm and provide a solution by shifting the emphasis onto others.

Non Virtuous Speech

I received formal teachings on motivation during the ngondro retreat I took with Lama Drimed in 1996, before moving into the gonpa. I was in an open frame of mind and the teachings on motivation sunk in very deeply. I felt happy and encouraged. It seemed as though the very next thing I heard, right on the heels of this life-altering teaching, also made a deep impression on me, but it was more like horror than joy.

It was part of the teaching on the ten negative actions to be abandoned. In addition to killing, stealing and sexual misconduct, there were four categories of speech which were deemed unworthy of a sincere seeker. They were said to create non-virtue and to be the cause of a lower rebirth, to say nothing of hampering spiritual progress.

As these were described, I recognized every single one of them as prominent features of my speech. The four were lying, sowing discord, harsh speech and worthless chatter or gossip. I was horrified when contemplating what it would mean to give these up. Was it possible? Would there be anything left?

I had always been given to exaggeration, or as I liked to think of it, poetic license. I knew that I also tried to speak in a way that would present myself in a good light. In studying our text, which was Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher, it seemed pretty clear that this constituted lying.

Sowing discord, the next category, was not so frightening. It didn’t seem to apply to me quite so much, but I suspected that if I searched deeply, I could find that it too was a habit of my speech. I certainly remembered complaining to others about those who upset me, in the hopes that they would be on my side and think less highly of the ones who made me feel badly in any way. This was certainly a form of sowing discord rather than harmony.

Harsh speech was definitely going to be a problem to overcome. I have always been quite undiplomatic, preferring to “tell it like it is.” My judgmental nature manifested in my speech. This category included not only overtly harsh speech, but also included words that made others unhappy or uncomfortable. I saw that giving this up would take quite an effort. But still, it seemed easier than the last category of non-virtuous speech.

This category was worthless chatter and included gossip and irrelevant talk. Wow! That pretty much summed up most of what passed my lips! I had always been pretty good at small talk and social chit-chat. I loved to talk about people. I didn’t feel that it was malicious, but more a love of analyzing people and digging into what makes them tick. I also wanted to facilitate greater understanding between people. Although I was trying to move beyond judgment, I knew that my analyses were still tinged with judgment. Furthermore, I could not pretend that I didn’t know that sharing stories that people would not like told about them was hurtful.

I decided to contemplate this teaching and to move in the direction of more virtuous speech. I was helped by the fact that the residents of the gonpa and the members of the sangha who visited were all trying to do the same thing. Of course, talking about people did go on, but it was done in a slightly more conscious way. Practically speaking, this meant that it was often done with various subterfuges. One would hear such things as, “I know I shouldn’t be gossiping, but ……” or, “I really love so and so, but……”

The traditional teachings on motivation emphasize the attitude of compassion for beings, the attitude of wishing for and acting for the benefit of others. I was inspired by this general teaching, but even more inspired by the motivation to really put all of the teachings into practice. I found that I was in the midst of people who were trying to diminish their negative emotional habits and it was very moving to me.

Harmlessness

An example of how this worked for me involved the teaching on not killing. I was surprised to discover that the Buddhists did not even kill mosquitoes. I had grown up routinely killing insects. I didn’t enjoy it or do it gratuitously, but I had no qualms about slapping mosquitoes, swatting flies, or mopping up infestations of ants on the kitchen counter. This was not done at the gonpa.

We used bug wands, little vacuum devices, to capture and transport spiders and other bugs from our rooms to the outdoors. Infestations of ants were dealt with by creating “pure lands,” boxes containing grass, twigs and sugar. When the ants migrated to this, it was simply carried outside. There were also mouse traps that captured the mice alive so they could be taken out to a field and released. There was a crew who captured rattlesnakes and took them across the river to be released.

At the beginning, I felt that this was perhaps too much political correctness and began to inquire as to why it was wrong to kill small things that were dangerous or very inconvenient. I heard a lot of explanations, but the one that moved me was the idea that by making a decision not to kill or harm any being, one becomes a “harmless” rather than “harmful” being. This reduces the amount of fear in the universe. It makes you someone that others can look to for protection and refuge, rather than someone who is to be feared. On a subtle level, this is a very big energetic shift.

Taming the Mind

I decided to sign on and began to work at breaking old habits. I even let mosquitoes bite me, rejoicing in the fact that I was providing a meal for them. I discovered that if I did not scratch a mosquito bite, the itching would totally disappear in a few hours. In actual fact, it was not that difficult. The difficulty lay in my emotional habits and reactions.

Practicing not harming in this very physical way was an exercise in watching my mind, watching the fear and aversion that automatically arose when I heard a mosquito buzzing. It felt like an important victory to be able to control my mind in this very limited situation. By learning to do this small thing, I could then extend it to the larger issues of my willfulness.

To actually be of benefit to sentient beings, one must have control over one’s mind. It is a project that involves more than good intentions. As a child, reading about the Catholic saints and martyrs, I saw that it was impossible to be good just by wanting to. I couldn’t even begin to accomplish it nor could I see how it even could be done by anyone. It seemed to be impossible.

Now I was on a path that promised to show me how it could be done. I trusted this path, primarily because of its first tenet, which was motivation. Just setting my compass in the direction of bodhicitta, the attitude of compassion, gave me the feeling that all things were now possible. As a young person, dealing with my impulses had seemed an overwhelming and impossible task. Here I was learning to take baby steps. Even if I didn’t get very far in this life, at least I was moving in the right direction.

Bhakti and Compassion

I found it very interesting that the Buddhists use the word compassion instead of the word love to describe the form side. So instead of jnana (wisdom) and bhakti (devotion), they have wisdom and compassion. At the highest level, I think that love and compassion are the same thing, but at the bottom of the mountain, they manifest differently.

Around Baba, I was immersed in the world of bhakti, of intense devotion. Baba’s devotees wept, danced, bowed, reached out to touch him and sat gazing in adoration from morning to night. We also saw displays of Baba’s devotion to his guru, Bhagawan Nityananda. Baba had installed a beautiful lifelike statue (murti) of his guru and had formal worship of it done throughout the day. He would do full pranams or prostrations to this murti and also circumambulate it every day.

This was all very moving and uplifting and we were raised up out of our ordinary worldly focus. This is how the path of bhakti works. The ordinary capacity for love, admiration and adoration is focused on the divine and intensified. The goal is selfless love of and union with God.

Both the path of devotion and the path of compassion are about development of the heart, but whereas bhakti yoga is associated with emotional yearning and weeping for god, the path of compassion has practices such as tonglen, with its focus on developing compassion for others, and also the practice of exchanging self for other. Always, the focus is on others and not on oneself.

The gonpa was much less juicy than the love-drenched atmosphere of Baba’s ashram, but it also seemed to have fewer of the adverse aspects of that atmosphere. Around Baba I had experienced god-intoxicated bhaktas – passionate devotees - who would think nothing of pushing and shoving their fellow seekers out of the way to get closer to the object of their devotion.

In all fairness I also found this at the gonpa, but usually the Buddhists were much “nicer.” They had been instructed from day one in the six paramitas or virtues and were committed, to some extent at least, to forswear anger, desire, jealousy, greed, and pride.

I did miss the chanting and other aspects of the path of bhakti or devotion which are rich and full of joy. Chanting is one of the things I love about the Shiva Ashram. Still, in spite of the bliss of chanting, it hadn’t led me to a transcendental level. It had not taken me beyond the little me, screaming inside for satisfaction. I was still brought down by my ego, like the gopi who, when she finally had Lord Krishna in her arms, began to pride herself on her accomplishment. In that instant the Lord fled from her embrace.

I was uplifted by the emphasis on the other, which seemed to me to offer a way beyond the selfish concerns of ordinary love, which had always been connected, in my case, with wanting, desiring, and striving. The focus on motivation seemed to diminish this pitfall.

Although the tantric maelstrom of Baba’s ashram served me well, it also went against my grain from time to time. I wanted a model that felt like one I could reasonably and easily aspire to, one that displayed itself in a kinder, more humble and apparently caring fashion.

The Tibetan Connection

This desire came up for the first time when the Karmapa visited Baba in Ganeshpuri in the early 70’s. When I first laid eyes on him as he stepped through the front gate, without knowing who he was, I burst into tears. This was so unexpected and embarrassing that I fled to the bookstore and closed the door.

I felt enormously guilty when, during his visit, I had the thought, “I wish he were my guru.” I hoped Baba would not hear this thought as I gazed at the Karmapa with a kind of longing. I admired his humility, his apparent lack of ego, his lack of bluster, his kindness and calm demeanor. I certainly loved Baba enormously, but somehow there was an attraction to this Tibetan.

Baba spoke highly of the Karmapa in Ganeshpuri, and in fact paid him a rare compliment. He was usually very strict about spiritual promiscuity. He did not approve of guru-hopping and encouraged his disciples to focus on one guru. Because of this atmosphere, one of the young boys who was serving the Karmapa was alarmed when the Karmapa gave him a mantra.

He ran to Baba in a panic and told him that the Karmapa had given him a mantra. Baba reassured the boy saying, “That is his nature. It is OK. It is just who he is.” It was clear that Baba had high regard for this smiling Tibetan.

Later in Ann Arbor, when he visited for the opening of the Ann Arbor ashram, Baba pointed out to a few of us gathered in his room that the Karmapa was fat and could not keep up with him on their walk. There was no malice in it, but still I did not like it. It seemed like bragging and there was a hint of competitiveness which rubbed me the wrong way.

I now chalk this up to nothing more than a quirk of personality. I no longer feel critical of Baba as I once had. None of the judgment that I burned with seems to remain. I also don’t believe that the way of humility is superior. I just like it better. It is a quality which allowed me to develop trust, which I needed to develop my own being.

I was delighted to meet Chagdud Rinpoche and many other Tibetans. As a culture they are - for the most part - humble, kind, and calm. One would not expect to see them bragging or showing off, which would be considered bad form. During my first meeting with Rinpoche at his gonpa, I told him that I would like him to be my teacher. His response was, “I very bad teacher.” I was so shocked that I blurted out, “Oh don’t say that!” It was so antithetical to my concept of the guru.

I was also charmed by the fact that the Tibetans all claim to be without attainment. The Dalai Lama, for example, refers to himself as a simple monk. This is not to say that all the Tibetans I met were enlightened and had no egos. I met some who displayed the poisons of the mind, who appeared arrogant or competitive, but overall the culture was more to my liking. I attribute this in large part to the teachings on motivation with its focus on compassion.

In the early day at the gonpa, when confronted with what I deemed to be arrogance and pride in a highly placed person, I would share my views with others and would be frustrated by their calm reactions. They would express compassion for the person instead of outrage, which is what I felt. It wasn’t that they disagreed with my analysis of the situation, but they had a totally different attitude. I wondered if I could ever feel as they did.

Even before going to India and meeting Baba, I had felt that my task as a seeker was to somehow become egoless. Except for the few short-lived experiences in which it was lifted away, I could not get away from the sense of “me” which looked for its own gratification. There were no specific practices that promised to lead to the eradication of this troubling samsaric being which seemed to be inseparable from myself. I eventually found help in this endeavor in the teachings on motivation and compassion, which focus on others and not on the personal self.

Refuge and Bodhicitta

The practices of taking refuge and generating bodhicitta are the first two practices of the ngondro, which I began the day after visiting the gonpa and having a meeting with Rinpoche. One takes refuge in the buddha, the dharma and the sangha. Although this was explained quite beautifully, it did not really impact me greatly. With Baba, I had already taken refuge in the guru, in the spiritual path, in the spiritual teachings and in the divine. For these reasons, taking refuge didn’t seem like something essentially different or new to me.

However, the generation of bodhicitta, the mind or attitude of compassion, was quite different. I had never heard of generating this motivation consciously as a practice. It made sense. Why not wish for ordinary and ultimate happiness for all sentient beings? It was obvious to me that one wanted the very best for all of those one loved and felt connected to. It was also obvious to me that this “very best” had to be enlightenment, or at the very least, access to divine grace.

I recently read the last Harry Potter book and was struck by the fact that, at the end, it was the quality of Harry’s motivation – specifically the motivation to help and support those he loved – that made all the difference. It is a beautiful and modern story of the bodhisattva.