Chapter 7: Compassion/The Path of the Bodhisattva

Kindness

The reverence with which Tibetan Buddhists regard compassion is supreme. Great importance is placed on it. I was told that without bodhicitta (the word used for compassion), enlightenment was impossible, whereas with bodhicitta, it was inevitable. This made a deep impression on me. I was fortunate to be with Chagdud Rinpoche who was famous for being the “motivation lama.” The motivation of benefiting all sentient beings, of offering compassion to them, was his trademark. Lama Drimed follows in his footsteps.

In the teachings I received on the path of the bodhisattva, it was pointed out at great length and in great detail that kindness to others was supremely important. It was also put into practice at the gonpa. I had never met a group of people as genuinely kind as the various Tibetans who spent time there.

Rinpoche, for example, had an open door and seemed to have infinite patience. He was capable of being fierce and upholding discipline, but the underlying feeling tone was great compassion. Lama Drimed put up with my demanding personality with patience, kindness and love. I knew that he truly wanted the very highest for me. I am enormously grateful to have such a being on my side, not only in this life but beyond.

I knew that Baba loved me and had evidence for it over and over. He was, however, not the slightest bit tolerant of my delusions. I literally spent years weeping daily for his love and attention, to no avail. This kind of personal desire and attachment was still present when I moved into the gonpa and it became focused on Lama Drimed. Again, I was a gopi, yearning for his love and attention.

At the beginning of my time there, he would meet with people once a week and I took hours and hours of his time going over my emotional baggage and my numerous insights and ideas. Instead of relaxing, I persisted in trying to get something from him to make the suffering go away for good.

He never once showed annoyance or asked me to go. Nor did he do it with any one of us. He never yelled or showed anger or displeasure with me. His presence, however, made me acutely aware of my shortcomings. They stood out in bold relief. During these long meetings I would finally realize that I had used up too much time and drag myself away. Each time after I left his presence, I felt healed, calmed, relieved of the inner burden – for a while. Over time, his kindness and compassion really had a transforming effect.

The Bodhisattva’s Vow

The ideal of the path of compassion is the bodhisattva, a being who lives only to benefit others. Once I heard the bodhisattva described as someone with a permanently broken heart. The heart is wide open to the suffering of the world. From the point of view of the ego, this sounds terrible, but the pain of the bodhisattva’s broken heart is incredibly sweet and poignant with love.

It is wonderful to imagine and evoke the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the ten directions, as described in so many of the liturgies used at the gonpa. It is said that space is filled with these compassionate beings who are ever listening, caring, and relieving suffering and to whom one can pray.

Hearing the teachings on the path of the bodhisattva brought to mind a long-forgotten experience. When I first arrived in India with my husband in 1970, before meeting Baba, we took a 10 day vipassana course with Sri Goenka in Bombay. Early one morning in one of the optional sessions, he performed a ceremony in which we took the bodhisattva vow. I remember being moved to tears by the ceremony, which brought up a feeling of deja vu and tremendous nostalgia in me. This seemed to be another mark of the karmic connection I had with this path.

Tonglen

I loved the fact that there were practices one could do to instill this attitude. Instead of spending countless hours in a kind of neurotic inner dialog, as I did in the early days of my sadhana, trying to figure out how I could get what I wanted – personal love and attention from Baba, a good position, recognition, relief from pain, liberation, etc. – the training in tonglen shifted this focus away from the incessant focus on “me.”

This practice of breathing in suffering and breathing out compassion is totally counterintuitive. Because it so profoundly goes against the purpose and energy of the ego, it is a powerful tool in undermining the ego’s sway. I found the practice of breathing in the dark and breathing out the light to be very soothing and peaceful. The ego’s practice of keeping darkness and suffering away and trying to attract all that is pleasurable does not produce a feeling of peace.

Another compassion practice, called exchanging self for others, was, however, too difficult for me at the beginning. I was resistant to the notion that one should put others above oneself. For some reason, taking in the suffering of others still allowed me to feel some self worth - that I was being good - whereas exchanging myself for others left me no ego gratification at all. It felt unattractive, wrong and even dangerous. Here I bumped up against what they call ego clinging.

So I proceeded to pray for others, to breathe in the suffering of others, but could not go the whole way of exchanging self for others as taught by Shantideva, the saint who was the acknowledged expert on the subject of bodhicitta, or compassion. However, over time and in that environment, it slowly dawned on me that I could renounce my little self, at least on the level of belief. It felt good and was in fact a relief. This was a sea change for me.

Kindness as a Path

I watched Chagdud Rinpoche and Lama Drimed intently and saw the results of their kindness and softness. They were not wimps at all, but they lacked the dynamic, energetic and very self confident quality I had not fully appreciated in Baba. There was, however, a lot to appreciate about Baba. I loved him deeply and marveled at his dynamism. The energy of his presence was intoxicating and dramatic and took one out of oneself. He was like a force of nature, a whirlwind, but as with forces of nature, there are certain contexts in which there is unease and fear. I felt more at ease and more trusting with the path of the bodhisattva.

I know that there are Tibetans who are self-centered, powerful and charismatic in the way Baba was. I am also certain that there Hindus who are as kind and “selfless” as my Buddhist teachers. I do not mean to compare the paths or the cultures, but rather to tell my own story. This is a personal story of my own development and not meant to be an indictment of anyone or anything. It is just my story. I want to be honest and tell it like it was – or more correctly, as I perceived it at the time. I did arrive at a place where I no longer had any residue of the criticisms I had felt of Baba, but I lived for a long time with rancor and resentment eating away at my heart. I do not wish this kind of suffering for anyone.

My original focus at the gonpa was dzogchen, and the teachings on the way of the bodhisattva came later. Perhaps the reason that the teaching on the bodhisattva path resonated so deeply was because I heard it in the context of studying dzogchen, the great perfection teachings of supreme wisdom.

The teaching on compassion can be approached from a non philosophical or secular point of view, as Rinpoche did in his Bodhisattva Peace Training course. It was a course designed for people in the helping professions to provide teachings and practices to help them avoid burnout. This work was inspired by Lama Shenpen, an American woman lama ordained by Rinpoche, who had been an activist and feminist but who had gotten burnt out doing this work.

When she turned to the spiritual path, she met Rinpoche and found what she needed in his teachings on motivation and compassion. She asked him to create a training for those who wanted to work with people’s suffering without getting stressed by their work. She wrote a book called Change of Heart which is a compilation of Rinpoche’s words during many Bodhisattva Peace Trainings and which was the text used in a study group which I facilitated for several years while at the gonpa. It was the experience of facilitating the study group that led me to recognize the importance of this perspective for myself.

As I immersed myself in Rinpoche’s teachings on compassion, I saw that it solved the problem of how to become good. One piece of the solution had been provided in the teachings on no self. If there were no individual self, then I didn’t have to spend any energy building it up or worrying about its concerns. But how to get away from it? The answer to this question was pointed to in the practices of motivation and compassion. There was a way to actually move beyond the morass of ego fixation.

Wisdom and Compassion

When I first moved into the gonpa, I was drawn to the dzogchen path, with its allure of "the highest secret teachings," and I came to the teachings on the bodhisattva path later. They provided the final piece of the puzzle. Each alone was not enough for me. It was the marriage of wisdom and compassion – the combining of these two aspects of the path which made it feel complete.

I loved dzogchen with its lofty view, its untrammeled non-duality, its freedom from all cultural trappings and its simplicity, and at the same time I revered the mahayana’s teachings on the bodhisattva’s compassion.

Wisdom without compassion can be dry and fruitless. Compassion without wisdom can be misguided, self-serving and also lacking in lasting benefit. The two together, which are called view and conduct, provide a complete path.

Padmasambhava, the great siddha who brought Buddhism to Tibet, famously said that one’s view should be as high as the sky while one’s conduct should be as fine as barley flour. It is not that any particular conduct is enjoined, but rather the motivation behind it. With the correct motivation - to be of benefit to beings - any activity undertaken is of benefit.

Integrating Head and Heart

The other day I heard some meditation instructions, from an Anglican priest, which said in part, “Put your mind into your heart.” It was a beautiful expression of this path of wisdom/compassion, the integration of head and heart.

When I arrived at the gonpa, I already had the essence of the dzogchen piece from Kashmir Shaivism, but I didn’t really have the compassion piece. I believed that Baba operated from compassion, that he lived to serve beings. He did not, however, formally teach a path of compassion as did the Tibetans. Receiving these teachings was like nectar, balm, much longed-for grace.

Because of my experience, I find that I like to teach meditation from both perspectives, alternating between a focus on Awareness meditation and the practice of tonglen. I also have begun teaching a variation of tonglen for one’s own suffering. This does not involve breathing in someone else’s suffering and is therefore a good way to begin. One does breathe in one’s own suffering, but then it is already there, so it is less problematic. I find that this technique is excellent for alleviating current upsets, as well as long standing traumas.

In this application, on the inbreath one allows the present suffering or contraction to be fully present in one’s being. During this part, one gives enormous space to the feeling of suffering. The attitude may be one of curiosity or hospitality. It is like inviting in a dear friend with a problem. You invite your friend to sit comfortably, offer a cup of tea and then listen to her problems with an open heart.

In the practice of tonglen for oneself, the contraction or suffering is allowed to expand, without judgment, fear or revulsion. Then on the outbreath, love and compassion are sent to this suffering in whatever form is needed - understanding, acceptance, relief, forgiveness - whatever form love takes in the situation.

This practice can lead directly into the more traditional tonglen practice in which one imagines a being or beings before you and allows their darkness and suffering to flow in on the inbreath and allows love and compassion to flow out on the outbreath.

The practice of offering compassion to others in one’s own body is very powerful. It provides one with the experience of being the source of, or channel for, divine grace. Depending on one’s perspective, it can be looked at as accessing the higher emotional center of the heart, or accessing the heart of the chosen deity - whether it be Tara, the Divine Mother, or Avalokiteshwara.

Offering One’s Virtue to Others

One often hears criticism of those who do long retreat or who spend their lives in caves, meditating. It is felt that such a life is selfish, useless and indulgent, but if the retreatants and cave dwellers are praying for humanity and dedicating the merit of their practice to the upliftment of all sentient beings, then this is beneficial work for the planet and indeed, the universe.

This brings up the idea of dedication of merit, an aspect I particularly love about the Buddhist path. At the gonpa, at the end of every practice session in the shrine room, we would all recite Chagdud Rinpoche’s prayer of dedication and aspiration in which we offered the fruits of our practice for the welfare of all sentient beings.

I was taught that unless one’s merit is sealed by offering in this way, it can be destroyed by non-virtuous activity, such as anger. Although I can’t say that I fully subscribe to the fear-inducing aspect of this teaching, I really like the idea offering one’s merit.

Chagdud Rinpoche’s dedication and aspiration prayer says, “Throughout my many lives and until this moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including the merit generated by this practice and all that I will ever attain, this I offer for the welfare of sentient beings.

“May sickness, war, famine and suffering be decreased for every being, while their wisdom and compassion increase in this and every future life.

“May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.

“May I quickly attain enlightenment in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of all sentient beings.”