Category: Writing

The Tender Heart of Sadness

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Compassion or karuna is one of the four Brahmaviharas or Divine or Supreme States. True compassion is not grounded in pity or fear but, rather, a deep supportive response of the heart based on the dignity, integrity and well-being of every single creature. It’s a spontaneous response to the suffering and pain we encounter. It’s our feeling of mutual resonance and natural connectedness in the face of the universal experience of loss and pain. And the ground for compassion is laid first by practicing sensitivity toward ourselves.

Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings. Compassion for ourselves allows us to extend warmth, sensitivity and openness to the sorrows around us in a truthful and genuine way. True compassion arises from a sense that the heart has a fearless capacity to embrace all things, to touch all things, to relate to all things.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this the spiritual warrior’s tender heart of sadness. He said:

This sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely open, exposed. It is the pure raw heart. Even if a mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched…It is this tender heart of a warrior that has the power to heal the world.

What is it like to move through the world with that open, exposed, raw heart? Can you bring that tender heart to your experiences?

Our Life as Blessing

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In the Mangala Sutta the Buddha poses and answers the question “what in life can truly be considered a blessing or mangala?” The 38 blessings he names include many fruits of our practice of Dharma such as giving, learned understanding, self-discipline, artful speech, blameless work, humility, and contentment, among others. We can contemplate these blessings as gifts we give to ourselves.

The Buddha frequently began his teaching with giving because that is something everyone can do – a blessing available in every moment. The blessing is the recognition that any act of sharing makes us happy because we contribute to another’s happiness. Giving is the act of opening the heart, letting go. And gifts are not necessarily material. We can always smile at someone, or offer a kind, encouraging or comforting word–we can give in that way. Material abundance is not a sine qua non of our ability to give.

The theologian Howard Thurman said, “Look at the world with quiet eyes.” Isn’t that lovely? Just look at the world with quiet eyes. Usually when we are in the midst of life’s circumstances—whatever they are—we can be very reactive and therefore miss the many gifts for which we can have gratitude and also miss opportunities to give, thus making our very presence a blessing. It reminds me of some cartoon characters with eyeballs on springs that pop out when they see something surprising. But looking upon the world with quiet eyes, we can feel a sense of simply coming back into ourselves and into receptive mode. Ready to give and to receive the blessings of our life.

Refuge of Sangha

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We all seek a peaceful, safe place in which we can rest. In what do you take refuge? In the teachings, we are encouraged from the very beginning to take refuge in what are called the Three Jewels: the Buddha (the awakened mind/heart), the Dharma (the teachings, the truth of the way things are), and the Sangha (the community of beings who have walked and are walking the Path). Let us reflect on the refuge of Sangha.

In Sangha we gather together to encourage each other to have the patience and determination to keep going, to fulfill the resolution that we have to end greed, hatred and delusion and discover true freedom. I know that even having been taught how to meditate and to be generous with integrity, I could not have persevered in the practice without the companionship and support of spiritual friends. One of the most important things about being part of a community is the sense of honor and belonging with like-minded folks.

The quality of Sangha empowers that in us which encourages us to say, “You can let go of this, you don’t have to believe everything your mind conjures up, you can follow a different Path.” So this is why I feel in my heart that the Sangha is something that we need to deeply treasure and respect. Without the Sangha and its communal aspiration, so many of us would just fall away, caught in our desires, anger, worries, fears and distractions. Those qualities that are pure and noble within us would be lost, or not given the opportunity to fulfill themselves. In an ideal world, if we were all enlightened beings we wouldn’t need communal support. But because there is work to be done, we need friends. We need to connect with people who respect what is good, spiritual and pure. Those connections will help maintain that capacity within us for the wholesome qualities of our hearts to grow and flourish.That is the power of the refuge of Sangha.

A Heart at Rest

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Life can become so complicated and filled by our preferences and plans that we miss the actual simple experience of life as it is, of things as they are.  We become attached to, and excessively rely on, our judgments, plans and ideas as if we really know what is going to happen.  Although we can have a good guess as to how things will be, we really don’t know.  We don’t know whether our time on this small rock we call earth will end tomorrow, or whether we’ll win the lottery (as my teacher once said, we have the same chance of winning as of their sending it to us by mistake!!!)

We can learn how happiness comes from a heart at rest and not from trying to control inexorably changing external circumstances, which we know, is like trying to capture lightning.  All of this can be discovered as the power and fruit of our practice.  That we can experience all the changes in form, feelings, mind and unfolding circumstances and remain centered and unflapped, with an open heart and a joyous spirit, is the jeweled discovery of practice.  We can live in the cradle of equanimity–unshakable evenness, balance and stability in the midst of the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

The Power of Stillness

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We tend to overlook the capacity we have to allow the mind to settle down and rest, to become deeply silent and peaceful.  This stillness is a great power that we can develop in our meditation practice–through persistent discipline and deep kindness for ourselves.  Through stillness, we learn to see, and listen more fully to, the wisdom of our own hearts and the world around us.  We can support this quality of calm,  of tranquility, by fostering, through attention to the calmness of breath in the body, inner ease and restfulness.

The value of this stillness is that it teaches us how it is to come to rest.  Through the culmination of a steady practice, it is possible to be still in the midst of the mind storms. The most direct way of coming to rest mentally is by learning to let go of the domination of our likes and dislikes and come to live in the reality, the truth of each moment, just as it is.  This means we can stop living in the desires, plans, and regrets of the mind and live in peace, even in the midst of activity.  This is the power of our constant and consistent practice.

Patience

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Patience is one of the ten paramis or perfections of a Buddha. To discover
the perfection of patience in spiritual practice is to discover a quality of
resting and waiting. It is in the waiting itself, in the listening, in what the
poet Rilke called “living the question,” in staying with the process of life,
that spiritual practice is fulfilled. Patience–aaah– taking a breath and
resting where we are, in how things are.

Suzuki Roshi taught that a better word is not patience but constancy – a
willingness to be ever present for what is. To simply sit, to breathe out and
in, to be aware of whatever is present–thinking, discomfort, joy, love,
sleepiness, sadness. Allowing what is to arise and pass in its own way and
its own time. There is a resting in the rhythm of life and nature. Really,
what’s the hurry? Where are we going?

Perhaps the opposite of impatience is not patience, but kindness,
contentment and a spirit of wonder. It is the capacity to be kind, to rest
and to trust. Sometimes in spiritual life we strive for progress. That can be
like a bud on a branch deciding it has to hurry up and open. Rather, it fills
itself out slowly and gradually according to conditions, and then one day
it blooms. Patience is very kind. It is like a slow walk in the country, like
holding hands, like sitting in the sun–like planting an orchard that might
take 10 or 15 years to bear fruit. How is patience manifesting in your own
life–can you plant now what may blossom far beyond your own life?

Breathing In and Out

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Breathing out and breathing in—neither is possible without the other. We can’t just decide that we only want to breathe in. If we tried, the breath (and our lives) would end. So it is with the teachings. It is always a giving and receiving. The Buddha set it up that way. The teachers give to the students the teachings, but they also receive from the students—inspiration and support; and the students receive the teachings, but they also support in gladness the teachers and the Center. We are dependent upon each other in our dancing in the Dharma together. And we are very fortunate to recognize this interrelationship and to actively cultivate the development of a generous nature. The Buddha taught this development as the basis of happiness and freedom. We have the opportunity to allow a spontaneous movement of the generous heart, an expression of gratitude and appreciation for these beautiful and unexcelled teachings that nurture our lives. At New York Insight events, we continue this cultivation of dana and offer the opportunity to share in the joyful cultivation of generosity through practice, manifesting the resulting freedom in offerings to the teachers and to the Center as well as in countless other ways.

The Buddha said:
A bikkhu, thinking ‘I am one who engages in generosity gains inspiration in the meaning, gains inspiration in the Dhamma, gains gladness connected with the Dhamma. It is that gladness connected with the wholesome that I call an equipment of the mind. That is, for developing a mind that is without hostility and without ill will.’

My sincere and compassionate wish is that we all consciously cultivate this gladness, this opening our hearts to the needs of others. As a community, we can develop a practice of deep generosity and gratitude as a basis of our journey to freedom.

Cultivating Dana

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As most of us know, dana, or generosity, is the first “parami” or perfection of a Buddha taught ias the fundamental basis of happiness and freedom. The generous offering of the teachings is a wonderful model of the Buddha’s philosophy of interconnectedness. Teachers from the Buddha to now have made the teachings available for 2,500 years in a long lineage leading to us, from a fount of compassion and deep generosity. In turn, this requires reliance on the generosity of students–one of many beautiful examples of our interdependence.

While the spirit of giving that the Buddha taught is the natural expression of a generous, connected and loving heart, we must cultivate it in our practice. Giving needs to be practiced and developed because it cuts through our underlying tendency toward attachment, aversion, and confusion and develops the free and happy heart. So, we can look for opportunities to give of our time, our energy, our resources, our love and our service to others. With its cultivation, true generosity grows in us and kindness and joy grow in us, all bringing us closer to freedom. With each act of generosity, our heart opens more, and as the heart opens, our generosity becomes even more spontaneous and immediate. We become a natural channel for our own happiness and for the happiness of all around us.

The Endless Circulation of Divine Charity

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Chan master Hui Hai said “Deluded people fail to understand that the paramitas [usually translated as the “Perfections of a Buddha]  all proceed from the Dana Paramita and that by its practice all the others are fulfilled.” “Dana” is usually translated as charity or almsgiving—of goods, money, or the teachings.  More precisely, dana is the spirit and act of generosity.  Its salutary effects are endless, and they multiply beyond measure every time we form an intention to be generous and each time we fulfill that intention.  Neglecting its cultivation in the heart also has the inevitable consequences of the contracted heart, the blocking of the fulfillment of our Buddha heart.

With cultivation of the Dana Paramita,  the Buddha’s teaching of universal harmony is put into practice.  Mutual interdependence becomes mutual intersupport.  And its practice is not only Buddhist–it is perennial.  The Earth itself flourishes by what Emerson calls the endless circulation of  divine charity:  “The wind sows the seed, the sun evaporates the sea, the wind blows the vapor to the field…the rain feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animal.”  The very stars hold themselves on course through a mutual interchange of energy.  And the flow of this energy is dependent on every living being.

In keeping with this natural charity, ancient customs of gift giving and circulating the gift has kept  human society healthy from primal times to now. In reflecting on our suttas, we turn the virtue of the reflection back to  ancestral teachers in gratitude for their guidance.  We are constantly receiving that teaching, constantly sending it around again.