The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (29 page)

This seems to be the interesting point where the two aspects of the bodhisattva vow, mönpa and jukpa [desiring to enter and actually entering into bodhisattva discipline], come together. It is how you work with your fellow sentient beings. If you do not allow a little bit of blame and injustice to come to you, nothing is going to work. And if you do not really absorb all the blame, but say it is not yours since you are too good and are doing so well, then nothing is going to work. This is so because everybody is looking for someone to blame, and they would like to blame
you
—not because you have done anything, but because they probably think you have a soft spot in your heart. They think that if they put their jam or honey or glue on you, then you actually might buy it and say, “Okay, the blame is mine.”

Once you begin to do that, it is the highest and most powerful logic, the most powerful incantation you can make. You can actually make the whole thing functional. You can absorb the poison—then the rest of the situation becomes medicine. If nobody is willing to absorb the blame, it becomes a big interrelational football. It is not even tight like a good football, but filled with a lot of glue and gooey all over the outside as well. Everybody tries to pass it on to each other and nothing happens. Finally that football begins to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Then it causes revolutions and all the rest.

As far as international politics are concerned, somebody is always trying to put the blame on somebody else, to pass that huge, overbuilt, gooey, dirty, smelly, gigantic football with all sorts of worms coming out of it. People say, “It’s not mine, it’s yours.” The communists say it belongs to the capitalists, and the capitalists say it belongs to the communists. Throwing it back and forth doesn’t help anyone at all. So even from the point of view of political theory—if there is such a thing as politics in the mahayana or in Buddhism—it is important for individuals to absorb unjustified blame and to work with that. It is very important and necessary.

Such an approach is neither very theistic and Occidental nor is it Oriental. But it is possible to do, which is one of the interesting points about nontheism. If you are in a theistic discipline, you don’t actually take the blame. Supposedly this guy up in the sky with the beard and big nose says that when you’re right, you’re right, so fight for your right; and when you’re wrong, you just repent. You should do your duty and all that. So much for that old hat. But for a lot of people, this may be a new hat, actually. You could freak out and say, “Do you mean to say that I should take the blame for somebody else? I should get myself killed for that?” You don’t have to go so far as to do that—but you actually can accommodate that much blame. You can do that.

Usually, with any problems at all that might occur in your life—political, environmental, psychological, or for that matter, domestic or spiritual—you always decide to blame it on somebody else. You may not have a particular individual to blame, but you still come up with the basic logic that something is wrong. You might go to the authorities or your political leaders or your friends and demand that the environment be changed. That is your usual way of complaining to people. You might organize a group of people who, like yourself, blame the environment, and you might collect signatures for a petition and give it to some leader who might be able to change the environment. Or, for that matter, your complaint might be purely individual: if your husband or wife is in love with somebody else, you might ask him or her to give up his or her lover. But as far as you yourself are concerned, you feel so pure and good, you never touch yourself at all. You want to maintain yourself 100 percent. You are always asking somebody else to do something for you on a larger scale or on a smaller scale. But if you look very closely at what you are doing, it becomes unreasonable.

Sometimes, if he is brave enough, your husband might say to you, “Isn’t there some blame on your side as well? Mightn’t you also have to join in and do something about it?” Or if your wife is brave enough, she will tell you that the situation might have something to do with both of you. If your spouse is somewhat timid and intelligent, he might say, “Both of us are to blame.” But nobody says, “It is
you
who has to change.” Whenever anybody does say, “It’s your problem, not anybody else’s,” you don’t like it at all. We have a problem with relative bodhichitta here.

The text says: “Drive all blames into one.” The reason you have to do that is because you have been cherishing yourself so much, even at the cost of sacrificing somebody else’s life. You have been cherishing yourself, holding yourself so dearly. Although sometimes you might say that you don’t like yourself, even then in your heart of hearts you know that you like yourself so much that you’re willing to throw everybody else down the drain, down the gutter. You are really willing to do that. You are willing to let somebody sacrifice his life, give himself away for you. And who are you, anyway? So the point is that all blames should be driven into oneself. This slogan is the first slogan connected with viewing your whole life as part of the path of relative bodhichitta.

This slogan does not mean you should not speak up. If you see something that is obviously destructive to everybody, you should speak out. But you can speak out in the form of driving all blames into yourself. The question is how to present it to the authorities. Usually you come at them in an aggressive, traditionally American way. You have been trained to speak for yourself and for others in the democratic style of the “lord of speech.” You come out with placards and complaints: “We don’t like this.” But that only solidifies the authorities even more. There could be a much better way of approaching the whole thing, a more intelligent way. You could say, “Maybe it’s my problem, but personally I find that this water doesn’t taste good.” You and your friends could say, “We don’t feel good about drinking this water.” It could be very simple and straightforward. You don’t have to go through the whole legal trip. You don’t have to use the “lord of speech” approach of making public declarations of all kinds, “Freedom for all mankind!” or anything like that. Maybe you could even bring along your dog or your cat. I think the whole thing could be done very gently.

Obviously there are social problems, but the way to approach that is not as “I—a rightful political entity,” or as “me—one of the important people in society.” Democracy is built on the attitude that I speak out for myself, the invincible me. I speak for democracy. I would like to get my own rights, and I also speak for others’ rights as well. Therefore, we don’t want to have this water. But that approach doesn’t work. The point is that people’s experience of themselves could be gathered together rather than just having a rally. That is what you do in sitting practice.

In an extreme case, if I happened to find myself in the central headquarters where they push the button that could blow up the planet, I would kill the person who was going to push the button for the bomb right away and without any hesitation. I would take delight in it! But that is slightly different from what we are talking about. In that case, you are dealing with the threshold of the power of society altogether. In this case, we are simply talking about how we can collectively smooth out this world, so that it could become an enlightened society. Creating an enlightened society requires general cultivation of that nature.

13

Be grateful to everyone
.
*

This slogan also is dealing with
kündzop
, or conventional reality. That is to say, without this world we cannot attain enlightenment; there would be no journey. By rejecting the world we would be rejecting the ground and rejecting the path. All our past history and all our neurosis is related with others in some sense. All of our experiences are based on others, basically. As long as we have a sense of practice, some realization that we are treading on the path, every one of those little details that are seemingly obstacles to us becomes an essential part of the path. Without them we cannot attain anything at all—we have no feedback, we have nothing to work with, absolutely nothing to work with.

So in a sense, all the things taking place around our world, all the irritations and all the problems, are crucial. Without others we cannot attain enlightenment—in fact, we cannot even tread on the path. In other words, we could say that if there is no noise outside during our sitting meditation, we cannot develop mindfulness. If we do not have aches and pains in our body, we cannot attain mindfulness, we cannot actually meditate. If everything were lovey-dovey and jellyfish-like, there would be nothing to work with. Everything would be completely blank. Because of all these textures around us, we are enriched. Therefore, we can sit and practice and meditate. We have a reference point—encouragement, discouragement, or whatever. Everything is related to the path.

The idea of this particular teaching is actually to give our blood and flesh to others. “If you want me, take me, possess me, kidnap me, control me—go ahead, do it. Take me. I’m at your service. You could bounce on me, shit on me, cut me into pieces, or anything you want. Without your help I would not have any way to work with my journey at all.” That is a very, very powerful thing. In fact, one of the interesting sayings of Lang-ri Thangpa, one of the Kadampa teachers, was: “I realize that all mistakes belong to me and all virtues belong to others, so I cannot really blame anybody except myself.”

There is a little phrase which might be good to memorize. In Tibet we used to stick it on our door handles and things like that. The saying goes: “Profit and victory to others; loss and defeat to myself.” That sounds terribly self-flagellating if you look at it the wrong way. In particular, the popular idea of Catholicism is to blame everything on oneself as an ultimate guilt concept. But in this case, we are not talking about guilt or that we did something terribly wrong. It is seeing things as they are. By “profit and victory,” we mean anything that encourages us to walk on the path of dharma—that is created by the world. Yet at the same time we are filled with loss and defeat all the time—that is ours. We are not supposed to sulk on that particular point, but we are supposed to take pride in that. It is a fantastic idea that we are actually, finally fearless persons—that profit is others’ and loss is ours. That is great, fantastic! We may not find that to be so when it is early morning and we have just woken up and feel rather feeble; although at the end of the day, when we have had a few drinks and our belly is filled and we are relatively comfortable, we might feel that way. But fundamentally it is true.

These statements are not based on guilt or punishment, like the Jewish idea of
oy vey
. But it is actually true that a lot of things that we tend to blame others for are our own doing—otherwise we wouldn’t get in trouble. How come somebody else doesn’t get in trouble and we do get in trouble? What causes that? It must be something happening to us, obviously. We can write our case history and employ our own lawyer to prove that we are right and somebody else is wrong—but that is also trouble we have to go through. It is all trouble, problems. And trying to prove our case history somehow doesn’t work. In any case, hiring a lawyer to attain enlightenment is not done. It is not possible. Buddha did not have a lawyer himself.

The slogan “Be grateful to everyone” follows automatically once we drive all blames into one. We have a feeling that if others didn’t exist to hassle us, we couldn’t drive all blames into ourselves at all. All sentient beings, all the people in the world, or most of them, have a problem in dealing with “myself.” Without others, we would have no chance at all to develop beyond ego. So the idea here is to feel grateful that others are presenting us with tremendous obstacles—even threats or challenges. The point is to appreciate that. Without them, we could not follow the path at all.

Walking on the path of the dharma is connected with dealing with our neurosis. But if there were no neuros-
ees
, we couldn’t develop any neuros-
is
. Therefore, we should feel very grateful to such persons. They are actually the ones who are pushing us onto the path of dharma. I will tell you a little story about Atisha, who is the source of these teachings. Atisha was invited to teach in Tibet, and he had heard that the Tibetans were very kind, gentle, hospitable people. So he decided that he should take along with him one object of practice—his attendant, a Bengali servant who was very short-tempered. Since the Tibetans were so kind and good, Atisha took his servant along so that he could practice lojong on him. Interestingly enough, he said later on that he needn’t have brought this person, as the Tibetans were not as good as he had heard.

If someone hurts you, you should be thankful to them for giving you the opportunity to practice. But you do not have to expose yourself to be hurt, that would be some sort of martyrdom. You don’t have to ask to be hurt, but when you come up with such a situation, then all the things we discussed apply. It is not that you have to stage the whole thing. Instead, somebody will blame you and then you will think, “It is mine.” You don’t have to avoid such situations and you don’t have to cultivate them. You just lead your life, being very sane, and you don’t hurt anybody else. But if anybody happens to hurt you, then you know what to do. It is very simple. We are not talking about deliberately jumping on a sword. That would be a misunderstanding. Instead you are making a close relationship with the person who is hurting you.

At a further level of development it may be possible to stop an attacker by force to prevent him from having the karma of having injured you. But that is a very high level of sympathy. For instance, there is a story about a Tibetan teacher who was ambushed by his enemies, who were going to kill him on his way to teaching a seminary. He pulled out his dagger and said, “This is the tooth of a tiger,” and he stabbed the chief, killing him on the spot. Everybody was so shocked, they let him go. That is an entirely different approach. I think it would be too dangerous for us to go as far as that. As long as you know what you are doing, it is okay, but that sort of approach escalates the warfare.