The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (78 page)

Compassion

I
WOULD LIKE TO
repeat things again and again and again, until you get them into your skulls completely. [
Laughter
] That seems to be my duty, passing on that familiarity with vajrayana discipline.

The mahayanists’ experience of reality and how they work with reality completely and fully is bounded by several categories, naturally. But these categories all combine into one basic point: the notion of compassion, or karuna. In fact, there is a hidden continuity that goes through the entire path right from the beginning. The hinayana aspect of compassion is nonaggression, as we know. The essence of hinayana discipline being—do you remember?

Audience:
No harm to others.

Rinpoche:
No harm to others. That’s right. Yes. This is the beginning of the continuity of compassion, in some sense. The continuation of that compassion in the mahayana sense is doing good for others. So at this point we could say that the definition of one’s mind following the dharma is the same as the definition of one’s mind mixing with dharma. The reason it becomes very simple and comforting for us to practice gentleness and to mix our minds with dharma in the mahayana path is largely because of genuine egolessness—or for that matter, potential genuine egolessness. That potentiality arises out of some sense of being willing to get into the discipline, obviously. If we are unable to get into the discipline fully and properly, then we seem to have a problem. We tend to cook up unnecessary ego trips, justifying ourselves in the name of the dharma. But I would not like anybody to do that.

There is a sense of delight, as well as of egolessness, in the regular discipline of karuna. Fundamentally speaking, that sense of delight is present right from the beginning of the hinayana and mahayana paths when we begin to feel some sense of joy, some sense of purpose, and some sense of strength—actual strength, the actual existence of strength. That strength is a confirmation of your own individual joy in having the right person to work with you, the right teacher; the right discipline or right procedures of discipline; and also the right conviction, faith. It is a sense of highness, if we could use such a word.
Highness
, in this case, is not so much tripping out, but simply a basic, genuine appreciation of the teachings. You feel somewhat delightful about the whole thing. In other words, you feel fundamentally good. The notion of faith goes along with that. Feeling fundamentally good comes from the notion that we no longer have any little pockets of deception. In fact, we have become bankrupt of reserves of any kind. We have been squeezed and fundamentally we have given up.

Here’s an interesting and cute story about myself. When I was about ten years old, I was studying the Kadam slogans with my teacher. And in spite of the overwhelming presence of my tutors, who were very nasty (usually they are), I felt somewhat relieved that I had nothing to do but to take pride in the dharma. There was no other entertainment for me—I could just simply take pride in whatever I understood. I felt extremely relieved that I could be gentle. I realized that, if I pushed, I would be pushed back. And I felt very good about the whole thing. And I have felt that way ever since then, through my childhood and my adulthood, up until the present situation. We talked the other day about the notion of blame. That is part of that whole thing. I feel extremely good that I’m a practitioner, that I’m following the path of the bodhisattva, and that I am a nontheistic Buddhist. Eternally, I feel grateful and good. Well, to make a long story short, so to speak—I personally feel that you should share what I feel. You should have a firsthand account of how it feels to be captured by the dharma, to be squeezed into a corner, into the dharmic world, and helplessly to be pushed in. Obviously, you people have more choices than I did—you can skip out and go to Miami Beach, join the war department, become mafiosi or whatever, or just be regular naive people. However, some kind of situation of being cornered is also happening to you as individuals at this point. So I am sharing with you what I used to experience, what I did experience for a while, which was that I was cornered. Of course, later on when students came to me, I began to realize that I was the corner and the students were being pushed in. But that is a slightly different situation.

The slogan which goes with that is: “Always rely on just a happy frame of mind.” In this case, actually, the Tibetan literally means “Continuously maintain joyful satisfaction.” That means that every mishap is good, because it is encouragement for you to practice the dharma. Other people’s mishaps are good also: you should share them, you should bring them into yourself as being the continuity of their practice, discipline. So you should include that in turn. It’s too nice to feel that way, actually. For myself, there is some sense of actual joy. You feel so good and so high. I suppose I was converted into Buddhism. And I was so convinced, that although I was not sticking bumper stickers on my car saying “Jesus saved me,” I was doing that mentally. Mentally I was putting on bumper stickers saying “I’m glad that I’ve been converted, that my ego is converted into Buddhism, and that I’ve been accepted and realized as a Buddhist citizen, a bodhicitta person, a compassionate person.” I used to feel extraordinarily good and so rewarded. But from where [any reward came] was no question at that point, particularly. I felt so strong and strengthened by the whole thing. In fact, I began to feel that, if I didn’t have that kind of encouragement in myself, I would have a lot of difficulty studying the vajrayana disciplines at all. I felt so grateful, so good; there was some sense of joy taking place in my personal individual life. So, to sum up, the slogan “Always rely on just a happy frame of mind” means to maintain a sense of satisfaction and joyfulness in spite of all the little knickknacks, problems, and hassles which take place in one’s life.

Next seems to be the beginning of the concept of compassion. The warmth and sympathy of compassion that we are talking about is that same sense of joyfulness. It is that same sense of delight that you can actually get high within your situation, that you are actually able to do such a thing. Tonight’s discussion is based purely on how to go about maintaining our awareness of the practice of mahayana literally and fully. You might feel uptight about somebody’s terrible bad job, that his particular bad trip has been transferred on to you and has messed up the whole environment. But in this case, you don’t blame such a person. What you do is blame yourself as we’ve talked about already. And blaming yourself is a delightful thing to do, because you begin to realize that that whole approach is taking a very cheerful attitude toward the whole thing. You are not particularly pushed into the depths of the ghetto of human punishment any longer. So you are transcending any kind of “oy vey” situation—and getting out of Brooklyn [
laughter
], metaphorically speaking. This is virtually the opposite of the oy vey approach. You could do that; it is possible to do that.

This kind of cheerfulness has a lot of guts; at the same time, it is founded in buddha nature, tathagatagarbha. It is founded in the basic compassion of the people in the past who have done such a thing: people like Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, Jamgön Kongtrül, Mila, Marpa, and all the rest of the gang. They have already done such a thing. So we could do it ourselves. It is founded on a real situation. If someone punches you in the mouth and says, “You are terrible,” you should be grateful that such a person has actually acknowledged you and said so. You could, in fact, respond with tremendous dignity by saying, “Thank you, I appreciate your concern.” In that way his neurosis has been taken over by you, taken onto you, much as is done in the maitri bhavana practice. We will be doing that practice later on, so you will know about that whole thing. There is an immense sacrifice thing place here. And if you think this is somewhat ridiculously trippy, you are right. In some sense, the whole thing is ridiculously trippy. But on the other hand, if somebody doesn’t begin that approach of providing some kind of harmony and sanity, we can’t develop sanity in this world at all. Somebody has to plant some kind of fruit or seed, so that such sanity can happen on this earth. And we are those people—the chosen people, if you would like to call it that—quite proudly. We are the inspired Buddhists who have the truth and the conviction and power to transplant the root of compassion into the land where we belong, where we were born.

The other day I was talking to a close friend of mine, and she said that originally she felt that she had the kernel of insanity in her, so she didn’t want to push too hard. If she pushed too hard, that kernel of insanity would begin to grow and become gigantic, a monumental monster just like her mother. That is a very good starting point for the discovery of buddha nature. I thought it was very good, extremely good. Starting from there, we begin to feel wretched, right? We feel terrible, absolutely absurd and stupid and mean. And because of that sense of meanness, wretchedness, deprivation, and terribleness, something begins to grow out of it. My friend had enough guts to tell me how she felt, which I thought was the essence of tathagatagarbha. She was willing to relate with somebody and to communicate that. She actually felt that [her experience] was an analogy for something which she used to believe and which quite possibly she could rediscover. That kernel of neurosis in the depth of the depths of her being was softness, which is all-joyful. At that point, pain and pleasure are mixed together. And pleasure is basically more powerful than pain at that point. I felt quite proud of my friend who said that—it was very good. It meant that there was some basis for someone to work on. Usually what happens is that people philosophize the whole thing, and you can’t actually get a hold on anything. But she was able to say, “This thing is happening in me. I feel terrible.” I was able to hold on to it, and she was able to hold on to it. That was the basis of our communication, and buddha nature was actually the pith or kernel of it. And that buddha nature is beginning to grow up at this point, hour by hour, day by day, right now.

The next important slogan that you have studied already in last year’s transcripts is “If you can handle whatever comes across to you, that is the mark of perfect practice.” Maybe we could give a better translation for that: “If you can do it while you’re distracted, that is the mark of perfect practice.” That seems to be the point where we begin to realize that we can actually practice in spite of our wandering thoughts. I’m sorry to be such a chauvinist, but let me give an example of that. What used to happen was that I was terribly hurt—psychologically depressed and pushed into dark corners—by my good tutor and by my administration in Surmang monastery. When I was more remorseful, more sad, and more helpless—but carefully helpless, deliberately helpless—I used to think of Jamgön Kongtrül and actually, literally weep. After he departed from Surmang monastery, I kept thinking of him, and he actually did something to me, cheered me up. I used to try the vajrayana approach to devotion, and I would say to all my attendants, “Go out. I don’t need to observe tea time at this point; I’m going to read.” Then I used to lie back and just purely cry for thirty minutes or sometimes forty-five minutes. And then somebody would jump up. They became very worried, thinking that I was sick or something. And I would say, “Send them back. Go away. I don’t need any more tea.” But somehow I found that that was not very effective, that it was too early to introduce vajrayana devotion, because we didn’t have enough basic training. So I developed a new tactic, which was purely in accordance with this slogan. Whenever there was some problem or chaos, I told Jamgön Kongtrül about it when I visited him. And when I came back, I began to use a new method. Whenever there was chaos or a problem, or even when there was goodness or some celebration—whenever anything happened—I would just come back to my existence and my memory of him, as well as my memory of the path and the practice. I began to be able to feel some sense of awareness, quick awareness, very direct awareness. This awareness was not necessarily related particularly with the memory of Jamgön Kongtrül. But it was the awareness that comes just when you are drifting off and the process of drifting brings you back. That’s what it means here. In other words, even if you are drifting off, if that process of drifting off can bring you back, that is the mark of perfect practice—traditionally, that is described as being like a good horse that has been trained completely and precisely in the equestrian world. Such a good horse has a good gait, good feet, good leaps, and good jumps; and he has good composure in his muscles, with his neck, hindquarters, and everything working together. So if such a good horse slipped on the ice, mud, or something like that—automatically, because of the goodness and coordination of his muscles in his neck, body, and hindquarters—such a good horse would prevent itself from falling on the ground.

That brings about the notion of compassion, which is actually being both soft to oneself and disciplined with oneself. It is actually not particularly a big problem for us personally to be so at this point, although we are not all that highly developed spiritually. Although we have not achieved twofold egolessness, or one-and-a-half-fold egolessness particularly at the point, nevertheless we are actually able to practice mahayana completely and fully. And in a lot of our interpersonal relationships, interofficial relationships, inter-dharmadhatu relationships, intersexual relationships, interbusiness relationships, or whatever relationships we have, that approach is very applicable. Mahayana practice is actually applicable. It helped me a lot personally, so I can say that much. And seemingly you are the same sort of human beings as myself—hopefully. Nobody is a Martian or a weirdo here. I don’t think so. So that whole approach is completely applicable. And in the process of presenting mahayana teaching—which I would like to present to you, and which I have been presenting to you—I would like actually to get down to floor-level as much as possible.