Buddhism: Week 1
Summary: Sunday, August 30-Friday, September 4, 2015
“When we seek what is truest in our own tradition, we discover we are one with those who seek what is truest in their tradition.” —James Finley (Sunday)
“Siddhartha turned and looked at the day star with awakened eyes, as the Buddha, meaning ‘the one who is awake,’ seeing life the way it really is, free from all projections, all distortions, all delusions, all strategies, all agendas, all belief systems.” —James Finley (Monday)
You need a deep experience of radical participation to break beyond your normal illusion of ego separateness. (Tuesday)
“According to Buddhism, there are two kinds of truth, relative or worldly truth . . . and absolute truth.” —Thich Nhat Hanh (Wednesday)
For the Buddha, the ability to see reality as it really is, free of all concepts that distort it, was also the extinction of suffering. (Thursday)
If you do not transform your pain, you will almost certainly transmit it. (Friday)
Practice: Tonglen
Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön shares the practice of tonglen as a way of holding suffering and awakening compassion:
In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.
In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean—you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. . . . Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.
The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering—ours and that which is all around us—everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be.
We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy, or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness, happens to be at that moment.
At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it—a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness, or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in—for all of us and send out relief to all of us.
[You] can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward. . . .
Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.
Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings. [1]
Reference:
[1] Adapted from Pema Chodron, “The Practice of Tonglen,” Shambhala.org.
Gateway to Silence:
To understand everything is to forgive everything. —Buddha
For Further Study:
James Finley and Richard Rohr, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3 download)
Richard Rohr, Living the Eternal Now (CD, MP3 download)
Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know
