The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Your Treasure is Heart”
How are you going to practice Bodhichitta? That’s the question. What’s it going to look like for you? Do not make the mistake that so many people make by trying to adapt a saintly demeanor where everything is love and light and there are no real feelings, only fabricated ones. As if all of those neurotic little ulcers in our personality are neatly covered with bandaids and we’re not seething underneath them at all! That’s not the mistake that you want to make. That’s not even what compassion looks like. Why should it? What difference could it possibly make to any other person, really and truly, that you look saintly? How is that going to help someone else, unless that’s exactly what that person needs to see? Then, as a Bodhisattva, that’s what will happen.
I have to say, for the most part, my experience has been that love is not neatly tied up in little bundles or appearances. It doesn’t necessarily fit in a box. Love, we should all know by now (unless we’re just stupid) is not convenient. It is just not convenient. Love is messy.. It doesn’t have any particular appearance, because it appears exactly as it needs to appear. So don’t make that terrible mistake of doing something that’s the equivalent of playing dress-up, putting on your mommy and dad’s clothing and walking around like “Oh I’m a Bodhisattva now.” That’s not it. Adapting a certain demeanor that you feel is some sort of compassionate ideal has nothing to do with love. It brings no real benefit. All it does is stroke your ego. In one way, the most self-absorbed thing that you can do is to selfishly use Bodhichitta as a costume for yourself. Instead toss all those images out the window.
Do you think that Bodhichitta should always appear as sweet words and sugary kindness? No. No, if sweet words and sugary kindness always worked, if that’s all that it took, you could go to Dale Carnegie or something like that modified to fit this particular need. You could learn how to speak words of love and light, and how to be so sweet that everybody loved you. If that’s all it took, how easy it would be. I mean, really, it would be a no-brainer. Somebody could write a list of statements and responses that you could have all typed up on a laptop computer. Whenever you got hit with a situation and didn’t know how to practice Bodhichitta, you could just key it in and come up with a response—see the blue aura, give the blue speech. It could work, but that’s not how love is. Love is messy. Love has to reinvent itself every single moment, because it’s constantly looking to see what is needed. The moment love becomes a concept, it is not love. The moment you have a concept about what love should look like, you are not loving. Love is not the way you think.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
