Suffering

Compassion – Antidote to Suffering

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A Teaching by Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

In Vajrayana Buddhism (literally the Diamond Vehicle), which is the form of Buddhism preserved in Tibet and Mongolia and the one followed in my temple, one of the foundational teachings is the understanding and practice of compassion.  I personally find that a religious philosophy based on selfless compassion is deeply satisfying, and I believe that it strikes a chord with many Americans.

However, although there are many people who embrace the idea of compassion as love and a deep caring for others, they do not realize that to actualize the mind of Great Awakening requires a deliberate and disciplined path.  Human beings are not born with great compassion automatically realized.  Thus, the Diamond Path can be described as a technology for spiritual development.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are primarily two ways to approach compassion: aspirational compassion and practical compassion.  When one begins to practice on the Diamond Path, one begins straightaway to make wishing prayers, cultivating the idea of being of benefit to beings who are revolving helplessly through cycles of existence.   This is aspirational compassion.

Every practice in which we engage, every teaching we hear, every empowerment we receive, every prayer we chant, can all be dedicated to the liberation of all beings from all forms of suffering.

Thus, aspirational compassion is practiced in the beginning by many repetitions of wishing prayers.  These prayers are meant to benefit beings through developing the sincere desire to utilize all one’s activities — from the mundane to the sublime — as a means of eliminating the causes of suffering in all its forms.  One prays for the cessation of war, poverty, sickness, death and rebirth, loneliness, hatred, greed and ignorance.  One adopts a posture of pure intention based on the idea that every portion of this life, as well as future incarnations yet to come, might somehow be useful to sentient beings.

As an example of this type of wishing prayer, I will paraphrase a famous practice:

If there is a need for nourishment, let me return as food.  If there is a need for shade, let me be a tree.  If there is a need for shelter, let me be a house.  If there is a need to cross over, let me be a bridge.  If there is sickness, may I manifest as the doctor, the medicine and the nurse who restore health.  May I be land for those requiring it, a lamp for those in darkness, a home for the homeless, and a servant to the world.

While this may sound very kind and loving, the intention here goes far deeper than the apparent words because one must strive to be of benefit not only to fulfill the immediate needs of beings, but also to bring future benefit.  Providing things such as food, housing, and medicine bring about benefit, of course, and this type of kindness is profoundly virtuous.  We should all strive to meet the needs of others in just these ways.  Yet, from a Buddhist perspective, being able to practice only this type of compassion does not bring ultimate benefit.  For instance, if it were possible to feed an entire nation or perhaps even the world and completely eliminate hunger and hopelessness, we still would not be solving the root of the problem.

According to the Buddha, there is no condition or circumstance without a cause.  Just as the fruit does not manifest without first appearing on a tree, which came from a seed, neither does any circumstance, good or bad, in which we find ourselves manifest without a cause.  These causes may not be found in this life only, but may come from previous lifetimes.

It is not possible for people to be born randomly into difficult circumstance or to suddenly experience the onset of tremendous suffering and upheaval.  These events are always the result of a tapestry of cause-and-effect relationships (karma) woven around the delusion involving the definition and maintenance of an ego.  Thus, to solve the immediate needs of beings may bring some relief, but it does not guarantee that they will not experience great difficulty in the future, because it does not break the continuum of cause and effect that ripens unexpectedly and constantly.  This continuum originates from the belief in an ego self and the desire that results from that belief.  It is through the pacification of desire that one can begin to transform one’s karma.  When the delusion of ego begins to dissolve, karma also begins to dissolve.  But if the mindstream is not purified of the karma of suffering, the potential for suffering remains.

We were raised to believe that reality can be manipulated.  Our libraries are filled with books of great American success stories.  These tend to be about material successes.  But the spiritual aspirant must ask: Will this success last?  Even if it lasts for an entire life, will it survive death?  If we had the power to bring peace to the world, to disarm nations and maintain order and harmony, would that peace last beyond our lifetime?  Many leaders have exhausted their lives forging great nations and empires only to have them destroyed shortly after their deaths.

To provide beings with the ultimate benefit of freedom from all suffering, one must apply the ultimate technology.  The aspiration to be of benefit to beings, the cultivation of pure intention, the continued observance of human kindness, the making of wishing prayers, and constantly hoping from the core of one’s mind and heart to be of lasting benefit to others, are practices to develop compassion.  Yet at some point the ultimate step must be taken.  This begins with the realization that temporary happiness is not enough, that feeding and clothing people, along with other acts of kindness, are not enough.  These things cannot undo the certainty of death, which puts people beyond our reach.  How can we follow them into future incarnations to ensure their safety?

There is only one way to cease the ripening of the seeds of suffering: enlightenment, which dissolves the belief in ego, pacifies all cause-and-effect relationships or karma, and reveals one’s true primordial nature.  The Diamond Path utilizes many techniques to purify the five senses and the mindstream itself.  When these practices are engaged in, not only for one’s own benefit but also to purify the karma and suffering of others, the practical aspect of the Awakening Mind — practical compassion — is engaged.  This is “practical” because it is the technology to completely rid oneself and others of the causes for suffering.  Buddhists view this type of compassion as the act of ultimate kindness.

While ordinary kindness is a valid undertaking and should be part of the activity of every spiritual aspirant, one must address the question of ultimate benefit, of eliminating suffering at its roots.

We should take to heart what the great Indian Buddhist Shantideva wrote a thousand years ago.  “May I act as the mighty earth or like the free and open skies to support and provide the space whereby I and all others may grow.  Until every being afflicted by pain has reached to nirvana’s shores, may I serve only as a condition that encourages progress and joy.”

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

First Noble Truth

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by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a Teaching called “How Buddhists Think”

The Buddha’s first teaching dealt with what is now called “The Four Noble Truths.”  This is the basis for everything he taught later.  If it is not understood, then Buddhism will not be understood.

The Buddha taught that cyclic existence, the entire cycle of death and rebirth with all its phenomena, is pervaded by suffering.  If you disagree with that, just look at a newspaper.  Most people’s lives are affected by war, by hunger, by old age; we will all experience sickness and death.  Other forms of sentient life have similar suffering, and it also pervades their lives.

The Buddha does not deny that some happiness exists.  Is there not joy in the drug-like process of falling in love, in loving relationships, in the birth of a child, in acquiring wealth, in seeing and having beautiful things, in enjoying nature and simply feeling good on a good day?

But there is a form of suffering that we all share: every joy has a point of termination.   The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent.  Short-term loves break our hearts when they fail to endure.  Then we revert to our habitual loneliness, anger, and unhappiness.  Even life-long loves and marriages end in separation.

The bottom-line cause of suffering, the Buddha taught, is desire.  And what causes desire to arise?  At a point so unimaginably long ago that it’s called “time out of mind,” there arose the idea of self-nature as inherently real and as separate from “other.”  This fixation on the duality of subject and object is the persistent skeletal structure for all experience.  Until you achieve realization, all the experiences you have derive from this misperception.

Copyright ©  Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Awareness of Suffering

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Excerpt from a teaching on Compassion by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

If you’ve never practiced the Buddhadharma before, or if you’re interested in practicing, or if you have practiced some general meditation and you feel it’s time to move on to a path that is more stable or well known, then you’re in a perfect place for this teaching. You can start practicing one of the most important teachings of the Buddha right now. You can begin to cultivate the mind of compassion. How might you do this? First of all, you might look around and examine physical existence.

In America, we hide our suffering. We have very little knowledge of real suffering, and I think that’s one reason why it’s very difficult for Westerners to practice a pure and disciplined path. We think we understand suffering because we have experienced loneliness, or because when we were kids we had the measles, or because we have gone through marriages and divorces. Or maybe we’ve seen some sickness or poverty. For these reasons, we think we understand suffering, and we do to some extent. These are valid sufferings.

But there’s a funny thing about our culture that we must understand. We are actually hidden from the sufferings of our culture. When people are deformed, handicapped, mentally or terminally ill, they are taken away from the mainstream of society and they are hidden. Or if we are considered unpresentable to most people, we have plastic surgery or we have some kind of therapy that makes us like everyone else. In fact, if we examine the healing process in American medicine, part of that process is to become like other people.  We are made to look like other people.

In other countries around the world suffering is more evident, for many different reasons: those countries may not be as technologically advanced as our country, or their culture may be an older society in which suffering has become more the norm and it is not such a shock to see it. Or perhaps poverty is a factor.

I will describe how I felt when I first went to India. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t claim to be so compassionate; I too have to cultivate the idea of compassion every day. But I remember seeing people walking the streets with arms and legs missing, eaten up by leprosy. I saw mothers and fathers maim their children, not because they hated them or because they were cruel to them, but because that would give them a deformity they could use for begging. That would be the only way they could ensure their survival. There was no other way for them to get food. What do we do for our children? We might send ours to school. In the streets of India, they have to prepare them in a different way.

Suffering is a part of the fabric of the society in India, and it’s very evident. I remember walking down the street in Delhi. There was a young boy who must have been twelve; it was hard to tell, he was so small. He was lying on a rag, a tattered blanket, and he was dying. He was so thin that he looked like the pictures of starvation we see from Ethiopia. He was beyond thin. His bones were sticking out, his belly swollen, his tongue hanging out. And next to him were a few coins and a candy bar. Someone had thrown them down for him.

We don’t see that in our culture. We don’t understand it. We think that the things we’ve gone through – the divorces, not being able to pay the light bill, the heartbreak of psoriasis, the things we consider so awesome – are the real sufferings of the world. But they are not all the world has to endure.

Look at the animal realm. We know what our animals are like. They get fed everyday and they have it pretty good. But not all animals are like them. If we go to different countries, we see beasts of burden that are treated in horrible ways. We see animals that are denied their natural environment.

Humans and animals are only two life forms. According to the Buddha’s teachings, there are many different life forms, many of which are non-physical. How we appear, how we manifest, what form we take has to do with the qualities of our mind. If we are filled with hate, we are reborn in a hell realm. Why is that so hard to understand? When you are filled with hate now, even as a human being, aren’t you in your own private hell? Have you ever gone through a period where you were so filled with anger that everything you saw became ugly and you managed to distort it somehow? Each of us has lived in a private hell. Why is it so hard to believe that we are capable of living in or creating a situation like that? If your mind is capable of having a nightmare, then rebirth in a hell realm is a possibility.

Have you ever been needy? Have you ever gone through a period in your life when you needed approval, or love, or some kind of nourishment so badly, that you were in a state of despair? When people did reach out to you, they couldn’t get through? Each of us, for at least one moment in our lives, has experienced this. Why then is it so hard to understand that these kinds of existences really do exist?

Having understood that this is logical, having examined your own mind truthfully – and truthfully is the key – and found the residue of these experiences in your mind, you can allow yourself to go more deeply into the recognition that the Buddha was right. There is suffering in cyclic existence.

We have to think also of our own suffering. We must think that even if we have a TV, a car, a house, and all of the things that we are taught to desire, there will be a point at which we cannot take them with us. There will be a point at which they will do us no good. That point, of course, is death. All of the efforts that we’ve gone through to get those things will have been wasted.

Long-time Dharma practitioners may think, “I really wish she’d get on with it. I know this.” I have to tell you, if you really knew the truth of suffering, there would not be one moment that you did not practice with the utmost compassion. There would not be one moment when you thought only of yourself and your needs, and of the temporary gratifications you think you must have. Yet you still have many of those moments.

The Test

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An excerpt from a teaching called The Dharma of Technology by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

You should come to respect the root of Dharma, which is bodhicitta or compassion, as the most profound teaching at whatever level you are practicing.  You should come to understand that if you accomplish only that, then you have a right to wear your robes and you have a right to call yourself a Buddhist.  But it is by far the most difficult of all of the vows. You have to think about compassion like this.

If you can pass this test, then you have accomplished Dharma, even if you don’t know how to do a single mudra or ring a bell, even if you don’t have any arms or legs to do it.  Here is the test.  Ask yourself,  “If Lord Buddha Amitabha came to me right now, giving me an opportunity and saying, ‘I’m going to make you a deal.  You could take on all the suffering of all the six realms, every bit of suffering that every sentient being carries, meaning that you have to take on and absorb all the causes of their suffering – hatred, greed and ignorance, desire.  I can give you that, and you could take all of that onto yourself and absorb it completely so that you will suffer endlessly in the most extreme, horrible way until time has run out and in doing that there would be no more suffering in the six realms.’”  Would you do it?

When you hear me say this, you are going to say yes.  You get carried away with emotions.  But if Lord Buddha Amitabha really appeared to you, red and sitting on his lotus, and he really said that to you and he showed you the condensed suffering of all the six realms and you knew that the six realms of cyclic existence appear to be like an endless ocean, and have been going on for uncountable eons, then if you had to accept all that suffering onto yourself, knowing that your mind had to change from the nice thing that you think it is now into a monster filled with hatred, greed and ignorance from all the six realms, but in doing that all of the six realms would be emptied, would you do it?   If you were shown this horrible poison of suffering, this cauldron, this endless sea of suffering and Lord Buddha said to you, “Eat it for their sake and become for an uncountable amount of eons a horrible thing suffering in agony for their sake.”  Would you do it?  Would you open your mouth and start eating?  More than that, would you be happy about it?  Would you be able to do that?

You should try it sometime.  You should test yourself in that way by really thinking that it is possible.  Would you take on every bit of the suffering?  Would you become so grossly misshapen and ugly because of the grossness of all of that suffering?  Would you become so unrecognizable to what you are now?  Would you be willing to do that, knowing that as a result there would be nothing in the six realms of cyclic existence except for you?  There would be nothing.  There would be no more suffering.  The karma of all of those minds, uncountable minds would be purified so that they were free of desire, free of all karma.  Would you bite the big one?

If you think that you would do that, then you know less about yourself than you think.  But to accomplish Dharma you have to get to that point where you would gladly, joyfully, willingly start to eat an ocean of suffering for their sake.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Use Your Awareness

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An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love series

It is useful to really look around at sentient beings and see they are suffering. It is also useful to look at yourself. This is not meant to make you depressed or sad. It is meant to give you what it takes to go to the next step, which is to try to determine for yourself the way to remove the causes of suffering.

Even though there are times when hunger is not comfortable, when you would rather not think about it, there are also times when hunger is useful in that it keeps you alive. In the same way, while it may be uncomfortable for you to think that all sentient beings are suffering, it is actually quite useful for you to realize that. It is this realization that will give you the foundation and the ability to turn your mind in such a way that you have to seek out the causes of suffering, and how you can remove them from your mind.

It is not useful in any long-term way to try to convince yourself, by putting a band-aid on an ulcer, that everything is okay, because you still have to face the same things that you’ve always had to face. Nothing has changed. You still have to face old age, sickness and death. Neither does it help you to be helpful to other sentient beings. Look at the animal realm. Go to India and see how the oxen are beaten and tied up in order to be worked. They are worked all of their lives. That is suffering. Look at all the different ways that other creatures suffer just out of ignorance, because they have no way to help themselves.

Once you have determined suffering does exist, there is no need to dwell on it in a morbid way. Rather, you should think, “This is how it is. Now I have to realize that there is, in fact, a cure, there is a way to deal with this.” It is not useful to dwell on suffering without also accepting the antidote. In other words, if you just think about hunger all the time, and you don’t eat, that is stupid. When hunger is no longer useful to you, it is simply suffering. You should use your awareness of suffering to prod you to seek and practice the antidote to suffering. Use your awareness; it is your tool.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Give Rise to the Bodhicitta

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Have you thought about the welfare of sentient beings today? Remembered those hungry, sick, old, grieving, warring, without hope?

After contemplating the suffering beings in cyclic existence, have you felt mercy, compassion, concern, sadness, grief, a wish to help?

Have you wondered at the meat on your plate? The suffering of the animal? We want the animal’s fur, skin, meat, have you considered this?

Have you seen human beings sleeping in the street? Homeless, addicted, dysfunctional, addled? Families that have lost everything?

Have you seen dogs and cats, family pets, dropped off at a shelter because they are inconvenient? And then killed for the same reason?

Have you seen slaughterhouses? The look on a pet’s face when it knows it is being sent to die? The terrible suffering of animals?

Have you seen the heinous nature of war? The suffering of people returning home shattered? The horror of nations torn apart by hate and war?

Has it bothered you that women in some countries are mutilated to be pleasing to the men? Women treated as property, worse than cattle?

If these things have bothered you, maybe caused a tear, if you see and are moved- MAYBE, just maybe you are ready to learn to pray.

If you ache for the confusion and suffering of beings, if you cannot bear to see such suffering, Maybe, just maybe- compassion lives in you.

Are you ready to dedicate yourself in this and every future life to heal suffering in all forms? Maybe, maybe you gave rise to the Bodhicitta.

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