When we are not disturbed, our hearts are at peace and tsewa flows abundantly. None of us would rather feel disturbed than be in this ideal state. But most of the time we have no sense of how not to get disturbed.
by Dzigar Kongtrul ~ Edited by Joseph Waxman
A few years ago, I was in Varanasi, India, an ancient city on the Ganges that is considered holy in several religious traditions, including Buddhism. Every day at dusk, thousands of pilgrims come to take part in a Hindu ceremony in which they make offerings to the river to wash away their sins. One evening, I was part of the immense crowd returning from the ceremony when I noticed many people in a certain area having an intense reaction of shock and concern. When I got closer, what I saw made my heart leap out of my chest. On the pavement, in danger of being trampled, was a tiny infant, not much bigger than a melon, lying on a thin cloth. The parents had placed the baby there to attract alms. The baby was wide awake, moving, naked. My heart filled up with concern for this child. Then I realized all the people around me were reacting in the same way. All our hearts were completely occupied by concern.
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What accounted for this strong common response? No one would have paid much attention to a baby doll on the ground. But this was a living being—an innocent child in a dire and painful situation, so vulnerable, so much in need of protection, stability, and improved conditions. The baby was no different from the rest of us—capable of experiencing comfort, joy, and happiness as well as discomfort, pain, and suffering. It took no time for every witness to process this. We all knew instantly that the baby was just like us, which triggered our feelings of deep warmth and care. I saw this as a reflection of the basic tenderness of heart we are all born with.
Though it is often invisible, our tender heart is with us at all times, always with the potential to come into the open and connect us to our world. The sight of the baby was an extraordinary circumstance that brought out this potential in all the witnesses. But even when we’re not presented with such a compelling scene, we always have the basis for tenderness in our heart. We have the capacity to feel love toward all living beings, to care about their needs and their happiness just as much as we care about our own. This innate quality of a warm, open heart is known in Tibetan as tsewa. This is the main subject of my previous book, Training in Tenderness, but here I would like to say a little more about it, especially in terms of how it connects to the practice of patience.
For most of us in these modern times, life is full of busyness, drive, and speed. When we are caught up in this outer activity day and night, it is difficult to connect deeply to ourselves and others. Unless we want to stay in this disconnected state, we need to find some gaps in day-to-day life where we can pause and look within. These are opportunities to ask ourselves some basic, but indispensable, questions: What am I trying to achieve? Why? What am I so fixated on? Why? What exactly goes on inside me, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day? What do I feel? What is my view of life? What are my greater aspirations?
When we can’t sleep at night, or when we have a few moments to sit in a park, a quiet place, or even at the airport, we should ask ourselves such questions. Then, instead of coming up with an immediate answer, we should go a little deeper and let ourselves genuinely discover where we are. We should listen to the voice of our deeper intelligence.
I believe that anyone who pursues this kind of inner research will eventually come to the same conclusion. Beneath our ambitions and activities, what we all seek comes down to something very simple—a sense of well-being, full of joy, peace, satisfaction, meaning, and spark. We want these feelings to be with us not just for some scattered moments but all the time, without any interruptions. This means well-being can’t depend solely on outer conditions. It must come from within, from a mind that is flexible, healthy, and resilient. To live in such a state of continual joy and peace is really what we’re all after. This is the basic aspiration that we all have at our core—no matter how our hopes, fears, habits, and drives play out and manifest on the outside.
What can we do to fulfill this aspiration? This is not a brand-new question for anyone. We’ve all been working on this project our entire lives. But have we succeeded? If we had, we wouldn’t have much incentive to study and practice the dharma or any other spiritual tradition. So, at this point, it would be useful to examine our old methods, to understand why they don’t work, and to see if we can find a better approach.
Our habitual way of trying to achieve happiness and fulfillment is to focus our love and care on ourselves—and perhaps a few others to whom we feel connected. This is what we do most of the time. Yet all of us have also had experiences when our hearts feel much more open. We’ve had moments of deep warmth and tenderness toward complete strangers or even people we normally dislike.
Having had both types of experience—a narrowly self-centered heart and an open, unbiased heart—we can compare our mental and emotional well-being in the two cases. When our tenderness was focused mainly on ourselves, how much deep joy and satisfaction did we feel—even when things went our way? How did that feeling compare to our more selfless, all-embracing moments, when our kindness and compassion stretched beyond their usual boundaries? Which of these two feelings would we like to prevail in our hearts?
This is an investigation we need to do for ourselves, based on our own experiences and not just taking someone else’s word for it. I’ve found that when my tsewa is limited to one or a few people, I suffer in a box of self-absorption. My world feels small, and my mind feels anxious. Instead of flowing freely and exuberantly, as is its inherent tendency, my tsewa becomes imprisoned by my own self-cherishing and self-protection. On the other hand, when my heart is open, I naturally feel joy, which I gladly spread to others. In summary, my personal research has led me to conclude that the main factor determining my joy and well-being is the openness of my own heart.
There is no limit to how much our hearts can open. Our tsewa can become so far-reaching and impartial that it covers all people, all animals, all living beings everywhere. We can care so much for these beings that their happiness becomes our happiness, and their pain becomes our pain. When we are filled with such deep love for others, we wish only the best for them, as a mother wishes only the best for her children. This gives our lives profound meaning, fulfillment, and joy. In this state, we deeply enjoy our freedom from the obsessive self-concern that usually plagues us.
In my own experience and from what my teachers have taught me, no positive state of mind can surpass this free-flowing tsewa. No material success, pleasure, comfort, recognition, knowledge, or “intelligence” can come close. It’s not that I’m dismissing these things as unimportant. If we have tsewa, they may enhance our lives. But if the heart is closed, such things can do very little to bring about true happiness.
As we reflect on tsewa and examine it through our own experience, we may come to see it as our most precious possession. When we value something so highly, we go to a lot of trouble to take care of it. For example, most of us spend a great deal of our time doing things related to wealth. We are continually trying to gather, protect, and increase our money. This can involve working long hours, seeking promotions, watching the stock market rise and fall, searching for bargains, buying insurance policies, and so on. Each of these pursuits involves struggle, hope and fear, and suffering.
With tsewa, we also need to put effort into gathering, protecting, and increasing. We gather tsewa simply by remembering to let the heart be open, which is its natural and most joyful condition. We protect tsewa by averting and removing obstacles and threats that can rob us of this joyful state. And we increase it by training to expand our love to more and more beings.
Of these three efforts, this book is mainly concerned with protection. The obstacles and threats to tsewa come in many forms, but all arise from a heart that is in some way feeling disturbed. Something is happening that we don’t like, and inside we feel some level of irritation. This could be a very subtle aggression that we may not even notice, or it could be a blatant, almost intolerable emotion that culminates in an ugly outburst of anger. However it appears, it always comes with some kind of inner rejection. We reject whatever is occurring in our lives. This means we are separating ourselves from the world and from others. When we feel aggression, the heart starts to close. Our precious, nourishing tsewa ceases its flow.
This is why the eighth-century sage Shantideva refers to aggression as “our sorrow-bearing enemy,” and why I felt inspired to write a book about its antidote: patience. The word “patience” is a translation of the Tibetan word zopa. Other common translations are “tolerance” and “forbearance.” For the sake of simplicity, I will use “patience,” but the essence of zopa is more like “not getting disturbed.”
When we are not disturbed, our hearts are at peace and tsewa flows abundantly. None of us would rather feel disturbed than be in this ideal state. But most of the time we have no sense of how not to get disturbed. We have no idea how to practice zopa, patience. On one hand, we may think that the key to not getting disturbed is to avoid any situation that might disturb us. It’s common sense not to place yourself purposely in stressful or irritating situations, but it’s impossible to avoid most of the countless hardships and misfortunes that come to all of us. Even people who have safe, comfortable lives usually find plenty of things that disturb them or things to complain about. This is why every Buddhist method focuses on changing our mind, not our outer world.
On the other hand, we may steel ourselves to remain undisturbed in difficult situations by mastering the approach of “grin and bear it.” But that is also not what’s meant by zopa. Grinning and bearing it is no different from suppressing or bottling up our emotions. It is a guaranteed method of turning the mind into a pressure cooker, which will at some point explode.
To enjoy life in an undisturbed state—what I like to call “peaceful heart”—we need to understand and be aware of how we get disturbed in the first place. Then we need to have effective antidotes for each kind of disturbance—antidotes that make sense to us and are easy to apply. These two subjects—the causes of emotional disturbance and their antidotes—make up the core of this book.
It’s important to emphasize that patience is a practice—a practice of learning to experience feelings that are hard to tolerate without reacting in ways that cause harm to oneself or others. As with any Buddhist practice, there are many nuances and instructions for meeting different circumstances. We are fortunate enough to have an unbroken lineage of accomplished teachers who have passed on their knowledge and experience, from individual to individual, until this very day.
One of the most popular texts to be transmitted through the generations is Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva. Though it is thirteen hundred years old, its poignant and concise teachings are as relevant as ever to people of modern times. When he taught his students about patience, my root teacher, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, based most of his teachings on the sixth chapter of this work, commonly referred to as the Patience Chapter. Following the noble tradition of my teachers, instead of making up my own ideas about patience, I will take the 134 stanzas of the Patience Chapter as the framework and inspiration for everything I have to say. Thus, I hope you will consider this book to be blessed by Shantideva’s own wisdom and compassion and that of all the fully realized sages who have come between us.
The word bodhisattva in Shantideva’s title refers to a person who strives to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings. Enlightenment is the state of mind of a buddha, one who has awakened to their ultimate potential. It is the most positive state of mind possible—a state of perfect, irreversible happiness and perfect, irreversible freedom from suffering. It is the ultimate state of peaceful heart, from which love flows continually and without impediment. A bodhisattva’s motivation is not just to achieve this state for oneself, in order to dwell on an island of individual bliss, but to use the powerful qualities of enlightenment for the maximum benefit of all beings.
This noble aspiration is the supreme expression of tsewa. It fills the bodhisattva’s life with profound happiness and meaning. This is why bodhisattvas are said to “go from joy to joy,” despite being fully aware of and connected to the tremendous suffering in this world. Shantideva’s intention in composing the Patience Chapter was to give people engaged in the bodhisattva path a set of thorough instructions for maintaining this supremely peaceful heart in the face of every kind of challenge and threat. My intention in writing this book is the same: to pass on any advice from my teachers that may help you work with whatever disturbances arise in your life and mind so you may meet them and use them to grow and progress on your path. I hope that by learning and applying the practice of patience, you will discover that all difficult circumstances, people, and emotions can be used to open your heart rather than close it.
Dzigar Kongtrul grew up in a monastic environment and received extensive training in all aspects of Buddhist doctrine. In 1989, he moved to the United States with his family, and in 1990, he began a five-year tenure as a professor of Buddhist philosophy at Naropa University. He also founded Mangala Shri Bhuti, his own teaching organization, during this period. He has established a mountain retreat center, Longchen Jigme Samten Ling, in southern Colorado. When not guiding students in long-term retreats and not in retreat himself, Rinpoche travels widely throughout the world teaching and furthering his own education.
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