Let me say, right at the start, that I am not going to be diplomatic. The extent to which the notion of forgiveness has insinuated itself into contemporary Buddhist thinking disturbs me deeply. Although many may disagree with me, I feel that current interpretations of forgiveness in the Buddhist community undermine the teachings of karma, encourage the cult of victimhood, weaken human relationships, and obfuscate the practice of purification.

In contemporary Buddhist settings, forgiveness is interpreted in several ways. One is as a way of letting go of our expectations and disappointments in others—in other words, letting go of our attachment to a different past. Another interpretation is as an extension of lovingkindness. In the Tibetan tradition, it is sometimes presented as an extension of patience or of compassion. These are all key practices, and they appear in virtually every Buddhist tradition, but to call them forgiveness? Well, that may be unforgivable. As Idries Shah writes in Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition, when you adopt the methods developed in another culture, those methods and the ways of thinking associated with them eventually take over, and you lose touch with your own understanding and training. In the same way, by importing the foreign (to Buddhism) notion of forgiveness, contemporary Buddhists are unwittingly importing a very different system of thought and practice and undermining the powerful mystical practices in Buddhism that may have inspired them in the first place.

These various interpretations of forgiveness all overlook the fact that the meaning of forgiveness is grounded in the language of debt. In days of yore (and, in some cultures, not so yore), when I impugned your honor, I incurred an obligation to you, a debt that had to be paid somehow. From there, the notion developed that when I do any kind of wrong, to you or anyone else, I have incurred a debt, to you or to society or to God. When we view interactions with others in terms of debt, we are, wittingly or unwittingly, reducing our relationships with others to transactions. Human feeling, human understanding, human empathy all go out the door. “I owe you” or “You owe me” now becomes the defining expression of the relationship.

Whether the debt is a debt of honor or a material debt, if I am in debt to you and am unable or unwilling to honor the debt, you can choose to use whatever power you have to compel me to make good on what I owe, or you can choose to forgive the debt. In today’s world, the person owed has a certain moral power supported by custom, the law or the state. As the American anthropologist David Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

Forgiveness releases me from my obligation to you and from the threat that you will bring those instruments of power to bear on the issue. In this sense, forgiveness is itself an exercise of that power. In the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, the four kinds of awakened activity (pacification, enrichment, magnetization, and destruction) provide an effective template for meeting conflict. One begins by trying to talk things out, and if that doesn’t work, then one brings in additional resources—time, money, a mediator, and so on. If those efforts fail, one may try to compel a resolution, but if that is not possible, the only course of action that remains is to sever or destroy the dynamic in the relationship that gave rise to the conflict. Forgiveness represents the implementation of the fourth stage—destruction. All other efforts at resolution having failed, we make the unilateral decision that the only way to be free from the shadow that the debt casts in our own life is to forgive the debt.

There is no grace in the operation of karma, just as there is no grace in the operation of gravity. The only way to stop the evolution of reactive patterns is to change our relationship with those patterns.

Such self-interested motivation is hardly awakened activity. Awakened activity is exclusively motivated by the wish to help others awaken (bodhicitta). The self-interest implicit in this exercise of power reinforces attachment to a sense of self. As taught by some Western Theravada teachers, this self-interest is made quite explicit: people are encouraged to practice forgiveness to make themselves feel better. For me, at least, such interpretations go against the basic tenets of Buddhist practice. 

Related: Three Ways to Practice Forgiveness 

The act of forgiveness changes the relationship. It does not go back to what it was before. Something necessarily comes to an end. Consider what happens with a bank loan. As long as I owe money to a bank, the bank and I are tied together. When the bank forgives the loan and writes it off, I am free to live my life without the threat of collection, foreclosure, or court action, and the bank frees itself from any further obligation to collect on the debt. The relationship between the bank and me with respect to the loan is ended. To forgive the loan is to end the relationship. This is one of the overlooked aspects of forgiveness—the dynamic in the relationship that tied the two parties together no longer holds. It is gone.

Forgiveness is also a way for you to step out of the transactional framework that has reduced our relationship to what is or is not owed. In this sense, forgiveness is about returning to the human quality in our relationship, but the power to do so still rests with you, not with me. 

Because of this essential power imbalance, it is easy for me to regard myself as a victim, a victim of circumstance, a victim of your harshness or callousness, or a victim of societal or state power. Victimhood is always a temptation because the status of victim releases me from any moral or social obligation. Ironically, when you forgive my debt, you may reinforce my identity as a victim  (which is precisely what the political right complains about).

All these aspects of forgiveness are often overlooked when people talk about forgiveness. To come closer to a measure of understanding, take a few minutes now and consider: What do you really mean when you say to someone, “I forgive you”? 

What about personal responsibility and forgiveness? When you forgive me, you allow me to go on with my life without the burden of obligation. Others will see you as compassionate, and I will usually be grateful. But your forgiveness on its own does not and cannot do anything about whatever I did to incur the debt in the first place. That is out of your hands. 

One of the central principles of karma is that no one can intervene in the way my actions evolve in me, not even a buddha. Only I can do something about that, through purification practice or other means. In Christianity, where the notion of forgiveness is central, the picture is quite different. Even here, the language of forgiveness operates in strange ways. When God forgives our sins, which are regarded as debts incurred to God, it does not mean that our relationship with God is over. On the contrary, it means that the relationship has been restored. But this restoration is possible only because of God’s grace (again, the power element), and God’s grace can enter only a mind that is sincere in its remorse. The words of Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet speak to such sincerity:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

And the words of the hymn “Amazing Grace” speak to the entrance of God’s grace:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

When God’s grace enters a sincere mind, through the action of grace that person is freed from the reactivity that gave rise to the original transgression. But this direct intervention by a higher power into the mindstream of another person is not a Buddhist notion. You may forgive me—that is to say, you may forgive the supposed debt I owe because of my transgression. It may well be that by saying to me that you do not hold the transgression against me, you help me come to terms with the reactive process within myself. Yet it is still up to me to work through the reactive patterns that gave rise to that transgression. 

In the Protestant context, the picture is a bit different. With the elimination in all but name of the mystery of God, forgiveness has evolved to a social protocol that functions to restore a sense of connection when a break or disruption has occurred. It would be easy for me to understand forgiveness in this context as an application or extension of lovingkindness, compassion, or patience, though in doing so, I would be ignoring the intrinsic power dynamic that lurks just beneath the surface of social interaction.

My concern here is that in today’s world, many people who practice Buddhism seem to feel that when someone forgives them, they have been absolved and the matter ends there. Forgiveness in their minds completes the transaction, albeit not as it would have ended if the debt had been paid. No mention is made of the power of grace, and not many individuals would claim that power for themselves.  Karma does not work that way, however.

Karma is not based in transactions. It is based in evolution. Patterns of behavior set in motion by our actions in the world continue to evolve and shape our perception and predispositions. That process does not stop until we change our relationship with those patterns. As the 11th-century Tibetan teacher Gampopa wrote in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, “Samsara is notorious for being without end.” There is no grace in the operation of karma, just as there is no grace in the operation of gravity. The only way to stop the evolution of reactive patterns is to change our relationship with those patterns. And that is what purification is about. 

In Buddhist thinking, the analogy of dirt is used to understand how such actions affect us. When I do harm to you, I set in motion a process that will ripen in time in my own experience. I have, as it were, introduced some dirt, some impurity, into my experience of life. Purification is about removing that impurity so that it does not fester and generate problems in my stream of experience. 

Related: Three Tactics from the Buddha to Forgive without Feeling Defeated 

One set of traditional teachings on purification is called the four forces: regret, reliance, remedy, and resolution [see below]. Regret (or remorse) means to acknowledge the harm or wrong we have done, to know we have done wrong and to regret it. Reliance means to renew our connection with spiritual values. Remedy means to do what we can to remedy the harm or wrong or, if that is not possible, to do some good, not as compensation (let alone penance), but to set the evolution of habits in a different direction. Finally, resolution means to stop feeding the inner patterns that moved us to do that harm.

Apology is part of the third force, remedy. An apology can do much to mitigate the harm done and to set things in a more constructive direction. Even in serious medical situations, when a doctor does something wrong, in many cases what the aggrieved party wants most of all is a sincere apology. To know that the doctor knows he or she did something wrong and sincerely regrets it may put patients at ease, if only because now they have some confidence that no one else will suffer the same fate. 

What constitutes a sincere apology? A sincere apology consists of an admission and expression of regret not for the results of an action but for the action itself. Feel the difference between the words “I’m sorry if I offended you” and “I’m sorry I spoke harshly to you,” or even “I’m sorry—that was insensitive on my part.” In the latter two versions, I am acknowledging my action. I am not making the apology conditional on your state of mind. We can only take responsibility for our actions and the intention motivating our actions. 

Purification in the spiritual sense is about creating the conditions for reactive patterns to release themselves. More than this we cannot do. If we try to let go of a pattern directly, the survival mechanism on which the pattern is based goes into operation and the pattern is usually reinforced, not released. In neurological terms, purification often involves creating the conditions in which an experience from the past can move from intrinsic memory to narrative memory. The key capacity necessary for that transition is to be able to experience in open awareness the emotional material associated with what happened. All purification practices do precisely this. Some practices use ritual as a way to create a space for that material to be experienced without acting it out or reliving it. Other practices make use of specific behaviors to create that space for awareness. Still others use visualizations (deity practice in the Tibetan tradition, for instance), or powerful positive emotions (lovingkindness, compassion, joy, or equanimity). Through such practices, we experience what we could not or would not experience before, and our relationship with those reactive emotions change. They become experiences, and they no longer run the show. That shift changes everything.

Needless to say, the path of purification is not easy. It involves experiencing precisely what we have always ignored or suppressed. For instance, the Tibetan practice called tonglen, or “taking and sending,” extends and deepens our relationship with compassion. In this practice, we imagine taking in the pain, illness, negativity, confusion, and ignorance of others, freeing them from those afflictions, and then sending to them the joy, health, goodness, good fortune, well-being, and understanding that we experience in our own lives, giving it all away so that they may enjoy it, too. Practitioners are often surprised a few months into this practice by the deep and difficult emotions they find themselves experiencing in reaction to taking in pain and negativity. Understandably, they would prefer simply to be forgiven for their own negativity and to continue to repress their own pain.

One final point: purification is not about being pure. Purification is about changing our relationship with the reactive patterns that run our lives. Purity, on the other hand, is a spiritual ideal. Many religious traditions and many practices have been built around purity, usually by taking a practice of purification to an extreme and idealizing a hypothetical end state. However, the idealization of purity is a pattern based on a deep and often unacknowledged aversion to dirt. Sadly, unless open awareness plays a role in the practice (specifically by bringing acceptance and equanimity into the picture), every effort made to avoid dirt reinforces the aversion at the core of this pattern.

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, forgiveness is a notion foreign to Buddhism. Many Asian teachers do not understand the nuances of forgiveness in Western usage, and they naively associate or equate it with teachings and practices with which they are deeply familiar. On the other hand, few Western teachers take time to consider, let alone understand, the Abrahamic resonances that color their interpretations of Buddhism. 

Buddhism has sometimes been viewed as a science, an equivalence that was promoted in the late 19th century in an attempt to establish the legitimacy of Buddhist thought in the minds of the Western colonialists who occupied Asia. But it is not a science. Its objectives and methods are completely different. More recently, Buddhism has often been presented as a psychology or psychotherapy—again, an attempt to translate Buddhist thought into Western idiom. But it is not a form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy’s aims are cultural. Buddhism’s aims are soteriological. Today, as Buddhism becomes more and more part of the spiritual landscape of Western culture, it risks being taken over by indigenous Western spiritual perspectives. For this reason, I encourage all those who find inspiration in Buddhism—teacher, student, monk or nun, working stiff or retreatant—to take care to understand, practice, and present Buddhism on its own terms, in its own vocabulary, so that all who seek a path of freedom as exemplified by the Buddha may find it. 

The four forces: regret, reliance, remedy, and resolution 

Regret means that we admit what we did and acknowledge the harmful consequences of our action. The intention of regret is to remove any defense or justification of the action in our mind. In Buddhism, nonvirtuous actions are regarded as negative because they grow into unpleasant and painful experiences, not because they violate an authority or law. Therefore, regret does not involve guilt. Suppose you unwittingly drink a glass of poison and learn right afterward that what you drank is poisonous. You haven’t violated a law. You don’t feel guilt, but you do feel regret because you will suffer from the poison. Reliance means that we renew our connection with spiritual practice, whether it be through devotion, compassion, awareness, or presence. Most of what we do that is negative happens when we fall out of attention and mindfulness. Reliance means that we deliberately reestablish our practice so that the conditions for negative action are no longer present in us. Remedy means that we act in a way that disrupts the operation of the pattern behind the negative action. If we can, we correct the negative action—apologize, make restitution, or make amends. If we cannot remedy the action itself, then we undertake a positive action with the explicit intention to remedy the negative—make a donation to charity, do some community service, help a friend, or better, help someone we don’t like. Remedying does not by itself remove the patterns of negativity established by the negative action, but the introduction of a positive dynamic changes the way the action develops into experienced results. Resolution means to form the intention not to act that way again. As long as we retain the slightest sense that we might repeat the action, the patterns associated with that action have a place to grow and develop. To stop the karmic process from evolving further, we renounce completely any defense of the action and any intention to act that way again. The resolution we make irrevocably commits us to cutting through the pattern and doing something different whenever that issue arises in the future.

Adapted from Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention © 2002. Reprinted courtesy HarperOne.

The post Forgiveness Is Not Buddhist appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have had the good fortune to study and practice Vajrayana in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism for more than a few years. Despite the sometimes yawning chasms in culture and thinking, I have come to appreciate the power and depth of samaya and sacred outlook as tools of practice. At the same time, I am dismayed at the way these tools have been exploited for individual and institutional agendas. In this article, my aim is to clarify what these tools are and how they work.

People engage in spiritual practice for different reasons. Some people practice to make their lives better by developing new skills or healing old wounds. Some want to participate in a community of people who share a common outlook on matters of the spirit—a congregation, or in Buddhist terms, a sangha. And for a few, spiritual practice is a response to a mystical calling to some kind of direct experience.

Practically speaking, all three motivations operate in most of us. Who wouldn’t like to function better in their lives? We are also social animals and enjoy the company of like-minded people. And, if you are reading this article, there is probably a mystic lurking somewhere in you. By a mystic, I mean someone who seeks a way to experience life that is not mediated by the conceptual mind.

Each of these motivations gives rise to a different set of behavioral guidelines. In the first case, the ethical principles are usually similar to those set for other professionals, such as therapists or doctors. In the second, agreed-upon values give rise to a shared moral sense that determines not only what behaviors are or are not acceptable but also who does or does not belong to the community. As for the mystic, it is hard to lay down clear guidelines, just as it is hard to do so for the arts, or for any practice or discipline that challenges social and cultural conventions. In this article, I am writing for the mystic in you, the part of you that seeks a direct experiential knowing of life, the universe, and who or what we are.

In the Vajrayana traditions of Buddhism, samaya and sacred outlook are two tools of practice that speak to that mystical calling. Misunderstandings abound here, particularly in the area of the teacher-student relationship.

Related: Shambhala Leaders Step Down after Abuse Allegations Shake Community

Samaya is the Sanskrit word for commitment. In a Vajrayana context, samaya is our commitment to awakening—to experiencing life directly, free from the projections of thought and feeling. It is also our commitment to use whatever we encounter in life to further that awakening. It has many facets: our commitment to our teachers, our students and our peers, our commitment to the forms and methods we practice, and our commitment to how we approach life.

Where samaya is a commitment, sacred outlook is a mystical experience. The Tibetan dag snang is also often translated as “pure perception,” but I prefer Shambhala founder Chögyam Trungpa’s rendering of the term as “sacred outlook.” It is how we experience life, the world, and what we are when we are awake. Words fail here. We have to resort to metaphor and allusion—the language and methods of poetry. For an example, the 11th-century Indian mystic Tilopa says in his Ganges Mahamudra:

Your body has no core, hollow like bamboo.
Your mind goes beyond thought, open like space.
Let go of control and rest right there.

Obviously, your body is not hollow. Nor do we try to make it hollow when we practice. But we can experience the body that way. Similarly, mind is not space, but we can experience it being like space. When such experiences arise, Tilopa says, “Let go of control and rest right there.” Only the last sentence is actual instruction.

In the same way, you hear or read that your teacher is buddha, you and everyone you encounter is your yidam or meditation deity, and everything that arises in your life is the activity of the protectors. These statements are not meant as instructions. They describe ways of experiencing life. When these kinds of experience arise, they are of such profundity that you are both completely present and deeply at peace, even if your life is a complete mess at the time. Sacred outlook refers to that transformation of experience, and the language used to describe it is poetic. It is not meant to be taken literally.

Samaya, then, is a commitment to sacred outlook, a commitment to experiencing your life as you would when you are awake and present. It is not like the commitment not to take life, say. You can keep that commitment because you can decide not to take life. But to be awake and present in every moment of life? Most of us cannot just decide to do that. Even the 11th-century Indian master Atisha said that his lapses in samaya were like rain pouring down. Patrul Rinpoche, the 19th-century Nyingma master, wrote that maintaining samaya is like trying to keep a mirror clean in a dust storm. No matter what we do, dust keeps settling on it! Perhaps it is better to think about samaya as our connection with awakening. We may keep losing it, but we keep coming back to it

One of the key requisites for Vajrayana practice is that we have the emotional maturity to take responsibility for our actions and decisions. Another key requisite is that we have an experiential relationship with emptiness; that is, we know what it means to be awake. It is meaningless to talk about a commitment to awakening unless we have some notion of what we are committing to. It is equally meaningless to talk about commitment if we are not capable of taking or willing to take responsibility for our own state of mind and our actions and decisions. If, in our minds, someone else is responsible for how we feel or what we do, how can we possibly say we are committed? In following a mystical calling, we voluntarily step into territory in which all our belief structures are called into question, including the restrictions and the protections of the law, of conventional morality, and our ordinary understanding of life. Because you, yourself, are questioning these conventional belief structures, you and only you are responsible for your actions and decisions.

The multifaceted jewel of Vajrayana gives us many ways to arrive at a mystical experience of life. Three such facets are the teacher-student relationship, which models our relationships with ourselves and everyone we know; the yidam, the meditation deity we engage in practice; and the protectors, through which we learn how to meet what happens in our lives.

As a teacher, sacred outlook means that you see the student as embodying awakening—as a potential buddha. Your commitment or samaya is to nurture that potential. Your primary gesture is compassion, but not the compassion that seeks to alleviate suffering. Rather, it is the compassion that seeks to end suffering. Your aim is to help the student become free from the burden of reactivity and know the utter groundlessness of experience.

If you are a student, you see the teacher as exemplifying what it is to be present and awake. Your primary gesture is devotion: respectful appreciation for your teacher and his or her understanding and ability. Your commitment is to make use of your teacher’s instructions.

Both student and teacher are sensitive to imbalance in the relationship. If the teacher does not challenge the student, the student does not grow. If the teacher pushes the student too hard, the student shuts down. The student needs to clarify his or her experience with the teacher, and that requires honest communication. Teacher and student may not always be perfectly attuned, and that is where samaya comes in. Each person takes responsibility for whatever happens. If things aren’t working, neither blames the other. Rather, each person uses the experience to identify how he or she is caught in reactivity and takes appropriate steps. It is a joint venture, and samaya is the commitment not to exit it. Through this intimate dance, teacher and student evolve a path that leads the student to awakening.

Much has been made of the teacher’s command and how the student has to do whatever the teacher says. In the early Vajrayana of India, obedience was part and parcel of the small intimate groups that formed around a teacher. Those students were fully committed to the spiritual path and simply followed their guru’s instructions. In Tibet’s monastic culture, however, spiritual devotion came to be conflated with feudal fealty. As far back as the 16th century, Pawo Tsulak Trengwa felt it necessary to point out that the teacher’s command applies only to spiritual instruction, not to how a student conducts his or her life. In the West, the combination of idealization of the teacher and literal interpretation of poetic language has led many students to see their teacher as an absolute authority. This projection has created a lot of confusion and caused more than a little harm, particularly when students have not understood how samaya works. Ato Rinpoche, a Kagyu teacher who lives and teaches in England, once said to me that it was meaningless to talk about students violating samaya if their teacher approached them romantically or sexually. In his opinion, the teacher had already stepped out of his or her commitment by approaching them, and the student was free of any obligation.

In my own case, there were a few occasions when I was in profound disagreement with my principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche. On each occasion I felt I was in a double bind, as two fundamental values seemed to be in direct conflict. First, I did not want to initiate a break in my relationship with Rinpoche. Second, I could not compromise my own sense of what felt right. When you hold two seemingly contradictory principles at the same time, you are forced to look deeper. If you look deep enough, you may find that the conflict comes from holding onto something without being aware of it. In one situation, I was unaware how attached I was to my own cultural perspective. In another, I was attached to my role as a teacher. In a third, I was attached to certain expectations about the future. In each case, when I let go of the attachment, I was able to find a way through the situation that maintained my relationship with Rinpoche and did not compromise my own integrity. In retrospect, these situations were tremendously helpful. I don’t know what else would have brought me to let go of those particular patterns. For me, this is how sacred outlook and commitment work on the student’s side: you use the conflict between what the teacher is requiring and what you yourself know to be true to go deep into your own patterns of reactivity until you find clarity right in the confusion of conflict.

Related: How to Heal After Your Teacher Crosses the Line 

As for yidam practice, in deity meditation you imagine that you are the yidam, the embodiment of a quality of awakened mind—awakened compassion, awakened intelligence, awakened power, or some other quality. You imagine you have a different body, a body of light, often with multiple arms, legs, and faces. You have a different voice, the voice of the deity’s mantra. And you have a different mind. If you are practicing being the embodiment of awakened compassion, for instance, you see yourself as Avalokiteshvara, or Guanyin, and you imagine feeling infinite compassion for all beings—you are willing to plunge into the depths of your own reactive patterns, like the hell realms of anger, if by doing so you can help even one person wake up. Once you have been introduced to this possibility (usually through the ritual of empowerment), your commitment is to hold that compassion in your heart until it permeates everything you experience. That is the samaya of deity practice.

Many Tibetan teachers seek to help their students come to that experience by telling them that they have to do the practice every day and recite a certain number of mantras, either every day or in total. The purpose of these perfunctory commitments is to make the students spend enough time to absorb something of the deity’s spirit. However, because of the spiritual materialism rampant in both Tibetan and Western culture, students often collect large number of empowerments and then simply crank through the recitations in order to “keep their commitment.” This was a problem in Tibet as much as it is in the West, and the Tibetans were well aware of it, as a Tibetan saying indicates: “In India, they practiced one deity and saw hundreds. In Tibet, we practice hundreds and see none.”

Samaya and sacred outlook are powerful tools, but powerful tools can cause serious harm when misused.

Another facet of Vajrayana is dakini and protector practice. Dakinis are expressions of the activity of your own mind. Protectors are expressions of those forces within you that create conditions conducive to practice and dispel conditions not conducive to practice. Again, the usual form these commitments take is to do these practices on a daily basis, adding even more recitations to the list. As we cultivate a relationship with nonconceptual knowing, we often find that we make what we would ordinarily call intuitive leaps: we just know what to do in a given situation. Where that knowing comes from is a mystery, but it is clear, precise, and balanced, and it leads to effective action that takes into account the whole situation—in short, the five aspects of timeless awareness. Dakinis symbolize that knowing. Commitment in the context of dakini practice is to trust that knowing.

Protectors are similar, but their role is a bit different. The nightmarish forms of most protectors reflect forces stirred up in us when we encounter difficult situations—the dark primitive forces that go into operation whenever we feel threatened. From the Vajrayana perspective, there is a wakefulness even in these dark forces. Through protector practice, we familiarize ourselves with those forces and how they operate and come to recognize the wakefulness present in them. Commitment in the context of protector practice is to be awake in whatever life throws at us, using the four kinds of awakening action: calm, expansive, compelling, and forceful [See box].

In the standardized practice methods, samaya is often presented in terms of prescribed behaviors and prescribed states of mind. The language then takes on legalistic tones — infraction, breach, violation, and complete break, for instance. In my opinion, this vocabulary masks the violence implicit in the feudal system and recasts difficulties as guilt. The American anthropologist David Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years: “There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.” The word guilt functions in much the same way as the word debt. With this language, it is easy to see the student as the one at fault, even when it is the teacher who has betrayed the commitment to awakening by giving teachings or empowerments to people who are not ready for them or by using his or her position for personal benefit.

Samaya and sacred outlook are powerful tools, but powerful tools can cause serious harm when misused. These two spiritual tools were never intended to govern society or to govern the operation of political and social institutions. To use them for these purposes is, in my mind, contrary to both their spirit and intent. To invoke them for any personal gain or for any purpose other than awakening is also contrary to their spirit. They are directed to the mystic in us, for that part of us that seeks something utterly ineffable yet viscerally important—a direct knowing different from, indeed at right angles to, our conventional understanding of life. When we are ready to commit to that and are ready to go wherever our calling takes us, then these tools will serve us well, showing us how, as Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, we can use our very imperfections to find our firm, way-seeking mind.

The post How Samaya Works appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Anger is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion.” This is how Charles Duhigg sums up a conversation he had with James Averill, professor emeritus of psychology at UMass, Amherst. Averill also noted that a bit of anger can quickly clear up unspoken resentments, unacknowledged boundary violations, and unaddressed imbalances. On the other hand, in Buddhism anger is often regarded as taboo, an emotional reaction to be avoided as much as possible. The 8th-century monk-scholar Shantideva, in The Way of the Bodhisattva, writes that a single moment of anger destroys the good karma built up over a thousand eons. These are two very different views, but both agree that anger is very powerful.

Is there a way to direct the energy, clarity, and power of anger to spiritual or mystical ends? Is it possible to find the peace and clarity of awareness in the experience of anger? Is it possible to use anger to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and so undermine the tendency to treat ourselves as special? Is it possible to step out of the world of conflict and opposition that anger projects? And is it possible to discover the groundlessness of experience in an emotional reaction as intense and potentially destructive as anger? Although I cannot speak for other Buddhist traditions, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the answer to all these questions is an unambiguous “yes.”

For instance, Jan Willis, professor emeritus at Wesleyan, described an occasion when she was furiously angry while at Lama Yeshe’s center in Nepal. She remembers standing outside the temple fuming at something or other. Lama Yeshe crept up beside her and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind very angry today.” Her mind stopped. The mind that is angry is the same as the mind of buddha? She had never considered that possibility. It changed everything. Anger was no longer a force or demon that took you over. It became, instead, a movement in mind, a mind as clear and empty as the sky.

In the tradition in which I trained, all experience is seen as movement in the mind. Experiences arise and fade on their own, like clouds in the sky. Anger is one such cloud, though it often arises as an overwhelming black storm cloud whose earthshaking thunderclaps deafen us to all other voices and whose flashes of lightning can set our whole world on fire. In this article, I describe four practices, each of which opens a door to a different way of experiencing anger.

Mindfulness of Anger

The first practice comes from the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. I learned it years ago from Yvonne Rand, a Zen teacher associated at that time with San Francisco Zen Center. The practice is based on the Anapanasati Sutta, the “Sutra of Full Awareness of Breathing.” In this practice the breath is used as a rope: you use it to lower yourself into the experience of anger. What you find there may come as a bit of a surprise.

Start with just being in the experience of being angry. Say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel this anger. Breathing out, I feel this anger.” No analysis, no trying to understand it, no attempt to reason your way out of it or justify it. At first, the anger may feel too hot to touch (or too cold, in the case of hatred). No matter. Touch however much you are able to, using the breath as a rope. You will probably notice physical sensations associated with anger—tightness in your stomach, for example, or constriction in your throat, or pressure in your head. You may also notice various emotional sensations, too, not just anger, but fear, perhaps, or jealousy, or sadness, or hurt. Stories will run, stories about the anger or about who or what made you angry. Again, using the breath as a rope to hold onto, just let all those reactions to the anger swirl around and in you like autumn leaves in the wind. While you are doing this, you might say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel reactions to this anger. Breathing out, I feel reactions to this anger.”

Something strange often happens at this point. You may find that you can feel the anger and how your whole system reacts to it and not be carried away in the storm. You discover that you can feel the anger and be calm at the same time. Now you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel calm in this anger. Breathing out, I feel calm in this anger.” Then you discover that it is possible to relax in the anger, to be at ease in it. To bring out that possibility, you might say, “Breathing in, I am at ease in this anger. Breathing out, I am at ease in this anger.”

“Breathing in, I feel calm in this anger. Breathing out, I feel calm in this anger.”

At this point, you have to be a little careful. When you start to relax in the anger, you will feel everything that you have felt before more clearly and more intensely. You may wonder if something is wrong. Isn’t the anger meant to go away? In fact, nothing is wrong. You are just experiencing what is going on in you more completely. You may need to cycle back to one or another of the earlier stages, but there is no problem with this. A common misconception is that practice proceeds in a linear progression, but it doesn’t. There are many ups and downs. Meanwhile, you are discovering a new possibility—namely, that you can experience anger without tensing against it—and you are beginning to explore that possibility.

Somewhere in this process, you may suddenly become aware that your relationship with the anger has shifted. You know what it is, and it doesn’t intimidate or disturb you. For the moment at least, you are free from the tyranny of reaction. Now you might say, “Breathing in, I know this anger. Breathing out, I know this anger.”

And that’s it. Using the breath as a rope, you have lowered yourself into the experience of anger and discovered the possibility of peace and clarity there, not by controlling the anger or trying to get rid of it, but by opening to the anger and experiencing it completely.

One final point. This is not a one-shot exercise. This is a practice. You do it again and again, until it becomes part of you. Then you keep doing it, and the practice starts to work on you. That is when real understanding begins to ripen. Furthermore, as you gain facility, you may find that when anger arises during the day, at work or at home, you can open to it and touch that peace and clarity in the moment.

Taking and Sending

A second method for working with anger or other difficult emotions is taking and sending, one of the key practices in the Mahayana mind-training tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

If you are consumed by anger, consider everyone in the world who is experiencing anger right now. It doesn’t matter what you are angry about, or what they are angry about. It is enough that you are angry and they are angry. As you breathe in, imagine their anger coming into you through your nostrils and down into your heart in the form of thick black smoke. Imagine, too, that everyone in the world except you is now free of anger. Experience everyone’s anger for them! As you breathe out, imagine that all the joy and peace you’ve experienced in your life goes out to everyone. The joy and peace arise in your heart, and go out your nostrils like silvery moonlight, going to every being in the world and filling each one with joy, peace, and well-being. Give all your joy and well-being away!

Don’t force this practice. Don’t hurry it, either. There is plenty of anger out there. Just take it in, breath by breath. Connect with your own joy and peace. There is plenty of that, too. Give it all away, breath by breath.

Keep it simple with the black smoke coming in and the silver light going out, reminding yourself every few breaths what you are taking in and sending out. Don’t exert a lot of effort trying to track exactly what you are taking in or sending out. Let the symbolism of black smoke and silver light work their magic. Just do it, without expectation or anxiety.

Related: “Tonglen on the Spot“

You are not transforming the anger into peace and joy, and then sending that back out to others. Some people have been told to do taking and sending this way. There may be other practices in which you imagine such a transformation, but they are not taking and sending.

Don’t force this practice. Don’t hurry it, either. There is plenty of anger out there.

In the beginning, people often say that they don’t feel much of anything when they do this practice. That is not unusual. As you become accustomed to this exchange, however, you will feel more and more the negativity and suffering coming into you and more and more how you can give peace, joy and well-being and everything that you value in life to others. Your effort is to let taking and sending work on you by letting the exchange strip away everything that you have ever hoped or longed for, and then strip away the hope and the longing, too.

Taking and sending is a very effective way of breaking the spell of anger and other strong emotional reactions. If, however, you do this practice to help yourself feel better in difficult situations, you are, unfortunately, corrupting the  practice. Inadvertently, perhaps, you are reinforcing your sense of self. The aim of taking and sending is twofold: to break the spell of emotional reactions and to move beyond self-interest. Thus you just take in the anger and give away your joy. Over time this practice brings about a fundamental rewiring of your whole being.

Emptying the Hell Realm

The third practice is drawn from deity practice, one of the principal methods of Vajrayana in Tibetan Buddhism. The purpose of this practice is to instill the experiential understanding that how you see the world when you are possessed by anger has no underlying reality. You see the world as if under a spell, and the spell can be broken.

Vajrayana practice assumes that you have the capacity to know that you are angry. If you are not even aware that you are angry when you are angry (and more than a few people are not), you cannot do this practice. At best, it will be just an intellectual exercise. At worst, it will reinforce your anger and you will become a monster. Instead, do either of the previous two methods, both of which build the ability to know when you are angry.

To begin this practice, acknowledge that you are angry. You are in hell. You see the world in terms of conflict and opposition. You see everything as a struggle, as a fight to the death. An intolerable surge of molten fury is trying to burst out and incinerate anything and everything that might oppose you. It is as if a flaming spear has pierced you from head to toe and is burning you from the inside out. You feel you have to fight just to survive, and everyone and everything is against you. Even if you can control the impulse to lash out to protect yourself, you seethe inside.

Turn to that place in you that knows you are angry. What knows you are angry is itself not angry. Connect with that part of you and let the spirit of awakened compassion come into you. Let yourself be taken over by the energy or spirit of awakened mind. That spirit is often imagined as Avalokiteshvara or White Tara, embodiments of awakened compassion. Feel that you are the embodiment of awakened compassion and that you have infinite resources of wisdom, compassion, patience, and power.

Infused with the spirit of awakened compassion, your body fills with light, and the light radiates all through the hell realm. It permeates your own body and touches each and every being, instantly dissolving all pain and injury and replacing the crash and clash of conflict with peace and joy. Light continues to radiate from you until the whole hell realm and all the beings there dissolve into a light of even greater intensity. That light comes back into you, and you become light. And there you rest. After a few moments, your ordinary sense of self returns, but there is a difference. Something of the spirit of awakened compassion returns, too.

This practice is a form of magic. You are using intention, symbolism, and ritual to change how you experience life. We often think of magic as working instantly, but magic works over time as power and energy accumulate in intention and ritual. Therefore, do this practice again and again. Through repetition, it will inform your life in ways that are often unexpected and unanticipated. This is how magic works.

Groundless Experience

The fourth practice is drawn from the direct-awareness traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. This particular instruction is from the Dzogchen tradition, but you will find similar instructions in the Mahamudra tradition.

In this practice, you are going to use the energy of anger to power attention. Basically, for practice purposes the angrier you are, the better. However, there is a definite danger here. If you cannot stay in the experience of anger without being consumed by it, you will inevitably fall under its spell and risk serious damage—to other people and to your life.

You are angry. That is all you need. What gives rise to your anger is irrelevant to this practice.

Let mind and body settle for a few moments. Then look right at the anger. What is the anger made of? What makes the anger? What produces it? You are not looking for psychological, neurological, scientific, or rational explanations. Those are all beside the point. You are looking for what in you actually generates the anger. Again, not what makes you angry, but what makes the anger.

When you look right at what makes the anger, you probably won’t see anything. Right at that moment, you may not feel angry at all, and then you may fall into a kind of confusion. If that happens, then bring back the anger. Replay the circumstances or the issue that stirred you up, and then look again at what is making the anger you experience. Look for short periods, just a few seconds initially, but look intensely. Feel the anger and let the anger fuel your looking.

When you look, you will probably not see anything. You are not necessarily doing anything wrong. Keep going, looking again and again. You are learning how to let the energy of anger flow into attention. Feel the anger, look at what is making the anger right in that moment, and let the energy of anger pour into your attention and your looking, as if you are riding a rocket going straight into the sun. Again, do this for short periods, and then rest. It is an intense practice and will demand everything of you. At some point, the not seeing anything shifts, and you see.

Not seeing anything is a kind of blankness. When you do just see, you are completely awake and clear. As the 19th-century Nyingma master and mystic Ju Mipham writes, “You experience an awareness that is free from thought and movement, has no sense of inside or outside, and is utterly clear and transparent, like space.”

The first time this happens will probably be a bit disorienting, as it is a startling clarity and knowing that has no conceptual content whatsoever. Don’t make anything of it. Just let it soak into you. When it passes, don’t try to duplicate or replicate the experience. Nothing is ever the same the second time, because you are different. Just keep doing the practice and, like the other practices, let this practice work on you.

Conclusion

Here I’ve presented four different methods of practice. Any one of them is sufficient for discovering the possibility of being awake in anger, or any other emotional reaction. But they do differ in what they do, what you need in order to practice them, and what result they bring about.

The first practice, in which you lower yourself into the emotional reaction using the breath as a rope, answers the question “Is it possible to find peace and clarity in the experience of anger itself?” The answer is yes. You find that peace and clarity in the storm of anger itself. It is not an intellectual exercise. To do this practice, you do need a quiet consistency in effort. Over time, the practice itself develops your capacity to experience anger without being consumed by it. When you do find that peace and clarity, you also discover how anger is transformed into attention and awareness. Here, transformation is not something you do but something that happens when the condition are right.

Related: “Soothing the Hot Coals of Rage“

The second practice, taking and sending, undermines our sense of being special and the associated tendency of self-cherishing, the view that we somehow deserve special consideration. You come to understand, experientially, that you are no different from any other human being. One of the side effects is that you see how untenable any form of prejudice and discrimination is, whether based on race, gender, political ideology, or socio-economic status. In order to do this practice, you need to have a solid relationship with compassion. In particular, you need to be willing to experience the pain of the world. As my teacher once said, “If you could really take away all the suffering of the world by breathing it in in a single breath, would you hesitate?” If you don’t feel this way, this practice is not for you. The principal result of this practice is that our sense of self, our identity as being this or that, evaporates like mist in the morning sun. We know that we are not special and not different from others, because the way we struggle in our lives is not different, fundamentally, from the way others struggle in theirs.

The projected world of anger is like a bad dream that has somehow taken us over.

In the third practice you connect with the spirit of awakened compassion and radiate the energy of that compassion in the form of light. The higher level of energy empties the hell realm, the world projected by anger. In order to do this practice, you need to be willing to enter hell, to experience your own anger and hatred and at the same time know the quiet place in you that just knows. This practice reveals that the projected world of anger is like a bad dream that has somehow taken us over. We discover the possibility of being awake, even in this bad dream. Then when anger does arise in our lives, we are less likely to believe our projections and more likely to know them for the phantoms they are. That experiential knowing is freedom.

Finally, in the fourth practice you use the energy of anger to go right through the experience of anger to see what anger really is. To do this practice, you need to have sufficient attention to stay present in the sustained experience of intense anger. This is no small matter, and it is no picnic, either. As you build skill and capacity in this practice, you are increasingly able to touch the groundlessness of being. The more you do so, the more you are able to let go of the crutch of rationality and reason and trust the clear, empty, immediate, and responsive nonconceptual knowing that arises whenever you touch that groundlessness.

The practices discussed here are qualitatively different from how spiritual practice is often presented these days. They are not intended as quick fixes, ways to hack your mind or your life, or as practices to help you in a difficult situation, to feel better when you are down, or to work through a problem in your life. All those are possible side effects. The practices themselves are designed to bring about fundamental changes in how you experience life. While you may learn how to do them in a matter of days, you will probably notice how the practices are working on you only after at least six to eight months of consistent practice, with the real changes typically coming over the course of years. More than a few people have deep insights soon after beginning a new practice. However, those insights are usually a result of energy surges, releases of energy from emotional patterns that have been locked up for a long time. Those insights are rarely stable and soon dissipate because the mind-body system is still configured to react rather than respond.

Through consistent effort, however, you may uncover a kind of compassion that enables you to see the destructiveness of suffering, however it arises. This understanding will enable you to see through cultural prejudices and to see all people, regardless of political, social, or cultural identity, not as “other” but as human beings who, like you and me, are struggling to make the best of their lives. You may also discover a different way of experiencing life, a way that does not depend on the conceptual or the rational mind, but puts you directly in touch with the great mystery of being.

The post Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Three years ago in these pages, I offered a poetic translation of Garab Dorje’s Three Lines That Hit the Nail on the Head. The Tibetan in these three lines is extraordinarily terse and recondite. Nevertheless, they are among the most revered instructions in the Nyingma tradition. One way to understand them is that the first points to the nature of mind, the second to the essence of practice, and the third to how to live the practice. That is a lot of heavy lifting for three short lines. A vibrant English translation that does not rely on technical language is not easy. The translation I made is not meant to be a literal rendering, but one that evokes the pointing-out experience in the reader:

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.
There! Now let it unfold.

A more literal translation of the same lines might read:

Recognize your own nature right now.
Cut down to one right now.
Cleave to trust in release right now.

At that time, hardly anybody was thinking about computerized translation of Tibetan texts. Then ChatGPT came along. A short time later, Google threw its hat into the ring with Bard. In March of this year, a friend asked ChatGPT if it was familiar with Classical Tibetan. Ever helpful, the GPT-4 version replied that it was and then began to extol its own abilities:

With the release of GPT-4, AI-powered translation has reached new heights. The large language model has been trained on an extensive dataset, including numerous classical texts in Tibetan, making it capable of understanding and translating the language with remarkable accuracy.

It went on to describe the supposed benefits of its translations: improved accuracy, faster results, and contextual understanding. As a test, my friend then asked for a translation of Garab Dorje’s text. Here is the result:

I am walking on the top.
Breaking on the first step.
Bound on the top of the pole.

Two months later, he repeated the request with this result:

In my own hands, I spread.
One after another, I count.
In the hands of liberation, I am cut off.

True creativity depends on more than randomized choices.

In order to avoid repetition in its responses, ChatGPT makes random choices from a small set of selected words. This random element means it will return different translations each time a text is submitted. The results can vary considerably, more than most human translations would. Unlike humans, the chatbot does not learn anything from these repeated attempts. It has no memory, and as it says of itself:

As an AI language model, I am unable to learn from individual conversations in real-time. My training and knowledge are based on the dataset I was last trained on, which has a cutoff date in September 2021. This means that I cannot adapt or improve my translations based on this conversation or any other interactions.

Google’s newly updated Bard provides the following rendering, which isn’t much better:

I offer myself.
I tie myself to a single thread.
I release myself to freedom.

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to translate the Tibetan text in the style of Ken McLeod:

I am wondering, what is this?
A thought arises, what is that?
A feeling arises, what is it?
I look closely, and it dissolves.

This response reveals that the AI machines based on LLM (large language models) make guesses that are more emulations than translations per se.

Garab Dorje’s Three Lines may not be a fair test, as this text is enigmatic—even in the Tibetan. What about some pith instructions that are in clear and straightforward Tibetan? For this, I turned to Niguma, another Indian mystic. Here is a translation of two verses from Like an Illusion by Nicole Riggs:

Whirling in the ocean of samsara
Are the myriad thoughts of love and hate.
Once you know they have no nature,
Then everywhere is the land of gold, my child.

If on all things, like an illusion,
One meditates, like an illusion,
True Buddhahood, like an illusion,
Will come to pass, due to devotion.

In The Magic of Vajrayana, I translated the same two verses this way:

Like and dislike are the mind’s disease,
Certain to drown you in samsara’s seas.
Know that there is nothing here at all,
And then, my child, everything is gold.

Experience arises like magic.
If you practice like magic
You awaken like magic
Through the power of faith.

ChatGPT’s translation was:

Circling the center of the ocean,
This gathering of the six kinds of suffering,
Without any true existence, I contemplate.
All-pervading golden realm, may it be so.

As for the phenomena of cyclic existence,
Meditate on them as illusory,
Manifesting as the enlightened ones,
May they arise from the power of devotion and aspiration.

Then I asked it to translate the same two verses in the style of Bob Dylan. The first two attempts were a bit bizarre. On its third attempt, ChatGPT came up with:

In the cycle of the ocean’s vast embrace,
A world of chaos, doubt, and tangled grace,
No self to find, I contemplate the scene,
A golden realm, where all things intertwine.

The teachings of illusion that we see,
In depths of dreams, we practice, wander free,
Enlightened through illusion, we arise,
With humble hearts, compassion fills the skies.

When I asked it to translate Niguma’s verses in my own style, it came up with lofty gibberish that had little, if anything, to do with the text. I was crushed! For a moment, I wondered if I should redo my translation. No, I decided. I translate for human beings, not machines.

Google’s Bard made a good effort in the first verse and then went completely off the rails:

The round of samsara, which is marked by birth, old age, sickness, and death,
Is a dream-like illusion that has no inherent existence.
When this is realized, all is empty.

Through the practice of the Dharma of Amitabha Buddha,
If one recites his name with devotion,
One will be born in his Pure Land,
And be freed from the cycle of birth and death.

Translations, even human translators, vary considerably. Even so, when it comes to translation, these bots are unreliable and unpredictable. They have been trained on texts that have already been translated, and they emulate the models they have been fed. The randomizing element can lead them in a direction that has nothing to do with the subject matter at hand, and there is no mechanism to bring them back.

This little experiment, when combined with what else I have learned about these large language models, leads me to the following tentative conclusions: First, accuracy depends on the quantity and quality of the data on which it has been trained. Second, these machines will inevitably perpetuate the word choices and styles of the past, as well as established preferences, perspectives, and assumptions. And third, given the rate at which these machines are evolving in other areas, I expect readable anodyne translations to arrive sooner rather than later.

However, I wouldn’t look for any true creativity or insights here. True creativity depends on more than randomized choices, while insights require an awareness that can express directly what is experienced, not regurgitate what has been assimilated.

My own approach to translation is to evoke in the reader direct insights and feelings that are similar or comparable to those that readers of the original might have experienced. To make this possible, the English needs to engage the reader on its own merits. If the reader feels that he or she is reading a translation, I have failed.

To prevent the reader from being caught up in thinking about the meaning, the English must read almost like poetry, evoking the meaning directly. Wherever possible, I use words that can be traced back to Old and Middle English. They almost always have more power and energy than the philosophical or scholastic forms that are often used.

In translating pith instructions such as the examples here, I keep the grammar simple and direct. When I am successful, tears come to the reader’s eyes, he or she slips into the experience being described, and flashes of insight arise on their own—exactly what happens when one reads such instructions in the original Tibetan.

Given how these AI engines operate, they necessarily tend to provide translations that are, if they make any sense at all, barely reworded clichés. It is a truism that every cliché contains a kernel of truth. That kernel may lead people to feel that the AI engine actually understands the text. A little further digging quickly elicits randomized responses that lack depth, insight, or relevance. These engines have no way to step out of the consensus of meaning they have acquired from the data they have been fed. They cannot touch the meaning of the text itself.

Do these engines change the game for Tibetan translation? Not yet. For the time being, if you want translations that are accurate, sing, evoke meaning, and leave you stopped in your tracks, better to look elsewhere.

The post A Game Changer for Classical Tibetan Translation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For the past forty years, Ken McLeod has worked as a translator of Tibetan texts and practices. With his new book, The Magic of Vajrayana, McLeod takes a more personal approach, drawing from his own experience to provide readers with a taste of Vajrayana rituals. Through practice instructions, evocative vignettes, and stories from his own life, McLeod offers a practical introduction to many of the rituals that may seem obscure to contemporary Western practitioners, including protector practice and guru yoga.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with McLeod to discuss how rituals can take us to the edge of the unknown, what we risk when we ignore the presence of gods, and how Vajrayana helps us uncover the clear, empty knowing that is always present in experience. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

What is Vajrayana, and what is a vajra? Vajra is the name of a weapon. It is the thunderbolt associated with the Vedic rain god Indra. The story behind it is that at one point, a pernicious titan, who was deeply protected by magic, had overthrown Indra. Indra called upon the other gods to help him defeat the titan. The gods saw that because of the magical protection, the only way that they could do so was to come up with a totally new weapon. They prevailed upon a sage, who had been born a sage for seven lives in a row, to give up his life so that they could use his bones to make the weapon. The sage, understanding the situation, agreed. The gods fashioned a vajra from his bones. With the vajra, Indra was able to destroy the titan and bring order back into the world.

Now, this thunderbolt crops up all over the place. It’s virtually the same thunderbolt that Zeus, the Greek god of thunder, holds. Its property is that when deployed as a weapon, it destroys whatever it is thrown at and returns to the hand of the owner unchanged. As such, it is a very suitable metaphor for the clear, empty knowing that is at the heart of all Buddhist practice: when you touch that clear, empty knowing, all afflictions, reactive patterns, and confusions are dispelled, and nothing changes that clear, empty knowing.

The term yana can be translated either as vehicle or as path. It is something that takes you from one place to another. So Vajrayana is the path or the vehicle of clear, empty knowing. Another word that is often used here is tantra, which is also an implicit metaphor. In weaving, tantra means a thread that runs continuously through the cloth and goes back and forth as it is woven. You could translate it as continuity, I suppose. This clear, empty knowing is present in every experience in our lives. We aren’t always aware of it or don’t always touch it, but it’s always there. And so the word tantra means the path of that clear, empty knowing which is always present in experience.

So how does Vajrayana practice create the conditions for the shift into this clear, empty knowing? Well, that clear, empty knowing is always present, and most people have touched into it at points in their lives. These moments are usually fleeting or very temporary, and often we don’t recognize them as such. Athletes, when they are exerting themselves very strongly, sometimes have the experience of moving into a kind of timeless awareness which they call the “zone,” where they’re able to do extraordinary things because it seems like time has slowed down or even stopped. Sometimes people confronted with an accident are able to move into that space. When someone close to us has experienced a tragedy and we’re just with them, we might have the experience of being with that person not as one, but not as two either.

In that clear, empty knowing, the separation that we ordinarily experience between subject and object is no longer there. You’re just present in—and you might even say you are—the world you experience. Vajrayana creates the conditions in which we can move into that kind of relationship with the world. In fact, the Vajrayana tradition is known for having many different methods for precipitating, eliciting, stabilizing, or uncovering that clear, empty knowing.

You say that in practicing Vajrayana, you may have to sacrifice a part or all of your life to practice. What do you mean by that? What are we giving up? If we look at the life of the Buddha, he grew up as a prince in a kingdom. He encountered old age, illness, and death, which shocked him to his core, and he also encountered a sadhu, a religious mendicant, who seemed to be at peace. To the young man, he couldn’t imagine how you can be at peace in a world shaped by old age, illness, and death. That puzzle so puzzled him that he left his wife and child and his royal position and embarked on a spiritual quest. That was a sacrifice. And that question, I think, is the heart of Buddhism: How do we live at peace in a world or in a life shaped by old age, illness, and death? It’s actually a nontrivial question. I know people who have sacrificed their family or their children or other things very dear to them for material gains.

Whatever we pursue, we’re going to give up something. And I think we need to take very careful stock of what we really want in our lives and what we are prepared to give up to pursue it. Those are very important decisions. For whatever reason, and I don’t have an answer to this, something called to me about spiritual practice or mystical practice. I encountered, as many people do, very, very considerable difficulties in it. And I don’t regret it. Because in a small way, I feel I’ve come to understand how to be at peace in life shaped by old age, illness, and death.

You also write about the importance of submission in Vajrayana practice, which you define as living practice in whatever life brings to you. Can you say more about the power of submission? I think it is when we submit to what our life actually is rather than always striving for it to be something different that we come to understand something very profound about the human condition. [When I became sick,] I was forced to accept that: “OK, this is my life. I have this illness, I have this imbalance, I have these problems, and they’re probably never going to go away. What do I do with that?”

I think one of the most important things, at least for me, that this leads to is a humility—you don’t control your life. I don’t take anything in my life for granted anymore. If good fortune comes, I’m grateful for it, but I don’t take it as something that is my due. And if difficulty and pain come, then, well, that is what my life consists of. How can I be in that experience completely? Because it is only by being in such experiences completely that we can find the clear, empty knowing that I referred to earlier. It is our resistance to what is arising in our experience that prevents us from knowing that clear, empty knowing.

The post “You Don’t Control Your Life” appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The way we struggle is self-perpetuating and it is difficult to change. Hence samsara, the Sanskrit word for cycle.

The aim of Buddhist practice is to break that cycle, to end that struggle. That is nirvana.

Nirvana is how we experience life when we know what we are. This knowing is not an ordinary knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing. It is a qualitatively different kind of knowing, a direct knowing not mediated by the conceptual mind. In that knowing, we are not presented with a sense of self that perceives a world out there. Instead, knowing and experience arise without separation. We are what arises in experience, all of it. In particular, in this knowing, there is no one thing that makes us what we are. And there is no “other.”

♦ 

Excerpted from Ken McLeod’s article “Reflections on a Changing World.”

The post What is Nirvana? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In last month’s post, I wrote:

“Spiritual practice acts like a mirror, and sooner or later, you find yourself looking in that mirror. For me, the only question that counts at that point is ‘Do I work with what I see, or do I turn away?’” 

One person tweeted, “How do you work with what you see in the mirror?” 

Before I start to answer this question, I want to be clear that my wording wasn’t the best. I did not mean that you necessarily work explicitly with the stuff you see. I meant that you do not turn away from practice, no matter what you see in the mirror. 

In spiritual practice in general, and in mystical practice in particular, the view that you should always be working on something explicitly may reinforce the felt sense that you are separate from what arises in experience. I have often criticized the use of the word observe in the context of meditation for this same reason. 

As for what to do or not do, here are three points that have been important to me.

1. Hacking doesn’t work

Practice throws up all kinds of stuff. The stuff that comes up is usually the result of patterns that have been operating for a long time. A common mistake is to think you can do something about this stuff right away—a mind hack as some people say. That approach is deeply problematic. If you don’t have a sufficient base of attention, you end up playing whack-a-mole with your mind. You might be able to change how stuff arises for a short period of time, but usually that effort masks a subtle or explicit repression. The effort doesn’t change the underlying patterns. When the patterns throw up stuff again, you are usually in worse shape than you were before, and you will also be discouraged. In other words, this approach reinforces a sense of “I” and an illusion of control, and it undermines your efforts. 

Related: Releasing emotional reactions

The irony is that when you look in the mirror of practice and see that stuff, something has already begun to change in you. The best thing to do at this point is to keep going, stabilizing the base of attention until you can experience what you see without checking out or being consumed by it. I learned this from my own teacher. For a long time his response to everything I took to him from my meditation practice was, “Not good, not bad. Keep going.” I learned that flashes of insight or understanding were not that meaningful and that practice was about something subtler and deeper.

2. Let practice work on you

Work at a practice quietly and consistently. Small, regular efforts over a long period of time are more effective than short sprints. This point I learned the hard way—after two three-year retreats. Seriously out of balance emotionally and energetically, I could do very little in terms of practice. Taking and sending (Tib. tonglen) was the only practice that didn’t compound the imbalances. Even that I could do for only a short time each day. I also learned some energy balancing techniques, but problems developed if I did more than 1/3 the usual amount. So that’s what I did for twenty years—small consistent efforts. I had to let go of any idea of making progress. That letting go made it possible for the practice to work on me. 

Faith doesn’t come through believing. Faith is a form of knowing and it comes through doing.

To practice this way means that you have to have faith—in yourself, in practice, and in your teachers. Faith doesn’t come through believing. Faith is a form of knowing and it comes through doing. You come to have faith in yourself when you work through difficulties. You come to have faith in practice when you notice that how you experience and act in your life has changed, without you making explicit efforts to do so. You come to have faith in your teachers as your own practice and understanding deepens.

3. Don’t be concerned with results.

As Chekawa wrote in Mind Training in Seven Points, “Forget about results.” Just do the practice. Practice is about training skills and building capacity. When your skills have been refined through practice and when you are able to rest in attention at a high enough level, you experience stuff not as something that you have to do something about, but as movement in mind. It arises and it is experienced. It isn’t something “other.” It doesn’t take you over and you don’t have to do anything with it. In fact, if it feels like anything, it feels like you do nothing at all. You don’t react. You don’t fall into confusion. Something comes and goes. That’s all. 

Find a practice that speaks to you. Learn it thoroughly. Do it consistently, so much so that it becomes part of you. When stuff comes up, don’t turn away and don’t try to make the stuff go away. Instead, learn to experience it without falling out of awareness. Over time, things change. What was once incomprehensible becomes clear. What was once impossible happens on its own.

♦

This article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter.

The post The Mirror of Practice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We have entered a period of turmoil in human affairs. It has happened many times before, but changes of this magnitude usually happen only once in a person’s lifetime. Thus, it is almost always like nothing any of us have ever experienced. It typically lasts 10 to 15 years. A new order eventually emerges, but often only after a period of authoritarian, if not totalitarian, rule. Whether that new order emerges peacefully or through revolution or civil war is hard to say because many factors are in play and their interactions are impossibly complex. What that new order will look like and how much of it I will live to see, I do not know.

So many things are changing so deeply that I and more than a few people I know are at a loss to understand exactly what is happening and why. Some of the factors on my mind:

• The pandemic, with all its inconveniences large and small, and more importantly, the constant sense of danger despite the vaccines and the very real loss of family, friends, and colleagues who have succumbed to this persistent yet unpredictable disease.
• Pollution, the results of which now include not only the steady poisoning of our environment but also climate change, with changing weather patterns, floods, wildfires, disease, uncertainties in food and water supplies, and other repercussions, many of which we are only beginning to feel.
• War. After almost 80 years of relative peace in Europe, the invasion of Ukraine has become a full-scale war of attrition, Europe is rapidly rearming, and hundreds of millions in Africa and the Middle East are threatened with starvation as life-sustaining fertilizer and grain shipments have been severely disrupted.
• The devastation of existing social, political, and financial orders by technology in general and social media in particular, with whole sections of societies frequently held hostage by a few bullies who all too easily avoid being held to account.
• Seemingly intractable political polarization in this and other countries as more extreme ideologies take hold.
• Unprecedented levels of mass violence in the US, including the repeated slaughter of children in their own schools.
• Increasing turmoil as corporate, financial, educational, medical, judicial, scientific, and government institutions at all levels struggle to maintain cohesion and remain viable as they seek to come to terms with this chaotic world.
• Unprecedented levels of burnout and exhaustion in professionals in virtually every arena as they face increasingly burdensome oversight and increasingly demanding clients in their efforts to provide financial, legal, medical, therapeutic, or other forms of service and guidance.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of what is happening and why, I have found these four sources particularly helpful (among many others):

• Ray Dalio’s The Principles of Dealing with the Changing World Order (a video synopsis may be found here)
• Peter Zeihan’s demographic and strategic analyses (many videos, but this one is representative
• Jonathan Haidt’s books and articles, which provide thoughtful analyses of the sociological and psychological factors that have contributed to this state of affairs, and
• Brad Gregory’s Rebel in the Ranks, a detailed history of the Reformation and its aftermath, what it bequeathed to the world, and its ramifications (up to 2017, when the book was written).

These sources have not brought me peace of mind, exactly, but they have given me ways to place the problems I noted above in a bigger, perhaps more coherent, picture. 

What does any of this have to do with Buddhist practice? 

The short answer is not much. The current turmoil in the world belongs to the realm of human affairs, the playing out of cycles that span decades, if not centuries, cycles that are affected and sometimes disrupted by the unpredictable effects of new technologies on the functioning of human society and the dynamics of the planet on which we live.

The world of human affairs is the world of human affairs. It is not samsara. Nor is it nirvana.

Samsara and nirvana do not refer to situations in the world. They are ways that we experience life. This distinction is important to understand and remember.

Samsara is how we experience life when we do not know what we are. In that unknowing, we take the way life presents itself to us as real—a world out there and a sense of a self in here that perceives the world out there. Clouded by confusion about the nature of experience and what we are and clouded by patterns of reaction to what we experience, we struggle. Unfortunately, the way we struggle is self-perpetuating and it is difficult to change. Hence samsara, the Sanskrit word for cycle.

The aim of Buddhist practice is to break that cycle, to end that struggle. That is nirvana.

Nirvana is how we experience life when we do know what we are. This knowing is not an ordinary knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing. It is a qualitatively different kind of knowing, a direct knowing not mediated by the conceptual mind. In that knowing, we are not presented with a sense of self that perceives a world out there. Instead, knowing and experience arise without separation. We are what arises in experience, all of it. In particular, in this knowing, there is no one thing that makes us what we are. And there is no “other.”

The purpose of Buddhist practice is to develop the skills and capacities that make it possible to develop, uncover, fall into, or be visited by this knowing.

Hence the instruction from countless mystics, from Ajahn Chah to Rumi, from Niguma to Julian of Norwich, from Chuang Tzu to Black Elk, to open and listen to everything that arises in experience. It is all we have and all we ever will have. Through practice we find a way of being with all that we experience, a way in which we don’t react to any part of it and, in doing so, we no longer inflict on others our inability to know and experience what arises in our lives.

Why is there so much Buddhist teaching on practice in difficult times? 

It isn’t to help us resolve the difficult times. That is almost always beyond our power. Personally, I think it is because difficult times bring out deeper levels of reactivity and confusion, levels that in turn place greater demands on our practice. In meeting those demands, we have to move to deeper levels of understanding, insight, clarity, compassion, and peace. When we are able to meet difficult situations and not fall into reaction, struggle and suffering end. That is the purpose of all the practices we do—speaking from the Tibetan tradition, from basic attention to compassion, emptiness, and awakening mind to deity and energy practice to mahamudra and dzogchen.

If you are making this journey, that is what you are called to do.

Yet more than a few people who know little or nothing of spiritual practice per se also speak to the importance of deeper or higher levels of knowing. Two such are Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

From Solzhenitsyn: 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. 

Through my own practice, I also came to understand that good and evil do not exist out there. Evil, whatever form it takes, is the result of deliberate ignoring. Good is the result of giving attention. The dividing line is in me. If I can meet what arises without reacting to it, then, again in Buddhist terminology, the five aspects of timeless awareness come into play—seeing clearly, appreciating differences, sensing balance and imbalance, doing what needs to be done, and being in all of that in direct knowing. In particular, others do not arise as “other.” They arise as human beings like me. If I do fall into reaction, however, something in me shuts down. I ignore or disregard some aspect of experience, imbalances arise, and problems ensue, in me and in the world around me. I lose touch with my own humanity and visit that loss on others. This, for me, is the essence of evil, the ignoring of another person’s humanity, the relegation of another human being to the category of “other.”

Arendt, in her essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” writes:

The total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds.

Spiritual practice acts like a mirror, and sooner or later, you find yourself looking in that mirror. For me, the only question that counts at that point is, “Do I work with what I see, or do I turn away?” Why, I cannot say, but I have repeatedly chosen and continue to choose to work with what I see. For this, I feel deeply grateful, though to whom or what I cannot say. 

It has not been easy, but the alternative always seems to be worse. In this process, I have to question not only myself, but everything that I think I know or understand. I think this is what Arendt is pointing to. The qualities that develop in us from questioning ourselves deeply are precisely the qualities that make it difficult for us to accept things at face value or how they are presented to us by an arbitrary authority. The same qualities may make it possible for us to exercise personal responsibility even when it means that we may pay for it with our welfare, our well-being, or even our lives.

Both these people had deep experience with authoritarian regimes. Given where we may be heading, I think it is worth paying attention to what they have to say. We may not be able to affect the course of human affairs, but at least we can live and die knowing that we did not let such authoritarianism, in all its different guises, infect us with its ideology and strip us of our humanity. We all have to die at some time. Some ways of dying are worse than others.

The post Reflections on a Changing World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In music, tone is everything. A friend of mine studies shakuhachi, the Japanese flute. His teacher focuses almost exclusively on tone, for when the tone is true, the music is alive. Technical brilliance by itself may be impressive, but if the tone isn’t true, the music does not resonate, and those who listen soon become bored or restless.

The same holds true for meditation. There is a quality in attention, and when you hit it, your practice is alive and awake, and thinking and dullness drop away on their own.

As in musical training, it is often helpful to practice simple basic exercises to develop stability, clarity, and flexibility. One that I have found helpful is the one-breath meditation. This is good to do any time, but it is particularly helpful when you are feeling very agitated or very dull.

Related: Working and Playing with the Breath, a Dharma Talk by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Don’t try to hold your attention on the breath. In the case of agitation, you will inevitably end up suppressing material, and you will become more agitated.  In the case of dullness, you’ll keep falling into deeper and deeper torpor or even sleep.

Instead, breathe out just once. You are always able to have clear stable attention for one breath, so breathe out, gently and steadily without strain. At the natural end of the exhalation, stop. Let your body breathe however it wants to. Look around for a moment or two. If you wish, adjust your posture and move your body a little. And then breathe out again.

Just one breath. And stop. Do this over and over again.

After a few such one-breath meditations, you may find that a certain quality has developed in your attention, a stable clarity. It may be subtle. It may be fragile. But it’s there. You can’t make it happen. You can’t hold onto it. But it comes when you breathe out.

When you can touch that stable clarity consistently, do a two-breath meditation. Breathe out, breathe in, and then breathe out again. Then stop, look around, relax, move a little if you wish, as before. If that clarity was present throughout the two-breath meditation, good. Do it again. If not, continue with one-breath meditations.

When you feel ready, you can lengthen to three-breath meditations, or more.

You may think the point here is to build up your ability to rest in that awareness for longer and longer periods. You can take that approach if you want, but in doing so, you run the risk of falling back into a pattern of achievement, and that will cause problems down the line.

Related: Breathe Deep

Practically speaking, on any given day, you will probably reach a point where that stable clarity no longer arises. Okay, you’ve run out of juice.  That’s a good time to move to another practice or end your meditation period. No point in beating a dead horse, as they say. When you return to practice the next day, you will naturally pick up where you left off, fresh and rested.

In my experience, the important point is that you actually taste that clarity, just as the musician tastes what it’s like to blow a clear clean note that is true and awake. There is a body experience and a body memory in that single note practice, and the same holds true in meditation. When you hit that stable clear attention, mind and body both relax and are in tune, so to speak. And the more you touch into it, the more your mind and body become attuned to it. In this way, one-breath meditations can be more helpful than long periods of motionless sitting.

This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the Unfettered Mind newsletter. It was originally published on Tricycle’s website on March 5, 2019.

The post One-Breath Meditation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When a society is orderly, a fool alone cannot disturb it; when a society is chaotic, a sage alone cannot bring it to order.
—The Book of Leadership and Strategy

Where we are
As I write this, over 500,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. Although vaccines now offer a light at the end of the tunnel, millions of people in this country are still facing uncertainty, isolation, and hardship—some through mistaken beliefs, some through personal choices, many through the force of circumstances beyond their control.

Even with a new administration in office, ideological, political, and economic forces continue to shred the fabric of our society. When these factors are combined with the challenges of widespread pollution and its effect on the planet’s climate, we have at best a temporary respite from the troubles of our times.

What to do?
For me, the answer to this question is hard to put into words, but it seems to have something to do with fulfilling a responsibility, a responsibility that comes out of my training in the bodhisattva path. This path has always resonated with me and it has provided me with guidance and direction in some very difficult situations.

Mahayana Buddhism talks about the two aims: the aim for oneself and the aim for others. The aim for oneself is to clean up one’s own mess. It is to find a way to end our own struggles with life, not by creating an ideal world, but by finding a way to live at peace in and with the human condition. In Buddhism, this aim is realized principally through seeing through life’s illusions and knowing the groundlessness of experience.

The aim for others is the expression of that understanding through how we live, an expression that sees the humanity in each and every person, is courteous and respectful towards them, treats with them justly, and appreciates them for who they are—in short, the social expressions of the four immeasurables: equanimity, loving kindness, compassion and joy.

In the current uncertainty, I put my attention and energy into living the best way that I know. I find that through the practice of taking and sending or tonglen, as it is called in Tibetan. This practice gives me both a way to address my own garbage and a method to cultivate the qualities that make it possible to help others.

Taking and sending is not a complicated practice. It can be applied to everything we experience, and its applications are broad and profound.

The crux of taking and sending is that you use the coming and going of your breath to exchange the good you experience in your life for the struggles that others experience in theirs. On the in-breath, you take in all the ills of the world, all the evil, all the pain, all the injustice, in the form of thick black smoke. On the out-breath, you send out everything that is good in your life in the form of silvery moonlight. You give it to everyone who struggles in life, and you feel that each of them can now rest in peace and joy, free from struggle. You make this exchange again and again, synchronizing it with your breath.

The following instructions are taken from Mind Training in Seven Points, the mind-training text that I know best. Written in Tibet in the 12^th century by the Kadampa master Chekawa Yeshe Dorje, it is a comprehensive training manual that summarizes this practice in 59 pithy instructions. 

Use one practice for everything.

Whether I am happy or sad, ill or well, having a miserable time or enjoying life to its fullest, I can practice taking and sending. When I was ill during a three-year retreat, the only practice I could do was taking and sending, and I forged a solid relationship with it. It led me to my first significant experiential understanding of what Buddhist practice is actually about—the end of struggle.

Three objects, three poisons, three seeds of virtue.

Three objects—what I like, what I don’t like, what I don’t care about. Three poisons—attraction, aversion, indifference. Three seeds of virtue? I use my own emotional reactions to generate goodness. When I want something, I take in the longing and yearning of others and send them whatever I have. When I dislike something, I take in the anger and aversion of others and send them my peace and joy. When I don’t care about something, I take in the dullness and obliviousness of others and send them clarity and energy.

Whatever my reactions are—attraction, aversion, indifference—taking and sending gives me a way to relate to them without being consumed by them and without dumping them on others.

Even though my life is relatively peaceful right now, I am quite aware that I am still affected by the pandemic, the political turmoil, and uncertainty and confusion and keep this next instruction in mind.

Make adversity the path of awakening.

I meet what is happening, no matter how unpleasant, how intimidating, how overwhelming it may be. Millions of people in this country are struggling more than I am with illness and death. They struggle with unwanted connections and unwanted separations, financial uncertainty, and fear and isolation. They struggle with threats to their well-being, their families, their jobs, and their homes. I don’t try to avoid, suppress, or ignore the pain, difficulty, unfairness, inequity, and heartbreak. I take it all in and feel it in my heart. It hurts, but I don’t try to change the hurt. I just feel it. Then I send out my good health, my well-being, my home and garden, the food I eat, my ability to understand what I read, the joy I take in music and in walks. I give away everything that I enjoy and value in life and imagine that it brings peace, happiness, understanding, and strength to every person.

Train on everyone, without preference.

I do this with everyone—no favorites, no preferences, no prejudices. I take joy in taking in everyone’s struggles and sending my peace, well-being, and joy into their lives. It’s an imagined exchange, but it sets something in motion. Parts of me are not happy with this exchange and that leads to another instruction.

Work with whatever you encounter.

Whatever arises—anxiety about what is going on in the world; anger at the shortcomings of leadership and lack of effective action; despair at the proliferation of conspiracy theories and their adoption by significant sections of the population; disgust with those who feel they have the right to impose their utopian ideals on others and those who feel they have the right to tell others how they should think, feel, and live; uncertainty as to how all this is going to play out; attachment to my home and means of support—I open to all of it and I take in the same feelings from others, freeing them from their struggles. In return, I send them the quiet, comfort, peace and support that I do enjoy in my life. 

But then it gets a bit more difficult. Anger at dishonest leadership and ineffective action leads me to take in the mindsets of those responsible, those who seem to be capable of doing nothing to alleviate the problems of millions when they have the power and means to do so. I find that taking that mindset into me is harder than taking in illness and fear. I feel the hardness and the cold in me, and wonder what it is like to live that way. When I do take it in, when I actually feel what it might be like to have that coldness of character, I touch into times in my life when I have ignored or turned away from situations when I could have been more understanding, could have been kinder, or could have done something to help. 

Similar resonances come up when I take in the mindsets of those who buy into conspiracy theories or problematic ideologies. With people who see the world differently from me, it’s all too easy to slide into “I’m right and they’re wrong.” Instead, as much as possible, I take in their feelings of being left behind, unwanted, unvalued, and their difficulties in not knowing who or what to trust. I take in what it must be like to live in a world that has changed beyond recognition, a world that has rendered meaningless much that gave meaning to their lives, a world that has squashed them at every turn, a world that does not support a life they deem worth living.

Having lived outside or at the margins of society for significant portions of my life, I know these feelings and I know the pain and alienation behind them. In exchange, I send what was one of the harder lessons for me, the simple gesture of taking joy in others’ goodness, abilities, and accomplishments.

I’ve come to see that when I dwell on the arrogance and righteous anger of those who would tell me how I should think and feel, I’m essentially looking into a mirror and seeing a reflection of myself. I then do taking and sending with the reflection in the mirror, no matter how distasteful or disgusting I find it. As I recognize that I have my own ideas about how others should think and live, I remember the disappointments I still feel when the world does not meet the expectations I had as a child, for fairness, kindness, justice, and encouragement. Then my anger and disgust dissolve, and I understand their yearnings for the world to be a better place, and I can take in their pain.

It’s all very well to say that all this is fuel for taking and sending, but when I really touch these sentiments and feel them in myself, it forces me to face my own capacity to be cruel, to hurt others, or to do evil. While I can sit here now and send out peace and freedom, giving away what I have learned through practice, I still have to face the fact that, in different circumstances, I could have been like the people with whom I’m angry or disgusted. 

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.

My own capacity for evil is a truth that I have to face squarely. When I see it and acknowledge it, practice becomes real. It becomes a matter of life and death. Only then do I appreciate how attention, compassion, and faith really are the three doors to freedom.

Learn to meet three challenges.

This is the heart of the practice—to listen to what is arising in me, to meet it, and to keep meeting it until it lets go on its own. One of the most important practice principles I’ve learned is that I don’t control my reactions. I can only meet them, feel them, and experience them to the best of my ability. They let go when they are ready to let go. I don’t call the shots.

Give up any hope for results.

If I hold even the slightest hope that they will release, my preoccupation with how I want to feel ensures that they remain in place.

Rest in the basis of all experience.

To rest in what arises, to rest without distraction, to rest without controlling, to rest without trying to do anything, this is one path to the groundlessness of being, to mind nature in traditional vocabulary. To do that, however, I have to have the skill and capacity to experience anything and everything that arises and I have to be willing to do so without any thought of personal gain or benefit. Only then can I know that I am nothing and that, because I am nothing, anything is possible.

Sometimes I suspect that Chekawa, the author of Mind Training in Seven Points, had a wry sense of humor. His last instruction is a kicker:

Don’t expect thanks.

For me, this is where I come back to the sense of responsibility I mentioned earlier. In many respects, practice is about cleaning up my own mess, and I can hardly expect to be thanked for that.

As for others, we are not always aware of the ways that we help them. Mind nature, empty, clear, and free is like a quiet room filled with light, with an unrestricted view. Whenever I come into or sit in such a room, it evokes something similar in me, a peace, a clarity, a sense of freedom, easing if only for a moment whatever may be bothering me at the time. To help others, maybe it’s enough to be that room.

The post Taking and Sending in Difficult Times appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The right question opens a treasury of teaching.

The Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana text written between the 2nd and 5th centuries, begins as Subhuti, a disciple of the Buddha’s, asks his teacher, “How does a bodhisattva stand? How does a bodhisattva walk? How does a bodhisattva quiet the mind?” Subhuti asks these questions because he was stunned by the naturalness with which the Buddha came in, arranged his robes, and sat down after returning from his begging rounds. In their exchange, the Buddha leads Subhuti into the experience of emptiness. The Heart Sutra begins in a similar way, when the Buddha’s disciple Shariputra asks Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, how a person trains in the perfection of wisdom. Shariputra is moved to do so because the Buddha nudges him energetically while Avalokiteshvara is right in the experience of the perfection of wisdom.

Questions, whether from student to teacher or teacher to student, are an integral part of Buddhist practice. Yet most of us have limited opportunities to meet with our teachers and ask our questions. How, then, do we make the best use of those opportunities? Here are a few ideas I’ve found helpful.

Keep it simple. Ask about experience, not theory, philosophy, or what something means. Ask about challenges you are facing in your practice, insights you have experienced, or questions you are not able to resolve.

Go to the edge. Go to the edge of your practice, where you step into what you do not know. It may be where your conceptual mind reaches its limits and you fall into confusion or where you begin to lose attention and fall into reaction. If you know how to go empty, let your question come from there. If you don’t know how to do that, then stand in your reaction and confusion, take a breath, and speak from that place. The questions you ask from the edge of your practice will tell your teacher exactly where you are and invite him or her to meet you there.

Cut to the chase. Spiritual practice is about your experience right now and how it arises. You do not need to give any background about yourself or the sequence of understandings that led you to your question. If your teacher needs background or history, he or she will ask you for it.

Be succinct. Say what is true for you, no more, no less. It’s a good exercise to boil your question down to the point at which you can ask it in 25 words or less.

Ask the question behind the question. It’s good to do a bit of homework. When there is a question you want to ask, bring the question with full attention. Don’t analyze it. Let the question permeate your whole being, body, heart, and mind. Is there a question that is impelling this question? If so, that’s the question to bring to your teacher.

Ask about now, not then. Don’t ask about what might happen or how things might be. At best, you are looking for reassurance. No one knows—not you, not your teacher—where practice will eventually bring you. Let your questions come from what and how you experience right now.

Don’t try to impress your teacher or prove yourself. Intellectual, clever, or convoluted questions come from trying to avoid something, whether you are aware of it or not. Your teacher will see through them immediately. As they say in Zen, “I spare you 30 blows.” This is not a compliment.

Your teacher is not your therapist. Your teacher is not there to heal your old wounds. That may happen in spiritual practice, but it is not the aim or purpose.

Or your consultant. Your teacher is not there to solve problems. If anything, he or she is there to create problems that you as you are now cannot solve.

Or your friend. Despite the misleading translation of the Sanskrit and Tibetan term kalyanamitra as “spiritual friend,” your teacher is not a friend in the ordinary sense. You are not there to hang out or be supported or share ideas. You are there to learn what you do not know, and you can only do so by going to a place where you do not know.

Don’t be intimidated. When you are actually with your teacher, your questions may suddenly seem unimportant or even silly. If you have done your homework and they come from your heart, ask them anyway.

Your teacher may not answer the questions you ask. Your questions themselves reveal where you are in your practice. Your teacher may respond by asking you questions based on what your questions have revealed. Answer them as best you can. Your teacher’s questions are intended to lead you deeper into how experience arises for you.

Stay in the dance. A meeting with a teacher is a dance, each of you respond- ing to what the other has just said or asked. You can’t rehearse it. You can’t go back and repeat a step. You can only be in what is happening right now.

In this dance, the basic instructions for Mahamudra (emptiness) practice apply: Stay in the dance (no distraction). Don’t try to lead (no control). It’s not a rehearsal (no practice).

This is the kind of meeting the French philosopher Pierre Hadot pointed to when he said that learning only takes place during in-person interaction. It is only there that both teacher and student step out of their respective worlds and meet. In the Buddhist context, teacher and student meet when both go empty. In that emptiness, you go beyond question, and the doors to understanding open.

The post Beyond Question appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What makes a translation work? For poetry and for practice-related texts—pointing-out instructions, oral pith instructions, songs of mystical insight, and even certain sutras—what makes a translation work is the effect it has on the reader. Ideally, when I translate a text, the translation elicits an experience in the reader that is at least an echo of what I experience when I read the original.

Garab Dorje’s Three Lines That Hit the Nail on the Head is probably the most famous pointing-out instruction in the Dzogchen tradition. It is a profound and somewhat enigmatic first-century text that has inspired much commentary and instruction. Numerous translations have been made. I have translated it three or four times myself. None of them, I feel, reflects either the power or the poetry of the original. What, I wondered, would happen if I broke a few conventions and really focused on the experiential quality? In this article, I lift up the hood on the translation process and show you a little of how I go about it, what happens, and what it leads to.

For those of you who know Tibetan, the three lines are these:

ངོོ་རང་ཐོོག་ཏུ་སྤྲད༔
ཐག་གཅིིག་ཐོོག་ཏུ་བཅད༔
གདེེང་གྲོོལ་ཐོོག་ཏུ་བཅའ༔

Tibetan is a monosyllabic language. Almost every syllable is a word in its own right. Because the formal written language was developed to express Buddhist thought and practice, it often takes only a few syllables to express profound instructions and insights. Yet even by Tibetan standards these three lines are extraordinarily dense. They pack a punch in their combination of key technical terms, poetic meter, alliterative emphasis, precise instruction, and experiential impact.

A word-for-word rendering with minimal accommodation to English idiom or grammar might read this way:

Meet your own face directly.
Cut one rope directly.
Go with confidence and release directly.

As they say in business, “Price, quality, service—pick any two.” The same often holds for translation. Literal accuracy, clear meaning, experiential impact—pick any two. In most translations the highest priority is literal accuracy. If the translation conveys the meaning clearly, so much the better. Experiential impact is rarely a consideration. The absence or presence of experiential impact becomes obvious when you read a translation out loud.

From the perspective of literal accuracy, the phrase meet face in the first line is an idiom and is usually rendered in English as “recognize.” “Face” is taken to refer to one’s own mind or mind nature. Thus a typical translation might read “Recognize your own face,” “Recognize your own nature,” or “Recognize mind nature.”

In the second line, Cut a rope is also an idiom. It means “Decide.” Thus we have “Decide on one option.” However, the word “decide” in English is quite a bit weaker than the Tibetan idiom. The Tibetan carries the idea of coming to a decision so deeply that all other options are eliminated. “Conviction” might be one possible rendering, but because one can be convinced about something that is completely wrong, it is not the right word. In an earlier translation, I had tried “Be absolute about one point”—a choice that is accurate in terms of meaning, perhaps, but unattractive in terms of sound and rhythm.

Literal accuracy, clear meaning, experiential impact—pick any two.

Finally, in the third line, the idea is to continue, to keep going, to become familiar with this way of experiencing life. You have recognized your own face or nature. You have decided on the one option. Now you make it part of your life by relying on your confidence in the experience that movements in mind release themselves or let go on their own. The idea of release is often rendered as “liberation,” or “liberate,” but the form of the verb in Tibetan has no agent; there can be no liberator as such. Because an agent is implied by “liberate”— someone or something sets you free—some translations use the term “self-liberate.” It is workable, but I feel that the image is wrong, and with four syllables it is clumsy English. I use the word “release” because, at least in theory, an outer agent is not necessarily implied. A knotted snake unties itself. Thoughts and other movements in mind just let go, seemingly without reason or agent. They vanish as they arise, like drawings on water or snowflakes on a hot stove, when the energy in your attention is at a sufficiently high level. But I am getting ahead of myself a little.

When we choose literal accuracy as our top priority, we usually end up with something like this:

Recognize directly your own nature.
Decide directly on one option.
Continue directly with confidence in release.

This translation has quite a bit going for it. It is clear, to the point, and straightforward. I am being told to take three actions: recognize, decide, and continue. Yet although the translation makes sense, it does not move me. As I think about it, questions arise. What does “recognize directly” mean? It doesn’t sound quite like English. Ditto for “decide directly” and “continue directly.” My own nature— what’s that? One option—what option? Continue with confidence—continue what?

Stumbling blocks are places where the reader starts to think about the words. In writing and in translation, they are problematic, particularly when you are trying to move the reader into a nonconceptual experience.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD.

Now that we have a basic translation, we need to take another look at what we are doing. Is there a way to eliminate these stumbling blocks? Is there a way to make these lines pop with energy? Is there a way to make something happen in the reader? Perhaps we should start with the key ideas—recognize, decide, continue—and see what can be done with those.

Here we run into a peculiarity of English: we have two vocabularies. We have a sophisticated, intellectual, and conceptual vocabulary based on words with Latin roots, most of which came into English after the Norman Conquest. The French invasion did not obliterate the language of the countryside and the streets completely, however. Old English with its Germanic and Norse roots survived, though it first broke up into several regional dialects and then recoalesced into a common tongue. Philosophers, intellectuals, and academics generally gravitate to the Latinate vocabulary because it offers a wide range of precise terminology steeped in classical thought. Poets and writers, however, find that the energy and power of English are in the old language, in words that have Old English, Germanic, or Norse roots.

“Recognize,” “decide,” and “continue” are all Latinate—reconnaître, décider, continuer. They are accurate and precise translations, but they lack power and energy. What to do?

In translation, when I run into difficulty expressing something in English, I go back to the Tibetan and go deeper into the meaning. What does it mean to recognize your own nature, your own mind, your own face? What experience does this refer to? Where in life do we find ourselves committing to one option and eliminating all others? What does it mean to have the confidence that thoughts and emotions release themselves in the groundlessness of experience? And what about this “directly”? What’s going on with that?

“Directly” is the one word that is repeated in each line. The Tibetan is ཐོག་ཏུ (pronounced tok tu). It means “directly” or “immediately.” Again, we run into those vocabulary issues: Both these words are Latinate and both have lots of syllables. They are adverbs, too. You lose power in writing and speaking when you use too many words, too many syllables, or too many adverbs. Here we are translating pointing out instructions, which are pithy, poetic, and punchy. How do we point something out in English and deliver a punch at the same time? We say “There!” We could say “Right there!” for even more emphasis, but in writing, less is usually more. “There!” seems to say everything in one syllable.

We could also ask to what the Tibetan ཐོག་ཏུ refers. It refers to what you are experiencing right at that moment. When you sit with your teacher and follow his or her instructions, when he or she asks you a question and your mind just stops, your teacher might say “There!” or indicate in some other way that you are experiencing what he or she is pointing to. There is a sense of immediacy in the Tibetan. According to the 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its use. If we follow his guidance, “There!” conveys the meaning at least as effectively as “directly.” Let’s try “There!” to translate ཐོག་ཏུ.

Now, what to do with “recognize”? Let’s go back to the actual experience of recognizing. Here it is not recognizing another person, but recognizing something about yourself, about what you are. Consider the situation when someone, a good friend perhaps, or someone you are getting to know, says, “Do you know that you are . . . ?” and she names some quality. It may be a compliment. It may be a criticism. It may be just an observation. At first you don’t see it. What is she referring to? She says it again or gives you an example. You still don’t see how that quality applies to you. And then you do. “Oh! Yes, I am that.” You recognize that quality in you.

That is what is happening here. A teacher, a fellow practitioner, a line in a book or a song, or a question from a student points you to a clear empty knowing that cannot be described in words, a knowing that does not rely on understanding or concept. You are a bit stunned at first; there is absolutely nothing there. But then you see. Underneath all the confusion of conceptual thinking and emotional reaction, underneath all the ideas you have about who and what you are, there is nothing—no self, not a vestige—but there is a clear empty knowing. There! This is what you are.

At this point, we could take a chance. Instead of trying to find another word for “recognize” that conveys that experience, why not go right to the experience? This is what you are. Recognition is implicit here, but that fits well with how the Tibetan original works. In Tibetan, grammar is centered more on what happens rather than who does what. Let’s take this for our first line.

There! This is what you are.

Interesting. Let’s keep going and see where this approach takes us.

The next line falls into place a little more easily. For some time now, I have been comparing mystical practice with musical practice. They are different, of course, but there is a lot of overlap in terms of the calling, the yearning, seeking out guidance, apprenticeship, training, experience, tribulations, struggles, transformation, accomplishment, and acquired skills. Many musicians pursue music at considerable cost to their health and well-being, they ignore or let go of alternative careers, and they may even neglect important relationships. They do so because they have to—nothing else matters. The same holds for mystics. Nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters? That phrase seems to capture the decisiveness of the second line better than “Decide on one point.” “Nothing else matters” conveys more than an intellectual decision. It carries emotional and experiential weight. Nothing else matters! And it does not contain any adverbs or any long words. It is a leap, of course, and it is definitely not a literal translation. However, we are going for clear meaning and experiential impact, not literal accuracy. And, perhaps fortuitously, the act of deciding now becomes implicit in this line, just as the act of recognizing became implicit in the first line. Let’s go with it.

There! Nothing else matters.

TWO DOWN, ONE TO GO.

The last line is the most difficult in Tibetan—so many ideas, so few words. We now have an additional challenge. At this point, we have

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.

Both lines are six syllables. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to put the third line into six syllables, too? In practice, that means five, because “There!” counts as one. Five syllables to express confidence, release, and continuing—definitely a challenge.

Perhaps we could get away with using trust instead of confidence? That would help with the syllable count. But what about release? What about continue? I could not find any shorter words that might work. I tried different formulations, including one that was a bit dubious grammatically: “Trust— let it unfold.” Still, I was not satisfied. Something was off.

At each step I have chosen clear meaning and experiential impact over literal accuracy.

Most teachers explain these three lines in terms of view, meditation, action, or, to translate them in another way, outlook, practice, and behavior. Outlook is the utter groundlessness of experience, that empty clarity that is our human heritage—this is what you are. Practice consists of coming to that again and again, whatever we are experiencing—nothing else matters. Behavior, how we live this, how we make it part of our lives, is based in the confidence of what we have already experienced—movement in mind releases itself, and this knowing is always present. If we let it, this knowing unfolds in every moment we experience. Mystically speaking, we make it part of our lives by having the confidence to step out of its way and just let it be. How do we say that in five syllables?

I am OK with “Let it unfold.” It isn’t literal, of course, but it seems to carry the idea of stepping out of the way and letting awareness be itself. The sticking point is the idea of trust or confidence. Ah! To keep the parallelism with the other two lines we should make the key idea implicit rather than explicit, and the key idea in this line is confidence. How do we make it implicit? I tried different ways, but nothing worked. Then, while I was listening to a flute duet played by a couple of friends in a bookstore in Sebastopol, California, it came to me:

There! Now let it unfold.

Why does “Now” work? I’m not quite sure, and it may not work for everyone. Perhaps it’s because it says (again implicitly) that you have come to this point and there is nothing to do but live in this awareness. To do that requires a great deal of confidence—confidence that mind, or mind nature, or natural awareness, functions just fine when it is freed from the fetters of conceptualization and reactivity. “Now” seems to say all that without saying it.

We are finished. The translation is complete, or, to be precise, we have taken it as far as I know how. As you see, at each step I have chosen clear meaning and experiential impact over literal accuracy. Does it work? The only way to know is for you to read it aloud and let it resonate in you. Then you will know whether it works or not. Here you are:

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.
There! Now let it unfold.

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Two men meet. One intends to resign his position as the archbishop of Argentina. The other intends to abdicate the papacy. A dance ensues—or are they two dogs, sniffing each other out before they can get down to business?

The Two Popes is a Netflix movie about Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. It is a cinematic adaptation of a play that presents a fictional conversation between Pope Benedict and Cardinal Bergoglio before he became Pope Francis. The two leads do a superb job in their respective roles, Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio and Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict. Written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Fernando Meirelles, it was a surprise hit at the Telluride Film Festival in 2019 and was nominated in 2019 and 2020 for a number of awards.

It is a deeply humanistic story. The two men represent different and antagonistic views of the Catholic Church and its role in society. The movie opens with the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to be Pope Benedict. Ratzinger is presented as a wily and ambitious politician who knows how to play the game in the College of Cardinals, a staunch conservative who insists on orthodoxy and tradition. At the end of the movie, Cardinal Bergoglio, Ratzinger’s earlier rival for the papacy, is elected to be Pope Francis. Bergoglio is a man of the people—a man who cares about the poor, talks about his hometown soccer team while conducting mass, and chats about the virtues of oregano with a gardener on the papal estate. But he has a past, and we learn about the weight of his past as the movie unfolds.

In the course of their conversation these two leaders come to understand that they have to find a way to reconcile their differences and decide how best to fulfill their respective responsibilities in a religious and cultural environment that is rapidly changing. They dance, and there is both pathos and bathos in their dance. Pope Benedict struggles to understand the joy Cardinal Bergoglio takes in human connection, while Cardinal Bergoglio presents his letter of resignation again and again, only to have Pope Benedict deflect it with one ruse after another. But their dance is not just about the present. It is also about the past.

Last year I was referred to an essay by Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under a Dictatorship.” The account given here of Cardinal Bergoglio’s past illustrates all too tragically one of Arendt’s principal points, the impossibility of accommodation with a dictatorship. Inevitably, you not only betray yourself, you end up endangering those you are trying to protect. How can Bergoglio possibly shed the burden of guilt he carries for mistakes he made, albeit with the best of intentions?

The movie is a mirror of how religion, particularly institutional religion, operates today.

In a pivotal scene, the two men take turns as priest and confessor, hearing each other’s confession and conferring absolution. This is where the movie moves from the humanistic into the religious. The scene conveys the power of the sacrament of confession, without being maudlin or saccharine. Here you feel God’s power to absolve sin—how the ritual of confession lifts a weight from each of them and enables them to move forward, free from the burden of their pasts. We have no comparable ritual in Buddhism, but like Christians, we do have ways of laying down the burdens of the past.

The quality of forgiveness portrayed here is absent in today’s world of conflicting ideologies. Ideological purity—morality in its coldest and cruelest form—precludes the possibility of forgiveness. I encourage you to watch this movie, if only to see this scene and understand what it means to accept the humanity of even those to whom we are most opposed.

The story reveals in different ways how, even in a life devoted to sacred service, we are still human beings. Yet in one of the final scenes, Pope Benedict reviews the sequence of events that brought them together. In doing so, he compels Cardinal Bergoglio to accept the possibility that larger forces were at play. Only here do the mystery and the awe at the heart of spiritual practice come into view.

The movie is a mirror of how religion, particularly institutional religion, operates today. It reflects how secular concerns have relegated the mystical, the spiritual, and the religious to supporting roles. What takes primacy? In the case of Pope Benedict, academic theology and adherence to tradition. In the case of Cardinal Bergoglio, helping to make lives better and human connection through community. In effect, the two men represent two ways that spiritual practice devolves when it loses its touch with awe and mystery, into academic exegesis on the one hand and humanitarian altruism on the other.

In both cases, the spiritual takes a back seat. We see this in the way that, for example, suffering and bodhicitta (awakening mind, an intention that arises through the union of emptiness and compassion) are commonly misunderstood in Buddhism in the West. When we take practice as the alleviation of the suffering of the human condition, we reduce Buddhism to humanitarian principles. Birth, old age, illness, and death are the human condition. They cannot be avoided, as we are seeing all too clearly today. We suffer because we struggle against these unavoidable aspects of the human condition and everything else in our lives that we find problematic. The true end of suffering is to be at peace in whatever life brings to us. As it is said, nirvana is peace, and we seek to find a peace that passeth understanding, to borrow a phrase from Christianity.

Similarly, in the same way that a peace that passeth understanding is a mystical peace, bodhicitta is a mystical compassion. It is not just altruism. It goes beyond the wish to alleviate the sufferings we encounter in our lives. In classical terms, it is the union of compassion and emptiness. In practical terms, it is the compassion that arises out of emptiness, the intention to help others find the peace that passeth understanding, the compassion that seeks to bring an end to the pain of life itself.

Finally, the movie portrays the hazards of positions of responsibility. Whether you are a pope, a cardinal, the head of a center, or a meditation teacher, or have any other role that involves responsibilities, it is easy to fall into the trap in which the responsibilities of your position take precedence over everything else. In such roles you are often faced with difficult external and internal choices. You may lose touch with your humanity in fulfilling your responsibilities as you see them. You may shut down to life because of the demands placed on you. You may even endanger those who depend on you through your efforts to protect or take care of them. Again, these are all facets of the human condition.

Life is complex. At any moment we may have to make difficult and painful decisions. Perhaps more than anything else, it is the complexity of life that calls us to seek the peace, freedom, and wisdom that come through spiritual practice. This movie, perhaps not intentionally, reminds us of that calling.

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