The Buddha offered us this teaching on patience: If you put a handful of salt in a small bowl of water, it will be too salty to drink. But if you pour it into a river, the river can accept it without harm and flow on. If we are small-minded and shut off from others, a small word can enrage us, because we are trapped in a small prison of defended self-interest. But if we can widen our hearts and think bigger, if we have compassion and understanding for the suffering of others, we aren’t so easily harmed by them. We can widen our circle of patience and compassion, even for those with whom we might be in conflict.

♦

From The Zen Way of Recovery: An Illuminated Path Out of the Darkness of Addiction by Laura Burges © 2023 by Laura Burges. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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When you studied Macbeth in English class—or skimmed the CliffsNotes and hoped for the best—you probably learned the standard interpretation: Macbeth’s fatal flaw is ambition. Ambition, we are told, is the great error that fuels his ruthless drive to become king of Scotland, leading ultimately to his downfall and all that messy bloodshed. But after decades of teaching the play and practicing dharma, I beg to differ. This is a play about impatience. You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow test, the famous Stanford study of delayed gratification in which a child would be left alone in a room with a single marshmallow and be told that, if they could resist eating it till the researcher returned, they’d get two marshmallows. Macbeth flunks the marshmallow test, but his failure helps point us toward liberation.

The play opens with the three witches, who are actually called the Weyard Sisters. Weyard is an Anglo-Saxon word for fate; like the three Fates of Greek myth, they’re embodiments of destiny. They greet our hapless hero with the words “All hail, Macbeth, who shalt be king hereafter.” The crown is his destiny; that’s not a problem. His problem is with that vague word “hereafter.” Being king is in the cards, but he doesn’t want to wait for the hand to play out. Once he hears the witches’ prophecy, it takes him about three minutes to start thinking about whacking whoever stands in his way. Top of the list is Duncan, the current king. Macbeth briefly tries to resist the idea his imagination suggests to him—to assassinate Duncan—but soon finds himself caught up in it.

… Why do I yield to that suggestion,
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature?

Here Shakespeare is clearly showing us physiological symptoms of an arousal state—heart pounding, hair standing on end—in which we’re ready to rush past the sober counsel of our better judgment and better nature.

Last year, six centuries after Shakespeare and a little to the south of Scotland, we saw the counterexample of delayed gratification at its regal extreme: Prince Charles Mountbatten-Windsor’s elevation to the British throne after a 73-year wait. The world seemed to quietly tell him what so many customer service reps have told me after I’ve spent forty minutes on the phone, listening to some robot’s notion of soothing music: “Thank you for your patience.” I’m always tempted to answer, “How do you know I’ve been patient? Maybe I’ve been punching the wall in frustration.”

There’s a difference between patience and waiting. Sometimes we, like Charles III, have no choice but to wait: that’s situational. We might even drum our fingers on the desk and snarl between clenched teeth, “I’m being patient.” But that’s impatience. True patience is kshanti paramita, “sublime forbearance,” the third of the six sublime virtues that help bring about enlightenment. Like all the Buddhist virtues, it’s really a meditative exercise to be practiced in everyday life—not a strategy for earning brownie points in some alleged hereafter, but skillful means for lifting ourselves and others out of suffering here and now. 

We can apply it, for example, when we’re stuck in city traffic. The unskillful approach is to tighten our grip on the steering wheel, strain forward against the seatbelt, and try to magically will ourselves into the next block. We keep doing that, not only behind the wheel but in all of life’s traffic jams—professional, romantic, you name it—even though (surprise!) it keeps not working. The skillful approach, kshanti paramita, is to breathe out, relax your grip, sink back in the seat, and know for sure that you’re going to be in this block till the traffic moves; that the traffic is perfectly immune to your magical thinking, as always. 

That’s liberating. Contained within the word kshanti is shanti, peace, and bone-deep acceptance of present reality leads to bone-deep peace. We still get to our destination when we get there. Our only choice is whether we get there with a settled buddha-mind or a mind like Macbeth’s, “full of scorpions.” I first learned about this sanity-preserving wisdom from a lama who used it to endure torture at the hands of the Chinese Communists. I’ve shared it with prisoners facing thirty-year sentences, who found that it helped them stop banging their heads against the bars—in some cases, literally. 

There is one character in Macbeth who understands this: Macbeth’s war buddy Banquo, who is with him when he meets the witches. Unlike Macbeth, Banquo takes their prophecies in stride. His is a relaxed, big–picture view:

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grains will grow and which will not,
Speak, then, to me, who neither begs nor fears
Your favors nor your hate.

This is just the right attitude; not caught up in craving a rosy outcome or in dreading a dire one; just being, without hope or fear. Banquo respects the natural ripening of events, like the sprouting of seeds in their own good time. When the witches tell him he won’t be king but his children will, he’s OK with it. He’s a Type B, in for the long game. The notion of Type A and B personalities was first conceived by the cardiologist Meyer Friedman when his upholsterer remarked that the chairs in Friedman’s waiting room—used, naturally, by lots of impatient hypertension patients—were the only ones he’d ever seen that had worn out first on the front edge instead of the back. We can imagine Macbeth in that waiting room, on the edge of his seat.

The paradox of impatience is that, in trying to hurry toward enjoyment, we hurry past it.

Whether or not we live on the edge of our seat is up to us. The first step out of such unskillful behavior is simply awareness—noticing that we’re doing it. Sometimes it’s easier to see these patterns in others and ask ourselves, “Hmmm. How’s that working out for them? Does their pushing against the moment help matters? Or does it just create stress?” Then we can look in the mirror and ask the same question about ourselves. If we’re worried that relaxing our grip on Type A impatience is going to make us lazy, we can remember that the next virtue on the list is virya paramita, diligence. When we stop wasting energy champing at the bit, we actually become more effective at diligently taking care of business. Macbeth drives his kingdom into chaos and his wife into suicide, then gets his head chopped off. How effective was he?

If it seems too hard to practice kshanti paramita with regard to the big things, we can start with small ones. A practice that I’ve found useful is, when I’m eating, to put my fork or spoon down after each bite. Then, instead of hovering vulture-like over the next mouthful, I’m sitting back and enjoying this one, the present one. All experience, all reality (as we keep having to learn) is in the present. That makes it the only place where we can enjoy things. The paradox of impatience is that, in trying to hurry toward enjoyment, we hurry past it. The paradox of kshanti paramita is that by being OK with delayed gratification we find gratification here, now. Relaxing into the richness of just being, in this moment as it is, turns out to be completely gratifying. Virtue, it turns out, really is its own reward. 

And if in the process we also wind up getting a marshmallow, or two marshmallows—well, fine.       

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Khanti, or patience, is the sixth of the paramis, following energy (viriya) and preceding truthfulness (sacca). The great Indian commentator Dhammapala (5th or 6th c. CE), in A Treatise on the Paramis—his commentary on the late canonical text the Cariyapitaka—says that patience has the characteristic of acceptance; its function is endurance; its manifestation is tolerance, or non-opposition; and its proximate cause is seeing things as they are. Contrary to what we may think, there’s nothing passive about patience. Acceptance, endurance, and tolerance arise out of clear seeing, which cannot exist without effort and insight—both of which we must practice deliberately. Shantideva, the 8th-century Indian monk and author of The Way of the Bodhisattva, said there’s no austerity greater than patience. In order to truly practice khanti-parami, we must actively renounce our sense of entitlement. We must want to be free more than we want to be right; choose what is instead of what we’d like. But patience is not resignation. It works with the other paramis of generosity, determination, loving-kindness, and so on. In The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shantideva offers what I think is the perfect recipe for wise and engaged patience: With perfect and unyielding faith, / With steadfastness, respect, and courtesy, / With conscientiousness and awe, / Work calmly for the happiness of others.

• “No evil is there similar to anger,
  No austerity to be compared with patience.
  Steep yourself, therefore, in patience,
  In various ways, insistently.” —The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, trans. by the Padmakara Translation Group
• “Complete patience helps the heart to mature into nonreactivity, and it comes into its full maturity through being animated by the wish to alleviate suffering and to uproot greed, aversion, and delusion.” —Dawn Scott
• “Patience entails choosing not to respond reactively, allowing other possibilities to arise; it provides tremendous support for mindfulness practice.” —Gil Fronsdal
• Tip: When anger arises, draw close to it instead of pulling away. How does it feel in your body? Can you accept this experience without trying to change it?
• “Patience is an ocean on account of its depth; a shore bounding the great ocean of hatred; a panel closing off the door to the plane of misery; a staircase ascending to the worlds of the gods and Brahmas; the ground for the habitation of all noble qualities; the supreme purification of body, speech, and mind.” —Dhammapala, Commentary to the Cariyapitaka, trans. by Bhikkhu Bodhi
• Tip: When feeling impatient, stop and consider your thoughts. If you need to take action, can you do so without centering the self, without the need to vindicate yourself or win an argument?

♦

This is the sixth installment of our Pocket Paramis series of quick tips to keep in mind while working with the ten perfections: generosity, ethical conduct, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, lovingkindness, and equanimity. A printable version is available here.

The post Pocket Paramis: Patience appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Patience as forbearance can be such a boon and ballast for us during really turbulent, rocky, difficult times like the times that we’re living in with the global pandemic, vaccines and variants, political divisiveness, the climate crisis, and the gender and racial awakening and reckoning that we’re experiencing. 

You can think of forbearance—an antiquated word we don’t hear often—as protection against your own reactivity or in the face of another person’s reactivity. You can also think of it as self-restraint in the face of injury and insult. 

The Buddha says, “If others abuse, revile, scold, and harass you, on that account, you should not entertain any annoyance, bitterness, or dejection of heart.” 

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I hear that I think, “That’s a tall order.” When we’re the object of another person’s seeming disrespect, disdain, hostility, or impatience, we react in all kinds of ways. We can meet aggression with aggression. We can collapse or freeze. Sometimes we want to pull away and run. 

None of these reactions, especially running, are helpful, because there are instances in which it is appropriate to turn toward harm and injury and set a very clear, firm boundary that’s born of love and wisdom. But patience doesn’t mean that we allow people to walk all over us. Practicing patience as forbearance helps us broaden the repertoire of our responses in really challenging, difficult situations. 

***

In a passage called “Suffering and Faith,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

Due to my involvement in the struggle for the freedom of my people, I have known very few quiet days in the last few years. I’ve been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails 12 times. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not the recipients of death threats.

We can read this and think that’s a relic of another time. But there are freedom fighters today—like Bryan Stevenson and his colleagues at the Equal Justice Initiative, who are in the heartwork of exonerating people who have been wrongly imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit—who have received death threats because of their work. This is not something from the past. There are freedom fighters still experiencing these threats today, and they’re calling on patience as forbearance. 

King continues: 

I’ve been the victim of a near-fatal stabbing. So in a real sense, I have been battered by the storms of persecution. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. 

But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and sustain my determination. [Determination is one of the paramis.] I have learned now that the master’s burden is alight precisely when we take his yoke upon us. [Remember, King is a minister, a man of God.]

My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted, I soon realized that there were two ways I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. 

I’ve decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering, I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transfigure myself and heal the people and the tragic situation, which now obtains.

The East Point Peace Academy, which trains people and offers workshops in Kingian-Gandhian nonviolence and nonviolent action, exposed me to a campaign from the civil rights era that is an example of this creative response to personal injury and insult. 

It’s April of 1963, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference starts a campaign to challenge the segregation laws of Birmingham, Alabama. They want all lunch counters integrated, Blacks to be hired in the department stores downtown, schools integrated that fall. 

To give some context to that last demand, nine years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. And then a year later, in 1955, in Brown v. Board of Education II, or Brown II, the Supreme Court said, “OK, y’all need to actually desegregate schools with all deliberate speed.” These southern states were really dragging their feet, so this campaign said they needed to integrate schools this fall. 

This campaign, however, was not gaining communal support or getting a massive number of Blacks coming out to protest. This was really understandable. The violence unleashed against Black activists (or just average citizens who were participating in these protests) was often lethal, discouraging people from coming out to protest. As an adult, if you participated in these protests, you risked losing your job. And there was a fragile false peace—what King called a “negative peace”—that was struck between the Black middle class of Birmingham, Alabama and the white power structure. 

One of the ministers said, “Alright, we’re not getting the mass number of adults coming out to protest. Let’s train the children.” There was a lot of argument and debate about this, asking, “Is it ethical to train children?” The brilliant argument that won the day, made by this one minister, was, if these young children are empowered with the choice to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, then shouldn’t they be empowered to actually protest and challenge racism? (Remember, this is a Christian community.)

The point that he was making is that racism has a deleterious effect on the hearts and minds of people, and it starts at a young age. He was saying that these young people should be empowered with the choice to actually challenge the policies, practices, mores, and ideology that was and would continue to have an adverse impact on the development of their own hearts and minds.

So it’s May 2, 1963, and the aim of this campaign was to overwhelm the jails—to get so many people coming out to protest, so many children coming to protest, that Birmingham wouldn’t be able to jail everyone. 

The parents were really worried for their children. They were saying, “You’ve better not go down to that church. Please don’t go to that church.” But the children came in droves to the 16th Street Baptist Church. Six hundred children were jailed on that first day of May 2. It’s estimated that ten thousand children total were jailed during this protest. It took the Birmingham authorities completely by surprise.

I don’t want to romanticize this protest. There are children who were jailed. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them, so they had a lot of fear running through their system. They defied their parents to do this, and this put a strain on the parent-child bond. 

Perhaps you’ve seen the iconic photos and footage of these children facing fire hoses, pounds of water tearing at their clothing and flesh, or of these very courageous young people facing down dogs that were unleashed on them, and grown men empowered by the state to use lethal force on these young people. 

They endured these hardships, and they did it with the spirit of knowing that what they were doing was right. They did it with the hope that their country and their fellow humans would see the rightness and nobility of what they were standing for, and the intention that was animating them. They hoped that their country would respond with generosity and support and would also see the rightness of what they were doing. This rightness filled them with a nobility. 

Maybe you’ve also seen footage and recordings of these young people singing and dancing to shore each other up, keep their spirits up, and remind themselves of their intention.

When we call on forbearance in the face of insult and injury without reacting, it frees up our energy so that we can respond creatively.

They desegregated downtown Birmingham, Alabama. They did it. And it came at a cost. I know a lot of older Black people from this era who are terrified. I’ve seen Black people who were raised during this era who are just terrified of dogs, gripped by fear. We can romanticize that kind of courage, forgetting that it comes at a cost. It comes at a high cost that can live on in the people who endured these hardships in the name of justice. 

This nonviolent campaign was rooted in six principles, the third of which is a way of practicing patience as forbearance. It says, “The nonviolent approach helps one analyze the fundamental conditions, policies, and practices of the conflict rather than reacting to one’s opponents or their personalities.”

When we call on forbearance in the face of insult and injury without reacting, it frees up our energy so that we can respond creatively. In this particular campaign, that energy was used to deconstruct the conditions that created the injustice and the harm. They used that energy to escalate the situation and dramatize the injustice and harm done so that the status quo was no longer tenable for those in the dominant culture who were superficially benefiting from the injustice. They escalated and dramatized the situation with the intention to actually de-escalate so that they could enter into negotiation and start the process of restoring equity, respect, and mutual right relationship and planting the seeds of a beloved community. 

This was the genius of the Black-led freedom struggle here in the United States, and this is what’s possible. This is the fruit. This is what’s possible when we summon forbearance in the face of injury, insult, and harm. All that energy that would have been bound up in reactivities is actually freed up so that we can respond creatively from our deepest values. 

I’m not saying that you need to go out and protest and open yourselves to the lethal violence that these freedom fighters actually opened themselves up to. There were very special conditions that allowed them to rise to the challenges of their times. They trained in forbearance daily. Their direct action was rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence and nonviolent action. This philosophy was strengthened by a deep Christian ethic of love, to which they wholeheartedly gave themselves over because they wholeheartedly believed in it. And they had sangha. They were there for each other. 

So they had very special circumstances supporting them. That said, the civil rights movement and these teachings on patience are a part of our inheritance. So what does that mean for us as practitioners? 

The children of Birmingham, Alabama trained in patience as forbearance. Diane Nash and John Lewis trained in patience as forbearance. The Buddha trained in patience as forbearance. And we, too, can train in patience as forbearance. 

♦

Adapted from Dawn Scott’s Dharma Talk, “The Steadying Power of Patience” 

The post The Power of Patience as Forbearance appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Patience is not gritting our teeth and white-knuckling it through some challenging or painful experience, or some injustice. That’s just trying to survive—waiting with aversion to the current moment while holding out hope for a better future. 

When we bring our practice to social justice issues, sometimes we’re told, “Just wait. I know you’re wanting to see X, Y, and Z shift and change. But just wait because the conditions aren’t right, and by pushing to affect change now, you’re being impatient.” 

That’s not patience either. Let’s be straight up about that. That’s not patience. That’s resistance to change. That’s aversion at work in that person’s heart and mind, co-opting the word patience with the intention of maintaining the status quo to preserve and consolidate power. 

True patience that’s matured to its full strength helps us to be in relationship to the way things actually are without causing harm.

[Below, in a teaching from a text called The All-Embracing Net of Views], are some of the qualities and manifestations of complete patience. A scholar let me know that it can also be translated as the “net of Brahma” or the “divine net.” 

 Patience is a “strength.” Summon patience, knowing that it’s a strength. “Patience is a stream of water extinguishing the fire of anger.” 

Patience is “a mantra for quelling poisonous speech.” What if you had a word or phrase that was an expression of patience that you held in your heart and mind so that when you were in a challenging situation with another person, you just held that word, image, or mantra in your mind? 

This is my favorite image: “Patience is an ocean on account of its depth, a shore on account of bounding the great ocean of hatred.”

Patience is a beautiful quality—a beautiful, benevolent, beneficial quality. I have a teacher who suggests that when we cultivate these beautiful qualities like the ten paramis [“perfections”], they are gems that adorn the heart and mind. You may have experienced this in your own life. You meet someone who’s so dedicated to living with wisdom, compassion, or kindness that the light of those qualities shines through their being, and they’re made beautiful by having these qualities active within their heart-mind stream. I’m not talking about physical beauty. It’s an inner beauty that comes radiating through their being. So you can think of patience and its steadying power as a gem with many, many facets—patience as forbearance, patience as gentle perseverance (a phrase I learned from Gil Fronsdal), and patience as acceptance of the truth. 

Complete patience helps the heart to mature into nonreactivity, and it comes into its full maturity through being animated by the wish to alleviate suffering and to uproot greed, aversion, and delusion. These paramis are brought to life through the intention of compassion and liberation. 

♦

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. See here for Dawn Scott’s full Dharma Talk, “The Steading Power of Patience.”

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Patience, one of Buddhism’s ten paramis (perfections), is a steadying force that supports us during times of trial and stress. Insight Meditation teacher Dawn Scott explains how to cultivate this noble and essential attribute and how it can reveal a wealth of meaning in everyday experiences. She explains patience is not gritting our teeth and white-knuckling it through difficulty or challenge. True, complete, mature patience, or khanti parami, trains us in nonreactivity that helps us to be in relationship to the way things actually are without causing harm.

Dawn Scott is a graduate of Insight Meditation Society’s teacher training program, a co-principal teacher of Marin Sangha, a core teacher of Spirit Rock’s Advanced Practitioner Program, and served as the Family Program Coordinator at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for eight years. She is a co-teacher of Love & Liberation, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Insight Meditation’s joint year-long program, slated to start in early 2022. Dawn has a deep love of long retreat practice and the Buddha’s liberative teachings.

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My son is 9, huddled down beside the toilet. I’m leaning over him, grabbing at his arm. We are both screaming, shrieking, cursing one another. All the energy in the house, in the whole universe it seems, has become a concentrated white light burning into this tiny bathroom. I am so wild with fury I can’t see, can’t even hear the words coming out of my mouth.

This is me, a Zen Buddhist practitioner of nearly twenty years.

Anger brought me into practice in my twenties. I was falling in love with the man I would later marry and have children with, and it was painfully clear that even his kindness wasn’t enough to defuse my rage. In fact, my anger seemed to expand alongside our growing intimacy, in a kind of terrible tango.

So I started to sit. With a Zen group, and alone. I read books, and listened to dharma talks. I sat through sesshins. I started to look at my anger with softer eyes, to pay attention to the terrified feelings beneath. I remember in a sangha discussion on the precept on anger, a friend recounted her appreciation of its liberating energy. But for me, despite Zen, and despite having an excellent therapist, anger still snapped at me like a metal trap. What l really wanted was to keep out of its way.

In time our daughter was born, followed closely by our son, and a few years later, another son. Three beautiful, healthy, wanted children. It was demanding of course, and a little dizzying to reorient from career and travel to domestic life. I was so grateful to have found a tradition that honored the wisdom of repetitive tasks done with a fresh mind. Chop wood, Carry water! Change diaper, puree pumpkin! We played, read stories, cuddled, laughed, baked cakes. All the astonishing ordinary acts of a loving family.

But as they grew into toddlers and beyond, the rage which could flare in my relationship with my husband, began stalking me as I cared for my children. That’s exactly how it felt: a stalking beast breathing on my neck, using me to invade our home. The stakes were so much higher now. I knew that my anger risked marking my children, in body and spirit, even horribly disfiguring our relationship. The Indian philosopher Shantideva, never one to mince words, reflects in The Way of the Bodhisattva: “Good works gathered in a thousand ages. A single flash of anger, shatters them.” 

Shantideva would have had some things to say about what had happened in that bathroom.

One night, in the midst of another heated and quickly escalating conflict with my son, I escaped to the bathroom and closed the door. Every one of my muscles was coiled and tense, driving for action; my ears were ringing with the furious accusations racing around inside my skull. I found myself shuddering and shaking, gasping for breath. It was not unlike the final stage of labor where your body feels as if it is being cleaved entirely in two. But I stayed where I was. I sat with it. The fury blazed in full and eventually abated. The arrow of Mara had passed through me and left a flower of insight.

To be really angry is to experience a radical contraction of the self. It narrows the vast infinity of awareness to the very tightest clutching of I want and I don’t want. And for me it was at that very moment of most extreme contraction that the door into emptiness and impermanence dropped open. The teachings of no-self suddenly became intimate. Not in a place of calm on the zafu as I had imagined they might, but in hot furious tears sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Anger was pointing its giant red neon sign at where I most strongly divided the world into self and other, right and wrong, him and me.

This flash of realization was powerful. But it was not enough to dissolve the habits of a lifetime, and I didn’t have lifetimes to play with: there was still an angry child on the other side of that bathroom door demanding his playstation. I had to leave the bathroom, get up off the zafu each morning, and keep on parenting. To help me bring wisdom and compassion to the intensity of family life I came to understand that my practice needed something more than “just sitting.”

Pema Chödrön’s book Practicing Peace stood on the bookstore shelf like a little blue flag marking a great treasure: dig here. The book introduced me to the Tibetan practice of tonglen, which offers a way of working directly with the painful sensations of aggression. This practice of “sending and receiving” gently but powerfully strengthened the insight I had in the bathroom that night—that there is no fundamental separation of self and other. The final step in tonglen is practicing for all sentient beings who have known this pain, underscoring that the experience of rage, however shameful it may feel, does not make us monsters but is part of our rich, messy, human inheritance. 

Pema also wrote about practicing the paramita of patience as an antidote to anger. So from my Australian living room I signed up for an online course on the paramitas, offered by Pema Chödrön and given to her students at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. Paramita is a Sanskrit word meaning “perfection” and traditionally there are six qualities that encourage the perfection of character. Pema shared an excellent mnemonic to help remember them:

Gosh — Generosity
Darn — Discipline
Please — Patience
Eat — Enthusiasm
My — Meditation
Pizza — Prajna (wisdom)

Reassuringly (as “perfection” can feel way out of the realm of possibility), Pema emphasized that it is effort, stretching beyond our habitual ways of acting, that allows these qualities to flower.

I had never given much attention to patience, mistaking it for meekness or repression. But I discovered that patience is a discipline and a commitment like no other. Shantideva again: “No evil is there like anger. No austerity to be compared to patience.” While anger is all about the misguided urge to control, patience is a willingness to be with whatever is as it is. Patience can demand the most determined effort, especially when the habits of irritation and anger have built up over a lifetime or more, yet it is enlivened by the sweetest of qualities, such as humor, lightness, and perspective.

In seeking to cultivate patience I am constantly learning to pay attention to my body off the cushion. The sensation of rage is so physical that taking care of anger often means directly addressing the body: cooling my face with ice, exhaling all the way to my toes, or placing my hand on my heart. It also asks that I pay attention to the wider physical context: am I getting enough sleep, enough food, enough quiet? Working with the body in this way has the great added benefit of bypassing the storylines that fuel fury: He never listens! I can’t handle this!

It is nearly three years now since that night with my son in the bathroom. Through expanding my ways of practicing, life at home has become calmer for all of us. At 11 my son is curious, smart and kind. He is also quick to anger. I could blame myself for that, for the hot blood I passed to him through example or the hidden workings of genetics. But my intimacy with anger also means I can help. I have walked that path, hung on to that cliff. He doesn’t need to feel abandoned to the intensity of those feelings or lost in shame in their aftermath. We can burn that karma together. All beings awakening as one. Right here in the bathroom, and everywhere.

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The 8th-century Indian Buddhist sage Shantideva dedicated a chapter of his work The Way of the Bodhisattva to the subject of patience. In the new book Peaceful Heart: The Buddhist Practice of Patience, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche follows the 134 verses from the Patience Chapter and explains how they apply to our busy lives today. In this excerpt, he discusses verses 15 through 18, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group.

15
And do I not already bear with the
common irritations—
Bites and stings of snakes and flies,
Experiences of hunger and thirst,
And painful rashes on my skin?

16
Heat and cold, the wind and rain,
Sickness, prison, beatings—
I’ll not fret about such things.
To do so only aggravates my trouble.

If we look at our lives, we already have a certain amount of patience. We can bear many difficult circumstances quite well. For example, we all have to endure minor illnesses such as colds and headaches. We have to deal with plenty of weather we don’t like. We put up with mosquitoes and mice and many other creatures that cause us minor trouble.

Rather than constantly seeking to eliminate all small irritations from our lives, we can use them as a basis for developing more patience. If you emphasize comfort over the practice of patience, your mind will get weaker and weaker. If you want your life to be free of the challenge of needing patience, your mind will be in constant fear. You will feel increasingly under threat, increasingly provoked, increasingly paranoid. This will lead you to act more negatively and to reject much of the world.

Practitioners need to be going in the opposite direction. We need to have a little oomph to work with all the challenges we encounter. A lot of people wonder, “Why does my life have so much struggle?” But there is no such thing in samsara as a life free of struggle. There is no such thing as a life where nothing threatens us. So instead we should ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t my life have more oomph?”

It’s interesting that it’s easier to be patient with things or beings that cannot be held responsible, such as the weather or infants. We should also notice that it’s relatively easy to muster our tolerance toward people we want to please or impress, such as those we find attractive or our superiors at work. These examples show how capable we are of having control over our minds. If we use these easier situations as a training ground, we are also capable of extending our patience to situations or people that tend to provoke our anger more strongly.

Shantideva’s point here is that developing patience depends a lot on our self-confidence and self-image. If we see ourselves as nervous, shaky, and irritable, our experiences will tend to follow that image. So we need to change our attitude to see ourselves as tolerant and not easily disturbed. This will make a great difference in how we react to outer conditions and will set in motion more favorable ways for things to unfold. When we see ourselves in such a positive light, it will be easy to tolerate small disturbances, let go, and move on with ever-increasing patience. As our minds become more agile and ready to make use of discomfort and adversity, we will gain more strength to face the great disturbances of life with tolerance.

17
There are some whose bravery
increases
At the sight of their own blood,
While some lose all their strength
and faint
When it’s another’s blood they see!

18
This results from how the mind is set,
In steadfastness or cowardice.
And so I’ll scorn all injury,
And hardships I will disregard!

Our reactions to situations, people, and our own states of mind are based on how we condition our minds. For instance, if you have habituated yourself to be brave in battle, seeing your own blood flow may give you even more courage to fight. But if you’ve habituated your mind to weakness and oversensitivity, you may faint or panic even when you see someone else’s blood. Your response in that moment comes from how you’ve built up your habits in the past.

You can train your mind to be strong and resilient, or you can train your mind to be fainthearted and easily discouraged. This is your choice. If you want to be a bodhisattva, it’s not viable to act like a weak dog and run away with your tail between your legs, succumbing to your habitual reactions. A bodhisattva needs to endure countless challenges, so you have to shed any tendencies toward cowardice.

In these modern times, particularly in the West, it’s common for people to give up on themselves easily. Many dharma students tend to judge themselves too harshly and then become discouraged. Part of the problem is they want to be too good. So when they see their neuroses and their imperfections, they have a hard time accepting themselves. This comes from having unreasonable expectations. It is a puritanical mindset. I hear people say, “I’ve been practicing for the last twenty years. How could this happen? How could I do this? How could I have this thought, this feeling?” This often happens just when they think they’ve made some progress. The result can be deep despondency.

Our thoughts, feelings, and reactions come about due to a vast number of interdependent circumstances. When the perfect circumstances converge for you to have a particular reaction, it’s almost impossible not to have that reaction, at least initially. As a result, no matter how long you’ve practiced, it’s very unlikely that nothing will bother you anymore. It isn’t realistic to think you’ll be exempt from getting frustrated or losing your temper. The mark of a true practitioner is not what arises in your life and mind, but how you work with what arises.

It all comes down to your perspective and your self-confidence—your oomph. Now you may think, “What can I do about that? I’m just not a self-confident person.” It’s important to know that self-confidence isn’t something we’re born with. Everyone can develop self-confidence if they want to. But we must understand that here we are talking about genuine self-confidence, not ego’s bloated version, which is more like arrogance.

The process begins with your willingness to take a chance. Rather than having everything absolutely clear and predictable ahead of time, you have to be willing to go into the unknown. This may require a leap of faith—faith in your own mind and its innate wisdom and ability. Then, having taken that leap, you have to work with your intelligence—skillfully, mindfully, and patiently—as the situation unfolds. Going through this kind of process repeatedly will increase your self-confidence, especially when you encounter difficulties and find ways to turn them around or bring about the best outcome possible.

The mark of a true practitioner is not what arises in your life and mind, but how you work with what arises.

Here it is helpful to remember verses 15 and 16, in which Shantideva advises us to train ourselves in cultivating positive qualities by beginning with relatively small things. This is a realistic, doable approach to developing any desirable attribute in your mind. For example, you may wish to be a generous person but realize that you’re not very generous. Resigning yourself to being stingy by nature will get you nowhere. That is just making an excuse based on laziness.

If you’re genuinely interested, you can always find small ways to be generous. You can even practice by passing money or some object you’re attached to from one of your hands to the other. The Buddha actually suggested this simple practice to a disciple who thus got over his miserliness and eventually became a great patron of the dharma. Starting small will serve as an effective beginning to your generosity practice, which you can then take as far as you want it to go.

With patience especially, we can use the small irritations that come up in our lives as wonderful opportunities to train. For example, sometimes we feel offended, but at the same time we realize it’s silly to be offended. Here we have a great chance to apply the humor we already see in the situation. This humor is based on realizing the irony of what is happening: we’re blaming somebody else, but the real problem is our own ego, manifesting in the form of a ridiculous uptightness. This kind of ironic humor is not just a patch we use to cover up pain. It is an insight that can turn irritation into a genuine laugh or smile, which gives us a feeling of release. A humorous perspective gets us through the slight pain of the offense and enables us to turn that pain into wisdom. We can then appreciate the pain as we would the pain of an immunization. We need to take advantage of these situations, which are within our reach to work with successfully. If we forgo such opportunities to practice in small ways, then to believe we will be patient when bigger things come around is just wishful thinking.

Because humor and appreciating irony are such effective means of cutting through irritations, I would like to share a contemplation I once had, which I found both funny and helpful. It occurred to me that people come with different shoe sizes, but that doesn’t bother me. They have different pants sizes and hat sizes. That also doesn’t bother me. So why should I be bothered that people come with different sizes of ego? Just as I don’t have to wear other people’s shoes, I don’t have to wear other people’s egos. I can just let them wear their own egos, whatever size they are. Why should I take the size of someone else’s ego personally and let it bother me? It is theirs and theirs alone to wear. I can just let them be.

The size of another person’s ego can make you feel very bothered and uncomfortable. But if you can find other ways of looking at your irritation, especially using humor, then you have a better chance of being patient. In this way, your patience will increase not only in trivial situations but also in serious situations where humor and irony are more difficult to find.

♦

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During the month of February, we’re reading Allan Lokos’s Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living at the Tricycle Book Club. Pick up a copy and join the discussion here. Below is an excerpt from the book.

“One day, Ananda, who had been deep in thought for a while, addressed the Buddha saying, ‘I’ve been thinking, spiritual friendship seems at least half of the spiritual life.’ The Buddha replied, ‘Not so, Ananda, not so. Spiritual friendship comprises the entire spiritual life.’”
—Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya 3:18

Every moment of our lives is spent in relationship with someone or something and every relationship has the potential to bring both joy and sorrow. We are always in a relationship with self, which becomes abundantly clear when we spend quiet time with ourselves such as in meditation. There we can see whether we treat ourselves honorably with kindness and compassion or are overly self-critical and easily annoyed. Are we patient with ourselves? If not, can we really expect to be kind and patient with others? This type of self-examination is essential if we want to bring greater joy and reverence to our relationships.

Although the boss or the noisy neighbor can try our patience, it is our relationships with those we care about most that can, at times, present the most challenging issues, undoubtedly for the very reason that these are the relationships that matter most to us. This is where we are emotionally most heavily invested. Our long history with a parent, brother, sister, or other relative can be laden with offenses and misunderstandings. Our relationship with a significant other can be easily stressed as together we maneuver the choppy waters of the ocean of our days.

If we want others to listen to our views, we must be willing to listen to theirs.  Quickly formed opinions may be hindrances to patience. We can become so convinced of the validity of our views that we can’t hear those of the other. You can be sure that will try the patience of others just as it would yours. Watch carefully what goes on in your mind as you listen to views that are different from your own. Those thoughts and feelings may also be detected as sensations in the body. Become familiar with those sensations. They might be indicating reactive or conditioned responses or a lack of openness to the views of others. In the quiet of meditation we have an excellent opportunity to observe the relationship between thoughts and feelings and their subsequent physical sensations.

The Brahma Viharas: kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, can be the building blocks for inner peace and meaningful relationships. With patience we can develop deeper levels of these virtuous qualities.

Have something to say? Join the discussion here.

Below is an animated trailer for Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living, following which are a number of video teachings by Lokos.

The post Allan Lokos: Patience in Relationships appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I was a child, I was told many times, “Be patient” or “Patience is a virtue.” I would relate to these words in much the same way I would to the order “Eat your spinach.” To me, “Be patient” meant “Grin and bear it,” or that I should repress my feelings about the disagreeable aspects of life. This is not what is meant by patience from the Buddhist perspective, however.

Patience, or khanti, is the sixth of the ten perfections, or paramis (the virtues that one has to perfect in order to fully awaken; there are ten paramis in the Theravada tradition, six paramitas in the Mahayana). The clarity of wisdom and the softness of compassion are the companions of each of the perfections. Patience is motivated by our desire for inward and outward peace and by faith in our ability to accept things as they are. In Buddhism patience has three essential aspects: gentle forbearance, calm endurance of hardship, and acceptance of the truth.

Gentle Forbearance
The first aspect of patience is gentle forbearance. We may be the exhausted parent of a child who is having a fit over some baffling homework; perhaps patience in this case means taking a few deep breaths instead of yelling in frustration. Or we may be on the verge of making a brilliant retort to a coworker, but we hold our tongue rather than say something hurtful. Even though our impatience is triggered, we can tap into the deeper reservoir of our motivation not to do harm. Gentle forbearance may feel difficult—even contrived—because it doesn’t constitute true acceptance of how things are. But it is nonetheless a critical aspect of patience because it helps us restrain ourselves long enough to determine the most skillful action for the moment.

Impatient thoughts come and go by themselves, just as the breath comes and goes by itself.

Gentle forbearance helps to anchor our attention in the movement of the breath. Can we truly receive just one breath? Can we sustain the attention from the birth of the breath, through its life, and through its passing away? We notice that in these moments of attention we are temporarily freed from mental torment. There is no need to focus on our expectations or attachment to results. Impatient thoughts come and go by themselves, just as the breath comes and goes by itself.

Any time we want life to be different than it is, we are caught in impatience. We lose our sense of humor; and self-pity, despair, and blame seep into the heart. Gentle forbearance includes the spirit of forgiveness. When we feel conflict with others, understanding their suffering is the first step in being able to communicate, forgive, and begin again. The practice of forgiveness happens when we are able to realize the underlying cause of our anger and impatience, and this allows us to distinguish between someone’s unskillful behavior and essential goodness. Serenity and calm develop as we learn to accept imperfection in others and ourselves.

Endurance of Hardship
The second aspect of patience is the calm endurance of hardship. The Buddha said that the world rests on suffering. But endurance of suffering doesn’t mean doing nothing to alleviate it. Patience isn’t passive; it’s motivated by an acceptance of and compassion for suffering rather than a desire to eradicate it. When we feel impatient with our relationships, our work, or our spiritual practice, we need to realize that we are resisting how things are. A sense of humor and curiosity about our lives can also help us confront impatience.

My five-year-old niece complained to me recently, “I hate school.” I replied, “Oh, that’s too bad. Why?” “Because it’s so boring,” she said. She loves the movie Finding Nemo, so I reminded her how Dory and Nemo’s father, Marlin, endured the obstacles on their long journey to liberate Nemo. I asked, “What did Dory say to Marlin when they were lost and ready to give up?” She remembered “When life gets you down, just keep swimming.” She laughed, and she became interested in exploring why she gets bored in school. I challenged her to tell me one interesting thing that is happening every time she thinks she’s bored. Through investigating boredom instead of concluding that we are wasting our time and disconnecting from what is, we can pause, explore, and begin again.

In a frustrating situation, it helps to ask ourselves the question, “What would being patient mean right now?” We can explore what happens to our relationship to our experience when we find ourselves rushing around, always anticipating the next moment, the next event. The more we practice patience, the more time we find we have. Perhaps we’ve become accustomed to eating so fast we don’t even taste our food. Asking ourselves this question slows us down enough to appreciate receiving our food—receiving our life. Gratitude and contentment arise. Many of us try to do so many things at once that there is no space for serenity. We wonder why we are unhappy, why we feel alienated. We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next.

Acceptance of the Truth
The third aspect of patience, acceptance of the truth, means that we accept our experience as it is—with all its suffering—rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which take a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective. As we come to this understanding, we gain the strength to be present for the long haul, and we are less likely to get caught in being overly insistent, frustrated, and demanding.

There is great power in patience because it cuts through arrogance and ingratitude. It is the path that lets us move from resistance to acceptance and spontaneous presence. Holding on to our judgments about others and ourselves is a major cause of impatience. Repeating softly to ourselves, “May I be happy just as I am” and “May I be peaceful with whatever is happening” helps us accept our vulnerabilities, imperfections, and losses: everything from chronic physical and emotional pain, to the death of loved ones, the end of a job or relationship—even nightmare traffic jams.

By accepting the agreeable and disagreeable aspects of life, we are no longer limited by our longing for life to be different than it is. We have all the time in the world, in the spaciousness of every moment.

Shantideva on Patience

All the virtuous deeds and merit,
Such as giving and making offerings,
That we have accumulated over thousands of aeons
Can be destroyed by just one moment of anger.

There is no evil greater than anger,
And no virtue greater than patience.
Therefore, I should strive in various ways
To become familiar with the practice of patience.

If I harbor painful thoughts of anger,
I shall not experience mental peace,
I shall find no joy or happiness,
And I shall be unsettled and unable to sleep.

—Shantideva (687-763 C.E.)

Those who cause me suffering
Are like Buddhas bestowing their blessings.
Since they lead me to liberating paths,
Why should I get angry with them?

“Don’t they obstruct your virtuous practice?”
No! There is no virtuous practice greater than patience;
Therefore, I will never get angry
With those who cause me suffering.

If, because of my own shortcomings,
I do not practice patience with my enemy,
It is not he, but I, who prevents me from practicing patience,
The cause of accumulating merit.

—Shantideva

Even while I remain in samsara,
Through patience, I shall attain beautiful forms,
Good health, reputation, very long lives,
And even the extensive happiness of a chakravatin king [a universal monarch]!

—Shantideva

♦

Quotes from Guide to a Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Shantideva, © 2002 by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and New Kadampa Tradition. Reprinted with permission of Tharpa Publications, www.tharpa.com.

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