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Peaceful Mind, Peaceful World by Lama Zopa
Rinpoche
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| Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Photo from
the collection of Francesco Prevosti. Photographer
unknown. | If you can
practice bodhicitta, renouncing yourself and cherishing others, then keep
this as your heart practice. Bodhicitta is the essential practice, like
the foundation of a house. Whether you are happy or sick, dying or
healthy, young or old, working or too old to work, living at a Dharma
center or in a city where there is no Dharma center and no Dharma friends
having the same faith and doing the same practice as you, whether you are
depressed or excited, practice bodhicitta.
As the great bodhisattva Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen
said, "When you eat, eat with bodhicitta. When you stand, stand with
bodhicitta. When you sleep, lay down with the good heart, bodhicitta. When
you are happy, remember bodhicitta. When you are sick, remember
bodhicitta. When you are feeling unhappy, depressed or aggressive,
remember bodhicitta. When death comes, remember bodhicitta." Like this,
always remember bodhicitta.
Bodhicitta is the essential practice, the very first
of all practices. When you wake from sleep, instead of remembering the
office, job, money or coffee, if you want peace of mind, the first thing
to remember is bodhicitta, the ultimate good heart. If you can practice
bodhicitta, plan your life in this way. Then, wherever you are living,
whether in the city or in the countryside, in a Dharma center or wherever,
you will always be happy, so incredibly happy, because there will always
be much peace in your mind.
Otherwise you will always have many problems. You
may be living in a monastery or a Dharma center where there is the sound
of Dharma twenty four hours a day—teachings coming from all ten
directions, people reciting texts on the incredibly profound teachings of
Buddha, which are to subdue the mind, to control the mind and eliminate
the disturbing thought that harms both others and ourselves by binding us
to samsara. You may be living in a Dharma center, in a monastery, in a
cave on the highest mountain or even on the moon, but however far you may
be from people or animals, if there is no change in your mind, if you
allow your self-cherishing thought to keep on functioning as it always
has, you will never have any real peace.
As long as you keep your self-cherishing thought in
your heart, cherishing it like a wish-granting jewel or a precious
treasure, you remain a servant to and completely enslaved by this enemy.
If you follow self-cherishing you will never find any peace of mind.
Taking the side of self-cherishing instead of that of cherishing others
blocks any kind peace.
As long as you do not exchange yourself for others,
renouncing yourself and cherishing others, since you have not changed your
mind, no matter how many weapons or how many millions of bodyguards you
have, they cannot protect your life from danger. You can see from the
example of presidents or prime ministers that no matter how many weapons
or external protection they have, it just increases the danger they're in.
Instead of protecting their life, these things can even endanger it—even
their own bodyguards can finish up killing them.
In his Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of
Life, Shantideva said,
By destroying your inner enemy, the disturbing
thoughts, you destroy all your outer enemies as well. The work is
accomplished at the same time.
Once the inner enemies of disturbing negative
thoughts and self-cherishing are destroyed, all outer enemies are
automatically destroyed as well. You don't have to shoot or insult them.
You don't need to use any weapons to harm the outside enemies, not even a
needle! Destroying the inner enemy destroys all outer enemies
simultaneously because all outer enemies come from the self-cherishing
thought.
This is very easy to understand if you relate it to
your everyday life. Even today, if you check your life, the nature of the
mind, how it has been today—peaceful, happy or confused—you can see that
when you cherish yourself more, whether at home or at work, there's more
confusion, more pain, more problems and more disharmony, but when you have
more loving kindness and compassion, when you care more for others than
yourself, there's more harmony, more peace and better relationships;
things are more successful.
Right now you can understand by analyzing what
happens when you change your attitude towards another person. First you're
cherishing only yourself, then, remembering the precious teachings on
Mahayana thought transformation, you suddenly give yourself up and cherish
the other person more, thinking, "She has as much right to be happy as I
do; her wants and happiness are more important than mine," and
immediately, in that very moment, you experience incredible peace. The
pain of self-cherishing abates and you're liberated at that very moment.
When self-cherishing is strong it's very easy for
you to get angry. The stronger your self-cherishing thought, the more
impatient and jealous you become. Many problems arise, quickly and easily,
one after the other, and you can't relax or find the peace that comes from
weakening the self-cherishing thought.
Thus you can see how cherishing yourself and
renouncing others gives rise to all the other delusions and makes you
create many different kinds of negative karma. Then, because of this and
the vast amount of negative karma you have accumulated in past lives, you
experience many problems in this one.
But when you practice bodhicitta, even if you're
alone, you're happy. Even if you're happy, your mind remains controlled
and you don't experience the dissatisfaction and attachment that arise
from too much excitement. Even if you're experiencing pain, your mind is
happy; even if you're dying, your mind is happy. All the time, whatever
circumstances or people you meet, your mind is constantly
happy.
Even if you meet an enemy, someone who treats you
badly and criticizes you, you're happy, extremely happy. You remember his
kindness from the depth of your heart, how he's helping you develop
compassion, loving kindness, patience and bodhicitta. It's the same with
friends and strangers. Whether you're living alone or with others, you're
so happy—at home or at work, East or the West, wherever.
Sometimes people think, "I'm so fed up living in a
family with lots of people. I just want to go off into the forest alone,
keep on walking and see what happens." One of my students in Australia
once told me this. There's much bush and thick forest there and you can
see from an airplane that there are no houses, nothing. He said that one
day he just wants to go out into the bush and walk for days, thinking that
something might happen. He doesn't want to go walkabout to find suffering
but to find peace, to experience something new in his life, something
pleasant. But as long as the practice of the good heart is missing, one
can find no real peace or satisfaction.
Practicing the good heart makes you and whoever else
you meet happy; it makes everybody happy. Also, it's a great purification.
When you cherish others more than yourself you think of yourself as their
servant, that you are living for others. "My life is for others; the
purpose of my breathing is for them; everything I do is for others, to
serve them, to free them from all their suffering and lead them to
enlightenment." Even if you don't think about enlightenment, you still
want to benefit others, give them happiness and eliminate their problems
and suffering.
When you're more concerned for others and less for
yourself, when you have less self-cherishing, your other delusions—anger,
pride, jealousy and so forth—are weaker and you create less negative
karma, which is the cause of sickness. Therefore, in this and future
lives, you experience less sickness. You're also more successful and your
wishes in this and future lives are fulfilled. Whether you wish to be
wealthy, successful or anything else, you succeed in even the worldly
activities of this and future lives.
Thus you can see that renouncing yourself and
cherishing others cuts off the root of self-cherishing and plants the root
from which all the branches, flowers and fruit of happiness come. Success
depends on how much you cherish others.
No matter how many meditations or different
techniques there are, as long as you do not practice the good heart, even
if you say many prayers and practice hundreds of different meditations,
you won't find peace. Cherishing others is the most important thing, the
first thing, the most beneficial practice for yourself and others. It is
most precious because with it you can achieve enlightenment, the highest,
peerless happiness.
Without cherishing others, even if you can explain
what enlightenment is and recite all the Prajnaparamita texts by
heart for months and years, enlightenment will remain a dream, hopeless.
As long as you do not change your mind you will find no peace, no matter
how many hundreds of meditations or practices you know.
With bodhicitta, you not only accumulate less
negative karma twenty-four hours a day—thereby causing less harm and fewer
problems for yourself and others—but you also purify those from previous
lives. Bodhicitta is the greatest, most powerful method of
purification.
As long as you don't have bodhicitta, no matter how
many meetings for world peace you attend, nothing happens. Bodhicitta is
the foundation. Nobody hates those who have a good heart, who renounce
themselves and cherish others. Everybody likes people like that. We all
like to be helped by and receive benefit and kindness from others. Even
animals like people who feed, protect and cherish them.
If you renounce yourself and cherish others, you
generate bodhicitta. Even if you don't actually realize it, at least you
get closer by being less concerned with yourself and more concerned for
others. That's the foundation of real peace.
When you realize bodhicitta, renouncing yourself and
cherishing others, naturally, without effort, you stop harming others. The
nature of bodhicitta is to cherish and single-pointedly want to benefit
others, so with bodhicitta you not only stop harming others but also
become concerned to help and benefit them, doing whatever is needed. You
are no longer a cause for others to get angry and create negative karma.
Instead, you become an example for them to learn from; you make it easier
for them to develop more compassion, loving kindness and peace of mind and
to even generate bodhicitta themselves.
In this way even one person can bring much peace to
the minds of others and benefit so many of them. Just by being a good
example you can help others generate bodhicitta, transform their minds and
develop examples for others. Having generated bodhicitta they in turn
become good examples to help others develop the good heart, change their
minds and establish peace in their own minds and the world. And again,
they in turn become further examples for others.
This is how we bring true peace into our family, our
workplace and the world. By generating the good heart, bodhicitta,
cherishing others more than ourselves, those around us get peace. So, that
many people become happy and there is that much more peace. Then more and
more people get peace, until all those in the country, all those in the
world, have peace. In this way, even if the whole world is filled with
atomic bombs, since the self-cherishing thought—the real enemy and the
greatest danger of all—has been transformed into the thought cherishing
others, no matter how many weapons there are, none of them can endanger
people's lives.
Therefore it is extremely important to study and
always keep bodhicitta in mind. Study the teachings on bodhicitta as
extensively as possible, then meditate, practice and learn to recite the
texts. Then, when you have studied and have acquired some knowledge, you
should explain to others even the little that you know. Teach them
whatever you know about meditation and the good heart.
By doing this you give others the opportunity to
understand that there is a way to transform the self-cherishing attitude
and disturbing thoughts. You show them that self-cherishing and delusion
are not one with the mind so that they no longer think, "It's impossible
to live without attachment, dissatisfaction, impatience, depression,
aggression and all these things. That's what life is about."
When I meet speak with people who have not met
Dharma—shopkeepers, business people and so forth—they say, "You can't live
without attachment. It's part of life." What they are actually saying is
that the mind is oneness with attachment so there's no way to transform
the mind, it's not possible to change the mind. That's what they believe
and it serves only to make them depressed. Neither does it help at all nor
is it realistic.
Therefore it's very important to help others
understand the incredible practice of bodhicitta because bodhicitta makes
you and others happy in this life and all future lives. It fulfills all
your wishes and those of others and enables you to accumulate extensive
merit, purify all your obscurations and achieve the peerless happiness of
enlightenment. If you explain the teachings on bodhicitta to others, it
gives them an opportunity to practice.
By being a good example to others, talking to them
and telling them with good heart even the little you know about
bodhicitta, you begin to stop the harm, problems and dangers of this life.
This is the way to bring peace to the world and to really help
others.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave this teaching at Tushita
Retreat Center, Dharamsala, 18 June 1985. Edited from the Lama Yeshe
Wisdom Archive by Ven. Sarah Thresher and Nicholas Ribush.
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