The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  The hinayana version of taming ego is to cut through sloppiness and wandering mind by the application of shamatha discipline. Shamatha practice undermines the fundamental mechanism of ego, which is that ego has to maintain itself by providing lots of subconscious gossip and discursive thoughts. Beyond that, vipashyana brings awareness of the whole environment into our discipline. That allows us to become less self-centered and more in contact with the world around us, so there is less reference to “me” and “my-ness.” Vipashyana allows us to cut through our ego. When we enter the bodhisattva path and begin to practice bodhichitta, our concern is more with warmth and skillfulness, with karuna and upaya. We realize we have nothing in ourselves to hang on to, so we can give away our attachment each time it arises.

  In the hinayana, our ego begins to get a haircut. In the mahayana, the limbs of ego are cut, so there are no arms and legs. We even begin to open up the torso of ego. With ultimate bodhichitta, we take away the heart, so nothing of ego remains. Then with relative bodhichitta, we utilize the leftover mess of cut-off arms, legs, heads, and hearts. We find a lot of this mess, along with lots of blood on the floor, and we make use of it. We don’t throw that away. We don’t want to pollute our world with our leftover ego. Instead, we bring it onto the path of dharma by examining it and making use of it. So our progress on the path depends on how much we are able to shed our limbs, torso, and heart. According to another Kadam saying: “The shedding of ego is like a scale that measures the practitioner.” The shedding of ego is the measure of how much meditation and awareness have developed and how much mindlessness has been overcome.

  The amount of reality that is presented to you depends on how much the lesson of the subjugation of ego has taken hold in you. And the extent to which you are able to give up your personal project of ego aggrandizement and achieve the impersonal project of attaining enlightenment depends on how heavy-handed or open you are. In this particular journey, you and your commitment can be put on a scale and measured. If your ego is very heavy, you go down, and if your ego is light, you go up. All the dharmas that have been taught are based on that. There is no other dharma in the teachings of Buddha.

  Bodhichitta practice is based on groundlessness or egolessness. When groundlessness becomes a continuing and natural part of discipline, we understand that we are not fighting our own war for our own victory. We are just giving up and going along with the general understanding of things as they are. Bodhichitta practice is not a personal project. It is beyond personal projects, so any further projects become nobody’s projects. We do not possess any ground, and we do not need to build ourselves up. With groundlessness, there is an absence of personal projects or ego aggrandizement. With groundlessness there is compassion.

  The basis of compassion is nonterritoriality, non-ego, no ego at all. Further warmth, workability, and gentleness take place as well. If there is no ego-clinging, then all dharmas are one. All the teachings are one teaching, which is compassion. But in order to develop an affectionate attitude to somebody else, you have to begin by experiencing the nonground quality of compassion. Otherwise, you become an egomaniac, and try to attract people with your seduction or arrogance. So emptiness and compassion work together. It is like sunning yourself at the beach: you do it because there is both sunlight and heat, and a beautiful view of the sea. Compassion arises because you have nothing to hold on to, nothing to work with, no project, no personal gain, and no ulterior motives. Therefore, whatever you do is a clean job. Once there is groundlessness, there is no notion of choosing compassion—whatever you do is compassion.

  20

  Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one.

  In the phrase “Of the two witnesses,” the “two” are you and the other. When you do something, you would like to get feedback from your world. You have your own opinion of yourself and how well you have done, which you usually keep to yourself, and you also have other people’s opinions of how well you have done. But even though you have your own opinion, you branch out and ask somebody else, “Was that all right? How do you think I’m doing?” That is a traditional question that comes up in meetings between teachers and students.

  This slogan says that of the two witnesses, or two judges, you should hold the principal one. The actual, authentic witness is you. If you have been raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you may associate the idea of judging yourself with guilt. But we do not acknowledge concepts like original sin, and from our point of view you are not basically condemned. Your naughtiness is regarded as only temporary—but at the same time, it is witnessed.

  You are the only person who knows yourself. People may be very impressed by you because you look fit and cheerful, and you seem to know what you are doing. Sometimes you receive a lot of compliments, and sometimes you hear a lot of criticism from people who do not properly and fully know what is actually happening within you. But you are the only person who has been with yourself since you were born. And even before that, you carried your own great karmic baggage with you. You decided to enter the womb of somebody or other, and you came out of it, and you still carry your baggage along with you. You feel your own pain and pleasure. You are the one who experienced your infancy, the pain and pleasure of it. You are the one who went through your teenagehood, the pain and pleasure of it, and you are the one experiencing your adulthood, the pain and pleasure of it. You may be beginning to experience your middle-age years, the pain and pleasure of it, and finally you will experience getting old and dying, the pain and pleasure of it. So you have never been away from yourself for even a minute.

  You know yourself so well; therefore, you are the best judge of yourself. You know how naughty you are. You know how you try to be sensible, and you also know how you sometimes try to sneak things in. Usually you are talking to yourself: “I” is talking to “am.” “Am I to do this? Am I to do something naughty? If I do, nobody will know.” Only we know, so we could do it and we might get away with it. There are lots of tricks, projects, and activities that you and yourself do together, hoping that nobody will actually find out. If you had to lay the whole thing out in the open, it would be embarrassing. You would feel so strange. Of course, it is also possible that you are trying to be very good. You could be trying to be good so that somebody will be impressed with you and with how much effort you put into yourself. But if you had to spell the whole thing out, nobody would actually believe how good you were trying to be. People would think it was just a joke.

  Only you really know yourself. You know that at every moment. You know the way you do things—the way you brush your teeth, the way you comb your hair, the way you take your shower, the way you put on your clothes, the way you conduct yourself in talking to somebody else, the way you eat. During all of those things, “I” and “am” are still carrying on a conversation about everything else. So there are a lot of unsaid things happening to you all the time. Therefore, the principal witness is you. The judgment of how you are progressing in your lojong practice is yours. You know best about yourself, so you should work with yourself constantly.

  This slogan is based on trusting your intelligence rather than trusting your self, which could be very selfish. It is trusting your intelligence by knowing who you are and what you are. Because you know yourself so well, any deception could be cut through. You should come back to your own judgment, to your own knowledge of the tricks you play on yourself and others. So relying on the principal witness is not self-centered. Instead, it is self-inspired from the point of view of the nonexistence of ego. You just witness what you are without being judgmental. You are simply witnessing and evaluating the merit, rather than analyzing or psychologizing it.

  21

  Always maintain only a joyful mind.

  The mahayana experience of reality and how mahayanists work with reality completely and fully is bounded by several categories. But these categories all combine into one basic point—the notion of compassion, or karuna. In fact, that is the hidden continuity tha
t goes through the entire path right from the beginning. The hinayana aspect of compassion is based on nonaggression, on doing no harm to others; the continuation of that compassion in the mahayana is doing good for others.

  Compassion is being both soft to oneself and disciplined with oneself. Although you may not yet have achieved twofold egolessness or one-and-a-half-fold egolessness, if you have compassion, you are actually able to practice the mahayana completely and fully. In interpersonal relationships—sexual relationships, business relationships, or whatever relationships you have—mahayana practice is very applicable. It helped me a lot personally, and it could also help you.

  There is a sense of delight, as well as of egolessness, in the discipline of compassion. That sense of delight is present right from the beginning of the hinayana and mahayana paths, when we begin to feel a quality of joy, purpose, and strength. You take joy in having the right teacher to work with you, the right discipline, and the right conviction or faith. You have a genuine appreciation of the teachings and you are delighted with the whole thing, almost high. In other words, you feel fundamentally good. That feeling comes from no longer having any little pockets of deception. In fact, you have become bankrupt of reserves of any kind. You have been squeezed by the dharma, and fundamentally you have given up.

  When I was about ten years old, I was studying the Kadampa slogans with my teacher. In spite of the overwhelming presence of my tutors, who were usually very nasty, I felt relieved that I had nothing to do but take pride in the dharma. There was no other entertainment for me. I felt extremely relieved that I could be gentle. I realized that if I pushed, I would be pushed back. I felt very good about the whole thing, and I have felt that way ever since. I feel extremely good that I am a practitioner, that I am following the path of the bodhisattva, and that I am a nontheistic Buddhist. I feel eternally grateful and good, and I would like you to share that feeling. You should know firsthand how it feels to be captured by the dharma, to be squeezed into the dharmic world. Obviously, you have more choices than I did, but that same situation of being cornered by the dharma could also happen to you. So I am sharing with you what I experienced. And later on, when students came to me, I began to realize that I was now the corner, and it was the students who were being pushed in.

  The slogan “Always maintain only a joyful mind” means that you should maintain satisfaction and joyfulness in spite of all the little problems and hassles that take place in your life. In fact, every mishap is good, because it is encouragement for you to practice the dharma. Other people’s mishaps are good also, as the continuity of their practice and discipline. You should share those mishaps as well, and bring them into yourself. It is a joy to feel that way; you feel so good. I felt that way myself. I felt so strong and strengthened by the dharma—so grateful, so good, and so joyful.

  The warmth and sympathy of compassion has that same quality of joyfulness. You begin to take a very cheerful attitude toward the practice of mahayana. You are no longer pushed into the depths of the ghetto of human punishment, and you are transcending any kind of “Oy vey!” approach. You are getting out of Brooklyn, metaphorically speaking.

  Cheerfulness has a lot of guts. It is an expression of buddha nature, or tathagatagarbha. Cheerfulness can be found in the compassion of people like Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, Jamgön Kongtrül, Milarepa, Marpa, and all the rest of the gang. They have already experienced such a thing, and so could you.

  The other day I was talking to a close friend of mine. She said that because her mother was insane, she felt that she had the kernel of insanity in herself as well, so she didn’t want to push too hard. She thought that if she pushed too hard, that kernel of insanity would begin to grow and become gigantic, and she would become a monster, just like her mother. But out of that feeling of wretchedness, something positive can begin to grow. When you begin to feel wretched, terrible, absurd, stupid, and mean, that is a very good starting point for the discovery of buddha nature.

  My friend had enough guts to tell me how she felt, which I thought was the essence of tathagatagarbha. She was willing to relate with somebody and to communicate that. My friend felt that her experience was pointing her to something that she used to believe and that quite possibly she could rediscover. She thought that kernel of insanity might have something else inside it, that it might turn out actually to be a kernel of sanity or buddha nature. My friend was afraid of that possibility, and at the same time she was ripe for it. It was as if she were having cramps, and was about to give birth to a baby.

  That kernel of neurosis in the depth of the depths of my friend’s being was softness, which is all-joyful. At that point, pain and pleasure are mixed together, and pleasure is more powerful than pain. I felt quite proud of my friend. It was very good that she said that; it meant that there was a working basis. Usually people philosophize everything, and you can’t actually get a hold on anything. But she was able to say, “This is happening in me, and I feel terrible.” I was able to hold on to that as a working basis, and she was able to hold on to it as well. That was the basis of our communication, and buddha nature was the pith of it. And that buddha nature keeps growing hour by hour, day by day, right now.

  Since you are not condemned, you could apply a joyful mind. You do not have to be startled by sudden wretchedness or, for that matter, by sudden upliftedness. Instead, you could maintain your cheerfulness all along. To start with, you could maintain a sense of cheerfulness because you are on the path. You are actually doing something about yourself. Many sentient beings have no idea what to do with themselves, but at least you have a lead on it, which is fantastic. You might have heard a lot about the bodhisattva ideal already and become familiar with the whole thing, but if you step out into Brooklyn or into the Black Hole of Calcutta, you will realize that what you are trying to do with yourself on the bodhisattva path is incredible. Most people do not have the slightest idea about that possibility. The bodhisattva path is an incredible, fantastic idea. You should be tremendously excited and feel wonderful that somebody ever thought of such a thing.

  Whenever you feel depressed, whenever you feel that you do not have enough in the environment to cheer you up, or whenever you feel that you do not have the feedback you need in order to practice, you can refer back to that quality of joy and celebration. Whether it is a rainy day, a sunny day, a very hot day, or a very cold day; whether you are hungry, thirsty, or full; whether you are healthy or sick—you can maintain cheerfulness. Constantly applying only a joyful mind allows you to wake yourself up.

  22

  If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.

  According to this slogan, whenever extraordinary situations come up—your pot boils over, or your steak is turned into charcoal, or you suddenly slip or lose your grasp—a sudden memory of awareness should take place. It is like a well-trained, powerful horse that loses its balance, and in the middle of doing so, suddenly regains it. This is like an athlete who slips, and in the process of slipping, regains their balance by using the momentum of the slipping process. It is like skiing, where by using the force of gravity and letting yourself slide through the snow, you develop balance and attention. But this slogan is not about becoming chauvinistic about practice; there is a need for renunciation. You are not trying to be a fantastically powerful and strong person who has mindfulness taking place all the time. But when something hits you as a result of unmindfulness, suddenly that unmindfulness itself automatically creates a reminder of mindfulness. So you are able to get back on track, so to speak, and you are able to handle your life.

  If you are a good rider, even if your mind is wandering, you do not fall off your horse. You have been trained already, so you will not have any problem in continuing. So when either pleasurable or painful circumstances hit you, you do not become the slave of those situations. You have learned how to reflect suddenly, on the spot, on shinjang, tonglen, and bodhichitta, so you are not subject to extreme pleasure, extreme pain, or depre
ssion. If you become uptight and lose your awareness, at the same time you regain it. And whenever there is a sudden surprise in your life and the fear of seeming to lose your grip on reality, it could be included in your practice. In our tradition, any chaos that comes up is regarded as an opportunity for holiness, for some kind of help, blessing, or prayer. In ordinary life as well as in the theistic traditions, when something shocking happens, we yell, “Goodness!” or we shout sacred names. Traditionally, that was supposed to be a reminder for awareness, but these days we utter such phrases and swear words in a more degraded way.

  When you meet with a situation, it affects your emotions and your state of mind. But suddenly, because of that jolt, the situation itself becomes your awareness and mindfulness, so there is less need for you to put effort into it from your end. You don’t have to try to project, to understand, or to be watchful. But that does not mean that you should give up trying, and things will come to you all the time. This slogan is connected with the paramita of meditation, and there is obviously a need for you to develop awareness and mindfulness and to be alert. In fact, that alertness could become your fundamental frame of mind.

  This slogan is about realizing that you can practice in spite of your wandering thoughts. Let me give a personal example of that. At Surmang Monastery I was terribly hurt, psychologically depressed, and pushed into dark corners by my good tutors and my administration. When I felt remorseful, sad, and helpless—but carefully helpless, deliberately helpless—I used to think of my guru Jamgön Kongtrül and weep. My yearning for him was so great that I wept, but I didn’t weep because I was deprived. In fact, I felt great about that weeping. I was weeping at my discovery of something new and good. I used to say to all my attendants, “Go out! I don’t need to observe teatime. I’m going to read.” Then I would lie back and just cry for thirty minutes or more. They became very worried, thinking that I was sick, but I would say, “Send them away! I don’t need any more tea.”