Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [113]
When confronted with different points of view of what is right, use this slogan to remind yourself that your own conscience is the main judge of your actions. Of course we can always learn from others, but finally each of us can only trust our own intuitive heart.
The whole thrust of the bodhicitta mind-training and Bodhisattva path is to be able to become naturally more loving and compassionate without expecting or hoping for anything in return. Although your ego may want some form of positive reinforcement or reward for what you do or say, your innate Buddha-nature doesn’t require that kind of acknowledgment. Whatever occurs is what occurs, and it is all positive. Even if a Bodhisattva is the last person on earth, he or she would continue on the way of awakening.
Gradually we learn to loosen our tightfisted grip on worldly values. We become more centered, balanced, straightforward, calm, and clear amid any temporary weather conditions—outer circumstances as well as internal emotional weather. We learn to both sit and stand erect, needing nothing to lean on. We stand up for ourselves and our beliefs and stand behind our words and deeds. We become masters of our own domain.
This is how we awaken our inner guru, our inner guide—the Buddha within, the secret master comfortably ensconced forever in our own heart cave. This inner guru is none other than truth itself—our own innate wisdom and heart center’s noblest intuitive understanding and love. This is the inner meaning of the provocative, iconoclastic Zen saying: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”(Because he must be an impostor, since the only real Buddha or divine being is within.) When you invoke the gods or angels, when you pray, you are awakening this sublime being within yourself. There is no one else to rely upon.
EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE—AND
THE SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
As Buddhism emerges in the West, it is struggling, successfully I believe, to become more gender equal, with women sharing an equal role in both the practice and teaching of the Dharma. At the time of the Buddha’s enlightenment in Asia, there were only men in holy orders and being educated in lay society. The Buddha’s aunt, Queen Maha Prajapati, the woman who raised him after his own mother died in childbirth, was the first woman to ask to become a member of the Buddhist order. At first the idea seemed incomprehensible and risky to almost everyone, including the Buddha himself: How could a pampered noblewoman adjust to the disciplined, renounced, dangerous life of an unattached wandering mendicant?
To demonstrate that women were also capable of the holy life, Maha Prajapati gathered together several hundred women. Cutting their hair, donning saffron robes, and carrying alms bowls, they began to live like the monks. Even so, the Buddha was still adamantly opposed to the notion that women would be able to lead such arduous, insecure, and potentially dangerous lives. One day his gentle cousin and attendant Ananda interceded by asking the Buddha whether women were capable of enlightenment. “Yes,” the Buddha replied, “women are no more or less capable of enlightenment than men.” Then Ananda asked in logical fashion, typical of Buddhist reasoning, why they should not be ordained as well? Finally won over by Ananda’s arguments and the women’s sincere determination, the Buddha allowed women into the order. The Buddha thus became the first societal leader to flout the rigid Hindu caste system and openly educate and ordain women.
We can’t pretend that Buddhism—like other world religions—doesn’t have a troubling patriarchal streak. There have always been female lamas in Tibet—stretching back to Padma Sambhava’s main disciple, the youthful queen, Yeshe Tsogyal, but these instances have been rare. For too long, women practitioners were treated more as tea makers than learned teachers. Sexism was eloquently addressed at the first Western Buddhist Teacher’s Conference with the Dalai Lama in India when one female teacher asked the assembled male lamas, monks, and teachers