Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [71]
Like this Bodhisattva, innately we all have noble and tender hearts, but unlike him, our hearts are not always so open and available. We harden and shield our hearts with our negativity, we protect them with anger, and we conceal them with hostile emotions. We build hard shells and emotional armor to protect us from the suffering of life, but this armor ultimately keeps us so desensitized and frozen in place that we are no longer sensitive and vulnerable, no longer readily able to experience heartfelt compassion or spontaneous joy.
Buddhism consistently presents a practical path-oriented philosophy. The Dharma doesn’t just teach that these are the ideals of Buddhism. It says here are the ideals, and these are the tools and techniques for cultivating and achieving these ideals. This is the true genius of the path of Buddha Dharma. It’s impossible to change our hardened hearts and entrenched attitudes overnight. Yet over time, it can definitely be done. The Dharma presents a do-it yourself method of gradually transforming the mind and opening the heart, thus turning thoughts away from narcissistic self-absorption and over-preoccupation with personal anxieties and toward altruistic, warm-hearted love for the universal web of being.
Perhaps the most radical teaching of the enlightened Buddha is that ordinary men and women, like you and me, can perfect their innately noble hearts by training the mind. This is something everyone can do. The special training is known as the “Seven Points of Mind-Training,” Lo-jong (in Tibetan), and Mahayana mind-training.
LO-JONG: AWAKENING THE MIND,
AND OPENING THE HEART
To understand where a man is coming from, walk a few miles in his moccasins.
—NATIVE AMERICAN SAYING
Mahayana mind-training—known as Lo-jong—is the very practical enlightened technique by which we work at transforming our egotistical and selfish attitudes. Through this thorough mind-training, putting ourselves in another’s shoes, we soon learn how to treat others as we would like to be treated. By developing that empathic, visceral feeling-experience, we actually begin to be able to act differently. Cultivating warmth, fearlessness, and acceptance of both others and ourselves, we really can become more friendly, forgiving, and happy. By changing the atmosphere in which we live, we can favorably alter our entire environment.
These profound mind-training teachings date back to the mid-eleventh century, when a Tibetan king prevailed upon the erudite Indian abbot named Atisha to come from distant India to spread the Dharma in Tibet. It is said that Atisha long contemplated the royal invitation before praying to his meditation deity, the female Buddha Green Tara, for guidance and inspiration. Noble Tara appeared to him in a luminous dream, telling the august master that if he went to Tibet, the longevity of the Dharma would increase, but his own life would be shortened by twelve years. At that time, Atisha was considered India’s greatest spiritual master. He decided that it was more important to share the liberating Dharma than it was to prolong his mortal existence. At the age of sixty, he traveled by foot from the plains of India through the arduous Himalayan mountain passes of Nepal to the snowy roof of the world, Tibet, where he spent the last years of his life transmitting his teachings orally. He finally passed away in Tibet just as Tara had foretold.
One hundred years after Master Atisha’s death, a monk named Geshe Chékawa was in his lama’s room one day, and there he noticed some lines of verse that were written down on parchment. They said, “Give all the profit and gain to others, and unselfishly accept all the blame and loss.” My teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the enlightened lama who first told me this tale, said that Geshe Chékawa was so moved by the notion of such saintly