The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [64]
But the best part of all is that no matter how long you practice, or what method you use, every technique of Buddhist meditation ultimately generates compassion. Whenever you look at your mind, you can’t help but recognize your similarity to those around you. When you see your own desire to be happy, you can’t avoid seeing the same desire in others. And when you look clearly at your own fear, anger, or aversion, you can’t help but see that everyone around you feels the same fear, anger, and aversion. This is wisdom—not in the sense of book learning, but in the awakening of the heart, the recognition of our connection to others, and the road to joy.
Smile at Fear
Carolyn Rose Gimian
The late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was unique among Buddhist teachers in emphasizing fear as a central cause of our spiritual problems. Fear undermines our natural confidence. It stops us from experiencing life fully. It traps us in a small world. The antidote, as Carolyn Rose Gimian—Trungpa Rinpoche’s brilliant editor—explains, is the teachings of a fearless lineage.
Spiritually speaking, I come from an eccentric family. The patriarch of my family was the Indian mahasiddha Tilopa who, while spiritually accomplished, was not motivated by worldly success. He held humble jobs: grinding sesame seeds into oil during the day, and at night, procuring clients for a prostitute. Later in life, having attained the supreme realization of the Vajrayana, he became a wandering yogi, known to feast on fish entrails left by fisherman down by the lake. At least, that’s the story passed down to me, told with a great deal of family pride.
His spiritual son, Naropa, was a renowned scholar at the greatest Indian university of his era, Nalanda. After realizing that he didn’t understand the inner meaning of the texts he was studying, he left the university to study with Tilopa. Naropa was subjected to a series of difficult trials by his teacher, such as jumping off buildings or lying in leech-infested water. Eventually, he attained complete, stainless enlightenment when Tilopa whapped him across the cheek with his sandal.
The next forefather, Marpa, owned a farm in Tibet and was married with children. From time to time, he traveled to India to study the dharma. There he found Naropa. Marpa had brought a bag of gold dust to make offerings to the teachers he encountered. When Naropa demanded the whole bag, Marpa didn’t want to part with it, but he gave in. At that point, Naropa scattered the gold dust into the air, singing: “Gold, gold, what is gold to me? The whole world is gold to me.” This was the beginning of Marpa’s training with Naropa, which led to his ultimate liberation.
The next spiritual son, Milarepa, studied black magic and sent a hailstorm to destroy the farm of his aunt and uncle, who had made him and his mother into servants, but the vengeance did not fundamentally satisfy him. Eventually he found Marpa, who asked him to construct a series of buildings in exchange for receiving the teachings. Milarepa had to carry large boulders and shove them into place by himself, but Marpa would show up, often drunk, and ask Milarepa just what in the name of heaven he was doing. Ordered to dismantle the edifice, he would have to put up another somewhere else. Finally, when Mila was completely broken down and close to suicide, Marpa give him formal initiation. Mila eventually left to pursue meditation in solitude, spending the remainder of his life in caves, surviving mainly on nettles (to the point of developing a green glow). Milarepa sang to anyone who came by his cave, leaving thousands of songs of realization for us to contemplate.
These are some of the early forefathers of the Karma Kagyu school of Vajrayana Buddhism, a lineage that has continued