This article is adapted from a one-day workshop offered by Sylvia Boorstein at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on April 5, 1997. Since that time, Sylvia has also taught a ten-week course on Paramis at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.
We begin this day of
practice in the traditional way of honoring the Buddha and all those others
who have awakened to the possibility of living a fully wise and compassionate
life. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.
When I reflect on what
it means to take refuge in the Buddha, I often think that the Buddha was a
human being, just like us, and we share with him and with all awakened beings
that capacity to see clearly, to be fully awake, responding always with kindness
and compassion. It's very thrilling for me to think about that capacity and
to use awakened beings a role models.
When I think about taking
refuge in the Dharma, I think about what a relief it is to have had so many
people practice before me. I don't have to reinvent the wheel. The fact that
the path of practice has worked for so many others gives me confidence that
it can work for me as well.
In reflecting on taking
refuge in the Sangha, I think about how fortunate I am, how fortunate we all
are, to have friends and family and a community of people who are eager to
support us in our practice. I am grateful to all my companions who share with
me the sense of the inevitable challenge of being alive as well as seeing
the possibility for living life with grace and appreciation.
Let's sit quietly for
a while together and use our reflection of gratitude for the possibility of
practice to inspire our zeal to study together today. You can further inspire
your dedication to practice by reflecting on your motivation for practice.
Perhaps you'll feel inspired, as I do, by the verse from the Dhammapada
which carries the triple imperative to turn away from all evil-doing, to do
what is good, and to purify your heart. I am always inspired and motivated
in my practice by my faith that this possibility exists.
This is a day about cultivating
the paramis, the fully cultivated mind and heart qualities of a bodhisattva,
of a Buddha, of a fully awakened being. One of the roots of the word parami
conveys the sense of "supreme quality." Paramita means "going
toward" something, going toward perfection.
In traditional texts,
the ten paramis are presented in a particular order, beginning with generosity
and ending with equanimity. In preparing for our workshop today, I constructed
this chart, listing the ten paramis, their characteristics, functions, manifestations,
and proximal causes, using the text in A Treatise on the Paramis by
Acàriya Dhammapàla as my guide.
I wondered, as I prepared
the chart, whether it would work as a "flow-sheet" in chemistry,
with one quality in fact conditioning the next in a way that seemed natural.
My sense is that each of the paramis really includes all of the others and
can be restated using the characteristics other paramis in their definition,
that each parami is a hologram for the other nine. The Buddha taught that
generosity was the first of the paramis because most people have something
they can relinquish. In the largest sense, generosity is not giving away material
things. It is non-clinging. As you can see in the chart, the proximal cause
of generosity is seeing what can be relinquished.
For myself, giving up
attachment to ideas, attachment to views, has been a much more difficult challenge
than giving away material things. When I have been able to give up my attachment
to views, it has seemed like an act of generosity both to myself and to others.
I've been able to give
up views when I've recognized that I didn't need them to protect my sense
of self. In fact, they are easier to give up when I see that attachment to
views constructs a sense of separate self and adds to my suffering. Students
of the Zen teacher Seung Sahn report that he often said, "Only keep Don't-Know
Mind." Another teacher of mine once said that a helpful mantra to be
recited daily by anyone who teaches is "I could be wrong."
I think another manifestation
of generosity is giving up destructive habits or lingering grudges. In moments
of clear seeing, which come through practice and perhaps by grace, we understand
that anything we hold on to, whether material or emotional, is a potential
source of complication and of suffering. With that understanding, generosity
becomes easy.
Morality is the second
of the paramis. The commentarial tradition says morality has a composing effect.
The practice of morality steadies and balances the mind and allows it to see
clearly. Seeing clearly, we know that there's a tremendous amount of inevitable
pain that is part of life experience, and the impulse to respond with impeccable
morality, to not add further pain to the inevitable discomfort of life, becomes
spontaneous.
The parami of renunciation
is often thought of as giving up something tangible in life. In Buddhist scripture
it is usually to describe renouncing the world and joining the Order of monks
and nuns. I find it more helpful to think of renouncing the habitual patterns
of mind that keep me enslaved more than renouncing a particular lifestyle.
Perhaps that's because at those times in my life when I have needed to make
a choice in terms of a more skillful lifestyle or habit, my experience has
been that my strong decision to make a change made the actual changing fairly
easy. It's been much harder for me to change the habits of my heart.
It's not easy to stay
balanced. The mind's habitual response to pleasant stimulus is to grasp it;
its habitual response to unpleasant experience is aversion. Neutral moments
are not so interesting, and we tend to stop paying attention to them.
I feared in the beginning
of my practice that things wouldn't feel as good or taste as good or sound
as good or anything else as good, because a lot of the practice stories I
heard talked about extinguishing lust. I still experience lust. And, while
renunciation means to me giving up outbursts of anger in favor of a more considered,
helpful response, I still recognize when I am annoyed.
I believe that renunciation
is more a question of not being bound by or being a victim of the lusts and
desires and angers that naturally arise as the result of having a body. I
believe this is the difference between a compulsion or an addiction, which
is always burdensome, and the possibility of making conscious choices, which
is not burdensome. I don't see renunciation as the difference between monastic
and non-monastic lifestyles, but between being a victim of mind states, driven
by compulsions, and being free to make a choice.
Restraint is a characteristic
of renunciation. I remember Joseph Goldstein, one of my teachers and my friend,
saying that restraint allowed for the verification of the empty nature of
sense desire. In thinking about restraint, the most mundane example comes
to mind.
I receive lots of mail
order catalogs. Probably you do, too. My first thought often is, "No,
I don't need anything." But the catalogs have interesting covers, and
sometimes I think, "Well, I'll just look inside." Not infrequently,
when I look through a catalog, I find something in it that I didn't want or
need two minutes before. In the moment of discovering it, and noticing that
it's attractive, I suddenly feel that I want it.
I think that it's the
nature of the mind to move toward pleasant experience in a grasping way. It's
not my hope for myself that my practice will lead me to a time that there
is no movement of my mind toward things that are pleasant. What I hope will
happen is that I will never be driven or compelled by wanting. In the matter
of catalogs, my rule for myself is not to make a decision in the midst of
a moment of lust.
Wisdom is the fourth of
the paramis, and its characteristic is clarity. Clarity seems the naturally
developing result of restraint. When the movements of the mind in greed, hatred
and delusion are fueled by stories— "I need this." "I
don't like this." "This is boring."— truly clear seeing
is not possible. When the movements of the attention, fueled by stories, are
attenuated by the capacity for restraint, clarity emerges.
Validating for oneself
the third noble truth of the Buddha, that peace is possible in this very life,
requires only one moment of personal experience. If a moment is free, it's
free; if there is suffering, there is suffering. The clarity to recognize
freedom, even a moment of freedom, can lead to faith that becomes unshakable.
Otherwise it's just hearsay.
In a moment of clear awareness
we recognize the pain in our life and realize that we have the capacity to
manage it. It's a great liberation to know that you don't need to be pleased
in order to be happy. I think this is what leads to energy. On the chart you'll
notice that a characteristic of energy is indefatigability. I don't think
that means that you never get tired—I think it means resoluteness and
dedication to practice.
I once heard a story about
Chogyam Trungpa, that he classically would say to students at the end of the
first day of retreat practice, "I'm sure that many of you would now like
to go home." Then he would laugh, and he'd say, "Too late."
I think that there's a
point at which each of us begins to intuit that there's a way to live life
more gracefully and more peacefully. I think there's another point, very important
in developing practice, when we experience that possibility for ourselves.
Patience is the next of
the paramis. One way to think about patience is reflecting on the ability
to wait when anger arises in the mind. Lots of things make us angry. Often
we feel the victim of something, and, especially when we feel we're unjustly
a victim, a lot of energy comes up around righteous indignation. Patience
allows us to wait until the cloud of anger, which distorts the mind, subsides
so we can decide on appropriate action. I once heard someone ask of the Dalai
Lama, "Do you ever get angry?" He responded, "Of course. Things
happen. They're not what you wanted to have happen; anger arises. But it's
not a problem."
On another occasion, the
Dalai Lama was teaching about patience, using as his text Shantideva's Guide
to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. He read each verse of Chapter 6 (the
chapter on Patience) — 134 verses — and commented on each one. Each
verse proposed different situations in which anger arises in the mind and
proposed appropriate responses. As the Dalai Lama read the last verse he leaned
forward and held his head. Since my principal hindrance is worry, I thought,
"Oh dear, something has happened to him." Then he picked up his
head, and I saw that he was crying. Since I know he's taught this chapter
and verse many times, I was touched by how much it obviously moved him to
say that any response to vexation other than patience is unwise. Just unwise.
If we have the patience to wait, waiting leads to clarity, and clarity allows
for the truth of the situation to emerge.
The next parami is truthfulness.
Every moment of mindfulness is a moment of truthfulness, of directed knowing.
Direct and clear, true understanding is such a relief. It inspires determination
in practice. And when we see the truth of how things are, our capacity for
loving-kindness, for metta, increases. We see people just the way they are—as
people, like ourselves, struggling to be content, to be happy, to live gracefully—not
as people about whom we have substantive commentaries that put them in categories
of friends or enemies. As we become less judgmental and more tolerant, more
able to understand that things and people are the way they are as a result
of complex and legitimate causes, our capacity for balanced equanimity increases.
In choosing one story,
in the service of creating an edited version of a whole day's teaching on
the paramis, here is a story that combines the capacity for seeing the truth,
the determination to tell the truth, a moment of genuine metta, and the joy
of equanimity.
About a year ago, I was
fortunate to be part of a group of twenty-six Western teachers of Buddhism
who went to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama. A trip to India is difficult
under any circumstances and Dharamsala is harder than Delhi. Nevertheless,
this was a trip I would not have missed. I was excited about meeting with
the Dalai Lama and excited to meet the twenty-five other teachers.
Our group of teachers
gathered for several days before the meetings with the Dalai Lama to establish
the agenda for our time with him. I knew perhaps half of the other teachers
and only some of them well. At the start I noted that there were really three
categories of people there: people I knew quite well and liked, people I didn't
know at all, and a few people I knew but didn't have a good feeling about.
For various reasons, all in the past, I had been negatively affected by these
persons in some way. But, here we were far away, all of us with high alertness.
On our first day of meeting
together, my friend Jack Kornfield who was the facilitator, said, "Let's
go around the room and introduce ourselves. Each of us will say our names
and what we see as our current and greatest spiritual challenge in our personal
lives and in our teaching lives." I thought, "This is a most intimate
question to respond to in a group of twenty-six people, most of whom I don't
know." But, I couldn't leave, I couldn't say, "I've decided not
to come to Dharamsala." I didn't even have to make a decision about when
to talk be cause Jack said, "I'll go first, I'll pass the microphone
around and everyone will go in order." I had the same feeling that I
have half-way down a ski slope, or in a dentist chair mid-way through a complicated
procedure, or, indeed, in the middle of life: "There's no place to go
but forward."
In the clarity of that
realization, my mind relaxed, and I listened. Each person's story seemed touching
to me—everyone told the truth about his or her current struggle. By and
by, the people I had negative feelings about told their stories as well, and
I discovered that I felt the same about them as about the people before and
after them. My mind was clear and focused. I was relaxed. I wasn't adding
to that experience all the stories I had in my memory bank. I was seeing everyone
just as they were. It was a tremendous relief. My insight that we are all,
after all, just doing our best with the circumstances of our lives to manage
gracefully, authentically and with integrity had a transformative effect.
Everyone became my friend. And I felt a friend to everyone.
I think that equanimity,
the last of the paramis, is the ability to feel and understand, in wisdom,
that everyone and everything is different, legitimately, as a result of different
causes. To live in a friendly, non-adversarial relationship with all things,
with all people, and with our lives is the source of greatest equanimity.