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Lama Zopa Rinpoche circumambulating Boudha Stupa late at night, Nepal, January 2021. Photo by Ven. Roger Kunsang.
Patience: A Guide to Shantideva’s Sixth Chapter is a recent book of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings on the perfection of patience, a topic Rinpoche has taught on extensively. In this book, Rinpoche gives commentary on the verses on patience in Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “How to Accept Suffering”:
Shantideva next explained that whatever we do will become easier the more we practice it. This is very important advice. Whether something is easy or difficult depends on how acquainted we are with it. It all depends on training. Say we have been living with bugs for a long time: fleas, bedbugs, and so forth. This becomes normal for us. Fleas in our clothes, lice in our hair—they don’t bother us at all after a while. On the other hand, if we have never come across bugs before, if we are used to sleeping in a clean, soft bed and living a very luxurious lifestyle, to encounter bugs for the first time is a great shock. While there are fleas in our house we can’t do anything. We want them killed or we want to buy a new house!
Training the mind in patience can be done for worldly reasons or for the Dharma. I mentioned the people in India who cut and burn their bodies and fast for many days—something we cannot do. They can do this because they have trained their minds to accept that suffering, mistakenly thinking it is worthwhile. It all depends on how the mind—the colorless, shapeless, immaterial mind—interprets things. Something we find impossible to do can be done by somebody else easily. For a person who seeks worldly pleasure, practicing the Dharma is extremely difficult because their mind sees it as difficult. On the other hand, they will persevere for what they dearly want—possessions, reputation, and so forth—no matter how difficult, willingly undergoing hardships and danger.
For a Dharma practitioner it is completely the opposite. All the hard work needed to gain possessions, reputation, and so forth seems utterly pointless, but they willingly accept suffering to obtain the happiness of future lives, liberation from samsara, and enlightenment. Whereas the smallest samsaric thing is unbearable, they are happy to do the most difficult Dharma work.
Shantideva said we should not be impatient with things such as heat, cold, insect bites, and so forth, because if we are, then we will become increasingly intolerant of them. Conversely, we need to slowly build up our acceptance of small sufferings so we can start to accept greater ones.
Things that irritate us now, such as bad weather, can be the beginning of our training, learning to accept them for the sake of other sentient beings because we see the importance of developing patience on our road to enlightenment. Gradually, once we train our mind in these small sufferings, we can learn to become like the Buddha when he was a bodhisattva and give our body to a starving tiger.
Therefore it is greatly worthwhile to train the mind in patience in this way. If we live in a place that is full of snakes, mosquitoes, fleas, and bedbugs, it is like living in a palace full of jewels.
Excerpted from Patience: A Guide to Shantideva’s Sixth Chapter by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, edited by Gordon McDougall, published by Wisdom Publications:
https://shop.fpmt.org/Patience–A-Guide-to-Shantidevas-Sixth-Chapter-eBook_p_3366.html
Watch the video series “Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Teachings on Thought Transformation during the Time of COVID-19” and find links to videos in translation, transcripts, MP3s, additional practice advice, and more:
https://fpmt.org/fpmt/announcements/resources-for-coronavirus-pandemic/advice-from-lama-zopa-rinpoche-for-coronavirus/
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.