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Khadro-la, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and Ven. Thubten Tendar, Kopan Monastery, December 2020. Photo by Ven. Lobsang Sherab.
Patience: A Guide to Shantideva’s Sixth Chapter is a new book of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings on the perfection of patience, a topic Rinpoche has taught on extensively. (Perhaps this is not surprising since Rinpoche’s name “Zopa” means “patience.”) In this book, Rinpoche gives commentary on the verses on patience from Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “Overcoming the Wish to Retaliate” where Rinpoche discusses the conventional reason anger is inappropriate:
Ultimately, the enemy who gives harm and the harm itself are both empty. Neither exists inherently in any way. Because we are unable to see it like this, we should train to see things as like illusions, like dreams—maybe like hallucinations that happen when we take LSD! Because everything is dependent on other factors and nothing governs itself, these illusion-like phenomena are nothing to get angry about. It is like in our dreams there might be an enemy, but when we awaken we realize there is no enemy there, existing by its own nature.
The enemy is like a dream enemy, but that does not mean they are actually a dream, that is, nonexistent. When we are meditating on emptiness, we must be so skillful not to fall into nihilism. In his Four Hundred Stanzas, Aryadeva said that believing that nothing exists—including the I and karma—and hence falling into nihilism creates karma heavier than having killed a hundred million people.
If the emptiness of the I meant there were no I at all, either truly existing or merely labeled, then nothing would exist. No suffering would exist; no pleasure would exist. There would be no need to move the body, no need to breathe. Everything would be completely pointless. Everything we do is to attain happiness and stop suffering, but if there were no I at all, none of our actions would have any effect. With no I, why have expensive treatments in hospital to cure the I that doesn’t exist?
Many mistakes arise when we mistakenly think that the I doesn’t exist at all. We meditate to try to attain a peaceful, happy mind, but this I cannot receive any peace because it doesn’t exist. There is no karma, no cause, and no effect. There is no point to anything and no reason to refrain from creating negative actions.
To think that because there is no I, no enemy, no phenomenon, and therefore nothing matters, we deny karma. That is a completely dark mind; it is very dangerous. Emptiness is not nothingness; meditating on emptiness is not watching nothing, like sitting in a helicopter looking at blank sky.
Nothing exists ultimately, but because everything is a dependent arising, everything exists conventionally, existing in dependence on causes and conditions. The enemy, the anger they have, the harm they give us, all arise due to causes and conditions. The suffering we feel from that person’s anger has arisen due to karma, the negative actions we have done in the past, therefore we should not become angry in return.
For instance, it might seem that being criticized is a cause of anger, but if it that were so, then anybody who ever received criticism would have to get angry. That is not so. Somebody could criticize a buddha or a bodhisattva and no anger would arise at all. Even many ordinary goodhearted people will not react to criticism and other harmful actions.
A higher bodhisattva, who has totally renounced the self and only cherishes others, has still to remove the subtle imprints to knowledge, but all the grosser disturbing-thought imprints have been destroyed, so it is impossible to become angry even if somebody tried to harm them. Anger is only a condition; it is not an inherent cause. And because the cause is our own delusion, there is no reason to be angry at the person who has harmed us.
Excerpted from Patience: A Guide to Shantideva’s Sixth Chapter by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, edited by Gordon McDougall, published by Wisdom Publications (WisdomExperience.org).
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.