THE BRIDGE OF COMPASSION

Compassion becomes a bridge to the world outside. Trust and compassion for oneself bring inspiration to dance with life, to communicate with the energies of the world. Lacking this kind of inspiration and openness, the spiritual path becomes the samsaric path of desire. One remains trapped in the desire to improve oneself, the desire to achieve imagined goals … Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy. They recharge your energy, because in the process of relating with them, you acknowledge your wealth, your richness. So if you have difficult tasks to perform, such as dealing with people or life situations, you do not feel you are running out of resources. Each time you are faced with a difficult task, it presents itself as a delightful opportunity to demonstrate your richness, your wealth. There is no feeling of poverty at all in this approach to life.

From “The Open Way,” in CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM, pages 98 to 99.

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 - 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

“Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious and very generous. When a person develops real compassion, he or she is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself, because compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without ‘for me’ and without ‘for them.’ It is filled with joy, spontaneously existing joy, constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness.”

From “The Open Way,” in CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM, page 99.

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 - 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

“Usually in life, when we act, when we exist, we tend to have a very wretched and small notion of what we are doing. Sometimes, we try to be good boys and girls. We struggle, taking our journey stitch by stitch. We go to sleep at night, we get up the next day, and we struggle to lead our life. The ordinary approach to that is undignified and very small, like flat Coca-Cola. Sometimes we feel better, we try to cheer up, and it feels pretty good. But then, behind that, there is the same familiar “me” haunting us all the time. We don’t have to be that way, at all. We actually could see our world as a big world and see ourselves as open and vast. We can see our world as sacred. That is the key to bringing together the sun of wisdom with the moon of wakefulness.”

  — From OCEAN OF DHARMA: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa. 365 Teachings on Living Life with Courage and Compassion. Number 284.

NEGATIVITY

We all experience negativity — the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout, there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul-smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

   — Chogyam Trungpa, from “Working with Negativity,” in THE MYTH OF FREEDOM and the Way of Meditation, page 93. Shambhala Library edition.

Within an enormous vacuum, an enormous space, enormous outer space, you begin to experience the dawn of enlightenment — just the dawn. You get the message that the sun is going to shine, purely because there is a little glow in the east. The dawn of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition cannot take place unless first there is a sense of desolation, meaninglessness, and being a fool, to begin with. Then the dawn of enlightenment can actually take place properly. You begin to experience what we might call, from a traditional Western reference point, the Star of Bethlehem. The birth of something is taking place. There’s a star in the midnight sky. The sky is black, deep blue, but there is a star shining in that sky. There is hope in the positive sense. There is something taking place. Such a thing cannot happen unless there’s nightfall and darkness … We have already understood that there’s no me, no self, no ground. That nonexistence begins to make sense. That non-existence of self, of ego, becomes the Star of Bethlehem, and the dawn of enlightenment begins to take place.

  — Chogyam Trungpa (1939-1987), From “The Dawn of Enlightenment,” Talk Five of MEDITATION: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, July 8, 1974, Naropa Institute. Edited from the transcript.

If only it were this easy:

MINDFULNESS IS EXTRA BLISS

According to the Buddha, when you are being mindful, then walking is mindful, talking is mindful, breathing is mindful, feeling is mindful, hearing is mindful, sensation is mindful. You don’t need to work harder to feel more than you usually feel, or to hear more than you usually hear. Rather, mindfulness is extra bliss in some sense. I am not particularly trying to make a sales pitch for mindfulness, but it is somewhat joyful. You realize that you could be so uplifted by being mindful. You begin to feel very good that you could rise beyond your regular, ordinary struggles, which don’t even require that much awareness, but which normally give you tremendous pain and misery and unmindfulness….We can always experience some sense of the joy of being alive, as human beings.

  — From “Mindfulness Discipline: Cutting the Root of Cause and Effect,” in THE 1981 HINAYANA-MAHAYANA TRANSCRIPTS, page 24. All material by Chogyam Trungpa is copyright Diana J. Mukpo and reprinted here without permission.

A WARRIOR WITHOUT TERRITORY

Student: The idea of a warrior is usually associated with territory or responding to a sense of danger. If we give up all territory, what is the motivation for having the spirit of a warrior?

Chogyam Trungpa: A warrior is not like a samurai who is looking for a job. You are not trying to be hired by anybody, not even by yourself. The idea of a warrior is based on a sense of fundamental fearlessness. There is no reason why you should be a coward. It’s as simple as that. You are not being a warrior because a state of war exists in your country. We are not trying to win against the egohood people. We are not trying to fight with them. You are being a warrior because you ARE a warrior. If someone asks you, “Are you twenty-one years old?” you say, “Yes, I am.” They don’t ask you WHY you are twenty-one years old or how you have done this. You would have no answer for that. You are just twenty-one. Warriorship is a basic sense of unshakeability. It’s a sense of immovability and self-existing dignity rather than that you are trying to fight with something else.

From “Meditation: The Way of the Buddha,” Talk Four, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, July 1 1974. Edited from an unpublished transcript.

All material by Chogyam Trungpa is copyright Diana J. Mukpo. Reprinted without permission.