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“You know, Professor, this stray kitten and you have one very important thing in common.” “I can’t imagine,” responded the professor coolly. “Your life is the most important thing in the world to you,” said His Holiness. “Same for this kitten.”
“As humans we have much greater potential, of course,” His Holiness replied. “But the way we all want very much to stay alive, the way we cling
our particular experience of consciousness—in this way human and animal are equal.”
“We all share these wishes. But also the way we look for happiness and try to avoid discomfort is the same. Who among us does not enjoy a delicious meal? Who does not wish to sleep in a safe, comfortable bed? Author, monk—or stray kitten—we are all equal in that.”
When His Holiness got out of bed every morning at 3 A.M. to meditate for five hours, I would follow him and curl up in a tight knot beside him, basking in his warmth and energy. I thought that most people started each day in meditation.
I was beginning to realize that just because an idea is simple, it isn’t necessarily easy to follow. Purring in agreement with high-sounding principles meant nothing unless I actually lived by them.
“Isn’t that interesting? Only this morning at the temple, we saw novice monks competing for admission to the monastery. There are too many novices and not enough places. But turning to the jail, nobody wants to go there, even though the conditions are easier than in a monastery. This proves that it is not so much the circumstances of our lives that make us happy or unhappy but the way we see them.”
“Most people think that their only option is to change their circumstances. But these are not the true causes of their unhappiness.
It has more to do with the way they think about their circumstances.”
“The purpose of Buddhism is not to convert people. It is to give them tools so they can create greater happiness. So they can be happier Catholics, happier atheists, happier Buddhists. There are many practices, and I know you are already very familiar with one of them.”
It was not my circumstances that were causing me distress but my belief about these circumstances. By letting go of the unhappiness-creating belief that I needed another cat, I would convert my jail into a monastery.
There would be an occasional observation about the flavor of a spice or the texture of the rice. From the expressions on their faces, it was as though they were on a journey of discovery: what sensory pleasure awaited them today? What nuance would they find that was subtly different or gratifying?
If the monks up the hill were able to find such pleasure in the most basic of foods, surely the delectable cuisine offered to patrons of Café Franc should be the cause of the most intensely spine-tingling, claw-curling, whisker-quivering ecstasy imaginable? As it happened, no.
Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment deliberately and non-judgmentally.’
Moving between Jokhang and Café Franc more and more often, I began to see that up the hill, happiness was sought by cultivating inner qualities, beginning with mindfulness but also including such things as generosity, equanimity, and a good heart. Down the hill, happiness was sought from external things—restaurant food, stimulating holidays, and lightning-quick technology. There seemed to be no reason, however, that humans couldn’t have both: we cats knew that being mindful of delicious food was among the greatest happinesses imaginable!
The important thing is to be in the direct state, attending to the here and now. Not in the narrative state”—he spun his index finger beside his temple—“which means thinking
“For me,” he continued, “she is a beautiful reminder to be in this moment, here and now. What could be more precious? So I suppose”—he looked at me with that oceanic love—“she is my Rinpoche, too.”
“When you say ‘true cause,’ what do you mean?” “A cause that can be relied upon. One that always works. Heat applied to water is a true cause of steam. No matter who applies the heat or how often the heat has been applied before or where in the world heat is applied, the result is always steam. In the case of money or status or relationships”—His Holiness chuckled—“we can easily see these are not true causes of happiness.”
The danger is that self-development can lead us to more self-cherishing, self-absorption, self-infatuation. And these are not true causes of happiness but the opposite.
Two main true causes of happiness: first, the wish to give happiness to others, which Buddhists define as love, and second, the wish to help free others from dissatisfaction or suffering, which we define as compassion.
“The main shift, you see, is from placing self at the center of our thoughts to putting others there. It is—what do you say?—a paradox that the more we can focus our thoughts on the well-being of others, the happier we become. The first one to benefit is oneself. I call this being wisely selfish.”
“We all face this same choice when dealing with problems. We don’t ask for them. We don’t want them. But the way we deal with them is what’s most important. If we are wise, the greatest problems can lead to the greatest insights.”
I also discovered that I felt a lot happier not being jealous. Envy and resentment were demanding emotions that had disturbed my own peace of mind. For my sake, too, there was little point in being consumed by unhappy and irrational feelings.
The law of cause and effect is the assumed basis of all Western technology. Nothing is causeless; everything occurs as the result of something else. But as soon as one ventures beyond the immediate, material realm, Westerners talk about luck, fate, or divine intervention.
‘The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, and let it spring from love born out of concern for all beings … As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.’”
Impermanence can be another cause of unhappiness. We can get things just the way we want them, and then”—the lama snapped his fingers—“change.”
“But the underlying reason for our dissatisfaction, the root cause, is that we mistake the way that things exist. We see objects and people as separate and independent from us. We believe them to have characteristics, qualities, that we are attracted to or repelled by. We think everything is happening outside us and we are just reacting to it—as though it’s all coming at us from the outside.”
“Because when we look very hard, we can’t find an essence to any person or object, including me. We can’t find any qualities that exist separate from our own minds.”
This subtle truth is called ‘dependent arising,’ and it can take much study and meditation to understand. But it’s the most amazingly powerful concept—life-changing when we begin to comprehend it. Just as quantum scientists have confirmed, what Buddha taught is that the way things exist, how things exist, depends, in part, on our own minds.
“If all this dissatisfaction, all this dukkha, were coming from out there, it would be impossible to do much about it. But because it originates in the mind itself, well, we have some hope. So the Fourth Noble Truth is the treatment—what we can do about our mental problems.”
Buddhism we also interpret Dharma to mean ‘cessation,’ as in the end of dissatisfaction, the end of dukkha. This is the purpose of Buddha’s teachings.”
“The Lam Rim, or graduated path to enlightenment, is a good place to start,” the lama told him. “It teaches us to become more aware of our own mental behavior, to replace negative patterns of thought with more positive ones.”
“Everyone has the same basic problem. Expressed in different ways. Our main problem is that we are all ‘I’ specialists.”
“We don’t stop thinking about ourselves the whole time. Even when this makes us unhappy and uptight. If we focus too much on ourselves, we make ourselves sick. We have this constant inner chatter going morning, noon, and night, this inner monologue. But paradoxically, the more we are able to think about making other beings happy, the happier we become ourselves.”
“Exactly. It is not permanent. It is not part of you. You cannot say, ‘I’ve always been an angry person.’ Your anger arises, abides, and passes, just like anyone else’s. You may experience it more than others. And each time you give in to it, you feed the habit and make it more likely you will feel it again. Wouldn’t it be better, instead, to decrease its power?”
‘Though one man may conquer a thousand men a thousand times in battle, he who conquers himself is the greatest warrior.
When we see for ourselves there is a problem, change becomes much easier.”
‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’
“One of the last things Buddha said to his followers was that anyone who believed a word he had taught them was a fool—unless they had tested it against their own experience.”
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
We cats are not robotic beasts who can be conditioned to jump up or sit down or salivate at the utterance of a command or the press of a bell. Did you ever hear of Pavlov’s cat?
