The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path

by Norman Fischer

Imagination isn’t an escape from reality. Imagination deepens and enriches reality, adding texture, depth, dimension, feeling, and possibility. The truth is, all that is creative and ennobling in us ultimately sources in the imagination. Without imagination reality is too flat, too matter-of-fact, lacking in color and fervor. To go beyond the possible to the impossible, we need to imagine it.

All idealism and moral vision depend on imagination. So does love. To go beyond one’s own material and practical needs to loving care for another is the greatest of all imaginative acts. Love isn’t rational or practical. It isn’t data- or performance-driven. Though it may include animal or psychological need, its roots run deeper.

Buddhism’s most basic formulation is the four noble truths: suffering, origination, stopping, path.

Suffering: all conditioned existence is characterized by dissatisfaction and suffering.

Origination: dissatisfaction and suffering originate in the failure of our imaginations to se...

Stopping: we can stop suffering by opening our imaginations to the truth of how things are and...

Path: the way to effect this opening is through practice of the Buddhist path of right conduct, right understanding, and r...

What makes suffering painful is that we identify it as “mine.” In fact, the suffering I experience isn’t mine; it’s the common human suffering. Understanding that loss and pain connect me to others, and to life, I transform suffering. Embracing it fully, I see it as an expression of the radical identity of all things. Experiencing suffering like this, suffering ends. It transforms into love. Loving without limit, I dedicate myself to others and the world.

Imagination expands the heart, causing us to understand others as ourselves and ourselves as not belonging to us.

when a painful thorn lodges in the foot, the fingers pull it out without hesitation or fanfare. The fingers don’t feel good about themselves for doing this, nor is the foot grateful. It is just a perfectly normal thing for the fingers to do. Why? Because the fingers don’t think of themselves as independent of the foot. Fingers and foot are one body. They don’t have to think about this; it’s simply the case. So naturally, easily, smoothly, without trouble or fanfare, there is caring and beneficial action. One-body reality.

When I view others and myself like this, I have maximum happiness and ease.

I don’t need to be wary of others. I don’t need to worry about whether they validate me, like me, or are taking advantage of me. I understand that every person will have some kind of conditioning that will cause them to see and live in a particular way that may or may not seem good to me, given my own conditioning.

So naturally I—and everyone else—will have preferences and patterns. But all of this is myself, and I am all of it. I don’t need to judge, congratulate, or condemn. I only need to love as a natural extension of my being alive, and I only ...

We’re only human. But we’re also more. We’re by nature aspirational beings. Our imaginations are unlimited.

We can’t be satisfied simply with the world as it appears. Presented with that, and only that, we will do what we have always done—distract and destroy. We will be deeply, narcissistically, self-protective and dissatisfied, and out of that uncomfortable smallness we will do stupid and terrible things. This is unworthy of us.

We need a wider, deeper, more altruistic vision of who we are, for we are bigger than we look—as big as our imaginations project us to be. We each have to take ourselves less seriously as the person we think we are and more seriously as the bodhisattva we also surely...

For spiritual practitioners, life is the field of practice. Spiritual practitioners try to master the art of living. They pay attention to how they live, which means how they think, speak, and act. They pay attention to states of mind and body, relationships to self and others, perceptions, feelings.

“Nobody’s perfect.” Like most common sayings, this too is true. No human being can be perfect. But this doesn’t stop us from trying. The six perfections are impossible. No one can practice them. But we practice them anyway. We make the impossible possible.

The only way to do what cannot be done is imaginatively. I can’t practice the paramitas objectively, but I can practice them imaginatively through vow, intention, spirit, commitment, action. I can practice them through love, through expansion of my heart. That’s the spirit of practicing the six perfections.

The six perfections are generosity, ethical conduct, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and understanding.

The perfection of generosity: opening our hearts to ourselves, to others, and to the abundance of life.

The perfection of ethical conduct: paying attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds, turning them away from self-centeredness and t...

The perfection of patience: fully facing difficulties and transformin...

The perfection of joyful effort: rousing ourselves to hopefulness and joy so we can keep our practice com...

The perfection of meditation: focused, regular sitting and walking practice to refresh and slow down our heart and minds, so that our...

The perfection of understanding: recognizing that nothing is as we think it is; that there is no separation, no tragedy; that nothing is fixed or solid; that there is only love and endless hopefulness beyond and within what happens and doesn’t happen. The perfection of understanding pervades the other five perfections. It...

What is attitude anyway? Attitude is the climate of our lives. Everyone has some kind of attitude or set of attitudes. Probably we have never thought about them, never examined them, and don’t much experience ourselves as having any particular attitudes. A fish doesn’t know what water is because it sees and experiences everything through the medium of water. Like a fish in water, we swim in the medium of our attitudes.

Someone once asked Tang dynasty Zen Master Baijang why giving is the gateway to the bodhisattva path. Baijang answered that it is because to practice giving is to practice letting go. The monk then asked, “What do you let go of?” Baijang said, “You let go of narrow views. You let go of the idea that things are small and tight, graspable and possessable.”

it is the crabbiness of our thinking, the stinginess of our minds, our desire to judge, evaluate, separate, define—holding on to scraps—that stop us from opening to the abundance that must be within us, living beings that we are.

How do we go about challenging and opening up our stingy attitudes about reality? First, we pay close attention to our thoughts and viewpoints, which are expressions of our attitudes. If as living beings we are heir to a generous spirit, what blocks it? We have to investigate this. We have to become diligent students of our own minds, messy and unpleasant as they often are.

We study our minds by noticing in detail whenever we feel pinched, small, fearful, or stingy; whenever we find ourselves seeing the glass half-empty rather than half-full or clenching up with defensive and protective feelings. We learn to identify these feelings in our bodies and minds—noticing the tightness in our chests and breathing, the clenching in our shoulders and faces, the old familiar paranoid and panicky trains of thought. With lots of patient repetition and training, eventually we learn how to notice these things before they run away with us.

We learn to catch ourselves in midstream and just, literally, stop. If we are walking, we stop walking. If we are sitting, we stand up. We take a conscious breath or two and ask ourselves, “Is this really true? Am I really under attack? Is there really not enough to go around?” And we ask further, “What are the effects of this habit of mind?” T...

Usually when we ask these questions, we answer no. We are not really under attack, and there really is enough to go around. What’s bothering us is probably more a matter of pride and habitual defensiveness than reasonable necessity. When we reflect further, we notice that the consequences of this habitual response are not good: we end up with words, deeds, and feelings...

If we investigate and intervene like this again and again, we will eventually see our small-mindedness for what it is: an unsuccessful habit based ...

How do you do it? Sit down in meditation posture and come into connection with your body and breath. Let yourself relax, and focus your attention not so much on your thoughts, feelings, or sensations as on the spaciousness that surrounds them. Mind or awareness itself is wide, without boundary. Within this wide openness—always there, though you may not have noticed it before—thoughts and feelings arise and pass away. Some of them you like; some of them you don’t. Usually you are focused on the feelings and thoughts. Now shift your focus a bit. Let thoughts and feelings slip into the background and allow the background spaciousness to come forward. Settling down and paying attention to body and breath will absorb the free-floating anxiety that is usually there in your mind without your knowing it. This enables you to relax and let go into that generous spaciousness. Sit in the midst of it. You can say to yourself, “This is life: body, breath, consciousness. I share it with everyone and everything. It holds and protects me.”

In this way, meditation will open up your attitude, little by little over time. It’s a process. It won’t help to try to measure progress. The effort to measure and accumulate progress is already small-minded and stingy! It already assumes you don’t have enough and that you need more. Instead, be willing to keep sitting like this every day, and bit by bit you will be able to see some daylight in your basic attitude that wasn’t there before—patches of blue sky peeking through the clouds.

The third traditional gift is that of fearlessness, which seems like an impossible gift to give. But it can be given. You give it by giving love, because when you feel loved, you feel confident. To give the gift of fearlessness is to give others the sense that they matter; that they are respected, cared for, secure within a loving reality, and therefore ultimately protected.

Shame, loss, physical pain, and even death are part of life; they are folded into the bodhisattva’s imaginative vision of the path ahead. Bodhisattva fearlessness doesn’t deny catastrophe. It recognizes its inevitability. Everything that exists will one day not exist—this is how existence works; this is its beauty and the source of its bounty. So bodhisattva fearlessness is very solid, very tough, very large. When you feel it, it’s easy to give the gift of fearlessness. You will give it all the time.

all of us need to give material goods, teaching and inspiration, and fearlessness as we can.

Bodhisattva practice isn’t easily codified. This is why bodhisattvas practice upaya, skillful means. Skillful means is the intuitive, practical, flexible understanding of how to concretely apply the perfection of generosity (or any other imaginative practice) in the many nuanced and specific situations presented in a messy world.

We all give, but do we really give? To practice generosity is to try one’s best to give with a genuine feeling of love and well-wishing for the other person. It turns out this takes practice.

You can give the gift of your happiness to others by being happy in a generous and inclusive way. This seems odd—how can my being happy be a gift to someone else? But it can be. If I experience my happiness in a light and outgoing way—if I don’t think of it as my happiness, my good fortune—then others can feel happy with me. If I am happy and others are miserable, maybe I feel guilty. Maybe I think I ought to be miserable too. But my misery won’t reduce theirs; it will only compound it. However, if I share my happiness without feeling I need to protect myself from others’ misery, I can cheer them up.

Years ago, when I was elected abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, a very complicated and burdensome position, people would ask me what priorities I had for my new role. I said that my first priority was my own happiness. This shocked people. But it made sense to me. An abbot practices at the center of a community. A crabby abbot will dampen everyone’s mood, while a happy abbot increases the community’s joy. We are all abbots, each of us practicing at the center of our various communities, so we should all cultivate our own happiness, not for ourselves (true happiness can never be selfish anyway) but for others.

Similarly, we can give others our joy and stability, our love and understanding. These last two might be the simplest and purest of all gifts—we simply aim to love, respect, and honestly try to understand another person, without a need to improve or fix, or think we have to figure out the person.

Besides, whatever you think you are giving—time, money, possessions, love—was never yours in the first place. It was a gift, given for no particular reason, and you are merely passing it on.

Meditation slows you down enough to experience, at close range, the workings of sensual perception. You notice that in pleasurable perceptions there is usually something more going on than the simple act of enjoyment. Underneath enjoyment you detect a subtle clinging, a greediness for more and better.

The closer you look, the more you see the lack, even sadness, at the center of pleasant sensual experience.

When we face our human condition, we can go beyond sensual distraction; we can end the grasping, clinging, comparing, and averting that characterize our normal perceptual acts. When we do so, we feel each act of perception as a gift received in peaceful gratitude. We don’t need to grasp in our greed or push it away in our annoyance. This is another way to understand the perfection of generosity—as perception itself, in which we receive the world as gift.

When your mind is quiet, practice looking with soft eyes, listening with soft ears. Practice feeling the air on your cheek, the taste of food, the fragrance of flowers. Be fully present with sensual experience and you will feel what it is like to receive the gifts of the senses—without looking for more.

Empty means “whole, connected, fluid, free, boundless.”