Loving-kindness and Compassion A Transcribed Teaching Given by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in January, 2004 Loving-kindness and compassion protect us, and protect others as well. The Buddha taught that these qualities spontaneously bring benefit, just like a wish-fulfilling jewel, and that if our minds are filled with aggression and anger, not only will we be unable to help ourselves, we will not be able to help anyone else either. We will not be able to benefit ourselves in this life or in future lives. For example, if you are someone who always thinks about the people you don’t like, and how you can get the better of them, you will never be happy and peaceful. During the day, you will not be able to eat your food well. When you are sitting down, you will want to stand, and when you are standing, you will want to sit down. You won’t be able to sleep well either. In other words, you will never be content. This isn’t the only problem with anger. When your mind is filled with anger, your enemies will increase, not decrease. The mind of anger or aggression thinks about enemies and about how to overcome them. It considers the enemy to be someone who is harming us or will harm us, and therefore thinks about how to overcome the enemy, obtain victory over the enemy. The opinion of this attitude of anger is that we actually can overcome our enemies by way of anger. But actually we find that if we follow after this mind of anger, if we follow after those thoughts, we can notovercome our enemies at all. It is possible to inflict some levels of harm upon our enemies. The ultimate level of harm of course would be to kill them. But if we killed someone, then two enemies would rise up behind that person we killed. Then if we killed those two people, we would then have four enemies that rose up behind them. If we killed those four enemies, they would multiply into eight, and eventually that would lead to having a hundred enemies, and eventually the whole world would be filled with our enemies. We can see how this mind of aggression cannot really overcome enemies. Another Approach Translator: Rinpoche is going to give another example to you, and then will ask you a question - it won't be a hard question, so you shouldn't have too many worries [laughter]. Rinpoche [in English]: Don't worry, really [laughter]. 1 | L o v i n g - kindness and Compassion — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche There was a nomadic people who lived more than two or three thousand years ago. Everywhere they went they had to go by foot - they couldn't drive anywhere, so they had to walk up and down mountains and through plains and so forth. Sometimes they encountered roads on which there were very small, sharp stones and thorns that pierced through their feet. They thought that to get around this problem was to cover the ground with leather. In that way the thorns and stones would not pierce their feet. So they gathered together all the leather they could find and were able to cover about fifteen or twenty kilometers of road. After that all of their leather was gone. The question for you is: What could they really do to ameliorate the situation? Student: Make shoes. Rinpoche: So we have one suggestion, that they could make shoes out of leather. Does everyone agree with that? Even if you don't agree, you should speak up. You could come up with other suggestions. [There was much laughter throughout this section.] S: Sweep the roads. Rinpoche [in English]: Okay. Good idea. S: Walk beside the road. S: Go back from where they came from [laughter]. S: You could make a new road, without thorns and the sharp stones. S: Re-use the leather. Rinpoche: Thank you all for considering this topic well [laughter] and providing your answers. If you take just enough leather to cover your feet, then it will protect your feet no matter where you step. It is equivalent to covering the whole earth with leather. This is the best idea, even though this was a time two or three thousand years ago when there was not good machinery to make sneakers, and there weren't good plows to make new roads. If we take just enough leather to cover our feet, it becomes the same thing as covering the whole earth with leather. In the same way, if we tame our mind from within, it becomes the same thing as taming all enemies on the outside. If we imbue our mind streams with mindfulness and with loving-kindness and compassion, what will appear to us will be happy experiences. How we appear to others will also be 2 | L o v i n g - kindness and Compassion — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche pleasant. Things will be pleasant both for ourselves and for others. In this way we accomplish both benefits. How They Differ To give another example: If our minds are filled with aggression, hatred and other kleshas or mental afflictions, then our minds are never relaxed and never open - they are always tight and stuffy. If our minds are tight, we won't have any self-confidence. If we are devoid of loving-kindness and compassion and lack this wish to benefit others we won't feel brave. When our minds are this way, this is mirrored in external appearances. Things that appear to us externally will also seem to be unpleasant. If we had two people standing before this assembly tonight, and one of them had a mind filled with loving-kindness and compassion, a very open and relaxed mind, and the other person had a mind that was very disturbed, very tight and only concerned about their own benefit, they would see two different pictures as they looked out into the audience. I am not talking about myself and the translator in this case [laughter]. I'm saying, if there were two other people [laughter]. The person with the disturbed mind filled with aggression would be looking at everyone and thinking badly of them. They would look at each person and say, "That's not a very good person, that's not a very nice person." They seem to have a lot of pride, fixated on their own concerns. The person with loving-kindness and compassion in their heart would look out and see nice people, good people. They would look and say, "Oh, what a nice person, what a good person." They would be able to keep company with anyone and be harmonious with anyone in any situation. The narrow-minded person with a mind filled with pride would not be able to get along with many people because they would see faults in everyone. Not only that; they would see small faults as very big faults - for instance, when we get into fights over very small, menial things. We could take this cup and put it neatly right here on this table in front of me. 3 | L o v i n g - kindness and Compassion — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Someone else might think it is better to put the cup over there. [Rinpoche demonstrates two people arguing over the precise placement of his cup.] "No, it's better to put the cup here." The two people would fight. The fight would become greater and greater until it became a huge fight. But the whole issue of where to place the cup isn't really a great one to begin with. We need to recognize that this is the case. If our minds are filled with aggression and concern only for ourselves, it is very hard to recognize when that happens. We Are All Interdependent In this way when we get into fights through having such a narrow mind, we do not accomplish our own benefit, nor do we accomplish the benefit of others. How is it that we don't accomplish any benefit? Because everything is interdependently arisen. Everything comes into being by depending on something else. For us as humans to experience goodness or benefit, we have to depend upon others to experience that goodness, benefit or happiness. Without depending on others, it is very difficult for anything good to happen to us. Since we all live in a human society on one single planet, we have to depend upon each other. The best way to depend upon and communicate with each other is through having loving- kindness and compassion. If we have these qualities, we will be able to relate with each other, we will have connections with each other, and we can depend upon each other. But if we don't have any loving-kindness and compassion, the entire path of depending upon, communicating with and having connections with each other will become destroyed. If we have loving-kindness and compassion with an attitude that we are contributing to this interdependence of humans, things will come along well for ourselves, things will come along well for others and the whole world will benefit. When that happens we will not need armies or a lot of laws or police. Take the example of bees working together, and see that one bee by itself doesn't have much power at all to accomplish anything. But when you have a whole hive of bees working together, 4 | L o v i n g - kindness and Compassion — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche look at the beautiful house they can make.