[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
kick him in the head.
Pa-bong-ka himself uses the example of one s own mother:
If your mother became crazed and attacked you with a knife,
you would relieve her of the knife. You would not then proceed
to beat her up. That s his appeal: Once there s a profoundly
close relationship, the close relationship predominates. Why
is a friend acting so terribly? Why is she turning against you
and attacking you? It s due to a counterproductive attitude a
distortion in the person s mind.
Indeed, if your own best friend went mad and came at you
with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek
to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to
beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker
in whatever way you could you might even have to hit the
person in order to disarm him, but once you had managed to
disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because
he is close to you.
If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the
same relationship to you as your very best friend and if you
saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend gone mad,
you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with
behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking
to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred. He would be
too dear to you.
everyone as a friend 111
Therefore, in teaching compassion, Buddhists do not choose
a neutral person as the example of all sentient beings; they
choose the strongest of all examples, their best friend. Your
feeling for that person is the feeling you should ideally have
for every sentient being. You cannot go up to the police officer
on the corner and hug her. But you can, inwardly, value her, as
well as all sentient beings, as your best friend.
So if everyone in the past has been close, then there is good
reason that closeness should predominate. And this becomes
a reason in addition to the similarity between oneself and
others for meditatively cultivating love and compassion,
rather than hatred and distance, with respect to everyone. It
is not sufficient merely to see that sentient beings are suffer-
ing. You must also develop a sense of closeness with them, a
sense that they are dear. With that combination seeing that
people suffer and thinking of them as dear you can develop
compassion. So, after meditatively transforming your attitude
toward friends, enemies, and neutral persons such that you
have gained progress in becoming even-minded toward all of
them, the next step is to meditate on everyone as friends, to feel
that they have been profoundly close.
In meditation, take individual persons to mind, starting
with your friends. Reflect on how close your best friend is
recognize your attitude, for example, when your friend needs
your concern, like when she s ill. This is an appeal to common
experience to how we already naturally react to close friends.
Then, in meditation, extend this feeling to more beings.
First you need to recognize people as having been friend,
enemy, and neutral person countless times over countless
112 a truthful heart
lifetimes or at least you can t say that there isn t anyone who
hasn t been a friend, or you can t say there isn t anyone who
hasn t been an enemy, or you can t say with surety that there s
anyone who hasn t been neutral. Once you recognize this, it s
possible to begin to recognize everyone as friends.
To consider ourselves dear we usually do not have to enter
into meditation. We cherish ourselves greatly. When we see
ourselves suffering, we have no problem in wishing to escape
that suffering. The problem lies in not cherishing others. The
ability to cherish others has to be cultivated. In meditation:
1. Visualize someone you like very much and then super-
impose the image of someone toward whom you are neu-
tral. Alternate between the two images until you value
the person toward whom you are neutral as much as the
friend.
2. Then superimpose, in succession, the images of a number
of people toward whom you are neutral, until you value
each of them as much as the greatest of friends.
3. When you have developed facility with those two steps, it
is possible to extend the meditation to enemies.
For me, it s much more disruptive to think about my friends
as having been enemies than it is to think about my enemies as
having been friends. No matter how difficult it is to think of a
hated enemy as having been a close friend in a recent lifetime,
it s more disruptive to think of my close friend as having been
an enemy. With regard to neutral people, it s shocking, a whole
everyone as a friend 113
new perspective, to think, Just two lifetimes ago, we were
very close friends, and now by the force of our own actions we
don t even know each other, don t even care about each other,
we neglect each other, we re indifferent.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]