A genuine heart of sadness

How sad is your love?

I shall begin with the story about an ageing Buddhist master who was growing really tired of his student’s constant complaints. One morning, he sent him to get some salt. When the student returned, the master told him to mix a handful of salt in a glass of water and then drink it.

“How does it taste?” the master asked.

“Bitter,” said the student.

The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take another handful of salt the same size and put it in the lake. The two walked together in silence to the nearby lake and once the student swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.”

As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?”

“Fresh,” remarked the student.

“Do you taste the salt?” asked the master.

“No,” said the young man.

At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things.

“Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”

In ordinary prose we might say “stop focusing on your own suffering and remember that suffering is a universal reality”. The vast and universal character of suffering is something we realize from reflecting on the Buddhist teachings. We come to a point when we know that we have to find a way of facing suffering and accepting it is part of life. We need to learn how to contain suffering within our experience instead of employing our usual tactics of avoiding it or denying it or complaining about it. All these are attempts to push suffering away, to keep it at a safe distance, to hide it under the rug, either because we find it just too painful or because it’s inconvenient and upsets the apple cart of the life we have built for ourselves.

Now the subtitle of this article is quite striking, isn’t it? I find it so myself. I came across the phrase in the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar where it was used in an article on Korean Buddhism, and it so struck me I wanted to use it for this piece of writing. As you will see, it fits my subject perfectly. It’s another way of talking about renunciation which Chogyam Trungpa calls ‘the genuine heart of sadness’. Words matter, don’t they? 

The term ‘renunciation’ is quite abstract and will have lots of associations for you which may or may not be helpful in our present context.  In English it means to give away, reject or disown; and anyone with a Christian background might associate it with penance and austerity, with deliberate deprivation and self-punishment to atone for our sins. But in Buddhism renunciation is quite different from this so we should not hang on too tightly to the word.

I think the phrase How Sad is your love captures the Buddhist flavour of renunciation perfectly. It speaks directly to the heart, it’s poetic and takes us to a different wavelength; for me that phrase stops me in my tracks and touches me deeply.

It’s paradoxical to associate love with sadness. We usually link love to happiness, and lost love is linked to lost happiness. We associate love with joy and positive energy and sadness sounds like the opposite of that. That is what is so special about this phrase, because it brings together two seeming opposites into a single flavour or experience, and that makes us want to know more and go deeper.  How can that be? How can love be sad?

There are two words associated with renunciation in Tibetan: nge jung – literally emerging, from our habitual patterns - carries a sense of both sadness and joy. Sadness as we accept to let go of things that we might like but that are intrinsically ungraspable, sadness thinking that nothing whatsoever in samsara is exempt of suffering. Sadness because we realize the futility of our old ways. And then joy at discovering the infinite love, wisdom and strength within, the enlightenment potential in ourselves and others, our basic goodness which makes freedom from samsara possible. Joy because a greater vision begins to unfold. We don’t become enlightened because we are special, we become enlightened because, like everyone, we have this basic goodness.

Renunciation also refers to the Tibetan word kyoshe: a lucid sadness or disenchantment or disillusionment with samsara. It’s about getting bored with samsara in the way a child loses interest in a toy. The pleasures of samsara lose their shine.

Renunciation is considered extremely important in Buddhism. Many masters tell us that unless we have a genuine sense of renunciation for samsara, then however many hours of meditation we do and however many prayers we make, it will all be useless. Without renunciation our interest in spirituality will be inconsistent and half-hearted, and consequently the results we reap will be equally half-baked.

We can easily relate to this last point when we remember how inconsistently we might engage in regular meditation. When we begin meditation practice, it’s very often more about how we feel this morning. The decision we make to sit on our cushion or not to sit on it will depend more on whether we feel like meditating than on any understanding of how crucial the practice of meditation is. And if we only meditate sporadically our efforts will produce weak results.

So we might say that the time when we start to turn away from samsara is really the starting point of the spiritual journey. Until then we are dipping our toes into spirituality but our journey has no firm foundation.

As the Sakya master Drakpa Gyaltsen wrote:

If you are attached to this life, you are not a Dharmic person

If you are attached to samsara (cyclic existence) you do not have renunciation

If you are attached to your own interests you do not have bodhichitta

If grasping arises, you do not have the Buddhist view.

This is a very famous verse in Tibetan literature and one that I personally come back to again and again. It tells us that the hallmark of a spiritual person is holding a broad, long-term view of existence that is not limited to the present life alone. A spiritual perspective encompasses what occurs after death, however that is understood. Furthermore, the second line of the verse means that a spiritual person is not attached to either happiness or suffering. As long as we long for those smaller forms of happiness that manifest within the cycle of samsara then we will never be free of samsara itself.

The third line mentions bodhichitta, the infinite compassion and wisdom of the enlightened mind, and that is attainable only if we give up our self-centredness. And finally, a genuine Buddhist will not even be attached to their own views and opinions, thinking their view is right, and the best. Ideas and opinions have to be renounced on a subtle level if we are to attain complete openness of mind.

So from this verse we can see that the Buddhist understanding of renunciation concerns the inner life and how our mind is.

The understanding that prompts renunciation

There are four key reflections that lead to an understanding that supports the wish for renunciation:

Reflecting on the preciousness of human life is about developing confidence in basic goodness, both our own and that of all other beings. Basic goodness is the reason for celebrating human life as being full of potential. As human beings we can attain full enlightenment. We should therefore not waste the time we have.

The reflection on impermanence is essentially about becoming more spacious and open, and ceasing to grasp and fixate on to things. We see the futility of grasping at ungraspable clouds. But importantly, it’s also about realizing that we are not stuck in this one dimension of existence; there is a deeper dimension beyond causation altogether, and beyond time. There is the dimension of appearances and there is the dimension of the nature of things as they are.

That is why the result of reflecting on impermanence is not a sense of loss, it is the joyful experience of being connected to our true selves. We may have lost the clouds but we have gained the sky. The contemplation on impermanence leads directly to realizing the nature of things, which is the whole point of the Buddhist path. As Sogyal Rinpoche says in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

From contemplating, continually and fearlessly, the truth of change and impermanence, we come slowly to find ourselves face to face in gratitude and joy with the truth of the changeless, with the truth of the deathless, unending nature of mind.

Impermanence applies to the surface level of reality, not to the deeper dimensions of existence. Change is not the only thing there is. Underlying the change is a continuous stream of awareness that has no beginning and no end.

Reflecting on karma connects us to the interdependence of all things. Our actions and their consequences are part of the cosmic web of causality.

And the point of reflecting on samsara is that it brings a sense of renunciation and the urge to be free from it.

Samsara

Do you find that the world in general has become much more unstable than before? We are in an age of uncertainty, aren’t we – on the political level, on the financial level, in terms of what AI might bring, in terms of the predictable and unpredictable effects of climate change... And uncertainty, and the insecurities it brings, is one of the ways of characterizing the experience of samsara.

Samsara is the dimension of existence that is conditioned by our mental afflictions and that is characterized by experiences of suffering. It’s the endless round of lives and deaths that we are powerless to stop for as long as we are governed by those mental afflictions. It is a domain of suffering that affects countless types of being, not just us humans. I find that reflecting on the vastness of this vision and the intensity of suffering that is experienced, my heart cannot but open to the immensity of pain in the world.

Samsara is not a place, it is the neurotic way in which we live.

Samsara is not just a theory, or the diagram of a wheel in which we go round and round. It is excruciating, it is heartbreaking, it is relentless.

The reflection on samsara will take us to the point where we are determined to renounce it. We realize that if we carry on the way we are our future can only hold more and more suffering. Fundamentally, this is what we renounce: samsara. But, of course, there would be no point to renounce anything if we were not able to free ourselves from the cycle of suffering by doing so. The Buddha’s teaching tells us that liberation from samsara is humanly possible to achieve, and this is what makes renunciation worthwhile. By contrast, the idea of transcendence is noticeably absent from modern thinking. Most people around us don’t know that another way of being and living is actually possible.

Renunciation

In renunciation there are two things that must come together: firstly, understanding the nature of cyclic existence to be suffering, and secondly developing the urge to be free of it.

This requires turning our worldly values upside down, for example, withdrawing the value we place on pleasant things because we can see that short-term happiness is really a form of sugar-coated suffering.

Renunciation is not about changing our clothes, or deciding not to wash, or selling our house to live on the streets. Fundamentally, it’s about changing our core values from worldly ones to spiritual ones. So what you consider important changes, your priorities shift, what you spend your time on will be different.

That doesn’t mean you can no longer enjoy life.  Renunciation is not deprivation.  It means that what you enjoy changes. For example, you learn to enjoy doing your Dharma practice, it is not a hard sacrifice or a boring routine.

The Dalai Lama says that renunciation springs from recognizing that as long as we are in the grip of destructive emotions, we can never hope to achieve anything that is meaningful or positive in any true sense. When we realize just how hollow life can be, we are filled with the urgent longing to find true meaning. What’s more, we know that even the good circumstances in our life will not last, and are not in themselves the key to happiness as long as we are governed by destructive emotions.

So thinking about all this evokes a natural sense of weariness, sadness and disenchantment. This disenchantment becomes renunciation when it fosters in us a determination and decision to turn our back on samsara, and when we act on that.

Pitfalls

Now some readers might already have changed the direction of their life in this way, so you might be thinking that I am not saying anything very useful or new. And yet the decision to become a more spiritual person is just the beginning and the process of continuing to live like one can be quite tricky. Why? Because our ego-centric attitudes don’t disappear overnight. Our grasping ego will come along for the ride and try to sabotage our efforts.

One of the main ways this happens is that we keep the Dharma at arm’s length so it doesn’t really touch us. In the same way as we tend to keep suffering at a remove, paradoxically we can do the same with the Dharma even though the Dharma is intended to free us from suffering. We go through the motions of saying prayers and chanting mantras, but our minds and hearts have not softened or opened and our destructive emotions are still very much there. We can kid ourselves that we have renounced worldly life because we regularly sit on a cushion, but that might be a delusion.

The Tibetan teacher Khandro Rinpoche gives the example of students who have been receiving teachings on compassion for many years, and who may occasionally spend a few minutes trying to cultivate compassion on their cushions. They imagine they are doing all the right things to be good Buddhists. And yet it doesn’t take much to topple this delusion. They pop out to the toilet for a few minutes and when they come back into the shrine room the person next to them has taken their cushion. How do they react? If it were me, I know I would be furious!

What we really have to renounce is our destructive emotions themselves, our habits, our tendencies, our likes and dislikes, our hopes and our fears.

A friend recently told me about his niece who is lactose intolerant. He was walking with her at the seaside and they passed an ice cream shop. She was seriously tempted, and after humming and hahhing for a while decided that she would have one.  He warned her: ‘but you know that you don’t normally eat ice cream’. ‘Oh, just this once’, she said.  She ate it and enjoyed it and soon afterwards she was really sick and vomited the whole thing up.  We are all like this aren’t we? We know that certain things aren’t good for us, and yet we say to ourselves ‘just this once’.  The point here is not to renounce ice cream – or cigarettes, or anything else - but to renounce our craving for it.

When we are in pain it’s easy to say ‘Samsara is terrible!’ but we don’t tend to say that when we are happy. It’s easy to give up the things you never liked much anyway, but it’s a different story when it comes to the things you are attached to. As long as there are samsaric experiences that we long for and believe in, we will not be able to free ourselves from their grip. There will always be a dark corner of the mind where a destructive emotion is lurking and waiting to pounce.

If we want to understand renunciation even more deeply, then it is based on the realization that nothing in our mundane world has an essence, has any lasting reality or meaning. We renounce samsara because samsara does not ultimately exist. We know that the dream is only a dream. When we realize this, then we are beginning to become a Dharma practitioner, a spiritual person.

How sad is your love?

Your sadness will come from understanding that things don’t last, even happiness doesn’t last; that we create our own suffering despite ourselves, that we are driven by habits and tendencies that are beyond our control, and that as a result everyone is plagued by sufferings of all kinds.

Through the process of reflecting on these topics your heart will soften and open. You will be in touch with your own suffering and have empathy for the pain of others; you will not be closed off and in a bubble, you will be wide open to life. You renounce the skin of your bubble, the protective shield behind which you hide.

Trungpa Rinpoche calls renunciation the genuine heart of sadness. It is the experience of giving up the ideas we have about ourselves and of how life ought to be and connecting directly with what we feel. That means, above all, facing the suffering we hold, the disappointments, the unfulfilled longings, the frustrations; connecting with our experience as it is, without any whitewashing. It means giving up our idea of an important ego-self at the centre of the world, and dissolving the protective barriers we erect between ourselves and other people, and between ourselves and the experience of pain. These are the things we need to let go.

I am quoting the following passage from Chogyam Trungpa because when I read it slowly I find it so moving and transforming. It’s from Shambhala: The Path of the Warrior, chapter 3.

The first step in realizing basic goodness is to appreciate what we have. But then we should look further and more precisely at what we are, where we are, who we are, when we are, and how we are as human beings.

Basic goodness is very closely connected to the idea of bodhichitta, "awakened heart." Such awakened heart comes from being willing to face your state of mind. That may seem like a great demand, but it is necessary. You should examine yourself and ask how many times you have tried to connect with your heart, fully and truly. How often have you turned away, because you feared you might discover something terrible about yourself? How often have you been willing to look at your face in the mirror, without being embarrassed? How many times have you tried to shield yourself by reading the newspaper, watching television, or just spacing out? That is the sixty-four·thousand-dollar question: How much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?

The sitting practice of meditation is the means to rediscover basic goodness, and beyond that, it is the means to awaken this genuine heart within yourself. When you sit in the posture of meditation, you are like a naked man or woman sitting between heaven and earth. When you slouch, you are trying to hide your heart, trying to protect it by slumping over. But when you sit upright but relaxed in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked. Your entire being is exposed- to yourself, first of all, but to others as well.

So through the practice of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and dissolves, you are connecting with your heart. By simply letting yourself be, as you are, you develop genuine sympathy toward yourself. When you awaken your heart in this way, you find, to your surprise, that your heart is empty. You find that you are looking into outer space.

If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn't come from being mistreated. You don't feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There is no skin or tissue covering it; it is pure raw meat. Even if a tiny mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched. Your experience is raw and tender and so personal.

This experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. We are not talking about a street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.

That’s how you can become a lake.

That’s how you can be not just a Buddhist but a buddha.