The Indestructible Wisdom of Caring for Others

by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

How can we make others the source of our happiness? By seeing our regard for others as an opportunity to discipline our own mind. This is an opportunity to discipline our mind to become kind and compassionate, to develop sympathetic joy and a sense of equanimity among all who we relate to. Then, we can recognize that the happiness of all others is as important as our own happiness. The freedom of others from their suffering is equally as important as our freedom from suffering. Once this clarity dawns through our deep intelligence into our sensible mind, we can work with our habits and tendencies. Making our mind more flexible becomes a worthwhile challenge, exciting a keen interest in finding deeper sanity. Who wouldn’t want that kind of sanity? If everybody can imagine that kind of sanity, then everybody can get excited about working against their habits, against the rut they’re in.

When you see somebody else making more profit than you, instead of getting bummed out, you could feel joy for them regardless of your own smaller gain, or even loss. We all know that is a good thing to do. Right? When your friend is making a lot of money from his stock investments, if you feel bummed out it is really going against your friendship. We should rejoice, but we don’t feel we can rejoice. We feel more and more bummed out as we hear about the friend’s portfolio changing for the better. We feel embarrassed, although we don’t want to feel embarrassed or bummed out. We don’t want to feel that kind of disturbance on hearing of our friend’s good news.

Perhaps your own portfolio didn’t go down. It just stayed the same. Just because it didn’t make as much money as your friend’s, doesn’t require that you feel bummed out. This is what we’re talking about — the ruts and habits of our old, self-absorbed mind. This self-important mind just doesn’t have the flexibility at this stage not to be concerned about ourselves first, or to be happy for the friend. We’re not ready to make the friend’s happiness our own happiness, or recognise that we are actually better off than the friend is through our ability to make his happiness into our own. If we are able to do that, there will be a tremendous sense of sanity to place against the feeling that our mind is stuck in its ruts and habits of being bummed out, depressed, or caught up in jealousy. This is completely sane. Not only sane, but deeply sane. If we can move out of the habits and out of the rut, then sanity is right there. Not only is sanity there, happiness is there. Joy is there.

If we can actually see the importance of this, and feel its importance, we can really begin to pursue it in small ways first. What you are able to do in small ways then becomes easy to do in bigger ways because the principle is the same. Say a mutual friend comes to visit both you and your other friend. This mutual friend brings a gift to your other friend but not to you. You start to feel a little bit bummed out and unhappy because you think, why did she bring a gift for my friend but not for me? Then you see yourself getting caught in your self-absorption, in your habit, and your mind is weighed down by it all. So you say to yourself, “No, this is not right. I’m going to change this. Instead, I’m going to be happy she brought her a gift. I’m going to be happy for their friendship. I’m going to be happy about these new dangling earrings, about the material they're made from, and about the satisfaction she feels from this gift. I’m going to be happy for all of it.” Test whether you can remove yourself from having an inflexible mind that is caught in an old rut through habit and self-absorption, and then open your mind and your heart to really feel joy, as if you were given the gift. Even more importantly, check to see whether the Dharma is true or not. See whether this discipline of your mind sustains you or not; if that clean way to happiness is really the most noble way of obtaining happiness or not. Does it really bring you that feeling of deep sanity inside, or not? These are all questions for us to examine.

When we examine this, we can recognise: "Ah, yes! Now is not like yesterday. Now I’m feeling very sane inside. Yes, today I am feeling very cheerful. Today I feel sustained by my discipline of rejoicing. I feel touched by my own good mind and good heart. Today I feel much better off than when I've gained anything in the past. Today I feel like I have an indestructible discipline inside myself rather than being dependent on outside circumstances.”

When you begin to feel this way, seeing your mind in this light, and really get the nectar from the goodness of your mind to sustain yourself, then next time you'll be even more interested to do that again.

So, part of the teacher’s job is to introduce this view to clarify confusions. When you are caught up in confusion, and don’t know which direction to go that will bring you to a place of sanity and freedom from your neurosis, then you’re just lacking information. You’ve simply been deprived of the wisdom that the Enlightened Ones have discovered.

To find this kind of wisdom on one’s own, without education, is very difficult. The Buddha went through so much hardship to gain this knowledge and wisdom of how to develop our qualities and good heart to sustain our well-being, not just for ourselves but to contribute to the well-being of others. He went through great hardship for just one single bit of such information. Now all this information that the Buddha has cultivated through so much hardship, he has given to us as a gift. Without that gift we are bound to be in confusion.

For instance, when you have diabetes, when your blood sugar really drops way down and you’re about to die, if you can get a little sugar in your mouth, it actually brings you back. Isn't that true? But if you didn't know that, you would be doomed to die. Once you know that, then it’s easy to find a little sugar and pop it in your mouth. So if that can save your life, that information is incredibly valuable for someone with diabetes.

So when you lack information, you’re bound to the confusions. But when you have this information, and it really makes sense to you about finding a path of happiness through the Dharma and the discipline of your mind — finding gentleness, kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy — then you can practice in small ways, such as when your friend receives earrings and you don't. When you can see that you can do it, to get out of your habit, out of the rut, away from that inflexible mind that reacts in the old way, then you become very excited and deeply enthusiastic about bringing down the habit of samsara, along with the habit of ignorant mind and confusion. This is where the path begins.