Rejoice

by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

In the context of ordinary life, one of the most difficult things is to actually rejoice in another’s good fortune. If somebody we like or love is fortunate, we may manage to squeeze out some appreciation — but forget about being happy with our enemies’ good fortune! Honestly, though, rejoicing practice is incredible. It offers a great deal of benefit for very little  effort.

A saying goes, “Little labour, much gain.” On the path of Dharma, less effort and greater benefit is a sign of wisdom. This principle applies even in technology! Less effort combined with greater efficiency and productivity signals progress. Take the example of computers. When I first came to the West, computers were huge. Now they are small and streamlined — much  better than those old big ones. Efficiency has been established.

In the case of the path, this is also true. There is the path to be reborn in the higher realms, and then the path of Hinayana. Next is the path of Mahayana, and lastly that of  Vajrayana. In the Vajrayana there are many levels of the path. Studying these, you will see how in the higher yanas there is less effort and greater productivity because there is more wisdom. The degree of wisdom corresponds to how much you gain through relatively little effort. Not that I  am anti labour, but if you don’t have to, why bother?

Rejoicing practice involves modest labour with a tremendous gain. Before we actually practice rejoicing, we must be able to appreciate the merit of others as equal to our own. In order to do that, we must lose some of our dualistic thinking regarding merit, as in, “It’s mine; it’s others’.” More specifically, we tend to think that if something is “mine,” no matter how insignificant it is, it has to be good. If it belongs to others, the thought tends to be, “However momentous it might be, it’s still not good.” We have to be able to resolve this misguided mental attitude.  If we can actually get to the point where, in the context of the practice of bodhichitta, we give up our lives and possessions as well as “our” merit for the enlightenment of all beings and for their security and freedom, we will be able to let go of our self-importance. Then we can easily get  to the point of rejoicing in others’ merit, being able to praise others’ merit with tremendous  sincerity and a genuine heart.

A story tells about a day when the Buddha was invited by his father. He and the monks were offered an enormous amount of delicious food for lunch. An old beggar lady who saw this thought to herself, “Because of past merit, this man has been born as a king. To be able to do such things now — how incredibly fortunate for him! In the future he will have even more merit.” From the depths of her heart, she rejoiced in his actions. She didn’t feel there was any competition — she just felt pure appreciation for him and what he was doing. At the end of the day the Buddha asked his father, “Should I dedicate the merit of this for you, or for someone who has gained even more merit than you today?” The king replied, “Please dedicate it to whoever has gained the most merit.” And the Buddha dedicated the merit to the old beggar woman.

When you have no arrogance, no degree of competitiveness, and when you are  able to appreciate and see the significance of the positive actions of others, you can rejoice a great deal. But feeling competitiveness inside yourself — a sense of arrogance or of holding on to the  self — reduces the opportunity to rejoice. Having no sense of clinging to the self, no arrogance or competitive feelings at all, opens up your mind to truly and fully rejoice. This kind of practice  provides a great opportunity for people who have less to not feel competitive and to gain the  same amount of merit by freely rejoicing in others’ merit. The ability to appreciate others’ good qualities and good deeds depends on how psychologically free you are from arrogance, pride, competitiveness, and any sense of deprivation. When you are free of these, you  have the opportunity to actually fully rejoice. Not only do you gain merit; you will become free  of troubles. This is incredible.

To exercise conscious rejoicing is an amazing practice, particularly for those of us who often feel we are lacking something in our lives. We may not know how to pinpoint what we lack, but when someone else says, “I have this,” or, “I have that,” the feeling arises that we are  missing out on the goodies. To hear about someone’s good luck can actually become painful. This shows that our covetous mind is caught in dissatisfaction and a poverty mentality. It shows a lack of merit. Rejoicing practice is the best way to reverse that.

Anytime you hear about someone else’s good fortune, you can practice appreciating the achievements, qualities, and wealth of others. Appreciate them exactly as if they were yours. Even if you could somehow have the whole world, you might still feel it was not enough. Especially in regard to your own possessions, you can only get a finite amount of happiness out of them. But by rejoicing in others having them, the joy becomes unlimited. Through this practice you can constantly be happy and have a tremendous sense of cheerfulness. It’s like this: A king can only have a limited amount of wealth in his treasure house compared to  how much his subjects can own collectively. The king who rejoices in all his subjects becoming as rich as a king would actually have much greater happiness than the king who simply focused  on his own wealth.

The opportunity to be sustained by your good heart, your good wishes for others, and your sense of rejoicing in others’ positive qualities, positive conduct, and merit is limitless. Not only do you have the joy and happiness that comes from that, you can also have more or at least equal merit. If somebody does meritorious work, there may be resources that are not so clean involved in that. The individual who rejoices in that merit doesn’t know about this, however, so the rejoicing itself is pure, and thus even greater. The person who goes through the trouble of doing the action may even get less merit than the person rejoicing. This clearly illustrates how  rejoicing in merit is a great practice for all of us.

In our current age, there is a great deal of competitiveness and feeling internally impoverished. Many people’s hearts lack richness. People feel squeezed. In the old days, having one gold coin made a person feel rich; nowadays, having a hundred gold coins does not make a  person that rich. People feel that no matter how much wealth they have, it is not enough. This has something to do with the era and time. The feeling of impoverishment is strong in everyone’s psychological makeup. Perhaps this could be remedied by rejoicing. When you rejoice, you really feel like you have richness inside. Your good heart sustains your mind.

At the very least, rejoicing practice will let you be unperturbed when you hear good things about others. This in itself is a great freedom. Investigate how other people respond when they hear about good things happening to someone else or about others’ qualities or gains. Quite often there’s a sense of almost wanting to turn away from hearing this news, an uneasiness. But if the gain is theirs or associated with them in some way, there is delight in their response. This shows that we in these small ways are very restricted by our minds, to not be able to truly embrace the goodness in the world. We have to be able to at least appreciate the goodness in the world, even if it’s in the hands of our enemy. Mature people in the old days had an appreciation of an enemy’s good qualities. The practitioner’s way is to be able to appreciate all and have no enemies, to treat everyone’s achievements as if they were one’s own and to rejoice  in their goodness.

You hear so many great stories. Somebody is building a 108-foot-tall Guru Rinpoche statue, while someone else is building a great stupa or a big monastery, or a lama is supporting and honouring many monks. If you can rejoice in these great deeds, you can actually earn all of that merit too. It really doesn’t have to be happening here on “my property”; it doesn’t  have to be “my doing,” “my this,” or “my that.” That’s a very limited perspective. If you’re starting something, that’s wonderful. But if you aren’t starting something, that doesn’t mean that you can’t rejoice and have a tremendous sense of appreciation of the fact that  somebody else is doing it.

I very much request you all to consider rejoicing as a practice that can shape our psychology and our sense of contentment. It helps us get over our own lack of appreciation of the world and the goodness in it. By rejoicing, we can truly be on the side of virtue. If we are not appreciating somebody who is doing virtue, then we are on the side of non-virtue. To be on the side of virtue is to rejoice in it regardless of who performs the deeds. In this way, rejoicing can benefit us all tremendously. Virtue is rare these days, and when it occurs we must rise to appreciate it and rejoice in it. This can involve any level from an individual on up to a community. Rejoice fully in all positive efforts made to benefit beings, the Dharma, and the environment. Rejoicing in others’ qualities is contagious; we will also want to have those qualities. In order to magnetise others’ good qualities, first be appreciative, rejoice in their qualities, and do not feel  inferior.

Jealousy is merely a matter of embarrassment about your own state of mind. Getting jealous and covering it up — as in calling jealous speech “discernment” is just like carefully  putting icing on a piece of shit. When you are jealous about something, you say, “It’s not so good as it is; it’s not wholesome as it is; it has a problem. You have not understood the problem. Only I  have understood the problem, and I am going to give you a lesson about what the problem is. And you should actually pay heed to me.” But in reality it’s very obvious that you are speaking  out of jealousy, and that you yourself are feeling quite embarrassed. People are looking at  you, nodding, and knowing what’s going on. You cannot successfully put icing on shit. It  just becomes a total loss of face.

Jealousy offers us a great opportunity to rejoice. However often we are jealous  becomes that many opportunities to cleanse ourselves of this negative pattern. Here’s a practice to do: Identify people you are jealous of. Think, “Whom do I have jealousy towards? Whom do I  actually tend to pick on out of my jealousy?” Then sit down and, one by one, practice rejoicing and cleanse your mind. After that kind of practice, the next time the person’s name comes up,  your face will light up instead of darkening.

Right after you rejoice, dedicate the merit. Whether it is your own merit or that of  others, you could actually rejoice in the merit and dedicate that over and over. Constantly rejoicing and dedicating could be your main practice.

Student: I have a problem rejoicing. What more can I do?

Rinpoche: People work so hard to obtain conventional happiness. If they never got  anything out of that, it would all be for nothing. To wish for them to have some fruit of their labour, and then to rejoice in those who actually have some fruit, is a decent thing to do. It’s not necessarily that you believe this is ultimate happiness, or that you actually believe this is happiness with  no side effects or problems. Still, consider how hard people strive, look at these great cities, New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, where people rush around like ants, caught up in the speed and trying to get here and there. Basically they are actually trying to have some accomplishment of tainted happiness. And tainted happiness as we know from our own experience, is  like salty water: The more you drink, the thirstier you get. That’s just the way it is, unless you have some self-reflection, some detachment and understanding of your true nature. The more wealth you obtain, the more greed increases. The more power you gain, the larger your appetite for power grows. The more leisure you have, the more self-indulgent you become.

Many of our psychological and emotional problems nowadays seem to be because of two things. One is because there is a sense of, let’s say, the Hollywood or television version of how things should be. This involves a tremendous dissatisfaction and an internal feeling of impoverishment. People see an image on the screen and think, “Why is life not like that for me?” There is a chronic sense of internal complaining about one’s life, the feeling that one is missing out on the cheese or being deprived of the American dream as it is ideally presented by media. The second aspect is that there is always dissatisfaction from a little bit of jealousy or envy. This is a big problem. Actually if you visit another country where there is not much television, where there are not so many prefabricated ideas of how our lives should be — of how things should be according to Hollywood’s point of view — people may have very little, but they are  quite content with that. And there is also not so much resentment towards others who have it. There is a sense of, “Oh, so-and-so is wealthy,” but it comes with a kind of appreciation for his or her good merit.

You also have to think about karma and merit in regard to this subject. So many people put tremendous effort into doing things to make themselves successful, but they never are. And then here comes someone else who’s not really putting much of an effort into it and becomes wealthy right away. This kind of example shows that effort alone is not the thing. Part of it comes from one’s previous karma and merit. When you do not include this factor in the equation, your mind can be a little discontented with life. You think your life is not good enough; it should be better. You resent others and feel jealous. But in reality, nobody gets even an extra penny  without his or her own karma and merit being involved. Similarly, nobody suffers the lack of anything without his or her own karma and merit being involved. From the perspective of merit and karma, nobody is lucky and nobody is unlucky.

There’s no such thing as lucky and unlucky in Buddhist terminology. It’s all due to past lives, all the way up to this particular life. People have to tune in to practising merit. Therefore, you want to wish the best to those whose actions are about to bear fruit — to rejoice in them,  and likewise you want to wish the best to people who are putting a great deal of effort and time  into getting some fruit. You want to rejoice with them too. You see how farmers work so hard to  cultivate a crop, what they go through day and night. If you were to wish these farmers not to have a good crop, that would simply be indecent — mean, in fact. If you see somebody who worked hard and got the crop they wanted, you should be happy. Wish that the farmer who is working  hard will eventually reap a great crop. Be happy for whoever is happy. Towards those who are discontented, wish that their fate be changed.

From this point of view, wishing happiness for others is more motivated by pity at seeing how people work so hard in samsara to gain this tainted happiness that doesn’t last very long. Do not focus so much on the problematic sides of it. If you focus on the problems, not only might you not find happiness in samsara, you might not find happiness in nirvana either! Happiness is a relative thing, and it is dualistic.

Student: There’s a practical question about a technique a few of us discussed yesterday at lunch. When we try to reflect on a situation, often times that which we reflect on becomes a story and we get lost in it rather than doing the reflection. So, could you give advice about techniques for reflecting without that — knowing how to reflect on actual situations without getting lost in the story?

Rinpoche: Your question is how to be objective in your reflection, right? I think the way to do this is to try to become a researcher yourself — to find the real truth, the real story, rather than a bias towards your own tendency to see it one way or the other. If you become a researcher searching out the truth, the real story, rather than creating a bias out of your own inclinations to support somebody and be against someone else or even be in support of the Dharma and against samsara, you will not become partial. If you become a genuine researcher, you are trying to find the truth. Then the Dharma and your fndings will come together. And this is the way to be objective. And you have to take time. Not everything becomes clear [Snaps fingers] at once. You have to take time too to sometimes sit with the situation or sit with what you are contemplating to find out more.

Let’s say, for instance, that something is said in the Dharma about how your mind works. And then you are contemplating whether your mind is working that way or not. Maybe you don’t see very clearly that your mind works that way. But then let’s say you are in pain, in the pain of feeling quite jealous about something. At that point, if you could disassociate yourself from the pain and look at the pain more closely and openly, you would see that what the Dharma says about your state of mind much clearer. Pain can be a better revealer of your own mind than any other state. Sometimes pain is really a great ally for you to discover certain defects in your mind. Pain sometimes can serve as an illuminator. People think, “Oh, I’m not very arrogant; I don’t feel so arrogant; I don’t think I see myself as arrogant.” And it’s true, people feel that way. But when they are offended and they have pain, they can see how they have been arrogant all along. My answer to you is, “Become a researcher,” and not just in support of the Dharma. That is why Buddha has said, “Examine my words like a goldsmith examines gold; do not take my word because it’s my word.” These words encourage us to become like a researcher. Use pain to get to know your state of mind much more deeply, in order to develop a conviction in the Dharma.