In Shantideva’s Bodhisattva’s Way of Life he says, After patience, you have to focus on enthusiasm. People who have enthusiasm will find enlightenment. Then he gives examples – Without wind there is no movement. Likewise, without enthusiasm we will not accumulate any merit. When we say merit, often we are thinking about a light. Something that we cannot see, cannot touch, sort of energy there. it’s not just like that. Merit is coming from two things, your physical practice and your mental practice. The merit you earn from your mental practice is called the merit of wisdom. That is your training of mind that you earn from meditation.
The other things are how you practice in your life, being nice to others, being generous to others, having great discipline in your life. Discipline as in how to behave, how to be nice to people. How much patience you have. Even though something is burning inside your heart, you don’t let smoke go out. Meaning, you are a little upset, but still you have the patience to not affect other people. Patience to avoid it, to find the skill to control it. These are patience. These are the merit of merit. Your mental practice through which you can transform your heart and develop your mind. In your physical practice you train yourself. Behave well. All these merits come from enthusiasm, hard work. Shantideva made the example: If there is no wind when you are sailing, your boat will not move anywhere. You will stay where you are. Even if the water moves, without wind, no, right. You will not get anywhere.
Same thing, without enthusiasm, without effort, you will not get anywhere. That is all the time. If you are expecting a great result without doing anything, that will not happen. Therefore, enthusiasm is very important in your life. When you don’t want to do anything, if you don’t even want to eat, then you don’t need enthusiasm. Anything in your life that you want to do, anything, you need at least some enthusiasm. Then, a lot of people put effort into doing other things. If you put a puzzle together, you have a lot of enthusiasm there. You pick up all these small pieces five times to see where they go, right? At least five times, and then that takes three hours or six hours or whatever. You have a lot of enthusiasm to for putting puzzles together and taking out weeds in the garden and other things that take a very long time.
One laziness is when you are so familiar with and like so much to be lazy. Not caring about anything, just doing things without your heart in there, like driving without a driver. You are doing something but you don’t have the actual mind of doing it. You are just floating around. Most of the time you enjoy your couch and your phone. You walk five feet and then just find a corner and lay down there and look at your phone, right. Then you walk another 20 feet and lay down again on the couch and look at your phone. You are just enjoying doing nothing. Actually, you are doing something but nothing that works. I went to TJ Maxx. If you go there, you know the line at the cashier can be very long and the people working are not always that – how should I say – quick. There were two ladies working and they were quite lazy, not doing anything. Customer might have struggles with their credit card and they have to wait for five, ten minutes. Sometimes the customer waits and the cashier too. Then there is a long line of people waiting for both of them while there are a lot of other empty cash registers. I thought, “Now she will rest and enjoy the time.” But while waiting, a cashier immediately left her customer, opened another cash register and let me go through. That is how energy and enthusiasm works. Instead of wasting time and not caring about customers, she wanted to do her duty. She could have waited there with the customer, but she did not. Sometimes there are people like that and they do well in their life. But there are others, who see this as a chance to be idle for five minutes and they are so happy. They have a walkie talkie and call, “Can you find that thing?” and they are just chewing gum and not even looking at the customer, avoiding them. Sometimes I feel like they walk around and never look at you. Otherwise you could say, “Can you help me?” But they don’t look at you. Somehow they put their eyes in some corner where there is nobody. That is the first laziness. You don’t want to work. You enjoy doing nothing.
Then another laziness is when you do things but you always do things you don’t have to do or is not your work to do. For example, if you go shopping you forget everything you have to buy. At home you think, “I have to buy this and that vegetable, that food, etc.”, but when you get to the store you don’t remember anything. Maybe you remember some things but not everything. Then you come back home and realize, “Oh I forget to buy this and that”. But other people go to the store and they find everything. The point is, sometimes we have that laziness that makes us not focus on something we are supposed to do, dragging our mind and focus on something else that is not our job to do. Then sometimes you forget about good things and are totally busy with the wrong things. Some people have that sort of obsession or attachment and they do something that is not their job and then forget about their whole family. Later on they don’t care about their family, their kids, and that becomes a big issue, and maybe ends up in a divorce.
They get into some sort of organization or something and definitely feel they are doing something but actually it is like doing nothing. That is actually laziness. You are doing things and working so hard doing something that you are not supposed to do or don’t have to do, and you don’t do anything that you are supposed to do and that is the second laziness.
Many lay people work really hard at home. There is always Dharma to practice. There are Dharma teachings going on, but some people in Tibet are so busy with their fields, their cows or yaks and don’t get time to practice Dharma. The only thing they can do is go to the temple and light a butter lamp. That is in our culture. If you ask them, “Are you religious, are you a practitioner?” the answer is, “I go to the temple”. “What do you do there?” “I light butter lamps.” That’s not a bad thing, but just lighting a butter lamp is not enough. Why can’t you meditate or attend a teaching? Then they say, “I have no time, I have to look after the cows, feed them, clean the cow dung, then dry it and sell those things.” So that is the second laziness.
Sometimes you are a person who is in a situation where you don’t want to do anything. You like to do things, you can do things, you are active. But you don’t have something that moves your mind, which means you do have the time but you have another laziness that tells you, “I cannot do it.” You are looking down on yourself and think, “I cannot do it.” These three lazinesses, surely keep us away from practicing, from training our mind; from learning something about mind training. Iin the teachings, the real enthusiasm is for virtuous actions, for something that helps yourself and that helps other people in the future. Very important.
Any act that makes you a better person, that will help other people – these acts. Any mind that is interested in the work or any actions that are non-virtue, that are mainly driven by negative emotions, these are laziness. So you can be busy and lazy in your life.
Sometimes people say, “Don’t work for money, let money work for you.” That is a very important thing. If you work for money, why do you do it? You need money. Money is a medium everybody accepts. It is how it works in society. Earlier, in India, people used shells as money. Earlier in Tibet you had to earn barley as money. If you work for money you are wrong. You are working for the desire to have money. We need money, but remember, money will help people if you know how to use it. Any actions driven by negative emotions, if you are busy with them, you are lazy.
What we need is enthusiasm for virtuous actions. These are Dharma. If you do virtuous actions through your physical body, these are the discipline of Dharma. If you have a virtuous mind inside of you, if you develop your virtuous mind that is also practicing Dharma. Therefore, to do that we have to make ourselves interested in and develop an interest in Dharma, in developing virtuous minds. If you have $100, until you spend it you have something. The moment you spend it, it is zero, nothing there. Like you buy a balloon and blow it up as hard as you can. What happens? It bursts, right? Then nothing is there. Something like that.
If you have some mind training, if you transform your heart, if you change something in your heart, that will last long and always provide you with something. This is summer time and there are lots of flowers and I like to plant them and I have the choice between perennials and annuals. I will take the perennials. Even though it’s double money, I know they will come back every year. Annuals are good, but I prefer something that comes back every year.Same thing, if you change something in your mind, that will benefit you continuously all the time, that is the Dharma we need. That’s why we are here, because we know the value of that.
When you approach your practice, when you move forward, we are all on our own journey. I don’t know if you want to call it moving toward enlightenment or what, but we are on our journey. Among those three lazinesses, one big obstacle is looking down on yourself, self-deprecation, underestimating yourself. It is the mind that says, “I cannot do it.” Some people say, “I cannot meditate.” “I cannot study, I cannot understand.” At the beginning you tell yourself, “I cannot”. If they ask you to run like Usain Bolt, the athlete, then surely, you cannot. But if we are asked to run, we can run at our pace. When it comes to Dharma, many people will say, “I cannot do that. It is so hard for me.” I don’t mean you cannot say that. You can say it, but that will not help you.
Another mind says, “I am not ready.” That is also part of laziness. If you want to study something, if you want to do something, then who is ready? No one is born ready. Slowly, slowly, we learn things.You might say, “I am not ready.” But to learn something, to move forward, there is not something called “I am not ready.” You are ready at some point. Once you move and do something you will know slowly, slowly that you are ready. Look back on your life. Is there something that you studied earlier and you were not ready and you failed? And did you get it later? Of course, when you are not ready to swim but you jump in the water and almost die, that’s possible, but other than that, most successful people start when they are not ready. They learn, they make themselves from a not-ready person into a ready person. Therefore, I always think that the mind that tells us we cannot do something is a big problem. We can try all the time. Instead of saying, “I cannot do it”, we can say, “I can try.” Instead of “I am not ready”, say, “maybe I am ready.”
Then we often say: I have no time for it. We don’t say, “I am not ready”, we don’t say, “I cannot do it”, but we say, “I have no time for it right now, I am very busy.” Deeply you are thinking, “I need more time to do that, I need more preparation, I am not ready.” But you don’t say it. You say, “I have no time.” Especially some people who are new to Dharma and who are young, they feel like they don’t have to rush or start now. They will say, “I will do it later.” They are pushing it back. All these things come from one thing, underestimating yourself, something that tells you that you cannot do it.
Therefore, there are two things. Do you want to do it or don’t you want to do it? If you want to do it, you can. That’s the thing. Especially here, I am talking about learning mind training, learning meditation, learning about Dharma. Shantideva said, There is nothing that cannot become easier after practicing it many times. That is very true. If you practice something many times, surely at first it is the hardest, but if you do it again, it’s not that hard. If you do it again, then it’s nothing. Then if you do it later, it’s boring. (laughs). It’s funny, but you feel bored because there is no challenge.
When I was a kid in Dharamsala there are hills. It feels hard in the beginning, but later if you go here and there you don’t even feel they are hills. Climbing up and down becomes like a flat road for you. Especially for people who live in the mountain areas, for them there is not much difference between hills and flat land. But if you live in a flat place like Michigan, totally flat, and then you go in to the mountains, you feel it’s really hard. Then when you live there for a while you get used to it, right?
So therefore, practices like generosity, giving something to somebody, is very hard in the beginning. Maybe when you were kid you don’t know the value of what’s in your hand and you give away everything. Then when you know the value of things and how hard it is to earn those things, and then you try to practice generosity, but it’s not easy.
Then you practice and practice it, and it is getting easier and easier. Like buying gas at the gas station. I am surprised when I see American people. They care about money when they spend at the store buying food, but not when they put gas in their cars. They are so used to it. They have those huge trucks and they fill them up and they feel it’s like routine. Surely, they care about when the price goes up and down by 10 cents. They care a lot about that, but when you have a huge truck and you are used to it then you put gas in there all the time and you don’t feel stinginess there. You fill it up and think that’s what it is and you drive – unless you have no money. Then you are used to it. I am not saying it is generosity to put gas in your car. But same thing, you give food to people, buying them a cup of coffee and those things, at first it is hard, then you do it two times, three times and you get used to it. You are happy to do it and you have no problems, and then you get better at your practice of generosity.
Same thing with discipline. Discipline is hard, but when you do it again and again you get better. Same thing with patience. It’s so hard, when someone says something to you not to argue back. When you do it again and again, its get better. It’s the same thing, even with meditation. If you do meditation again and again you get better. Also studying and listening to Dharma talks. At the beginning of some teachings that are very complicated, you don’t get it, and ask “What’s he saying?”. You don’t get things and they confuse you. And then if you listen again and again, later on you know what the teacher was talking about, because you are used to it. You should not deny teachings you cannot understand. We have to chew it and try to get it, slowly. It will take time.
I always feel that when listening to deep meaning teachings, what is the deep meaning. It makes your meditation deeper. It doesn’t mean that your meditation will become longer or focused better, but it increases the value of your meditation. Your meditation is like a vase and what you put in there matters. If you put just water in there it’s just a water vase. If you put jewels in there it is a jewel vase – or nectar. That’s why we have to study and try to understand those complicated subjects. And then at that point the laziness tells you, “I cannot understand it. I will never understand it.”
It’s like reading a map, when you have a big map. In earlier times, when I looked at that map it really confused me, honestly. I don’t mean like a simple map showing countries, but a map that has tiny numbers and a lot of colors, like red, white and many lines and tons of names of places, really confusing. Then I looked again and again and learned how to read the map. As a kid someone taught me how to read the map. Then every single number at the side made sense. When we learned how to read a map, those numbers became easy. But if you reject it from the beginning because there are too many names in there, that’s part of the struggle in our life. Therefore, following the teachings is hard, but don’t think, “I cannot do it, I cannot understand it.” Just try it.
Even if you only understand 10 percent, that is the practice where you are challenging the laziness of self-deprecation. I am not criticizing, but you should not underestimate yourself. Then, we need to be happy to do these things, happy to listen to teachings, happy to go to teachings. And there you can play little tricks. For example, if you want to go for teachings you don’t have to think about the teachings. Just think, “I will go there and see my friends.” Just play a trick with you, go to see your sangha friends. True, you will see your friends and how nice is that, right? That kind of thing makes you go to some teaching. That is an example of any place. But don’t forget that the teaching is essential, not the trick. So that’s not right. Sometimes you just think, “Let me get away from my everyday situation. Go for teachings. I am so bored to look at my work, or puzzles or dealing with something that I always deal with.”
Just have a little space. It’s funny to say that in a teaching but this will help you to move forward. That is working. When we were kids we went for teachings all the time. Even as little kids. We were happy to go, not because we really understood the teachings or were so devoted, but we had a lot of fun there. When we went to the teachings we would see all the other kids our age, all the young monks and that gathering is also a joyful moment. Because of that we went to the teaching and listened to the teachings and coming back we had got those teachings. So create a fun part, a reason, don’t look at the boring part. Focus on the happy parts. I always think that way. If you focus on the happy part you will get happiness.
If you focus on the hard part, everywhere there is a hard path, okay. And then, if you want to think about teachings, think about the benefits. If you go to the teachings you can write down notes. Whatever you learn you can write it down and analyze and every time you go to listen to a teaching you will learn something new. And some teachings include the opportunity to bring your questions. You can bring questions or sometimes the teachings will give you the questions in your head. Then introduce yourself to new teachings.
Therefore, enthusiasm is the life of everything. Without enthusiasm everything is not working. In your daily life, no. If you have no enthusiasm in your work then you cannot do well. But enthusiasm is not something that comes with you from the beginning. You have to create it, you have to make it. You have to think about reasons and create it. Look at the best part. We should push away the boulder of laziness and move the horse of enthusiasm. What’s laziness? Distractions and looking down on yourself and then doing everything that is doing nothing, like sitting in a corner. That comes into your habit slowly and that’s not good. Tell your horse of enthusiasm, “Go there, there is nice water, there is nice grass to eat and lots of other horses to have fun with”, and then your horse might say, “Okay, I will try.”
Ride the Horse of Enthusiasm (Demo Rinpoche – Ancient Wisdom. Modern Times. #211 June 30, 2024)
