The power of reliance

• The energy of mantra
• The power of reliance
• Creating negative karma in relation to holy beings
• Creating negative karma in relation to sentient beings
• Transforming our attitude towards those we’ve harmed
• Questions and answers

Here we are again. Let’s start with doing about seven Vajrasattva mantras out loud and then go directly into some silent meditation.

Generating bodhicitta and mantra energy

How do you want to be perceived by others, and what areas in your life or what aspects or qualities do you want to receive praise about? How do you act in order to receive that praise that you want? Are those actions genuine or is there pretension and deceit involved? Pretension is pretending to have good qualities we don’t have, and deceit is hiding our bad qualities. So, what do we do in order to get praise? What happens when you don’t receive the praise, or when you receive criticism and disapproval instead? What happens to your mind and how does that affect your behavior? Does receiving the praise you seek really help you? Seeing how our need and our craving for praise and approval is pretty much unlimited and never completely fulfills us, then turn the mind to something more broad-reaching or expansive: the welfare of all living beings. Develop the confidence that as you progress along the path, and after you become a bodhisattva and then a Buddha, that you can really be of great benefit to living beings. Let that knowledge fulfill you. In that way, generate bodhicitta.

Does that help to relieve some internal pressure? It’s powerful when we recite the mantra together, isn’t it? Just the energy of the mantra, the energy of so many voices in union chanting the mantra. The mantra has a meaning and I think it’s detailed in the book. I think we put it in there. It’s on page 41. Sometimes thinking about the meaning of the mantra when you’re chanting it can be inspiring. Sometimes, just pay attention to the energy, the vibration, of the mantra. Could you feel that somewhat when we were chanting it together? Just the energy and the vibration of it. I found with chanting mantra that sometimes, listening to the mantra and that vibration, just the sound, is having a very strong effect on my mind in a way that maybe I can’t describe in words. I think it has to do with the effect on the qi or the energy winds in our body. The mantra affects that and has some purifying effect. Sometimes, when I chant mantra, I can feel that my energy and the mantra energy are [VC makes strange noise], you know? They’re not compliant, they’re rubbing against each other. That is often when my mind is afflictive, or when I’ve just been living on automatic. That’s kind of a wake-up call to me, when my energy and the mantra energy don’t get along, they’re just not syncing. That means I have to slow down, I have to turn the mind back to virtue so that the energy of the mantra and the energy of my mind are more in harmony. Do any of you ever find that?

Power of reliance

There are many ways we can use the mantra in our meditation to help us purify. It’s actually the power of the remedial action, which is one of the four opponent powers. The power of remedial action is basically doing any kind of virtuous action. It could be reciting mantra, chanting the Buddha’s names, making offerings, making prostrations, meditating on emptiness, meditating on bodhicitta, offering service at a dharma center or monastery, offering service at a charity, helping the ill or the disabled. Reaching out and doing any kind of virtuous activity could constitute this power of remedial effort. In other words, we’re not just sorry that we did something, but we want to make amends. We want to do something wholesome to kind of steer our energy in a good direction and make up for the lapse in care that we had. That’s the fourth one; let’s go back to the first one.

Actually, in the order I usually explain them, the first one is regret. Here, in the sadhana, the first one is the power of reliance, meaning that we take refuge and generate bodhicitta. What that means, why it’s called reliance, is we rely on those that we acted in an unwholesome way towards. We rely on them by changing our attitude towards them, and then that has a purifying effect on our mind. The two main groups that we act negatively towards are holy objects—holy beings—and sentient beings. Sometimes we act negatively towards machines. I earned my way through college working on a research project and sometimes the machine that was measuring people’s reactions didn’t work very well. We actually resorted to kicking it and that made it work better. So, sometimes you get mad at a digital thing or whatever, but mostly it’s at either holy beings that our anger, or resentment, or greed comes across, or with sentient beings. Reliance means we have to change our attitude towards them.

I was thinking about this in terms of New Year’s resolutions. When I was saying this morning that so often we make New Year’s resolutions but then they don’t last very long, I think one of the reasons is that we haven’t really come to terms with our negative attitudes and negative behaviors towards others yet. Because we haven’t resolved those afflictive emotions in ourselves, then even though we say, “Oh, I’m not going to get mad at my boss again” or, “I’m not going to shout at my kids again,” or whatever it is, we can’t do it because we haven’t really looked at the underlying issues of why we get upset or why we’re so desirous and greedy. That is what I think this power of reliance, or I often call it the power of restoring the relationship, [is]. I think that’s what that power is all about. It’s not just, “Okay, I feel badly because I screamed at somebody so, yeah, that is due to my anger and I’m not going to scream at them again.” No! That’s not going to work, is it? We have to look and [be] like, “Why did I lose my temper?”

What was going on in my mind that my needs weren’t getting met, or my expectations weren’t getting met, or I had unrealistic expectations, or whatever it was that prompted the anger? Or, what was going on in my mind that I was grasping so strongly onto having a possession or some recognition or something else, that I did whatever negative action I did to get what I wanted? How was I looking at the situation? What was going on emotionally for me? Was that all very realistic? If it wasn’t realistic, what is a more realistic view? What is a more realistic approach or emotion to have? Are you getting what I’m saying? Really looking more deeply, not just, “Oh I’m sorry I did that,” but like, “What was going on that I did that?” I’m going to talk about that a little bit more later, but I want to first outline some ways that maybe we create negative karma with regards to holy objects and sentient beings, and then we can look at some of the emotions and thoughts involved in that.

Negative actions toward holy objects

With holy beings, that refers to our spiritual mentors, the people we’ve chosen to be our Dharma teachers, and to the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. With regard to the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, there are refuge guidelines for those people who have taken refuge. You can look in the Blue Book on page 88. It’s looking at those kinds of things: criticizing the Buddha, Dharma Sangha; using the Three Jewels to make money for yourself—selling statues, for example, or selling Dharma books for a profit, and having a mind of greed that wants to get something from giving the Dharma materials or selling the Dharma materials; or seeing nice things on the altar, and thinking, “How can I get that?” In Singapore, I noticed—not so much now, but when I was there in the 80s—that people would bring lots of food to offer on the shrine. They would offer it, we would do our practice, and then it was time to take the food down from the shrine and eat it. I used to say, “Are you really offering it to the Three Jewels or are you just putting it on the altar until it’s time for you to eat?” We offer things and then we take them down at the end of the day, that’s kind of how things are usually done, but taking them down at the time you are hungry because you want to eat them? That’s not so good. Taking them down because you are the caretaker of the altar, that’s okay.

Also, it’s very important, if Dharma items are sold or if donations are made to the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha specifically, that the money is used for that. If Dharma books are sold, then the money should go for printing more Dharma books or for buying thangkas or something like that, furbishing a meditation hall. In other words, we shouldn’t sell Dharma items and then go on our samsaric holiday with the money, or go out and have a steak dinner, or go to Starbucks. The money belongs to the Three Jewels, we should use it for their benefit. If somebody donates something, like for example, we are going to be building a temple in the future, if people make donations for building the temple, those funds have to be used for building the temple. We can’t say, “Oh gee, actually our food fund is short, let’s buy food with that money,” because the money wasn’t given for that purpose. It wasn’t given to our stomach, it was given for the construction of the temple. So, it’s very important in these ways to really use the money donated to the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha exactly for the purpose it was donated for and not to mix our worldly needs with money like this.

Also, other ways of transgressing or acting against the holy objects: criticizing Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, criticizing our teacher. Now, we may have different opinions than our teachers, that’s fine, but having a different opinion doesn’t mean we have to criticize them. Many of my teachers like Tibetan tea. I think Tibetan tea is disgusting and bad for your health, but that doesn’t mean that I go around and say, “These Tibetans, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re so stupid, and they don’t care about their health, and blah, blah, blah.” We have a difference of opinion. That’s Tibetan tea, that’s a little bit easier to accept. Sometimes we have different political opinions than our teachers, or we may have different opinions about gender equality than our teachers. Issues that are a little bit more important to us than the kind of tea we drink. It’s very important in those circumstances. We don’t have to criticize our teachers. We can just disagree and know that it’s a free world and everybody can have their own ideas. They have their ideas about these issues and I have my ideas, and I didn’t come to my teachers to learn politics or to learn gender issues. I came to learn the Dharma and they teach the Dharma incomparably well. That’s something to look out for.

Another thing we do is, sometimes our teachers give us an instruction and we don’t like it one single bit. In that case, rather than get angry, it’s good to go and ask our teacher, “Please explain the meaning of the instruction and what you wanted.” That’s quite different than just digging in our heels and saying, “No, this is ridiculous, you’re hypocritical, you’re prejudiced,” whatever it is, and making accusations. In a similar way, in the Sangha, in our precepts, there are a lot of precepts that concern being able to receive feedback and instructions rather than accuse the Sangha of being biased towards us. There are a lot of precepts where, let’s say, the person in charge of the storehouse gives out the clothing or gives out some of the resources in a way that we don’t agree with because we didn’t get what we wanted. Our instinct when I don’t get what I want is, “It’s not fair, you’re prejudiced. You give the nice things to the people who are your friends, you don’t give the nice things equally to everybody,” and make accusations like this against the storekeeper.

In our monastic precepts there are a lot of things about that, not acting out in anger and making these kind[s] of false accusations simply because we didn’t get what we want. There are also precepts concerning not making false accusations of people breaking their precepts. That’s considered a very negative thing to do. Then the question comes, what happens if you saw somebody break their precepts or you suspect that somebody is not acting in a proper way, what do you do? You bring the issue up to the Sangha. Instead of saying, “This person did this and nyah, nyah, nyah,” it’s like, “I have this impression,” but the Sangha needs to examine what really happened. So, we try and remove our anger from the issue, but we don’t cover up the issue either. I say this because if you look at areas of sexual abuse in Buddhist communities, one of the things that’s been going on is that people cover up out of fear of criticizing a teacher or somebody who’s an authority. It’s a delicate thing because you don’t want to criticize that person and also you know if you bring an issue up, other people may attack you because they’re partial towards the person that you’re bringing up the issue towards. There are all sorts of things going on there.

It’s better [to] bring up the issue but without being angry. Bring it up to the community so that the community itself can investigate and see what is going on. We don’t want to cover it up because more people could get hurt that way. But also, you don’t want to go around—well I don’t know, His Holiness says make it public, put it in the newspaper. He said, if these people don’t listen to his advice in teachings, maybe the only thing that will make them listen is if they are shamed in public. That was his take on it. Maybe that’s true, that’s the only thing that will make somebody look again at their own behavior. It’s a delicate thing, but the thing is not to make false accusations and not to bring things up in a way that you create factions in a community. There are ways of bringing up issues, aren’t there? You can say, “Okay, it seems to me like this is going on and we need to look at it,” and there’s, “Oh, this guy’s doing this, can you imagine? I can’t believe it!” and “Oh my goodness, blah. blah, blah,” and we talk to everybody, and we gossip, and we get everybody all riled up. Spare the drama. That just makes everybody quite emotional and it makes it very difficult to actually get to the bottom of what happened. So, it’s important to bring it up, but in a calmer manner, I think.

Jealousy

Another one that comes up often with respect to our spiritual teachers is we get jealous of other disciples because they get more attention than we do, or we get unhappy with our teachers because we worked hard on a project and they didn’t even comment on it. They gave us some work—we worked really hard, we did a good job, and they didn’t even say good job or thank you. To this other disciple they’re so nice, they’re so kind, but to me, they ignore me, why? This isn’t fair! It’s very interesting, all these childhood issues come up. What’s one of the first things—I don’t know for other cultures, but in America I think one of the first things we learn to say as kids is, “It’s not fair.” Your brother or sister got to do something you don’t get to do? “It’s not fair!” The kids across the street get to do something you don’t get to do? “It’s not fair!” That same kind of sibling rivalry goes on with our Dharma teachers. “I did this and this and they didn’t even acknowledge it. But they spend so much time and they’re so sweet to the other disciples.” Especially here at the Abbey after you ordain: “When I was a lay person the teacher was so nice to me, and look at the lay people, the teacher talks so nice to the lay people, but to me the teacher says ‘do this, do that’ and they don’t even say please and thank you.”

“They should be so happy to have me here as part of their Sangha,” instead of having a humble attitude. “They should be so happy that I live here because I am so wonderful.” These kinds of things come up. I’m talking about them because these are the kinds of things we need to purify. We need to recognize them. Like I said, some of them are just, we’re acting like we did [when] competing with our siblings when we were little, or wanting attention from our parents when we were little. Here we go again. So, quite interesting. Some of my teachers have wonderful attendants, and the attendants are so helpful and so kind and I have become friends with the attendants. But, a couple of my teachers have attendants… it’s quite difficult. Then you hear stories about what those attendants say to the teachers and you go, “Wow, they get away with saying those things and the teachers still pay attention to them and have them as attendants? But me, I’m who’s so nice and polite, I don’t get a chance to do those things for my teachers! How come they choose those really nasty disciples to be there attendants, and not me?”

Non-violent communication

All these things come up and we have to look, “What’s going on in my mind? What am I wanting? What am I needing? Oh, I want approval.” Then think about it. Look at His Holiness: hundreds of thousands of disciples and they all want approval. What’s His Holiness supposed to do? Even a teacher that has a hundred disciples, and they’re all fluttering, hanging out for some approval. What are we really expecting from our teachers anyway? Are they supposed to be mom and dad and fulfill what we didn’t have as a child, or are they supposed to be Dharma teachers and teach us how to attain liberation? What I’m saying here is to acknowledge those kinds of transgression and then really look at our own mind. What afflictive emotion is prominent and making these problems? What are the thoughts and interpretations that lie behind those emotions that I’m believing and that are making me so clingy or so angry or whatever it is, and then really working those things out so we can let go. Then, to restore the relationship with our teacher, we actually can be successful in doing that. We’re not just saying things, but we’re actually working on our own mind and transforming our emotions and our interpretations.

So, one group is with the holy beings and then the other group is with sentient beings. I don’t know which each of you have more negativity towards, when we’ve messed up more towards holy beings or messed up more towards sentient beings, but I think I’m safe in saying each one of us has gotten angry in the last year. Is that a safe assumption? Each one of us has had attachment and jealousy. Each one of us has had bouts of arrogance, or pretension and deceit, and ignorance. These kinds of things have come up in the last year, and very often with respect to other sentient beings. When we’re purifying, we need to look at these different situations and again, check out what was the disturbing emotion? What was the thought behind the disturbing emotion? What was I actually trying to say when I acted in that way? Is it fairly safe to say that everyone here has gotten angry at a family member in the last year? When you get angry at a family member, what are you really trying to say? What do you really want? What do you really need at that time when you get really upset at a family member? [Audience: To be heard. Acceptance. Connection. Respect. To be the way I want you to be.]

Let’s go a little bit deeper. When we’re angry with them, what kind of relationship do we really want to have with them? [Audience: To be close.] We really want a close relationship, don’t we? We’re angry, [but] what we’re really wanting is a close relationship. Is our behavior producing a close relationship? No. It’s usually producing the opposite, isn’t it? We may want respect and them to be the way we want them to be or whatever it is. That may be what we’re thinking we want from them, in other words, as if we should be able to demand from them certain attitudes or behavior. But, what we really want beneath the whole thing is to be close to them. Somehow, the way we’re handling our emotional needs and emotions in general is actually producing the opposite effect. We often think, “If I am angry enough, if I express to them enough my unhappiness, then out of love for me they will change and they will meet my needs.” Isn’t that what we’re thinking? So we shout at them, we scream at them, we walk off and refuse to communicate, we hang up the phone, who knows what we do. We think that kind of behavior is going to make them want to be close to us so that they act differently and meet our needs.

Is that reasonable? If you flip the situation, and a family member is very upset and angry with you and saying, not in a calm voice, “I need respect, I need to be understood, you’re not listening, you don’t care for me at all,” and saying things like that, are you, out of love, going to change your behavior? Forget it. But we expect them to change their behavior in the face of our throwing a tantrum. Are you getting what I’m saying? Basically, it comes down to, we have very unreasonable expectations of others. If other people, when they have those expectations of us, if they were to verbalize those expectations we would say, “No way, forget it, I can’t do that,” but we expect that from them. Then we wind up having a lot of problems.

We may make the New Year’s resolution, “I’m not going to get mad at my mother, sister, father, son, whoever it is, in the new year.” But, unless we deal with these underlying emotional issues, and the craving we have for our needs to be met, unless we deal with these, we’re not going to be able to change our behavior. We need to find other ways to either convey our needs to others or to learn how to meet our own needs. Instead of, “You don’t respect me,” well, do I respect myself and do I respect other people? Mother Teresa had this really beautiful thing—somebody can find it on the internet—where she says things like, “If I am lonely give me someone to love,” stuff like that. In other words, if I have an emotional need, may I give somebody else what it is I need, because when I do that with others it establishes a relationship and they’re probably going to give back to me what I have given to them. But, if I dig in my heels and I demand something, what I want isn’t going to come about. This is the same in personal relationships, in group relationships, in international relationships. We can see it very clearly. If the president makes a demand, or one party or the other makes a demand, then we have the chaos that is America today. We have to soften and really think, “What are my needs and how can I meet them and how can I express them?,” and, “Instead of demanding that other people meet my needs, how can I open my heart to other living beings?” This is because I think that at the bottom of most of our emotional needs, what we really want is connection with others. We really want to feel like we have something to contribute to the world. It doesn’t have to be towards a particular individual, but we just need to feel like we are valuable and can contribute, so to find a way to do that and rejoice in that. Then, when we can rejoice in that, maybe we can let up a little bit on our expectations of other people. Making some sense?

Forgiveness

When we want to purify, the power of reliance really takes some attention. How can I really transform my attitude or feeling towards who[m]ever it was that I acted in an unwholesome way towards? This sometimes involves forgiving the other person, or forgiving our self, or apologizing to the other person, or even apologizing to our self. This process of fixing the relationship, the main, important part is that our attitude changes, that we are able to release the clinging or the arrogance, or the jealousy, or the resentment, or whatever it was. We are able to release that towards the other person and then have an attitude of loving kindness, compassion, and bodhicitta instead.

This really takes some work on ourselves, especially when our buttons are pushed and we’re really upset. [We are] so upset that it’s even difficult for us to hear any constructive feedback or advice about how to handle the problem. We’re so like this [Ven. Chodron makes gesture] that we can’t hear anything. We have to learn how to work with our mind when we get like that. Do you ever get like that? I think in psychology they call it a refractory period. You can’t take in any information that doesn’t agree with what you already think. That really limits us. We have to learn how to relax that, take things in, learn to let go of stuff, and if it’s suitable, apologize. There are many situations in which we can apologize, either verbally by going to meet the person or calling them, or maybe writing them a letter if we’re not sure how they’re going to take it. Maybe sometimes the person has died, or we’ve lost touch with them. Especially when we start purifying and doing a whole life review, needless to say previous lives, and what we’ve done, we don’t know even where the person is to apologize [to]. The main important thing is that in our own heart, we release the negative emotion.

If we can apologize or write a letter or whatever, then that’s very good. The other person may not be ready to see us yet. That’s okay, that’s their thing. The important thing for us is that we’ve made peace with the relationship. We’re not holding onto resentment against somebody else. Often the people that we have the strongest negative emotions towards are the people who we were once the most attached to: family members, ex-boyfriends or girlfriends, ex-husbands and wives, children, parents. We often need to do some work in those areas to really be able to make peace, and it’s so relieving when you can. To do that, you have to deal with the mind that says, “Yes, but…” In terms of family, “Yes, they were kind to me, yes, they brought me up, they sustained me, they supported me, they did this and this and this, but… they didn’t do that, and they didn’t do that, and they did this, and they did that, and nyahhh!” We need to go beyond the, “Yes, but…” What happens when we’re stuck in “yes, but…” is we have a very reified notion of what the relationship was and who that person was. They are only this. We’re not seeing the person in their entirety. We’re only seeing one small part and then hating them for that, or being hurt by that, or whatever it is we’re feeling. We’re not seeing the totality of the person. There are some people, I know them over a while and they talk about their family or whatever and I only hear bad things about a parent or a sibling, only, “They did this, they did that, they didn’t do this, they didn’t do that.” Only bad things. I think it had to be more than that because a person is not entirely negative, and I think when we really begin to heal is when we can acknowledge the positive sides towards that person. Yes, there might have been hurt, there might have been abuse, but that isn’t all there was. There were other things as well.

Power of reliance

I’ve done some reading with Holocaust survivors and gone to some of their talks, and some Holocaust survivors will say, “I forgive,” regarding what a guard or somebody in the concentration camp did towards them. Other ones will say, “I will never forgive them.” It always kind of hurts me when I hear people say, “I will never forgive,” because to me that means, “I will always hold onto my anger.” That means that that person will always have some part of their heart that is stuck in suffering, whereas if we can really say, “I forgive,” we’re not saying what the other person did was right, we’re not saying their behavior was acceptable, we’re just saying, “I’m going to stop being angry about this,” and that’s an incredible relief.

I think this is the kind of thing, on a deeper level, that the power of reliance involves.
Remember, “Hitler means well, dear.” If Hitler means well, dear, imagine what Lama Yeshe would say about the person that you’re holding something against. Actually, Lama was totally amazing. One time, somebody asked him about how he felt about being a refugee, because he was only 24 years old in 1959 when there was the abortive uprising against the Chinese communist occupation in Tibet. Lama, like many of the Sera Je monks, they took their tea cup and went into the mountains thinking the uprising would be over in a few days, they would go back to the monastery and continue. No Tibetan monk ever goes anywhere without his teacup. In those days it wasn’t a cup, it was a wooden bowl, you take it everywhere. They went up into the mountains behind Sera and thought it would be over in a few days and it wasn’t over in a few days. They wound up crossing the Himalayas in March with great difficulty, and snow, and danger, with the Communists shooting at them, and went into India where they were refugees, where they didn’t know the language, where they didn’t have appropriate clothing. They had heavy woolen garments, which were great for the cold in Tibet, but weren’t suitable for the heat in India. They weren’t used to the viruses and bacteria in India. A lot of them got sick and many died, and the monks were put into a British military prison. If you saw the movie Seven Years in Tibet, that was the one where they threw Heinrich Harrer. That’s where the monks went, and [they] had to continue their study as best as they could with little food and everything else that’s going on, and then start their lives all over in India. Lama one time was telling us this story of how that happened with him, and then he put his hands together like this and said, “I have to thank Mao Tse Tung.” We were going, “Huh?,” because Mao Tse Tung was the one behind all this. He said, “I have to thank Mao Tse Tung,” because he was the one who taught me what the real meaning of Dharma was. If I had stayed in Tibet, I would have gotten my Geshe degree and become very complacent, receiving offerings, giving teachings, not really working on my mind. Due to the kindness of Mao Tse Tung, I had to go and become a refugee, and that made me really understand what the Buddha’s teachings were about because that’s the time I really had to practice. Whoa! If Lama can be grateful to Mao Tse Tung, maybe we can see something good about the people who have harmed us. There are a few minutes for questions.

Audience: I’m really struggling with this whole idea of it always wanting to be that we want to be close, so I just want to talk about that for just a minute. There are people in my family who have done harm that I feel I have made peace with and that I have forgiven, but they continue to want to have me be closer to them than I am really comfortable or feel safe. So, my anger comes up when they’re wanting me, guilting me, doing whatever they do, wanting that from me. That’s when my anger arises. I don’t know if I am missing something, but to me it’s not because I want to be close, it’s actually because I’m trying to keep myself safe. So just anything on that.

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): Ideally, in an ideal universe, you would like to be close to them, wouldn’t you? In an ideal universe.

Audience: Okay, yes. I will give you that. Absolutely

VTC: If they were able to handle all their emotional craziness, wouldn’t [it] be nice to be able to have a good relationship with them?

Audience: That’s very true, thank you, yes.

VTC: Yeah.

Audience: But…

[laughter]

Audience: Slipped out!

VTC: In your heart, you would really wish that it would be possible to be close. Due to the present circumstances, those conditions aren’t there for you to feel safe being close so you keep a respectful distance, but if the situation changes you would be happy to join them again.

Audience: I just don’t know if I’ll ever trust it’s changed enough. That would be what keeps me from doing that.

VTC: Right. When trust has been broken, sometimes we need to be wise, but it doesn’t mean that you have to trust them fully like you did before. Maybe there are some incremental ways of establishing a little bit more trust than there is now.

Audience: Thank you.

Audience: I know that this question can be specific to spiritual teachers, but I take it a little bit more broadly. I’ve seen recently the impact that transgression has on a community, so whether it’s a schoolteacher or administrator, whether it’s a spiritual teacher, the weight of it is so serious, so impacting. I appreciate many of your comments in terms of not having a realistic view of who this individual is, seeing them in a very monochromatic light, especially as a public figure. Nevertheless, I have felt instances in spiritual context where it hurts so deeply when you see or experience those transgressions. So, whether a secular or spiritual context, do you have any advice in terms of how you process that and how you make sense of it? I think there is something to the strategies and skills, but there’s an intensity to this that is sometimes…

VTC: It’s a feeling of betrayal, isn’t it? We’ve been betrayed by somebody we trusted and relied on to be a model and an example for us. In some way we feel shattered, as if, “If that person can’t really be that way or isn’t really that way, then nobody can be, and then certainly I can’t be either.” I think there are a lot of assumptions there; first of all, just the assumption that somebody is always going to behave impeccably. Now, you might say, “But isn’t that reasonable? If somebody is an authority figure, especially if somebody is a spiritual guide, we should be able to rely on them and really trust implicitly.” I think sometimes it’s like, maybe I just have to accept the puzzle of the situation that that person appeared so wise and compassionate to me, and now they don’t appear to me that way, and I don’t understand, and I accept that I don’t understand. That’s how I would term it for a spiritual mentor. Towards other authority figures who[m] I respect, I wouldn’t hold that expectation that they are always going to be perfect and wonderful and never misbehave. I don’t hold that towards them, because I’ve been around too much. I mean, I was friends with somebody who was an expert on mediation and he and his wife wrote books about mediation and conflict resolution, and then he found out his wife was cheating on him. Then I heard another story. I was friends with somebody who also, she and her husband were in the same field, in the psychology field, and her husband was kind of a model figure about talking about substance abuse and everything, and then she told me that he had a marijuana problem. Then, I knew another woman who was married to a pastor in a church, very charismatic, and she told me… what was he doing? I can’t remember now. What I’ve learned is, people have a public face, and unless they’re really on high stages of the path, they still have their own internal stuff that they need to work out. I can appreciate their good qualities and benefit from their good qualities and at the same time acknowledge their limitations. The mind that says, “If they can’t be perfect the way I thought they were, then nobody can be,” that’s not a correct assumption, and if I say, “If they can’t be perfect then I can’t be that either,” that also is not a correct assumption. So, here we are in samsara, what a mess.

Audience: I’ve been trying to do some reading on the differences between the concept of forgiveness and more Judeo-Christian Western understanding, and then that same idea more Buddhist epistemology. I’m not sure I have it down quite yet, so I’d appreciate a comment on that. As well, I’m wondering about that letting go of anger and forgiveness but at the same time having to still acknowledge the reverberation of very negative karma, that we have to hold that duality. I mean, yeah, Hitler meant well, but we’re still dealing with the reverberation of that action and I would like maybe some comment on both.

VTC: First of all, the question is, just because we’re still dealing with the reverberation of somebody’s negative action, why does that mean that we have to be mad at them?

Audience: True, they don’t have to be connected.

VTC: We don’t have to be mad. We can still deal with the reverberations. We can still say what they did was wrong and inappropriate and harmful. Saying that and knowing that doesn’t mean we have to be mad. That’s the thing. I say that because we are so much in the habit of when somebody does something we don’t like, we think the only reasonable emotion is to be angry at them. That’s another wrong assumption on our part. We don’t need to be angry, we have a choice. Being angry puts us in prison. I see forgiveness simply as putting down our anger so that we can go on in life and not be chained to a reified conception of something that happened in the past.

Audience: I’d like to come back to Hitler again if that’s alright. I do assume that the karma that brought Hitler to his evil was generated in a previous life. If he were to purify, what would [he regret]? … in Vajrasattva, it talks about, “I regret things from a previous life.” How does one know what to regret if it’s in the past?

VTC: In a previous life? I think it’s safe to assume that we’ve done everything and to purify it.

Audience: How does one choose?

VTC: We don’t know specifically what we’ve done in previous lives, but as long as we have ignorance, anger, and attachment, it’s very probable that we’ve done who knows what in previous lives, so it’s very therapeutic to purify. Even if we don’t know if we’ve done it or not, it never hurts to purify. Because part of the purification process is making a determination not to do that action again, even if we haven’t done it in a previous life, if we purify and make the determination never to do it again in the future, then that helps us not do negative actions in the future. It only benefits.

Audience: In my own experience, when I stay angry at people it keeps me from seeing how I do the same thing. In particular, talking about Hitler and how bad he is, and then when I start looking at racism in my own country and systematic racism and that it lasted a lot longer and did a lot more harm, I can’t be holding my nose in here about anything. And how I, in my life, I incorporated it, I’ve been taught it, and I absorbed it and I still do these things.

VTC: Yeah. This will be the last question.

Audience: All of the things you were mentioning, I had a specific person in mind that I’ve forgiven multiple times, that keeps repeating the same thing over and over, and even though I want to be close to this person it’s hard to because they prove that they keep doing the same thing. Is it wrong for me not to be close to them?

VTC: It’s similar to her situation. You can forgive somebody, but that doesn’t mean you have to trust them in the same way you trusted them before. Clearly, if this person, if their harmful behavior is continuing, you don’t want to be anywhere near it. So, you can forgive them; know that ideally you would like to be close to them; but know that at the present time that’s not possible. Be kind of peaceful about that and have some compassion for them even though you maintain a distance.