Joyous effort

Seeing even Hearers and Solitary Realizers, who accomplish
Only their own good, strive as if to put out a fire on their head,
For the sake of all beings make enthusiastic effort,
The source of all good qualities—
This is the practice of Bodhisattvas.

• Joyous effort is the antidote to laziness in spiritual practice
• The three kinds of laziness that are obstacles to practice and how to counteract them
• Seeing the benefits of spiritual practice will generate joyous effort
• The story of Sargent Joy S. Effort

SDD 28: Joyous effort (download)

We’ve been going through this Tibetan poem for the last almost three years. It’s a wonderful poem called Thirty Seven Practices of the Bodhisattvas. A bodhisattva being is someone who’s developed the altruistic intention to become fully awakened for the benefit of all beings and who is very fully engaged in practicing the path to achieve that goal. 

Verse 28

That path includes developing love, compassion, generosity, ethical conduct, fortitude, joyous effort, concentration, wisdom, and many other good qualities. The poem has been talking about how to do this. What we’ve been doing is one verse every month, so today we’re on Verse 28. We’re getting there. This one is on joyous effort. So I’ll read you the verse, and then we’ll talk about it. 

Seeing even hearers and solitary realizers, who accomplish only their own good, strive as if to put out a fire in their head, for the sake of all beings make enthusiastic effort, the source of all good qualities. This is the practice of bodhisattvas.

There are some new words in here I’m sure you’ve never heard before: hearers and solitary realizers. When we talk about the Buddhist path, we talk about three different paths that people can take. What is called the hearers and solitary realizer paths lead someone to liberation to become what’s called an arhat. If someone develops the altruistic intention to benefit all beings, they follow the bodhisattva path, and they become a fully awakened Buddha. The people who follow the bodhisattva path and who are working not only to free themselves but to free all living beings from our situation in cyclic existence are considered, I guess you could say, superior in the sense that their motivation extends to all living beings. They’re not just seeking their own personal liberation. 

It says:

Even the hearers and solitary realizers who accomplish only their own good [meaning these people are working for only their own liberation] strive as if to put out a fire on their own head. 

So, they work really hard, but how about us? We want to be the kind of person who works for the sake of all living beings, so if these others—those who aren’t even working for the benefit of all living beings—are practicing their spiritual path very diligently and conscientiously, then those of us who have the altruistic intention or are intent on developing that altruistic intention and becoming fully awakened should do likewise, especially because we’re working for the benefit of all. 

Here, when it says these practitioners “strive as if to put out a fire on their head,” you have to understand that image in context. When we think of your head being on fire, the first thing that comes to mind is terror and freaking out. That’s not the meaning of this verse. It’s not that if you’re a spiritual practitioner, you practice because you’re terrorized and you freak out. It’s not like that. It’s only an analogy. If you had a fire on your head, you would be single-pointed about putting it out. You wouldn’t be thinking, “Well, it’s a beautiful day; I think I’ll take a walk, or sleep in today, or have a nice leisurely breakfast.” No, you wouldn’t sit down and watch five movies. You would go and put out the fire on your head. You wouldn’t be lazy and procrastinate. That’s the meaning of it. 

Laziness prevents practice

What this verse is getting at is to really put our effort into our spiritual practice without getting distracted by all sorts of other things. It’s very easy to get distracted by all sorts of other things as we all know and experience. Therefore, when they talk about joyous effort, they talk about it as an antidote to laziness because laziness is the chief thing that keeps us from practicing; we can’t even do the dishes when we’re lazy. We have to do something about our laziness. In a spiritual context, laziness has a slightly different meaning than in regular life as we’ll see. 

Three types of laziness

There are three kinds of laziness. Some of them correspond with the laziness in regular life that keeps us from getting anything done and some don’t. 

The first kind of laziness we have to work on and to apply joyous effort towards is the physical kind of laziness. It’s sleep, lounging around, saying to yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow. Today I’m just going to rest. I’ll do it tomorrow.” In our regular life, this is clearly an obstacle when we’re lazy because you can’t even keep your house clean, let alone get a job and perform the functions at your job and things like that. And with spiritual practice, if you’re lazy in this way, you can’t make it to the meditation cushion; you can’t make it to the Abbey to hear teachings. You can’t even make it to your computer to turn on the Abbey YouTube channel. It’s right there; you don’t have to do much, but this laziness just overtakes us. So, that’s one form of laziness that we want to overcome, and the way we overcome it is by thinking that our life doesn’t last forever, so it’s really important to put our energy into the things that are important and to do it now without putting it off because we don’t know how long we’re going to live. And in terms of our spiritual practice, that is something really important for a happy life, for a peaceful death, and for our future lives. 

The second kind of laziness that joyous effort overcomes isn’t what we call laziness in regular society, but rather from a spiritual perspective. You’re lazy when you’re very busy doing all sorts of unnecessary things. That’s a form of laziness. In our society everyone is saying, “You have to have a life,” which means you have to be so busy that you don’t have any time to sit and breathe and think. If you don’t have every single minute of your life filled with some kind of engagement, then you must be like some dropout, someone who can’t do anything. 

We all try to keep ourselves incredibly busy, so we don’t have to even look at what’s inside our own heart. We run from here; we run from there. You have your phone with you and you can’t put it down. You’ve got to be checking it all the time because there might be one incredibly interesting text message from your friend that says, “Where are you?” You can’t miss it, and you’ve got to see this movie and that soap opera, and run here and there and do everything everybody else is doing and keep yourself so busy. You’ve got to work overtime, and you’ve got to impress your boss, and you’ve got to have this fantastic social life, and you’ve got to do this and that. 

So then, every evening you’re just conked out in bed because you’re exhausted and emotionally you’re frazzled. Keeping ourselves very busy doing worldly activities, from a spiritual viewpoint, is a kind of laziness because we’re lazy in doing what’s important, which is our spiritual practice. Are you getting what I’m saying? It’s an interesting way to look at laziness, that keeping ourselves so that we are the busiest of the busy is laziness. We counteract that kind of laziness by thinking if we continue to be busy and keep ourselves busy like that, then we’re never going to get any spiritual practice done, so we’ll never experience the benefits of our spiritual practice in this life or in future lives. 

In addition, because we’re so busy doing all these kinds of sometimes really dumb things, we’ll wind up accumulating a lot of destructive karma because we’re not being very conscientious about our ethical principles or really even sitting and thinking about the effect of our actions on other people. When we’re too busy to think of the effect of our actions on others, then we just do any old thing, don’t we? But thinking like that helps to settle us down and contemplate what’s more important.

It’s really interesting that the third kind of laziness is self-deprecation: putting ourselves down, low self-esteem, criticizing ourselves, feeling like we’re hopeless. That’s a form of laziness. Isn’t that interesting? Did you ever think of that as being lazy? Usually when we have those kinds of thoughts, we think that those thoughts are true, and we really are hopeless and helpless and poor quality and can’t get anything accomplished. “Let’s just give up before we even start.” 

When I first read that, I went, “Wow, they call that laziness.” From a spiritual viewpoint, we are training to see that we all have the potential to become a fully awakened Buddha, that we all have this amazing human potential that we can develop, but when we ignore that potential and think that we’re worthless, we are being lazy because that whole self-deprecating view keeps us pushed down, so we don’t do anything. We give up before we’ve even tried. It’s interesting to look at our lives and see what the areas are where we’ve had a lot of this self-criticism to the extent that we give up on ourselves before we’ve even tried to do something.

I always remember, and I always speak about it because I taught third grade before I became a nun, and there was a little boy named Tyrone. Someone had told Tyrone somewhere along the line that he was stupid or something like that because Tyrone, in third grade—and he is eight or nine years old—felt like he couldn’t learn to read. He had that idea. “I can’t learn to read because I’m dumb.” Tyrone was not dumb. He was very capable, but because he had this poor quality view, he couldn’t learn to read. It was not a lack of intelligence. It was not dyslexia. It was self-image. 

When you think about it, so many of us have this kind of self-image where we just say, “I can’t do anything right. I’m totally unlovable. My life’s a mess. I’m not very smart.” What was the thing we said when we were kids? “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll eat some worms.” Remember that? I don’t know where the worms came into it. Does anybody know the history of this little jingle? [laughter] Do you remember that? Did they have it in Denmark? No? In France? No? In Germany? No? Okay, maybe you had some other ones that were just as bad. Anyway, our specialty as Americans is that we eat worms. [laughter] 

Oh, I’m joking, but under all of our grandiose grandiosity, there is this view of,  “I’m not good enough.” It’s only a thought, but thoughts can be so powerful. It’s only a thought, but that thought impedes us from growing and blossoming and learning and contributing and loving and doing so many things. It’s really a pity, isn’t it? And that is considered a form of laziness, because we give up on ourselves. We don’t try. 

The remedy to that one is to remember our buddha nature, remember our potential, remember that we have some love and compassion and wisdom and generosity and all these good qualities in us right now. They’re underdeveloped, but we have them. They can never be removed from our mind, so if we just put in some energy we’ll develop those qualities because cause brings effect, so if we put in some energy to develop these qualities, of course, the good qualities are going to increase. So, it’s important to remember that in our buddha nature, that in our precious human life, we have this amazing opportunity as human beings to practice right now. That also gives us a lot of inspiration and energy to do our spiritual practice, and, of course, when we do the practice then we experience the beneficial results.

Developing joyous effort

Joyous effort is the quality we’re trying to develop here. It’s the joyous effort. It’s not to drag yourself along because you “should” make some kind of effort. Sometimes that’s the kind of effort we get into. Like, “Well, I really don’t want to do this, but I have to.” If you bring that kind of attitude into your spiritual practice, your practice is not going to last very long because nobody likes feeling obliged to do something. Nobody likes shoulds and ought tos and supposed tos and have tos. But most of the time, we’re doing that to ourselves. 

Nobody else in our spiritual world is standing there saying, “You lazy bum. Why don’t you have a daily practice?” Nobody says that to us. We say it to ourselves. This is part of the self-talk, self-criticism thing. “Oh, everybody else has a daily practice. I’m so stupid; I can’t do it. I’m just too lazy.” And we put ourselves down. Or we say, “Oh so-and-so is going to be really disappointed if I don’t do my practice, if I don’t go to teachings. So, I should go, then I’ll feel like I’ve done my duty.” Boy, that’s no fun. 

What we want to do to develop joyous effort is to really see the benefits of our spiritual practice. When we see the benefits, then, of course, we’re quite eager to practice. It’s like with anything—when you see the benefit, you want to do it. I mean, people go out and get an education, but does anybody like studying all these different things and taking exams and writing long papers that nobody reads? I mean, for some people, if you have a really good professor and a good class, it’s really good, but a lot of times you just have classes that are boring, but you do them anyway. Why? Because you need an education. Why do you need an education? “I want to make some money.” So, we put up with what we have to do in order to get the job to make the money.

Benefitting future lives

From a Buddhist viewpoint, because we’re thinking not just of this life but future lives, money comes, and as we all know, money goes. And when you die, your money does not go with you. It stays here. At the time of death, money is not really important. What’s more important is the quality of our spiritual practice and the quality and kind of actions we’ve done: if we’ve planted the seeds of good karma in our own mindstream, if we’ve increased our impartiality towards others, our love, compassion, and so forth. These are the kinds of things that are very important when we die, that we want to make sure that we cultivate while we’re alive. When we really see the benefit of those qualities, how when we have those inner qualities our life is better, more peaceful, filled with less conflict, and that we have better relationships with others, we are able to die peacefully. In our future life, we have the seeds of good karma so that we can have a good rebirth. We can progress towards liberation and full awakening. 

Seeing results encourages us

When we see the benefits of our spiritual practice, then there is a feeling of, “Oh, gee, I want to practice.” And we get some joyous effort there. It becomes a joy to practice. And once you start practicing and you see the results, then your motivation really changes. Sometimes at the beginning, you have to nudge yourself because otherwise we’re just like pancakes—we just lie there. So, sometimes we really need to nudge ourselves and encourage ourselves or discipline ourselves. You make a schedule, and you think, “I’m going to stick to the schedule.” 

What I often tell people if they can’t seem to make it to the meditation cushion in the morning is to put in your diary what you do each day, “At 6:00 every morning, I have an appointment with the Buddha.” Then the night before, if somebody wants you to stay up late, you say, “Oh gee, I can’t, I have an early morning appointment. I’ve got to bed early.” Then you make sure you get to bed early so you can get up in the morning and do your practice because you don’t want to break an appointment with the Buddha. That’s not so good, is it?

We want to have this attitude of joy when we practice. It’s kind of contagious. You really see this in the people who practice very well. They’re quite happy. If you look at His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he’s a happy individual even though he’s been a refugee since he was 24 years old. He doesn’t drag himself around. I was just thinking about his upcoming teaching schedule in December. For one month straight he is going every single day, all day. I get exhausted thinking about it, and I’m younger than him. But His Holiness, it’s like he just loves to do that. 

He’ll get up there and teach, the schedule he keeps is amazing. When he has these teachings in south India, he’ll teach three hours in the morning and two and a half hours in the afternoon. There’s a lunch break of an hour and a half; he probably spends 20 minutes eating, and then the rest of the time there are appointments. Before he starts teaching in the morning there are appointments, and after he ends teaching in the afternoon, there are more appointments. Yet he’s always joyful and happy. When people really have a motivation of compassion, that comes across. It gives them incredible energy.

Joy S. Effort

I wanted to read you a story here. The story will sound very familiar to one of our nuns. It’s a story about Sergeant Joy S. Effort and how to transform. With each of the verses, I ask people to give me stories about how they practice these verses in their own daily lives and how they use them to transform themselves. We changed the name in the book, but it’s somebody who lives here. I won’t mention who, but I think she’ll probably let you know. [laughter] 

I didn’t write it as a story at the Abbey. I wrote it as somebody who’s doing just a regular job. It says, “For my first few years in a new job, I prided myself on the effort I put out but didn’t really understand the concept of joyous effort. Mine was imposed effort. As time went on, a caricature appeared of this outstanding, competent worker who could get everything done efficiently. At first, I created her unintentionally because I thought she was quite lovely and remarkable. But in my mind, everyone at my workplace loved her, and the company, and the company could not last without her for any period of time.”  So, you know how we feel like we are indispensable and if we’re not there to get everybody going, the whole place is going to crash? 

“At one of our office skits, I officially created her—Sergeant Joy S. Effort—and everyone laughed. Thereafter Sergeant Joyous Effort began to take on a life of her own, and for the following two years, I felt I had to uphold, sustain, and embody her through thick or thin, darkness or light, snow, hail and sleet.” Otherwise, everything was going to fall apart. 

“Eventually, I crashed into a figurative wall and had months of health problems that were rooted in pushing myself. I had to stop and rethink my approach. In another office skit, Sergeant Joyous Effort went on a permanent holiday to the Bahamas. Bless her heart, and may she never return.” [laughter] “If she does return, the loving community I live in will remind me that she is on permanent vacation. For my new life, as I recreate myself once again, I’m trying not to make the self too solid. Sargeant Joyous Effort has become a symbol of all the things joyous effort is not.” 

“It was great in the first skit she did when she dressed up in fatigues, had a stick and a chart, and was showing the layout. This is bodhisattva boot camp, and you’re doing this, and you’re doing this, and you’re doing this: ‘Okay, stand up, get in line, march into the meditation hall, salute to the Buddha, sit down.’ Joyous effort is not about striving, dictating, controlling, imposing authority, or driving myself and others to the point of exhaustion. Now I’m learning to understand what joyous effort is, mostly because I’m still recovering my health, and I don’t have much effort these days, even though I have an increasing amount of joy. One of my personal aspirations this year is to be able to define for myself, as well as to model for others, the practice of far-reaching joyous effort. I hope to inspire myself and others with light-heartedness, fortitude, and self-acceptance. With joyous effort we have the capacity to do what is possible to the best of our ability. In this way, we attain great results.”

Turn all actions into Dharma practice

Joyous effort has to be like that. It has to be joyous and fun and where there’s a sense of enthusiasm. Like I said, that comes about through seeing the benefits of what we’re doing. Joyous effort isn’t about being heavy-handed. It’s not about beating up on ourselves or trying to control others. It’s really about having this nature of joy so that whatever you’re doing, your feeling of enthusiasm spreads to the people around you and everybody wants to join in and do it. With Buddhism, that’s really possible. 

We say that every action can be transformed into a Dharma action by changing our motivation. Instead of thinking, “Oh, more dishes to wash. I washed them yesterday. Why doesn’t somebody else wash them today,” we think, “Oh, I get to offer service to the community. I get to help others out.” And then you think when you’re washing the dishes that you’re washing the defilements from the minds of sentient beings, or when you’re vacuuming you’re cleaning up the anger and attachment and so on from the minds of sentient beings. You can take these kinds of imaginings into the actual action—into what you’re doing. 

When you’re walking upstairs think, “I’m leading sentient beings to awakening.” When you’re going downstairs think, “I’m going down to the unfortunate realms to benefit others.” We can work to really transform all the actions we do in our lives so that we have a sense of joy while doing them. When we can do that, it really transforms things because then we stop complaining so much. It’s not like, “Oh, I did this, and I did this, and I did this, and I did that. Did you guys know how much I did? And what were you doing at the time when I was doing this and that and that and that? And I work so hard for you and you don’t appreciate it. What did I do to deserve this?” Remember that? Instead of getting into that, just be happy doing what you’re doing because you’re contributing to the well being of other living beings.

Questions & Answers

Audience: [inaudible]

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): See how you put that already? “I shouldn’t feel obligated.” How about, “I don’t want to feel obligated.” That changes it, doesn’t it? 

Audience: [inaudible]

VTC: You don’t want to have this idea of fun in your mind because when we think of fun, we think of things like going to the park and skipping around and balloons and kites. It’s not that the Dharma practice is fun like that, okay, but it’s something that settles your mind, brings peace in your heart, enables you to process what’s happened in the day, enables you to get in touch with your good qualities and increase them. When you think about doing that, that kind of thing isn’t fun like making s’mores at the beach, but it’s something that’s definitely worthwhile and beneficial, something you will feel good after you do it. 

If you can remember that you’ll feel good after you do it, then you have some energy: “Oh yeah, I’m doing this to help myself be a happy individual.” So, you take the shoulds and the ought tos and the supposed tos out. I know for me, one thing that was a big mind-changer regarding the shoulds and ought tos and supposed tos—which I had a lot of when I first started practicing—was when I was in Nepal and I thought, “Oh, I should do more meditation.” I should do this because I was staying at a monastery. I should do that because all these other people are doing it. And I wasn’t even noticing how much I was shoulding myself, and then I got hepatitis, hep A. And hep A just knocks you flat, and I couldn’t move. I just had no energy. And somebody brought me this book called The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, which was all about karma and cause and effect. There was one verse in it about when your body is wracked with pain and you’re exhausted and you have physical difficulties, it’s because of having harmed other people’s bodies before. 

All of a sudden I realized, “Oh, wow. I’m suffering this now because of my uncontrolled selfish actions that I did in the past. So, this whole thing about our actions brings results, that’s really true, and I don’t like this result of being so sick, so I need to stop doing these kinds of actions that harm others.” That really changed things for me because then instead of thinking, “I should keep my precepts.” It was more like, “I want to keep my precepts.” Instead of, “I should meditate,” it was like, “I want to. I want to do purification practice.” If you believe in karma, there’s nothing like thinking, “Okay, this is due to my own actions, and I have to change.” That gives you a lot of positive energy to change because you realize that you are creating the causes for your own future. When we think like that then of course, we all want to be happy, don’t we? We all want to have a good future. If we want that, then with joy, we can go about creating the causes for it now. And with joy, we can abstain from all the things we do that prevent us from having a good future. Does that make some sense?

Audience: [inaudible]

VTC: Yeah, right. Exactly—when we say joyous effort, it doesn’t mean you’re skipping into the meditation hall. “Oh, goody, I get to go meditate. This is so much fun.” It’s not like that, but you do it because you know that it is beneficial for yourself and others. You remind yourself of that. Then your mind is happy to go do that. You don’t see it as, “Oh, Gosh, I’ve got to sit here in this hall for an hour,” because if you have that kind of feeling towards your practice, you’re certainly not going to do it, are you? Yes, you keep your energy up.

Something I really appreciate about the Buddhist teachings is that there are so many different ways to transform your mind. A lot of times I have to do things that I don’t feel like doing, but when those situations happen I think that my long term vision is that I want to become a bodhisattva and then a buddha to be able to benefit others. And bodhisattvas and buddhas don’t drag themselves everywhere, and they do lots of things that may not be their favorite thing to do, but they’re happy to do them. Now I have a chance, an opportunity, to overcome my own laziness. That’s basically what it is: my own self-indulgence. This is a good opportunity for me, and I need to practice it if I am ever to think of becoming a bodhisattva. I’ve got to get rid of this kind of attitude. If I go through my life with that attitude, I’m going to be miserable. There is no way I’m ever going to progress on a spiritual path. So, this is my opportunity right now to work with this mind and transform it. 

Because if I don’t, I’m just going to do my same old thing: grumble, grumble. We all know what grumbling brings us. Yes, it bring more grumbling. We grumble and then the people around us don’t like when we grumble, so they grumble about us. Then we grumble some more. Nothing changes. Everybody just gets mad. It doesn’t bring anything. It’s like every time we hit a bump in the road, instead of reacting to it with, “Okay, this is too much. I quit,” it’s like thinking instead, “Okay, there’s a bump in the road, how am I going to get over this bump?” It’s a bump. It’s not a mountain. It’s a bump. So, how am I going to get over this bump? And you use your creativity to devise an inner plan to get over the bump, and you eventually succeed in doing it. If it were Mount Everest then maybe it would be difficult, but our bumps are merely bumps. So what is it people say? “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” Do you have that one in Germany? [laughter]

Audience: [inaudible]

VTC: Yeah, that’s actually a cultural thing. We’re very ingrained with, “I want instant gratification.” And this is actually something quite harmful to our minds and to our society because good things don’t come instantly. And instant gratification is usually instantly gone.

Audience: [inaudible]

VTC: You mean that you’re coming in and doing a lot of work, and then they feel like they’re being seen as lazy for not keeping up with you? Well, tell them to wear earphones when they watch the football game: “I don’t have a lot of spare time, and I need to vacuum the house right now. I know you’re watching the football game. I know you don’t want to be interrupted. How about putting on some earphones, and I’ll vacuum quickly, and then it’ll be over and you’ll have a cleaner place?” You could say something like that, yeah? Our happiness shouldn’t depend on other people’s moods because other people’s moods are completely unreliable. And our happiness should rely on their appreciation either, right?