The Path to Tranquility

fr Dalai Lama's Daily Wisdom: The Path to Tranquility

1. I love friends, I want more friends. I love smiles. This is a fact. How to develop smiles? There are a variety of smiles. Some smiles are sarcastic. Some smiles are artificial - diplomatic smiles. These smiles do not produce satisfaction, but rather fear or suspicion. But a genuine smile gives us hope, freshness. If we want a genuine smile, then first we must produce the basis for a smile to come.

2. To develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. Such people give us real opportunities to practice tolerance. They test our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot. Basically, patience protects us from being discouraged.

3. Laziness will stop your progress in your spiritual practice. One can be deceived by three types of laziness: the laziness of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate, the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or putting great effort into nonvirtue.

4. Everything has its limits. Too much consumption or effort to make money is not good. Neither is too much contentment. In principle, contentment should be pursued, but pure contentment is almost suicidal.

5. A nagging sense of discontent, a feeling of being dissatisfied, or of something being not right, is the fuel that gives rise to anger and hatred. This discontent arises in us when we feel that either we ourselves, or someone we love, or our close friends are being treated unfairly or threatened and that people are being unjust.
Also when others somehow obstruct us in achieving something, we feel that we are being trodden upon, and then we feel angry. So the approach here is to get at the root, appreciating the causal nexus, the chain, which will ultimately explode in an emotional state like anger or hatred.

6. Human potential is the same for all. Your feeling, "I am of no value," is wrong. Absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. We all have the power of thought - so what are you lacking? If you have will power, then you can do anything. It is usually said that you are your own master.

7. At the moment when strong feelings of anger arise, no matter how hard one tries to adopt a dignified pose, one's face looks rather ugly. The vibration that person sends is very hostile. People can sense it and it is almost as if one can feel steam coming out of that person's body.
Indeed, not only are human beings capable of sensing it, but pets and other animals also try to avoid that person at that instant.

8. Happiness is a state of mind. With physical comforts if your mind is still in a state of confusion and agitation, it is not happiness. Happiness means calmness of mind.

9.The image we have of ourselves readily tends to be complacent. We look at ourselves with indulgence. When something unpleasant happens to us, we always have the tendency to cast the blame on others, or on fate, a demon, or a god. We shrink from descending into ourselves, as the Buddha recommended.

10.If an individual has a sufficient spiritual base, he won't not let himself be overwhelmed by the lure of technology and by the madness of possession. He or she will know how to find the right balance, without asking for too much, and know how to say" I have a camera, that's enough, I don't want another. The constant danger is to open the door to greed, one of our most relentless enemies. It is here that the real work of the mind is put into practice.

11.If in a competitive society you are sincere and honest, in some circumstances people may take advantage of you. If you let someone do so, he or she will be engaging in an unsuitable action and accumulate bad karma that will harm the person in the future. Thus it is permissible, with an altruistic motivation, to take counteraction in order to prevent the other person from having to undergo the effects of this wrong action.

12.People who fight with other human beings out of anger, hatred and strong emotion, even if they gain victory over their enemies in battle, are not in reality heroes. What they are doing is slaying corpses, because human beings, being transient, will die. Whether or not these enemies die in the battle is another question, but they will die at some point. So, in reality, they are slaying those already destined to die. The true hero is the one who gains victory over hatred and anger.

13.Ideals are very important in one's life. Without ideals, you cannot move - whether you achieve them of not is immaterial. But one must try and approximate them.

14.I myself still occasionally become irritated and angry and use harsh words toward others. Then, a few moments later, when the anger has subsided, I feel embarrassed; the negative words are already spoken, and there is no way to take them back. Although the words have been uttered and the sound of the voice has ceased to exist, their impact still lives on. Hence, the only thing I can do is to go to the person and apologize, isn't that right?

15.While you are engaging in the practice of giving, you should do so with great happiness and radiance on your face. One should practice giving with a smile and with mental uprightness.

16.Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that in nonviolent and nonharming, or nonaggressive. Because of this there is a danger of confusing compassion with attachment and intimacy.

17.In one sense, we can say it is delusion itself - in the form of the wisdom derived from delusion - that actually destroys the delusions. Similarly it is the blissful experience of emptiness induced by sexual desire that dissolves the force of sexual impulses. This is analogous to the life of wood-born insects: they consume the very wood from which they are born. Such utilization of the path to enlightenment is a unique feature of tantra.

18. I am sometimes asked whether this vow of celibacy is really desirable and indeed whether it is really possible. Suffice to say that its practice is not simply a matter of suppressing sexual desires. On the contrary, it is necessary to fully accept the existence of these desires and to transcend them by the power of reasoning. When successful, the result on the mind can be very beneficial. The trouble with sexual desire is that it is a blind desire and can only give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna said:" When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."

19. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions done in one's past, we strengthen ourselves and can solve problems of the present constructively.

20. The main cause of depression is not a lack of material necessities but a deprivation of the affection of others.

21. A very poor, underprivileged person might think that it would be wonderful to have an automobile or a television set, and should he acquire them, at the beginning he would feel very happy. Now if such happiness were something permanent, it would remain forever. But it does not; it goes. After a few months, he wants to change the models. The old ones, the same objects, now cause dissatisfaction. This is the nature of change.

22. Guilt. as experienced in Western culture, is connected with hopelessness and discouragement and is past-oriented. Genuine remorse, however, is a healthy state of mind - it is future-oriented, connected with hope, and causes us to act, to change.

23. As far as your personal requirements are concerned, the ideal is to have fewer involvements, fewer obligations and fewer affairs, business or whatever. However, so far as the interest of the larger community is concerned, you must have as many involvements as possible and as many activities as possible.

24. Rather than being unhappy and hateful, we should rejoice in the success of others.

25. When others insult, rebuke, and speak unpleasant words to us, although an intolerance pain arises like a thorn at the heart, if we comprehend the teachings then we can recognize the essenceless nature of these words which resemble an echo. So just as when an inanimate object is scolded, we will experience not the slightest mental turmoil.

26. When things are not going well for someone we dislike, what is the point of rejoicing? It does not make his present suffering any worse and even if it did, how sad it would be that we should wish such a thing.

27. Regarding intergender relationship, I see two principal types of relationships based on sexual attraction. One form is pure sexual desire in which the motive or impetus is temporary satisfaction, a sort of immediate gratification. But it is not very reliable or stable because the individuals are relating to each other not as people, but rather as objects. In the second type, attraction is not predominantly physical. Rather, there is an underlying respect and appreciation of the value of the other person, based on one's feeling that the other person is kind, nice and gentle. One can therefore accord respect and dignity to that other individual.

28. Since we have a natural compassion in us, and that compassion has to manifest itself, it might be good to awaken it. Violence done to an innocent person, for example, can make us indignant, scandalize us, and in so doing help us to discover our compassion. By its very violence, television might keep us in a state of alert. However, it is very dangerous if violence leads to indifference. Thus, a central point of our teachings is how to reach nonattachment without falling into indifference.

29. Longing for eternity exists because we cherish ourselves, provided our daily life is happy. But if it is miserable, then you want to shorten life.

30. The mind can and must transform itself. It can get rid of the impurities that contaminate it, and rise to the highest level. We all start off with the same capacities, but some people develop them, and others don't. We get very easily used to the mind's laziness, all the more easily because laziness hides beneath the appearance of activity: we run right and left, we make calculations and phone calls. But these activities engage only the most elementary and coarse levels of the mind. They hide the essential from us.

31. Ordinary compassion and love give rise to a very close feeling, but it is essentially attachment. As long as the other person appears to you as beautiful or good, love remains, but as soon as he or she appears to you as less beautiful or good, your love completely changes. Even though your dear friend is the same person, he feels more like an enemy. Instead of love, you now feel hostility. With genuine love and compassion, another person' appearance or behaviour has no effect on your attitude. Real compassion comes from seeing other's suffering. You feel a sense of responsibility, and you want to do something for him or her.

32. If you help others with sincere motivation and sincere concern, that will bring you more fortune, more friends, more smiles and more success. If you forget about others' rights and neglect others' welfare, ultimately you will be very lonely.

33. If one feels very profound compassion, this already implies an intimate connection with another person. It is said in our scriptures that we are to cultivate love just like that of a mother toward her only child. This is very intimate. The Buddhist notion of attachment is not what people in the West assume. We say that the love of a mother for her only child is free of attachment.

34. No matter who are are with, we often think things like "I am stronger than he," " I am more beautiful than she," " I am more intelligent," "I am wealthier," "I am much better qualified." and so forth - we generate much pride. This is not good. Instead, we should always remain humble. Even when we are helping others and are engaged in charity work, we should not regard ourselves in a haughty way as great protectors benefiting the weak.

35. To be angry at hearing other people speaking highly of one's enemies is totally inappropriate, because at least in the mind of the person who is praising this enemy, there is some sense of fulfillment, some satisfaction. That person is doing so because he or she feels joyous and happy, and one should rejoice in that because one's enemy has caused someone to be satisfied. If possible one should also join in the praise rather than trying to obstruct it.

36. Overall I found much that is impressive about the Western society. In particular, I admire its energy and creativity and hunger for knowledge. On the other hand, a number of things about the Western way of life cause me concern. People there have an inclination to think in terms of "black and white" and "either, or," which ignores the facts of interdependence and relatively. Between two points of view they tend to lose sight of the gray areas. Also, with thousands of brothers and sisters for neighbours, so many people appear to be able to show their true feelings only to their cats and dogs.