Finger Pointing

DISCIPLINES OF MIND TRAINING
POINT SIX
31
Don’t malign others.

You would like to put people in the wrong by saying disparaging things. However pleasantly coated with sugar and ice cream, underneath you are trying to put people down, trying to get revenge. Disparaging people is based on showing off your own virtue. You think that your virtues can only show because other people are lessened, because they are less virtuous than you are. This applies to both education and practice. You might have better training in the dharma and say, Somebody’s attention span in his shamatha practice is shorter than mine; therefore I am better,” or “Somebody knows fewer terms than I do.” Fundamentally, these are all ways of saying, “That other person is stupid, and I am better than he is.” I think this slogan is very straightforward.

TRAINING THE MIND

and Cultivating 

Loving Kindness

by Chogyam Trungpa

~

 These “slogans” are essential to the “lojong” practice Chogyam Trungpa brought to Canada, the United States and Europe after the Chinese invaded Tibet. Lojong is Tibetan for “mind training”. Mind training that Trungpa spoke of was not instructions on achieving some sort of magical power (as I often thought of Eastern or especially, Tibetan, mysteries). The more I understand Buddhism the more I have come to see that it is not a religion in the sense that we think of as a religion. Unlike moralistic teaching, most practices are simply methods that help me to see myself as I am and to uncover the connection I have with universal compassion. Thinking that “I have it” and that anyone else doesn’t is counter-productive and useless. This attitude of “me against you” subtly dresses up the mask I am so proud of with another layer of delusion… carefully painted on to disguise that reality I fear the most… that what is under that mask is a demon of some sort. When I see myself as I am; the vices and weaknesses, the pride of righteousness, the self-centered pumping of ego I think of as this bag of skin I call George, I see they are nothing but thin air in face of the Spirit of Compassion they conceal. When we say that we are alcoholics or addicts of some sort we are not claiming the disease as another mask. Admitting my weakness is simply another way to take off that mask and to open my heart up to healing.

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