Q & A with Robina

QUESTION

Dearest Venerable,

I hope you are doing very well.

Recently I gave a donation to a sangha member and they thanked me profusely. I wish they did not thank me! Isn't all I have in this life the result of good deeds and generosity from past lives? And isn't every good thought, word, action, the result of meeting my gurus in this life and previous ones? And doesn't the training of the mind rely on the guidance of the gurus and sentient beings? 

Also, it’s the same when I do other good actions, such as saving the lives of insects etc. I told the sangha member that I get insects out of the water, for example; some are struggling to get out, other seem dead, but recover as they dry in the sun. And then I say Medicine Buddha mantra and blow on them.

Is it for them, right? Not for myself. How should I think?

ANSWER
Dearest K

Wonderful that you save the creatures! It’s true, isn’t it? One little creature was in my offering jug all night it seems, and when I got it out, it ran away! They’re very hardy.

Yes, it is for them, no question: you have compassion. Wow! And, yes, you get incredible benefit from it. That’s undeniable!

I remember when I first heard about bodhisattvas I couldn’t grasp it at all, it was too high, too outrageous to think that that level of compassion was possible. But then I heard His Holiness say, “If you want to help others, practice compassion. If you want to help yourself, practice compassion.” That was the link. So sensible.

So don’t hesitate to delight in the merit you create by saving the lives of creatures. It’s actually one of the actions taught in the Six Perfections of the Bodhisattva, an action of generosity: saving the lives of others.

And, of course, don’t forget to delight in the merit you create with your generosity. Yes, of course it’s due to your past practice, to your gurus, to sentient beings: that’s the dependent arising of it. But of course you must rejoice for yourself.

In the West we get very conflicted about this. We think it’s selfish. Well, another thing His Holiness says — he’s so practical! — is “If we’re going to be selfish, be wisely selfish: help others.”

You’ll see in the method for developing bodhichitta called Exchanging Self for Others that we train ourselves to think about the disadvantages to ourself of cherishing ourselves, then we think about the advantages to ourself of cherishing others. We need to go through these steps in order to go beyond them. It's so logical, so down to earth.

The entire first stages of the path, the lower and middle scopes (as you know what I call Junior School and High School), are for our own benefit. We have to remember that. Of course, we can abide by the laws of karma wiht bodhichitta, but we ourselves are the direct beneficiaries of the merit. The rats and cockroaches that we don’t kill will also benefit — they’ll have a party, Lama Zopa says, because we leave them in peace! — but the main reasons behind Lord Buddha exhorting us not to kill at this first level of practice, Junior School, is so that we don’t sow the seeds of killing and thus don’t suffer in the future. We have to get that first before we get anywhere near real compassion.

Rejoicing in our virtue, delighting in the goodness we do, being so happy about the merit we create is a fundamentally necessary practice. It makes our mind happy and encourages us to continue practicing. Eventually, of course, when we’ve realized bodhichitta, there’ll be no thought of the benefit to ourself. But it’s one step at a time.

Much love,
Robina