Pema Chodron

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GOOD MEDICINE

Pema Chödrön in conversation with Alice Walker
San Francisco | September 1999

Pema Chödrön: One of the things the Buddha pointed out in his early teaching was that everybody wants happiness or freedom from pain, but the methods human beings habitually use are not in sync with the wish. The methods always end up escalating the pain. For example, someone yells at you and then you yell back and then they yell back and it gets worse and worse. You think the reason not to yell back is because, you know, good people don't yell back. But the truth is that by not yelling back you're just getting smart about what's really going to bring you some happiness.

Judy Lief: The lojong slogan says Drive all blames into one, that is, yourself. But there are definitely situations where from the conventional viewpoint there are bad guys and good guys, oppressors and oppressed. How do you combine taking the blame yourself with combating oppression or evil that you encounter?

Alice Walker: Maybe it doesn't work there. (laughter) Pema why don't you take that one. (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: Well, here would be my question: does it help to have a sense of enemy in trying to end oppression?

Alice Walker: No.

Pema Chödrön: So maybe that's it.

Alice Walker: I think it's probably about seeing. As Bob Marley said so beautifully, the biggest bully you ever did see was once a tiny baby. That's true. I mean, I've tried that on Ronald Reagan. I even tried that on Richard Nixon, but it didn't really work that well. But really, when you're standing face to face with someone who just told you to go to the back of the bus, or someone who has said that women aren't allowed here, or whatever, what do you do? I don't know what you do, Pema, but at that moment I always see that they're really miserable people and they need help. Now, of course, I think I would love to send them a copy of "Awakening Compassion."(laughter)

Pema Chödrön: It's seeing that the cause of someone's aggression is their suffering. And you could also realize that your aggression is not going to help anything. So you're standing there, you are being provoked, you are feeling aggression, and what do you do? That's when tonglen becomes very helpful. You breathe in and connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. You have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like you do. If you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth. Alice Walker: And war will not be what comes out.

Judy Lief: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had the quality of a tonglen practitioner. Yet he didn't ask us not to take stands.

Alice Walker: He was from a long line of Baptist preachers, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer and through love. I think the person who has a great capacity to love, which often flowers when you can see and feel the suffering of other people, can also strategize. I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got very angry and upset, but at the same time he knew what he was up against. Sometimes he was the only really lucid person in a situation, so he knew how much of the load he was carrying and how much depended on him.

As activists, it is really important to have some kind of practice, so that when we go out into the world to confront horrible situations we can do it knowing we're in the right place ourselves. Knowing we're not bringing more fuel to the fire, more anger, more despair. It's difficult but that should not be a deterrent. The more difficult something seems, the more it's possible to give up hope. You approach the situation with the feeling of having already given up hope, but that doesn't stop you. You said we should put that slogan about abandoning hope on our refrigerators.

Pema Chödrön: "Give up all hope of fruition."

Alice Walker: Right. Just do it because you're doing it and it feels like the right thing to do, but without feeling it's necessarily going to change anything.

Pema Chödrön: Something that I heard Trungpa Rinpoche say has been a big help to me. He said to live your life as an experiment, so that you're always experimenting. You could experiment with yelling back and see what happens. You could experiment with tonglen and see how that works. You could see what actually allows some kind of communication to happen. You learn pretty fast what closes down communication, and that's the strong sense of enemy. If the other person feels your hatred, then everyone closes down.

Alice Walker: I feel that fear is what closes people down more than anything, just being afraid. The times when I have really been afraid to go forward, with a relationship or a problem, is because there is fear. I think practice of being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away, is incredibly helpful.

Question from the audience: Thank you both for being here and bringing so much pleasure to so many people tonight. I'm asking a question for a friend who couldn't come tonight. She was at Pema's three day seminar and she left on Saturday feeling badly because she had got in touch with her anger and couldn't stay. Now she feels she's a bad Buddhist, a bad practitioner. I've been trying to tell her it's okay but I think she needs to hear your words.

Pema Chödrön: Well, tell her we're used to using everything that we hear against ourselves, so it's really common to take the dharma teachings and use them against yourself. But the fact is we don't have to do that anymore. We don't have to do that. It's just like Alice saying that the heart opens and then it closes, so she has to realize that's how it is forever and ever. She'll get in touch and then she'll lose touch and get in touch and lose touch. So she has to keep on going with herself and not give up on herself.

Question: This is really hard on her because you two are her favorite people in the entire world.

Alice Walker: And she didn't come?

Question: She's so broken-hearted.

Pema Chödrön: She didn't come because she was so ashamed of herself for not being able to stay with it...that's not true, is it?

Question: Yes, it is. Pema Chodron: Really. Wow. You should tell her that she's just an ordinary human being. (laughter) What's a little unusual about her is that she was willing to get in touch with it for even a little bit.

Question: My name is Margaret, and I have practiced Tibetan Buddhism for a number of years. About eighteen months ago, right around the time that for the first time in my life I fell in love with a woman, the Dalai Lama made a number of comments pointing out where the Tibetan tradition did not regard homosexuality as a positive thing, but in fact as an obstacle to spiritual growth. It reached the point that I left the sangha I was connected with and found a different part of the spiritual path that's working for me now.

I have gay and bisexual friends who are interested in Buddhism but some of them have been stopped by what the Dalai Lama had to say and by the lack of coherent answers from other people. I think it would be a big service if you could address that.

Pema Chödrön: Well, listen. I have so much respect for the Dalai Lama and I think that's where people get stuck. I didn't actually hear those comments, and I heard there were also favorable comments. But aside from all that, as Buddhism comes to the West, Western Buddhist teachers simply don't buy that. It's as if Asian teachers said that women were inferior or something. I mean, it's absurd. That's all there is to it. (applause) It's just ridiculous.

Question: Let me ask you to say that often and loud.

Pema Chodron: Sure! I go on record. And I'm not alone, it's not something unique with me. Western teachers, coming from this culture, we see things pretty differently on certain issues and this is one, for sure. But the Dalai Lama is a wonderful man, and I have a feeling that if he were sitting here he'd have something else to say on the subject.

Alice Walker: You know, when he was here at the peace conference he was confronted by gay men and lesbian women and he readily admitted that he really didn't know. He didn't seem rigid on it. But also, when there is wisdom about, we should have it! Wisdom belongs to the people. We must never be kept from wisdom by anybody telling us you can't have it because you're this, that or the other.

Question: I have a question about the connection between tonglen and joy. I kind of understood the moderator's question about when you breathe in so much suffering, how do you avoid becoming so burdened or martyred by it? What I'm understanding about tonglen is that there's something kind of transformative about it, when you breathe in suffering and then you breathe out relief and healing. I keep thinking about that prayer of St. Francis of Assisi about being an instrument of peace, and where there is hatred, let me sow love, and where there is despair, let me sow hope. I'm wondering if joy has a place in the ability to make that transformation.

Alice Walker: I think the practice of tonglen is really revolutionary, because you're taking in what you usually push away with everything you've got, and then you're breathing out what you would rather keep. This is just amazing. I mean, it really shakes you up.

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