From the Buddhist teachings’ point of view, nothing happens by chance. Every effect has its causes. This is the law of karma. Sometimes the relationship between cause and effect is immediate and obvious. You drop a glass and it breaks. You don’t sleep enough and you feel lousy. Sometimes karma is a little more subtle but still observable. We may need someone to point out the cause and effect so we can study it in our own experience until we are convinced. A good example here is tsewa. When our heart is open, we feel joy. When it’s closed, we feel pain. This is how karma works. [Tsewa is a form of warm energy and openness of heart. It is the warmth we express and receive through empathy with others, especially those closest to us. In Tibetan Buddhism, it is taught that one of the most essential qualities of enlightenment is tsewa.]
In the majority of cases, however, karma is too intricate and far-reaching for ordinary beings like ourselves to be able to comprehend it fully. To use some classic Buddhist examples, we don’t know why peas are round or why peacocks’ tails have iridescent eyes.
But just because our vision is too limited to trace back a vast array of causes doesn’t mean things happen at random. If they did, then why would farmers plant seeds and expect crops to grow? Why would we do anything and expect a result?
A mixture of karma and randomness is also illogical. For how would it make sense for some things to happen due to cause and effect and other things to happen by pure chance? Chance is just an illusion. We say that a roll of the dice is “random” because there is no way for anyone to predict the outcome. But is it truly random? No, there are clearly causes leading to a result.
There is no such thing in this universe as genuine randomness. If you hurt someone, it’s natural for them to want to repay the injury. So if they hurt you back, at some point you will probably understand where they’re coming from—unless you remain caught up in strong emotions or keep justifying your previous action.
When you wise up to the mutually destructive pattern and its potential to go on and on, you will be in a good position to realize the best course of action: to open your heart and put an end to the cycle by forgiving.
Here is one powerful technique for opening your heart toward someone against whom you hold a grudge. This works by tapping into the kindness and joy that already arise in the course of your life. When you notice yourself feeling tenderness toward another being—your parent, your child, a friend, a pet—bring to mind the person you resent. Then, with one sudden movement of your mind, see if you can transfer your warm feeling to that person. This abrupt shift can short-circuit your story line and establish conditions in your mind to feel more open toward the object of your bitterness.
Of course, this technique and any other will only work for those who really want to get over their grudges. In some cases, you may feel more justified in holding on to your resentment. For example, what about when someone causes you pain and you feel like you’ve done nothing to deserve it?
This is a good time to think about the vastness of karma. Who you are and what you experience in this life is infinitely varied and complex. The story of your life includes your physical and mental attributes, your habits and preferences, the people around you, the places you inhabit and visit, countless events, good and bad fortune, and so much more. Could all the causes of this intricate web of detail be located within the few decades since your birth? And what about the causes of those causes, and so on? Wouldn’t this be a severely limited way of looking at things?
For this and many other reasons, it makes sense to expand our story to include past and future lives. When we do so, we find much more room in our heart for forgiveness. Looking at just this one life, it appears that the reason someone hurt us has nothing to do with our own past actions. We are the victim, the other person is the culprit. That’s the whole story—and that’s where we’re stuck.
But when we have confidence that nothing happens at random, we can be sure that at some point in the past the roles were reversed: we were the culprit, and the other person was the victim. Otherwise, why would this particular person out of so many have come to have this relationship with us? For anything that happens to us, we must have been involved in the past, whether we can trace it back or not.
The point of reflecting on karma in this way is not to make ourselves feel guilty. Karma is not some form of divine punishment for our sins. There’s no one in charge of this process: it’s just how things naturally work. No one “deserves” pain and suffering. But at the same time, our relationships don’t just pop up out of a void.
If we don’t understand or acknowledge how things actually function, our view of the world will be distorted. Every victim in this world has been a culprit, and every culprit a victim. Every prey has been a predator, and every predator prey. This cyclic pattern in which we all cause and experience pain is known as samsara.
The cause of samsara itself is ignorance of our true nature, which includes the true nature of our heart—tsewa. From this point of view, the entire point of the path to enlightenment is to gain the wisdom that will help ourselves and others go beyond this cycle. If our aim is enlightenment—or at least some form of spiritual growth—then any time we are hurt, we can view it as an opportunity.
Now we have a chance to look at things in a different way, which is based on wisdom. We can choose not to see the story with ourselves in the role of intrinsic victim and the other person in the role of intrinsic culprit.
Both of us have the wish-fulfilling jewel of the tender heart, which gives us the potential to attain the ultimate state of happiness. But both of us, perhaps to different degrees, have let our jewel go to waste because of our ignorance. Either we haven’t recognized our tsewa, we haven’t appreciated it, or we’ve failed to take advantage of it because we continually get swept away by our habits. So far, our impediments have gotten the best of us. That is why we keep hurting one another.
But now that we’ve encountered the Buddha’s wisdom and skillful means, we can finally learn to open our heart to all, including those who have hurt us in this life. As we gain confidence in the power of our tsewa, we can even hold a special place in our heart for the former objects of our grudges.
We can be grateful that they have helped to open our eyes to the cyclic nature of suffering and motivated us to expand our mind and try a different approach. And if they are continuing to hurt others out of the suffering of a closed heart, we can feel compassion for them. In this way, the pain we have gone through can be transformed from an impediment into a warm rain that nourishes our precious seed of tsewa.
Source: Based on Dzigar Kongtrul. Edited by Joseph Waxman. Foreword by Pema Chodron. Training in Tenderness: Buddhist Teachings on Tsewa, the Radical Openness of Heart that Can Change the World. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications, 2018.
In our next life, we are likely to find ourselves with even more supportive circumstances for continuing to develop our tsewa. For someone who has embarked on the bodhisattva path, another life is another chance to make progress. It is something to look forward to rather than something to fear. At the end of this life, we do have to part from our loved ones, but this is also not a final loss.
From the Buddhist teachings’ point of view, in past lives, we have all been each other’s parents and children, sisters and brothers, lovers and friends. We have all met many times in the past and will continue to meet in the future, until we are all free from the suffering of samsara. Death is not a final parting.
Even with this view, for most of us, there may still be some anxiety about the dissolution of this body and the unknown future. But it is possible to develop a totally carefree attitude about death, like Patrul Rinpoche, one of the great masters from the lineage of teachers before me. A practitioner like him, whose mind is governed only by bodhichitta, is equally happy with a long or short life. Which is better depends on which will more rapidly fulfill one’s ultimate aspiration to attain enlightenment. At the end of a life like that, there is no sense of holding on and no fear of what is to come.
The beauty of having a human brain is that you can imagine the future and plan for it. You can imagine and compare different scenarios and choose which one you would like to aim for.
At the time of death, there are two main scenarios to consider: either you die with a warm heart and a positive attitude, or you die with a cold heart and a negative attitude. This choice is up to you, but you have to make the choice as soon as possible.
If you wait until you’re on your deathbed to open your heart and become a positive thinker, you will discover that it is too late. We can’t trade our bad habits for good habits at the drop of a hat. It takes a long time to get over bad habits and adopt good ones.
While we are relatively young and healthy, we need to use as much of our time as possible to create favorable conditions for our death and our transition to the next life.
(Dzigar Kongtrul. Training in Tenderness.)