Problems and
Benefits
Jun 012015 The
Endless Further
That
‘Old Philosopher’ and poet of Ancient China, Lao Tzu said, “The
acceptable and the unacceptable are both acceptable.”
This means to
take life as it is. Sounds simple. Well, it is easy to accept the
acceptable, but to accept what is unacceptable seems
counter-intuitive to normal way of thinking. What is unacceptable
is undesirable, unsatisfactory, intolerable, unreasonable – why
would we want to embrace that?
If we look at it
from a psychological point of view, it is important to be in touch
with our negativity. We cannot overcome anger, sadness or other bad
feelings unless we deal with them. Buddhism teaches that suffering
comes from our thoughts and feelings, so it seems rather obvious
that denial is not a strategy we want to employ. We can expand this
to cover just about everything else in life.
Early Buddhists
developed a meditation practice designed to help us accept the
unacceptable. It is called Kammatthana,
a Pali word that means “basis of meditation” or “place of work”.
These are meditation subjects suited to individual temperaments and
inclinations.
Buddhaghosa, in
his epic meditation text Visuddhi-magga
(“Path of
Purification”) listed 40 kammatthanas, and they range from subjects
such as the non-existence of a permanent self and the idea of
friendliness to some really unacceptable ones like the impurity and
wretchedness of life and a the idea of a corpse in a state of
decomposition.
Buddhaghosa
wrote, “When the mind is familiar with the perception of foulness,
then even divine objects do not tempt a person to
greed.”
I have never
meditated on the idea of a rotting corpse, and I don’t I ever
shall. But I do get the intention behind it.
The first step
in accepting the unacceptable is recognizing that to divide things
into acceptable and unacceptable, good and bad, and so on, is
dualistic thinking. That is not as simple as it sounds,
either. It is difficult to undo thought patterns that are
nearly habitual. A way to break down this wall of duality that
might be more helpful than corpse contemplation might be to just do
away with the idea of unacceptable, tear down the concept of
foulness.
To give you an
example, one of the most unacceptable things in life is illness.
Definitely one of the worst problems we can have. In his
book, Ultimate
Healing, Lama Zopa
Rinpoche advises us that “To transform our problems into happiness,
we have to learn to see them as pleasant.”
He goes on to
say that to see problems as problems, illness as illness,
unacceptable as unacceptable has many disadvantages and that we can
turn it around if we meditate on the benefits of problems, which is
probably a more difficult notion to hold in the mind than the idea
of a corpse.
I
don’t think I need to discuss the various ways in which embracing
the unacceptable is beneficial. If you open your mind, they will
come to you. When it comes to thoughts and emotions, we must be
willing to experience even our negative thoughts and emotions
fully. We can’t allow ourselves to reject them as invalid.
Everything is valid. Whatever arises in our life is acceptable.
Take life as it is.