What is the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel?

wisdomeye SG

by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

One of my favorite texts is an ancient instruction given by a high lama to the prince of Dege, a kingdom in eastern Tibet. The lama told the prince, who was about to become ruler of the huge kingdom, “In order to become successful in this world, you need three qualities: wisdom, compassion, and courage. These three will lead to a successful, happy, and fulfilled life.”

The first quality, wisdom, means knowing what brings true happiness. Most of us go through life being fooled. The Tibetan word for “fool” means someone who keeps doing the same thing again and again, expecting a different result each time. Because fools don’t know how happiness really comes about, they’re always chasing after happiness thinking that it depends on other people or things like food and clothing. A wise individual, in contrast, knows how to move forward instead of in circles, because he or she knows the true source of happiness: the mind.

In one of the most beautiful Buddhist poems, the great Indian teacher Shantideva compares the true nature of our mind to an incredibly large jewel lying in a heap of garbage we walk past every day. This is the jewel of bodhichitta— the compassionate and loving nature of our own being. It is called the wish-fulfilling jewel because it leads to happiness and success. Garbage is a metaphor for our discursive mind, which lacks trust and confidence in the source of true happiness, loving-kindness and compassion.

When we first get a glimpse of the wish-fulfilling jewel, we might not believe that it is with us all along, so we embark on a spiritual journey in search of it. Some people feel that they can find the wish-fulfilling jewel only by going into some kind of deep meditation retreat; others think they can find it by going to India or Tibet. But when they get there—in addition to getting a stomach ache, jetlag, and everything else—they wake up to the fact that they could have just as easily found the jewel back home.

It isn’t necessary to travel to exotic places in order to find our true heart. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing—walking down the street or washing dishes—our precious jewel of a mind is there to be discovered. When we know our own compassion, we can rely on it to accomplish our wishes. We have the wisdom to remember the source of true happiness and live our lives accordingly.
Compassion is the best way to lead life fully, not just in terms of the spiritual, but also the mundane. Yet some of us seem to think that we can’t practice compassion between Monday and Friday, or that acting compassionately just doesn’t accord with reality. Maybe we have thoughts of compassion, but we’re not able to live up to them. So another necessary element is courage.

To have courage is to remember that we can gradually change our mind with quite a simple technique. If we can stop thinking constantly about ourselves, we’ll be free to ask, “What about others? What do they need?”
With courage, we think about what we are willing to give before looking at how much we are going to get.
What we can always give is compassion. I’ve noticed that when I am worried about something, I can flip my attitude by generating a mind of compassion, thinking about others instead of giving in to my own frustration. In doing this, I am offering myself compassion as well. Flipping our thoughts toward people in need relaxes the mind, which allows delight to arise. The mind becomes light, because it is no longer burdened by the concept of “me.” That’s why we have a nimble feeling when we do something nice for someone else, like fixing dinner for a friend. Likewise, if someone does something nice for us, we remember it all day. We recognize the courage of compassion when we see it.

When I think about the lightness that comes from acting with compassion, I often recall my teachers. As they grow older, they become more and more cheerful. If you ask them, “How do you manage to have that level of happiness?,” they reply that it comes from turning the mind towards others. The sense of delight is a reflection of the power of compassion. What’s astonishing is that we never quite believe that happiness is so available. We want to think some more about ourselves, and others maybe later.

Turning the mind towards others might sound like a lot of work, but it requires much more effort and energy to think about ourselves. That’s truly high maintenance. When we think only about ourselves, we get serious, uptight, and heavy. Fewer things make us happy, and we become very territorial about the ones that do.

Suffering and pain arise because we separate ourselves from other beings. When we meditate on compassion, we begin to realize that we aren’t separated from others at all: they are having the same experiences that we are, because all beings want happiness and we wish for them to have it. All beings do not want to suffer and we wish that they will not. It is a very simple practice, but it is also a transforming practice, because as we continue, the conceptual boundary between “us” and “them” begins to melt. That gives us more energy to think about the needs of others, develop kind thoughts and intentions, and lead our life based on those principles.

The thought of helping others is compassion, knowing how to do it is wisdom, and doing something about it is courage. No matter who we are—practitioners of meditation or not—we all want a level of happiness and contentment. What is the cause of happiness and contentment? A compassionate mind. The mind of compassion is the source of lasting joy.

When I was talking with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about compassion as the basis of a meaningful life, we both wondered why so many people mistakenly think that aggression is the way to make things work out well in a conventional sense. Why do we continuously try to solve our problems with anger, jealousy, and other unfriendly reactions? Everything is interdependent. Because aggression is unstable, it perpetuates instability. It’s a short-range solution that’s difficult to handle and painful for the aggressor and everyone else. When we try to accomplish something with aggression, we literally get in our own way.

Many people assume that living compassionately is a spiritual matter, but living compassionately is actually the most effective way to succeed at anything. Practicing compassion may take more time than engaging in aggression, but the results of compassion are much more stable and lasting. Compassion is a long-range solution that has a positive influence on our society and our economy. It stabilizes our lives and the lives of others. When we have the courage to cultivate wisdom and compassion, the weeds of anger, jealousy, and self-involvement have less room to grow.

Bringing the wish-fulfilling jewel into experience is how we activate the true source of happiness, which uplifts our minds and increases our life-force energy.

wisdomeye SG

by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

In his journey toward enlightenment, the Buddha saw that human existence is characterized by three qualities: impermanence, suffering, and selflessness. He discovered that we suffer because we try to make ourselves solid and permanent, while our fundamental state of being is unconditionally open and changing—selfless. The Buddha encouraged others to discover this open state of being for themselves in the process of sitting meditation.

A Tibetan word for meditation is gom—familiarity. When we meditate, we’re becoming familiar with something. In shamatha meditation we first become familiar with a technique: to recognize and release thoughts and emotions and return our attention to the breath. Over time we become familiar with the open state of being that the Buddha called selflessness. As we learn to abide peacefully, we also become familiar with what I call a healthy sense of self. Like the Buddha, we become strong, caring, clear-minded individuals in harmony with ourselves and our environment. The meditation posture itself embodies this healthiness: grounded, balanced, and relaxed.

In sitting meditation, we develop the patience and honesty to be self-aware. As our minds become more flexible and curious, a whole new range of reality becomes available to us. We begin to see certain truths about the way things are. For example, we begin to notice that even though we want to live a dignified, enlightened life, there’s a constant pull on our attention. Everywhere we go, moment to moment, we’re trying to be entertained. We’re not just talking about watching movies and television or roaming around on the Internet. This notion of entertainment is older than modern technology. The ancient meditation texts are full of observations about how the mind is always seeking entertainment.

In Tibetan this quest for entertainment is called chag pa. “Chag pa” is attachment or passion—passion that’s arising out of pain. Somehow we’re not able to rest in our own mind. We’re always thinking that the next little thing—the next thought, bite of food, conversation, or relationship—is going to give us the permanence and solidity that we lack. We keep looking and looking for what will bring us final satisfaction. Meditation shows us this tendency most directly. As we sit there, we notice that even though we could abide peacefully, the mind is still churning. Rather than relax right now, we continue to look for entertainment. We distract ourselves with replays of the past and fantasies about the future. We rehash conversations and plan our day.

Sometimes we regard what’s happening in a very simple-minded way: we say we need to entertain ourselves because meditation is boring. But in fact, meditation is not boring. When we’re doing it properly, it is fully engaging. To fully engage, we have to work with the speed of our minds. This speed is something we’re producing, a byproduct of our frantic search for entertainment. It’s easy to get lost in it, and then we forget to engage our minds in recognizing and releasing thoughts. The volume and speed of our thoughts overwhelm us, and we zone out or fall asleep. Or we look at our watch and take our body off the cushion to relieve the pressure of our minds.

I think it’s odd for people to say, “I meditate,” or “I don’t meditate.” It’s like saying either you work with your mind or you don’t. The reality is that whether or not we are working with our mind in formal meditation, one way or another we are always working with our mind. Most of the time we’re using it to meditate on “me.” We’re using it to become familiar with our immediate reactions to the world around us. Somebody has something we want, so we meditate on jealousy. We don’t get something we want, or we do get something we don’t want, so we meditate on anger. Our root meditation is, “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” Our mind is continuously chasing itself around, trying to secure happiness in all the wrong ways. Its speed and reactivity keep us under siege. There’s so little space that by the end of the day we feel physically exhausted. We are drained by our continual meditation on the mental fabrication known as “me.”

In formal meditation we learn to become familiar in a positive way with how our mind works. Our mind becomes open, inquisitive, and supple. We’re comfortable looking at ourselves honestly. We’re not too hard on ourselves; at the same time, we’re becoming wise to our little tricks. We know how we get slippery. We know when we’re about to buy in to habitual reactions such as anger or jealousy. At some point we have the strength and discipline to make a choice about how we’re using our minds. We can be open to alternatives beyond the knee-jerk reaction. We can say, “Traffic is bad, yes I know, but I don’t always have to be angry, I don’t always have to be irritated. I can choose a different response.”

Meditation offers space to see that we can choose not to wallow in grasping and irritation. At the same time, finding this space and encouraging our healthy sense of self to come forward involves more than just sitting down and crossing our legs. When we sit down to meditate we might think, “Now I’m going to just relax and try to breathe my problems away.” That’s helpful to a certain degree. But we’re not going to sit down as Joe or Mary Schmo and arise as the Buddha. It requires discipline to strengthen our mind by actively working with our thoughts and emotions.
People often come to me as if I were a priest and confess that they have not been meditating. They apologize. They’re surprised when I say, “Look, I don’t really care whether you are meditating or not. It’s your mind, your life. Your practice is there not for me, but for you.”

Meditation isn’t about being “good.” It’s about taming our mind by engaging our mind, with enthusiasm and inspiration. With practice we become grounded in the experience of basic goodness. This leads us toward a healthy sense of self.

With a healthy sense of self, we feel wholesome, balanced, confident, pliable, at ease. The mind is more robust. Now we can meditate on qualities like love and compassion, deep aspects of being human that represent the genuine health of the mind. The stronger and more stable the mind, the more compassion and kindness we can generate. We are being courageous like a warrior in strengthening a healthy sense of self, for it liberates us from the “me” plan. Now we can extend ourselves toward others.

What the Buddha discovered on this journey is that we’re all ultimately capable of seeing things as they are: empty, joyous, and luminous. In practicing meditation we rejoice in the possibility of developing a clear view of the facts of life, an unconditionally loving heart, and the wisdom to know the right thing to do always. Everything we need is already here. Our human potential is to realize this truth and consciously root our activities in it. Centering ourselves within this state of contentment is how we become totally happy.