Gate 89: Forbearance paramita

The forbearance pāramitā is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we abandon all anger, arrogance, flattery, and foolery, and we teach and guide living beings who have such vices.
忍度是法明門、一切嗔恚、我慢、諂曲、調戲、化如是惡衆生故.

This part of the text is about the six paramitas, or perfections.  We’ve considered dana or offering and keeping precepts.  This time we're considering forbearance (patience or endurance).  It’s important to know from the beginning that this is not a sort of patience or endurance that makes you a martyr.  It’s not about suppressing an emotional reaction to what’s going on in youir life or what you’re encountering.  It’s not about patiently waiting for your reward or about trying to be your idea of a good person by putting up with annoying stuff.

Depending on the tradition or text, there are between two and ten kinds of patience.  The gate statement lists four elements to be abandoned when practicing patience, so I’m guessing it’s pointing to the content of the Maha Prajna Paramita Sastra in particular, attributed to Nagarjuna from the second century.  Among other things, it’s a commentary on the Maha Prajna Paramita Sutra and one of main themes is the way of the bodhisattva and skillful means.  It’s no coincidence that this is where we find teachings about patience, because wisdom is critical to this paramita,

This sastra points out two kinds of patience
1. patience with regard to living beings; and 
2. patience with regard to dharmas, or all the things we encounter internally and externally that aren’t living beings.

Both of these are based in the cultivation of wisdom.  When we deeply understand emptiness, impatience doesn’t arise.  We can see that because of cause and effect and the universe doing what the universe does, it doesn’t make sense to take things personally.  

Let’s start with patience with living beings.  The sastra says: When the Bodhisattva meets with slander or insult,when he is struck with a sword or a stick, he knows on reflection that the cause of such a treatment lies in his past actions, and that the dharmas, both internally and externally, are completely empty and without an åtman. The triple seal of the Dharma is imprinted on all the dharmas, and although they may have the power of bringing about a painful retribution, the Bodhisattva endures them without becoming annoyed or voicing insults.

Now you can subscribe to the idea of karmic retribution or not, but the point is that we’re not the recipients of some random misfortune, and rightous indignation doesn’t help.  The sastra says that we encounter two kinds of people: those who respect and honor us and those who hate and insult us.  As bodhisattvas, we don’t cling to the people who flatter us and don’t hate the people who do us harm.  It seems counterintuitive to think that we need patience when we’re dealing with flatterers.  It’s not hard to listen to someone extolling our virtues and telling us how great we are; we could do that all day.  However, what we’re encountering is actually a fetter or a hindrance.  It can encourage clinging and attachment, so we need to treat that flattery or honor with indifference and recognize clinging when it comes up.

Nagarjuna says there are three kinds of honor:
1. the respect due to your merit from previous lives; 
2. the respect due to your good qualities from practicing the elements of the eightfold path: morality, concentration and wisdom; 
3. the respect gained through falsehood and deception, or misleading people by pretending to be perfect when you actually have no virtues at all.

When we encounter these three things as bodhisattvas, we try to remember certain teachings.  The merit from previous lives is the natural result of our diligent practice, so there’s no cause for feeling proud.  As for good qualities, that’s what others appreciate rather than appreciating us personally, so again we let go of pride.  Flattery gained through fraud is said to be like a self-inflicted wound -- when we do it, we’re no different from thieves.

How do we practice patience in the face of flattery and maintain non-attachment and avoid clinging?  Because of our wisdom, we can see impermanence and we know that this flattery and the momentary good feeling we get for the ego is temporary.  We can see how this is a source of suffering, no matter what kind of compliments we’re getting and how they arise, and that we’re shoring up a self that’s actually empty.

There are more important things to pay attention to than this kind of fleeting ego boost.  The sastra says that when a deer is being chased by a tiger, even when it sees some tasty looking plants or cool water it doesn’t care much!  When we’re committed to investigating the nature orf reality, we don’t get distracted by this kind of flattery and we can abandon it.

The opposite of all this is having patience with people who bring us suffering.  We know it’s going to happen because everyone makes mistakes and does unskillful things, and the human condition is that we want revenge on people who harm us.  It’s hard to remember that this too is the unfoldng of causes and  conditions.  Another person may feel injured by something I did unknowingly, and even if not, his own causes and conditions are driving his perceptions and behavior.  If I caused harm, I can take responsibility.  If not, I can still remember that the suffering he’s inflicting is based in his own suffering, and try to have some compassion.  We can do this without condoning harmful behavior.  The point is that it’s not necessary to make it personal and escalate the problem.

The sastra says: All living beings are constant prey to all kinds of suffering. They suffer the confinement of the womb and they are squeezed out at birth. Their flesh and bones are fragile and cold winds pierce their bodies more sharply than a spear. It is for such reasons that the Buddha said that among all sufferings, the pain of birth is the most severe. The same applies to the sorrows of old age, illness, and death. Why should a practitioner try to increase further the suffering of living beings? If he did, he would be acting in a manner similar to one who pierces a wound with a sword.

The world doesn’t need any more suffering; if we can practice patience, we can help.  Because of our practice, we have an opportunity not to just react.  We have the chance to do something other than just bump along down the usual road of samsara.  We can try to see suffering from its source and do something different, something other than giving in immediately to greed, anger and ignorance.  That’s the kind of patience that this gate statement is talking about.

Our everyday reaction to theft is to become angry.  Our everyday reaction to getting something we want is to rejoice.  Our everyday reaction to scary situations is fear.  Those are all perfectly understandable responses.  As bodhisattvas, we can maintain compassion for ourselves and others and not get irritated, greedy and fearful.  The Buddha said that in the past he’d been the father and mother of all living beings and they had also been his father and mother.  If we get annoyed with living beings, we’re getting annoyed with Buddha!  How would it be if we could have the patience will all beings that we would have with Buddha?

Among all the issues we have, anger is said to be the most problematic because it undoes our work of cultivating compassion, and without compassion we have no basis for good qualities and we’re unable to liberate beings as bodhisattvas.  The sastra says that if someone is harming us, we need to consider the qualities of that living being.  Even though he’s doing something harmful, somewhere in there there are some good qualities and on that basis we can’t hate him.  Also, every once in awhile, someone says something that’s hard to hear but actually contains some kernel of truth if we have the patience to really listen and consider it.  Thus he/she/they're really doing us a favor.  There’s a story about a group of monks engaged in a dispute who got so caught up in anger and irritation they refused even to listen to the Buddha, so we can really go off the rails if we’re not paying attention.

When we considered the precepts paramita, we considered fearlessness.  When we keep the precepts, we offer fearlessness to others because we’re moving through the world in a way that poses no threat to them.  There’s a thread of that offering of fearlessness that comes up in this paramita as well.  If we lose patience and indulge anger, it just gets much harder to see clearly.  We can’t tell wholesome from unwholesome.  We can’t reflect appropriately on what we’re doing with body, speech and mind.  We forget all the wise teachings we’ve encountered and eventually we ignore the effect we’re having on others.

The sastra says: A man full of hate, like a tiger or a wolf, is difficult to endure. Like a painful ulcer, he breaks out and becomes inflamed. He is like a venomous snake that people look at with no pleasure. When a man heaps up anger, his wicked dispositions become intensified and he ends up committing unprecedented crimes such as killing his father or rebelling against the Buddha.

It’s the complete opposite of not being a threat and doing no harm.  There’s no way to offer fearlessness to others if we lose patience, so one of the exercises for cultivating patience is to remember the bodhisattva vows.  We’ve vowed to liberate beings, so we have to consider what gets in the way of that and how to deal with it.  There’s also a connection here with parental mind, one of the three minds of sanshin.  Sometimes we can have more patience with our children or grandchildren or pets than with other beings.  Oh well, she’s just a child -- she doesn’t know how the world works yet.  Oh well, he’s a cat -- he doesn’t understand that knocking over the vase to play in the water is a problem for me!

(Sometimes dogs understand children better than adults do.  They know that when the baby is pulling their ears or tail, he means no harm and he's just exploring his world, and they show incredible patience.  There's a baby picture of me chewing on ear of the long-suffering family dog.)

The Bodhisattva cares for all living beings and cherishes them like his children. When they molest him, he remains compassionate and does not become angry. A father knows that his children, being young and lacking proper judgement, are occasionally impudent and show him no respect.  However, he forgives them and his love for them continues to increase. Even when the children do wrong, he does not become irritated and does not hate them. The patience of the Bodhisattva is similar to such a father.

Of course, in the broadest possible view, there is no being with which we lose patience and become annoyed.  For now we’re dealing with a “person,” but really it's a pile of five skandhas.  It’s empty of a fixed and permanent self nature, so what are we really becoming impatient with?  It’s like a pile of sand that blows away.

Now let’s consider patience with dharmas, all the things that aren’t living beings.  One of the distinctions this text makes is the difference between having patience with living beings who may harm or affect us in some way, and having patience with everything else that’s not a living being.  Some of these things are external and some are internal.  Things like the weather, our physical circumstances or the tools we have to work with are external.  We can certainly lose patience with day after day of rain, or that door that doesn’t stay shut, or the phone that dies just when we need it.  At some point we realize that the weather and the door and the phone don’t care what we think about them.  Our feeling annoyed or miserable about them doesn’t change them and doesn’t help us; it only hinders our bodhisattva activity.  On the other hand, if we can cultivate benevolence for external beings or things,  even if they don’t really gain anything from our good wishes, it’s helpful for us and our own practice and frame of mind.  

Then there are the mental formations and the feelings and emotions that we may or may not be happy to have: our awareness of the frailty of the body, sickness, aging, our day to day emotional state, sadness, doubt, anxiety.  Even though when we’re deep into a particular emotional state it feels like it fills the whole world and will never lift, we know from our practice that that feeling is impermanent, just like everything else.  Having changing emotional states is the human condition, and becoming attached to our ideas about a realm of rapture and bliss somewhere is only going to trip us up, because even if we get there for a minute, that’s going to shift too.

Giving up this human condition means giving up the ground of our practice -- this body and mind is all we have, so yes, it gets sick and old and eventually dies, and it may experience uncomfortable mindstates, but we need to practice with it while we can because the human realm is the only one of the six in which we can practice and benefit living beings.  We might think our mental state would be better if we had some different life situation, but we also know that all beings experience suffering, so no matter what our circumstances, we’d still be prone to wanting things to be different than they are.

As bodhisattvas, we have the chance to encounter suffering a bit differently than others.  We get to have a conversation with Mara, if you will, and try to understand what’s happening.  Mara might seem to be throwing difficult conditions at us from the outside and defilements from the inside, just like he did to Shakyamuni when he sat down under the bodhi tree.  As we know, Shakyamuni prevailed!  He overcame desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, languir and forpor, fear, doubt, anger, hypocracy, profit and fame, self-exaltation and contempt for others.  As practitioners we all encounter these things, and it’s tough to have patience.  The sastra says that when confronted with all this stuff: the Bodhisattva puts on the armour of patience, seizes the sword of wisdom, holds the shield of dhyåna, and stops the arrow of defilements. This is called internal patience. 

The text raises another really interesting reason that patience or endurance is a bodhisattva practice.  It reminds us that bodhisattvas could get rid of all of their  defilements or delusions altogether in order to stop suffering; they have the wisdom and compassion to do it.  However, instead they choose to live with them in order to stay in this realm and benefit living beings.  Rather than escaping to a place where patience isn’t necessary, they stay and practice patience with their karmic conditions, and rather than getting knocked over by them, they use those conditions to help others.

One way they do that is the recognition of non-duality.  Bodhisattvas see interconnectedness, and they don’t pick and choose.  They see one reality from two sides and express two sides in one action, so they move easily in both form and emptiness without being attached to either one.  Without attachment to outcome or idea, patience becomes possible.

The sastra winds up with the recognition that sometimes we need patience just in order to keep practicing.  We’ve got questions about the nature of the universe that are not easy to answer.  There were fourteen questions the Buddha never did answer because he said that kind of conjecture wouldn’t help people with their suffering, but still there are things we want to know!

Establishing a zazen practice, undertaking dharma study, with all the many traditional and contemporary texts there are to look at, and coming to understand teachngs that may feel a bit counterintuitive at first . . . it can feel like a lot to take on and commit to.  Keeping up our dedication and determination to practice takes patience.  We don’t yet see the way Buddha sees, so we need a degree of faith.  

As bodhisattvas, we’re also practicing for something larger than our personal gain.  We’re not looking for fastest and easiest way out of here to Nirvana.  We’re looking to understand how reality functions, what these five skandhas really are, what the nature of compassion is and how we manifest it.  That’s big stuff.  Not only that, we can’t use our usual intellectual processes to “figure it all out” because logical arguments will only get us so far.  Buddha appears to contradict himself across scriptures; he says one thing to one group and another thing to another in an effort to tailor the message and make it understandable in various circumstances.  And of coure anyone who's read some Dogen knows that a straight academic approach to that canon is sort of hopeless.  At some point we have to let go of our impatience and throw ourselves into the house of Buddha and see what happens.

The sastra leaves us with the connection between wisdom and patience:  When the Bodhisattva practises the patience paramita in its pure form, he does not perceive the characteristic of patience, does not perceive himself or those who insult him, and does not speculate about the dharmas; and this constitutes pure patience paramita.  [Because he sees nonduality, he doesn’t take things personally.]  It is for this reason that it has been said that the Bodhisattva residing in the perfection of wisdom must accomplish the perfection of patience by abiding in it without agitation or falling back. This lack of agitation and falling back implies the absence of hatred, malicious words, physical evil deeds, and mental doubts.

Having heard that, we see the connection with today’s gate statement:  The forbearance pāramitā is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we abandon all anger, arrogance, flattery, and foolery, and we teach and guide living beings who have such vices.

The sastra concludes:  Once the Bodhisattva knows the true character of the perfection of wisdom, he does not perceive the dharmas because his mind is purged of opinions and their subject. Thus, when a man insults, torments or strikes him, he can endure all such things. It is for this reason that it is said that by residing in the perfection of wisdom, one can accomplish the perfection of patience.

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Questions for reflection and discussion:

• ​What's your experience of encountering people who flatter you and people who criticize you?  What opportunities do you see for practicing non-attachment?
• How do you practice having patience with suffering, your own and others'?
• What are some ways to remember the good qualities in people you don't like so much?
• Do you find it easier to be patient with beings or with dharmas, and why?