The One Who Benefits Most from Your Compassion is Yourself
“If you start working for the benefit of others, amazingly your own welfare is taken care of as a matter of course.”
In this teaching from the unique Awake Amsterdam 2012 event, Sogyal Rinpoche teaches on the Logic of Compassion, based on some key points from His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s own teaching.
As Sogyal Rinpoche writes in Chapter 12 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:
“We all feel and know something of the benefits of compassion. But the particular strength of the Buddhist teaching is that it shows you clearly a “logic” of compassion. Once you have grasped it, this logic makes your practice of compassion at once more urgent and all-embracing, and more stable and grounded, because it is based on the clarity of a reasoning whose truth becomes ever more apparent as you pursue and test it.”
You can find the full teaching of the Awake event online here.
To learn more about Awake Amsterdam go to their website here.
Podcast: Part 3 of “Living and Dying Today” Now Available!
This episode of The Tibetan Blog of Living and Dying Podcast features
Part Three of the talk called Living and Dying Today.
No truer words to live by
Felicia Chan from Manchester, in the United Kingdom, writes: “Happy 20th anniversary! I seem to be taking just as long to get through the book and am only about halfway through several years after picking it up. Taking in a book at this pace is very unusual for me, but for some reason, I have found that it has not been one to speed through. In fact, it seems to find me when the occasion calls for it. I can sometimes leave it unread for weeks or months and then suddenly pick it up again only to find in the next passage the answer I seem to need for whatever I’m dealing with in the moment.Our modern life demands so much speed, I feel that taking my time over this text is not merely a luxury and a treat, but also a liberation. A liberation from what happens at ‘the end’, from how the story turns out, in more ways than one.
Life itself is about many ends and beginnings, many births and many deaths. I birth new thoughts, new behaviours, new attitudes to things as much as old attitudes, beliefs and fears die out when I let them.
Letter from Death Row
In the early 90s, not long after The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was published, a young man called Greg from the United States, wrote to Rinpoche from his prison cell, where he was preparing to be executed. He wrote: “I am not writing this for any benefit to myself, other than the possibility that if what I have to say will help just one person find the path as I have, then my past suffering will have been of some benefit to someone other than myself.
“I have been a truly miserable example of a human being; all through this lifetime I have only cared for one person and that person is myself. I’ve used people with no concern for their feelings; I’ve stolen just for the thrill of stealing; I’ve developed relationships with many women to satisfy my lusts and then thrown them away with no more of a thought than I’d give a piece of garbage—and I treated them as such.
“My ego was so inflated and fragile that with the slightest of slights I had to hurt others. I enjoyed it, but I was a coward. I would hurt the weak and the innocent. I always took the easy way out with everything I did, and if there was any possibility I would fail I would not even attempt it. I only loved myself—but then I didn’t really even care about myself deep down.
“Because of my inflated ego, my pride, my self-importance, and my pent-up anger, I am now an inmate incarcerated on death row awaiting execution. When I arrived here I even blamed others for the actions that put me here. A year after I arrived, I was put in an isolation cell for an infraction of the rules. Two days after being put in this cell I met and became friends with a man in another cell in the isolation unit. You are not allowed anything to read in this unit other than law and religious material. At that time I wasn’t in a very religious mood, but this new friend offered me the opportunity to read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
“I knew absolutely nothing about Buddhist teaching, other than it was an eastern religion, but I was kind of curious. I started to read the book with no preconceived ideas or prejudices. I expected nothing from that book, it was just something to read. Little did I know then that the book would be the greatest gift I would ever receive. As I read the book, the door to my heart was opened, filling my inner being with compassion and the wisdom to see the truth in the Buddhist teachings. 
“Although I am only an infant in my knowledge of the Buddhist teachings, I’ve taken my first step on the path. I tell you that this first step onto the path is the most important step any of us can ever take. My thoughts, emotions, and attitudes have completely turned around. I am still ruled by them but now I see the ignorance in them. I’ve realised so much about myself since learning of the teachings. I truly believe that everything I’ve done in my lifetime led me to that isolation cell for only one reason, and that reason was to find the Buddhist teachings waiting for me in that cell.
“I’ve realised the love I’ve denied myself—to express to others, and the love I’ve denied—the love that others have offered. I realised that when I allowed myself to be hurt and had to hurt others, I was only hurting myself again with this attitude. Buddhism for me is the key that unlocks and opens the door to my inner being and allows me a glimpse of a person I’d long ago forgotten had existed.
“The one thing I’ve found about Buddhism that’s different from other religions is that it actually teaches you while the other religions only tell you just as parents tell their child, not teaching them. Other religions tell you to look outward to find happiness in some thing, whereas Buddhism teaches that the only way to find anything is to look inward because all the answers are there, waiting to be found.
“Look within your own hearts, my brothers and sisters, Thank you.”
What is your story about The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying? To share it, follow this link: Share your story.
Coming Home to Our Fundamental Goodness
“The fundamental message of the Buddha is that, regardless who we are, we all have Buddha nature, the potential of enlightenment. In fact our true nature is the Buddha. That means our true nature is goodness.”
