A Worth to the Wise

Last night, the exercise in my Dharma class was to breath/feel deep down into the body and say aloud: "I am worthy...I am worthy." Three weeks ago it had been: "I am grounded in the Earth...I am grounded in the Earth" and two weeks ago: "I am alive!"

Being worthy turned out to be much harder than being alive, at least for the small, dark haired woman facing me as a pair-off partner. At first she couldn't get the words to pass through her thin lips and when they finally did escape, water flooded her eyes. She wiggled, struggling to tamp down her despair so she would not cry. Instead of the words: "I am worthy," she uttered a trembling sigh, and her shoulders sank under its painful weight.

"Do you not know about Buddha nature?" I felt compelled to whisper. She shook her head, "no."

She was an excruciating reminder that way too many of us don't know how Buddhism is fundamentally different from other religions readily available to us. Unlike Catholics being damned for original sin, Protestants with lists of must not dos, obsessive Jewish guilt and consumerism with its come-ons that if you just buy this now you will live happily ever after, Buddhists believe we are all pure and perfect just as we are, 24/7. This is not a stretch of the imagination. The Buddha was just a human being, one who used his personal struggles to get enlightened and thus transcend the limiting depredations of his human body. By logical analogy, all human beings also have what it takes: that same "Buddha nature." Right now, and always, we have within us that same ability to use our own experience to cultivate enlightening wisdom. We just have to want to stop shopping and texting and try.

"Sentient beings possess the essence of Buddhahood," Je Gampopa says in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. "The actual way in which they possess it can be exemplified by the way silver is present in silver ore, the way sesame oil is present in sesame seeds or the way butter is present in milk. It is possible to obtain the silver that is in the ore. It is possible to obtain the oil that is in the sesame seeds. It is possible to obtain the butter that is in the milk and likewise it is possible to obtain the Buddhahood that is in sentient beings."

The late Trungpa Rinpoche liked to say our failings and foibles, what we and he called "our shit", was the ideal fertilizer, the perfect manure for wisdom to grow in. Our ability to sense that the problems we have and create for ourselves are what make us ill at ease, this painful sensation of dissatisfaction is actually the bright sign that wisdom is already seeded in us. At the most basic level, Mingyur Rinpoche once pointed out, when our leg gets cramped or throbbing, we instinctively move it into a different position that will make it feel better, so we do know how to fix ourselves.

In the homeopathic sense, our "shit" is the poison that becomes the medicine that can cure us. The more of it we have, the more it churns, the more likely, and faster, we are to see how useful it is, because it takes a suffocating sense of suffering to impel us to seek relief, if not through drugs perhaps by tiptoeing or diving headlong into something else mind altering like Dharma. "They haven't suffered enough," is what my teacher told one of his longest students when she asked him why her adult children weren't as interested in Buddhism as she was.

The churning of crap into the gleam of Buddhahood is the supreme way Dharma proves you are worthy, because if you don't have any suffering, any bad stuff to wrestle with like Jacob and the angel, you're not likely to discover your own potential and net worth. The lotus is the symbol of Dharma precisely because this magnificent, eye-catching flower grows out of unseen mud and comes into view unsullied.

At lower and simpler levels, Dharma is chockablock with re-assurances, starting with the unimpeachable fact of your human life. Given how many lower life forms are out there in the universe--gazillions of bacteria, insects and protozoa--you obviously did something right to have had the good karma to get born in a human body and not as a beetle, or a burro or a goldfish. The proof that you are super worthy is that you were born not only in a human body, but to boot in a safe place with clean food, water and easy shelter, with nobody firing bombs or natural devastation like earthquakes blowing you to smithereens. You are not a slave in chains or other physical bondage. Then too, you must have been top of the good karma crop to be born with your brain chemistry balanced and your sense faculties in working order so that you can see, hear, taste, feel and as they say in law, know the difference between right and wrong. Not everybody is that lucky. You evidently earned this.

All these riches bestowed upon you are the magic wand that can crack open the treasury of Dharma, and grant access to an infinite wealth of wisdom. The wealth starts with the re-assurance that you are good to go as is, pure and perfect as you'll ever get, and paves a path to the profound understanding of this great inheritance, your inherent Buddha nature, s surf board that will carry you up and over all the waves of suffering.

Meanwhile all Dharma cohorts and the Asians in traditional Buddhist countries who politely bow to you are a rewarding reminder that you are a potential Buddha, even if you, like that woman I was paired off with, think you're going to be the turkey at Thanksgiving. After I whispered all this to her, she managed to smile. And when the class was over, she got up and hugged me.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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