“You’ve got to take a negative and transform it into a positive.” That was the simple mantra the Dalai Lama repeated when he came to my Japanese hometown of Nara not so long ago. See yourself as the center of the world (he could have said, but didn’t), and every small problem in the workplace becomes a cataclysm; see yourself as part of a much vaster canvas than you can ever imagine, and it can look like an opportunity.
Friends pass away every day, he conceded (when I asked him once about death); yet every day brings new friends, the possibility of a fresh start. With a logic that emphasized that this was almost a process of Newtonian physics, again and again he stressed how good acts can be as empirically supported as the laws of quantum mechanics. He argues for the power of the mind: nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Many wise men over the centuries have affirmed this special power – it’s not the sufferings of the world that afflict us, as the Stoic Epictetus pointed out, it’s our response to suffering. Some Buddhists have brought this point home to me more forcibly than anyone I know. In every loss, loss being the way of things, there is a potential gain, a different opportunity. It all depends on how we choose to look at it.
That meeting the Dalai Lama is sitting in on might be a little boring, so he will choose to repeat some mantras to himself to make it fulfilling. However powerless we may be against the force of external circumstances, we always have the power, within, to choose what position we will take. The response to suffering can come from no one but ourselves.
A few years ago, to take another example, my house burned down in a forest fire and I lost everything. Every note, every manuscript I’d ever collected, and to that extent every hope I’d fashioned over 30 years went up in flames. Suddenly I was officially homeless and owned nothing but the toothbrush I had bought in an all-night supermarket after escaping the conflagration (by which I’d been encircled for three hours). I could have told myself, at the end of that day, “If only I’d had 10 minutes more, I could have saved all the papers that were of such value to me, and so changed the course of the rest of my life.” Yet on the other hand, if I’d had 10 minutes less, there’d have been no me, no fragile, temporary, illusory self even to say that; I’d have been dead. I could have chosen to concentrate on what I’d lost or on how much I was still lucky enough to have.
In much the same way, I realized, I could focus now on all the projects, memories and expectations that were exploded. Or on the fact that a new house was built, thanks to the insurance company (much nicer than the house that had been there before), and, even in my most stricken state, I was leading a life that 99.999% of the people on the planet would have envied. I was in a free country, in an affluent town; I’d never had to worry very much about my health, and I’d never had a concern about hunger or war. Indeed, I’d lived in such ease that I’d gone over to Japan to live with fewer possessions. How could I complain?
I don’t think this means pushing down whatever frustration or grief one feels, or pretending it doesn’t exist. But I do think it means deciding whether I will concentrate my attention on all the things this somewhat illusory being “Pico” doesn’t have, or on all the things he does have. The Dalai Lama has implied many times that he could rue what exile has brought him, or be grateful for the way in which it has saved him and his people from internecine fighting, protected the institution of the Dalai Lama from needless ritualism and formality, exposed many Tibetans to the world and the world to Tibet. There is an element here of choosing whether to see the glass as half-empty or half-full; but there is an even greater element, it seems to me, of seeing the glass from the perspective of eternity. Does it much matter in the larger scheme of things?
No philosophy can cure a toothache, as the old texts say, and in the midst of a pain or a grief, all we can do is give it vent. But that doesn’t prevent another part of one, more quietly, from seeing that the problems of little Pico, newly homeless, don’t amount to a hill of beans in a world in which most people would cry out for circumstances as lucky as his. As Emerson and Thoreau always said, the coming of the dark is the first step towards the dawn again.
Shall I be angry about the fact I lost the job, or glad that I have the freedom to apply for another?
A few years ago, not so long after the fire, my Japanese stepdaughter, then 14, was diagnosed with cancer and forced to spend a year living in a hospital, going through intensely painful chemotherapy. It seemed a terrible thing to happen to a little girl who, as far as I could tell, had never been of harm to anyone. But given the diagnosis, all she could do, she seemed to see, was make the most of it. She learned things about suffering and death (and therefore about pleasure and gratitude) that she’d never have learned at home. She missed a year of school, but she returned to her class much wiser and better educated than many of her classmates – and with a much clearer, sharper sense of direction. She could have regarded the experience as a horror (as she did, of course, in the first day or two of shock). Instead, she knew the best response was to bring to it a spirit of openness and optimism, as is common among her Buddhist neighbors in Japan.
These truths are all as simple as the truths of birth and death. But they seem to have a particular application for those of us in North America today. America suffered a terrible loss when terrorists came to its shores and took the lives of thousands of innocent people. But it’s not clear that focusing on that loss is going to help anything, least of all those brave or unwitting souls who gave their lives. And it’s even less clear that focusing on a local loss is very useful when the whole world is suffering similar losses daily. In a story that has always moved me, the Buddha said: When felled by an arrow are you going to quarrel about its origins, or pull it out?
I’ve always been moved, too, by the story of the Buddha asking a bereaved mother to find a single house that has not seen heartache or death. I certainly have never been to any country or met anyone over the age of consent who has not experienced loss and suffering of some kind. What separates the young from their elders, though, is that the first loss comes with particular shock, and perhaps with less ability to be aware of the shocks of everyone around one. For the young, suffering may be something that pushes them back into themselves rather than bringing them out into a sense of commonness with the world.
This is not to extol what is so unthinkingly called “denial,” or a kind of blind panglossianism. But we do have a choice, at every moment, in every place, as to how we will play the cards we’re dealt. Pain blinds us for a moment, but for few of us, happily, is the pain unremitting. Shall I complain about the fact it’s raining, or be glad that it isn’t freezing? Shall I be angry about the fact I lost the job, or glad that I have the freedom to apply for another? Do I trust, at heart, the circumstances I’m handed, or will I be always at odds with them?
Living in Japan, listening to the Dalai Lama, I have learned, more than from anyone I’ve met in my own tradition, that the mind is a powerful thing, and its power can be used for good as much as ill. Move over here, and the view looks different; imagine yourself into that person’s being, and suddenly you look different, too. At any moment, in any setting, you can imagine that this day is your last, or that person is your mother, or that enemy is you, and switch notions around quite fruitfully. My house burned down, as the Japanese poets say; I can now see better the rising moon.
Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of Abandon, a Sufi romance, and of Sun After Dark, a set of travels into Buddhism and questions around the world.
