Floating can be joyful and necessary.
Swimming is more.
Learning how to swim you first learn how to float.
Floating peacefully in a pool, lake or ocean, floating can be enough. Drifting down a river, floating can be enough. Dropped in deep and distressed water, floating can be enough, more than enough, as it keeps you from sinking.
But floating is not swimming. Swimming can take you places that floating won’t.
Learn to float. Train to swim.
Whenever we can connect the Dalai Lama and Jesus, we know we are in the right place.
The Gospel of Thomas, sometimes called the Fifth Gospel, is a collection of sayings of Jesus that parallel and supplement the canonical gospels.
It contains this short and simple direction:
This enigmatic saying for me has the depth of any words in scripture.
Today I came across related wisdom from the Dalai Lama, who makes the same point. Just as Jesus is not offering a limited Christian perspective, the Dalai Lama is not offering a limited Buddhist perspective. It is a fact of human life.
Here the Dalai Lama comments on verses from Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva.
We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So while we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives. Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if we were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important thing is to be a good human being.
Dalai Lama, For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva
Passersby. Tourists. Together.
Note: By coincidence—or is it?—this was created spontaneously today on the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama.
There is a notable lack of compassion in some of the public initiatives in America and in other nations. These are nations that officially or unofficially identify as Judaeo-Christian.
For some time I’ve focused on that lack of compassion and considered how it might be improved.
But here I move to a predicate question. Why do those traditions or society value and promote compassion at all?
The question particularly arises for students of Buddhism. It may be an overbroad characterization, but it is not imprecise to say that compassion is at the center of Buddhism.
Which leads to the question of whether and how much compassion is at the center of other traditions.
So why compassion at all?
Here a few of the possible answers.
It is the right thing to do.
God wants it and expects it.
The Golden Rule advises it, because we will be treated as we treat others.
It will get us into heaven or keep us out of hell.
It makes us feel good.
Unlike those and other explanations, Buddhism reaches compassion not as an assigned transactional value but as an unavoidable conclusion. To simplify in my own substandard understanding, if there is absolute equality among us, there can be nothing but compassion. If we don’t recognize that absolute equality—and we so often don’t, instead putting ourselves in an unequal position—how can we be genuinely compassionate?
With that, back to the events of the day, and the open question of how, once we have advanced our own compassion, we can find ways to advance it in our traditions and in our nations.
“Since I affirm nothing, no one can refute my point of view.”
This saying, valuable for individuals and the world, is from Nagarjuna (1st-2nd century CE), arguably the most influential Indian Buddhist thinker after Gautama Buddha.
The Middle Way does not suggest that we hold no views. Buddhism, along with every religious tradition, distinguishes between right views and wrong views. So do philosophical, political, social and cultural traditions of all kinds. We can’t and won’t stop holding views.
The Middle Way does say that such views, as essential as they seem, are also empty and nonexistent, mere creations of our minds. That they guide our actions in our lives and the world is undeniable. But to the extent we embrace them tightly, it is the source of trouble in our lives and the world.
Nagarjuna is correct, not just as a matter of logic but as a matter of living with ourselves and others. Views, what we learn and discern as right views, can guide us. When we also see those views as empty, not to be attached to, it is less likely those views will drive us to unnecessary confrontation. There is no refutation when there is no affirmation.
Randomness is one of the most helpful and illuminating elements of life. Gregory Bateson commented that within the holy of holies is a random number table.
The I Ching is one example. It is a book that offers thoughts based on numbers generated in various ways, and additional thoughts on those numbers changing their character. The system is viewed different ways. It may be that the numbers are reflections of the moment and the situation. It may be that the numbers are random, and it is that randomness that makes the thoughts most valuable, given that whatever path is taken, it is changing as we plan and step. Those plans and steps are good but temporary. As physics finds with quanta, or as Shunryu Suzuki said, “It is so, but it is not always so.”
Randomness can be used with any text, not just the I Ching. A cousin of random numbers is bibliomancy, in which a page and passage on that page in a book are randomly selected for advice.
I have used random numbers to explore texts from many traditions; the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible contains 929 chapters, for example. Today I applied it to the Dhammapada, considered the most accessible and most widely-read summary of the Buddha’s teachings. It contains 423 verses. The number generated was 3:
“He abused me, attacked me,
Defeated me, robbed me!”
For those carrying on like this,
Hatred does not end.
“She abused me, attacked me,
Defeated me, robbed me!”
For those not carrying on like this,
Hatred ends.
Dhammapada, Chapter 1 – Dichotomies, translated by Gil Fronsdal
© 2025 by Bob Schwartz
We are not used to staying in the present but there is nowhere else to be. The past has gone and the future is not yet here. It is that simple: only now exists. The present cannot be controlled. If we hold this moment back, it becomes the past. If we try to make the moment last, we are sending it into the future.
All meditation methods have the same purpose: to keep us in the present and to introduce us to the mind. We are not trying to stop our thoughts but to feel less trapped by them. The earlier we can catch ourselves from falling in with habitual patterns and getting entangled the better, and one of the most dependable techniques for preventing this is awareness of the breath.
Usually we breathe without taking any notice but in this technique we watch the breath, following it as it flows in and out of the body. We keep calm. We are not trying to accomplish anything. We just allow the mind to use the breath to settle. We do not have to supervise our senses or our thoughts. If something distracts or interrupts us, we let it pass. Staying mildly aware of our breath, we observe it without getting too absorbed by it.
Meditation is like taking a holiday. We have permission to give up planning and worrying. We are off duty. It is time to relax and slow down. Too much effort with our practice makes us tight and that is no use, but allowing the mind to go completely flat is not the answer either. If we are not alert, we will fall asleep or our attention will wander without us knowing it. We are trying to find a balance, neither too tense nor too sluggish.
When we are not wound up or straying between the past and the future, the meditation gradually brings us into the present moment—grounded in our body.
“We can’t tailor the world to suit ourselves, or force it to fit into our vision of things. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to make things better.”
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche
The 59 slogans of lojong mind training are divided into Seven Points.
Point Three: Transforming Adversity into the Path of Awakening
We now come to the instructions on how to train our minds amid the unfavorable and unwanted circumstances of our lives. We have been born into an imperfect world, characterized by unpredictability and adversity, as finite human beings that have foibles, make mistakes, get confused, and think irrationally. There is much to contend with, and our ability to prevent or circumvent difficulty is quite limited. We aren’t omnipotent beings, and while we try to protect ourselves and maintain order in our lives, we simply don’t have the ability to safeguard ourselves from its disasters….
We can’t tailor the world to suit ourselves, or force it to fit into our vision of things. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to make things better. The bodhisattva ideal specifically recommends trying to improve our world to the best of our ability, but that ideal is based on a realistic recognition that the world is imperfect and likely to remain that way. Things may sometimes work a little better, sometimes a little worse, but so long as there is ignorance, hatred, jealousy, pride, and selfishness, we will all be living in a world that is socially and politically imperfect….
Sometimes things just happen, and there may be nothing we can do to change that, but we can control our responses to events. We don’t have to despair in the face of disaster. We can either continue to respond in the way we’ve always done and get progressively worse, or we can turn things around and use our misfortune to aid our spiritual growth. For example, if we suffer from illness, we should not allow despondency to get the better of us if our recovery is slow. Despite seeing the best doctors and receiving the best medication, we should accept our situation with courage and fortitude and use it to train our minds to be more accommodating and understanding. No matter what situation we encounter, we can strengthen our minds by incorporating it into our spiritual journey.
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training the Mind
“We can’t tailor the world to suit ourselves, or force it to fit into our vision of things. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to make things better.”
Traleg Kyabgon
The 59 slogans of lojong mind training are divided into Seven Points.
Point Three: Transforming Adversity into the Path of Awakening
We now come to the instructions on how to train our minds amid the unfavorable and unwanted circumstances of our lives. We have been born into an imperfect world, characterized by unpredictability and adversity, as finite human beings that have foibles, make mistakes, get confused, and think irrationally. There is much to contend with, and our ability to prevent or circumvent difficulty is quite limited. We aren’t omnipotent beings, and while we try to protect ourselves and maintain order in our lives, we simply don’t have the ability to safeguard ourselves from its disasters.
It is self-evident that the natural world doesn’t behave in a predictable way or do our bidding. We can see this in the recent examples of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the hurricane that decimated New Orleans. Natural disasters have occurred repeatedly in the past and are likely to continue to do so in the future. Millions of people have lost their lives, are losing their lives, and will lose their lives to disease: the typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and bubonic plagues of the past; the HIV epidemic of the present; and so on. Even at a personal level, many things go awry, and our efforts to complete projects are constantly thwarted and disrupted by sickness, mental distress, and all kinds of deception and mistreatment by others.
Adverse circumstances and situations are an integral part of conditioned existence. They tend to arise as sudden interruptions, so we shouldn’t be surprised that natural calamities and upheavals occur in both our private and our public lives. Buddhists do not believe in divine authorship or omnipotent governance of any kind; things just happen when the proper conditions and circumstances come together….
We can’t tailor the world to suit ourselves, or force it to fit into our vision of things. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to make things better. The bodhisattva ideal specifically recommends trying to improve our world to the best of our ability, but that ideal is based on a realistic recognition that the world is imperfect and likely to remain that way. Things may sometimes work a little better, sometimes a little worse, but so long as there is ignorance, hatred, jealousy, pride, and selfishness, we will all be living in a world that is socially and politically imperfect….
If things are interdependent, as Buddhists say, we can never expect to protect ourselves against unexpected occurrences, because there is no real order to existence apart from the regularity of certain natural processes. The fact that anything and everything can and does happen would then come as no real surprise to us. The question then becomes not so much why these things happen, but what we can do about them once they do. We cannot control the environment in any strict sense, so we must try to change our attitude and see things in a different light. Only then will we be able to take full advantage of our situation, even if it happens to be a bad one. While it often seems there is nothing we can do in the face of insurmountable obstacles, the lojong teachings tell us this is not true. The imperfect world can be an opportunity for awakening rather than an obstacle to our goals.
Sometimes things just happen, and there may be nothing we can do to change that, but we can control our responses to events. We don’t have to despair in the face of disaster. We can either continue to respond in the way we’ve always done and get progressively worse, or we can turn things around and use our misfortune to aid our spiritual growth. For example, if we suffer from illness, we should not allow despondency to get the better of us if our recovery is slow. Despite seeing the best doctors and receiving the best medication, we should accept our situation with courage and fortitude and use it to train our minds to be more accommodating and understanding. No matter what situation we encounter, we can strengthen our minds by incorporating it into our spiritual journey….
We grow more quickly if we are open to working with difficulties rather than constantly running away from them. The lojong teachings say that when we harden ourselves to suffering, we only become more susceptible to it. The more harsh or cruel we are toward others, the more vulnerable we become to irritation or anger that is directed at us. Contrary to our instincts, it is by learning to become more open to others and our world that we grow stronger and more resilient. It is our own choice how we respond to others. We can capitulate to the entrenched habits and inner compulsions deeply ingrained in our basic consciousness, or we can recognize the limitations of our situation and apply a considered approach. Our conditioned samsaric minds will always compel us to focus on what we can’t control rather than questioning whether we should respond at all. However, once we recognize the mechanical way in which our ego always reacts, it becomes possible to reverse that process.
The great strength of the lojong teachings is the idea that we can train our minds to turn these unfavorable circumstances around and make them work to our advantage. The main criterion is that we never give up in the face of adversity, no matter what kind of world we are confronted with at the personal or political level. When we think there is nothing we can do, we realize there is something we can do, and we see that this “something” is actually quite tremendous.
Traleg Kyabgon , The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training the Mind
Whatever your area of study and learning—not just religion, but science, business, arts, etc.—there are those who you want to learn from and those who want to teach you. Sometimes individually, sometimes institutionally.
You may keep in mind two Buddhist principles that apply universally: skillful means and testing teachings.
Skillful or expedient means—known in Sanskrit as upaya—suggests that at any point in a life, under any particular circumstances, one method of learning may be appropriate for an individual, but at another point under different circumstances, another method may be more appropriate.
Buddha was also very specific about how an individual can choose methods and teachings. In a sutra attributed to Buddha, he recommended testing teachings, and not simply accepting teachings from any teacher—not even himself:
Don’t accept what you hear by report, and don’t accept mere tradition. Don’t jump to conclusions based on assumptions. Don’t accept a statement just because it is found in scriptures, or on the basis of general acceptance, or because it is what your teacher says. After examination, only believe and act upon what you yourself have tested and found reasonable.
—Kalama Sutta
© 2025 by Bob Schwartz
Bob Schwartz 