On Being a Bodhisattva

What does it mean to be a Bodhisattva? Does it mean you have to be a super human with super-powers who flies in the moment someone is in distress and you fix the day with your superior skillful means? Is it about being someone great?  Is being a Bodhisattva a goal of personal achievement where you start by helping others when they clearly need it, and over time become better and better at helping until you are like the Bodhisattvas of the past?

I would say.... no. This is not what it means to be a Bodhisattva.  In fact this is the trap that our ego sets to prevent us from being helpful to others. Egos are so clever at turning altruism into paths toward personal greatness.  When I first took the Bodhisattva vow, I thought that it was about helping others.  It is in a way, but not from the perspective of  a selfish personal agenda no matter how subtle that agenda is. In fact, what I found is that trying to be helpful to others from the perspective of becoming great never works.  In the past when I tried to help others I didn't usually realize that I was really motivated largely by selfishness, and not by any real care for the person I was "trying" to help.  Whenever I tried to help, it would almost always backfire in some way.  The "help" would turn out to either separate them from me or  make the situation worse for them.

A good example of this kind of egoic negative consequence born out of good intentions is the temperance movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Many temperance activists thought they were saving society from the scourge of alcohol by working hard at making it illegal. The end result was arguably much worse for society.  It didn't really stop people from drinking alcohol, instead it caused a huge black market to develop which was fertile ground for organized crime to gain a real foothold in our country. Organized crime syndicates didn't go away after prohibition was repealed, they only grew into other black markets such as prostitution, racketeering, money laundering, as well as having many other corruptive influences on society. I think its fair to say that their good intentions backfired and actually made the world worse than it had been.

Once I realized that the ego was hijacking my attempts at being more helpful I really stopped trying to be helpful for fear that I would do more harm than good.  I think a lot of people who take the Boddhisattva vow fall into this same hole.  It is very crippling to realize that even when you want to help, there is a good chance that you will create more harm in the long run if you try.  Its easy to lose faith in your ability to be truly helpful and its easy to come to the conclusion that you need to be fully enlightened before you can be truly helpful to others.  Then and only then, we tell ourselves, will we have the wisdom and skillful means to be truly helpful.

Luckily, I didn't fully believe in that line of thinking. I still thought, that there must be a way to be truly helpful to others even before my ego went away.  I'm glad to say that I did find a way. Its so simple that its very easy to miss.  I've found through my observations that in order to be truly helpful to others you have to truly care about them first.  I found that if you really really care about someone then you really don't even need to do anything to be helpful. Just the act of really caring about them is often helpful in and of itself. If you truly care about someone then I believe its pretty darn hard to screw it up, because your ego is out of the picture.  When you truly care about someone and they need help, its usually pretty obvious what needs to be done, and its usually pretty easy to do it.  People sense when you really care about them, and so the process of "helping" them becomes more of a process of solving a problem with them rather than for them.  When you really care about someone, its really easy to give them things they need. The gifts really mean a lot to them too, because its not done out of pity its done out of friendship and maybe even love.  Pity is a form of being superior to others and that is just ego trying to make you into someone you are not.  No one is superior to anyone else in the same way that apples are not superior to oranges.

So, if you want to become a better Bodhisattva the path is very simple and very clear, but not necessarily very easy.  You have to recognize the strategies and habits the ego uses to separate you from other. You have to realize that you are as equally important as the other no matter what differences in ability or status there may be between you.  You have to realize that every living entity is sacred and dynamic and everyone is a one of a kind masterpiece in their own unique way.

You have to be able to recognize when you are judging someone and remember at that moment that any reasons you may have to judge them are only from a narrow finite perspective and not from the broader truth that it is not up to us to decide whether someone else is worthy of our help, or if they "deserve" to be helped. The only thing we can truly know about someone else is that they are a manifestation of the one big life that we are all apart of and are born out of.  The universe is so vast and time in both directions is so infinite that how can we say with any certainty that this person is "good" and that person is "bad"?  If we have all had many lives as so many Buddhas have said, then how can we judge?  They are who they are right now, but that doesn't mean they will be that way forever.

According to Karma theory we all have the tendencies that we do because of the habits developed in the past.  Since we are always changing, isn't it totally fallacious to assume that just because someone is a jerk today that they will always be that way?  We have most likely seen in ourselves the wide range of persons we can be depending on what the circumstances are in the moment.  We can be a saint and a sinner all in the same day. We can be stupid in some ways and really smart in others. We can have a big heart at times and almost no heart at others.  If these things are true of ourselves, then why wouldn't it be true of others too? How can we judge?

If you want to become a useful person in this world and truly accomplish something that will last and reverberate throughout time, then learn to love others unconditionally.  Learn to see their beauty, and we all have that beauty at our core no matter what heinous crimes or misdeeds we may have done.  Look for that beauty instead of looking for perfection. There is no perfection because perfection is always an oversimplification of life. The beauty of life shines in us all equally because as Eckhart Tolle says, we don't have a life, we are life.

If you can't see the beauty in another person, then contemplate what mental habit you are using to separate and elevate yourself above them, and question the validity of that belief.  If we can see the beauty in another just as their mother or father did when they were born, then we will have a heart of love for them, and they will sense it.  It will be incredibly healing for them and probably for you too.  I've found that usually the hardest heart has a soft core just underneath.  Look for that rather than convincing yourself that they are bad to the core.  Learning how to love unconditionally is the true work of a Bodhissatva and when one can master that, they will be truly helpful to all.