The Teaching I wasn't Ready For
For the past seven weeks, I've had the gift of co-leading a small course — meant to be ten weeks — on The Way of the Bodhisattva, the famous text by Shantideva, a monk of the great Nalanda Monastery in India. It's one of the most beloved and treasured works in the Himalayan Buddhist traditions, a kind of relic from Indian Buddhism. Some of you will know it; some of you won't. Either way, it's easy to find.
The text moves through the entire path by way of the six paramitas, and a great deal more besides. It's complete in itself — you can study the whole sutrayana path of Mahayana Buddhism through it. I came to it early on, in my first couple of years in Tibetan Buddhism, and between the fervor of my teachers and the popularity of the text, I thought, this is incredible, I have to study this. So I bought the book and read it through — and honestly, it was kind of a nothing burger for me at the time.
That's a little embarrassing to admit. This is a powerful, beloved text in the Himalayan lineages, and there I was wondering, am I missing something? And I was. I was missing a lot. To be fair, there were probably parts that landed for me early on and parts that didn't. But over the years — as I studied it more, treasured it more, and of course practiced the dharma more — the qualities of the text began to come out. In this course especially, there are just so many gems. Even reciting it can be a profound meditation on yourself and your motivations: how to develop loving-kindness, how to hold honest regret even for the things you want to change or transform in yourself.
Why I couldn't hear it
Part of what made the text so hard to receive early on was that I grew up with a lot of what we'd call shame — not the healthy kind, but the kind turned against oneself. It used to be called low self-esteem; we have all sorts of names for it now. My own favorite term for that particular wound — one so many people carry in the modern world — is the wound of unlovability: the feeling that we're unlovable, or simply not good enough. When I was caught in it as a young person, I assumed there was something wrong with me. But as I searched out paths of healing, both Buddhist and not, I came to find that there's nothing wrong with me. It's just a confusion about oneself.
A large part of the early text is what I'd call taking honest stock of one's faults and where one needs to improve. There are a lot of admonishments throughout. And at that point in my life, I couldn't take it. It was too much — shame piled on shame — and I couldn't read it for what it was actually saying. Going through it again in this course has brought a lot of those memories back, along with some reflections I thought might be worth sharing.
I run into this often — with the mentees I work with, and sometimes in classes, when the material is more traditional, framed in the language of Mahayana Buddhism, or traditional Buddhism in general. Here's what I mean. Until there's a settled sense that we are lovable — that, as I used to put it, "I'm not a screwed-up person; I make mistakes, I have things to improve, there are things I do that I like and things I don't, but none of that makes me a screwed-up person" — many of us go on struggling. Our faults, or what we take to be faults, or what others point out as faults, trigger an almost primal sense: I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, I'm not a good person.
I've come to see it less as a psychological wound and more as an energetic one — something lodged in the body. My teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes the feeling of it as hollowness, and he teaches practices for working with it: the Handshake practice, Dropping, and others.
Either way, I want to name that there is a way through. For many years I almost couldn't hear what Shantideva was actually saying, because it was so colored by my own low self-worth. So it's been a gift to feel how powerful the text is — how powerful any traditional Buddhist text is — when you meet it with a mind that isn't clouded by your wounds. And it's not that we're bad for having the wounds. The wounds are wounds; we can work with them. The point is that they can be remedied — and these texts become that much more valuable to us when they are.
Who Shantideva was
For those who don't know the story behind the text, here it is briefly. Shantideva was a monk at Nalanda, probably one of the largest universities in the world at the time. We're talking roughly the 8th century — medieval India. And it was enormous. You can still visit the ruins; I've been to them. They're near Bodhgaya, in Bihar, and they run for miles. This was a vast place of learning, not only for Buddhism but for all kinds of sciences and Vedic studies — so not strictly a Buddhist institution, though it seems to have been primarily focused on that.
Within the monastic college, Shantideva had a reputation for being lazy. People didn't see him studying. He didn't seem especially active or interested; maybe he sat around more than the others. He was made fun of a little — easy fodder for the ones who thought they were hot stuff. The monks took turns giving dharma discourses, each offering a commentary, essentially a dharma talk, to the assembly. So, partly to mess with him, some of his peers said, "Why don't you give the talk this time?" And Shantideva said, "Sure." They laughed, expecting to watch him bomb.
That's how this text came to be. He sat down in front of them and recited the whole thing from memory — a work he had written himself. And it isn't only, as I said, more or less the entire path, at least of the sutrayana vehicles. It's also eloquent. It reaches your heart as you read it; it opens the mind and the heart. It's deeply poetic. And once you arrive at the chapter on non-duality, it becomes profound and deep — every bit as impactful, I'd say, as Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, and the other great practitioner-scholars of the time. I find the story moving precisely because he wasn't a famous, erudite teacher. He taught from such humility that no one knew who he really was — a realized bodhisattva.
A verse from the chapter on patience
There are so many gems that it's genuinely hard to choose one verse, and some are quoted often — by the Dalai Lama and others. But since we were working with the chapter on patience last week, this one is fresh. It's verse 126:
"The greatly compassionate lords consider all beings as themselves. There is no doubt of this. Those whom I perceive as beings are Buddhas in themselves. How can I not treat them with respect?"
Within the context of patience, Shantideva is offering another reason to cultivate it — though we can take it further still. What struck me is how often I catch myself limiting other people: reading someone in a single moment by their body language, their words, the way they look. You know the old line, "Don't judge a book by its cover"? I find myself doing exactly that. Part of my practice is to notice it, and to challenge or transform it on the spot, if I can.
No one higher, no one lower
This verse gave me another way to do that. First, there's the reminder that the Buddhas — those who are truly enlightened and free — don't hold themselves as higher. They don't carry the thought of higher or lower at all; if they did, they wouldn't be enlightened. So for those of us who practice traditional Buddhism and aspire to awakening, it raises a real question: what are we actually aspiring to? Among other things, we're aspiring to be no one — not non-existent, but no one special, no one higher or lower than anyone else, just here. So when I notice myself feeling higher or lower than someone, however it arises, two things are true: it isn't accurate, and it isn't even what the Buddhas experience. And since I aspire toward Buddhahood — well, let's work with that. Not that I'm bad, or wrong, or screwed up. Just that this way of thinking, this belief, is what's at fault. So how do I begin, slowly, to correct it?
Seeing others as Buddhas in training
But it's the second half of the verse that really got me: "Those whom I perceive as beings are Buddhas in themselves. How can I not treat them with respect?" This is something else entirely. What if we saw other beings — including the ones we don't like — as Buddhas in training, potential Buddhas? Maybe that's the more accurate way to put it. It comes from the Mahayana teaching on Buddha nature: the principle that all beings, at their root, carry the seed of awakening. We don't discard one thing and become another. The seed, the potential, is already within every being, and we simply uncover it through the path, through the dharma.
To me that makes sense. Even when I see someone as truly awful, or undesirable, I try to remember — I like to try to remember — that they hold that potential. They have the seed, even if I can't see it in the moment. And whether or not that's ultimately true, what I've noticed is that it really does help my mind drop its judgment. It loosens the way I limit a person to whatever my mind happens to be labeling in that instant. The more we practice it, the more a kind of companionship can arise — a sense of closeness, as if the person isn't so far away after all. They're not a stranger. They're not just someone I dislike. They're someone who, at their core, wants what I want: I want to be happy, I want to be free from suffering, and I know they want that too. Even when it's never spoken, it shows in how we behave.
So this isn't only something lovely to think about. It's a practice — something we can cultivate, something we can put real energy into. When we catch ourselves limiting someone, through mindfulness, we can simply think: this is a Buddha, a Buddha in potential. They hold the full capacity, as I do, as anyone does, to awaken. And a kind of reverence can rise up — even, I'd say, a sense of sacredness. There's a sacredness in our existence together, in being alive on this earth at the same time.
The work goes both ways
When I'm limiting myself — caught in some belief or delusion about whether I'm good or bad — it's that much easier to fall into delusion about someone else. So the question becomes: how do we open the mind? How do we stop reifying and constricting around the belief? I find the work runs both directions. Self-honesty and open-mindedness toward ourselves make it easier to be open-minded toward others, and the reverse is true as well. It's all connected here.
If you haven't read The Way of the Bodhisattva yet, I'd encourage you to pick it up. It's wonderful, and you'll find it in print and online in many forms. And the next time you catch yourself sizing someone up, deciding who they are from the cover, you might try holding the question Shantideva leaves us with: what if this, too, is a Buddha?
