Travelling Light
Los Angeles has come back to life with a roar these past two weeks, stirring memories of our first joyous encounter with this city many moons ago. We noticed the change whilst in the car on a weekday afternoon. Having become accustomed to zipping around at a rate of knots, it took me by surprise. There seemed to be lines of traffic at every stop and an appointment was missed due to journey length. Later that week whilst on the freeway, the volume of cars headed confidently in the direction of days of old. The LA traffic jam; immortalised in movies such as Falling Down had returned.
After the coldly clinical and proudly dystopian flavour of the past year my reactions to such a situation are not what they once were. In another life I would have needed to gentle an impetuous impatience which fumed at such inconvenience. Now I feel nothing so much as a flooding sense of joy that people are out and about, beginning to pick up the pieces of life once again. Let there be more traffic, not less, I hear myself wishing! The past thirteen months have painted many things in blazing colour, but most clearly of all they have shown me the miraculous nature of our mutually dependent existence, a phenomenon which I will never again take for granted. One may say that the freeways and the boulevards are the arteries of Los Angeles but it is the people and their intertwined experiences who are the life blood of the city and of our world.
I have become increasingly concerned with thoughts such as these of late. In quiet times of reflection I have seen the necessity, now perhaps more than ever before, for a powerful commitment to rooting out self serving attitudes and focusing upon mind training techniques which provide the skilful methods to interact constructively with our world. Surrounded by the feeling of a city waking up and dynamism returning, I come back to the power of joy and its place in Buddhist doctrine. As one of the Four Limitless Meditations it teaches us to rejoice in the happiness gained by beings through their practice of virtue; I have found it of immeasurable benefit over the years. As firmly as we believe that the self exists, just as stubbornly do we cling to the notion that there is a finite amount of happiness to be had. Thus success gained by others threatens to topple our fragile sense of control and power. Serious contemplation of joy cuts through such deluded thinking, allowing us a glimpse into a world beyond our current imaginings, where the limitations we currently insist upon no longer have any meaning at all.
Musing further along these lines I return to a short passage that I have read and re-read countless times since I first encountered it way back when. Usually a moment will arise and I’ll hurry to the bookcase to retrieve my beloved dog eared text and turn to the marked page. The story is a description of a brief episode in the early life of the great master Gyaltse Thogme Zangpo and I quote it in full here:
‘Bodhichitta was very strong in Ngulchu Thogme from his earliest youth. Once when he was a little child, he went outside to relieve himself. On his way back he caught sight of a bush covered in snow. Thinking it was a man, the little boy wrapped his clothes around the bush and came back into the house naked. His mother asked him, ‘Where are all your clothes?’ “There is a man outside who is freezing,’ he replied. ‘I put them over him.’ His mother went outside and saw that it was only a bush.
That is the kind of Bodhisattva Ngulchu Thogme was. He truly practised and was fully experienced in the Bodhisattva way of life.’
Whenever I read this story I smile and breathe a little easier. That’s how it should be I think and I aspire to have a heart as great and warm as this incredible being. And in the meantime I can lighten up and smile a little more; it’s not so bad after all. Or as that famous lizard Frankie once said to his friend in a Budweiser ad ‘Let it go Louie, let it go.’
