Start Where You Are

Empty Boat
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we could let them stop our minds. Even if they only
stop our mind for one point one seconds, we can rest
in that little gap. When the story line starts, we can
do the tonglen practice of exchanging ourselves for
others. In this way everything we meet has the po-
tential to help us cultivate compassion and recon-
nect with the spacious, open quality of our minds.
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Empty Boat

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1 3
Teachings for Life and Death
T
h e f i v e s t r e n g t h s
are the subject of two of
the slogans: “Practice the five strengths, / The
condensed heart instructions” and “The mahayana
instruction for ejection of consciousness at death / Is
the five strengths: how you conduct yourself is im-
portant.”
The underlying point of all our study and practice
is that the happiness we seek is here to connect with
at any time. The happiness we seek is our birthright.
To discover it we need to be more gentle with our-
selves, more compassionate toward ourselves and
our universe. The happiness we seek cannot be
found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It
cannot be found through getting serious and uptight
about wanting things to go in the direction that we
think will bring happiness. We are always taking hold
of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the
happiness we seek is already here and it will be found
through relaxation and letting go rather than through
struggle.
Does that mean you can just sleep all day? Does
that mean there’s nothing you need to do? The an-
swer is no. There does seem to be something that we
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have to do. These slogans tell us to practice the five
strengths: strong determination, familiarization, seed
of virtue, reproach, and aspiration. The five strengths
are five sources of inspiration to trust that we’ve got
all that we need in the palm of our hand.
These are the heart instructions on how to live and
how to die. Last year I spent some time with two peo-
ple who were dying. Jack and Jill were both old
friends; they each had a very different relationship
with their death. They each had the privilege of
knowing quite a few months in advance that they
were going to die, which is a great gift. Both of them
began to fade away. When things began to slip away
on Jack, when his body stopped working well for him,
he was angry at the beginning, but then something
started to shift, and he began to relax. When it was
clear that everything was dissolving and slipping
away, he seemed to get happier and happier. It felt as
if he were letting go of all the things that had kept
him separate from his basic goodness, letting every-
thing go. He would say things like, “There’s nothing
to do, there’s nothing to want,” and he would start to
laugh. Day by day he wasted away more, but that was
not a fundamental problem; this dissolving was very
liberating for him.
The external situation was the same for Jill, but
she got scared, and she began to struggle against the
whole process. As her body started to waste away and
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Teachings for Life and Death

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there was less to hold on to, she became more grim
and terrified, clenching her teeth and her hands. She
was facing a vast abyss and was going to be pushed
over into it, and she was screaming with terror, “No!
No! No!”
I understood why I practice: we can discover the
process of letting go and relaxing during our lifetime.
In fact, that’s the way to live: stop struggling against
the fact that things are slipping through our fingers.
Stop struggling against the fact that nothing’s solid to
begin with and things don’t last. Knowing that can
give us a lot of space and a lot of room if we can relax
with it instead of screaming and struggling against it.
The five strengths are instruction on how to live
and how to die. Actually, there’s no difference. The
same good advice applies to both, because if you
know how to die then you know how to live and if you
know how to live then you’ll know how to die. Suzuki
Roshi said, “Just be willing to die over and over
again.” As each breath goes out, let it be the end of
that moment and the birth of something new. All
those thoughts, as they come up, just see them and
let them go, let the whole story line die; let the space
for something new arise. The five strengths address
how to give up trying all the time to grasp what’s un-
graspable and actually relax into the space that’s
there. Then what do we find? Maybe that’s the point.
We’re afraid to find out.