Start Where You Are

Empty Boat

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throughout every day of our lives! This gift is given
to us by the unexpected circumstances referred to
in this slogan.
After the gap, when you’ve begun to talk to your-
self again—”That horrible person” or “Wasn’t that
wonderful that he allowed me to rest my mind in the
nature of alaya?”—you could catch yourself and start
to do tonglen practice. If you’re veering off toward
anger, resentment, any of the more unwanted “nega-
tive” feelings, getting really uptight and so forth, you
could remember tonglen and the lojong logic and
breathe in and get in touch with your feeling. Let the
story line go and get in touch. If you start talking to
yourself about what a wonderful thing just hap-
pened, you could remember and send that out and
share that sense of delight.
Usually we’re so caught up in ourselves, we’re
hanging on to ourselves so tightly, that it takes a
Mack truck knocking us down to wake us up and
stop our minds. But really, as you begin to practice, it
could just take the wind blowing the curtain. The
surprise can be something very gentle, just a shift of
attention. Something just catches your eye and your
attention shifts, and you can rest your mind in the
nature of alaya. When you start talking to yourself
again, you can practice tonglen.
The surprise comes in pleasant and unpleasant
forms—it doesn’t really matter how. The point is
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that it comes out of the blue. You’re walking down
the street, caught in tunnel vision—talking to your-
self—and not noticing anything, and even the croak
of a raven can wake you up out of your daydream,
which is often very thick, very resentful. Something
just pops it; a car backfires, and for a moment you
look up and see the sky and people’s faces and traf-
fic going by and the trees. Whatever is happening
there, suddenly you see this big world outside of
your tunnel vision.
I had an interesting experience of something sur-
prising me like this on retreat. It was a very strong ex-
perience of shunyata, the complete emptiness of
things. I had just finished my evening practice. I had
been practicing all day, after which you might think I
would be in a calm, saintly state of mind. But as I
came out of my room and started to walk down the
hall, I saw that in our serving area someone had left
dirty dishes. I started to get really angry.
Now, in this retreat we put our name on our
dishes. Everyone has a plate and a bowl and a mug
and a knife and a fork and a spoon, and they all have
our name on them. So I was walking down and I
was trying to see whose name was on those dishes. I
was already pretty sure whose name was on them,
because there was only one woman of our group of
eight who would leave such a mess. She was always
just leaving things around for other people to clean
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up. Who did she think was going to wash these
dishes, her mother? Did she think we were all her
slaves? I was really getting into this. I was thinking,
“I’ve known her for a long time, and everyone thinks
she’s a senior practitioner, but actually she might as
well have never meditated for the way she’s so in-
considerate of everybody else on this planet.”
When I got to the sink, I looked at the plate, and
the name on it was “Pema,” and the name on the cup
was “Pema,” and the name on the fork was “Pema,”
and the name on the knife was “Pema.” It was all
mine! Needless to say, that cut my trip considerably.
It also stopped my mind.
There’s a Zen story in which a man is enjoying him-
self on a river at dusk. He sees another boat coming
down the river toward him. At first it seems so nice to
him that someone else is also enjoying the river on a
nice summer evening. Then he realizes that the boat
is coming right toward him, faster and faster. He be-
gins to get upset and starts to yell, “Hey, hey, watch
out! For Pete’s sake, turn aside!” But the boat just
comes faster and faster, right toward him. By this
time he’s standing up in his boat, screaming and
shaking his fist, and then the boat smashes right into
him. He sees that it’s an empty boat.
This is the classic story of our whole life situation.
There are a lot of empty boats out there that we’re al-
ways screaming at and shaking our fists at. Instead,