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Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions
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somehow open up the situation and work in an hon-
est, fearless way with what’s going on. Instead we just
give our burden to somebody else and ask them to
hold it. It’s called passing the buck.
The next slogan is “Don’t act with a twist.” It means
don’t be devious, but it’s similar to those slogans
about not eating poisonous food or turning gods into
demons. You’re willing to drive all blames into your-
self very publicly so everyone will notice, because
you want people to think well of you. Your motivation
is to get others to think that you’re a great person,
which is the “twist.” Or there’s a person who’s doing
you wrong, and you remember lojong, but there’s a
twist. You don’t say, “Buzz off, Juanita,” or anything
harsh. You’re this sweet person who wins everyone’s
admiration, but the other side of this is that they dis-
like Juanita more and more for mistreating you. It’s as
if you set Juanita up by acting like a saint. That’s the
idea of acting with a twist. There are all kinds of ways
to get sweet revenge.
Finally, “Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your
own happiness,” which is to say, “Don’t seek others’
pain as a way to get happiness for yourself.” We are
glad when the troublemakers in our lives get hit by a
truck or go bankrupt, or anything of that nature. I
have a few people in my life who fall into this cate-
gory, and I’m amazed at how happy I am when one of
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them writes me a letter and tells me that things are
going badly. Conversely, I feel haunted by distaste
when I hear that things are going well for them.
There’s still the memory of how they hurt me, and I
wish they would just continue to go downhill and
drop dead, painfully. That’s how we seek others’ pain
as the limbs of our own happiness.
These slogans are a curious study of the human
species. They reveal that we need to be very honest
about what we do. Through seeing these things we
can begin to have a lot of compassion, because in
studying ourselves we’re studying the whole human
race. The monastic rules give us insight into what all
these saintly monks and nuns were like at the time of
the Buddha. There are rules like Don’t cover your
meat with rice so that the server will give you more
meat, thinking that you don’t have any. Don’t irritate
your roommate on purpose to get the person to leave
so that you’ll have the room to yourself. These are ac-
tually rules, the code for the monks and nuns coming
from the time of the Buddha.
All the cartoons in the world and all the funny
movies are made out of what this particular group of
slogans is saying. When we are doing things like this,
either we don’t see it or we do see it and feel as if
we’ve committed a sin, so we either zone out or make
a big deal: “I malign others. I’m not fit to live on this
earth. What a burden. The more I know myself, the
more I see. I’m just continually gossiping. There’s no
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hope for me. Oy vey.” However, we can also just see
what we do—not only with honesty but also with a
sense of humor—and then keep going and not make
a whole identity out of it.
However, we’re still left with a question: when I
feel my worst—when I feel jealous or like I need to
get revenge—how do I give my best? The first step is
to dive into the experience of feeling bad. Make
friends with that feeling. The next step is to learn to
communicate with the people that you feel are caus-
ing your pain and misery—not to learn how to prove
them wrong and yourself right but how to communi-
cate from the heart. This is a lifetime’s journey, and 
a profound one; it’s not something that happens
quickly or easily.
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