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in his eyes; she never had any sense of him as a per-
son. It was all for display, and it hurt. So that’s part of
the point of this slogan. You have to question what’s
behind your action, especially if it is making a big
splash.
Cultivating patience. The last of the three basic prin-
ciples is to cultivate patience, which is the same as
cultivating nonaggression. Patience and nonaggres-
sion are basically encouragement to wait. Sometimes
I think of tonglen that way. You are in a situation in
which you would normally just yell back or throw
something or think of the person you are with in the
same old stuck way. Instead it occurs to you to begin
to do the exchange for other. This whole solid sense
of self and other begins to get addressed when you
cultivate patience. You learn to pause, learn to wait,
learn to listen, and learn to look, allowing yourself
and others some space—just slowing down the cam-
era instead of speeding it up.
It’s a little bit like the old advice to count to ten be-
fore you say something; it makes you pause. If you
become afraid or angry, there is a natural kind of
adrenalin principle, when the camera actually starts
to speed up. The speeding up itself can bring you
back to the present. You can use it as a reminder just
to slow down and listen and look and wait and de-
velop patience.
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“Abandon poisonous food” and “Don’t make gods into
demons” are warnings that only you know whether
what you are doing is good practice (“gods” or “good
food”). Anything could be used to build yourself up
and smooth things over and calm things down or to
keep everything under control. Good food becomes
poisonous food and gods become demons when you
use them to keep yourself in that room with the doors
and windows closed.
Another slogan that concerns compassionate action
is “Work with the greatest defilements first.” Devel-
oping loving-kindness for yourself is the basis for
compassionate communication and relationship.
The time is now, not later. The greatest defilement is
what you consider to be the greatest obstacle. This
slogan is suggesting that you start where you feel
most stuck. Making friends with that will begin to
automatically take care of the smaller obstacles.
Because the larger obstacles like rage or jealousy
or terror are so dramatic, their vividness itself may be
a reminder to work with the practice of tonglen. We
may so take for granted the multitude of minor daily
irritations that we don’t even think of them as some-
thing to work with. To some degree they are the hard-
est obstacles to work with because they don’t reveal
themselves. The only way you know that these are
arising is that you feel righteous indignation. Let
righteous indignation be your guide that someone is
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holding on to themselves, and that someone is prob-
ably you.
If you begin to work with the greater defilements,
or the major stuck places, these little ones tend to be-
come more obvious to you as well. Whereas if you try
to work with all of these little ones, they are like your
hands and your nose; you don’t even think of them as
anything but you, and there is no sense of them as ob-
stacle. You just buy them every time they happen.
Our greatest obstacles are also our greatest wis-
dom. In all the unwanted stuff there is something
sharp and penetrating; there’s great wisdom there.
Suppose anger or rage is what we consider our great-
est obstacle, or maybe it’s addiction and craving. This
breeds all kinds of conflict and tension and stress,
but at the same time it has a penetrating quality that
cuts through all of the confusion and delusion. It’s
both things at once.
When you realize that your greatest defilement is
facing you and there seems no way to get out of it be-
cause it’s so big, the instruction is, let go of the story
line, let go of the conversation, and own your feeling
completely. Let the words go and return to the essen-
tial quality of the underlying stuff. That’s the notion
of the inbreath, the notion of making friends with
ourselves at a profound level. In the process we are
making friends with all sentient beings, because that
is what life is made of. Working with the greater de-
filements first is saying that now is the time, and also
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