It is easy to speak of bodhicitta, but far more difficult to live it. Our bodhicitta is often unstable, and at times even hypocritical. I have experienced this many times. One example I often mention happened years ago when I drove my BMW 740 out one day. Before leaving home, I had been contemplating bodhicitta before a thangka, so deeply moved that tears streamed down my face. Yet, at a gas station, another car rear-ended mine.
At that moment, the momentum of my practice left was still present, and I genuinely felt like a bodhisattva. I thought to myself, "He is just an ordinary sentient being. As long as he was polite about it, I would not make an issue of it." But when I got out of the car, I found that he was a drunken troublemaker. Not only did he refuse to apologize, he even insisted that my car had stopped too quickly. My anger flared up instantly. I rushed over, dragged him out of his car, and beat him up mercilessly. Only afterward did I suddenly realize, "Oh dear! He, too, has been my mother!"
I have done many things like this. From then on, I no longer believed that I possessed genuine bodhicitta. Whenever I carefully examined myself, I would always discover some extremely ugly aspects within my mental continuum. I am like this—what about you? Perhaps you are not. But you must observe yourself honestly and never deceive yourself.
Generating bodhicitta is never a bad thing. As the saying goes: "If you wish to benefit yourself in the long run, the key is to benefit others for the time being." Whether your bodhicitta is genuine or not, at the very least, at the moment you arouse it, your intention is directed toward benefiting others. Ultimately, however, the Mahāyāna path is about benefiting others forever.
In reality, there is no truly existent "self" at all. Every thought of self-benefit is a deluded and unwise state of mind. It is precisely because of self-grasping (ātmagrāha) that we have come into this world. This tendency toward self-benefit is not a conceptual idea. Rather, without going through any process of thought, the mind directly projects a sense of "I" together with an image of that "I." From this arise endless suffering, inner conflict, and emotional turmoil, leaving us repeatedly struggled by all kinds of emotions.
Yet every practice on the Mahāyāna path is directed toward benefiting others. Such a mind driven by self-interest points in exactly the opposite direction. How, then, could it possibly give rise to Dharma joy? Even from a theoretical standpoint, we know that it is impossible.
Many of you here have practiced Buddhism for years. We constantly read teachings that instruct us to benefit others—but have we actually generated relatively genuine bodhicitta? Those of us who have received Vajrayāna precepts, have we broken them? Observe yourselves carefully.
If, instead of benefiting others, we devoted ourselves to ignoble and unwholesome actions, we are not benefiting ourselves at all. Rather, we are forging for our own future an incomparably solid cauldron filled with molten copper and burning iron. The object against which these actions are committed is extremely weighty. Yet we have only a few decades in this lifetime—we truly cannot afford to waste them.
— Excerpted and compiled from Genuine Bodhicitta and Conceptual Bodhicitta
This article is a preliminary translation draft and has not yet been reviewed or proofread by the speaker.
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