Ruling Your World

"RECENTLY I VISITED my friends Adam and Allie, the parents of two-year-old Javin. I asked them how parenthood was going, and they replied that what impressed them most was that Javin seemed to know things naturally. They said, “We didn’t teach him—nobody did. It’s got to have come from somewhere.” As human beings, we are so wise. Our minds are vast and profound. In the teachings on rulership, this innate wisdom is known as “basic goodness.” It is the natural, clear, uncluttered state of our being. We are all appointed with heaven—great openness and brilliance. Bringing this heaven down to earth, into our daily life, is how we rule our world. 

Dawa Sangpo, the first king of the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Shambhala, once supplicated the Buddha for spiritual guidance. He said, “I’m a king. I have a palace, a family, ministers, subjects, an army, and a treasury. I want to realize enlightenment, but I cannot abandon my responsibilities to pursue spiritual practice in a monastery. Please teach me how to use life in the world to become enlightened.” 

The Buddha assured the king that he would not have to become an ascetic or a monk in order to attain enlightenment. Indeed, he could practice a spiritual path while fulfilling his many responsibilities. He could become a sakyong—a ruler who rules by balancing heaven and earth. Heaven is wisdom. Earth is nitty-gritty experience. When we begin to mix wisdom into our secular life, we have success—both spiritual and worldly. The Buddha said to the king, “Don’t be biased. Look at the land and look at your people. If you can develop certainty in the indestructible basic goodness that lies at the heart of everything, then you can rule your world. But becoming a sakyong is a challenging path, since life in the world is full of decisions to make, as well as endless distractions.” Taking these instructions to heart, King Dawa Sangpo developed certainty in the view of basic goodness. This vision transformed his kingdom, for it brought inspiration and meaning to people’s lives. 

“My father, the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—who was born a monk and died a sakyong—led three hundred people out of Tibet in 1959, with the Chinese Communists on their heels. They climbed mountain after mountain, often through deep snow and bitter cold. They ran out of food, so they boiled and ate their yak-skin bags. Some people in the group died; some were captured by the Chinese. They lost many of their possessions, including a thousand-page manuscript on the Shambhala teachings that Rinpoche had written, which was swallowed by a river. According to my mother, in spite of the suffering, they were always cheerful. Finally they crossed the border into India. After enduring many more hardships, Rinpoche eventually came to the West, where he introduced these teachings. 

In raising me, my father applied the traditional guidelines that the Buddha had established in his instructions to Dawa Sangpo, continuing the Shambhala lineage of the bodhisattva-warrior and the enlightened ruler. This is a lineage of fearlessness: we are not afraid of our own power to unite heaven and earth. Certain teachings are made for certain times. The Shambhala teachings have appeared in the West at this particular time to pacify aggression, which obstructs our ability to love and care for one another. Aggression produces fear. Fear produces cowardice; we are afraid even of our own thoughts and are therefore ruled by them. The teachings of Shambhala tell us how to establish peace and confidence. In the potential to discover basic goodness and to bring forth wisdom and compassion in our daily life, we all have what we need to become a sakyong—a Tibetan word that means “earth-protector.” What we are protecting is the earth of our innate sanity. 

If ruling our world stems from developing certainty in our sanity, how do we discover it? The Shambhala teachings instruct us to “put our mind of fearfulness in the cradle of loving-kindness.” The most loving environment we can create is on the meditation seat. My father taught me to meditate when I was a child. At the beginning, this meant simply taking time out of my day to reflect on my feelings. Then I learned to stabilize my mind by placing it on the breath. When I had accomplished the precision of this technique, he told me to contemplate impermanence, suffering, karma, selflessness, and compassion. When I was about twelve, he instructed me to meditate and contemplate for one hour a day. He later increased the sessions to two hours. At times I meditated for several days, and eventually for weeks and even months. Since meditation was to be the mainstay of my future vocation, I had the time to do it this way. 

When I was a teenager, I explained to my father that I wanted to go camping alone in the wilderness. After pondering it for a few days, he said that this would be a good time. As a parent, he was proud that I wanted to explore the world on my own, and he was concerned about my safety. He wanted to make sure I could carry a heavy backpack, so after loading me up, he had me run up and down the stairs a few times. Having satisfied his concerns, off I went, feeling exuberant. 

I hiked for about a week, rarely seeing anyone and encountering all kinds of foul weather—wind, rain, hail. I felt surprisingly happy. Having grown up in situations where there were many people around, I had always been tutored, fed, and served. Feeling alone helped me appreciate what others had done for me, and I also began to discover my own strength as a Shambhala warrior on my way to becoming a ruler. Nature was an excellent teacher, never giving an inch. If I wanted to eat, I had to make a meal; if I wanted to sleep, I had to think ahead and find an appropriate camping spot. 

Upon my return, people were relieved, excited, and proud. Although it had been a short trip, I had grown tremendously. Through all the dramatic weather and other challenges, I was left sitting with my mind. I had discovered my own confidence, which gave me confidence in my basic goodness.  My father also trained me in poetry and calligraphy, following the traditional guidelines for educating a future ruler. One day as we were leaning on a railing at our house in Colorado, looking out at a meadow and some pine trees, a hummingbird appeared. It fluttered in several directions and darted off.

My father turned to me and said, “Today I will teach you how to write poetry.” I have continued to practice and enjoy this art, as well as calligraphy. Such deepening arts teach us to express the inexpressible—love, impermanence, and beauty. Diving into our own profundity, bringing the precision of meditation into physical form, we discover the profundity of life. 

In addition, my father made sure that I trained in martial arts—the physical discipline of moving meditation that helps us become less insulated within our own mind. Practicing sports or martial arts gives us natural confidence. We develop a bond of kinship and appreciation with friends. Breathing fresh air and learning to synchronize mind and body help us develop a healthy sense of self, which allows us to further increase our confidence. We can then offer our understanding to others. I learned Japanese archery—kyudo. Initially, we were not allowed even to hold the bow and arrow. Then for the first year of practice, we shot at a target only six feet away, the idea being that if we could develop proper form, hitting the target would not be an issue. Eventually, we shot at a target seventy-five feet away. 

Raising a ruler differs from the conventional approach to education, which considers the mind an empty box waiting to be filled. My father once told one of my tutors that in raising a future sakyong or sakyong wangmo—earth-protector king or queen—we are educating the sky. The sky perceives, understands, and encompasses everything. There are no boundaries—only possibilities. Educating ourselves as sakyong is therefore not a laborious undertaking. It is filled with appreciation, curiosity, and delight. We are cultivating certainty in basic goodness and developing our noble qualities. When we are connected with basic goodness, it inspires our every breath, action, and thought. With the resulting brilliance and confidence, we can accomplish whatever we wish. This is how we rule our world…

AS A CHILD, I was struck by the story of the prince and the pauper. The Tibetan version of this story has it that the prince and the pauper are the same person. Through a series of mishaps, the prince grows up as a pauper, only later to discover that he is a child of the royal family and the future ruler of his kingdom. He was always a prince; he was never a pauper; the only thing that changed was his view. We are in a similar situation. We are all of royal birth. 

In the legend of Shambhala, there is a family of beings called the Rigdens, who have never strayed from basic goodness, a pure radiance that has never been stained by ignorance, anger, jealousy, or pride. The Rigdens are not some celestial entities; they represent the ultimate ruler within us all. Tibetan paintings of the kingdom of Shambhala show the Rigdens conquering the negativity of the dark age. They are often depicted sitting on thrones of diamonds, indicating unshakable possession of the awareness of basic goodness, our primordial nature, which is also known as the Great Eastern Sun. 

The Rigden king manifests wrathfully, but his armor is always gold, an expression of compassion. His sword represents the incisive wisdom that sees basic goodness. There are pennants on his helmet, which symbolize the courage it takes to bring windhorse—long life, good health, success, and happiness—to others. After the victory of the Rigdens, the story goes, the age of enlightenment arises. The Great Eastern Sun appears on the horizon. 

Whether we take this story as literal or metaphorical, the meaning is the same. We all have the potential to be enlightened rulers. The Buddha is an example of a human being who developed this potential. By sitting still and working with his mind, he uncovered essential truths and developed techniques to help the rest of us discover our ability to rule. Since I’m a Buddhist, he is my role model, but obviously basic goodness is not confined to any one tradition. It is the essence of everyone and everything. 

We all belong to the family of the Rigdens. Basic goodness, the shimmering brilliance of our being, is as clear as a mountain lake. But we’re not certain about our own goodness. We begin to stray from it as soon as we wake up in the morning, because our mind is unstable and bewildered. Our thoughts drag us around by a ring in our nose, as if we were cows in the Indian market. This is how we lose control of our lives. We don’t understand that the origin of happiness is right here in our mind. We might experience happiness at times, but we’re not sure how we got it, how to get it again, or how long it’s going to last when it comes. We live life in an anxious, haphazard state, always looking for happiness to arrive. 

When we are confused about the source of happiness, we start to blame the world for our dissatisfaction, expecting it to make us happy. Then we act in ways that bring more confusion and chaos into our life. When our mind is busy and discursive, thinking uncontrollably, we are engaging in a bad habit. We are stirring up the mud of jealousy, anger, and pride. Then the mind has no choice but to become familiar with the language of negativity and develop it further. 

When desire or anger takes our mind and says, “You’re coming with me,” we become paupers. The pauper wakes up each morning with the thought “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” This meditation resonates through our day like a heartbeat. We think, “Will this food make me happy?” “Will this movie make me happy?” “Will this person make me happy?” “Will this new sweater make me happy?” “What about me?” becomes the motivating force of our activity. 

Occasionally when I meet with meditation students, their questions show that they are approaching even spiritual practice as a way to make themselves happy. Is my yoga, my tai chi, my meditation making “me” feel better? They are simply using a new guise to perpetuate the old habit of putting themselves first. This self-infatuated approach is like using unclean fuel. When our motivation is to make “me” happy, the engines of our life run rough. Our self-obsession makes us stressed and ill. The magnet of “What about me?” draws away windhorse—our ability to bring about success—and our mind becomes very small. We lose touch with earth—our potential to give our life meaning—so there’s no place for true happiness to land. 

In Tibet, trying to achieve happiness without understanding the cause of happiness is called lotok, “backward.” It’s like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars—happiness doesn’t get bigger and closer, it gets smaller and farther away. What makes the mind of “me” so small is confused emotion, in Sanskrit, klesha—anger, desire, ignorance, and pride. These are obscurations that block our view of basic goodness. They are all very familiar and friendly to us. For many of us, they are simply the tools by which we engage in life. We may think that they’re the only tools we have—that pushing hard and clinging tight is the secret to success. This confusion doesn’t always show up as a temper tantrum. It also manifests as insidious discursiveness - going over things again and again in our mind, or jumping from one thought to another with “What about me?” playing in the background. 

Being fooled into trying to make things work out for “me” is called samsara. This is a Sanskrit word that describes an endless dark age in which we are completely distracted by the agitation that comes from trying to make “me” happy. Our mind is constantly volleying between irritation and desire, jealousy and pride. We are unhappy with who we are, and we are trying to destroy our own suffering, which reflects our basic discontent. As we indulge in this negativity, our mind becomes thick with contamination. This contamination manifests as stress—lack of peace. It is fueled by fear—fear of not knowing what will happen to “me.” With the ambition to get what we want and to avoid what we don’t, our mind becomes very speedy. We act in ways that hurt others and ourselves. Bewilderment rules our days and nights.

We keep imagining that a love affair, a new job, a thinner body, or a vacation is going to lead to happiness. When we get what we want, we feel good, and we become attached. Then the situation changes, and we feel angry. Or somebody else’s relationship, job, or body looks better than ours, and we feel jealous. When we’re fooled by the world of appearances, we aren’t seeing beyond the surface. Our changing mind keeps us trapped in suffering, the nitpicky details. We lose our desire for deepening and begin to consider the smallest, most irrelevant things important. We’d rather hear a piece of gossip about a celebrity we’ll never meet than contemplate the truth. We are more interested in listening to a new song on the radio than in hearing instruction about how to bring meaning to our life. If somebody tries to give us advice, we lash out. Slowing down and relating to life through a discipline like meditation seems like a frivolous luxury.”

~ Sakyong Mipham, Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life