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Resource Index | Left Brain | Right Brain | Courses | Site Directory Balancing Spiritual Life with "Ordinary" Life -- by Catherine Jetsun Yeshe The following was written in a personal letter composed in response to questions from a student who lives in Singapore. It outlines the general principles of balancing spiritual and "ordinary" life as we understand and implement them in our own lives at Friends of the Heart. The Buddhist path is frequently taught as though the lay life does not exist with the same potential as the monk's life. This may be true as far as the deepest meditative attainment is concerned but we need to ask the question whether or not the Buddha was teaching a way of life or a way of meditation attainment. I rather think the former. Ours is a secular age that does not support the great monastic tradition of old. So how are we to bring these two together to bring about the greatest happiness and peace for ourselves and the society in which we live? The Five Precepts, the Eightfold Noble Path and the Six Paramitas are "how-to" steps we can all take. Meditation studies should help us to live a full, well-rounded ordinary life if they are to fulfill their compassionate aim of bringing us out of suffering. Taking responsibility for our own economic well-being is part of fulfilling the ordinary life. Feeling successful in what we do contributes to the sense of ourselves as important and relevant. It does not have to feed the false ego, if we see that it only reinforces the operative self, a self we require in order to conduct day-to-day business in the ordinary world. Finding our particular vocation, one that is consistent with "right livelihood" (cf. Eightfold Noble Path), often comes later, after a period of training and testing of the student in a variety of ways, perhaps through a variety of jobs or a series of failures. These times of "failure" often provide us with the first opportunity to really understand the nature of suffering, for we cannot truly "know" something unless we experience it. This great and sometimes fearful teaching helps compassion to dawn in our hearts as it breaks through the veil of conditioned blindness and self-regard with which we commonly view the world. Remaining fixed in our views about where we should go and what we should do in the future only causes our suffering to deepen. It also causes some of us to retreat into a dream world wherein all problems are solved and we do nothing. Our meditation studies can sometimes be used to escape the need to take action and to seemingly validate inaction. At those times we need to remember Christ's teaching, "By their deeds ye shall know them" and motivate ourselves to take a decision and set in course a sequence of action, trusting and keeping faith in the principles of the Buddhist way of life. The longer I do this work, the more that I know that although we make decisions, we are not in charge and that the only way things work out is to keep the work of the Transcendent Compassionate Consciousness firmly in front of ourselves by continually taking refuge and raising bodhicitta. In this way, whatever happens to us, wherever we go and whatever we do, the strength of all the Buddhas goes with us, which, with the guidance of the Bodhisattvas, enables us to slowly emerge out of suffering and into a state of joy. SARVA MANGALAM - ALL BLESSINGS.
Catherine Jetsun Yeshe
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