Last month I landed back in Beijing from a month of holidays outside the country. I flew from the shores of Como Lake to the hyper luxury empty airport of Doha and I finally landed at Beijing airport, where I had to stand in a line for two hours with a crowd of thousands of passengers. When my wife got a WhatsApp snapshot of the Capital Airport mess, she told me ‘welcome to the bodhicitta bootcamp!’. I have to admit there’s not better definition of life in the megacity.
I’ve learned the word bodhicitta since one year or so, since buddhist meditation has been easing my life in the metropolis. For those unfamiliar with spiritual jargon, bodhicitta means ‘a spontaneous wish to attain enlightenment motivated by great compassion for all sentient beings, accompanied by a falling away of the attachment to the illusion of an inherently existing self’ (a note for dharma freaks: I consider so-called ‘relative bodhicitta’ and I don’t dig into ‘absolute bodhicitta’, shunyata etc.).
When you live in an overcrowded place, when the frenzy pace of life swallows your time and the overwhelming distances restrict your interactions to a bunch of screens, the ‘lack of compassion for all sentient beings’ can easily arise.
How to cope with frustration, rushes of merciless violence and evil thoughts is almost a daily conversation topic with my wife and many friends living in Beijing.
How can you be compassionate when you politely tell your neighbour than smoking is not allowed in the doorway and he replies ‘Oh, your Chinese is so great’ while taking another drag from his ciggy, when you get to ground level and a numb crowd squeezes you back inside the elevator, when you ride your bike and see death at every crossing because nobody cares about rules or bother to see who is behind, when you are doing your groceries and fierce discount-hungry grandmas drive their shopping carts into your hip?
The list of possible examples is almost never-ending. And when you talk about ego attachment, let’s just mention the flying drops of loud spits which regularly remind you that your ego goes pretty unnoticed.
But instead of acknowledging the ‘illusion of an inherently existing self’, let the attachment fall, empathise with the equally transparent individuals surrounding you, the first natural reaction is that you armour yourself in the ego bubble and from there you curse a world which does not make sense, or in other words, it does not represent the perfect fulfilment of your desires.
In this scenario others become enemies, strangers who actively conspire to make your life miserable, robots programmed to systematically piss you off, and it’s easy to imagine how the bubble can become thicker and thicker. And there, I admit my wife and I often discuss about the best ways to react to these daily offenses. The range of lucubrated reactions can vary from possible sarcastic comments, lectures from our ‘higher’ moral ground, plain and simple retaliation and sometimes - and I regret about it - fantasies of mass murder or apocalyptic revenge.
Now you will agree that all these options are not very appropriate nor compassionate and far from being ego-less.
There I came up with the idea of a ‘bodhicitta counter’, not an APP or a fancy wearable, but just an effort of awareness. Let’s say you start the day with your bodhicitta at 108 points (like the number of beads in a buddhist mala), any action or thought which reinforces your sense of separation from other fellow sentient beings gets your bodhicitta down, any action or thought which puts aside your ego-obsession gets your points up. Our family code to signal a ‘bodhicitta infringement’ and a loss of ‘bodhicitta’ points is say the made up word ‘beppo’ (the onomatopoeia of screw-up in many online games, but obviously you can set whatever alarm sound/code word you like)
i.e. Lovely sunny days, we have a family ride to the park, the usual SUV asshole driver steers right from the very left of the road, cutting four lanes and threatening your life while talking on his/her mobile. My wife yells ‘fuck you until your 18th generation’ <beppo> I focus on the ‘sweet’ vision of the driver screaming while trapped in a lump of metal scraps <beppo> and two points of bodhicitta are gone! (consider that this is something which can happen multiple times in a single day and you easily lose 30% of your bodhicitta just while navigating through urban traffic).
We’ve realised this works pretty well in helping yourself to acknowledge your repressed anger, your lack of empathy for fellow human beings and ultimately also to improve your life: you become more patient, less easily overwhelmed by your sudden reactions and emotions, better armoured to make a decent living in a megacity.
Far from being a guideline for everybody, here are my personal tips to keep my bodhicitta counter under control (and I encourage everyone who is reading this, to add his/her tips):
1) thoughts naturally come and go like waves, don’t grasp onto them. Sometimes we get stuck in the loop of remembering bad happenings of the past, dreaming of alternative scenario or filling future ones with anxiety. “That guy I don’t even know told me I’ve aged, he was so mean, who the fuck he thinks he is to tell me something like that, why did he do that? Why didn’t I react accordingly”… “I should have told him that at least I’m not a fat bold asshole like him!”; or ”My job interview might go very wrong, what if I get there late, what if other candidates are much more experienced than I am, what if I screw this up and can’t find anything else…” the train of thoughts can easily and quickly get to the future scenario where you are unemployed, living alone under a bridge and your bold fat friend drives by just to tell you how you look exactly like his grandpa when Alzheimer’s took over.
2) Things can actually get worse in the real world, and sometimes that’s unavoidable. But why shall I punish myself for a pain I have already suffered or for a possible one to come? Sometimes I think of those Italian hyper-protective moms who see their kid falling on the ground and - out of loving fear - instead of promptly comforting him, they scold him right away and give him a good slap: ‘I told you not to run, you see, why the hell did you do that!” Sometimes I feel we behave like those moms: instead of comforting ourselves for past or future sorrows and putting them behind our back, we reiterate a pain we have already experience or imagine future ones, in a few words we don’t help up the kid who stumbled and fell, but we beat him up instead! That is wrong and it fosters resentment. Compassion has to be applied toward other human beings but a good start is to be compassionate about ourselves.
3) The world is not conspiring against you, if something goes wrong, it is not necessarily the beginning of Armageddon, never indulge in self-pity.
4) People are not constantly plotting ways to piss you off, sometimes there is no deliberate intention behind actions which upset you, sometimes there is a pile of rightful explanations to others’ seemingly hostile behaviour. You never know, maybe the driver who cut in on you was just rushing to the hospital to see his kid, and in that moment his thoughts were way too trapped in anguish to notice you. Here and there we are all too trapped in our thoughts to notice other ‘sentient beings’ around us: don’t judge too quickly, because…
5) ...you don’t have the monopoly over suffering.
6) If a difficult situation cannot be changed because it is beyond your control, just accept it instead of overthinking. We have a limited amount of energy, so we would better use them in meaningful directions.
7) If a situation can be changed, then commit yourself to change it and act accordingly. This is kind of the hardest part, since it is always easier to be an ‘enlightened being' when you just have to sit still and do nothing. Mindfulness and bodhicitta are not meant to be the key to a carefree life of inaction and procrastination (for that you can just wish for a next life as a house cat).
8) Do not be proud for your good deeds, for the mala hanging on your neck, for your new “mindfulness club” membership, for your knowledge of fancy Sanskrit words, for your affiliation to a specific guru or school, and last but not least for your bodhicitta counting always staying high. When you bath in wisdom, make it get to your bones instead of keeping it on your skin, just to be showed off like a great suntan. Be always aware of your reactions, keep an eye on them. The path is never-ending for the most and if by the end of the day you always have 108 points, there is a good chance that your bodhicitta meter has been rigged… and you should know who did it.
Namaste!
