The Four Immeasurables: Cultivating a Boundless Heart by B. Alan Wallace

Author:B. Alan Wallace
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Snow Lion Publications
Published: 2004-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

THE ADVANTAGES OF A LAY PERSON IN THE

PRACTICE OF LOVING-KINDNESS

One of my beloved teachers, the late Tara Rinpoche, an extremely warm person as well as a great scholar and contemplative, addressed this issue in the cultivation of loving-kindness. Having been a monk since he was a child, he had the following observations to make about a monastic route towards the cultivation of loving-kindness, as opposed to a lay route. For a monk or nun, part of the motivation for removing oneself from family and becoming homeless is to develop this sense of evenness, an impartiality to those near and far. The idea is to develop a sense of kinship equally with everyone, as opposed to favoring a family for which one has a special responsibility to protect and care for. So one viable avenue for cultivating loving-kindness with impartiality is to simply withdraw yourself from personal attachments. You remove yourself physically by going to a monastery. Then, from that place of neutrality, you develop a sense of kinship, of lovingkindness and compassion for all: for your own family, and for all other beings as well.

Tara Rinpoche was telling this to a roomful of lay people, and he said that there is also another viable avenue that works. That is, one takes a spouse, has children perhaps, and remains a lay person. In that case you now have a special obligation to your own spouse that you don't have to other men or women. You have an obligation to take care of your children with a special care and affection that you don't have for other children. In fact, if you treated your own children as you treated all other children you would probably be a rotten parent. And this path is the most appropriate for some people because, by entering into such intimate relationships with a spouse and children, there is an opportunity to draw forth loving-kindness that might otherwise not emerge at all. There are some pretty crusty monks around who never get around to loving anybody. Having been a monk myself for fourteen years and a solitary monk for quite a long time, I can tell you that when you are living alone for months and months on end, you gain a very high degree of control over your immediate environment. You know exactly how much granola is in the can. Nobody's going to surprise you by saying: "You ate up all the granola? What about me?" You know that you can turn on the heater and you don't have to think about whether anyone else is too hot at night.

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