Read Online Into the Heart of Life by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo - Free Book Online Page A

of a king in ancient India. He had a palace, concubines, gold, silver, jewels, silks, and all the nice things that kings have. He also had a brahmin guru, who was extremely ascetic. All that this brahmin owned was a clay bowl, which he used as a begging bowl.
    One day, the king and his guru were sitting under a tree in the garden when the servants came running up and cried, “Oh Maharaja, Your Majesty, come quickly, the whole palace is in flames! Please come quickly!”
    The king replied, “Don’t bother me now—I’m studying the Dharma with my guru. You go and deal with the fire.”
    But the guru jumped up and cried, “What do you mean? I left my bowl in the palace!”
    What we’re talking about is the mind. We’re not talking about possessions. Possessions and things are innocent; they are not the problem. It doesn’t matter how much we own or what we don’t own: it’s our attachment to what we own which is the problem. If we lose everything tomorrow and say, “Oh there we are, easy come and easy go,” there’s no problem; we’re not caught. But if we are distressed, that is a problem.
    Clinging to things and to people reveals our fear of losing them. And when we do lose them, we grieve. Instead of holding things so tightly, we can hold them more lightly. Then while we have these things, while we have these relationships, we enjoy them. We treasure them. But if they go, well, that’s the flow of things. When there is no hope or fear in the mind, the mind is free. It’s our greedy, grasping mind that is the problem.
    There’s a story about a kind of monkey trap which they use in Asia. It’s a hollowed-out coconut which is nailed to a tree or a stake. This coconut has a little hole in it just big enough for a monkey to put his hand in, and inside the coconut they put something sweet. And so the monkey comes along, smells the bait, puts his hand into the hole, and grasps the sweet. So now he has a fist holding the sweet. But when he tries to withdraw his fist through the hole, he can’t. So he’s caught. And then the hunters come and just pick him up.
    Nothing is holding that monkey to the coconut. He could just let go of the sweet and be out and away. But the greed in his mind, even with his fear of the hunters, will not let him let go. He wants to go, but he also wants to have the sweet. And that’s our predicament. Nothing but our insecure and grasping mind is holding us to our hopes and fears. This is a very fundamental and important point, because we are trained to think that satisfying our desires is the way to happiness. Actually, to go beyond desire is the way to happiness. Even in relationships, if we’re not holding on, if we’re not clinging, if we are thinking more of how we can give joy to the other rather than how they can give joy to us, then that also makes our relationships much more open and spacious, much more free. All that jealousy and fear are gone.
    In the East, no one ever asked me, “Why on earth did you go live in a cave?” Only in the West do people ask that question. To an Asian, it’s obvious. But because our society fantasizes this glamour of success and wealth, having so much and so many possessions, our whole psyche becomes distorted. We are continually creating this outer glittering image which has little connection with what’s going on inside that image. It’s just the external manifestation of success. I have met a number of very wealthy, successful, and famous people, but they were not particularly happy people. They might be the envy of many, but actually they came to talk to me about all their problems.
    We live in our mind. We spend so much time buying nice houses, decorating them according to our desires, making everything look very nice. We keep them clean, well-furnished, and beautifully decorated, and we show them with pride to other people. But actually, we don’t live in our houses, we live in our minds. We also spend a lot of time on our physical