Milarepa and Buddhist Under-Achievers

 

By Tim Cooper

I was on the point of abandoning Buddhism a few months ago.

I’d hit a brick wall. Every time I sat down to meditate, I was flooded with anxiety. The mind seemed to take more pleasure in intrusive thoughts, fears I hadn’t felt for decades and an odd reluctance to even look at the cover of a book on Buddhism.

It was a sad time, partly because I had pinned so many hopes on the Dharma. There was no joy in crawling along a loop of wanting to progress but feeling scared of sitting down and meditating, then feeling that you’re worthless because of a fear that doesn’t even have a name, and avoiding anything to do with the Dharma for one more day, once again wanting to progress—but feeling scared.

Part of the problem was that a part of me wanted to turn its back on what I call, “the Mahayana Vajrayana bullshit,” with its constant emphasis on what I understood as the obligation to always be nice.

They call it bodhicitta, I call it being a creep. Always giving, always being so fucking nice, seeing everyone as your mother, dedicating every fucking meditation to other beings, resigning yourself to never really forming part of a viable sangha because the only places nearby want a fuck of a lot of money from you to listen to individuals whose photos show a suspiciously fixed smile.

And if you fuck up, watch out; there’s always some fire and brimstone lama who warns you of the consequences of not being nice and thinking nasty thoughts.

Whoever trotted out the same old platitudes about Buddhism being essentially a very modern, pragmatic type of therapeutic practice obviously hasn’t read Lama Zopa Rinpoche, or prefers to brush him under the money-making rug for rich liberal agnostics. This constant insistence on niceness and the eternal punishments awaiting you for not being nice is hard to swallow when you don’t love your mother, misanthropy is like a canker in the soul and your bank statement says “pay us, you swine.”

The constant background whine of negativity was further compounded by watching far too many videos of American Buddhist nuns with saccharine voices, who very gently (but firmly) remind you of the need to always be nice and always dedicate your meditations to others and develop lots and lots of bodhicitta. Those patronising Californian tones reminded me of pompous primary school teachers who were always going on about having to share your lunchtime sandwiches and not look at the girls’ knickers.

My defense mechanism back then was to turn into Bart Simpson.

A nasty little under-achiever. A few kids seemed to genuinely like me and want to be in my company. I did not want to be in theirs.

At the tender age of 18, tortured by hormones and family issues, I discovered The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, and discovered there and then that Buddhism was for me. It all made perfect sense. Life really was about being suspended from a wild strawberry bush on a cliff face, with one tiger above and another waiting below, and tasting that delicious strawberry.

The Here and Now. But I had a lot more underachieving to do until I finally got tired of wanking about and started to wander around the spiritual shopping mall. So then with singular intelligence and careful forward planning, I chose Vajrayana Buddhism: expensive, full of middle-class dilettantes and with the underlying obligation of always having to be nice: nice when I meditate, nice on the street, nice to my partner, nice to every fucker.

Nice, nice, nice.

I live in what is fast becoming a problematic district.

More drugs, more loud cars, more Latin Kings, more narcopisos (squatted apartments where people sell drugs, kill each other and throw refrigerators out of fourth floor windows). I sometimes wonder how the Venerable Sangye Khadro would feel about her infinite potential for bodhicitta in a neighbourhood where the results of stagflation have made barely contained aggression a fashion accessory?

I firmly agree with the contributors on TTB who feel that Western Buddhism has become a spiritual playground for rich liberals. In Spain it’s no different: tireless seekers of the truth financed by pappy’s hard work as a lawyer defending the right of multinationals to not pay their taxes.

Two things are immediately visible when you first meet someone: one is poverty and the other is wealth. You can smell them both, and many Spanish Buddhists reek of money.

So, things came to a head in February.

It was all too much. I had to give in. I was tired of feeling disappointed with myself, with the Buddhist market place and the lack of any tangible progress. But then I saw a picture of Milarepa on my wall—one that I’d pinned up there many years ago. There he was, sitting on a rug, in that classical posture, one hand cupped to an ear as if he was listening to something hard to hear, like my moaning and whining.

Milarepa was another underachiever.

At an early age, his mother sent him off to learn black magic from a lama and take revenge on the people that had royally ripped his family off and left them in poverty. Milarepa was a good son, so he went off to learn how to kill aunts, uncles and all their benighted offspring.

One spell he cast caused an earthquake that killed 35 guests at a local wedding. He summoned up hailstorms to destroy crops and ruin his enemies. Bad karma—the type that I imagine produces a few sleepless nights, and certainly not the negative karma caused by wondering if the action of buying a new Tesla was nice, given that Musk is not a nice person, which is the type of bad karma that gives the current breed of spiritual dilettantes some serious insomnia.

A man of his time, he obeyed his mother and become a serial killer.

Then something inside him said that enough was enough. His biography does not go into a lot of detail about the process, although there is a wonderful comment of his that says, “I felt remorse for the evils I had committed through casting black magic and hailstorms. I thought about dharma so intensely that during the day I forgot to eat. If I went out, I wanted to stay in. If I stayed in, I wanted to go out. At night I was so filled with world-weariness and renunciation that I was unable to sleep.”

Ring a bell?

So, he looked for someone who could get him out of his mess. His first encounter was with a lama who sounds alarmingly like a lot of the so-called gurus out there today. Meditate a bit, only if you want, and if your karma is good, don’t even bother to meditate, just chill, sleep in and you’ll be a buddha in no time. It didn’t take long for him and his Esalen guru to realise that it wasn’t working, so he went off to seek Marpa, a lama, translator and an altogether tougher proposition.

Marpa treated him badly, ordered him to build four-story towers and then knock them down, one after another, built one, knock it down, build another, knock it down…

A serial killer has a lot of bad shit to work off.

Milarepa did as he was told and built towers and demolished them, ploughed fields and bore the brunt of Marpa’s bad temper. Finally, he was sent off to meditate in a cave. He worked hard, he faced all manner of dangers: tigers, demons, bandits. His skin went green from a diet of nettles.

One day he passed to the other side and became a buddha, and the rest is history. He is now a Tibetan national hero. The bad guy, the underachiever, became an enlightened yogi, a saint.

The anxiety reached a stage where I went back to my NGO and began to spend more time with other underachievers like me. One of the many good outcomes was that I started meditating again.

I sometimes wonder if we Western Buddhists are so busy intellectualising about the whys and wherefores of the Dharma, and so concerned about our traumas and whiny needs to not have our mental constructs shaken, that we lose sight of something as simple as putting yourself to one side and getting your hands dirty. Because that’s what really makes you happy

To my mind the message in Milarepa’s story is that change is not easy.

You need courage and faith to face up to your nastiness and not give up. And you need to put in the work, and you will have to face up to your inner demons, and try in some way to put others before yourself, although you will never really get to be nice.

Milarepa was the man that made me think I had a chance to change through Buddhism and he still does.

 

Tim Cooper is a more or less practicing Buddhist and recovering alcoholic who’s lived in Spain for over half his life. After many years of stumbling about in the lush gardens of Buddhism, picking one flower here and another flower there, he finally settled down and is trying to make sense of it all in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and generally trying to be a bit nicer. He works as a translator, teacher and facilitator with fellow ex-drunks. He likes flowers, rugby, bad science fiction films and cooking. He also likes to think he writes like Hemingway, but the rejection slips tell another story.

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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