finding our own true nature

excerpt from the wisdom of no escape by pema chodron

in one of the buddha's discourses, he talks about the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the really bad horse. the excellent horse, according to the sutra, moves before the whip even touches its back, just the shadow of the whip or the slightest sound from the driver is enough to make the horse move. the good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip on its back. the poor horse doesn't go until it feels pain, and the very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.

when shunryu suzuki tells the story in his book zen mind, beginner's mind, he says that when people hear this sutra, they always want to be the best horse, but actually, when we sit, it doesn't matter whether we're the best horse or the worst horse. he goes on to say that in fact, the really terrible horse is the best practitioner.

what i have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about being the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse. it's about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. whatever our quality is, that's our wealth and our beauty, that's what other people respond to.

once i had an opportunity to talk with chogyam trungpa, rinpoche, about the fact that i was not able to do my practice properly. i had just started the vajrayana practices and i was supposed to be visualizing. i couldn't visualize anything. i tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; i felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. i was quite miserable because everybody else seemed to be having all kinds of visualizations and doing very well. he said, 'i'm always suspicious of the ones who say everything's going well. if you think that things are going well, then it's usually some kind of arrogance. if it's too easy for you, you just relax. you don't make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.' so he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. when you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!

dainin katagiri roshi once told a story about his own experience of being the worst horse. when he first came to the united states from japan, he was a young monk in his late twenties. he had been a monk in japan - where everything was so precise, so clean, and so neat - for a long time. in the u.s., his students were hippies with long, unwashed hair and ragged clothes and no shoes. he didn't like them. he couldn't help it - he just couldn't stand those hippies. their style offended everything in him. he said, 'so all day i would give talks about compassion, and at night i would go home and weep and cry because i realized i had no compassion at all. because i didn't like my students, therefore i had to work much harder to develop my heart.' as suzuki roshi says in his talk, that's exactly the point: because we find ourselves to be the worst horse, we are inspired to try harder.

at gampo abbey we had a tibetan monk, lama sherap tendar, teaching us to play the tibetan musical instruments. we had forty-nine days in which to learn the music; we were also going to learn many other things, we thought, during that time. but as it turned out, for forty-nine days, twice a day, all we did was learn to play the cymbals and the drum and how they are played together. every day we would practice and practice. we would practice on our own, and then we would play for lama sherap, who would sit there with this pained little look on his face. then he would take our hands and show us how to play. then we would do it by ourselves, and he would sigh. this went on for forty-nine days. he never said that we were doing well, but he was very sweet and very gentle. finally, when it was all over and we had had our last performance, we were making toasts and remarks and lama sherap said, 'actually you were very good. you were very good right from the beginning, but i knew if i told you that you were good, you would stop trying.' he was right. he had such a gentle way of encouraging us that it didn't make us lose heart. it just made us feel that he knew the proper way to play the cymbals; he'd been playing these cymbals since he was a little boy, and we just had to keep trying. so for forty-nine days we were really worked hard.

we can work with ourselves in the same way. we don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse. we could be very sympathetic with that and use it as a motivation to keep trying to develop ourselves, to find our own true nature. not only will we find our own true nature, but we'll learn about other people, because in our heart of hearts almost all of us feel that we are the worst horse. you might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or your might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you're the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

in his talk, suzuki roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it's actually the motivation. when you find yourself slumping, that's the motivation to sit up, not out of self-denigration but actually out of pride in everything that occurs to you, pride in who you are just as you are, pride in the goodness or the fairness or the worstness of yourself - however you find yourself - some sort of sense of taking pride and using it to spur you on.

the karma kagyu lineage of tibetan buddhism, in which the students of chogyam trungpa are trained, is sometimes called the 'mishap lineage,' because of the ways in which the wise and venerated teachers of this lineage 'blew it' time after time. first there was tilopa, who was a madman, completely wild. his main student was naropa. naropa was so conceptual and intellectual that it took him twelve years of being run over by a truck, of being put through all sorts of trials by his teacher, for him to begin to wake up. he was so conceptual that if somebody would tell him something, he would say, 'oh yes, but surely by that you must mean this.' he had that kind of mind. his main student was marpa, who was famous for his intensely bad temper. he used to fly into rages, beat people, and yell at them. he was also a drunk. he was notorious for being incredibly stubborn. his student was milarepa. milarepa was a murderer! rinpoche used to say that marpa became a student of the dharma because he thought he could make a lot of money by bringing texts back from india and translating them into tibetan. his student milarepa became a student because he was afraid he was going to go to hell for having murdered people - and that scared him.

milarepa's student was gampopa (after whom gampo abbey is named). because everything was easy for him, gampopa was arrogant. for instance, the night before he met gampopa for the first time, milarepa said to some of his disciples, 'oh someone who is destined to be my main student is going to come tomorrow. whoever brings him to me will be greatly benefited.' so when gampopa arrived in the town, an old lady who saw him ran out and said, 'oh, milarepa told us you were coming and that you were destined to be one of his main students, and i want my daughter to bring you to see him.' so gampopa, thinking, 'i must be really hot stuff,' went very proudly to meet milarepa, sure that he would be greeted with great honor. however, milarepa had had someone put him in a cave and wouldn't see gampopa for three weeks.

as for gampopa's main student, the first karmapa, the only thing we know about him is that he was extremely ugly. he was said to look like a monkey. also, there's one story about him and three other main disciples of gampopa who were thrown out of the monastery for getting drunk and singing and dancing and breaking the monastic rules.

we could all take heart. these are the wise ones who sit in front of us, to whom we prostrate when we do prostrations. we can prostrate to them as an example of our own wisdom mind of enlightened beings, but perhaps it's also good to prostrate to them as confused, mixed-up people with a lot of neurosis, just like ourselves. they are good examples of people who never gave up on themselves and were not afraid to be themselves, who therefore found their own genuine quality and their own true nature.

the point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. it's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.