When it comes to any claim to spiritual insight, I don't know of a better measure than how we react to ordinary challenges.
My teacher, Segyu Rinpoche, used to tell a story about a meditator who lived in a cave near a small village. Revered far and wide, he spent his days in deep meditation.
One day, a stray sheep wandered into the cave. When the shepherd came to retrieve it, the meditator shouted, “How dare you! Get that sheep out of here!”
As the shepherd led the sheep away, he turned back. “If that’s how you feel about an innocent sheep,” he said, “I don’t know why you’re meditating.”
I love this story. It captures something I think is fundamental to Buddhist thought: the way we meet everyday life. On this site, I call it Everyday Mind.
In our culture, we have largely cleaved the spiritual from the everyday. Daily life is filled with work, relationships, responsibilities, pleasures, and all the little things that occupy our time. Our spiritual endeavors—retreats, classes, workshops, rituals, and more—happen elsewhere. It’s easy to miss how closely the two are connected.
Instead, we tend to measure our spiritual well-being by what happens during those endeavors. How deep was my meditation? Did I feel blissful? Gain insight into myself or reality? Complete a silent retreat? Day-to-day life has little to do with these.
Except it does.
If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years with Buddhist thought, it’s that little matters more than how we act, react, and engage with everyday life. How peacefully do we run errands we’d rather not be doing? How irritated are we when things don’t go our way? How do we treat the servers, ticket takers, and clerks we encounter every day?
I don’t doubt that sitting in silent meditation for a week or gaining insights into ourselves is hard-won and valuable. But I think putting those insights to work in everyday life is harder.
It’s like the difference between training for a tennis match and playing one. In training, we set the parameters: how far to run, how to develop technique, what drills to do. In the match, someone is sending balls over the net, trying to throw us off guard. It’s the matches that push our game to new levels.
When it comes to our spiritual efforts, life is the match. We don’t get to choose the conditions. The world keeps hitting balls our way.
Few of us respond with ease to all of life’s challenges. Some, hopefully very few, take us down. But in the ordinary ups and downs of day-to-day life, there are countless opportunities to be less harsh, irritable, and defensive, and more patient, considerate, and good-humored.
When it comes to any claim to spiritual insight, I don’t know of a better measure than how we react to those ordinary challenges. How do we treat all the stray sheep wandering into our lives?
In my experience, as our insight develops, we gain more perspective on the things that irritate us. We’ll discover that far more of our ups and downs are just stray sheep than we think. What once irritated us may not anymore. Then we can flow with life more easily.
Buddhist thought has been concerned with everyday life from the outset. How we carry ourselves day to day is central to reducing suffering and living more freely.
The Eightfold Path, one of Buddhism’s foundational teachings, is largely about how we live: how we speak, act, and work, and how we direct our effort and attention. Here is a passage from the Pali Canon, an early collection of Buddhist teachings, in which the Buddha speaks to a lay follower named Mahānāma:
“Mahānāma, you should develop this recollection of the Dhamma [the Teaching] while you are walking, while you are standing, while you are sitting, while you are lying down, while you are busy at work, while you are resting in your home crowded with children.”
The challenges we encounter every day are not distractions from our practice. They are part of it.
The ideas and practices under Everyday Mind will gently draw attention to how we act and react in everyday life. We will practice meditation to calm the mind and see our patterns more clearly.
We’re not trying to become different people. Just to recognize stray sheep when we see them, and learn to meet them differently. We may find not just more ease in handling life, but that much of life doesn’t need handling at all.
Source: Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, trans., “Mahānāma Sutta: To Mahānāma (2),” Aṅguttara Nikāya 11.13, Access to Insight.