by Rev. Kinrei Bassis 

The quote below is from Bodhidharma in which he teaches that the real entrance into Buddhist practice is when we are willing to suffer injustice. 

First, suffering injustice. When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, “In Countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past. Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice. The sutras say “ when you meet with adversity don’t be upset because it makes sense.” With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path. (Translated by Red Pine) 

Until we are willing to work at accepting injustice, we are actually mostly battling our karmic conditions rather than doing the hard work of converting them. In Buddhism, it teaches that we never fully understand how karma works, just like the fact that we will never fully see all karmic threads that have brought us to our present condition and situation. People often think what they believe is what really matters and it is common that many in this modern world have trouble believing in karma. Yet transforming our spiritual life does not depend on accepting the truth that past life and present life karma exists but rather depends on us seeing better how vital it is that we try to do right and good actions in our life and to refrain from wrong behavior. Making deep spiritual progress is dependent on us doing the relatively simple but difficult task of keeping the Buddhist moral Precepts; doing that which promotes good and does not promote more evil and suffer- ing. Keeping the Precepts also requires us to work at transform- ing our minds and opening our hearts so we can learn to accept this whole stream of karma we have inherited that makes up our life and the life of our world. All the various conditions of our life, our upbringing, all the people in our life, our society and world around us, are all karmic conditions. We are not fully entering the path until we are seeing and working on the difficult task of trying to develop this wholehearted acceptance. 

Suffering injustice is key in that our normal worldly mind is always rejecting many of the karmic conditions that we are facing. I remember talking with someone who was complaining about the difficult and seemingly unfair conditions in her workplace. I asked her, why do you expect things to be fair? Later, she told me that my advice bothered her until a year later when she felt she finally got it. Suffering injustice is not that we do not feel that the injustice is wrong. It just embracing the fact that the opposites are always going to be present. Everyone at times is behaving fairly and at other times, unfairly. People look at the news and are upset by the injustice and evil in the world. Yet we cannot really conceive of a world in which some people are not behaving wrongly. Accepting some injus- tice in an intimate relationship is actually a requirement in order to have a successful and lasting relationship. I remember someone telling me how they ended their marriage when their spouse made, what seemed to me, a trivial mistake. That person continued this pattern of not wanting to put up with difficulties in her partner throughout her life so none of her relationships had ever lasted. 

Everyone, at times, is behaving well and everyone at times, is behaving poorly. One vital aspect of spiritual life is the willingness to see our wrong thoughts and behavior and then, work on changing them. However, nothing in life is ever completely perfect. The perfection we can awaken spiritually is never a perfect self or perfect world. The perfection lies in what spiritual life is pointing us to finding, our unborn, undying life of Buddha. We can only get in touch with this boundless perfection when we stop cutting our life and the world around us into the pieces we want and the pieces we reject. It is a very spiritually challenging and difficult task to try to accept the whole of our life. Naturally everyone wants a life that gives them what they desire and everyone wants a life that does not give them what they fear and find painful. Yet only by pointing ourselves to the deeper truth that both our desires and fears can be seen, in their reality, as just impermanent conditions that have no fundamental substance. All the pain and suffering in our life and in the world will all pass away like a dream and nothing is ever being fundamentally harmed. The more we point our lives into finding this deeper spiritual truth, the more we begin to free ourselves from feeling bound by our difficulties. 

Great Master Dogen began the Shushogi with this teaching. 

The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely for then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish. All you have to do is realize that birth and death, as such, should not be avoided and they will cease to exist for then, if you can under- stand that birth and death are Nirvana itself, there is not only no necessity to avoid them but also nothing to search for that is called Nirvana. The understanding of the above breaks the chains that bind one to birth and death therefore this problem, which is the greatest in all Buddhism, must be completely understood.  (Shushogi by Dogen)

Dogen is teaching that everything in birth and death is impermanent. Nirvana and Samsara can become one when we view the conditions in our life with complete acceptance. Whatever is unfolding in our life, the good and the bad, the happiness and suffering, are all just conditions that need to be accepted if we want to experience Samsara and Nirvana as one. We need to recognize that, in reality, there is nothing in birth and death that that we can actually keep clinging to. Death washes away the significance of our successes and failures, our pleasures and our pain. Enlightenment can be understood as experiencing the truth that no karmic condition can actually bind us. It is our delusions that generate our burning desires that are binding us. Awakening to seeing the inherent emptiness of our desires is what frees us from spending our life battling all the conditions in our life. This leads to our hearts and minds being at peace and thus open to experiencing the boundless Buddha Heart. 

All aspects of Buddhist training is always involve our working on a continuum, just making the effort to do more good, trying to be kinder, trying to be more compassionate, trying to be more generous. This requires us to be aware of all the negative aspects of ourselves, and trying to be less selfish, less greedy, less critical and less judgmental. The more we take the Dharma to heart and take responsibility for what we are generating in our hearts and mind, the better we both make both our life and the lives of those around us. 

People often mistakenly think that accepting injustice means we do not work at correcting injustice. The ground of Buddhist training is the Buddhist Precepts, trying to do good, trying not to do that which is bad, and trying to do that which is good for others. The Buddhist Precepts are just pointing us to having less desire and clinging so we free ourselves to do that which will create a better life and a better world. Daily life training in Buddhism can be seen as just trying to generate good actions which will lead to more happiness and less suffering for ourselves and others. To respond to injustice when our actions can create less injustice is right action and we are being spiritually irresponsible when fail to respond. The Bodhisattva vows point us to the deep need for us to do all we can to lessen the suffering in the world. Yet most of the injustice I witness in others and in the world are usually things that I frequently have no way to meaningfully influence or change. I need to accept my limited power to help with many of the problems I confront. I often talk with people who are making choices that are causing them to suffer yet I am frequently powerless to provide meaningful help to them so they can change their behavior. An example is counseling many people who suffer with addictive behavior. I can point out the reality of the damage that they are doing to themselves and others. Yet the fact that they are damaging themselves is usually something that they al- ready know. They just feel unable to resist the pull of their addictive desires. The ground of evil is that strong pull of our karmic desires, our defilements, our greed, our ill will, and our delusive thoughts, which have us behaving selfishly, ignoring the karmic consequences of our thoughts, speech and actions. Whenever we suffer injustice, we are generally being hurt by the other person’s defilements, by their greed, their ill will and their delusions. 

One aspect of accepting injustice is seeing how, in our lives, we have often felt ourselves to be victims of mistreatment and injustice. I have talked with many people who were nearing the end of their life, and they were still dealing with the seeming injustice of their upbringing, the damage caused by the mistakes of their parents. If we look with a judgmental mind at our parents, we have always experienced some injustice in growing up since no one has had two Buddhas raising them. We all are carrying our various wounds and ill feelings for how we have been treated in our past relationships, in our work place, by parents, our siblings, our children and our friends. A normal unavoidable aspect of life is the reality that everyone we interact with will have some spiritual defilements and naturally their defilements may cause us to suffer. I have never known anyone who has eradicated all aspects of their defilements and this means, if we interact enough with anyone, we will, at times, be dealing with their defilements. We free ourselves from being a victim of other people’s defilements with the understanding that all people have good and bad aspects within them and instead of judging and being upset with them, we need to have compassion for them. The goal in Buddhism is to wholeheartedly embrace and deal with the actual reality we are living with rather than thinking this is not how things should be. For instance, we cannot conceive of how we could possibly create a world in which there are not bad parents, bad spouses, bad bosses and bad political leaders. We are often asking for a reality which when we analyze what we want, is inconceivable. For example, bad parents are usually not trying to be bad parents, they generally are just having a difficult time with their life and this can cause their children to suffer. For instance, a parent with clinical depression and other mental health problems will probably create some difficulties and suffering for their children. Yet we cannot create a world that stops some people from having or developing mental illness. 

A common question is how do I not get upset and angry with someone’s wrong behavior? Most people can often be very nonjudgmental about the wrong behavior of a small child. We understand that it is normal that a four year child is often very selfish and self absorbed. This is the accepted karma of being four years old. Yet it is normal human karma that many who are forty-four years old are still very selfish and self-absorbed but we often judge them and think they should not be this way. Yet the world and our lives are filled with people with difficulties that cause them to behave poorly. Buddhist practice is grounded on making us aware of not just how others are making mistakes but the reality that we still can be selfish and self-absorbed. We need to recognize how difficult it is to really change ourselves. This helps us to see others with compassion for their failings rather than just being upset and critical when we are experiencing the mistakes of others. 

I remember someone saying that after a few years of Buddhist practice, she began to change how she looked at the people in her life. She used to view many of the difficult people in her family and her life as the burdens and obstacles that she needed to put up with. After a few years of practice, she began to see that, for the other people in her life, she was, sometimes the difficult burden and obstacle that they were needing to deal with. 

The root meaning of the word atone is being at one, making things whole and harmonious. This is the goal of Buddhism, how can we make our life and how we relate to the world as whole and harmonious as possible. Criticizing ourselves or others is a way to break our life and the world into pieces we want and the pieces we reject. We are trying to open our hearts and minds so the light of Buddha can be experienced throughout whatever good and bad karmic conditions that are flowing through our life and the life of the world. Compassion for all the evil and wrong in the world is necessary if we wish to free ourselves from suffering.