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On Help and Helplessness

A couple of posts back, Sammy in Iowa asked this question:

Could you write about helplessness too? i sometimes wonder about trying to become a bodhisattva when some around me are bent on increasing their own suffering. i feel more helpless when it comes to animal beings sometimes; but, i see it in humans too, myself included.

Hm. Well. This’ll be the first time I’ve ever written a blog post by request. Here goes…

A Boddhisattva is defined as someone who delays their own achievement of nirvana in favor of saving all sentient beings from the sufferings of samsara, and helping them to achieve their own enlightenment. One of the best known stories about boddhisattva action concerns Mahasattva and his encounter with a starving mother tiger. You haven’t heard the story yet? Oops, my bad.

Mahasattva was one of the incarnations of the Buddha. One day, while traveling through a forest, he encountered a starving tigress and her cubs. The tigress was too weakened by hunger to hunt properly, and feed herself and her children. Selflessly, Mahasattva offered himself to the tigress, so she could kill him, feed, and regain her strength. But the poor tiger was too weak to strike him down. Mahasattva then cut his own throat, so the tigress could feed.

I know when I first heard this story, my first thoughts were about how beautiful the story was, but would I ever really slit my own throat for a helpless animal? Hm. And what about all of the encumbrances of modern life? There’s bills to pay, and then that meeting next week…and, if I died that way, what would happen to my stuff? A lot of the helplessness I feel is partly a sense of being caught up in my own little section of samsara.

So there’s one of the biggest differences between a boddhisattva and us regular folk. A boddhisattva has none of these worldly considerations. He or she is purely focused on the salvation of all sentient beings. There’s no time spent telling other folks that they need to slit their throats for hungry tigers; no postings on a blog site or on YouTube to trumpet their accomplishments; no bumper stickers or t-shirt sales to spread the word about this work. There’s just the moment, and the tiger, and the knife.

It’s also true that some of my helplessness comes from being at a loss as to how to begin saving a particular being. Sammy mentioned folks bent on increasing their own suffering. I have a personal tale of my own to share…

Some years back I was riding in a friend’s van with some other folks. We were in the Mission district of San Francisco–not the more gentrified part filled with trendy restaurants and nightclubs, but the section in the low ‘teens, where gangs and drugs and prostitution abound. It was night, and we’d pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank. We all stopped what we were doing to gape through the front windshield. In the glare of the van’s headlights, one of the local crack whores was changing clothes in a corner of the gas station lot. She made no attempt to shield herself from the light at all. Modesty is one of the first things to go when it comes to a lifestyle bent on turning that next trick to get the money to buy that next rock as quickly as possible. I remember the scene to this day; and one of the first thoughts to go through my head was, “Ya know, Nyondo, when you’re saying manis for the salvation of all sentient beings, this is one of those beings.”

Despite that, I still felt helpless in the face of her suffering. Although I was working one day a week for the SAGE Project, this particular woman wasn’t a SAGE client, and probably not even close to entering a program that would help her escape the life she was living. And I’m not proud of this, but the fact is my friends and I did nothing, immobilized by the sheer amount of help this one person needed. Housing, medical care, clothing, food, detox, regular employment…

The whole experience was something of a revelation. For one thing, the boddhisattva attitude makes it clear there is no room for racism, prejudice, or judgement of any kind. How can you commit yourself to saving all sentient beings, only to say “except for that soul, over there?” Ridiculous. And while I still might not be prepared to slit my throat for the first hungry tiger I encounter, there are many other smaller things I can do for other beings, if I keep their salvation firmly in mind.

I could end the post here, but the fact is that even here in the remote Himalayan foothills, the desire to become a boddhisattva is sorely put to the test. I’ve written previously about the animals here, but in this case I’m referring to a person.

There’s a man here who was once employed as chowkidar (caretaker) of the lake. He would go around and clear away some of the garbage, and generally patrol for litterers and vandals. Then he started to go crazy. He would shout his prayers to the fish in the lake, and bless me continually as I passed by. He took on that skinny, wild-eyed look that people get when they’ve been listening to the voices for too long. He started to pray in the middle of the bus stand, chanting “Om Namah Shivay” while forcing the buses and taxis to drive around him. About two months back, he came up behind me, and tried to cut of some of my hair with a knife. He didn’t hurt me, and got only two or three dreads. The odd thing is, after it happened, I didn’t become angry. I mostly went into some kind of shock, and felt sorry for him. Friends asked me if I wanted to go the police, and I refused.

You see, in the States, calling the police for this kind of situation would result in a “5150” (Danger to self and others) and a nice hospital stay with food and psych meds. Here, though, the only thing calling the police will do is result in beatings and a stay in a jail cell. Would beatings and imprisonment do anything for the craziness? No. Would I feel better about myself for having put someone through that? No. For the most part, no one in town is willing to call in the police for this reason.

The chowkidar disappeared for some weeks around Baisakhi Mehla, and showed up again in town the other day, crazier than ever. He now goes about town with his face covered in yellow powder, and bits of garbage tied onto his clothes. He’s been praying to me as his mother, and touching my hair. I told him off this morning, and a local wallah suggested again I go to the police. In town I ran into David, a Western friend, and asked his advice. It turned out the chowkidar had been praying to him as his “father”. David and I went back out on kora, and when we encountered the chowkidar, David gave him a stern, fatherly lecture not to touch his mother. The chowkidar apologized, and we continued on our way. During the walk David told me the local Rewalsar police had shipped the crazy man off to Simla, and it looked like the Simla police had shipped him back.

So now what? Here is the boddhisattva test for y’all. Here we have a sentient being, certainly in need of saving. But how to do it? He’s pretty far into his tin-foil hat reality and seems happy there, where gods are wandering around as confused indjis, and garbage makes perfectly good jewelry. For myself, the options seem to be these:

1. Not leave the house for a while, and hope the chowkidar regains his sanity (or at least picks different parents)
2. Leave the house, and play along with being his mother, as long as it seems safe
3. Leave the house, but avoid him whenever possible. This tactic is kinda limited, since there’s only four main streets in Rewalsar….
4. Leave the house, and go to the police.

What do you think? what would you do?

May 29th, 2007 Posted by admin | India, Tibetan Buddhism | 6 comments