By Jonathan Landaw

In the September-October issue of Mandala, I solicited comments about this column and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the various readers who wrote in with their responses. The letters I received were generally positive and encouraging – though my editor remarked that some people told her personally that they found my columns quite boring – and I want to thank everyone who took the time to write and express his or her opinion. Several of you also shared with me details of your personal lives and Dharma careers, so now my indulgent readership has ceased to be as silent and anonymous as it once was. While I cannot guarantee that this personalization of my audience will improve the quality of this bimonthly column, it does mean a great deal to me to know there are living, breathing entities somewhere out there who react, positively or negatively, to what I write. And just as I find it meaningful to learn about your responses to my columns, so too would the other contributors to Mandala benefit from your responses to their offerings. Therefore, on behalf of all of us, please continue to share with us your thoughts concerning our contributions and, if you have no objections to your remarks being published, please address them to Mandala‘s editor. Once again, thank you all very much.

When I ran the spell-check on the paragraph above, “personalization” was rejected; either my computer thinks I am making this word up, or it finally became fed up with my tendency towards Latinate verbal constructions and hoped I would choose something a bit more Anglo-Saxon and direct. However, my New Collins Concise Dictionary of the English Language does list “personalization” as a legitimate word and that gives me courage to construct this month’s column around it.

Furthermore, since the dictionary only gives it spelling (with the alternate ending “-isation” for those who prefer that sort of thing) and not its definition, I feel free to use it in whichever way suits my purposes. In this I follow the example of the esteemed linguistic philosopher, Humpty Dumpty, who stated, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (For those of you not familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, from which this quotation was taken, I highly recommend them, not only for their surreal humor, but for the pithy eloquence of their Zen-like utterances. For example, in describing the chessboard universe of Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, “… here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”)

So much for freelance philology; let us turn to the main thread of today’s thesis. And this concerns the often profound changes in conception that occur with our personalization of others. By this I mean that when we strip others of their anonymity – when we cease to view them as ciphers or mere generalities and begin to relate to them as unique individuals – this can have a pronounced transformative effect upon our own mind and heart. As many of you already know, within the traditional Mahayana Thought Transformation teachings, or lo-jong, great emphasis is placed on recognizing others as having been our mothers. According to these teachings, it is difficult to remain indifferent to a stranger or angry with even our worst enemy if we can vividly bring to mind the many kindnesses we received when he or she was our life-giving and life-sustaining maternal parent and we were her completely dependent child. Meditators well-trained in the lo-jong techniques find they can eventually tap a deep wellspring of love for those who previously aroused in them only apathy or dislike, and this love establishes them in the center of a world of transcendent beauty and spiritual fulfillment. I have often felt that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is so widely admired, even by those with little or no interest in Buddhism, precisely because, in his presence, we sense that we have been invited to visit, however briefly, the mandala of love and compassionate wisdom in which he dwells.

The prerequisite for creating such a mandala of love and wisdom is the ability to pay attention to others. That may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but we are generally so preoccupied with ourselves and so misled by the false images projected onto others that we are barely able to pay real attention to anything outside our mandala of fear and insecurity. Occasionally, however, the defensive walls separating ourselves from others dissolve somewhat, and there is a chance for a communion of souls to take place.

These are the miraculous moments of our existence, intimations of the divine within the commonplace, and I am fascinated by the many stories I run across, often from very unexpected sources, that hint at such epiphanies. From the violent world of American professional football, for example, comes the firsthand account of an offensive guard’s week-long preparation to face a particularly powerful defensive tackle. (For those unfamiliar with this sport, suffice it to say that it is the job of such guards and tackles to engage in sustained trench warfare with each other throughout each football game.) This particular player prepared himself for battle by cultivating a particularly intense hatred of his opponent. He would visualize the man he would have to face as the very incarnation of evil, as the force intent on depriving him and his family of their daily bread. By the time Sunday arrived – the day set aside for this most sacred of American religious observations – he was so pumped up with hatred for his opponent that he was ready to kill. On the particular Sunday in question, however, just before the game was about to begin, his opponent came up to him, greeted him warmly by name, politely inquired about his wife’s health, and wished him well. In an instant, the violent intentions cultivated for a week were deflated and the requisite intensity to pound his opponent into dust was lost. The moral: never get personal with a defensive tackle.