Seven Points of Mind Training

Point 7 : Guidelines of Mind Training

42: Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.

Point Seven : Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.

Commentary :

Whether a joyful or a painful situation occurs, whatever happens to you, your practice is not swayed by it, but you maintain continual patience and continual practice. Whether you are in the midst of extreme happiness or extreme suffering, you should be patient. You should regard extreme suffering as the result of previous karma. Therefore, there is no need to feel remorseful. Instead you should simply try to purify any evil deeds and obscurations. Extreme happiness is also the result of previous karma, so there is no reason to indulge in it. You should donate any riches to virtuous causes, and your sense of personal authenticity and power should be resolved into virtue.

Quite often, when things are disturbing or problematic for students, they lose their sense of perspective and try to find some kind of scapegoat within the dharma. For instance, in order to justify their own inability to practice, they come up with all sorts of ideas: the environment is not right, their brothers and sisters in the practice situation are not right, the organization of the dharmic environment is not right. All sorts of complaints begin to come up. In extreme cases, people begin to take refuge in nondharmic people again and go back to situations in which their existence might be acknowledged. The idea in this slogan is to develop and maintain discipline so that whether situations are good or bad, you still maintain patience in your practice. The point is to be patient, which means taking more time and being forbearing.