Intention and Boddhicitta
Anyone who is concerned with happiness (ie everyone who has ever lived) might find some value in the Buddhist proposal that the way to be happy is to care about others. In their thought, we’d be well advised to make compassion part of the central intentions of our lives: placing more emphasis on “what can I give” than “what can I get”. The source point for this approach to life is called Boddhicitta.
The idea of Boddhicitta is often presented in such ornate Buddhist lingo that its easy to mistake it as a point of esoteric philosophy or an exotic moral position. But it is not these things. The Dalai Lama simplifies things by calling Boddhicitta the “altruistic wish for enlightenment”. But even these words are fertile ground for confusion.
The word Sanskrit word Boddhicitta combines two smaller words: Citta (Mind) and Boddhi (Buddha). So - Buddha-Mind. This Mind, of course, is deeper and more mysterious than our usual engine of thought and understanding. The Buddhist master Shantideva points us toward this sense of mystery in one of his texts: ‘this noble, jewel-like state of mind arises truly wondrous, never seen before”. Never seen before: so it’s not part of our ordinary knowing of the world. It reveals itself like a stripper jumping out of a birthday cake. Surprise!
The defining point of this jewel-like mind is that it is innately altruistic: oriented to the liberation of beings. This is hugely different than a moral choice to be nice to people, or a sense of empathy or sympathy toward others. Boddhicitta’s nature and expression is liberating beings, in the same way rain’s nature is to fall from the sky as water drops. There’s no choice in the matter. When the Dalai Lama refers to the “wish” for enlightenment, he’s not describing a persons’ wish that other people (as well as herself) become enlightened. He’s describing the reality that the ground of being is reflexively involved in the liberation of beings. As human beings, we can be consciously on board with that reflex or not. Boddhicitta carries on just the same.
A particular kind of compassion arises with Boddhicitta. Its nature is to express itself in a way that actively liberates beings from anything that binds them. In other words: the ground of our being is Love. But this love is not dedicated to bringing comfort to people, or giving them what they think they might want. Liberation is the priority. So - this compassion may shape-shift into profound all-accepting love, so that every movement of mind dedicated to self-condemnation and self-rejection can let go - as if into a Divine Mothers’ embrace. Or this compassion may shape-shift into a profound sense of elemental power, so that every moment of mind that grasps for security in illusion has the chance to feel reality’s innate strength and stability; so that one can feel the, unmoveable mountain nature underlying the tendency to frantically spin in the wind grasping for stability.
Boddhicitta rises of its own accord. It is by definition completely outside our personal agendas and control. And yet we can make a choice: to give the flowering of this way of being central priority in our lives. And this wraps us back to intention. We can choose to dedicate our attention to noticing nuances and hidden truths of consciousness, so that Boddhicitta becomes a reality in our lived experience. And - inseparable from that - we can choose to dedicate our intention to aligning with Boddhicitta in the way we are in the world: so that the way we love and live and buy coffee and take out the garbage carries some quality of this impulse for liberating beings. Living this way, we follow what Shantideva first the way of the boddhissatva.
The Zen teacher Joan Sutherland describes this approach beautifully: “Bodhisattvas give birth to themselves, something that happens every time a person like one of us does a couple of things. First, you find arising in your heart the intention to awaken, so that you can discover what you uniquely do that’s helpful in the world; that’s boddhicitta. And then you make the commitment known as the bodhisattva ow to put that intention at the centre of your life…A boddhissatva is born not by becoming instantly and completely awake and skillful at everything, constantly bestowing wonderful gifts on others, but simply by having the willingness to put this commitment at the centre. And then spending the rest of your life figuring out what that means, provisionally, imperfectly, every day.”
So - we may frame our intentions according to this question: do they align with the profound heart-truth that reality wishes the liberation of beings? If the answer is yes, then reality’s bless at carrying out its nature might also be your bliss at carrying out your nature. No separation between the two.