Today I read a chapter on Dhamma-Vinaya (The Doctrine and Discipline) in the Theravada tradition. The book is called The State of Mind Called Beautiful by Sayadaw U Pandita. After the intro, the first topics covered are the four protective meditations.
The first protective meditation is Buddhanussati, or recollecting the Buddha’s qualities of compassion, wisdom, teaching, and all of the other ways in which the Buddha was fantastic. This meditation can be done in just a minute or two, but as I was sitting for fifteen, I tried to hold in my mind the word compassion, and the ways it applies in my life. Compassion for M, for my students, coworkers, family, and most importantly, myself.
This text stressed that attending to your own enlightenment first and then that of others is the right order.
So, I mean, it is hard as hell to still my mind. It is hard to imagine how Buddha could have ultimate compassion for all beings. It is hard to imagine myself forgiving all who have wronged me. It is harder still to focus on my breathing in and breathing out when I start to think about those people.
One of the qualities that I love about so many Buddhist texts is their magnanimity–even in the case of Buddhanussati, Sayadaw U Pandita says if you’d rather not recollect the historical person of Gautama Buddha/Prince Siddartha, you may instead focus on the qualities of Dhamma, or the Way/the Doctrine. Imagine an Evangelical pastor saying, “You don’t have to pray to Jesus, per se, as long as you are praying to the ideas that Jesus represents.”