Ego, Bodhicitta, and the Middle Way
Do we do good out of ego and to impress others? How much should we worry about it?
…too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long. —Albert Camus, The Fall
Camus’ The Fall is a novella told as a monologue in the voice of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer who recounts his life and his fall from grace to a fellow Frenchman in a bar in Amsterdam. Clamence describes his former life as a successful and seemingly noble lawyer who prided himself on altruism and moral superiority.
One night during Clamence’s heady days in Paris—he tells his unnamed drinking companion—while walking over a bridge, he ignored a woman leaning over the railing who then appeared to jump into the river. His resulting traumatic self-examination revealed his deep-seated hypocrisy and the realization that his good deeds were driven by vanity and the desire for social approval rather than genuine compassion. He became bitter not only about his own good deeds but those of others as well.
Camus, in the voice of his character Clamence, sums up the feeling well in the quote above about people climbing onto a cross to be seen from a greater distance, even if they trample Jesus to get there.
My Buddhist equanimity prevents me from becoming as passionate and bitter about the subject as Clamence. Still, I believe in focusing awareness on the interplay between ego and bodhicitta. Is it like the old song about love and marriage?
Can you not have one without the other?
If you’re taking time out of your day to read a Buddhist-themed blog, you don’t need me to remind you that bodhicitta arises from a genuine desire to reduce the suffering of others, along with one’s own awakening. It isn’t bodhicitta if it’s done to impress your friends. But how much of it is related to ego?
Silent retreats are great opportunities to learn what concerns bubble up in your mind as you rest in awareness. During one retreat in 2017 or 2018, I had concerns similar to Clamence’s. Was anything I did motivated by compassion and loving-kindness, or did my ego want to feel good about itself? Attending that retreat with me was a woman I consider a bodhisattva, so I decided to discuss that with her during the last day of the retreat when we could chat.
For some years, I knew her only as Nicole, a lovely person who attended the same retreats as I did. We’d occasionally have a discussion at the end of the week. Eventually, I learned that she was Nicole Phillips, an adjunct professor of law at UC Law San Francisco; a law professor at the Université de la Foundation Dr. Aristide in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; a Haiti analyst for Freedom House; and an advisor on legal cases in the United States involving human rights abuses in Haiti.
I learned she spent half of every year preparing law students in San Francisco and the other half working with them in Haiti. Despite that heavy schedule, she found time twice a year to attend week-long retreats with Lama Surya Das, our teacher. (“I make the time,” she replied when I asked her how she managed.)
So I told her I was trying to figure out how to separate my ego from my desire to teach Buddhism. Her reply went something like this:
Oh, don’t worry about it. If it weren’t for ego, I’d never get on a plane.
That reply has stuck with me. Our egos have value when they help us manifest our relative bodhicitta—and that important phrase will take some explaining.
As I’ve written, many questions about Buddhism’s apparent contradictions can be answered by understanding what Wikipedia1 calls the two truths doctrine. I’ll call the “two truths”…
Relative reality—the world we perceive and live in daily.
and
Absolute reality—the world in which we know, not intellectually but experientially, that we are the sea, not the wave. We may glimpse absolute reality occasionally in meditation or other times, but we don’t get to live there permanently until full enlightenment.
Gautama Buddha famously taught the middle way between asceticism and indulgence. As Buddhism has evolved, we’ve applied it to other extremes. To practice Buddhism in the relative reality in which we live, each of us needs to find a middle way between relative and absolute reality.
I may manifest absolute bodhicitta for brief periods as I sit in ego-less nondual meditation, but anything that starts with a “me” and a “you” is relative bodhicitta. When Nicole gets on an airplane and when I sit down to write one of these posts, we’re practicing relative bodhicitta. If we could completely rid ourselves of our egos, we’d probably give all our food away to hungrier people and have no energy left for anything else.
When I let go of my ego a few years back, I knew there would always be a remnant keeping me going in the relative world. I also let go of writing, partly because—without an ego telling me otherwise—I couldn’t think of anything the world needed to hear from me.
Now that I’m experiencing life in a state of joy…
from an address in the Pure Land…
…I’ve returned to blogging to share that with others and invite them along, regardless of their chosen religious path.
Like the rest of my conceptual mind, my ego is still with me, and yes, it has become part of my motivation. So, I’ll keep my eye (otherwise known as my awareness) on it.
From the Pure Land has subscribers in 21 U.S. states and seven countries.
If you have found this blog post helpful, whatever your religious path, please consider sharing it with your friends.
Many of you read From the Pure Land as an email and even more as an email forwarded by others. If you’re one of them, or if you read a post only when you see it on social media, consider becoming a subscriber. Once you enter your email address and click the “Subscribe” button, you can choose the “free” option. You’ll still receive every one of the regular posts. Paid subscribers get a thank-you gift of occasional, longer essays on more general subjects. (If you don’t want to see posts from other Substack writers, click “skip” when offered free subscriptions to other blogs.)
A more-than-just-musical bonus for readers of all faiths, even if they need their egos to help them do something.
When I link to other sources to explain or amplify my writing, I often look for Buddhist sources and eventually decide on Wikipedia. It has not always been reliable on Eastern religions, but its hive mind has improved it immensely during its two-decades-plus history. Because I’m writing for a general audience, I appreciate its viewpoint—not centered on Buddhism or any particular school.
Always appreciate this reminder, I have been struggling with this recently as my mind has me questioning my motives for doing things constantly. I'll just stick to trying to do and be good and not worry about the rest.