Forget About Perfection

 

11.26.2021 FORGET ABOUT PERFECTION We often feel that, unless and until we attain perfection, we can’t really start living. We daydream about all the great things we’ll do for the world once we become our ideal selves. But Buddhism lets us in on a little secret: that all we really have is the present moment, and despite our perceived limitations, we don’t require any fixing. The three teachings here remind me of all the good that can happen when we stop trying to be perfect and instead choose to show up for ourselves, and the world, exactly as we are. We may even find gratitude for life’s imperfections along the way. They’ve each inspired me to start where I am, working for the benefit of all. I hope they might do the same for you. —Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, LionsRoar.com

You’re Ready Enough Wherever you find yourself, says Pema Khandro, that’s the starting point of the bodhisattva path—all you need to do is take that first step. The mindset of samsara is that we can only be happy if we are someone other than our present self. Someday, somewhere, somehow—different. Oh, the things we would do if we were smarter, richer, thinner, if we had more knowledge or better opportunities. This is the clinging to a self that generates dukkha, or pervasive unsatisfactoriness. Dukkha often manifests in negative self-images and accompanying fantasies of a better me. Buddhism, by offering an alternate focal point, can shift our primary focus from this futile pursuit of our ideal selves. Instead of trying to be perfect, we focus on purifying our underlying motivations so that we can wake up, show up, and act with enlightened intention—right here, right now, just as we are.

Wherever You Are, Enlightenment Is There “Even in our imperfect practice enlightenment is there,” says Suzuki Roshi. “We just don’t know it.” Many Zen masters missed this point while they were striving to attain perfect zazen: things that exist are imperfect. That is how everything actually exists in this world. Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality. It is true intellectually and also in the realm of practice. It is true on paper and true with our body. You think that you can only establish true practice after you attain enlightenment, but it is not so. True practice is established in delusion, in frustration. If you make some mistake, that is where to establish your practice. There is no other place for you to establish your practice.”

The Path of Gratitude The goal of Shin Buddhism’s central practice, nembutsu, is not to attain buddhahood for ourselves, says Jeff Wilson, but to express gratitude for all we have received. Shinran taught that we must give up attachment to our ego-laden efforts to become enlightened and relax back into the embrace of inconceivable wisdom and never-abandoning compassion. In this way, we are freed from our anxieties and pettiness. Our practice, then, stops being about attaining buddhahood for ourselves and instead becomes about expressing gratitude for all that we have received. This is a way of life that deep­ens as the years pass; as Shinran put it, “My joy grows even fuller, my gratitude and indebted­ness ever more compelling.” Buddhist practice is transformed into an act of pure expressiveness that puts our inner feelings into word and deed through the utterance of the nembutsu and other acts of gratitude.

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