How Do External Circumstances Make Their Way Into Your Mind to Hurt You?
To cultivate forbearance, you must first develop a clear understanding of the mental objects that arise within your own mind. These mental objects act as a critical bridge for the transmission of affliction. Let me put this to all of you...
To cultivate forbearance, you must first develop a clear understanding of the mental objects that arise within your own mind. These mental objects act as a critical bridge for the transmission of affliction. Let me put this to all of you: you may claim that external circumstances hurt you, but there is a fundamental question we need to address first: how can anything outside your mind ever enter your inner world to cause you harm?
External circumstances are form—phenomena with material obstructive properties. Your inner world is mind. There is an inherent boundary between mind and form, so how could anything external ever penetrate your inner self to cause you harm? Ah, so the answer lies in these mental objects: we grasp hold of the perceived image of the external stimulus. To break it down: first, a mental object shaped by past causes and conditions arises; second, we generate a discriminating mental object based on it.
Let’s start with the mental object shaped by causes and conditions. First, we need to understand a core principle: when someone says something to you, their words are simply a combination of countless individual linguistic elements. If their words cause you suffering, this is because, from the perspective of the Buddhist principle that all phenomena arise dependent on causes and conditions, you share a karmic tie with that person. If you had no karmic tie to them, nothing they said could ever cause you pain. After all, this is the very essence of dependent origination: if a single sentence could cause suffering for every person who hears it, that sentence would possess an inherent, independent nature, which directly contradicts the principle of dependent origination.
But this is not how it works in reality. Consider: four people hear the exact same sentence. Three feel no pain at all, while only you suffer. This makes clear that the problem lies with you. When that mental object enters your mind and triggers a sense of unease, the reason is simple: karma. You and this person must have shared some karmic tie in your past lives. To some extent, you created karma with them, so now it is being reflected back to you. This is the first type of mental object: the one shaped by causes and conditions. There is no need to fear this, because it is only a sensation, a passing feeling.
The second stage is that you grasp hold of this mental object, and layer your own imagination and discrimination onto it. At this point, the situation becomes far more complicated: it is no longer just a matter of past karma, but also stained with the deluded thoughts you have generated in this lifetime. After you entertain all these imaginings, the matter balloons to involve countless unrelated issues. You start ruminating on the past, worrying about the future, constantly grasping at and discriminating against every detail of that single sentence. What happens next? You will inevitably retaliate, and this action will create new karmic causes between you and the other person. When this new karma ripens in your next lifetime, it will give rise to yet more deluded thoughts… and so you fall into a vicious cycle of suffering that repeats across lifetimes.