Practice

Pico Iyer is one of my favorite writers. He has a new book out on the Dalai Lama whom he has known for 30 years. It was a fascinating read, covering the public, private, political and monastic sides of a this man who is revered by some of his followers as a god but who refers to himself as a simple monk. This excerpt is at the very end of the book...

'He (the Dalai Lama) told me that sometimes he felt that he could never do enough, and that nothing he did could ever really affect things....He told me that it was "up to us poor humans to make the effort," one step at a time, and again, as if invoking the final words of the Buddha, he spoke of "constant effort, tireless effort, purusing clear goals with sincere effort.".

Then as we were walking out of the room, he went back and turned off the light. It's such a small thing, he said, it hardly makes a difference at all. And yet nothing is lost in the doing of it, and maybe a little good can come of it, if more and more people remember this small gesture in more and more rooms.

Six thousand days or so after that morning, when he came back to Japan, I though about that simple gesture of turning off the light. Every one of those six thousand days, it seemed to me, I had had some revelation, encountered some wisdom, scribbled down sentences I'd read or come up with myself about the meaning of the universe, the way to lead a better life, the essence of the soul, the unreality of the soul. I had had more lightning flashes and moments of illumination than I could count in the next six thousand years. And yet now, on this bright autumn morning, I could remember not a one of them, except the simple, practical task of turning off the light. Not enlightenment, not universal charity, not the Golden Rule or the wisdom of the ages: just something I could do several times a day.

I went home after hearing the Dalai Lama on the sunlit island, and then went out for a walk. I closed the door behind me and was about to turn the key in the lock when I remembered the long-ago day. I opened the door again, and turned off the light.'

The Open Road - The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer