Before the refuge ceremony last Saturday, Acharya Eric Spiegel talked with us about the meaning of refuge vows for lay practitioners. How do we “take refuge” if we’re not shaving our heads and joining a monastery? Stillman covered a lot of that conversation, and the retreat itself, in his post yesterday. But there was something else Acharya Spiegel said that’s still on my mind: we were there to cultivate four things: kindness, gentleness, decency, and courage. The first three, he said, we already had in abundance. The ID Project is a pretty decent bunch!
But what about that last one? How, exactly, can we cultivate courage? The Cowardly Lion needed a wizard, after all…


The first step: definition. Does courage mean risking your life? There’s running into a burning building to save someone else, or riding your bike down Broadway to save yourself some gas. To do either one, people would say, is brave. There are the monks in Burma risking their lives for freedom — that’s definitely brave.
We know that courage is more than a lack of aversion violence. It takes a lot of power to bash a hippopotamus from top to bottomus, but it isn’t really courageous. Any idiot can lift weights, put on body armor, and swing an ax. All you need to be is desensitized.
I think courage has a lot to do with what’s on the inside — like staying calm while the markets crash. And it’s interpersonal, too: telling someone that they’re being harmful without letting anger overtake you — keeping your cool when you’d normally fly into an angry, name-calling rage. Or having a difficult talk with a family member who’s very sick. Or getting up in front of a classroom to teach. Striking up a conversation with that cute person on the subway. Or even just making eye contact. All of that takes at least a little bit of courage.
Courage is central to Buddhism. It takes a lot of courage to do the most basic Buddhist thing: letting go. Leaving a thought behind and staying with the breath. It’s easier to stay afraid and run away with thinking than face the present moment all alone.
But where does courage come from? We know its opposite: fear, which is related to anger, whose opposite is compassion. So maybe cultivating compassion has something to do with being brave. But those other three traits Acharya Spiegel said we already had down pretty well — gentleness, kindness, and decency — are all based in compassion.
So what are we missing? I’m not sure at all. And, to be honest, I kind of suck at courage.
Any dharma warriors out there want to take this one on?