Each week two-three members of Hardcore Dharma do a presentation about our assigned readings.  Last week’s selection in Training the Mind by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was about Point Three of the Lojong Slogans: Transformation of Bad Circumstances.  Some of the most famous slogans emerge in this grouping, the most notable, catchy yet ego-catching  being the oft-quoted “Drive All Blames Into One.”  Saturday’s presenters, Cassie and Denise, questioned how to integrate this slogan into daily life without turning into mealy-mouthed sad sacks who lay their body atop slush puddles so that the nasty and oblivious pedestrians of the world might use them for stepping upon.
Learned Ethan mentioned that the original translation of this particular slogan is, “Drive All Blames Into One Sense of Self.”  Jamgon Kontrol, a 19th century Buddhist scholar and great influence on CTR, explains the slogan comme ca:

Whether you are physically ill, troubled in your mind, insulted by others, or bothered by enemies and disputes, in short, whatever annoyance, major or minor, comes up in your life or affairs, do not lay the blame on anything else, thinking that such-and-such caused this or that problem. Rather, you should consider:
This mind grasps at a self where there is no self. From time without beginning until now, it has, in following its own whims in samsara, perpetrated various non-virtuous actions. All the sufferings I now experience are the results of those actions. No one else is to blame; this ego cherishing attitude is to blame. I shall do whatever I can to subdue it.

Whether you relate to the concept of ‘one’ or ‘one sense of self’, this slogan is where Buddhism gets good and hard and hard and good.  Drive all Blames into One conflicts with our traditional theistic sense of justice.   We fear that if we are to absorb blame, let anger disperse and rid ourselves of the pain of fixation, then the person who trespassed against us may never reap the suffering THEY have sown.  We fear if we take complete responsibility for our mental and emotional states, if we remove ‘objects’ from anger and see a situation as a massive web of empty, interdependent phenomena perceived by an unflinchingly subjective mind void of solidity then the classroom that is the world will not improve under the tutelage of our morally erect instruction.

Drive All Blames into One says – who cares.  Give it up.  Eat it.  Buddhism is not so concerned with justice, and certainly not in the Judeo-Christian way of punishing perpetrators.  Letting our self-righteous, “what you did was really freaking messed up and you need to know that” diatribe go is 99.999% of the time the most skillful action towards creating inner and outer harmony.  It may not be the most satisfying option but not all Buddhism is supposed to always be some milk and honey mental massage.  We are supposed to confront our own ego clinging, and our ideas of moral rectitude are part of that ego to which we cling.
Under-experienced actors in a scene study class often lean into conflict.  They yell, scream, cry, wave their arms, shout histrionically and attack.  A good director will encourage the actors to attempt, at all costs, to create order.  Executed properly, once the actors eschew conflict for order the scene lights up – the characters, struggles, themes and essential questions of the play are clarified.  The players seem more truthful, and stripped of all the fuss, they become one thousand times more interesting to watch. 
We’re so afraid that if we stop yelling, screaming, crying and waving our arms at the outside world we might turn into that mealy mouthed sad sack who lies atop a slush puddle beneath the digs of spike-heeled pedestrians.  But maybe if we get rid of all our messy judgments, histrionics and ‘rocks in my bed’ mentality, some truth could be revealed.  Maybe, if we let go of blaming objects outside of ourselves, what we do within this world might become one trillion times more interesting to watch.  At least it’s worth a try.