The Buddha Walks Into the Office by Lodro Rinzler l Buddha and Prayer l Buddha in the Workplace l Buddhism and Work l Lodro Rinzler l Career Advice l Mindfulness at Work

A Guide to Livelihood For a New Generation

Does it seem that a lot of the people you work with are, well, jerks? The book, The Buddha Walks Into the Office, by author Lodro Rinzler, is about how not to let work turn you into one of them.

Apply the simple Buddhist teaching and practices to whatever you do for a living, and you'll not only avoid jerk-hood, but you'll be setting out on a path toward making your livelihood an expression of your inherent wisdom, honesty, and compassion.

This is career advice of the profoundest kind, geared towards today's twenty- and thirty-something workers and job-seekers whose employment outlook is radically different from that of a generation ago.

Three Steps for Creating Social Change Through Inner Change

I believe that thoughtful young people entering the job force today are not just interested in making lots of money; they want to be of benefit to the world too. They want to make other people’s lives better in addition to their own. A recent study developed by the Career Advisory Board showed that one of the most important factors for the millennial generation when looking for a job was that they felt the work they are doing is meaningful. The notion of doing something meaningful outranked “high pay” and “sense of accomplishment.”

What meaningful work looks like in today’s world can be confusing, but I believe that if you hold the view of compas¬sion, understand cause and effect, and want to apply the six paramitas, you can be the very change you want to see in the world and effect that change in the culture around you.

Step 1: Cutting Through Fixed Views

The first step is to learn to work with our expectations. We all have them: The idea for what the world would be like if only X, Y, and Z would change. The utopia we know we could achieve if only the right people were elected, the right economic checks were put in place, the right sorts of companies were given a chance to succeed.

The problem with these fixed views is that they are the basis for dualistic thinking. If you go into the world with the notion that your opinions are better than everyone else’s and try to force them down people’s throats, you are only propagating aggression.

When you find that you have been trying to push your personal trip on someone at work, you can meditate and examine where these fixed views come from. You can sit on the cushion, breath after breath, and watch the display of your mind. As thoughts come and go, it’s almost like you’re watching a really funny, scary, and sometimes obnoxious movie play out right before your eyes. Yet you can just watch this display, gently coming back to the breath over and over again.

By continuously coming back to the present, we are learning to free ourselves from fixed points of view. That is an important first step in creating change, at work and in society.

Step 2: Raising Your Gaze

As you get to know your mind, you see where you get hooked by fixed emotions, but they no longer get their hooks into you like they used to. You come to recognize when you stray into one of the six realms. Then you start to recognize people around you similarly lost in the fog of their own emotional states. As you are freed from just listening to and expounding upon your own fixed views, you become more available to notice the emo¬tional turmoil of those around you.

Perhaps you used to be dragged down by strong emotions. Perhaps it felt like you were lost in a waterfall of passion, aggression, and bewilderment. However, because of serious hours logged on the meditation cushion, that waterfall seems less powerful—now it is more like a stream. You’re not hopping off the cushion fully enlightened, but you have a greater familiarity with your own habitual patterns and are moving toward opening your heart more fully to others, unconditionally.

From the recognition that everyone around us experiences the same things we do, compassion naturally dawns. You feel a tug at your heart and you want to help people out from under their own personal waterfalls of disturbing emotions.

Step 3: Compassionate Activity

Having raised our gaze, we can take our experience of empathy and recommit to a strong motivation: we want to be of benefit. We can have faith that it’s possible to be of benefit, because we are no longer so attached to our own fixed expectations. This is the experience of prajna, the wisdom that sees situations clearly and allows us to exercise the six paramitas accordingly.

Instead of trying to yell our ideas for societal change into existence, we have the opportunity to infiltrate the same organizations we seek to transform and create the change from within. If you work as a cashier, you can engage the hundreds of customers you see each day with an open heart and a desire to be helpful. If you work in a hospital, you can be present with everyone you encounter—patients as well as their families—and extend a caring presence to them. If you work in sales, you can listen deeply to your customers and make sure they feel like their needs are heard and met. We can maintain an open heart, even in tough corporate settings, and let our compassion touch others.

It's Up to Us

If we can continuously connect to the power of our own open heart, I believe we can indeed create societal change over time. We can use our work situation as a jumping-off point for sharing our heart more widely with everyone we encounter. We can reflect each day on whether what we have done has helped others or created positive change in the world. Through this gradual process, we can build a society that is based in em¬pathy and compassion.

In this way, societal change might not look like what we thought it would, but we still shape the world around us in a positive and healthy way. At the end of the day, it’s not someone else who will change your work environment or even our society for the better. It’s you. It’s always been you and will always be you. So let’s all please step up and help this world progress further toward compassion and empathy. It’s not up to some elusive “them”—it’s up to us.