instruction—that’s what it means by dropping the
object. Then you can do tonglen.
If you aren’t feeding the fire of anger or the fire of
craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn’t
have anything to feed on. It peaks and passes on. It’s
said that everything has a beginning, middle, and
end, but when we start blaming and talking to our-
selves, things seem to have a beginning, a middle,
and no end.
Strangely enough, we blame others and put so
much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is
because we’re afraid that this anger or sorrow or lone-
liness is going to last forever. Therefore, instead of re-
lating directly with the sorrow or the loneliness or the
anger, we think that the way to end it is to blame it on
somebody else. We might just talk to ourselves about
them, or we might actually hit them or fire them or
yell. Whether we’re using our body, speech, mind—
or all three—whatever we might do, we think, curi-
ously enough, that this will make the pain go away.
Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.
“Drive all blames into one” is saying, instead of al-
ways blaming the other, ownthe feeling of blame,
ownthe anger, ownthe loneliness, and make friends
with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can
place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cra-
dle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be
gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and cre-
ate an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s
Drive All Blames into One 73