There are several different types of power:  Example power, expert power, positional power, reward power and coercive power.  It is important to understand the relationships between these different types of power and how to misuse power.

1. Example power is others wishing to emulate you, to identify with you, to wish to associate with you.  This is the highest form of power demonstrated by the Buddhas and Spiritual Guides.  It is essentially the power of your example and the extent to which it inspires others to emulate it or to associate with it.  This is also sometimes known as ‘referrent power.’
2. Expert power is you possesses some special knowledge or experience which is useful to yourself or others for solving your own or their problems.  In particular, genuine spiritual realizations are the highest form of this special knowledge or experience because it helps people solve their actual inner problems and it helps and protects living beings in this and all of our future lives.  Ultimately, it is only our realizations which have any value to ourself or others, and all of the other forms of power exist solely to serve help share and disseminate your realizations.
3. Positional power is the power afforded to you by your position in conventional interaction.  For example a teacher has a specific position, and with that position comes different levels of conventional deference and respect.
4. Reward power is the power to reward others in some way for having done the right thing.  This is very easy to abuse if you offer rewards only to the extent to which others fulfill your selfish wishes.  But it can be used virtuously if for example you are dealig with somebody who has a pure motivation and you are in a position to put them in a position of higher responsibility, then if they do the right thing in terms of serving and helping others, then you reward them with a higher position.  Likewise, sometimes praising, even publicly, the virtues and qualities of others can help inspire them to be even more virtuous and to develop their qualities further.  The fundamental point is what behavior are you rewarding – behavior that has as its objective serving and helping others or behavior that has as its objective serving or helping your own selfish wishes (or worse, behavior that harms others).
5. Coercive power is the flip side of the coin of reward power.  It is the ability to punish othrs in some way for having done the wrong thing or from having failed to do the right thing.  Like with reward power, the fundamental issue is what behavior are you punishing.  If you are punishing incorrect behavior (specifically behavior that is selfish or harmful to others) then it can be done virtuously.  Wrathful actions are, in essence, the virtuous use of coercive power.

Some thoughts on the skilfull exercise of power:

1. First, if your motivation for using power is selfish, then any use of power will generate resentment by others, which, in the long-run, will function to generate resistance to your power ultimately leading to its decline.  And, more importantly, you will generate negative karma creating the causes for others to abuse their power towards you.  Any use of power for the sake of helping others, in contrast, is a virtuous use of power and will generate respect and apreciation from others, which, in the long run, will function to increase your power as people come to respect you and want to put you in positions of higher and higher authority (they naturally want to do this because they know you are going to use your power virtuously.  When you use it non-virtuously, they strive to take you down, and eventually they will succeed.
2. Second, your use of cooercive power should never exceed your expert power.  The rationale for this is simple:  if you are wrong, and you use cooercive power to accomplish your wrong objectives, then people will lose respect in you and generate resentment towards your exercise of power.  This will function to decrease your example power as people will not want to be like you or to associate with you.  In contrast, if you use your coercive power and in the end you are right, then others will come to respect you that you have the strength and backbone to fight for what is right.  Ultimately, children, for example, want to be shown right from wrong, they want to have limits imposed upon them when those limits are understood and known to be just and correct limits.  They may protest your use of the cooercive power, but deep inside them they know you are right and they respect you for your taking a principled stand and being willing and able to fight for it.  Our ability to do this depends upon not having any attachment or aversion for the things the other person can take away from us or inflict upon us.  If we have no attachment or aversion, but instead can transform everything anybody throws at us, then others will have no power whatsoever over us.  We give people power over us by being attached or averse to what they can give or take away.
3. Your positional power depends entirely upon its perceived legitimacy.  First, others will only put you in positions of power if you have demonstrated a sufficient level of example and expert power.  Sometimes people will put you in a position of power because they hope that with that power you will advance their own selfish, negative agenda.  Do not acquire power in this way because then you are using your power for negative purposes and in such a case it would be better to be powerless.   The one exception to this rule would be if by acquiring the power you will then be in a position to dispose of the person whose agenda is selfish and negative.   Once you in a position of power, its strength will depend upon its perceived legitimacy.  If your purpose is virtuous and for the sake of others, then others will assent to your power, in fact they will seek to reinforce it.  If your purpose is seen to be negative or selfish, then others will not assent to your positional power and they will seek to undermine it (and inevitably they will succeed).  Often what happens is when people are being brought down, they will then resort to the negative use of coercive power in an effort to hang on to power, but inevitably this will only accelerate their eventual decline from power.  The legitimacy of your positional power is also a function of your example and expert power.  If people wish to emulate you or associate with you and if people see you as an expert in the domain which you have positional power over, then people will naturally assent to and even reinforce your position.  People must also trust you.  They will trust you in dependence upon you always telling the truth (lying creates the cause for people to never believe you) and in dependence upon your intentions and purposes being virtuous.
4. Your pursuit of power should always be kept hidden.  Others naturally resent and fear the ambitious.  If they perceive you as being prematurely ambitious (meaning you seek higher power before you have proven yourself worthy of that power), then they will seek to knock you down and to block your rise.  Ultimately, power is either earned or bestowed.  You earn power through increasing your example and expert power.  It is bestowed upon you by others through your demonstrated example and expert power and your virtuous use of the reward and coercive power that you already possess.  Thus, the best strategy for acquiring power is great compassion and bodhichitta.  You use whatever power you have for the sake of helping others (virtuous use of reward and coercive power) and you increase your qualities and qualifications so as to be able to better help others (virtuous pursuit of increased example and expert power).  If your focus is on creating the causes of increased power then it will naturally be earned and bestowed upon you without you having to explicitly pursue it.  In this way, you can continuously grow in power without being perceived as ambitious.  In reality, within you, you are virtuously ambitious.  You wish to become Heruka, a Chakravatin King.  You wish to become a Spiritual Guide for all beings.  You wish to free all beings from all suffering.  These are incredibly ambitious goals.  But externally, you show none of this since in the end that proves counter-productive.

Heruka is a Chakravatin King, the highest and most powerful position in all of reality.  Learning the virtuous dimensions of power is part of my bodhisattva training, striving to become a virtuous Chakravatin King.  In business it is about how much money you have; within government the bottom line is how much power you have.  Power has enormous potential to corrupt (power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely…).  Therefore, it is very important to be mindful of the legitmate exercise of power and how it is acquired.  Power need not be shunned if your intentions are virtuous, you use that power for the benefit of others and you are able to protect yourself against its corrupting influence.  Indeed power can be sought after if you know you will use it for good.

Your turn:  Describe a situation in which you have used whatever power you have for virtuous purposes.

Many many people in the world, especially the U.S., suffer from being overweight. Once they get really fat, they give up on even trying because they feel like it would take too much to ever be able to get back to normal. Since they can’t get back to normal, they figure there is no point in trying. Those who do try, they then really struggle to diet. If they do manage to diet, afterwards they quickly gain all of their weight back. While dieting, they will go through manic phases where they starve themselves to lose, but while they are doing this they just repress their attachment to food, then sometimes they just crack and have a binge where once they start eating a little bit they can’t stop themselves from eating a ton of food all at once. After they do this, they then feel guilty about it and like a failure. They lose their confidence and some then intentionally vomit it all up so that they don’t gain the weight. But then they think that they can eat without consequence, and so they are more likely to binge knowing in the back of their mind they can vomit it back up again. In this way, real severe eating disorders can develop. Another problem faced is the mind can play tricks on people regarding their weight. When they are fat, because they gained the weight slowly over a long period of time they don’t realize that they are fat. They don’t see it so don’t really know or think they have that big of a problem. Once they realize that they have a problem, then all they can see is that they are fat even after they have lost a ton of weight. They just focus on even minor areas of fat and exaggerate them. What makes all of these matters worse is how in society, basically the only thing that counts is how you look, so people become obsessed with their appearance and what others think as the basis of their feeling of self-worth.

I have gone through much of the above (not so much the eating disorders or the concern about what society thinks, but most everything else). At the end of the day, it is really very simple: I got fat because I was not willing to accept the pain of being hungry. As soon as you can mentally accept that pain, you can then choose to eat less and to eat better foods. Losing weight is as simple as consuming less calories than you expend. You can accept this pain if you have good reasons for doing so.

My reasons are as follows: First, I don’t want to die as a result of what I have eaten. Most cancers are traced back to poor diet. Heart disease is the number one killer in America, and this is primarily a function of how people eat. I apparently have low good cholestoral and high triglycerides as a matter of genetics, which means I am particularly susceptible to heart disease, so I need to be even more careful about these things than the average person. How stupid it would be to lose one’s precious human life prematurely just to eat a Big Mac!

Second, I can accept the pain as purification for all of the negative karma I have created with respect to food. When I was a hungry ghost, and also as a human being, I created tremendous negative karma with respect to food. I killed, stole, lied, etc., all in the name of securing food. I committed all of these negative actions because I could not accept the pain of being hungry and the ignorance of not knowing or undertanding the consequences of my decisions. When I experience the pain of hunger, I can accept this pain with regret as purification for my negative karma with respect to food. It is very similar to precepts days. In fact, those on diets can take precepts each day and diet in the context of that. I have not done this, but it is a good idea to do so.

Third, if related to like a drug, food can be a drug. The mind of overeating is very similar to any other addiction. The problem does not come from the side of the object (the food), though it does to a certain extent with junk food, but rather from the side of the mind. It is deluded tendencis which cause somebody to become addicted to food and to struggle to eat less and better. As long as deluded tendencies exist within my mind that I cannot control, I will remain trapped in samsara. So overcoming these deluded tendencies is an important part of training my mind and escaping from samsara. If I can overcome them with respect to food, then I will be able to overcome them more easily with respect to my other attachments. Seen in this way, food is like candy of the devil, tricking you into remaining emmeshed in samsara.

Fourth, so many people in this world, especially America, struggle with this. So if I can learn how to overcome these particular delusions then I will be able to help many other people who suffer from this. So it is part of my bodhichitta training – I need to put effort into gaining the realizations that others need so that I can help them. The more expereince I gain overcoming any one delusion, the more easily I will be able to overcome all other delusions because the nature of the delusion is the same, what changes is the object of the delusion.

Once again, from these three reasons, it is obvious that the lamrim is the opponent to all delusions. The stronger I can make the lamrim within my mind, the more easily I can overcome any and all delusions.

When I was younger, I was skinny like a stick but I ate like a cow. My metabolism then changed, and I started slowly getting fatter. When I got to the US, I ballooned, because the food is so bad for you here and bad food is so abundant. I got up to 190 pounds. But in the last 3.5 months of 2010, I lost almost 35 pounds using the above reasoning. At the end of the day, dieting is largely a question of mind.

I have succeeded in eating less and a little bit better, but I have not yet succeeded in eating in a healthy way. Once I reach my target weight, and I only have a few more pounds to go, I will then turn to starting to eating foods which are more healthy. Likewise, I also need to get physically in shape. Not for vanity reasons, but because I need to keep this body healthy if it is going to live a long time. I will need all of the time I can get to practice Dharma while I have this precious opportunity to do so and I have the wish to do so. If I cannot control my own mind with respect to my own health, how will I have any credibility with others about encouraging them to control their own minds?

Your turn:  What are some delusions you have faced while dieting, and how have you overcome them?

I was at a conference on the Roma in Krakow over the weekend.  Part of the trip included a trip to Auschwitz.  I thought I would share some of the thoughts I had from my visit.

First, Auschwitz is the natural, logical, end result of hatred and racism.  I think a very useful way of testing whether a thought is virtuous or not is by asking ourselves “what is the end result of this train of thought?”  Anger mistakenly blames others for our problems, and generates the wish to harm the object of our anger.  The end result, the logical end, of human anger is Auschwitz.  Why would we allow even the slightest trace of this horrible mind to remain within us?

Second, samsara gives us impossible moral dilemmas every day.  I was told a story of a sister who was in the camp.  She knew it was just a matter of time before her pregnant younger sister and elderly mother would be brought to the camp.  The Nazis would automatically send any woman carrying a baby and all old people to the gas chambers.  One day the sister saw her mother and younger sister arrive on the train carrying the baby.  She knew how the camp worked but she knew her sister did not.  In an effort to save at least one of them, she told her younger sister to give the baby to the mother without explaining why.  The Nazis took the mother and the baby away and sent the younger sister into the work camp.  When the younger sister found out what had happened, she never forgave her older sister for having told her to give the baby to the mother.  What would we do when faced with impossible choices like this?  To a lesser extent, samsara gives us choices between two bads every day.

Third, the Roma are the forgotten victims of the holocaust.  Approximately 500,000 Roma were killed in the holocaust, and they were treated exactly as the Jews were with the same intention of extermination.  But within Europe, discrimination against the Roma is still an acceptable form of discrimination.  In many countries, they are still called “parasites” by mainstream politicians who call for their being rounded up and put into what can only be described as concentration camps.  For 60 years the Roma have been fighting to get recognized as holocaust victims.  I met this weekend the man who has been leading this charge.  The work was actually started by his father, and the son is continuing the work.  Only in the last 6 years have the Roma finally been given a building for an exposition at Auschwitz, a memorial by the furnaces and a memorial in the “gypsy city” within the camp where on one night several thousand were shot and killed just for Nazi fun.  One of the reasons why it is so taboo to be racist against Jews is because everybody knows what happened to them in the holocaust.  I can only hope through the efforts of brave civil rights activists like the man I met this weekend it can become similarly taboo to be racist against the Roma.  There are laws against denying the holocaust, yet it has been considered acceptable to deny the genocide against the Roma.  Why?  Racism projects the mistakes of a few on an entire group.  Yes, there are some Roma who steal and engage in forced begging, but the vast majority are people like you and me who struggle to survive.  More accurately, I think the Roma can be viewed as 10 million homeless people shunned by the whole world with nowhere to go.  After you have lived like that for a few centuries, then decide whether you want to judge them for the mistakes made by some in their community.  Really, what is the difference between some of the criminal bankers on Wall Street and some of the criminal Roma?  The difference is only how well they dress and the amount and methods by which they steal (no, I am not saying all bankers on Wall Street are criminals, check my language carefully).

Fourth, dehumanization is the precursor to genocide.  Both the Jews and still to this day the Roma were considered an inferior race.  Because they were “inferior”, they didn’t matter as much and it became OK to treat them worse and worse until finally they became like cockroaches that needed to be killed.  As Buddhists, we go one step further and equate all living beings, human and non-human alike, as being equally precious.  Shantideva says we should realize that each being is just as precious as a Buddha.  The sign that we still have deluded discrimination in our mind is when we consider any being to somehow be less precious than a Buddha.

Fifth, we are all in Auschwitz.  Samsara is a death camp, pure and simple.  It is powered by delusion and the end result for all of us is ritual slaughter.  The only difference between Auschwitz and samsara is speed and intensity.  There were some Jewish people who worked with the Nazis in the gas chambers believing that if they did so, somehow they might survive.  But every two months, they would round them all up and kill them all in a surprise.  Our thinking we can cooperate with samsara is no different than these ill-fated victims who thought they could cooperate with the Nazis and survive.  We make all sorts of bargains with our delusions thinking we can somehow get away with it.  We never can.  Likewise, the Nazis system of control was largely based on lies aimed at creating false hopes.  People so want to believe that it will work out and people so want to deny the horror of the rumors they had heard that they willingly believed the lies and were then led, like sheep, to slaughter.  We are the same with samsara’s lies and its promises of false hope.  We are little different than those in the photos, naked in the forest having a picnic thinking they were waiting their turn for their “shower”.  Many people say there is no way the German people did not know what the Nazis were doing.  While some surely did, after visiting the camp and learning how people moments before their murder still held onto willful denial and ignorance, I can see how the average German could do the same.  We are little different.  All of us have received teachings on the horrors of samsara, yet we still do not engage these as truths because if we did, we would not behave the same nor maintain the same priorities.

At Auschwitz, they make a point of saying of the 8,000 SS who worked at the camps, only about 10% were ever “brought to justice for their crimes.”  It is the desire for revenge that keeps the cycle of slaughter going.  As hard as it is to do, I think it is very important as Kadampas that we view the Nazis as equal victims of the holocaust of delusions.  They became possessed by their delusions, their delusions compelled them to enage in unbelievably horrific actions, and they are now experiencing the fruits of their actions in hell.  Ghandi said the oppressor is unfree when he oppresses. When we can find it in our hearts to also view the Nazis as victims of their delusions and generate compassion for the terrible sufferings they must be experiencing in hell then our compassion has the potential to become universal.  But for as long as we still wish harm on anybody and don’t feel equal compassion for oppressor and oppressed (which are separated only by time, not by fate), then we will never generate the compassion of a Buddha.  I know what I am saying here can be misinterpreted and misunderstood if one tries.  I am not justifying in any way what happened nor belittling in any waythe suffering metted out against the victims, rather I am trying to take a more expanded view that sees the karmic tragedy of delusion and karma as it plays out over the expanse of time.

Your turn:  what does the holocaust and the plight of the Roma mean to you?

One of the most trouble-making aspects of ignorance is grasping at what ‘is’ true. We think there is a truth independent of what we think, and therefore when we choose to try think/believe certain things that are different than what we grasp at being true, our thinking/believing lacks any power and seems like make believe. I can think X, but I know it is not true, so it doesn’t move my mind any. Virtually every Dharma mind involves believing in certain things, and so this ignorance can block us from developing virtually every Dharma mind.

But with all the objects of Dharma, it is our believing in them that they in fact become true – believing makes them true. This is especially true with Tantric objects. The key point is wherever you imagine a Buddha, a Buddha actually goes. So if I believe something is an emanation of my spiritual guide, he enters into that object completely and inseparably, and it becomes actually true – the object becomes an emanation of my spiritual guide and I can receive his blessings through it. In this way, if I believe that all objects are his emanations and that I am in the pure land (the pure land is a world emanated by him for practitioners to complete their training), then this becomes true – I actually am in the pure land. So it is a correct belief – a belief in something that is true. When I understand this, then the belief has real power to move my mind and oppose my delusions.

There is a deeper level at which believing makes things true. The mental action of believing in an object of a correct belief plants the karma on your mind which will ripen in the future in the form of that object appearing directly to your mind as your living reality. In other words, by engaging in the mental actions of pure conceptions, we create the karma to have pure appearances later. When we have pure appearances, it is easy to have pure conceptions about them, and so the karmic cycle becomes self-replicating.

To be precise with all of this, because Buddha’s mind pervades everywhere and is the ultimate nature of all things, whether I personally believe it or not does not make it true since it is already true (from the perspective of the Buddha’s mind). But my ignorance obscures my mind from this truth. But by believing it to be true, then it makes this truth become manifest within my mind (before it was a hidden truth) and then it functions within my mind as being a manifest truth.