The professional world is full of temptations to engage in negativities in order to professionally get ahead.  I would argue that as a long-term prospect even in professional terms, such actions are short-sighted and ultimately will fail even if they produce some short-term gains.  Karmically, if one succeeds in a professional environment, it has much more to do with whether they have previously created the karma for success than their current actions.  For example, somebody will become rich if they have given a lot in the past, not how hard they work today (though of course hard work is a circumstantial condition most of the time).  Somebody will become powerful if they have protected others in the past, not whether they are willing to assert themselves today. 

Further, if we engage in negativities today in the workplace, it actually increases the likelihood that good things will not happen for us even in the short run.  Why?  Because negative minds activate negative karma.  So if we are generating negative, selfish minds thinking this will get us ahead (the peak of delusion), then this will activate negative seeds on our mind which will bring about more misfortune and obstacle.  The only exception to this is when we are subject to massive spirit interference where malevolent spirits actually activate karmic seeds for ‘success’ in an effort to fool us into confusing cause and effect (namely negative actions bring about success).  This is quite similar to the mythical ‘deals with the devil.’  Even if they are not formal deals, karmically they are quite similar.

Finally, from simply the perspective of being happy while you work, engaging in negativities in the workplace is self-defeating.  Even if you ‘succeed’ more, you do so at the price of your own inner peace, so you are not able to actually enjoy your success.  Inner peace is an essential condition for being able to enjoy anything, and without it even if we become the richest and most powerful person in the world, we will not enjoy any of it.  So what is the point? 

Given all of the above, what then are the qualities of a Kadampa in the workplace?  First and foremost, we should be like my former boss Dr. Sahliyeh who has as his operating principle that he wants what is best for his employees, even if that means something not good for him.  He demonstrated this to me two times.  The first was when I was interviewing, and instead of saying something bad about other employment opportunities I had, he said he hoped I got Gonzaga and that he wanted what was best for me.  Then he suggested my name for the job in Dubai, even though that meant he might lose me which he didn’t want to do.  When our employees know that want what is best for them, even if it means it comes at our own expense, then they will naturally respect us and give us their all.  Dr. Sahliyeh was also an outstanding boss in that he always makes a point of asking how the family is and how our personal lives are going before he addresses the professional issues.  He does not view us just as workers, but as people with lives first, and he takes that into account in what he demands.  For example, he allowed me to only work mornings for the first couple of months when we arrived in Dallas so I could help get my family established in their new lives here.  All of these things are really amazing.  He is about as good of a boss as they come.

We should also be extremely competent in all that we do.  I think some Kadampas make the mistake of thinking that because our ordinary work is largely mundane that it does not matter, so we don’t really apply ourselves.  But even if the work we do is mundane, the personal skills we acquire by working are only mundane if we only intend to use them for mundane purposes.  But if instead we wish to acquire these skills for the sake of spreading the Dharma, then such skills are vital for the welfare of all living beings.  We will not be able to help all living beings if we are incompetent at all that we do!  This is one of the things that appeals to me about being a diplomat.  A diplomat needs to be the embodiment of virtually every good professional quality – smart, hard working, competent, diplomatic, good organizational skills, good communication skills, presents well, represents well, etc.  Kadampa teachers and practitioners in this world are, in effect, the diplomats of all the Buddhas.  Hard power is the ability to force people to do what we want, soft power is the ability to get people to aspire from their own side to do what we want, and this largely comes through the power of emulation.  Why would people want to become a Kadampa if they see us all as a bunch of incompetent losers?  Ambassador Chung was to competence what Dr. Sahliyeh is to personal qualities.

We used to watch Celebrity Apprentice.  This too was revealing about professional conduct.  Bret Micheals never said anything bad about anybody, he worked really hard, he was creative, he did not fight people or try advance his own agenda at their expense, he was just a genuinely good guy.  Since he was such a good guy, you cannot help but want him to win.  In contrast, Holly was a back-stabbing, self-serving, two-faced (sorry to say) b**ch.  But she is really competent at all that she does and she fights for a good cause.  But despite that, you can’t help but want her to fail because of the way she is.  As Thomas Friedman says we are in the age of ‘how’.  How we do things is more important than what we do.  Curtis was smug and too much of a pretty boy, so people also did not want him to succeed.  Cindy Lauper was brilliantly creative, but was such a wierdo that had no time management skills that, while you liked her and she was right on the personal side of things, couldn’t inspire the respect of others.  Sharon Osborne was really good at what she did and she clearly ‘got it’ in terms of the human skills, but she was either too tired, too sick or too emotionally involved to make it.  It just overwhelmed her.  Some people made it far simply by not rocking the boat and quietly operating under the radar.  Not being remarkable, either too good or too bad, just quietly doing a good job.  But if you don’t stick your neck out and lead you won’t make it all the way. 

The point is this:  as Kadampas we need to embody every good quality, but we develop these qualities for the sake of helping and inspiring all beings to enter into and complete the path.  We need to never say anything bad about anybody ever, work hard, be competent at all that we do, be fair, put our employees or clients interest firsts, not be smug, be creative, be a risk-taker, manage our time well, be diplomatic, etc., etc., etc.  Dorje Shugden arranges for us to be in a working environment for a reason.

The bottom line is this:  our ordinary minds are completely under the control and influence of our ignorance and self-cherishing.  Ignorance is our root view, and self-cherishing is our root value.  Therefore, if we rely upon our ordinary mind to make our daily decisions, the decision will be a product of these two deluded minds.  Ignorance functions to keep us trapped in samsara, and self-cherishing has one goal:  to put us in the deepest hell as quickly as it can.  Thus, it is quite foolish to make ANY decisions, even the most mundane, with our ordinary mind, because what good could come from that.

In contrast, our guru’s mind is omniscient, perfectly compassionate, omnipotent (within the constraints of karmic possibility) and possesses perfect skilfull means.  Wisdom is its root view and compassion is its root value.  The guru’s mind and our ordinary mind are completely opposites and take us in completely opposite directions.  One takes us out, the other takes us deeper in. 

Since every situation is equally empty, every situation is an equal opportunity to either plunge deeper into samsara or surge towards enlightenment.  There is no moment, no situation in which we do not face this choice and possibility.  We think many of our daily moments have no particular spiritual significance once way or the other.  We consider them to be mundane moments, or neutral moments.  We are not engaging in negativity, but we are not creating virtue either.  Every such moment is a total waste of our precious human life!  Through the most incredible good fortune, we have found a set of instructions that can get us our of samsara once and for all and through the greatest of miracles we are actually motivated to put these instructions into practice.  But through ignorance of the possibility pregnant within each moment, we flitter away the little time we have to purify and train our mind. 

Therefore, it is of paramount importance that we rely upon the guru’s mind in every moment of every day for every decision, even the most mundane such as brushing our teeth or when to wipe. We need to make our ordinary mind completely still and allow the guru to completely take over every moment of every day of our life.  We need to put him completely in charge of everything.

Some may say that this is a denial of free will, but it is in fact the very expression of our free will.  What makes us unfree is the fact that our mind is completely a slave to our delusions.  Delusions funciton to make our mind uncontrolled.  Delusions are what make us unfree.  Rather, it is with our free will that we examine the relative merits of relying upon our ordinary mind compared to relying upon the guru’s mind, and we make the decision to abandon the former and adopt the latter.  This is an expression of our free will, the very means of acquiring free will (because we gain freedom) and it is the wisest thing we can do with our free will. 

At the end of the day, we face a choice:  have to make a myriad of decisions on the basis of ignorance and self-cherishing or make one decision again and again on the basis of wisdom.  If we make the decision to rely in every moment, then the guru will make all other decisions for us, and each of these decisions will be the reflection of his omniscience and compassion, and they will function to swiftly take us to enlightenment.

So how do we rely on his mind at all moments?  Very simply. 

1. Make your ordinary mind completely still
2. Generate the wish for him to take over every moment of our life motivated by the wisdom that knows he will make the best possible decisions which have as their goal the swiftest possible enlightenment of all beings.
3. Make the request that he please take over, decide and act through us.
4. Be prepared to do whatever he says, regardless of how much our self-cherishing and other delusions may howl!

Samsara is nothing more than the turbulant waves of the ocean of my mind.  Delusions are like violent winds which create rough karmic waves on the ocean of my mind.  The winds of delusion activate contaminated karmic seeds on the ocean bed of our mind.  When these seeds activate they push up, creating contaminated waves.  These waves then create distorted appearances on their surface, appearances of objects that exist from their own side independent of the ocean.  In fact, they mask and obscure the ocean completely where we are totally unaware of the fact that everything is, in reality, only mind.  When we assent to these appearances, we come to believe in a world of objects that exist from their own side, totally separate and independent from the mind.  We believe that our mind simply observes a world that exists out there, independent from the mind itself.  We believe this because this is what appears to us and we never put it into question.

But when we realize that the entire universe is actually nothing more than the ocean of our mind, and every object is like a wave on this ocean, then everything becomes possible.  To cause samsara to subside, we simply need to allow the waters of our mind to become completely still.  By opposing, reducing and finally eliminating our delusions, the wind stops blowing, and the waters of our mind calm.  When this happens, contaminated appearances subside and our mind settles into the clear light Dharmakaya.  It is like choppy water that becomes increasingly still, and as it does so, the water becomes increasingly clear and transparent, less and less obstructed, until it becomes completely clear and without obstruction.  Before, the ocean of our mind was in the shape of samsara.  Now the ocean of our mind is in the shape of a perfectly still and obstruction-free clear light. 

From this clear light, we can then intentionally choose to put the ocean of our mind into the shape of the pure land with ourselves as the deity.  We emerge new, pure waves in the aspect of the pure land.  All beings, which were previously imprisoned by our mind into contaminated appearances have now been freed as pure beings abiding in the pure land, inseparable from the ocean of clear light emptiness.  The mental action of emerging a pure land out of the ocean of our mind plants new, pure karmic potentialities on the ocean bed of our very subtle mind.  These seeds will later ripen due to the pure winds of compassion and bodhichitta, causing the ocean of my mind to actually transform into a pure land within which all beings can take rebirth and complete their training.

The best way to cause the ocean of our mind to subside into the clear light is to connect with the emptiness of each object, recognizing them as distorted, contaminated, falacious appearances.  While they appear to be there, they are in fact illusions or distorted reflections on the ocean of my mind.  Recognizing them as such, I can then let go of them and allow them to dissolve and subside back into the ocean of my mind.  I keep doing this with every object that arises until eventually I abide in the completely still pure, clear light Dharmakaya.

In the course of a professional career, one faces many choices.  The question is how to make good professional choices in a spiritual way.  In many parts of the world, especially old Asia, spiritual life and professional life are conceived of as mutually exclusive.  Part of bringing the ancient wisdom of Kadampa Buddhism into the modern world is overcoming this false duality.  Every professional situation is different, but certain principles can help guide us in making spiritually and professionally good choices.

1. Our main focus should be skill-building.  Every job we do provides an opportunity to develop within ourselves further skills.  Heruka, the principal deity of Keajra, is the Spiritual Father of all beings, a Chakravatin (Universal) King and the principal deity of the body mandala (essentially the supreme spiritual doctor for all beings).  Therefore, to become a good principal deity you need to cultivate within yourself all of the skills of being an enlightened father, leader and doctor.  So in our work, our main focus should be on cultivating these skills within ourselves.  The substantive knowledge we acquire is transient and generally is only useful in our present job, but the skills we build within ourselves we take with ourselves from job to job (or assignment to assignment).  The more skills we acquire in our present job the more successful we will be in all of our future jobs and the more we build up to being a good principal deity of our future pure land.
2. Do not just report, be an agent of change.  Many many jobs have a reporting dimension where we are to report to our supervisors what is going on so that they can make informed and intelligent decisions about what to do.  This is a very important function, and one we should strive to do diligently, thoroughly and objectively.  We should provide for our supervisors the quality of information we would want if we were the ones having to make the decisions.  Providing reporting is good, but providing quality analysis is better.  We are hired to not just report what is going on, but we need to also provide the analytical insights which help the person understand the dynamics at play in the situation.  Analysis is good, practical recommendations are better.  We should never just come to our supervisors with a problem, we need to come to them with a solution to that problem.  We were hired to lighten the work load of our supervisors, not add to it.  Coming to them with just problems adds to their work load and runs counter to their purpose in hiring us.  Coming with the solution lightens their load.  But a bodhisattva goes beyond all of that.  The distinguishng characteristic of a bodhisattva is superior intention, or the assumption of personal responsibility for the solution to the problems you have identified and analyzed.  You should ask only from your boss permission to implement yourself the solution you have identified to the problems you have analyzed from having objectively investigated the situation you are to report on.  Your work has certain policy priorities, your job is to actualize those priorities.  Reporting is good, analyzing is better, recommending adds value, solving problems yourself is fulfilling.  Do not just be a reporting officer, be an action officer.  Do not just be an action officer, be an activist.  Do not just call on others to change things, become an agent of change yourself.
3. First do exceedingly well whatever you have been assigned, then go beyond that.  Some people don’t like the work they have been assigned, so they do everything they can to avoid it.  But you have been hired to do that task, so if you avoid it you are not doing your job and will certainly never succeed in a professional context.  One of the commitments of training the mind is to not pass your burden onto others.  You need to assume first and foremost responsibility for what you have been assigned.  As my Grandma says, ‘a job worth doing is a job worth doing well.’  So you need to do what you have been assigned, and you need to do it well.  Other people do their jobs but are unwilling to go beyond their job descriptions with the ever so useful retort “not my job.”  This is a laziness and professionally self-defeating.  As bodhisattvas, our goal is to become the solution to all of the problems of all living beings for all of their lives.  So we should constantly seek to expand the envelope of the problems we seek to solve.  We should work outwards in concentric circles, first solve the problems for which we have been hired, then solve the situations which create the problems for which we have been hired, and so forth working outwards.  This will both be seen as us doing our job and going beyond our job.  It is the willingness and ability to do the extra that will enable us to progress professionally as well as personally as we assume more and more responsibility.
4. Head straight for the biggest problems your work has to face, both in the short-term and more importantlyin  the long-term.  Often we want to avoid the biggest problems because we are either lazy or we lack confidence in our ability to tackle such problems.  But we will never build our pure land if we indulge ourselves in our laziness and we will never grow in capacity if we do not force ourselves to rise to the occasion.  A bodhisattva plunges straight into the biggest problems because that is where he or she can add the most value.  Again, it is an issue of assuming personal responsibility for the biggest problems in our world.  Being a first responder to crises is very noble and valuable, working to avert long-run problems is more subtle and often goes unrecognized (noone ever sees or appreciates the solution to problems which never materialized) but it is a higher purpose.  If you think long-term about things you will gain the skills now to be able to effectively respond to the problems of tomorrow when they come.  Then, even if the problem is not averted (best outcome) you are best prepared to rise to the challenge when the problem does manifest in the future.
5. Seek  to do the work that looks most interesting to you, not what you think you need to do to get ahead.  If you find it interesting, you will enjoy it.  If you enjoy it, you will do it well.  If you do it well, you will succeed.  In this way, you will both enjoy your professional life and succeed at it.  Doing what you think you need to do to get ahead is a deceptive strategy.  First, you are likely to not enjoy the job itself (and so you will do a bad job and impress nobody, so you will likely not get the career boost you are hoping for).  Second, even if you do a good job, the career boost you were hoping for might not come at which point you will be disappointed.  Third, even if the career boost comes, it will boost you further in a direction of doing something you don’t want to do because you now possess greater skills and experiences in a field or domain you do not like.
6. Be flexible and willing to do whatever the situation requires.  Nobody likes people who are rigid as they just create more work for everyone else.  Everybody appreciates somebody who never complains and is willing to be a team player and do whatever is required.
7. Serve others in everything that you do – always.  You should never work for your own purposes, but always be seeking to fullfill others’ (virtuous) purposes.  Everything you do, you should do for others.  We are here to serve, we should be a servant to others.  Service to others is the highest calling and the real purpose of both our professional and spiritual lives.