Dr. Brilliant Vs. the Devil of Ambition

One night, Brilliant and his team set up camp in one of the most devastated villages -- and got no volunteers for the inoculations that they were offering. Desperate, they ambushed the village leader. They broke into his house as he slept and then vaccinated him. Believing that faith in God meant surrendering to all suffering, the tribal leader considered it his responsibility to resist the doctors. He tried to suck out the vaccine, and he attacked members of the UN team when they vaccinated his wife.

When the battle was over, the leader, exhausted, went into his garden, plucked the single ripe cucumber from its vine, and presented it to a young Indian doctor whom his wife had bitten as she had struggled. The tribal leader had been firm in his faith, he said, but now it was time for truce. As a crowd of villagers gathered to witness the struggle, Brilliant's Indian colleague refused to accept anything less than total victory. It was Brilliant's dharma -- his destiny -- to fight the disease, the doctor explained. Brilliant had come 10,000 miles to this village to save lives because it was his guru's wish that smallpox should be eradicated. The village leader gave the project his blessing, and the entire village lined up for inoculations.

But even that moment came at a price for Brilliant, who had been on the Michigan board of the American Civil Liberties Union and had worked for civil rights. How do you justify breaking down a person's door to vaccinate him, even if that inoculation saves his life?

"I used to spend weekdays in New Delhi, working at the World Health Organization, and weekends in the monastery," Brilliant recalls. "I would travel 17 hours by public bus to get to the monastery. I was having a very rough time, and I asked Baba how I could deal with this amount of corruption and contradiction.

"It was like the answer to the question 'How do I deal with such ignorant officials as the tribal chief?' I had externalized the problem by asking, 'How do I deal with these corrupt authority figures?' My guru said, 'It's not them, it's you. If you live in a world of sense objects, you're not at peace. You are not thinking clearly. When you are not thinking clearly, the mind is behaving like a drunken, crazed monkey in a cage.' "

Two-Thirds Dalai Lama, One-Third Chauncy Gardiner

Here's the problem: You begin to develop attachments to meaningless things, to sense objects. From those attachments, you make choices. From those choices, you find preferences. From those preferences, you identify with the best or the worst attributes of some of them. That identification takes you directly to the land of illusion, because those attributes are meaningless. From that identification comes cognitive dissonance. As a result, your desire for one thing versus another is based on illusions in your own mind -- illusions that cloud your ability to see what is really worth doing, what would truly make you happy.

Here's how it plays out: "Say you decide that you like Chevrolets and not Fords," says Brilliant. "Or you decide that you like Yahoo! and not Lycos. It's all the same. In my case, I felt that it was more important to stay in the monastery and to become noble than it was to do common work. But in the long run, preferences don't matter to your success or to your happiness. They distract you from seeing what is most important to you. The point of life is to transcend the smallness of the finite self by identifying with things that last. Preferences, or attachments, lead to forgetfulness: How can I really remember why I like Chevys and not Fords, why Yahoo! is better than Lycos? Why, in my case, is study better than action? From my preference for a certain path comes confusion, and from that confusion comes inability to reason, and from that inability to reason comes pranashiti -- total destruction of the cognitive process.

"Comparisons are odious," Brilliant continues. "The more you think about that, the more it helps you to achieve your goal. The goal is to be equanimous." Equanimity, balance, peace -- so that you are yourself no matter what goes on around you, no matter what the world hurls at you. "If you are constantly making judgments based on superficial affiliations, your world gets to be pretty small."

The exemplar of that attitude? That, in Brilliant's estimation, was U Thant, secretary general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971. "He was a great and spiritual man. Dag Hammarskjold had just been killed. There was a possibility of nuclear conflagration over a surrogate war being fought in the Congo, in which the West and the East were actually at war. U Thant was locked in a last-ditch meeting to avert disaster when he was handed a piece of paper, which he read, and he stayed in that meeting until the parties had reached a truce. Someone then asked him what was on that slip of paper. He said, 'My son was just killed in a car accident.'

"The newspapers wrote about a cold-hearted Buddhist. But in that act was someone whose love of humanity allowed him to transcend his own narrow definition of family and to expand it into a greater definition. U Thant's act was an act of a great, loving human being. That is equanimity, and it will probably see you through tougher times than passion or balance will.

"If you live a rich life of the spirit, you are not distracted," says Brilliant. "You carry out your duty, your dharma, no matter what."