A Heart as Wide as the World: Living with Mindfulness, Wisdom, and Compassion, by Sharon Salzberg

(208 pp., Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1997)

On the night I read A Heart as Wide as the World, I stayed up past midnight, as absorbed (though not as horrified) as I once had been by the novel Dracula. Sharon Salzberg’s book is sometimes poignant, sometimes playful. It has the feel of an intimate conversation. Salzberg, a good friend, remarked to me that she thought she had become a writer in the course of producing this book. I agreed that she had.

A Heart as Wide as the World is a collection of short essays drawn from life, beginning with Salzberg’s childhood and continuing through nearly thirty years as a practitioner and teacher of Buddhism. She begins each essay with a resonant image or anecdote, such as a trip to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, a friend’s autumn visit, or the lunch during which she unexpectedly bites down on a Burmese chili pepper. She then teases meaning from each incident through a page or two of expanding insights and realizations. She is frank about her personal suffering, humorous and forgiving about the confusions and delusions that beset us. In much the same way that her writing reveals the depths of an incident, readers are likely to reach the conclusion that an awakened mind and heart will enrich any life experience.

At one point, a late-night fire alarm goes off in a hotel in which Salzberg is staying. She exits her room, carrying her passport, the item she decides it is most necessary to save from the flames. In the lobby, she observes among the guests a variety of responses to the emergency. Some women wear white gloves, pearls and makeup; some men, three-piece suits; others have rushed from their rooms in deshabille. Musing on these peculiarities of response, Salzberg recalls that fear often makes our interpretations of situations seem absolute. But rather than condemn our nest of projections, she suggests that the possibility of freedom lies in the midst of the relative. “Recognizing that an incredible array of feelings and interpretations and thoughts can arise in response to any event, we see that we do not need to cling so ferociously to our own reactions.” Appreciating our reactions exactly for what they are, we are freed from the need either to condemn and reject them, or to solidify and embrace them.

Sharon Salzberg’s book makes a strong case for the development of a loving mind and a wise heart. Reading anecdote after anecdote, we develop an appreciation for the flavor of mind that develops when the wisdom and compassion aspects of practice are equally present. “Those who have been badly hurt…. can challenge us to see that no one and no thing should rightfully be left out of our awareness.”

Salzberg’s previous book, Lovingkindness, was more structured and traditional than this one. It was a manual, an ordered explanation, with sample meditations, of formal practice. A Heart as Wide as the World is a different kettle of fish. It’s a series of epiphanies revealing the workings of a mind supported by spiritual practice. You can pick it up at any time and read a bit without feeling pressured to finish. Since the essays are independent of each other, it will even be okay if you lose your place. And if you read one of them two or three times, its interesting language and sprightly style, not to mention its depth of insight, will offer fresh rewards. However, if you do read sequentially, you may be drawn into a kind of entranced atmosphere by the way the author’s mind works, associating one thing with another along a web of intuitive connections.

This isn’t an autobiography, but its anecdotes sometimes are more personal than those Sharon Salzberg would include in a formal dharma talk. Students may be surprised to learn that she has suffered all of the pain, the self-judgment and even the misconceptions about meditation practice that most of the rest of us have. “Early in my practice I got the idea that really good meditators were continuously being bathed in a flood of white light,” she confesses.

Some of the book’s most poignant sections address Sharon Salzberg’s relationship to the Holocaust, which shadowed her childhood. The book’s generative spirit arose from her relationship with Dipa-Ma, a Bengali teacher of extraordinary meditative attainments. Dipa-Ma, with her love and rigor, her dedication to freedom, served as a model when Salzberg was bringing her own life into a more liberated, less anguished perspective.

Salzberg demonstrates very clearly how spiritual growth works. Each time we are able to make peace with ourselves, each time we choose awareness over denial or meet a suffering person with love rather than condemnation, each time we recognize our deepest motivation to be loving and free, we destroy the illusions that separate us from all that is. Bit by bit, the heart grows; when our hearts have opened wide enough to contain all the world’s suffering, we also experience unlimited joy. Or in Salzberg’s words, “we emerge from the half-dead world of disconnection and move into the profound and timeless satisfaction that is itself the fruit of mindfulness.”

∞

From the Spring 1998 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 14, No. 2)

Kate Lila Wheeler is a writer and meditation teacher who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is the author of Not Where I Started From (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and When Mountains Walked(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and editor of an anthology of Buddhist fiction, Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree (Wisdom Publications). She was ordained for short times as a nun by Sayadaw U Pandita in 1991 and 1998.