What One Can Provide

 According to the bodhisattva path, one must aim to "deliver all sentient beings". But I have found that in this kind of lofty goal, I have often found myself overstepping my means--that is, not having the wisdom or resources to be of help when it is needed. I wonder if trying to be of help can also be a kind of self-attachment, meaning that we have an idea of what being helpful might look like, and then try to impose it on others. Similarly, even at work, wanting to be everything to everyone turns out to be an impossible goal, and it would be perhaps the height of self-attachment to think that one could embody that goal. Could some of the process of becoming a bodhisattva consist in realizing the impossibility of helping all beings? And could that impossibility be the road to no-self?

 In Christian tradition, Paul Tillich uses a similar idea that humans are born eternally and irrevocably guilty. Humans owe immeasurable things to their creators and supporting beings, yet have no way of paying back the dividends. In reaching the point of impossibility--after genuinely trying to embody it--one has an opportunity to drop the self altogether. This is because all those efforts to vainly cover and help all sentient beings proved to be an utter delusion, so much so that one  is in a corner and all they can do is drop the illusory "giving" self that they had harbored for so long.

 In The Man Who Died, D.H. Lawrence talks about a Christ figure who decides, after his resurrection, to abandon the life of a savior, perhaps realizing the futility of trying to save all. I take this as an allegory for the exhaustion of the self, and the realization that the goal was to lose the self altogether, rather than harbor a sacrificial self.