Enemy and Friend Are Mind-Only

We find our friends pleasant,
But when we get angry, they displease us.
We find enemies unpleasant
But when they become our friends, they please us.
Therefore, both friends and enemies are also only mind. (13)

Why are friends and enemies only mind? When we meet close friends and family, seeing their forms and hearing their voices make us feel good. However, when we get angry at those friends and relatives, we find them repugnant, and they can even become our enemies. When your best friend becomes your enemy, they become your worst enemy. This is because when you were friends, you talked to them about everything and shared all your secrets. When they become your enemy, they know so much about you that it is horrifying.

The opposite can also happen: Your enemy, whose form and voice you once found repugnant, can become your friend, whom you now very much enjoy seeing and speaking with. And your worst enemy can even become your best friend because when they were your worst enemy, you only went around saying bad things about them; but now, you cannot say bad things about them anymore, you have nothing like that left to say, so you speak only of their good qualities.

Thus, both classifications of enemy and friend are only mind, because people are not friends or enemies from their own side. Rather, it is only the mind that designates people as enemy or friend, and that designation can change. So neither enemy nor friend truly exists externally; those labels depend on the mind.

The logical reasoning for this verse is: Friend and enemy are only mind, because friends please us, but when we get angry at them, they become enemies who displease us; and enemies displease us, but when they become our friends, they please us.

The Mahayana and Vajrayana teach that friends and enemies are equality; meaning that friends’ and enemies’ true nature is the same. We need to meditate on friends’ and enemies’ equality, because both “friend” and “enemy” are the confused projections of habitual tendencies, and by meditating on them as equality, such confused tendencies are purified. Not only should we meditate on friend and enemy being equal, we should also cultivate compassion for friends and enemies alike. That is how to transform our biased compassion and extend it in an unbiased way. That is much easier to do once we understand that friends’ and enemies’ true nature is equality, and this is one example of how wisdom and compassion complement each other in the Mahayana and Vajrayana.

Meditating on the equality of friends and enemies benefits us in our daily lives, because we suffer greatly from thinking friends and enemies are unequal and from being attached to our friends and angry at our enemies. By meditating on equality, we can lessen such attachment and anger, be happier and more relaxed as a result, and develop compassion that encompasses all beings.