Head& Heart Together 11] Food for Awakening

 

Food for Awakening

The Role of Appropriate Attention

The Buddha never used the word for “bare attention” in his meditation instructions. That’s because he realized that attention never occurs in a bare, pure, or unconditioned form. It’s always colored by views and perceptions—the labels you tend to give to events—and by intentions: your choice of what to attend to and your purpose in being attentive. If you don’t understand the conditioned nature of even simple acts of attention, you might assume that a moment of nonreactive attention is a moment of Awakening. And in that way you miss one of the most crucial insights in Buddhist meditation: how even the simplest events in the mind can form a condition for clinging and suffering. If you assume a conditioned event to be unconditioned, you close the door to the unconditioned. So it’s important to understand the conditioned nature of attention and the Buddha’s recommendations for how to train it—as appropriate attention—to be a factor in the path leading beyond attention to total Awakening.

The Pāli term for attention is manasikāra. You may have heard that the term for mindfulness—sati—means attention, but that’s not how the Buddha used the term. Mindfulness, in his usage, means keeping something in mind. It’s a function of memory. When you practice the establishings of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna), you remain focused on observing the object you’ve chosen as your frame of reference: the body, feelings, mind, or mental qualities in and of themselves. This is called anupassanā. Mindfulness is one of three qualities you bring to anupassanā. Its function is to keep your frame of reference in mind, to keep remembering it. At the same time, you have to be alert (sampajāna), clearly aware of what you’re doing, to make sure that you’re actually doing what you’re trying to remember to do; and ardent (ātapin) to do it skillfully. The act of establishing mindfulness in this way—by being mindful, alert, and ardent—then forms the topic or theme (nimitta) of right concentration.

For instance, if you focus on the breath in and of itself as your frame of reference, anupassanā means keeping continual watch over the breath. Mindfulness means simply remembering to stick with it, keeping it in mind at all times, while alertness means knowing what the breath is doing and how well you’re staying with it. Ardency is the effort to do all of this skillfully. When all these activities stay fully coordinated, they form the theme of your concentration.

To understand how appropriate attention functions in the context of this training, though, you first have to understand how attention ordinarily functions in an untrained mind.

In the teaching on dependent co-arising—the Buddha’s explanation of how events interact to create the conditions for suffering—attention appears early in the sequence, in the factor for mental events called “name,” where it comes even prior to the sense media and sensory contact. But it’s not the first item in the list. It follows on ignorance, fabrication, and consciousness.

“Ignorance” here doesn’t mean a general lack of knowledge. It means not viewing experience in terms of the four noble truths: stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. Any other framework for viewing experience, no matter how sophisticated, would qualify as ignorance. Typical examples given in the Canon include seeing things through the framework of self and other, or of existence and non-existence: What am I? What am I not? Do I exist? Do I not exist? Do things outside me exist? Do they not?

These ignorant ways of seeing then condition the way we intentionally fabricate or manipulate bodily, verbal, and mental states. The breath is the primary means for fabricating bodily states, and practical experience shows that—in giving rise to feelings of comfort or discomfort—it has an impact on mental states as well. When colored by ignorance, even your breathing can act as a cause of suffering. As for verbal states, directed thought and evaluation are the means for fabricating words and sentences; while mental states are fabricated by feelings—pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain—and perceptions—the labels we apply to things.

Sensory consciousness is colored by these fabrications. And then—based on the conditions of ignorance, fabrication, and sensory consciousness—the act of attention arises as one of a cluster of mental and physical events called name and form.

As if the preconditions for attention weren’t already complex enough, the co-conditions in name and form add another level of complexity. “Form” means of the form of the body—as experienced from within as properties of earth (solidity), water (liquidity), wind (energy), and fire (heat), and as shaped by the activity of breathing. “Name” includes not only attention, but also intention, again (as a repetition of fabrication in general); feeling and perception, again (as a repetition of mental fabrication); and contact, which here apparently means contact among all the factors already listed.

All of these conditions, acting together under the influence of ignorance, are what ordinarily color every act of attention to any of the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, the tactile sense, and the sense of the mind that knows mental qualities and ideas. Even before we are aware of contact at the senses, conditions in the mind are primed to create suffering and stress from that contact.

So from this—and a great deal more could be said about these conditions—it should be obvious that the simple act of attention is anything but bare. It’s ordinarily shaped by ignorant views and the intentional actions influenced by those views. As a result, it’s usually inappropriate: applied to the wrong things and for the wrong reasons, thus aggravating the problem of stress and suffering, rather than alleviating it.

So how can attention be trained in the other direction? Obviously, it should be freed from the conditions of ignorance, but that doesn’t mean that it should—or even can—be freed from conditions entirely. After all, that would require an act of will, and that act of will would have to be formed by a correct and pragmatic understanding of suffering and its causes. Also, that act of will and that understanding would have to be borne in mind continually so that attention could be effectively retrained.

So instead of being stripped from all conditions, attention requires this new set of conditions to make it appropriate. This is why the Buddha said that the factors of the path corresponding to understanding, will, and memory—right view, right effort, and right mindfulness—hover around every step of the path. Right view provides the ability to see things in terms of the four noble truths; right effort activates the desire and intent to act skillfully on those views; while right mindfulness provides a solid basis for keeping that view and that effort in mind.

Of these three factors of the path, right view comes first, for it’s the direct antidote for the primary condition of ignorance. Right view is not simply knowledge about the four noble truths; it sees things in terms of those truths. In other words, for a person aiming at the end of suffering and stress, it points out the four salient factors to look for in any given moment. At the same time, it sees the tasks or duties appropriate to each factor: Stress is to be comprehended, its cause abandoned, its cessation realized, and the path to its cessation developed. As the Buddha noted in his first sermon, this knowledge of the appropriate tasks for each truth comes in two stages. The first stage identifies the task. The second realizes that it has been completed. This second stage is the knowledge of Awakening. Between the first and the second lies the practice—which, because it involves mastering the skills of each task, has to be gradual. That’s why it’s called a path.

As with the development of any skill, the path has its inevitable ups and downs. In other words, the practice is marked by alternating periods of ignorance and knowledge, with the knowledge gradually growing stronger and more refined. During these periods of knowledge, the act of attention is informed by an understanding of suffering and its causes. It is also motivated by intentions—expressed through the way you relate to your breath, your mental activity of directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions and feelings—that aim at bringing suffering to an end. This combination of wise understanding and compassionate intention is what turns the act of attention from a cause of suffering into a strategy for health: a healing attention. This healing attention is called appropriate because it looks at things in ways appropriate for advancing the tasks of the noble truths, focusing on whichever task needs to be advanced at any particular moment.

For instance, when attention needs to be focused on comprehending suffering, the role of appropriate attention is to view the aggregates—the components of our sense of self—in such a way as to induce dispassion for them.

“A virtuous monk should attend in an appropriate way to the five clinging-aggregates as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a dissolution, an emptiness, not-self. Which five? Form as a clinging-aggregate, feeling... perception... fabrications... consciousness as a clinging-aggregate…. For it is possible that a virtuous monk, attending in an appropriate way to these five clinging-aggregates as inconstant... not-self, would realize the fruit of stream-entry (the first stage of Awakening).” — SN 22.122

To attend to the aggregates in this way helps to advance the task of abandoning any craving for the aggregates that causes suffering.

When attention needs to be focused on developing the path, the role of appropriate attention is to feed the factors for Awakening and to starve the five hindrances that stand in their way. Here is where appropriate attention applies to the practice of establishing mindfulness, in that mindfulness solidly established is the first factor for Awakening. Thus one of the first roles of appropriate attention is to feed the development of mindfulness.

The image of feeding and starving here is directly related to the insight into conditionality that formed the essential message of the Buddha’s Awakening. In fact, when he introduced the topic of conditionality to young novices, he illustrated it with the act of feeding: All beings, he said, subsist on food. If their existence depends on eating, then it ends when they are deprived of food. Applying this analogy to the problem of suffering leads to the conclusion that if suffering depends on conditions, it can be brought to an end by starving it of its conditions.

In its most sophisticated expression, though, the Buddha’s insight into causality implies that each moment is composed of three types of factors: results of past intentions, present intentions, and the results of present intentions. Because many past intentions can have an impact on any given moment, this means that there can be many potential influences from the past—helpful or harmful—appearing in the body or mind at any given time. The role of appropriate attention is to focus on whichever influence is potentially most helpful and to look at it in such a way as to promote skillful intentions in the present.

The Food Discourse (Āhāra Sutta, SN 46.51) indicates how appropriate attention can be applied to the potentials of the present to starve the hindrances and feed the factors for Awakening. With regard to the hindrances, it notes that:

1) Sensual desire is fed by inappropriate attention to the theme of beauty and starved by appropriate attention to the theme of unattractiveness. In other words, to starve sensual desire you turn your attention from the beautiful aspects of the desired object and focus instead on its unattractive side.

2) Ill will is fed by inappropriate attention to the theme of irritation and starved by appropriate attention to the mental release through good will, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity.  In other words, you turn your attention from the irritating features that spark ill will and focus instead on how much more freedom the mind experiences when it can cultivate these sublime attitudes as its inner home.

3) Sloth and torpor are fed by inappropriate attention to feelings of boredom, drowsiness, and sluggishness. It’s starved by appropriate attention to any present potential for energy or effort.

4) Restlessness and anxiety are fed by inappropriate attention to any lack of stillness in the mind, and starved by appropriate attention to any mental stillness that is present. In other words, both potentials can be present at any time. It’s simply a matter of how to ferret out, appreciate, and encourage the moments or areas of stillness.

5) Uncertainty is fed by inappropriate attention to topics that are abstract and conjectural, and starved by appropriate attention to skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. In other words, instead of focusing on issues that can’t be resolved by observing the present, you focus on an issue that can: which mental qualities result in harm for the mind, and which ones don’t.

In short, each hindrance is starved by shifting both the focus and the quality of your attention.

However, with the factors for Awakening—mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, serenity, concentration (the four jhānas), and equanimity—the process of feeding consists primarily of changing the quality of your attention. The discourse lists each factor with its potential basis, saying that the factor is starved by inappropriate attention to that basis and fed by appropriate attention to the basis. With one exception, the discourse doesn’t say what each basis is. Apparently, the purpose of this is to challenge the meditator. Once you’ve received instructions in mindfulness and concentration, you should try to identify in your own experience what the potential basis for each factor of Awakening is.

The one exception, however, is illuminating. The basis for the second factor for Awakening—analysis of mental qualities—is the presence of skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. To pay appropriate attention to these qualities not only feeds the factor of analysis of mental qualities but also starves the hindrance of uncertainty, at the same time providing the framework for identifying for yourself the bases for each of the remaining factors for Awakening.

Of these factors, equanimity is the closest to what is sometimes described as bare attention or non-reactive awareness. But even equanimity is conditioned by views and intentions. For instance, the Buddha points out in MN 101 that when encountering unskillful qualities in the mind, you’ll observe that some of them go away only through concerted effort; in other cases, nothing more is required than on-looking equanimity. But even this equanimity is conditioned by an understanding of skillful and unskillful, and is motivated to make the unskillful go away.

In fact, equanimity has many levels, and a crucial insight on the higher level of practice is to see that even the equanimity of refined jhānic states—in which awareness and its object seem totally “one”—is a fabrication: conditioned and willed. On gaining this insight, the mind inclines toward what is called “non-fashioning” (attammayatā—literally, “not-made-of-that-ness”), in which you add nothing at all to the data of sensory experience.

The move from equanimity to non-fashioning is briefly described in a famous passage:

“Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there’s no you in that. When there’s no you in that, there’s no you there. When there’s no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress.” — Ud 1:10

On the surface, these instructions might seem to be describing bare attention, but a closer look shows that something more is going on. To begin with, the instructions come in two parts: advice on how to train attention, and a promise of the results that will come from training attention in that way. In other words, the training is still operating on the conditioned level of cause and effect. It’s something to be done. This means it’s shaped by an intention, which in turn is shaped by a view. The intention and view are informed by the “result” part of the passage: The meditator wants to attain the end of stress and suffering, and so is willing to follow the path to that end. Thus, as with every other level of appropriate attention, the attention developed here is conditioned by right view—the knowledge that your present intentions are ultimately the source of stress—and motivated by the desire to put an end to that stress. This is why you make the effort not to add anything at all to the potentials coming from the past.

The need for right view would seem to be belied by the circumstances surrounding these instructions. After all, these are the first instructions Bāhiya receives from the Buddha, and he attains Awakening immediately afterward, so they would appear to be complete in and of themselves. However, in the lead-up to this passage, Bāhiya is portrayed as unusually heedful and motivated to practice. He already knows that Awakening is attained by doing, and the instructions come in response to his request for a teaching that will show him what to do now for his long-term welfare and happiness—a question that MN 135 identifies as the foundation for wisdom and discernment. So his attitude contains all the seeds for right view and right intention. Because he was wise—the Buddha later praised him as the foremost of his disciples in terms of the quickness of his discernment—he was able to bring those seeds to fruition immediately.

A verse from SN 35.95—which the Buddha says expresses the meaning of the instructions to Bāhiya—throws light on how Bāhiya may have developed those seeds.

Not impassioned with forms

— seeing a form with mindfulness firm —

dispassioned in mind,

one knows

and doesn't remain fastened there.

While one is seeing a form

v2v2— and even experiencing feeling —

it falls away and doesn't accumulate.

Thus one fares mindfully.

Thus not amassing stress,

one is said to be

in the presence of Unbinding.

(Similarly with sounds, aromas, flavors, tactile sensations, and mental qualities or ideas.) — SN 35:95

Notice two words in this verse: mindfulness and dispassioned. The reference to mindfulness underlines the need to continually remind oneself of the intention not to add anything to any potentials from the past. This again points to the willed nature of the attention being developed here.

MN 106 offers an alternative way of expressing this intention, at the same time offering further analysis of the stages the mind goes through when it is kept in mind. The intention is this: ‘It should not be, it should not occur to me; it will not be, it will not occur to me. What is, what has come to be, that I abandon.’ As the Buddha says in that discourse, a person who pursues this intention will abandon passion for sights, sounds, etc., and arrive at the equanimity of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. But if discernment isn’t yet sharp enough, he or she will simply move the focus of passion from sensory and mental input to the equanimity itself, and thus stay fixated on that level. Thus the importance of the second word noted above—dispassion—which highlights the fact that passion is the crucial factor normally added to the seen, heard, sensed, and cognized, and thus the factor most needing to be undercut in every way possible.

Some interpretations of the instructions to Bāhiya identify the added factor as a metaphysical view about there being something behind the data of experience, but this sort of metaphysical view—even though it can form a basis for passion—is only one of many such bases. The belief that there is something out there that can be grasped and possessed can obviously form a condition for passion, but so can the belief that there’s nothing there: When there’s nothing, there’s nothing to be harmed by giving in to desire, an idea that can excuse all kinds of harmful passions. So the meditator has to be careful not to add any assumptions to the data of experience that would foster passion in any way, shape, or form. And this involves more than bare attention. It requires right view about how passion works and what’s necessary to thwart it.

As SN 22:36 and SN 23:2 indicate, our sense of who we are is defined by our passions. Even when we don’t consciously think of “self”—as when we’re totally immersed in an activity, at one with the action—there can be a passion for that oneness with a strong sense of “being here,” “being the doing,” or “being the knowing,” which is identity in a subtle form.

But when discernment is sharp enough to see that even this equanimity is fabricated and conditioned, something that’s done (see MN 137 and 140), any passion for it can be undercut as well. When passion is consistently offered no place to land, there’s no nucleus for a “place” of any sort: no “here,” no “there,” no nucleus for a sense of identity to be constructed around anything anywhere at all. This explains why the state of non-fashioning is expressed in terms devoid of place: “When there’s no you in that, there’s no you there. When there’s no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two.”

With the total fading of passion, the final intention to undercut passion can thus be dropped. When it’s dropped—with no need to replace it with any other—nothing more is constructed. This brings a true opening to the Deathless, which lies beyond all conditions—even the conditions of right view, mindfulness, and appropriate attention.

The extraordinary nature of this experience is indicated by the verse that concludes the discourse on Bāhiya:

Where water, earth, fire, & wind have no footing:

There the stars do not shine,

the sun is not visible,

the moon does not appear,

darkness is not found.

And when a sage,

a brahman through sagacity,

has known [this] for himself,

then from form & formless,

from bliss & pain,

he is freed.

When the awakened person emerges from this experience and resumes dealing with the conditions of time and space, it’s with a totally new perspective. But even then, he/she still has use for appropriate attention. As Ven. Sāriputta notes in SN 22:122:

“An arahant should attend in an appropriate way to these five clinging-aggregates as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a dissolution, an emptiness, not-self. Although, for an arahant, there is nothing further to do, and nothing to add to what has been done, still these things—when developed & pursued—lead both to a pleasant abiding in the here-&-now and to mindfulness & alertness.”

So it’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as bare attention in the practice of the Buddha’s teachings. Instead of trying to create an unconditioned form of attention, the practice tries to create a set of skillful conditions to shape and direct the act of attention to make it appropriate: truly healing, truly leading to the end of suffering and stress. Once these conditions are well developed, the Buddha promises that they will serve you well—even past the moment of Awakening, all the way to your very last death.

Head& Heart Together 8] Head & Heart Together

 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu 

Head & Heart Together

Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras

The brahmavihāras, or “sublime attitudes,” are the Buddha’s primary heart teachings—the ones that connect most directly with our desire for true happiness. The term brahmavihāra literally means “dwelling place of brahmās.” Brahmās are gods who live in the higher heavens, dwelling in an attitude of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity. These unlimited attitudes can be developed from the more limited versions of these emotions that we experience in the human heart.

Of these four emotions, goodwill (mettā) is the most fundamental. It’s the wish for true happiness, a wish you can direct to yourself or to others. Goodwill was the underlying motivation that led the Buddha to search for awakening and to teach the path to awakening to others after he had found it.

The next two emotions in the list are essentially applications of goodwill. Compassion (karuṇā) is what goodwill feels when it encounters suffering: It wants the suffering to stop. Empathetic joy (muditā) is what goodwill feels when it encounters happiness: It wants the happiness to continue. Equanimity (upekkhā) is a different emotion, in that it acts as an aid to and a check on the other three. When you encounter suffering that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, you need equanimity to avoid creating additional suffering and to channel your energies to areas where you can be of help. In this way, equanimity isn’t cold hearted or indifferent. It simply makes your goodwill more focused and effective.

Making these attitudes limitless requires work. It’s easy to feel goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy for people you like and love, but there are bound to be people you dislike—often for very good reasons. Similarly, there are many people for whom it’s easy to feel equanimity: people you don’t know or don’t really care about. But it’s hard to feel equanimity when people you love are suffering. Yet if you want to develop the brahmavihāras, you have to include all of these people within the scope of your awareness so that you can apply the proper attitude no matter where or when. This is where your heart needs the help of your head.

All too often, meditators believe that if they can simply add a little more heart juice, a little more emotional oomph, to their brahmavihāra practice, their attitudes can become limitless. But if something inside you keeps churning up reasons for liking this person or hating that one, your practice starts feeling hypocritical. You wonder who you’re trying to fool. Or, after a month devoted to the practice, you still find yourself thinking black thoughts about people who cut you off in traffic—to say nothing of people who’ve done the world serious harm.

This is where the head comes in. If we think of the heart as the side of the mind that wants happiness, the head is the side that understands how cause and effect actually work. If your head and heart can learn to cooperate—that is, if your head can give priority to finding the causes for true happiness, and your heart can learn to embrace those causes—then the training of the mind can go far.

This is why the Buddha taught the brahmavihāras in a context of head teachings: the principle of causality as it plays out in (1) karma and (2) the process of fabrication that shapes emotions within the body and mind. The more we can get our heads around these teachings, the easier it will be to put our whole heart into developing attitudes that truly are sublime. An understanding of karma helps to explain what we’re doing as we develop the brahmavihāras and why we might want to do so in the first place. An understanding of fabrication helps to explain how we can take our human heart and convert it into a place where brahmas could dwell.

The teaching on karma starts with the principle that people experience happiness and sorrow based on a combination of their past and present intentions. If we act with unskillful intentions either for ourselves or for others, we’re going to suffer. If we act with skillful intentions, we’ll experience happiness. So if we want to be happy, we have to train our intentions to always be skillful. This is the first reason for developing the brahmavihāras: so that we can make our intentions more trustworthy.

Some people say that unlimited goodwill comes naturally to us, that our Buddha- nature is intrinsically compassionate. But the Buddha never said anything about Buddha-nature. What he did say is that the mind is even more variegated than the animal world. We’re capable of anything. So what are we going to do with this capability?

We could do—and have done—almost anything, but the one thing the Buddha does assume across the board is that deep down inside we want to take this capability and devote it to happiness. So the first lesson of karma is that if you really want to be happy, you can’t trust that deep down you know the right thing to do, because that would simply foster complacency. Unskillful intentions would take over and you wouldn’t even know it. Instead, you have to be heedful to recognize unskillful intentions for what they are, and to act only on skillful ones. The way to ensure that you’ll stay heedful is to take your desire for happiness and spread it around.

The second lesson of karma is that just as you’re the primary architect of your own happiness and suffering, other people are the primary architects of theirs. If you really want them to be happy, you don’t just treat them nicely. You also want them to learn how to create the causes for happiness. If you can, you want to show them how to do that. This is why the gift of dharma—lessons in how to give rise to true happiness—is the greatest gift.

In the Buddha’s most famous example of how to express an attitude of unlimited good will, he doesn’t just express the following wish for universal happiness:

“Happy, at rest,

may all beings be happy at heart.

Whatever beings there may be,

weak or strong, without exception,

long, large,

middling, short,

subtle, blatant,

seen & unseen,

near & far,

born & seeking birth:

May all beings be happy at heart.”

He immediately adds a wish that all beings avoid the causes that would lead them to unhappiness:

“Let no one deceive another

or despise anyone anywhere,

or through anger or resistance

wish for another to suffer.” — Sn 1:8

So if you’re using visualization as part of your goodwill practice, don’t visualize people simply as smiling, surrounded willy-nilly by wealth and sensual pleasures. Visualize them acting, speaking, and thinking skillfully. If they’re currently acting on unskillful intentions, visualize them changing their ways. Then act to realize those visualizations if you can.

A similar principle applies to compassion and empathetic joy. Learn to feel compassion not only for people who are already suffering, but also for those who are engaging in unskillful actions that will lead to future suffering. This means, if possible, trying to stop them from doing those things. And learn to feel empathetic joy not only for those who are already happy, but also for those whose actions will lead to future happiness. If you have the opportunity, give them encouragement.

But you also have to realize that no matter how unlimited the scope of these positive emotions, their effect is going to run into limits. In other words, regardless of how strong your goodwill or compassion may be, there are bound to be people whose past actions are unskillful and who cannot or will not change their ways in the present. This is why you need equanimity as your reality check. When you encounter areas where you can’t be of help, you learn not to get upset. Think about the universality of the principle of karma: it applies to everyone regardless of whether you like them or not. That puts you in a position where you can see more clearly what can be changed, where you can be of help. In other words, equanimity isn’t a blanket acceptance of things as they are. It’s a tool for helping you to develop discernment as to which kinds of suffering you have to accept and which ones you don’t.

For example, someone in your family may be suffering from Alzheimer’s. If you get upset about the fact of the disease, you’re limiting your ability to be genuinely helpful. To be more effective, you have to use equanimity as a means of letting go of what you want to change and focusing more on what can be changed in the present.

A third lesson from the principle of karma is that developing the brahmavihāras can also help mitigate the results of your past bad actions. The Buddha explains this point with an analogy: If you put a lump of salt into a glass of water, you can’t drink the water in the glass. But if you put that lump of salt into a river, you could then drink the water in the river, because the river contains so much more water than salt. When you develop the four brahmavihāras, your mind is like the river. The skillful karma of developing these attitudes in the present is so expansive that whatever results of past bad actions may arise, you hardly notice them.

A proper understanding of karma also helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well just leave them alone. When you catch yourself thinking in those terms, you have to keep four principles in mind.

First, remember that when you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, whatever wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place.

There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no one’s karmic history is a single account. It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, each seed maturing at its own rate. Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared; some are sprouting now; some will sprout in the future. This means that a person’s present condition reflects only a small portion of his or her past actions. As for the other seeds, you can’t see them at all.

This reflection helps you when developing compassion, for it reminds you that you never know when the possibility to help somebody can have an effect. The seeds of the other person’s past bad actions may be flowering right now, but they could die at any time. You may happen to be the person who’s there to help when that person is ready to receive help.

The same pattern applies to empathetic joy. Suppose that your neighbor is wealthier than you are. You may resist feeling empathetic joy for him because you think, “He’s already well-off, while I’m still struggling. Why should I wish him to be even happier than he is?” If you find yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself that you don’t know what your karmic seeds are; you don’t know what his karmic seeds are. Maybe his good karmic seeds are about to die. Do you want them to die any faster? Does his happiness diminish yours? What kind of attitude is that? It’s useful to think in these ways.

The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain. The Buddha simply says that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain. Karma is not a respecter of persons; it’s simply an issue of actions and results. Good people may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past. People who seem horrible may have done some wonderful things. You never know. So there’s no question of a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain. There’s simply the principle that actions have results and that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions. You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think skillfully when those actions bear fruit in the present, you don’t have to suffer.

A third principle applies to the question of whether the person who’s suffering “deserves” your compassion. You sometimes hear that everyone deserves your compassion because they all have Buddha-nature. But this ignores the primary reason for developing compassion as a brahmavihāra in the first place: You need to make your compassion universal so that you can trust your intentions. If you regard your compassion as so precious that only Buddhas deserve it, you won’t be able to trust yourself when encountering people whose actions are consistently evil.

At the same time, you have to remember that no human being has a totally pure karmic past, so you can’t make a person’s purity the basis for your compassion. Some people resist the idea that, say, children born into a warzone, suffering from brutality and starvation, are there for a karmic reason. It seems heartless, they say, to attribute these sufferings to karma from past lives. The only heartlessness here, though, is the insistence that people are worthy of compassion only if they are innocent of any wrongdoing. Remember that you don’t have to like or admire someone to feel compassion for that person. All you have to do is wish for that person to be happy. The more you can develop this attitude toward people you know have misbehaved, the more you’ll be able to trust your intentions in any situation.

The Buddha illustrates this point with a graphic analogy: Even if bandits attack you and saw off your limbs with a two-handled saw, you have to feel goodwill starting with them and then spreading to include the entire world. If you keep this analogy in mind, it helps to protect you from acting in unskillful ways, no matter how badly provoked.

The fourth principle to remember concerns the karma you’re creating right now in reaction to other people’s pleasure and pain. If you’re resentful of somebody else’s happiness, someday when you get happy there’s going to be somebody resentful of yours. Do you want that? Or if you’re hard-hearted toward somebody who’s suffering right now, someday you may face the same sort of suffering. Do you want people to be hard-hearted toward you? Always remember that your reactions are a form of karma, so be mindful to create the kind of karma that gives the results you’d like to see.

When you think in these ways you see that it really is in your interest to develop the brahmavihāras in all situations. So the question is, how do you do that? This is where another aspect of the Buddha’s teachings on causality plays a role: his teaching on fabrication, or the way you shape your experience.

Fabrication is of three kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Verbal fabrications are thoughts and mental comments on things—your internal speech. In Pāli, these thoughts and comments are called vitakka—directed thought, and vicāra, evaluation. Mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings: the mental labels you apply to things, and the feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain you feel about them.

Any desire or emotion is made up of these three types of fabrication. It starts with thoughts and perceptions, and then it gets into your body through the way you breathe. This is why emotions seem so real, so insistent, so genuinely “you.” But as the Buddha points out, you identify with these things because you fabricate them in ignorance: you don’t know what you’re doing, and you suffer as a result. But if you can fabricate your emotions with knowledge, they can form a path to the end of suffering. And the breath is a good place to start.

If, for example, you’re feeling anger toward someone, ask yourself, “How am I breathing right now? How can I change the way I breathe so that my body can feel more comfortable?” Anger often engenders a sense of discomfort in the body, and you feel you’ve got to get rid of it. The common ways of getting rid of it are two, and they’re both unskillful: either you bottle it up, or you try to get it out of your system by letting it out in your words and deeds.

So the Buddha provides a third, more skillful alternative: Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced.

Here the analogy of the lump of salt is an important perception to keep in mind, as it reminds you to perceive the situation in terms of your need for your own goodwill to protect yourself from bad karma. Part of this protection is to look for the good points of the person you’re angry at. And to help with this perception, the Buddha provides an even more graphic analogy to remind you of why this approach is not mere sentimentality: If you see someone who’s been really nasty to you in his words and deeds but has moments of honesty and goodwill, it’s as if you’re walking through a desert—hot, trembling, thirsty—and you come across a cow footprint with a little bit of water in it. Now what do you do? You can’t scoop the water up with your hand because that would muddy it. Instead you get down on your hands and knees, and very carefully slurp it up.

Notice your position in this image. It may seem demeaning to have your mouth to the ground like this, but remember: You’re trembling with thirst. You need water. If you focus just on the bad points of other people, you’re going to feel even more oppressed with the heat and the thirst. You’ll get bitter about the human race and see no need to treat it well. But if you can see the good in other people, you’ll find it easier to treat them skillfully. Their good points are like water for your heart. You need to focus on them to nourish your own goodness now and in the future.

If, however, the person you’re angry about has no good qualities at all, then the Buddha recommends another perception: Think of that person as a sick stranger you’ve found on the side of the road, far away from any help. You have to feel compassion for him and do whatever you can to get him to the safety of skillful thoughts, words, and deeds.

What you’ve done here is to use skillful verbal fabrication—thinking about and evaluating the breath—to turn the breath into a skillful bodily fabrication. This in turn creates a healthy mental fabrication—the feeling of ease—that makes it easier to mentally fabricate perceptions that can deconstruct your unskillful reaction and construct a skillful emotion in its place.

This is how we use our knowledge of karma and fabrication to shape our emotions in the direction we want—which is why head teachings are needed even in matters of the heart. At the same time, because we’ve sensitized ourselves to the role that the breath plays in shaping emotion, we can make a genuine change in how we physically feel about these matters. We’re not playing make believe. Our change of heart becomes fully embodied, genuinely felt.

This helps undercut the feeling of hypocrisy that can sometimes envelop the practice of the brahmavihāras. Instead of denying our original feelings of anger or distress in any given situation, smothering them with a mass of cotton candy or marshmallow cream, we actually get more closely in touch with them and learn to skillfully reshape them.

All too often we think that getting in touch with our emotions is a means of tapping into who we really are—that we’ve been divorced from our true nature, and that by getting back in touch with our emotions we’ll reconnect with our true identity. But your emotions are not your true nature; they’re just as fabricated as anything else. Because they’re fabricated, the real issue is to learn how to fabricate them skillfully, so they don’t lead to trouble and can instead lead to a trustworthy happiness.

Remember that emotions cause you to act. They’re paths leading to good or bad karma. When you see them as paths, you can transform them into a path you can trust. As you learn how to deconstruct emotions of ill will, hard-heartedness, resentment, and distress, and reconstruct the brahmavihāras in their place, you don’t simply attain an unlimited heart. You gain practice in mastering the processes of fabrication. As the Buddha says, that mastery leads first to strong and blissful states of concentration. From there it can fabricate all the factors of the path leading to the goal of all the Buddha’s teachings, whether for head or for heart: the total happiness of nibbāna, unconditionally true.

Which simply goes to show that if you get your head and your heart to respect each other, they can take each other far. Your heart needs the help of your head to generate and act on more skillful emotions. Your head needs your heart to remind you that what’s really important in life is putting an end to suffering. When they learn how to work together, they can make your human mind into an unlimited brahma-mind. And more: They can master the causes of happiness to the point where they transcend themselves, touching an uncaused dimension that the head can’t encompass, and a happiness so true that the heart has no further need for desire.