https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations10/141120_Loving_Yourself_Wisely_.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1zOg5buAVq1g6Hp3myBFUtyuqTN0Tg7DsBbrgFPk3Sy1sVaj4oJL7h-WU
Loving
Yourself Wisely
November
20, 2014
One of my
favorite stories in the Pali Canon is when King Pasenadi and his Queen Mallika
are alone in the bedroom and at one point he turns to her and asks, “Is there
anyone in the world you love more than yourself?” And, of course, being a king,
he’s expecting her to say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than myself.”
Now, if this were a Hollywood movie, that’s probably what she would have said.
But this is the Pali Canon, and she says, “No. And how about you? Is there
anybody you love more than yourself?” And the king has to admit that there’s
nobody he loves more than himself. So that’s the end of that scene.
The king leaves
the palace, goes to see the Buddha, and reports the conversation. And the
Buddha affirms what Queen Mallika said. You could search the entire world and
there’s nobody you can find that you love more than yourself. Now, you could
take that realization in lots of different directions, but the Buddha takes it
in a really wise one, which is that as a result of this realization you should
never harm anybody or cause them to do harm.
In
other words, you should love yourself intelligently.
Ajaan Suwat
would make this point many times. There’s a phrase in Thailand, “looking after
yourself,” which is the Thai way of saying “being selfish.” But he said that it
doesn’t have to mean being selfish. It can also mean that you look after
yourself intelligently; you behave in a way in which you make yourself
deserving of your self-esteem.
And that’s what
the practice in generosity, the practice in virtue, and the practice in
developing the mind are all about: looking for happiness in ways that you can
take pride in.
I received a
strange letter from a young guy the other day saying that he saw the big flaw
in this approach to the practice, which is that you can develop pride. Well,
there’s healthy pride and unhealthy pride. Healthy pride comes from seeing that
your actions are blameless. It doesn’t have to come from comparing yourself to
someone else. The comparing pride is the kind of pride that the Buddha said was
unhealthy. If you start comparing yourself to other people, the goodness of
your actions and the goodness of your meditation disappear. But if you look at
yourself and see that you’re getting better in the practice, that’s a healthy
pride, healthy self-esteem.
That’s the kind
of pride the Buddha encourages. When he was teaching Rahula he said that if you
look at your actions and see that you didn’t harm yourself or harm anybody
else, take joy in that fact and then continue training. Because a lack of
self-esteem doesn’t come from the fact of not loving oneself, it comes from
loving yourself but then having a sense that you’re not deserving of that love.
And so you have to act in a way to make yourself deserving of it. You’re not
automatically deserving.
There’s a
misunderstanding that you often hear when people attribute to the Buddha the
idea that you could search the world and find no one who’s more deserving of
love than yourself—which is not what he said. You’re not automatically deserving
of your love. You have to act in a
way that’s deserving of self-esteem.
This is why the
Buddha places generosity right at the beginning of the path. You find happiness
in helping others either with material goods or with your time, your energy,
your knowledge, or your forgiveness. When you’re able to be generous in these
ways, a sense of self-esteem comes from that, that you’re not just grubbing
around and grabbing what you can. There’s a sense of inner wealth that comes
with generosity, too, that you have more than enough. You’re not constantly
scrounging around and worried about things running out. You realize that you
have more than enough energy to give. And the funny thing is, as you give that
energy, you find that more energy comes.
The same with
the precepts: When you follow the precepts, you find that you can look at your
behavior and see nothing to criticize about it. And there’s a sense of
well-being, a sense of self-esteem that comes from that. You look at the world
around you and you see all kinds of behavior, sometimes pretty awful, and you
realize you don’t have to give in to those standards. You have your own higher
standards. And although there may be a little bit of comparing yourself with
others in that thought, what it comes down to is that you realize that your
goodness doesn’t have to depend on other people’s goodness.
There was a
debate recently over the question of whether there are times when it’s
justified to go out and kill people if they’re really evil. Well, that’s making
your goodness depend on their
goodness or badness. It’s not an independent value; it’s not an independent
principle. But as the Buddha pointed out, your goodness has to be generated
from within. It comes from your wisdom, seeing that regardless of how bad other
people are, you’re not going to behave in that way. And that gives rise to a
sense of self-esteem.
So the
self-esteem that they’re trying to teach our kids—simply by the fact of
existing, you should have self-esteem—doesn’t really work. Self-esteem comes
from the fact that you love yourself and you want to behave in a way that you
feel you’re worthy of that love.
And this is why
we have that reflection that we’re the owners of our actions, because our
actions are basically what make us. Our actions make us, just as we make our
actions.
Think of the
reflection the Buddha has you make every evening: “Days and nights fly past,
fly past, what am I becoming?” What you’re becoming, of course, comes from your
actions, from the habits you develop. So what kind of person are you creating
through your actions, through your thoughts, through your words, through your
deeds? You want it to be a good person, someone who really is deserving of your
love. And that requires that you have an independent source of goodness
inside—“goodness,” here, in the sense of the worth of your actions.
So this is one
of the reasons why we train the mind in meditation. It’s not just for
relaxation; it’s for gathering strength. On the one hand, as the mind gets more
still, you see things in the mind a lot more clearly, you can understand when
there’s an unskillful impulse and you can see what it’s coming from. When
there’s a skillful impulse, you can see that it’s there as well.
The second gift
that comes from the meditation is the strength to let go of the unskillful
impulses and to develop the skillful ones. And to remember these things: what’s
skillful and what’s not, and what you should do with these things as they
arise. That’s what mindfulness is all about—understanding mindfulness as a
quality of memory, your ability to hold things in mind.
Because you’re
constantly shaping your experience. This is the kamma that the Buddha had you
focus on most intently: what you’re doing right now. As for your past kamma,
that’s going to come willy-nilly. When it meets up with good kamma in the
present, sometimes past bad kamma can be dissolved.
The image the
Buddha gives is of a big lump of salt. If you try to dissolve it in a little
tiny cup of water, the water’s going to be too salty to drink. If you dissolve
it in a large river—assuming that the river’s not polluted otherwise— you can
drink the water.
So you want to
make your mind expansive, make it into that river of water, which he defines
first as expansive through the development of the brahmaviharas, your goodwill,
compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. You want to make those large. As he
says in another place, you make them large like the river Ganges, large like
the element of space, large like the earth, bigger than anything that’s coming
your way.
And then,
secondly, you want to have the quality that the Buddha calls being developed in
body and developed in mind. Developed in body means that pleasures can come and
your mind isn’t overwhelmed by them. Developed in mind means that pains can
come and your mind isn’t overwhelmed by them. In other words, your mind is
larger than these things.
So your
experience of what your past kamma is very much dependent on the quality of
your mind right now. This is the aspect of kamma that the Buddha wants you to
focus on. As for where your past kamma is coming from and where all the details
of what you’re experiencing right now came from, he says those things are
inconceivable. They’re just too complex to tease out, and it’s not worth it.
What’s worth it is realizing that by creating a good state of mind right now,
you’re getting more and more in charge of what you’re experiencing right now.
And as long as you’re a living human being, you’re going to be creating kamma,
so do it well. And in creating the kamma, you’re creating yourself.
Of course, ultimately, we want to create the
kind of kamma that goes beyond having to be a self, beyond having to experience
these things. There is a dimension that lies beyond all this, and it’s only
through our efforts that we can arrive there. We’re not creating it.
This was another
issue that was raised in that letter, the idea that if you’re working on your
path, then you’ve got the wrong assumption that somehow you can create the
unconditioned. That’s not the case at all. Ajaan Lee’s image is of salt water.
There’s fresh water in the salt water, but just relaxing and letting the water
sit there is not going to get this fresh water out of the salt water. You’ve
got to distil it. The effort we put into acting skillfully with our thoughts,
words, and deeds: That’s the heat of the distilling and that’s what gets the
salt away so that we can see, “Oh, the fresh water’s been here all along.” And
when you’ve found that, that’s when you’ve done the best thing you can for
yourself and for other people.
It’s a false
dichotomy to think that by finding awakening for ourselves we’re narrow and
unconcerned about other people. Actually the fact that there are people working
for awakening in the world is what gives hope to humanity. Otherwise, we’ll
just be grubbing around, grabbing this, grabbing that as in the Buddha’s image
of fish fighting over water in a puddle that’s shrinking all the time. That’s
what the world is like if you’re not trying to make yourself worthy of your
self-love.
So when you find
people who are suffering from self-hatred, it’s not so much that they don’t
really love themselves. They love themselves, but there’s a conflict. They’re
disappointed in themselves.
And the Buddha’s
right: If you just go looking for your immediate pleasures without any concern
about the consequences, there’s very little to respect. And it gets very
dismaying, looking at the world that way. But if you decide you want to love
yourself intelligently, wisely—in other words, you behave in a way that’s
worthy of your self-love—you find that it’s a gift not only to yourself but
also to the people around you.
And it’s a gift
whose effects just keep rippling out. So—realizing that you love yourself more
than anybody else—act in a way that’s in line with intelligent self-love, wise
self-love, wanting the best for yourself. And that means wanting the best for
all your thoughts, words, and deeds. That’s why this teaching on self-love is
so tied up in the teaching on kamma, because it’s through your actions that you
create yourself. And so it’s going to be through your actions that you can
create a self that’s worthy of your love and that can take you beyond yourself
in the end.
