In the Eyes of the Wise : The Buddha’s Teachings on Honor & Shame

In the Eyes of the Wise : The Buddha’s Teachings on Honor & Shame

In the Eyes of the Wise

The Buddha’s Teachings on Honor & Shame

Several years back, I led a retreat in Santa Fe on the topic of karma. One of the readings was a passage in which the Buddha teaches his seven-year-old son, Rahula, how to examine his actions, as he would his face in a mirror, to make sure that he harms no one—neither himself nor anyone else. One of the retreatants was a therapist who, the day after the retreat, was scheduled to hold the final meeting of a therapy group she had organized for some of her clients. She decided to Xerox the Buddha’s teachings to Rahula and share them with the group, to get their opinion on the Buddha’s parenting skills. Their unanimous verdict: “If our parents had taught us like that, we wouldn’t be needing therapy groups like this.”

What was striking about their verdict was that they arrived at it even though the Buddha’s teaching emphasized the need for Rahula to develop a sense of shame around his actions: If he didn’t feel shame at telling a deliberate lie, he was as empty of goodness as an overturned dipper was empty of water. If he realized that he had engaged in thinking that had harmed himself—or could lead to harm to others—he was to feel ashamed of those thoughts and to resolve not to repeat them.

And the Buddha didn’t teach shame only to Rahula. In his more general teachings to the public, he called shame a bright guardian of the world, in that it kept people from betraying the trust of others. He also called shame a noble treasure, something more valuable than gold or silver in that it would protect you from doing things you’d later regret.

The high value that the Buddha placed on shame contrasts sharply with the way it’s regarded in many segments of our culture today. In business and in politics, shame is all too often viewed as weakness. Among therapists, it’s commonly seen as pathological—an unhealthy low opinion of yourself that prevents you from being all that you can. Book after book gives counsel on how to overcome feelings of shame and to affirm feelings of self-worth in their place.

It’s easy to understand this general reaction against shame. The emotion of shame—the sense that you don’t look good in the eyes of others—is a powerful one. It’s where we allow the opinion of other people into our psyches, and all too often unscrupulous people take advantage of that opening to trample our hearts: to bully us and force on us standards of judgment that are not in our genuine best interests. It’s bad enough when they try to make us ashamed of things over which we have little or no control: race, appearance, age, gender, sexual orientation, level of intelligence, or financial status. It’s even worse when they try to shame us into doing harm, like avenging old wrongs.

But efforts to avoid these problems by totally abolishing shame miss an important point: There are two kinds of shame—the unhealthy shame that’s the opposite of self-esteem, and the healthy shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. This second kind of shame is the shame that the Buddha calls a bright guardian and a treasure. If, in our zeal to get rid of the first kind of shame, we also get rid of the second, we’ll create a society of sociopaths who care nothing for other people’s opinions of right or wrong—or who feel shame about all the wrong things. Businessmen and politicians who see no shame in lying, for instance, feel shame if they’re not at least as ruthless as their peers. And for all the general dismissal of shame, advertisers still find that shame over your body or ostensible wealth is a powerful tool for selling products. When all shame gets pathologized, it goes underground in the mind, where people can’t think clearly about it, and then sends out tentacles that spread harm all around us.

This is where the Buddha’s teachings on healthy shame can be a useful antidote, helping to bring the topic into the open and to show that, with proper training, shame can be a great force for good.

To begin with, the Buddha couples healthy shame with a healthy sense of honor: a sense that you deserve respect for holding to a high standard of conduct. In this sense, shame is a sign of high, rather than low, self esteem.

Honor, like shame, begins with the desire not only to be good, but also to look good in the eyes of others, which is why it, too, comes in both healthy and unhealthy varieties. Duels, feuds, gang wars, and honor killings—based on the belief that respect is earned by your ability to do violence—have given honor a bad name. But honor can be redefined and made healthy so that it’s earned through integrity. A society without this sense of honor would be as bad as a society without healthy shame.

The Buddha’s insights into healthy honor and shame came from his own experience in searching for, and finally finding, awakening. His initial search for the right path had taught him that honor and shame had to be treated with discernment, in that he couldn’t always trust the opinion of others. If he had been swayed by the honor shown him by his early teachers, he would have stayed stuck in the practice of concentration without developing discernment. If he had been swayed by the disdain shown by the five brethren when he abandoned his austerities, he would have died without ever finding the goal.

But as he realized after his awakening, the problem with shame and honor is not that you want to look good in the eyes of others. It’s just that you want to look good in the wrong people’s eyes. If you can focus on the right people, shame and honor can be an enormous help in developing what the Buddha identified as the most important external factor in gaining awakening: admirable friendship. He was now in a position to give others the guidance he had lacked in his own quest, and to teach his disciples to be admirable friends to others. This is why the Buddha set up the monastic sangha: to keep the lineage of admirable friends alive.

But admirable friendship involves more than just making friends with admirable people. You also need to emulate their good qualities. This is where a sense of shame and honor comes into the equation. Your desire for your admirable friends to think well of you is a crucial incentive to follow their good example.

The good qualities of admirable friends are four:

• conviction in the Buddha’s awakening and in the principle of karma;

• virtue, in the sense of not breaking the precepts or encouraging others to break them;

• generosity, and

• discernment.

The discernment of admirable friends can be seen in two things: the standards by which they judge you, and their purpose in judging you. If they’re really discerning, they’ll judge you by your actions—not by your appearance, wealth, or anything else over which you have no control. They’ll judge your actions both by the intentions on which you act and on the results of your actions. In both cases—and here’s where the Buddha’s sense of honor inverts the military sense of honor in which he was trained as a young prince—the standard of judgment is that you can find happiness in such a way that your intentions and actions harm no one: not you or anyone else.

The purpose for which admirable friends judge you is not simply to arrive at the judgment. They want to help you recognize why your mistakes are mistakes, so that you can learn not to repeat them. In this way, they’re encouraging you to develop the true source for your happiness: your ability to act with more and more skill.

If they judge you in these ways, your friends show that they’ve developed both of the discernment factors of the path: right view—in seeing the importance of action—and right resolve, in extending goodwill to you. If you internalize their standards, you’re internalizing the path as well.

This is why the Buddha taught Rahula how to internalize those standards by examining his own actions. That way, even if the society around him was falling apart and he was separated from his admirable friends, he could still live by their values. That would be for his long-term welfare and happiness.

The Buddha prefaced his instructions with the image of a mirror: Just as you use a mirror to see how you look to other people, Rahula was to look at his actions to see how he appeared in the eyes of the wise. And the wise would have him judge his actions like this:

Whatever he did in thought, word, and deed, he was first to examine his intentions: If he anticipated that the act he planned would cause any harm inside or out, he was not to act on that intention. If he didn’t anticipate harm, he could go ahead and act. While acting, he was to check the results of his action. If he was causing unanticipated harm, he should stop. If not, he could continue with the action. After the action was done, he should look at the long-term results of the action. If it turned out that he had caused harm in word or deed, he should talk it over with a trusted friend on the path who would advise him on how to avoid causing that harm again. Then he should resolve not to repeat that action. If his thoughts had caused harm, he should feel shame around that type of thinking and resolve not to repeat it. If he had caused no harm, though, he should take joy in his progress on the path, and keep on training.

In this way, the Buddha didn’t simply tell Rahula to cause no harm. Instead, he told him, in effect, “Try not to cause harm, but if you do cause harm, this is how you go about learning from your mistakes.” This shows the element of practical goodwill that pervades these teachings.

As does the Buddha’s recommendation for joy. After all, joy is what healthy shame and honor are for: to help you see for yourself the well-being that comes from mastering higher levels of skill and harmlessness in your actions. When this becomes your source of happiness, you grow up, with less need for the approval and affirmations of others. In seeing the power of your actions and really wanting to act in harmless ways, you make right view and right resolve your own.

One of the dangers that can come from shame and honor in admirable friendship is that, out of a desire to look good in your friends’ eyes, you might want to show off your good qualities. To counteract this tendency, though, the Buddha warned that if you do, your good qualities immediately get ruined. One of the signs of integrity, he said, is modesty—to speak as little as possible of your own good qualities, and never to exalt yourself over others who lack them.

The other danger of shame and honor is that you might want to hide your mistakes from your admirable friends. This is why the Buddha stressed that, if you’ve made mistakes in the past but have now learned not to repeat them, you brighten the world like the moon when released from a cloud. And it’s also why the Buddha prefaced his instructions to Rahula with a teaching on truthfulness, letting him know that making a mistake is much less shameful than making a mistake and not admitting it. If you hide your faults, you not only lose the trust of your friends, but you also close the way to making progress on the path. Or even worse: In the Buddha’s words, if a person feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there’s no evil that that person won’t do.

The Buddha illustrated this point with the image of elephants in battle. If an elephant goes into battle and uses his feet and tusks, but holds back his trunk, the elephant trainer knows that the elephant hasn’t given his life to the king. But if an elephant uses his feet and his tusks and his trunk, the elephant trainer knows that the elephant has given his life to his king. There’s nothing it won’t do.

This image is a good lesson in the Buddha’s revolutionary sense of honor. At first glance, it would seem that the elephant who doesn’t hold back would be the hero of the image—after all, that’s the kind of elephant a king would want to send into battle, and it represents the kind of honor often extolled in warrior cultures. But the Buddha is actually presenting the image in a negative light: The elephant’s willingness to risk its trunk is a sign of its servility to the king. In effect, the Buddha’s telling Rahula that if, like the elephant who protects his trunk, he’s heedful to protect his truthfulness, it’s a point of genuine honor: a sign that he’s a servant to no one, neither to anyone outside nor to his own defilements inside.

This inversion of the old military sense of honor is echoed in the Buddha’s comment that better than victory in battle over a thousand-thousand men is victory over one person: yourself.

The Buddha’s instructions in training Rahula to develop a healthy sense of honor and shame eventually bore fruit. Instead of taking pride in the fact that he was the Buddha’s son, Rahula showed a willingness to learn from all the monks. And after he gained awakening, the Buddha extolled him for being foremost among the monks in his desire to learn.

Of course, at that point Rahula didn’t need the Buddha’s praise. He had already found a deathless happiness that was beyond the reach of other people’s respect. Actually, the Buddha was praising Rahula for our sake, to let us know that shame and honor can be useful tools on the path. If you’re careful in choosing whose opinions you let into your psyche, and internalize the qualities that make shame and honor healthy, you’ll not only look good in the eyes of the wise. Your eyes will become wise as well.

All Winners, No Losers : The Buddha’s Teachings on Animosity & Forgiveness

All Winners, No Losers : The Buddha’s Teachings on Animosity & Forgiveness

All Winners, No Losers

The Buddha’s Teachings on Animosity & Forgiveness

by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s karma in having done wrong. This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings, and that it’s incompatible with the practice of what he taught. But that’s not so. Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but it can prevent new bad karma from being done. This is especially true with the bad kamma that in Pali is called vera. Vera is often translated as “hostility,” “animosity,” or “antagonism,” but it’s a particular instance of these attitudes: the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs. This attitude is what has no place in Buddhist practice. Patience can weaken it, but forgiveness is what clears it out of the way.

The Dhammapada, a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts. The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury back. The second is when you’ve lost a contest—in the Buddha’s time, this referred primarily to military battles, but now it could be extended to any competition where loss entails harm, whether real or only perceived—and you want to get even.

In both cases, forgiveness is what puts an end to vera. You resolve not to settle the score, even if society grants you the right to do so, because you realize that, from the point of view of karma, the only real score in contests like this consists of more bad karma points for both sides. So, in forgiving the other side, you’re basically promising yourself to forego any opportunity to add to the score. You have no idea how many lifetimes this particular karmic mud fight has been going back and forth, but you do know that the only way to end it is to stop the vera, and if the end doesn’t first start with you, it may never arrive.

“He

insulted me,

hit me,

beat me,

robbed me”

—for those who brood on this,

vera isn’t stilled.

“He insulted me,

hit me,

beat me,

robbed me”—

for those who don’t brood on this,

vera is stilled.

Veras aren’t stilled

through vera,

regardless.

Veras are stilled

through non-vera:

this, an unending truth. — Dhp 3–5

Forgiveness is a stance you may have to make unilaterally, within yourself, but there is the possibility that the other side will be inspired by your example to stop slinging mud as well. That way, both sides will benefit. Yet even if the other side doesn’t immediately join in the cease-fire, there will come a time when they lose interest, and that particular back-and-forth will die.

The Buddha recommends three tactics to help you deal with any lingering feelings that this strategy might leave you on the losing side, victimized without recourse.

• The first is to remember that we’re all in the process of dying, and you don’t want thoughts of vera to get in the way of a skillful death. The narrative that “He wronged me, and I won’t feel at peace until I get back at him” is not one you want to focus on as death approaches—something it’s doing all the time. Otherwise, you may find yourself reborn with a vera mission, which is a miserable way to live a life. You’ve got other, better things to do with your time.

• The second tactic is to develop thoughts of infinite goodwill, “free from vera, free from ill will.” These thoughts lift your mind to the level of a brahma, a very high level of heavenly being, and from that heightened perspective the idea of trying to find satisfaction in settling old scores seems—as it actually is—petty and mean.

• The third tactic is to take on the five precepts: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, and no taking intoxicants. Ever. At all. As the Buddha notes, when you hold to these precepts in all your encounters with others, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done, you give universal safety from danger and vera—at least from your quarter—to all beings. And because that safety is universal, you enjoy a share of that safety yourself.

As for the case when you’ve lost out in a competition, the Buddha says that you can find peace and end vera only by putting winning and losing aside. To do this, you start by taking a good look at where you try to find happiness. If you look for it in terms of power or material possessions, there will always be winning and losing. If you gain power, for instance, others will have to lose. If others win, you lose. And as the Buddha says,

Winning gives birth to vera.

Losing, one lies down in pain. — Dhp 201

But if you define happiness in terms of the practice of merit—giving, virtue, and meditation—there’s no need to create losers. Everyone wins. When you give, other people naturally gain what you’ve shared with them; you gain a spacious sense of wealth within and the love and respect of others without. When you’re virtuous, abstaining from harming anyone, you gain freedom from remorse over your actions, while others gain safety. When you meditate, you give less rein to your greed, aversion, and delusion, so that you suffer less from their depredations, and other people are less victimized by their prowling around as well.

Then you further reflect:

Greater in battle

than the man who would conquer

a thousand-thousand men,

is he who would conquer

just one—

himself.

Better to conquer yourself

than others.

When you’ve trained yourself,

living in constant self-control,

neither a deva nor gandhabba,

nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,

could turn that triumph

back into defeat. — Dhp 103–105

Other victories can be undone—“settled” scores, in the light of karma and rebirth, are never really settled—but victory over your own greed, aversion, and delusion is something that lasts. It’s the only victory that creates no vera, so it’s the only victory that’s really safe and secure.

But this isn’t a victory you can hope to attain if you’re still harboring thoughts of vera. So in a world where we’ve all been harmed in one way or another, and where we could always find old scores to avenge if we wanted to, the only way to find a truly safe victory in life is to start with thoughts of forgiveness: that you want to pose no danger to anyone at all, regardless of the wrong they’ve done. This is why forgiveness is not only compatible with the practice of the Buddha’s teachings. It’s a necessary first step.

First Things First Thanissaro Bhikkhu in Misc Essays

First Things First

First Things First

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

If you were to ask people familiar with Buddhism to identify its two most important wisdom teachings, they’d probably say emptiness and the four noble truths. If you were to ask them further which of the two teachings was more fundamental, they might hesitate, but most of them would probably put emptiness first, on the grounds that the four noble truths deal with a mental problem, while emptiness describes the way things in general are.

It wasn’t always this way. The Buddha himself gave more importance to the four noble truths, and it’s important to understand why.

When he boiled his teaching down to its shortest formulation, he said that he taught just dukkha—suffering and stress—and the cessation of dukkha (MN 22; SN 22:86). The four noble truths expand on this formulation, defining what suffering is—clinging; how it’s caused—craving and ignorance; the fact that it can be brought to an end by abandoning its cause; and the path of practice that leads to that end. Because part of the path of practice contains desire—the desire, in right effort, to act skillfully so as to go beyond suffering—the four noble truths also expand on one of the Buddha’s main observations about the phenomena of experience: that with the exception of nibbāna, they’re all rooted in desire (AN 10:58). People aren’t simply passive recipients of their experience. Starting from their desires, they play an active role in shaping it. The strategy implied by the four noble truths is that desire should be retrained so that, instead of causing suffering, it helps act toward suffering’s end.

As for emptiness, the Buddha mentioned it only rarely, but one of his definitions for emptiness (SN 35:85) closely relates it to another teaching that he mentioned a great deal. That’s the teaching popularly known as the three characteristics, and that the Buddha himself called, not “characteristics,” but “perceptions”: the perception of inconstancy, the perception of suffering/stress, and the perception of not-self. When explaining these perceptions, he taught that if you perceive fabricated things—all things conditioned by acts of intention—as inconstant, you’ll also see that they’re stressful and thus not worthy identifying as you or yours.

His purpose in teaching these perceptions was for them to be applied to suffering and its cause as a way of fostering dispassion for the objects of clinging and craving, and for the acts of clinging and craving themselves. In this way, these perceptions were aids in carrying out the duties appropriate to the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation by developing the path. In other words, the four noble truths and their duties supplied the context for the three perceptions and determined their role in the practice.

However, over the centuries, as the three perceptions were renamed the three characteristics, they morphed in two other ways as well. First, they turned into a metaphysical teaching, as the characteristics of what things are: All are devoid of essence because they’re impermanent and, since nothing has any essence, there is no self. Second, because these three characteristics were now metaphysical truths, they became the context within which the four noble truths were true.

This switch in roles meant that the four noble truths morphed as well. Whereas the Buddha had identified suffering with all types of clinging—even the act of clinging to the phenomenon of the deathless (amata-dhamma), the unchanging dimension touched at the first taste of awakening—the relationship between clinging and suffering was now explained by the metaphysical fact that all possible objects of clinging were impermanent. To cling to them as if they were permanent would thus bring sorrow and disappointment.

As for the ignorance that underlies craving: Whereas the Buddha had defined it as ignorance of the four noble truths, it was now defined as ignorance of the three characteristics. People cling and crave because they don’t realize that nothing has any essence and that there is no self. If they were to realize the truth of these teachings through direct experience—this became the purpose of mindfulness practice—they wouldn’t cling any more, and so wouldn’t suffer.

This is how this switch in context, giving priority to the three characteristics over the four noble truths, has come to dominate modern Buddhism. The common pattern is that when modern authors explain right view, which the Buddha equated with seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, the discussion quickly switches from the four noble truths to the three characteristics to explain why clinging leads to suffering. Clinging is no longer directly equated with suffering; instead, it causes suffering because it assumes permanence and essence in impermanent things.

Even teachers who deny the truth of the four noble truths—on the grounds that the principle of impermanence means that no statement can be true everywhere for everyone—still accept the principle of impermanence as a metaphysical truth accurately describing the way things everywhere are.

As these explanations have percolated through modern culture, both among people who identify themselves as Buddhist and among those who don’t, they’ve given rise to four widespread understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging and how it’s best avoided so as to stop suffering:

1. Because there is no self, there is no agent. People are essentially on the receiving end of experience, and they suffer because they cling to the idea that they can resist or control change.

2. To cling means to hold on to something with the misunderstanding that it’s permanent. For this reason, as long as you understand that things are impermanent, you can embrace them briefly as they arise in the present moment and it doesn’t count as clinging. If you embrace experiences in full realization that you’ll have to let them go so as to embrace whatever comes next, you won’t suffer. As long as you’re fully in the moment with no expectations about the future, you’re fine.

3. Clinging comes from the mistaken view that there can be such a thing as long-term happiness. But because all things are fleeting, there is no such thing. Pleasures, like pains, simply come and go. When you can resign yourself to this fact, you can open to the spacious wisdom of non-clinging, equanimous and accepting, as you place no vain expectations on the fleeting show of life.

These three understandings are often illustrated with the image of a perfectly fluid dancer, happily responsive to changes in the music decided by the musicians, switching partners with ease.

A recent bestseller that devoted a few pages to the place of Buddhism in world history illustrated these three understandings of the Buddhist approach to suffering with another image: You’re sitting on the ocean shore, watching the waves come in. If you’re stupid enough to want to cling to “good” waves to make them permanent and to push “bad” waves away, you’ll suffer. But if you accept the fact that waves are just waves, fleeting and incessant, and that there’s no way you can either stop or keep them, you can be at peace as you simply watch, with full acceptance, as they do their thing.

4. The fourth widespread understanding about the Buddhist stance on clinging is closely related to the other three: Clinging means holding on to fixed views. If you have set ideas about what’s right or wrong, or about how things should be—even about how the Buddha’s teachings should be interpreted—you’ll suffer. But if you can let go of your fixed views and simply accept the fact that right and wrong keep changing along with everything else, you’ll be fine.

I recently saw a video clip of a French Buddhologist explaining this principle: When asked by a female interviewer to explain the practical applications of the teaching on impermanence in daily life, he replied, “It means that we have to accept that my love for you today will be different from my love for you yesterday.”

It’s been argued that these three understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging don’t promote an attitude of unhealthy passivity, on the grounds that if you’re fully attuned to the present moment without clinging, you can be more freely active and creative in how you respond to change. But still, there’s something inherently defeatist in the picture they offer of life and of the possibilities of happiness that we as human beings can find. They allow for no dimension where we can be free from the unpredictability of waves or the self-righteous infidelity of lovers. It’s only within this narrow range of possibilities that our non-clinging creativity can eke out a little peace.

And when we compare these understandings with the Buddha’s actual teachings on clinging and the end of clinging—returning the three characteristics to their original role as three perceptions, and putting the four noble truths back in their rightful place as the context for the three perceptions—we’ll see not only how far the popular understandings of his teachings deviate from what he actually taught, but also what an impoverished view of the potentials for happiness those popular understandings provide.

To begin with, a lot can be learned from looking at the Pali word for clinging, upādāna. In addition to clinging, it also means sustenance and the act of taking sustenance: in other words, food and the act of feeding. The connection between feeding and suffering was one of the Buddha’s most radical and valuable insights, because it’s so counter-intuitive and at the same time so useful. Ordinarily, we find so much pleasure in the act of feeding, emotionally as well as physically, that we define ourselves by the way we feed off the world and the people around us. It took someone of the Buddha’s genius to see the suffering inherent in feeding, and that all suffering is a type of feeding. The fact that we feed off things that change simply adds an extra layer of stress on top of the stress intrinsic in the felt need always to feed.

And just as we feed off physical food without assuming that it’s going to be permanent, clinging to things doesn’t necessarily mean that we assume them to be permanent. We cling whenever we sense that the effort of clinging is repaid by some sort of satisfaction, permanent or not. We cling because there’s some pleasure in the things to which we cling (SN 22:60). When we can’t find what we’d like to cling to, our hunger forces us to take what we can get. For this reason, the act of embracing things in the present moment still counts as clinging. Even if we’re adept at moving from one changing thing to another, it simply means that we’re serial clingers, taking little bites out of every passing thing. We still suffer in the incessant drive to keep finding the next bite to eat.

This is why being constantly mindful of the truth of impermanence isn’t enough to solve the problem of suffering. To really solve it, we need to change our feeding habits—radically—so that we can strengthen the mind to the point where it no longer needs to feed. This requires a two-pronged strategy: (a) seeing the drawbacks of our ordinary ways of feeding, and (b) providing the mind with better food in the meantime until it has outgrown the need to feed on anything at all.

The first prong of the strategy is where the three perceptions come in. First you apply them to things to which you might cling or crave, to see that the benefits of holding on to those things are far outweighed by the drawbacks. You focus on the extent to which the happiness they provide is inconstant, and that because it’s inconstant, the effort to rest in it involves stress. When you see that the happiness isn’t worth the effort of the clinging, you realize that it’s not worthy to claim as you or yours. It’s not-self: in other words, not worth claiming as self. In this way, the perception of not-self isn’t a metaphysical assertion. It’s a value judgment, that the effort to define yourself around the act of feeding on those things simply isn’t worth it.

This analysis works, however, only if you have something better to feed on in the interim. Otherwise, you’ll simply go back to your old feeding habits. Nobody ever stopped eating simply through the realization that foods and stomachs are impermanent.

This is where the second prong of the Buddha’s strategy comes in. You develop the path as your interim nourishment, focusing in particular on the pleasure and rapture of right concentration as your alternative source of food (AN 7:63). When the path is fully developed, it opens to another dimension entirely: the deathless, a happiness beyond the reach of space, time, and all phenomena of the six senses.

But because the mind is such a habitual feeder, on its first encounter with the deathless it tries to feed on it—which turns the experience into a phenomenon, an object of the mind. Of course, that act of feeding stands in the way of full awakening. This is where the perception of not-self gets put to use once more, to counteract this last form of clinging: to the deathless. Even though the deathless in itself is neither stressful nor inconstant, any act of clinging to it has to involve stress. So the perception of not-self has to be applied here as well, to peel away this last obstacle to full awakening beyond all phenomena. When this perception has done its work, “not-self” gets put aside—just as everything else is let go—and the mind, free from hunger, gains full release.

A traditional image for this release is of a person standing on firm ground after taking the raft of the noble eightfold path over a river in flood. Safe from the waves and currents of the river, the person is totally free—even freer than the image can convey. There’s nothing intrinsically hunger-free about standing on a riverbank—it’s more a symbol of relief—but everyone who has experienced what the image is pointing to guarantees that, to the extent that you can call it a place, it’s a place of no hunger and so no need for desire.

If we compare this image with that of the person on the shore of the ocean watching the waves, we can get a sense of how limited the happiness that’s offered by understanding the four noble truths in the context of the three characteristics is, as opposed to the happiness offered by understanding the three perceptions in the context of the four noble truths.

To begin with, the Buddha’s image of crossing the river doesn’t put quotation marks around concepts of good and bad waves in the water. The flood is genuinely bad, and the ultimate goodness in life is when you can truly get beyond it.

Second, unlike the image of sitting on the shore, watching an ocean beyond your control, the Buddha’s image conveys the point that there’s something you can do to get to safety: You have within you the power to follow the duties of the four noble truths and develop the path that will take you to the other side. As he said, wisdom begins with the question, “What when I do it will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” (MN 135) The wisdom here lies in seeing that there is such a thing as long-term happiness, that it’s preferable to short-term, and that it depends, not on conditions beyond your control, but on actions you can train yourself to do. This version of wisdom is a far cry from the “wisdom” that ends in resigned equanimity and reduced expectations. It honors your desire for long-term happiness, and shows how it can actually be found.

Third, to sit watching the ocean waves come ashore is peaceful and desirable only as long as you’re wealthy enough to be at a resort, with someone to bring you food, drink, and shelter on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have to keep searching for these things on your own. And even at the resort, you’re not safe from being swept away by tsunamis and storms.

The image of crossing the river to safety on the further shore also offers an enlightening perspective on the view that all fixed views should be abandoned. In the Canon’s own interpretation of the image (SN 35:197), the river stands for the fourfold flood of sensuality, becoming, views, and ignorance, while the raft of the noble eightfold path includes right view. Although it’s true that the raft is abandoned on reaching the further shore, you still have to hold on to it while you’re crossing the river. Otherwise, you’ll be swept downstream.

What’s rarely noticed is the paradox contained in the image. Right view, seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, is part of the raft needed to cross over the flood of views. As the Buddha saw, it’s the only view that can perform this function, taking you safely all the way across the river and delivering you to the further shore.

It can take you all the way across because it’s always true and relevant. Cultural changes may affect what we choose to feed on, but the fact of feeding is a constant, as is the connection between suffering and the need to feed. In that sense, right view counts as fixed. It can never be replaced by a more effective understanding of suffering. At the same time, it’s always relevant in that the framework of the four noble truths can be brought to bear on every choice you make at every stage of the practice. Here it differs from the three perceptions, for while the Buddha noted that they’re always true (AN 3:137), they’re not always relevant (MN 136). If, for instance, you perceive the results of all actions, skillful or not, as impermanent, stressful, and not-self, it can dissuade you from making the effort to be skillful in what you do, say, or think.

In addition to being always true and relevant, right view is responsible. It gives reliable guidance on what should and shouldn’t be taken as food for the mind. As the Buddha said, any teaching that can’t give trustworthy guidelines for determining what’s skillful and unskillful to do abdicates a teacher’s primary responsibility to his or her students (AN 3:62). The Buddhologist’s answer to the interviewer exemplifies how irresponsible the teaching to abandon fixed views can be. And the look she gave him showed that she wanted nothing of it.

After taking you responsibly all the way across the river, right view can deliver you to the further shore because it contains the seeds for its own transcendence, which—as you develop them—deliver you to a transcendent dimension (AN 10:93). Right view does this by focusing on the processes by which the mind creates stress for itself, at the same time encouraging you to abandon those processes when you sense that they’re causing stress. In the beginning, this involves clinging to right view as a tool to pry loose your attachments to gross causes of stress. Over time, as your taste for mental food becomes more refined through its exposure to right concentration, you become sensitive to causes of stress that are more and more subtle. These you abandon as you come to detect them, until eventually there’s nothing else to abandon aside from the path. That’s when right view encourages you to turn the analysis on the act of holding on to and feeding on right view itself. When you can abandon that, there’s nothing left for the mind to cling to, and so it’s freed.

The view that all fixed views should be abandoned, however, doesn’t contain this dynamic. It provides no grounds for deciding what should and shouldn’t be done. In itself, it can act as an object of craving and clinging, becoming as fixed as any other view. If you decide to drop it, for whatever reason, it delivers you nowhere. It offers no guidance on how to choose anything better, and as a result, you end up clinging to whatever passing view seems attractive. You’re still stuck in the river, grasping at pieces of flotsam and jetsam as the flood carries you away.

This is why it’s always important to remember that, in the practice to gain freedom from suffering, the four noble truths must always come first. They give guidance to the rest of the path, determining the role and function of all the Buddha’s other teachings—including emptiness and the three perceptions—so that, instead of lulling you into being satisfied with an exposed spot on the beach, they can take you all the way to the safety of full release, beyond the reach of any possible wave.

Forgiveness | Meditations6

Forgiveness | Meditations6

Forgiveness

November 2, 2010

Right view comes in many levels. There’s mundane right view, which deals mainly with action and the results of action, the principle of rebirth, and the conviction that there are people who know these things from direct knowledge; it’s not just a theory. Then there’s transcendent right view, which deals more with events in the mind: suffering, its cause, the end of suffering, and the path to its end. Many of us make the mistake of wanting to go straight to the transcendent level. Who wants to muck around in the mundane? Especially when you hear the theory about two levels of truth, that there’s just conventional truth and then there’s the Real Thing, so who wants to get stuck on conventions?

But the Buddha never taught that way. He would lead people into transcendent right view by starting with mundane right view. It provides the context for understanding every stage of the practice, because the more refined parts of the practice have to build on the basics. If you can’t get the basics right, things are going to get skewed by the time you get to the end.

Like the issue of forgiveness: Forgiveness seems to be such a basic human activity that we forget that our ideas about forgiveness are picked up from our culture and our view of what’s going on in the world. If you want forgiveness to be a helpful part of the practice, you have to look at how your ideas of forgiveness are tied up with your views about the world.

Many of us in the West have a feeling that we’ve picked up from the culture, that there’s a plan for everything: The universe had a beginning point, it’s going to have an end point, there’s a story, and it’s going to come to closure. Now there are different ideas about what exactly that story is and where it’s headed, but just the idea that there is a beginning point and there is an end point, that there’s a purpose to the universe at large: That right there has a big impact on how we think about forgiveness. If there’s a beginning point, you can tally up who did what first: how many times you’ve been wronged, how many times you’ve wronged the other person, who owes a debt of forgiveness to whom. If the plan for all of this is that we’re going to become one loving community, we need to get back on good terms with everybody else. Especially if we’re going to be divided into two communities for eternity—those who are on loving terms and those who are not on loving terms—everyone would want to be on the loving-terms side. This is why we believe that forgiveness has to involve learning how to love the person you forgave.

Then there’s another view about the plan for all of this, which is that each person has his or her own independent inspiration from within and that we’re not in any position to judge anybody else. In a universe like that, forgiveness is inappropriate. How can we judge someone else’s behavior? Who are you to decide that you’re in a position to forgive somebody else when you can’t judge anyone’s behavior at all?

We see this not only in modern Western culture but also in the Mahayana. Several years back, a scholar who was working on an early Mahayana text got in touch with me and wanted to know where the principle of not judging others appeared in the Pali Canon, because apparently it’s all over the Mahayana: the idea that each bodhisattva has his or her own independent inspiration or path to follow, so no one can judge anyone else’s behavior or teachings. I looked around in the Canon and I couldn’t find it. There is actually a lot about judging people in the Pali Canon—what principles you should use, what principles you shouldn’t use—but the idea that you’re in no position to judge anybody else does not appear in the Buddha’s teachings at all.

In other words, you can judge when you’ve been wronged. Now, you may have some misperceptions about the other person’s intentions or about the actual long-term impact of that person’s actions, but there are times when you know you’ve been wronged. So what are you going to do about it?

You look at it in terms of the Buddha’s mundane right view. He says that this process of wandering on comes from an inconceivable beginning and there’s no way to make sense of it. He never comes down for sure on whether there was a beginning point or not, but either way you simply can’t conceive it. It’s too far back; it’s too bizarre. As for the endpoint, again, he doesn’t make any statements about whether there’s going to be an endpoint to all this. But his picture of how the universe goes through its cycles is pretty random. You get a lot of people improvising. There’s no big plan. There’s no one narrative about all this, which means that if you stop to ask yourself that question—who was the first person to do wrong, you or the other person—you don’t really know.

There’s a story of Somdet Toh, who was a famous monk in 19th century Thailand. He was abbot of a monastery right across the river from the Grand Palace. One evening, a young monk came in to complain about how another monk had hit him. Somdet Toh’s response was, “Well, you hit him before he hit you.” And the young monk said, “No, he came up and just hit me out of nowhere. I didn’t do anything to him.” And Somdet Toh kept saying, “No, you hit him before.” The young monk got really frustrated and went to complain to a monk higher up in the hierarchy, and Somdet Toh had to explain himself. He said, “Well, it must have been in some previous lifetime. The complaining monk hit the other monk first.” Of course, that might not have been the first time. It could have been just the latest installment of a long back and forth.

So there’s an inconceivable beginning and no real closure. Different people decide that they’ve had enough of the wandering-on and they figure out how to stop, but that doesn’t keep the other beings in the universe from continuing to wander on and on. There’s no real plan. As one of the chants we recite in the evening says, “There’s no one in charge.” There’s no overall narrative.

What there is, though, is the question: What kind of kamma do you want to create? If the answer is “skillful kamma,” then one of the things you’ve got to learn how to do is not to get focused on how you’ve been wronged by other people. You don’t want to go around getting revenge because that just keeps the bad kammic cycle going on and on and on.

This is what forgiveness means in the context of mundane right view: You decide that you’re not going to hold any danger to that person. You’re not going to try to get back at the other person. You’ll let the issue go. Whatever unskillfulness has been going on between the two of you, you want it to stop—and it has to stop with you.

And that’s it. It doesn’t mean you have to love the person or go and kiss and make up or anything, because there are some cases where the way you’ve been wronged is so heavy that it’s really hard even to be around the other person, much less to interact. You’re not called on to love the person and there’s no forcing of the issue that you have to come to closure, that you have to continue weaving the relationship. You can just leave the frayed ends waving in the air, and you’re done with them.

Now if you want, you can go for a reconciliation, but that requires the other person’s cooperation as well. Both of you have to see that the relationship is worth continuing. But there’s no sense that every wrong has to be reconciled, because there are lots of cases where reconciliation is impossible. One side just doesn’t want it or won’t admit to having done wrong.

You see this even in the Vinaya. The Buddha places a heavy emphasis on harmony within the Sangha but he never advises trying to achieve harmony at the expense of the Dhamma. If someone is advocating a position that’s really against the Dhamma, and you can’t get the person to change his or her mind, then that’s it. The Sangha expels the person. Or if the conflict is between two groups of people, one of them will just leave. If you figure out that the other side’s motivation is just too corrupt, then the Buddha says you can’t achieve reconciliation in a case like that. You can’t achieve harmony. To try to force harmony by pretending that there’s no difference or that both sides are okay, is against the Vinaya; it’s against the Dhamma.

So again, there’s no master plan that everything’s going to have to get resolved in the end. It’s up to you to decide exactly where you want to take the relationship. Now, it’s for your own good to give forgiveness, and forgiveness is something you can give from your side alone, regardless of whether the other person accepts your forgiveness or even thinks that he or she did something wrong that merits forgiving. But for the sake of your own training of the mind, for the sake of gaining freedom, you have to forgive. You don’t want to pose a danger to anybody, yourself or the other person. You don’t want to get back, for it will force you to keep coming back.

As for being forgiven, you have to accept there are times when people will not forgive you for something you’ve done—but that doesn’t mean that what you did was so awful that nobody could ever forgive you. Again, it’s the other person’s individual choice. As the Buddha once said, there are two kinds of fools: one, the fool who never admits having done wrong; and two, the fool who, when presented with a righteous and sincere apology, refuses to accept it. Now, a sincere apology means not only that you really are sorry, but that you’re also sincere about trying not to do that again in the future, whatever it was. Some people are wise and they’ll accept that kind of apology. Other people are foolish. You can’t make your happiness depend on trying to get them to forgive you, to overcome their foolishness.

So keep that phrase in the back of your mind: “There’s no one in charge.” There’s no overall narrative that says everything has to be tied up into nice neat packages. Not every story has to come to closure. Think of yourself more as an author just tossing out story ideas. If the story gets to the point where it’s no longer good, it’s not going to go anywhere, so you just throw the story away and start a new story.

This is one of the advantages of mundane right view: It allows you to start new stories all the time, stories in which you learn how to develop skillful qualities. However bad your upbringing or however bad you’ve been behaving in the past or however poorly you’ve been treated in the past, you overcame the difficulties; you took charge of your life. You realized that whatever happiness was going to be true and lasting was going to have to come from training the mind, giving up any desire to settle old scores, or to go around loving everybody or being loved by everybody. You give those attitudes up.

Now you do develop goodwill. Goodwill is not lovingkindness. Goodwill is the desire that all beings be happy. In some cases that happiness can be found by continuing a relationship; in other cases you have to say, “Well, that’s it as far as this relationship goes, but may you be happy wherever you go.” Like the chant the Buddha gave for wishing goodwill for snakes and scorpions and rats and creeping things: May all beings be happy, whether they have no legs or two legs or four legs or many legs, may they meet with good fortune and may they now go away.

There are some cases where a continued relationship is not going to be a good thing for either side. Like the story of Ajaan Fuang with the snake in his room: The snake moved in—I don’t know whether it was during the day or the night—and Ajaan Fuang realized he had a snake in the room but he decided to take it as a test. So he continued living with the snake in his room for three days to see how much fear might come up in his mind and whether he really could spread goodwill to snakes. And he was spreading goodwill to the snake all the time. Finally, on the third night, he sat and meditated, and in his mind he addressed a message to the snake, which was basically, “We come from different branches of the animal kingdom, like people from different societies. Our language is different, our attitudes, our backgrounds are different. It’s very easy to misunderstand each other. I might do something that you would take offense at. It’d be much better if you went someplace else. There are many nice places out there in the forest.” And the snake left.

Remember that one of those passages in the phrase for goodwill is, “May all living beings look after themselves with ease.” It’s not that you’re going to go around to look after everybody else and clean up after them and take care of them and try to please them and always have a close intimate relationship with them. There are some beings, some people, where it’s really hard and it’s too much to ask. You want to focus instead on your own mind, making sure that you have no ill will for anybody and that, at the very least, you’re harmless in your behavior.

When you understand forgiveness in this way, then the practice of forgiveness is a lot easier. And it’s a lot more conducive to becoming free.