1] The Lessons of Gratitude | Head & Heart Together

The Lessons of Gratitude | Head & Heart Together

The Lessons of Gratitude

“These two people are hard to find in the world. Which two? The one who is first to do a kindness, and the one who is grateful and thankful for a kindness done.” — AN 2:118

In saying that kind and grateful people are rare, the Buddha isn’t simply stating a harsh truth about the human race. He’s advising you to treasure these people when you find them, and—more importantly—showing how you can become a rare person yourself.

Kindness and gratitude are virtues you can cultivate, but they have to be cultivated together. Each needs the other to be genuine—a point that becomes obvious when you think about the three things most likely to make gratitude heartfelt:

1) You’ve actually benefited from another person’s actions.

2) You trust the motives behind those actions.

3) You sense that the other person had to go out of his or her way to provide that benefit.

Points one and two are lessons that gratitude teaches kindness: If you want to be genuinely kind, you have to be of actual benefit—nobody wants to be the recipient of “help” that isn’t really helpful—and you have to provide that benefit in a way that shows respect and empathy for the other person’s needs. No one likes to receive a gift given with calculating motives, or in an offhand or disdainful way.

Points two and three are lessons that kindness teaches to gratitude. Only if you’ve been kind to another person will you accept the idea that others can be kind to you. At the same time, if you’ve been kind to another person, you know the effort involved. Kind impulses often have to do battle with unkind impulses in the heart, so it’s not always easy to be helpful. Sometimes it involves great sacrifice—a sacrifice possible only when you trust the recipient to make good use of your help. So when you’re on the receiving end of a sacrifice like that, you realize you’ve incurred a debt, an obligation to repay the other person’s trust.

This is why the Buddha always discusses gratitude as a response to kindness, and doesn’t equate it with appreciation in general. It’s a special kind of appreciation, inspiring a more demanding response. The difference here is best illustrated by two passages in which the Buddha uses the image of carrying.

The first passage concerns appreciation of a general sort:

“Then the man, having gathered grass, twigs, branches, & leaves, having bound them together to make a raft, would cross over to safety on the far shore in dependence on the raft, making an effort with his hands & feet. Having crossed over to the far shore, he might think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having hoisted it on my head or carrying on my back, go wherever I like?’ What do you think, monks? Would the man, in doing that, be doing what should be done with the raft?”

“No, lord.”

“And what should the man do in order to be doing what should be done with the raft? There is the case where the man, having crossed over to the far shore, would think, ‘How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the far shore. Why don’t I, having dragged it on dry land or sinking it in the water, go wherever I like?’ In doing this, he would be doing what should be done with the raft.” — MN 22

The second passage concerns gratitude in particular:

“I tell you, monks, there are two people who are not easy to repay. Which two? Your mother & father. Even if you were to carry your mother on one shoulder & your father on the other shoulder for 100 years, and were to look after them by anointing, massaging, bathing, & rubbing their limbs, and they were to defecate & urinate right there [on your shoulders], you would not in that way pay or repay your parents. If you were to establish your mother & father in absolute sovereignty over this great earth, abounding in the seven treasures, you would not in that way pay or repay your parents. Why is that? Mother & father do much for their children. They care for them, they nourish them, they introduce them to this world.

“But anyone who rouses his unbelieving mother & father, settles & establishes them in conviction; rouses his unvirtuous mother & father, settles & establishes them in virtue; rouses his stingy mother & father, settles & establishes them in generosity; rouses his foolish mother & father, settles & establishes them in discernment: To this extent one pays & repays one’s mother & father.“ — AN 2:32

In other words, as the first passage shows, it’s perfectly fine to appreciate the benefits you’ve received from rafts and other conveniences without feeling any need to repay them. You take care of them simply because that enables you to benefit from them more. The same holds true for difficult people and situations that have forced you to develop strength of character. You can appreciate that you’ve learned persistence from dealing with crabgrass in your lawn, or equanimity from dealing with unreasonable neighbors, without owing the crabgrass or neighbors any debt of gratitude. After all, they didn’t kindly go out of their way to help you. And if you were to take them as models, you’d learn all the wrong lessons about kindness: that simply following your natural impulses—or, even worse, behaving unreasonably—is the way to be kind.

Debts of gratitude apply only to parents, teachers, and other benefactors who have acted with your wellbeing in mind. They’ve gone out of their way to help you, and have taught you valuable lessons about kindness and empathy in the process. In the case of the raft, you’d do best to focus gratitude on the person who taught you how to make a raft. In the case of the crabgrass and the neighbors, focus gratitude on the people who taught you how not to be overcome by adversity. If there are benefits you’ve received from things or situations you can’t trace to a conscious agent in this lifetime, feel gratitude to yourself for the good karma you did in the past that allowed those benefits to appear. And be grateful for the good karma that allows you to receive and benefit from other people’s help in the first place. If you had no good to your credit, they wouldn’t be able to reach you.

As the Buddha’s second passage shows, the debt you owe to your benefactors needn’t be tit for tat, and shouldn’t be directed solely to them. Now, the debt you owe your parents for giving birth to you and enabling you to live is immense. In some passages the Buddha recommends expressing gratitude for their compassion with personal services.

Mother & father,

compassionate to their family,

are called

Brahma,

first teachers,

those worthy of gifts

from their children.

So the wise should pay them

homage,

honor

with food & drink

clothing & bedding

anointing & bathing

& washing their feet.

Performing these services to their parents,

the wise

are praised right here

and after death

rejoice in heaven. — Iti 106

However, AN 2:32 shows that the only true way to repay your parents is to strengthen them in four qualities: conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. To do so, of course, you have to develop these qualities in yourself, as well as learning how to employ great tact in being an example to your parents. As it happens, these four qualities are also those of an admirable friend (AN 8:54), which means that in repaying your parents in this way you become the sort of person who’d be an admirable friend to others as well. You become a person of integrity, who—as the Buddha points out—has learned from gratitude how to be harmless in all your dealings and to give help with an empathetic heart: respectfully, in a timely way, and with the sense that something good will come of it (MN 110; AN 5:148). In this way, you repay your parents’ goodness many times over by allowing its influence to spread beyond the small circle of the family into the world at large. In so doing, you enlarge the circle of their goodness as well.

This principle also applies to your teachers, as the Buddha told his disciples:

“So this is what you think of me: ‘The Blessed One, sympathetic, seeking our well-being, teaches the Dhamma out of sympathy.’ Then you should train yourselves—harmoniously, cordially, and without dispute—in the qualities I have pointed out, having known them directly: the four frames of reference, the four right exertions, the four bases of power, the five faculties, the five strengths, the seven factors of Awakening, the noble eightfold path.” — MN 103

In other words, the way to repay a teacher’s compassion and sympathy in teaching you is to apply yourself to learning your lessons well. Only then can you spread the good influence of those lessons to others.

As for the debts you owe yourself for your past good karma, the best way to repay them is to use your benefits as opportunities to create further good karma, and not simply enjoy the pleasure they offer. Here again it’s important to remember the hardships that can be involved in acting skillfully, and to honor your past skillful intentions by not allowing them to go to waste in the present. For example, as Ajaan Lee once said, it’s not easy to attain a human mouth, so bow down to your mouth every day. In other words, respect your ability to communicate, and use it to say only what’s timely, beneficial, and true.

These are some of the lessons about kindness and empathy that well-focused gratitude can teach—lessons that teach you how to deal maturely and responsibly in the give and take of social life. Small wonder, then, that the Buddha cited gratitude as the quality defining what it means to be civilized (AN 2:31).

But well-focused gratitude can also teach lessons that apply further to the training of the mind.

First are the lessons touching on the nature of human action itself. The sense that you’ve benefited from another person’s action underscores the point that action does give results; the importance you give to the other person’s motives in helping you underscores the point that the quality of the action lies in the intention behind it; and the sense that the other person went out of his or her way to help you underscores the sense that action isn’t totally determined: You feel indebted to the people who helped you because you sense how easily they might have denied that help, and how difficult your life might have been if that’s what they had chosen to do. Your parents, for instance, didn’t have to raise you, or arrange for someone else to raise you; they could have aborted you or left you to die. So the fact that you’re alive to read this means that somebody chose, again and again, to help you when you were helpless. Sensing that element of choice is what creates your sense of debt.

All three of these points—the efficacy of action, the importance of intention, and the existence of choice—were distinctive elements in the Buddha’s teaching on action. And the emotional resonance that gratitude and empathy give to these points may be the reason why, when the Buddha introduced the basic outline of this teaching, he cited topics connected with these emotions: the value of giving, and the debt owed to one’s parents (MN 117). He couldn’t offer his listeners proof for his three points—that would come only with their experience of Awakening—but by showing how his teaching on action allowed for generosity to be a meaningful action, and gratitude a meaningful emotion, he offered his listeners an emotionally satisfying reason for accepting his words.

Gratitude also gives practice in developing qualities needed in meditation. As the Buddha noted, the practice of concentration centers on the power of perception. Training in gratitude shows how powerful perception can be, for it requires developing a particular set of perceptions about life and the world. If you perceive help as demeaning, then gratitude itself feels demeaning; but if you perceive help as an expression of trust—the other person wouldn’t want to help you unless he or she felt you would use the help well—then gratitude feels ennobling, an aid to self-esteem. Similarly, if you perceive life as a competition, it’s hard to trust the motives of those who help you, and you resent the need to repay their help as a gratuitous burden. If, however, you perceive that the goodness in life is the result of cooperation, then the give and take of kindness and gratitude become a much more pleasant exchange.

Similarly, gratitude requires mindfulness, in the Buddha’s original sense of the word as keeping something in mind. In fact, the connection between these two qualities extends to language itself. In Pāli, the word for gratitude—kataññū—literally means to have a sense of what was done. In SN 48:10, the Buddha defines mindfulness as “remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago.” Our parents’ instructions to us when we were children—to remember the kindnesses of others—are among our first lessons in mindfulness. As we develop our sense of gratitude, we get practice in strengthening this quality of mind.

However, not all the lessons taught by gratitude and empathy are of a heartwarming sort. Instead, they give rise to a sense of saṁvega—which can be translated as dismay or even terror—over how risky and precarious the goodness of the world can be. To begin with, there’s the fact that you can’t choose beforehand whose kindness you’ll be indebted to. There’s no telling what kind of parents you’ll get. As the Buddha rightly notes, some parents are stingy, immoral, and foolish. Not only are they abusive to their children, but they also might not be content or even pleased with the type of repayment the Buddha says is best for them. They may demand an unreasonable level of repayment, involving actions that are downright harmful for you, themselves, and others. And yet this doesn’t cancel the debt you owe them for the simple fact that they’ve enabled you to live.

You’ve probably heard of the passage in which the Buddha says,

“A being who has not been your mother at one time in the past is not easy to find…. A being who has not been your father … your brother…. your sister…. your son…. your daughter at one time in the past is not easy to find. Why is that? From an inconceivable beginning comes transmigration.”

When you think about how difficult each of these relationships can be, it’s no surprise that the Buddha didn’t say this to make you feel warmhearted to all the beings you meet. He said it to induce saṁvega:

“Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries—enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released.” — SN 15:14-19

Even the debts of gratitude you owe to yourself for the good actions you’ve done are enough to induce a sense of dis-ease. You know that not all your past intentions have been skillful, and yet these are the things that will shape the conditions of your life now and into the future. You’re in a precarious position—enough to make you want to find a way out even of the network of kindness and gratitude that sustains whatever goodness there is in the world.

This desire grows even stronger when you allow your empathy to spread to those who have had to make unwilling sacrifices to keep you alive. Every day, the Buddha advised, you should reflect on the fact that life depends on the requisites of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Many are the beings who have had to die and suffer other hardships because of your need for these things. Contrary to the song that concludes Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, lambs don’t gleefully jump into the stewpot to feed you. And even if—when you’re in the fortunate position to be able to decide what kind of food you eat—you adhere to a vegetarian diet, you still owe an enormous debt to the farmers and workers who have had to slave under harsh conditions to provide the requisites you need.

The sense of indebtedness that these reflections induce goes far beyond gratitude, and is certainly not pleasant to think about. This may be why so many people try to deny that they owe anyone a debt of gratitude at all. Or why those who do encourage the contemplation of gratitude as a source of happiness tend to reduce it to a generic sense of appreciation and contentment—in the words of one writer, “wanting what you have,” “knowing that you have, and are, enough”—devoid of any sense of debt. Gratitude of this sort tends to focus on things, because gratitude to things is so much easier than gratitude to benefactors. Things don’t make demands. They don’t suffer, and they don’t mix their kindness with abuse.

Yet there’s no getting around the fact that our very lives depend on the kindness and hardships of others, and that we can’t get out of the resulting debts by callously denying them or blithely wishing them away. If we don’t repay them now, we’ll have to repay them—sometimes at high interest—later, for even death doesn’t erase our debts or free us from coming back to incur more.

So to avoid these entanglements, we need another way out—a way the Buddha found through training his mind to reach a happiness that no longer needs to depend on the kindness and sacrifices of others. And although this happiness provides an escape, it isn’t escapist. It settles your debts in a responsible and generous way.

This is because unconditional happiness allows you to abandon the cravings and attachments through which you repeatedly take on the identity of a being. To identify yourself as a being means having to find food—both physical and mental—to keep that identity going. This is why, when you’re a being, you need to depend on a network of kindness, gratitude, and sacrifice. But when you can abandon the need for that identity, the mind no longer has to feed. It’s no longer a burden to anyone. As for the body, as long as you’re still alive, those who provide for its needs reap merit many times over for the gifts they provide. This, in fact, is one of the motivations for gaining awakening:

“We will undertake & practice those qualities that make one a contemplative… so that the services of those whose robes, alms-food, lodging, and medicinal requisites we use will bring them great fruit & great reward.” — MN 39

At the same time, the example of your behavior and freedom of mind is a gift to others, in that it shows how they, too, can free themselves from their debts. This is why the Buddha said that only those who have attained full awakening eat the alms food of the country without incurring debt. They’ve even paid off their debt to the Buddha for having taught the way to release. As he said, the only homage he requested was that people practice the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma—i.e., to develop the disenchantment and dispassion that lead to release (DN 16; SN 22:39-42)—so that the world will not be empty of awakened people. In this way, attaining full release is not a selfish act; instead, it’s the highest expression of kindness and gratitude.

Of course, it’s a rare person who will take this route to freedom, but that doesn’t lessen its value or relevance. As with gratitude and benefaction, it’s an opportunity to become rare and distinctive that’s open to anyone with the discernment to appreciate it and the determination to become truly kind and debt-free.

13] Freedom from Buddha Nature | Head & Heart Together

Freedom from Buddha Nature | Head & Heart Together

Freedom from Buddha Nature

“What is the mind? 

The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” — Ajaan Chah

“The mind is neither good nor evil, but 

it’s what knows good and knows evil. 

It’s what does good and does evil. And 

it’s what lets go of good and lets go of evil.”  

                                              — Ajaan Lee

----

But when you understand the principle of freedom

—that past kamma doesn’t totally shape the present, 

and that present kamma can always be free to choose 

the skillful alternative

—you realize that the idea of innate natures is unnecessary: 

excess baggage on the path.

----

the Buddha advised exploring the possibility of freedom 

as it’s immediately present each time you make a choice. 

----

1] Assumptions about the Mind
2] Building on Discernment
3] No Innate Nature
4] Exploring Freedom

------

A brahman once asked the Buddha, “Will all the world reach release [Awakening], or half the world, or a third?” But the Buddha didn’t answer. Ven. Ānanda, concerned that the wanderer might misconstrue the Buddha’s silence, took the man aside and gave him an analogy: Imagine a fortress with a single gate. A wise gatekeeper would walk around the fortress and not see an opening in the wall big enough for even a cat to slip through. Because he’s wise, he would realize that his knowledge didn’t tell him how many people would come into the fortress, but it did tell him that whoever came into the fortress would have to come in through the gate. In the same way, the Buddha didn’t focus on how many people would reach Awakening but he did know that 

anyone who reached Awakening would have to follow the path he had found: 

• abandoning the five hindrances, 
• establishing the four frames of reference, and 
• developing the seven factors for Awakening.

What’s striking about the Buddha’s knowledge is the implied “if”: 

If people want to gain Awakening they will have to follow this path, 

but the choice as to whether they want Awakening is theirs. 

The Buddha’s knowledge of the future didn’t mean that the future was preordained, for people are free to choose. They can take up a particular course of action and stick with it, or not, as they see fit.

The Buddha thus based all his teaching on freedom of choice. As he said, if everything were predetermined by the past, there would be no point in teaching a path to Awakening. The number of people who would reach Awakening would already have been set a long time ago, and they would have no need for a path or a teacher. Those preordained to awaken would get there inevitably as a result of a long-past action or an essential nature already built into the mind. Those preordained not to awaken wouldn’t stand a chance.

But these things are not preordained. No one is doomed never to awaken, but—until you’ve had your first sight of the deathless at stream-entry—neither is Awakening assured. It’s contingent on intentional actions chosen in each present moment. And even after stream-entry, you’re constantly faced with choices that will speed up final Awakening or slow it down. Nibbāna, of course, is independent and unconditioned; but the act of awakening to nibbāna depends on a path of practice that has to be willed. It happens only if you choose to give rise to its causes. This, as the Buddha noted, involves determining to do four things: 

• not to neglect discernment, 
• to preserve truth, 
• to develop relinquishment, and 
• to train for peace.

1] Assumptions about the Mind

To stick with these four determinations, the mind has to make some assumptions about itself: its power to do the necessary work and to receive the anticipated benefits. But one of the central features of the Buddha’s strategy as a teacher was that even though his primary focus was on the mind, he nowhere defined what the mind is. As he said, if you define yourself, you limit yourself. So instead he focused his assumptions on what the mind can do.

To begin with, the mind can change quickly. Normally a master of the apt simile, even the Buddha had to admit that he could find no adequate analogy for how quickly the mind can change. We might say that it can change in the twinkling of an eye, but it’s actually faster than that.

And it’s capable of all sorts of things. Neither inherently good nor inherently bad, it can do a huge variety of good and bad actions. As the Buddha said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Think of the many species of fish in the sea, birds in the sky, animals on the land and under the ground, whether extant or extinct: All of these species are products of minds, and the mind can take on a wider variety of forms than even that.

This variety comes from the many different choices the mind makes under the influence of ignorance and defilement. But the mind doesn’t always have to be defiled. Past kamma karma — action업 is not entirely deterministic. Even though past kamma shapes the range of options open to the mind in the present, it doesn’t have to determine present kamma—the intentions by which the mind chooses to fabricate actual experiences from among those options. 

Thus present kamma can choose to continue creating the conditions for more ignorance, or not, because present choices are what keep ignorance alive. Although no one—not even a Buddha—can trace back to when the defilement of ignorance first began, the continued existence of ignorance depends on conditions continually provided by unskillful kamma. If these conditions are removed, ignorance will disband.

This is why the Buddha said that the mind is luminous, stained with defilements that come and go. Taken out of context, this statement might be construed as implying that the mind is inherently awakened. But in context the Buddha is simply saying that the mind, once stained, is not permanently stained. When the conditions for the stains are gone, the mind becomes luminous again. 

But this luminosity is not an awakened nature. As the Buddha states, this luminous mind can be developed. In the scheme of the four noble truths, if something is to be developed it’s not the goal; it’s part of the path to the goal. 

After this luminosity has been developed in the advanced stages of concentration, it’s abandoned once it has completed its work in helping to pierce through ignorance.

The fact that the mind’s own choices can pierce its own ignorance underlies the Buddha’s most important assumption about the mind: It can be trained to awaken, to see the causes of ignorance and to bring them to an end. The primary step in this training is the first determination: not to neglect discernment. 

This phrase may sound strange—to what extent do we consciously neglect discernment?—but it points to an important truth. Discernment is insight into how the mind fabricates its experiences. This process of fabrication is going on all the time right before our eyes—even nearer than our eyes—and yet part of the mind chooses to ignore it. We tend to be more interested in the experiences that result from the fabrication: the physical, mental, and emotional states we want to savor and enjoy. It’s like watching a play. We enjoy entering into the make-believe world on the stage, and prefer to ignore the noises made by the back-stage crew that would call the reality of that world into question.

This ignorance is willed, which is why we need an act of the will to see through it, to discern the back-stage machinations of the mind. 

Discernment thus has two sides: understanding and motivation. You have to understand the mind’s fabrications as fabrications, looking less for the what—i.e., what they are—than for the how—how they happen as part of a causal process. And you have to be motivated to develop this discernment, to see why you want it to influence the mind. Otherwise it won’t have the conditions to grow.

The understanding comes down to the basic insight of the Buddha’s Awakening, seeing things as actions and events in a pattern of cause and effect. It also involves seeing how some actions are unskillful, leading to stress and suffering, while others are skillful, bringing stress to an end; and that we have the freedom to choose skillful actions or not. This understanding—which forms the basic framework of the four noble truths—is called appropriate attention.

The motivation to develop appropriate attention grows from combining good will with this understanding. You set your sights on a happiness totally harmless. You see that if you make unskillful choices, you’re going to cause suffering; if you make skillful ones, you won’t. 

This motivation thus combines good will with heedfulness, the quality that underlies every step on the path. In fact, heedfulness lies at the root of all skillful qualities in the mind. Thus, in encouraging people to awaken, the Buddha never assumed that their Awakening would come from the innate goodness of their nature. He simply assumed something very blatant and ordinary: that people like pleasure and hate pain, and that they care about whether they can gain that pleasure and avoid that pain. It was a mark of his genius that he could see the potential for Awakening in this very common desire.

2] Building on Discernment

When you stick with the understanding and motivation provided by this first determination, it sets in motion the other three. For instance,

 the determination to preserve the truth grows from seeing the mind’s capacity to lie to itself about whether its actions are causing suffering. 

You want to be honest and vigilant in looking for and admitting suffering, even when you’re attached to the actions that cause it. 

This truthfulness relates to the path in two stages: first, when looking for unskillful actions that keep you off the path; and then, as the path nears fruition, looking for the subtle levels of stress caused even by skillful elements of the path—such as right concentration—once they have done their work and need to be let go for the sake of full liberation.

The determination to develop relinquishment can then build on this truthful assessment of what needs to be done. Relinquishment requires discernment as well, for not only do you need to see what’s skillful and what’s not; you also need to keep reminding yourself that you have the freedom to choose, and to be adept at talking yourself into doing skillful things you’re afraid of, and abandoning unskillful actions you like.

The determination to train for peace helps maintain your sense of direction in this process, for it reminds you that the only true happiness is peace of mind, and that you want to look for ever-increasing levels of peace as they become possible through the practice. This determination emulates the trait that the Buddha said was essential to his Awakening: the unwillingness to rest content with lesser levels of stillness when higher levels could be attained. In this way, the stages of concentration, instead of becoming obstacles or dangers on the path, serve as stepping-stones to greater sensitivity and, through that sensitivity, to the ultimate peace where all passion, aversion, and delusion grow still.

This peace thus grows from the simple choice to keep looking at the mind’s fabrications as processes, as actions and results. 

But to fully achieve this peace, your discernment has to be directed not only at the mind’s fabrication of the objects of its awareness, but also at its fabrications about itself and about the path it’s creating. 

Your sense of who you are is a fabrication, 

regardless of whether you see the mind as separate or interconnected, 

finite or infinite, good or bad. 

The path is also a fabrication: very subtle and sometimes seemingly effortless, but fabricated nonetheless. If these layers of inner fabrication aren’t seen for what they are—if you regard them as innate or inevitable—they can’t be deconstructed, and full Awakening can’t occur.

3] No Innate Nature

This is why the Buddha never advocated attributing an innate nature of any kind to the mind—good, bad, or Buddha. 

The idea of innate natures slipped into the Buddhist tradition in later centuries, when the principle of freedom was forgotten. Past bad kamma was seen as so totally deterministic that there seemed no way around it unless you assumed either an innate Buddha in the mind that could overpower it, or an external Buddha who would save you from it. 

But when you understand the principle of freedom—that past kamma doesn’t totally shape the present, and that present kamma can always be free to choose the skillful alternative—you realize that the idea of innate natures is unnecessary: excess baggage on the path.

And it bogs you down. 

If you assume that the mind is basically bad, you won’t feel capable of following the path, and will tend to look for outside help to do the work for you. 

If you assume that the mind is basically good, you’ll feel capable but will easily get complacent. 

This stands in the way of the heedfulness needed to get you on the path, and to keep you there when the path creates states of relative peace and ease that seem so trustworthy and real.

 If you assume a Buddha nature, you not only risk complacency but you also entangle yourself in metaphysical thorn patches: 

• If something with an awakened nature can suffer, what good is it? 
• How could something innately awakened become defiled? 
• If your original Buddha nature became deluded, what’s to prevent it from becoming deluded after it’s re-awakened?

Buddha nature as a potential not fully developed?

These points become especially important as you reach the subtle levels of fabrication on the more advanced stages of the path. If you’re primed to look for innate natures, you’ll tend to see innate natures, especially when you reach the luminous, non-dual stages of concentration called themeless, emptiness, and undirected. You’ll get stuck on whichever stage matches your assumptions about what your awakened nature is. But if you’re primed to look for the process of fabrication, you’ll see these stages as forms of fabrication, and this will enable you to deconstruct them, to pacify them, until you encounter the peace that’s not fabricated at all.

4] Exploring Freedom

So instead of making assumptions about innate natures or inevitable outcomes, the Buddha advised exploring the possibility of freedom as it’s immediately present each time you make a choice. 

Freedom is not a nature, and you don’t find it by looking for your hidden innate nature. You find freedom by looking at where it’s constantly showing itself: in the fact that your present intentions are not totally conditioned by the past. 

You catch your first glimmer of it as a range of possibilities from which you can choose and as your ability to act more skillfully—causing more pleasure and less pain—than you ordinarily might. Your sense of this freedom grows as you explore and exercise it, each time you choose the most skillful course of action heading in the direction of discernment, truthfulness, relinquishment, and peace. The choice to keep making skillful choices may require assumptions, but to keep the mind focused on the issue of fabrication the Buddha saw that these assumptions are best kept to a bare minimum: that the mind wants happiness, that it can choose courses of actions that promote happiness or thwart it, that it can change its ways, and that it can train itself to achieve the ultimate happiness where all fabrications fall away.

These assumptions are the Buddha’s starter kit of skillful means to get you on the path of good will, heedfulness, and appropriate attention. As with any journey, you do best to take along only the bare essentials so that you don’t weigh yourself down. 

This is especially true as you test the limits of freedom, for the closer you come to ultimate freedom, the more you find that things fall away. 

• First the nouns of natures and identities fall away, 
• as you focus on the verbs of action and choice. 
• Then the verbs fall away, too. 

When the Buddha was asked who or what he was, he didn’t answer with a who or what. 

He said simply, “Awakened”: a past participle, a verb that has done its work.

 Similarly, when the suttas describe the Awakening of an arahant, 

they say that his or her mind is released from fermentations. 

But when they describe how this release is experienced, 

they simply say, “With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’” 

No comment on what is released. Not even, as it’s sometimes translated, “It is released.” There’s no noun, no pronoun, just a past participle: “released.” That’s all, but it’s enough.

Glossary | Head & Heart Together

Glossary | Head & Heart Together

Glossary

Ajaan (Thai): Teacher; mentor. Pāli form: Ācariya.

Arahant: A “worthy one” or “pure one;” a person whose mind is free of defilement and thus is not destined for further rebirth. A title for the Buddha and the highest level of his noble disciples. Sanskrit form: Arhat.

Brahmā: An inhabitant of the highest heavenly realms, of form and formlessness.

Brahman: A member of the priestly caste, which claimed to be the highest caste in India, based on birth. In a specifically Buddhist usage, “brahman” can also mean an arahant, conveying the point that excellence is based not on birth or race, but on the qualities attained in the mind.

Deva: Literally, “shining one.” An inhabitant of the heavenly realms.

Dhamma: (1) Event; action; (2) a phenomenon in and of itself; (3) mental quality; (4) doctrine, teaching; (5) nibbāna (although there are passages describing nibbāna as the abandoning of all dhammas). Sanskrit form: Dharma.

Jhāna: Mental absorption. A state of strong concentration focused on a single sensation or mental notion. This term is derived from the verb jhāyati, which means to burn with a steady, still flame.  Sanskrit form: Dhyāna.

Kamma: Intentional act. Sanskrit form: Karma.

Nibbāna: Literally, the “unbinding” of the mind from passion, aversion, and delusion, and from the entire round of death and rebirth. As this term also denotes the extinguishing of a fire, it carries connotations of stilling, cooling, and peace. “Total nibbāna” in some contexts denotes the experience of Awakening; in others, the final passing away of an arahant. Sanskrit form: Nirvāṇa.

Pāli: The language of the oldest extant complete Canon of the Buddha’s teachings.

Samaṇa: Contemplative. Literally, a person who abandons the conventional obligations of social life in order to find a way of life more “in tune” (sama) with the ways of nature. The samaṇa movements of the Buddha’s time—of which the Buddha’s was one—taught doctrines that, rejecting many of  the conventions of brahmanical practice and beliefs, looked to nature for their inspiration.

Saṁsāra: Transmigration; the process of wandering through repeated states of becoming, with their attendant death and rebirth.

Saṁvega: A sense of overwhelming terror or dismay over the pointlessness of life as it is normally lived.

Saṅgha: On the conventional (sammati) level, this term denotes the communities of Buddhist monks and nuns. On the ideal (ariya) level, it denotes those followers of the Buddha, lay or ordained, who have attained at least stream-entry.

Sutta: Discourse. Sanskrit form: Sutra.

Theravāda: The school of Buddhism that takes the Pāli Canon as the most reliable record of the Buddha’s words.

Vinaya: The monastic discipline, whose rules and traditions comprise six volumes in printed text.