Harmless Means
November 07, 2023
As we meditate, we’re learning how to find happiness in a totally harmless way. In fact, you could say the Buddha’s entire path is a harmless path. When you’re generous with other beings, it doesn’t harm anybody. When you’re virtuous—holding by the precepts, holding by your principles of not harming—nobody gets harmed. You don’t get harmed; nobody else gets harmed. And when you meditate, you’re sitting here training your mind to see where greed, aversion, and delusion are making you see things wrongly, so that you can correct for those distortions. So the means are totally harmless.
And the end, of course—as the Buddha said—is an end where there’s no conflict, where there’s no oppression at all. That means no inner conflict, no outer conflict; no inner oppression, no outer oppression. The focus is both on the means and on the end.
We live in a world where there really are no ends. People will claim that they have a noble end here or a noble goal there. But as long as it’s still in space and time, it’s going to get worn away. So those ends become means.
That calls into question the whole idea that the ends can justify the means. In other words, people will kill and steal and do all kinds of harmful things, saying that they have a good goal, they have a good purpose behind all this. But as the Buddha saw, the universe doesn’t serve anybody’s particular purpose, and nothing that you attain within the universe is going to stay. So we have to focus on the means.
Now, because everything is means in the universe, make sure the means are so good that you don’t have to justify them. Sometimes people will try to impose their idea of justice on other people, and they’ll give you a story: “So-and-so started it by doing this, and then so-and-so did that.” The story has a beginning point and arrives at the point where you are, and you can tell who did what, and then add and subtract to decide who’s been wronged and who did the first wrong.
But as the Buddha pointed out, the idea of a beginning point for the cycles of samsara is inconceivable. Not just unknowable. Inconceivable. So there’s no beginning point from which you can start the tally. That takes the whole notion of inflicting your ideas of justice on other people and calls it into question. The Buddha himself never imposed his standards on others. He did have clear standards for what’s right and wrong, but he never imposed them on anyone.
And the person who suggested to him that he could take over a position of power where he could impose his ideas of right and wrong: That was Mara. But as the Buddha told Mara, there’s no way you could rule in the world, order the world, so that everybody would be happy. If you had two mountains the size of the Himalayas totally made out of gold, it wouldn’t be enough for one person’s desires. So there would never be genuine peace through social action.
So there’s never any talk of imposing any idea on anyone else. It’s all for us to consider and voluntarily practice, realizing if you want a happiness that’s solid and lasting, it has to be harmless. When you take that into consideration, then you develop thoughts of compassion, thoughts of goodwill, and you learn how to act in ways that are totally harmless. This is all for the good of the world.
Now, how much good is going to be accomplished outside, the Buddha didn’t give any guarantees. But he did say inside you can accomplish quite a lot. You can find total freedom where you’re not oppressed by anyone, and you don’t oppress anyone else. You’re not in conflict with anyone—not in conflict inside. The Buddha said you should take delight in the fact that this is where the path leads. It’s what makes it the best path of all.