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March 24, 2024

We talk about meditation as training the mind, but we have to remember that the Pali word for mind, citta, covers both what we think of as mind and also what we think of as heart. So we try to develop both a good mind and a good heart.

Some people miss this fact. They think it’s simply a matter of training the mind to understand the Buddha’s concepts and then just to apply them. The question of your goodness, or lack of goodness, doesn’t come in. But that’s really unbalanced, and it really misses a lot of the training.

A group of Abhidhamma students once came to see Ajaan Fuang. Abhidhamma tends to be very analytical, interested in analyzing the concepts that the Buddha taught and then trying to apply those concepts to your experience—but with very little reference to the heart.

So they came to see him. They’d heard he was a good teacher, but they didn’t know what he taught. When they arrived, he said, “Okay, close your eyes, focus on your breath.” They said, “No. No, we can’t do that.” “Why not?” “We’re afraid that we’ll get stuck on jhāna, and then be reborn as Brahmās.” His response was, “Well, what’s wrong with being reborn as a Brahmā? Non-returners”—people at the third level of awakening—“are reborn as Brahmās. And at any rate, being reborn as a Brahmā is better than being reborn as a dog.” The reference there, of course, was to people who are really good at the concepts but don’t have virtue, don’t have generosity: They could very easily be reborn as dogs.

It’s not the concepts that are going to help you understand. You have to understand what it’s like to develop a good heart and a good mind together. In the course of that, the concepts will make a lot more sense. You’ll be able to do the practice, and the practice will have energy, because there’s a lot of need for nourishment as you follow the path, and our nourishment comes from a sense of our own worth.

This is why you develop a good sense of who you are and what you’re capable of, so that you feel worthy of a happiness that doesn’t change, a happiness that’s better than ordinary because you’re not harming anyone. This sense of self-worth comes from looking at yourself as you practice acts of generosity, *as *you practice acts of virtue, and you get a sense of your own goodness. It gives you confidence.

As the Buddha said, people who are stingy and greedy can’t get into right concentration, to say nothing of levels of awakening. As for lack of virtue, there are people who are not virtuous who can get their minds strongly concentrated because they’re good at compartmentalizing their minds, but that concentration is not going to be honest. You have to learn first how to be honest in your dealings with yourself, with other people, if you want to get a state of mind that’s honest with itself.

This is why, when the Buddha taught his son at the very beginning, he said to look at all your actions done with the body, your words, and your thoughts. Before you do them, ask yourself: What kind of intention do you have? What do you expect to come about as a result of that action? If you expect any harm, don’t do it. That’s making you responsible right there. If you don’t foresee any harm, go ahead and do it. But while you’re doing the action, keep watch, and if you actually are causing harm, stop.

After all, there are a lot of things we don’t understand before we do them. Only when we actually do them do we see what the results are. You can’t just say, “Well, I had good intentions to begin with” and just plow right through. You want to test your good intentions to make sure they’re actually skillful.

So if you see any harm, stop. If you don’t see any harm, you go ahead.

Then, when you’re done, you ask yourself, “This action that I did: Did it lead to harm over the long term?” If it did, go talk it over with someone who’s more advanced on the path and then make up your mind not to repeat that mistake.

This way, as you try to be harmless in your actions, you learn a lot of good qualities. You learn compassion for yourself and for others, you learn responsibility, you learn honesty, all of which are good qualities to develop for the sake of the meditation.

This is why the Dhamma is special. Not just anybody can master the Dhamma. You have to be a good person to master the Dhamma. Being a good person gives you the energy to keep on practicing.

For example, with generosity: Someone once asked the Buddha where a gift should be given, and he was expecting the Buddha to say, “Give to the Buddhists,” but the Buddha said something else. He said to give where you feel inspired. So start with your heart. Where does your heart want to be generous? Be generous there, and then you can look at the results. You may decide after a while that you wanted something that was not really wise, but the important thing is you start with your heart.

The same with the precepts: You realize that you don’t want to suffer; other people are just like you, they don’t want to suffer, so you don’t want to do anything that would cause them suffering. You look into your heart and try to see what’s the best you can do with your heart.

And as you sit and meditate: The first meditation instructions the Buddha gives when he talks about acts of goodwill are that you want to make your goodwill universal.

Ordinarily our goodwill is human. In other words, there are some people for whom we have goodwill and other people for whom we have ill will. We’d actually like to see them suffer. We feel that they’ve done wrong and they should be punished.

But how many people actually learn from punishment? What you want—if people are acting in an unskillful way—is for them to see, and then to make up their minds on their own, that they need to change their ways, they want to change their ways, and they’re willing to put in all the effort that’s needed.

When you wish that for someone else, that’s what genuine goodwill is all about. You get a sense of your own power. You can generate goodness from within even when the people around you are not good. You’re not just a transmitter transmitting someone else’s goodness through you.

We learn of the goodness of the Buddha, we learn of the goodness of the Saṅgha, the people who’ve gone before us, but there has to be something within us that says, “Yes, that really is good, and I want to do some goodness like that.” That requires a sense of yourself as an independent starter, yourself as an agent. So it’s at this level of the practice that the concept of self is really useful. In fact, it’s a necessary part of the path.

When the Buddha was giving instructions to Rāhula, the way he had Rāhula express his questions to himself, “This action that I want to do,” “This action that I am doing,” “This action that I have done,” I, I, I. You make skillful use of that concept of self, and at the end you rejoice in the fact that you’re doing well. That’s a healthy sense of self, a nourishing sense of self. It gives you the energy to keep on practicing because you realize the path is not going to get done on its own. You have to do it, but you’re capable of doing it, and you’re going to benefit. You have proof of that in yourself. You can see yourself acting in good ways.

This is why Ajaan Suwat, when he was teaching in Massachusetts—I think it was the third day of the retreat—looked out across the room and mentioned to me, “Notice how grim everybody is here.” And you looked out across the room, and they did look pretty grim. It was as if they had a band across their forehead saying “Nirvāṇa or die!” He attributed their mood to the fact they didn’t have much background in generosity, much background in virtue. They’d gone straight to the meditation.

When you’re meditating and your mind is wandering off, wandering off, wandering off, you begin to get discouraged. You wonder if the Buddha really was teaching something worthwhile. You wonder if you’re capable of doing it even if it is worthwhile. But if you have some experience in the practice of generosity, the practice of virtue, you gain confidence in the Buddha, and you also gain confidence in yourself that you can do good things.

We’ve learned what for a little child is a counterintuitive lesson, which is when you give things away, you actually gain in happiness. The same holds true when you hold yourself back from doing things that would put you in a position of having an advantage over somebody but actually would be doing harm. When you learn how to gain a healthy sense of self from being generous and being virtuous, you’ve learned an important lesson—that a lot of things in life require that before you can be happy, you have to give.

Happiness is not just getting, getting, getting. It lies in the act of being responsible. That strong sense of your responsibility, that you’re not just a victim of forces outside yourself, you’re actually an independently good agent: That’s really nourishment on the path. That’s food for you on the path.

So this is where depending on yourself—as the Buddha said, attāhi attano nātho, the self is its own mainstay—has to be developed out of a good heart. This is the level of the path where you need a strong sense of self, a healthy sense of self, a nourishing sense of self. That provides you with the energy and nourishment you need to keep going.