Abandoning & Developing
April 01, 2024

One of the skills we have to develop as meditators is to have a healthy attitude toward our goals. We do have goals. We want to put an end of suffering: the suffering we cause ourselves, the suffering we cause others. That’s a worthy goal. The Buddha called it part of the noble search, the search for something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die—totally free from suffering.

**But we have to relate to that goal in a skillful way. If we start getting impatient, try to rush there, thinking simply about the goal without being very careful to look at the steps, it’s like driving to a mountain. You can try to make the road to the mountain constructed out of your ideas of the mountain. But a road of ideas doesn’t work. Right anticipation is not one of the factors of the path. **

You have to have confidence that the path laid out by the Buddha goes where you want to go. Then you look at the steps that are required. There’s developing, and there’s abandoning. You see this in the Buddha’s teaching on dhammānupassanā, taking dhammas as your frame of reference as you practice mindfulness. You base your concentration on your breath, and then you notice: Do you have the qualities of mind that help you stay with the breath? **

The two main sets of qualities that the Buddha teaches in that context are the hindrances on the one hand, and the factors for awakening on the other. They’re a paired set. Often you see them together in different contexts in the Canon. What separates them and makes them a pair—a skillful side and an unskillful side—is the question of whether you exercise appropriate attention or inappropriate attention around the qualities and potentials in your mind.

If you find that your sensual desire is being aggravated, you have to ask yourself, “What am I focusing on in the wrong way?” Usually you find that it’s something you really want. All you can think about is how much you want it and all of its good characteristics, without looking at the drawbacks of actually having whatever that is. You have to have a balanced view.

There are things that are nice in the world. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. You read the poems of the elder monks and the elder nuns, and a lot of them are devoted to the beauties of nature. So the Buddha does admit: Yes, there are beautiful things out there. But how do they fit in with this quest to gain awakening, this quest to put an end to suffering? They can help refresh you. And the Buddha says you don’t impose pain on yourself unnecessarily. If there are pleasures that are in line with the path, enjoy them.

But you have to look. When you indulge in a particular pleasure, where does it take you? What does it do to your mind? We often don’t think about pleasures in terms of the results that they give us. We simply think they’re good in and of themselves because we like them. You have to ask yourself: What does it do to the mind, to keep focusing on these particular pleasures? Some of them are perfectly okay. The Buddha says going out into nature is good for the mind. Living in a harmonious community is good for the practice pretty much across the board.

But then there are some things that are going to be an individual matter. You notice, in Thailand, some monks stay in monasteries and they can gain full awakening. Other monks stay in monasteries and their minds are a mess. They have to go out and suffer some hardships in the forest before their minds will be willing to settle down. So you have to look at the pleasures you enjoy and ask yourself, “What do they do to me? What do they do to my mind?” That’s called having appropriate attention.

The same applies for ill will. Ill will’s pretty much, across the board, bad. After all, what is it? It’s the desire to see somebody suffer. Now, you may justify it by saying, “Well, that person really did horrible things, and it doesn’t seem right that that person doesn’t suffer in consequence.” But would that actually yield good results?

Think about Angulimala. If he had suffered justice for his actions, he never would have gained awakening. The Buddha saw, though, that he had potential, so he focused on that. Which means that justice wasn’t served in his case. He became an arahant, and the results of all those murders that he had done were simply people throwing things at him on his alms round, probably people who had had their relatives killed by him, or were just upset that he was a criminal literally getting away with murder.

We have to careful about our desire to see justice done. It can often turn into ill will. If we act on ill will, it’s going to be bad for us. So when you have that desire to see somebody suffer, ask yourself: What would that really accomplish? Wouldn’t it be better if they could see the error of their ways voluntarily and change their ways voluntarily, without your having to keep score?

**So look into your ideas about justice. A lot of them are picked up from our Western worldview, which doesn’t really fit into the Buddha’s worldview. The Western worldview has a beginning—at least traditionally it does. That’s where our ideas of justice come from. When there’s a beginning, then you can tally the score: Who did what first, or who overreacted? Then you can add up the score and decide what needs to be done to bring things back into balance. **

But in the Buddha’s worldview, there’s no beginning point. He said the beginning is inconceivable. So how would you tally a score? It’s like a football game in which one team tallies their scores from the whole past year, while the other one tallies their scores just from the beginning of the second half. There’s no justice there.

So when there’s ill will, ask yourself: What would be accomplished by that? Why can’t you have goodwill, or, at the very least, equanimity around certain issues? That’s having appropriate attention.

Sloth and torpor. When you’re really tired, you have to ask yourself: Are you really tired, or is the mind just putting up obstacles? Sometimes it’s bored. Sometimes it senses that something is going to come up in the meditation that it doesn’t want to see, so it puts you to sleep. Which means you have to test it. The Buddha gives a whole series of tests: Change the meditation object, which could mean, in the case of the breath, breathing in a different way, or changing to something else, like recollection of death. Rub your limbs. Pull your ears. Go out and look at the stars. Do walking meditation.

If you do walking meditation and you’re still dropping off, it’s a sign you really do need to sleep. But there’s always the need to test it first, because the mind does have its way of deceiving itself around this issue. That’s appropriate attention there.

Appropriate attention with regard to restlessness and worry. You have to ask yourself: Do you really know what’s going to happen in the future? You don’t. But you do know that whatever happens, you’re going to need more mindfulness, more alertness, more discernment. So the best way of preparing for future dangers is actually to get the mind into concentration. Develop your mindfulness and alertness and discernment. If it so happens that things get really bad, you’ll have the resources you need inside, because if you try to prepare a little bit of this and a little bit of that, in hopes that you can depend on things outside being a certain way in terms of your relationships, in terms of your material possessions, those things could easily let you down. This is where you have to depend on the strengths of your mind. So you work on those.

And finally, with doubt, the only way you’re going to overcome doubt—either about the truth of the Buddha’s teachings or about your ability to practice them—is by really observing what’s going on in your mind, learning how to label different mind states as skillful or unskillful, and see: Do they really lead to the results that the Buddha said they would? In other words, you think unskillful thoughts—what does it do to your mind? You think skillful thoughts—what does it do to the mind?

As you begin to see for yourself that you’re much better off developing skillful qualities, then you have something more solid to base your decisions on. You eat away at the doubt. You can’t just simply say, “Well, I believe, believe, believe.” The Buddha doesn’t ask for that. He says, “Look. Test it.”

Among the skillful qualities he recommends developing are the brahmavihāras. In fact, in the context of ill will, and restlessness and anxiety, and doubt, he recommends the brahmavihāras as one of the antidotes. It’s obvious, in the case of ill will, that goodwill is an antidote. In terms of restlessness and anxiety, you may be thinking about some of the things you’ve done wrong in the past. Instead of just letting yourself be overcome by remorse, you remind yourself, “Okay, I can’t undo that through remorse, but I can make the promise to myself that I won’t do it again.” Then you reinforce that promise with goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others, to make the mind less likely to be inclined to do unskillful things.

As for doubt, you know that goodwill is a skillful mental quality. That’s hard to doubt. Then you think more about the Buddha’s teachings on what goodwill means. Goodwill is one of those general virtues that’s extolled in almost all religious traditions, but the Buddha has a particular take on it, because when you’re wishing for happiness, you have to ask yourself: Where does happiness come from? It has to come from your actions. If you’re wishing goodwill for others, you’re hoping that their actions will be skillful, too.

Thinking like that makes it a lot easier for your goodwill to be more universal. You’re not saying, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” You’re saying, “If you’re doing unskillful things, may you learn how to see the error of your ways and change your ways voluntarily.” Then you think the same thought for yourself. That way, your goodwill is fair.

Realize that you have work to do in developing universal goodwill and you want to succeed in that work. The more you think about it, the more you realize the universal goodwill really is a good, skillful state of mind. You can see the results immediately. It gives you energy, makes your mind more expansive. It’s like a house: If your house is narrow, confining, it’s not going to be a comfortable place to stay. If it’s wider, more open, it’s a good house to be in. Well, this is a good mind to be in—the mind of the brahmavihāras.

You can also use the brahmavihāras as a background for developing the factors for awakening, because the brahmavihāras are a form of mindfulness. Based on that, you’re going to develop all the other factors for awakening. Analysis of qualities—in other words, analyzing what’s going on in your mind, which is precisely what you’ve been doing as you try to overcome doubt. As you do that, you’re developing persistence. A state of rapture and refreshment can come when you work on skillful qualities and they really do start showing their results. The mind grows calm. You get settled, centered in concentration.

Then you develop a state of equanimity, which here is a nourished equanimity. All too often, we’re told, “Just be equanimous about things. Accept things as they are. Learn how to be okay with whatever.” But look at the world. It’s hard to be okay with all the horrible things that are happening if you don’t have an inner resource to draw on. If you do have that inner resource, through the concentration and all the other skillful qualities you’ve developed inside, then your equanimity comes from the fact that you’re well fed inside, and you don’t need food from outside.

It’s like someone bringing you a plate of really disgusting food. You say, “I don’t need it because I’m not hungry.” If you’re hungry, you look at the disgusting food and you get really upset. You want something else, but this is what they give you. It’s hard to live in the world like that. But if you’re already well fed inside, then regardless of what food they have outside—it can be garbage—it doesn’t affect you. So you can be equanimous, with a well-nourished equanimity.

Then you see what you can do to make things better. Maybe you can teach other people how to stop creating garbage or to find better ways of feeding themselves. But you’re doing it totally for their sake. This is why equanimity is not simply indifference. It’s a state of mind where you can actually look more clearly at what needs to be done, what can be done, without a neurotic need to change things the way you think they should be just for the sake of changing, or for the sake of feeling good about yourself. You’ve already got a sense of well-being inside, which allows you to feed yourself. Your good actions are an expression of the goodness that’s already there.

So this is a way of looking at the different things that you abandon and the different things that you develop as you practice. On the way to your goal, you focus on these issues. Instead of taking the path of your dreams of the goal, you take a path of specific actions that the Buddha said will take you there, step by step by step. And remind yourself, however many steps it’s going to take, it’s always going to be less than the path of not heading toward the goal. That path is endless. So even though the goal may seem far away, remember: It’s shorter than samsara.

**And every step you take along the way is a good step. It’s not the case that the path saves all its rewards for the end. There are rewards all along the way. Learn how to appreciate them. That gives you more energy to take each step carefully, thoughtfully, mindfully, with full alertness, with confidence. That’s what it means to have **a mature attitude toward your goal.