Equanimity After Victory
August 05, 2024

There are so many lists that end in equanimity: the four brahmaviharas, the factors for awakening, the Buddha’s explanation of the different kinds of emotions you encounter on the path—renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity.

It makes it sound like equanimity is where the practice is all aimed, what it’s all about. And with our typical Western efficiency, we say, “Why bother with the lower stages? Go straight for the top.” But those “lower stages” are really important, because there’s a kind of equanimity that the Buddha doesn’t praise—what he calls “householder equanimity.” That’s what people usually start out with. If they don’t develop anything else, that’s where they stay—learning just to accept the fact that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self; things have to change, so tell yourself not to get worked up about it.

Now, we do have to use some of that kind of equanimity on the path.

Think about the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula: “Make the mind like earth.” People throw disgusting things on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react. “Make the mind like water.” You can use water to clean dirty things away, but the water doesn’t recoil. “Make the mind like fire.” Fire can burn garbage, but it doesn’t seem to be upset by the fact that it’s burning garbage. “Make the mind like wind.” Wind can blow clean things, unclean things. It doesn’t make a difference.

But the Buddha’s meditation instructions didn’t stop there. He went on to explain all 16 steps of breath meditation, which are very proactive.

You learn to breathe in ways that give rise to pleasure, breathe in ways that give rise to rapture; train yourself to be aware of the whole body, thinking of yourself as being like a bathman who’s working water through a ball of bath powder. In the same way, when there’s the sense of ease, well-being, and rapture you feel with the breath, you let it spread throughout the whole body, so that no part of the body isn’t saturated with that sense of ease and well-being.

This doesn’t happen on its own. You have to work on it.

It requires that you do battle with your defilements, do battle with your hindrances, the parts of the mind that want to go off and think of something else—want to think about sensual pleasures, want to think about thoughts of ill-will, or that are happy to be sleepy, so that you can just drift off. Or feel responsible when you’re restless and worried about this or that and the other thing, assuming that somehow by worrying about it, you at least show that you’re responsible, your attitude is responsible. Then there’s the mind’s tendency to want to go for doubt, because when you can doubt the Buddha’s teachings, you say, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have to practice these after all.”

You don’t want to accept those attitudes. You don’t want to be equanimous about them. You have to fight them. As the Buddha said, when the mind is bogged down in hindrances, it’s as if it were imprisoned, as if it were a slave, as if it were in debt, crossing across a desert where you’re not sure about your safety. The Buddha doesn’t want you to stay there in slavery or in debt. He wants you to get out of debt, out of slavery, out of prison, arrive at safety. You’ve got to do something.

And, of course, one of the ways of getting the mind to want to go past those hindrances is to learn how to breathe in ways that are really satisfying. So use the concentration to fight off the hindrances and then use it to develop other, subtler forms of discernment. When the mind has come to discernment—the discernment that comes as you peel away layers of fabrication on the mind—then you can arrive at equanimity. But you don’t stop with equanimity in the practice of concentration. You use that equanimity to look more carefully into the mind, to see the subtler defilements that come up, that are apparent when the mind gets really still like this.

So equanimity is not the goal.

The Buddha never wants you to settle for the equanimity that just accepts things. After all, the equanimity that comes with concentration comes after you’ve satisfied the mind with feelings of rapture, after you’ve satisfied the mind with feelings of pleasure. It’s not just telling itself to be equanimous. There’s a natural equanimity that comes when you’ve completed the work of getting the mind to settle down.

The same with those lists of emotions the Buddha talks about on the path: Renunciate grief—he actually encourages that you develop that. It’s the grief over the idea that there are people who’ve found awakening, but you’re not one of them. That grief is meant to motivate you. The fact that there are people who have done this means that it is possible. This is grief with hope of getting out of grief. It’s based on this grief that you get to work, do what has to be done until you’ve trained the mind so that it does gain the joy that comes with insight.

Here again, this insight is based on concentration. You’ve got to do the work—fighting off the hindrances, getting the mind to settle down, so that you can begin to gain insights into the mind. And those insights free you.

The sense of freedom that comes with those insights gives rise to joy. That’s called renunciate joy. Then, when there’s the satisfaction that comes with that joy, the mind can have a sense of equanimity in the sense that it doesn’t need anything more.

And there’s an equanimity that goes beyond the equanimity of concentration. That’s the equanimity that comes when the mind realizes that it’s free from all the defilements. It’s the equanimity that comes with the deepest happiness.

So again, you don’t just go straight to equanimity. You have to do the work so that equanimity is well-nourished and comes from a sense of a job completed, a job well-done.

As for the equanimity in the brahmaviharas, the Buddha again doesn’t say to go straight to equanimity. You have to start with goodwill. There are some people for whom it’s easy to feel goodwill; for other people it’s not so easy. You don’t just tell yourself, “Okay, goodwill, goodwill, goodwill.” You have to think about, “Why do I have trouble thinking thoughts of goodwill for that person?” This way, you begin to understand some of your unskillful attitudes and learn how to fight them off.

The equanimity comes when you realize that there are certain people you just can’t help. You have goodwill for them, you have compassion for them when they’re suffering, empathetic joy when they’re happy. That requires work, too, because there are a lot of people who have more wealth than you, more power than you, they’re better looking than you, their lives seem to go better than yours in every way. There are the people who have gained awakening before you do. You still have to have empathetic joy for them. You can’t be resentful. Those are test cases for your goodwill. You say, “May all beings be happy.” Well, here are people who are happy. If you resent their happiness, then what kind of goodwill is that?

So there’s work to be done before you can arrive at an equanimity that’s solid and expansive. There’s a lot of fighting that has to be done. The Buddha’s most frequent images in the Canon are of people who are fighting, people who are searching, people who are trying to master skills, all of which require effort.

So it’s good to remember that we’re here battling with our defilements. We have to adjust our attitude as to what it means to be a warrior. Nowadays, most warriors say just to bring in a lot of firepower and you’ll render your enemy defenseless with shock and awe. But what’s happened with shock and awe? It just builds a lot of resentment.

When you rely only on strength and not on your intelligence, that’s stupid. If you really want to win the war, win a battle, you have to think strategically. You have to understand your opponent.

In this case, you have to understand your own defilements. What is their allure? That’s what keeps them going. And how can you counteract that allure by finding something else in the mind that has even greater allure that’s on the side of the Dhamma? You have to strategize. To think. Choose your battles.

So we’re not just here to accept whatever comes up on the kammic screen.

We’re here to see what’s wrong with what we’re doing and how we can change what we’re doing so that we can do it better. That’s what the four noble truths are all about. If you think of the three characteristics as being the Buddha’s most important teachings, they do tend to point you toward equanimity, in the sense that, “Well, I’ve just got to accept that things are inconstant, stressful and not-self. I can’t get a permanent happiness, so I’ve got to accept, be content with whatever I can get.”

That’s a very defeatist attitude. Remember, the four noble truths are the basic teaching. They point out that you’re doing something wrong, but you’re going to learn how to do it right. The Buddha says that learning how to do it right is the unexcelled victory. There are going to be some battles. There’s going to be some fighting. So you need strength, but you also need intelligence, the kind of intelligence that thinks strategically. Then, when you come out winning, you can go for the equanimity that comes when the battle is over and won.