A Happy Tradition

When the Buddha taught people how to put an end to suffering, he never asked them first, “Do you deserve to suffer?”

You look at the people he taught: In many cases there were people whose karma was such that they were going to die soon. But he’d teach them how to become awakened anyhow.

Even his foremost disciple, Ven… Moggallana, had some pretty bad karma in his past that was going to follow him all the way into this lifetime. But again, the Buddha taught him how to become awakened, so he wouldn’t have to suffer from that karma.

There’s a case of King Ajatasattu, who killed his father, King Bimbisara. One night he comes to see the Buddha and asks him some questions. The questions are kind of dumb, but the Buddha takes pity on him. He teaches him one of the longest discourses in the Canon, one of the most complete pictures of the path of practice.

Now, Ajatasattu’s karma was such that he wasn’t going to be able to understand the teaching, and he had a bad destination after this lifetime. But the Buddha still taught him in a lot of detail, seeing that would benefit him. At the very least, he admitted the fact that he’d killed his father. He had remorse around that. As the Buddha saw, this teaching would save him a lot of suffering, in spite of all the pains he was destined to experience. He’d eventually come out and get awakened in a much later life.

So, the question of deserving or not deserving to suffer, deserving or not deserving to be happy, never comes up. Even when people have bad karma, the Buddha teaches them how not to suffer from that karma.

Think back on his analogy of the salt crystal, or the analogy of the stolen goat. If a poor person steals a goat, he goes to jail. A rich person steals a goat, he may pay a little fine, nothing much, and it certainly doesn’t make an impression on him, because he has so much more money to spare. It may not sound fair, but what the Buddha is illustrating is the principle that if you make your mind wealthy in skillful qualities, then whatever past bad karma you have, when it comes to hit you, it’s not going to make much of an impact.

To make your mind wealthy, you develop the brahmaviharas: goodwill for all, compassion for all, empathetic joy for all, equanimity for all. You train your mind not to be overcome by pleasure, not to be overcome by pain. You develop your virtue; you develop your discernment. So, there are skills that can enable you not to suffer, no matter what your past karma is. He’s giving you power.

For a lot of us, that takes a lot of getting used to. Either the culture of our families or the culture of the religion we were raised in told us to have a low opinion of ourselves, in that they make a virtue out of humility, out of low self-esteem. But they’re basically putting you in a position of powerlessness.

You have to wonder why. You read about God in some of the monotheistic religions, and he doesn’t sound very happy. He seems to be pretty miserable and he takes his misery out on other people. Some of us have had parents like that.

If that’s the background we’re coming from, we have to learn to unlearn it: to learn that happiness is something that is available. The path is there. And it’s open to anyone who wants to follow it. No questions asked. Now, some people, because of their past karma, are going to have a more difficult time than others. But that doesn’t mean they’re hopeless. Simply that it’s going to take longer.

You have to learn how to talk to yourself in a new way. This is why we develop a new sense of self to go along the path. If you’ve been trained to think that your self is incompetent and undeserving, you have to learn not only to talk to yourself, to convince yourself that, Yes, you can do this path, but you also have to master some of the skills that go with self-esteem, to support your self-confidence.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has you practice generosity and virtue as a foundation for meditation. When you look at your actions, you can see that there are good things you’ve done, bad things you’ve avoided. There’s a sense of joy that goes with that, a sense of strong self-worth.

So, the question of deserving never comes up. Every time they use the word “deserving” in the Pali Canon, it’s reserved for arahants. In fact, that’s what the word “arahant” means: deserving. It’s related to an old custom from the Vedas, that when they would have a sacrifice, they would make a cake. I don’t know what went into the cake, but they called it the “sacrificial cake.” After the sacrifice was done, you wanted to find somebody who was worthy to partake of that cake.

As the Buddha said, there’s no one more worthy than the arahants to receive that cake, or to receive gifts in general, because when they receive a gift, they’re not placed into debt to anybody. And those who give gifts to arahants gain a lot of merit.

But the ability to become deserving like that is open to anybody, including you. Think about that.

We read about the noble ones and they seem so far away. We have to remember that they came from a position very much like ours. They had their defilements. They had their greed, aversion, and delusion. Sometimes we read the biographies of the ajaans and it sounds like they were born arahants, but that’s not the case. They had a lot of defilements they had to fight against. On top of that, they came from a society in which they were very low on the ladder. You read some of the teachings of Ajaan Mun that some of his students wrote down. A lot of them have to do with reminding his students: “You’re a human being, you’ve got all 32 parts of your body, you’ve got all you need in order to gain awakening. The fact that you’re a human being means that you’re in the best position for gaining awakening.”

So, whatever your status in society, whatever ideas have been placed in your head about your value, either through your family or through your past religion, you’ve got to shake them up. Remember Ajaan Mun’s teaching: The fact that you’re a human being means you’re ready. You’re in the ideal position to take on the practice, to follow it through. His students were mainly sons and daughters of peasants in a very poor part of Thailand, yet they were the ones who revived the practice.

In a lot of cases in the Canon, people from very low positions in society, who thought very little of themselves, found that they, too, could practice; they, too, could gain awakening. There’s one story of a leper who was taught by the Buddha. Soon after he was taught, he gained the Dhamma eye and then he died. He was reborn as a deva and, as a deva, he outshone all the other devas in heaven. That’s a story that’s told in one of the udanas.

There’s a story told in another sutta where the devas are kind of snooty. Here’s this deva they feel is undeserving. He outshines them. They’re pretty upset. “Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it astounding?” they say in a sarcastic way. But as the case often happens in the heavens, the more the other devas get upset, the brighter the deva who’s being looked down upon begins to shine.

So, no matter how much people have been looking down on you—or getting you to look down on yourself—the path is open. All you have to do is learn how not to fall back into your old patterns, thinking that humility is a good thing, or low self-opinion is a good thing.

Humility in the sense of realizing you’ve got defilements that you’ve got to work on: That’s good. But humility in the sense that you’re incapable of doing this without outside help: That’s not good. Learn some skillful humility.

And some skillful pride. We have traditions that tell us not to take any pride in the fact that we’ve done good, that somehow all the good we’ve done has to be attributed to some higher power working through us. Again, that comes from a very unhappy tradition.

The Buddhist tradition is a happy one, where everybody deserves to find true happiness. The Buddha was happy and he wanted to spread his happiness around. That’s the figure we bow down to, the person we take refuge in—because he wants us to be happy, too.