The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis

It’s not the case that we give in to every desire that comes into the mind. After all, so many different desires are clamoring for our attention. We have to decide which ones are worth following, which ones are not. So subconsciously we do a kind of cost-benefit analysis: Is this desire worth the effort? The problem is that some of the considerations that go into that cost-benefit analysis are pretty stupid. A lot of them have to do simply with what we like and what we don’t like. Things that catch our attention. Secret preferences that we tend to feed and nourish. So, for a lot of us, this cost-benefit analysis goes underground because it’s so arbitrary. We don’t like even to hear the idea that there is such a thing. But it is an important part of our lives. This is one of the problems with teenagers: They’re not really good at figuring out what’s worth going with and what’s not. A large part of maturity is when you get a better sense of how to do this analysis well. To be really mature, you learn how to do it well as part of the path.

Think about when the Buddha said he got on the path. He began to divide his thoughts into two kinds: those that were imbued with sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness on one side; and those imbued with renunciation, non-ill-will, and harmlessness on the other hand. He was looking at his thoughts not in terms of what he liked, or at least in the content of the thoughts themselves, but where they came from and where they were going to go. He learned how to step back from these things.

This is how he learned right resolve. There are different accounts of which of the factors of the path are the first factors the Buddha discovered. There’s one that starts with right concentration. There’s one that starts with right resolve: deciding that whatever thoughts were on the unskillful side, he was going to beat them back, just as a cowherd would beat back any of his cows that were trying to get into the rice during the rainy season. As for thoughts that were skillful, he’d allow them free range, like the cowherd during the dry season. There’s no trouble about getting into the rice fields because there’s no rice in the fields, so the cows can pretty much go anywhere they like.

But the important thing was that the Buddha learned how to step back from his thoughts—this includes his desires—and he learned to expand that cost-benefit analysis in two directions: one, looking at where these thoughts came from and, two, holding them to a high standard. As he said, the thoughts that were unskillful should be abandoned because they didn’t lead to awakening.

That’s a pretty high standard for your desires. Most people go through life making that cost-benefit analysis without even thinking about awakening. It doesn’t even come into the equation. At best, they think about the consequences of what they’re going to do. And the question of where these thoughts come from, where these desires come from, for most people, is a very dark and mysterious area. Yet that’s precisely there that the Buddha said we have to look.

So we step back. It’s probably this part of his own personal experience, his own personal path, that led him to make teach the five-step program that we talk about so often.

To start, you look for the origination. In other words, where in the mind do these thoughts come from? Where do these desires come from? What kinds of mind state? Imbued with passion, aversion, delusion, or free from those things?

When you look at where these things are coming from, in philosophy they call that genealogy, in the same way that we talk about your genealogy in terms of where your ancestors come from. Look for the genealogy of your ideas. Doing that can often be a very sobering experience. You realize they come from some pretty bad mental states. But that should help you step back from them. Do you really want to identify with this part of your mind? You don’t have to.

So you look for the origination inside, and then you look to see how these things pass away. A lot of our desires like to tell us that they’re going to hang around relentlessly until we give in to them. But if you really observe them, you’ll notice that they come and they go, and they come again and they go again, back and forth. Often it’s because we dig them up, and even in cases where we have a mind-storm—where they just seem to be coming, coming, coming on their own—if you look carefully, they’re not there all the time. It’s just that they have a quick repeat button. But seeing that they do pass away helps give you some handle on them, it helps give you a sense that you can get past them. You’re not totally sucked into what they have to say.

Then you look for the allure. When the mind decides to go with something, why? Here the Buddha says you want to look for the location of your craving. Say that you crave a person: Exactly where is your craving located? Very rarely in the person him- or herself. It often has to do with your perceptions about the person, the storylines you make up involving you and that person, or simply the perception of you in relationship to that person—all kinds of things that have nothing to do with the actual person. This is why our interpersonal relationships are so unreliable. We’re all caught up in our thought worlds and they blind us to what’s actually going on outside. Yet these are the things that drive us: little bits and snippets of an idea or something that appeals to you.

This is why the Buddha has you also contemplate the drawbacks. Here again, as I said, this is where you go beyond the normal cost-benefit analysis, because you look and see: This desire, is it really going to lead to awakening? You have to say No—so many times, yet part of you wants to give in. You have to ask yourself, what’s that all about? That goes back to your question of: Where is this desire located? To what extent have you really decided that, Yes, this is what you want to do if you take the Buddha seriously? When you see the drawbacks way outweigh the allure, that’s when you have the escape through dispassion.

So you apply these five steps to any of those unskillful mental states that right resolve tries to abandon. Take sensuality, for instance: Here it’s important to realize that sensuality is one thing, sensual pleasures are something else. Sensuality is our fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. The mind’s internal dialogue, made up of your inner conversation, your perceptions: That’s the big problem. As the Buddha said, it’s not the case that every sensual pleasure is bad. Some are good. But you do have to be careful to see which kinds of sensual pleasures lead to skillful mind states and which lead to unskillful ones. Some of the good ones, he says, include enjoying the beauties of nature, enjoying solitude, enjoying a community when the community is harmonious, doing your best to make the community harmonious. Those are good pleasures to cultivate. But even there, he says, you can’t get obsessed with them.

But there are a lot of pleasures that are really bad for the mind, because they pull you down, they encourage more greed, more lust, more aversion when you’re worked up about the idea that they might be taken away, more delusion when you keep telling yourself, “Well, this is a really worthwhile thing to go after in spite of the obstacles,” when it’s very much not. So we have to see the drawbacks of these pleasures.

That’s why we have that chant on the 32 parts of the body. Exactly where in there do you feel lust for someone else, or where do you feel pride in your own body? Which of those organs is the center of your lust? Well, none of them, when you take them apart like that. Then why is it that, when you put them together, that you can feel desire? What is the mind doing to itself?

This is why this contemplation keeps leading away from the body itself. The body is not so much the problem. It’s all this elaboration that the mind spins around it. When you can see how arbitrary it is and how false a lot of it is, it’s easier to see the drawbacks.

The same with ill will: What on earth do you gain by seeing someone else suffer? Sometimes there’s the satisfaction of seeing someone who’s done something really bad getting what they deserve. But what does that solve? A lot of people are punished for wrongdoing and yet won’t admit that they did anything wrong. So they keep coming back, back, back, continuing to do wrong. Why would you get satisfaction out of seeing that person get punished? What kind of mind state is that? What part of your mind? Is it something you really want to encourage? Well, no.

This is why it’s important to remember what goodwill means. It doesn’t mean, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” For people who are doing unskillful things, it means, “May you see the error of your ways and voluntarily stop.” That’s how these things are ended. So try to cultivate goodwill.

As for thinking imbued with harmfulness, that’s basically doing harm but without ill will. A lot of times when you realize that an action you’re taking or a desire you have is going to harm some people, you tell yourself, “It doesn’t matter.” It’s a callous attitude. You say, “Well, there’s bound to be collateral damage.” You say, “It doesn’t matter.” That’s the attitude you have to get over, realizing that if you’re willing to harm anybody in your actions, that harm is going to come back to you.

You’ve got to have a strong sense of compunction, that you don’t want to do anything that would cause harm. And a strong sense of compassion, thinking about people’s feelings. Nobody likes to be relegated to the category of—what do they call them—“surplus mouths” nowdays? Everyone has his or her feelings. Everyone has his or her desire for happiness. This is why the Buddha said, “You can go the whole world over and not find anybody you love more than yourself, but then remember that everybody else loves themselves just as fiercely.” So if you’re willing to look for happiness in a way that causes harm to somebody, even without any ill will, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re not going to be treated as nothing.

These are the some of the ways that we can think to get the mind to do a better cost-benefit analysis of which desires really are worth going with and which ones are not.

This is what right resolve is all about. It’s the active side of discernment. Think of Ajaan Lee when he talks about the three qualities of mind that go into mindfulness practice. There’s mindfulness itself, the ability to keep something in mind. Then there’s alertness, knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. And finally, ardency, the desire to do this well. Of those three qualities, he assigned wisdom to the ardency because he realized that the Buddha didn’t teach simply to decorate our minds with ideas. The wise response to listening to his teachings is to say, “I’ve got to learn how to master this skill.”

That’s what right resolve is all about: realizing that—given the four noble truths, particularly the truth of how suffering is originated—you want to avoid any thinking that would originate more suffering. So you learn how to step back from your thoughts, step back from your desires, and view them in this context of a cause-and-effect chain—where they come from, where they go—so that you can develop dispassion, or as the Buddha says, the subduing of desire and passion, which is the fifth step of the five. It’s the step that leads to the escape, to freedom. Remember: For the Buddha, freedom doesn’t mean simply doing what you want to do. It means learning how to act in a way that you’re not going to cause harm to anybody. And that’s a skill we can all develop if we put our hearts and minds to it.