Skillful Fears
October 31, 2023

The Buddha says that as we’re born into this world, we’re subject to five kinds of loss. We can lose our health. We can lose our wealth. We can lose our relatives. We can lose our right views, and we can lose our virtue. Of those five, he says only two kinds of loss are really serious: losing your virtue, losing your right views. You can lose the other things, and he said it doesn’t take you down to hell. And you usually get those things back.

Think about how many times you’ve been born and how many times you’ve had different mothers, different fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. The Buddha said it would be hard to meet someone who hasn’t been one of your relatives in that way. So these things keep coming back, coming back.

The same with your health. You lose this body; you get another body.

The same with wealth. Wealth comes; wealth goes—goes again, comes again. It doesn’t need to have a really bad impact on the mind. But those are the things that people in the world fear the most, and the Buddha says they’ve got it backwards. The things you really have to fear are losing your right view, losing your virtue. If you lose your right view, you start doing things that are unskillful, and those can have an impact for a long, long time. Not only in this lifetime, but on, on, on into the future.

Fortunately, these are things you lose only when you abandon them yourself. No one else can take them away from you. You have your right view. You have your virtue. Nobody can steal these things. They become part of the mind itself.

Someone once asked Ajaan Mun if you can distinguish between the mind of a person and the person’s virtue. Ajaan Mun said, No, you can’t. And that’s a good thing. If you could, people would probably steal your virtue, just as they could steal other things. But your virtue is part of the mind itself.

So make sure you maintain the things whose loss would actually be serious. As for the other things, learn to accept it as a fact that you chose to come into this world. Nobody invited you. Nobody forced you to come. It was just the force of your own craving, your own clinging. And these are parts of the world itself: the gain and loss, gain and loss, again and again. If we learn how to deal with those kind of gains and those kind of losses in the right way, we can gain benefit from them. When you’re having a period of gain, you learn how to use those gains well to develop good qualities of the mind. When you lose them, you start seeing who are your real friends outside, and what can you really depend on inside.

So learn from the gain. Learn from the loss of those other things. But for your virtue and your right view, do your best to maintain them. Hold on to them tight. People may say you’re attached, but it’s a good attachment. We see other people throwing away their virtue, throwing away their right views so easily, so make that more motivation to make sure that you don’t throw yours away—that you maintain them as best you can.