Be True
January 11, 2024

When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, try to be true to that intention. We’re looking for the truth, and it’s not something that you can just push a button and have it appear on your screen—at least the kind of truths that we’re looking for. They require that you be true: true in your virtue; true in your concentration. In that way, you get true discernment.

The Buddha placed a lot of emphasis on virtue. It tends to get overlooked here in the West. Everybody goes straight for the meditation. But if you want your concentration to be clear and honest, you’ve got to be clear and honest in the rest of your life. The mind that tends to make up little lies here and there finds it really easy to lie to itself. Then when you get the mind still, it’s not the case that you can’t get the mind still if you’re not virtuous. You can. But what comes out of the mind when it’s still is not necessarily reliable.

So if you want reliable truth, you have to be a reliable person. This is why this is a training of the entire citta, as they say in Pali, because the word citta means not only the mind but also the heart. We’re training the heart.

We start with generosity. When the Buddha would introduce the four noble truths, he didn’t start with concepts like emptiness or not-self. He started with generosity. If people couldn’t absorb that and agree with him that generosity is a really good thing, that’s as far as the talk would go. But if they were receptive and saw the value of generosity, then he’d move on to virtue. And again, if they didn’t see the value of virtue, he’d spend a lot of time explaining virtue and stop there. But if they already saw that virtue was a good thing, something worth maintaining, worth being strict with yourself about, then he would move on to the higher teachings.

So remember, we’re training the whole heart, the whole mind. And for the heart to know the truth, it has to be true. For the mind to know the truth, it has to be true. It’s like a scientific experiment. If you fudge the results, you’re not going to get the truth. If you’re thinking of getting famous from your experiment, getting rewarded some way, then you’re going to fudge the results.

But if you’re there for the truth, you’re going to find some interesting things you wouldn’t have suspected otherwise. And those unsuspected things are the things that are really going to count.

So when something comes up unexpected in the mind, you have to ask yourself: Where is this coming from? If you’ve trained your heart to be true, trained your mind to be true, then it’s much more likely that insight you gain in the meditation will be true as well.