The Battle Inside
April 20, 2024

Close your eyes, watch your breath—all the way in, all the way out, and then again, in and out. Stick with it. When you’re doing something good, you want to stay with it as much as you can, because the mind does have a tendency to wander around, and it ends up falling for its defilements. Greed, aversion, and delusion can pull you away. You lose out to these things how many times in the course of the day? You’ve got to put up a fight.

You’ve got something good here. The breath can be as comfortable as you want. Just learn how to maintain that sense of well-being inside, because it is perfectly harmless, and it does give you the strength you need to overcome greed, aversion, and delusion when they come and try to pull you away again.

There’s a passage in the Canon saying that the devas shout for joy on three occasions. (1) When a disciple of the noble ones decides to go forth, to ordain, the devas shout out, “Ah, the disciple of the noble ones has decided to do battle with Mara!” (2) When a disciple of the noble ones is practicing the seven sets of the wings to awakening—the four establishings of mindfulness, the four bases of power, the four right exertions, the five strengths, the five faculties, the seven factors for awakening, the noble eightfold path—the devas shout out, “Now, the disciple of the noble ones is doing battle with Mara.” (3) When the disciple has attained full awakening and become an arahant, then they shout out, “Now he’s won out over Mara. His victory is complete.”

That’s the kind of victory that the devas celebrate. The victories that we have in the world where one person wins out over another person, or one country over another country, nobody celebrates those up in heaven because they see them simply as creating more bad karma. The real victory is the victory inside. Victory outside comes and goes. You gain the victory and then it erodes away. But the victory inside, if you keep at it, takes you to a place where it cannot erode away, cannot change. You’re not creating any bad karma as you do this. It’s all good karma in this kind of battle.

So, we don’t need to get involved in the battles outside. Other people trying to pull us away will say, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Well, no, that’s not the case. You’ve got other battles you’ve got to fight, battles that are more important—the battle inside—because battles outside never really settle anything. But the battle inside, that’s where the true victory can be found.

So, when someone has decided to go forth and do battle like that, we all express our admiration, too. It’s an expression of empathetic joy, seeing that it’s good that there are people in the world who are taking on this battle, and we’re happy to support it. It gives us encouragement that we can take on this battle as well. Whether we ordain or not, we can still practice the seven sets to the wings to awakening. Maybe someday the devas will shout out about you, that you’ve won out as well.