3. Proactive People with Proactive Minds

One of the striking features of the early Buddhist dialogs is the extent to which the Buddha took a personal interest in his listeners. He responded to their questions in a way that showed respect for the fact that they were agents: individuals already acting on their desires for happiness, influencing events within them and around them. Although those desires, in his eyes, were often misguided, he saw that the basic desire for long-term happiness, if it was sincere, should be honored and encouraged. His role as a teacher was to teach his listeners better ways to satisfy that desire.

The second dialog in the discourse collection (DN 2) makes this point in a very pointed way. A king approaches the Buddha with a question: What are the visible fruits of the contemplative life? Before the Buddha answers, the king tells of how he had posed the same question to teachers of other schools, and all had responded, not by addressing the question, but by giving the king a canned version of their doctrines. As he commented, it was as if he had asked about a mango, and they had answered with a jackfruit.

The Buddha then gives a long and thorough answer to the king’s question, so convincingly that the king declares himself a follower of the Buddha from that day forward, for life.

And it wasn’t only with kings that the Buddha exercised such care and attention. The discourses tell of laborers, lepers, and outcastes to whom he gave the same level of attention with even better results, leading them to awakening.

It’s important to underline the personal attention that the Buddha gave to his listeners and their sincere desires. Often there is so much emphasis on the impersonal nature of some of his teachings that it seems as if he didn’t see people as really real, and that his mission was to persuade them that they didn’t exist. His criticisms of craving are often presented in a way that portrays him as an enemy of desire in all its forms.

Both of these interpretations miss an important point: The Buddha saw that people were suffering from confused desires and passions—in fact, they were defined by their desires and passions—and that their sufferings were real (SN 23:2; SN 56:27). In response, he felt compassion for them. He realized that one of the best ways to solve the immediate problem of their confusion and sufferings was to teach them to regard events in their own minds in impersonal terms. That way, they could get enough distance from even their most cherished desires to see how confused and counterproductive they were. From that point of view, they could more easily abandon them and replace them with desires more conducive to genuine happiness.

So the Buddha never treated his listeners as ciphers or as passive recipients of his teachings. He saw them as people in action. Their sufferings were genuine and had them bewildered, and they were searching for someone to help them put an end both to their bewilderment and to their sufferings (AN 6:63). So he was dealing with people who were already proactively involved in a search, and he wanted to help them find what they were looking for.

When he explained the nature of the search for the end of suffering, using both personal and impersonal terms, he would always start with the proactive nature of the mind. This means that when Sāriputta opened his explanation of the Buddha’s teachings with a mental action—the subduing of desire and passion—he wasn’t engaging in a mere rhetorical ploy. He was going straight to the heart of the matter: The power of mental action is the central fact of the Buddha’s teachings.

That’s why the Dhammapada begins by establishing the principle that the state of mind with which you act determines whether you will meet with pleasure or pain. This is the Buddha’s distinctive teaching of the principle of karma—kamma in the language of the Canon, action in English. Although he recognized three types of kamma—bodily, verbal, and mental—he identified intention, the mental act that aims at doing something, as the determining element in all three. Actions based on unskillful intentions—greed, aversion, or delusion—lead to unpleasant results. Now, this doesn’t mean that they result in no pleasure at all. The Buddha himself cites cases where people get rewarded for killing, stealing, or lying, etc. (SN 42:13). But, he would add, the greed, aversion, and delusion underlying these actions are, in and of themselves, unpleasant, and their long-term consequences are going to be painful.

On the other hand, actions based on skillful intentions—devoid of greed, aversion, and delusion—lead to pleasant results. Here again, skillful actions might lead to pain in the short-term—think of people who are punished for telling the truth—but the fact that you’re acting on skillful intentions is, in and of itself, a pleasant source of self-esteem, and the long-term consequences will be good.

Note, though, that this doesn’t mean that good intentions necessarily lead to good results. After all, well-meaning intentions can often be based on delusion, which explains the famous observation that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But that road is never paved with skillful ones. Skillful intentions are both good and devoid of delusion.

Intentional actions play such a large role in shaping our experience that all six of our senses—the five physical senses plus the mind’s ability to sense ideas—are the result of old kamma (SN 35:145). However, old kamma doesn’t entirely shape our experience of the present moment. If it did, the Buddha noted, there would be no room for choice in the present moment. We’d be powerless to restrain ourselves from doing unskillful things if old kamma pushed us in that direction. The idea that something should or shouldn’t be done would be meaningless. People would simply do what they were predetermined to do (AN 3:62). But as the Buddha affirmed, the mind can create new kamma by choosing to act skillfully or unskillfully right now, regardless of what’s coming in through the senses, which is why ideas of “should” and “should not” have meaning. It’s also why it’s possible to follow a path of practice that can lead to the end of suffering.

So the mind as a recipient of sense data is subject to past kamma, but the mind as agent, deciding what to do with each moment, isn’t necessarily so. It’s free to make skillful choices, to act on those choices, and for those choices to make a difference.

It’s in this way that the Buddha avoids the powerlessness of the two extremes of total determinism and total chaos. His view of causality allows for causal relationships and for freedom within those relationships to understand and master causality to direct events to where you want them to go. The Buddha never explains where this freedom comes from, but he does encourage us to take advantage of it for the sake of our long-term welfare and happiness.