17. Starting Out Right

It’s also why, when he began training his own son, Rāhula, he started out with lessons in how best to develop qualities of honesty and powers of observation, focused on one’s own actions (MN 61). These two qualities function as the beginning step in the training in heightened virtue, but then also inform the training in heightened mind and heightened discernment.

First he taught truthfulness. Rāhula had seen the Buddha approaching from afar, so he set out a pot of water and a dipper. When the Buddha arrived, he washed his feet with the water in the pot, leaving a little water in the dipper. Showing the dipper to Rāhula, he asked him: “Do you see how little water there is in this dipper?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s how little of the quality of a contemplative there is in anyone who tells a deliberate lie with no sense of shame.”

The Buddha then threw the water away, showed Rāhula the empty dipper, and finally turned the dipper upside down, making the point that when you tell a deliberate lie with no sense of shame, your quality of a contemplative is thrown away, empty, and turned upside down.

He then told Rāhula to train himself: “I will not tell a deliberate lie even in jest.”

Having stressed the importance of truthfulness, the Buddha went on to give instructions on how to be observant. Just as you’d use a mirror repeatedly to reflect on your own face, in the same way you should reflect on your own actions again and again.

When planning to do an action in body, speech, or mind, you should reflect on the intention and desire behind it: “This action I want to do—would it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Would it be an unskillful action, with painful consequences, painful results?” If you anticipate that it would cause harm, you shouldn’t do it. If you anticipate no harm, you can go ahead and do it.

While doing the action, you should reflect on its immediate results: “This action I’m doing—is it leading to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both?” If you see that it’s causing harm, you should stop then and there. If you see no harm, you can continue with it.

After the action is done, you’re still not done. You should reflect on it again: “This action I’ve done—did it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Was it an unskillful action, with painful consequences, painful results?” If you see that it did cause harm—even though you didn’t anticipate it—then if it was a bodily or verbal action, you should confess it to a fellow practitioner more advanced on the path, to see what advice you can gain on how not to repeat that mistake. Then you try to exercise restraint in the future. If it was a mental action, you should develop a healthy sense of shame around it—seeing that it was beneath you—and exercise future restraint.

But if you see that the action caused no harm at all, then you take joy in that fact and continue training in this way, day and night.

These are basically instructions for how Rāhula should develop his honesty and powers of observation to detect for himself which of his desires, when acted on, would be helpful on the path, and which would get in the way. But the Buddha covers a lot of other issues as well, in particular the other qualities of heart and mind that his son will have to bring to this task.

To begin with, he’s introducing Rāhula to the quality that he said elsewhere is the most important internal quality for achieving your first glimpse of awakening: appropriate attention. This is the ability to focus attention on asking the right questions for the sake of overcoming unskillful desires and developing skillful ones. These questions begin with the underlying questions leading to discernment as to which actions are skillful and which actions are not, and culminate in the questions related to the four noble truths: understanding suffering and developing the path that leads to its end. Appropriate attention is what gives proper focus to your powers of observation and your truthfulness. You focus attention on your actions, beginning with your desires and intentions, and judge them as to whether you expect them to be harmful or not.

This step emphasizes the role of desire as the root of all intentions, and the role of intention—the desire to act—as the beginning of kamma. It also teaches you that, if you really want to learn from your mistakes, you try your best not to make them. When you act only on what you think are good intentions but later find out that actions based on those intentions led to harm, you’ve learned something. If you act on intentions you already know to be unskillful and they end up causing harm, you haven’t learned much.

Once you’ve set yourself on a course of action you think is skillful, then, given that actions can show some of their results in the present moment and some over time, you judge the results of your actions both while you’re doing them and again after they’re done. Here you use the same criteria: Are they causing—did they cause—harm or not? And, of course, you don’t stop with simply judging the results. You refrain from acting on intentions you judge to be potentially harmful, you stop continuing with any action you judge to be immediately harmful, and you resolve not to repeat any actions that turned out to be harmful in the end.

These instructions show the basic pattern for how to train yourself to stick with your determination for awakening. You commit to the path by trying to act in line with it, you reflect on the results of your actions, and then make adjustments wherever you see that you’re lacking, until you finally get things right. This is called success by approximation. As we’ll see, this pattern holds all the way to the end of the practice.

In teaching Rāhula to talk over his mistakes with someone more advanced on the path, the Buddha is introducing him to the most important external quality for achieving his first glimpse of awakening: admirable friendship. This is a matter not only of trying to choose admirable people as your friends, but also of emulating their good qualities and asking them about how to develop those qualities in yourself (AN 8:54). As the Buddha’s instructions to Rāhula make clear, this relationship works best if you’re truthful in reporting your mistakes to your friends so that you can get pertinent advice.

The Buddha is also introducing his son more generally to training in heightened virtue. It’s important to notice that this training takes two forms: specific do’s and don’ts, and qualities of the character.

He starts Rāhula with a don’t: “I will not tell a deliberate lie, even in jest.” As he points out, this is a rule that Rāhula will have to train himself in. In other words, Rāhula will have to be responsible for voluntarily taking on this rule, for sticking with it, and for detecting times when he’s failed to hold to it, so that he can learn what unskillful desires or passions might have made him want to break it.

At the same time, the Buddha is teaching Rāhula virtue in terms of qualities of the character, both explicitly and implicitly. The quality he mentions explicitly is shame—not the unhealthy shame that’s the opposite of pride, but the healthy shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. This is the shame that makes you want your behavior to look good in the eyes of people you respect. When you respect the right people—the noble ones—this type of shame can take you far. It goes together with a sense of honor—that giving in to unskillful desires is beneath you.

Other qualities that are more implicit in these instructions include:

Finally, the Buddha is also teaching Rāhula how to develop the four determinations:

• He learns truthfulness in his willingness to admit his mistakes.

• He commits himself to relinquish any desires that would run counter to this training.

• Note that when Rāhula is able to reflect on his actions and see that they have caused no harm, he is to take joy in that fact. That sense of joy is calming— the calm that comes from a life of virtue. This is a pattern that holds throughout the triple training. You don’t simply force yourself to become calm and equanimous regardless of events. You first have to find an inner sense of joy that comes from virtue, concentration, and discernment. That joy keeps your calm from becoming grudging or defeatist. Based on a sense of inner satisfaction, it’s a calm that’s expansive and strong.

• Above all, Rāhula is learning to develop his discernment through a process that, as we’ve noted, the Buddha calls commitment and reflection. Rāhula is to commit himself to acting as skillfully as he can, at the same time reflecting on:

When he sees room for improvement, he commits himself further to making that improvement as best he can, using both his own determination to be skillful and ingenious in thinking up alternates, and the wisdom and compassion of others who can help him attain that aim.

As we noted above, the questions that lie at the basis of discernment are: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What when I do it will lead to my long-term well-being and happiness?” In the discourse where the Buddha sets forth these questions (MN 135), he recommends requesting answers from people who are more advanced on the path. Here, however, Rāhula is also being taught how to begin finding the answers for himself.

This is the basic approach that’s required in learning any skill, although here it’s applied to an especially high level of skill: putting an end to all suffering and stress. It’s the basic framework for all the steps in taking on the triple training. And as we’ve already noted, it depends on what the Buddha observed about the mind: that it’s luminous and has, in the present moment, the power of choice, together with the ability to change direction quickly. The power of choice allows you to commit to a course of action; the luminosity allows you to reflect on the results of following that course, at the same time to check to see whether the mind has switched direction, away from its commitment, while its ability to change course allows you to make adjustments as they seem advisable.

In terms of dependent co-arising, this approach is the way to overcome the ignorance—avijjā, which, as we noted, can also mean lack of skill—that causes your processes of fabrication to lead to suffering. As you observe for yourself which desires work and which don’t work, and as your standards for “what works” grow higher as you develop virtue, concentration, and discernment, you weaken ignorant desires and replace them with knowledgeable and skillful ones. In that way, you grow closer and closer to total freedom.

Those are some of the qualities of character that the Buddha taught to Rāhula.

If we want to understand virtue as taught by the Buddha, we have to understand both the rules of behavior he laid down, clearly delineating right and wrong, as well as the qualities of character he praised and tried to inculcate in his students. The rules are there to alert you to specific unskillful desires and passions that could hide behind general principles, as when you claim to be acting on compassion when it’s nothing more than an excuse for what’s actually unskillful behavior. They teach you that no unskillful desire is too small to merit your attention. After all, big fires come from little ones. At the same time, the qualities of character enable you to deal skillfully with areas calling for integrity that can’t properly be covered by rules.

It’s in this way that the training in virtue offered by the Buddha is both thorough and all-around.