Nightsoil for the Heart
July 6, 1959
Beautiful things come from things that are dirty, and not at all from things that are pleasant and clean. Crops and trees, for instance, grow to be healthy and beautiful because of the rotten and smelly compost and nightsoil with which they’re fertilized. In the same way, a beautiful mind comes from meeting with things that aren’t pleasant. When we meet with bad things, the mind has a chance to grow.
‘Bad things’ here mean loss of wealth, loss of status, criticism, and pain. When these things happen to a person whose mind is rightly centered in concentration, they turn into good things. Before, they were our enemies, but eventually they become our friends. What this means is that when these four bad things occur to us, we can come to our senses: ‘Oh. This is how loss of wealth is bad. This is how loss of status, how pain and criticism are bad. This is how the ways of the world can change and turn on you, so that you shouldn’t get carried away with their good side.’
When meditators meet with these four kinds of bad things, their minds develop. They become more and more dispassionate, more and more disenchanted, more and more detached from the four opposites of these bad things—wealth, status, pleasure, and praise—so that when these good things happen, they won’t be fooled into getting attached or carried away with them and can instead push their minds on to a higher level. When they hear someone criticize or gossip about them, it’s as if that person were taking a knife to sharpen them. The more they get sharpened, the more they grow to a finer and finer point.
Loss of wealth is actually good for you, you know. It can teach you not to be attached or carried away with the money or material benefits other people may offer you. Otherwise, the more you have, the deeper you sink—to the point where you drown because you get stuck on being possessive.
Loss of status is also good for you. For instance, you may be a person, but they erase your good name and call you a dog—which makes things even easier for you, because dogs have no laws. They can do what they like without any constraints, without anyone to fine them or put them in jail. If people make you a prince or a duke, you’re really in bad straits. All of a sudden you’re big: Your arms, hands, feet, and legs grow all out of size and get in your way wherever you try to go or whatever you do.
As for wealth, status, pleasure, and praise, there’ s nothing the least bit constant or dependable about them. The more you really think about them, the more disaffected and disenchanted you become, to the point where you find that you’re indifferent, neither pleased nor displeased with them. This is where your mind develops equanimity and can become firm in concentration so that it can grow higher and higher in the practice—like the lettuce and cauliflower that Chinese farmers plant in rows: The more they get fertilized with nightsoil, the faster, more beautiful, and more healthy they grow. If they were fed nothing but clean, clear water, they’d end up all sickly and stunted.
This is why we say that when people have developed mindfulness and concentration, they’re even better off when the ways of the world turn ugly and bad. If the world shows you only its good side, you ‘re sure to get infatuated and stuck, like a seed that stays buried in its shell and will never grow. But once the seed comes out with its shoot, then the more sun, wind, rain, and fertilizer it gets, the more it will grow and develop—i.e., the more your discernment will branch out into knowledge and wisdom, leading you to intuitive insight and on into the transcendent, like the old Chinese vegetable farmer who becomes a millionaire by building a fortune out of plain old excrement.
