The Skillful Heart
May 27, 2023

Every evening we have that chant, the brahmavihāras, the sublime attitudes, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, because these are our motivations on the path. We have goodwill for ourselves and goodwill for all beings because we’re looking for a happiness that’s harmless: doesn’t harm us, doesn’t harm anyone else.

**This is a quality of a good heart. There are so many intellectual explanations of the Dhamma that we tend to forget that it starts with a quality of the heart. The word **citta in Pali, which is usually translated “mind,” also means “heart.” Unlike Western languages, the languages of the Buddhist countries don’t make a clear distinction between the heart and the mind. The heart has its reasons. The mind has its desires. Our thoughts, our reasonings, have their desires. We’re trying to train both sides. If only one side gets developed, it gets lopsided.

This is why the training doesn’t begin with sitting down and learning a lot of concepts. It begins with generosity, which is a quality of a good heart. The Buddha emphasizes a generosity that’s voluntary. When he was asked where a gift should be given, he said, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel it would be well-used.” That’s your choice. And the culture of generosity that gets developed around that tries to protect that choice. There’s a rule for the monks that when someone asks them, “Where should I give this gift?” the response should be, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel a gift would be well-used, well-taken care of.”

Following on generosity is virtue, which again is a quality of the heart. You try to act in ways, speak in ways, that don’t cause harm. The Buddha lists five things that are harmful across the board, so we try to avoid them: killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, taking intoxicants. The motivation there is goodwill for yourself and goodwill for others. It’s interesting that the Buddha says you harm yourself by breaking the precepts, and you harm others by getting them to break the precepts. In other words, you harm them more, say, by getting them to kill or steal than you would by killing them or stealing things from them, because you’re getting them to create bad karma for themselves, which can have an impact that lasts far beyond this lifetime.

Then there’s conviction, which, too, is a quality of the heart. This is where the quality of the heart begins to meld with the qualities of the mind. There are certain things you believe, and the word “belief” here has three meanings: There are things you believe, ideas that you believe; then there are people you believe in; then there’s how you act based on those beliefs.

The fact that you’re calling them “beliefs” means you don’t really know. There are a lot of people who say, “Well, we don’t know these things about karma or rebirth, so we’ll just put them aside and leave them as unresolved. It’s more honest to say we don’t know whether they’re true or not”—which is a possible position in a discussion, but no one can live that way. When you live, you’re making choices about what you’re doing, saying, thinking. You’re calculating which things are worth doing, saying, and thinking, to what extent putting in an effort to be really skillful is going to pay off. Your calculation will have to include whether you think there’s going to be any karmic consequences in this lifetime and in future lifetimes. Conviction is when you see that you’ll probably behave best if you accept the teachings on karma, rebirth, and that desire to behave well. On one hand, that is a quality of the mind. On the other, it’s also a quality of the heart.

These are three of the qualities the Buddha said are the qualities of a good friend. You find someone who has these qualities. You try to emulate them. That leads to happiness in this lifetime, and it leads to happiness in future lifetimes. In other words, when you counsel yourself to be generous and virtuous and have conviction, you’re being a good friend to yourself. You’re looking after your well-being now and on into the future.

But there’s one more quality: discernment. This is where we get more into the area of the mind, because discernment has to do with cause and effect. It’s described as “penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away.” Some people interpret that simply as meaning seeing things come, seeing things go, learning to develop some equanimity toward their coming and going, but basically allowing them to do their thing.

But that’s not penetrative. When the Buddha uses the word “penetrative,” he’s talking about knowing when good things come and what to do with them; knowing when bad things come and what to do with them. After all, that’s the duty of mindfulness. It’s not simply to watch things coming and going. If there’s something good that you already have, you’re mindful to try to maintain it. In other words, you keep it from going. If there’s something good that you don’t have yet, you try to give rise to it. So discernment, if it’s penetrative, is more than just watching things coming and going. It contains an element of ardency as well.

But here, too, the discernment is colored by issues of the heart. The Buddha said that discernment begins with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” You’ve got to use your discernment for the sake of happiness long-term, and that’s a desire of the heart. The discernment comes in as you understand cause and effect. What kinds of actions will get you there? And what kind of happiness is really worth going for? How “long-term” do you want? The Buddha said, ideally, go for a happiness that doesn’t change at all. That’s more than long-term. That stands outside of space and time entirely. But building up to it, you ask yourself, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” That brings you back to generosity, virtue, and goodwill. That’s the very beginning.

But then you build on that. This is where the path comes in. You train the heart, you train the mind, not only to be virtuous, but also to develop powers of concentration, because you realize, if you’re really going to be discerning, you have to get the mind really still, really centered, so that it can really see what’s happening inside it. Otherwise, the mind’s running around all the time. Everything it sees is a blur.

It’s like tuning into a radio station where there’s a lot of static. As long as there’s static, you can’t really hear the message being broadcast. But if you tune it in just right, the static grows still, quiet. Then you can clearly hear what they’re saying. The same way when you get the mind really still, get the body really still: The little things that are happening in the mind, the subtle movements of the mind, become very clear.

This is the other lesson of discernment, which is that the suffering that’s weighing down the mind is not being imposed on you from outside. It comes from within. Craving, clinging—these are the things that you’re doing. You’re actually doing the suffering, and not simply passively being subjected to suffering. You’re doing it. You want to see that.

Now, these qualities—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment—lead to a good rebirth. Of course, they’re good for you in this lifetime, and they’re good for you on into the future. So when the question comes up, how do you prepare? What do you think about when you think about the possibility of dying before you’ve gotten anywhere in your practice? Just remind yourself: Just keep on doing the practice. Develop these qualities, and the qualities will take you where you want to go.

You may make a general determination: You want to go to a place where you can practice. But don’t put too many other qualifications on it. Ajaan Fuang told me one time that he was reading a book about King Asoka. At one point, the book said, Asoka said in one of his edicts that the reason he was doing all this good with his lifetime as a king was not because he wanted to become king again, but because he wanted to have a capability within himself. In other words, he wanted to be able to have the strengths inside, the skills, the discernment, that would allow him to depend on himself.

The skills here are not just intellectual skills. They’re skills of the heart. It’s a concept we don’t think too much about: the skillful heart. But that’s basically what the Buddha’s teaching, because you’re not going to gain insight unless you have a good grounding in generosity and virtue. As he said, you’re not going to be able to get into concentration properly, and you’re not going to gain the discernment that goes to the transcendent levels without generosity and virtue.

After all, if you’re going to know your mind, it’s best to watch your mind while it’s doing good things. When it’s doing things that you know are wrong, you know are harmful, you’re going to hide a lot of things from yourself, especially your motivation, why you’re doing those things. There’s a lot in there where the mind is lying to itself. But when you’re doing good things, you can be true, open, and aboveboard. The mind becomes like an open book, written in a language you know clearly, because it’s a language of the heart.

So try to develop this skillful heart. It’s good for you now, and it’s good for you on into the future. It combine****s the qualities of a good mind and a good heart. And when they’re combined in this way, they can take you far.