Compassionate Duties
October 24, 2023

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October 24, 2023

One of the ironies of modern Buddhism is that the Buddha is represented as teaching us that we should have a non-reactive state of mind, a non-judging state of mind as our approach to life in general. Whereas when you look at his teachings, you can see that there are a lot of judgments from the very beginning.

As he said, there are two paths that should be avoided: the path of sensual indulgence and the path of self-torture. He recommends instead the middle way, the noble eightfold path. That’s a value judgment right there.

Toward the end of his life he was asked if there were awakened beings in other teachings, and he said any teaching that has the noble eightfold path can give rise to awakened beings. If there’s a lack of the noble eightfold path, then no awakened beings at all.

So again, a value judgment

There are basically two things he advises you to judge. One is who you can take be a good teacher. And two, you judge your own actions.

For a teacher, he says you look for someone who’s knowledgeable, compassionate, and truthful—someone who really knows how to put an end to suffering and will tell you truthfully how to do it. And good teachers need to have compassion for you: They won’t try to get you to do anything that would be for your harm. To judge that in a person, you have to stay with that person for quite a while and really be observant, to get a sense of that person.

But the issue of your own happiness and suffering is important enough that you should be willing to spend time. You can’t decide on the basis of a little thumbnail sketch or a picture on a website. You have to be around that person. But notice, an important quality of that person is that he or she be compassionate, and that’s the attitude you need to have toward yourself as well when you judge yourself.

As you’re judging yourself, you’re not trying to come to a final conclusion, a final judgment on your worth as a person. It’s more judging what you’re doing, and how effective it is in putting an end to suffering, the purpose being so that you can change your behavior if it’s not up to standard, so that you can put an end to suffering. You’re judging a work in progress here out of compassion, and wise people who judge you will judge you out of compassion as well.

But a lot of us coming to the practice have very immature attitudes toward being judged. We’re judging ourselves by very bad patterns or standards of judgment, which is one of the reasons the Buddha starts out by saying, “Make your mind like earth.” This was first meditation instruction to his son: “People throw disgusting things on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react.” In the same way, when negative things come up in your meditation as you watch your mind, try to be solid, non-reactive, so that you can admit, yes, these things are there. If you’re going to do something about your unskillful habits, first you have to admit they’re there and not get blown away by them.

Now, this is based on some of the Buddha’s earlier teachings to his son about learning how to judge mistakes. He said, if you see you’ve done something that caused harm either to yourself or to others, you go talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path. In other words, don’t be ashamed to admit it. You talk it over with that other person to get some ideas about how not to repeat that mistake.

Then he says you should feel shame over that mistake. That’s a loaded word in English. But it’s good to remember there are two types of shame: There’s the shame that’s opposite of pride, which is not what the Buddha’s recommending here. After all, he does have you develop a sense of confidence that, yes, you can do this path. It’s not beyond your capabilities. And it’s a path that’s open to you.

The Buddha never asked people before he taught them the end of suffering, “Do you deserve to suffer or not?” Some people seem to think that they deserve to suffer, but that was never a question for the Buddha. His approach was: If you’re suffering, here’s the way out. After all, we’ve all done things in the past that are pretty unskillful.

If you had to be perfectly pure before you could begin the path to the end of suffering, you’d never get on the path. The path is for people who are not yet pure, not yet wise. It’s there to make you pure, make you wise, as you act on it, reflect on it, reflect on the results of what you’re doing, and try to do them more and more skillfully, with less and less harm.

The shame the Buddha’s recommending is the opposite of shamelessness—in other words, the attitude where you don’t care what wise people think, you just want to do what you want to do. The kind of shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness is healthy. You do care what wise people think. You want to live up to their standards. That’s a way of developing healthy self-esteem.

So already he’s given Rahula, his son, some training in self-esteem, so that as he sees unskillful things happening in his mind, he’s not blown-away. Then the Buddha gives him tools to work with those things.

You don’t just watch things coming and going, because you’re not just on the receiving end of things. A lot of mindfulness instructions seem to assume that you’re simply on the receiving end of good or bad things, learning how not to get upset about the bad things, not getting overly excited by the good things—as if you were just a consumer of experiences.

But you’re also a producer. You’re making choices. You’re acting, and your actions shape your experience. So you want to act on skillful choices, act on skillful mental states.

Some of the modern clinical definition of mindfulness, on the one hand, tell you to be non-judging of whatever comes up in your mind, but then on the other hand they tell you to try to be skillful in your actions, thoughtful in the way you act. Well, you’re going to be skillful in your actions only if you can develop skillful mind states. Which means you have to learn how to judge your mind states, knowing which ones to encourage and which ones not, so that they do lead to skillful actions.

The Buddha himself said he got on the path by dividing his thinking into two sorts. First were the thoughts inspired by sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness: Those he said you had to keep in check. The thoughts that were inspired by renunciation, in other words, trying to find happiness in a way that doesn’t involve sensuality—i.e., what we’re doing right now, trying to find a sense of well-being as we focus on the breath—thoughts based on non ill-will and harmlessness: Those he said you can encourage. And you do that by being mindful.

Remember, his definition of mindfulness was not a non-reactive state. It was the ability to keep something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping in mind the duties that the Buddha set out in the four noble truths, as we chanted just now: Suffering is to be comprehended, its cause is to be abandoned, the cessation is to be realized, and you do that by developing the path.

It’s a way of dividing up your experience so that you know what to do with it for the sake of your happiness. Here again, the Buddha’s not imposing the duties on you. He’s simply observing that if you want to find true happiness, this is what you’ve got to do.

Now, in that context, he says mindfulness is a governing principle. This means that if you notice that there are skillful qualities that have not arisen in the mind yet, you’re mindful to try to give rise to them. When they are there, you’re mindful to try to make sure they don’t pass away.

Here again, you’re not just watching things coming and going, you’re trying to make skillful mind states come into being, and prevent their going away.

In another place he says that one of the duties of right mindfulness is to remember to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. That’s the complete practice of mindfulness. When you practice it that way, the mind settles down. You’re focused on the body in and of itself, you’re ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the standard formula.

You stay with the body, right here, right now. You take one aspect of it that you experience, like the breath, and you stay alert to what the breath is doing, and how well you’re staying with the breath. Then you’re ardent in trying to do this well. You put your whole heart in to it because this is the path to the end of suffering, and the Buddha recommends that you take that on as an important task.

The world imposes all kinds of other tasks on you: the work you have to do; people demanding that you side with them on some political issue, and that you’re the enemy if you don’t side with them, as if the whole world were divided over that particular issue.

You have to realize, you have your issues: You have greed, aversion, and delusion. They’re causing harm to you; they’re causing harm to others. Those are your responsibilities, so you focus on what you’re responsible for.

Remember, one of the Buddha’s definitions on the difference between a fool and a wise person: A fool takes up duties that don’t fall to him or her. A wise person takes up duties that do fall to him or her.

In this case, if you want to put an end to suffering, these are your duties and they’re for your own benefit. As you follow through with them, you also benefit others around you, because as I said, your mind is not just on the receiving end, you’re not just a spectator in the world, you’re an agent, someone who acts. So you want to make sure your actions come out of a good place in your mind. And because you’re responsible for what comes out in your thoughts, in your words, in your deeds, that’s where your real responsibility lies. So focus there.

As the Buddha said, you can find happiness this way. You’re not just being a good citizen. You’re being a happy person, a responsibly happy person—a person who can find well-being inside because you’ve got resources inside that you can develop.

Ajaan Lee makes the comment that we have so many resources inside us that stay undeveloped, one, because we don’t appreciate them, we don’t know where the potentials are; and two, we’re distracted by other things that really don’t fall to us as our responsibilities.

So look inside for your potentials. You already have mindfulness and alertness to some extent, and you are ardent about some things. You just want to develop these qualities in the right direction. Most importantly, you want to be ardent about putting an end to suffering because when you’re ardent in that way, that makes your mindfulness right, your alertness right. Otherwise, you can be mindful of anything, you can be alert to anything, and it would still count as mindfulness or alertness. But for it to be right, you have to be ardent in trying to do this well, to be mindful of and alert to the right things—for the sake of true happiness.

So you are making judgments all along about what’s skillful, what’s not, but you’re doing it in such a way that you realize it is for your own benefit. So learn how to exercise your judgment well. Be mature in how you judge your actions.

And just as how you look for a teacher who’s knowledgeable, truthful, and compassionate, you have to learn how to be knowledgeable, truthful, and compassionate as well. But these are potentials that we all have within us, and they’re really good to develop.