Take the Buddha Seriously
October 29, 2023

There are a lot of the Buddha’s teachings that people don’t take seriously. One of them is the verse in the Dhammapada: “Greater than someone who gains victory over a thousand-thousand people is someone who gains victory over him- or herself.” Sounds like a nice sentiment, but people just toss it away. They say, “It’s not practical because we live in a world where we have to beat other people.”

Of course, that makes sense only if you think of the short term, because the victory you get over other people by beating them doesn’t end the story. You can wipe them out, but they come back. They get reborn, and they get reborn with a sense of animosity. Some people are born for the sake of revenge. So that way of dealing with problems in the world doesn’t end them.

Think of the Buddha and his insight that everywhere you would look in the world for any happiness, someone else has already laid claim to it, and you’d have to fight them off if you wanted a piece of it. So what was he going to do? Was he going to fight them off? He turned around, looked in his own heart, and realized that there was an arrow in the heart—the suffering with which he was making himself miserable. He saw that he had shot himself, basically, with that arrow.

You know the story: There’s the arrow of pain, say, and then you shoot yourself with another arrow—with your commentary on the pain. That’s the arrow that sticks, the arrow that hurts. And that’s the arrow you can pull out.

If the Buddha were the sort of person who could get frustrated, you can imagine his frustration, saying things over and over and over again, and people not listening. You can also understand why, after his awakening, he hesitated to teach others, realizing that his message was one that a lot of people would have trouble understanding, a lot of people who wouldn’t want to understand. There would be some people who would understand his message, and for their sake he decided to teach. But there are still a lot of people who don’t want to understand.

So the teachings are there, and it’s up to us to decide that if we actually took the Buddha seriously, we’d actually benefit a lot.

How do you gain victory over yourself? You realize you’ve got a whole passel of attitudes inside the mind. That’s why we use the image of the committee. As the different committee members get up to have their say, you find yourself playing the role of that member.

This is what becoming is all about: You take on an identity. But you can take on many different identities in very quick succession, so you have to figure out which identity in the mind is the wisest, the one that really does want long-term welfare and happiness, and is willing to do whatever is needed. That’s an identity you want to hold on to. That’s the one you want to listen to.

As for any other identities that come up and contest that, you’ve got to learn how to step out of them. Even though it feels like you’re the one who’s greedy or the one who is angry, it’s better to see it simply as a voice in the mind. When you step back from the voice, that’s the beginning of discernment.

As the Buddha said, discernment is a matter of seeing things as separate. We hear so much about the wisdom of Oneness, but we don’t hear it from the Buddha. He says you have to learn to see individual events in the mind as individual events, for the purpose of getting past them, for the purpose of gaining victory over them if they’re unskillful—because as long as you identify with them, it’s going to be hard. It’s like stabbing yourself.

You’re trying to gain victory over them, and if you realize, “Okay, it’s not really me. It’s just an event in the mind, and I have the choice of going with it or not”: That’s when you can gain that inner victory.

So we’re sitting here meditating. Lots of different voices can keep coming up in the mind right now, so you want to get some practice in saying No to the unskillful ones.

Of course, this doesn’t start with meditation practice. It starts with the precepts. Or you could say it starts with the act of generosity. Part of you wants to hold on to something, and another part realizes that there’s a greater happiness that comes from giving it away.

The first voice may say, “Well, I’m going to be poor, I’m going to be lacking.” And the other voice says, “What? Lacking in what?” Maybe lacking in the taste of that thing whatever it was, if it was food, or the little bit of enjoyment you get from playing with whatever the thing was. But there’s something else that compensates for that when you freely give it away. You’re making a trade. You gain a sense of inner worth, a sense of fellow feeling.

The same with the precepts: You have to say No to any inclination that would kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants. Some of those actions are obviously unskillful. And it’s interesting that for most people the easiest precept to break—the one against lying—is the one the Buddha took most seriously. He says that if you feel no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there’s no evil that you might not do.

Look around. There are so many people who say, “Well, there are certain circumstances where you have to lie,” or it’s “the moral thing to do,” to kill someone in order protect this, protect that.

But try taking the Buddha seriously. If you lie, you give people misinformation, and people will often base a lot of their decisions in life on that misinformation. You’re contributing to their delusion on the one hand. And if they find you out, that it was a lie, then they learn not to trust you. Remember that part: Now everything you say will have a question mark in their mind. So you lose out in a really important way.

Yet the world holds on to the things, holds on to the reasons that would make it seem reasonable to lie or to kill or to steal. So you have to learn how to dis-identify with those parts of the world that you’ve internalized.

As you’ve learned how to say No to certain impulses inside, to train your mind, to focus on your intentions to stick with the precepts, then you’re coming to the meditation with the right frame of mind, and with some very important skills.

The concentration allows you to go deeper. After all, as you’re meditating here, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself talking to yourself about the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that you have around the breath. What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions.

You begin to realize that the feelings are there, not just willy-nilly, and they’re not totally the result of past karma. They’re based on what you’re doing right now. So you turn to look more and more at your own actions right now. Realize you’ve got bodily fabrication with the breath, verbal fabrication with the way you’re talking to yourself, and mental fabrication with your feelings and perceptions. You see these things clearly because they go into making up your concentration.

Once you start seeing them clearly here, you can see them in other parts of your life as well. Say, when anger comes, you breathe in a certain way that aggravates the anger; you talk to yourself in ways that aggravate the anger; you hold certain perceptions in mind; and there are feelings that come from the breathing and the directed thought and evaluation that make you feel that you’ve got to get the anger out—you’ve got to act on it.

But the lesson you’ve learned from the concentration is that you can change all of these things. This is where you want to identify with the voice in the mind that says, “Victory over yourself is better than victory over a thousand-thousand people.”

So it’s worth your while to breathe in a new way—that calms you down; to talk to yourself in a way—that pulls you out of the anger. And you can argue with the voices in the mind that say: “Well, I’m going to gain an advantage from acting on the anger. I get what I want. People won’t listen to me unless I’m angry.” That kind of thing. And as for whatever the perceptions aggravate the anger—question those, too.

You’ll find you’re actually creating new feelings in the body, new feelings in the mind. You don’t have that felt need to express the anger, to get it out of your system. You can get it out of your system by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself.

But the important thing is, you hold to the value that acting on anger is not in your best interest. As for the voice that says, “Well, nothing gets done,” things get actually do get done a lot better when you see that something is wrong and you’re not angry about it.

I was talking with an executive in a company just the other day. He was saying that his big problem is that he has his temper tantrums when he deals with his subordinates. Because he’d heard a lot of Buddhist teachings saying, “Well, don’t hold other people to such high standards, learn to be more accepting,” he thought that that was the kind of advice I would give him. But I said, “No, if your standards are high, that’s a good thing. But being angry is not going to get other people to want to meet your standards. There have got to be other ways that you can make your standards more attractive.”

Think of that old story of the Sun and the storm cloud. The Sun and the cloud got into an argument one day as to which was more powerful. They saw a man walking along this road with a cloak. The cloud said, “Well, let’s see who can get the man to lose his cloak.” So the he blew and blew and blew on the man. And the more the wind blew, the tighter he held his cloak to him. Then it was the Sun’s turn. The Sun just beamed. As it got warmer and warmer, the man took the cloak off of his own free will.

This is a story we think you tell to children to make them behave but that it’s not a story for real life. That’s our problem: We treat all these important stories as fables. They’re okay to tell a child, but not for real people in real life, and as a result, the wisdom that should get passed down from the past just gets tossed away. The world would be a better place is adults acted like the Sun.

So take the Buddha seriously. It really is better to gain victory over yourself than it is to gain victory over the people around you. Everybody benefits that way.