From: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/NobleStrategy/Section0000.html
Teachings by Thannisaro Bhikkhu
The Road to Nirvaṇa Is Paved with Skillful Intentions
There’s an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that’s not really the case. The road to hell is paved with intentions that are lustful, harmful, and mean. Good intentions—well-meaning and harmless—pave roads leading to heavens of pleasure. So why do they have such a bad reputation? There are three main reasons:One is that not all good intentions are especially skillful. They can be misguided and inappropriate for the occasion, resulting in pain and regret.
A second reason is that we often misunderstand the quality of our own intentions. We may mistake a mixed intention for a good one, for instance, and thus get disappointed when it gives mixed results.
A third reason is that we easily misread the way intentions yield their results—as when the painful results of an bad intention in the past obscure the results of a good intention in the present, and yet we blame our present intention for the pain.
All these reasons, acting together, lead us to become disillusioned with the potential of good intentions. As a result, we either grow cynical about them or else simply abandon the care and patience needed to perfect them.
One of the Buddha’s most penetrating discoveries is that our intentions are the main factors shaping our lives and that they can be mastered as a skill. If we subject them to the same qualities of mindfulness, persistence, and discernment involved in developing any skill, we can perfect them to the point where they will lead to no regrets or damaging results in any given situation. Ultimately, they can lead us to the truest possible happiness.
To train our intentions in this way, though, requires a deep level of self-awareness. Why is that? If you look carefully at the reasons for our disillusionment with good intentions, you’ll find that they all come down to delusion. And as the Buddha tells us, delusion is one of the three main roots for unskillful intentions, the other two being greed and aversion. These unskillful roots lie entangled with skillful roots—states of mind that are free of greed, aversion, and delusion—in the soil of the untrained heart. If we can’t isolate and dig up the unskillful roots, we can never be fully sure of our intentions. Even when a skillful intention seems foremost in the mind, the unskillful roots can quickly send up shoots that blind us as to what’s actually going on.
If we were to sketch this state of affairs, the picture would look something like this: The straight road to hell is paved with bad intentions, some of which may look good to a casual glance. Roads paved with good intentions, leading to heavens of pleasure—some of them quite skillful—branch off on either side of the way, but all too often they get lost in an underbrush of unskillfulness, and we find ourselves back on the road to hell. The Buddha’s discovery was that if we nourish the skillful roots, they can grow and effectively block the road to hell; if we cut away the underbrush of unskillfulness and dig out its roots, we can develop our good intentions to higher and higher levels of skill until ultimately they bring us to a happiness totally unlimited, beyond any further need for a path.
The most basic step in this process is to make sure that we stay off the road to hell. We do this through the practice of generosity and virtue, consciously replacing unskillful intentions with more skillful ones. We then refine our intentions even further through meditation, digging up the roots of greed, aversion, and delusion to prevent them from influencing the choices shaping our lives. Greed and anger are sometimes easy to detect, but delusion—by its very nature—is obscure. When we’re deluded, we don’t know we’re deluded. That’s why meditation has to focus on strengthening and quickening our powers of mindfulness and alertness: so that we can catch sight of delusion and uproot it before it takes over our minds.
The Buddha’s most basic meditation instructions for refining intention start, not on the cushion, but with the activity of daily life. They’re contained in a discourse (MN 61) to his young son, Rāhula, and attack the Catch-22 of delusion through two approaches. The first is what the early Buddhist texts call “appropriate attention”: the ability to ask yourself the right questions, questions that cut straight to the causes of pleasure and pain, without entangling the mind in needless confusion. The second approach is friendship with admirable people: associating with, learning from, and emulating people who are virtuous, generous, and wise. These two factors, the Buddha said, are the most helpful internal and external aids for a person following the path.
In essence, the Buddha told Rāhula to use his actions as a mirror for reflecting the quality of his mind. Each time before he acted—and here “acting” covers any action in thought, word, or deed—he was to reflect on the result he expected from the action and ask himself: “Is this going to lead to harm for myself and others?” If it was going to be harmful, he shouldn’t do it. If it looked harmless, he could go ahead and act.
However, the Buddha cautioned Rāhula, he shouldn’t blindly trust his expectations. While he was in the process of acting, he should ask himself if there were any unexpected bad consequences arising. If there were, he should stop. If there weren’t, he could continue his action to the end.
Even then, though, the job of reflection wasn’t finished. He should also notice the actual short- and long-term consequences of the action. If an action in word or deed ended up causing harm, then he should inform a fellow-practitioner on the path and listen to that person’s advice. If the mistaken action was purely an act of the mind, then he should develop a sense of shame and disgust toward that kind of thought. In both cases, he should resolve never to make the same mistake again. If, however, the long-term consequences of the original action were harmless, he should take joy in being on the right path and continue his training.
From this we can see that the essential approach for uncovering delusion is the familiar principle of learning from our own mistakes. The way the Buddha formulates this principle, though, has important implications, for it demands qualities of self-honesty and maturity in areas where they are normally hard to find: our evaluation of our own intentions and of the results of our actions.
As children we learn to be dishonest about our intentions simply as a matter of survival: “I didn’t mean to do it,” “I couldn’t help it,” “I was just swinging my arm and he got in the way.” After a while, we begin to believe our own excuses and don’t like to admit to ourselves when our intentions are less than noble. As a result, we get into the habit of not articulating our intentions when faced with a choice, of refusing to consider the consequences of our intentions, and—in many cases—of denying that we had a choice to begin with. This is how addictive behavior starts, and unskillful intentions are given free rein.
A similar dynamic surrounds our reactions to the consequences of our actions. We start learning denial at an early age—“It wasn’t my fault,” “It was already broken when I lay down on it”—and then internalize the process, as a way of preserving our self-image, to the point where it becomes second nature to turn a blind eye to the impact of our mistakes.
As the Buddha points out, the end of suffering requires that we abandon craving and ignorance, but if we can’t be honest with ourselves about our intentions, how can we perceive craving in time to abandon it? If we can’t face up to the principle of cause and effect in our actions, how will we ever overcome ignorance? Ignorance is caused less by a lack of information than by a lack of self-awareness and self-honesty. To understand the noble truths requires that we be truthful with ourselves in precisely the areas where self-honesty is most difficult.
It also requires maturity. As we examine our intentions, we need to learn how to say no to unskillful motives in a way that’s firm enough to keep them in check but not so firm that it drives them underground into subconscious repression. We can learn to see the mind as a committee: the fact that unworthy impulses are proposed by members of the committee doesn’t mean that we are unworthy. We don’t have to assume responsibility for everything that gets brought to the committee floor. Our responsibility lies instead in our power to adopt or veto the motion.
At the same time, we should be adult enough to admit that our habitual or spontaneous impulses are not always trustworthy—first thought is not always best thought—and that what we feel like doing now may not give results that will be pleasant to feel at a later date. As the Buddha said, there are four courses of action that may be open to us at any particular time: one that we want to do and will give good results; one that we don’t want to do and will give bad results; one that we want to do but will give bad results; and one that we don’t want to do but will give good results. The first two are no-brainers. We don’t need much intelligence to do the first and avoid the second. The measure of our true intelligence lies in how we handle the last two choices.
Examining the results of our actions requires maturity as well: a mature realization that self-esteem can’t be based on always being right, and that there’s nothing demeaning or degrading in admitting a mistake. We all come from a state of delusion—even the Buddha was coming from delusion as he sought awakening—so it’s only natural that there will be mistakes. Our human dignity lies in our ability to recognize those mistakes, to resolve not to repeat them, and to stick to that resolution. This in turn requires that we not be debilitated by feelings of guilt or remorse over our errors. As the Buddha states, feelings of guilt can’t undo a past error, and they can deprive the mind of the strength it needs to keep from repeating old mistakes.
This is why he recommends an emotion different from guilt—shame—although his use of the word implies something totally unlike the sense of unworthiness we often associate with the term. Remember that both the Buddha and Rāhula were members of the noble warrior class, a class with a strong sense of its own honor and dignity. And notice that the Buddha tells Rāhula to see his past mistakes, not himself, as shameful. This implies that it’s beneath Rāhula’s dignity to act in ways that are less than honorable. This shame is a mark of high, rather than low, self-esteem. The fact that Rāhula can see his actions as shameful is a sign of his honor—and is also a sign that he’ll be able not to repeat them. This sense of honor is what underlies a mature, healthy, and productive sense of shame.
At first glance, we might think that continual self-reflection of this sort would add further complications to our lives when they already seem more than complicated enough, but in fact the Buddha’s instructions are an attempt to strip the questions in our minds down to the most useful essentials. He explicitly warns against taking on too many questions, particularly those that lead nowhere and tie us up in knots: “Who am I? Am I basically a good person? An unworthy person?” Instead, he tells us to focus on our intentions so that we can see how they shape our life, and to master the processes of cause and effect so that they can shape our life in increasingly better ways. This is the way every great artist or craftsman develops mastery and skill.
The emphasis on the intentions behind our actions and their resulting consequences also carries over from daily life onto the meditation seat, providing our meditation with the proper focus. In examining our actions in terms of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, we are already beginning to look at experience in line with the two sets of variables that make up the four noble truths: the origination of stress (unskillful cause), the path to the cessation of stress (skillful cause), stress (unskillful effect), and the cessation of stress (skillful effect). The way the Buddha recommended that Rāhula judge the results of his actions—both while doing them and after they are done—echoes the insight that formed the heart of his awakening: that intentions have results both in the immediate present and over time.
When we look at the present moment from this perspective, we find that our experience of the present doesn’t “just happen.” Instead, it’s a product of our involvement—in terms of present intentions, the results of present intentions, and the results of past intentions—in which present intentions are the most important factor. The more we focus on that involvement, the more we can bring it out of the half-light of the subconscious and into the full light of awareness. There we can train our intentions, through conscious trial and error, to be even more skillful, enabling us to lessen our experience of suffering and pain in the present. This is how skillful intentions pave the road to mental health and well-being in the ordinary world of our lives.
As we work at developing our intentions to even higher levels of skill, we find that the most consummate intentions are those that center the mind securely in a clear awareness of the present. As we use them to become more and more familiar with the present, we come to see that all present intentions, no matter how skillful, are inherently burdensome. The only way out of this burden is to allow the unraveling of the intentions that provide the weave for our present experience. This provides an opening to the dimension of unlimited freedom that lies beyond them.
That’s how skillful intentions pave the road all the way to the edge of nirvāṇa. And from there, the path—“like that of birds through space”—can’t be traced.
Trading Candy for Gold
(Renunciation as a Skill)Buddhism takes a familiar American principle—the pursuit of happiness—and inserts two important qualifiers. The happiness it aims at is true: ultimate, unchanging, and undeceitful. Its pursuit of that happiness is serious, not in a grim sense, but dedicated, disciplined, and willing to make intelligent sacrifices.
What sorts of sacrifices are intelligent? The Buddhist answer to this question resonates with another American principle: an intelligent sacrifice is any in which you gain a greater happiness by letting go of a lesser one, in the same way you’d give up a bag of candy if offered a pound of gold in exchange. In other words, an intelligent sacrifice is like a profitable trade. This analogy is an ancient one in the Buddhist tradition. “I’ll make a trade,” one of the Buddha’s disciples once said, “aging for the ageless, burning for the unbound: the highest peace, the unexcelled safety from bondage. (Thag 1:32)”
There’s something in all of us that would rather not give things up. We’d prefer to keep the candy and get the gold. But maturity teaches us that we can’t have everything, that to indulge in one pleasure often involves denying ourselves another, perhaps better, one. So we need to establish clear priorities for investing our limited time and energies where they’ll give the most lasting returns.
That means giving top priority to the mind. Material things and social relationships are unstable and easily affected by forces beyond our control, so the happiness they offer is fleeting and undependable. But the well-being of a well-trained mind can survive even aging, illness, and death. To train the mind, though, requires time and energy. This is one reason why the pursuit of true happiness demands that we sacrifice some of our external pleasures.
Sacrificing external pleasures also frees us of the mental burdens that holding onto them often entails. A famous story in the Canon (Ud 2:10) tells of a former king who, after becoming a monk, sat down at the foot of a tree and exclaimed, “What bliss! What bliss!” His fellow monks thought he was pining for the pleasures he had enjoyed as king, but he later explained to the Buddha exactly what bliss he had in mind:
“Before … I had guards posted within and without the royal apartments, within and without the city, within and without the countryside. But even though I was thus guarded, thus protected, I dwelled in fear—agitated, distrustful, and afraid. But now, on going alone to a forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty dwelling, I dwell without fear, unagitated, confident, and unafraid—unconcerned, unruffled, living on the gifts of others, with my mind like a wild deer.”
A third reason for sacrificing external pleasures is that in pursuing some pleasures—such as our addictions to eye-candy, ear-candy, nose-, tongue-, and body-candy—we foster qualities of greed, anger, and delusion that actively block the qualities needed for inner peace. Even if we had all the time and energy in the world, the pursuit of these pleasures would lead us further and further away from the goal. Pleasures of this sort are spelled out in the path factor called right resolve: the resolve to forego any pleasures involving sensual passion, ill will, and harmfulness. “Sensual passion” covers not only sexual desire, but also any hankering for the pleasures of the senses that disrupts the peace of the mind. “Ill will” covers any wish for suffering, either for yourself or for others. And “harmfulness” is any activity that would bring that suffering about.
Of these three categories, the last two are the easiest to see as worth abandoning. They’re not always easy to abandon, perhaps, but the resolve to abandon them is obviously a good thing. The first resolve, though—to renounce sensual passion—is difficult even to make, to say nothing of following it through.
Part of our resistance to this resolve is universally human. People everywhere relish their passions. Even the Buddha admitted to his disciples that, when he set out on the path of practice, his heart didn’t leap at the idea of renouncing sensual passion, didn’t see it as offering peace. But an added part of our resistance to renunciation is peculiar to Western culture. Modern pop psychology teaches that the only alternative to a healthy indulgence of our sensual passions is an unhealthy, fearful repression. Yet both of these alternatives are based on fear: repression, on a fear of what the passion might do when expressed or even allowed into consciousness; indulgence, on a fear of deprivation and of the under-the-bed monster the passion might become if resisted and driven underground. Both alternatives place serious limitations on the mind.
The Buddha, aware of the drawbacks of both, had the imagination to find a third alternative: a fearless, skillful approach that avoids the dangers of either side.
To understand his approach, though, we have to see how right resolve relates to other parts of the Buddhist path, in particular right view and right concentration. In the formal analysis of the path, right resolve builds on right view. In its most skillful manifestation, it functions as the directed thought and evaluation that bring the mind to right concentration. Right view provides a skillful understanding of sensual pleasures and passions, so that our approach to the problem doesn’t go off-target. Right concentration provides an inner stability and bliss so that we can clearly see the roots of passion and, at the same time, not fear deprivation at the prospect of pulling them out.
There are two levels to right view, focusing (1) on the results of our actions in the narrative of our lives and (2) on the issues of stress and its cessation within the mind. The first level points out the drawbacks of sensual passion: sensual pleasures are fleeting, unstable, and stressful; passion for them lies at the root of many of the ills of life, ranging from the hardships of gaining and maintaining wealth, to quarrels within families and wars between nations. This level of right view prepares us to see the indulgence of sensual passion as a problem. The second level—viewing things in terms of the four noble truths—shows us how to solve this problem in our approach to the present moment. It points out that the root of the problem lies not in the pleasures but in the passion, because passion involves attachment, and any attachment for pleasures based on conditions leads inevitably to stress and suffering, in that all conditioned phenomena are subject to change. In fact, our attachment to sensual passion tends to be stronger and more constant than our attachments to particular pleasures. This attachment is what has to be renounced.
How is this done? By bringing it out into the open. Both sides of sensual attachment—as habitual patterns from the past and our willingness to give into them again in the present—are based on misunderstanding and fear. As the Buddha pointed out, sensual passion depends on aberrant perceptions: We project notions of constancy, ease, beauty, and self onto things that are actually inconstant, stressful, unattractive, and not-self. These misperceptions apply both to our passions and to their objects. We perceive the expression of our sensuality as something appealing, a deep expression of our self-identity offering lasting pleasure. We see the objects of our passion as enduring and alluring enough, as lying enough under our control, to provide us with a satisfaction that won’t turn into its opposite.
Actually, none of this is the case, and yet we blindly believe our projections because the power of our passionate attachments has us too intimidated to look them straight in the eye. Their special effects, as a result, keep us dazzled and deceived. As long as we deal only in indulgence and repression, attachment can continue operating freely in the dark of the sub-conscious. But when we consciously resist it, it has to come to the surface, articulating its threats, demands, and rationalizations. So even though sensual pleasures aren’t evil, we have to systematically forego them as a way of drawing the agendas of attachment out into the open. This is how skillful renunciation serves as a learning tool, unearthing latent agendas that both indulgence and repression tend to keep underground.
At the same time, we need to provide the mind with strategies to withstand those agendas and to cut through them once they appear. This is where right concentration comes in. As a skillful form of indulgence, right concentration suffuses the body with a non-sensual rapture and pleasure that can help counteract any sense of deprivation in resisting sensual passions. In other words, it provides higher pleasures—more lasting and refined—as a reward for abandoning attachment to lower ones. At the same time, it gives us the stable basis we need so as not to be blown away by the assaults of our thwarted attachments. This stability also steadies the mindfulness and alertness we need to see through the misperceptions and delusions that underlie sensual passion. And once the mind can see through the processes of projection, perception, and misperception to the greater sense of freedom that comes when they’re transcended, the basis for sensual passion is gone.
At this stage, we can then turn to analyze our attachment to the pleasures of right concentration. When our understanding is complete, we abandon all need for attachment of any sort, and so meet with the pure gold of a freedom so total that it can’t be described.
The question remains: How does this strategy of skillful renunciation and skillful indulgence translate into everyday practice? People who ordain as monastics take vows of celibacy and are expected to work constantly at renouncing sensual passion, but for many people, this is not a viable option. So the Buddha recommended that his lay followers observe day-long periods of temporary renunciation. Four days out of each month—traditionally on the new-, full-, and half-moon days—they can take the eight precepts, which add the following observances to the standard five: celibacy, no food after noon, no watching of shows, no listening to music, no use of perfumes and cosmetics, and no use of luxurious seats and beds. The purpose of these added precepts is to place reasonable restraints on all five of the senses. The day is then devoted to listening to the Dhamma, to clarify right view; and to practicing meditation, to strengthen right concentration. Although the modern workweek can make the lunar scheduling of these day-long retreats impractical, there are ways they can be integrated into weekends or other days off from work. In this way, anyone interested can, at regular intervals, trade the cares and complexities of everyday life for the chance to master renunciation as a skill integral to the serious pursuit of happiness in the truest sense of the word.
And isn’t that an intelligent trade?
What is Emptiness?
Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. So they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.
Say for instance, that you’re meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind’s reaction is to identify the anger as “my” anger, or to say that “I’m” angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother, or to your general views about when and where anger toward one’s mother can be justified.
The problem with all this, from the Buddha’s perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of “I” and “mine” that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can’t find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.
If, however, you can adopt the emptiness mode—by not acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves—you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or possessing. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the subtlest events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of “I” and “mine” are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can then drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that’s totally free.
To master the emptiness mode of perception requires training in firm virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind tends to stay in the mode that keeps creating stories and worldviews. And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or worldview with new ground rules. In terms of the story of your relationship with your mother, it seems to be saying that there’s really no mother, no you. In terms of your views about the world, it seems to be saying either that the world doesn’t really exist, or else that emptiness is the great undifferentiated ground of being from which we all came to which someday we’ll all return.
These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the people in the story of your life don’t really exist, then all the actions and reactions in that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there’s any point in practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being to which we’re all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in concentration and discernment, since we’re all going to get there anyway? And even if we need training to get back to our ground of being, what’s to keep us from coming out of it and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode.
Now, stories and worldviews do serve a purpose. The Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness when speaking in these modes. He recounted the stories of people’s lives to show how suffering comes from the unskillful perceptions behind their actions, and how freedom from suffering can come from being more perceptive. And he described the basic principles that underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can take you beyond the round altogether. In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at motivating people to focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present—in other words, to get them to want to get into the emptiness mode. Once there, they can use the teachings on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all greed, anger, and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress. And when you come right down to it, that’s the emptiness that really counts.