Posts by Bodhipaksa

Way back in my teens I read a book called “From Primitives to Zen,” which was a compendium of texts from the world’s religious traditions, compiled by Mircea Eliade. If you haven’t heard of Eliade, he was a well-known and influential Romanian historian of religion who was Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. His book provided one of my earliest exposures to the Buddha’s teachings, since one whole section comprised extracts of the early Buddhist scriptures.

Buddhism, I quickly discovered, liked lists. The reason for this is that Buddhism arose at a time when nothing sacred was written down. The safest place for the preservation of important information was, people believed, in the human mind. In India at that time paper was unknown, and special leaves were used as a writing material. Probably only relatively ephemeral information, such as brief notes and business sales receipts, was written down.

The Four Right Efforts

Some of these lists baffled me (the fault was with me, not them) but some of them stood out as models of clear thinking. One such teaching was the “four right efforts,” which is actually one item in a longer list, the eightfold path. Here’s a translation of the Buddha’s exposition on right effort:

And what, monks, is right effort? Here, monks, (1) a monk generates desire for the nonarising of unarisen evil unwholesome states; he makes an effort, arouses energy, applies his mind, and strives. (2) He generates desire for the abandoning of arisen evil unwholesome states…. (3) He generates desire for the arising of unarisen wholesome states…. (4) He generates desire for the maintenance of arisen wholesome states, for their nondecay, increase, expansion, and fulfilment by development; he makes an effort, arouses energy, applies his mind, and strives. This is called right effort.

So we:

1. Prevent unskillful (unhelpful) mental states from arising.
2. Abandon unskillful states if they already exist.
3. Bring into being new skillful states.
4. Further develop skillful states that have already arisen.

It is very neat and logical, isn’t it? And it’s practical, too. These four right effects are the core of what spiritual practice consists of. In virtually any moment we have the opportunity to “nudge” the mind in one direction or another. And the reason we do this of course is because it helps us to free the mind from suffering and makes us happier.

The Power of Appreciation

At it happens, I was thinking about another practice the other day — mudita, which I prefer to translate as “joyful appreciation,” and saw a connection between that and the four right efforts.

Most teachers explain mudita in terms of “being happy about someone else’s happiness” or “sympathetic joy.” Originally, though, it seems to have been “joy at appreciating the virtue of others.” Mudita is appreciation, admiration, and gratitude.

One of the wonderful things about appreciation, admiration, and gratitude is that they are very encouraging attitudes. If we express appreciation when someone has done something we admire, then we make it more likely that they’ll do that thing again. And if we admire a good quality in another person, then we’re more likely to develop it ourselves.

Anyway, I was thinking about mudita, and realized that although we usually think of the four right efforts in terms of what we do with our own mental states, we could also apply them to how we relate to other people’s mental states. After all, one of the things about Buddhist practice is that it lessens our emphasis on ourselves, and increases our concern for others.

Turning the Four Right Efforts Toward Others

So how might the four right efforts work as applied to others?

1. We’d be concerned not to encourage the arising of unskillful states in others. Rather than just be concerned about whether our unskillful states — for example, hatred or craving — will hurt us, we can be aware that our behaviors set an example for others. If we are negative on social media, for example, then we encourage others to act likewise. Mental states are contagious.
2. We’d be concerned to help others free themselves from unskillful states of mind. Ordinarily, if someone is in a bad mood, what do we do? Roll our eyes? Avoid them? Get snippy right back at them? If we have compassionate concern for them, then we’ll be concerned not just about how they’re behaving and how it affects us, but also about the suffering they’re causing themselves. So we might show them empathy, for example, and ask them what’s going on to cause their unhappiness.
3. How can we bring skillful states into being within others? Remembering that states of mind are contagious, we can affect others through our example. If we’re kind, that encourages kindness in others. I remember reading about an experiment where a very negative person — someone who complained about everything and everyone — was put in a room with a highly trained Buddhist monk. In time the negative person started being more at ease and ended up, despite himself, feeling happy. Here again we come to mudita, which involves seeing and rejoicing in others’ good qualities. If we give someone positive feedback when we see even a glimmer of some skillful quality in them, we encourage them to focus on, value, and develop that quality.
4. The kind of appreciation I’ve just discussed will also help someone to grow and develop skillful qualities once they’ve arisen. What springs to mind for me here are spiritual friendship, since encouraging someone to turn their skillful states into steady habits is something that takes consistent contact over a long period of time, and the kind of easy and frank communication that comes from really knowing and trusting someone.

“Taking Care of Others, I Take Care of Myself”

I thought it interesting that I’d never before thought in terms of turning the four right efforts outwards. I’m imagine I’m not the first person to think of this, but I don’t remember them ever being presented in this way.

The emphasis I’m putting here on being a friend and exemplar to others fits very well with many other teachings from the scriptures. For example, the Buddha tells the housholder Sig?laka that he can recognize a good friend because “They keep you from doing bad. They support you in doing good. They teach you what you do not know. They explain the path to heaven [i.e the path of ethical conduct].”

And in one of my favorite teachings, the Buddha explains to two acrobatic performers, whose safety depends on them taking care of each other, “Taking care of myself, I take care of others. Taking care of others, I take care of myself.” When we work directly on our own unskillful states, eliminating the negative and accentuating the positive, this benefits others, since we’re kinder and easier to be with. When we help others, this benefits us, since being connected to others through kindness, compassion, and appreciation is deeply fulfilling and brings us peace and joy.

I was in the thick of putting together my online course, “Love Your Enemies,” when the coronavirus crisis became serious. As a result I’ve felt a little late in responding to what’s going on right now. I plan to start a new course this month called something like “Meditating In a Crisis.” But today I want to share just a few thoughts on that topic, using the Buddha’s Eightfold Path as a framework.

If you’re not familiar with the eightfold path, it’s a comprehensive system of practices that help us move from ignorance to Awakening, from suffering to peace.

The path is not eightfold in the sense that it’s eight stages to be followed, one after another. The eight components of the path can all be practiced in every moment of our lives. You could think of the path being eightfold in that it’s composed of eight lanes — a kind of highway to Awakening. Or if you prefer an image on a less industrial scale, you could think of it as being like a brick path, eight bricks wide. With every step you practice all eight factors of the path. Or you could think of the path as being like a rainbow, except with eight “colors” rather than the standard seven. Or you could think of it as resembling a cord woven from eight threads.

I hope to show you that the eightfold path is a practical teaching, and that it’s flexible and capable of being applied in contemporary circumstances.

Right View (Samma Ditthi)

In this model of practice, we start with examining our views. Views are core beliefs. They’re the basic assumptions we make about life. Some views we have contribute to our long-term happiness and wellbeing, but some detract from it.

Usually we don’t just go looking for unhelpful views. We find ourselves suffering, and then we look inside ourselves to see what we’re doing to cause that suffering.

A lot of us, for example, carry around assumptions like “Bad things shouldn’t happen to me.” And so when a major disruption like coronavirus comes along, it seems unfair and unjust. After all, we’ve just been trying to get on with life, which is difficult enough as it is. And now this? Views such as this, which  encourage us to have self-pity, aren’t going to help us. Closer to what the Buddha would have described as a Right View is the common saying, “Shit happens.” Things change. They sometimes change in unwelcome ways. And we just have to work with that and make the best of it.

Another view, “This kind of thing always happens to me!” is also unhelpful. It’s a maladaptive attempt to find solace in a sense of “specialness,” as if we’ve been singled out by the universe for mistreatment. The thing is that this epidemic isn’t about us individually. It’s a crisis that affects many people, and no matter how it’s affecting us, there are others who are worse off. Focusing narrowly on ourselves isn’t helpful. In fact it makes us miserable.

So it’s helpful for us to become aware of the views we have around the coronavirus pandemic, so that we can let go of those that are unhelpful, and embrace those that are more in line with reality and that help us be at peace.

So, shit happens. That’s true, and it might be helpful to adopt it as a view. But other views, such as “Every difficulty is a spiritual opportunity” can be helpful as well. As the title of one of my other posts says, “All people and all circumstances are my allies.” Including this one.

Right Intention (Samma Sankappa)

Samma sankappa is also sometimes translated as “right resolve,”  “right attitude,” and even as “right emotion.”)  We’re talking about our emotional interaction with the world, and whether they help or hinder our wellbeing

I mentioned above that some views support attitudes of self pity.  The emotion or attitude of self-pity isn’t, of course, helpful. Panic isn’t helpful. Despondency isn’t helpful. These things tend to happen automatically. But since those reactions cause us suffering, what’s being suggested is that we find other ways to respond. Healthier ways.

What’s healthier? Self-compassion helps because it provides us with an inner source of support, encouragement, and comfort as we face difficulties. Compassion for others helps us because it takes the focus off of us personally, and helps us see that we’re all in it together, albeit to varying degrees.

Right Speech (Samma Vaca)

The Buddhist scriptures define right speech like this: “Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter; that is right speech.” They also describe right speech positively, as holding to the truth, bringing people together in concord, as being kind and polite, and as pointing people toward the goal of liberation, or awakening.

So every time we remind ourselves to be compassionate to ourselves and others, we can take that attitude into the way we communicate. Other people, whether we’re separated from them or confined indoors with them, need our support and reassurance. They need our encouragement. Once we’ve shown compassion to ourselves, we can offer supportive, appreciative, kindly words to others. We can express appreciation to those who are doing the crucial work of helping others.

Although it’s not traditionally included in discussions of right speech, we can be mindful of the kinds of speech we expose ourselves to — especially news media that all too often are calculated to provoke anxiety in order to keep us hooked, and social media, which often expose us to inflammatory or false information. You might want to unplug from those, even if just for a couple of days, to see what effect that has on you.

Right Action (Samma Kammanta)

“Action” here is what we intentionally do. Right action is action that benefits, rather than harms ourselves, and others in the long-term. Traditionally this is seen in terms of not physically harming, not taking from others what isn’t freely given, and not engaging in inappropriate sex.

In terms of our current crisis, we can take care to physically distance ourselves from others, to keep our shopping trips to a minimum, to make sure we don’t take from the shelves more than we really need so that others too can meet their own needs, and so on. We can do all of those things in a spirit of care and compassion. We can also act compassionately by (safely) checking up on friends and neighbors, and especially on those that are vulnerable.

Right Livelihood (Samma Ajiva)

Traditionally, right livelihood means doing work that, at a minimum, doesn’t cause harm. Ideally our livelihood would involve work that’s materially, emotionally, and spiritually beneficial to others.

Many of us aren’t working right now, of course. But we could regard “work” here as what we do with our time. Right livelihood could include taking care of ourselves — for example by exercising as best we can, and making good use of our time, so that we’re learning and growing. It’s been great to see so many people making use of opportunities to practice online. And maybe there are household tasks you can do — getting rid of clutter, doing some gardening, and so on. Those things can leave us feeling much better and create a sense of normality.

Right Effort (Samma Vayama)

“Right effort” brings us back to what’s going on inside ourselves. Traditionally it’s the work we do to prevent the arising of unskillful states of mind, and to generate skillful states.

Right speech concerns what we say to others, but a lot of our communication is internal — it’s self-talk. So we can observe our thoughts, and when we find that they’re making us stressed and unhappy we can drop them and turn our attention back to our breathing, and our bodily sensations more generally. And perhaps we can find more helpful ways of talking to ourselves: “In this moment, I’m OK.” “May I be well and happy, and at ease.” “Today I am grateful for this, this, and this.”

Right effort doesn’t just cover inner speech, though. It’s the ongoing effort to extract the mind from anxiety, anger, craving, doubt, and avoidance, as well as the effort to cultivate kindness, compassion, patience, courage, and so on.

At a time of crisis, worry is one of our “go to” unskillful states. It’s important to recognize that worry isn’t “bad.” It’s just unhelpful. Focusing on things that might go wrong in the future doesn’t solve anything and in fact it makes us unhappy right now. Our inner work involves recognizing that worry has arisen. It involves letting go of worrying thoughts, and coming back to our immediate sensory experience. And it also involves finding ways to bring more helpful mental states into being.

Even if we drop our catastrophizing thoughts, we’ll find that feelings of anxiety persist. If you’re familiar with my teachings on self-compassion, you’ll know that I encourage people to regard anxiety as communications from a part of you that is suffering. And our right effort here is to connect with our innate kindness and to offer support for that struggling part of us. Having done that, we are more at peace, and we’re freer to offer kindness and compassion to others.

Right Mindfulness (Samma Sati)

To do any of the above, we need to have mindfulness. We need to have the ability to observe our minds, to see how we’re thinking and what our attitudes are. We need to see what effect those thoughts and attitudes have on how we’re feeling, and on how others feel, and so on.

And so in every one of the factors of the path that I have mentioned so far, we practice mindfulness. In fact it’s helpful if we cultivate an attitude of mindfulness all the time, or at least as much as possible, by coming back to the sensations of the body and to what we’re perceiving in the world, being aware of our movements, observing our feelings and attitudes, and so on.

This is probably the single most important thing we can do for ourselves in a crisis. We can stay grounded in sensory reality and stop ourselves from being pulled into the world of catastrophizing. We train ourselves to recognize when we are getting sucked into anxious thinking and to instead come back to our actual present-moment experience.

Right Concentration (Samma Samadhi)

Samadhi is usually translated as concentration. It doesn’t necessarily mean concentration in the sense of narrowly focused attention, though. It really means having continuity of awareness. To practice any of the factors of the path requires concentration. When our attention is all over the place, jumping from object to object, it’s hard to cultivate skillful states of mind. We might for example start off intending to cultivate kindness, and find that a moment later we’re daydreaming. So we need to train ourselves to stay on track, at least for long enough to bring about change in our habits.

The ultimate benefit of concentration, the Buddha said, is that it helps us to observe and appreciate the arising and passing of things. Once we realize that anxiety arises and passes away, and that in fact it’s arisen and passed away tens of thousands of times before in our lives, we start to take it less seriously. One of our big fears when we’re anxious is that we’re going to be stuck that way. But it always passes.

And in fact, as we focus more closely on anxiety and see that it’s just a sensation, arising and passing away in every moment, we realize that in a sense there’s nothing real there. Anxiety is like a flickering movie show — a magical display that entrances the mind. And once we start to realize how we’ve been repeatedly fooled by this movie show, we start to become immune to its enchantments.

Three Core Factors

Three of the factors — view, effort, and mindfulness — have a special place in the eightfold path. As the Buddha put it, “These three things keep running and circling around [each of the factors of the path], namely: right view, right effort, and right mindfulness.”

When we’re cultivating or practicing each of the factors of the path we need to understand that there’s a benefit in doing so. We need to have a view that it’s beneficial to be ethical, mindful, and so on. So, right view is always involved in practice.

We need to have the mindfulness to recognize whether what’s going on, or what we’re doing, is skillful or unskillful, helpful or unhelpful, leading to peace or leading to suffering. Mindfulness is always involved in practice.

And we need to put effort in to letting go of unskillful habits and to cultivating skillful ones. Effort is involved in all practice.

So these three factors—view, effort, and mindfulness—are involved in every moment of practice.

So, I hope you can see how a traditional teaching like the eightfold path has very direct relevance to our practice in a crisis such as the one we face today. Hopefully I can go into this in even more depth in the course I’m planning to put together.

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Someone wrote the other day saying that she’d had a hard time forgiving a colleague at work who had reflexly shot down her very excellent ideas. Apparently this colleague does this a lot. It’s just a habit with her.

My correspondent found her colleague’s actions very hurtful. She struggled with resentment for several days as she worked on practicing forgiveness and on cultivating metta. (Metta is “lovingkindness,” or simply kindness). Eventually she was successful, and she managed to forgive her critic. So that’s excellent! Practice works!

The thing is it took her a long time to find her way back to peace. And I think her story highlights something that’s missing from many people’s practice of metta. It’s the missing link in our practice of lovingkindness.

I sometimes worry about sounding like a broken record, but I find that one key thing when we’re hurt is to practice kindness and compassion toward ourselves. I’ve written in a number of places about how we can do this, for example in Self-compassion: lovingkindness squared and The power of self-kindness. You can also check out my book on self-compassion, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.”

When this colleague reacted to my correspondent, this caused pain. Whenever she felt resentful afterward, that also caused her pain. Trying to wish another person well while we’re not responding compassionately to our own pain tends not to be very effective. (I’m not saying this to blame anyone — this is a very common oversight in our lovingkindness practice. It’s something we all do.)

Resentment is our pain’s way of trying to protect itself. It’s like a kind of bristly, spiky forcefield that we erect around our hearts. If we recognize our own pain and send it our love and reassurance, then we’re “protecting” the heart in a different way. We protect it by offering it love, and by surrounding it with love. It becomes much easier to direct this love toward the person that hurt us. It becomes much easier for us to let go of our resentments. The forgiveness can happen much more quickly. Sometimes it takes minutes or even seconds rather than days.

When we ignore our pain in favor of directing well-wishing to the other person, we’re not being very compassionate to ourselves. In fact we’re unintentionally being cruel. To see this more clearly, imagine yourself walking past a friend who is obviously in distress, without really acknowledging them. You’d be taking a person who’s in pain, and adding to their pain by not being concerned and compassionate.

Now the part of you that’s hurting has exactly the same response. When you ignore it and focus on someone else instead, the hurt deepens. And so your hurt continues to try to protect itself. It continues to erect this spiky forcefield or resentment. And the more you feel this resentment, the more you’re likely to work harder at cultivating compassion for the person who hurt you. And so we stay stuck, until eventually a current of genuine kindness appears, the dynamic changes, we let go of some of our resentment, and your heart feels safe again.

So when we’re trying on the one hand to cultivate kindness to another person, while also (accidentally) cultivating unkindness toward ourselves, it can take us so long to let go of our reactions.

I never used to quite believe the teaching that we have to be kind toward ourselves before we can be kind to others, but the longer I practice the more I see that it’s true.