Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
April 03, 2007
There’s a passage where the Buddha describes how a wise person and a foolish person differ in the way they react to pain. They both feel pain. Awakened people get sick, they grow ill, and they die just like regular people. But they react in a different way. The foolish person, when struck by a pain, reacts in a way that adds more pain. The classic analogy is of being shot by one arrow and then turning around to shoot yourself with another arrow—although it’s always struck me that the classic image is too weak. Actually, you shoot yourself with your whole quiver. Whatever arrows you’ve got, you shoot yourself with them all, and no wonder you suffer. The wise person, however, doesn’t fire those extra arrows at all.