A Heart Bigger than the World

Start with thoughts of goodwill, wishing for your own happiness—your own true happiness—and the true happiness of everyone around you.

Life is a lot easier when we can maintain that wish, even though we know that not everybody is going to be happy. And why is that? Because not everybody acts on the causes of true happiness. You can’t make anybody act that way, so your goodwill has to be backed up by equanimity. We say, “May all beings be happy,” but can all beings be happy? They can. It’s a possibility. Will they? We don’t know, but we can maintain that wish, because when you act on it, you don’t have the scars of looking back on bad motivations. You can live with yourself, and your actions are much more likely to be skillful.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to be difficult. Often, the people who are most difficult in our lives are the ones that are closest to us. Goodwill is not a Pollyanna kind of wish, thinking that “Everybody’s going to be good, therefore I’ll be good to them.” It’s because people are often not going to be good that you’ve got to be good to them, good in a discerning way, thinking about what would be in their best interest, the best interest of their true well-being, and taking that as your guide.

So spend some time with the thought of goodwill. All too often we think that we know all about goodwill. All you have to do is say, “May all beings be happy,” and there you are. But that’s not the end of the matter. You have to stop and think about the implications of that wish. If you don’t want to be a hypocrite, it means that you have to look at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds to make sure, at the very least, that they’re a good example. It also means you have to make your mind bigger than the events of the world.

This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, expanding our awareness to fill the body, because if the mind is small, it gets overwhelmed. All you can think about is what this person did or what that person did, and how you’re squeezed by their actions. If you put yourself in the world, the world’s going to squeeze you. But if you make your heart bigger than the world, the world is still there and it can still squeeze, but it can’t find the boundaries of your heart, so there’s nothing for it to squeeze on.

So when the Buddha recommends goodwill, it’s not because he thinks that everybody is going to be good. In fact, one of the examples he gives is of bandits who have grabbed hold of you. They’ve pinned you down and are going to cut you into pieces with a two-handled saw. Even in a case like that, the Buddha says, you have to extend thoughts goodwill, first to the bandits, then to the world at large. That doesn’t mean that by spreading goodwill you’ll stop the bandits from cutting you up. They’ll probably go ahead and continue. What’s important is that you maintain your state of mind. If you’re going to be losing your limbs, you’re quickly going to be losing your body, and what do you have left? Just your mind—the qualities you’ve developed in the mind. You don’t want your good qualities to be sawed into pieces along with your body.

The Buddha saw the world as it really is. There’s a very schizoid way that we in the West tend to look at Buddhism. On the one hand, we think that the Buddha was very negative, saying that everything was suffering, but on the other hand, there’s the Buddha with that blissful smile, the Buddha of sweetness and light that we see portrayed sometimes. So which is the true Buddha?

Neither. The Buddha saw that the world has its good and its bad sides. He doesn’t pretend that everybody is good by their innate nature. In fact, he never talks about innate nature at all. When you hear talk about Buddha-nature, you have to remember that the person most qualified to talk about Buddha-nature, the Buddha himself, never mentioned the topic. He didn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but he did see that the mind can be trained so that it doesn’t have to be affected by the difficulties and outright cruelties in the world.

That’s why we’re here—to train the mind so that it’s larger than the world, to train the heart so that it’s larger than the world—both when you’re on the receiving end of things and when you’re on the proactive side. As you’re planning your actions with regard to the world, remember that everyone wants happiness, yet a lot of people are very ignorant about how happiness can be found. That’s something you’ve got to live with, and there are a lot of people who refuse to give up their ignorance. But you want to overcome your ignorance.

You know that the events of the world will have an impact on the mind, so you make sure that when you’re making an impact on the world, it’s a good impact, coming from a good motivation. That way, you can look at the world and realize that there are people out there who are good in some ways and not so good in other ways. When you want to nourish your heart so that it’s easier to develop thoughts of goodwill, you focus on their good side. That doesn’t mean that you pretend the bad side isn’t there. It’s just that that’s not where you should go for your food. All too often, the mind will nourish itself on other people’s bad qualities. If you enjoy feeding on the idea that you’re a victim or that you’ve been mistreated, there is a kind of food there, and there are a lot of people who like to nourish themselves that way, but it’s not really good for you.

So the Buddha reminds you that when you’re looking for food in the world, look at people’s goodness—the goodness of their actions, the goodness of their words. Somewhere in each person, there is some goodness. If you can’t find it, you have to pity them. You want to keep that in mind.

Now, letting people treat you like a doormat is not showing them goodwill, but again, when you can make your mind larger than the world, there’s nothing for people to step on. So try to develop this limitless quality, this immeasurable quality: goodwill without conditions, goodwill without bargaining—in other words, with no idea that “I’ll be good to the world if the world is good to me.” There’s nothing special about that attitude at all.

Limitless goodwill—goodwill that comes first, regardless—is something special. As the Buddha said, it’s a brahmavihāra. This is how the Brahmas live. This is how they became Brahmas to begin with. They developed these qualities, all four of the sublime attitudes. These attitudes start with goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy, which are all aspects of goodwill. In other words, compassion is what goodwill feels when it sees that people are suffering or creating the causes for suffering. Empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when it sees people happy already or acting on the causes of happiness. But these attitudes have to be backed up by equanimity, remembering that there’s a lot in people’s actions that you cannot change. When they’re being unskillful, or if you’re currently meeting up with the results of your own past unskillful actions, you have to treat that with equanimity.

You also have to realize that when you’re dealing with people, you can’t let down your guard. Some people think that “If I have enough goodwill, everything will be okay, people will pick up on the good vibes, and then they’ll respond in kind.” Equanimity is there to remind you that’s not always the case. You can sit there beaming goodwill, and yet a lot of people will resist it. But that doesn’t mean you should stop beaming. It means, simply, that you have to be heedful in your actions.

We used to get snakes in the kitchen at Wat Dhammasathit: cobras. And for some reason, it always fell on me to get them out. I learned that one of the first steps in doing that safely is to have goodwill for the snake. That way, you can get your mind into the snake’s mind and figure out, “Okay, what does the snake want, and where can we put our wants together?” That’s how you can catch the snake—you have to be very careful because, after all, it is a cobra—and take it outside and give it its freedom, all the time with goodwill but all the time with heedfulness.

When you can balance these two qualities, then your goodness can survive in the world.