Resilience Plus

I have a student who lives near a state forest, and she and her husband have made themselves stewards of the place, in the sense that they try to keep it clean. I’ve noticed that since the pandemic began, a lot of people who had no other place to go started going into the outdoors. People who’ve never been to the outdoors, don’t know the etiquette of being outdoors. They’ve been trashing the place.

And it’s just one of the many signs we see of people behaving badly. Society’s being put through a stress test right now. There’s a lot of misbehavior from the top of the society on down, some of it very, very bad. The question is how to respond.

Of course, the obvious answer is don’t respond in kind. But getting down to the nitty-gritty, this begins with the way you respond to other people’s speech and their behavior on a personal level. It’s all too easy to focus on the misbehavior of others, and then to use that as an excuse for our own misbehavior, which simply adds more fuel to the fire, more weight to the oppression, more stress to the stress test.

Here’s where it’s good to think about the Buddha’s instructions on how to respond to what he calls vacanapatha, which we translate as courses of speech or pathways of speech, but seems to be an idiom for criticism. He says there are five ways in which people can engage in this kind of speech. It’s either timely or not timely, true or not true, spoken gently or spoken harshly, dealing with things that actually are beneficial or not, and then with a heart of goodwill or with an attitude of inner hate. This is the way human speech is in the world. These are the categories. We’re going to be meeting up with these different kinds of speech as we go through life. This is the human realm.

In every case, whether it’s timely or untimely, true or untrue, gentle or harsh, beneficial or not, spoken with goodwill or with inner hate, the Buddha says you have to make up your mind that your heart will not be altered; your mind will not be altered—citta in both cases. You try to remain sympathetic to the welfare of the other person and develop a heart of goodwill.

In other words, the first requirement here, however bad the situation is to make sure your heart and mind are not altered. Remember what you’ve learned in the Dhamma, what you’ve gained from the meditation, and try to keep that solidity in mind.

The images the Buddha gives to illustrate this principle are all images of immense size, resilience, and strength. In one image, you’ve got the whole earth. A man comes along with a shovel. He’s going to dig in the earth and spit on the earth and urinate on the earth, trying to make it be without earth. But the earth is much too big. Another image is the river Ganges. A man comes along with a torch and tries to set fire to the river Ganges. Of course, he’s not going to succeed. Another image is of space. A man comes along and tries to paint colors in the air, paint pictures in the air, but there’s nothing for them to stick to. In other words, when you’re presented with people behaving badly, make your mind a mind which none of their behavior sticks to. And make sure you don’t feel oppressed by what they’ve done or what they’ve said. Think of your mind as being as large as the earth, as inflammable as the river Ganges.

Now, if we were to stop right there, that would be simply a lesson in non-reactivity. But the Buddha doesn’t stop there. He says you’ve got to have that person’s welfare in mind and you have to have an attitude of goodwill, which means that you have to stop and think: What would be the most useful thing to say or do in this case?

Here’s where you have to turn around and look at yourself. What are your strengths? All too often, when people misbehave, we think of our strengths in terms of how we can misbehave in response or how we can complain in response. When the Buddha talks about reflecting on your strengths, neither of those come into any of the equation.

First, he has you think about the four qualities that make you an admirable friend, starting with conviction in the principle of kamma, that you’re not going to do anything harmful and you want to see what you can do to influence the other person to be inspired to act in that way. You think about your virtue, that you’re going to hold by your virtue in your response. And your generosity: You’re coming from a place of giving rather than being a place of being threatened. And finally, your discernment. What’s the most skillful thing to say or do at this time?

Here, your discernment is aided by two other qualities that the Buddha recommends, or that he mentions as strengths. One is your learning of the Dhamma. What have you learned from what the Buddha taught, from what the ajaans have taught, that would give you some good advice on what to do or say or think in these situations? This is why some of our Dhamma books are full of very short things, like the Dhammapada: a collection of very short poems, very short ideas, very short principles that are easy to hold in mind in a difficult situation.

This is why those books of the ajaans’ teachings in short quotes are also popular. They’re really handy for keeping in mind when things get difficult. In fact, that was the source of Awareness Itself, that collection of Ajaan Fuang’s teachings. The year after he died was a very difficult time at the monastery. Things were topsy-turvy. There was really no one in charge. When difficult situations came up, I kept finding myself remembering, “Oh, Ajaan Fuang said this, or he said that.” So I’d hold by it. At the very least, it got me through the difficulties, and many times it helped come up with a solution. So I started writing those things down.

So try to find short statements of the Dhamma, basic principles of behavior, and, as they say in Thai, “decorate” your discernment with the discernment of others. That way, if you can’t think of something on your own, at least you’ve got something else to fall back on.

This relates to the sixth strength, which is another way of decorating your discernment. Develop your quick-wittedness, your ability to see similarities where similarities have not been pointed out to you, connections where connections have not been pointed out, solutions in one area that you could apply to another.

If you have these six qualities, these are strengths that you can fall back on, that you can use as you deal with a difficult situation.

In Thai, they often like to talk about “looking at yourself” before you say or do something. In some cases, what they mean is, “look at your position in society.” But I think what the Buddha would mean in a case like that is look at your strengths and see your strengths in these terms: your conviction, your virtue, your generosity, your discernment, your learning, your quick-wittedness. As for the kinds of strengths that are good for fighting off people, put those aside.

Try to build strengths of the Dhamma, so at the very least you can maintain your resilience, your mind can stay unaltered, your heart can stay unaltered. When it’s unaltered, then you can see clearly what would be for your benefit and the benefit of the other person, what would be a good expression of goodwill for both. It’s in this way that you don’t have to be stressed by the stress test around us, and you don’t add stress to the situation. And it’s in this way that your practice of the Dharma is a positive event in the world.

Things may be falling apart. We see politicians being paid to make sure that there are no agreements, that problems are not solved. And when it starts at the top of the society, that attitude trickles down, and it’s bad. We want to have something radiating up from each individual heart. You can’t get all the hearts in the world to work together like this, but you’ve got your heart and you can be responsible for that. And when it’s in tune with the Dhamma, then it really is a gift to the world.