Protecting the Mind from Itself

We live in a world with a lot of dangers, but the big dangers are inside: the dangers that come from our own greed, aversion, and delusion—the things that can get us to behave in ways that will cause trouble for ourselves, trouble for other people.

When the Buddha said that the duty of a teacher is to protect the student in every direction, what he meant was that he gives us instructions on how to behave in a safe way, and particularly how to behave so that we don’t fall into the dangers presented by the mind itself.

He gives two kinds of instructions. One, he sets out the precepts, he sets out what are called the kammapatha, or the guidelines or principles for skillful action. These are general principles, like no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex. Those are the principles for bodily action. The principles for speech are no lying, no divisive speech, no harsh speech, no idle chatter. Then there are the principles for the mind: no excessive greed, no ill will, no holding to wrong views—in other words, views that your actions don’t matter or that they’re not even real. If you avoid these unskillful actions, that covers a lot of territory. It prevents you from falling into a lot of dangers.

But at the same time, they don’t cover everything, which is why the Buddha also taught us the principles for how to figure out what’s skillful and what’s not skillful through our own powers of observation.

As he once said, what he looked for in a student were two things: one, that the student be honest; and two, that the student be an observant person. He gave an example of these qualities in how he taught his own son, Rāhula.

First, he taught Rāhula how important it is to be truthful, that you have to hold on to the principle of truthfulness no matter what. Then he went on to talk about how to use your actions as a mirror for observing the mind and for learning about what’s skillful and what’s not.

You start out, before you act, by looking at your intentions. If you see that the action you intend to do would cause harm or suffering to anybody, you don’t do it. This applies to harm to yourself or harm to others. If you don’t foresee any harm, then you can go ahead and do the action. But while you’re doing it, you have to keep an eye out to see what results are coming right away, because that’s the way causality works sometimes. It’s not always the case that you do something now and have to wait for your next lifetime for the results to come.

Sometimes the results come while you’re acting. You stick your finger in a fire, you don’t have to wait until the next lifetime for it to hurt. It’s immediate. So look for that kind of result, and if you see that what you’re doing is causing any harm, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, you keep on acting until you’re done.

Then when you’re done, you’re still not done. You have to look back at the long-term consequences. If you see that you actually did cause harm, then you go talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path so that you can learn how not to repeat that mistake. Then you make up your mind that you’re not going to repeat it. You develop a sense of shame around it, a healthy sense of shame, the shame that really cares about how you look in the eyes of the wise.

If you see that you caused no long-term harm, then you take joy in your progress and keep on training.

When you keep looking at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds in this way, then you become more and more observant about what’s skillful and what’s not. You can fill in the blank spaces that are not covered by the Buddha’s broad principles.

And you get very attentive to your intentions—because as the Buddha said, that’s where the karma is: It’s in the intention.

You see this in the precepts. When you take the precepts against killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants, you can break these precepts only intentionally. If you step on a bug not even knowing that you did it or inadvertently, it doesn’t break the precept. It’s only when there’s the intention to do something against the precept that the precept is broken. So training in the precepts means that you’re not only going to show restraint in your actions, but you’re also going to pay special careful attention to your mind.

If you really want to see the mind well, if you really want your precepts to be good, then you also have to practice concentration and develop discernment. Sometimes we hear that you have to first perfect your virtues and then you can work on your concentration. And when your concentration is perfect, then you work on discernment.

But the Buddha himself never taught that way. And it’s a very basic principle in the forest tradition that you use your concentration and your discernment to develop your precepts; you use your discernment to develop your concentration. In this way, all three trainings help one another along. And all three of them are focused on the mind.

In the textbooks that they use in Thailand for the monks and novices, there’s a statement to the effect that virtue is a matter of your words and your deeds. When the textbooks first came out in the 1910s, Ajaan Mun took exception to this teaching. He said, “Virtue is primarily a matter of the heart, of the mind, because it’s a matter of your intentions.” When you understand virtue in that way, then the precepts don’t just become ceremonial. They become an active part of training your mind. That’s because you’ve got to exercise restraint not only over what you do and say, but also over what you plan, what you want to do and say.

That’s where the discernment comes in, because there will be things that you want to do but you see are going to cause a lot of long-term harm. You have to use your discernment to figure out how to talk yourself out of wanting to do those things. With things that you don’t like to do but will give rise to long-term benefit, you have to use your discernment to talk yourself into wanting to do them. In this way, your discernment is pragmatic. We’re not just trying to figure out the world outside to say, “Oh yes, it is inconstant, stressful, not-self.”

The big facts of life are not things outside. The most important facts in life are what you’re doing and how can you act in ways that are going to be skillful. This is why you have to think strategically.

The Buddha is like a doctor. He’s going to give you a course of medicine. Sometimes he has to think ahead of time. You take this medicine up to that point, and then you switch over to another medicine, and then you switch over to another medicine. The third medicine is what’s going to cure you, but the first one is the one that gets you prepared so that the third medicine will work.

So even though there are some parts of the path that you abandon after a while, still you have to develop them first, so that they can take you to the right place for the other parts to work.

When you’re observant in this way, when you’re honest with yourself in this way, that’s when you can provide your own protection. As the Buddha said, he points out the way, but it’s up to us to develop our own powers of observation, our own honesty, and our own commitment to the practice, so that we actually get the results. He can’t do the work for us, because after all, we’re suffering from our own lack of skill, and nobody else can give us their skill.

But the Buddha does what the Buddha can. In other words, he teaches us the basic principles for how to develop skill. As we follow those principles, we find that we become much more observant on our own.

When you’ve developed the powers of observation that can tell—with or without a precept, or with or without a guideline from the Buddha—that something’s going to be skillful or not, that’s when you can rely on yourself. That’s when you’re really safe.

This is why we meditate: to develop our powers of observation. We start by trying to get the mind still. Then we notice: When the mind is trying to be still but it’s still not still, what’s wrong? What’s getting in the way? What can be done to get rid of those obstacles?

When you can approach every problem this way, then there’s no problem that’s going to be beyond your grasp, beyond your ability to solve. That’s how the Buddha teaches us to protect ourselves.