The Roles of Equanimity

Equanimity appears in a lot of the lists of qualities we should be developing. Often it appears at the end of the list, which gives the impression that it’s the highest of the qualities on that particular list. But we need to realize that the Buddha never recommended developing equanimity on its own—and that when it appears in different lists, it’s not necessarily the highest quality in and of itself. It has to depend on the ones that come before to make sure that it doesn’t turn into an unhealthy equanimity, such as indifference or apathy.

As with the brahmaviharas: You start out with goodwill. And your goodwill has to be tough. The Buddha gives examples of people coming to you and saying all kinds of harmful, hurtful things. You have to maintain your goodwill toward them. It seems as if the world is behaving in such a way to defy your goodwill. You want to wish for their happiness, you want to wish for your own happiness, you want to have an attitude of friendly goodwill, but it’s hard to be friends with people who are misbehaving in really harsh and cruel ways—as we see all around us. Yet you still have to have goodwill for them.

The Buddha says you have to make your goodwill large. Think of it being like the whole earth. A little man comes along with a shovel, a hoe, and a basket. He digs here and digs there, spits here and spits there, pees here and pees there, saying, “Be without earth. Be without earth.” But because his efforts are so puny, they’re not going to succeed. They look kind of ridiculous.

That’s the way, the Buddha said, that you should regard people who are misbehaving in harsh ways directly to you or to those you love. You have to think of your goodwill as larger than them, larger than anything they can do.

A lot of the evil efforts we see in the world are not just one little man with a shovel and a basket. There are whole armies doing horrible things. But you have to think of your goodwill as being so large that whenever armies are brought against it, it’s still larger than the armies.

So your goodwill has to have some endurance. And where are you going to find that endurance? Through equanimity. There’s a lot of behavior in the world that you cannot control, and you can’t let yourself get upset by that. This doesn’t mean you don’t try to fix things when they can be fixed. But there are a lot of times when you don’t have the power to do that. You realize your limitations.

It’s like the equanimity of a doctor. A doctor has some patients he can cure, and other patients he can’t cure. For the ones he can’t cure, he has to maintain an attitude of goodwill toward them even though he has to be equanimous about their chances of getting well: “It looks like I can’t bring about a total cure, but maybe I can help to at least some extent.” You look for areas in which you can help and you mean well toward the patient all the way, even though the patient can sometimes be very difficult. I happened to be in the hospital a couple years back, and I had a glance at the chart that they had hung down at the foot of my bed. It told not only what my symptoms were, but also whether I was a nice patient or not. So you can imagine some of the comments they made for difficult patients. Still, regardless, you have to treat the patients well.

So here equanimity is in the service of your goodwill. You don’t just say, “Well, this patient is difficult. I don’t care about him. I care about her. I have to let them go. ” Before you let them go, you try your best to alleviate their pains, to lessen their symptoms, even though you know you can’t cure them.

Then there’s the equanimity of a soldier. There are going to be setbacks in your battle, but they don’t mean you’ll have to give up or that you don’t really care about the outcome of the battle. When there are setbacks, you simply can’t let yourself get upset by them. You have to be equanimous.

This is more the equanimity you see in the seven factors of awakening. You’re working on your concentration, and there are days when it just doesn’t go well. So instead of getting upset about it, you calm the mind down and watch, because obviously there’s something you don’t understand—maybe in the breath, maybe in the mind—and you’re not going to see these things or understand them unless you just sit with them for a while and watch. Here you keep in mind the attitude that, “Okay, we’re going to come out victorious here, but there’s been a setback.” Instead of getting upset about the setback, you try to learn, “What did we do wrong?” You’re not going to see what you did wrong unless you’re equanimous enough to watch.

This is the same equanimity that’s recommended in the image of the goldsmith. The goldsmith sometimes puts the gold in the fire, sometimes takes it out of the fire and blows on it, sometimes just looks at it. Putting it in the fire stands for the effort you put in the practice. With the unskillful qualities of the mind, you do your best to get rid of them. As for skillful qualities, you do your best to give rise to them. Once the mind is concentrated, then you try to maintain it. That’s taking it out and blowing on it, letting things rest and cool downfor a while, trying to gain a sense of energy that comes from the pleasure, the ease, the feelings of fullness that you can get as you settle into the breath. But then there are times when you just have to watch what’s going on. You’re not sure, “Is this time to put it in the fire, or is this time to blow on it?” You watch. You can’t do just one of these three activities. You have to do all three. They have to help one another.

As the Buddha said, “If you’re just equanimous, nothing happens.” This is a trap that a lot of meditators fall into. They’re told that they shouldn’t desire any results in the practice, because desire is a bad thing, so they just learn how to accept whatever comes up. They clone the attitude of an equanimous meditator. But then as the Buddha said, nothing happens. The mind will not get into concentration if you’re just equanimous. So your equanimity has to work with other qualities in order to be valuable and not actually become an obstacle on the path.

You might say this is the equanimity of a hunter. A hunter knows where the animals tend to be, but he can’t make an appointment with them, saying, “Okay, at two o’clock I want a rabbit to come by.” He has to go and sit and be very still, very alert, extremely patient, and can’t get upset by the fact that the rabbits aren’t coming when they usually come. Sometimes things simply take time, and you have to learn to be patient—and who knows what you’re going to see? You wanted a rabbit, but instead you might get something that you didn’t even expect.

What this means is that sometimes you make up your mind you want the mind to do this, you want the mind to do that, and it’s just not working. So you get as still as you can and watch whatever is unstill in the mind. And you begin to see little things you didn’t see before. That’s where the equanimity is good—because then it’ll allow you to figure out what you need to do.

So equanimity is not the goal of the practice.

When the Buddha talks about nibbāna, he doesn’t say it’s the highest equanimity. You do have the equanimity toward the rest of the world, because you’re not feeding on it anymore. And that’s because the experience of awakening itself is the ultimate happiness.

This is a principle that we see throughout the practice: Equanimity, to be solid, has to be based on happiness. As when you’re doing concentration practice: You don’t go straight to equanimity. First you have to give the mind a sense of well-being. Let it feed off the well-being, the sense of ease, the fullness of a mind that’s settled in. That’s your food on the path. Then, when you’re well-fed, you can be more equanimous, not because you’ve told yourself to be equanimous, but simply because your needs are met, so you don’t need to feed off of anything else.

As for the equanimity of an awakened person, again, this person has found the ultimate happiness. There’s no need for anything else. That’s the kind of equanimity we want—because when the mind is feeding off the world, you can’t trust its perceptions. When there’s no feeding off the world, you can look in a really balanced way at things and see what really needs to be done. In other words, you don’t stop with equanimity. Equanimity is a means, not a goal. It’s your ability to look at a situation and see it for what it really is. Then you can decide what needs to be done.

Again, think of the goldsmith. When is the time to put the gold in the fire? When is the time to take the gold out and blow on it? You’re going to learn that by watching it. And you want to make sure that, as you watch it, you’re calm, collected.

So even though equanimity appears at the end of a lot of lists, it’s not the case you get to equanimity and you drop everything else. It’s simply the balance point, so that whatever else needs to be done, you can see it clearly.