Victory over Death

We chanted a passage just now about the four mountains moving in from four directions. It comes from a sutta where a king comes to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asks him, “What have you been doing?” The king is remarkably frank. He says, “The typical things of someone who’s obsessed with gaining and maintaining his power.”

So the Buddha asks him, “Suppose that someone trustworthy came from the east, saying there was a huge mountain moving in from the east, crushing all living beings in its path; another reliable person came from the south, saying there was a mountain coming in from the south; a person from the west, a person from the north—a mountain moving in from the west, a mountain moving in from the north, crushing all living beings in its path. With this huge destruction of life, what would you do?”

The king said, “What else could I do but practice the Dhamma, practice what is good.”

The Buddha said, “In the same way, I tell you: Aging, illness, and death are moving in, crushing all living beings in their path. What are you going to do?”

The king said, “What else can I do but practice the Dhamma, practice what is good?”

That’s what our real wealth lies in.

The king—Pasenadi—is generally portrayed in the Canon as brand new to the whole idea of a spiritual life. Now he has the Buddha living on the outskirts of his city. He gets a chance to talk with the Buddha every now and then. He comes up with these realizations and he tries them out with the Buddha.

One of them is that even if you have a huge army but you’re not observing the precepts, you’re leaving yourself unprotected. If you’re observing the precepts, then even if you don’t have a huge army, you’re protected. The Buddha affirms that that’s the way it is.

This is where our protection lies: in the goodness we do. We live in this world of aging, illness, and death. The mountains are moving in. So we want to develop strengths inside, wealth inside, that the mountains can’t crush. One of our strengths, of course, is meditation, training the mind, based on generosity, based on virtue. You develop good qualities of the heart and mind. It’s good to remember when training the mind that the Pali word for “mind,” citta, also means “heart.”

So we’re not just training the thinking side of the mind. We’re also training the part of the mind that wishes for happiness, wishes for a true happiness. We’re using our thinking abilities to figure out what kind of happiness would be true, what kind of actions would lead to true happiness. That, the Buddha said, is the beginning of wisdom, or discernment: the question, “What when I do it will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” “What when I do it when I do it will lead to long-term harm and suffering?”

You’re taking your desire for happiness for granted and you’re using your wisdom to develop it, to provide for it. That’s when the heart and the mind grow together. And in growing together, they become strong.

To get to know your mind, it’s good to do things that you know are good—like being generous and being virtuous—because then the mind is more open to itself, the heart is more open to itself. You see what’s going on. On the one hand, you have a sense of your own worth because you’re doing these things. That way, when you see parts of the heart and the mind that are not so good, you’re not blown away by them. You realize you do have some goodness to you. You can take that as a basis for your confidence. Then when you look into the mind, as the Buddha said, and you can begin to see your own foolishness, that’s when you begin to be wise.

Ajaan Chah made a similar comment. He said, “When you get to know the mind, one of the first things you realize is how much it lies to itself.” We tell ourselves that we have good intentions, but sometimes our good intentions cover up some that are not so good. As long as we don’t feel confident in ourselves, we keep those things covered up. But with the sense of confidence coming from doing what’s good, we can look and see: How can we make the mind better? So as you build on your confidence, as you build on your goodwill, things inside begin to open up and you can work with them.

We talk a lot about the techniques of meditation, and they are important. But we also have to remember the motivation and the qualities of the heart that we have to bring to the meditation.

There are three that the Buddha talks about in terms of his own quest for awakening. One is heedfulness: realizing that because your actions make a difference, you really have to be very careful about what you do and say and think. In particular, you have to be careful about your intentions.

Unfortunately, our intentions are an area where we tend to be pretty blind to ourselves—like those old maps drawn in the 17th century, where they’d show the coastlines of the different continents and then leave huge white blank spaces in the interior. Very early on, we learned to lie to ourselves about our intentions. We have to learn how to undo that tendency if we really want to be safe.

So you take care. Be very careful to watch yourself as you act.

Think of the training that the Buddha gave to Rahula: looking at his intentions before he acted, what he expected the results of that action to be. He told Rahula to act only on intentions that he expected not to cause any harm. Then, as he was acting on them, he was to look at the results. If he saw that the action he was doing was actually causing harm, he should stop. If he didn’t see any harm, he could continue.

When the action was done, he still wasn’t done. He had to look at the long-term results. If he saw that he had caused harm, he should go talk it over with someone else more advanced on the path, and then make up his mind not to repeat that mistake. He should have a sense of shame around it—a healthy sense of shame, that comes together with self-regard, together with self-esteem: the sense that that kind of action was beneath him. He could do better.

If, looking back on his action, he saw that he hadn’t caused any harm, then he could take joy in that fact and continue training.

Now, notice here: This is a training based on acting on good intentions. If you act on intentions you know are unskillful or know will be harmful, what are you going to learn?

Yet the mind keeps saying, “Well, let me see for sure that that was harmful.” That’s the mind that’s going to cover things up. You want to learn. When you think something is harmless, but then it does cause harm, you’ve learned something new. That’s how you grow.

Now, that requires a lot of care. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve said, “That’s an awful lot of attention to pay to your actions.” But the proper response is, “What else are you going to pay attention to?”

You learn from acting. You learn by doing. You especially learn by trying to do your best and, when you see that your best is not good enough, you try to do better. The whole point of heedfulness is that even though there are dangers that can come from careless actions, there’s safety that can come when you act skillfully. If that safety weren’t possible, then heedfulness wouldn’t have any meaning.

Heedfulness, as the Buddha said, is the basis for all the strengths that the mind and the heart need. Strength of conviction, that your actions really do matter. Strength of persistence, as you try your best to act in skillful ways. Strength of mindfulness and concentration, as you try to give the mind a place to rest fully alert and to gather its strength. And then strength of discernment, as you examine your own actions above and beyond what the Buddha said was skillful and not skillful—as you learn to look and decide for yourself.

How do you cause harm in your own mind? How do you cause disturbance in your own mind? What can you do not to cause that disturbance? The Buddha does give some general instructions here, but a lot of what you learn has to depend on your powers of observation.

It’s in this way that heedfulness leads to the second quality the Buddha said was necessary for his awakening: ardency, the wholehearted desire to do this well.

Notice that: Your heart is in it. You’re not doing it simply because you’re forced to. You learn how to talk yourself into wanting to do what is skillful and wanting to abandon what’s not, even when it goes against your likes. You learn to let the training change your likes, change your sense of values—looking for the long term, and not for your immediate likes and dislikes, having a sense of the long-term power of your actions.

The third quality is resolution. This is a quality that the Buddha doesn’t discuss much, but it basically means that when things look bleak, you hold to what you know is right. When the mountains come moving in, you keep on doing what’s good.

There’s that story of Shackleton and his expedition down to the Antarctic. The plan was to take a ship down to land on one coast, hike across the continent and get to another side, where another ship would pick them up.

Well, it turned out they couldn’t even get to the coast. The sea was frozen over. Their ship was frozen in. It was going to be crushed. So they had to leave the ship, drag their dinghies behind them as they walked across the slushy ice.

Things looked pretty bleak. Who was going to come and pick them up? There were no planes to come in, and no radios to contact anyone. It was just them trudging across the ice.

What kept them going was Shackleton’s insistence that “Whatever you do, do what you know you should be doing. That way, even if you don’t come out alive, you don’t die with a sense that you’ve failed because of your own laziness or your own carelessness.” Resolution in this sense has a sense of self-honor and self-worth. You just keep on doing what you know is right. The mountains may come in and crush, but you still have your goodness. You won’t let anything crush that.

It turned out that everyone in the expedition came out alive, because they kept doing what they knew they had to do.

This relates to that other passage we chanted just now, about the importance of not thinking about the past or the future, but focusing on the present moment. You focus on the present moment not because it’s a wonderful moment or because your awakened nature is here. You focus on the present because there are things you need to do here, duties you have to fulfill, because tomorrow death may come. Your duties, of course, have to do with the duties of the four noble truths. We’re here to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation of suffering by developing the path. The Buddha doesn’t impose those duties on us, but he does tell us, from his perspective as an expert, that these are the actions that will lead to the end of suffering.

So however bright or bleak the perspective is for the future, you’ve got the present moment where you can do your duty.

For instance, to comprehend suffering: What are you doing that is the suffering?

That’s interesting. It’s not just that you’re doing something that causes suffering. You’re doing the suffering. You’re doing clinging: passion and desire for the different aggregates. As you create your sensual fantasies, as you create your views about the world, your sense of what should and shouldn’t be done, and even your sense of self: All these things are created out of these aggregates. The things we take to be really solid in the world, when you look at them carefully, are just instances of form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. And when you look carefully at these aggregates, seeing how ephemeral they are, you begin to realize: How could you construct anything really reliable out of them? The one reliable thing you can construct out of them is the path.

It’s like building a ladder up a mountain. The ladder won’t be totally permanent. It’s going to fall away. It’s going to rot away, the same as if it’s a ladder made out of vines. But, it’s good enough to get you up.

Or in the Buddha’s image of the raft you take across the river: Rafts can fall apart very easily, but if you bind one together well enough, you can at least get across the river to the other shore. That’s good enough. Everything else you can make out of these aggregates, though, is ultimately unreliable.

So you rely on the path. That’s how you get across. Once you’ve gotten across, then you’re truly safe, because there is a deathless element on the other side, a deathless element that the mind can discover as it follows the path. That was the Buddha’s discovery.

We’re so familiar with the story of the Buddha that it’s good to stop and think about how remarkable it was. He basically gained victory over death. He found something deathless, something with no limits at all—a happiness with no limits—through his efforts.

The efforts didn’t cause it, of course, because the deathless, if it were caused, wouldn’t be deathless. But he gained victory over death and he says that we can do that, too, through the goodness we develop in our hearts and minds.

So have confidence in this goodness. This is where your true survival is. If you give yourself seriously enough to the path, you can come out victorious, too.