Purity

The first thing the Buddha taught his son was how important it was to be truthful. The second thing he taught him was how to purify his thoughts, his words, and his deeds. It was a gradual process. Whenever he was going to think about something or say something or do something, the first thing he had to ask himself was, “This thing that I plan to do, will it cause any harm to myself or to other people?” If he foresaw any harm, he shouldn’t do it. In other words, if you’re going to learn, the first thing you have to do is learn how to act on your skillful intentions and say No to your unskillful ones. Because if you act on unskillful intentions, you know they’re unskillful. You’re not learning anything. You’re not going to progress.

So the first thing to purify is your intentions. If you see that what you plan to do is not going to cause any harm, you go ahead and do it. Then, while you’re doing it, you watch for the results—as when you’re meditating here right now. Make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath. Other thoughts will come in. You have to learn how to say No to them. If you find yourself wandering off with another thought, you’ve got to drop it, because that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here to master the skill of getting your mind concentrated—centered on one topic. Anything else right now should be considered unskillful.

To say it’s harmful might be too strong a word. But it’s a disturbance. It’s getting in the way. It’s an obstacle. So you want to say No. You stop engaging with whatever it is and come back to the breath.

If you see what you’re doing is working, okay, stick with it.

Then when you’re done, you reflect on the results. If you realize that even though you were acting on your best intentions and didn’t see any problems when you were doing it, but the long-term results came out harmful, you make up your mind not to repeat that mistake. See that as an impurity in your thoughts and words and deeds. Talk it over with someone else whom you trust to get their ideas on how you can avoid that harm in the future. And then the Buddha says you develop a sense of shame around that kind of action.

Now, “shame” has a bad rap, especially in modern psychology. It’s because “shame” has many different meanings. There’s the shame that’s the opposite of pride and self-esteem, but that’s not what the Buddha’s talking about here. He’s talking about the opposite of shamelessness. Remember, he was a member of the noble warrior caste. And he was training his son to have the same sense of pride and self-esteem that the noble warriors had. So, the shame here is seeing that the action was beneath him, unworthy of him, and trying to avoid it in the future.

Now, if you saw that your action had no bad consequences, you should take joy in the fact that you’re progressing and then keep on training. In other words, you don’t stop there. You realize there are ways that you can get more and more skilled at this. There are gradations of purity.

It’s like cleaning out a house that’s been abandoned for a long time, and all kinds of animals and cocaine addicts have moved in. First you clean out the big stuff. Once the big stuff is out, then you clean out the middle-sized stuff. When the middle-sized stuff is out, you deal with the smaller stuff. Then finally you get around to really cleaning it, washing it, mopping it, fixing it up so that it’s livable.

The Buddha gives an analogy here. He says it’s like being a gold washer. You get gold, and first it’s got gravel in it, so you get out the gravel. Then you get out the smaller gravel. And then you get out the fine sand, and then the fine dust. This is his analogy for what you’re doing as you’re sitting here meditating. First you get rid of the gross hindrances: greed, aversion, and delusion; sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, doubt about what you’re doing. Get those things cleared out. Then there are subtler defilements—just the little wanderings of the mind. You clean those out.

The question is, what do you clean out of the mind? Whatever is obviously not a good thing to have there, you clean that out first. Then as you get more sensitive, you see there are other things that are actually disturbing the mind, and you clean those out, too.

As the mind gets into concentration, you discover that there are levels of concentration. In the beginning, you have to talk to yourself about staying with the breath and adjusting the breath, because you want the mind and the breath to fit together well—and you’re dealing with the parts of the mind that are not ready to settle down yet. In some cases, there are specific issues that different parts of the mind want to talk about. In other cases, it’s just the mind’s inability to stay settled down. It’s used to jumping around. It stays with something for a little bit and says, “Okay, what’s next? What’s next?” You’ve got to tell yourself, “This is what’s next. We’re learning a new skill here: the skill of staying.”

So you do your best to make the breath interesting. In other words, you think about how the way the breath energy flows in the body will have an impact on the different organs in the body: your liver, your spleen, your kidneys, your digestive system, your lungs, the brain, all the muscles in the body. If the breath energy flows well, these different parts of the body will function well. Free medicine. How do you know it’s flowing well? If there’s any tension or tightness in any part of the body, you know it’s gotten stagnant. So you think of loosening it up, relaxing that tension, dissolving any sense of tightness.

So you’ve got to talk to yourself to get the breath and the mind to fit together.

Then you check out the mind. What thoughts of the day are still hanging on? One of the reasons we have those chants about goodwill at the beginning of the meditation is to clear things out. Any thoughts about who said what today, who you like, who you don’t like, just get them out of the way.

We have the chant on the parts of the body in case thoughts of lust come up. Think about which part of the body you’re lusting for. What if you had just that one part without the rest? What would that be like? You see how ridiculous a lot of your thoughts are. You focus on some things and have to hide other things in order to actually have any desire at all for a human body. So clear those thoughts out.

Then remind yourself of the importance of what you’re doing here. That’s why we have the chant on aging, illness, and death. What do you have of any substance, here in this body that ages, grows ill, and dies? You’ve got your actions. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. Is your mind well-trained? If not yet, then you’ve got work to do.

These are some ways of thinking that get the mind in the right mood to practice. You think about the mind, you think about the breath, you make adjustments.

But there will come a point where the mind is ready to settle down, in which case you don’t need to do all that thinking anymore. You can let that go. There’ll be simply a perception that holds the mind with the breath. Then you’re just thinking, “breath, breath,” or a mental image about the breath flowing through the body. That’s enough to keep you here. Then, as the meditation progresses, other things will fall away as well. The mind gets purer and purer.

So it’s a progressive practice. You start with the big things, the obvious things. Clear those away. Then worry about the subtler ones.

One problem that a lot of meditators have — Ajaan Lee talks about this — is that they want to jump to the high levels of insight right away. They don’t want to bother with the lowly stuff. They figure, “We’re educated people. We’re smart. We don’t need to go through the baby steps.” But you learn a lot through the baby steps. Otherwise, it’s like going to a house, as I said, where you’ve had animals living along with cocaine addicts, and the place is a total mess. Yet without cleaning out the big mess, you start polishing the silver. Well, you can’t live there. You’ve got to clean out the big mess first. That’s how you purify the mind.

The question came up today, what if you’re trying to have goodwill for everybody but there are people you don’t like? Well, goodwill doesn’t mean you like people. It means you wish them well. It’s an important distinction. There are a lot of very unlikable, unlovable people out in the world, but you have to learn how to treat them well. If you don’t treat them well, that becomes your karma. That’s your lack of skill. So for your sake, you wish people well. And what does it mean to wish them well? Wish that they will behave in ways that lead to true happiness.

Goodwill is not just a magic wand, where we say, “May everybody be happy,” and we sprinkle happiness dust on people. People are going to be happy because of their own skillful actions. So if they’ve been behaving in an unskillful way, you wish, well, may they be skillful. May they see the error of their ways and come to their senses. If there’s anything you can do to help in that direction, you’re happy to help. That makes the world a better place. But you don’t have to like people.

Our likes and dislikes are based on all kinds of things, some of which have good reasons, some of which don’t. But you’ve just got to tell yourself that your likes and dislikes are not going to determine whether an action is skillful or not. Just because you don’t like somebody doesn’t mean you can act unskillfully toward that person. In fact, it’s the people you don’t like that you have to be especially careful around.

We’re not here to be one big happy family in the human race. So if there are people who are difficult, you leave them alone. Think about having goodwill for snakes. The best way to show goodwill for snakes is to keep your distance. Leave them alone. Let them find their way. And that’s how you’ve got to treat a lot of people who are like that. Which is why when they translate metta as “loving-kindness,” it creates a lot of wrong impressions. It’s best translated as “goodwill.”

As we say, “May all beings be happy.” We’re not saying, “May all beings be likable,” or, “May I like all beings.” Just, “May all beings be happy.” If you have that thought in mind, it’s a lot easier to act in skillful ways, and a lot easier to purify your actions around other people.

So as the Buddha said, that’s how you purify your actions: by being very clear about your intentions and acting only on the intentions that you think are skillful. Watching your actions and the results you’re getting immediately as you act. And then looking for the results over the long term. This applies to actions outside and actions in your meditation. If you intend to focus on the breath in one way, and you see that it’s not getting good results, well, you can change to another way. This process of purification is basically the Buddha’s instructions in how to learn from your mistakes. After all, you look at his quest for awakening: He made lots of mistakes. But he knew how to learn from them, which is how he gained awakening. It’s going to be how we gain awakening, too.

So you try your best not to make mistakes, but you also try your best to be honest about when you do make mistakes so that you can learn from them. That’s how the mind gets purified. It’s a simple principle, but it’s important that you learn how to apply it and be consistent in applying it. That’s when you get the real results.