Determined on Goodwill

The Buddha had two insights that are connected. One is that all things are rooted in desire. The other is that the present moment is fashioned through fabrication for a purpose. Our desires, our purposes, have an arrow in them. We’re heading in a particular direction.

The problem is that from moment to moment that direction can change, which is why so many people’s lives are muddled. They seem to be going in the right direction, then they turn around. As the Buddha said, there’s nothing quicker to change direction than the mind. There’s no adequate analogy for how fast it is. Even the twinkling of an eye is too slow.

So the fact that we have these desires, we have these directions, has both good and bad potentials. If we want to make the potentials good, we have to work on determination—in other words, setting a direction and sticking with it.

Traditionally, in the Buddhist calendar, the time for setting up determinations is the beginning of the rains retreat, the full moon in July. But we can borrow the Western tradition of having resolutions for the new year. There’s nothing wrong with it. As Ajaan Mun once told Ajaan Chah, “Make your practice in the shape of a circle.” In other words, if something is good, you don’t do it just during the rains retreat. You do it all year round.

So think about the qualities that are needed in a determination. There are two kinds. There’s the determination that focuses mainly on a particular goal you want to attain, and there are those that are focused on the practices that lead you there, trying to become more consistent in those practices, to put more energy into them.

They’re connected, of course.

You might decide in the course of the coming year that you want to attain a particular goal in your practice, in your work, or in your family life. That means, though, that you have to focus on what needs to be done, and there’s a time element there. Otherwise, you might say, “I’ll just focus on my day-to-day practice, trying to be more virtuous, more generous, to meditate more,” leaving it more open-ended. In other words, you’re focused more on being more consistent in your practice, or as Ajaan Fuang would say, “making your practice timeless.”

Our days tend to get chopped up into so many times: time to eat, time to relax, time to practice, with the arrow pointing this way when we’re eating, pointing someplace else when we’re working, pointing someplace else when we’re at home. Try to make the underlying arrow one that points to the Dhamma all the time.

And remember what the Buddha had to say about determination: There are four aspects to a wise determination. The first one is wisdom or discernment, paññā. As he said, don’t neglect discernment.

How do you neglect discernment? By neglecting the long term. Discernment begins by thinking in the long term: What are the long-term consequences of your actions going to be? Then you stick with the things that will lead to good long-term results. So think of what you want in the long term, and of what would be the skillful ways of getting there—because you want to be skillful both in your targets and in the means to the target.

The next quality, the Buddha said, is to guard the truth. This has a particular meaning in the Canon. It means being very clear about where your ideas and beliefs come from.

There may be some things you hold to as absolutely true, but you have to question yourself, “How true are they? How do you know? Where did you get those ideas? What are they based* *on?” Are they based on agreement with your pre-existing opinions? Are they based on the fact that somebody else has said it, you heard a report that made sense to you? Those things, he said, are not necessarily reliable.

You want to base your opinions on what you know from your personal experience to be true; and for that, you have to make yourself the sort of person whose awareness of his or her personal experience is reliable.

In terms of a determination, you may have some ideas about what will get you where you want to go, particularly about how to meditate, how to observe the precepts in the course of the day. But you have to be willing to watch as you’re actually trying these things. You got your ideas from somebody else or you cooked them up from your own ignorance inside. You’ve got to test* *things, so that your discernment is not just ideas. It’s actually based on reality.

The third quality is to be devoted or committed to relinquishment. In other words, anything that’s going to get in the way of your goal, you’ve got to be willing to put it aside, let it go. And be forewarned that the things that get in the way are not all necessarily bad.

As the Buddha said, when you see that there’s a greater happiness to be gained by letting go of a lesser happiness, the wise person is willing to let go of the lesser happiness.

Now, that lesser happiness may be perfectly okay, but it’s not as important as the greater one. So it’s not a matter of choosing between good and bad, pleasure and pain, and just going for what’s good and pleasurable. Our minds are like gardens. You plant certain trees in the garden—like eucalyptus—and they’ll kill the other plants, even though, on its own, the eucalyptus can be a perfectly fine tree. In the same way, there are certain pleasures you enjoy that are going to get in the way of your goal. You’ve got to be willing to put them aside.

As the Buddha said, he’s not against all pleasure. Any pleasure that’s in line with the Dhamma he says is perfectly fine. When you engage in a particular activity that’s pleasant, you have to look at its impact on your mind. And although it may be pleasant, if it has a bad impact—either in the doing or in the enjoying of the pleasure—you’ve got to drop it. And even though it may seem innocent from other perspectives, if you realize that this is getting in the way of what you’ve determined that you really want over the long term, you’ve got to put it aside.

This is where the skill lies: In seeing things that you enjoy doing but will give long-term harm, and learning how to make yourself want to stop doing them. That’s an aspect of discernment: how you can psych yourself out, how you know to push your buttons in the right direction.

Finally, there’s calm. As the Buddha said, you train only for calm. You want to keep your mind on an even keel as you do this. If you trip up, you don’t get upset. You recognize that you made a mistake, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, keep going.

There was a famous Olympic swimmer one time who was forecast to win the gold medals in all the events he entered, but he missed the first one. The reporters were saying, “He’s probably going to go into a downward spiral now.” But his coach told them, “No, you don’t know him. He knows how to not let these things faze him.” And the coach was right. The swimmer swept all the remaining gold medals.* That’s* the kind of quality you want in the practice.

Remember the Buddha’s instruction to Rāhula: If you make a mistake, you recognize it as a mistake, you go talk it over with someone else you trust, and you resolve not to repeat it. In other words, he didn’t say, “Rāhula, never ever make a mistake.” He said, “Try not to make a mistake, but if you do, this is what you do. This is how you handle it.” It’s not the end of the world.

We can apply these four aspects of determination—not neglecting discernment, guarding the truth, being devoted to relinquishment, and training only for calm—to the practice of goodwill.

The Buddha said that goodwill is a form of mindfulness on which you should be determined. It’s one of the last lines in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta—etaṁ satiṁ adhiṭṭheyya.

Goodwill needs to be a form of mindfulness because it doesn’t come to us all the time. You have to keep remembering that you need to have goodwill for everybody, even the people who are behaving in really bad ways. You can’t have ill will for them, because if you do, then your own actions are going to create bad kamma.

So you have to bring discernment to this, remembering what goodwill means: Not, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing,” but, “May you act in skillful ways and avoid unskillful ways.” Try to keep that thought in mind. As you’re going through the day, don’t neglect the fact that you, say, chanted passages of goodwill or had a meditation of goodwill earlier in the day. It’s an attitude you have to bring with you all the time so that you don’t neglect it. xx

Then you guard the truth. You have to remember, when you’re looking at somebody, that you don’t see the whole story. Sometimes you see that they’ve done nothing but bad things, but then you have to ask yourself, “How much do you know about their past, in this life, in previous lives?”

So when the thought comes up that someone doesn’t deserve to be happy or doesn’t deserve your goodwill, think back: You don’t know the whole story. What you do know is what you’re putting into the process right now, and you want to make sure you’re putting in something good. For that, you need to maintain your goodwill.

As for relinquishment, whatever prejudices you have about people, your likes and dislikes, don’t let them get in the way. You don’t have to like people in order to have goodwill for them. In fact, the people you don’t like are the ones where you really have to develop goodwill, you really have to be mindful, you really have to be determined, because that’s where you’re most likely to slip up.

As for training for calm, remember that the practice of goodwill is coupled with the practice for equanimity. We want people to behave in skillful ways, but they have the choice—just like you have the choice—to behave in skillful ways or unskillful ways. You can’t force them to be skillful, so you have to be prepared for the fact that people will behave in all kinds of horrible ways, and you can’t let that disturb your goodwill.

I mean, there are people in the world now who think that preparing for nuclear war is a rational thing, and they’re in positions of power where they can do this. There are a lot of crazy people in the world, and you have to have goodwill for the crazy people; remembering that their misbehavior doesn’t pull you down. It’s going to be your misbehavior that pulls you down, so you have to be careful.

That is something that is in your power. In other words, you can maintain goodwill for yourself all the time, telling yourself, “May I understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” That can be a calming thought, because that’s where you are in power, as long as you stay determined, as long as you keep goodwill in mind.

So as we begin the new year, it’s good to think we can take advantage of this convention of having New Year’s resolutions. We can make our practice in the shape of a circle: goodwill during the rains retreat; goodwill outside of the rains retreat; goodwill all the way to the end of the year and beyond. When a practice is consistent like that, then the results are going to be consistent as well.