Rightly Directed

The Buddha learned about the principle of karma in the second knowledge on the night of his awakening. In the standard description of that knowledge, it sounds pretty simple. Beings who act skillfully, based on skillful intentions with right view, go to a good destination. Those who act on unskillful intentions with wrong view go to a bad destination. And the basic principle is simple. But the working out, it turns out, is more complex.

There was another time when he mentioned that it depended a lot on what came before and what came after each act. After all, you don’t do just one action per lifetime. And it’s not the case that you add up the good actions and subtract the bad actions at the end of your life, and then go wherever the sum tells you to go. It’s more complex.

To begin with, there’s the fact that you may have many actions from previous lifetimes that you don’t know about that could send long-term results that you haven’t seen yet. But even more important is what happens to your mind after you’ve done something.

Say you’ve done something good, but then you have a change of heart. You decide you don’t believe in the principles of right view anymore. You start breaking the precepts. That’s going to pull you down, despite the good action you did.

Even more importantly, there’s the power of your mind at the moment of death. If you did something really good in this lifetime, but then at the moment of death you decide, with all the pain that’s coming from your death or your illness, whatever, you don’t believe in the principle of karma anymore, that wrong view will pull you down.

In fact, it was this point that alerted the Buddha to the power of your actions in the present moment, especially your mental actions in the present moment.

Of course, the obverse is true. If you’ve done something really bad, but you’ve had a change of heart—you take on right view, you take on the precepts, and you hold that right view all the way through death—that will pull you up. The results of the bad action will be there in your past, and they will show the results eventually, but the way they show their results will be delayed. And if in the meantime you’ve developed good qualities of the mind—you’ve made your mind more expansive, you’ve developed virtue, discernment, you’ve trained the mind so it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain—then when the results of that past bad action come, you’re hardly going to feel them.

So the important thing is that you keep your mind rightly directed toward right view, directed toward the precepts. As the Buddha said, this is one of the principles of progress. It’s also one of the blessings by which you bless yourself.

The problem is that the mind, as the Buddha said, is really quick to change direction, so quick that he couldn’t even think of an analogy for it. Here he was, the master of analogies, and he could think of nothing to compare with how fast the mind can change direction. Which is why we have to train it. Once you’ve got the mind headed in the right direction, you don’t want it to change.

We’re sometimes told that resistance to change will cause us to suffer. Well, there’s good suffering and bad suffering. In other words, there’s the suffering that leads to the end of suffering, and there’s the suffering that just piles more suffering on.

So whatever stress is involved to make sure your mind stays headed in the right direction, you take it on, because it’ll pay off in the long run.

The qualities that lead in the right direction are virtue and right view. That’s why the Buddha said these are your most important possessions.

You can lose your wealth, you can lose your health, you can even lose your relatives, but it’s not nearly as serious as losing right view, losing your virtue.

There are passages where he says that virtue and right view are the foundations for developing mindfulness. But at the same time, mindfulness is what keeps these things going. If you forget the principles of right view, it’s very easy to start doing things that are unskillful. So you have to keep strengthening this quality of mindfulness, this ability to keep something in mind.

Mindfulness is like a little message you keep sending to yourself from one moment to the next to the next. It’s like that incident in The Sirens of Titan. There’s a character who has had his memory erased many times because he’s in revolt against the forces that are in charge of Mars, where he’s been spirited away. They don’t totally erase his memory, though. They discovered that if you totally erase somebody’s memory, he turns into a vegetable. So there’s a little nub of memory that remains. So in that little nub our character plants the memory that he’s written a letter to himself and where the letter is placed. So each time he’s had his memory erased and he’s finally released, he goes back to that spot, reads the letter, and is able to remember the things they wanted him to forget.

That’s what mindfulness does. It’s a little letter to the future: “Remember this, remember this, remember this.”

Of course, you can’t carry a whole load of things in your memory on such a basic level, which is why we stay with the breath. As you get used to being with the breath and developing good qualities around the breath, those good qualities will continue to surround your breath. Each time you return to the breath, there they’ll be.

So imbue your breath with conviction. Imbue it with persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment, all the qualities that are developed in those sixteen steps, and then just keep the breath in mind. That will be your connection to all these other good qualities, beginning with virtue and discernment. Virtue is what keeps you honest. Discernment is what reminds you of the importance of your actions.

So what you’ve got are basically three qualities: virtue, mindfulness, discernment. That combination of mindfulness and discernment based on virtue is something that the forest ajaans always stress. The Thai word borrowed from the Pali is satipaññā: sati, mindfulness; paññā, discernment. In ordinary Thai conversation, satipaññā means intelligence. But in Buddhist circles, this is a special kind of intelligence, based on virtue, based on your knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings.

Then the question is: How do you intelligently put those teachings into practice, and how do you stick with them? The combination of the three qualities is what sees you through, keeps you rightly directed—sets you in the right direction and keeps you on course.

There are a lot of things in the mind and in the world outside that could pull you off course if you’re not careful. But if your mindfulness is strong, your discernment is really clear, and your virtue is solid, then you have a chance for progress.

In that case, you know what kind of change is good, what kind of change has to be accepted, and what kind of change does not have to be accepted. Wavering in the mind does not have to be accepted.

Remember that the practice of mindfulness, when it’s done properly, leads to concentration. It gives you a good focus.

So all these qualities are strengths. The virtue comes under conviction, together with persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. This is what keeps you strong in doing good. And if you can maintain that strength all the way through death, then a good destination can be hoped for.

It all depends on what you’re doing right here, right now. You can’t depend on what you’ve tallied up in the past.

In China, there’s a tradition of people keeping merit books—how much they donated here, how much they donated there, what other meritorious activities they engaged in. It’s good to keep those things in mind. It lifts your spirits. But you can’t depend on the tally. You can’t depend on the numbers. You’ve got to depend on this ability to keep yourself rightly directed all the way through aging, illness, and death.

So develop the strengths that will keep you rightly directed. That’s when you can rest secure.