Harmony, Right & Wrong

When we bring the mind into concentration, we’re trying to bring the body and the mind together in harmony in a right relationship.

Both of those aspects are important: both the harmony and the right relationship. This is why we spend so much time with directed thought and evaluation at the beginning: evaluating the breath, evaluating the mind, to see how the body and mind can fit together nicely. What kind of breathing would feel comfortable right now?

And the word *comfortable: *What does that mean right now? Sometimes comfortable will mean energizing, sometimes it’ll mean soothing. sometimes it’ll mean relaxing, all depending on the state of the mind, the state of the body. You need to learn how to read the situation and see what’s needed so that they’ll be happy to stay together—so that, when they stay together, they can benefit from each other’s strengths.

The awareness of the mind helps to detect when things are wrong with the body. Then you can do something about them. The rest of the body gives the mind some grounding. Otherwise, it floats around here, floats around there, as if it gets into bubbles of thought worlds. Then the bubbles burst and you land wherever.

Ajaan Lee’s image is of your needing a safe landing strip. When the mind wanders around in thoughts and concepts, it’s like a plane flying around in the air. If it doesn’t have a safe landing strip, it’s going to come crashing down. So give it a good place to land—and more than just land: a place to stay.

To stay together requires that you actively work at harmonizing the body and mindn. After all, the nature of the body and the nature of the mind are two different things. The mind is what knows and thinks. The body is just the elements.

Sometimes we attribute to the body things that are actually issues of the mind. One of my first embarrassing discussions with Ajaan Fuang was about the needs of the body. I insisted that the body has needs, but he said that the body doesn’t need much of anything. It’d be perfectly happy to die. It cares nothing about surviving. The mind is what wants the body to survive for the sake of its own happiness. Then it forces the body to do things that are not necessarily good for the body. Think of all the addictions people have to drugs, to sex, to whatever, that are not good for the body at all. They use the body and abuse the body.

In many ways, that’s normal for our relationship to the body that we’re in conflict. The mind wants to go to all kinds of places, but the body can just stay right here.

There are times when the mind does have to think about other things, but it’s good to have its thinking grounded. So try to breathe in a way that makes it feel good to be here, feel good to stay here for a good long time. Whatever’s needed for the sake of harmony, you do it. Don’t see it as a luxury.

This is one of the problems with our society, our culture. It feeds on strife. We fall into strife very easily. We find harmony hard. I was given a dictionary as a gift in Thailand, a long time back. It was created by Thai academy, which is like the Académie Française, in that it keeps watch over the Thai language, among other things. One of the newspapers in Bangkok came up with another dictionary of all the new slang you won’t find in the official dictionary. I was given a copy of that, too, and as I was reading through the new dictionary, I noticed that a huge portion of the words were insults. We’re really good at insulting one another, even when we’re not really good at it—in other words, we just do it in crude and unthinking ways, as we see so much around us—but we’re good at it in that it comes very easily to us.

Conflict, strife, is easy. That’s what we think because we’ve habituated ourselves to it.

We have to learn how to be good at harmony, both inside and outside. Learning how to be good at harmony outside will to be helpful inside as well. As the Buddha said, “Happy is harmony in the Sangha.” One of the conditions conducive for gladness that can bring the mind into concentration is peace in the Sangha, harmony in the Sangha. It’s worth whatever effort is needed to learn how to bring things to harmony, and not regard it as a luxury.

That’s another thing that’s strange about our society. They see the programs that bring education, health, and other things that promote harmony and well-being in the society as a luxury. They call it the peace dividend. When we’re lucky enough to have peace, they say, then we have the luxury of being harmonious, while the normal state of nature is conflict. However much money is needed to build a huge army, maintain a huge navy, whatever, it’s all worth it. Look in the budget of the government. It’s crazy.

Actually, conflict is the real luxury, if you can afford conflict—in other words, if you can afford to repair all the damage that’s done by conflict. It costs huge amounts of money, and yet it keeps happening again and again and again.

Harmony is the necessity, so think in those terms. Whatever needs to be invested in learning how to speak and act and think in ways that are conducive to harmony, that can bring conflict to an end, invest there, because you’re investing in the well-being of your own mind, creating an environment where training the mind is easier.

Of course, it does have to be, as I said, in a right relationship. The Vinaya is really interesting on this point. It places a very strong emphasis on not getting into arguments, not creating a split in the Sangha. As the Buddha warned, anyone who intentionally creates a split in the Sangha, knowing that what they’re doing is wrong, and just doing it for the sake of the split: There’s a special place in hell for people like that. So there’s a very strong emphasis on learning how to get along with one another, learning the various skills that help life in the monastery so that we can share our strengths.

One of the ways of providing a refuge for yourself is to learn the skills that are helpful for other members in the community. That way, of course, when something happens where you need their help, they’ll be happy to help.

But it does have to be in a right relationship. The Buddha talks about how important it is, when there has been a crack in the community, to patch it up, but if, in the course of finding out why the crack happened, you find that the underlying motivation was corrupt, the motivation for the crack was corrupt, there’s no possibility of patching it up.

So it’s not harmony at all costs. Otherwise, you get a harmony that just papers over huge differences. Things can be very wrong as long as everybody says, “Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. We’ll just learn how to let it go.” That’s not harmony. It’s repression. It’s not healthy.

I know communities where, when you give a Dhamma talk, nobody else in the roster of teachers is allowed to criticize you—both in lay communities and in some monastic communities. No matter how wrong it is, you’re not supposed to say anything contrary. This is what gives harmony a bad name.

As the Buddha said, true harmony is based on having goodwill for one another expressing it in thought and word and deed; sharing whatever special gains you get; having right view in common; having virtue in common—again, right virtue, not just any old virtue. Make sure that everybody lifts the level of his or her virtue to a level pleasing to the noble ones.

Which is why it’s important to recognize there are standards of right and wrong. Sometimes when harmony is stressed too much, right and wrong get thrown out the window. The Buddha wants you to learn harmony based on what is right. That’s the kind of harmony that gives harmony a good name, and it really is necessary for our practice.

So think about that the next time you open your mouth or the next time you’re thinking about one another. If there’s a conflict, what can be done to end the conflict? How can it be done in a right way? Give it some extra thought. That’s a skill worth developing, even when it’s awkward.

Otherwise, we go back to “the necessity of conflict” or “the state of nature of conflict.” We’re not here to maintain the state of the jungle, even though we’re a forest tradition.

One of the characteristics of the forest tradition that Ajaan Fuang noted was that Ajaan Mun and his students were all very, very neat and clean. They lived in the jungle, but their quarters were not a jungle. They practiced a very high level of civilization, even though they were in the wilderness, because they valued harmony. They had a good, neat relationship among themselves. Living in a clean place is one way of being harmonious. Cleaning up your views, cleaning up your virtue, is a good way of being harmonious.

When you have harmony outside, then it’s a lot easier to create harmony inside. You value whatever effort is required to figure out how to get the mind to stay with the body on good terms, how to get the body to stay with the mind on good terms, so each can benefit from the strengths of the other.