The Intelligent Heart

One of my favorite titles for a book on Buddhism was one called, The Intelligent Heart. It reminds you that when the Buddha uses the word citta, he doesn’t mean just mind, he also means heart. He means the two of them together. It also reminds you that the heart actually takes primacy. As the Buddha said, “All dhammas, all phenomena, are rooted in desire,” and desire is the heart side of your citta. What we want determines so many things in life. We have to learn how to train our wants.

As we’re sitting here practicing, you’re not just focusing your mind on the breath, you’re also focusing your heart. Come wholeheartedly to this—that’s one of the meanings of the word, ātāpi, or ardent—you really want to do this well. Of course, you want to be intelligent about your wants, which is why the Buddha said that discernment starts with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”

Happiness is something we ordinarily want, but the problem is that we tend to be kind of stupid about it. We want what we want with the minimum amount of effort and we want it as fast as possible. This is where the heart has to be trained to be intelligent, to realize it’s going to require effort on our part—this happiness we want—and it’s going to take time. So you have to learn how to talk to yourself, to encourage yourself in your efforts. This is why right effort starts with the phrase “generating desire.” You generate desire to abandon unskillful qualities and to make sure they don’t arise again. You generate desire to develop skillful qualities and then to maintain them and develop them when you’ve got them. You train yourself to want to do this.

In the definition of practical discernment, there are four types of action you can do. The first two are things that you like to do and give good results, and things you don’t like to do but give bad results, which are no-brainers. Then there are things that you would like to do but will give bad results, and things you don’t like to do but will give good results. In those cases, you have to make yourself want to aim at the good results. That’s where the effort comes in. This is where the intelligence comes in, figuring out how to psych yourself up.

You come to the evening sit sometimes, and you’re here because it’s part of the schedule, part of the routine. If we didn’t have the routine, you might not come. Other nights, you’re eager to come. But you need to have some eagerness, regardless. So if you find yourself sitting down here and thinking, “Okay, another session. How can I get through this as quickly and as painlessly as possible?” you’ve got to talk to yourself. Remind yourself that the desires you’ve had in the past have let you down. Even though you wanted them very strongly, they were unfaithful to you. Remind yourself of that.

Think of the Buddha’s teaching about how you can go through life and it would be difficult to find someone who had never been your mother in a previous lifetime, never been your father, your sister, your brother, your son, your daughter. You desired those people very strongly when the relationship was there. But now—what? It’s all gone. It’s as if it never happened. You don’t want a happiness that goes away that way. You want a happiness that comes and stays—and this the Buddha promises. This path we’re following takes you to a happiness that stays, that won’t let you down.

The problem is, of course, that you can’t see it yet. As Ajaan Maha Bua once said, “If you could take nibbāna out and show it to everybody, nobody else would want anything but nibbāna. Every other market in the world would go bankrupt.” But we can’t see it. We’re going on faith, yet our faith is not blind.

Yesterday I saw a sign when I was outside the monastery that said, “We walk not by sight, we walk by faith,” which shows a certain amount of loyalty to those you have faith in. But then it denigrates the fact that you have sight. That’s a sad thing. You’ve seen what the Buddha has to say so far about the virtue of generosity and the virtue of the precepts, the virtue of goodwill for all beings, and you see that it really is a good thing. It’s a happiness you can create under any circumstance, no matter where you are.

Then you look at what he has to say about training the heart, training the mind—in mindfulness, alertness, ardency, developing concentration, developing discernment, seeing where it is you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering—and it all makes sense. As the Buddha said, though, just because something makes sense doesn’t mean that it’s true—but it’s a good sign. If something doesn’t make sense at all—that’s what you’ve got to watch out for. That’s the area where some people say, “Well, that’s where your faith really shows itself.” But it shows itself as foolish.

We’re not here to just be loyal. After all, the Buddha didn’t create us. Our relationship to him is not what we’d have toward a creator or a parent. He’s an expert, an expert in happiness. You have to develop the right attitude toward such an expert, someone who went through a lot of trouble to find this path. He taught it for free. He spent many, many years setting up the Dhamma and Vinaya so that people thousands of years later could still benefit from it. So we should respond to that kind of goodness, both with our heart and our mind—our heart of respect, our heart of gratitude, our heart of admiration.

We’re not hoping that just loving him will be enough—that’s another attitude of the immature heart, hoping that if you love somebody strongly enough, you’ll always be happy together. But again, the mothers of your previous lifetimes, you probably loved them very much—but here you are, still. The fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the sons and daughters who you’ve loved very strongly, but that relationship didn’t save you from having to come back and suffer again and again and be separated from them again and again.

So we’re trying to develop a mature heart, an intelligent heart, one that realizes that suffering has its causes, and the causes are inside the heart and mind. There are things we have to change within ourselves, but we have a path. This path is speaking directly to our heart—that the heart’s basic desire is that it wants happiness.

When the Buddha talks about the questions that lie at the basis of discernment, he doesn’t question the idea that we would want happiness. Some teachings say you have to sacrifice your happiness for the sake of others. The Buddha said No. You want happiness? Okay, it is possible to have it, in an unselfish way, in a wise way, in an intelligent way. That part of your heart is taken for granted, and the Buddha encourages it. But he says that you’ve got to be intelligent about it.

The desire for concentration: If you want to succeed in that desire, you have to focus it on the causes. You have to make sure that the desire is well-balanced, not so intense that it gets in the way of seeing clearly what you need to do, and not so weak that you don’t have the energy to do it. You train your desire to be just right, focused in the right place, with the right amount of strength—alert, ardent, mindful. These establishings of mindfulness that we use as the basis of our concentration are establishings for the heart and the mind together.

Remember to think of that combination primarily in terms of the heart. On the nights you come up here and it seems kind of routine—we’re going through the same chants over and over again, in the same building, with the same other people in the room—remind yourself that, Yes, this is a routine, but it’s a special routine. It’s an opportunity to be special.

Ajaan Suwat would begin the meditation instructions often by saying, “Lift your heart. Develop a sense of conviction and a sense of clarity.” There’s an adjective in Pali, pasanna: It means clarity, it means confidence. Lift your heart as you lift your mind to the meditation topic. Remember, it’s a lifting that we’re doing here, raising our level.

And even though the daily routine says that we do this, try to think of it as not routine. It is special. Remind yourself of how much you want true happiness, and then say, “This is how it’s found.”

It may not be what you expected, but of all the opportunities out there, all the alternatives out there, this is the best. It looks the best. There are people who guarantee that it is the best. Now it’s up to you to bring your best to test whether that’s true, with a sense of confidence, with a sense of clarity, that this is something you can do, and to be glad you did.