Large-hearted

There’s a pair of Pali terms that’s often mistranslated: mahicchatā; appicchatā. Mahicchatā is often translated as “ambitious,” and its opposite— appicchatā—is translated as “unambitious.” The second quality is praised in a number of places in the Canon. It’s in the list of qualities we’re supposed to develop as a sign that our practice is going well. That’s in the Gotami Sutta. In the Anuruddha Sutta, it’s listed as one of the qualities of a great person.

But as I said, those translations are mistranslations. The way the Buddha actually explains the terms, mahicchatā is that you’re showing off, you’re self-aggrandizing. Appicchatā is when you’re modest. He describes it as a person who has lots of good qualities but is not developing them for the sake of having other people know. In fact, you’re trying to hide it from other people. You have special powers, you have special good qualities, and you keep them under wraps. You’re not showing them off. You’re doing them for their own sake, not for the sake of popularity or other people’s praise.

It’s important that we keep these translations straight. Because when you think of the Buddha as a person, “unambitious” is not the term that comes to mind. He already had wealth, he had power, but it was not enough. He wanted a happiness that was even better: a happiness that didn’t die. And he was willing to do whatever it took.

So the modesty he cultivated was that as long as he hadn’t attained anything, he didn’t make any claims. In fact, that was one of his saving graces. During all those years of austerities, he had never made any claims about what he’d attained. So later on, when he did attain awakening, the group of five monks who had been attending him during his austerities and then had left in disgust after he gave up on the austerities, were at first disinclined to listen to him when he sought them out. But then as he reminded them, “Have I ever made a claim like this: The deathless has been attained. I can teach you how to attain it”? And they realized he’d never made a claim like that. So they were more willing to listen to him, to “lend ear,” as they said. So the fact that he didn’t show off, didn’t make excessive claims, was what made people want to listen to him.

But he was ambitious. He aimed high, and he recommends that we aim high as well. He was a very large-hearted person. His aims were high, and he was willing to do whatever it took. He found the resilience within himself.

There’s an account of the path to his awakening. It’s not in the Canon, but it comes later and it seems realistic. It talks of his reaction to his first alms meal. You can imagine someone who’s been living in a palace, having only the best food every day for his life, suddenly going out in the forest and living off alms. What kind of food was he going to get? He had to train himself. He had to say, “Whatever it takes.”

So his dreams were big. He dreamed big, but he didn’t just dream big. He made himself big in the sense of developing his resilience. If you’re going to be persistent, you have to be resilient and enduring. If you’re going to be resilient and enduring, you have to find joy not only in the fact that your aim is high, but also that you’re going to enjoy what you do along the way, no matter how difficult it gets.

I had a student one time whose son was a professional golfer, and he found joy in difficulties. His ball would get in the rough. It would take a while to figure out how to get it out. And he did some pretty amazing things, I was told, because he learned how to enjoy the difficulties, he learned how to enjoy the challenges.

So as you meet up with challenges on your path, see them not as obstacles but as opportunities to test yourself, to learn something new, to figure things out, to find some joy in the effort. That’s what sustains you. That’s a sign of a truly large heart.

Too many people say, “I’ll aim high only if it’s easy,” or “I want the easiest path.”

There was an article one time called, “The Physical Genius.” It talked about people who had developed manual skills, physical skills. And one of the signs of being really excellent at a particular skill is just that: enjoying the challenges.

So find joy in what you’re doing. As you’re sitting here meditating, there will be problems coming up. Instead of regarding them as obstacles or weights or burdens, tell yourself, “Here’s a chance to learn something new.” When the Buddha says to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out, if your mind naturally tends to stay only in one part of the body, ask yourself why. It may be an old habit, but you don’t just keep doing things because they’re old habits. You ask yourself, “There must be some advantage to having the whole body as your frame of reference. What is it?” One advantage relates to the fact that if there’s a blind spot in the body, there’s going to be a blind spot in your mind.

The reason we develop whole-body awareness is that we want to have an all-around vision of what’s going on in the mind, in the body, so that defilements can’t sneak up on us from behind and bang us over the head—or so that they can’t operate in the dark while we’re blissfully ignorant of what they’re doing.

Or if there’s pain in the meditation, you have to learn how to read your pains. Sometimes the pains are actually telling you, “Move your body. Don’t sit like this.” But other times they just come up. If you let them become an obstacle, then they become a wall. How can you get around the wall? How can you get through the wall? See it as a challenge.

Ajaan Maha Bua talks about his experiments with pain. He came up with some very ingenious ways of dealing with pain because he wasn’t willing to give up. He had that large goal in mind—and it’s a large-hearted goal. You’re looking for happiness that doesn’t harm anybody.

Most of the people in the world look for happiness and don’t really care if it causes harm down the line. Sometimes they don’t even care if it causes harm for themselves down the line. That’s really apathetic.

This is what the virtue of compunction is: the opposite of apathy. Compunction is one of those strange words we don’t use very much in everyday language. But the Buddha describes it as an unwillingness to do something you know is going to cause harm or pain down the line. You care.

It’s all too easy to say, “Well, I don’t care about the future. The future is pretty uncertain. All I have is right now, so I’m going to make right now as comfortable as I can, as easy as I can.” But you have to remember that you’re the inheritor of your past decisions. If your past you was careless, apathetic, you’re now dealing with that. Do you want to send the same problems down the line? Because it’s going to be you down the line. This is just you.

Then you think about all other beings. When we get the mind in concentration, the Buddha does say to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. You have to put aside all thoughts about other beings. But when you come out of concentration, you’re dealing with other beings and you want to have the strength within you to deal with them skillfully.

So being large-hearted doesn’t mean just having large, broad goodwill for all beings, compassion for all beings. It means being resilient, being enduring. And the best way to endure a long path is to find joy with each step.

So be happy that you’re here. You have the time, you have the opportunity, to train your mind. The responsibilities of the world are lifted for you right now. So aim high.

Ajaan Mun used to talk frequently about practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma as his main theme. Well, it means not only practicing the Dhamma as the Buddha taught it. It also means practicing for the sake of the highest Dhamma. In other words, you aim high, you’re ambitious, you practice for dispassion, the maturity that comes when you’ve done battle with all your defilements.

We tend not to like the idea of someone being ambitious, because it usually means stepping on other people. But here you’re stepping on, what? Your defilements. Stepping on your bad habits. Training the mind to come out victorious over itself. We’re not fighting off other people. We’re fighting off our own defilements. See that as an enjoyable challenge, a challenge that you’re up for. Find the strength within yourself. Find the resilience within yourself.

I’ve told you about that time when Ajaan Fuang said, “We’re going to be meditating all night.” He was going to be sitting with a group of laypeople but he wanted me to sit off on my own. I’d never sat all night alone. I told him I didn’t think I could do it. His response was, “Is it going to kill you?”

“Well, no.”

“Then you can do it.”

So I did, and I found that I did have the resources within me. I had to dig in some places I hadn’t expected, but they showed themselves in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of before, either.

So set your sights high, aim high, dream big, but have a large heart along the way. Think of the Buddha’s image of goodwill: large like the earth, broad and cool like the river Ganges, immense like space. That’s the kind of heart you want to develop.

Now, if you tell yourself, “I don’t have that heart yet,” you can develop it. It is something people develop. Remember, the Buddha didn’t start out as the Buddha. He started out as an ordinary person. He even fell many times below human level, but he finally decided that this was the only thing that would make life worthwhile: aiming high and developing whatever strengths are needed to realize that ambition.

We look at the Buddha in his last lifetime, and he seems superhuman. But he wasn’t superhuman. He took the qualities that human beings have and developed them as far as he could to show us that, yes, we can do something like this, too. We may not become Buddhas ourselves, but we can train our minds. We can come out victorious over our greed, over our aversion, over our delusion. It’s something human beings can do. As he said, if human beings couldn’t do this, he wouldn’t teach it. The fact that he taught it means that we can.