The Desire to Do Well

The iddhipādas, or bases for success, are the Buddha’s explanation of how right effort gives rise to right concentration, the kind of concentration that then gives rise to special knowledge, including the knowledge of awakening. So they’re important qualities to know. They’re related to right effort in the sense that three of the* iddhipādas* are right there in the formula for right effort: generating desire, arousing persistence, upholding intent. Those are the first three of the iddhipādas: desire, persistence, intent. Then you apply those qualities to abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones. The ability to know what’s skillful and unskillful, and the ability to figure out how to abandon things that are unskillful and develop things that are skillful: That’s the fourth iddhipāda, vimamsā, which is sometimes translated as “discrimination,” sometimes as “ingenuity,” sometimes as “circumspection,” sometimes as “powers of analysis.” It’s the discernment factor of the four.

Now, in the texts, these qualities are specifically related to concentration, but in practice they actually apply to the whole path. Everything from generosity through virtue through meditation, everything from right view all the way through right concentration, requires that you have some desire. As the Buddha said, “All things are rooted in desire.” That includes skillful and unskillful things. It even includes the path. The only thing that’s not rooted in desire is* nibbāna*. That’s the ending of all things.

So of the four iddhipādas, desire is the most primary. The remaining iddhipādas basically express it and fine-tune it. If you have desire but you don’t have any effort or persistence, then it’s not a sincere desire. You have to want to act on it. You also want to have focus. That’s what the intent is all about: focused on paying full attention to what you’re doing and to the results you’re getting, so that you can judge them properly. The fine-tuning comes in the fourth iddhipāda, because raw desire on its own is not going to cut it. To make it part of the path, you have to have a sense of how it’s best applied.

But the important thing is that you really do sincerely want to gain awakening.

All too often, we’re told that if you have desire in the path, it’s a bad thing. After all, desire is the cause of suffering. Well, there’s going to be some stress in the path, and the Buddha never said that all desire is bad. After all, there’s desire in the description of right effort. It’s just a question of learning how to express it and fine-tune it in the right way.

Sometimes you hear that the desire to be better is the enemy of the good. That does apply in some cases, but actually one of the biggest enemies of the desire to do well is the desire to be already good. Notice the distinction there. Doing well is different from being good. “Being good” is a matter of conceit. The “already” is an obstacle to learning anything new.

Remember the Buddha said that the secret to his awakening was discontent with skillful qualities. In other words, as long as the qualities in his mind were not taking him all the way, he didn’t want to rest content. He wanted to keep on learning how to do better. He was happy to find out where he was not doing well, so that he could learn how to erase that mistake.

Now, the desire to be “already good” gets in the way of that. You want to tell yourself, “I’m already fine. I don’t need to learn anything more.” That closes off the path. Then when you do see that you made a mistake, either you don’t admit it or you feel very embarrassed, and the embarrassment gets in the way of the right attitude for learning.

Now, there is such a thing as a healthy sense of shame. But if your desire is strong enough that you really do want to get the results, you really do want to do well, then you should be happy to see, “Oh, this is an area where I can still do better.” That takes some of the sting out of the embarrassment.

So, as in the Buddha’s instructions to Rāhula, you start out trying to act on what you think are skillful intentions. That’s an important part of learning. If you act on intentions you know to be unskillful, then when the results come out bad, you haven’t really learned all that much. You already knew you shouldn’t have done that to begin with. So when you look at your intentions as to why you want to do something and you finally come to an intention that seems skillful, act on that. Then tell yourself, “This is something I’m going to learn from.” Either it actually is skillful as you act on it and see the results, or you learn that it’s not skillful. In the latter case, you’ve learned something important, something you didn’t know. This is part of the desire to do well.

The desire to be already good would then get in the way of your actually seeing the results or admitting the results to yourself when they’re not as skillful as you had hoped. If, on the other hand, you really want to act skillfully, you tell yourself, “Oh, I thought this was going to be skillful, but while I’m doing it, I can see this harm is being done. I’ve got to stop.” Or maybe you didn’t see the harm while you were doing it, but it comes out later. “I’ve learned.” Then you go talk it over with someone else whose knowledge you trust, to see what more you can learn.

So although you are supposed to have a sense of healthy shame around the mistakes you’ve make—in other words, you realize that those who mean you well and are wise would be disappointed—still, they wouldn’t be disappointed if you saw the mistake and were willing to learn from it. So you try to have a healthy sense of shame, but you don’t want your embarrassment to get in the way of talking it over with somebody else.

So the enemy of doing well is the desire to be already good. That’s a basis for unsuccess. It’s a basis for failure. But when you have the desire to do well and then act on it, that’s the persistence. Then you’re intent on observing the results — observing the actions, observing the results — and when things don’t come out well, you use your ingenuity to try to figure out what would be good. And you’re not embarrassed to go seek the help of others.

After all, we’re here working on skills together, working on skills that other people have mastered in the past, which means we can gain advice from them. They’re usually happy to give it, especially if we’re honest in our desire to do well.

This all comes down to the basic principle that the Buddha said nourishes the Dhamma, which is commitment followed by reflection. The commitment is in the desire, in the persistence, and in the intent, and then the reflection is in your intent and your powers of analysis, your circumspection, your ingenuity. This is how you make yourself worthy of the Dhamma, as you nurture the Dhamma within you, so that you keep the focus on doing well, doing as best you can. When it’s not good enough, well, you learn that you can do better. That’s fine. If you want to be already good, you’re going to be disappointed, or else you’re going to go into denial, neither of which is going to be helpful on the path.

So keep that desire focused: the desire to do well, to get good results, to keep on learning. That kind of desire will see you through.