Equanimity when You Care

Equanimity is one of the attitudes we’re supposed to develop as part of the practice. It’s one of the brahmavihāras, one of the factors for awakening, one of the perfections. A lot of people don’t like the idea that equanimity plays such a large role. For them, equanimity means you don’t care.

And there are cases where equanimity means just that, but they’re not the cases where the Buddha is recommending that you develop it. He talks about uncaring equanimity in the case where a man who’s been in love with a woman falls out of love, and later on he sees her laughing and talking with another man. He feels equanimous because he doesn’t care about her anymore.

But when the Buddha talks about developing equanimity in your meditation, it’s actually for cases where you care a lot. There are five different ways you can characterize it.

First, there’s the equanimity of a doctor, which is the equanimity that’s one of the brahmavihāras. You start with goodwill and compassion. You want your patient to recover from the illness. You do what you can, but then you reach the point where there’s nothing more you can do. The patient’s going to die. So you have to be equanimous. You can’t let yourself push and push and push against the impossible. You realize that it’s a waste of your energy that you could be devoting to other patients. So you have to be equanimous about the fact that the patient is going to die.

That doesn’t mean you stop caring entirely. You still try to provide for the patient’s comfort as best you can.

In other words, when you practice the brahmavihāras, you start with goodwill. When you reach equanimity, it doesn’t mean you don’t have goodwill anymore. It just means that you have to adjust your hopes and learn priorities.

We hope that all beings will be happy and that they will act in skillful ways. We see that not all of them are going to act in skillful ways, so we focus on areas where we can have an influence. If there are areas where we can’t, we have to let them go. It’s a matter of priorities—realizing that our goodwill may be unlimited, but our resources and abilities are limited. You have to use your discernment to accept that fact and devote your resources and abilities to areas where you can be of help.

That’s the equanimity of a doctor.

Then there’s the equanimity that the Buddha recommends as the beginning of meditation practice. He says you make your mind like earth. Good and bad things happen to earth—disgusting things are poured on earth, perfumes are poured on earth—but the earth doesn’t react. In the same way, you try to make your mind like earth as you meditate. Good and bad things are going to happen. If you want to understand them, you can’t be reactive—getting thrilled when something good happens, depressed when something bad happens. You have to keep the mind on an even keel. And depending on how things are going, you can have the equanimity of a fisherman or the equanimity of a soldier.

A fisherman puts his bait in the water and then just waits, realizing that he can’t tell the fish to come at a certain hour, so he has to be patient. You have to stick with something that’s very minimal, but it requires that you stick with it. You don’t get flustered because it takes more time than you wanted it to. After all, this practice is a long-term practice. You’ve been developing unskillful attitudes in the mind for who knows how long, and it’s going to take time to overcome a lot of them.

Some of it just requires time. Not that you don’t do anything at all. You keep the hook in the water. But you have to train yourself to be very quiet so that you don’t disturb the fish.

As for the soldier, equanimity is for when you have a setback. Things have been going along well and all of a sudden they don’t go well at all. You’ve suffered a defeat. Your meditation crashes. So think of a soldier in battle. If a soldier got upset about every setback in his battle, he’d never have any chance to win. He makes sure that his efforts are more concerted. So you have to have a mind on an even keel.

Remember that setbacks are a normal part of the battle and they’re a normal part of meditation. When you can view them as normal and then figure out what needs to be done, you don’t let your setback get to you. You keep at the effort. Whatever effort is required for developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, you do it. You don’t let the temporary setbacks deflect you from your path, so that someday you come out victorious.

Those are two other types of equanimity: equanimity in the perfections.

These first three types of equanimity have to do with equanimity of striving. The last two have to do with when you get results.

You can call them the equanimity of a diner—someone who has eaten a meal. There are two types. There’s the case where you’ve eaten a meal and, as far as that particular meal is concerned, you’re full. You’re going to get hungry again at some point, but for the time being, you can be equanimous about food. If food is there or food is not there, it doesn’t mean anything to you because you’ve eaten your fill.

This is equanimity in the factors for awakening, the equanimity of someone who’s gotten more advanced in concentration. You’ve fed off of pleasure, you’ve fed off of rapture, and finally you’ve decided you’ve had enough for now. You prefer to just sit there very equanimous. The breath grows more and more still until it finally stops, and you’re perfectly content where you are.

The other diner is one who has gained awakening, who has strengthened the body, strengthened the mind, through the five strengths, to the point where he or she doesn’t need to eat at all anymore. That experience of awakening, the Buddha said, is met with joy, but also with equanimity. Your needs for happiness have been totally met, so you’re equanimous about everything else. This is what Ajaan Fuang would call the “large-hearted equanimity” that comes when you’ve succeeded and you’re at peace.

So we can see that there are five types of equanimity: the equanimity of a doctor, which is the equanimity of the brahmaviharas; the equanimity of a soldier, which is equanimity that has to go together with persistence; the equanimity of a fisherman, which goes together with patience; and the equanimity of someone who’s eaten, which is equanimity in the factors for awakening.

In all these cases, you care. In the last two, you’ve cared about getting the mind’s needs for happiness met, they’ve finally been met, and that issue is no longer an issue.

But with the first three, you still care very much about wanting to come out ahead, wanting to make progress. Then you respond in a proper, non-reactive way. When there’s been a check or a setback, your attitude is that it’s simply going to take time.

So it is possible to develop equanimity when you care. In fact, that’s when you really need it—not to tell yourself that you don’t care. Simply that you have to be wise in how you approach what you care about, so that you’re more likely to actually come out ahead and achieve the aim you want—which in the meditation, is finding a happiness inside that doesn’t have to depend on conditions, so that the mind isn’t subject to the ups and downs of the world anymore.

Up until that point, though, there will be ups and downs, but you’ve got to learn how to keep the mind on an even keel in spite of them if you want to attain what’s really worth attaining.