Honest & Observant

The Buddha once said, “Let an observant person come, someone who’s honest and no deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” That’s what he was looking for in a student—one, the student be observant and two, be honest. You have to be observant because, after all, you’re dealing with events in your own mind. Nobody else can see them for you, even if you live with someone who can read your mind. He doesn’t know what your mind feels like from inside, and he can’t see all your defilements. So you have to learn how to be very observant.

It starts from outside. Just notice what’s going on around you. Pick up what messages you can learn from people’s body language, from the way they behave. Many Dhamma lessons are not in books. There are a lot of things you have to learn simply by observing. The Thai ajaans would force you to be observant. They don’t explain everything. Their attitude is, if you really want to learn the Dhamma, you’ll look for it.

So. Learn how to look. Be observant. And then be honest with yourself about what you see. If you see something unskillful coming up in the mind, recognize it as unskillful and realize that this is something you have to get around. You have to figure out how to get past it. Sometimes it just requires watching it. Sometimes you actively have to take it apart, de-fabricate it, before you can get past it.

So be honest; be observant. If you have those two qualities, then you can learn. You can learn not only from other people, but also from your own actions. This is what the Buddha was teaching Rahula, when Rahula was seven—how to be honest and how to be observant. Look at your intentions; look at your actions; look at the results of your actions.

Act only on skillful intentions as best you can, because if you act on unskillful intentions, what do you learn? You learn that unskillful intentions lead to something really not good—well, the Buddha could have told you that. It doesn’t take the Buddha to tell you that. What you want to learn is when you think your intentions are skillful, but it turns out that they’re not.

So you act on the skillful intentions, and then see what the results are. If it turns out you did cause harm, then you go back and try to figure out where you were wrong. Of the different defilements we have, greed is pretty easy to see, anger is pretty easy to see, but delusion is hard. When you’re deluded, you don’t know you’re deluded. So this is how you test. It’s through your honesty and through your powers of observation, focused on your intentions, your actions, and their results that you get past your delusion.

Just learn how to focus in the right place: what you’re doing, right now. And then work from outside. This is one of the reasons why we have the precepts. When you learn how to be observant of your actions outside, the habit spreads inside as well.