Goodwill Without Hypocrisy

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in your body. Focus your attention there, each breath coming in, each breath going out. Ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow; heavier, lighter; faster, slower. Try to become sensitive to what feels good right here, right now. It’s a very quick and immediate way of getting a sense of well-being inside.

Everything we do in life is for the sake of well-being, for the sake of happiness. The problem is that a lot of our desires for happiness are not all that skillful, especially the ones where we want happiness in a way that causes harm to other people. That kind of happiness is not going to last. They want happiness, too, and they don’t want to be harmed. So they’ll do what they can to put an end to your happiness.

So if you really want to be happy, you have to find happiness in a way that harms nobody at all. This is why the Buddha recommends that we start our practice every day with goodwill: “May I be happy; may all beings be happy.” Try to extend that to everybody. And do it without hypocrisy, without exception.

That may be hard in some cases. You think of some people who don’t deserve to be happy. But given the Buddha’s teachings on karma, what does it mean to wish for somebody to be happy? You wish that they’d do skillful things and stop doing unskillful things. So when you’re telling yourself: “May I be happy; may I stop killing; may I stop stealing; may I stop having illicit sex, stop lying, stop taking intoxicants,” that’s having genuine goodwill for yourself.

And the same with other beings. When we say, “May all beings be happy,” we’re hoping that all beings will stop killing, stealing, having illicit sex, lying, taking intoxicants. That’s a wish you can have pretty much for everybody without hypocrisy. There may be some cases where you think, “I’d like to see them suffer a little bit first. After all, they’ve done a lot of harm. It doesn’t seem right that they not suffer for it.” Well, you don’t have to wish that on them. Think of when people are punished for their wrongdoings. How many times do they really take it to heart and admit that, yes, they did wrong? Often they get even more entrenched in their wrong views.

So what you really want is for people to voluntarily see that if they’ve been behaving in unskillful ways, that they see the error of their ways, try to understand what would be a more skillful way of acting, and then be willing and able to follow through with that. When you can think that thought for everybody, then you can start thinking about, “Well how do I try to find happiness in my life? In what ways am I causing other people to suffer? In what ways can I stop?” This way, thoughts of goodwill don’t just stop with the thoughts. They should inform your actions.

This is not like dedicating merit to somebody else. Sometimes at the end of a meditation session, or any act of generosity, people will dedicate merit. You dedicate merit to those who will approve of what you’ve done. That’s the end of your responsibility. Whether they approve of it or not, that’s their responsibility. That’s how they gain their merit.

But with goodwill, you want it to carry through. You don’t want to be the sort of person who sits here thinking thoughts, “May all beings be happy; may all beings be happy,” and then you get behind the wheel of your car and drive off, somebody cuts in front of you, and you say, “May this being go to hell.” You don’t want that kind of attitude. You want to have goodwill for everybody, and to be enduring when you see that other people are making mistakes.

The Buddha says try to think of your goodwill as being large like the Earth. People come along and try to make the Earth be without earth, but the Earth is much too large. They can dig here, dig there; spit here, spit there; urinate here, urinate there, but it doesn’t make the Earth be without earth. You want your goodwill to have that kind of resilience. After all, you don’t want your goodness to depend on the goodness of others, because the goodness of others is pretty undependable. You don’t want to be the sort of person who says, “Well they did bad things to me, so I have the right to do bad things to them.” No one has the right to do bad things, and nobody is wise if they do, anyhow.

So look after your own actions. Make sure your actions are skillful and hope that all beings will be skillful. Whether they are or not, that’s up to them. If there’s any way you can help them, you’ll be happy. In that way, you can have goodwill for everybody, and your happiness becomes safe because you start looking for happiness in ways that are harmless—like being generous, being virtuous, meditating. These ways of finding happiness are an expression of goodwill. So focus your hopes for happiness here. And then, given the principle of action, those hopes will be realized.