Don’t Accept Change

I’ve been listening to some TV shows from France, where they interview Buddhist teachers, to get my French ready. A theme that you hear over and over again is that the Buddha said we suffer because we don’t accept change. If we only accepted change, we’d be fine; there’d be no suffering at all.

I’ve never seen the Buddha say that. We suffer because we cling. The problem is that we cling to the wrong things. And change itself is not necessarily something to be accepted. There are changes that are to be encouraged and changes that are not to be encouraged. The most changeable thing in the world, the quickest to change, is the mind. As the Buddha said, there’s nothing to compare with how quickly it can change direction. So you have to be careful. You can make a change in a good direction, but sometimes it’ll change in a bad direction.

So you have to decide which kind of changes to encourage and which ones to try to prevent. If you don’t prevent the mind from turning in a bad direction, there’s going to be a lot of suffering. Even if you accept it, there’s a lot of suffering. So have a good idea of which changes are positive and which ones are not.

We practice mindfulness to get the mind on the right course and then, once it’s on that course, we want it to stay on that course so we don’t forget. As for the things we cling to that change, we can cling to the path. There comes a point ultimately, of course, where you have to let it go. But in the beginning, in the middle, and almost to the end, you have to hold on to it. It’s going to change on you. It can change, again, in a good direction or a bad direction, so you have to be on top of things.

So you don’t just accept change. You have to use your discernment to see what kind of change is actually a positive change and which kind is a negative change. This gets back to that basic teaching that Buddha said is categorical: that skillful qualities should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. There’s a duty there. You don’t just sit there and accept both. You admit that they’re there, but you don’t just leave things there. Skillful qualities should be developed further.

As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was not resting content with his skillful qualities. When you’ve done something good, recognize it as good. Be happy that you’re making progress and then continue to make progress even further.

As for the qualities in the mind that are not skillful, you want to drop them as soon as you see them. Don’t let them take hold. If they have taken hold, do your best to pry them loose. This way, you have the right attitude toward change. It’s not simplistic; it’s not naive. It’s the attitude of an awakened person. If we want to gain awakening ourselves, we have to adopt these attitudes as well.