Goodwill Like Earth

Living with one another is difficult. As the Buddha said, it requires a lot of patience and endurance, a lot of equanimity. But at the same time, you have to maintain your goodwill and your kindness. When you do that, you benefit. You develop in these qualities and they strengthen the mind.

The image the Buddha gives is that you want your goodwill to be like earth. You want your endurance to be like earth. A little puny person comes along and digs here and digs there, spits here and spits there, urinates here, urinates there, trying to get rid of the earth. But the earth is just so much bigger. That’s the image you should have for your goodwill and your endurance.

The problem is that we tend to destroy our own endurance. A lot of it has to do with the way we talk to ourselves. When you say that you can’t stand a situation, often it’s because the way you talk about it is hard to stand, hard to bear with. So learn how to talk to yourself in new ways—that you’re here to strengthen your mind, strengthen your goodwill.

As for whatever difficulties you meet up with, well, that’s a test of how well you can develop your perfections. Because that’s what you want to take away when you go. You want to take away perfections, not the fact that you lived with a group that you liked, or that nothing disturbed you because there were no disturbing people.

If you can live with disturbing people and not be disturbed, that’s a strength. Our society doesn’t see it that way. But then again, our society has lots of wrong views about all kinds of things.

So think of your goodwill as being so large that you can conquer any attempts, either outside or inside your own mind, to tear it down. That way you benefit, and the world is more peaceful. As the Buddha said, by helping other people in this way, you provide a lot of help for yourself. You strengthen your mind so that it can face whatever even greater difficulties are going to come down the line.