Delighted but Not Satisfied

The Buddha says that when you look back on the good that you’ve done—in terms of being generous, observing the precepts, meditating—you should take delight in the goodness you’ve done, but you shouldn’t be satisfied. There’s always more to do.

We take delight so that we can have energy to continue improving, so that we can see that, yes, we are making progress. We’re not just a dead weight on the world. We’ve actually done good things for ourselves and good things for other people. But as long as there’s still the possibility of suffering, there’s more work to be done.

So you take energy from the goodness you’ve done and you reinvest it. This is one of Ajaan Fuang’s themes. A person who makes profit in a business transaction should learn how to reinvest it and not just eat the profits. In the same way, you get some satisfaction out of what you’ve done, but you’re not totally satisfied, not totally content. Try to figure out what more needs to be done.

Because it does happen, the Buddha said, that people do good and then they suddenly stop doing it. They change their minds, change their attitudes, develop wrong view. And that can pull them down, in spite of all the good they’ve done. So you want to have right view all the way to the end, realizing, even through your last breath, that you can still do good.

The possibility for the mind to get centered, the possibility for the mind to make sure that its intentions are right—that’s something you can do all the way. So keep on doing that all the way. That way, we can make progress. And if we have to come back, we come back with a purpose.

Most of us—most people—are born just for the sake of being born. They saw an opportunity; they went for it. But people who are wise realize that once you’re born you have to make up your mind as to what you want to do with this life, because there’s no overarching purpose for the universe. It just goes around and around and around, through lots of different feedback loops.

But if you want a purpose, the best purpose is to get out—basically, to stop feeding in this feeding chain. That requires developing all sorts of perfections: generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. Those are all things we can develop, and you can develop them all the time.

When you think in these terms, it’s not just a practice for sitting with your eyes closed. It’s a practice in all ways: developing the right attitude toward other people; developing the right attitudes toward your situation in life; looking for the opportunities to develop good qualities in your mind; seeing where you’re lacking; admitting where you’re lacking; and then working to make up the lack. That kind of life has a purpose.

Otherwise, if you’re just born for the sake of being born, well, then from there it goes to aging, and then to illness, and then to death. It doesn’t really go anywhere. But if you’re born for the purpose of the perfections, that goes someplace. It goes to a place really worth going.