Your Responsibility

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there and then keep it there. Do what you can to maintain the sense of being with the breath all the way in, all the way out. Nobody else can do this for you. It’s something you have to do for yourself.

Ajaan Suwat, who was the founder of this monastery, would say, “With all the people there are in the world, there’s really only one person, and that’s you. You’ve got to take care of your thoughts, your words, your deeds.”

Our problem is, as the Buddha said, we tend to take on things that are not really our own duties, and we neglect things that are our own duties.

But if you want to put an end to suffering, you don’t go around looking at other people’s behavior, criticizing people’s behavior. You look at your own behavior and see what you’re doing that’s causing suffering. Try to comprehend the suffering. Abandon the cause. Develop the path so you can realize the cessation of suffering. Those are your duties. Nobody’s imposing them on you. Even the Buddha doesn’t impose them on you. But if you want to put an end to suffering, this is what you’ve got to do.

As for other things in this world, other people have to be responsible for their actions. If they’re not being responsible, you can’t step in and be responsible for them. You can try to help them see the error of their ways, but there comes a point where their choices are beyond your power to make any difference. The problem is that we make our own choices beyond our own power to make any difference. We don’t pay attention to what we’re doing.

The Buddha teaches us to be careful about our intentions, to act only on the best intentions, and then be careful about our actions. While we’re doing them, see if there’s any harm coming up. If there is, you stop. No harm, you keep on going. After you’re done, you reflect on your actions. What were the long-term consequences? If you see that you’ve caused any harm, you resolve not to make that mistake again and you go talk it over with someone who’s more knowledgeable about the path than you are.

If you don’t see any mistakes, then the Buddha said you take joy in what you’ve done. Yet at the same time, you’re not satisfied. You realize there’s more to be done. But you use that sense of joy, the sense that you’re making progress, and you use it to fuel your desire to do even better.

Someone once complained that that’s spending an awful lot of time paying attention to your actions. Well, that’s what they deserve. If you’re going to learn from them, you have to do it this way. Act only on intentions you think are going to be harmless. If you act on intentions you think are going to be harmful, you don’t learn anything.

Sometimes you unlearn what you could learn. In other words, you start denying that you had a harmful intention to begin with. If you don’t pay attention to the results of your actions while you’re doing them, thinking that you can just get by on good intentions, you don’t learn anything, either. You stay deluded. And if you don’t reflect on the results after they’re done, then you go through life creating a lot of harm and not realizing what you’ve done. Again, you don’t make any progress.

So you’ve got to pay a lot of attention to what you’re doing, saying, and thinking. This is where you are responsible. So give it your full attention.

As I said, the Buddha’s attitude towards the progress you make on the path is that you should be glad when you are making progress. But he said that the secret to his own awakening was not resting content with his skillful qualities. If there was something more to be done, he would try to do it.

So again, you’re happy in the progress you’re making, but not satisfied. You want to do more; you want to do better. This way, you’re really responsible in taking care of that one person for whom you are responsible. If everybody in the world were responsible like this, the world would be a much better place. The problem is that everybody’s running around trying to tell everybody else what to do, neglecting their own duties.

So. Be a good example to the world. Say that, “I’m going to take care of my duties and do them well, as best as I can.” When you’ve covered that, you’ve covered an awful lot. Some people say you’re looking after only yourself. But if your happiness depends on harming other people, that’s not going to be good. Your happiness has to be harmless. When your happiness is harmless, that goodness spreads around. Other people benefit from your own quest for happiness. And that’s quite something.

With most people, their quest for happiness takes a lot from other people. Other people have to suffer. But the Buddha teaches us that we can search for happiness in ways that make other people happy, too. That’s quite a gift to yourself and to the world at large.