Heedful & Wise

The Buddha said that all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness, a sense of danger—but also a sense that there’s a way to escape danger. Now, that statement has to be qualified. You have to be heedful in a way that’s informed by right view, because there are a lot of people out there who see danger in the world but, as the Buddha pointed out, they see danger in the wrong places, and their sense of how to protect themselves from danger is also misguided.

A king came to see the Buddha one time and said he’d finally come to the realization that even if you have a big army but you act in unskillful ways in your thoughts, your words, your deeds, you’re leaving yourself unprotected. The army can’t protect you from the results that come from your own individual karma. However, if you are careful in what you do and say and think, then even if you don’t have an army, you’re safe. For the king, that was a big realization. For the Buddha, that was something he’d seen a long time ago.

It’s good for us to see the dangers of the world in the light of what he had to say about karma: Our own actions are dangerous, potentially dangerous. But if we learn how to be careful in acting in skillful ways, speaking in skillful ways, thinking in skillful ways, then we protect ourselves from danger, including outside dangers from other people—not so much what they can do to our bodies or the nasty things they can say to us. The dangers coming from them are when they get us to do things that are unskillful. So we have to protect ourselves from that.

This is why we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. Even though he said to take refuge in ourselves, still, we need guidance. We need the guidance of their example. And they show how true safety can be found.

So think of their example. The Buddha became a Buddha, not because anyone told him to or because he had a nice friendly group of people to practice with. It’s because he saw the danger in his own life, seeing that something had to be done about that, and realizing that overcoming those was nothing anybody else could do for him. He had to overcome those dangers himself.

So he learned how to be a self-starter. This is what it means to take refuge in yourself— because you’re a self-starter too. When you have the advantage of a community, take advantage of it. But when you’re away from the community, you’ve got to be your own guide. You have to be your own teacher. You have to be your own support, to learn to think in ways that are helpful in that direction. In this way, you can rely on yourself.

You keep in mind the principles that the Buddha taught and realize that no matter what the world says, you want to side with the Buddha. There was a time when one of his students, who was a stream-enterer, was asked if he had faith in the Buddha. And he replied, “Even if the whole world were against the Buddha, even if the Sangha as a whole were against the Buddha, I’d still side with the Buddha.”

He’d seen in his own mind, seen in his own heart, what the Buddha said was true. So take that as your example. And even though you may have doubts about the practice—or doubts about your ability to do the practice—remember that other people have had doubts in the past but they’ve been able to overcome them. In doing so, they found something of real value, something that really is safe—causes no harm to anybody at all—that can be found inside. So do your best to find it.