Right Resolve & Right Effort

We’ve been talking about the Buddha’s solution to the problem of unskillful desires and conflict among desires. You bring knowledge to the process of how desires are formed and judged, then you judge them against the best possible desire, which is for the end of suffering. Any desires that help in that direction are to be encouraged and developed. Any that work against it are to be abandoned. The approach of the solution is fueled by desire itself: We have to want to do it for it to work.

Last night we talked about the noble eightfold path as a whole. It takes the pattern of how we develop and stick to desires in general and applies it to the desire for the end of suffering.

Tonight I’d like to focus on two of the factors of the path: the factors that most directly focus on the issue of desire, which are right resolve and right effort.

Right resolve is defined as making up your mind that you want to develop three types of desires: those aimed at renunciation, those aimed at non-ill will or goodwill, and those aimed at harmlessness. This means that you have to aim at abandoning the opposite kinds of desires: for sensuality, for ill will, and for harmfulness.

Right resolve sets your general policy in dealing with these desires. It builds on right view, realizing that suffering comes from cravings of three types—for sensuality, for becoming, and for non-becoming—and that right concentration is central to overcoming them. So it determines to abandon any desires that would get in the way of attaining right concentration.

Right resolve is the active side of discernment. You see that right view is not enough on its own. You also have to resolve to act on it, to change the way you think and act if you’re going to get any real benefits from it. This is a theme throughout the teachings of the Canon and the forest tradition: The wise response of the Dhamma is to want to do it. It’s like getting the recipe for a good dish. The wise approach is not to frame it and put it on the wall. You follow the recipe so that you can actually taste the food.

That’s the general policy.

Now, the specific tactics for getting into right concentration are in right effort, where you generate the desire to do four types of right effort: to prevent the arising of any unskillful qualities that haven’t yet arisen, and to abandon any unskillful qualities that have. As for skillful qualities, if they haven’t arisen yet, you try to give rise to them. When they’re already there, you try to develop them as far as they can go.

Right effort also involves learning how to motivate yourself. In other words, you give yourself reasons for wanting to do this. The Buddha recommends many reasons you might use to motivate yourself for practicing right effort: Heedfulness is the main one, realizing that you open yourself to suffering if you don’t abandon unskillful qualities of mind, but that you can avoid that suffering by developing skillful ones in their place. Compassion is another reason for wanting to practice right effort: You’ll suffer less, and the people around you will suffer less as well.

Right effort also involves knowing how much effort is right. The Canon talks about having “just right” effort. It tells a story about a monk who tried too hard. When he was a lay person, he was so delicately brought up that he had hair on the soles of his feet. He hears the Dhamma, so he decides to ordain. He does walking meditation to the point where his feet start bleeding. So he gets discouraged. He thinks, “Maybe I can disrobe and still make merit.”

This is another case where the Buddha suddenly appears in front of him. “Were you thinking of disrobing?” “Yes, sir.”

The Buddha asks him, “When you were a lay man, were you good at playing the lute?” “Yes, sir.”

“What happened when you tuned the strings too tight? Did it sound good?” “No, sir.”

“When it was too loose, did it sound right?” “No, sir.”

“Did it sound good if you tuned it just right?” “Yes, sir.”

If you’ve ever tuned a guitar, you know that first you have to tune one string so that it’s just right, and then you tune the other strings to that first string.

In the same way, the Buddha said, you have to tune the effort of your practice, starting with how much effort is just right for you right now, and then you tune the remaining of the five faculties to that. Those other faculties are conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment.

For example, suppose you come home from work and you’re tired. You don’t sit down and say, “I will not get up until I have achieved supreme awakening.” You tell yourself, “I’m going to get through the hour.” At other times, though, when you do have a lot of energy, you don’t say, “I’ll just take it easy tonight.” You give it whatever you can. So that’s one of the things that go into consideration when you figure out how much effort is just right: how much effort you’re capable of right now.

The other thing you have to take into consideration is the nature of the particular problem you’re facing. As the Buddha says, the causes of suffering come in two types. With some of them, you simply look at them and they wither away. In other words, you haven’t been paying much attention, but when you do pay attention to what’s going on in the mind, you see that this mind state is stupid and you drop it.

However, there are other defilements in the mind that, when you look at them, they stare right back. They won’t go away easily. In cases like that, the Buddha says, you have to exert a fabrication—in other words, the three types of fabrication we’ve been talking about: the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, and the perceptions and feelings you hold in mind.

Those are some of the issues of right effort.

Now, right effort and right resolve are closely related to each other, especially in the practice of right mindfulness and right concentration. Yet right resolve is one of the most under-appreciated factors of the path. So for the rest of tonight’s talk, I want to focus attention on that.

Right resolve is one of the first factors the Buddha discovered when he got on the right path. He saw that he needed to divide his thoughts into two types, based not so much on their content, but on their source and their result: where they came from in the mind and what they led him to do. On the one side, there were unskillful thoughts, the ones that came from sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness.

The Buddha said to himself, “These thoughts lead to my own affliction or to the affliction of others or to the affliction of both. They obstruct discernment, promote vexation”—trouble or frustration—“and they do not lead to unbinding.”

On the other side, there were skillful thoughts that were involved with renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness. As the Buddha observed, “These thoughts lead neither to my own affliction nor to the affliction of others nor to the affliction of both. They foster discernment, they promote lack of frustration, and they lead to unbinding.”

He gave the image of a cowherd. In South and Southeast Asia they need cowherds because people grow rice, and during the rainy season, the cows like to get into the rice fields and eat the rice. So the cowherd has to do everything he can to stop them from getting into the rice. He beats them and he yells at them. As the Buddha said, in the same way, he had to control his unskillful thoughts, beating them back, making sure that they didn’t invade and remain in his mind.

During the dry season, though, the cowherd can relax. The rice has been harvested, and there’s no danger of the cows eating the rice, so they can go pretty much anywhere they want. During this period, the cowherd can rest under a tree and just keep in mind the fact that the cows are over there someplace. In the same way, when the mind is thinking skillful thoughts—based on renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness—you can let those thoughts wander as they like.

And before we go on to the next step, I’d like to stop for a minute to give you an overview of what the Buddha is doing here. It’s basically the cost-benefit analysis we ordinarily do, but with three important added features. Remember, we discussed our ordinary cost-benefit analysis: thinking about the allure, thinking about the drawbacks, and then deciding whether the allure outweighs the drawbacks. Then we come up with a temporary decision as to what to do with that particular desire for right now.

In this passage, though, the Buddha is adding three important features.

First, he introduces two preliminary questions. He looks to see where these thoughts come from within the mind by seeing what arises with them, and to see what passes away, leading them to pass away. That’s the first additional feature.

The second is that he sets a very high standard for what kinds of thoughts or desires will be acceptable. They have to be harmless and they have to not stand in the way of unbinding.

The third is that he tries to arrive at the total ending of any passion for that kind of desire.

This approach is laid out in a more detailed program that he later recommended to his students. This program has five steps, expanding on the three-step program we usually follow.

• If any unskillful desire arises in the mind, look for, one, the origination in the mind—what event in the mind caused that desire to arise.

• Two, look for its passing away: both of the desire and of its cause. This is a test to make sure that when the cause and the actual desire arise together, it’s not just a coincidence. If the cause also disappears at the same time that the desire disappears, that shows that they are connected.

• The third step is to look for the allure.

• The fourth is to look for the drawbacks. You compare the allure to the drawbacks, holding on to that standard of harmlessness and leading to unbinding, until you see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure.

• Then the fifth step is what’s called the subduing of desire and passion. Here the value judgment is aimed at total escape from the desire, and not just at a provisional judgment. This step is also called the escape.

These five steps are derived from the four noble truths as explained in right view. The origination and passing away establish the cause of whatever is problematic. In the case of the four noble truths, that would be the second noble truth and its connection to the first. The allure is the location of the craving. That also is connected to the second noble truth. Seeing the drawbacks is a part of the fourth noble truth. And finally, the escape through dispassion is connected to the third noble truth.

I’d like to stop right here to explain dispassion. It’s not a gray, dismal state of mind. It’s more a state of maturity. You’ve grown up and are able to abandon childish games. I’ll give you two examples. One is tic-tac-toe. There comes a point where you’ve played it enough that you’ve figured it out. You know how never to lose, so it’s no longer a challenge and you’re no longer interested. Another example would be chess. You know you’ll never totally figure it out, but the lessons you learn from it about strategy are so artificial that getting any better at it would be a waste of time. It’s still a challenge, but you see that it’s not a challenge worth taking on. So you just lose interest in it.

Those are two ways in which you develop dispassion for things.

Now, more to the specifics on right resolve. The three resolves are about wanting to overcome three kinds of desire: for sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. We talked about temporarily getting past the hindrances of sensual desire and ill will yesterday morning. Here I want to look into how we can get more serious about gaining real freedom from these ways of thinking.

As you may remember, sensuality is not the same thing as sensual pleasures. It’s more the fascination of thinking about and planning sensual pleasures. The Buddha calls this delight. It’s your inner conversation or verbal fabrication, combined with mental fabrications, devoted to advertising the pleasures to yourself so that you feel good about pursuing them and will want to pursue them more. It’s because of this delight that we often blind ourselves to how foolish we can be in the pursuit of some of these pleasures and how they can actually be harmful to ourselves or to others or to both.

We often think we’re clever in our pursuit of sensual thoughts and in our striving to realize them.

Years back, I was invited to give a talk at a university in Indiana. Afterwards, the professor told me that the class that I talked to had had a discussion about what it was like to meet a monk. One of the women, a cheerleader, said she was surprised to find that I had intelligent opinions about things in general because she thought that monks would be sub-human—her point being that people who pursue sensual desires, in her eyes, were smarter than those who don’t.

Now, this sense of our being clever can take very sophisticated forms. Think about the vocabulary we have around wine and cheese, and now even chocolate. People talk about the notes and the taste of wine, the character of the wine. In America, they talk about the personality of wine. And now with chocolate, they talk about the notes you have in chocolate: notes of fruit or tobacco.

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw in The New Yorker one time.

A caveman has just received a bowl of soup from his wife. He sniffs it and says, “I’m getting notes of woolly mammoth.”

Just before I came here, I was given a chocolate bar, and the wrapper said that, sure enough, it had notes of chocolate.

A lot of this has to do with telling ourselves that we’re very sophisticated in indulging in certain sensual pleasures. But what is the pleasure? It’s simply the burst of taste on your tongue and that’s it.

You could also think about the discussions of art and music that suck you in and make more out of sounds and colors than is really there. There’s just a contact, and then it disappears. You have to work at making it stay in the mind. And for what purpose? Usually there’s a strong sense of self that feels the more sophisticated your taste, the more discriminating your palate, then the better person you are. But does a fine palate really make you better than other people? The clear fact is that this obsession with refined tastes can actually make you more conceited.

Now, some sensual pleasures are totally harmless. They’re to be judged by their effect on the mind. Among the harmless pleasures are the beauties of nature, harmony in groups of people, the pleasures of seclusion, and basic good health. Even with them, though, you have to be on your guard not to get infatuated. An example I can think of from America: We have a lot of people who we call fitness nuts. And there was a company in Salt Lake City that offered to freeze your body after you died, just in case someone would later be able to put the life back into frozen bodies some time in the future. One woman signed up. When they asked her why she had signed up, she replied, “I worked so hard to put my body in good shape. It’d be a shame to let it decompose.” That’s going too far.

Now, harmful sensual pleasures are:

As for sensuality itself, the time spent in delighting in past, present, and future pleasures is basically a waste of time. It makes it hard to get the mind into concentration because one of the prerequisites for the first jhāna is that you are secluded from sensuality. So you’ve got to learn how to develop thoughts of renunciation if you’re going to get the mind into right concentration.

You do that by applying the five-step program that the Buddha recommended. In other words, one, you start with the origination. You try to locate the spot where your craving and desire are focused. Say that you desire another person. Do you really desire the person or is it your perception of the person? Is it in an inner conversation about what you would like to do with that person or is it your perception of yourself in relationship to that person? In other words, “If I go around with this person, I’ll look kind of cool.”

When you examine this issue, you begin to realize that the craving isn’t located in the person him- or herself, it’s actually located in your mental activity. This is why personal relationships can be so fraught. You’re more interested in your perceptions than you actually are in the real person.

The second step is to see the desire pass away. You see that desire is not at all monolithic. It comes and it goes. Then it comes and goes again. Often you have to dig it up again. Even when it seems relentless, if you’re observant, you see that it has its lapses. Seeing those lapses enables you to realize that it’s not as powerful or as overwhelming as it seems. Sometimes it’ll tell you, “If you don’t give in to me now, I’m simply going to get stronger and stronger until you can’t stand it.” But if you can see that it does pass away, you realize that it’s lying to you.

The third step is to consider the allure. You try to see exactly the moment in which you tell yourself that you really want to side with the origination. The reason of the allure is often very arbitrary, fleeting, and sometimes it’s embarrassing. That’s why it’s often so hidden.

Then you look at the drawbacks of those desires. You have to work hard at maintaining those desires, and even then they’re fleeting. You often get involved in doing unskillful things to maintain the pleasures you desire. And then you have to ask yourself, “Do you ever really gain satisfaction this way?” As the Buddha said, “Even if it rained gold coins, it wouldn’t be enough for one person’s sensual desires.” Another time he said, “If you had two mountain ranges the size of the Himalayas made of solid gold, it still wouldn’t be enough for one person’s desires.”

Then you remind yourself that it’s going to keep you out of right concentration and it stands in the way of the third noble truth.

The step of looking for the drawbacks is where the Buddha has you apply the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the desire. Remember that this step is related to the fourth noble truth, aimed at attaining the third noble truth—and that it’s in the context of the third noble truth that these three perceptions actually have some power. Ordinarily, without taking the third noble truth into consideration, we’d say, “If something is inconstant, who cares? I want to get it when I can.” But in the context of the third noble truth, you say, “This is getting in the way of something more worthwhile. So something inconstant, stressful, and not-self would actually be not worth going after.”

That leads to the escape, which is the value judgment: You develop dispassion and you outgrow it. And you gain a sense of freedom when you can get past it.

Now, there’s a need for a non-sensual physical pleasure of concentration and mental pleasure of insight to compensate for letting go of sensuality. Only then can you really get past it. This is why right resolve focuses on getting you into right concentration. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow.

The second right resolve is to get past ill will, and if we discuss this now, we’re going to be here until ten o’clock. We’ll be talking about goodwill further on in the retreat, so we can skip over ill will for now.

However, let’s talk about the third right resolve: wanting to get past harmfulness. This harmfulness is a willingness to let your actions harm others or yourself, not out of ill will, but simply because you don’t care. You decide that others don’t matter, or you don’t matter, or you think that what you’re doing is serving a higher purpose. Here again, you have to use that five-step program. You start with the origination of thoughts that the suffering of other people or your suffering doesn’t matter. You have to ask yourself, “What kind of mind state does that come from? Is it because you’re lazy and apathetic? Doctrinaire? Self-righteous? Self-important?” In America, you often hear callous people saying, “These people are losers, they don’t matter.” Where does that idea come from?

Then you have to look to see, “When do these thoughts actually pass away?”

As for the allure, again: Harmfulness allows you to be lazy. Is that the allure? Is the allure in that it gives more importance to your ideals than to actual people? Is the allure in the idea that you’re above thinking about the consequences of your actions?

As for the drawbacks, there was a time when King Pasenadi was in the palace with his queen, Mallikā. In a tender moment, he turns to her and says, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” You know what he’s thinking. He wants her to say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” And if this were a Hollywood movie, that’s what she would say. But this is the Pāli Canon. You don’t get away with saying stupid things in the Pāli Canon. So she says, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself. And what about you? Is there anybody you love more than yourself?” The king has to admit that, No, there’s no one he loves more than himself. That’s the end of that scene.

So the king goes to see the Buddha and tells him what happened. The Buddha says, “You know, Mallikā is right. You can search the whole world over and you will never find anybody you love more than yourself. But at the same time, everybody else loves themselves just as fiercely.” And the conclusion the Buddha draws is interesting. It’s not that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. He actually says, “You should never harm anybody or cause them to do harm.” After all, if your happiness depends on harming others, it’s not going to last, one. And two, it’s going to be really bad kamma. Then three, if you get other people to do harmful things, they’re later going to hate you. So the conclusion is: Don’t do any harm and don’t be careless about the harm you cause.

The escape in this case would be developing compassion for yourself and others.

What you’re doing here is replacing unskillful desires with more skillful ones. You investigate the verbal and mental fabrications that go into those unskillful desires and you’re replacing them with more skillful verbal and mental fabrications. But many of our emotions and desires don’t respond just to talking. In psychotherapy, they’ve discovered that the best methods combine a talking cure with training in being sensitive to your body. In Buddhist terminology, this would involve bodily fabrications, the way you breathe, as well. That’s mastered through concentration based on breath meditation. You need to have the pleasure of concentration to change the balance of power in this cost-benefit analysis of the Buddha’s five-step program, because a state of inner well-being gives you something good with which to compare the allure of the unskillful desire.

The Buddha in many places shows the connection between right resolve and getting the mind in right concentration.

One passage comes from the sutta in which the Buddha talks about comparing himself to a cowherd.

He thought, “I could allow those skillful thoughts to wander as much as they liked.” Then he tells himself,

In other words, when you’ve trained yourself to think skillful thoughts and avoid unskillful thought, it’s much easier to drop those thoughts to get the mind into concentration.

In Majjhima 117, the Buddha talks about two levels of right resolve. There’s mundane right resolve, which we’ve been talking about so far. And then there’s transcendent or noble right resolve, which is defined as the verbal fabrications that go into bringing in the mind into the first jhāna, the first stage of right concentration.

In other words, you have to examine any unskillful desires in terms of the three fabrications. And you can develop dispassion for them through the Buddha’s five-step program. You take them apart and then you reassemble those three fabrications into skillful mental and physical states as a basis for strengthening your skillful desires and for allowing the mind to get into right concentration.

So tonight we’ve been focusing on using desire to create better mental and verbal fabrications. Tomorrow night we’ll focus on how to use desire to create a state of concentration to make skillful use of all three types of fabrication.