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Introduction

In this short passage, the Buddha describes his sense of dismay at the violence and conflict in the world, together with his important discovery: that the only escape from violence is to remove the causes of violence from your own heart. To remove these causes, you first have to restrain yourself from engaging in violence on the external level. That helps create the proper karmic context—more peaceful and honest—for extracting the causes of violence and conflict on the internal level. In other words, you have to stop engaging in violence before you can isolate and uproot the emotions and thoughts that would make you want to engage in violence to begin with.

The following passages from the Pāli Canon explain these two levels of the practice. They are divided into eight sections.

The first two sections deal with the first, external, level of practice. Section 1 details the drawbacks of engaging in violence, focusing on the long-term and immediate harm you do to yourself if you do so. To fully understand this section, it’s good to have some background on the Buddha’s teachings on kamma (karma). A good place to start would be the short booklet, Karma Q&A.

Passage §6 in this section makes the important point that the desire for power creates a vicious circle, in which you have to treat others violently in order to gain and maintain power, and then the fact that you’ve been violent makes you unwilling to listen to teachings that point out the dangers of violence. In this way, you close yourself off from realizing the damage you’re doing, making it harder to stop causing yourself even more harm.

Section 2 focuses on what it means to practice restraint, along with the benefits that come both from exercising restraint yourself and from getting others to exercise restraint, too. One of the implications of passage §13 in this section is that, from the perspective of kamma, you do harm to yourself when you engage in violence, and you do harm to others when you get them to engage in violence. And as passages §§18–20 clearly show, the Buddha taught that restraint against killing should be exercised in all situations, without exception. In other words, there are no grounds for justifying any act of killing, no matter how badly provoked. This means that there’s no room at all in the Buddha’s teachings for a theory of “just war.” The path to put an end to suffering requires that you be willing to sacrifice many things, but not the purity of your virtue. Passage §19 makes this point clear by stating that the forms of loss usually cited as excuses for breaking the precept against killing—loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of health—are nowhere near as serious as loss of virtue and loss of right view. Passage §20 illustrates this point with one of the most dramatic stories in the Pāli Canon, in which the hero of the story succeeds in exercising restraint in a situation where many a lesser person would succumb to the desire to get revenge.

Section 3, Overcoming the Causes of Violence, introduces the second, internal, level of practice. Passage §21 lists the character traits leading to violence—desire, anger, fear, and delusion. Read together with passage §22, this list exposes another vicious circle in the practice of violence: People kill and maim out of fear of death, but then the fact that they have done something cruel makes them fear death all the more. This means that they are likely to continue engaging in even more violence because of their fear.

The next two passages in Section 3 introduce three of the basic character traits that have to be developed to break these vicious cycles by doing the inner work that eradicates the causes of violence.

The first trait is heedfulness: realizing that your actions will make the difference between suffering long-term pain and experiencing long-term pleasure. As a result, you want to be careful to avoid acting in ways that will lead to long-term pain, even if they entail pain in the short term.

The second trait is a sense of shame—not the debilitating shame that’s the opposite of pride, but the healthy shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. You want to look good in the eyes of wise people, and you would be ashamed to behave in ways that they would criticize.

The third trait is compunction, which is the opposite of apathy: the mind state in which you don’t care about the long-term. When you develop compunction, you care about your long-term happiness, and so you develop a healthy fear of the consequences of behaving in unskillful ways.

The remaining passages in Section 3 focus on how the Buddha’s values reverse the values of the world that glorify war and other violence. True victory, in his eyes and the eyes of all the wise, is to conquer your own internal unskillful qualities, rather than to conquer other people. Many of the passages in this section illustrate this principle with similes of warriors and elephants in battle, in which the truly brave warrior stands for the person who overcomes his own anger, sensuality, and lack of endurance. Genuine strength lies, not in forcing your will on others, but in using your will and intelligence to overcome your slavery to your own anger and sensuality.

The next three sections form a set, dealing with techniques to solve the problem of anger. Section 4 contains passages that suggest lines of thought that can be used to overcome anger. Of these passages, §36 is especially interesting in that it recommends using a defilement—spite—to overcome the more serious defilement of anger. Other passages then recommend developing nobler and more far-sighted lines of thought—such as goodwill, equanimity, and a contemplation of the long-term results of kamma—to overcome both anger and spite.

Section 5 introduces a character trait that’s particularly useful for overcoming anger—endurance—and suggests lines of thought for developing it. Some of these lines of thought aim at depersonalizing unpleasant experiences by (1) showing that they are perfectly normal in the human realm and (2) learning how not to embroider unpleasant experiences beyond the stage of mere sensory contact. In other words, if you can say of unpleasant words or painful sensations simply that “an unpleasant object has made contact at the senses” and leave it at that, then it’s much easier to bear than if you allow the mind to reverberate with complaints and recriminations over that contact.

Passage §41 introduces another practice that helps to develop endurance, the development of goodwill, a topic discussed in more detail in Section 6. The end of passage §41 also presents another line of thought: Given how badly human beings can treat one another, it helps to remember, when they’re unkind, that at least they are not treating you as badly as they could. Passage §45 takes this line of thought even further, showing how to think so as not to suffer when people do treat you as badly as possible.

Section 6 goes into more detail on a meditation practice that’s good for fostering endurance: the development of unlimited goodwill for all beings. As passage §46 shows, this practice is particularly useful not only to prevent yourself from treating others with violence, but also to heal the emotional scars that can come when you remember ways in which you were violent in the past.

Section 7 discusses contemplations and concentration practices useful for overcoming sensuality—our fascination with thinking and planning sensual pleasures—which is another important cause of violence. The contemplations help you to see the drawbacks of sensuality; the practice of jhāna—strong absorption in a mental state free from sensuality—helps you to find a pleasure that weakens the desire to resort to sensuality even when you see its drawbacks. Passage §58 then acts as a segue from the practice of concentration to the type of insight that puts an end to the causes for violence once and for all.

Section 8 requires the most explanation, as it deals with a subtle topic: the contemplations that put an end to papañca, the type of thinking that lies at the root of violence and all conflict.

What type of thinking is papañca? In some Dhamma circles, this term means “mental proliferation,” suggesting that it’s simply thinking run riot. In other words, the problem is that you think too much in an uncontrollable way. However, the Canon shows that the problem with papañca is not so much the amount of thinking as it is the types of perceptions and categories that inform the thinking: how you think, rather than how much you think.

Passage §65 states that the root of the categories of papañca is the perception, “I am the thinker.” This self-reflexive thought is what creates your sense of self as a being or object—which is why papañca is best translated as “objectification.” When you objectify yourself with the thought, “I am this,” a number of thought-categories grow from that thought to form the basis for how you relate to the world. These categories include the dichotomies of: being/not-being, me/not-me, mine/not-mine, doer/done-to. Also, when you identify your self with something that experiences, then based on the feelings arising from sensory contact, some feelings will seem appealing—worth getting for the self—and others will seem unappealing—worth pushing away. From this there grows desire, which comes into conflict with the desires of others who are also engaging in papañca.

This is because, once you take on the identity of a “being,” you need to feed—both physically and mentally. In fact, the need to subsist on food is the one thing that characterizes all beings (§60). As a being, your sense of who you are has to inhabit a world that can provide for the food you need. This applies both on the external, physical level and on the internal, psychological level. This is why the views and questions of objectification cover not only who you are, but also where you are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. (See passage §61.)

Externally, as a human being with human desires, you inhabit the same physical world—in the image of §1, the same puddle—as other human beings and common animals. When you think in terms of objectification and look for food in the human puddle, you inevitably run into conflict with other beings inhabiting the same puddle: those who you would like to take as food, those who would like to take you as food, and those looking for the same sort of food that you are. Thinking in terms of the categories of objectification spawns the desires that see your sources of food within that puddle as dear, and anyone who blocks those sources as not-dear. From this distinction come envy and stinginess, hostility, violence, rivalry, and ill will (§62). These attitudes, in turn, lead to the violence of “taking up rods & bladed weapons, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech” (§15).

This is how inner acts of objectification breed external contention.

(To help visualize the different ways in which the suttas describe the processes by which papañca leads to conflict and violence, Section 8 ends with a study-aid that maps out three of those descriptions.)

How can these processes be ended? Through a shift in perception, caused by the way you attend to feeling, using the categories of appropriate attention (see passage §61). As the Buddha states in passage §62, rather than viewing a feeling as an appealing or unappealing thing, you should look at it as part of a causal process: When a particular feeling is pursued, do skillful or unskillful qualities increase in the mind? If skillful qualities increase, you can pursue the feeling. If unskillful qualities increase, you shouldn’t. When comparing feelings that lead to skillful qualities, notice that those endowed with thinking (directed thought) and evaluation are less refined than those free of thinking and evaluation, as in the higher stages of mental absorption, or jhāna. When you see this, you can opt for the more refined feelings, and this cuts through the act of thinking that, according to passage §64, provides the basis for papañca.

In following this program, you avoid the notions of agent and victim, along with any self-reflexive thinking in general. There is simply the analysis of cause-effect processes. You’re still making use of dualities—distinguishing between unskillful and skillful actions, between suffering and stress on the one hand, and an end to suffering and stress on the other—but the distinction is between actions or processes, not things. In this way, your analysis avoids the type of thinking that, according to passage §62, depends on the perceptions and categories of papañca. This is how the vicious cycle in which thinking and papañca keep feeding each other is cut.

Ultimately, as you follow this program to greater and greater levels of refinement through the higher levels of mental absorption, you find less and less to relish and enjoy in the six senses and the mental processes based on them—and ultimately even in the action of mental absorption itself. With this sense of disenchantment, the processes of feeling and thought are stilled, and there’s a breakthrough to the cessation of the six sense spheres.

When these spheres cease, is there anything else left? Ven. Sāriputta, in passage §66 warns us not to ask, for to ask if there is, isn’t, both-is-and-isn’t, neither-is-nor-isn’t anything left in that dimension is to papañcize what is free from papañca. However, this dimension is not a total annihilation of experience (§67). It’s a type of experience that DN 11 calls consciousness without surface, “luminous all around, where water, earth, fire, & wind have no footing, where long/short, coarse/fine, fair/foul, name/form are all brought to a stop.” This is the fruit of the path of arahantship—a path that makes use of dualities but leads to a fruit beyond them.

It may come as cold comfort to realize that conflict can be totally overcome only with the realization of arahantship. However, as the earlier sections have shown, violence can be abandoned much earlier in the practice, and a lot of the suffering that comes from violence and conflict can be relieved by developing some very basic character traits: restraint, heedfulness, a healthy sense of shame and compunction, endurance, and goodwill. And even before you tackle papañca head-on, it’s possible to start using the approach recommended in passage §62: learning to question the ways in which you identify your “self,” and trying to view feelings not as things to consume for their own sake but as parts of a causal process affecting the qualities in the mind. In this way, the basis for papañca is gradually undercut, and there are fewer and fewer occasions for conflict. In following this path, you reap its increasing benefits—more peace, both within and without—all along the way.

For more on the topic of non-violence, see the essays, “Educating Compassion” and “Getting the Message.” On the topic of restraint, see the articles, “Trading Candy for Gold,” “Reconciliation: Right & Wrong,” “The Streams of Emotion,” and “All Winners, No Losers.” For more on the development of goodwill, see The Sublime Attitudes. For more on the topic of papañca, see the essay, “The Arrows of Thinking” and the discussion of papañca in Skill in Questions.