All about Acceptance

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

When the Dhamma gets sound-bitten, one of the most common bites is that the Buddha’s teachings are all about acceptance. Depending on the person biting off that piece of the Dhamma, this can mean any number of things. One common denominator among Buddhist teachers is the idea that we have to accept the existence of unskillful qualities in our minds if we want to overcome them. In this case, acceptance means the opposite of denial. And there’s nothing controversial about this point.

But some teachers take the idea of acceptance much further. For them, it means adopting a non-judging attitude. They go on to say that we suffer because we don’t accept ourselves, others, or the world around us, but we can end our sufferings by learning to embrace reality in its totality with deep, non-judging affirmation.

So it can come as a surprise to look into the Pali Canon—the oldest extant record of the Buddha’s teachings—and to find that, aside from accepting invitations, the Buddha mentions the word accept (adhivāseti) in only three contexts:

But even in these three cases, the Buddha and his disciples don’t counsel mere acceptance. They also recommend tools for minimizing the suffering that can come from these facts.

Even more important, there’s a very large range of things that the Buddha says not to accept, an area directly related to one of his most categorical teachings: the need to abandon unskillful mind states. As he says, if any of these mind states should arise, you should not accept it, and instead should “abandon it, destroy it, dispel it, & wipe it out of existence” (MN 2).

Equally important, we have to note the Buddha never uses the words acceptance or non-acceptance in connection with the area where they’re most commonly used by many Buddhist teachers at present: accepting yourself, accepting other people, or accepting the world at large.

So the idea of acceptance played a fairly limited role in the early teachings, circumscribed by the strong directives on what not to accept and the areas where the issue of acceptance or non-acceptance plays no role at all.

This means that there’s a huge contrast between the early and modern teachings on the role of acceptance. Part of this contrast comes from the fact that the word acceptance means one thing in the modern context and something else in the Canon. The modern idea of acceptance carries two clusters of meanings, centered on the opposite of denial on the one hand and the opposite of rejection on the other. This second cluster of meanings covers a wide range, from an attitude of non-judging and non-contention to one of actively embracing. This wide range can sometimes lead to confusion, as when a person talking can mean one thing by the word acceptance, but a person listening hears something else.

In the Canon, though, acceptance covers a narrower range: tolerating. This means that the most fruitful way to compare modern ideas of acceptance with those in the Canon is to see how the Canon uses a different vocabulary to treat the issues covered by the modern idea of acceptance. That way, we can see to what extent the modern sense of the word is in harmony with what the Canon teaches, and whether it adds something new and potentially useful to what might be lacking in the early teachings.

The best way to answer this question is to look in more detail at:

When we answer these questions, we can decide if the Buddha would have accepted the modern concept of acceptance as a useful addition to his vocabulary and to the strategies in his repertoire, or if he would have rejected it. Having settled these issues, we can then look more clearly at what his own teachings on acceptance have to offer us.

Part One : Global Acceptance

We have to note at the outset that not all the modern teachers who advocate acceptance as a central Buddhist teaching are equally global in their claims. Most will admit that acceptance, meaning non-denial, is at most a first step in dealing with the unskillful behavior that leads to suffering: You have to accept the fact that you’re acting or thinking unskillfully before you can work to abandon that unskillful behavior. Others, though, advocate acceptance in a more global and all-encompassing way, claiming that acceptance is the central Buddhist teaching, that—in and of itself—it strikes at the root of the cause of suffering and is the main tool for bringing suffering to an end. These more global claims are the ones we’ll focus on first.

There are two major ways in which these claims are made. Both see that the primary cause of suffering lies in reactivity toward negative self-judgment. They differ in how they explain their approaches in Buddhist-sounding terms.

1) The first approach draws on the idea that, by nature, we’re interconnected with all of reality, and that we suffer when we feel cut off from that interconnectedness. Why do we feel cut off? Because we feel cut off from parts of ourselves, parts over which we feel ashamed, to the point of denying that they even exist. We’re afraid that if we acknowledge them, to say nothing of embracing them, we’ll feel unworthy of love. And why is that? Because we engage in negative reactive self-judgments. These then cause us to be negative about the world as well, cutting ourselves off from it.

Acceptance solves this problem by embracing our shortcomings, admitting their existence without judging them and affirming they don’t diminish our self worth. Embracing our inner wholeness in this way allows us to find an even more expansive wholeness in embracing the world at large.

2) The second approach draws on the idea that conditioned reality is by nature impermanent, stressful, and not fully under our control. This means that we can’t find perfection in it, either because (a) conditioned things are inherently imperfect, (b) we can’t influence present-moment conditions anyway, in that they’re already fully determined by past causes and conditions, or (c) both. We, however, lose sight of these facts and try to find happiness and perfection in those realities. In doing so, we assume a contentious attitude toward conditions, demanding from them something they cannot provide. This causes us to suffer because we can never achieve our ideals for happiness and perfection. Why does this make us suffer? Because we judge ourselves to be failures. These negative self-judgments are then compounded when we reactively judge ourselves negatively for being so negative and reactive.

Here, acceptance solves this problem by affirming that our ideals are unrealistic, and that imperfections in our lives are not our fault. This allows us to rest at peace with our imperfections and those of others, greeting the world in a non-contentious way, content with whatever imperfect happiness it has to offer.

The means for nurturing acceptance in all of these instances is said to be mindfulness, which is explained in many ways. In some cases, it’s defined as an unresisting openness to the flow of phenomena—kind, non-contentious, and non-reactive. In others, it’s defined as unconditioned intuitive awareness of the present, a reality that places no conditions on anything that it knows, and that doesn’t have to be developed but always and already simply is. In all cases, though, a defining feature of mindfulness is that it doesn’t pass judgment on the things it’s aware of, but simply accepts them for what they are.

These explanations sound Buddhist because they use terminology made popular by Buddhist teachers, medieval and modern. Actually, though, they have very little to do with what the Canon tells us about what the Buddha taught.

With regard to the first approach, the Buddha never extols interconnectedness. The closest he comes to the idea of interconnectedness is in his teaching on dependent co-arising, which deals, not with our connections to one another, but with the connections among events in the mind as it processes and shapes experience. And he never suggests that these connections should be embraced. In fact, quite the opposite: He saw interdependent phenomena as inherently unstable, and thus the source of suffering rather than a consoling sense of wholeness. So embracing your imperfections, even if it makes you feel more connected with others, won’t put an end to your suffering.

With regard to the second approach, the Buddha did state that unconditioned happiness can’t be found in conditioned realities, but he also affirmed that conditioned realities can be mastered to form a path that leads to the unconditioned happiness of unbinding, or nibbāna. In other words, he was less interested in what conditions are, and more interested in how they can be made to function so as to lead to the unconditioned. So the path of wisdom doesn’t consist of accepting whatever limited happiness can be found within the confines of conditions. It consists of mastering conditions as a path to the unlimited happiness that lies beyond them.

As for the idea that the present moment is entirely determined by past causes and conditions, the Buddha went out of his way to attack this idea in no uncertain terms (AN 3:62; AN 3:101; MN 101). If the present moment were totally pre-determined, he said, there would be no way to practice for the complete ending of suffering and stress. Even though past actions play a role in influencing the present moment, our present-moment choices and intentions play a larger role in shaping those influences into what we actually do and experience in the present. So instead of denying the possibility of choice in the present moment, we should instead learn how to realize its full potential more skillfully.

And as for mindfulness, the Buddha never defined it as an accepting, non-judging awareness. He defined it as a faculty of active memory and compared it to a gatekeeper to a frontier fortress, wise in recognizing who’s an enemy and who’s a foe, judging who to let into the fortress and who to keep out (SN 48:10; AN 7:64). The purpose of mindfulness is not simply to be open, without resistance, to the flow of phenomena. Instead, it allows you to recognize and judge skillful and unskillful qualities as they arise in the mind, and to remember how to abandon unskillful qualities and to develop and maintain skillful ones for the sake of developing all the factors of the path (MN 117; AN 4:245).

And it’s not unconditioned. Mindfulness, as part of the path, is something to be developed. Present-moment awareness isn’t unconditioned, either. It’s simply part of the aggregate of consciousness, which, like all aggregates, is conditioned by the aggregate of fabrication and by the objects of which it’s aware, which can include the perception of infinite consciousness itself (MN 38; MN 52; SN 22:79; SN 35:93).

What the advocates of global acceptance generally describe as mindfulness corresponds to the Canon’s definition, not of mindfulness, but of equanimity. And although the Buddha does note that some causes of suffering will disappear when you look on them with equanimity, there are others that won’t. Those require a more concerted effort—what he calls the exertion of a fabrication—to create the conditions in the mind that will allow you to let them go through dispassion (MN 101). Now, even equanimity is a fabricated mind state, which means that when the Buddha contrasts equanimity to the exertion of a fabrication, he’s apparently referring to cases where the exertion required to fabricate equanimity isn’t conscious. This further means that the ability to get rid of the causes of suffering always requires the conditioned activity of fabrication to at least some extent.

So, although those who recommend global acceptance clothe their ideas in what sounds like Buddhist rhetoric, their rhetoric actually deviates from what the Buddha taught. When it’s stripped off, there’s not much left: just the idea that people suffer because of negative self-judgments. Compared to the way the Buddha described the sufferings he saw in the world, this analysis of the problem of suffering seems pretty shallow and lame. When, in the second watch of the night of his awakening, the Buddha saw the beings of the cosmos dying and being reborn, the lowest level of the cosmos wasn’t that of human beings suffering from negative self-judgments. It was deep, horrendous levels of hell that lasted for many eons (MN 4). When, soon after his awakening, he surveyed the world, he wasn’t struck by the number of people with wounded self-image who were blaming themselves for being failures. Instead, he saw the beings of the world “burning with the many fevers and aflame with the many fires born of passion, aversion, and delusion” (Ud 3:10). His response to seeing beings in hell and on fire wasn’t to accept them. It was to have goodwill and compassion for them. He decided to teach so that the beings of the world would know how to escape from hell and to put those fires out. Suffering, he saw, was caused by passion and desire in all forms, and not just shame and fear of being judged. To put an end to all varieties of suffering would be a far-reaching and radical task.

Because beings suffered from their own actions, his teachings had to focus on how his listeners could act skillfully, creating the causes for happiness, so that they could actually bring their sufferings to an end. This is why goodwill, in the context of the power of kamma, is not the same as non-judging acceptance. To give full expression to his goodwill, the Buddha had to give his students clear standards for judging which actions should and shouldn’t be done (AN 3:62).

So the idea that global acceptance of oneself and others would count as the central Buddhist teaching pales in comparison to the mission the Buddha set for himself in teaching the Dhamma and, in the course of his lifetime, fulfilled.

On Self-acceptance

The question remains, though, that even though global acceptance doesn’t represent the heart of the Buddha’s teachings, isn’t there at least some role for self-acceptance in the practice of taking those teachings on? In other words, would the Buddha have judged modern ideas of self-acceptance to be a useful addition to his own conception of acceptance?

To answer these questions, we have to remember two points we’ve already made.

The first point is one we just mentioned: the Buddha’s realization that genuine goodwill for others means teaching them how to judge their actions so that they can recognize their unskillful actions as mistakes and learn not to repeat them. This means that goodwill for yourself carries the same implication: You have to learn how to be skillful in judging your actions. As the Buddha said, you should be your own prosecutor and cross-examiner, pointing out your faults so that you can learn from them (Dhp 379).

An important feature of this examination is that you pass judgment, not on yourself as a person, but on the actions you choose to do. As the Canon notes, the ideas “I am good” and “I am bad” are craving verbalizations that ensnare people (AN 4:199). These ideas are best abandoned so that they don’t interfere with seeing that goodness and badness lie in specific acts of intention, and not in your very being, where they would be harder to train. You accept agency, but you judge, not the agent, but the acts the agent does.

Now, the Buddha wouldn’t have you stop simply with passing judgment on your actions. He also taught how to use those judgments to avoid repeating any mistakes you’ve made: to recognize that the action was wrong, to be ashamed of it—in the healthy sense of not being shameless—to realize that it was beneath you, and to desire not to repeat it. You talk it over with someone more advanced on the path, and then you spread thoughts of goodwill for all beings. You extend goodwill to yourself to keep from being crippled with remorse and to remember what goodwill for yourself means: that you be firm in your determination to learn from your mistakes and not to do harm. You extend goodwill to all others to keep that determination in mind in your dealings with everyone (MN 61; SN 42:8).

On the other hand, when you see that your actions haven’t caused harm, you should take joy in that fact and determine to keep on training. In other words, you find happiness in being harmless, but you don’t rest satisfied with your skills until you’ve completed the path to the end of suffering (MN 61; AN 2:5). In fact, you take joy in not resting satisfied (AN 6:78). That’s when your goodwill for yourself and others is truly wise.

Now, it’s obvious that this approach to the practice involves that you not deny your past failings. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to learn from them. At the same time, you don’t cripple yourself with the thought that you don’t deserve to follow the path to true happiness. So on these points, the Buddha’s approach is in line with that of modern self-acceptance.

But this is where a second point we’ve already made becomes relevant: the fact that the modern idea of acceptance carries so many meanings that it obscures the distinctions that Buddha made in his understanding of what goodwill implies. If we try to apply the modern approach to self-acceptance to the practice, it could actually get in the way of following through with his instructions.

So, instead of teaching self-acceptance to his listeners, the Buddha had them focus more on the goal that could be attained—and the dangers that could be avoided—by taking on the path. Instead of having them focus on the past, he had them focus on what they could do right now for the sake of a bright future, encouraging their fighting spirit to be up for the challenge. This approach requires that they develop goodwill for themselves, and that an important part of that goodwill is learning to judge their actions as skillful or unskillful. To try to add the vocabulary of modern self-acceptance to the Buddha’s vocabulary of goodwill and skillful action would simply muddy the waters with imprecise concepts, and in some cases—as in extolling a non-judging, non-resistant, non-contentious state of mind—actually get in the way.

On Accepting Others

The other side of modern ideas of acceptance deals with offering acceptance for all. Here again, there is some overlap between modern ideas and the Buddha’s recommendations for how to treat others, but there are also areas where the two approaches diverge, and where his vocabulary for dealing with the subtleties of this issue is more useful and precise.

The overlap is in the area of the general attitude you should have toward everyone. The Buddha advocates developing a heart and a mind of goodwill toward all, wishing that they “be free from animosity, free from oppression, free from trouble, and may they look after themselves with ease” (AN 10:165). He recommended cultivating not only the wish that beings be happy, but also the wish that they create, through their own actions, the causes for happiness. For example, he suggested thoughts like these:

May all beings be happy at heart.
Let no one deceive another
or despise anyone anywhere,
or, through anger or resistance-perception,
wish for another to suffer. — Sn 1:8

Yet even though the Buddha himself extended unlimited goodwill to all, there were some limits on who he would accept to teach. Here again, the relationship between goodwill on the one hand and the need to judge actions on the other comes in.

We can assume that everyone the Buddha taught had bad kamma in their past to at least some extent. The lepers (Ud 5:3); the outcastes (Thag 12:2); Aṅgulimāla, the mass murderer (MN 86); and King Ajātasattu, the patricide (DN 2) are just a few of the most obvious examples. The question of whether they deserved to suffer from their past actions was, for him, a non-issue. His purpose was to help people change their actions to become more skillful, regardless of how badly they had acted in the past. If their present kamma was such that they genuinely desired to end their suffering, he was willing to teach them. By focusing on that desire—and not on who they were or had been—he was teaching them to train their focus there, too.

But if people were not willing to accept his advice, he wouldn’t even discuss Dhamma with them (MN 18; Sn 4:8). If a deceitful person came into the monkhood, he would have him expelled (Ud 5:5). If a student didn’t respond either to gentle or to harsh training, he would “kill” him, in the sense that he would stop training him (AN 4:111).

So the Buddha didn’t practice blanket acceptance for everyone he met.

And he taught his students that even though they should extend goodwill to all, they, too, shouldn’t accept everyone as friends. Goodwill for others doesn’t mean sacrificing goodwill for yourself. You should be careful to accept as your close friends only those people who will have a good influence on you.

This point is so important that when the Buddha listed the steps for progressing in the Dhamma, he would often begin the list with the act of looking for friends of the right kind (MN 95; AN 9:1; AN 10:61). As he saw in the second knowledge on the night of his awakening, your choice of friends influences your views and actions, leading potentially to rebirth on either the highest or the lowest realms of the cosmos.

He advocated friends of two types: those who were loyal—who had your well-being at heart—and those who were admirable, people of integrity who set good examples for you to follow.

Loyal friends he defined as having four characteristics: They’re helpful, they share in your sorrows and joys, they point you to activities that will be for your benefit, and they treat you with kindness. Friends like this should be cherished in the way that a mother would cherish her only child.

Disloyal friends are those who make friends in order to cheat them, who are good only in word, who flatter and cajole, and who are companions in ruinous activities, such as gambling and drinking. Friends of this sort are actually enemies, and should be avoided like a dangerous road (DN 31).

Admirable friends are marked by four qualities: conviction (in the Buddha’s awakening), virtue, generosity, and discernment. To enter into an admirable friendship means not only looking for friends of this sort but also trying to emulate their good qualities, so that you can become an admirable friend to yourself and to others as well (AN 8:54). A friendship of this sort, the Buddha said, is the most important external aid in gaining the first level of awakening (Iti 17).

The Buddha also recommended being very careful in choosing a teacher, which he treated as an aspect of choosing admirable friends. He recommended devoting time to noticing if the teacher would advise people to do things that were not in their best interest, or if he or she would claim to know things he or she didn’t know. In other words, you had to check to see if the teacher was compassionate and truthful (MN 95). You also had to take time and be observant to notice if the teacher was virtuous, pure, and endowed with endurance and discernment (Ud 6:2). And to be a judge of a teacher’s integrity, you had to have some integrity yourself (MN 110).

So the Buddha—by his example and by his words—didn’t recommend a blanket non-judging acceptance of others. He made a clear distinction between friendliness as an attitude to be cultivated in all cases, and specific friendships that should be cultivated or allowed to end. A similar distinction applied to a teacher’s attitude in accepting the responsibility of taking on a student.

To keep this distinction clear, it would be a mistake to characterize his attitude toward others as one of all-around acceptance. His goodwill required that he be selective in who he accepted to teach. He didn’t want to waste time by accepting all comers. That way, he could focus on accepting as students those he could actually help. As the standard description of his qualities states, he was the unexcelled trainer, not of everyone, but of those fit to be tamed (SN 11:3). And if, out of goodwill for yourself, you aspire to be fit to be tamed, you should be equally judicious in your choice of friends.

Part Two : The Buddha’s Acceptance

This leaves us with two questions: If the Buddha wouldn’t have found the modern concept of acceptance useful in his teaching, where did he find the words acceptance and non-acceptance useful? And how would he advise you to treat the things you should and shouldn’t accept?

As we noted, the Buddha uses the word acceptance to mean tolerating. When he advises acceptance, it’s to show you how not to suffer from things over whose existence you don’t have total control. When he advises non-acceptance, it’s to show you how not to suffer from things over which you do have some control.

So his use of these concepts is another part of his larger strategy in teaching how to extend goodwill to yourself in the context of the principles of skillful kamma. This strategy is based on two points that we’ve already mentioned. The first explains why this strategy can possibly work; the second explains how it’s done.

1) Your experience of the present moment is not totally determined by your past kamma. It’s also shaped by present kamma, which is potentially free to fashion the raw material coming from past kamma in skillful or unskillful ways.

2) The causes of suffering come in two sorts: those that go away when you simply look at them with equanimity, and those that go away only when you make an effort to abandon them. This effort the Buddha described as “exerting a fabrication,” and it refers to three types of fabrication: bodily, verbal, and mental.

As we’ve already noted, even the act of looking on with equanimity is a fabricated activity, which means that every instance of abandoning a cause of suffering will require fabrication to at least some extent.

These two points—the fact that the present moment is partly shaped by present kamma and the fact that the causes of suffering require the exertion of fabrications, conscious or not—are related in the sense that the three types of fabrication are the present-moment kamma that shapes, from the results of past kamma, your experience of the present moment, in the same way that a cook prepares raw ingredients to make a meal.

The Buddha teaches skillful versions of these cooking skills to help make sure that you don’t suffer even from past bad kamma, but their impact doesn’t end there. The fact that you’re not suffering puts you in a better position to clearly see the negative situation in which you find yourself and to think of actions that would change it in a genuinely beneficial way.

One more point: There’s a discourse—AN 3:101—in which the Buddha lists the ways in which you can minimize the bad impact of past unskillful actions on the present moment. All of his specific instructions scattered throughout the discourses for how not to suffer from the things he has you accept fall under the general instructions given in that discourse:

The image the Buddha gives for this expansive mind state is of a broad river as opposed to a small cup of water. If you put a large salt crystal into the small cup of water, you can’t drink the water because it’s too salty. But if you put the same salt crystal into a large, clean river, the water would still be fit to drink. In the same way, when you follow the Buddha’s instructions for dealing with the things you have to accept, your mind becomes so expansive that the difficulties of life seem small in comparison.

This is a good perception to keep in mind.

The Nature of Things

In all the cases where the Buddha advises acceptance, he has you start with a perception of reality: This is the nature of things.

It’s the nature of human speech that people will say things that are timely or untimely, true or false, affectionate or harsh, beneficial or unbeneficial, spoken out of goodwill or inner hate.

It’s the nature of the body that it’ll have pains and be exposed to physical attacks.

It’s the nature of everything that is born to die.

The purpose of these reflections is to remind you that when you encounter these things, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. The universe isn’t dumping on you alone. Everyone is subject to these facts of the human realm. That thought should get you out of the confining narrative of your own suffering and inspire some broader compassion in you, as you reflect on the sufferings of all the beings all over the world who are subject to the same kinds of things. And because these things are ordinary, if you’re exposed to untimely, false, unfriendly speech or to physical attacks, it doesn’t give you extraordinary rights to break the precepts in retaliation. It’s precisely in cases like this that you should hold to the precepts as your only trustworthy guidelines for avoiding suffering.

Once you’ve accepted these general principles, you can move on to the specifics for how to deal with the various instances of what you should accept.

Unwelcome Speech

If you’re subjected to what the Buddha calls unwelcome speech, the Canon recommends depersonalizing it with the following reflection: “A painful feeling, born of ear-contact, has arisen within me. And that is dependent, not independent. Dependent on what? Dependent on contact” (MN 28). The implication here is that you should leave it at the contact at the ear, let it end when the contact ends, and not to drag it in to reverberate in your mind. This makes sense, but how many times have you ever thought in that way? And what gets in the way of thinking that way? The unskillful verbal and mental fabrications that spring up in response to the contact—thoughts like: “Why is she treating me with such disrespect?” “Doesn’t he appreciate all that I’ve done for him?”

This is one of the reasons why we try to develop mindfulness, which, as we’ve noted, is the ability to keep things in mind. In this case, you try to keep in mind the perception that if you’re feeling oppressed by someone else’s words, it’s because you’ve dragged them into your mind when you could have just dropped them at the ear. To see yourself as responsible here isn’t meant to lay blame on you. It simply means that you can change the situation: If you let things stop at the contact, you can stop suffering. That’s an empowering perception.

At the same time, you have to bring goodwill to the situation in a way that makes you strong. This, too, will require fostering some skillful perceptions. If someone harasses you with his or her speech, you can think of your goodwill as being as large as the Earth. The person harassing you is like a puny man who comes along with a hoe and a basket with the aim of making the Earth be without earth. He digs here and digs there, spits here and spits there, urinates here and urinates there, saying, “Be without earth, be without earth.” But of course, his efforts seem laughable because the Earth is so immense.

The Buddha also recommends perceiving your goodwill as large and cool, like the River Ganges. If someone were to come along with a torch to set it on fire, he wouldn’t succeed. Or you can perceive your goodwill as being like space: If people were to try to write words on space, there would be nothing for their words to stick to. You want to think of your awareness as being cool and unflammable, as offering no surface onto which anything can stick, in just the same way (MN 21).

So even though we have to accept the fact that unwelcome speech will be directed at us, we can perceive the situation in such a way that we don’t put ourselves in the line of fire. We won’t have to suffer from it. And when you’re not causing yourself pain over that person’s words, you’re less likely to want to retaliate and cause pain to that person. You can think more clearly about the most appropriate way to respond to the situation: whatever will lead to true well-being in the long term.

Physical Pain

As for physical pain, the Buddha says that it’s perfectly fine to use medical treatments to deal with it, but he also notes that there are plenty of cases where the pain won’t respond (AN 3:22). In any event, the aim when confronted with pain, even when it remains in the body, is to make sure that it doesn’t invade and remain in the mind (MN 36).

Now, the Buddha rarely talks specifically on the topic of how to endure pain. In fact, most of his recommendations on dealing with pain come in his discussions of feelings in general. This may be because if you don’t understand feelings in all their forms—pleasant, painful, and neutral—you’ll open the door to let pleasures invade your mind, leaving the door open for pains to invade as well.

One perception the Buddha recommends is to perceive feelings as like the bubbles that appear on the surface of a body of water when it rains (SN 22:95). They come and go in a flash. In the same way, when you’re faced with an ongoing pain, you should see it not as a solid block of pain, but as discrete moments of pain arising and passing away. Past bubbles are gone, future bubbles haven’t happened yet. There are just the ephemeral bubbles disappearing even as they appear in the present. This perception makes the pain much easier to take.

Similarly, when you focus on the topic of feeling while doing breath meditation, you should focus on giving rise to feelings of refreshment and pleasure, to notice how feelings and perceptions play a role in shaping the mind, and then cultivate feelings and perceptions that have a calming effect on the mind (MN 118). Applied specifically to feelings of pain, this means that you first look for parts of the body that you can make comfortable and refreshing by the way you breathe, and then, coming from a position of strength, you can investigate the perceptions you have around the pain, trying to find ones that have a calming effect.

Here the Buddha offers a perception to apply to perceptions themselves: They’re like mirages, without any substance (SN 22:95). This thought encourages you to let go of any perceptions that aggravate the pain, no matter how true they may seem, to replace them with perceptions that are equally true but have a better effect on the mind.

Over the centuries, Buddhist practice traditions have taken the hints provided by these instructions to develop further perceptions and thought fabrications as techniques for dealing with pain. Some examples include: If the mind is weighed down by thoughts of how long the pain has already lasted—and how much longer it may continue to last—remind yourself that past pain is gone, future pain hasn’t yet arrived, so pay attention only to the pain in the present. If you’re able to see the pain as discrete moments, ask yourself: Are those moments coming at you, or are they going away from you even as they appear?

It’s in ways like this that you can take the Buddha’s general instructions on feelings and use your ingenuity in applying them to the experience of pain in such a way that the mind doesn’t have to suffer from it.

If you can train your mind so that pain can’t invade it or remain, you can approach the physical dangers of the world with a lot less fear. There’s even a passage in the suttas where a monk reflects in a way that shows how acceptance of pain, combined with the proper mental skills, can lead to fearlessness:

If malicious people harass or beat you, the Buddha would expand on the above instructions to remind you that you should extend goodwill to those people so that you don’t drag your own mind down with thoughts of rage and revenge. Although he allows his monks to defend themselves when attacked, their acts of self-defense have to be measured, never aiming at breaking the precept against killing. Even then, though, you should have goodwill for your attackers.

Here the Buddha provides another perception: Even if bandits were to saw you into little pieces with a two-handled saw, you should develop thoughts of goodwill, starting with them, and then extending from them to infuse the entire cosmos. You may have to lose this body, but you can still protect and lift the quality of your mind. That’s where your true wealth lies (MN 21).

This, by the way, is the meaning of the Buddha’s image comparing universal goodwill to a mother’s attitude toward her only child. He’s not saying that you should love all beings as a mother would love her child. That’s impossible. He’s saying that you should protect your goodwill as a mother would protect her only child, even if it meant risking her life (Sn 1:8). Better to lose your life than to lose your goodwill.

Loss

As for the grief that comes from losing a loved one: When the Buddha tells you to reflect on the fact that all those who are born will have to die, he does it not only to lessen the sense that the universe is dumping on you alone. He also wants you to open your heart to feel compassion for all those who have been suffering in this way and who will continue to do so as long as birth keeps happening. That thought helps to take the “me and mine” out of the grief, which the Canon identifies as one of the major sources of suffering in your sense of loss: the hurt that comes when you focus on the sense that a part of yourself has been ripped away (SN 21:2).

However, the Buddha does allow room for recognizing the particulars of your suffering. He says that as long as you see the benefit of “eulogies, chants, good sayings, donations, and family customs,” to honor the dead and to show the living that the goodness of those who have passed away is deeply appreciated, you should follow those customs diligently.

But then you have to accept the fact that you still have work to do, to attain whatever aims you may have in terms of the world or the Dhamma. Then you focus on returning to that work (AN 5:49). This reflection is aimed at counteracting one of the most debilitating aspects of grief: the sense that, with the loss of a loved one, life has lost its meaning. You should reflect that as long as you’re still breathing, there’s still a lot of good you can do, especially in training your mind. As the Buddha notes, if you take seriously the fact that—no matter where you go in the cosmos—death and separation won’t stop until you’ve uprooted the sources of birth in the mind, you’ll make it your aim to give rise to the path to the end of suffering (AN 5:57). Life needs a purpose, and in this way you give yourself a good purpose for however much life is left in you.

The Mind Like a River

It’s easy to see that in all the cases where the Buddha encourages you to practice acceptance, he doesn’t leave you to suffer from outrageous misfortunes. He has you develop your discernment to keep your situation in the proper perspective, and to foster perceptions and ways of talking to yourself that save your mind from being overcome by pleasure or pain. You develop your virtue to make sure that you don’t respond to unvirtuous people in unvirtuous ways. And you expand your mind with the brahma-vihāras, seeing things in the context of the cosmos as a whole, so that the difficulties of life seem small in comparison. You make your mind like a broad, clear river: You accept the salt of your past kamma, but you pay more attention to expanding the river, developing the present kamma that, as we noted above, protects you from having to suffer in the here-and-now.

What Not to Accept

As for what not to accept: It’s because of the power of present kamma that the Buddha trains you not to accept any unskillful states that arise in the mind. While it’s good to be able to protect yourself from the ravages of past bad kamma, it’s better to focus on not creating any new bad kamma to begin with. That helps free the mind to work more directly on training itself to put an end to suffering entirely.

Here again, goodwill for yourself—and for others—requires that you learn how to judge your actions as skillful or unskillful as quickly and effectively as you can.

When the Buddha discusses what not to accept, he covers the whole range of any unskillful fabrications arising in the present, but he focuses attention on three: thoughts of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. These thoughts he labels as wrong resolves in that they directly get in the way of the practice of right concentration (MN 2; SN 45:8).

He has you fight these thoughts off in two ways. The first is through developing their opposite attitudes: resolve on renunciation, goodwill, and harmlessness (or compassion). You do that by engaging in verbal fabrication—the way you talk to yourself—to convince yourself of the value of these positive attitudes in comparison to the drawbacks of their negative counterparts. By focusing on the positive attitudes, you make it easier for the mind to be at peace with itself and to settle into the pleasure and clarity of good, strong states of mental stability.

Then, building on that clarity and stability, you can train yourself to gain freedom from unskillful mind states, not just through restraining them, but also, and more importantly, through understanding them. Here the Buddha provides a five-step framework for actively uprooting any attraction you might have for them.

In the first two steps, you try to see, when they arise, what other factors in the mind cause them to arise; then you try to see how, when those factors in the mind pass away, these unskillful attitudes pass away, too. This teaches you many lessons. Instead of focusing on the external triggers for thoughts, say, of lust or ill will, you look for the triggers in the mind. The mind is not a passive, innocent child, minding its own business until an attractive body or malicious gossip outside provokes it. It’s usually actively out looking for trouble on its own. When you try to detect what the Buddha calls the origination of these mind states inside, you turn your gaze inward and begin to get a sense of what drives the mind to keep prowling around outside.

Trying to detect how these unskillful mind states pass away helps you separate yourself from them. The fact that you can see them passing away means they’re not you. If they were you, you’d pass away along with them. But you don’t. Seeing this is helpful in two ways.

First, you realize that in passing judgment on them, you’re not passing judgment on yourself as a person. The fact that you can see they’re unskillful is a sign that at least part of your mind is above them.

Also, seeing them pass away shows you that they’re not as monolithic or powerful as they sometimes seem. You’re not doomed to keep falling for them. They may tell you that if you don’t give in to them, they’ll just build and build until you’re ready to explode. But when you see them come and go, you realize that the idea of their steadily growing intensity is a ruse based simply on the fact that you’ve been playing along with them—through the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions and feelings you focus on. If you’re really intent on gaining freedom from unskillful states, you’re free to fabricate the present moment in other ways.

These first two steps focus on seeing the reality of these mind states: how, why, and when they’re actually fabricated. These steps depend on the stability and clarity of concentration for you to be able to detect these things.

The next two steps focus on their value. On the one hand, you look for the allure or gratification of these mind states: What does the mind—or what do your many minds—find appealing about them? On the other hand, you look for their drawbacks: What damage do they do to your long-term well-being and happiness when you give in to them?

Both of these steps require a grounding in the well-being that comes from concentration. When you’re coming from a state of steady pleasure and refreshment, you’re less likely to lie to yourself about the value of unskillful mind states, hiding their actual allure or underestimating their actual drawbacks.

It’s in the context of contemplating drawbacks that the Buddha has you apply the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. These perceptions are meant to emphasize the fact that, whatever the allure of unskillful mind states, that allure is undependable: quick to pass away, turning rapidly from pleasure to stress, and ultimately lying beyond your control.

Then you can compare these drawbacks with the undying happiness the Buddha promises in the truth of the cessation of stress. When you do that, your sense that they have any value begins to fade.

On top of that, you see that you’ve been the one inflicting these drawbacks on yourself. That realization gives rise to dispassion at the thought of continuing to fabricate these states. And with that thought, you stop producing them and they fall away. This is the fifth step in the Buddha’s program: escape through dispassion. That’s when you’re finally free from that unskillful mind state. You’re that much closer to the end of suffering.

The Power of Kamma

The Buddha’s teachings on what to accept and what not to accept are best understood in light of his teachings on how to show goodwill for yourself in line with the principles of kamma. The things he would have you accept are all classed as past kamma and the results of past kamma. Those can’t be changed. What you can change is your present kamma: both in the processes of fabrication that shape the raw material provided by past kamma into an actual present-moment experience, and in your intentional responses to that experience. If you’re acting unskillfully here and now, you shouldn’t simply accept that fact, and you certainly shouldn’t refrain from passing judgment on your behavior. In passing judgment, you’re not afflicting yourself. You’re making good on your thoughts of goodwill for yourself and others as you open to the possibility that you can learn from your mistakes and can stop repeating them. Once you recognize that you’re creating unnecessary bad kamma, you can learn the skills for expanding your perspective and enlarging your heart, skills that allow you not to suffer from past bad kamma and not to respond to past bad kamma in ways that create even more bad kamma, along with more suffering, now or into the future.

You have the potential power not to suffer. Make the most of it.

And if you want a sound bite to quickly convey the Buddha’s message, that would be a good one to keep in mind.

See also: “All about Change”; “The Power of Judgment”; “An Arrow in the Heart”; “Danger Is Normal”; “Beyond All Directions”; “The Streams of Emotion”