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Avoid All Evil, Do Good, Purify the Mind (2 of 3)

Welcome everyone, it's nice to see you all there. I'm going to share my screen and talk a little bit about the topic for tonight. Last time, of course, we talked about avoiding evil, and tonight we're going to focus on cultivating good. It means a lot more than just doing good things in the world, as I'm sure you're well aware. It's about really embracing the good life, embracing a life that is in accordance with the Dhamma^[1], so that we can really develop our mind, our skillful actions, and our skillful speech.

This is a little snippet from Majjhima Nikaya^[2] 46, which talks about four ways of undertaking things. The part that I felt was really appropriate, just as a quote to begin with, is the Buddha contrasting the untaught ordinary person—the person who hasn't heard the Dhamma, doesn't have that kind of knowledge and guidance for their life—with the educated noble disciple. It starts out with one who hasn't seen enlightened beings or noble ones or people practicing. They don't know what practices they should cultivate and foster, and which practices they shouldn't cultivate and foster.

The Buddha contrasts the uneducated ordinary person with a noble disciple in a lot of places in the suttas^[3] in his teachings. He says they cultivate and foster practices that they should, and they don't cultivate and foster practices that they shouldn't. When they do so, unlikable, undesirable, and disagreeable things decrease, and likable, desirable, and agreeable things increase. This is something that I'm going to invite you to reflect on later. I know when I think about my own life, I can really see how, before I met up with the Dhamma, even though I was trying very hard to develop myself, live a good life, and be a good person, there was a lot of uncertainty. There were mixed messages to know what is good to cultivate and what isn't. It's really the Buddhist teachings that have helped me get clear about that. I'm just starting here with the importance of really being able to hear the Dhamma, and how lucky we all are that that's been the case.

Cultivating Good Relationships: The Sigalaka Sutta

For these two readings that I asked you to read first, we'll talk about the Sigalaka Sutta^[4] a little bit. I just highlighted a couple of pieces. If you had a chance to read the sutta, it's in the Long Discourses, the Digha Nikaya^[5]. I think it's a very sweet interaction. If you've read it, you know this young man is up early in the morning. His hair is all wet, and he's prostrating to the six directions. When the Buddha asks him about it, he says it's because his father on his deathbed said that he should do this, and so he's doing it. Like so many things in our life, I think, we may be doing them without knowing why, or we are not really clear about what the results are.

Of course, the Buddha gives him some guidance around this. You can really see that he's speaking to a young man about how to live life and what to be careful of. The first part is very much about what we were covering last time: avoiding the pitfalls and the unskillful things. Then, I pulled out parts reflecting on where the Buddha says, "If you live your life this way, if you gather friends that are really good friends." He divided them into four types: the helper, the friend in good times and bad, the counselor (the one who guides you towards good things and helps you develop in a good way), and one who's compassionate.

This is the translation that I had, giving links for SuttaCentral^[6] and Bhante Sujato's^[7] translation. The translation of Maurice Walshe^[8] is also interesting. It's helpful to kind of see both. It might be nice sometimes if you have a chance to look at that one published by Wisdom Publishing, because they use different language, and it gives you an even fuller sense of what the Buddha was trying to say in the Pali.

To really think about what it means to have good friends—friends that are the same with us whether we're going through good times or bad times. Someone who really wants to help you, someone who's really interested in our well-being, someone who really takes good care of us when we aren't able to take care of ourselves. I wanted to shine a little light on that, and also shine a little light on when the Buddha talks about the six directions. Some of the descriptions are about the way we treat our children, how children treat their parents, how we have this relationship with our teachers, and how we support each other as partners, friends, colleagues, and workers. Anyone who works for us—whether we're managing in a company and they're not really our employees, but we are making decisions that affect them—and spiritual teachers. I wrote in "sustaining relationships" because these are all extremely important relationships in our life.

When I take this as a whole and I think about these descriptions, even though some of them might feel pretty antiquated and maybe not the things that we would value—for instance, with our partners, we may have very different values now just because we have more freedom beyond our social mores. But when we think about the purpose or the thought behind it: how do we really cherish each other? How do we really support each other? How are we really solid, sincere, and kind to each other? Even though in these close relationships, there are often a lot of things that are really difficult and hard to work through. This is really where the cultivation of good is kind of where the rubber meets the road. This is the day-to-day stuff that we really can cultivate to make a huge difference in our lives.

The flip side of it, like with friends, is to really pay attention to how much time, effort, and influence we are under around people who really aren't good friends. The Buddha says (the translation is sometimes "fake friends") they are the ones who really aren't interested in giving back to us, or sharing fairly, or being in a real cooperative friendship where everyone benefits. Or they are ones who are totally self-focused. Of course, there can be a lot of different reasons to spend time with people. Sometimes we're in a family relationship, or for some other reason we're doing it to support someone else, but we need to not be confused about the kind of relationship it is. It doesn't mean condemning others, but really being clear about who you spend your time with.

We had a situation recently with someone who was in business. He wanted to help a couple of people, and he got them involved in his work. Then he found out that they were suffering from addiction problems. They weren't being reliable, they weren't following through on promises, and they were really taking money from him. He was talking to us about it, and I think the impression I sometimes can have is, "Well, wouldn't Buddhist nuns be just endlessly forgiving and compassionate and try to help everyone?" The truth is, the Buddha was pretty clear that there's only so much you can do. You have to be conscientious about that, and that it's not alright to open the way for people to be dishonest, take advantage, and be irresponsible. He said a lot of things about just staying away from people who are harmful. In terms of friendship, it's different if there's an avenue for really giving them some kind of support that they need, but we have to be careful we're not just facilitating bad behavior.

I remember early on when I was exposed to the Dhamma, spending time in monasteries in Thailand, the abbot of the international monastery at Ajahn Chah's^[9] was away. When he came back, they had some builders working on making a new kitchen for the monastery. He's British, and he said, "We're gonna have to sack the builder." I thought, "Whoa, a monk is gonna fire the guy? It felt so unkind." But of course, he was not doing the job. It's something that I had to get realistic about. And it's not just being realistic; it's the bringing together of wisdom along with compassion. We have to include ourselves in the relationship factor: that we are not putting ourselves in harm's way, that we're not allowing this kind of being taken advantage of, but we're also still working with compassion.

Majjhima Nikaya 8: Sallekha Sutta (The Discourse on Effacement)

Alright, so I'm going to move on here to Majjhima Nikaya 8, Effacement^[10]. Now, this is a sutta I love and have used myself a lot, and I know that sometimes reading it without any explanation can be a little bit hard to understand. There are really five sections.

There's the first section where the Buddha is talking about when people are practicing meditation, and they have jhanas^[11], and they think, "Oh, I'm practicing effacement." The Buddha said, "No, that's not how you practice effacement." Effacement here, the way I take it, is a kind of erasing or rubbing away of defilements. You're really rubbing away those unskillful qualities and you're cultivating good qualities in their place.

Sometimes when we have great meditation, we think that our defilements are deteriorating, or maybe we think we're much more advanced. There are many stories from practitioners and monastics where you're off on your own and you have solitude and you're meditating, and it's all great. Then you come home, or you get back to the monastery, and there are all kinds of people around making noise, and you're just unhappy and irritated with them. You realize you're not quite as fully free as you thought. The Buddha wanted to let them know that there is a way to work with our unskillful tendencies and patterns, but it's not going to happen just through meditation. Meditation of course helps—this is not a talk on not meditating, because the Buddha was very clear that it's important to be meditating and it helps us—but it doesn't do the whole job.

He gives these different steps. The first one is just identifying these ways of practicing effacement based on forty-four different kinds of qualities or tendencies. I always really like the very first one: "Others will be cruel, but here we will not be cruel." Just that one alone, I feel like if we all lived according to that, and every community we'd go to would be committed to that, we'd have some real benefits from it. Of course, he goes through the other forty-three things as well.

With each one we can look at it and we can ask ourselves, "Do I have this tendency? Do I have this tendency towards irritability or envy? Could I stand doing some reflection and work on Right Speech, meaning truthful, not malicious, not divisive, not frivolous?" It goes through the precepts, but it also goes through many other characteristics or qualities of our mind, our attitudes, and our patterns. Working with something like anger, irritability, being arrogant, or self-centered. These are really valuable things to recognize. We can see that even if it's kind of subtle, it's a way that we can really be held back. So we start with just that identification of these forty-four (and there could be any number more that we might identify).

Q&A: Understanding Effacement and Deliverance

[Terry:] "I'm sorry, I'm missing a little context here. I haven't heard the word 'effacement' before. You gave a brief comment about rubbing away the defilements, and then we have four categories here. Are those four of the forty-four?"

Thank you for the question. The title Effacement comes from the Pali word sallekha. Venerable Ñāṇamoli translated it as 'effacement', and Bhante Sujato translates it as 'self-effacement'. Personally, I like 'effacement' better because it can be just kind of dissolving or rubbing away the defilements. When you efface a statue, you're destroying the features. You're effacing these qualities that are unwholesome, or these patterns. These are things that are deeply ingrained in our minds; these are sankharas^[12] that can be very well-practiced, deep grooves in our habits.

The Buddha goes through the same list five times. He has these forty-four items that he lists, and then he goes through it again as the inclination of mind. When the mind inclines, it gives rise to this thought: "Others will be cruel, but here we will not be cruel."

The first section is about the Buddha being approached by a teacher who sees his students needing this guidance. The Buddha talks about how no matter how many attainments in meditation you have, you're not really practicing effacement. Then he explains how you do practice effacement. He goes through this list. You think about how others kill living beings, but here we won't do that. Being uncelibate, speaking falsely, speaking maliciously and harshly, gossiping, being covetous, having ill will, wrong view, wrong intention, wrong speech, wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, wrong concentration, wrong knowledge, and wrong deliverance. This goes beyond the Noble Eightfold Path. You don't really have the knowledge of enlightenment yet, you don't really have deliverance or freedom yet, but you may think you have. You really are working at being clear and honest about what's actually true with yourself.

Then he brings in some more qualities: anger, resentment, being contemptuous and insolent, envious and avaricious, fraudulent, deceitful, obstinate, arrogant, difficult to admonish, and hanging out with bad friends. Being negligent, faithless, shameless, having no fear of wrongdoing, little learning, being lazy, unmindful, lacking wisdom, holding tightly to our own views tenaciously, and relinquishing them with difficulty. "We're not going to do that here."

The next section covers the same forty-four, but he says this is the inclination of the mind. When we want to work with this kind of thing, it's not enough to just know a list. You really incline your mind towards this, and you reflect upon it.

The next step is avoiding the unskillful tendencies. "A person given to cruelty has non-cruelty by which to avoid it." The similes are helpful. If there's a path that's uneven, and there's another path that's smooth, you take the smooth path. Or if there's a place to cross a river or a road, and it's very difficult or treacherous, but there's another place that you can go that's really safe and easy to walk over, you use that. This is the Buddhist method for how we change these things in our self. It sounds so simple, like, what does it mean to use non-cruelty to avoid cruelty? If a person has the habit of killing living beings or being cruel, every time they stop themselves and don't do it, it helps them overcome that tendency.

I imagine you've experienced this in your own life. The first time I lived in a monastery, it was the first time I was around people who didn't kill insects. It was a common practice for me to swat mosquitoes if they sat on my arm. Then, to stop myself and just gently shoo them away, or blow on them so they leave, or just let them bite you. This is a way to start to let go of that habit that feels automatic. It starts to have an impact on the heart and on the mind, where you start to feel more gentle and kind. You have some more compassion developing for other living beings.

He goes through the whole list again, and it's usually the opposite thing. Interestingly, in Pali, you'll have a word, and the opposite just adds an 'a' on the front of it. There's cruelty, and then non-cruelty. To think about non-cruelty, it's different from kindness or compassion; it's actually just the absence of cruelty. You can have more neutral feelings, and there's still the absence of cruelty. You're not doing that thing that's cruel, and you're no longer thinking in that way either. This is purifying our conduct, but it's also purifying our mind.

If a person has declared that they're celibate, they avoid doing things that are not in the spirit of celibacy. The Buddha even said if you're a celibate man, and you're standing by a wall listening to women talking or singing on the other side of the wall, you're not practicing celibacy. You're still looking for that sensual input. Just noticing any of these things that we have, and then abstaining from harsh speech, abstaining from gossip. Usually, it's just non-ill will instead of ill will. We can really see what it takes and what we need to employ to be able to avoid this behavior.

[Terry:] "I wonder if you can elaborate on the translation using the word 'deliverance'."

In the suttas, this idea of knowledge and deliverance is really about knowing the way things actually are, and realizing that. Then there is freedom from the defilements, even if it's a temporary freedom. It may not be the realization of Nibbana fully, but there is a freedom from some level of being caught up in the world. Looking at SuttaCentral, the Pali word is sammā vimutti^[13] (Right Deliverance). Vimutti means released, emancipated, or freed. It isn't like the realization of Nibbana, but it's a level of freedom from suffering and from being caught up in wrong view. Vimutti can be associated with other words like ceto-vimutti^[14] (an emancipated heart) or paññā-vimutti^[15] (emancipated by insight, freed by reason).

[Shawna:] "I don't know if I have a question, but I have a comment. I remember reading about the antidotes to anger and other hindrances, and this seems to be kind of another way of approaching that."

Yes, it's a good observation. We do see that the Buddha taught so many different ways to approach things, and that is so valuable. We might be in a different place, or something might hit us at some point that really is helpful. This is a really simple method.

Leading Upwards and Complete Erasure

We've talked about listing the forty-four things, the inclination of the mind, and then the way around it using the opposite approach. Then we go to this part called "going up", where you're heading upwards because of this work to hold ourselves back from doing things that are cruel or unskillful. The very last one was: instead of being attached to our own views and holding them tight, we let them go easily. By doing that, it leads us upwards. The unskillful qualities lead us downwards; the skillful qualities lead us upwards.

When we're contemplating doing or saying something, we can ask: "Is this leading upwards, or is this leading downwards? What's the result likely to be?" This is very close to the Pali idea of appamada^[16]—heedfulness, or real care in what we're undertaking. It includes a reflection on, "Where is this going to go? How's this going to end up?" A lot of times, especially if we find ourselves swept up in the moment with strong feeling, we don't think about where it's going to end up, or if anybody is going to get hurt, including ourselves. Having this sense that there is this upwards or downwards motion in the trajectory we are taking is very helpful. If we are really attached to our views, we get into arguments with people who have different ways of seeing things. We need to think, "Does this really lead to any resolution, or is this just causing bad feelings? Is this really helping anyone see more clearly?"

The fifth level or pass is this tendency really going away. The rubbing away is complete, like you're erasing a strong pencil mark. You work at it, and it's still there kind of gray, and then you work at it some more, and finally it's gone. The Buddha warns here that if we're sinking in the mud ourselves, we can't really pull someone else out. We really want to completely erase this tendency, and then we can really help someone else from a position of knowing for sure ourselves.

I had read this sutta a number of times, and one time I read it again and I really recognized one of the qualities in my life. It was when I was taking care of my mom. That relationship had always been challenging for me, and I noticed that I was carrying resentment. I didn't realize that's what it was until I was reading the sutta, going through these things and looking for where I had this in my own mind. When I got to resentment, I realized that's what was really lying underneath some of my irritability with my mother. It would show up in my tone of voice, which I did not want. Seeing that it was resentment, and being able to bring it more to the surface for myself, I could really work through these steps. Really seeing when it arises, how to avoid any kind of action on it, and eventually noticing that it's gone. It's really inspiring to notice that we really can work with our own tendencies to the point that they disappear, and there's something beautiful in their place.

Guided Meditation

I think this is a good time for some meditation.

Let's find a comfortable position. Breathing in and letting the breath move through your whole body. We're taking in the air into our lungs, but it also has that breath energy that can really flow through our entire being. It's the time of day when it might feel like you want to nod off a bit, but we want to also bring in some energy that helps us to stay alert. Relaxed and alert.

Mindfulness is established and present. We let go of tension in our physical body to the degree that we can, and let go of mental tension in our minds.

One way to cultivate good, of course, is by developing the Brahmaviharas^[17]. As we let ourselves relax and let go of whatever has been happening today, you can also invite in a feeling of warmth and kindness. The Buddha suggested that we fill our whole body, our being, with that kindness, with that metta^[18], one quarter at a time.

I tend to think of myself as being in a kind of cylinder. Starting at my center core, the vertical pole in the middle, and from that, filling one quarter. What is it like to think of that feeling with this energy of loving-kindness? However you evoke it, feel that softness, this tenderness.

Then filling the next quarter, I go to my right side. And one quarter at the back. And to my left side. Really filling up my whole being and the area all around it with this beautiful, kind energy. Unconditional love. It's unconditional. It's not aimed at anything or connected to anything, there's nothing to expect from it, nothing that needs to limit it.

Then also imagining it above us and below us. A sweet orb of kindness. We have our mind immersed in metta. Leaving aside all other qualities. A beautiful, contented, pleasant experience.

We can have this metta related to other living beings, but as we expand out to any of them, we want to do it with that same lack of conditions. Equally for all beings, the way the sun shines equally on everyone: good or bad, large or small, young or old.

I think there is a lot more forgiveness in the Dhamma than we recognize. There's a lot more kindness in this world, in this universe, and the world systems. When we create this kind of goodness in ourselves, I think we're aligning more fully with the Dhamma.

[Pause]

So now I'm going to bring the meditation time to an end. We can begin to prepare ourselves to come back and open our eyes. Thank you.

Reflections and Q&A

I have a couple of questions for you. I'd be happy to hear about anything you practiced this past month on not doing unskillful things and what the results were. Or, what are some of the positive changes you've experienced since you picked up the Dhamma as a practice? This is something I think is really valuable to reflect on from time to time, seeing how different we've become, maybe even in small things. And the third one is what challenges you expect to face as you go deeper into cultivating the good.

[Terry:] "I spent more effort practicing not bringing my ego along with me while I was driving my car, because that's where my ego wants to hang out. If I noticed I started to generate a story about the other driver, I realized it. Are the stories ever nice? Do they engage in Right Thought or Right Speech? No, they never do. My thoughts can lead me to actions, and I don't want to do that. So I would catch myself starting to create a narrative about this other driver, and I would say to myself, 'I don't really know anything, do I?' Not in a negative way, but thinking, 'That's okay, I don't need to know. Everything's fine, we're all interconnected.'"

Thank you for sharing, Terry. We've all heard lots of stories about the road. It's amazing how driving gets under our skin.

[Anthony:] "My question is regarding the unwholesome. I wanted to know if you can apply it to the aggregates^[19] and how our conditioning makes it tougher. At times, my mind plays tricks on me where I don't see the suffering that is going to be caused in the short term or long term."

We see this a lot, of course, in ourselves and in other people. There was a woman who was talking to me on the phone today. She was saying that she's really starting to understand her husband. He's a very good person, and he really wants to do things in a good way, but where she lives, husbands are often very controlling in their culture. We learn in our culture how to behave in certain ways, and that's encouraged. I've even seen this in corporate culture, where dishonest leadership encourages that kind of behavior in their employees. We can easily see some aspect of ourself coming out and matching that environment unless we're really careful and mindful.

Her husband tries not to be controlling, but his father was that way. When he gets tired or stressed, something will come out. This is deeply embedded. We're not thinking at that time about the damage it's going to cause. I think it's really helpful to be forgiving of each other, to see that it's under certain conditions. We so easily just follow the conditioning we have, but we can catch ourselves.

Regarding the aggregates, we have contact—we hear, see, taste, touch, smell, or think something—and we're making sense of it. Sense consciousness is there, and immediately there's feeling. We can't stop that part because the feeling just comes up; that's old karma that's coming from our conditioning. Then there's perception. We have built-up perceptions about ourselves, other people, different professions, etc. A lot of it we've learned from watching other people, and frankly, I am convinced that a lot of it comes from past life experience. We come in with attitudes, likes, dislikes, and propensities.

We have to begin to be the astute observer of all that. We must reflect: "Why do I have this perception? Is it true?" The more we can unpack this, the better. Whether we put these things in the category of the khandha^[20] of perception or sankhara, it helps us think of these as pieces that construct a certain reaction and feeling. The sankhara plays into the feeling, and then you've got more feeling and more perceptions arising, and it snowballs unless we put some gaps in there.

Terry was really describing putting in a wedge of awareness. This is where the wisdom faculty comes in: "Is this leading upwards, or is this leading downwards?" We can tell by how it feels. If it is opening my heart and making more loving-kindness and compassion arise, this is a good direction. If it is closing me down, making me more afraid, angry, greedy, or confused, it's going in the wrong direction. It's a great way to use the aggregates.

[Anthony:] "But in the moment when your mind gets hijacked, it would be a lack of awareness right in that moment."

Yes. There's the part that you can't stop, but if you don't have the awareness to catch it, it's going to just keep rolling. The ability to catch it earlier is something we develop. We're developing the sensitivity, the awareness, and the ability to slow things down. We can even recruit our partner or best friend to remind us when they see it start happening.

We can learn to say, "I'm going to step away and I'll be back in 20 minutes." That's actually a very mature response when you're having strong feelings and you're about to go somewhere you don't want to go. The more we work with what we feel, we can let that emotion appear in the body and work with it. We don't have to be pushed around by the feeling. If something like anger shows up, there are chemicals flushing through the system, and we have to let that all settle.

[Madeira:] "I had an experience today. We're downsizing, and my husband was pulling things out of a box of his possessions and putting them on the table. My impatience was rising and I was getting frustrated. Then I thought, 'He actually doesn't have the skills to do this. His forte is hanging on to things.' I told him, 'How about if this is recycling, this is trash, and these are for your treasures?' I produced a small box for him. It was a successful operation, but I could easily have gone into, 'Look, there's nothing important there, let's just get rid of it.' I caught myself, and patience is a quality that I think I have significantly improved on."

Thank you for sharing that. I think that's true of me too; I'm much more patient than I was in the past. When we've been together with someone for a very long time, we have shared sankharas. We've developed this calcified coral of how we behave. We repeat what isn't necessarily constructive, so we must find the way out of that and anticipate it.

For next month, I'm suggesting that you find two items in the list in the Effacement Sutta and really apply yourself to it. Find the word that really describes what you want to change, and see if you can work with it in those five steps—mostly avoiding it by the smooth path. Second, increase any practice that you do this month that cultivates good. Listen to Dhamma talks, read Dharma books, read suttas, do active service, increase your meditation time, or include a new devotional practice. Next time we're going to talk about purification of the mind. I've picked three suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya^[21], but if there are any that you find on your own in the Sutta Pitaka^[22], I'd be happy for you to bring them.

Thank you so much for your practice and your attention, and I hope you have a really great month. Take care everyone.