This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Four Dimensions of the Inner LIfe

Greetings from Redwood City, from IMC. I want to begin this talk by referring to a passage in the teachings of the Buddha that I found a little perplexing and became a source of reflection on what it could mean.

The Buddha refers to people who are going along, engaged in their life without any concern for the welfare of themselves or the welfare of others. The way that the ancient Pali language talks about this, it literally says they are engaged in neither the welfare of self nor the welfare of others. The word for self is attā^[1]. Many of you know the word because of the word anattā, which means "not-self," often considered to be a central teaching of the Buddha. In this passage, he talks about people who have no concern for their own welfare, for their self, or for others. It makes me wonder: who is it that has no concern for the welfare of both themselves or others? What kind of person is that, or how does that happen?

One hint on how to understand the sentence has to do, in fact, with this word attā, often translated into English as "self." Because of the strong emphasis that teachers use, insisting that Buddhism teaches that there is no self—this not-self teaching—there is often very strong resistance to using the word self in any kind of way that implies that there is a self. But the word attā also sometimes refers to something else. We'll say it this way first: the focus here is on self and other—attā and para. This is one of the fundamental orientations, perspectives, or perceptions that people need to have. We need to know where our self is, our body, our being, and where others are in space. If I'm crossing a road where there's a lot of traffic, I need to have a strong sense of where the self is, where I am, where this being is, and where the cars are. I hope the drivers have a strong sense of where they are and where I am. You really need a strong sense of self and other to navigate that.

If someone is watching from the sidewalk, they might see that these people walking across and the people driving all seem to be finding their way nicely, and they have a clear sense of who's who. We behave in the world often with a very strong, clear idea of "there is my self here, and there's someone else over there." That's observed from the outside, that there is this clear behavior that people live by. Whether there's a clear sense of who they are, where they are in space, or where they are socially—this idea that there's a self here and an other there is part of healthy living. It might not be so conscious on the inside or at the forefront of their thinking about themselves, but observing from the outside, one will see there's one person, there's another person, and there's a clear sense of differentiation going on as they navigate the world.

So this teaching that some people have neither care for themselves nor care for the welfare of others—I think these are people who don't have any connection to their inner life, to their attā. The word attā here doesn't refer to a singular thing, but rather an abstract notion of "this being here," this inner life here, the sense of personhood. By using the word attā, which is a very rich word in ancient India, it refers to something really rich and valuable that's here. But it's not something permanent; it's not something unchanging. Rather, it's the overall feeling of how we are at any given moment in our inner life.

Sometimes Bhikkhu Bodhi^[2], the great translator, translates the word attā with the English word "mind," because in the context it clearly refers to something internal within us. It means something more like the mind as opposed to the soul or some central self. Probably one of the most common words that the Buddha used for this inner life is in fact a very rich word called citta^[3]. Citta means mind-heart. It's the totality or quality of this inner life that we have. This inner sense of vitality, peace, agitation, happiness, or unhappiness—whatever kind of feeling is inside—that's not a thing. That's not an unchanging essence; it's rather a gestalt of all the shifting, changing things that are going on for us that vary from day to day, occasion to occasion. In Buddhist practice, we are caretaking for it.

If someone has no connection to this inner life in themselves, they also will have no understanding of the inner life of other people, and so they will have no sense of how to care for it. Other people then just become objects. They might be objects of their desires, or objects of their wrath and anger, or objects that interfere with the free expression of their desires—this free wanting of things or getting rid of things. But once we start living deeper and deeper in our inner life, we stop living on the surface of our desires. On the surface of desires, hates, and preoccupations, there really isn't any depth. People who live on that surface of life will just go around from one addiction to another, from one sensual pursuit to another, from one kind of belief or expression to another. Often there can be a lot of conceit in someone who lives on the surface of their life because it's all about their desires, what they want, and what they don't want, without any care and concern for other people at the most extreme level.

So the Buddha seems to recognize there were people like that. But there begins a shift when there starts to be an inner life. Then there's more care for others, and a deeper kind of care for oneself because one knows what to care for. We begin knowing what real welfare is. It's not just being able to buy what everyone wants or have recreational opportunities. Those things might actually not support this deep flowering of our welfare from the inside out.

This sentence—that some people are engaged in neither the welfare of self nor in the welfare of others—comes from a very interesting teaching where the Buddha refers to four kinds of people. The first is someone engaged in neither the welfare of self nor in the welfare of others. The second is someone engaged in the welfare of others but not in the welfare of the self. The third category are those engaged in the welfare of the self but not in the welfare of others. And the fourth category are those engaged in the welfare of the self and the welfare of others.

I like to think of these four categories as being four dimensions of our inner life. I also like to think of them as a bit of a developmental model of how some people can grow and develop their inner life over time. We find that in the teachings of the Buddha. In the modern world, he would probably be considered a developmental psychologist because he saw in so many different ways that people's inner life grows and develops over time. It gets cultivated. We bring conditions together, care for it, and allow it to deepen, unfold, grow, and get stronger over time. He had many perspectives in which to appreciate this potential for inner growth and change. These four categories, I think, represent four dimensions, maybe even stages of growth that people can have.

Some babies are born with no connection to the inner life, to the heart, to what goes on inside. As babies grow up, at some point, little infants are very oriented towards others. Belonging, modeling, mimicking, and learning from others is the name of the game. They tune into how their caretakers are feeling. There's a very strong orientation outward. At some point as we grow up, we're not looking for everything we need to learn, do, and be taken care of from others, but we learn to take care of ourselves. Some babies learn to self-soothe relatively early, but we slowly begin to take care of this inner life and become more and more autonomous in taking care of our own welfare.

If all goes well in childhood development, then at some point we have a good sense of how to take care of ourselves and a certain autonomy in our own inner life. But there are all kinds of ways in which that is stunted. If we don't feel safe, if we don't feel loved, if we don't get the feedback from the parents and family around us, and our needs aren't met as a young child, then it's a little hard to feel that understanding of how to care for ourselves and others. We tend to recede to the surface of our life, maybe just to be safe, or because we don't know anything interior, or because it's so painful that people recede to the outside so they don't have to feel inside.

When one of my sons was maybe a year and a half to two years old, he had a playmate who started getting into the habit of hitting and biting other kids. The parents were quite distressed and they went to a child psychologist. The psychologist said that whenever the son began doing that, they should smother him with love. Just hold him, hug him, care for him, and love him. The first instinct of the parents was that it would just reward the behavior. But the psychologist said, "No, no, just do it." They did it, and very quickly that behavior stopped. Somehow that little kid wasn't getting the reassurance and settlement that he needed, and so he was lashing out as a substitute or out of frustration. So this idea of tending to what's in here and having it settle is important. Doing these different stages of development well means we can care for ourselves and care for others. There's this reciprocity that we grow up learning from family and community—intimate reciprocity of mirroring and mutual support. Eventually, we become more autonomous and are able to care for ourselves.

At some point, that autonomy outgrows the limited sense of "me, myself, and mine." It breaks down the artificial boundaries between self and other. It's not to return to some childhood non-differentiation of self and other, but rather to be clearly differentiated without any hard barriers. We become acutely aware of and sensitive to the inner life of others. That deep inner life is deeper than conceit, deeper than any selfishness. It's the place where our goodness, our care, our kindness, and our love come from.

There, the concern becomes the welfare of both attā (the self, the mind) and the care of others. Because we really know the quality of our inner life and are in touch with it, we cultivate it. The more we are cared for in this way, the greater is our sense of empathy, care, love, or resonance with other people as well. So of course we're going to be concerned for the welfare of others, maybe equally as we are for the welfare of self.

In these four stages of human growth, the word attā (self) is used in a very positive way. It's not a reified, essential self, but rather the self as the quality of our inner life, the quality of our heart and mind that we are the gardeners for, that we are the caretakers of. Part of the function of mindfulness is to keep coming back here to really cultivate this deep place that allows our care for the world to arise out of the deepest places within us.

There is one passage where the Buddha says:

Having let go of conceit, the settled self, the good mind is everywhere freed. Dwelling alone in the forest, diligent, one can cross beyond the realm of death.

Here it seems that the "settled self" and the "good mind" are almost the same. Maybe they are synonyms of each other or closely related. Again, we have the word attā, but it doesn't mean this essential, permanent thing. I think it just means something like citta, the mind, the inner life. What does that mean to go beyond the realm of death?

Here's another interesting poem:

He who loves the self, who wishes for greatness, should deeply revere the Dharma.

Remember the Buddhist teachings in the idea, "He who loves the self." Whatever this attā is, there is a place for this inner life to be loved, to be cared for, to be tended to. In this very curious expression, "who wishes for greatness," I don't think it means conceited greatness like "I'm so great and so wonderful." I think it refers to this inner mind, state of consciousness, state of heart, that becomes magnanimously great, boundlessly full and large. This movement on the path of liberation is not one where we get more small and constricted. There's a boundlessness, an openness, and a fullness because the limitations and constrictions of a narrower, small sense of self have been dissolved or let go of in a deep way.

Finally, two more verses:

If one knows oneself is dear, the sage would guard the self with care.

The word "guard" means to watch over, but it also means to nourish. "If one knows oneself is dear, the sage would guard oneself with care, would nourish himself with care." So again, there is something here to tend to, and the deeper we tend to it, any concern you might have that this is being selfish will dissolve because it can't be sustained.

And finally:

Oneself is the refuge of oneself. What other refuge can there be?

The self is the refuge. The mind is the refuge. The quality and care of one's inner life becomes one's own refuge.

So tend to your garden well. Be a witness. Be a tender. Pay attention to what goes on within. Notice the quality of it, not so you can selfishly look to find pleasure for yourself, but rather to discover how to set it free. Whatever painful movements of greed, hatred, delusion, or conceit that live in there can be resolved, healed, and settled, so we can go deeper to the depths of what's really good and wonderful in this inner being that we're capable of having. When it becomes so settled and free, then we get turned inside out, and it doesn't really make sense anymore to talk about the inner life. It's just the life that we live, the quality of this life that we share with others.

Then we become caretakers, engaged with the welfare of the self and the welfare of others. This whole enterprise of the Buddhist path goes in the direction of caring for self and caring for the whole world. If you want to know if someone is enlightened in Buddhism, see if they're helping the world. That's really the litmus test of mature Buddhist maturity along the path.

References

Thank you for this morning and giving me a chance to share my thoughts. I look forward to more times like this together.

I see that there are some chats here about the references. These four different categories of concern for the welfare of self and the welfare of others are from the Numerical Discourses of the Buddha 4.95. The poems that I've been reading, the first couple of them come from the Connected Discourses of the Buddha 1.9 and 6.2, and the last verses are from the Dhammapada. So it's wonderful. Thank you.