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Cultivate the Wholesome

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Is that loud enough?

Welcome, both in person and online, on this Christmas morning. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas! For those of you who don't, merry anyway! [Laughter] It is a day of cheer. I've been inspired by Christians who celebrate Christmas as a day of love, a kind of universal love.

Today, following and continuing a theme that I've been teaching this last week, I want to start with a quotation from the Buddha. He says something like, "If it were not possible to cultivate the wholesome, I would not teach you or instruct you to cultivate the wholesome. But it is possible to cultivate the wholesome; therefore, I instruct you or teach you to cultivate the wholesome."

It's a celebratory statement about our potential—that we have the potential, whether or not we use it, to do things that are wholesome. The Pali word is kusala^[1]. If you want to make it really simple in English, we would say "do good," but that kind of misses some of the nuances or richness of the term. The word kusala means something which is really wholesome, beneficial, or helpful. It also refers to something which is skillful, which is done well for a particular purpose. And then you have to ask, what's the purpose? When you translate it as wholesome, the purpose is itself: to be nourished, to be supported, to do something that feels like it makes you whole, or wholehearted.

The idea of wholesomeness is that what is beneficial for us is beneficial for the world. It is non-afflictive; it is the absence of causing any kind of harm to oneself and to others, and it is for our welfare. With this language of our welfare—to help us, to develop us, to strengthen us—we have this potential.

Now, we could just ignore that potential, or take it on faith: "Well, I'm good enough. I don't have to do anything special. I can just go along with my life, I'll stop for pedestrians, and live a basically good life." That's fine. But it's possible to cultivate the wholesome so that it brings a feeling of inner thriving, a sense of abundance within.

This is part of what the teachings of the Buddha were about: not just to do good for yourself and for the world, but to cultivate something that brings a fullness, a wholeness, an abundance, a phenomenal sense of thriving from the inside out. Our sense of thriving does not depend on conditions in the world, but rather has to do with the conditions of our own heart, our own inner life. So there is a lot of attention given to this inner life that we want to cultivate and develop.

Maybe because I was giving this talk, I was struck when I was meditating with all of you just now, that after some minutes there was a clear shift within me. I've been thinking about things over these last few days, and my mind was still in the momentum of my concerns, my thoughts, my activities lately. But after sitting here breathing for a while, I could feel a shift and I could say, "Oh, now I'm here." It took me five minutes, or it took me a while, but now I'm here.

Once I was here, I could feel the sense of being here not just in this room, but physically: I'm here in this body. It's almost like I'm connected. I had this sense of expansive space in my body when I was finally here. Now that I was here in the space of my body, there was space for the good, for the wholesome, for the beneficial to flow or to grow. Whereas when I was caught up in my thoughts, the space within was tight. If I was even paying attention to the space, there was no space; it was contracted. I was in my head, in a sense.

The head is a very different source for the wholesome than being here in this body, grounded, with space for something to flow and to well up. When I'm in my head, I can have the idea and the admonition: "I'm supposed to be good, I'm supposed to do nice things." That comes from a conceptual, conceiving world of logic, ideas, and things I've learned from other people about how things should be. Because I'm disconnected from the rest of myself, it's difficult sometimes to notice the bias that's operating there—it just seems like it's the truth. There are all kinds of biases by which this thinking mind can live without even being seen.

But when I dropped in, when that moment switched and I could feel, "Oh, here I am," I found that I wasn't as interested in my thoughts anymore. They were okay, but they weren't really the name of the game. I had much more clarity about it, and much more choice about what I did next. I had some choice to stay there, or I had some choice to go back into my thoughts—I had some really good thoughts going! [Laughter] I had a choice, but I could feel that what felt wholesome, what felt like a really good and nice place to be, was settled here in the present, in this open space in my body.

Within that, there was a different source for the choices I make: choices for what I want to develop, or how I want to be, or what I want to give energy to. What you focus on gives energy to things and keeps them spinning. But if you give your attention here inside, to qualities of generosity, love, kindness, gentleness, calmness, or wisdom, then focusing on that makes room for it. It allows it to grow, makes space for it, validates it, and authorizes it to be there. "It's okay, you're allowed to be there. It's good, I'm not going to overlook you."

One of the interesting things about this switch to really being here was that it became a little bit easier to see that these deeper feelings, this deeper way of being, was not so connected to my usual self-identity. My usual self operates with ideas like: "This is how I need to be, this is what I need to do, this is what those people did to me." But with this shift, I was less inclined to take it personally, or to claim or appropriate these inner wholesome feelings. I could feel that if I appropriated them, it would make a smaller space for them.

So we have this wholesomeness. The Buddha said to cultivate the wholesome, and he offered things like meditation practice as a seedbed that you prepare so these seeds of the wholesome can grow. That's a very different way of thinking about it than just saying, "Just do it." That instruction comes from the conceptual mind, from the head. It comes from places other than this seedbed deep inside that wells up and flows.

One of the things that's needed if we want to cultivate the wholesome is desire. Without some desire for it, why would we do it? Why would we put any energy or effort into it? I emphasize the need for desire because I think that generally, us Buddhist teachers—including myself—don't talk about desire in a good way very often. We don't hold it up as being important. If anything, we talk about attachment, craving, thirst, greed, and the issues we should let go of. It's easy for desire to get put into that same category just by listening to us.

But without some kind of desire for the wholesome, why would we cultivate it? Why would we focus on it? The Buddha actually talked about having the desire for practice, having the desire to cultivate, and awakening the desire for the wholesome. I think us Buddhist teachers need to spend a little time reclaiming desire as a good thing.

The danger of doing that, of giving instructions to cultivate or develop something, is that it can put us in the self-help camp. There is a strong momentum in many parts of our culture toward self-help, which just becomes another attempt to reinforce your idea of your glory as a self. The danger of that is that it's impossible to maintain. Sooner or later you'll crash, because you can't live up to the hype of building a good, perfect self. There is no such thing.

The other issue is that for some people, there's a certain neurotic attitude toward doing: "The more the better, we have to do more, we have to be efficient, we have to get ahead." You have to work 60 hours a week—ideally 75, but you have a generous boss so it's only 60. With this emphasis on doing, doing, doing, we have so many possibilities that even those of us who don't have to struggle to survive feel like we should accomplish, manage, and keep up with so many things. This attitude lends itself to more doing. "I'm so busy already, now I have to do this Buddhism thing on top of it. Give me a break."

Because of this neurotic sense of doing, achieving, and improving oneself, Buddhist teachers in the West have placed a lot of emphasis on not-doing, on acceptance, on just letting yourself be. This has been very powerful for many Westerners because it allows something to unwind and settle. Then, at some point, maybe they have that switch I described earlier: "Oh, now I'm here. It's okay just to be."

Once you're there, you can turn on the desire. You can have the desire for the wholesome. You can switch it on in a wholesome way. That's the art of it: How do you have desire that is wholesome? How do you have desire that you feel nourished by, inspired by, and delighted to have? "Wow, I'm so lucky I get to have this wonderful desire!" It's not a burden. You don't add it to your to-do list like, "Okay, desire wholesome states... check that off, done." Just having the desire feels like, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Is that possible?"

It is. But I think it requires really being grounded and settled here in the present moment, in yourself. If you're racing around in your head, spinning with thoughts and ideas, it's hard to find that seedbed inside where there can be a welling up of an almost selfless desire. It's almost as if it's not part of your usual, contracted sense of self. You feel the goodness of it: "Oh, here is something within me that really cares for me, that wants the best for me, and that wants the best for the world." Because how can I support and bring welfare and happiness to others if I don't have it myself?

This desire wakes you up to pay attention. "Oh, look at that! The desire for the wholesome, for the beneficial, the desire to thrive emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually."

Are we allowed to do that? There are people who feel they're not allowed. I've known people who grew up with teachings—not Buddhist ones—where you were absolutely not supposed to have a lot of joy, because joy bordered on a carnal sin. So they hold back. I've known people who've held themselves back in meditation because they wouldn't let themselves get concentrated. As we get concentrated, good feelings tend to come, and some of those good feelings are very physical. They think, "I'm not allowed to do that, there's something wrong with that."

Then there are people who feel that any kind of focus on personal well-being is somehow selfish, and you're supposed to be altruistic all the time. For them, self-focus is a problem. It is a problem sometimes. Part of the challenge in a practice like ours, where there is a lot of introvert focus, is to be able to differentiate between narcissism and a healthy inner focus that's not self-enhancing or self-making.

So it can be a problem, but the important thing is it doesn't have to be. There is something really beautiful that awaits us within, that we can cultivate with a beautiful desire to awake and do it.

There is a teaching called the Four Right Efforts. Two have to do with the unwholesome—the inner thoughts, ideas, impulses, motivations, and desires within us that are unbeneficial. The Buddha called them afflictive; they hurt, there's an "ouch" in them. The other two have to do with the wholesome, which are beneficial. They bring about welfare, they bring about a healthy kind of pleasure; they feel good to have.

Regarding the unwholesome, the Buddha says to have the desire to make an effort to prevent the arising of unwholesome states. If every time you watch the shopping channel you feel miserable from the exhaustion of all the things you want to buy, that desire is unwholesome. Have the desire to prevent that from happening. Don't go on the shopping channel, or limit yourself to a minute. Have the wisdom to know what to avoid because it triggers you in ways that are not healthy.

The second Right Effort is to bring up the desire to make the effort to abandon the unwholesome that is already happening inside of you. This language is very important, because Buddhism often gets associated with letting go. When the Buddha talks about what we let go of, it is always inner mental states which are unhealthy. He rarely talks about letting go of things in the world; he talks about letting go of greed, hatred, resentment, envy, and avarice. The world is the world, but how we relate to the world is the issue. So have the desire for abandoning what is unwholesome.

The third Right Effort is to have the desire to evoke wholesome states. Wholesome states are good, so what would you do to evoke them more? Make sure you get enough sleep, if you can. Make sure you have some downtime. Be sure you spend time with people who inspire you and bring out the best in you. Instead of the shopping channel, go on a channel that inspires you, where you feel good and find delight. There are choices to be made here; it's not just leaving things to chance. Part of a wise life involves reflecting on what behaviors we avoid and what behaviors we engage in.

And fourth, evoke the desire to make the effort to develop, expand, thrive, strengthen, and increase the wholesome. The Buddha uses a whole series of phenomenal words here like "abundance," "increase," "develop," and "strengthen."

So, avoid the unwholesome, cultivate the wholesome. I went through this review for a very important reason: having the desire to develop and strengthen the wholesome is important. That desire is important.

We want to study our desire, to get to know it, to ensure that it is wholesome and doesn't have any unwholesomeness mixed in. If unwholesomeness is mixed with your desire for spiritual practice, chances are you're going to suffer and have stress. Some people take up meditation or Buddhist practice and they are greedy, ambitious, or afraid. Or they feel a sense of duty, like they should do it. Or they're trying to get rid of something they don't like, doing the practice out of aversion. Those are all unwholesome states. If those states are mixed into the desire, the desire becomes unwholesome.

What is a wholesome desire? A wholesome desire has no stress as part of it. Do you have any inkling of what a stress-free desire is like? You have a lot of desires every day, I guarantee it: the desire to go to the bathroom, the desire to open a door. Those desires have no stress in them. You do them almost mindlessly, unself-consciously. Study those stress-free desires you have throughout the day to get a feel for what it's like to have desires that well up and are tension-free.

Wholesome desires also have no sense of burden to them. They don't feel like a heavy obligation. Instead, it's more like the feeling inside of, "Wow, I have the opportunity for this! Let's do it." How often do you have that feeling when you get up in the morning to make breakfast? "Wow, I'm so lucky I get to have this desire for breakfast, and the desire to make something here," as opposed to, "I have to make breakfast as quickly as I can because I have important things to do, like meditating and learning to be present." Instead of learning to be present with making breakfast!

What I'm trying to point to here is the idea that we can become students of our desire. We can discover how our desire can be wholesome, beneficial, and bring a sense of nourishment, support, delight, or joy in the pursuit of other wholesome things.

Do you have any clear idea of what inner movements, desires, impulses, emotions, mind states, and heart states feel nourishing, supportive, delightful, and inspiring to you? I would suggest that many people in our society have very little experience of this unless the world evokes it for them. So they go looking in the world for something to bring up these good things inside. But to discover how to find it in oneself, recognize it, and then have the desire to strengthen it, expand it, and grow it—to take that seedbed and water it and fertilize it—is wonderful.

The Buddha said, "If it were not possible to cultivate the wholesome, I would not teach you to cultivate the wholesome. But it is possible to cultivate the wholesome; therefore, I instruct you to cultivate the wholesome."

I hope that if my initial statement felt a little bit burdensome—"Oh no, more work, these Buddhists"—that by the end of this talk you have some sense that this actually could be a quite inspiring teaching. And maybe it's one that will prepare you for the new year.

Thank you very much. We have 15 minutes before we usually end, so we can take a few questions or comments.

Questions and Answers

Speaker 1: Hi Gil, my name is Rick. Thanks for the talk. I just wanted to ask you if you would mind elaborating on something to make it more real for me. I definitely relate to the joy of sitting down and making music, or sometimes just having my croissant. But you said there's something very beautiful within that we can cultivate. I would love to hear an example or two of how that is real for you.

Gil Fronsdal: I think love is one of them. The kindness and love that has warmth and tenderness in it. There is also sometimes a sense of generosity that's quite beautiful, strong, and full. It's a kind of embodied generosity, not just a policy in the head. There are sometimes feelings of peace that are quite lovely, a tranquility to feel inside that is considered wholesome. There is joy, happiness. Is that enough? [Laughter] Contentment is another one.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Gil. The word kusala comes from a grass called kusha grass, which is very sharp. You find it used throughout the scriptures. Even though they translate it as 'skillful,' it has the connotation of razor-sharp skills, like a person walking on a tightrope or somebody operating with machinery where they can get injured. So it refers to discriminative knowledge. In fact, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is one of the definitions for yoga. Yoga is called yogah karmasu kaushalam^[2]. It's a skill, a razor-sharp skill in action.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you. I've heard that before, and that it takes a lot of skill to be able to pick the grass, because you'll get cut if you're not careful how you pick it.

Speaker 3: I just wanted to say thank you for your teaching all year, and all the years.

Regarding desire, I'm aware of desires that I have that create a great deal of tension, and that is the desire to be better at something. I happen to be a dentist, and I have a desire to be a better dentist, and it creates a lot of tension. How would you react to that?

Gil Fronsdal: When we step back and take a bird's-eye view of this desire of yours that brings tension, what would be a wholesome way of beginning to address it?

Speaker 3: Hard work. And to step back further, because the hard work feels wholesome to me.

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, tell me how that works. How does hard work feel wholesome? Do you feel better after you work hard?

Speaker 3: Oh yes. My highest highs are after having accomplished something difficult and having done it well.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, lovely. So using that way of working hard, how would you address this tension around wanting to do it better?

Speaker 3: I am aware of... I mean, I work because I want to work and I enjoy it a lot. I don't have to work anymore, it's different than it was 20 years ago. But I'm aware of a conflicting desire: why would I go to work and do something that's very difficult when I could just sit at home and listen to meditation tapes or music? It's an interesting quandary in my mind. I would like to be comfortable, but I want the accomplishment. I guess I'm seeking the high of having done something well, and that is just hard work and creates a lot of tension.

Gil Fronsdal: I think the generic response is for you to spend a lot of time being mindful of what's really driving you and what's happening underneath the layers in your mind. There are probably layers of beliefs, attachments, and clinging operating there that you don't even see, especially because of all the tension. To do some deep investigation of this—maybe in conversation with someone who can help you dig into it—would be really nice.

But you also seem to have something really wonderful going for you, in that you throw yourself into doing something really well. It seems like it could be a beautiful thing to free that from the tension. To do it without tension, with delight and wholeheartedness, is a wonderful thing.

Listening to you, I wondered if you might try doing your dentistry in a different place—doing it for free for people who are low income. I wonder if that would give you a whole different sense of accomplishment and a different level of challenge, because you say you don't need the money anymore. That would allow you to explore a whole different side of yourself.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I do a fair amount of that.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. Does it make a difference where you do it, in terms of what you're talking about here?

Speaker 3: Not really, no. It doesn't matter if somebody's paying a lot of money or very little or no money. It's the work and the outcome of the work that matters.

Gil Fronsdal: Well, I think you have something good going here, but there's something for you to discover there that frees you from the tension. You might actually find that without the tension, you enjoy it even more. You'd be in the flow of it in a much more beautiful and wonderful way.

Speaker 4: I had heard the word chanda^[3] offered once as a counterpart to taṇhā, as wholesome desire. And then another scholar told me that it's more neutral, like 'you want to turn left here to go where you're going,' which was disappointing because I had named my dog Chanda by that point! [Laughter] But it brings up a whole new thing of a neutral sort of desire.

My question as a practitioner is regarding a tendency to cross-examine myself: 'Is this spiritual materialism? Is it becoming grasping?' I'm looking for the distinction between a wholesome desire that's inspirational and leading to a good place, versus the near enemy of grasping.

Gil Fronsdal: First, about chanda. The Pali word chanda is—I don't know if it's exactly neutral, but it's ambidextrous. It can be used for both wholesome and unwholesome desires. Sometimes in context, it's clear as being unwholesome, and in other contexts, it's wholesome. It can take different shapes that way. So it's still a very good word in context. In the context of your life, it's still a good name!

Regarding the difference between wholesome desire and grasping, or spiritual grasping: If you have some intuition that there's spiritual grasping going on, then see if you can flush out the stress, or the dukkha^[4]—the Buddha's word for suffering—that's part of that grasping. Sometimes just becoming an expert in recognizing stress, tension, or dukkha, and becoming more and more sensitive to how it operates even in the most subtle ways, is a window to identify what's unwholesome.

Speaker 4: So suffer better. [Laughter]

Speaker 5: Thank you for a very nice session on the wholesomeness of desire. I think in our first conversation one-on-one with you, I mentioned that my connection with the Buddha was that I used to visit this place—it was actually a hotel where they had a restaurant called Lumbini. Lumbini is essentially the birthplace of the Buddha. And right next to it, within the same compound at the hotel called Siddhartha, they had a bar called Trishna^[5]. Trishna essentially means 'thirst' or 'craving.'

I wondered if that's a wholesome desire, why they would name it that way. Or are they just being honest?

Gil Fronsdal: The word in Pali is taṇhā, and in Sanskrit it's tṛṣṇā. It literally means 'thirst,' but it has the connotation of craving. A good place to go for the craving for alcohol is the bar, so they're just being honest. I would hope that Buddhists would see that and say, 'Oh, that's not my place.' It's fascinating that near Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, there's a bar called that.

Speaker 5: No, the restaurant was Lumbini, and the bar was Trishna.

Gil Fronsdal: Ah, I see. Great.

Speaker 6: This might be similar to a previous question, but I still wanted to ask it. I feel like I have two wholesome desires, and they feel like they are in tension with each other. One is generosity and wanting to help others, and the other is wanting to be in community and be with others. They almost seem to work against each other to the point where it feels like I can only really cultivate one.

I have this deep desire to help others and to do better for each other. I work in mental health, so I see everything in light of how we can be better and do better for each other. Then I try to be in a community, but it's difficult for me because it's not achieving the standards I have for myself, or wanting people to be better. So I'm constantly judging the way we do things. I'm just wondering how to navigate that.

Gil Fronsdal: Let me see if I understand. The desire to be generous, to do good for the world, is really out there in the wider world. So to live in a community limits you, because it takes time to be in community, leaving you less time to do the good work out there. Is that the tension?

Speaker 6: Yeah, and I need community. The wholesome desire is to do it with people. But it's hard to work together sometimes. I notice people work differently, and it's almost hard for me to sit in that.

Gil Fronsdal: Community is easy, except for the people who are in it. [Laughter]

This is a really important topic, so whatever I say will just be shorthand. Please allow me that. One thing is that part of your desire to do good for others can be directed toward the people in the community you're in. That takes much more work and a lot more time. You sometimes get much more reward by doing things 'out there' where you don't have to deal with interpersonal issues. But working on the interpersonal issues in a community, in a Sangha or anywhere, is doing similarly important inner work as sitting in meditation by yourself. You're purifying yourself, clarifying yourself, and discovering yourself in really rich ways.

There are plenty of Buddhists who have not done the community part of the work, who have just done a lot of meditation, and they're really truncated in terms of their development because they haven't been challenged by interpersonal issues. If you really want to discover and work through a lot of attachments, limitations, and unhealthy ways we can be, find a community that feels like the right place to struggle in for you. Then you're developing and clarifying yourself.

The work you want to do beyond there does two things: you're better at it because you know the interpersonal stuff really well—that's become your clean channel now—and you've helped create a model for others about how a community could be together. We need more models of healthy community. How does that sound?

Speaker 6: It's very inspiring and it makes me want to keep trying to find a good community that I can trust and feel safe in. I think I have a few options; I just have to realize it's a process.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. It's not about finding a community of people who are all angels. No, that's no fun; I don't enjoy those communities anyway. Rather, it's more like, 'These are the people I want to be with. If I'm going to be in conflict with someone, these are the people I want to be in conflict with.'

Speaker 6: Thank you so much.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you all for being here and being part of this. I wish you well for the end of the year and the beginning of the next one. Gloria is hosting the potluck, and if you didn't bring anything but would like to stay, you're very welcome to stay for it. I wish you well. Thank you.