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Mindfulness of Oneself (1 of 5) Finding the Treasure of Oneself

I don't know how much you can hear the garbage trucks Monday mornings, but today they seem particularly loud. At some point, I became very happy with the sound, thinking how good it is to sit in the middle of this world, not to be apart from it. Somehow, sitting here quietly at IMC with the garbage trucks around me felt a little bit symbolic of just sitting with the world as it is.

Some of you maybe don't know this, but here in Redwood City there's a freeway, a highway called 101, that runs on the edge of town, the edge of the city. There's a parking lot next to the other side of the freeway—I mean just across the fence from it—and there's a little office complex there. In that parking lot, just on the edge of the fence looking down on the freeway, is a very large Buddha. It's probably a ten-foot tall Buddha, looking down at the cars driving by on this big major freeway in the Peninsula with his hand up, kind of blessing everyone.

That's kind of peculiar just that it's there. What's more peculiar is it's sitting on a little one-room cinderblock building with a big opening on one side. It's a storage shed, I guess, for a big garbage bin. So here the Buddha is sitting on top of the garbage bin in Redwood City, looking at the freeway and all the cars going by. There's a saying in Buddhism about the lotus flowering out of muddy waters. In Redwood City, we have a Buddha emerging out of the garbage, kind of.

The Wider Context of Not-Self

The title for this five-part series this week is Mindfulness of Oneself. I'm partly inspired to do this because it's very valuable to become really attentive and mindful of oneself, and to know how to do that in a way that is beneficial. But also, one of the important teachings in Buddhism is the idea of not-self^[1]. This often gets misunderstood. In the course of this week, I want to address this particular teaching, but I want to put the teaching in a bigger context.

I get the sense sometimes this not-self teaching is taught out of context, or out of its original context where the Buddha offered it. Sometimes I think it's given much more prominence—important as it is—in modern Buddhist teachings than it is in the teachings of the Buddha, where it has a very particular meaning and a very particular context for where it becomes alive, valuable, and maybe even an inspiring teaching. I want to talk about the wider context of it all.

One of them is that the Buddha used a lot of language about oneself. The word atta^[2] is self, and they say it can be both a philosophical term or a metaphysical term for something like a soul, but it could also just be an ordinary personal pronoun, kind of 'myself' to 'I.' 'I'm sitting here,' someone might say. 'The atta is sitting here' just as much as they would say 'I'm sitting here.' But we get a lot of emphasis in the early teachings on what we in English would call the self, on paying attention to oneself^[3]. If we use the expression 'oneself,' maybe it a little bit frees us from quickly getting it mixed up with this teaching of not-self, and then feeling that they're opposed to each other.

Finding the Treasure Within

There was a story of a group of aristocrats at the time of the Buddha who went to a park to enjoy the afternoon or the day. They had a picnic and there were all these couples, I guess married couples, but there was one aristocrat who came with a courtesan^[4]. That was his partner to the picnic. They all had this wonderful picnic and then they all took naps. While everyone else was sleeping, the courtesan went around and stole all the jewelry that everyone was wearing and disappeared. When they woke up, they noticed what had happened and that the courtesan was gone. So they went looking for her.

Elsewhere in the park was the Buddha, who was meditating. They came to the Buddha and said to him, 'Have you seen a courtesan?' And the Buddha said, 'What would you rather find, a courtesan or yourself?'

That got their attention. Instead of looking for the courtesan and their jewelry, they sat down to sit with this spiritual teacher to find out: what is he teaching? What does it mean to find yourself? This contrast between jewelry and courtesans, and finding what's been stolen versus finding yourself, is a dramatic contrast. It suggests that maybe the greatest treasure, the greatest jewelry we have, is found within, and maybe that has the most value. To spend time chasing after physical jewelry when we can discover the jewels within is unfortunate, at least from the point of view of what treasures we can find inside ourselves.

Here these people were just being introduced to Buddhism with that teaching. When people follow the whole path of Buddhism to the end, they sometimes are called 'great selves' or naga^[5] selves—selves that are like great serpents, great powerful beings. So there is not a shyness in the early tradition to use the word atta as a strong word in reference to people.

Knowing Oneself in the Wilderness

Also, there's not a shyness to talk about an individual in terms of being a strong, powerful person. Before the Buddha was enlightened, he was already a mendicant practicing in the woods. Someone came to him and said, 'You know, it's pretty scary to go meditating alone deep in the woods.'

The Buddha said, 'Yeah, I realize that. When I was thinking about going off to practice, I thought about the fear. I realized that if a person doesn't have concentration, it's easy to be afraid in the woods. But I have concentration. If a person does unethical conduct in body, speech, and mind, it's easy then to go into the woods and be afraid. But I don't have unethical conduct in body, speech, and mind. If a person has covetousness and greed, it's easy to be afraid in the woods. But I don't have that. If a person has hostility and hatred, it's easy to be afraid deep in the woods. But I don't have that.'

He went through all this list—he's checking himself out. He's getting to know himself, or he knows himself really well. And he knows that if he goes into the woods, those things are not going to be there to trip him up and make it difficult or frightening to be in the woods.

So here's a person who really knows himself in a situation where it's important to do so. Because if you go into the wilderness alone, in a sense, you only have yourself to survive, to find your way, to take care of yourself. You can't call first responders, you can't call someone to help you if something happens. You have to really use your own wits and your own abilities to be able to manage, including managing not getting frozen or lost in fear. There are lots of stories of monks, even in modern times—relatively modern Thailand, maybe not in the last decades—who went to practice in the woods and had experiences with wild animals, with tigers and different animals, that they had to deal with their fear.

There are times and places we go where clearly we're responsible for ourselves. Clearly, it's about us—me, myself, and mine—to really find our way. A person needs to have skills, needs to know themselves well to find their way and be responsible for themselves. No two ways about it, I think, for the most part. And there are personal places where people go in the modern world—and we're not in the wilderness—where we have to be responsible for ourselves. We have to track ourselves, know ourselves, and take responsibility for ourselves in a way that we don't expect anybody else to do. I apologize for this silly or inappropriate example, but no one else goes and pees for us^[6]; if we have to pee, we have to do it for ourselves.

The Inner Wilderness

So there is a place, a context for connecting and knowing oneself well. When we close our eyes in meditation, in a sense, we are going into an inner wilderness, an inner nature. In meditation, with our eyes closed—in spite of all the support we get from sitting with people, teachers, and teachings—once the eyes are closed, symbolically it's, 'Okay, it's just me and me. Here we are, and let's make the best of it. Let's find out.'

The Welfare of Self and Others

That's not the only thing we do in Buddhism. One of my favorite quotes of the Buddha is when he defined what it is to be a wise person. He said a wise person is someone who is concerned with the welfare of oneself—and here the word is atta, the word for self—one is concerned for the welfare of others, one is concerned for the welfare of both self and others, and one is concerned for the welfare of the whole world.

So clearly, the focus on self in meditation and Buddhist practice—which is a lot of it—is not meant to be selfish or self-absorbed. There is also a concern for others, a concern for the relationship between the self and others, and for the wider world. In different contexts, the attention of care goes in different directions. But there is a context for doing it here for us as an individual.

Some people aren't comfortable with that. They want it to be some kind of amorphous 'we,' or an amorphous place where we're not separate from everybody else. That's a fine thing to want in some ways. But to do that without becoming centered and stable here, becoming strong here, so that we have more to offer as we care for others, as we care for the world around us... Some people are afraid of really standing up here, recognizing who they are, respecting themselves, and really becoming embodied and full with who they are.

The Three Kinds of Conceit

In English, we say 'being full of oneself,' and that's a form of conceit. We can be afraid of that conceit, to be so full in everything. But there's a fascinating teaching in Buddhism about this, where conceit (māna)^[7] is viewed as being three different types. There's a kind of conceit that many of us think of as conceit: thinking that one is better than others. In Buddhism, there's also a conceit, a way of thinking about oneself and solidifying around oneself, that thinks of oneself as less than others. The third kind of conceit is the idea that we're equal to others. That's particularly challenging for some people in a society where being equal is considered to be the right way of being. So neither higher, lower, nor equal—because all three of those are a form of conceit.

What's the alternative? It seems like there's nothing left. What's left is not to play the comparison self-game, not to judge ourselves in any kind of way, because it involves an excessive preoccupation with self. That's what makes a conceit excessive: preoccupation with 'I have to be a certain way, I have to be better than others, worse than others, or I have to be equal, we all have to be equal.' That also can lend itself to a lot of constriction and tightness around self as conceit, as a form of attachment. Clearly conceit, attachment to identity, attachment to views, attachment to these things, are clearly something that Buddhism wants to let go of.

But not at the expense of becoming fully embodied people, fully present, strong, valued, and respected. There is a way in which doing this practice, at least from the point of view of the Buddha, is to help us become powerful in a benign way, in a beneficial way, in a peaceful way, in a harmless way. We're becoming abundant. These are the words of the Buddha, the language of the Buddha: we're becoming abundant, rather than being wasted, or deficient, or not quite living into our fullness.

That's one of the divisions that the Buddha made: he divided people not by better or worse, inferior or superior, but he used the words that some people are deficient, or deprived, or wasted, and some people have an abundance. Meditation practice, the spiritual practice of Buddhism, is to fill what is deprived, fill what's wasted, and become abundant from the inside out.

So that's the beginning of this context for the Buddhist teaching of self. Thank you, and I look forward to doing more of this throughout the week.