Shame Yes, Guilt No
April 09, 2024

There was a famous Olympic swimmer one time who was expected to sweep all of the events he swam in, but he didn’t win the first. The commentators then predicted that he would go into a slump and probably lose all the rest as well. But his coach said to them, “You don’t know him.” And sure enough, he went on to win all the remaining events he swam in. In other words, he didn’t let a defeat get him down. He didn’t let a mistake get him down.

This is an important principle to keep in mind as you think about your precepts. They’re basically training rules. That’s what sikkhapada means: Each precept is training rule. Think of being an athlete and how an athlete trains. If you lose a game, does that mean you’re going to lose all the games? Well, no. Does it mean you’re bad? Not necessarily. You have to reflect: What did you do wrong? Then you learn from that. If you let yourself get eaten up by remorse, that just makes it harder and harder to stick with the precepts.

On the one hand, you have the voice that’s hounding away at you, saying, “See? See? See? You made that horrible mistake.” You can listen to that voice only for so long, and then there will be the reactive voice that says, “I don’t care.” Things inside you then go back and forth like that. When you don’t care, you break the precept again, and then the hounding voice comes back.

So as you keep listening to that voice of remorse, and it sounds like the voice of the Dhamma, remind yourself there are things that sound like the Dhamma but are not Dhamma at all. This is one of them. The Buddha said, when you make a mistake, that you recognize it as a mistake, and you make up your mind you’re not going to repeat that mistake. Don’t go for remorse, because that doesn’t accomplish anything. Then you spread lots of goodwill around: goodwill for yourself, to give you the energy to keep on practicing; goodwill for the people you’ve wronged, so you’ll be motivated not to repeat that mistake.

Then tell yourself: This is the best a human being can do.

We’re fortunate in Buddhism that it was founded by someone who had made mistakes, admitted them, and learned from them. You can imagine what Genesis would be like if, after seven days, God looked to the world and said, “Whoops, let’s start all over again.” A world in which beings have to feed off of beings: Even Kurt Vonnegut could think of a better world than that. So the Buddha knew what it’s like to make a mistake, but also knew how to learn from one. And an emotion that he never recommends is guilt.

He does recommend shame. It’s very different. And the shame he recommends is not the kind of shame that says, “You’re a horrible person. You should be ashamed of yourself. Don’t show your face around anyone.” It’s more the shame of realizing, “Okay, I’m a good person, but I slipped.” When he taught Rahula to have shame over his unskillful actions, remember: He was a member of the noble warrior caste, talking to his son, trying to imbue him with the attitude of a noble warrior. These people are very proud.

Part of a healthy sense of pride is that there are certain actions that you’d be ashamed to do. If you do slip and do them, you say, “Okay, I’ve got to be more careful the next time.” That’s the appropriate way to learn from a mistake: learning that you’ve got to be more careful, and seeing exactly where you have to be more careful.

One of the reasons why we take the precepts is that they give us clear standards to hold by. You hear some people saying that the Buddha was too enlightened to teach hard and fast rules, so we should take them as general recommendations. But no, they’re meant to be followed as rules—training rules—because your mind needs to be trained. One of the things you’ll find very quickly is that your mind can be very quick in breaking the precepts, especially if you’ve lived without the precepts before and suddenly find yourself having to follow them. You can see how quick the mind is to want to break them and not even think that you’re breaking anything. You tell yourself, “In this situation, I’ve got to say this. In this situation, I’ve got to do this.” But the precept says No.

The precept around speech is the most difficult to hold to, because speech is so quick. A thought comes into your head, and sometimes the checkpoints between your brain and your mouth leave all their doors open, and it just slips right through. There was an intention in there that was not in line with the precepts, and you missed it. You let it slip right through. This teaches you that you’ve got to be more alert, you’ve got to be more mindful.

After all, the things that happen purely in your mind are a lot quicker than that—and they can be pretty devastating. Think of someone on his or her deathbed, whose mind starts thinking about this, thinking about that—all sorts of thoughts are swirling through the mind. If you’re not really clear about what’s going on in the mind, what the mind is saying to itself, then as you leave the body, you can go all kinds of undesirable places.

I read a novel one time in which one of the main characters is dying toward the end of the novel. All of a sudden, she fastens on a tree outside the window. Now, if the author were Buddhist, that would be a sign that she’s probably going to be reborn as a tree deva. Which is not too bad. But then again, she might be born as a bug in the tree, who knows? The mind is very quick and slithery. It’s like mercury. Nowadays, they don’t let kids play with mercury, but I remember when I was small, if a thermometer broke, we got to play with the mercury. It was amazing how it could slip around. Well, the mind is more slippery than that.

So if you find that all the effort required to turn a thought into actual speech is too quick for you to catch, what about the thoughts just on their own? Take this as a warning, that you’ve got to be more careful, you’ve got to be more alert.

This is why the precepts are a good preparation for concentration practice. You need to be mindful, alert, and really take your virtue seriously—but not in a grim sense. The more grim you are about the precepts, the less you’ll be likely to stick with them. You want to be serious in the sense that this is something you want to master.

Think of it as a game you want to get good at. Have a sense that it is enjoyable to learn how to get some control over your actions. This is an attitude a lot of us have trouble learning, but it really is important. And the Buddha keeps recommending it. He says you want to bring a sense of well-being, a sense of gladness to the concentration. One of the best ways of doing that is to learn how to stick with the precepts. You get more and more used to thinking in skillful ways, more and more used to seeing the times when you really stick with the precepts where you hadn’t before as a victory, and you take joy in that. This is when you learn how to enjoy the training: that you can keep it alive and you’re more likely to get quicker and quicker at catching yourself.

So if you find that you have that voice of guilt—and our culture, the religion on which our culture is based really advocates guilt as a good spiritual emotion—remember that from the Buddha’s point of view, it’s not. It’s unskillful. It’s actually a barrier to the kind of training that he wants you to take on. Of course, the people who advocate guilt as a good thing are trying to tell you that you’re basically a bad person. This is the difference between shame and guilt.

Healthy shame comes from a sense that you are a good person, you have good qualities, and you want to maintain those good qualities as best you can. Guilt basically tells you that you’re rotten to the core—and that’s not going to help you develop skill at all. It’s the kind of emotion that makes you more and more dependent on others. The Buddha’s trying to teach you to learn how to depend on yourself, and part of self-reliance is a sense of confidence: “Yes, I can do this. I am capable. I’ve slipped every now and then, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the slips.”

When that’s the attitude you bring, the training does become a joy, as you’re up for the challenges that come, both inside meditation and out.