What’s Important
June 19, 2024

In the transcript of one of Ajaan MahaBoowa’s Dhamma talks, he gives a little preface saying that it was given in response to a question posed by one of the more important monks of our day and age. When I first read that, I thought he was talking about one of the senior monks in Bangkok. Later, though, I found out from one of his students that that was not the case at all. It was a monk who was not well-known, a member of the forest tradition who was assumed to have become an arahant.

This makes you stop and think. What does it mean, “important”? We’ve been trained to believe that the important people of the world are those who have power, those who are creative, those who play a big role in history. Sometimes this attitude spills over into the history of Buddhism. They talk a lot about the people who’ve made innovations in the tradition as it’s been passed on.

But what’s important in terms of the Dhamma? As the Buddha said, what he wanted was students who would practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. That means not only in line with what he taught, but also for the purpose for which he taught it, which is for disenchantment, dispassion, release. That’s the important work.

When people tell us that we should be doing things for society, usually it’s one person’s defilements fighting another person’s defilements. If we really want to do something important in the world, we have to straighten ourselves out first. That’s where the important work is. After all, look at the Buddha. As we mentioned today, there was slavery in his time, but he didn’t go out railing against the institution of slavery. He fought against the institution of greed, aversion, and delusion in each person’s mind, starting with his own mind.

So, when people make deprecating remarks—and it’s sad, sometimes we hear even monks making deprecating remarks—about people who sit with their eyes closed, we should remember that their attitude has very little to do with the Dhamma. After all, the Buddha discovered that we suffer because of things inside the mind, and in the course of suffering, we tend to create burdens for other people. One of our wishes for goodwill is, “May I look after myself with ease. May all beings look after themselves with ease.” In other words, “May they not be burdens. May I not be a burden on other people.” That’s an attitude the Buddha said we should think about every day.

The best way not to be a burden is to train your mind. So, you’re doing important work right here. In the afternoon, when the afternoon seems long, you’re sitting there—in a couple of days we’ll be sitting in hot weather—and your mind doesn’t seem to settle down, it all begins to seem sort of futile. If you start thinking about other things that would be more useful to do, more beneficial to do, remember: There’s nothing more beneficial than straightening out your own mind.

Whether you’re seeing immediate success is not the issue. The issue is that you keep at it. After all, it is something that requires training, but it’s something we can do. If people’s value lies in how much change they’re able to make in the world, there are a lot of things that resist changing. You try and try and try and cannot change them. What does that say about your value if that’s how you’re going to measure it? But in terms of your own mind, you can make changes.

When the Buddha explained his principle of causality, he was saying that some things are influenced by past actions, but not everything. In fact, if there were people who said that everything you experienced right now was the result of some past action, he would go and argue with those people. He was not the kind of person who’d go around picking fights, but he saw that as a serious wrong view. He said it was a view of inaction, in that it meant that what you’re doing right now doesn’t make any difference right now.

This is one of the reasons why his teaching was so revolutionary at the time. You look at the other teachings that were expounded then. A lot of them started with physical principles, saying, this is how the world is, and human action is meaningless in the context of how the world is, as they saw it, largely in the materialist worldviews of the Ajivikas. Or with the Brahmans: You couldn’t do anything on your own. You had to depend on the Brahmans to do the sacrifices and prayers and other things for you. Or the Jains saying, if you do anything at all, it gets in the way of your freedom, so try to do nothing. They’re all talking about powerlessness.

But the Buddha is saying you have this power right here, right now.

As for how far you can go in changing the present moment through your present actions, that’s something you’re going to learn through experimenting, through trial and error, dealing with the fact that some past actions have really strong results and others have weaker results. That’s something you have to learn how to read. But you read it by doing what you can in the present moment: doing what you know is skillful, and having trust in the Buddha when he says that it is skillful. Whether it shows its results immediately or it takes time, that’s not the issue. This is why the teaching does require conviction.

When we read that its aim is the end of passion and desire, that may seem discouraging. But, actually, there’s a lot of encouragement buried in that statement. It’s basically saying that the important issue in the world is not what people are doing outside, it’s what you’re doing in your own mind. And you do have the power to put an end to your unskillful actions. That’s good news, because there’s a joy that comes with a sense of agency, a sense that you can make a difference, that you can change things. We’re not helpless. We don’t live in a big cosmic machine that just makes us into little cogs. We play a large role in shaping our experience.

The downside of hearing that the goal is the end of passion and desire, of course, is that so much of what we like in life is based on our passions and desires. In fact, everything that we experience, as the Buddha said, is rooted in desire. That’s why we have to train. But the training does work. And it does make a difference. It does put an end to suffering. The Buddha himself confirmed this. All of his arahant disciples, all of his noble disciples, have confirmed this as well. They’re reliable people.

I was reflecting the other day on the irony of the fact that people in my generation and before my generation who went to Thailand were coming from the hippie generation, the time of revolutions in the West, or attempted revolutions. When we went to Thailand, who did we end up studying with? The most conservative people in the country, the ones who held to the Buddha’s teachings as they were.

The reason was because we found that the people who held to the teachings were the most reliable people we’d ever met.

So, when they say that this is the work that’s important, and it can be done, it’s going to be hard sometimes resisting your old habits of running after your desires, but you realize that your desires are not all monolithic. They’re not all running toward sensuality. There’s a desire in the mind for freedom. There’s a desire in the mind for integrity. There’s a desire in the mind to be honest, to be truthful. These desires exist, too. So, it’s not that we’re totally denying desire. We’re simply sorting our desires out and trying to give prominence to the ones that are most honorable within us, the most noble within us.

Years back, when I was first back teaching in America, one evening in a group in Orange County, I happened to use the word “dignity” in a Dhamma talk. After the talk, a Russian woman in the group came up. She’d been in the States for about a decade. And she mentioned when she learned English in Russia, she’d learned the word “dignity,” knew what it meant, but since coming to America, she hadn’t heard the word used at all until that night. Which says a lot about our culture now. It also says something about how dignity is something that we might like to revive. There’s that desire within us as well.

So, the Buddha has us honor the most important, the most honorable, noble desires within ourselves. And he gives us encouragement, saying that this is important work, and it’s work that can be done. When the practice seems dry, and the results don’t seem to be coming as fast as you like, remind yourself that by sticking with the practice, you’re doing important work. The results are bound to come.