A Boxing Lesson

My older brother Galen told a story of when he was young. He was about to enter school and start first grade. My grandfather took him aside. My mother liked to give unusual names to her sons, but Grandpa didn’t think much of them. As he told Galen, “The kids at school are going to make fun of your name. You’ve got to learn how to box.” Grandpa had been a boxer when he was younger. So he got down on his knees in front of Galen and started tapping him on his face, getting a little bit more aggressive and then more aggressive until Galen lost his temper and started flailing. Grandpa put his hand on Galen’s head and said, “Stop. You may notice that the more you get angry, the easier it is for me to hit you. What you’ve got to do is learn to grow cold, focus on what you have to do: Take the other guy out.” Galen learned his lesson and was able to defend himself at school.

This is a story I like to tell in Buddhist centers because it shocks people, but it teaches an important Dhamma lesson. It’s very similar to the lesson taught in two of the suttas, in the simile of the saw. In that simile, you’ve got bandits who have pinned you down. They’re cutting you up in little pieces with a two-handled saw. The Buddha said, “If you have ill will for them, you’re not following my teaching. You have to have goodwill, starting with them, and for yourself, and then for the whole universe.” That’s how you protect yourself.

In that case, you’re helpless. They’re pinning down; they’ve overpowered you. So the best you can do is just to protect your goodwill.

But you need to have equanimity as well. You have to be equanimous about what they’re doing to your body. If you allow yourself to get upset about that, then goodwill is going to be impossible. So you have to grow cold. Focus.

In this case, you don’t take them out, you take out your own defilements. But the simile teaches an important lesson: that equanimity and goodwill have to go together. You have to be equanimous about the way the world wounds you. Then, based on your goodwill, for your own good and for the good of others, focus on what has to be done.

The other day we were talking about how the Buddha taught duties. It’s an aspect of the Dhamma that a lot of people slip over. They tell us the Buddha was a very open-minded kind of guy, perfectly fine with whatever people might do to his teachings, which is certainly not the case. His duty as a teacher, as he said, was to teach you what should and shouldn’t be done for your own good, for the sake of your long-term welfare and happiness. If you don’t want long-term welfare and happiness, then his shoulds have no power over you. He’s not trying to force them on you. But as he said, given the nature of how things work in the world, this is what has to be done if you want your happiness to be reliable.

The discourse in which the simile of the saw first appears makes the same point with several other images as well. It talks about how there are different ways that people can criticize you, sometimes with a mind of goodwill, sometimes with a mind of ill will, with what’s true or what’s false, what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. That’s the way of human speech. So on the one hand, you have to have some equanimity toward what they’re saying about you, so that you don’t get upset. Realize that it’s not outrageous that they’re saying these things, because these things are being said all over the world all the time.

But you still have to maintain your goodwill. Some of the images are of goodwill as being like the whole earth. You want your goodwill to be that large, that solid. A man comes along with a shovel and a hoe, and he wants to make the earth be without earth. So he digs here, digs there, spits here, spits there, urinates here, urinates there, saying, “Be without earth, be without earth.” But the earth is so much bigger. His puny efforts mean nothing.

You want your goodwill to be that large, your equanimity to be that solid, so that at the very least, the way the world digs into you and spits on you and urinates on you doesn’t get you upset. After all, you have other things you’ve got to do. You have to figure out what is for your own true well-being and what is for the true well-being of others. So you don’t let their misbehavior become an excuse for your misbehavior.

Another image is of your goodwill as being large and cool, like the river Ganges. Someone can come along with a torch and try to set it on fire, but it’s not going to catch fire. You want your mind, you want your sense of yourself to be that cool, that resistant to catching fire—because again, it’s so easy when people do outrageous things: Your fire sparks up and it spreads to burn away all your goodness. So you have to be equanimous about the way the world tries to set fire to you, realizing that your mind is not susceptible to that, and that you can still maintain your sense of what should be done, in line with your attitude of goodwill for all.

Another image is that your goodwill is like space. People can come and try to write things on space, but space has no surface. Nothing sticks, because there’s no place for it to stick to. So again, what people write about you, what people say about you: Don’t let it stick in your mind. That’s a sign of real equanimity. Let these things just fall away. Then your goodwill has a chance to thrive.

So see these two qualities as going together. It’s not the case that you start with goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy, and then you drop them when you go to equanimity. Equanimity is there to make sure they’re strong. But your duty to do what is for your true well-being and the well-being of others: That stays.

In the other sutta, where Ven. Sariputta refers to the simile of the saw, he tells you to reflect on the fact that your body is made out of physical elements: earth, water, wind, fire. Because of that, you’re exposed to sticks and stones and knives and being hit—so you have to keep that simile of the saw in mind.

Now, there are passages in the Canon, in the Vinaya, where they say that if a monk is being attacked, he has the right to defend himself. No right to kill, of course, yet it’s okay to defend yourself. But still, you want to maintain your goodwill and equanimity at the same time so that you can continue doing your duty. It sounds very stoic, but you have to realize that having a strong sense that you’ve mastered your duties and can do them well in all kinds of situations brings a strong sense of well-being, a strong sense of self-worth and happiness.

So the Buddha’s not saying to forego happiness. He’s just saying to look for happiness in places where you might not expect it. Look for it in mastering the skills of the path. So even though the world may hit you and stab you and piss on you and spit on you and saw you up into little pieces, you don’t let it get to your mind. You don’t let it get in the way of doing your duty, which is to act on goodwill.

The teachings on equanimity are not telling you just to accept whatever’s happening and say, “I can’t make any change.” The Buddha wasn’t the sort of person who would not make changes. After all, look at all the changes he made in the world. First he made changes in himself. He was a prince who was very delicately brought up, who had only the best food, only the best lodging, and yet he trained himself to live out in the wilderness. He even trained himself to undergo austerities, trained himself to find the right path, and then spent 45 years after finding true happiness to put up with all the difficulties of trying to establish the Dhamma and Vinaya in a world that was very much opposed to the Dhamma and Vinaya in many ways. It’s because of him that we have this Dhamma, we have this Vinaya, we have the Sangha. That’s a huge gift to the world.

He had to be resilient and equanimous about the criticisms that were sent his way, but his equanimity didn’t stop him from making big changes in the world. This means that the equanimity he taught is not a do-nothing equanimity. It’s a strength. It goes together with endurance, and it goes together with goodwill. When you realize that, then it’s a lot easier to practice in a balanced way that’s beneficial for you and for everyone around you.