Helping Others Is a Battle

We have that chant that we repeat regularly, that the Buddha was the unexcelled tamer, with a qualification: “of those fit to be tamed.” Even he couldn’t tame everybody, couldn’t train everybody. He realized that there were limitations. Here he had attained the ultimate awakening. When he contemplated what would be involved in teaching other people, his first reaction was discouragement—there would be so many people out there who would be resistant.

We had a case in Thailand recently. One of the forest ajaans who was reputed to be an arahant, fully awakened: Somebody tried to kill him. You can imagine what he thought: Here he had done all the work required to become awakened and he was willing to teach everybody—yet even so, there were people who were offended by what he taught.

Even the Buddha had people who tried to kill him. He realized that, taming himself, he had to do battle with his own defilements. Taming other people would involve having to battle with their defilements. In some cases, the people would be willing to receive his help; in other cases, not—they’d be very resistant, they’d resent him. So here he is, the person who has helped more people than anybody else in the world, and even he had to face limitations.

The best way to battle with those limitations was for him to clean up his own act first. The image he gives for helping other people is that it’s like two acrobats. One is standing on the shoulders of the other. As he said, each of them has to look after his or her own balance—and that protects the other. As you can imagine, if one of them loses balance, it’s going to pull the other down. But if you can maintain your balance, to that extent you’re helping the other person maintain his or her balance, which is why the emphasis in the practice is so much on cleaning up your own mind first. After all, if you’re going to help other people, you have to be reliable: one, to set a good example; and then, two, to understand what’s involved in being reliable.

As the Buddha said, the mind is quick to change—so quick that there’s no adequate analogy. Even the twinkling of an eye is too slow. You can change direction 180 degrees, very fast. If you haven’t trained your mind so that it won’t be that way, you can’t depend on yourself; other people can’t depend on you, either.

The other reason you have to straighten out yourself is that sometimes you tell yourself that you have good intentions, you have goodwill for all, but then you dig down a little bit deeper and you find there’s something else—something that goes in the opposite direction. Most of us don’t like to see that—that we do have unskillful thoughts, unskillful emotions—so we cover them up with what we think is skillful.

To face up to those things, you have to get the mind in a state where it’s really at ease with itself, where you feel comfortable in your own skin and not easily knocked over by unskillful thoughts that come through the mind. Then you can deal with them.

This is why we put so much emphasis on getting the mind into concentration: Focus on your breath. Breathe in a way that feels good, nourishing for the body. Soothing when you’re feeling frazzled. Energizing when you’re feeling tired. Relaxing when you’re feeling tense. Use the breath as medicine.

Realize that you do have good potentials inside. This will be an important lesson for dealing with the unskillful things that come up. When something unskillful blatantly comes into the mind, it’s so easy to say, “My intentions are all corrupt. I’m a bad person.” But if you know you have some good potentials that you can fall back on, then you’re not so easily knocked over. Work on that sense of well-being inside with some confidence that you do have good potentials—it’s just that you haven’t fed them properly yet.

So you learn how to feed them. You feed your mindfulness with observing the precepts and developing goodwill. You feed your discernment by noticing what’s happening in the mind, sorting your thoughts out into two sorts: skillful and unskillful. The skillful ones come from thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion. The unskillful ones come from thoughts of sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness.

Even the Buddha, when he was on his path, noticed that his thoughts fell into those two categories. This is one of the comforting things about the Buddha’s teachings—they come from a person who knows what it’s like to be impure, knows what it’s like to be imperfect, but also knows how to develop your potentials for purity and perfection.

So he’s been where you are. And he can show you the way to develop the good potentials, to have the confidence that “Yes, there’s something good inside you.” But it needs to be protected and it needs to be developed, and you have to watch out for your other potentials inside as well.

When you have a balanced view like this, then you can begin to trust yourself, so that when an intention comes up that looks pure and looks compassionate, seems to have the happiness of others in its sights, you’re going to look deeper to see what else is going on in there. Some people are good to other people because they have a sense of inadequacy inside and they’re trying to make up for it. Or they’re trying to cover up something else. Or sometimes it’s an ego trip. So you want to watch out, to see that your good intentions are really good all the way through.

Again, this is why you have to get your own balance established so that you’re not knocked off by unskillful thoughts and not deluded by your skillful thoughts that are hiding something else. When you have a good sense of balance like this, then you can help other people find a sense of balance as well, because it is up to them to want to accept your help. You have to provide a good example that convinces them that, yes, you are a worthy person to learn from.

So learn how to teach yourself first. And as you think of taking on others, you notice again the example of the Buddha—he didn’t go around teaching everybody. The tradition is that he would survey the world in the early morning, around 4 a.m. to see who was ready to be taught. Not everybody in the world came to mind—just specific individuals sometimes. So he would choose his battles.

Helping other people is a battle because they have their reasons for being the way they are, the unskillful ways they are. Sometimes you can overcome their defilements, and sometimes you can’t. Or, to put it another way, sometimes you can get them to want to overcome their defilements, often you can’t.

A lot of people are perfectly satisfied with their view of the world, their view of themselves. They have all sorts of reasons for justifying to themselves the ways they behave. It usually takes some insight into how they’re suffering for them to be able to change their ways. But look at yourself—if there were no sense that you’re suffering, that there’s something wrong, you wouldn’t try to train yourself. You’d just stay as you are.

So, even though when we’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, there’s a lightness to it—in the sense that we have thoughts of goodwill going out in all directions and our mind is radiant, nothing seems to be getting in the way—still, other thoughts can get in the way, especially when you think of all the people you might find difficult. In those cases, you have to work to convince yourself that it is possible to have goodwill for them. The best way to do that is to remember what goodwill means: wishing that they would behave in skillful ways and if they’ve been behaving in unskillful ways, that they see the error of their ways, voluntarily, and be willing to change. Now, that’s a thought you can extend to anybody.

There may be some cases where you see that they’ve been particularly cruel or thoughtless or irresponsible, and part of your mind says, “Well, I’d like to see them suffer a little bit first, so that they can get a sense of the wrong they’ve done.” A lot of people don’t equate their sufferings with the wrong they’ve done. Sometimes they get even more entrenched in their ways when they suffer. So basically, you hope that all beings will come to their senses.

But then you look around you: How many people are coming to their senses? They’ve got their reasons for not doing that. They may be really bad reasons, but they’re still holding on to them. So you have to ask yourself, “Is this a battle worth fighting? Is this a battle that you have a chance of winning?”

If you can see the prospect of helping other people as being like a battle, you’re prepared. And if you’ve learned how to do battle with your own defilements, you’re really ready. So have some goodwill for yourself. It’s one of the reasons why the chant on goodwill starts, “May I be happy”—i.e., “May I understand the causes for true happiness. May I understand what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and be willing to drop any unskillful behavior I’ve been doing.” When you can have goodwill for yourself in that way, bringing some more light into the processes in the mind by which different emotions take over—as we discussed today, looking at the way you breathe, looking at the way you talk to yourself, looking at the images you hold in mind of what’s going on, and if you see that any of those are unskillful, think of skillful alternatives: If you’ve brought some light to these processes within you, then it’s easier to shed light on the same processes in other people’s minds.

The breathing is important because really strong emotions have gotten into the body. They get to the hormones and they can really mess up with the balance in the body. So you need to work with the breath to restore balance.

When you can bring some light into yourself, then you have some light to share with others. It’s not the case that you have to be totally awakened before you help. Think of the Buddha in the many lifetimes leading up to his awakening: He was very generous to help, had lots of goodwill, was very virtuous. And in his generosity, he helped people in all kinds of ways—not just with material things, but also with his discernment, with his forgiveness, with his knowledge, with his energy. But he knew how much to give and how much was too much to give.

As the Buddha said, one of the principles of generosity is learning your limitations. You don’t give in a way that you harm yourself and you certainly don’t give in ways that harm other people. In other words, you don’t give them things that would induce them to do unskillful things. So, even though our goodwill is unlimited, there are limitations on our energy, on our ability to help, just as there were limitations on the Buddha’s ability to help—and he was much more prepared than we are.

So start with goodwill for yourself. As you show goodwill for yourself in the practice, you’re learning how to maintain your balance. That automatically has a good impact on the people around you. Now, the extent to which they’ll pick up on that impact, that’s their choice. You work on what you have the power to choose.