Put Your Heart into It

The Pali word for “mind”—citta—also means “heart,” which means that when we’re training the citta, we’re training both the heart and the mind.

A lot of times the emphasis is on the mind, in the sense that we’re trying to figure things out, and that is an important part of the practice. I’ve heard some people say, “Don’t try to figure things out. Just be with whatever comes up. Say that “it’s like this,” and that should to be enough.”

Well, that’s pretty mindless, and it doesn’t accomplish much of anything. Actually, if you want to comprehend stress and suffering, you have to figure out why things are happening. That requires the mind: your ability to think, to explore, to come up with hypotheses and then test them. That is an important part of the practice.

But the heart has to be trained as well. You can see this in the Buddha’s first instructions to his son on how important it is to be honest. Of the various precepts, the Buddha seems to emphasize the one on not lying the most. It’s not just a head issue—being accurate when giving a report of what’s happening. It’s also a heart issue—your integrity, your honesty. You have to bring that to the practice. If you’re not honest, and your precepts are not honest, your concentration is not honest, your discernment is not honest, the practice isn’t going to get anywhere.

Building on that, the Buddha talks of many other qualities of the heart. He extolls modesty, contentment, persistence, unburdensomeness. These are all qualities of the heart. We tend to think of someone being good-hearted as meaning that they’re kind and gentle. And that is an important part of the heart of a Buddhist trainee. Look at all the teachings on goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy.

But the idea of being good-hearted also sometimes carries the connotations of being weak, whereas for the Buddha, a good heart is strong. As he said when he talked about his own awakening, he had to apply qualities of being heedful, ardent, and resolute.

Heedful in the sense of seeing that there’s a danger, but it can be avoided by training the mind. It comes down to a desire for happiness, a desire not to be harmed, especially not to harm yourself. But at the same time, not harming yourself means not harming others.

I was listening recently to a secular Buddhist saying that the idea of harmlessness is vague and unhelpful. He wanted to see “flourishing” more as the Buddhist virtue.

But the Buddha is very precise in what it means to be harmless. You don’t intentionally do anything that’s going to injure others: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking intoxicants.

This person was saying, well, what about the ripple effect of your actions down the line? The answer is that we can’t be responsible for that. But you are responsible for the things that you do and say and think, and the things that you directly tell others to do and say and think. We’re not aiming at being totally harmless in the world, because it’s impossible to live in the world and be totally harmless. After all, we have to feed. And we can’t be responsible for what other people do in response to our harmless actions. We simply try our best to be harmless in the areas where we can be responsible so that we can get out.

Buddha talks about nibbana as being the unafflicted and the unafflictive, which means that when you find it, the happiness there doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm anybody else. That’s when you’re totally harmless. That’s where we’re aiming. So, harmlessness is not a vague notion. The Buddha is very precise in what he means, and the goal he points us to is utterly harmless.

Realize that if you’re harmless in these ways, you’re not causing danger for anybody—you’re not causing danger for yourself or the people around you. That’s what it means to be heedful, realizing that there are dangers in the world and dangers inside your own mind. The mind has its dangers for itself and for others, but we’re learning how to minimize those dangers. We realize that it can be done. If we couldn’t escape danger through our actions, there’d be no need to be heedful. So, you show your heedfulness in your efforts to be harmless.

As for ardent, this is where you get to the proper sense of the word heart, when you say you put your heart into doing this. You’re not just gentle or going with the flow. You’re intent. You really put your will into doing this well.

As you’re sitting here right now, you’re trying to keep the mind with one object, with the breath. Any thoughts that help in that, you try to develop, to encourage. Any thoughts that’d pull you someplace else, you try to abandon. You put your whole heart into this. In fact, the Buddha uses the word citta here again. That means that you aren’t just thinking about it. You’re intent. You’re wholeheartedly doing it.

As for resolute, the Buddha doesn’t talk about this quality much, but basically it’s the firmness of your determination, once you’ve found something good, that you’re going to stick with it. This is the quality you need to get the mind into concentration. It’s not that difficult to watch a breath or two. But if it’s going to have an impact on the mind, you’ve got to stick with it. And if it’s not working, this is where you bring in the ardency again, to figure out what’s wrong and what you can do to improve the situation. This stick-to-it-iveness is what’s going to make the real difference in your practice.

So, as you’re sitting and meditating, try to think of those qualities—heedful, ardent, resolute—and bring them to your practice, so that you’re not easily defeated. When sleepiness comes on, drowsiness comes on, you don’t just give in. You try to figure out, “What can I do to raise the level of my energy?” When the mind starts getting restless, you don’t say, “Well, the meditation is not going well, I just might as well give up.” You stay here and you figure out: When the mind is restless like this, what in that restlessness has an appeal?

Sometimes the mind seems to be running on its own. In a case like that, you say, “Well, I’m going to stay right here with the breath. As for the thoughts, they can run off on their own if they want, but I’m not going to follow them.” And you’re resolute in sticking with the breath, even though one part of the mind may be flailing around, concerned about this, that, or the other thing.

This is where it’s really useful to have a sense of the mind as being like a committee, and sometimes not everybody is on board with the concentration. So, with any parts of the mind that’re not on board, you tell yourself, “They’re not me, they’re not mine. They’re just there.”

Sometimes you’re dealing with the results of past karma: old habits that have been running through the mind for a long time and they’re not going to die down quickly. You can’t put an instant stop to them, but you can refuse to nourish them. That way, you don’t get tied up with them. They can run on their own as far as they’re going to run. But you’re going to be resolute in staying with the breath.

Years back, I was leading a meditation group in a college back east. They had assigned us to a room that had a really loud clock. At the end of the first meditation, as soon as the students opened their eyes, everybody said, “That clock!”

I had to point out to them that the clock didn’t destroy their breath. The breath was still there, as much as it’d have been without the clock. But there was that part of the mind that wanted to zoom in on everything around them. You just don’t get involved in things like that. Let the clock do its clock thing. You do your meditation thing.

You’re trying to develop good qualities in the mind because you want to be able to use them in all situations. So whatever disturbances there are outside, you learn how to not pay them any attention. Whatever disturbances there are in the mind, disregard them as just another committee member or block of committee members. They don’t have to have control over everything. You hold on. You’re resolute. You’re ardent.

And you do this because you’re heedful. You realize that if you don’t train the mind, it’s going to get scattered all over the place. Especially when things like aging, illness and death come, only a trained mind can handle these things and not suffer.

So, when you think about being good-hearted, training both the heart and the mind to be good, remember it’s not just a matter of the brahma-viharas. It’s not just a matter of being gentle and kind. It’s also a matter of the force of your will, your honesty, your integrity. That’s the foundation of being heedful, ardent, and resolute: putting your heart into this.

That’s how the heart gets trained. That’s how the whole heart and mind get trained. Because the mind has to learn lessons from the heart in this way. It’s trying to figure things out. There are all kinds of things you can try to figure out, but here the desire of the heart is for true happiness: a happiness that’s harmless, a happiness that’s reliable. You want to use your ingenuity in service of that.

So, it’s always a matter of heart and mind together. As you develop both sides, that’s how your practice gets mature, well-rounded: a genuine basis for gaining a state of well-being that’s well-rounded as well.