Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals

Spread thoughts of goodwill, starting with yourself. Tell yourself, “May I be truly happy.”

Put an emphasis on the “truly,” because it’s possible to be happy about all kinds of things on all kinds of levels, but you want to find a happiness that lasts, a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody—a happiness that comes from developing good qualities inside yourself.

Then spread goodwill to others. Start with people who are close to your heart—your family, your very close friends: May they find true happiness, too. Then spread those thoughts out in ever-widening circles until you encompass the whole universe.

You want to be able to sit here with no thoughts of ill-will for anybody. Have no grudges. Just let things be—because you have work to do inside.

That’s the next step. Focus on your breath and keep watch over the mind to make sure that it stays with the breath. It’s almost as if you have two minds here: the one focused on the breath, and the other focused on the relationship between the two. You want to keep them together.

Adjust the breath so that it feels good. If any thoughts come up in the mind that would pull you away from the breath, just let them go. If you find that they’ve already pulled you away before you realized what happened, you can drop that thought. You don’t have to finish it. Just let it go. Leave the ends dangling.

You want to establish yourself right here. You want to be able to watch your own mind, because, as the Buddha said, our happiness and our suffering come from within the mind. We do things that lead to suffering because we don’t know what we’re doing.

The way around that, of course, is to be more alert to what you’re doing. And it starts right here with the mind at the breath, and you talking to yourself.

This is purely an internal matter, because the question of suffering is basically the mind’s relationship to itself: the things you do and then the suffering that comes as a result. We may say that we suffer because of things other people have done to us or are doing to us, but it’s really how we take in that information that makes the difference between whether we’re going to suffer from it or not.

Arahants can live in a world where people criticize them and mistreat them, but they don’t suffer. They’re setting a good example, showing that this is possible, and that the real issue is inside.

Now, when you solve this inside issue, it’s your business and nobody else’s, but other people will benefit. After all, if you’re not acting on greed, aversion, or delusion, you’re not harming anyone. You’re setting a good example. And sometimes just being around you will calm people down.

So this is your responsibility right here, directly, which is one of the reasons why the Buddha says that modesty is a virtue on the path. We’re not doing this to show off to anybody else. We don’t have to post any notices on social media, because it’s really our own business. When you see your own stupidity—which is a lot of what awakening is all about, seeing how stupid you’ve been—it’s an issue between you and you. Nobody else has to know

Sometimes, of course, you hear about psychic powers that develop in the course of the meditation, but again, even if you gain them, nobody else has to know. If you start displaying them to other people, then it’s pride on your part.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that if you have powers like that—or if you have any attainments at all in your meditation in terms of gaining concentration, gaining insights—you don’t talk about them to others. You talk about them with your teacher so that you can know what to do with them, but otherwise, you stay quiet.

There are examples in the Canon, and some in the Forest Tradition, where monks did display some of their powers and they ended up regretting it, because people got all excited about the powers. They weren’t interested in the Dhamma at all, they were interested in the powers. When that happens, it makes it harder to practice.

Ajaan Lee tells the story of how he was once invited to visit a home where the mother of the house had been paralyzed for decades. Her children had been told by another monk who came through the area that another Forest monk would be coming soon, and he would be able to cure the mother. And sure enough, when Ajaan Lee walked into the house, she was able to get up and raise her hands in añjalī to him: the first time she’d moved in a long time.

Over the course of the next couple of days, she got better and better, to the point where she could actually do chores around the house. Well, the people in the village all came looking for Ajaan Lee. They wanted him to cure their illnesses, too. So he had to leave.

The same with that story that we read in the readings, about the monk who was able to create a little bit of rain and wind to cool the other monks down: A layperson witnesses this, and then the monk has to leave, for fear that the word is going to get out.

So when people have these powers and show them off, they suffer.

Even if people don’t have powers of any kind but they start talking about how much they know about the Dhamma, one, they can do a lot of damage. And two, even if what they say is true, the question is: Why are you doing this? Are you just doing it to attract attention to yourself, or what? This is why the Buddha says you should be modest about your attainments, because they actually are your business and nobody else’s.

But that doesn’t mean you should be modest in your aims. After all, the Buddha opens the way to you to put an end to suffering. That’s a pretty audacious aim. A lot of people say, “Well, I’ll just be happy with generosity, I’ll just be happy with observing the precepts, and stop there,” maybe doing a little bit of meditation to calm the mind down. But there’s so much more that the Buddha has to offer. It’s all for free, and he encourages you to take all of it.

In a case like this, when you take all of it l, it’s not a case of greed. You’re actually doing a service directly to yourself and indirectly to others. So when the Buddha offers the path to end suffering, you should say, “Let’s see how far I can go on that. It’ll take time and energy, but it’ll be time well spent, energy well spent.”

So be modest about what you reveal to others, but don’t be modest about what you aim for. The Buddha says there is something deathless inside of us, something that has nothing to do with space or time, it’s the ultimate happiness, and we can find it by following his path. That was the good news he gave to the group of five monks before he taught them the first sermon. He said, “The deathless has been attained, and if you do as I tell you, you’ll be able to attain it too.” It’s an invitation to us all.

Don’t content yourself with just a little bit of practice here, a little bit of practice there. You can practice all day long, and nobody else has to know. You can stay with your breath, stay grounded in your body, even as you do other chores. If your chores require a lot of mental work, you do the mental work and then you rest, get back into the body again, as often as you can. After a while, you begin to realize you can still do mental work and be aware of the body at the same time.

So develop that skill. It requires some effort and dedication, but after all it is a question of your true happiness, developing the foundation for a genuine happiness that harms nobody. It doesn’t harm you, it doesn’t harm anybody else. It’s a happiness that will not let you down. And it’s something we can all do.

The practice doesn’t change from monks to lay people. Lay people have some more challenges in terms of other responsibilities, but it’s basically the same practice for everybody: Be grounded as you go through the day. Notice when your mind slips off, and don’t be content to let it just slip off and wander around. As soon as you sense that it’s slipped off, you bring it back. If it slips off again, you bring it back again. Each time you come back, reward yourself with a way of breathing that feels especially good, so that the mind will be more and more inclined to want to come back.

So be audacious in your practice, but modest in not showing to other people what you know. You have to ask yourself: Why are you showing off your knowledge? You see this all around us, people showing off their knowledge as if the fact that they have access to social media gives them the right to spout off about whatever.

Ajaan Mun didn’t take to social media, not only because they didn’t have it at that time. Even if they had had it at that time, he wouldn’t have gone there, because he realized that the real work was inside. And the rewards were inside as well.

We read his biography, full of lots of stories about visions he had, but the monks who lived with him said that he very, very, very rarely talked about such things. He would talk about them only if you had visions like that in your meditation. Then he would give instructions on how to deal with them—how he had dealt with them so that they didn’t pose any danger.

You do have to watch out for these things, because they do have dangers. You have a vision, you have an intuition: It may be true, but it may be false. You don’t know where it’s coming from. If Ajaan Mun had believed everything he saw, he would have gone crazy.

The principle that he taught to Ajaan Fuang was that whatever comes up in your meditation, it’s not a question of who’s delivering the message. The question is, what is the message? And is the message in line with the Dhamma? And is it something you can test? If it seems to be in line with the Dhamma and it can be put to the test, well, you try it out. If it can’t be tested, or if it doesn’t work when it is tested, you put it aside.

In other words, you use your powers of observation in terms of what you’re doing right now, and the results you’re getting right now—that’s your test.

It’s purely your business. Messages and visions like that are often messages just for you. You don’t have to go telling anybody else. And in that way you’re safe. You don’t mislead anybody. You don’t attract attention to yourself.

It seems that in the world nowadays everybody’s trying to attract attention to themselves. But what do they do with that attention? Do they deliver messages that are of use to humanity, or do they just sound off?

Wait until you have something really genuinely good before you start sharing your knowledge with others. Even then, be careful. Share your knowledge when you know it’ll be beneficial, and not just for the sake of sharing. Have a purpose in what you say, what you reveal.

Otherwise, the basic principle is to keep everything quiet, keep everything private—because as I said, the problem of suffering is your own private problem. When you’ve solved it, you’ve solved your big issue, but it’s nobody else’s business.

When you’re modest in what you share but not modest in what you aim to attain, then you’ve learned the right balance.