The Good Heart’s Attachments

We were talking today about how society values wealth, status, praise, sensual pleasures, and they measure the value of people by their wealth, status, praise, sensual pleasures. We were also talking about how the Dhamma doesn’t measure people that way.

The way the Dhamma measures people comes down to good-heartedness. Good-heartedness is a matter of what price you’re willing to pay for your happiness, what harm you’re willing to do. Really good-hearted people don’t want to do any harm—to themselves or to other people—at all.

That’s why good-heartedness on the one hand, and wealth, status, praise, sensual pleasures on the other, are two very different sets of values, because you can gain wealth, status, praise, sensual pleasures by doing a lot of harm to yourself and to others. When people are willing to make that trade, to make that bargain, it’s a sign of a bad heart.

When we come to the Dhamma, you have to remember that when the Buddha talks about training the citta, he means training both heart and mind. You need to have both sides working together. The good-heartedness we’re trying to train through generosity, through virtue, through meditation, is a lesson in how you can find happiness without harming anyone. You can hold on to the practice and find happiness that way, and nobody’s harmed. It is a possibility.

The world will tell you that in order to gain wealth and status, you have to harm somebody someplace, and if you’re really clever you can get away with doing a lot of harm and yet somehow come out with all the goods. Of course, they don’t see the long term, but for them that’s part of the bargain they’re willing to take. They’re not sure about the long term, so they say, “I’ll take what I can take right now.”

This is what attachment is all about, this is what clinging is all about: how you go about finding things to feed on and what harm you’re willing to do as you feed.

We come to the meditation because it’s a harmless way of feeding. You’re feeding on your breath. Your experience of the breath is something you don’t take away from anyone else. It’s totally yours. Your sense of the body as you feel it from within is totally yours.

There’s a sense of happiness that comes while doing this that doesn’t cause any harm. You’re sitting here totally harmless, and you find a way of breathing that feels good, feels nourishing. That nourishment can spread throughout the body, permeate the mind, permeate the heart, and it’s a good thing.

As long as you have to be attached to the path, it’s a good attachment. And it’s all part and parcel of generosity and virtue as well.

There’s a tendency to see the training of the mind as one thing, and training in the merit of generosity and virtue as something else. But they go together. It’s when the heart is good that you can allow it to open up so that you can see clearly what’s going on inside. It’s not hiding things from itself, because what is there to hide? It’s not in denial. Most people go into denial over the harm they’re doing to others. But when you’re not harming anybody, what’s there to deny?

When the mind opens up, it’s like a flower opening up. You see clearly what’s inside the petals, what’s inside the stamens. You can come to an understanding.

So the question of attachment, of why we cling to things, is a question of trades. What price are you willing to pay for your happiness? What price are you willing to pay for the food that the mind feeds on?

This is why the Buddha’s solution is not just about getting the concepts straight, but it’s also about changing your values.

There are people who go around saying that the reason we’re attached to things is because we think they have an inherent essence, or because we think things are things, when they’re actually processes, and somehow seeing them as processes would make us hold on to them less fiercely. You admit that what you have is a process. You yourself are a process. Processes come and they go. You’re supposed to be okay with that.

Well, knowing that the process goes can also make you hold on to it more tightly, trying to squeeze as much as you can out of the process while it’s still on-going. If you think that people are not really people—they’re not really things, they’re just processes—it’s possible to mistreat them. You say, “Well, they’re going to end anyhow, so why bother?”

This is why the Buddha said that mundane right view begins with the statement, “There is what is given.” That means that the things you give to other people have meaning because people have meaning. Whether they’re processes or whatever, you see there’s meaning in helping them, meaning in not harming them.

The reason we hold on to things is not because we think they have an inherent essence, or that somehow thing-ness is different from process-ness, and that we’re more likely to hold on to things than to processes. We hold on to things and processes either because they’re useful for the sake of pleasures we want or because they have symbolic meaning.

If you have a mug that you hold on to, it’s not because you think the mug is a thing or that the mug has an inherent essence. It’s because the mug is useful. And whatever effort is spent in the process of maintaining the mug—keeping it clean, keeping it safe—you think is worth it. It’s a value judgment.

As for symbolic meaning, you may know the novel, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a person from a lower social status. He’s attracted to the world of the really, really rich, and he thinks there may be an opening there for him.

Toward the end of the book, though, it becomes very obvious to him that the way is closed. There’s a scene in which he’s struck by the thingness of material things, the things of the rich people that had offered him hope. Now he realizes that they have no meaning for him at all; they’re not meant for him. He’s struck by how they’re just things with no meaning, and it’s very alienating.

So we’re not attached to things because they’re things. We’re attached to things because they have meaning, because they’re useful or symbolize meaning . In the case of Gatsby, the things of the rich used to symbolize what he might be able to attain. When it became obvious he couldn’t attain it, they were just things. Alien.

The reason we hold on to things, the reason we hold on to ideas—to sensual fantasies, our views, our ideas of what should and shouldn’t be done, even our ideas about ourselves—is because we think that the allure outweighs the drawbacks. Part of the allure is in the usefulness of those ideas. Part is in what they symbolize.

Now, for the sake of the path, there are some views and habits and ideas of yourself that are worth holding on to for the sake of mastering the skills that lead to something even better. But there are a lot of things out there, you realize, that “If I hold onto them, there’s going to be harm.”

The question is, are you willing to cause that harm? What are your values? What’s important? What has worth? When you see that there is a happiness that doesn’t require harming anybody, are you still willing to cause harm?

We train the good heart to have a sense of shame and compunction. Shame—not in an unhealthy sense, which is the opposite of pride—but shame in the healthy sense of wanting to look good in the eyes of the wise. Shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness.

We develop compunction, the idea that “I just don’t want to cause any harm at all.” Shame and compunction are qualities of the heart. They should inform our ideas about what’s worth holding on to, what’s not, what kind of trade is worthwhile, what kind of trade just costs too much.

The good heart sees the value of the ultimate happiness that can be found by being harmless. It’s not just a matter of putting up with things and accepting things as they are. The path can take you to something that’s outside of saṁsāra entirely.

This idea that you can be with processes and accept the fact that they’re processes: That’s designed to keep you in saṁsāra, keep you saṁsāra-ing. It’s an activity. We just keep going, going, going, from one process to another—holding on to this, then having to let go while holding on to the next process, and calculating our trades as we see fit.

But there’s a possibility of unbinding: the total freedom that comes from total harmlessness. When that’s a possibility, the good heart says, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

So attachment is not a question of conceptual error. It’s a question of values—what price you’re willing to pay, what harm you’re willing to cause, to get the happiness you want. When you see that the best happiness of all comes from being totally harmless, holding on to the path as you need to develop it, taking it to the point where you can finally let it go, that’s what the good heart hungers for.

And that’s how you know that it’s good, that it has value. And it’s a value that’s not measured by social conventions. It’s a value that’s inherent in the way things are.