Determined Goodwill

When you’re able to have goodwill for all beings, the Buddha calls it a brahmavihara, literally a dwelling place for Brahmās, an attitude for Brahmās. We’re not Brahmās, but we can lift our minds to that level. We have to take our human goodwill, which tends to be partial — extended to people we like, and not to people we don’t like — and broaden it so that it does cover everybody.

This is why the Buddha says that goodwill as a brahmavihara is a form of mindfulness that you have to be determined on. If it came naturally, you wouldn’t have to remember it. It would be there. You wouldn’t have to be determined on it. But because you do have to keep it in mind, it’s a sign that you have to work on it. You have to use all four of the determinations, beginning with discernment.

You start by discerning what goodwill is. It’s a wish, but not just a wish. You want it to inform your intentions. And you’ll have to fight off intentions that go against it.

Think of the Buddha’s instructions to Rāhula: Before you think something, ask yourself, “These thoughts I want to think, will they lead to my harm? To the harm of others? To both?” That instruction is meant to train you in goodwill from the very beginning. If you intend something that’s going to harm you, don’t act on it. If you intend something that’s going to harm somebody else, don’t act on it. This is your gauge for judging what should and shouldn’t be thought, said, or done.

So, even though we think about goodwill as one of the topics of concentration, it actually comes very early in the path, part of right resolve. Once you understand what leads to suffering and what leads away from suffering, then you want to resolve on the attitudes that will lead away from suffering and lead you toward right concentration. If you act in any way that would intentionally harm other beings, you’re not acting in line with the path. This is why the Buddha says that the desire to see someone suffer is actually not just a form of wrong resolve, but also a form of wrong view.

So there’s some discernment built into the attitude of universal goodwill. And if you’re really going to be determined on it, you have to maintain that view, maintain that resolve.

You know the question that lies at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Well, remind yourself that goodwill—when you extend it to everybody, even to people you don’t like—is for your own good. It’ll lead to your long-term welfare and happiness.

Now, there are things that you may not like to do that will lead to long-term happiness, but you have to learn how to talk yourself into wanting to do them. That’s a lot of what the discernment is when you work on goodwill: looking at goodwill in line with the teaching on karma.

There’s the karma of what it means to be happy, and the karma of developing mind states. When you think of the karma of happiness, extending goodwill for yourself means basically saying, “May I act on intentions that are harmless.” That’s what it means to have goodwill for yourself. When you have goodwill for others, it means, “May they act on intentions that are harmless.”

So when you have goodwill for other people, it doesn’t mean you’re condoning their actions as they are. There are a lot of people out there whose actions you can’t condone. You look at some of our leaders and it seems as if they’re making war on humanity, both on the human race as a whole and in the sense of humanity as a set of human values. But you can’t let their behavior influence your goodwill, because your goodwill is actually for your own good.

This is where it’s good to remind yourself that you do have an independent part to you that doesn’t need to depend on other beings. It’s not the case that an independent sense of self is always bad. When you see that other people are misbehaving but you’re not going to let their misbehavior get in the way of your goodwill, that’s when it’s good to be independent.

When people are misbehaving, your attitude should be, “May you see the error of your ways and be willing and able to change.” The world would be a lot better place if people would come to their senses like this. When you try to force people to be good, they resist. So you hope for them to have an independent realization of what their behavior has been like and where it’s been lacking.

Of course, you have to look at your own behavior to see where it’s been lacking, too. That’s what it means to have goodwill for yourself. That’s what it means to think about what it means to be happy in line with the teaching on karma.

As for the karma of mind states, you know what the Buddha said about shaping the present moment by exerting a fabrication. You look at the way you breathe, you look at the way you talk to yourself, and you look at your perceptions and feelings. When you have the sense that you’d like to see somebody suffer, ask yourself, “How are you breathing? Is it aggravating your anger? How are you talking to yourself? Is it intelligent? Is it wise? Or are you just falling into childish attitudes? What perceptions are you holding onto?”

You see evil people as having a lot of power. Well, remember that power is not going to last. Someday they’re going to end up in really, really bad trouble. What happens when you see, say, a lost dog that’s sick on the side of the road? You don’t ask, “What kind of karma does that dog have?” You have compassion. You try to help the dog. That’s how you should perceive the people who are behaving in horrible ways. They’re going to end up suffering quite a lot, and at that point you won’t know anything about their past karma. All you can see is the suffering, and there’s a natural tendency to want to help. Well, you can want to help now, before they get there.

So breathe in ways, talk to yourself in ways, hold perceptions in ways that would lead the mind to realize that you don’t want to see anybody suffering, no matter how horribly they’ve behaved in the past. That way, it’s easier to have an attitude of goodwill in all situations.

That’s the first determination: discernment.

The remaining three types of determination are being determined on truth, being determined on relinquishment, being determined on stilling. Those follow from the determination on discernment. Remember, we’re talking about right view and right resolve here. To be determined on truth, the Buddha basically says to guard the truth. Now, this doesn’t mean you say, “Well, I’ll just hold on to what I really feel about things.” You try to hold on to an attitude that’s reliable, something you can truly depend on. Your likes and dislikes are not reliable. Your sense of justice is very clouded, very biased, because after all, you see only part of a story.

We’ve talked in the past about what the teaching on rebirth, the teaching on karma, the teaching on samsāra going way, way back, and what that means for our attitudes toward justice. It calls them into question because we don’t see the whole story. All we can see is that there’s a bad game going on right now, and the best thing to do with the bad game is to get out, and to recommend that other people get out, too. That’s a more reliable attitude. You don’t have to settle the score.

If other people see that we’re pulling out and they want to throw a little bit more mud in our direction, well, that’s their business. But we have to make sure, again, that we’re independent of their behavior, realizing that an attitude of goodwill for all is a lot more reliable than relying on our likes and dislikes.

As for relinquishment, you let go of your old attitudes about justice, your old desires for revenge, because you realize that you can’t depend on them.

And finally, you train only for stilling. What this means is that you look for an attitude in the mind that allows it to grow calm. Now, if you can take goodwill as your object of concentration, you realize that even more refined than goodwill is equanimity. As Ajaan Fuang liked to point out, goodwill without equanimity is going to suffer, because even though you want all beings to be happy, the question is, are they going to act in ways that will lead them to be truly happy? Well, no. There are lots of people who want to behave in unskillful ways. In a few cases, you’re in a position to influence them to see the error of their ways, but in a lot of cases you’re not.

So even though you hold to the intention, “May all beings be happy,” as your motivating attitude, you realize that not all beings are going to fall in line with that attitude. You have to maintain your goodwill, but you also have to have equanimity to back it up. Bring the mind to a state where its well-being is not disturbed by the behavior of others. Get the mind in a good, solid concentration, either based on goodwill and moving on to equanimity, or gaining equanimity through the breath.

When you can be determined on goodwill in this way, determined on being mindful of goodwill in all situations, that’s when you take this manusavihara we have of our human goodwill and lift it up to being a brahmavihara. In other words, it’s not just a human dwelling, it’s a Brahmā dwelling. And it’s part of the path, right there in right resolve, right there in right view. If you use it as a topic for concentration, it’s in right concentration.

Of course, there’s more to the path than just this, but it helps you progress quite a distance along the way, remembering that who benefits the most from your goodwill? You do. Who benefits the most from when your goodwill is without exception? You. In offering well-being for yourself, you’re offering well-being for others as well.

That’s what’s good about the Buddha’s teachings. When you look for your own true happiness, it’s got to spread out and make other people better off as well. Some people may not be pleased by the fact that you’re practicing, but that’s not harming them. You’re behaving in a harmless way to yourself; you offer no harm to anybody else. That’s a good way to live in the world, because it helps get you out of the world while at the same time leaving good things behind.