To Be a Reliable Judge
January 12, 2024

The Pali word for meditation, bhavana, literally means to develop, to bring into being. We’re trying to develop the discernment that comes from bringing good qualities to being in the mind.

There’s the discernment that comes from listening, when you get new information. There’s the discernment that comes from thinking things through, when you take in the information and see how it fits with what you know is true—or you see if it jostles some of your old ideas as to what might be true.

But the real test is when you develop qualities in the mind and see where they go. You can see cause and effect in action. You can see which teachings, when you put them into practice, actually do give rise to good qualities, and which ones don’t. You learn to be a good judge as well, because that’s part of passing judgment. It’s not just saying, “Well, I like this,” or “I don’t like this.” You have to ask yourself: Am I an adequate judge? What do I need to do to become a better judge? This is where you have to develop qualities of mindfulness, concentration, discernment so that you can test your judgments—and test them again and test them again to make sure they’re really sure.

You read about the Buddha’s awakening. He talks about the different standards he would use to test his awakening. He examined it from many, many sides. Only then was he sure that what he had was the genuine thing—that there was nothing that could surpass this. That requires a lot of character, to be able to test things that well and to have the standards of judgement, and the ability to judge, that can come to that kind of conclusion. Part of our practice is learning to develop those qualities within ourselves. So we don’t just do the practice obediently; we realize that we have to become good judges on our own. We need to develop the qualities of a good judge if we really want to know what’s true, what’s false, what’s good, what’s not good.

So remember, alertness, mindfulness, ardency: You try to really seriously do this well, because we’re facing a serious problem. There is suffering in the mind, and the mind keeps on creating more suffering until it learns how not to. Take that seriously.

You realize that you have to rise to the occasion. You have to become a better person in order to be able to judge the Buddha’s teachings, to put them into practice and judge them again. But it’s all to the good, even if you decide that things don’t quite measure up. You have to look inside and say, “Well, what is it that doesn’t measure up? Is it you? Or is it the teachings?” You have to look carefully and honestly at both sides. Only then can you come to conclusions that you can really trust.