Your Own Mainstay

One of the basic principles we’re taught in the Dhamma is: Attā hi attano nātho, “The self is its own mainstay.” But you can be a secure mainstay only if you train yourself. The mind in its natural state tends to wander all around. We complain about things in the world changing, but our mind changes a lot faster. We complain that things in the world aren’t reliable, but the untrained mind can be extremely unreliable. It can even lie to itself. So we have to train it.

We train it in virtue. We train it in concentration, discernment. We train it in generosity to begin with. When you learn that there’s a lot of happiness that comes from giving things away, this is counterintuitive to children. They’re happy when they get things. But as you get more mature, you realize there’s a lot more long-term happiness that comes out of giving something away.

Suppose somebody gives you two Cokes. You drink both of them; well, that’s it. The memory of two Cokes next week is not going to be all that special. But if you take one of those Cokes and you give to somebody else, then you have a better memory—the memory of your own generosity. That lifts the heart, lifts the mind.

So you train it in generosity to enlarge your sense of what true happiness is.

Then you follow through with virtue, realizing that you don’t want to harm anybody, and in harming others, you’re harming yourself. So you abstain from all different kinds of harm that are forbidden by the precepts, forbidden by the principles of right action, right speech, right livelihood.

Then you get the mind in concentration. That’s when the mind begins to become more steady and reliable. You tell it to stay with one thing, and after a lot of adjustment, a lot of back and forth, the mind finally gets used to being with one thing. Then it becomes more reliable.

But even then, it’s not totally reliable, because it can still change its mind. They talk about the brahmas who dwelled for long, long times on rapture. Then they get tired of the rapture, and they fall back down again.

So you want to find something better than rapture, better than pleasure. You want to find freedom for the mind. You do that through discernment: seeing where you’re causing yourself suffering when you don’t have to, and how you can stop. And in stopping the activities that cause suffering, you get more sensitive to subtler levels of suffering inside—so subtle that it’s hard to call them suffering. It’s more like disturbance, stress.

But you keep on pursuing this question, and you find the mind opens up to a true freedom. That’s when it really can depend on itself. That’s when you do have a mainstay. Prior to that time, you have to lean on the Buddha, lean on the Dhamma, lean on the Sangha. You borrow the Buddha’s wisdom; you depend on the Sangha to teach you, to give you good examples.

But then as you internalize these things, they become part of you, part of your refuge inside. That’s when you can be solid and secure, living in this world in a way that’s safe. In other words, you don’t cause harm to anyone else; you don’t cause harm to yourself. People may come and do things to you physically or to your material things, but you’ve got something inside that nobody else can touch. That’s when you’re really secure.