Heart & Mind

When we’re training the mind, we have to train the heart as well. After all, we’re looking for a happiness that’s lasting. You have to remember that if your happiness depends on the suffering or the harm of others, it’s not going to last. They’re going to try to destroy it if they can. So you want a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody at all.

This is one of the reasons why we look inside, so that we can build our happiness not depending on other people’s resources so much as we depend on our own resources. And they’re there. Sometimes they’re obscured by old, unskillful habits. But the potential for skillful habits is always there. If that were not the case, the Buddha said he wouldn’t have taught.

So we try to develop lots of compassion for ourselves, lots of compassion for other people. That’s an important part of the practice, too. You see that other people want happiness and you don’t want to get in their way. Now, their ideas of happiness may not be all the best, so the happiness that you don’t want to get in the way of is genuine happiness—in other words, a happiness that comes from within.

So to whatever extent other people are training themselves to be more mindful, more alert, more discerning, and more focused, you want to encourage that. That means that we have to keep our speech to a minimum, saying only things that are necessary. And when you do have to speak, don’t speak in ways that stir up greed, aversion, or delusion. That’s a tall order. You have to be very careful of your speech.

There’s that Peanuts cartoon where Lucy complains, “If you go around having to watch what you say all the time, you never get much said.” Well, that’s the whole point. Say things that are worth saying. As for things that are not worth saying, just leave them in the trash heap of the mind. Let them go. Focus on your need to create the causes of true happiness inside.

But whenever we can lighten one another’s burdens, that’s an important part of the practice, too. So it’s not just you don’t get involved with people and run away. You think of how you can help. After all, generosity is an important part of the practice. This is why the Buddha would begin with generosity in so many of his lists of dhammas: being generous not only with your things, but also with your time, with your forgiveness, with your knowledge, with your energy. That’s nourishment for the path.

So think about the fact that when the Buddha says citta, it means not only mind, but also heart. That means that when we’re training the citta, we’re training both the heart and the mind: the heart in the sense of the kindness you extend to others, and also in the sense of being determined on wanting a happiness that’s genuine, a happiness that’s true. In other words, the heart includes the will. We’re training that as well.

So train both your heart and your mind and you’ll find that the path progresses well, in a balanced way. Otherwise, it’s like exercising only one set of muscles in your body and leaving the rest weak. You get pulled out of alignment. And even though you have strength in that one set, it’s not good. You want to have your strengths balanced. You want to have your mind balanced. In that way the path becomes a lot smoother, and your act of walking on the path becomes a lot more graceful and direct.