Nobility Is the Best Policy
We repeat the terms, “noble truth,” “noble eightfold path,” to the point where the word “noble” seems to lose all of its meaning. It’s good to stop and think about what it does mean.
Part of its meaning comes from the context: what the Buddha described as the noble search for happiness. Instead of searching for happiness in things that age, grow ill, and die, things that will leave us or that we will leave, we search for happiness in what doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die. In other words, we search for a happiness that doesn’t let us down. And it requires that we take a noble attitude toward our suffering instead of blaming other people, blaming the stars, or blaming the creator of the universe. We don’t blame, we just try to understand where it comes from. We realize that it comes from within us. The suffering itself is our clinging and it’s caused by our craving. When we understand suffering that way, we’re taking a noble attitude toward it.
The same with the path: It’s a path of practice in which we take responsibility for our suffering and for putting an end to it. We realize that we’ve been making mistakes. We see our mistakes, admit our mistakes and the foolish ways we’ve been looking for happiness, causing a lot of unnecessary suffering for ourselves and for others.
So we take a noble attitude toward the whole problem of suffering. The important thing is that taking the noble attitude works. It’s not just empty noble ideas or vague noble sentiments. It’s pragmatic. When you take a grubby attitude toward happiness, just grasping whatever you can, that’s what doesn’t work. It leads to more misery. If you take the noble attitude and use it to direct your actions, your search really does lead to something satisfactory.
I’ve been thinking about this because yesterday I gave a talk to a group in Brazil on the topic of fear and anxiety. In particular, I talked about how to overcome fear and anxiety by recognizing that some fears really are worth fearing, and others are not.
I framed the issue in the context of rebirth. If you look at all the many lifetimes you’ve been through, you see again and again and again that the things you love, the things you hold on to, get taken away from you, or you leave them: things like wealth, your health, your relatives, your family. The question is not so much whether you’ll be separated from them. You will be separated from them. The question then becomes, “How do I get the most out of them before the separation?” And here, “getting the most out of them,” means getting both the most happiness and the most goodness.
Think of Ajaan Chah’s image of the broken cup. He picked up a good cup one day and told his listeners, “This cup is already broken.” Then he explained himself, saying that you know the cup is going to break someday, but this doesn’t mean that you use it casually or carelessly. You realize that you can get some good out of the cup, so you take care of it. But there will come a day when it breaks, and you shouldn’t be surprised. The fact that you’ve used it well means that you don’t get torn up with regret when it’s broken. The fact that you’ve cared for it means that you don’t have to blame yourself when it breaks. In that way, you engage with the cup in a way that leads to the least amount of suffering.
It’s the same with your wealth, with your health, with your relatives. As the Buddha said, loss of wealth, loss of health, loss of your relatives, is relatively minor compared to loss of right view and loss of your virtue. But he doesn’t say that these things are totally worthless or that you should treat them carelessly. After all, you can use your wealth to develop the perfection of generosity. You don’t have to give it all away. In fact, he doesn’t recommend giving it all away. He says you use it to provide for your own enjoyment, for the enjoyment of your family, to put some away for the future, but then also to give it, to be generous with it.
The day will come when you don’t have any wealth, when it’s taken away for one reason or another. But then, when you look back at the time that you did have it, you realize that you got good use out of it, particularly as you used it to develop the perfection of generosity. You’ve got an inner wealth now that, as the Thais say, can’t be burnt by fire, can’t be washed away by floods. You’ve made a good exchange.
The same with your health: The Buddha recognizes that health is very useful for the practice. When the body gets weak, it’s more difficult to practice. It’s not impossible, but when the body is strong it’s a lot easier to put in the effort that’s required. So you look after the body. In the Vinaya, the monks’ rules, there’s a very large section devoted to medical care. The Buddha recognized that some illnesses respond to medicine and others don’t. When the medicines are available, use them.
Think of that story about Ajaan Mun that Ajaan Fuang told. When there was a monk who was sick and there was no medicine, if the monk asked for medicine, Ajaan Mun would scold him. He’d say, “What kind of meditator are you? Use your discernment to deal with the pain, to deal with the suffering.” But if there was medicine and the monk refused to take it, Ajaan Mun would scold him, too: “Why are you making yourself difficult to look after?”
It sounds like you’d get scolded either way, but the lesson, of course, is that you adjust your desires to be in line with what’s available. If the medicine is available, use it. If it’s not, learn to use whatever resources you do have. Like Ajaan Lee when he had that heart attack when he was deep in the forest: He used his breath. He used his concentration to heal himself so that he could continue practicing and teaching.
So you look after your wealth; you look after your health. And you look after your relatives. You take good care of them and try to engage with them as best you can. If they’re junior to you, you try to teach them. If they’re senior to you, you try to help them. Make sure you have goodwill for them all the time, even when they’re difficult, even when you’re difficult. In that way, when the time comes to leave, there’s a minimum of regret.
The point here is that you know you’re going to lose these things someday, but you make sure that you don’t lose your virtue or your right view in trying to hang on to them. Because even as you hang on, they get taken away, and then you’ve lost everything.
Virtue, right view: These are things you don’t have to lose. You can lose them only if you abandon them. Otherwise, they’re yours. So you want to maintain them. And there’s a strong sense of well-being that comes with that, a strong sense of your own nobility.
I explained this to the group in Brazil yesterday. The question came at the end, “This all sounds very noble, but how about some real practical advice on how to deal with fear and anxiety?” The question, of course, missed the whole point. Taking a noble approach to fear and anxiety is what allows you to overcome those emotions in the most effective way. Taking the noble approach is what works. Noble is practical, pragmatic. Nobility is the best policy. When you can be inspired by your behavior, there’s a strong sense of well-being and confidence that comes with that.
So try to take the noble attitude toward the fact that the world is swept away, and the things we love, the people we love, are going to get swept away as well. But make sure your virtue doesn’t get swept away, your right view doesn’t get swept away. Maintain something solid inside.
A story appeared in the newspapers a while back about a young man in Iran who had been murdered. They caught the murderer, tried him, found him guilty. Apparently, under Islamic law, it’s the right of the parents of the deceased to decide whether the death sentence would be carried out or not. The mother had decided that she wanted to see it carried out so that justice would be served. But she started having dreams. Her son came to her and said, “Mom, Mom, don’t go for revenge. Forgive the guy.” As she later told newspaper reporters, she didn’t want to have those dreams, but they kept coming again and again.
So the day came when the decision was to be made. The guilty party was sitting in a chair with a noose around his neck. The mother goes up, slaps him in the face as hard as she can, and then takes the noose off. As she told the reporters later, she then felt a huge sense of relief. It’s in this way that you can pull out of this back and forth, back and forth that entangles you if you go for justice. That’s how the mind can be freed.
We have a story like that in the Buddhist tradition as well. There was a king and a queen whose kingdom was taken away from them by another king. So they disguised themselves and went and lived in the capital of the king who had defeated them. They had a son, and they realized after a while that the son was in danger. If anything ever happened to them, he’d probably get killed, too. So they sent him off to live with relatives out in the countryside. And he would come back to visit them from time to time.
One time, he came back and saw that they had been captured. They’d been tied up, their heads were shaved, and they were marched around the city to the sound of a harsh drum. He saw them. They saw him. The father said, “Don’t look too far. Don’t look too close, because animosity is not ended with animosity. It’s ended by non-animosity.” The people around were asking, “Who’s he talking to? What’s he saying? It doesn’t make any sense.” But the young son heard it.
The mother and father were taken off to the south of the city, where they were drawn and quartered. Guards were placed to watch over the body pieces, in case anybody wanted to perform funeral rites for the dead. Well, the young son got the guards drunk, built a pyre, cremated his parents, and then decided on revenge.
He got a job in the king’s elephant stables. At night he would play the lute for the elephants. Of course, the lute music didn’t stay just in the stables. It wafted into the royal apartments. The king liked the sound of the lute, so he had the young flute player brought into his apartments to have him play for him. The young man played the lute as best he could, and the king said, “Okay, you stay here with me.” So the young man did his best to become a trusted member of the king’s personal staff: He’d get up in the morning before the king, go to bed at night after the king. The king came to trust him more and more and more.
Finally, the young man was in a position where he had the king alone: The king was lying down with his head in his lap. The young man was thinking about all the mischief this king had done in killing his parents and taking the kingdom that would have been his. He pulled out his sword. Then he thought about what his father had said. So he put the sword back in the scabbard. Then he started thinking, and pulled out the sword again, but then thought of what his father said. This happened three times.
The king woke up in a fright, saying he just had a horrible dream in which the prince, the son of that king he had executed, had come after him. So the young man grabbed the king by the hair, pulled out his sword, and said, “Do you know who I am? I’m that prince.” So the king begged for his life. And the young man said, “No, I beg you for my life.” So they both swore that they wouldn’t harm each other.
In the end, the young prince married the king’s daughter, which meant that he was going to take over the kingdom.
And so, by not getting revenge, that huge pile of death after death after death that would have followed was ended, and both sides were freed.
It’s when you take the noble path that you find that it’s the path that works. It’s the practical path. It’s simply a matter of learning how to inspire yourself that you can do it. You can be noble, too.
That’s another one of the meanings of the noble truths and the noble path: They’re ennobling. As you follow them, as you take them on, you become a noble person. It’s the noble people who are truly happy, because they’ve followed the noble path that works.
