Responding with Skillful Karma
Last night we talked about past karma, and in particular the skills you need to develop in constructing the present moment so that you don’t have to suffer from the results of past karma. Tonight I’d like to talk about the skills you need to develop so that you don’t respond unskillfully to the results either of past bad karma or of past good karma.
We usually think of past bad karma as an enemy, and past good karma as a friend, but the results of past good karma are also dangerous because they can make us heedless and complacent, and we can end up destroying ourselves with the good things we worked so hard to produce. As we see all around us, wealthy people can destroy themselves with their wealth; powerful people can destroy themselves with their power. It’s for this reason that Māra, the embodiment of death and temptation in the Buddhist cosmos, is not the ruler of hell. He’s a heavenly being.
In responding to past bad karma, you have to develop endurance. That starts with verbal fabrication and a strong intention. If you tell yourself, “I can’t stand this,” you’ve already weakened yourself. Instead you have to make a firm intention that when bad things happen, you don’t want to take them as an excuse to something unskillful in response, because that will create more bad karma seeds in your field. That means you have to look for strategies and strengths within you that can make it easier to endure whatever is happening. You may not think that you have to the potentials to endure, but when you firmly intend to look for them, you’ll find that they’re they.
Now, you have the ability to shape the present moment through the three types of fabrication. Take advantage of the Buddha’s recommendations for how to use them.
For instance, if someone has done something to make you angry, look at the way you’re breathing. Usually when you’re angry, your breath is disturbed, which aggravates the anger. So remember what you’ve learned to do with the breath in meditation: Calm the breath down, breathe through any tightness you may feel in your chest or your abdomen, and in this way you begin to reclaim your body from the anger, which has hijacked it. You make the breath your own again. That’s bodily fabrication.
When the body feels calmer, it’s easier to think clearly about the situation. This is where you apply directed thought and evaluation. You can start asking yourself, “What, in the long term, would be the most skillful thing to do in this situation?” In other words, you’re not going just by your emotions or impulses. You’re looking at the long-term results, which is the beginning of wisdom and discernment. That’s verbal fabrication.
Finally, with mental fabrication, you can ask yourself, “What perceptions are you holding in mind that are aggravating the situation? For example, do you perceive yourself as a victim? Are you carrying perceptions of other times when you were a victim? Can you change those perceptions?” Instead of thinking that you’re in a weakened position, think of your goodwill and endurance as strong: large like the earth, cool like an enormous river. We’ll come back to these perceptions in a moment.
Another perception that’s a troublemaker when you’re angry is that, when passing judgment on the other person, you subconsciously perceive yourself as a judge in a court and you’re free to decide whether the person is guilty or innocent, without perceiving that the judgment will have any effect on you. But when you perceive that the consequences won’t touch you, you tend to get heedless. To prevent this, the Buddha advises changing the perception: Regard yourself as a person traveling through the desert. You’re hot, trembling, and thirsty. You see a small puddle of water in the footprint of a cow. You need the water, but you realize that if you try to scoop it up with your hand, you’ll make it muddy. So what do you do? You get down on all fours and you slurp up the water. Even though this is not a dignified position, and you wouldn’t want anyone to come and take a picture of you and put it on Instagram, it’s what you need to do.
In the same way, we sometimes need the perception that other people have at least some goodness to them, because that will nourish our ability to do good in response to them. The perception of their goodness is like water nourishing our own. So, even though we may be angry with the other person and we don’t feel in the mood to look at the person’s good traits because it hurts our pride, we should still realize that we need their goodness to nourish our goodness.
Otherwise, if we see the entire human race as basically bad, it’s going to be very difficult to treat people well. If we look for their goodness, we benefit in being more inclined to act skillfully. This comes from applying a totally different perception to the situation.
This is one example of how you can use these different kinds of fabrication or the factors of intention and attention to respond to the present moment with strength and with clarity. That way, you’ll be more likely to do the most skillful thing.
There are some other examples from the Pali Canon on how to use the three fabrications to help you endure a particular instance of past bad karma: the hurtful or untrue speech of other people.
First, from Majjhima 28: The next time somebody curses you, just tell yourself, “An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear.” See if you can leave it at that. Don’t add any extra stories. Don’t ask any questions that would add more pain to the unpleasant contact, such as, “Why is this person saying this, why is he abusing me, why doesn’t he like me, why is he evil” etc., etc. Try to keep the sound just at the ear and don’t suck it into the mind.
There’s an analogy that I’ve found useful—and, of course, this didn’t come from the Buddha—and that’s to make sure that your mind is not like a vacuum cleaner. When a vacuum cleaner goes through a room, it leaves all the good things behind and takes in all the bad things: the dust and the dirt. So if you find yourself taking in those unpleasant sounds and making them into big issues in the mind, do what you can to turn the vacuum cleaner off.
That covers the Buddha’s first strategy for depersonalizing unpleasant words.
The Buddha’s second strategy, from Majjhima 21, is to reflect on the different types of human speech that can occur in the world. There are kind words and unkind words. There are true words and untrue words. There are words that are helpful; there are words that are unhelpful. There are words said with a well-meaning mind, and words said with an ill-intentioned mind. This is normal human speech. So when something unkind, untrue, unhelpful is said to you through someone’s ill intent, tell yourself, “This is normal human speech. The fact that you’re being subjected to this is nothing unusual.” This helps to depersonalize the words.
It also reminds you that, given that this is ordinary human speech, the fact that someone speaks to you in an insulting way doesn’t give you extraordinary rights to break the precepts in response.
Several years back, a friend of mine gave me a dictionary of recent Thai slang. In Thailand, they have a Royal Academy very much like the Brazilian Academy, which, among other things, creates the official dictionary of the Thai language. The slang dictionary is called the Outside-of-the-Academy Dictionary. As I was reading through the dictionary, learning about new Thai slang words, it struck me that more than half were insults. Modern society is very creative at developing new ways to insult one another. So when you’re being insulted, just remind yourself, “This is normal.” That makes it a lot easier to take.
The Canon gives two other stories that help give additional skillful perceptions for dealing with hurtful speech. One, also in Majjhima 21, is called the Simile of the Saw. Suppose, the Buddha says, that a group of bandits has pinned you down. They take a two-handed saw and try to cut you into little pieces. Even in a case like that, the Buddha says, you should not let your mind be overcome by ill will. Instead, you should try to develop goodwill even for the bandits. In fact, start with them and then expand your goodwill to fill the entire universe. Make your goodwill as expansive as the Earth—something no one can harm. Make your goodwill even more expansive, as vast as space, which no one can harm. They can try to write words in space, but the words don’t stick. In other words, try to develop and maintain the perception that your mind is expansive, much bigger than the harm that anyone can do to you, and that the words they say to you don’t stick in your mind.
If you keep this simile in mind—that even if someone is trying to kill you, you should still have goodwill for that person—then, the Buddha asks, “Is there any type of speech that you could not bear?” No. The pain of the speech is so much less, and with that perception in mind, any ill will you might feel seems too petty to be worthy of your attention. You’re less likely to respond in unskillful ways.
That’s the first perception to hold in mind.
The second perception comes in Majjhima 145, in the story of a monk named Puṇṇa. Ven. Puṇṇa was going to a very uncivilized section of India, so went to say goodbye to the Buddha. The Buddha said to him, “Those people in that area are very uncivilized. They’re known to be very rough. What will you do if they insult you?”
Puṇṇa replied, “If they insult me, I will say to myself, ‘These are very good people in that they’re not hitting me.’”
And the Buddha said, “What if they hit you?”
“I will say to myself, ‘These are very good people in that they’re not stoning me.’”
“Suppose they stone you?”
“I’ll say, ‘These are very good people in that they’re not stabbing me.”
“What if they stab you?”
“I’ll say, ‘These are very good people in that they’re not killing me.”
“What if they kill you?”
“I will tell myself, ‘At least my death wasn’t a suicide.’”
And the Buddha said, “You’re fit to go.”
So the way you talk to yourself—verbal fabrication—can make a huge difference in how well you can endure a situation that comes from your past bad karma. Which means that it’s good to learn how to control your inner conversation so that you’re confident that you have the strength always to do the skillful thing.
Now, with the results of past good karma, the problem is different. You’re less under pressure, and not immediately faced with difficulties. Instead, you’re faced with a wider range of temptations. The main danger is that you become complacent. Things are going well and you don’t sense that you’re in any immediate danger of their falling apart. That attitude of complacency and heedlessness is precisely the problem, as you start getting lazy in acting on ways that are needed to maintain your good position in life, and start falling for temptations that will eventually lead you down.
The way to counteract this complacency is, one, be mindful of the principles of karma, and two, develop a conscious practice of empathetic joy.
Empathetic joy is the least discussed of the brahma-vihāras, but it can also teach you the most. As you contemplate people who are happy and develop the wish that they not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained, it makes you reflect on two things for the sake of developing heedfulness.
The first is: How do people enjoying good fortune ordinarily behave? Look around and you’ll notice that they tend to abuse it. Powerful people abuse their power; beautiful people abuse their beauty; wealthy people use the power of their wealth to take unfair advantage of others, and so on. When people abuse their good fortune this way, they tend to turn a deaf ear to the Dhamma, and so they end up using their good fortune to harm not only others but also themselves. This sort of things is easier to see in other people than it is to see in yourself, so it’s a good lesson to dwell on, and then use those people as a mirror: Do you have those tendencies in yourself? If so, this is what it looks like from the outside. This thought can make you more heedful.
One of the main problems of good fortune is that it fosters pride. This pride can be dangerous in two ways. First, you realize that you can get away with things that people less fortunate than you cannot get away with, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to see how far you can go in that direction. Second, pride can get in the way of the humility needed to accept the Dhamma. There was the case of Prince Jayasena, who was so immersed in the pleasures of his harem—and so proud that he had those pleasures—that he couldn’t even conceive of anyone getting the mind into a state of pleasure free from sensuality. That meant he had closed his mind to the Dhamma. There was also the case of Jenta, a young man who was so extremely handsome that he didn’t respect anyone else, even his parents. He was lucky that the Buddha was even more handsome than he was. Otherwise — if he had only met an old decrepit teacher like me—he wouldn’t have been open to listening to the Dhamma.
It’s because of dangers like this that the Buddha noted that when devas pass away from heaven, only a small minority go to a good rebirth. The rest have consumed all their good karma, and so they fall hard. They have to meet up with the results of their bad karma with nothing to cushion their fall.
The second reflection that comes from developing empathetic joy is that it forces you to think over the long term: How can beings maintain their good fortune over time? The world says that you often have to engage in unskillful behavior to maintain your wealth and power, so you have to make the effort to keep reminding yourself, through verbal fabrication, of what the Dhamma has to say: that the only way to maintain genuine happiness is to keep on doing skillful actions. Use your good fortune in such a way that other beings benefit from it, too. Use your power and wealth to foster the wellbeing of others. Use your beauty to make the practice of Dhamma attractive. That’s the only way you can maintain good fortune over the long term.
Of course, these reflections, if you follow them sincerely, will lead you to admit that good fortune, as defined by the world, has its dangers. As Ajaan Lee said, the truth of the world isn’t good; the goodness of the world isn’t true. When you can see this, you’ll want to aim at a truth and goodness that’s even higher. The karma that can take you there will be the theme of tomorrow night’s talk.
