Noble & True
To give rise to goodness in yourself—being generous, observing the five or eight precepts, listening to the Dhamma, and practicing meditation—is to find the treasures of noble wealth for yourself. People without discernment don’t know how to find wealth, don’t know how to keep it, don’t know how to put it to use. They look for it in the wrong way, keep it well within the reach of danger, and use it in ways that cause harm. When this is the case, their wealth brings them nothing but suffering and trouble. This is why we’re taught to develop discernment in looking for wealth, keeping it safe, and using it in a way that’s beneficial for ourselves and for others.
Worldly wealth—gain, status, praise, and pleasure—isn’t lasting. When you acquire it, it can waste away. This is why we’re taught to make merit and develop our skillfulness: being generous, observing the precepts, and meditating. Generosity and the virtues of the precepts are external wealth. They’re like royal robes and jewels that dress your body and make it beautiful. As for the internal merit of meditation, that dresses your heart to make it beautiful. These three kinds of clothing and jewelry are treasures that the Buddha left behind as an inheritance for his immediate followers, who can be compared to his children, and this inheritance has been passed down to us so that we can wear them, too.
Generosity—giving donations and making sacrifices for others—is an ornament. Virtue—taking care in your activities in word and deed—is an ornament. Meditation—making the mind firmly established and pure—is an ornament. These ways of making our thoughts, words, and deeds beautiful are the robes and jewelry of royalty and nobility. The noble disciples of the Buddha who gained awakening dressed themselves in these jewels.
The Buddha was the son of royalty. When we aim at being his children, we have to dress ourselves in a dignified way that’s fitting for our status as children of royalty, too.
For example, we observe the five, eight, ten, or 227 precepts.
The jewels of monks and novices are the 227 and ten precepts. At the same time, we depend on the four requisites to maintain ourselves. The four requisites are things we wear simply to keep us from being naked and to help us survive. They’re not jewels to dress up the mind. As for laymen and laywomen, they dress their bodies with the five and the eight precepts. If you don’t dress beautifully in these ways, you’re said to destroy the reputation of your father, the Buddha. And you destroy yourself as well.
As for the jewels of the four requisites—almsfood, robes, lodgings, and medicine: Once you’ve declared that you’re willing to be a child of the Buddha, people will bring these things to donate to you. If you didn’t have these jewels to depend on, your body wouldn’t survive. But don’t get carried away by them. You need to have a sense of moderation in storing them and using them. As for the jewels of the mind, those are the steps of the practice, and in particular, meditation—making the mind act in purity, without any defilement.
There have been many hundreds of millions of people in the world, but no one has been able to discover the truth of the world except for our Buddha, who was a genuine hero. He was brave and courageous, and put forth true effort. This is why he was able to find the truth that has no birth, no aging, no illness, and no death: the highest happiness in the world. All of us want the same thing, but we don’t act truly, which is why we don’t meet with the truth. Instead, we meet with things that are false and deceptive, that entertain us for a while but then bring pain and suffering afterwards.
The Buddha set his mind sincerely and truly on this thought: “I want the genuine highest happiness. I don’t want anything else, no matter how amazing it may be. I want only a happiness that’s for sure, that won’t turn back into anything else.” That was how he put forth persistent, unrelenting effort in his search for the truth. Even if his life were to end, he was willing. Then, ultimately, he found the truth: the reality of nibbāna.
If we search for the truth like our father—if we’re true in our intent and true in what we do—there’s no way the truth can escape us. We’re sure to find the truth in line with our aspirations.
Every person alive wants happiness—even common animals struggle to find happiness—but our actions for the most part aren’t in line with our intentions. We don’t get to realize the happiness that’s in line with our aspirations simply because there’s no truth to us. For example, when people come to the monastery: If they come to make offerings, observe the precepts, and sit in meditation for the sake of praise or a good reputation, there’s no real merit to what they’re doing. They don’t gain any real happiness from it, so they end up disappointed and dissatisfied. Then they start saying that offerings, precepts, and meditation don’t give any good results. Instead of reflecting on the fact that they weren’t right and honest in doing these things, they say that there’s no real good to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Saṅgha, that the Buddha’s teachings are a lot of nonsense and lies. But actually the Buddha’s teachings are an affair of the truth. If a person isn’t true to the Buddha’s teachings, the Buddha’s teachings won’t be true to that person—and that person won’t be able to know what the Buddha’s true teachings are.
Practicing the Dhamma in a way that’s not true is like performing a play for other people to watch. You get dressed up and walk to the front of the stage, announcing that you’re this character or that, but you’re not really the character you say you are. For instance, you dress up like a policeman, but you’re not a policeman. You dress up as a deva, but you’re not a deva.
People put on plays to be popular, to gain fame and praise, and to receive enough income to keep themselves fed from one day to the next. Those who perform well become famous and receive a good income. When they succeed, then the defilements take over: They start getting arrogant and squander their wealth, all of which exposes them to danger. For example, if they get really wealthy, they buy diamonds and jewels to dress themselves up, or else they brag about their wealth, so that thieves come to rob them and kill them. Or if they’re really popular, other people get jealous and try to destroy their reputation, or to steal their fame and their business, all of which brings them trouble. Or it may be that when they perform they’re very popular for a while, but then they lose their popularity and their income drops. As they get older and weaker, they can’t perform as well as they used to, which leads them to disappointment and suffering.
In the same way, when Buddhists practice goodness for the sake of praise and reputation, or for the sake of offerings and homage like the income that comes from performing a play, the same sorts of things happen. In other words, we can’t escape from suffering.
For this reason, the Buddha teaches us to be true in whatever we do—true in being generous, true in being virtuous, true in developing concentration and discernment. Don’t play around at these things. If you’re true, then these activities are sure to bear you the fruits of your own truthfulness without a doubt.
We’ve come to the monastery today to dress ourselves in the jewelry of royalty and the robes of the noble ones: i.e., virtue, concentration, and discernment, which are ornaments that are truly beautiful. But if we aren’t true in our practice, if we deceive ourselves and deceive others, it’s like taking robes and jewels and giving them to a monkey. The monkey is bound to get them dirty and tear them to shreds because it has no sense of beauty at all. Whoever sees this kind of thing happening is sure to see right through it, that it’s a monkey show. Even though the costumes are genuine, the monkey inside isn’t genuine like the costumes. For instance, if you take a soldier’s cap and uniform to dress it up as a soldier, it’s a soldier only as far as the cap and uniform, but the monkey inside is still a monkey and not a soldier at all.
If you were to make a comparison, our minds are not that different from monkeys. Even when there’s just one monkey, it’s as if there were lots of them. It writhes around, scratching here, picking there, grimacing and crossing its eyes, looking forward, looking back, running up and running down, with no time at all to sit still in one place. Our minds are like monkeys in this way. They can’t really stay still. They writhe around, reaching out here, reaching out there, thinking now about the future, thinking now about the past. When we put the jewels of royalty—i.e., concentration—on its head, it’s no different from putting a costume of diamonds and jewels on a monkey. Even if your outside costume is that of a monk but the reality inside you isn’t a monk, then you’re not really a monk. If your outside costume is that of a female lay follower but the reality inside of you isn’t a female lay follower, then you’re not really a female lay follower. You’re just deceiving people who are stupid, for the sake of a living and for your own momentary entertainment and delusion. It serves no genuine purpose at all.
Time is something of high value, so don’t be complacent about short periods of time. Hurry to put some goodness into yourself as quickly as you can. Don’t tell yourself that it’s too late or that you can’t do it. Aṅgulimāla was a great bandit who had killed almost 1,000 people, and he was about to kill his mother. But when he met the Buddha and listened to the Buddha’s Dhamma, he turned his heart around. He abandoned all his evil ways and set his heart on developing goodness for just one day, and he was able to become an arahant, washing away an entire lifetime of evil. This shows that doing good, even for just a little while, can wash away huge amounts of evil.
This is why we’re taught to develop concentration, which is the highest form of merit, and which can push you all the way to true happiness.
The power of good and evil is like a magnet that pulls the mind to do good or evil and then be born in good or evil places in line with its pull. If we do good or evil, it’s as if we leave magnets behind in the world. Those magnets will pull our minds to their level. People who aren’t intelligent enough to know how to avoid or extract themselves from the power of good and evil are sure to be pulled along by the force field of these magnets. They’ll have to keep swimming around in the world of rebirth. This is why wise people try to find a way to cut the force field so that they can escape its power and float free. In other words, they do good and cut the force field. They do things that may not be good, and they cut the force field. They don’t let these things connect. In other words, they don’t get attached to the things they’ve done. They don’t keep fondling them. This is what it means to be discerning: knowing how to cut the force fields of the world.
Our discernment is like light, and there are three levels to it: low-level discernment, which is like the light of a torch; intermediate discernment, which is like the light of a candle or a kerosene lantern; and high-level discernment, which is like electric light.
To get light from a torch, you need to use a lot of fuel. And even though it’s bright, it creates smoke. This is like the discernment that comes from being generous: It requires a lot of financial resources, and you sometimes have to contend with resistance from people outside.
The light of a candle or gas lantern is like the discernment that comes from observing the precepts. You have to exercise a lot of care and use your powers of endurance to keep them pure. Lantern-light requires fuel and a wick. As for candlelight, it requires a wick and some wax. If you have wax but no wick, you can’t get any light. And both lantern-light and candlelight create smoke and soot, so neither of them counts as being entirely good.
As for electric discernment, there’s no need for fuel, and it doesn’t create smoke or soot. It’s easy to use: Whenever you want it, by day or by night, just flip on the switch. This refers to the discernment that comes from developing concentration. The power of the mind, when it’s pure and firmly established, gives rise to the light of knowledge—liberating insight—enabling us to see events clearly, both in the area of the world and of the Dhamma. When we can make the mind clean and pure, it gives rise to concentration and to the light of discernment—paññā-pajjoto—which is like electric light or the light of the sun, which shines all twelve hours of the day. This kind of discernment is the discernment of the noble ones.
All three forms of merit—generosity, virtue, and meditation—depend on discernment. When we develop discernment, we’ll know how to look for merit on our own. And what kind of light will we want—torchlight, candlelight, lantern-light, or electric light? Death is like darkness. When the time comes to die, outside light won’t be of any use to us. Our speech, hands, feet, arms, and legs won’t be of any use to us. They won’t be able to help us at all. Our eyes won’t be able to see any light. No one will hear what we have to say. Our hands and feet won’t be able to move. Our possessions won’t be able to help us. The only resource that will be able to help us is our discernment, making sure that greed, aversion, and delusion don’t get provoked, maintaining the mind in a state free from greed, free from aversion, free from delusion. We’ll be able to separate these three things—body, mind, and defilement—out from one another, in the same way that we separate the wick of a candle from its wax. The fire of defilement will then have to go out, because the wick and the wax lie in separate places and don’t make contact.
In the same way, if we can separate the body from the mind, our normal awareness will have to go out. But when it goes out, that doesn’t mean that awareness is annihilated. It’s still there, but as a special form of awareness that doesn’t depend on the body or mind and yet can still be aware. It’s just like fire going out from a candle: It’s not annihilated. There’s still plenty of fire potential left in the world. It’s there by its nature, simply that it isn’t involved with any fuel. This kind of fire is better than the kind that requires fuel, because it doesn’t wear anything out. It’s simply there by its nature. This kind of merit is more wonderful than anything else.
The fire potential is something that exists everywhere, even in ice cubes. If we can separate the body, the mind, and defilement from one another, there’ll be no more heat. The mind won’t be hot, and instead will be cool at all times. The light of fire arises from the spinning of waves. If there are no waves, there’ll be no spinning. The waves are like defilement. If we can cut through the waves, the spinning will stop. There will be no more birth. Greed, aversion, and delusion are like waves—or like the wick of a candle. If we cut out the wick, leaving only the wax, fire will have no place to catch hold and so will have to go out. When the candle goes out, it’s like the death of human beings: The fire leaves the candle, but the fire potential isn’t annihilated. In the same way, the mind that goes out from the body isn’t annihilated. If it can remain on its own, without having to depend on a body, it doesn’t appear in any way, shape, or form anywhere at all. That’s the awareness of nibbāna.
This is the kind of awareness that’s really like electric light. Whenever we want it, it’s there for us to know. Sometimes even if we don’t want to know, we still end up knowing. As for ordinary people, even if they want to know things, they often don’t know; they often don’t see even when they want to see. That’s like torchlight or candlelight: If there’s no fuel, there’s no way it can be bright.
This is why we’re taught to train our minds to be firmly established in concentration—because the mind well-trained is what gives rise to the light of discernment that doesn’t get deluded: the discernment that knows for sure.
For this reason, I ask that we all set our minds on acting truly. Be generous, and make it truly generous. Be virtuous, and make it truly virtuous. Meditate, and make it truly meditation. If you’re a monk, be a true monk. If a novice, be a true novice. If a lay follower, be a true lay follower. Don’t put on costumes simply to deceive other people. Don’t put on a play for the world to see.
When you truly practice the Dhamma, you’re sure to get true results, i.e., happiness. If your practice isn’t true, the results won’t be true. This will lead to discouragement. Your conviction in the Buddha’s teachings will grow weak, your generosity will wither away, your precepts will be defiled and impure, and your meditation will get lazy. Eventually, you’ll blame the Buddha’s teachings, saying they’re not true, and so you’ll give up. This is the harm that comes from not acting truly.
For this reason, if you want true happiness, remember these words and try putting them into practice to polish your minds. In this way, the time you’ve set aside from your worldly responsibilities to look for goodness for yourself won’t go to waste. You’ll acquire the merit and skillfulness to dress yourself up and be beautiful in the way I’ve described.
