I’ve been reflecting on how Buddhist practice can be most useful when we can distill it into a set of organizing principles.
When I feel the weight of some personal thing that’s going on—a neighbor who’s quite ill, aging parents, or just the way the world seems to be in so much chaos and disarray—I can easily slide into a feeling of paralysis. Sometimes it feels like we’re witnessing a kind of moral bankruptcy. We don’t really take care of each other, and certainly many of the people leading nations are using resources in ways that are harmful.
It can create a sense of collapse. I don’t know which way to go sometimes. I can go right into nihilism or hopelessness. But even when we don’t know exactly which way to go, I think we can at least be facing in the right direction.
I think this understanding comes partly from motorcycle riding. There’s a phenomenon called target fixation. If you’re riding a motorcycle and you see an obstacle—a telephone pole, a guardrail—the training is to look away from it. The bike tends to steer where you’re looking. If you stare at the telephone pole, you’re more likely to crash into it.
I think there’s something similar in the mind and heart. Whatever we’re focusing on, the mind can become fixated around, and then that colors our whole view. For me, one of the vices I have is this deep-seated belief that if I just gather more facts, some understanding will arise and everything will somehow be okay. I can see that it’s a delusion. There’s no amount of facts that’s going to make things okay. But that’s how my mind is constructed.
When that tendency goes unchecked, my mind stays organized around collapse, and then I experience even more collapse. So I’ve been thinking about the organizing principles that practice offers us.
One of them is Right View, or Wise View. There’s a discourse called the Discourse on Right View, taught by Sariputta, the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom. It’s a famously detailed teaching, with sixteen different aspects of Wise View. But the one I want to focus on is the importance of distinguishing between what is wholesome and what is unwholesome.
It’s an old-fashioned word, wholesome. When I hear it, I think of reruns from childhood—The Andy Griffith Show, Leave It to Beaver. Or maybe Ted Lasso. People who are fundamentally good-hearted. Nothing mean about them.
But I actually like the word wholesome. The root comes from an old English word related to health. So another way to think about it is: what is healthy and what is unhealthy? What brings us toward wholeness and what fragments us? What helps us become more integrated as human beings, and what pulls us apart?
The underlying principle is that we live in a conditional world. There are laws operating here—not unlike the laws of physics. Certain actions of body, speech, and mind lead toward well-being. Certain actions of body, speech, and mind lead toward suffering, stress, sorrow, and discontent. This becomes a remarkably useful organizing principle whenever we reach a decision point.
You can simply ask: If I go this way, does it bring me toward wholeness? Does it support my well-being and the well-being of others? Or does it lead toward affliction and suffering?
The Buddha initially framed this in terms of ethics:
Train not to kill.
Train not to steal.
Train not to lie.
Train not to misuse sexuality.
Train not to take intoxicants that cloud the mind and lead to heedlessness.
These are powerful examples because the harm is usually obvious. If we strike out at someone, harm happens. If we lie, harm happens. If we cloud the mind, our ability to see clearly is diminished. When we can’t see clearly, we lose access to this organizing principle itself; meaning we can no longer reliably distinguish the wholesome from the unwholesome.
But the teaching extends far beyond ethics. Think about greed and generosity. Greed is often translated from a word that points to longing, craving, wanting. There’s a pain built into it. A mind organized around what it doesn’t have is a painful place to live.
Compare that with the mind that is free enough to give—our time, our resources, our energy, our care, our attention. It’s an entirely different state of being. Or consider hatred and non-hatred. I appreciate that the teachings use the phrase “non-hatred.” Love is beautiful, but sometimes it’s a very high bar. When I read the news and see the cast of characters appearing every day, love can feel difficult.
People are causing harm. There is a lot of insanity in the world. The Buddha’s teaching is more modest and, in some ways, more accessible: Non-hatred is sufficient. The teachings even offer the extreme example that if bandits were sawing you limb from limb, to give rise to ill will would be to miss the teaching. The point isn’t that the bandits deserve your forgiveness. The point is that the bandits are already gone. They don’t care whether you’re angry. The anger is simply a poison you’re consuming yourself.
Then there’s the distinction between delusion and wisdom. Delusion is the tricky one. Greed is usually easy to feel, and hatred is usually easy to notice. But delusion is harder because our entire paradigm is off. Someone once described it this way: it’s not that hard to admit you were wrong. It’s much harder to realize that you’re wrong and continue to be wrong.
One common form of delusion is failing to see cause and effect. We engage in destructive behaviors without recognizing the consequences they create. Another is the way we draw lines around things: we draw lines on the earth, we draw circles around groups of people based on various attributes. Then we fight about those lines. It’s baffling.
On a deeper level, we can ask: What is the line I’m drawing around “me”? What is the line I’m drawing around “you”? Is that boundary really what I think it is? We’re so deeply interconnected with one another and with this planet. To not see that interconnectedness is itself a form of delusion.
This is why spiritual friendship is so important. The Buddhist tradition calls it kalyāṇa-mitta—beautiful friendship. Friends who can gently point out when our view has become skewed. Friends who can help us see what we’re missing.
Another thing we tend to misunderstand is that we see things as things, when they’re actually processes. Modern science points to this. What appears solid is really a dynamic process. The same is true internally. A thought feels like a thing. Thoughts can torment us. We get trapped in loops of thinking. But what is the mass of a thought? Where is a thought located in space? It’s not really a thing at all. It’s a process.
According to the Buddha, everything we experience is process: sights arriving in consciousness. Sounds arriving in consciousness. Smells. Tastes. Sensations. Thoughts.
That’s our whole life. This understanding can be surprisingly liberating. If someone is angrily criticizing you, wagging a finger and yelling, one way to understand the experience is simply: sights and sounds arriving in consciousness. Everything else—the hurt, the defensiveness, the outrage—is being generated within our own minds.
There’s a kind of radical responsibility in that. Everything we do, say, and think has an impact. Which brings us back to this simple organizing principle: Will this lead toward wholeness? Will it support health, integration, and well-being—for myself and for others? Or will it lead toward suffering?
What I love about this principle is that it’s not case-specific. It applies everywhere. The Buddha gave essentially this teaching to his seven-year-old son, Rahula. Before you act, he said, ask whether the action will benefit yourself and others. While you’re acting, continue asking. If you discover that it isn’t beneficial, stop. And afterward, reflect. What were the results? Learn from them.
Afterward, if we discover that an action caused harm, we acknowledge it. We learn from it. We commit to doing better. And if an action was skillful, the Buddha says something equally important: Rejoice. Celebrate it, and continue acting in that way. There’s a lovely symmetry there. We can be honest about our mistakes, but we can also delight in goodness. We can rejoice when we’ve helped someone, when we’ve acted with integrity, and when we’ve moved, however slightly, in the direction of freedom.
It’s a remarkably simple teaching. Simple enough for a seven-year-old. Move toward what’s healing, what’s wholesome, what brings wholeness, health, and integration. Abandon what leads in the opposite direction.
This is one reason a daily meditation practice can be so helpful. It gives us enough mindfulness to remember this teaching in the countless decision points that arise every day: Should I send this email? Should I say this thing? How do I respond to this difficult person? How do I set this boundary? Having an organizing principle is an antidote to collapse and paralysis.
Instead of getting lost in the infinite number of possibilities, we have a way to orient ourselves. For me, that even includes my relationship to the news. I still feel the compulsion to engage with it, but now I’m trying to do so with awareness. I want to know the point at which it ceases to be helpful. When I reach that point, I can close the laptop, put down the phone, and change gears.
Maybe that’s enough. Not necessarily knowing exactly where to go, but at least facing in the right direction.
Thank you for reading,
Gullu
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