The Path

by Michael Puett

  These possible trajectories exist all around us. When you put off calling a faraway friend because you are waiting for your yearly get-together to catch up, you are actively choosing not to nourish the friendship. Your neglect is an active choice that will set things on a certain path. If your boyfriend is contemplating breaking up, and you insist anxiously that the two of you hash things out right now—instead of waiting a bit to see how time changes and softens both your emotions—you are hastening along a conclusion that might not have happened otherwise. If you voice a complaint calmly and courteously—let’s say that you’ve asked to speak to the manager of a store where the customer service was poor—you will open up the conversation between the two of you rather than shut it down by becoming angry and loud, and possibly change the outcome for the better.

  Remember the dilemma of how to best help a friend in trouble? Typically, we respond based on what we think we can do to help that particular friend in that particular situation. By acknowledging the specificity of the situation, we are indeed behaving in a Confucian way. It would never dawn on most of us to think first about rational benefit and universally applicable norms in this situation.

  Yet because we often think of ourselves as being a certain, stable way, we confine ourselves to certain past roles. If you think of yourself as the sympathetic type, for instance, you might be uncomfortable being more overtly interventionist—even if you can see that’s what your friend really needs at that moment—because it’s just not who you are. It falls outside the pattern of how you usually behave. You might think, Well, another friend can push her to see a doctor/call the lawyer/confront her coach. I’ll just listen.

  But defining yourself as “who you are” limits your sensitivity to the entire situation, the breadth of the response you can give, and the goodness you can show,

  In order to sense the whole context before making a decision in an endlessly shifting world, you need to train your emotions. You need to learn what it means to think of decisions in terms of a complex self and a complex world and complex trajectories that can go in multiple directions.

  Mencius believed that the only way to cultivate a full awareness of the complexity of situations is by cultivating our ability to understand how our actions can lead to positive trajectories. And he believed we are all born with the potential to do so: a potential for goodness.

  Our Potential for Goodness

  Imagine for a moment that you are walking through a grassy field where some children are playing. Suddenly, you hear a shriek. A boy has disappeared from sight, slipping into an abandoned well. He is now hanging onto the edge, desperately trying to keep from falling to the bottom.

  Without hesitation—without thinking even for an instant—you run to rescue the child. You reach in and heave him out to safety.

  Mencius used the parable of the child in the well to emphasize that all human beings have the same potential to become good. We know this is so, he argued, because there isn’t a person anywhere who would not instantly race over to help that child. And the reason for doing so would not be for acclaim, for rewards, or for praise or gratitude from the child’s parents. It would be a spontaneous reaction that any human being anywhere would have, and it would spring from a pure desire to simply save that child.

  If we could develop this instinct, we would know what to do and what to decide in just about any situation. Yet it is hard to live up to our potential for good. We gossip about neighbors, we’re jealous of friends, we yell at our children. Over and over, we let our worst sides come to the surface. If we would all run to rescue a child in peril, then why, in our daily lives, do we hurt those around us so often? Why don’t we do more to nurture our potential for goodness?

  Mencius found this all the more puzzling given his belief that every human being is born with a natural capacity for goodness. He wrote:

  The goodness of human nature is like water tending to flow downward. Just as there is no water that does not flow downward, there are no humans who do not have goodness.

  But this goodness exists only in potentia. Human nature is potentially good, but it can be lost, it can be warped, it can be changed by what it encounters. As Mencius said:

  You can dam and direct the water, and you can force it to remain on the top of a mountain without flowing down. But is this what water’s nature really is? It is what you have done to it that makes it so. Humans can also be made to be not good in the same way.

  Mencius wanted people to understand viscerally the sensation of goodness in order to understand how to become good. What does it physically feel like to be good? What do you do on a daily basis to gain that feeling?

  To answer these questions, Mencius taught that we should think of our incipient goodness as being like small sprouts. All sprouts have the potential to grow into something greater. But they must be cultivated properly in a nurturing environment to achieve that potential. Similarly, each of us has incipient goodness within us, and so each of us, Mencius concluded, begins life endowed equally with the potential to become like a sage: capable of creating an environment in which everyone will flourish.

  But we tend to either neglect our sprouts, forgetting to water or nourish them, or else we are too forceful: we grab them and try to tug at them to make them grow. Not only do we disrupt our natural goodness, but also we become miserable, easily dominated by our worst instincts: jealousy, anger, and resentment. When we do this, we harm our own humanity and harm those around us. By unleashing the worst in ourselves, we bring out the worst in others and cause them to kill their sprouts too. Most of us fail to achieve our potential, but this is not how it has to be.

  If goodness is indeed as physically perceivable as actual sprouts are, then it is not something abstract, like Mohist universal caring or Buddhist universal compassion; it is not linked to any sort of doctrine that requires us to feel the same toward strangers we’ve never even met as we do toward lifelong friends. Rather, goodness is something we can feel and nurture in our everyday lives with the very people we’re with right now.

  If we pay attention whenever we perform an act of kindness, no matter how small—speaking to someone warmly, holding open a door for strangers, helping neighbors shovel out their cars after a snowstorm—we might experience a physical sensation such as warmth or a tiny glow. That concrete sensation is Mencius’s sprout of goodness growing within, nurtured by our act of generosity and connection to another.

  As you pay attention to that physical feeling, nurture the better sides of yourself, and notice the impact on yourself and on others, you become motivated to continue. In this way, you are not growing your goodness in the abstract: you are learning through every step of this process how to sow the conditions in which it can thrive. You begin as a lone farmer, cultivating your sprouts in your humble field, but the effect radiates outward. Those on the receiving end of our goodness become inspired to act better and to continue growing their own sprouts of goodness in turn. Such moments of goodness build until they fill a day, and eventually an entire life.

  The Heart-Mind as One

  How is goodness related to making sound decisions?

  We bring out the great potential of human nature when we perfect our emotional responses. Continuously cultivating ourselves through our interactions with others and constantly working on nourishing our sprouts of goodness—these are what lead us ultimately to understand how to make the right moral decision in any given situation.

  Although some thinkers like Mozi believed in making a clear distinction between the rational and emotional faculties and separating the mind and the heart as much as possible, in Chinese, the word for mind and heart is actually one and the same: xin. The heart-mind is the seat of our emotions as well as the center of our rationality. It can deliberate, ponder, contemplate, and feel love, joy, and hatred. What separates those who become great human beings from those who do not, Mencius taught, is the capacity to follow their heart-mind rather than to go along blindly with either the senses
or the intellect. Cultivating the heart-mind is what fosters our ability to decide well.

  Think of the choices we are faced with throughout life, from the prosaic to the profound: what to make for dinner; where to go on your next vacation; whether to switch jobs; or whether to file for divorce. Wise decisions don’t come just from thinking things through rationally. They come from a complete understanding of what our heart-mind knows is the right thing to do. Good decisions are made when mind and heart are integrated.

  When we are passively led by our senses, we make unwise and unbridled decisions. Whether it’s something minor, such as overeating when we’re not that hungry, or something more significant, like heatedly berating a partner for a perceived slight, our senses often mislead us into reacting unwisely in the moment.

  But if we have cultivated our heart-mind, we respond to things from a far more stable place. Undistracted by impulses and by emotional swings, we can focus on the big picture and know what to do. We know which responses bring out the best in us and in those around us.

  Let’s return to the story of the child in the well. This parable describes, of course, a rare moment of crisis. But most decisions we face in life are not as clear-cut. A latent inclination for goodness will not immediately tell us what to do. It tells us, of course, that we need to save the boy. But how, exactly, should you best help a cousin dealing with a personal crisis? Which job offer would be right for your future? Should you move home to be closer to your ailing parents?

  A Mencian approach to integrating your cognitive and emotional sides would be to take note of your emotional responses and then strive to change them for the better. Use your mind to cultivate your emotions. Become aware of what triggers your emotions and reactions on a daily basis. What are the patterned habits, the entrenched narratives, through which you perceive the world? Does your partner’s criticizing you for the way you load the dishwasher trigger memories of your own childhood, when you were constantly made to feel inept? Do you tend to placate friends instead of being assertive because you feel unworthy of expressing a strong opinion?

  As you become aware of all the triggers and old patterns that shape your emotions throughout the day, you can work on refining your responses. Note that paying attention to your emotional responses is not the same as “mindfulness,” the popular notion that is based loosely on the Buddhist idea of detachment and nonjudgment. It is not about observing your feelings, accepting them, and then letting them go so that you can achieve a sort of personal peace. Because even if you did achieve a peaceful feeling, it would disappear soon after you started to engage with the world again. Nor is it about feeling compassion for all beings in an abstract way. Cultivating the heart-mind is an outwardly directed act intended not to remove us from the world but to engage us more deeply in it so we can better ourselves and those around us through every interaction. It’s about paying attention not in a mindful sense but in a Confucian one.

  External events trigger our emotional responses every day, like the surge of joy you feel when your toddler spontaneously brings you a bunch of flowers he picked just for you, the flash of pain you feel running into an ex-love on the street, the jolt of anxiety you feel when your boss sends you an email reminding you about an upcoming deadline. All our responses accumulate. Life becomes a series of untrained patterned responses—patterns that often end up being negative. In fact, a lot of what we tend to think of as conscious decision making is just us playing out old patterns. But if we cultivate our emotions, over time and with experience, we can learn to sense other people’s dispositions more accurately, assess what’s really going on in a particular situation, and work to shift the outcome accordingly—whether we are dealing with a conflict with a neighbor, a friend who is struggling with depression, or a child who’s falling behind at school. We can train ourselves to remain ever aware of these complexities and to know what we can do to alter them.

  Imagine that you have a coworker who interrupts you incessantly whenever you’re on a deadline. This chronic problem has caused you to form an idea of her as oblivious and annoying. You might feel tempted to give her the cold shoulder. Or you might give in and chat with her but then be annoyed with yourself for having let her take up so much of your time. Or you might blow up at her, furious that she doesn’t realize how busy you are. Or you might vent to your friends, who urge you to assert yourself and tell her in no uncertain terms that you cannot talk to her right now. But rather than label her and employ generic strategies aimed at a generic annoying, interrupting coworker, the most expansive response comes when you begin to recognize your coworker as an individual with a complex set of sensibilities, habits, patterns, emotions, and behaviors. Certain sides of her are playing out in this given situation for certain reasons, just as certain sides of you are. You might feel tempted to address the issue head-on and tell her you have a problem that the two of you need to discuss in order to get her to recognize your position. But the more efficient strategy will be to understand how altering things that you do will alter the direction of this situation over time. Once you see her as multifaceted and infinitely complex, rather than as a unified person who just is the way she is, it opens up your perspective to various things you can try to alter the situation; small things you can do to draw out different sides of your coworker, as well as yourself. Does she come to talk when she is lonely? Might there be other ways to address her desire for interaction? Or maybe she keeps checking in when she’s feeling uncertain and insecure; addressing the nervousness itself is where you might begin.

  Here’s another situation: let’s say that someone treats you with anger. Maybe a long-simmering resentment between you and your brother has finally exploded into the open. A refined response would be not to automatically respond with anger of your own—tempting though it might be. Nor would it be to placate him, numb out, or simply avoid talking. Rather, a refined response begins by taking a moment to try to grasp all the emotions and triggers that lie behind your brother’s behavior. There is the immediate catalyst, of course, but the current state of the relationship has almost certainly built up over years of patterned responses—on both your parts. If you start by trying to sense where the anger comes from and to grasp what might be done to alter those pieces of the situation, you will be lifted out of the mind-set that has you thinking of him as just being a certain way. New approaches will occur to you. Small gestures (as simple as an acknowledgment of anger, an admission of your own role in it, or a measured decision to wait to talk until the two of you have cooled down), precisely because they are counterintuitive and are directed at changing the underlying dynamic rather than responding heatedly to the immediate issue, have the capacity to break that underlying dynamic.

  None of these ideas is new to us: we know these are optimal ways to respond. And yet a refined response is not usually the first reaction we have when responding to highly challenging interpersonal situations. Most of us are usually buffeted about by the emotions of the moment and a desire for quick resolution. This different approach certainly offers no quick fix; none of this changes things immediately. But you accumulate experience in thinking of things in terms of the big picture; the long-term outcome. When you make a point of training yourself to approach situations with the broadest perspective and an understanding of how to alter an outcome, you are constantly cultivating your potential for goodness. This is not about overriding our emotions, because that would cause us to lose our ability to sense the overall context of a situation. It is about refining those emotions so that the better response comes to the fore intuitively.

  This is what it means to cultivate the heart-mind. It allows you to become more responsive to the world, your better sides to remain intact, and your vision to remain unimpaired. What Mencius referred to as “flexible judgment” is the ability to make good moral decisions instinctively while carefully weighing each situation in all its complexity. Training our heart-mind means honing our judgment: seeing the bigger picture, understanding what
really lies behind a person’s behavior, and remembering that different emotions such as anxiety, fear, and joy will draw out different sides of people we tend to think of as rigid. A sense for the right thing to do becomes a more complex, developed form of the instinct that would compel you to save a child in a well. Just as you wouldn’t have to ask yourself consciously what to do about a child in peril, you wouldn’t have to ask yourself how to move through life’s daily encounters if you had nurtured the heart-mind.

  Laying the Ground So Things Can Grow

  When it comes to larger life decisions—which college major to choose, whether to switch careers, whom to marry—we often make a mistake. Even if we use our heart-mind to make flexible judgments and recognize how our actions create small changes in the world constantly, we still think of the world as coherent, and thus we persist in thinking that there are some stable things: me, my strengths and weaknesses, my likes and dislikes, the world as it will be decades hence and my position in it.

  Thus, not just our short-term responses but also our long-term life plans are often based on an illusion of stability. We plan out what we can do concretely to get ourselves to our goals. If you are trying to decide on a career, for instance, you might think through what would suit you best: you figure out what kind of person you are, where your strengths lie, focus on classes and pursuits based on that assessment, and, finally, embark on a career path based on this fixed definition of who you believe you are.