by Ben Connelly
11
Cultivating Seeds of Goodness
The beneficial factors are faith, conscience, humility, lack of desire, aversion, and delusion,
Energy, tranquility, carefulness, equanimity, and nonviolence. || 11 ||
There are many ways to cultivate the seeds of goodness.
If we cultivate these seeds with our own mind and actions, their benefits go on forever. If nonviolence arises in the mind, an action will arise that is kind, the seeds of kindness will be planted in the storehouse, and we create the conditions for beneficial seeds in the storehouse of others.
Although a tiny moment of beneficial mind and action may seem insignificant in the vast ocean of time and space, it is, in fact, all we have to offer. It is the best we can do. No matter who you are, right now you have an opportunity to contribute to the universe something transformative and precious: your own beneficial intention. If you are making lunch and you do it with energy, tranquility, carefulness, and equanimity, you condition your mind to take care of the basics of life in this active, calm way. If you are enraged at the president of the United States for using your tax money to kill people and you take a moment to cultivate the faith that there is a way to alleviate suffering and to take care of the turmoil in your mind through nonviolence, you plant the seeds of commitment to alleviate suffering through kind action in your mind, and you may well find a way to go out and inch our world just a little bit further from its long cycle of violence and war. If you are completely depressed and lost in despair, and you cultivate faith in the possibility of well-being and accepting who you are with equanimity, you plant the seeds of hope through radical acceptance. You plant the seeds that can grow into a beautiful capacity to meet life, however and whoever it is, in each moment with energy, tranquility, lack of desire, nonviolence, and faith that this tiny moment of intention is your opportunity to contribute to the possibility of universal well-being.
I am talking about right effort: putting energy into cultivating beneficial mental states. We cannot climb into the store consciousness with a wrench and change the way it operates so that we are always happy and always do the most kind and helpful thing. The contents of storehouse are unconscious, beyond our knowing. What we can see are the six senses, and what Vasubandhu is suggesting we focus on—if we want to promote wellness—is the aspect of mind (the sixth sense) that is emotional and volitional. If we cultivate beneficial mind-states, principally through being mindfully aware of them as they arise but also by thinking and talking about them, encouraging each other to cultivate them, we can transform the storehouse. Consciousness tends to create the same kinds of things it’s seen before. Seeds of peace grow peace, which plants seeds of peace.
This verse lays out eleven of the fifty-five dharmas or mental factors listed in the “Thirty Verses”; these fifty-five are part of an Abhidharma list of one hundred dharmas. Vasubandhu leaves out forty-five and includes only those that are either tied to very basic meditation practice (the universal factors) or have to do with our emotional and volitional impulses (the specific, beneficial, and afflictive factors). These verses provide a way of describing moment-to-moment experience in terms of the things most fundamental to our ability to liberate ourselves from emotional conditioning.
These big lists are a subject of mirth among many Buddhists I know. “What’s with all these lists?!” they cry. If you delve into the Pali Abhidharma, you will find list upon list and even lists of lists! Memorization is facilitated by lists, and since Early Buddhists had a preliterate culture, without memorization it was impossible to transmit information. Even after literacy spread, it was very difficult to reproduce and transport texts. These days memorization may not seem so important, since it’s so easy to transmit and save information. I think memorization is a wonderful and valuable practice for bringing teachings into our lives. As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the things that inspired me to write this book was reading Thich Nhat Hanh talking about being required to memorize the “Thirty Verses” as a young monk. I encourage you to chant and repeat these verses until you know them by heart. Not so much by mind, but by heart.
Having said all that, I know that most of you reading this will not memorize these verses, nor the fifty-five mental factors contained therein, nor even the eleven in this line of verse. So here’s my take: It’s not so much about the specific list you’re using. There are other lists of beneficial mind-states out there. The main thing is to commit to cultivating a mind that promotes well-being. We can cultivate beneficial states by studying them, talking about them, thinking about them, and by being mindful of them. Perhaps you think some of these mental factors listed here are harmful or are sometimes harmful. Investigate. This is worth doing. Oftentimes semantics becomes the issue and that’s fine, if it opens the door to you seeking a way to be well and promote wellness. Faith is a word to which quite a few people I know are allergic. Perhaps it’s good to investigate what this word means to you and by what definition could it be said to be beneficial—or not. Most importantly, attend to how you feel and your intention, as you consider it. The most important way to cultivate beneficial mental states is by attending to them when they are present. Just knowing the mind that is here is powerful.
The kind of knowing that I’m talking about is the knowing of mindfulness, which is characterized by a lack of desire and aversion, just seeing. It’s not about changing or controlling what it knows. It’s characterized by energy, tranquility, equanimity, and nonviolence. It is just being with what is, with nothing extra. Mindfulness of mind is in itself a beautiful expression of the beneficial mental factors.
12
Being with Suffering
The afflictions are desire, aversion, delusion, pride, wrong view, and doubt.
The secondary afflictions are anger, hatred, hypocrisy, malice, envy, selfishness, || 12 ||
An excellent way to alleviate suffering is to attend to it in an intimate, nonjudgmental, compassionate manner. Running away from it and trying to control it rarely work.
In every mind afflictions arise—mental states that are, cause, or are conducive to suffering. The first of the six afflictions in this verse—desire, aversion, and delusion—are the three central afflictions referred to throughout Buddhist literature. These verses extend this list of afflictions and include a much longer list of secondary afflictions so that we may develop our awareness of the things that arise that are harmful, an awareness that facilitates letting them go.
Many of the items on this list bring up complex, subtle issues that would take at least a chapter to address. For instance, there are ways in which doubt, pride, or desire could be construed as beneficial. Investigating the semantics of these terms can be worthwhile, but it may be most helpful to just think of these words—in this context—in the way that seems to you to be clearly afflictive. For example, doubt that promotes deep inquiry is good, but doubt that keeps you on the couch all day watching TV, too hesitant to choose any path, is afflictive. These verses on mental factors recommend working with the emotional/volitional contents of mind so that we may be well and so the way we conduct ourselves in the world will be transformed at the root, in the storehouse.
Although these verses emphasize working with mind, I think it would be good to talk briefly about the ethical culture in which they were created, to talk about Buddhist guidelines for conduct.
This text is called “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only”; the subject matter is working with consciousness. If we look at the Buddhist Eightfold Path, we see a balancing of meditative, consciousness-transforming practices and ethical, compassionate action. These verses don’t address the latter subject. It may be that Vasubandhu downplayed it because of his faith that if you focus on cultivating a mind that is deeply attuned to the interdependence of all things and that manifests beneficial factors instead of afflictions, you will act kindly and in a way that benefits everyone. However it’s also true that the majority of the audience for
this text were probably Buddhist monks and nuns who had taken vows to follow an extensive list of precepts—not to kill, steal, lie, praise themselves, etc.—so he may not have found it necessary to discuss the subject any further. We still vow to follow these precepts as part of Zen training at my place of practice, and most practice centers encourage following them as well. Although I support this text’s emphasis on working with mind, let’s not forget that just making a commitment to act kindly and not harmfully, no matter what the mind is doing, is very helpful.
In fact, this kind of commitment integrates perfectly with practicing mindfulness of afflictions. When we are mindful of an affliction. we have the opportunity to choose whether we act on it or not. If we are not aware of our afflictions, we are likely to act impulsively. Then we are mere repeaters of our karma. Let’s suppose you have a sister who is more successful in her career than you, and your mother loves to talk about it. You find yourself mentally chewing on things your mother said: “Her bathroom is the size of your bedroom!” Perhaps you utter sarcastic barbs while cooking Thanksgiving dinner together; or you work yourself way too hard at your volunteer job to prove you’re better; or you lie around in bed all day, because what’s the point, you’ll never be good enough. If we are mindful of the afflictions, we can see envy, malice, hypocrisy, restlessness, and laziness arising in the moment; we can see them as afflictions, that is to say, suffering. We can observe them with an open heart and mind and watch them pass away without acting on them. This is how we take care of ourselves in the moment, step into responsibility for our own lives, transform our mind so it can be more well, and choose to act in a way that is beneficial rather than harmful.
In the Anguttara Nikaya Buddha is quoted as saying, “Actions willed, performed, and accumulated will not become extinct as long as their results have not been experienced.” Remember that Buddha, in another text, defines karma as intention and that intention, in this context, is closely linked to emotion. If you experience envy you will never let go of the habit of envy until you actually have directly and intimately experienced it as itself, not the mental projection it creates. We must taste the feeling, instead of just believing the story, the mental projection that mind makes out of it. This allows the seed of affliction to bear fruit and exhaust itself while we watch, but not create more seeds of affliction. Mindfulness is the practice of this direct and intimate experience, and mindfulness of afflictions is a wonderfully effective means to let go of the tendency to experience the same afflictions over and over again. It is how we can truly let go. As Zen monk Shitou says in “The Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage”: “let go of hundreds of years and relax completely.” By seeing ourselves how we are right now, we can let go of the bondage of the past, of our karma.
13
Taking Care of Suffering
Deceitfulness, guile, arrogance, harmfulness, lack of conscience and humility, sluggishness,
Restlessness, lack of faith, laziness, carelessness, forgetfulness, distraction, and unawareness. || 13 ||
Like some modern psychological methods, Buddhist practice sometimes encourages us to consciously draw difficult emotions into our mind and body. By allowing ourselves to experience afflictions in the light of mindfulness and our commitment to the alleviation of suffering, we can directly experience the fruits of afflictive karma and let it go. Even including this list of afflictions in this text is an example of this approach; when one reads this list, it probably takes the mind to a darker place than it was before. This list is here to help us face the difficult things that we’d like to avoid or blame on someone else.
Stories actually serve, in part, this purpose of bringing afflictions into our mind. In most cultures, stories include challenges or difficulties, and when we hear them we may experience fear, anxiety, or anger, as well as joy, tranquility, and laughter. Just look at the anxious faces of young children being told the story of Little Red Riding Hood, as she sits on the bedside with the malicious and deceitful predator. How many tissues have been soaked during viewings of the movie Brokeback Mountain? We have these stories in some part because we need to know that we are not alone with our pain, that someone else is crying as the aged, fading King Lear rages at his loving, devoted daughter.
Many stories from the Buddhist canon—particularly those from the Therigatha, the record of the first order of nuns—tell of terrible sufferings. I vividly recall one retreat in the steep, lush hills of Southern Minnesota where my teacher Tim Burkett told the story of the unbelievably bereft Patacara. She lost her children and entire family in a series of shocking tragedies, and she eventually made a commitment to practice and became one of the great teachers of her time. I wept copiously, my heart cracked wide by hours of meditation, the power of the story, and my teacher’s gift for storytelling. I tasted the raw pain of her loss as my own. I saw it in my own consciousness. I left that retreat with an opened heart, a newfound knowledge of my capacity to be with my own suffering, and a deepened sense of the vastness of my connection to all of life through the bond of shared grief.
Stories of course only go so far at helping us be well. Although they allow us to sense, generally unconsciously, that we are not alone with our pain, most of us don’t attend too closely to the experience of the affliction that arises; we tend to focus on the story. In order to see the ultimate benefits of drawing into mind the difficulties of life, we need to do it in the context of our vow to end suffering and with our attention focused on actually seeing the painful states as they arise in our mind and body. We need to practice right mindfulness.
Three Buddhist practices that are particularly popular in the United States these days center on cultivating beneficial mind-states but include this method of bringing up and clearly seeing afflictions. The first, the five remembrances, is a series of phrases centering on impermanence and the power of karma:
I am sure to become old; I cannot avoid aging.
I am sure to become ill; I cannot avoid illness.
I am sure to die; I cannot avoid death.
I will be parted from all that is dear and beloved to me.
Actions are my possessions, actions are my protection, actions are the womb from which I have sprung. I am heir of my actions; as I do so shall I become.
By saying these while practicing right mindfulness, we will likely feel the pang of loss, taste what we would like to push away, see that we can actually be present to that suffering without running away or trying to control things, sense the universality of our predicament, and hence become more compassionate to suffering wherever it arises.
The second is loving-kindness meditation (metta). For this practice we think loving phrases about people to cultivate a mind that loves, that manifests beneficial mental factors. However, when doing loving-kindness practice, we often see the mind making afflictions, particularly when we are encouraged to think loving thoughts about people we don’t like. We get to see that when anger and judgment arise they are our own suffering. They are ours to take care of.
The third is giving and taking, or tonglen. With giving and taking practice, we breathe in the suffering of others and breathe out well-being. We taste afflictions and we see how our aversion to them cuts us off from others; we see how letting them arise and pass away in the light of a mindful heart committed to the alleviation of suffering frees us from our aversion and opens up a vast compassionate connection.
We may have plenty of suffering in our lives already, but if we have a stable base of practice and will not be overwhelmed, drawing up the difficult tendencies of our minds in the warm light of our meditative awareness can allow us to directly know and let go of old conditioned fears, resentments, and barriers.
14
Not Always So
Remorse, sleepiness, initial thought, and analysis can be either afflictive or not. || 14 ||
The truth of this verse is not hard to see. Sleepiness is good when you’re in bed at ten o’clock at night. It’s not so good when you’re driving a c
ar. Remorse can be really helpful, for instance, when it provides some energy and impetus for us to not continue the same kinds of harmful actions over and over again. If I get frustrated with my son and say something sarcastic, a little remorse will help me to be more attentive to my frustration in the future and careful not to speak impulsively. However, remorse can also be toxic. There are things I’ve done that I thought about and suffered over and over again for years without making any effort to change the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. I spent most of my twenties in a cage of remorse and shame that kept me confined, alone, and completely caught in my own conditioned patterns. It took a comprehensive commitment to my well-being for me to pick up the key that was sitting in that cage with me, open the door, crawl out, and finally stand up and walk into the evening light.