Life Shaped by Mind

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Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.

Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.

This is how the Dhammapada, one of the earliest records of the Buddha’s sayings, begins. No stories of gods creating the world, or teacher sitting under trees surveying students gathered round: we jump right into the good stuff. And it’s simple stuff, right? We are what we think – every $5 self-help book on the bookstore shelf will tell you that. So just think positive thoughts, visualize what you want, and abracadabra, life is all better. Right?

Trained Beyond Fear

According to the Buddha, it’s not quite so easy as that, mainly because the pop culture version of this profound psychology misses out on some really important points, namely training the mind, developing serenity in the face of both pleasure and pain, and understanding our cravings and how the multitudinous ways we feed them push us away from this serenity.

Hard it is to train the mind, which goes where it likes and does what it wants. But a trained mind brings health and happiness…

They are not wise whose thoughts are not steady and minds not serene, who do not know dharma, the law of life. They are wise whose thoughts are steady and minds serene, unaffected by good and bad. They are awake and free from fear.

                                    Dhammapada, chapter 3

A Step Towards Wisdom

Positive thinking is good, but to really kick-start our spiritual lives we’ve got to go deeper. So today, think about your mind and how you are allowing it to shape your life. Is it covered in trashy TV and Internet gossip? Is it stuck in a well of worry that you have dug, maybe about work or home, family or friends? Does it shimmer with possibility and creativity?

Then ask yourself, do you want to take the time and effort to train your mind? Do you want to see beyond the reaching and grasping, the dash after pleasure, the fear and the pain? Because if you do, the Buddha and the Dhammapada have a lot to say to you. 

Quotations from The Dhammapada, trans. Eknath Easwaran

 

Attached by a Thread

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The Buddha talks a lot about attachment and how it's a bad thing, but to lots of Western ears that sounds really cold or nihilistic. What we're missing here is that he means attachment with a selfish end. He didn't think that being close to others was a bad thing; in Chapter 23 of the Dhammapada, for example, he tells us that having friends and being parents – in other words, forming attachments and loving other people - are good things in our lives. The problem comes when we let that attachment be a selfish, grasping thing, something that we use to support our view of ourselves rather an outward flow of affection.

Noble Intentions?

But our selfish attachments don't stop at people; they can be to something noble as well. There it can be even harder to keep our vision clear, because we have the flashing lights of “Good Intentions” before our eyes. But as modern Hindu saint Gandhi reminds us, selfish attachment is just waiting in the wings to snag us. In writing about Gandhi’s understanding of detachment, author Michael Nagler asks, “Is it wrong to be attached to a positive goal – say, to the one he was fighting for with every ounce of his life’s strength?” “Yes,” Gandhi would answer, “[for] if we are attached to our goal of winning liberty, we shall not hesitate to adopt bad means.”

Pleasure and Peace

This same principle applies to any sort of pleasurable experience. It's not that it's a bad thing to enjoy a good meal or a rockin' night out or a quiet walk in the woods, it is in grasping for more of these things after they are done. Not the experience, but the selfish grasping. The Buddha tells us to let go of pleasure as soon as it is over, and to let go of pain as well, because as much as we may want to stay in them - or may feel like we are stuck in them - they are just little eddies and currents on the side of the river. Our goal is what lies beyond both: peace of mind.

Quotations from The Dhammapada, trans. Eknath Easwaran