“Blessings to you and your family.” “Peace on earth.” “Good will to all.” These are messages we often hear, and offer easily, at the New Year. As the well-wishing words ring though the air, I most always smile. I experience an embodied feeling of metta, compassion, shared joy, and an open-hearted equanimity––peace. Many of us, as Buddhist practitioners, are training our minds and our hearts with these Brahmavihara ideals every day, all year. It’s interesting to notice the holiday season as presenting some possible “conditions” which give rise to feelings of goodwill and generosity.
In this, and in so many other ways, the Buddhadharma carries a message of hope and possibility, one which, oddly, is built into the realization of our inherent vulnerability. This is the first of the Four Noble Truths, or what Stephen Batchelor calls the Four Liberating Tasks. We are of the nature to age, sicken, and die; we will eventually lose everyone and everything we love. These are the existential parameters of any human life. At the same time, another very important fact of life is that we are the owners of our experiences in that, once a situation arises, we are free––called upon, in fact––to act in response. Thereby our own personal actions––our thoughts, words, and deeds––become creative aspects of our future, part of the causative links in the unfolding of ongoing experiences of life. The Dharma is a teaching based on action; it advocates wise action. It opens ways to actively and intentionally create less suffering and more joy in our own lives and in the lives of others. Good tidings it brings.
Action makes the world go round,
Action makes the generations turn,
Living beings are bound by action
Like the chariot by the linchpin.
–– MN 98.13
The Dharma’s second liberative Task is to know, and to resist acting from, our reactivity, much of which is often fueled by a selfish clinging, by greed, dislike, or a lack of clear seeing. It advocates the work of restraining. In contrast, the third Task encourages us to realize that the products of unkind and ignorant reactivity are not always present in the mind. We are to recognize when they are not the mind’s first response. We are to be mindfully aware when joy, patience, generosity, compassion, peace, a sense of well-being and other “pro-social” feelings are present instead. We are to pause and abide in such moments: to understand in our bodies and minds that “peace on earth” is possible here and now. The fourth of these basic Truths or Tasks is related to the third. It clearly explains how we can stabilize these wholesome, onward-leading states of mind and at the same time discourage the more negative, reactive states. It addresses eight categories. The teacher Bhikkhu Gunaratana calls the eightfold path the “eight mindful steps to happiness.” They provide a way to practice the steady, gradual transformation, which is going on in the mind, heart, and body through our intentions and our commitment to practice. This Dharma process is a resetting of our nervous system and can be experienced as “purifying,” or deconditioning or healing, the mind and heart.
Don’t do anything malicious.
Engage in what is beneficial.
Heal the mind of its reactive tendencies.
This is the teaching of the Buddhas.
–– Dhammapada 183
Once, when the Dharma teacher and scholar Bhikkhu Analayo was asked if he believed there was a positive force in the universe, something another Buddhist monastic teacher had said, Analayo responded, “I don’t know about that, but I do believe that I can be a positive force in the universe.”
Are we becoming a positive force in the universe? It is the ongoing refinement of mindfulness and metta––wisdom and compassion––which helps us to monitor our actions and their results and to get a sense of how we are doing on this Buddhist path of peace. Good tidings we bring. . . .
May our practice and our lives be of benefit for ourselves, for others, for both, and for this shared world.