Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relati...

"In another sutta — Majjhima 137 — the Buddha talks about different ways of relating to pain, pleasure, and equanimity. There’s the pain, pleasure, and equanimity of a householder on the one side, and the pain, pleasure, and equanimity of a renunciate on the other. The pain of a householder is not getting what you want in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and mental events. That’s householder pain. The pleasure of a householder is getting what you want in terms of the six senses. The equanimity of a householder is being determined that your mind will not be affected by any of the input of the six senses. Now, for most of us when we encounter householder pain, we try to find householder pleasures. But the Buddha said that a more skillful way of dealing with householder pain when you meet with it, is to go for renunciate pain, which is what I mentioned before: the desire to reach the goal, which at the moment is painful because you’re not there yet. The sa...

Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relati...

"You have to put your preferences aside. That old Zen saying that the Great Way is not difficult for those with no preferences: It doesn’t mean you just give up preferences of all kinds. You prefer to get skillful results and you prefer to gain awakening. What it means is that you don’t stick to your old ways of doing things, saying that “This is the way I’m going to do things, this is the kind of person I am, and this is how it has to be, and I want to get good results that way.” They don’t come simply because you want them to. Narcissism is not the Great Way. You learn from your actions — that’s why we’re focused on our actions and on their results." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focused on Results" (Meditations9)

"When you’re dealing with other people, there are going to be a lot of things you don’t like. You can’t let your likes and dislikes get in the way of your doing what’s skillful. If you treat the people you like well but treat the people you dislike in a shabby way, that becomes your karma. It’s not good for you. So you have to remember, you’re not treating people well because they deserve it. You’re treating people well because it’s part of your training. It’s part of your safety, your protection. The Buddha talks again and again about goodwill [mettā] as a form of protection. And goodwill always has to be accompanied by equanimity, just as equanimity has to be accompanied by goodwill. If we have just equanimity without the goodwill, we become indifferent, callous. We become apathetic. There’s that great story of the storm that went through Ajaan Chah’s monastery once. The next day, Ajaan Chah went around the monastery checking up on the damage, and he found one monk sitting in a...

"I have a student back East who’s on the autistic spectrum. She told me one time she could never understand why Dhamma teachers like to extol equanimity as the goal of the practice. As she said, she’s pretty equanimous all the time, and it’s not much of a goal. And the Buddha himself never said that it was the goal. It’s the last of the factors for awakening, and that’s led some people to think that that’s what the factors for awakening are aimed at. But all the factors are parts of the path. They’re meant to lead to something better than they are. They’re all means to an end. They’re tools for arriving at the ultimate happiness. There’s no place where the Buddha says nibbana is the ultimate equanimity. It’s always “the ultimate happiness.” So the question is: What role does equanimity play on the path? The first thing to notice is that sometimes it’s regarded as skillful and sometimes it’s not. When it makes you lazy, it’s not part of the path." ~ Thanissaro Bhi...

"We don’t start out by being equanimous about everything. All too often, people read about the Buddha’s teachings and they see that many of his teachings end in equanimity. The factors for awakening end in equanimity. The four brahma-viharas end in equanimity. It sounds like that’s where we’re going. And many people say, as long as that’s where we’re going, why don’t we just go there first? Why bother with all the steps? Well, the Buddha’s equanimity is very different from ours. The Buddha has found a true happiness. Notice that he doesn’t say nibbana is the ultimate equanimity. It’s the ultimate happiness: the word for happiness, here, sukha, can also mean bliss, pleasure, ease. And it’s worth our while to aim at that ultimate happiness, that we put forth an effort to attain it. Equanimity meant is for the things that either would pull us from the path, or prevent us from moving further along on the path. You have to develop equanimity for those things, the things ...

"When the Buddha lists the factors for awakening, equanimity comes at the end of the list, which gives the impression that it’s the highest of the list. And in one way it is, but in many ways it’s not. It’s listed as one of the factors that are useful only on some occasions. When the mind is overly excited, overly energetic, overly worked up about things, equanimity is one of the calming factors. It goes together with calm and concentration. When your energy is too low, though, that’s not the time to be developing equanimity. You have to work on the factors that are more energizing: analysis of qualities, rapture, and persistence. Otherwise, your practice will stagnate. So you have to use your equanimity together with your discernment to figure out what’s just right." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Equanimity"

"About a year after I returned to America, I was teaching meditation to a group up in Orange County and I gave my first interviews. One of the people in the retreat started her interview out by saying, “Buddhism: It’s all about love isn’t it?” I was taken aback. I said, “Well, no, it’s all about freedom.” She was taken aback. We come from a culture in which love is very highly valued — not only as a social virtue, but also as a religious one. So it’s a little shocking when we come to another tradition where it’s not valued so highly. The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity — and to us it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha’s teachings is put in the service of freedom. As the Buddha once said, all of his teachings have a single taste: the taste of release. This means that all of his teachings on goodwill on the one hand, and equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment on the other, are all put in the service of freedom — realizing, on the one ha...

 "There are things that we like, things that we don’t like. Even the Buddha: There were things he liked and things he didn’t like. But he learned how to keep his mind from being overwhelmed by them. When people would come to study with him, some of them would listen to him but they wouldn’t follow through with his teaching, and they didn’t get the results. Of course, he didn’t like that. But he said he established mindfulness so that his mind was not overtaken by his sense of dissatisfaction. When the students did follow his teachings, and did gain awakening, it’s not that he didn’t like that. He did like it, but he didn’t allow the sense of satisfaction to overcome his mind. What this means is that the mind has to learn how to look at these things and not get sucked into them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Caring Without Clinging"

"About a year after I returned to America, I was teaching meditation to a group up in Orange County and I gave my first interviews. One of the people in the retreat started her interview out by saying, “Buddhism: It’s all about love isn’t it?” I was taken aback. I said, “Well, no, it’s all about freedom.” She was taken aback. We come from a culture in which love is very highly valued — not only as a social virtue, but also as a religious one. So it’s a little shocking when we come to another tradition where it’s not valued so highly. The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity — and to us it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha’s teachings is put in the service of freedom. As the Buddha once said, all of his teachings have a single taste: the taste of release. This means that all of his teachings on goodwill on the one hand, and equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment on the other, are all put in the service of freedom — realizing, on the one hand, that we ...

"I have a student back East who’s on the autistic spectrum. She told me one time she could never understand why Dhamma teachers like to extol equanimity as the goal of the practice. As she said, she’s pretty equanimous all the time, and it’s not much of a goal. And the Buddha himself never said that it was the goal. It’s the last of the factors for awakening, and that’s led some people to think that that’s what the factors for awakening are aimed at. But all the factors are parts of the path. They’re meant to lead to something better than they are. They’re all means to an end. They’re tools for arriving at the ultimate happiness. There’s no place where the Buddha says nibbana is the ultimate equanimity. It’s always “the ultimate happiness.” So the question is: What role does equanimity play on the path? The first thing to notice is that sometimes it’s regarded as skillful and sometimes it’s not. When it makes you lazy, it’s not part of the path." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Eq...

"When the Buddha lists the factors for awakening, equanimity comes at the end of the list, which gives the impression that it’s the highest of the list. And in one way it is, but in many ways it’s not. It’s listed as one of the factors that are useful only on some occasions. When the mind is overly excited, overly energetic, overly worked up about things, equanimity is one of the calming factors. It goes together with calm and concentration. When your energy is too low, though, that’s not the time to be developing equanimity. You have to work on the factors that are more energizing: analysis of qualities, rapture, and persistence. Otherwise, your practice will stagnate. So you have to use your equanimity together with your discernment to figure out what’s just right." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Equanimity"