Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"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...

"So when you extend thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to others, you’re not thinking, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” You’re thinking, “May you understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” This is an attitude you can extend to all beings, without hypocrisy, regardless of how they’ve behaved in the past. Now, in some cases — where people have been particularly cruel — this may be difficult. You might feel that justice requires that they suffer first before they change their ways. But you have to remind yourself that people rarely see the connection between their misbehavior and their suffering, so wishing for them to suffer — even when it seems to serve the cause of justice — would rarely foster the causes for true happiness in the world. It’s better to wish that people come to their senses and have a change of heart on their own, and that you’d be willing to aid them in that process in whatever way you can. After all, wouldn’t you...

"Remember that when you’re reacting strongly to something outside, or even just reacting to little things that come in throughout the course of the day, it’s not that they’re moving in on you. You’re going out and feeding on them. The earth doesn’t feed. The earth just notices and stays solid. When the breath energy in the body is solid, it helps give you that quality of mind that’s like earth. Again, this doesn’t mean you sit there and just take whatever comes. But you’re in a much better position to see what really needs to be dealt with and what doesn’t, which issues are important and which are not. In particular, you get to see your own mind in action. Because there will be parts of the mind that are still not like earth, and they’ll want to react. But if you can side with the earth side of the mind, you can see those reactions for what they are. See how they’re a waste of energy; see how they muddy up your thinking, muddy up your powers of observation. So when the Buddha talk...

"Pass judgment in a way that doesn’t debilitate you. That’s the main problem with most people’s inner critic. It passes judgment and leaves no room for improvement, passes judgment and leaves no room for believing that you can actually do something right. Your inner critic has to be trained to understand that it is possible to put an end to suffering and you can do it. You have to be responsible, but you are capable and you really will benefit. That’s the other part of the bad inner critic, the part that says, “No matter how hard you try, it’s going to be a waste, so don’t even bother.” That inner critic has to be banished and replaced, not with an uncritical mind, but with a more skillfully critical mind — starting with teaching yourself to be non-reactive. You can see unskillful things in you and you don’t get worked up about them. You recognize them as unskillful and then you try to be very matter-of-fact in overcoming them. So that’s how non-reactivity functions. It’s a suppo...

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

"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...

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

"When, while you’re trying to develop compassion and empathetic joy, you run across cases where you can’t help the other person, either to become happy or to maintain happiness, that’s when you have to develop equanimity. This is the equanimity of a good doctor who realizes that he can’t solve all the cases in the world. But if he lets his heart get broken over all the cases he can’t solve, he won’t have the energy to help the cases he might have been able to solve. So for the people who come to him and have the karma that allows him to help — and he himself has the karma that allows him to help them — he should think of that as a precious opportunity. It’s not always there. Make the most of it and don’t let yourself get distracted by things you can’t control or where you can’t be of help. Because, as I said, karma is complex. The combination of the patient’s karma to be in a position where he or she can be cured, and the doctor’s karmic connection with that patient: It doesn’t al...

"And equanimity, too, is something you have to will — the ability to stay unperturbed with the things you like and the things you don’t like; not getting excited when things go well, not getting depressed when they don’t. In other words, you train yourself to have a certain amount of independence. Discernment is needed to perfect and understand this quality, and the equanimity helps foster the discernment, allowing you to see things more clearly, as well. The two qualities go hand-in-hand. There are times in the meditation where you do simply have to sit and watch. Some of your defilements really will go away just when you watch them — but not all of them. One of the points of developing equanimity is so you begin to see where the difference lies. So the Buddha is not recommending a blanket passivity here. He’s telling you to develop equanimity when it’s appropriate. You develop equanimity when you need to see things that you don’t yet understand. When you understand, sometimes eq...

(After a series of questions on political issues) Ajaan Suwat: The issues of the monks’ life are very subtle. The Buddha laid down rules forbidding us from even talking about these things, so I’d rather not go into these matters in detail. My main concern is what I can do so that you can depend on yourselves to attain peace and happiness of mind. That’s what concerns me: how each of us can learn how to depend on ourselves, so that our minds are solid and don’t waver in line with events, so that we can look after ourselves in a way allowing us to escape the dangers of the sufferings arising within us. Every person has suffering, and every person is only one person. There’s nobody who’s two. If each of us looks after our one person, without oppressing anyone or harming anyone, there would be no problems. The problem is that we don’t look after ourselves, and expect help to come from outside. That means that we abandon our responsibilities, and that’s why there’s injustice in the world —...

"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...