Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Equanimity Of Doctor, Hunter, Warrior

–Thanissaro Bhikkhu

First is the equanimity that realizes how even though you may have goodwill for all beings and compassion and empathetic joy, it’s not the case that everybody’s going to be happy or that they will be as happy as quickly as you might like. And there are times when no matter how much goodwill you have for somebody, there’s still going to be some suffering. That’s when you have to develop equanimity, to realize that certain things simply will not go in line with your wishes. You want things to go well, both for yourself and for others, but you run up against a brick wall. This doesn’t mean that you give up. It means that you look instead for the areas where you can make a difference. So the basic motivation for this kind of equanimity is the desire for happiness coupled with the realization that it’s not going to happen all the time, or as quickly as you like, or in the areas where you might want.

This is like the equanimity of a doctor. A person with an illness comes to the doctor. The doctor wants to help. He does his best. But then he’ll run into areas where he can’t make any difference for the patient. So instead of getting upset about the areas where he can’t make a difference, he focuses on the areas where he can.

Another kind of equanimity occurs in the context of concentration practice. It’s related to the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula when he first started meditating. He said, “Make your mind like earth. Nice things and disgusting things are thrown on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react.” When you’re meditating, you really are trying to get the mind under your control. You are trying to make a difference. Mindfulness is a governing principle that underlies concentration practice, and it has a task that it keeps in mind: to try to give rise to skillful qualities and try to maintain them. In other words, you don’t just watch them coming and going. You try to make them come, and then prevent them from going, but to be a good meditator you have to have a certain evenness of mind so that you don’t force things unskillfully, and so that when things do go well, you don’t just jump at them.

You might say it’s like the equanimity of a hunter. The hunter has to go out and wait for the rabbit. If he gets excited when the rabbit comes, then the rabbit will sense his presence and will run away. Or if he shoots the rabbit and misses and gets upset about that, he’s not going to have a second chance.

Then there’s equanimity in the context of determination. You’ve made up your mind you’ve got a goal, and you do everything you can to go for that goal, which involves developing all the other perfections. This will entail doing certain things you don’t like doing, and giving up certain things that you’d prefer to hold on to. In addition, there will be long fallow periods when things are not going well, and you have to maintain your good spirits and not get upset by your setbacks. You have to be able to maintain a strong sense of the direction you want to go in without giving up. This is the equanimity of a warrior, who realizes there are going to be some battles you’re going to lose, but you can’t get upset about those. You take them in stride and learn whatever lessons you can from your defeats so that you can win the war.

Ajaan Lee talks a lot about this in the context of what they call the worldly affairs: gain, loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, pain. As he points out, we’d always like the good side—the gain, the status, the praise, and the pleasure—but the good side is not always good for us. Status can go to our heads. Praise can go to our heads. People tend to forget themselves when the “good side” comes up. At the same time, there are lots of good lessons you can learn when things are not so good. When there’s material loss and loss of status, you learn who your true friends are. When there’s criticism, you have an opportunity to learn. If the criticism is true, it’s helping you because it’s pointing out an area where you may have become complacent. As for praise, you have to watch out for that, because sometimes you have to wonder why are people praising you: What do they want out of you? You have to be a little bit leery of what you think is a good side and not so quick to get upset about the bad side. This is what keeps you going, realizing that not every setback is permanent. There are ways around it. So you keep coming back, coming back.

That’s the equanimity of a warrior.

So equanimity is the opposite of apathy and indifference. It’s equanimity that allows you to attain your goals wisely and to not suffer in the process. It’s the grounding quality that keeps the mind on an even keel, enabling it to see things clearly that it otherwise might miss if it was getting excited or upset about things going or not going the way you wanted them to.

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Many moons ago, a couple friends got together to sit in silence for an hour, and share personal aha-moments. The ripples of that simple practice have now spread to millions over 20+ years, through local circles, weekly podcasts and more.

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When My Father Faced An Emergency

–Nora Bateson

We were in the car. Driving to my riding lesson. At that time we lived in Big Sur, California. If you have ever had the pleasure or terror of driving the Big Sur coastline on Highway One, you will know that the two-lane road is characterized by majestic mountains on one side and steep, death-defying cliffs that plummet down to the Pacific Ocean on the other. We had an old dirty white Volkswagen Van. It was the ’70s, we were a hippy family and I was a long-legged, scraggly, mountain child, about 10 years old. I was in the backseat, free to roam around as there were no seat belts back then. My father was driving, and while it is not part of this story let me just say he was one of the worst drivers ever. He was always busy looking at the whales in the sea, or spotting hawks. Terrible.

As we drove up the coast, we passed a hitchhiker on the side of the road who had his thumb out. He was a young man with a big backpack. A traveler. My father, ever the anthropologist, was interested in travelers, and in people in general. He liked to pick up hitchhikers. He liked to have conversations with strangers. So we picked up this fellow.

A few minutes later as we were driving along the man suddenly had a knife in my father’s side. He was demanding money; he was pumping with adrenaline.

I think this qualifies as an emergency. A two-lane road with nowhere to pull over. A kid in the back seat, and it would be another 30 years before the invention of the mobile telephone.

But I never noticed. I did not see the emergency because my father’s response was to cheerfully look down at the knife and then into the eyes of the hitchhiker and say in his most droll Englishness, “Well hello, what have we here?”

He was authentically calm and amused. His interest in the desperate young man had actually increased several fold by this communication, (i.e. a knife and monetary demands). My father began to ask him questions. How had he come to be in Big Sur? How had he found himself in such a muddle? Through these questions and, more importantly, the tone of the questions, my father was listening and learning about how someone can get in such a twist. He was not applying a psychological trick or a technique. This was not a manipulation. He was not ‘trying’ to calm the guy down. He was just interested, one human being to another. His curiosity in the young man was piqued, and his inquiry reflected that. He did not see a knife… he saw a person with a story.

How would most people react? Would they fight, would they try to get the money to him right away? Would they try to trick him? What are the scenarios that immediately play out? For most of us, a knife in our side would be a moment of panic. This was an emergency. But somehow it was not. As a passenger in the back seat of the van I watched their interaction and never for one second felt fear in the car. There was no spike in the drama, no flutter of breath, no indication of danger at all. I still do not think of that afternoon as being life-threatening, though surely it was.

After driving another half an hour we came to a place where we would have to drop off our hitchhiker and deliver me to my horseback-riding lesson. When we pulled off the road my father opened his wallet and gave the young man a $20 bill. He wrote our home phone number on a scrap piece of paper from the floor of the car and gave the guy a hug. My father suggested that the man call if he found himself in trouble. These were not idle generosities to suggest good will. He was not faking it. The warmth and the care he felt for the traveler was genuine. I could feel that, and so, apparently, could the hitchhiker. All three of us learned a great deal from that half an hour in the VW van.

As I look back now at that situation I can only say that I hope one day to be able to see context as well as my father did. He was not young when this story took place. He was maybe 74 years along in his practice of seeing more than just the tip of the knife. I suppose it takes time to be able to respond to an acute situation with love that stems from complexity… or is it the other way around: complexity that stems from love?

Perhaps there is no beginning to that loop. I will start by noticing my reactions, and searching for wider, deeper edges to the complexity I am reacting to, responding to—and shift that into mutual learning.

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About Awakin

Many moons ago, a couple friends got together to sit in silence for an hour, and share personal aha-moments. The ripples of that simple practice have now spread to millions over 20+ years, through local circles, weekly podcasts and more.