2

RIGHT THOUGHT

When the French philosopher Descartes made the pronouncement “I think, therefore I am” in the seventeenth century, he articulated the starting point for a nearly perfect duality between Self and Other that was mediated only by God. Buddhist teachings on the interconnection of all beings dispute Descartes’s stance, and when skeptics ask, “Does this mean that when I don’t think, I am not?” Buddhist wags reply, “You are not, whether you think or not.”

Descartes’s statement can seem downright frightening when people first begin to meditate and—perhaps for the first time—sit quietly and discover what their “thinking” is really like. Suddenly they encounter the phenomenon that the Buddha called monkey mind: Their minds ceaselessly swing from thought to thought while they are sitting in silence. They are remembering the past, planning the future, and engaged in imaginary conversations with people from the near and distant past, the present, the future, and sometimes—seemingly—another planet. Is this who we are?

Clearly, monkey mind is not the way to enlightenment. Another kind of thinking, called right thought, is a powerful, critical step of the Eightfold Path. In many ways all of Buddhism is an investigation into the nature of mind, including the views to which we become attached and the thoughts and emotions that drive so many of our actions. As we begin to explore right thought, it is helpful to note that the word citta (in Pali; chitta in Sanskrit) means both “mind” and “heart” and that emotions are considered mental factors in Buddhism.

TEACHINGS

The fact that the second step on the Eightfold Path is variously translated as “right intention,” “right resolve,” “right aspiration,” and “right motive”—as well as “right thought”—differentiates its connotations from the kinds of thinking that constantly bombard us. The Buddha defined right thought as “the thought of renunciation, the thought of non-ill-will, the thought of harmlessness” (DN 22.21). Because renunciation is renunciation of harming sentient beings and doing away with unwholesome intentions, he also made it very clear that three other steps on the path—right understanding, right effort, and right mindfulness— “run and circle around right intention” (MN 117.15). The “Eightfold Circle” again.

An important aspect of right thought is insight—the ability to see things as they really are, the opposite of delusion—which is why right understanding is such an important underpinning for this step (MN 117). For right thought, we need insight into the nature of dukkha explored in the Four Noble Truths, of impermanence, and of karma. The relationship between thoughts and karma is clearly expressed in two well-known verses of the Dhammapada, as translated by Juan Mascaro:

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow.

These verses point to the fact that right thought integrates reason and emotion, understanding and volition.

IN PRACTICE

An old non-Buddhism cliché says that you cannot think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking. There is some truth in that statement if think is defined as “sitting down and figuring out what to do without reference to right understanding.” The framework of the Buddhist wisdom teachings—right understanding (especially the workings of the five aggregates in the twelve links of dependent origination) and right thought—however, are what make possible right action, as well as right speech and right livelihood, which we’ll examine in subsequent chapters. Regarding both thoughts and actions, Buddhist teachers avoid the labels good and bad and instead use the terms skillful and unskillful, depending upon whether the thoughts and actions lead us toward or away from dukkha for ourselves or others.

Renunciation or Sacrifice?

In looking at the Buddha’s life in Chapter 1, we encountered two examples of renunciation in the way the word is often used today— to mean “sacrifice.” Siddartha certainly sacrificed a life of luxury when he went on his spiritual quest, and he sacrificed nutrition, rest, and cleanliness while he lived as an ascetic. After his enlightenment and embracing of the Middle Way, he still lived a life of renunciation, but what he renounced was everything that caused unskillful thought, ill will, and harming. In this sense renunciation could better be described as detachment from the greed, hatred, and delusion that are the source of dukkha for ourselves and for others.

When, in the second step, we cultivate renunciation, we are not saying that we will never have another good meal, travel to exotic places, wear nice clothes, drive a good car, enjoy cultural activities, or have enriching friendships. Buddhism is not a practice of bleak deprivation. What it does mean is that we can renounce mindlessness in all these activities. We can renounce eating foods cultivated with chemicals that harm animals, humans, and the environment. We can renounce traveling to places that systematically abuse the human and civil rights of its people. We can renounce wearing clothing made in sweatshops that exploit or even enslave their workers. We can renounce driving cars that are excessive gas guzzlers. We can renounce going to cultural events that express racism or ethnic prejudice. We can renounce having relationships in which we use other people for our own transient pleasure. All told, we can renounce harming.

And are these renunciations sacrifices? Not really. When with right thought we learn to detach from unskillful thoughts, ill will, and harming, we invite into our lives the opposite, skillful qualities of generosity, loving kindness, and compassion—so beautiful that they are known as the brahma-viharas, the “divine abodes.” (We’ll discuss the cultivation of the brahma-viharas in Chapter 8.)

The starting place for renunciation is our own minds, for as we read in the Dhammapada, “our life is the creation of our mind.”

Thoughts Are Not Facts

If thoughts are not facts, what are they? Zen master Kosho Uchiyama, in Opening the Hand of Thought, described them this way:

You might try looking at all the stuff that comes up in your head as just a secretion. All our thoughts and feelings are a kind of secretion. It is important for us to see that clearly. I’ve always got things coming up in my head, but if I tried to act on everything that came in, it would just wear me out.

This notion of a “secretion” is quite consistent with both the Buddha’s 2,500-year-old teachings on the aggregates and the most recent brain research. Discourses addressing the aggregates note that all mental formations (wholesome and unwholesome) are dependent upon perception, which includes memory, and can lead to grasping or aversion, which results in dukkha. The Buddha described, for example, what happens when we open the sense gate of vision without wisdom or insight: When our eyes see a form, eye-consciousness arises. The convergence of eyes, form, and eye-consciousness is contact, and whenever there is contact, there is feeling. “What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates” (MN 18.16). And so the “proliferation” goes on until we are caught in grasping or aversion and then dukkha.

The thoughts we have in response to seeing (or hearing, tasting, and so on) may go far beyond form and color in the present. For example, one person who sees a German shepherd dog may think of the freedom that guide dogs can give a person who is blind or deaf, while another becomes anxious remembering news reports of dogs attacking people. Two people might notice the same chocolate cake, and while one thinks with dread about gaining weight, the other wonders with delight if it is someone’s birthday.

In this process, when we see something, eye, object, and memory come into play and, along with them, historical anger, fear, greed, prejudices, delusions, and even advertising slogans. For example, three white people may see the same adolescent African American in their suburban neighborhood and have very different thoughts. One questions what he is doing in this neighborhood and recalls with nervousness that there was a break-in last week in the next block. The second wonders if he is selling drugs and thinks, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The third speculates that he is the new boy at school his daughter mentioned and thinks that he looks like a nice person. How can different people react so differently to the same dog or person? The explanation that memory comes into play with consciousness goes a long way to explaining how prejudices—even ones we are unaware of—can find expression, even if only in our thoughts.

Zen master Seung Sahn has explained both how many of our thoughts—skillful or unskillful—come to be and how we may use them to “change” our world:

Once, a very long time ago, somebody told you, “The sky is blue.” And ever since, you have carried this idea around with you. A dog never says, “The sky is blue.” Cats never say, “The tree is green.” A dog also never says, “I am a dog.” Cats never believe they are cats. Human beings make everything, and then they fight over it. Their view is a mistaken view. They make color, size, shape, time, space, names and forms. Human beings make cause and effect, life and death, coming and going. Originally these things do not exist. All this comes from thinking: our thinking makes everything.

Put another way, related to the verses in the Dhammapada cited, every thought we have, through karma, affects us and therefore will eventually affect others. Similarly, every thought that we have, through karma, is drawing on our past as well as our present reality. In relationship to karma, our thoughts in the form of intentions are especially powerful: Thus, right thought concerning karma shows us the effects of our intentions, and our intention to awaken creates the karma for us to do so.

Delusion: Here Come the Taints

In describing the links of dependent origination, the Buddha noted that three “taints,” or defilements, characterize delusion: craving for sensual pleasure, craving for being, and ignorance. He compared abandoning the taints to cutting off the crown of a palm tree so that it can no longer grow (MN 36).

The Buddha also described the nature of the mind itself as being radiant except when it is temporarily clouded by defilements such as delusion. Metaphorically, I had a striking example of such “clouding” one brilliant autumn day when I was paddling my kayak down the Saranac River in the Adirondacks. For the first several hours, the river was wide and slow, wandering through tall rustling grasses. A great blue heron flew ahead from meander to meander, pointing the way with its sharp bill. Later in the afternoon the river narrowed and began to run faster between the flaming maples and trembling yellow aspens that crowded the shore. It was almost impossible to tell where the trees ended and their mirror images on the river began. It was a magic run, and I was mesmerized by the reflections—until my kayak struck some boulders that were barely below the surface of the water. I was jolted so badly, I almost capsized. When I looked at the river, I could see the rocks clearly—they had been there all along—but I had not seen them before because I had been so enveloped in illusion, if not delusion.

The Buddha noted that not just delusion but also attachment to our own views is a huge barrier to enlightenment (MN 74). In fact, most of the divisive situations that arose in his first Sangha resulted from different disciples’ attachments to their opinions about the Dharma. To practice right thought, we can renounce our tightly held opinions and open ourselves to what is: To explore mind, we can have an “impersonal” mind.

Two Marauders: Expectations and Disappointment

There is an old adage that if you ever ask yourself, “Is it too much to expect . . . ?” the answer is always yes. Yet somehow in our thoughts we make people and situations into permanent, unchanging entities that we think we can predict. That is just the time that the marauder “expectation” sneaks up on us. Any time we experience disappointment, we have entered into two realms of delusional thinking. First, we are not accepting things as they are—we are fighting impermanence and change and are generating dukkha. The second realm—actually, the first in time—is that we had obviously decided that we knew how things would turn out, had become attached to that outcome, and had set ourselves up. This is not to say that we should not make plans or even that we should not hope for certain things to happen. When we can avoid clinging to (even the thought of ) a specific outcome, we can be delighted if it happens and sad but not devastated if it does not. The degree of our disappointment can be a touchstone for the “self” we created through our expectations.

Sometimes we are not even aware of the existence of expectations until something happens to bring them to light. Just as I was finishing this book, I awakened early one morning to discover bats flying around over my bed. The New York State Department of Health defines this situation as “reasonable exposure to rabies” and urged me to have the month-long prophylactic rabies vaccination sequence, because rabies is 100 percent fatal, and by the time one knows one has it, it is too late. For me, the problem was that I had to go off the “miracle drug” I had been taking for vasculitis, because it could weaken my immune system too much to accommodate the vaccinations. So this Pollyanna decided to see whether I really was in remission from vasculitis. Sixteen days after stopping the medication, the appearance of lesions let me know (1) that I was not in remission and (2) that I had a lot of story-producing expectations, including that I would soon be climbing mountains again and could travel without carrying and keeping cold the medication, which I have to inject.

The situation with expectations and disappointment is particularly difficult for control queens like me, who are convinced that if we plan hard and think about something thoroughly enough, it is sure to happen the way we want it to. The fourteenth-century Zen master Bassui Tokusho warned us not to try to keep thoughts from coming up—but also not to cling to them when they did. He advised us to let them arise and pass away without struggling with them. When we cling and then struggle, we cannot avoid disappointments, because we cannot think something that has already happened into not having happened.

Sometimes the situations for disappointment are minor occasions, as when a child does not like a dish we prepared; but sometimes we may think that the rest of our life is ruined, as when we finally meet “the life partner of our dreams” who rejects us. Some common life situations can evoke disappointment for many people. Most of us, for example, assume that we shall have good health indefinitely; for anything from a blister to a chronic illness we may experience disappointment verging on rage toward our bodies. Some of us who assume that our parents will always be there to support us are baffled when, as they age, they need us to take “parental” responsibility for their well-being. At some point most parents experience disappointment because their children grow up too fast or not fast enough, or do not call or write regularly, or are too closely in contact because they have moved back into the household.

In each of these situations, attachment to an expectation that created a sense of self set up the conditions for dukkha. Other common examples include situations involving the eight pairs of worldly concerns that the Buddha identified as dukkha producers when we think obsessively about them: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, and fame and disgrace. As if our thoughts alone did not cause us enough problems, the Buddha also warned us: “Do not think thoughts connected with feelings” (MN 125.24).

Feelings Are Not Facts Either

The first time someone said to me, “Feelings are not facts,” I almost renounced nonviolence on the spot. How could that person, seeing my anguish, dismiss it so callously? The fact is that my friend had not rejected my pain at all, only my interpretation of it.

There is a wonderfully illustrative story—it has achieved nearly legendary proportions—about a group of American Buddhist teachers who met with the Dalai Lama. One asked him how his spiritual practice dealt with feelings of low self-esteem. “What is that?” he asked. The Americans spent the next several hours trying to explain to him, much to his disbelief, that feelings of low self-worth and even self-hatred are widespread in our culture. He kept insisting that those feelings are not accurate, that all beings have intrinsic worth. Yet how many of us went through our teenage years—and some of us the decades afterward—feeling unlovable despite all evidence to the contrary?

Although feelings are not facts—even as a teenager I was at least somewhat lovable—they are real. They can hurt a lot. Among young people they can invoke the kind of delusionary thoughts (“I am invincible,” “Everyone in my school hates me”) that result in tragedies such as the recent rash of student killings. No matter what our age, we can create a lot of dukkha for ourselves and others when we act on our feelings.

One time, for example, unskillful thoughts led me to words and actions that were unskillful almost to the point of being comical, except that they ended a friendship. I used to have mixed feelings about this friend—I enjoyed him because he was intelligent and funny, but I was annoyed by his endless sarcastic judgments on just about everything. One day as I was going to meet him at a movie, my thoughts went like this: “So I wonder what it will be today? My haircut? The length of my slacks? The color of my blouse? The screenplay, the acting, the photography? The smell of the theater? The smell of the world?” Caught up in my own judgmental thoughts, I was furious with him by the time I arrived at the meeting place. He said, “Hi.” I said, “You are the most negative person I’ve ever met, and I don’t care to spend any more time basking in your judgments about everything and everybody.” I walked away. He had not said or done anything.

Unexamined, unskillful feelings and thoughts feed each other until we act on them, usually in ways that leave us less than pleased with ourselves and that can hurt others. Some of those feelings— especially powerful ones like anger and fear—and the stories they generate in us can have a major impact on our relationships and our lives for a long time. Right thought acknowledges such thoughts and emotions as they arise, then lets go of them.

Self-Centered Fear: The Combustible Fuel

Many years ago someone quoted to me a statement in the Alcoholics Anonymous book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: “The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear—primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.” When you have spent a chunk of your childhood as a Texan, you do not want to hear about fear (“You are not afraid! Where’s your grit?”), so I spent the next several decades trying to disprove that statement. I have not been able to, but within the Buddha’s teachings I have learned a great deal about the sources of “self-centered fear” and how it produces dukkha in my life.

When I am clear about what I’m feeling, I can see that every potentially destructive emotion I have is fueled by self-centered fear. In my case the fuel cluster involves fear that I’ll lose something I have, that I won’t get something I want (or won’t get enough of it), that I’ll be rejected, or that I’ll be abandoned. This kind of self-centered fear is well illustrated by what happened one day when a wasp stung me: I yelled, and my dog flattened her ears and wondered what she did wrong. Self-centered fear makes us personalize life.

The first big problem in this kind of dukkha is the self in self-centered. That self—as a permanent, unchanging, autonomous entity—simply does not exist. It is a delusion. It is nothing more than the convergence of the five aggregates. The feelings and unskillful thoughts that arise out of that sense of self do little but separate us from the interconnection we share with all other beings and consequently bring us dukkha. As Insight Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein observed in a Dharma talk, “If there is anyone home to suffer, they will.”

The second problem with self-centered fear is that all its objects are things, states, or people that we are grasping or clinging to. Because all of these objects are as impermanent as we are, clinging to them can only bring us dukkha. Breaking any of the links of dependent origination will end this fear.

In order for me to let go of self-centered fear, I have found that it is critically important for me to recognize it for what it is, and that realization may not be instantaneous. The process can be like peeling an onion, which causes most of us some tears. Once I went into a fairly severe depression. I sought professional help, and my therapist and I addressed the situations in my life that were in fact depressing. After spending considerable time and money, I understood my depression better, but I was still depressed. Finally, my therapist and I decided that the depression was in fact a mask for anger and that the depression would ease if we addressed the anger. Southern women do not want to hear about anger (“Ladies don’t get angry”) any more than Texans want to hear about fear. But we began working on that tack. The depression did ease somewhat, but now I was somewhat depressed and quite angry. It was not until I was able to get to the fear under the anger— a multiple attack of fear of rejection, abandonment, and loss—that I had real success in dealing with depression. That was a lengthy and serious process requiring professional help, but the same principles apply to many everyday flashes of dukkha. I experience self-centered fear as the Second Noble Truth and have found the answer to overcoming it within the Four Noble Truths.

Self-centered fear can arise in any area of our lives, but it can be especially painful when it involves our personal relationships or our career. Consider, for example, a fairly common type of office situation. A recent college graduate is hired as a sales assistant. She is attractive, energetic, and full of ideas. Joe, who has been a sales assistant for two years, cannot stand her and complains about her to colleagues. Everything Joe says may be true, but you can bet that her threat to his getting the sales rep’s job has energized his gossiping about her. If she did not threaten him in some way, why would he say anything? Her faults would soon be obvious to everyone anyway. Whenever someone’s faults really aggravate us, chances are that we are personalizing something related to fear. There’s an old saying that when we point one finger at someone, we end up pointing three fingers back at ourselves—a sure sign of self-centered fear that we may have that person’s faults in triplicate. But what about fear that does not seem to be self-centered?

Anxiety and Fear: Out of the Present

No matter how non-self-centered fear “feels,” it arises out of the same source as self-centered fear. What we often define as “anxiety ”—sometimes free-floating—is clearly self-centered; there is nothing outside of ourselves that is obviously menacing. Other kinds of fear may come as the result of what is perceived as a real threat. But all kinds of fear—from mild anxiety to stark terror— share one characteristic: the source is not in the present moment but in the future. Let’s take a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example to illustrate:

You are driving over a mountain range in midwinter and feel anxious about what the weather may do. (It hasn’t changed yet.)

Clouds move in, and you worry that it may snow. (It hasn’t snowed yet.)

It begins to snow, and you are frightened that you may get caught in a whiteout on this treacherous road. (There is no whiteout yet.)

You are suddenly enveloped in a whiteout swirling around the top of a ridge, and your fear intensifies because it is likely that you will not be able to see ice on the road. (You haven’t skidded yet.)

Your tires strike ice, the car spins out of control, and you are terrified that you will smash into the granite wall looming before you and die. (You haven’t hit it yet. When you do, either you die or you live, stranded and injured and afraid you won’t be found.)

Whenever we face fear, right thought teaches us to do whatever is necessary to bring ourselves into the moment. Sometimes we can do so by bringing awareness to our breath, our body, or another mindfulness object (MN 119.34).

In several discourses, the Buddha talked about how to avoid fear in the first place. His overall teaching is that by leading an ethical life and having the wisdom of right understanding and right thought, we are not subject to fears and dread. In one discourse (MN 2.4ff ), for example, he said that “whatever fears arise, all arise because of the fool, not because of the wise man.”

Anger: A Forest Fire Burning Its Own Support

Just as fear is self-centered, so too is anger. For that reason Buddhist teachers have often compared anger to a forest fire that is burning its own support. It does not matter whether anger is “justified” or not—it arises from the same conditions as fear, it causes us the same isolation from other beings, and it has the same “cures.” First, we must recognize how strongly anger intensifies the sense of self, permanent, unchanging—and separate. The reality is that anger arises, like all other manifestations of dukkha, because of the processes in the links of dependent origination. It therefore is not “good” or “bad” in itself, though its expression is almost always unskillful.

When we can see that anger is not personal—that it can arise in anyone under particular conditions—we can make the distinction noted by Joseph Goldstein, in Insight Meditation, between the thoughts “I am angry” and “This is anger.” When we can see that anger is present and note what it feels like, we can break the cycle of attachment to it and attain freedom from the dukkha that accompanies it when we solidify a sense of self as an “angry person.” As we shall explore more deeply in Chapter 7, a good way to interrupt this cycle, when it involves a difficult emotion such as anger or fear, is to make that emotion the focus of mindfulness practice.

In our exploration of renunciation, we noted that what we can renounce are ill will and whatever causes harm, to ourselves or others. Stories of what happens when anger is turned against others unfortunately are all too common: revenge bombings, shootings during road rage, spousal abuse, and murder. Throughout the Buddha’s teachings, anger (or hatred or ill will) is cited along with greed and delusion as the factors that keep us imprisoned in samsara, the endless cycle of existence that we are locked into until we achieve nirvana. A critical element in this cycle is karma, for karma is deeply affected by anger, and it is in this sphere that we most harm ourselves. Returning to our earlier metaphor, if we plant seeds of anger and repeatedly nourish them, we will grow into angry plants.

The Buddha described anger and bitterness as karmic “blemishes” resulting from lack of right understanding and right thought. He also included anger among the list of taints that defile the mind (MN 7.4). In the same discourse, he compared such taints to what happens when someone dyes a cloth: If the cloth is stained, the dye job will appear splotchy and badly done, but if the cloth is pure, the dye job will look good and the color will be pure. Thus, the defiled mind can only have an imperfect outcome.

In one of my earliest exposures to Buddhists working for social action, a friend invited me to a workshop led by Thich Nhat Hanh (called “Thây”) on how to bring about peace. My friend, a Buddhist, knew that I had been a political activist and thought I would find Thây’s approach “interesting.” I’m not sure what I expected—probably information about where I could effectively join with other (righteously angry but nonviolent) protestors. Much to my surprise, during the first several hours of the workshop, Thây only taught meditation and led guided meditations connected to the breath and body. He explained that the best— maybe only—way to bring peace to the world is to bring peace to ourselves through mindfulness and meditation practice. Then we can live a life that brings peace to our world. He in no way even implied that we should abandon social action, including protests, but he urged us to take part in them from a personal place of peace, love, and compassion. He also suggested that we contact our elected representatives—but he stressed that we should write them “love letters.” I did, and I got much more thoughtful responses than I ever had gotten from my threateningly angry letters.

Many years later I was to hear Thây repeat this counsel. Two weeks to the day after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center towers, he led a vigil at Riverside Church in New York City titled “Embracing Anger.” He explored ways to heal and to transform our feelings of anger resulting from this terrible tragedy, ways to understand the nature of the suffering that we— and those who perpetrated the violence—have experienced. He urged that in the relationships between nations and between individuals, we solicit information about the other’s suffering and listen very carefully. If we can understand the nature and the causes of their suffering, we will know how to respond with compassion. He stressed that all violence is injustice and that responding to violence with more violence is injustice both to the other person or nation and to ourselves. The evening ended very movingly with Vietnamese Buddhist nun Sister Chân Không singing a song written by Betsy Rose based on a poem by Thây. She sang about cradling her face in her hands to prevent her soul from leaving her in anger. The poem was composed soon after an incident during the Vietnam War when Viet Cong fired antiaircraft guns from a large city, then fled. American planes totally destroyed this city of more than 300,000 people. It was Sister Không’s home.

We express anger through our speech and our actions. But before we speak or act, the anger is in our minds, so right thought is an important forerunner of our behavior. As verse 5 of the Dhammapada so eloquently says: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred.”

B. Alan Wallace, in Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up, describes the role that thoughts that are not “right thought” and all their accompanying violence can play in our transformation:

The foundation and initial goal of [our] transformation is avoiding doing harm to others. Whether alone or with others, we must strive to avoid doing harm either directly with our words or deeds or indirectly with our thoughts and intentions. We may injure others with abuse, slander, sarcasm, and deceit, or by acts of omission due to insensitivity and thoughtlessness. The most subtle way of harming others is indirectly by means of our thoughts, judgments, and attitudes. When the mind is dominated by hostility, we may be viciously attacking others with our thoughts. Although no apparent injury may be inflicted, these thoughts affect us internally and influence our way of interacting with others, and the long-term effect is invariably harmful. So the initial theme of Dharma practice is a nonviolent approach to our own lives, to other living beings, and to our environment. This is a foundation for spiritual practice, and can provide well-being for both ourselves and others.

On this basis of nonviolence we can look for ways to serve others keeping in mind that any work will be altruistic if our motivation is one of kindness and friendliness.