The Buddha’s Smile: cultivating equanimity

Andrew Olendzki (Tricycle, Winter 2012); Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Young Biddjost novice touches the Buddha Shakyamuni’s smile, Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

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The most difficult Buddhist idea to explain, I’ve found, is not Dependent Origination (conditioned or interdependent co-arising) or nonself (the impersonal nature of all phenomena), challenging though these are. It is equanimity.

How can one avoid like and dislike without being emotionally detached and indifferent?

This sense of identity, this "self," is so bound up with desires that to many people the thought of being without preferences for one thing or another is tantamount to being stripped of the very quality that makes one a human.

Hey, it's good times for everybody, kids! (Budai, Hotei, Putai leads a lantern parade).

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C'mon, everybody, eat candy, be fat

Detachment (letting go, not clinging, nongrasping) is just so dry that it feels like I wouldn't like it. Give me that pot-bellied Laughing Buddha any day (who, of course, is not a buddha at all but a Chinese folk deity named Budai), rather than the austere sitting figure presiding over our meditation halls with barely a hint of a smile on his face.

The historical Buddha is not asking us to have no emotion, only to let go of more primitive and unhealthy emotions. Craving (thirst, desire, lust) -- in both its positive mode as greedy attachment and its negative mode as aversion or fear (hatred) -- is an unhealthy emotion that causes suffering.

• Craving and Letting Go each lead us to Ten Courses of Action or Karma-patha (Buddhist Dictionary)

We don’t always see this, but it’s true. It’s easy to see at the extreme ends of the spectrum, where craving manifests as uncontrollable addiction (obsession) or aversion results in a hateful frenzy of brutal ethnic cleansing.

But even at the near end of the spectrum, these same emotional forces are at work gently pulling us toward the things we want and pushing us away from what we don’t want. And though the effects of this are subtle, the heart of the Buddha’s insight was to recognize that they can be just as harmful.

What is the harm, we might ask, in liking the color purple or being mildly annoyed by people who are rude? Nothing much. The problem is that craving/desire is a house builder, as the Buddha discovered on the dawn of his great enlightenment and awakening.

“Housebuilder, you have been seen! You will not build another house... mind has reached the dissolution of craving.”

(Dhammapada 154)

Desire/craving constructs the scaffolding of "self" upon which suffering is then draped.

Only a selfish self (a personal sense of ego) has craving, unlike rocks or trees, not because it is some spiritual essence unique in nature, but because the liking and disliking things is itself what creates "self," the personal rather than impersonal likes and dislikes of what is happening in this moment.

Man, this sucks! I don't want it to be this way.

This then creates the conditions of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and suffering that co-arise with it, for only a "self" can suffer (be disappointed). Rocks and trees do not. We can only be disappointed if we set ourselves apart from and in opposition to what is happening by wanting it to be other than just what it is.

The crux of the second ennobling truth is not what we want but that we want. As the Buddha says in MN 43, greed and hatred are makers of measurement; they are delimiting and therefore limiting functions. They carve minds into boxes and compartments, hemming a sense of self in with habits, wishes, wants, and needs.

Consciousness -- which, like a luminous mirror, is capable of clearly (unbiasedly) reflecting whatever object it encounters (selflessly and thus naturally) — is restricted, distorted, and even perverted by the likes and dislikes of emotional habits — even those that seem harmless.

Under such circumstances, it is impossible to see things as they truly are. The truth is that self likes its preferences and prejudices. It likes defining itself in terms of what it likes and dislikes. It is precisely craving/desire’s entanglement with a sense of self that makes this all so difficult to unravel.

• [What in the world do Buddhists mean "There is no self"? Of course there's a "self." It's the one suffering. It's the one craving, hating, and being delusional!]

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy and accessible way to counter the impossibly powerful forces of craving, thirst, and desire: It is the cultivation of equanimity.

Every moment of mindfulness [unbiased observation of what is at this moment, temporarily freed of the strong habits of liking, disliking, and delusion] is also a moment of equanimity.

It is not a disengagement from the objects of awareness but rather a full and complete engagement with them. It is engaging with the breath, this breath going on right now, or with a feeling tone, or with a thought -- without simultaneously wanting for it to stay as it is nor wanting it to be any different than it is nor being deluded by it.

Awareness without wanting is not the same as having no emotion. For equanimity is an emotion. If a neutral feeling tone rests at the midpoint between pleasure and pain (desiring and aversion), equanimity as an emotional response lies midway between liking and disliking, wanting and not wanting, greed and hate.

In the former case there is still a feeling tone, just not one that is obviously either pleasant or painful. So too with equanimity: There may be a powerful emotional charge, but it is not one that falls to one side or the other.

It may strike us as surprising and even entirely alien, but practicing Buddhists are pointing to an intensity of emotional response that accepts and celebrates what is happening without trying to distort it into something else, into something that an “I” would prefer.

Loving-kindness or metta is an example of this. When we practice loving-kindness (what is really friendliness), we care deeply for the well-being of another without the personal complications that come with liking or wanting them. Metta is not romantic love, nor even parental love, but rather a selfless (altruistic) love.

Yes, love can reach great heights of passion when a self simultaneously wants someone as a lover or takes pride in them as a parent or teacher. But to the extent that a sense of self is implicated, the emotion tips from selfless to self-referential.

This is not to say it makes it wrong. It is only to say it makes it prone to generating disappointment, dissatisfaction, discouragement... all forms of "suffering."

Loving with equanimity can be felt with intensity, as can happiness, compassion, sorrow, and a host of other nontoxic emotions, without becoming self-involved.

A self does not become less human by purging toxic things from its emotional life. Rather, it becomes more nobly human. ("Noble" is a Buddhist term for enlightened).

Abandoning greed, hatred, and delusion -- the Three Poisons of the heart/mind -- at every opportunity, one is left with a healthy, rich, and nuanced emotional life.

Future buddhas will smile, too.

Like all other aspects of the deep and profound Dharma, the Truth reflected in the Buddha's Teaching, this is better understood through practice than by theory.

When we explore the cultivation of equanimity as direct experience, see if it is possible to discover what the Buddha is smiling about. The Buddha's Smile (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

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• The original author is Lesley University Prof. Andrew Olendzki, the director of the graduate program in Mindfulness Studies. He teaches two Tricycle online courses, "Going Forth" and "Living in Harmony," and created the daily email course "Dhamma Wheel."