During my first weeks with my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, I began to
realize that he had psychic powers. He never made a show of them,
but I gradually sensed that he could read my mind and anticipate
future events. I became intrigued: What else did he know? How did
he know it? He must have detected where my thoughts were going, for
one evening he gently headed me off: "You know," he said, "the
whole aim of our practice is purity of heart. Everything else is
just games."
That one phrase — purity of heart — more than intrigued me. It
reverberated deep down inside. Although I was extremely
disillusioned with Christianity, I still valued Kierkegaard's
dictum: Purity of heart is to will one thing. I didn't agree with
Kierkegaard as to what that "one thing" was, but I did agree that
purity of heart is the most important treasure of life. And here
Ajaan Fuang was offering to teach me how to develop it. That's one
of the reasons why I stayed with him until he died.
His basic definition of purity of heart was simple enough: a
happiness that will never harm anyone. But a happiness like that is
hard to find, for ordinary happiness requires that we eat. As the
first of the Novice's Questions says: "What is one? All beings
subsist on food." This is how the Buddha introduced the topic of
causality to young people: The primary causal relationship isn't
something gentle like light reflecting off mirrors, or jewels
illuminating jewels. It's feeding. Our bodies need physical food
for their well-being. Our minds need the food of pleasant sensory
contacts, intentions, and consciousness itself in order to
function. If you ever want proof that interconnectedness isn't
always something to celebrate, just contemplate how the beings of
the world feed on one another, physically and emotionally.
Interbeing is inter-eating. As Ajaan Suwat, my second teacher once
said, "If there were a god who could arrange that by my eating I
could make everyone in the world full, I'd bow down to that god."
But that's not how eating works.
Ordinarily, even well-intentioned people may not see eating as
harmful. We're so compelled to eat that we blind ourselves to its
larger impact. Our first pleasure, after the terror of being born,
was getting to feed. We did it with our eyes closed, and most
people keep their eyes closed to the impact of their feeding
throughout life.
But when you go to a quiet, secluded place and start examining
your life, you begin to see what an enormous issue it is just to
keep the body and mind well fed. On the one hand, you see the
suffering you create for others simply in your need to feed. On the
other, you see something even more dismaying: the emotions that
arise within you when you don't feel that your body and mind are
getting enough to eat. You realize that as long as your source of
physical or mental food is unreliable, you're unreliable,
too. You see why even good people can reach a point where they're
capable of murder, deceit, adultery, or theft. Being born with a
body means that we're born with a huge bundle of needs that compels
and can overwhelm our minds.
Fortunately, we human beings have the potential to civilize our
eating habits by learning to wean ourselves from our passion for
the junk food of sights, sounds, smells, etc., and look instead for
good food within. When we learn to appreciate the joy that comes
from generosity, honor, compassion, and trust, we see that it's
much more fulfilling than the pleasure that comes simply from
grabbing what we can for ourselves. We realize that our happiness
can't be independent of the happiness of others. We can give one
another our belongings, our time, our love, our selves, and see it
not as a loss but as a mutual gain.
Unfortunately, these qualities of the heart are
conditional, for they depend on a tender web of beliefs
and feelings — belief in justice and the basic goodness of human
nature, feelings of trust and affection. When that web breaks, as
it so easily can, the heart can turn vicious. We see this in
divorce, broken families, and society at large. When the security
of our food source — the basis of our mental and material
well-being — gets threatened, the finer qualities of the mind can
vanish. People who believe in kindness can suddenly seek revenge.
Those who espouse non-violence can suddenly call for war. And those
who rule by divisiveness — by making a mockery of compassion,
prudence, and our common humanity — find a willing following for
their law-of-the-jungle agenda.
This is why compassion based only on belief or feeling is not
enough to guarantee our behavior — and why the practice of training
the mind to reach an unconditioned happiness is not a selfish
thing. If you value compassion and trust, it's an imperative, for
only an unconditioned happiness can guarantee the purity of your
behavior. Independent of space and time, it's beyond alteration. No
one can threaten its food source, for it has no need to feed. When
you've had even just a glimpse of this happiness, your belief in
goodness becomes unshakable. That way other people can totally
trust you, and you can genuinely trust yourself. You lack for
nothing.
Purity of heart is to know this one thing.