By The XIV Dalai Lama
In the Buddhist understanding, the mind is not a solid thing hidden inside the head. It is the continuum of experience and knowing.
It is that through which we see, hear, feel, remember, hope, fear, and understand.
When you see a flower, the eyes and the brain are involved, but there is also the experience of seeing. When you hear a kind word, the ear is involved, but there is also the comfort that is felt within. It is this knowing and experiencing quality that we call mind.
The texts describe mind as clarity and knowing. Clarity does not mean brightness like a lamp. It means the capacity for appearances to arise: a colour, a sound, a memory, a pain, a hope. Knowing means the ability to recognise or apprehend what appears. A stone does not know. A table does not experience. The mind knows and experiences.
People sometimes ask whether the mind is the same as the brain. The brain is certainly important, and modern science has shown how injury, ageing, and chemical change affect memory, mood, and behaviour. We must respect this.
Buddhism is not opposed to science. At the same time, the brain has size, shape, and location, while consciousness has the quality of experience. These two approaches need not be in conflict.
Science investigates from the outside, through observation and experiment. Meditation investigates from within, through disciplined attention to experience itself.
In daily life most of us do not meet the mind calmly. We meet its disturbances. Anger comes and we feel, “I am angry.” Anxiety comes and we feel, “I am anxious.” We identify completely with each emotion.
But if we observe carefully, every emotion arises, stays for a while, and passes. If anger were truly our deepest nature, we would be angry all the time. Yet even an angry person sometimes laughs, sleeps, and shows affection. This tells us that destructive emotions are not fixed.
They are passing states.
The old comparison is the sky and the clouds. Clouds may cover the sky completely, and for a time we see only darkness, but the sky has not disappeared. In the same way, anger, fear, and confusion may cover the mind without defining it. Because the mind can know, it can learn.
Because it can learn, it can change. We are not condemned to remain as we are.
This is why meditation is not mysterious. The Tibetan word we translate as meditation means familiarisation. We become familiar with patience, compassion, and contentment until they grow more natural.
We also become familiar with the habits that disturb us: exaggeration, suspicion, resentment, grasping. Slowly we learn to recognise them before they take complete control.
Much of our suffering comes not from events alone but from how the mind relates to them. Someone speaks a harsh word to us. The word itself lasts only a few seconds.
But the mind takes it up and repeats it through the afternoon, through the night, sometimes for years. We add our own commentary.
We imagine what the person meant, what they may think of us, and what they might say next. Slowly we build a story far larger than the small event that began it.
In this way the untrained mind becomes a source of its own suffering. Yet the same mind, trained, can become our best friend.
As told to Rajiv Mehrotra
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
