How should I live? · The vow
The question, second half
Conduct was one half of "how should I live?" The other half is what you do about other people — and here, at last, the two traditions look as though they are going to agree.
Both hold that the mature state is one of unlimited goodwill. Both are willing to describe it in extreme terms. Both give you a test for whether you have got there.
And the two tests are the opposite of each other. That is the session, and it is the most genuinely surprising thing in this course — because the test that fails on one side is the thing most Western readers have been taught to think Buddhist compassion actually is.
The Southern answer
The four divine abidings, and a test with a knife in it
Chapter 9 of the Visuddhimagga is the manual for the four brahmavihāras — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. It is an unusually practical chapter: whom to start with, whom not to, nine separate remedies for when resentment will not go, and how to know when it is done.
Read the opening through "The Breaking of Boundaries, Tested by Bandits." The rest — the 528 pervasions, the eleven benefits, the near and far enemies — is remarkable and optional.
Brahmavihāraniddesa — the four divine abidings
Whom not to begin with, beginning with oneself, nine remedies for resentment, the breaking of boundaries, and why equanimity can only come last.
Read it →The Northern answer
How you would recognise a bodhisattva in a room
Fascicle 35 of the Yogācārabhūmi opens the Ground of the Bodhisattva — the longest and most influential single section of the whole hundred-fascicle treatise. Its opening move is not doctrinal. It asks how such a person would actually be recognised, and answers with marks: the marks of giving, of precepts, of patience, of diligence, of concentration, of wisdom.
Read sections 5 through 8 — the six sets of marks — and then section 10, on what happens to a bodhisattva who falls.
The Ground of the Bodhisattva opens
Two kinds of lineage, the six sets of recognisable marks, why buddhahood is inconceivable, and how even a fallen bodhisattva differs.
Read it →Come back when you have read both sides. The rest of this page assumes you have.
Where the road parts
1 · The standard is set at the furthest point available — and you set it yourself
"And this is done precisely by admonishing oneself in this manner: 'Hey, you angry man, was it not said by the Blessed One — "Monks, even if bandits were to sever you limb from limb with a two-handled saw, whoever there defiles his mind at that would not, on that account, be a follower of my teaching"…'"
"'Worse than the angered is the one who angers back; not angering back at the angered, one wins a battle hard to win. One practices for the good of both — one's own and the other's — knowing the other provoked, one who remains mindful is at peace.'"
Two things about the form of this, before the content. First, the standard is placed at the most extreme point the tradition can name — bandits sawing you apart — for the same reason Session 6's executioner stands so close: so that every lesser provocation you will actually meet falls automatically inside it.
Second, and more unusual: this is a script for talking to yourself. "Hey, you angry man" — the practitioner is instructed to address himself in the second person, with some impatience, and quote scripture at his own head. There is no teacher in the room. The chapter then supplies eight further remedies for use when this one fails, which tells you how often it was expected to fail.
And among them is a piece of pure strategic realism: the list of seven things an enemy wishes upon an enemy — that he be ugly, sleep badly, not prosper, not be wealthy, not be famous, and so on — every one of which, the text observes, anger delivers to your enemy for free. "Though he be well-bathed, well-anointed, his hair and beard trimmed, clothed in white — he is nevertheless ugly, being overcome by anger."
2 · The test — and why offering yourself fails it
"…suppose this monk were sitting in one place together with a loved person, a neutral person, and a hostile person — himself making a fourth — and bandits came and said, 'Venerable sir, give us one of these monks'… 'So that we may kill him, take the blood from his throat, and perform a sacrifice' — if, in that situation, this monk should think, 'let them take this one or that one,' the breaking of boundaries has not been accomplished. And even if he should think, 'let them take me, not these three others,' the breaking of boundaries has still not been accomplished. Why not? Because in wishing that any one of them at all be taken, he is thereby wishing harm to that one, while wishing well only to the others."
"But when, among these four persons, he sees not even a single one who should be given to the bandits, and his mind proceeds equally toward himself and toward those three others, then the breaking of boundaries has been accomplished."
Stop on the middle clause, because it is the most counter-intuitive sentence in this entire course.
"Let them take me, not these three others" — the breaking of boundaries has still not been accomplished.
Almost every Western account of Buddhist compassion would treat that offer as the summit. Here it is a failure of the exercise, and the reason given is exact: in wishing that any one of them at all be taken, you are wishing harm to that one, and wishing well only to the others. You have not attained equal goodwill. You have merely chosen a different person to exclude from it, and the person is you.
The attainment is specified instead as seeing not even a single one who should be given — including yourself. Which is why the chapter's earlier instruction, easy to miss, is to begin with oneself. Not from self-regard. Because a mind that has exempted itself from its own goodwill cannot produce the state this test is measuring.
3 · And the North tilts it the other way
"Toward beings who have shown kindness, one knows that kindness and repays it … seeing or hearing of another's suffering … one feels that suffering more keenly than one's own, weighing the karmic consequence and future life more heavily still; even the smallest wrongdoing is deeply feared, let alone a greater one."
"The mind is warm and gentle, pure and clear; anger and the wish to harm never last long or continue, arising only to be released… speech is always soft, never coarse; not even a harsh word for one's own servants, let alone anyone else. One honors and loves the virtuous, praising them exactly as they truly are."
於是等苦過於自受 — that suffering, more than what one undergoes oneself. This is the North's mark of arrival, and it is precisely the asymmetry the Southern test rules out.
And notice the register of these marks. They are not attainments; they are behaviours a bystander could observe. Does he repay kindness? Does he get his money honestly, and without violence? Does his anger end quickly? Is his speech soft — including to the people who work for him? That last clause is the one to keep. A whole ethics can be tested at the point where nobody is watching and nobody could complain.
- South — equality, with no exceptions in either direction. You have arrived when self and loved and neutral and hostile are genuinely indistinguishable in your goodwill, and you would hand over none of the four. Preferring your own destruction is a failure state.
- North — asymmetry, tilted toward the other. You have arrived when another's suffering registers more strongly than your own, and when this shows up in behaviour as ordinary as how you speak to your staff.
- Neither tradition lacks the other's value. The Visuddhimagga treats compassion as its own separate abiding and spends pages on it. The bodhisattva path has equanimity among its own perfections. What differs is which one is the test — the criterion by which you would know.
- And notice which one is easier to counterfeit. A grand gesture of self-sacrifice can be produced on demand, once, by almost anyone. Neither of these tests can: one requires you not to flinch from your own inclusion, and the other is measured on a Tuesday, in how you speak to somebody who cannot answer back.
One last thing from the Northern text, because it is unexpectedly kind and there is nothing like it on the Southern side. What happens to a bodhisattva who fails badly enough to be reborn in a lower destiny? The treatise says such a person is reborn there only briefly, "is swiftly able to gain release," does not undergo the fierce suffering others there endure — and that the slight suffering they do feel "is thereby moved to heightened revulsion, and gives rise to deep compassion for the suffering beings reborn there." Even the failure is turned into the same tilt.
One practiceThis week · four people, and one honest failure
This is the one practice in the course that comes with an explicit instruction to fail, because failing it is the informative part.
Spend a few minutes on each, in order, wishing them well. Not visualising, not affirming — just holding the person in mind and genuinely wanting things to go well for them. When you reach the fourth and it stops working, go back to the third and come at it again. The chapter expects this and provides nine remedies for it.
Then run the bandits. Four of you in a room; someone must be handed over. Watch what your mind does. Most people find it offers the hostile person almost instantly, and then, catching itself, offers itself — and the text says both of those are the same failure.
You are not going to pass this. Buddhaghosa treats the breaking of boundaries as a genuine attainment, not a Tuesday exercise. What the test is for, this week, is to show you exactly where your goodwill stops being equal — and that "I would take their place" is one of the places it stops.
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
Would you give yourself to the bandits — and what does it mean that you would?
Most people reading this would, or would like to think so, and would feel the offer as the best thing available to them. Buddhaghosa says it is not enough, and his reason is not that you matter more than you think. It is that the offer still contains a ranking, and a ranking is what he is testing for. There is something uncomfortable in being told that your willingness to be destroyed for others is a residue of the same partiality as preferring them — and something worth a week in finding out whether you can even imagine the state in which no one, including you, is the one who goes.
Session 9 · Does any of it mean anything?
The sixth question, and the end of the course. Emptiness that must not be allowed to become a view of its own, against ten vows built so that they can never be completed. And then the harder question underneath both — whether a tradition that empties every category can still tell you that anything is worth doing.