This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Looking Upon, Not Away: The Practice of Equanimity ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good evening. Welcome.
Tonight, I’d like to start with a story. It’s a Taoist story, but I heard it attributed as part of a Zen story. I’ve also heard the same story in a very secular setting, and here I am telling this story in a mindfulness setting. There’s something about this that I kind of love; it just points to human capacities or capabilities. It doesn’t matter what tradition it’s from; it’s just pointing to something that’s human and that maybe touches all of us in some way.
So, once upon a time—and I’ll just emphasize that this is a story—there was a farmer. Maybe some of you have heard this story. I know I’ve heard it a number of times. This farmer had a horse which he used to work the fields every day. This was part of how he farmed.
Then one day, the horse ran away. And there he is, left without a horse. All the villagers came by and said, “Oh, this is terrible. This is such bad luck that your horse ran away.” The farmer responds, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”
The villagers were kind of scratching their heads, a little bit confused, like, “Okay, whatever. This guy’s a little bit odd,” maybe they were thinking.
So the farmer finds his way. He makes do without having a horse as best he can. And then some weeks later, the horse returns, but it’s not alone. The horse is coming with a part of a herd or a pack of horses. It brought 10 other horses with it, and all these 10 horses somehow got into the paddock. So the farmer now went from zero to ten. The farmer has 10 horses.
All the villagers are like, “Wow, this is fantastic! What good luck that your horse brought back these other horses. Now you have so many!” And the farmer responds, “Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
So, a few weeks later, the son of the farmer was working with these new horses, and apparently, he got bucked off. Maybe not surprisingly, right? New horses. He got bucked off and broke his leg. Now he can no longer help his father on the farm. He’s really laid up, and it’s fractured pretty severely.
All the villagers hear about this and they come over like, “Oh, this is terrible. Your poor son. Oh, what bad luck.” And the farmer replies, “Bad luck? Good luck. Who knows?”
So then a few more weeks go by. The son is starting to get a little bit better, but he still definitely has this broken leg and is laid up. He can’t walk and he can’t work.
And then a regiment of the army came by, and they were conscripting every able-bodied male to join them. When the regiment came to the farmer’s house, they saw that the son was not able-bodied. He couldn’t even get out of bed. So they just left without him and didn’t conscript the son.
And of course, all the villagers came by and said, “Wow, this is fantastic! What good luck!” And you know what he says, right? “Good luck, bad luck. Who knows?”
You get the message, right? These things that at first we think are terrible actually turn out to create the conditions in which something better can arise. The farmer has this response: “bad luck, good luck, who knows?” He’s not jumping for joy like the villagers are, or down in the dumps the way the villagers are. Instead, he’s just taking it in stride, whatever is arising.
There are a number of ways we can interpret this story. There’s the way that the farmer is staying balanced. He’s not saying, “Oh, woe is me. This is terrible bad luck,” or, “This is fantastic! Oh, there’s a great fortune,” and going on a spending spree or something like this, right? He’s staying balanced no matter what’s happening or whatever the circumstances are. He’s not getting carried away. We could say that this is equanimity1—this idea of staying balanced no matter what’s arising.
Or maybe there’s another way we could interpret the story: the farmer sees the bigger picture. What’s unfolding now isn’t the final thing that’s going to happen. There are going to be other things that happen, so slapping a label of “good” or “bad” on it is premature because everything is provisional. He’s just looking at the bigger picture in terms of how things unfold. This is an appreciation and recognition that the way we initially think things are doesn’t mean it’s the way it’s going to stay forever. It’s not always going to be that way. But so often, we just want to slap this label on it: it’s good or it’s bad. There’s a way in which we’re trying to freeze it in time, and of course, nothing is frozen in time. Everything is changing and evolving and moving.
Assigning whether it’s good or bad is a way in which we’re maybe limiting our views about things and how things can unfold if we just allow them to. In this story, the horse was still going to come back with 10 more horses, and the army was not going to conscript the son, whether they were happy or sad about what had happened.
It’s not that the farmer knew what was going to happen. There was a certain trusting of the uncertainty, an allowing of uncertainty. He was saying, “bad luck, good luck, who knows?” It’s this “who knows,” this question, like, “I don’t actually know. I’m not sure.” He could have checked in with his experience and said, “Yeah, this doesn’t feel good, and I notice that my shoulders are tense and I’m tightening my jaw.” Some present moment experience, which is really different than just slapping a label on something and saying this is good or this is bad. I appreciate him saying “who knows,” this recognition that we don’t know. We know how it feels. We know this present moment experience. We know that. But that’s different than saying, “Oh, this whole situation is bad,” or “this whole situation is good.” We could say, “Yeah, I feel this uplift in my heart when I think about it, and I find myself smiling, have a little bit of ease in the body.” We could say these types of things, the impact it’s having on us, but that’s different than just assigning something as good or bad.
I appreciate that he is recognizing that we don’t know, and we don’t need to know. This is really hard. We like to know things, especially since we’ve been conditioned by these little square rectangular things in our pockets that let us know all kinds of stuff with just a few little taps. We feel like, “Oh, I have to know, I have to know.” But we didn’t used to know all that stuff, and we were perfectly fine.
Equanimity is partly about feeling balanced, but it can also be about seeing the big picture. When we hear about equanimity, it might not sound so fun, not so juicy. It feels more exciting to get in there and say how great things are or how terrible things are. But it turns out, that’s exhausting. There’s a part of us that knows that. Instead, to have some ease and some balance no matter what’s happening is a relief because there are plenty of terrible things that are happening that we can’t avoid or control. So why not practice some of this balance or seeing the bigger picture with smaller things? All of us are going to die. The dying process may be terrible, it may not be. So why not just practice having some balance and seeing the big picture with small, simple things now, so that it becomes easier when we have serious health challenges, or people we love have serious health challenges, or some of the things that impact us that are completely out of our control? Equanimity can help.
When I first heard it, it did feel like a kind of cool indifference or disconnection, but it’s not that at all. It’s still being connected, but connected with care, connected with this flavor of warm-heartedness. It’s an essential part of having a full, rich life.
The Buddha offers the simile of the goldsmith. It starts by describing how a goldsmith would prepare a hot furnace. A tremendous amount of fuel has to get put in there to make a hot furnace and a little receptacle. Then, putting some gold in the little receptacle, like a crucible. From time to time, the goldsmith would blow on this little receptacle. Sometimes they would sprinkle water on it, and sometimes they would just look to see how the gold is melting so that they can make jewelry with it. Three different things: blowing on it, sprinkling water on it, and just looking at it to see what’s needed.
We could say that this looking at it is the equanimity. It’s not that we have to all the time be making things hotter, blowing on them. And it’s not that we’re always trying to cool them down. But sometimes we’re just looking. If we were just making them hotter, the gold would just burn up. If we were just adding water, it would stay cool and wouldn’t be malleable enough to make jewelry.
This recognition that equanimity is such a powerful way in which we can meet whatever’s happening is important. Sometimes we feel like it’s just passivity, that I’m just supposed to turn into an ice cube and not be connected to what’s happening. But equanimity, and I would say mindfulness as well, helps us to see what is needed. Should there be a little bit of blowing, a little bit more energy? Or should there be sprinkling of water, which is often said to represent concentration? As we concentrate, we can get settled, like a cooling down. So the heat is in balance with the energy, concentration, and equanimity is what’s looking and holding all of it.
In this simile of the goldsmith, the Buddha ends by saying that if the goldsmith would from time to time blow on it, from time to time sprinkle water on it, and from time to time just look on it, then the gold would become purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, steady, attained to imperturbability. He has this long list of synonyms describing the gold. For me, this is fascinating. This is exactly how he describes his mind before awakening, using the exact same words. It’s not like we’re just one way, doing one thing, but instead, we’re being sensitive to what’s needed. And equanimity allows us to be in balance and to see the bigger picture so that we can see what’s needed.
Last week, I spoke a little bit about equanimity as well, and I talked about some of the supports for it. I talked about the notion of a sense of well-being being a support for equanimity. I used the metaphor of having a life jacket on when you find yourself in stormy waters. If you have a life jacket on, it’s a very different experience. You’re probably a little bit more easeful and can think a little bit more clearly than if you don’t. Cultivating a sense of well-being is like putting on the life jacket so that whatever life is bringing you, you can be more buoyant. Well-being can include doing some metta practice, some loving-kindness practice, as well as appreciating some of the pleasant experiences that you have in your life.
Today, I’d like to build on this. What are some other practices that we can do to cultivate equanimity?
One is to notice the changing nature of experience. It doesn’t matter which experience; they’re all changing, just on different time scales. Can we deliberately tune into one particular aspect of experience? Often when I’m giving meditation instructions, I invite people to just notice the sensations of breathing. I’m very intentional with this expression, “sensations of breathing,” which is different than just “the breath.” Noticing the sensations—the chest expands, there’s a little bit of a stretch, and then there’s a release. Or feeling how the belly moves, or how the air at the nose is cool and then warm. Not every single breath is the same. You can look at the transitions between the inhales and the exhales. There’s a lot of stuff that’s changing. Just to tune into that.
The same thing with sounds. You could do a mindfulness of sounds. Sounds are always changing, getting louder and then softer. We all know intellectually that things change. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But there’s something different about experiencing it in so many different settings and situations, and just seeing, “Oh yeah, wow, this is changing, and this is changing.” Our thoughts are always changing. This is a practice. It’d be easy to be dismissive, like, “I don’t need to do that. I know things change.” But there’s a way of tuning in. Then the mind starts to not hold on so tightly. It starts to maybe loosen its grasp of whatever is being known. This allows us to have a little bit more steadiness, a little bit more uprightness, and a little bit more balance because we start to see that it just doesn’t make sense to hold on.
You can also contemplate or tune into the vastness of the universe or history. I started this talk by talking about how the story of the farmer is from the Taoist tradition, the Zen tradition, the secular tradition, and the mindfulness tradition. For me, I really like this. How many people have heard this story? This goes back over a thousand years, probably thousands. I just love to think about that. We’re hearing this story, and it’s being interpreted. I’m interpreting it here, you’ll have your own interpretations, but it’s just one interpretation, one experience of that story. I like to think about how many people have heard this and maybe they’ve been touched in their own way. Maybe something terrible, like the horse running away, has happened to them, and maybe remembering this story has helped them. One way that we can cultivate or support equanimity is to intentionally take a bigger picture.
We can also just consider that some uncomfortable experiences might increase our capacity to be with discomfort. Maybe it’s not what we wanted, but maybe we’re increasing our capacity to be with discomfort, and maybe we’re learning something important. We’ve all had this experience where something happened that we didn’t want to happen, but we learned something. Whether it’s as simple as having a flat tire and realizing that if you call for help, they do show up, or whether it’s something much more serious, we realize, “This is terrible. What am I going to do?” But then we find our way and learn new things or increase our capacity, gaining a little bit of confidence. Maybe there’s a silver lining. Just because we don’t know about one or can’t see it when that uncomfortable thing is happening doesn’t mean that there won’t be one.
And of course, equanimity is also not losing balance when there are fabulous, wonderful things happening too. When wonderful things are happening, can we just allow ourselves to be fueled or nourished by these beautiful things? Allow ourselves to feel happy and joyful. This is an important part of life and practice. Allow ourselves to be filled with appreciation. And if we notice the changing nature of things, we’ll also notice a little bit of, “Oh, I don’t want this to end. How can I do this again?” There’ll be this little bit of wanting more. This is what humans do. It’s our evolutionary heritage. So can we have some equanimity and just say, “Oh yeah, of course, there’s that wanting to hold on,” and see if things can continue being joyful or wonderful in some way.
Here’s another practice. I don’t know where I learned this, but I do remember that when I started really doing this practice in my life, what a difference it made. This is to set the intention before you’re going to do anything. For example, making dinner. Set the intention: can you apply attention and effort equally to all the different stages—the preparation, the eating, and the cleaning up? I didn’t realize how much I was like, “Oh, I got to get this done quick so I can do the next thing.” The cleaning up, I wasn’t quite so present for. I always felt like that’s just the detritus of something else. But once I started to pay attention to the preparation, the doing, and the cleaning up, it completely transformed so many things in my life. There’s a lot of “cleaning up” we do in our lives. I hadn’t noticed I was being dismissive of that, thinking it’s not important. Your whole life is important. Equanimity is this balance and seeing the big picture—it’s all important.
I’ll end with this very short verse that comes out of the Theragatha2. This is a collection of verses from male practitioners who had awakening experiences. There’s also a collection for women. Here is Subhuti’s3 verse after his awakening:
My little hut is roofed and pleasant, sheltered from the wind. So rain, sky, as you please. My mind is serene and freed. I practice wholeheartedly. So rain, sky, as you please.
I love this. He’s saying it doesn’t matter what the weather is. It’s okay if it rains because his hut is roofed and pleasant. We could take that literally, but often a building is pointing to one’s life. He feels okay, so it’s okay what’s happening. I feel inspired by this. There’s something so simple and tender about it.
Questioner: When you were talking about the gold—looking at it, blowing it—I thought of this person I’ve been working with for years and how I’ve changed over those years. I’m not saying I’m equanimous now, but I’ve certainly changed. Probably a factor for me was wanting her to be different and wanting the situation to be different, and being very upset with how things were every time. It wasn’t good for me, in my body, and anticipating interacting with her. It’s been gradual, and it’s not totally equanimous, but it’s certainly shifted. Part of that was the experience of going, “This is really awful. I really want this to be different,” and banging my head against the wall. And then gradually thinking, “She’s going to be how she’s going to be.” My more pure intent is supportive for me. So kind of focusing on that and what good I can do in this situation has helped a lot. Plus, I have a support person that also has to deal with this difficult person, so we have the support of sangha.
Diana Clark: Trying to control others never works. Wanting things to be different… oh, look at that. Never works, right? But loving and caring works, right? You didn’t just say, “See ya,” and leave, right? You’re still there, but with a different stance, a different relationship to what’s happening. And I would say that’s exactly what equanimity is about—a shift in our relationship to what’s happening because we don’t get to choose what’s happening. Thank you.
Equanimity: In Buddhism, upekkha (Pali) is a state of mental balance and even-mindedness, free from attachment and aversion. It is not indifference, but a calm and steady presence that allows one to observe experiences without being carried away by them. ↩
Theragatha: A collection of short poems in the Pali Canon, attributed to early male elder monks (bhikkhus) who were disciples of the Buddha. The name translates to “Verses of the Elder Monks.” ↩
Subhuti: An eminent disciple of the Buddha, known for his deep understanding of emptiness (sunyata) and for being foremost among those who were “worthy of gifts” (dakkhineyyānam). ↩