Read Part ONE and TWO of Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries here.

Equanimity

Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

The Buddha also offered a teaching on the heart quality known as equanimity, a quality that balances generosity, compassion, and loving-kindness

When I first heard this teaching, I misunderstood it, thinking that equanimity meant loving everyone equally. But what the Buddha was talking about is a feeling of balance, a feeling of not being pushed off center by delusion, especially when we get into the realm of compassion, or caring about suffering. The tendency is to think, “I care about it, so I have to do something about it.” People are suffering, so we gotta stop the suffering.

In his teaching on equanimity, the Buddha says the right understanding is that, although the appropriate response is caring, it has to be balanced with wisdom.

Although we can care for and want to protect each other on a physical and perhaps emotional level, ultimately we can’t do anything to take away the internal attachment and identification with craving and aversion that creates suffering in others. All beings have to do the work for themselves; everyone has to purify his or her own karma. We can’t do it for anyone else, and no one else can do it for us.

This teaching must be understood on two levels. There is one level of physical suffering that we can and should do our best to alleviate. Then there is the more subtle level of internal suffering, due to clinging and aversion, that we have no control over in others. This second level is what equanimity points toward.

Equanimity highlights the fact that only the individual has the ability to transform the relationship to the mind. We cannot force people to be free; everyone has to start the inner revolution him or herself.

Practice in this realm of equanimity involves opening up to the understanding of the balance of compassion with humility. Although we may have the greatest intentions to free all beings from suffering—and there is a lot we can do through practicing generosity and kindness—equanimity shows us that ultimately all beings have to free themselves.

Noah Levine Dharma Talk: Equanimity

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