Energy In Pursuit Of The Good

This talk was given at the London Buddhist Centre, January 1998

“The striving and onward effort, the exertion and endeavour, the zeal and the ardour, the vigour and fortitude, the state of unfaltering effort, the state of sustained desire, the state of not putting down the yoke and burden, energy, right endeavour, this is viriya.” (Abhidhamma, Dhammasangani, Section 13. Quoted in Sangharakshita, Complete Works, Vol.1, p.439) This is how virya (Pali-viriya) is described in the Pali Canon.

There is a crisper description or definition in the Bodhicaryavatara – virya is, depending on the translator - “The endeavour to do what is skilful”, “Energy in pursuit of the good”, “Finding joy in what is wholesome”, or “Perseverance in the good”, and in the Jewel Ornament of Liberation”, it says that “The essence of strenuousness is to strive for the good and wholesome”. (trans. Guenther, p.182) From these definitions and descriptions we can see that there are two aspects to virya; the aspect of energy or effort and what that energy or effort is directed towards. And for virya to manifest we need both. It is not enough to have energy or enthusiasm; that energy needs to be directed towards what is good or wholesome, our efforts need to be directed towards the skilful.

Perfect Effort is the sixth stage of the Noble Eightfold Path. Perfect Effort consists largely in the practise of the Four Right Efforts. The Four Right Efforts relate to unskilful and skilful mental states. They are the effort to get rid of unskilful mental states, the effort to develop skilful mental sates, the effort to prevent unskilful mental states from arising and the effort to maintain skilful states that are already present. I could speak about virya solely in terms of these four Right Efforts but I have decided to look at virya from another point of view.

Virya appears as one of the five Spiritual Faculties and also as one of the six Paramitas. As one of the five spiritual faculties, virya is balanced by concentration. This is to indicate that virya is not merely a matter of external physical activity, not just a matter of neurotic busyness, but a case of energy based in tranquillity, based upon a healthy integrated personality. As the Buddhist scholar, Dr Conze, puts it “Vigour by itself leads to excitement, and has to be controlled by a development of concentrated calm.” (The Way of Wisdom, Wheel Publication 65/66, p.9) If we are of this sort of excitable restless nature we may need to learn how to sit still and do nothing before we can develop a more true energy in pursuit of the good. Excitability can lose sight of the Good and become a case of activity for its own sake, as ridiculous as a dog chasing it's own tail. So the five Spiritual Faculties highlight the need for balance; balancing Faith with Wisdom and virya with Concentration and underpinning all the virtues with Mindfulness. The Five spiritual Faculties are also sometimes associated with the Mandala of the Five Buddhas. In this connection, virya is associated with Amoghasiddhi, the green Buddha, the Buddha of Action. I will say more about this later. Then we come to virya as one of the Six Perfections.

Perfect Effort in the Noble Eightfold Path is concerned with the transformation of the will, of volition. The Five Spiritual Faculties emphasise the need for virya to be balanced by Concentration, the need for our energy to be based in meditative consciousness, and not just a manifestation of neurotic restlessness. virya as one of the Six Paramitas gives more emphasis to the goal or direction in which the energy is moving. It is “Energy in pursuit of the good” or “the endeavour to do what is skilful”.

This is the energy of the Bodhisattva which flows spontaneously into altruistic, creative, life-enhancing activity. In the Bodhicaryavatara by Shantideva, virya is looked at from the point of view of its opposites and then Shantideva goes into how to develop and maintain virya. So this is what I want to do in this talk. I'm not going to follow Shantideva exactly, but I will draw on some of his categories as a framework for talking about virya. First of all then, what are the opposites of virya, what are the hindrances? Shantideva lists four- namely laziness, clinging to what is vile, despondency and self-contempt. So let's look a bit more closely at these opposites of virya. In the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, sGam Popa, reckons there are three kinds of laziness. They are lassitude. Idleness and gross laziness.

Lassitude is described as “addiction to the pleasures of mental inertia such as sleepiness, restfulness and dreaminess”. (p.182) I don't know if any of you are familiar with this state of sleepiness and dreaminess. Sometimes it can be good, even useful, to allow yourself to relax into a state of dreaminess because your imagination can come into play then and you may experience intuitions or a sense of the connections between disparate things which you couldn't think your way to. However what is being talked about here is “addiction to the pleasures” of sleepiness and dreaminess, which is a state of torpor, of total lack of initiative or urge to act or evolve. It's an animal-like state, this state of mental inertia. Its a waste of the human potential to act , to create, to consciously evolve.

The second kind of laziness is called idleness. The text says, “Idleness is faint-heartedness from thinking how can dejected people like myself ever attain enlightenment even if we try to do so.”. (p.183) So this is a sort of false humility or lack of self-esteem that leads to doing nothing. It's the attitude that says “there is no point in making an effort because I'm such a worthless worm, that I'll never achieve anything or get anywhere”. It's a very debilitating state and it has the ring of self-pity about it, arrogant self-pity. “I'm so special that I'm an exception to the general rule about the ability of humans to unfold their potential”. So this is faint-heartedness.

The third kind of laziness is very interesting; it is called “gross laziness”. The text says, “Gross laziness is addiction to such evil and unwholesome practices as subduing enemies and hoarding money.”. (p.183) This is interesting because it suggests that you can be active, even very active, and still be lazy from a spiritual point of view. “Subduing enemies and hoarding money” could be paraphrased as politics and business. If all your energy is going into the pursuit of power or the accumulation of wealth and possessions, if these things have become ends in themselves for you, then according to the text, you are suffering from gross laziness. This is because you are not facing up to reality. You are hiding from the reality of impermanence. Your life is a form of escapism. This definition of gross laziness as “addiction to such evil and unwholesome practices as subduing enemies and hoarding money” reminds us that virya is not just energy, but energy in pursuit of the good.

That then is laziness, the first of the obstacles or opposites to virya. Then we come to the second which is called “clinging to what is vile.”. This is basically craving and illl-will and it is the opposite to virya because it is such a waste of energy. We experience craving and ill-will because we have a basic wrong view about the the nature of Reality. We experience self and other as essentially separate and this sets up a conflict of interests, which doesn't actually exist. In Reality there is no conflict of interests between self and other, but our limited perspective creates this conflict and this leads to craving and ill-will and the consequent dissipation of energy. Even worse, we are divided against ourselves because we can partially see through the veils of our ignorance and this internal conflict between spiritual aspiration on the one hand and a craving for security on the other, leads to a further loss of energy. This is “clinging to what is vile”. It's very similar to gross laziness, except perhaps it's even more basic. It is the energy that is tied up in keeping the whole edifice of ego intact and defended.

The third opposite of virya is despondency. We mentioned this earlier in relation to idleness and faint-heartedness. Despondency is the tendency to give up because the task seems too much, too daunting. Despondency involves a loss of perspective and following from that a lack of patience. We become despondent when we forget that transformation is a process that happens over time, sometimes almost imperceptibly. We look around us and everything seems today to be just as it was yesterday. These other people around us, who call themselves Buddhists, are just as imperfect as they were a month ago and we ourselves are still making the same mistakes we made before and it's all so frustrating and nothing seems to be changing and why don't they change and why can't we change and we get despondent and fed up and feel that it's no use trying because you try and try and nothing seems to change. And so we've lost perspective and got into a state of frustrated impatience, which prevents us from making the necessary effort to grow and prevents us from seeing the growth that is happening all around us. We become like someone who can only see the signs of winter even though the signs of spring are everywhere. We observe the world through the grey glass of our despondency and lose our will to strive. This is very energy draining. We are on the verge of giving up the pursuit of the good because we have become blind to the good.

The fourth obstacle to virya is self-contempt. This is slightly different from despondency although closely connected to it. Despondency is faintheartedness in the face of the huge task of self-transformation and pursuit of the good. Self-contempt is more narcissistic than that. It centres on our unique inability to change or grow. Our eyes are turned upon ourselves in a fascinated, all-absorbing, criticism. We seem to be worthless, incapable, unworthy of consideration by others and yet by some strange quirk, we are also the centre of the universe, unfairly treated, victimised, bullied and generally to be pitied. Self-hatred is a complex and common thing. It sometimes leads us to undermining ourselves and feeling unable to act and it sometimes gets projected out and is experienced as an uncaring, cruel and callous world around us that is totally unfair. However it is experienced, it is an obstacle to virya because it doesn't look up, to see the good and because it keeps ones energy in a whirlpool of absorbing self-centredness.

These are the four opposites of virya according to Shantideva: laziness, clinging to what is vile, despondency and self-contempt. Shantideva's response to these is characteristic and may seem very unsympathetic. But, perhaps if Shantideva seems unsympathetic in his response, it is because we haven't understood the great difference between pity and compassion. Shantideva says many things to wake us up to what is really going on . For instance, he shouts: “Hey you, expecting results without effort! So sensitive! So long-suffering! You, in the clutches of death, acting like an immortal! Hey, sufferer, you are destroying yourself! Now that you have met with the boat of human life, cross over the mighty river of suffering. Fool, there is no time to sleep! It is hard to catch this boat again. One should endeavour to increase ones exertion through the powers of desire, pride, delight, renunciation, dedication and self-mastery.” (Bodhicaryavatara , trans. Crosby/Skilton, p. 68-70) I'm going to to use this list of six “powers”, as Shantideva calls them, as a framework for the rest of this talk.

The first thing we need then in order to develop virya, according to Shantideva, is desire. The Sanskrit word that is translated as desire is “chanda” and the desire that Shantideva is talking about is Dharma-chanda. Dharmachanda is desire for the good, desire for for the skilful. We are being reminded again that virya is not just energy, it is energy in pursuit of the good. In order to pursue the good we need to know the good and also feel an emotional engagement with the good. The good is what is spiritually beneficial, it is what conduces to the evolving of higher states of consciousness. Whatever is beneficial to us in this way is also beneficial to others. Whatever is in our interests spiritually speaking, must also be in the interests of others. The power of desire is the power of our aspiration for self-transformation, it's the power of our faith in the Dharma and its methods, it's the power of our passion for the good, for the benefit of humanity. This desire, this passion, this faith moves us to act to make changes in our lives and to help others.

The second power that Shantideva mentions is the power of pride. This might seem quite strange at first. We are used to thinking of pride as something negative, like arrogance or conceit. But what Shantideva is talking about is the opposite to self-contempt. It is pride in our ability to change, to transform ourselves. It is pride in the fact that we are aware enough to want to attain higher states of consciousness. We can be proud of the fact that we want to evolve and that we have the ability to evolve. This is something that we perhaps don't appreciate enough. Our tendency may be to concentrate on our difficulties and what hinders us from growing, but we can, and indeed should, also give attention to what is in our favour. We should value our aspiration, value our understanding, value our pursuit of wisdom and compassion, value our efforts to change, value the progress we are making. By valuing ourselves in this way, by appreciating ourselves, we cultivate a positive pride and dignity. We refuse to be incapacitated by undermining thoughts and feelings. We take initiative, we act, we make an effort, because we know we can and we know that our dignity as human beings demands that we make an effort to consciously evolve. A positive pride can help to activate our energy in pursuit of the good. This is the Buddha-pride that Shantideva alludes to: “Today my birth is fruitful. My human life is justified. Today I am born into the family of the Buddha. Now I am the Buddha's son. So that there be no blemish upon this spotless family, I must now act as becomes my family. As a blind man might find a jewel in heaps of rubbish, so too this Awakening Mind has somehow appeared in me” (Bodhicaryavatara , trans. Crosby/Skilton, p.22)

The third power that helps us to make greater effort is what Shantideva calls “delight”. Delight here is the very opposite of despondency. Delight is an intense pleasure and satisfaction derived from performing skilful actions. Shantideva asserts that there is great joy and delight to be had from performing a task if we put ourselves wholeheartedly into it and if it is benign activity, helpful to others and related to out spiritual aspirations. He says: “One should be addicted solely to the task that one is undertaking, one should be intoxicated by that task, insatiable, like someone hankering for the pleasure and the fruit of love-play. ..how can one, for whom the task itself is satisfaction, be satisfied without a task? How can one get enough of the benign, ambrosial acts of merit, sweet in their results?” (ibid p.72/73)

Shantideva uses the language of addiction, intoxication, insatiability, hankering: language that is usually associated with sense pleasure such as sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling and he says this is how we can feel or even should feel about the “benign ambrosial acts of merit”. This is how a Bodhisattva feels, thoroughly delighted by skilful activity. The Bodhisattva is said to play, like a child playing games. Bodhisattvas play at performing heroic and compassionate deeds. A Bodhisattva goes from task to task joyfully, plunging from one task to another, like an elephant plunging into a cool pond of water on a hot day.

We can generate energy by cultivating a delight in skilful activity. If we delight in acts of generosity and in efforts to go beyond our limitations, then we will continue to be generous and to take the risks necessary to go beyond ourselves. To delight in our work, we need to make the connection between what we are doing and our spiritual aspirations. Our activity needs to be saturated with a vision of the spiritual Ideal. If we can see the spiritual ideal in our activity, then we can see the beautiful and the good in our activity and seeing the beautiful and the good brings satisfaction and delight. This is quite a difficult area for many people. It is all too easy to become very concerned with difficulties at work or difficulties in communication and to lose sight of the spiritual benefits and the spiritual necessity of working with and transcending those difficulties. We need something to remind us of the bigger picture, the larger perspective. We need to find ways to bring us back to an awareness of our ideals and how our ideals can permeate our whole life. If we manage to maintain an awareness of our spiritual ideals and values then we will have the energy to deal with difficulties and the energy to be creative and take initiative in our lives. We will progress spiritually and experience the joys of the spiritual life. Joy leading to greater joy.

The fourth power which enables us to increase our exertions is renunciation, according to Shantideva. Renunciation has a very specific meaning here. It means stopping an activity which cannot be effective. It is appropriate to make an effort and invest energy if we can be effective, but when our activity ceases to be effective then it is time to stop. Effective in the spiritual sense of course means conducive to the development and maintenance of higher states of consciousness and conducive to the welfare of ourselves and others. This points to the need for balanced effort and also points to the fact that our activities should include something of our spiritual goal in them. As Gandhi said, the means must include the end.

There is no point in carrying on an activity which is no longer effective. For instance, there would be no point in me carrying on talking if everyone else got up and left or if you all started talking amongst yourselves. It would be a wasted effort on my part. We need to know when to relax our efforts or switch to a different task. To know that, we need to know what it means to be effective and to know what it means to be effective requires us to keep our goal in sight. Renunciation also has the sense of gradually letting go of activities that are opposed to the spiritual life. Our energy can be too crude or coarse and by gradually letting go of our more crude pursuits and gradually engaging in more refined activities we can refine our energy, so that there will be less of a gap between our ordinary life and meditative states. We usually see this as involving some sort of engagement with the arts both as practitioner and consumer.

We can see renunciation in terms of gradually refining our energy and we can see renunciation in terms of balanced effort. There is also renunciation as letting go; letting go of attachment to material possessions, letting go of fixed views and opinions, letting go of attachment to certainty and security, letting go of attachment to comfort and pleasure, letting go, eventually, of a fixed sense of who we are and being content to be an impermanent process that is permanently in process of change. Being attached to a sense of the fixedness of things and the fixedness of ourself, leads only to suffering and pain. As Shantideva puts it: “All those who suffer on the world do so because f their desire for their own happiness. All those happy in the world are so because of their desire for the happiness of others.” (ibid, p.99) George Eliot brings out the same theme in her novel “Romola”. Here the heroine Romola is speaking: “There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of doing anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds -such as make men infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.” By learning to make a balanced effort, to refine our energies and to gradually renounce attachments and any fixed sense of ourself, we can become more spontaneously energetic in pursuit of the good.

The next way to cultivate virya, according to Shantideva, is by “dedication”. Dedication in this context is about the practice of mindfulness and in particular mindfulness of the mind. This of course brings us back to the four right efforts which we mentioned earlier. These are the effort to get rid of unskilful thoughts that have already arisen, the effort to prevent the arising of unskilful thoughts which have not yet arisen, the effort to develop skilful thoughts and the effort to maintain skilful thoughts already present: eradication, prevention, developing and maintaining. This practice involves what is known as guarding the gates of the senses. We receive input though our senses and respond to that input with feelings, thoughts and emotions. We need to maintain awareness of what we are allowing in, what input we expose ourselves to and we need also to keep a close watch on how we respond to what we receive through our senses. This amounts to a willingness to take responsibility for our emotional and mental states. It is a willingness to change, to move away from being the victim of circumstance and the victim of moods to taking initiative and making efforts to be more in charge of our lives and ourselves. This requires perseverance, stamina and a belief in the value of skilfulness. We need to be dedicated to a constant, ongoing cumulative practice of mindfulness and dedicated to attaining the fruits of spiritual practice.

Here are some exhortations from Shantideva to inspire us to a more thorough and immediate practice of mindfulness. “As poison, finding the blood, spreads throughout the body, so, finding a weak point, a fault will spread throughout the mind.” “So, on the approach of drowsiness or lethargy one should immediately counteract it, as one would jump up immediately were a snake to slide into one's lap.” “At every single lapse one should burn befittingly with remorse, then reflect, “How might I act so that this might not happen to me again?” “One should look forward to society or a given task with this motive: “How may I practice the discipline of mindfulness in these circumstances?” Remembering the teaching on vigilance, one should make oneself versatile, as one always prepares oneself prior to undertaking a task. In the very same way that cotton is swayed to the direction of the wind as it comes and goes, one should be directed by one's endeavour, and in this way one's spiritual power grows strong.” (ibid, p.73/74) Dedication to mindfulness keeps our mind on the task and concentrates our energy for a more potent practice of generosity, ethics, meditation and wisdom.

The sixth and final way to cultivate virya mentioned by Shantideva is self-mastery. Shantideva doesn't say much about this. Self-mastery is concerned with discipline. It is a matter of integrating our energies around our spiritual aspiration so that we are sufficiently motivated to act consistently and persistently in ways that will further our spiritual progress and be of benefit to ourselves and others. Without the motivation it is not possible to be a disciplined practitioner of the Dharma. It just becomes a cold struggle. If we are motivated and our emotional energies are flowing towards our ideals then there is satisfaction and fulfilment in the discipline of practice. We have the satisfaction of knowing that our ethical actions and our efforts in meditation are of great benefit and we gradually begin to experience the satisfaction of the results of our practice. Self-mastery involves a gradual gathering of our energies and focussing ourselves on the self-transcending goal of our practice. The more we focus on our practice, the more our ability to focus grows. The more disciplined we are in our practice of meditation, ethics and study, the more capable we become of maintaining a satisfying discipline.

We've looked at the six powers which Shantideva says we need to practise in order to cultivate and maintain virya; the active aspect of the spiritual life. Virya as one of the five spiritual faculties is sometimes associated with the Buddha Amoghasiddhi. As you know, Amoghasiddhi is one of the five Jinas, one of the Buddhas in the Mandala of the five Buddhas. He is the Buddha of the Northern Realm. He is green in colour. He is seated on a lotus throne which is supported by mythical creatures, half human half bird and his right hand is held aloft, palm facing outwards, in a gesture that indicates fearlessness. His left hand rests in his lap holding a double vajra; a symbolic double thunderbolt. Amoghasiddhi is known as the Buddha of Action and his Wisdom is the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. It is very appropriate that Amoghasiddhi should be associated with virya because to exercise our energy in pursuit of the good we need to overcome our fear. We need to be willing to take risks. There are dangers involved in living the spiritual life. We can experience hurt and upset and humiliation as we strive to overcome our limitations. And we need to be willing to go through the transforming fires of discomfort, hurt, upset and humiliation if we really want to grow. To grow is to take risks, to step into the unknown.

We sometimes speak of this as entering the crucial situation or even entering the cremation ground. The cremation ground represents the place where we encounter our fears. To enter the cremation ground means to deliberately face our fears and thus transform them. When our fear is transformed what appears is the Dakini, a naked female figure who dances with abandonment through the sky. The Dakini , the sky dancer, is the energy liberated from fear, it's the freedom and joy that awaits us at the other side of our fear. (Just as an aside here, I think dancing and indeed the physical disciplines such as yoga, TaiChi, and martial arts are very useful in the freeing of energy and emotion which may be locked in our stiff bodies).

We are afraid of so many things. We are afraid of what other people will think about us, or what they might think about us or what they might say about us and what they might say to us. We are afraid of failing. We are afraid of succeeding. We are afraid of anger, our own anger and other peoples anger. We are afraid of being bad and we are afraid to be too good. We are afraid of being swamped by the group and we are afraid of standing out from the crowd. We are afraid of being led and afraid of taking the lead. We are afraid of being isolated and lonely and afraid of initiating communication. We are sometimes afraid of the unknown, of what might happen to us, of what might be demanded of us.

And in spite of all that fear, fear of change, we do embark on the spiritual path and we do change. We do take risks. Meditation is a risky business, because we discover new things about ourselves, some of them not entirely to our advantage. Honest communication can be risky for the same reason. Dharma study can be risky because our whole world view can be threatened or even destroyed, by contact with new ideas and bigger perspectives. Getting involved with a Buddhist spiritual community can be risky because we quickly lose our romantic views about the holy purity of Buddhists. Trying to live by high ideals is risky because we are quite likely to fail frequently. Being alive is risky because we are unlikely to escape death. But we take risks and if we want to have any sort of satisfactory or fulfilling life we have to take risks.

We fulfil our potential by expanding emotionally and mentally and by being expansive in our communication. We have to go beyond the safe and comfortable limits that habit has accustomed us to and take the risk of being more emotionally visible and available, the risk of having our views and opinions challenged to the core and the risk of being rejected by other people. By taking risks, by going beyond our comfortable boundaries, we enter upon the adventure of the spiritual path, the adventure of expanding awareness and deeper communication. And this is the only way to live really, as far as I'm concerned. Life is a risk worth taking. The alternative is to tread water until we “kick the bucket”!

Amoghasiddhi holds up his right hand, palm outwards, in a gesture that symbolises confidence. The hand is open and outgoing. We can contemplate the significance of Amoghasiddhi's gesture and allow ourselves to be influenced to become more open, outgoing and confident. Each one of us has a unique and valuable contribution to make in the world and with a little more confidence, and pride in ourselves, we can give full rein to our abilities and potential. We need to work on ourselves, in meditation and communication, to gain greater self-knowledge and free up the energy being wasted in internal conflict and fear. When we can acknowledge our aspirations and our unskilfulness, our love and our hatred, our generosity and our selfishness, when we have a big enough perspective on ourselves to embrace our contradictions, then we are moving towards the tremendous power symbolised by the double vajra. The double vajra is a symbol of the union of all opposites and a symbol of the energy inherent in that electric embrace; the energy which can transform all obstacles, surmount all difficulties. This is the energy of Amoghasiddhi which leads to the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. The All-Accomplishing wisdom is the spontaneous, natural flood of helpfulness that pours forth from an Enlightened being. It is constantly creative, fearless and unstoppable.

When we have faith and confidence in the Spiritual Ideal, the Buddha, and in the Spiritual Path, the Dharma, and when we wholeheartedly take the risk, the step into the unknown, of living out the spiritual life with our friends in the Sangha, then we will gradually loosen up and unleash the energy and abandonment that will make our lives fulfilling to ourselves and an inspiration and boon to others.