The Buddha made a startling claim about the human mind. “Radiant is this heart/mind,” he taught. “And yet, it is afflicted, contaminated by adventitious (extrinsic, temporary) corruptions.” Understanding this teaching fundamentally changes how we feel when we struggle or feel tested on the meditation cushion. When anxiety arises, when rage burns, when we find ourselves caught in craving what we don’t have, we still feel the challenge of these painful states, but no longer deflate in disappointed self-judgement. We see these as nature passing through a mind and heart which are inherently luminous and free.
The Buddha went further, saying that one who does not understand this distinction cannot truly develop in spiritual practice, while the practice of one who does understand will naturally come to full fruition. When we believe our afflictions define or originate within us, we relate to them with shame or desperate attempts at control. When we understand they are visitors, we can meet them with the curiosity and steady presence that yields genuine transformation.
The teachings identify three core strategies the confused heart employs when confronted with life’s unrelenting challenges: craving or greed (trying to get what we don’t have, or keep what we fear losing), aversion or hatred (trying to push away or run from what we dislike), and delusion (checking out, numbing, disconnecting). These are the ‘three unwholesome roots’, the ‘kilesas’—the afflictions that distort the radiant mind. Buddhist wisdom holds the view that there is no suffering in the world, great or small, that does not originate from these.
While teaching this past spring with Sharon Salzberg, I heard her share an evolving understanding of these unwholesome roots which has stayed with me, and still strikes me as remarkably insightful. These sources of pain, she proposed, are in fact expressions of misplaced faith. Confronted with the truth that nothing impermanent can provide lasting satisfaction, the unwise mind responds reflexively by putting its faith in strategies which will always ultimately fail. It says, “Maybe if I obsess over what I want and how to keep it, then I’ll be okay”, “Maybe if I can permanently get rid of this difficulty, then I’ll be okay”, or “Maybe if I don’t have to be aware of life’s ups and downs, then I’ll be okay.” The heart—trying its best to secure our protection from suffering—mistakenly places its faith in the very approaches to life which perpetuate it.
Yet, even once we see them, no force of will can prevent these habits from playing out. So what do we do? We pay attention. We offer our fullhearted, loving attention to these same misguided strategies. We sense how craving feels in the body, witness how aversion tightens the mind, recognize the way delusion creates fog. Through the understanding this attention gives rise to, the mind naturally learns to create less misery, less struggle, and less suffering for ourselves and for others. We must feel and know the experiences with courageous, tender fidelity, for the sake of understanding.
These afflictions don’t originate within us. You didn’t invent greed, fear, or apathy—no matter how personal they feel. These patterns are inherited from the collective conditioning of the world. They move through us because we are sensitive beings shaped by our culture, our families, our historical moment. And the more that our meditation practice breaks down the illusory boundaries which seem to separate an inner and outer world, the more we experience our contemplative practice as one unified endeavor to alleviate all suffering, interior or exterior, in the here-and-now in which it is encountered.
In the Buddha’s view, the subtle or significant greed, aversion, and delusion we meet in our hearts every day are the same energies which spark and then fuel wars, mass disengagement, systemic exploitation, and cruelty. This holds an extraordinary implication: your personal practice matters beyond you. When you bring patient attention to the moment of grasping in your own mind, when you meet your own aversion with compassion instead of more resistance, you’re not just alleviating your private suffering. You’re uprooting the causes of the world’s suffering as they move through you before they are passed on or amplified. You’re cultivating sorely needed wisdom in relationship to forces the whole globe is facing. When there is the courage to take accountability for the pain we see most intimately, meeting it with steady, kind, unflinching awareness, the courage expands. We become one more being in the world with understanding of these universal energies, one more person who can respond rather than react, and who can counsel another individual, group, or institution through the same afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion. A beautiful capacity grows to move toward any suffering with the confidence “this is deeply familiar territory, no greed began with me, yet all greed is mine to contribute toward transforming, and so too all aversion, so too all delusion.”
Because these afflictions are constantly reinforced by a vast web of causes in the world, they won’t be uprooted overnight. A sustainable response is making a whole-life commitment to develop an increasingly intimate relationship with these adventitious visitors, within and without, to build the deepest familiarity possible with the radiant heart underneath them all, and to nourish friendships and networks with those beings who are inspired to do the same. With this view and this commitment, we make the personal undertaking of transforming suffering, a collective one. We make the collective undertaking of transforming suffering, a personal one.