The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology

by Jack Kornfield

Our world runs on desire. We would not have been born without sexual desire. Without continuing desire we would die. There is desire for love, connection, understanding, growth. When people lose their desire to live, they jump off a bridge or swallow pills. We need desire. And yet desire is also a great challenge for us. Mistakenly, many people think that Buddhism condemns all desire. But there is no getting rid of desire. Instead, Buddhist psychology differentiates between healthy and unhealthy desire. Then it leads us to a freedom that is larger than the desire realm, where we can transform desire into true abundance.

The idea is not to be without desire, but to have a wise relationship with desire.

There are both healthy desires and unhealthy desires. Know the difference. Then find freedom in their midst.

Buddhists connect the root of desire with the neutral mental factor called the will to do. It is part of the energy of life. When the will to do is directed in healthy ways, it brings about healthy desires. When the will to do is directed in unhealthy ways, it brings about unhealthy desires. The traditional description of unhealthy desires include greed, addiction, overwhelming ambition, gambling, womanizing, and avarice. Unhealthy desire gives rise to possessiveness, self-centeredness, dissatisfaction, compulsion, unworthiness, insatiability, and similar forms of suffering.

Healthy desires are associated with caring, appreciation, and loving-kindness.

these same healthy desires give rise to dedication, steadiness, stewardship, graciousness, generosity, and flexibility. They are the source of happiness.

Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision. —Hsi Tang

At its extreme, grasping and desire become addiction. Buddhist psychology describes the state of addiction as becoming a hungry ghost. No matter how much the ghost tries to eat, satisfaction is impossible. This is the state of consciousness where desire becomes insatiable, thirst becomes unquenchable. For the hungry ghost, like an addict, a few moments of relief come with the drink or the high or the binge, followed by a pause and craving for more.

Virginia Woolf describes it this way: “If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses…. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion…. Humanity goes.”

To recover our innate freedom and balance, we have to study desire and be willing to work with it. How? It depends on our conditioning—on whether we are prone to indulgence or to suppression of desire. For those of us who easily indulge their desire, seeking to fulfill one desire after another, the wisest approach will require a powerful discipline of letting go.

When desire is met mindfully, the energy of desire will often intensify for a time and try to overcome us. If we don’t rush to fulfill the desire, but simply stay present, the discomfort will eventually pass. Then we can notice what follows: usually a sense of ease, a peacefulness in body and mind, until desire arises once more a short time later. We can see this when we feel restless or uncomfortable toward the end of a sitting meditation. We feel the desire to move, accompanied by bodily tension and frustration. Fervently we hope the bell will ring. Then, as soon as it does, without our making a single movement, a dramatic change comes over us. The body relaxes and the tension disappears. The state of struggle is replaced by ease. Why is this so, since we have not done anything different? It’s simple: with the ringing of the bell, the desire has ended, and without desire, the mind and heart are at peace.

To live in this world wisely, we have to go beyond the extremes of being numb to desire and being lost in desire. We need to release unhealthy desire and learn to hold healthy desire lightly.

Imagine if the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed greed and driving ambition as human disorders. But we do not even recognize there is a problem here.

The absence of greed and wanting does not bring about a withdrawal from the world. Instead, we awaken to the abundance of the world.

As desire abates, generosity is born. When we are present and connected, what else is there to do but give? An African proverb puts it this way: “It is the heart that gives, the fingers just let go.”

money is a neutral energy that can used in either unskillful or skillful ways. Gained skillfully and used generously, material abundance is honored by the Buddha. When money is wisely used, says the Buddha, it benefits our welfare and that of our family, and its generosity extends to our community, our spiritual life, and the common good.

I felt like the Buddha under the bodhi tree, when he faced his own inner demons in the form of Mara. As the story is told, on the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he took a seat under the bodhi tree in northern India. He resolved to sit there, unshakably, and not to rise from his seat until he had achieved complete freedom. After a short time, Mara, the Indian god of delusion and evil, appeared, intent on stopping the Buddha from this goal. To do so, Mara sent his daughters, the most beautiful temptresses imaginable. But the Buddha was unmoved and simply said, “I see you, Mara.” When desire failed to work, Mara got angry and sent in his vast armies. There were fierce demons with frightening faces and war cries, hurling cudgels, flaming arrows, and deadly spears. Again, the Buddha sat unmoved, saying simply, “I see you, Mara.” Then the Buddha raised his hand to touch the armies of Mara with compassion and all the spears and arrows fell as flower petals at his feet. Finally Mara attacked the Buddha with doubt: “Who do you think you are? What right do you have to sit here to become enlightened?” At this, the Buddha placed a hand on the ground and said, “The earth is my witness.” And with this gesture, the earth goddess arose and bore witness to the lifetimes of patience, dedication, truthfulness, compassion, generosity, and wisdom that had prepared the Buddha for this night. Out of her hair came a flood of water and the armies of Mara were washed away.

If we cling to anger or hatred, we will suffer. It is possible to respond strongly, wisely, and compassionately, without hatred.

Aversion and anger almost always arise as a direct reaction to a threatening or painful situation. If they are not understood they grow into hatred. As we have seen, pain and loss are undeniable parts of human life. Buddhist texts speak of a mountain of pain. They tell us our tears of grief could fill all four great oceans. When our experience is one of pain, hurt, loss, or frustration, our usual habit is to draw back in aversion or strike out in anger, to blame or run away.

Like pain, fear is the other common predecessor to anger and hate—fear of loss, of hurt, of embarrassment, of shame, of weakness, of not knowing.

As James Baldwin put it, “Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.” That’s why we start by paying attention to small things, small pains and disappointments.

But to work honorably with anger, we must acknowledge the depth of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth—the truth of suffering. There is pain in our lives, in the world—disappointments, injustice, betrayal, racism, loneliness, loss. As blues masters Buddy Guy and Junior Wells say, “The blues is the truth.” No strategy can keep us exempt from loss and sorrow, sickness and death. This is human life.

It’s like two arrows, the Buddha said. The first arrow is the initial event itself, the painful experience. It has happened; we cannot avoid it. The second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves. This arrow is optional. We can add to the initial pain a contracted, angry, rigid, frightened state of mind. Or we can learn to experience the same painful event with less identification and aversion, with a more relaxed and compassionate heart.

When we examine anger and aversion with awareness, there is a radical shift of identity. These states are not who we really are. They are conditioned and impersonal, and they do not belong to us.

The opposite of aggression is not passivity, it is true strength. When we have lost a sense of our innate nobility, we mistakenly believe in our fear and weakness. We try to be strong through hate and aggression. When we release aggression, we discover true strength, a natural fearlessness, the courage to face our griefs and fears, and to respond without hate. Martin Luther King Jr. called this unshakable strength “soul force.” In ancient Greece, anger was described as a noble emotion. It stood up for what was right; it spoke out against injustice. Non-contention carries this courage with a loving heart. Mahatma Gandhi acknowledged, “Non-violence requires more courage than violence.”

Delusion has the characteristic of blindness, of not penetrating reality, of covering the true nature of experience, of fostering unwise attention, of causing deluded action. —Visuddhimagga

Delusion is different from lack of information. It is different from not knowing how a gasoline engine works or the facts of Middle Eastern history. Delusion can lead us to ignore the facts and cling to our views and opinions; it creates a loss of connection with reality.

Delusion misunderstands the world and forgets who we are. Delusion gives rise to all unhealthy states. Free yourself from delusion and see with wisdom.

When we live in delusion, we are quick to judge others. We miss their inner beauty. We also miss their pain, and cannot respond to them with compassion. With inattention, we miss the meal in front of us, the parade of passersby, the ever-changing scenery, the openhearted connection with the world.

Deeper than inattention, we find a second form of delusion: denial. Denial arises when we don’t believe what is actually in front of our eyes. On a personal level, we can deny problems at work, difficulties in our marriage, depression, or addiction, as if denial will make them go away.

Zen master Shunryu Suzuki summed up Buddhist teaching in this simple phrase: “Not always so.”

“To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier—that is the only way to keep joy pure,” says Nietzsche.

With delusion, we lose perspective, we cling, we forget our luminous true nature. Alan Watts called this “the taboo against knowing who you are.”

There is Suffering. There is the Cause of Suffering. There is the End of Suffering. There is the Path to the End of Suffering. These Four Noble Truths teach suffering and the end of suffering. —Buddha

Pain is an unavoidable aspect of the natural world.

Suffering is different from pain. Suffering is our reaction to the inevitable pain of life. Our personal suffering can include anxiety, depression, fear, confusion, grief, anger, hurt, addiction, jealousy, and frustration. But suffering is not only personal. Our collective suffering includes the sorrows of warfare and racism; the isolation and torture of prisoners everywhere; the unnecessary hunger, sickness, and abandonment of human beings on every continent. This individual and collective suffering, the First Noble Truth, is what we are called upon to understand and transform.

The Second Noble Truth describes the cause of suffering: grasping. Grasping, it explains, gives birth to aversion and delusion, and from these three roots arise all the other unhealthy states, such as jealousy, anxiety, hatred, addiction, possessiveness, and shamelessness.

The Third Noble Truth offers us the way out, the end of suffering. Unlike pain, suffering is not inevitable. Freedom from suffering is possible when we let go of our reactions, our fear and grasping. This freedom is called nirvana.

The Fourth Noble Truth is the path to the end of suffering. This path is called the middle way. The middle way invites us to find peace wherever we are, here and now. By neither grasping nor resisting life, we can find wakefulness and freedom in the midst of our joys and sorrows. Following the middle path, we establish integrity, we learn to quiet the mind, we learn to see with wisdom.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is not. Suffering arises from grasping. Release grasping and be free of suffering.

our suffering must be borne consciously. In the words of Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winner who has spent a lifetime exploring the suffering caused by the Nazis, “Suffering confers neither privileges nor rights; it all depends on how one uses it. If you use it to increase the anguish of others, you are degrading, even betraying it. And yet the day will come when we shall understand that suffering can elevate human beings…. God help us to bear our suffering well.”

Pain is physical, suffering is mental. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting. It is a sign of our unwillingness to move, to flow with life. Although all life has pain, a wise life is free of suffering. A wise person is friendly with the inevitable and does not suffer. Pain they know but it does not break them. If they can, they do what is possible to restore balance. If not, they let things take their course. —Nisargadatta

Buddhist psychology directs us to examine how grasping operates. The more we grasp, the more we experience suffering. If we try to possess and control the people around us, we will suffer. If we struggle to control our body and feelings, it is the same. If a nation acts from grasping and greed, the world around it will suffer. Meditation teaches us that we can release our clinging.

“When greed, hatred, and delusion are given up,” says the Buddha, “we no longer cause sorrow for ourselves or others. This is nirvana.” Nirvana is also called the undying and the uncreated because it is not a condition or state but the joyous natural peace and happiness when we are not clinging to anything.

In Buddhist Asia, popular culture mischaracterizes nirvana, imagining it as a heavenly realm where old monks go after many lifetimes’ work of purity and self-denial. Even Westerners can naively think of nirvana as far away, some transcendent state attained by yogis in the Himalayas. This is wrong. “Nirvana,” says the Buddha, “is immediate, visible here and now, inviting, attractive, comprehensible to the wise heart.”

Letting go does not mean losing the knowledge we have gained from the past. The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions, grudges and fears, clingings and disappointments that bind our spirit. Like emptying a cup, letting go leaves us free to receive, refreshed, sensitive, and awake.

karma is the result of our intention. Suppose a man picks up a knife and plunges it into another man’s body, causing his death. What kind of karma has he created? If the wielder of the knife is a skilled surgeon undertaking a risky procedure to relieve suffering, the karma is positive, even if the patient dies. But the same act done out of anger will produce the painful karma of murder.

When our intention is to live with nobility, respect, and compassion, and we act from these intentions, we shape a positive future.

Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.

In the ancient texts, karma is written as a compound word, karma-vipaka. Karma-vipaka means “action and result,” or what we call cause and effect. This is not a philosophical concept. It is a psychological description of how our experience unfolds every day.