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

by Jack Kornfield

Setting a long-term intention is like setting the compass of our heart. No matter how rough the storms, how difficult the terrain, even if we have to backtrack around obstacles, our direction is clear. The fruits of dedication are visible in the best of human endeavors.

Without a well-developed mindfulness, we are at the mercy of these promptings. We can easily lose our dedication. Even though benevolent states are innate to the heart, we forget. This is why Buddhist psychology emphasizes practice. We must practice wise speech, non-contentiousness, generosity, and compassion over and over again, in trivial and important situations alike.

Whether in meditation communities, churches, group psychotherapy, or AA, the help we provide for one another is critical. At one time the Buddha’s attendant Ananda asked if spiritual friendship was not half of the holy life. In response, the Buddha declared, “Spiritual friendship, association with wise and noble friends, and wise and noble deeds are the whole of the holy life.”

Try this in your next argument or conflict: Take a pause. Hold everyone’s struggle in compassion. Connect with your highest intention. Whenever things get difficult, pause before you speak and sense your wisest motivation. From there, it will all flow better. This is the secret of wise speech. As the Buddha describes it: “Speak with kindly motivation. Speak what is true and helpful, speak in due season and to the benefit of all.” When we connect with our highest intention, we learn to see with eyes of compassion and everything becomes more workable.

Without ritual we are ships passing in the night. —Malidoma Somé

What we repeatedly visualize changes our body and consciousness. Visualize freedom and compassion.

Buddhist trainings employ thousands of visualizations, each of which represents an aspect of compassion, courage, love, nobility, generosity, fierce honesty, emptiness, and a myriad of other potentials. As these are created and dissolved inside ourselves, time and again, we can learn to embody the states they represent.

Tara, the female bodhisattva of protection and peace who vowed to be enlightened only in a female body.

Since the first days of the Buddha’s teaching, if someone wanted to become a follower of the path, all that person had to do was recite, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma [the teachings], I take refuge in the sangha [the community of practitioners].” There is nothing to join, nothing to become—simply this turning of the heart.

What we repeatedly think shapes our world. Out of compassion, substitute healthy thoughts for unhealthy ones.

In Buddhist psychology, the instructions for thought transformation are very explicit. The Buddha instructs his followers, “Like a skilled carpenter who removes a coarse peg by knocking it out with a fine one, so a person removes a pain-producing thought by substituting a beautiful one.” The carpenter’s peg is a practical description of how we can remove unhealthy thoughts by substitution. What is required is the selection of a helpful substitute and repeated practice. Repetition is key. Repetition, compassion, and the belief that the painful cycles of thought can be transformed all have a part in developing new patterns of thought.

It is through the cultivation of inner concentration that luminous purity of mind arises. It is through luminous purity that access to expanded states arises. It is from the profound concentration of samadhi that liberating insight is revealed. —Majjhima Nikaya

The most important gift of expanded consciousness is a startling shift of identity. Mystical experiences can melt our boundaries and open our hearts to a reality beyond our limited sense of self. Through them we reconnect to our place in the holiness of all creation.

drugs, or attending the birth of a child. As we have noted, most traditional cultures deliberately summon these stories with shamanic drumming, vision quests, breath practices, chanting, and sacred medicines. In Buddhism, the main vehicle for opening to transcendent consciousness is the development of inner concentration.

Like a powerful telescope, the concentrated mind can open us to vast mystical states including realms of light, visions, rapture, and illumination. Like polishing a lens on a microscope, concentration can also allow us to see more deeply into the body and mind. Microscopic concentration initially brings a subtle awareness of body, a sensitivity to fleeting feelings, a refined perception of thoughts and memory. Going even deeper, we can open to an atomic level of perception.

The power of concentration can be developed through inner training. Concentration opens consciousness to profound dimensions of healing and understanding.

The jhana states that open the door to illumination are divided into two major groups: absorption concentration and insight concentration. These states are so central to the Buddhist world that the word jhana became Chan in China and Zen in Japan.

When concentration is strong enough, we slip below the waves of ordinary senses to a deep, silent realm of first jhana. Here consciousness is filled with stillness, rapture, happiness, and a steady awareness of the chosen subject. Initially we can rest in this stable state of jhana for some minutes. With practice we can sit drenched in joy for hours. As we continue to practice our concentration, the first of eight levels of jhana deepens to the second, and here the effort to focus becomes spontaneous and easy. Deepening yet further, in the third jhana, the coarse excitement of rapture disappears, leaving a steady current of unshakable happiness. By the fourth jhana, even the emotion of happiness fades, and an exquisite, unshakable stillness and equanimity arises. Beyond these, four more subtle jhana states follow: absorption in boundless space, absorption in boundless consciousness, and absorption in the silent realms beyond perception and non-perception.

In addition to these absorption jhanas, there is another category of concentration states, called insight jhanas. Insight jhanas do not focus on a single subject, but arise when concentration is focused and absorbed in the ever-changing sense experiences of body and mind. Concentrating on the body and mind in a fully absorbed way is like putting more and more powerful lenses on a microscope.

In the first insight jhana the mind becomes a silent witness to the experience of body and mind, which shows itself as almost mechanical, arising and passing, instant by instant. In the second deeper level of jhana, these momentary experiences reveal their patterns of conditioning, one being a cause of the next. In the third level, the body becomes more transparent and the fleeting selflessness of experience becomes more apparent. Over the next levels of insight we begin to experience luminosity, bliss, and then fear, followed by great joy as we dissolve into the mystical evanescence of all life. Inwardly it feels as if we move from sense organs to cells, to molecules, to atoms, to subatomic particles and waves. At each successive level of insight, equanimity grows, along with a profound inner freedom.