Courage

by Mark Donovan
A dharma talk given December 17, 2024

Tonight I’d like to explore our practice through a lens of courage.  Courage — from the French word, coeur, heart. Recent talks by our group of teachers have explored the experience of uncertainty that is arising for many of us in these times of rapid change — and how uncertainty can seed a sense of danger and feelings of fear.  Fear is an afflictive emotion, some say the root of the three poisons: clinging, aversion, and delusion.  In Brian Lesage’s talk on uncertainty, he pointed to how fear can be constricting when it gets the upper hand — when we avoid and withdraw into a protective stance, life gets cramped and small.  As the writer Elena Ferrante puts it in one of her novels:
Everything in the world is in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who don’t agree to take the risk waste away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

Ken, Brenda and Carol all suggested how challenging it can be for us to hang out in a place of groundlessness, of not knowing.  Our nervous systems evolved to keep us safe and to find security in the predictable; we want answers to our questions but may have to wait patiently for them to be revealed in their own time.  We might say that learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty is exactly what this practice is all about.  Pema Chodron’s teachings are all about this.  Just listen to her book titles : The Places That Scare You, When Things Fall Apart, Comfortable With Uncertainty, The Wisdom of No Escape.  Last week Carol suggested another response to uncertainty, one of opening to the mystery and wonder of life as it arises moment–by-moment, perhaps a continuation of her talk on improvisation, of responding to whatever life may present to us with, “Yes, and…” as we join in the dance.

Courage is a quality that feels important and useful for facing the challenges of uncertainty and change.  Courage is not a quality that appears on any of the Theravadin Buddhist lists.  It is not one of the 37 awakening or liberating qualities.  But although it is given little status on its own in the scriptural writings, I believe it is a quality that we manifest often in many different ways in our practice — this practice that aims at the unshakeable release of the heart, the coeur.

In its earliest forms, courage meant "to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart".  Heart and mind together.  To me this sounds a lot like the meaning of the Pali word citta, which refers to the heart-mind, not separate but one.  Merriam Webster defines courage as mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.  Another definition includes a quality of spirit — spiritual strength.  So we can think of  courage as mental, moral and spiritual strength to persevere in the face of fear, danger and difficulty.

Courage is a quality we often associate with heroes.  I think of Odysseus, the Greek hero known for his cunning intelligence, famous for his epic journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, as detailed in Homer's poem "The Odyssey" — where he faces numerous perils and trials on his long voyage back to his wife and son, ultimately overcoming them to reclaim his kingdom.  Or we might think of Martin Luther King, Jr.  and his courage as one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement who spoke out in the face of violent rhetoric and actions — as well as all of those people who put their lives on the line for civil rights.  Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, explored the idea of a hero’s journey that each of us experiences as we are called out into the world into adventure, into the unknown, heeding a call to grow in some new way, to shed an old, stale skin and go through a metamorphosis of growth and renewal.  As part of this process we face new challenges, ordeals, crises that test us.  Courage supports and steadies us as we live our life’s journey.  

Instructions on Not Giving Up
a poem by Ada Limon

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then
I’ll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

This poem speaks of beauty, wonder and delight but also  “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty…”  the arising and passing, contraction and expansion, death and renewal.  The full catastrophe.  “The mess of us, the hurt,” such a universally shared part of our common humanity, points us to the first noble truth of suffering, which Brian Lesage describes in this way:

This suffering is the pain of not getting what we want, the pain of being burdened by what we don’t want, it’s the heartbreak of losing what we love, it’s the difficulty with the decline of health and the loss of abilities, it’s the weight of personal crises and also the shared suffering of all beings on the fragile, tiny planet we call home.  And this suffering also arises from the ways our minds make this whole predicament worse, how it struggles, and resists, and tries to escape through denial and distraction.

The Buddha said: I teach two things only: suffering and the end of suffering.  The Fourth Noble Truth, the Noble Eightfold Path, points us to liberation from suffering.  We could say it teaches us practices that undergird courage.  Wise mindfulness cultivates mental strength and ethical conduct cultivates moral strength.  These are two of the definitions of courage.  The third definition of courage — spiritual strength — is the whole of our practice. We take refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha, develop liberating insights into the dependent origination and emptiness of phenomena, see for ourselves the fruits of practice that lead to faith and confidence in the path, grow in spiritual friendship and support within our sangha community.

It’s through the practice of mindfulness that we develop mental strength.  It is how we begin to loosen the bonds of self-view — I, me, mine, ego-clinging — into a more expansive experience of being the One who knows, being the One who is awake.  From this more spacious vantage point, we learn to experience the arising and passing content of our minds with less identification and reactivity, and with more equanimity and freedom. Ajahn Chah says:

Get to know the visitors well, become familiar with the vivid pictures they paint, the alluring stories they tell to entice you to follow them, but do not give up your seat, it’s the only chair around.  Continue to occupy it unceasingly, greeting each guest as it comes, firmly establishing yourself in awareness, transforming your mind into the One who knows, the One who is awake.

Keeping our seat takes courage — we face a vast array of mind states and emotions some of which are painful.  And yet we choose not to deny or distract ourselves but to learn to stay, to cultivate the wisdom of no escape, to get to know these visitors, to notice that they’re not so solid, befriending our experience, befriending ourselves.  It’s why it’s so important that our mindfulness is also kindful, that we cultivate loving-kindness and self-compassion.   When we can respond to ourselves sympathetically with “Ouch.  Of course I’m having a hard time, this hurts, this is difficult” — this normalizes our experience and allows the heart to soften.  Mindfulness is a way of saying yes to the experience — to the fear, the worry — whatever it may be and to bring that spirit of courage, the aspiration to land and be with the experience knowing that this will help free my mind.  It’s so helpful to land the felt experience in the body and step out of the story. Things change and become both more grounded and spacious when we can land the felt experience.

Maya Angelou says:
Courage is the  most important of all the virtues because without courage you can’t practice any other virtues consistently. You can value kindness, being true and generous and fair and merciful and just — you can do any of those things occasionally, but to be that thing time after time demands that you have courage.
 ...
And I think that you’re not born with courage, I don’t believe that, I think that you’re born with the ability to develop courage. Let’s say you wanted to pick up a 100# weight.  Unless you’re a bodybuilder or something, you wouldn’t just go out and pick it up, you would develop first.  You’d start by picking up a 5#, and then a 10#, 20#, 50# and finally you’d pick up the 100#.

Mindfulness is a practice that nurtures the mind-heart, the citta, so that there’s more and more capacity for courage.  The mind gradually becomes more enlightened, it develops bodhicitta. 

The Mind
from the Dhammapada

The restless, agitated mind,
    Hard to protect, hard to control,
The sage makes straight,
    As a fletcher the shaft of an arrow.

Like a fish out of water,
    Thrown on dry ground,
The mind thrashes about,
    Trying to escape Mara’s command.

The mind, hard to control,
    Flighty—alighting where it wishes--
One does well to tame.
    The disciplined mind brings happiness.

The mind, hard to see,
    Subtle—alighting where it wishes--
The sage protects.
    The watched mind brings happiness.

Far-ranging, solitary,
    Incorporeal and hidden
Is the mind.
    Those who restrain it
Will be free from Mara’s bonds.

For those who are unsteady of mind,
    Who do not know true Dhamma,
And whose serenity wavers,
    Wisdom does not mature.

For one who is awake,
    Whose mind isn’t overflowing,
    Whose heart isn’t afflicted
    And who has abandoned both merit and demerit,
Fear does not exist.

Neither mother nor father,
    Nor any other relative can do
One as much good
    As one’s own well-directed mind.

The practice of mindfulness develops a well-directed mind, mental strength, mental courage.  This is one of the three branches of the Noble Eightfold Path.  Another branch of the path is ethical conduct, or sila in Pali.  The path factors that relate to sila are wise speech, wise action, and wise livelihood.  In a nutshell, as Kenn and Carol talked about this fall, wise speech is speech that is truthful, timely, compassionately expressed, and useful -- forward-leading, it has a purpose.  Wise livelihood is concerned with earning a living in a righteous way, without trickery, deceit, exploitation or violence.  Wise action (householder precepts) is abstaining from unwholesome actions, including abstaining from taking life, abstaining from taking what is not freely given, abstaining from sexual misconduct, and abstaining from intoxicants that cloud the mind and lead to heedlessness and harm.  The Buddha describes the benefits of virtue in this conversation with his attendant, Ananda:

The Rewards of Virtue
from Anguttara Nikaya 10.1 Path to Deliverance

[Ananda:] What, O Venerable One, is the reward and blessing of wholesome morality?
[The Buddha:] Freedom from remorse, Ananda.
And of freedom from remorse?
Joy, Ananda
And of joy?
Rapture, Ananda
And of rapture?
Tranquility, Ananda
And of tranquility?
Happiness, Ananda
And of happiness?
Concentration, Ananda
And of concentration?
Vision and knowledge according to reality, Ananda
And of vision and knowledge according to reality?
Turning away and detachment, Ananda
And of turning away and detachment?
The vision and knowledge with regard to deliverance, Ananda

Quite a list of beautiful qualities! Freedom from remorse, joy, rapture, tranquility, happiness, vision and knowledge, deliverance.  Does it get any better than this?

Bhikku Bodhi describes sila as the roots of spiritual life:

The vigour of the spiritual life, like the vigour of a tree, depends upon healthy roots. Just as a tree with weak and shallow roots cannot flourish but will grow up stunted, withered and barren, so a spiritual life devoid of strong roots will also have a stunted growth incapable of bearing fruit. To attempt to scale the higher stages of the path it is essential at the outset to nourish the proper roots of the path; otherwise the result will be frustration. The roots of the path are the constituents of sila, the factors of moral virtue. These are the basis for meditation, and the ground for all wisdom and higher achievement.

Brian Lesage describes a notion in the early texts of how ethical integrity is akin to an artistic skill, it’s the art of bringing beauty into the world, ethical beauty.  We have the particular structure of the Dhamma, the Eightfold Path, that includes the practice of ethical conduct.  Then from that, we engage, learning how to bring beauty into the world.  The key word is learning.  There’s a Pali word used with these ethical precepts: sikkhapadam.  Sikkha means training or learning -- the ethics is rooted in a training or learning I am engaged in.  Padam is as ped, as in foot, so I’m on a learning path.  Sikkhapadam. 

So, ethical guidelines are not commandments, not a binary or right or wrong, but a path, a continuum, that’s  a learning process.  It’s not about being perfect but about learning.  Another Pali word that’s connected with this is kusala: skillful. One who  has ethical integrity is skillful.  And have you noticed in your own practice how beautiful these ethical qualities can be? Like experiencing kindness from someone else or from your own heart -- it’s like an artistic masterpiece -- and compassion, generosity, skillful speech -- all beautiful.  These are practices that develop moral strength, moral courage.

Mindfulness and ethical conduct: these are some of the ways we cultivate courage in our practice, courage in our lives, ways of responding to uncertainty, groundlessness and fear based on our deepest values.  I’ll end with this quote by Pema Chodron:

When [Trungpa Rinpoche] taught about fear he very clearly said that the only way to experience fearlessness was to know the nature of fear, that fear was not something that we got rid of or that we cast out, but something that we became very intimate with, and came to know so well that the journey of knowing fear, moving closer to fear, was in fact the journey of courage, the journey of bravery.  Fear itself is the vanguard of wisdom, fear itself is the vanguard of courage.