Look In The Mirror

When the Buddha first taught his son Rahula the dharma, he didn’t start with meditation. Instead, he offered Rahula the analogy of a mirror. Just as a mirror reflects your face, he said, so too should you reflect on your actions — physical, verbal, and mental — to see whether they cause harm.

But the Buddha never defined harm for his son. That’s because harm isn’t something you can define intellectually. It has to be seen directly, the way you see your own reflection. Thinking intellectually about harm tends to lead us astray: it tells us that what we do, say, or think isn’t really hurtful, only when others do it.

Right now, the amount of harm in the world is pretty overwhelming. From Gaza to Tehran to Minnesota, large-scale violence by governments against people is becoming totally normal. Yet the biggest news story is not the violence itself, but the number of people who look at that violence and think, "I’m okay with it, as long as it happens to the other side." That kind of moral dissociation is truly hard to fathom.

I recently saw a slogan that said, “You should take your happiness as seriously as you take your misery.” At first, it sounded like feel-good fluff, but it’s actually sound advice. We tend to study our suffering in detail, dwelling on what he said or she did, or who's to blame. But we barely tend to our happiness at all. We don't cultivate a vision of a better world. And we don't see the connection between our actions and the state of our hearts.


Above all, we don't see that the ability to feel pain is a precondition for happiness. We’ve invented drugs and technologies to avoid it, yet pain is the foundation of all survival-based intelligence. If you can’t feel harm as directly as you see your reflection in the mirror, you won't know true happiness. That’s why thinking that justifies hurting certain people is stupidity, no matter how much commentary it comes with.

I don’t have a single political solution to the world’s problems. But I’m pretty sure I know where to look: not in the endless analyses found on the news, but in the mirror.