BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #17 (Winter 1990-91)
                                           
                                           
                           A NOTE ON OPENNESS
                                           
                            by Bhikkhu Bodhi
                                           
                                           
   
   
   The sudden entry into general circulation of a familiar term with a 
   new ambience of meaning often has a significance that goes beyond 
   mere philological curiosity. Since language is molded by thought at 
   a level prior to and more basic than that of deliberate design, such 
   changes in linguistic currency may well signal deeper changes taking 
   place in the mental make-up of those who use the term. They can be 
   seen as barometric indicators of transformations in the sphere of 
   consciousness -- in our patterns of thinking, in our attitudes, in 
   our goals.
   
   If there is one term that might be chosen to characterize the 
   intellectual and moral climate of the present day, it would be the 
   word "openness." This seemingly colorless word has come to mark the 
   fulfillment of the centuries-long struggle against the oppressive 
   weight of established tradition in so many diverse departments of 
   human concern. Its three syllables are a hymn of victory for the 
   triumph of the empirical method over formulated dogma as the key to 
   knowledge, for the primacy of individual conscience over prescribed 
   morality in the domain of ethics, and in our private lives, for the 
   replacement of the reign of the superego by a new-found liberty to 
   explore the subterranean channels of impulse and desire in whatever 
   direction they might lead.
   
   Perhaps most importantly, the notion of openness also points to a 
   particular attitude towards experience, an attitude which has 
   quietly permeated our culture so thoroughly that it now seems almost 
   an innate human disposition. Briefly, this attitude might be 
   described as a soft and affable affirmation of experience in its 
   totality, coupled with a pliant receptivity to its full range of 
   forms. This attitude, it must be stressed, only rarely solidifies 
   into a consciously held conviction; more typically it lingers in the 
   background of the mind as an unverbalized intuition, a fluid and 
   shifting orientation towards the world. Historically rooted in the 
   widespread decline of belief structures centered upon a transcendent 
   goal of human life and an objectively grounded scale of values, the 
   philosophy of openness takes all truth to be relative, all values 
   personal and subjective. Thus it holds that our task in life is to 
   open ourselves as fully as we can to the unfolding miracle of 
   existence and to celebrate its infinite possibilities.
   
   The spread of this attitude through the general culture has left its 
   stamp on current interpretations of Buddhism as well. We thus find 
   that for many of today's Buddhist teachers the Dhamma is essentially 
   a method for arriving at the consummation of all that the notion of 
   openness implies. From this perspective Buddhism is not a doctrine 
   with its own distinct body of tenets, not a discipline guiding us to 
   a supramundane goal, but a tool for opening to the here and now. The 
   most basic flaw at the bottom of human suffering, it is held, is our 
   tendency to close ourselves off from experience, to lock ourselves 
   with our concepts and judgments into a limited compartment of 
   reality. By developing through meditation a non-discriminating 
   "choiceless" awareness which allows whatever arises to hold its 
   ground, we are enabled to break through our constraints and merge 
   with the stream of events, to dance with the "ten thousand things" 
   -- accepting them all yet without clinging to them.
   
   While the advocates of openness are usually adroit in assimilating 
   their principles to the classical Dhamma, a careful examination 
   would reveal gaping differences between the two. Here I want to 
   focus only on some crucial differences in their respective 
   orientations towards experience. It should be noted at once that 
   whereas the school of openness bids us to drop our discriminations, 
   judgments and restraints in order to immerse ourselves in the 
   dynamic flow of immediate experience, the Buddha prescribes an 
   attitude towards experience that arises from carefully wrought 
   judgments, employs precise discriminations, and issues in detachment 
   and restraint. This attitude, the classical Buddhist counterfoil to 
   the modern program of openness, might be summed up by one word found 
   everywhere in the ancient texts. That word is heedfulness 
   (//appamada//).
   
   Heedfulness denotes an attitude of critical scrutiny directed 
   towards one's own mind both in its internal movement and in its 
   reactions to external affairs. The term suggests diligent effort and 
   acute attentiveness, and it further sounds a note of moral caution 
   and care. It thus implies, as the Buddha intended it to imply, that 
   we are constantly exposed to danger -- a danger born from within 
   that becomes ever more imminent to the degree that we allow 
   heedfulness to slip and we slide into its opposite: into 
   heedlessness or negligence (//pamada//).
   
   Such caution is necessary because deeds have consequences that 
   extend beyond themselves. Whereas the school of openness tends to 
   subordinate concern with the consequential aspect of action to a 
   stress on abiding in the present moment, the classical Dhamma taught 
   by the Buddha asks us to recognize that all willed actions, even our 
   fleeting thoughts and impulses, are seeds with roots buried deep in 
   the mind's beginningless past and with the potency to generate 
   results in the distant horizons of the future. These long-range 
   consequences of action are of enormous importance to us; for however 
   far they might lie from our vision now, when the time comes for our 
   deeds to ripen, it is we ourselves who must experience their fruits. 
   As these fruits are invariably determined by the moral quality of 
   our actions, diligent self-examination -- that is, heedfulness -- is 
   urgently needed so that we may restrain ourselves from those deeds 
   that seem pleasant but bear painful results, and so that we may 
   apply ourselves to those deeds that may be difficult but yield 
   long-term benefits.
   
   The mode of thinking based on openness rejects duality as a product 
   of discrimination and deluded concepts. It tacitly presupposes that 
   existence as such is ultimately benign; that beyond our deluded 
   concepts, the rich and vivid diversity of forms has a single taste, 
   a taste that is sweet. In contrast, the attitude of heedfulness is 
   grounded upon the view that existence is textured through and 
   through by dualities that are profound and inescapably real. The 
   world bears testimony to this vision in the contrast between the 
   charming, delightful surfaces of things and their underlying 
   hollowness and inadequacy; our minds bear testimony in the ongoing 
   contest between the wholesome mental factors and the unwholesome 
   ones, between the upward urge for purification and the downward pull 
   of the defilements. That this duality is not trivial is seen by the 
   consequences: the one leads to Nibbana, the state of deliverance, 
   the Deathless, while the other leads back into the round of repeated 
   birth, samsara, which is also the realm of Mara, the Lord of Death.
   
   To practice heedfulness is to take full account of these dualities 
   with their profound implications. The heedful person does not aim at 
   a choiceless awareness open to existence in its totality, for to 
   open oneself thus is to risk making oneself vulnerable to just those 
   elements in oneself that keep one bound to the realm of Mara. The 
   awareness developed through heedfulness is built upon a choice -- a 
   well-considered choice to abandon those qualities one understands to 
   be detrimental and to develop in their place those qualities one 
   understands to be beneficial, the states that lead to purity and 
   peace.
   
   Both in our outer involvements in the world and in the mind's 
   internal procession of thought, imagination and emotion, there 
   continually spreads before us a forked road. One branch of this fork 
   beckons with the promise of pleasure and satisfaction but in the end 
   leads to pain and bondage; the other, steep and difficult to climb, 
   leads upward to enlightenment and liberation. To discard 
   discrimination and judgment for an easy-going openness to the world 
   is to blur the important distinction between these two quite 
   different paths. To be heedful is to be aware of the dichotomy, and 
   to strive to avoid the one and pursue the other. As the Buddha 
   reminds us, heedfulness is the path to the Deathless, heedlessness 
   is the path of Death.

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