Buddhist Audio Books

From chapter 7: The Creative Mind at Work

Having outlined the object-determining mental events, Yeshe Gyaltsen moves on to consider the Abhidharma’s next classification: the eleven positive (kuśala) mental events. The positive mental events come before the negative ones perhaps because it is considered healthier to examine the negative on the basis of an exploration of the positive. (The Indian tradition generally, however, would seem to favour putting it the opposite way round, at least in such teachings as the famous verse from the Dhammapada: ‘Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify the heart.’)These eleven are not intended to enumerate a fixed and limited number of mental states. Still, it is notable that just eleven positive mental events are deemed sufficient to set against twenty-six negative ones. The reason for this is no doubt that, as the saying goes, ‘There are many ways of being bad, but only one way of being good.’ To put it another way, there’s a greater variety of sinners than of saints, which is probably why the wicked are regarded as so much more interesting than the good.Of course, careful consideration of human nature reveals on the one hand what has been termed the banality of evil, and on the other the strong sense of individuality that is an inescapable characteristic of the highly integrated person. But there is no doubt that one follows the ‘primrose way to the everlasting bonfire’ (as the porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth colourfully describes the downward path) in one’s own little way, whereas through becoming more developed one comes to have more and more in common with other more evolved individuals. By their very nature positive mental events tend to cohere, to integrate more and more with each other. A positive action or mental state will partake in some sense of all of the positive mental events, inasmuch as if one of them is definitely absent then one is not in a totally positive mental state. Negative mental events, on the other hand, have the opposite tendency: they represent forces of disintegration, they are more differentiated, and there are therefore more of them.The eleven positive mental events are simply different aspects of the creative mind. They do not represent a cumulative, graded series like, for example, the seven bodhyaṅgas: recollection (smṛti), investigation of mental events (dharma-vicaya), energy (vīrya), rapture (prīti), tension release (praśrabdhi), concentration (samādhi), and tranquillity (upekṣā). But there are various connections between the eleven positive mental events and the seven bodhyaṅgas; in particular, the second bodhyaṅga, dharma-vicaya, is specifically concerned with reviewing one’s own mental events, analysing and understanding them. It is, one could say, a practical application of Abhidharmic thinking in the context of meditation.