Buddhist Romanticism

alternatives: renunciation, goodwill, and compassion. These skillful
resolves then provide the motivation for carrying out the remaining factors
of the path.
Here it’s important to notice two features of mundane right resolve: (1)
As indicated by the first item in the list of unskillful resolves, there is no
room for sensual passion in the path to the end of suffering. (2) Goodwill
and compassion are no more innate to the mind than are their opposites,
given that the mind is so changeable and has potentials for both skillful and
unskillful actions. Thus there has to be the resolve to develop goodwill and
compassion, and this resolve has to be motivated by the insights of
mundane right view: that unskillful intentions will lead to suffering, and
skillful ones to happiness. In other words, these skillful resolves all have to
be motivated by heedfulness, the desire to act carefully so as to avoid
suffering.
At the same time—again, given the changeable nature of the mind—the
Buddha did not trust that skillful resolves, without further direction, would
always lead to skillful actions. After all, an attitude of goodwill may be
ignorant of the long-term consequences of actions that appear skillful on the
surface. For this reason, he formulated specific precepts to define right
speech and right action, precepts that he recommended be intentionally
followed in all circumstances (SN 42:8; AN 4:99). He also described the
good and bad consequences of actions that did not lend themselves to being
formulated in absolute precepts (MN 135). And he advocated ways of
training the mind in integrity, so that his followers could learn how to
observe carefully the results of their actions on their own (MN 61), and in
mindfulness—the ability to hold things in mind—so that they could keep
applying the lessons they learned to all future actions (§35).
In this way, mundane right resolve does not end simply with good
intentions. Through the training of the path, it aims at carrying out those
intentions skillfully in everyday life.
Once mundane right resolve has succeeded in dropping all three
unskillful resolves, it leads on to its transcendent level: resolving on the
mental qualities that allow the mind to enter and remain in right
concentration (MN 117). Right concentration is a type of becoming, on a
non-sensual level of form or formlessness, but because of its stillness and
clarity it allows right view to ferret out ever more subtle levels of clinging
and craving until all that remains is the act of clinging to the path itself.
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