Remember and look for the potential for goodness and possibility to become skillful

"There’s a slogan that sometimes you hear floating around Buddhist circles: that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at their current condition; if you want to see their future condition, you look at their current actions. But that’s not true. There’s a lot more to a person than you can see in the present moment. That slogan seems to think that we have a single karma account and what you see right now is the running balance.

But in the Buddha’s image, karma’s more like a field full of seeds. What you see right now are the seeds that are sprouting. But there can be lots of other seeds in the field that you don’t see at all. They’re ready to sprout or they’re just lying dormant. Which means that when you see somebody suffering, or see somebody doing something that could lead to suffering, you don’t just say, “Well, that’s their past karma,” and leave it at that. The same when you look at yourself: You don’t say, “All I’ve got is the karma I see right now.” If we’re born as human beings, we have good and bad seeds in our field. We’re creating new seeds all the time. So we want to create as many good seeds as we can, but at the same time we also want to encourage the good seeds from the past. Because it is possible for them to crowd out the bad seeds, just as it is possible for the bad seeds to crowd out the good. Which means that when we look at ourselves, we’re going to look at our potential for goodness.

As Ajaan Lee points out, if you focus on your potential for being bad or focusing simply on your bad points, it pulls you down. And once you pull yourself down this way, it’s all too easy to spread out and focus on other people’s bad points as well, which means you don’t see their potential for good. That discourages your potential for good, and so those potentials just get wasted.

So which seeds do you want to water? You want to water the good ones. Which means you have to believe firmly in your potential to do good — and to believe firmly in other people’s potential as well.

When Ajaan Lee made those comments, he was talking about one of the forms of right resolve, which is to be resolved on harmlessness. You don’t focus on your bad points; you don’t focus on other people’s bad points. You try to focus on the good points. When you see somebody suffering, you focus on the potentials they have to become skillful, so that they don’t have to suffer from their bad karma.

Then you learn how to look the same way at yourself. Of course, the more you look at yourself this way, the easier it is to look at other people in this way. So karma’s not simply teaching us that we get what we deserve. It’s more teaching us that there is a way out. Because the Buddha’s teaching an end to suffering, whether it’s “deserved” or not.

Think of the story of Angulimala. He’d killed all those people but then had a huge change of heart. The Buddha saw that potential. Nobody else saw the potential, but the Buddha saw it and was able to bring it out. Angulimala became an arahant. And as you can imagine, there were some people who were not happy with this. There were people whose relatives he’d killed. They wanted to see him get what he “deserved.” But the Buddha’s compassion was different. He saw that this person had the potential. There was some hidden goodness in him, and the Buddha was able to bring it out.

So Angulimala was able to avoid a lot of suffering. The worst that happened to him was that when he was on his almsround, people would throw things at him. He came back one day, blood running down his head from something somebody had thrown at his head, and the Buddha said, “Bear up with it! It could have been a lot worse.”

So when you look at yourself and look at other people, remember, there’s a potential for goodness there. And compassion is a matter of looking for that potential for goodness and saying to yourself, “If there’s something I can do to help, I’d be happy to help.” If there’s nothing you can do, at least you don’t get in the way.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t see that other people have their bad side as well. We take that into account, for our own safety, but we focus on the potential for good. Because that allows us to focus on our potential for good as well.

Like we’re sitting here right now: You could focus on parts of the body that are in pain and you could focus on them in a way that’s really going to exacerbate the pain, make it worse. Or you could focus on your potentials for pleasure. You’ve got the choice.

That’s what the teaching of karma’s all about: There are choices here. And the complexity of karma is what gives us our hope, that even though some bad things may be coming up in the mind right now, there’s also a potential for goodness in their someplace. There are the seeds that have been planted someplace. So you want to look for those."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Potentials for Good"