Hope Isn't Really a Buddhist Teaching

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

By Thich Nhat Hanh

I disagree with this statement. It panders too much to the stickiness that lies behind hope. The longing for a future that may not come. The desire for something comfortable and stable to rely on. The fear that things will "get worse." I have written on this blog before, and continue to believe, that hope is mostly a hindrance. Thus my disagreement.

Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, using the word "hope" can be a skillful means. Telling someone "I hope you feel better soon" can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. That's where comments like Thich Nhat Hanh's above might be pointing us in a useful direction, but you have to reflect on where that might be.

We can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but also optimistic about life as a whole.

Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she'd considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn't be too bad (which it wasn't), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen would happen.

Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there's a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don't see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.

Now, even the word optimism is tied to a binary: pessimism. It feels a little clunky to me as I write this, but I'll opt to use it anyway.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don't get what you hope for?

Hope is Lazy

Over at Zendotstudio, Carole has a good post on hope and Buddhist practice. She writes:

The Oxford dictionary defines hope as "expectation combined with desire." Hmm, from a Buddhist point of view, we're not starting with the best recipe ingredients, are we? Hope implies something we want in the future. It may be something perfectly wonderful, like world peace or a new subaru station wagon. And baked into that hope are the seeds of suffering, if we don't get what we want.

Pema Chodron says something like, "we bounce back and forth between hope and fear", this is the common human state. When we hope we may also feel afraid that we won't get what we hope for. And then there is the disappointment when we don't get what we hope for, which inevitably happens if we're filling our shopping backs with a list of hopes. And after a while we feel the bruise of all this bouncing back and forth. In fact we may feel like a human bruise.

Lately, I've been noticing that hoping seems to come out of a kind of laziness. When I'm lost in hope, I actually am trying to conjure up a future reality, and the hang on to that picture, regardless of what's actually happening. I'm not willing to put in some work, take some risks, and let go of results. It's just "I hope this will happen or that won't happen" and then, usually, some perseveration on possible outcomes I don't want to happen.

In fact, what I have also noticed is that when I'm actively putting in some effort towards something, and/or living without attachment to a particular outcome, hope doesn't really enter into the equation. It's entrance into such a place would be just extra, like adding sugar to already naturally sweet enough apple juice.

Screw New Year's Resolutions - Part II

At the beginning of the year, I offered the following post. It remains true to me as 2010 comes to a close. It's really interesting how the same themes arise again and again, isn't it? Like this:

Even though I think there is something in the spiritual life that might be called Great Hope, most of what we call "hope" - even in a spiritual context - is simply fraud by another name. If you can find a hope that is not intimately attached to fear, then maybe that is worth having. But be honest, have you ever made a New Year's resolution that wasn't laden with the fear of failure, or some other fear?

I like the idea of beginning anew. Of starting again and again - with fresh eyes. Beginning anew is akin to "don't know mind" in that both, in their process, breaking through fixed views of what is.

Hope and fear. Guess I've been deliberately working with those two for awhile now. I imagine a lot of others are as well.

Here are a few poems to send off the old year, and ring in the new. May we all be liberated, again and again.

On Top

All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.

Gary Snyder

now begins
the Future Buddha's reign...
spring pines

Issa (1763-1828)

*Image - winter whimsy from my neighbor's garden.

Buddhists Love Hope as Much as Anyone Apparently

(*Our Good Buddy Manjushri, and his sword of wisdom that cuts through illusions. Always a good presence to have in discussions about things like hope. May we all awaken our "inner" Manjushri.)


Ahhhhh, hope. It seems like a sacred cow, an untouchable almost. The general view is that people have to have hope, or else they're lost.

Well, you'll have to forgive me, but I've always been one to question whatever is generally accepted as true. Gets me in trouble sometimes. I irritate people sometimes. I'm frequently misunderstood. But that's how it goes.

Yesterday's post, as well as Dean's recent post,have generated some valuable discussion in my opinion. One of the reasons why I have used this blog to question things like hope is that it helps people, including myself, clarify what we actually mean. Instead of just saying "hope is good" or "desire is bad" and then moving on, there's an opportunity to pause and consider what we mean, and how things actually play out in our lives.

Dean's post, and perhaps mine, inspired another blogger, David, to write a counterpost that includes the following:

Hope contributes to a positive outlook on life and if that sounds too “new age” or something that’s too bad. Unless you have some sense of optimism for the future, life can be very bleak. It is through pessimism and negative thinking that we create a lot of our suffering. Hope is a necessary ingredient for a satisfied, peaceful life, and it’s sad to me that there are some Buddhists who want to twist it around into something to avoid.

The Buddha way is the Middle Way. The balance between extremes. There’s no question that too much hope can be harmful. Living for the future excessively is not healthy. But to abandon hope and live only in the present is not the way to go either. Hope reinforces the ego only if you let it. The idea that it represents some form of control that we don’t actually have is wrong. The whole point of Buddhism is to train our minds so that we can control our thoughts, words and deeds and gravitate to wholesome states of mind and not dwell in unwholesome states. We want control and if that is just an illusion then there’s no sense in practicing Buddhism.

There's a lot here I could comment on. One somewhat tangential, but I think related point is that Buddhism is NOT about control. The longer I practice, the less I believe in having control, and that's been quite helpful. I'm less uptight, less angry, less rigid, and more responsive to my life than I was in the past. Acts of controlling destructive thoughts and actions can be skillful means at times, but do not represent the fruition of an awakened life.

I still have to control angry commentaries about certain political issues, for example, but that's because I continue to be working with attachments around those views, as well as insecurities about having political views that are outside the norm.

Back to hope, though. Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, I think that using the word "hope" can be a skillful means. Telling someone "I hope you feel better soon" can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. However, in both cases, we can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but also optimistic about life as a whole.

Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she'd considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn't be too bad (which it wasn't), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen would happen.

Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there's a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don't see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don't get what you hope for?

The Seduction of Hope

Over at the Mindful Moment, Dean has an excellent post about the illusions people have about hope. Whenever concerns about the future come up, I find hope to be like a bottle of quality microbrew after a long day. It's usually something that's nicely packaged, good tasting, and guaranteed to offer some short term relief from the pain. The problem is that hoping takes us away from what's present. And it also diverts us away from the deep source pool from which our future springs forth. To put stock in hope means to privilege an empty story over the wholeness that's inherent in each of us, if we only trusted it more. Dean writes:

In my experience and spiritual practice I've found hope is not a good thing. It's limits ones spiritual development. It isn't good because it in fact is a very subtle form of desire and control that makes us cling to our sense of self and our suffering, prolongs our suffering and keeps us suffering. It is an illusion of a sense of control that we don't actually have. Hope is nothing, it's not even a tangible 'anything', it's just a subtle desire for a future positive event or away from a future negative event.

I'd actually say that it isn't even about positive or negative. Spiteful politicians sometimes spend enormous amounts of energy hoping their political opponents are taken down, or even killed off. Greedy business leaders sometimes invest entire fortunes on schemes built on a hope that doing them will crush the competition. Seriously ill or seriously depressed people sometimes hope to die. Rebellious teenagers sometimes hope to fail exams, and flunk out of school. The common thread, whether the desired outcome is positive or negative in the relative sense, is that desire for control Dean speaks of. Control over what? Change.

I don't know about you, but I have never had any luck control changing. Certainly, I can plant seeds for the direction I'd like to go in, and shift my thoughts and behaviors to increase the possibility of that direction manifesting. And I can regulate my responses to whatever actually does occur. But controlling change itself? I don't think so.

The other thing I actually have come to see about hope is that it puts a lock on the doors of our life. Instead of having everything open and available in any given time, you only have a few doors open. The ones you hope for, and the ones you don't hope for.

That's the place you're operating from. I hope to get a job by the end of the month; I hope I don't go broke. Either one of the two "hopes" happen, or something entirely different occurs. With the former, the pattern of belief in hoping is reinforced. The latter often brings with it a surprise laced with confusion and even bewilderment. I didn't expect to inherit this money. What do I do now? Do I still get a job? Invest it? I don't know. I don't know.

In the end, when you give in to the seduction of hope, again and again, you loose the improvisation skills necessary to fully engage with life as it is.