We Are What We Think: Dhammapada Teaching for Our Times
Every day, the chaos and confusion in the headlines seem crazier than the day before. How can one make sense of it? Furthermore, how can one hold it without getting sucked into reactions that only take the mind further down the rabbit hole of negativity? This is my ongoing personal practice challenge. I’ve recently been spending time with the wisdom of the Dhammapada, a famous collection of the Buddha’s teachings that helps me hold current events in a practice context. I offer this reflection on the opening verses in hopes the teachings will support you as they have supported me.
The Dhammapada begins with a statement that has been central to my own practice: We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
In one translation, this opening chapter is entitled "Choices." Not fate. Not circumstance. Not what others do to us. Choices. In a world that so often feels beyond our control, the Buddha is pointing us back to the one domain where we actually have some agency — the mind itself. To me, if you get that, you've gotten the essence of the teaching.
The Silly Putty of the Mind
Years ago, a teacher shared an image that really drove this home for me. He said: The mind is like silly putty. Some readers might be old enough to remember Silly Putty — or think of Play-Doh. Same idea. It can be shaped any way you want. And he said, once you really understand this, that's the real secret. Most people don't have a clue. Most people are just at the mercy of their habits of mind, their projections, their interpretations — taking all of that to be reality and responding to it — and that's what leads to suffering.
We walk into a room feeling a little anxious, a little edge of paranoia, thinking, oh, they don't like me, and the tension we carry becomes the very energy we put out. We look for what's dangerous, and our brain, ever obedient, finds it everywhere. The Buddha said it plainly in another discourse: “Whatever we frequently think and ponder upon becomes the inclination of the mind.”
But here's the beautiful corollary of that. When we look for the good — genuinely, deliberately — the brain finds that too. I've made this a main practice of mine for many years. The more you look for what's good, what's kind, what's working, your brain actually notices and brings it forward. And when you look for the good in someone, they can feel that. You actually create a different reality just by what you choose to look for.
This is why we practice. Not to manufacture some false cheerfulness or look away from hard truths, but to understand this mind — to make friends with it instead of being run by it. Meditation is the laboratory. And one of the key gifts of practice is to see through the stories of shame or judgment to realize they are simply mental fabrications that may or may not be valid. We can see with humility and understanding that this is what it's like to have a human mind. We all have the confusion, the wanting, the pettiness. When we stop taking it so personally, something eases. And we see that it's possible to train the mind by inclining it in different ways.
We Make the World
The Buddha says it so clearly: With our thoughts, we make the world. Not just our inner experience — but the world itself. I love the old story of the village gatekeeper. Two travelers arrive, each asking what the people are like in this village. The gatekeeper asks each one, "What were people like where you came from? The first says: “awful—selfish, unfriendly.” The gatekeeper says, "You'll likely find people are like that here. The second says “warm, kind, wonderful to be around.” The gatekeeper says, "You'll likely find that here too.” We create our reality all the time, often without knowing it.
This is both humbling and liberating. Humbling because it asks us to hold our perceptions lightly. One of my favorite practices, which I learned from my dear colleague Sylvia Boorstein, is simply: I could be wrong. That's it. My mom — who had very strong ideas about things — heard Sylvia say that at Spirit Rock once and told me afterward, "That never occurred to me before." What a radical idea! I could be wrong. We both laughed. I reminded her of that understanding many times after. When you let go of knowing, you get “Don't-know mind. You get wonder. You get curiosity instead of certainty.
Liberating because it opens the door to genuine agency. We can't always control what arises — illness, loss, political upheaval, wildfire. But we can choose our relationship to what arises. Not to bypass pain or pretend harm isn't real, but to ask: What am I doing to myself with how I'm meeting this? That's not resignation. That's the deepest practice there is.
The Second Verse: He Abused Me
The Dhammapada’s next verses are relevant for our times. They read: Look how he abused me and beat me, how he threw me down and robbed me: live with such thoughts and you live in hate. Abandon such thoughts and live in love.
And then this oft-quoted line, which I've always been moved by: In this world, hatred never ceases from hatred. Hatred only ceases from love. This is an ancient and eternal law.
This teaching is easy to misinterpret. The Buddha is not saying that abuse is acceptable or that the work of accountability and justice should stop. He's not asking us to just say, “Oh, it is the way it is.” He's saying something far more personal: that you, the one who has been harmed, are not helped by letting hatred take up residence in your heart. Hatred, in the end, burns most the one who's carrying it. The Buddha gives an image of holding onto hatred: it is like picking up a hot coal to throw at someone, not realizing that you're the one getting burned. A similar image is drinking poison and hoping it hurts the other person.
The distinction that matters is between the fact of harm and the story the mind builds around it. The harm may be very real. But the mind, left unguarded, elaborates, replays, catastrophizes, imagines what they deserve, feeds on outrage until outrage becomes its own kind of home. This is papañca — mental proliferation — the mind spinning a painful web long after the original wound. And the more we scroll, the more we feed it. Have you noticed how easy it is to fall down that rabbit hole? I’m very familiar with this one.
I do think there can be a place for what I'd call conscious venting. Sometimes when I've been holding a lot, I'll deliberately sit down and just let it out. Sometimes, just to release the pressure, I watch a particular political show that I know will clearly articulate my exasperation with the news of the day, . There's a discharge in feeling our anger, and that can be real and necessary. The key word is conscious. We feel very alive in our rage; it can actually get a little addictive. If it becomes the main way we process everything difficult, then whatever we've been calling our practice starts to fall apart quietly.
Forgiveness as Self-Liberation
The teaching really opens up in the stories of people who have actually lived it.
For decades, I’ve recommended a book called How We Choose to Be Happy by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. They spent three years interviewing over 300 genuinely happy people, trying to understand what they had in common. One of the stories that has stayed with me is Hannah's.
Hannah was a Jewish teenager in Holland when the Nazis swept in. She was sent to live with family friends in Belgium. Her parents and brother were rounded up and taken to the camps. She spent the war in the Belgian underground, not knowing if her family was alive. When it was over, most of them — including her father, deported to Auschwitz — never returned.
And yet, Hannah was one of those profoundly happy people. How? This is how she explained it: "Feeling that I'm a victim of the Nazis gives them a perverse power over me. It would keep me in their hands and allow them to continue damaging me and my family fifty years later. Letting go is what leads to happiness."
Desmond Tutu, who as the architect of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped heal an entire nation post-apartheid, put it this way: "Forgiveness is the highest form of self-interest. I need to forgive so that my own anger and lust for revenge does not corrode my own being." Why self-interest? We're not forgiving to aspire for sainthood. We're not doing it for them. We're doing it for liberation — our own.
Forgiveness, understood this way, is the reclamation of our freedom. It doesn't mean condoning harm. It doesn't mean there's no accountability. It means: I will not let what was done to me keep being done to me, by me, inside my own heart, long after the fact.
This is a high bar. One can't force it. There may be trauma that still needs healing. Forgiveness may not be available yet. We need to accept being right where we are. The practice then might be: Can I aspire not to be consumed by hatred — even if I'm not yet free of it? For me, appreciating the wholesomeness of that wish is a good start.
I love Ram Dass's teacher Neem Karoli Baba's instruction: Never put anyone out of your heart. That's been a major aspiration for me. It orients me. And it connects with one of the most radical teachings in any tradition, what Jesus said from the cross — Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. They are acting from confusion, from damage, from unawareness. That doesn't excuse it. But it helps us understand it. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
The Ancient and Inexhaustible Law
You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?
This is the final verse in the teaching — the reminder that impermanence is the ground beneath everything. We are all here briefly. The question is not whether suffering will come; it will. The question is how we want to meet it. With a heart contracted by hatred that poisons everything it touches? Or with a heart that has been trained — however imperfectly, however gradually — toward openness and compassion?
We are what we think. With our thoughts, we make the world. This is a description of how suffering arises and how freedom becomes possible. The mind, once understood, is the greatest ally we have. And the ancient law — that only love dispels hate — is not weakness. It is, I believe, one of the most demanding and liberating things the Buddha ever taught.
May we hold it as an aspiration. May we hold our own struggle with it compassionately. And may the intention itself — even when we fall short, even when we're not quite there yet — incline us, little by little, toward freedom.