“Ultimate” Equanimity

In Complete Enlightenment (1997) Master Sheng Yen’s comments on a story of a famous person in Taiwan whose wife decides to run off to someone else (p.141). Rather than taking action against her, he decides to feel joyful that his wife found someone she really loves, and accepts that she is therefore with the right person. However, he adds that “If she eventually decides that I’m not a bad person and comes back, then it means that she still cares for me and she should be with me” (ibid). The actor further suggests that he was not wrong in his judgment of his wife if she truly is cared for by the other. However, when she later comes back to him, the man maintains that the marriage is “like a diamond”, “unbreakable” and “will never go bad” (ibid). While Master Sheng Yen agrees that this attitude is a very healthy one, it is still not “the ultimate stage—the stage where everything is equal and unchanging” (ibid).

As I was reading this passage, I started to ask myself, why isn’t this ultimate equanimity? Isn’t this good enough? Master Sheng Yen uses other examples to suggest that truly seeing everything as the same in essence is the ultimate enlightenment. He uses the example of the four elements (see previous blog entry) to suggest that everything is simply transformed, and is never destroyed. The water on my toothbrush is used to wash my teeth, but once it goes down the drain, it comes to function in other ways. The essence remains the same, but it just functions in different ways under different situations.

To go back to the example of the married man: did he truly see his wife and the situation with ultimate equanimity? I think perhaps the reason Master Sheng Yen doesn’t think it’s the ultimate stage is (perhaps) that the man still clung to ideas about good and bad, “best” and “worst”, and so on. Even though he had reached an insight that there are no absolute good and bad situations, he still harbored the view that his marriage “will never go bad” and is indestructible, based on his wife’s behaviors. In this regard, his feelings about the marriage are flexible, but still conditioned by what his wife does and the outcome of her actions. Had the husband perhaps realized that there is no ideal state of marriage, he would have become closer to an ultimate view of equanimity.

Shengyen (1997). Complete Enlightenment: Translation and Commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment. Elmhurst, NY: Dharma Drum Publications.