The second factor is the aiming that happens before anything is done. Three aims are named: letting go, goodwill, harmlessness. On the why underneath the doing, and why it needs resetting constantly.
You can see clearly and aim badly. History is full of clear-eyed people pointed at terrible things, and the tradition does not pretend otherwise — which is why the wisdom group has a second factor.
The three aims named are usually rendered renunciation, goodwill and harmlessness. The first is the one that translates worst: it does not mean austerity, it means the letting go of the grip described two essays ago, applied to what you are pursuing.
So the question this factor asks is not what you want. It is what your wanting is organized around — and whether it is organized around getting, or around something less cramped.
There is a discourse in which the teacher describes his own training, and it reads like a method rather than a doctrine.
He sorted his thinking into two streams: thoughts tending toward craving, ill will and harm, and thoughts tending toward release, goodwill and care. Then he watched where each stream led — not judging them, tracking them — and found the first led to his own affliction and the second did not. The method is observational, and it is closer to keeping a log than to obeying a rule.
The adjacent modern finding is that the kind of motivation matters, not only the amount. Goals pursued for reasons that are genuinely one’s own are associated with better persistence and better wellbeing than goals pursued to prove something or avoid something.4 Self-determination theory is one of the better-supported frameworks in motivation research, though it is a broad theory rather than a single finding, and the measures are largely self-report.
It does not establish the three aims. It supports the narrower claim that the reason underneath the effort changes what the effort does to you.
We are very good now at improving things and notably bad at asking what for. The tooling for optimization is abundant and cheap; the occasion for asking what the optimization serves is neither.
Part of this is that “why” questions do not have deliverables. You cannot ship the answer, and an hour spent on it looks, from outside and often from inside, like an hour spent doing nothing.
The result is a lot of skilled, disciplined people going quickly somewhere they did not choose, and noticing at forty.
Two things worth saying about the second aim in particular, because it is the one most easily softened into something harmless.
Goodwill in this tradition is not warm feeling and it is not approval. The classical practice extends it deliberately to people you dislike and to people who have harmed you, which is considerably more demanding than the greeting-card version. It is also, in that form, something that can be genuinely harmful advice — there is a real pattern of people being encouraged to cultivate goodwill toward someone they should be getting away from, with the practice functioning as a reason to stay.
The distinction I would hold: wishing someone well does not require proximity to them. You can want good things for a person and also never speak to them again, and any version of this teaching that collapses those two is being used against the person practicing it.
And harmlessness has a passivity failure. Not harming is not the same as helping, and a life organized entirely around causing no damage can be a very quiet way of doing nothing at all.
Note — goodwill does not require proximity
This practice gets used to keep people in situations they should leave. Wanting good things for a person and staying within their reach are separate decisions, and a version of the teaching that fuses them is working against whoever is practicing it.
Aims decay. One set on Monday is gone by Wednesday unless it is renewed, so this is a rhythm rather than a decision.
This list mixes primary texts, translations, scholarship and modern trade books, and the entries vary in how precisely they can be located. Quotations from the discourses follow Bhikkhu Sujato’s translations, freely available at SuttaCentral, cited by the standard sutta reference. Where a phrase is traditional and circulates in several renderings I say so rather than inventing a citation, and anything marked as a paraphrase is my own wording.
Clear sight is necessary and not sufficient — you can see accurately and aim at something that will cost you everything.
The question is not what you want but what the wanting is organized around. And goodwill, in the demanding classical form, still does not require you to stay within anyone’s reach.