One of the Buddha’s most frequent admonitions is to live a life motivated by ahimsa, or non-harming. Before his awakening, the state of the world obviously troubled him, as he described here:

Violence gives birth to fear. Just look at people and their quarrels. Seeing people thrashing about like fish in little water and seeing them feuding with each other, I became afraid. Then I saw an arrow, hard to see, embedded in the heart. Pierced by this arrow, people dash about in all directions.

An important insight here is that this arrow is a foreign object embedded in the heart—which means it can be removed. When he removed his own arrow, the Buddha saw that “one does not get agitated, nor does one give up and collapse.”

Pulling out that arrow is a foundational theme in his teachings.

The Buddha saw conflict and violence everywhere he looked, but rather than trying to stop it all externally, he took a different approach. He looked within himself and examined his own mind. He found the source of his own pain and suffering, and removed it for good.

After removing their own arrows, his followers clearly saw how their own anger and fear came from struggling with their own pain—from simply not knowing how to be with that pain.

One misconception I hear a lot is that by removing his own arrow, the Buddha became passive, thoroughly chilled out to the point of entirely withdrawing from the world. In reality, he was very clear that it is only by removing this arrow that one can truly be an effective peacemaker.

He modeled fearlessness, moving toward conflict—both in the world and in the heart—not away from it, much like first responders intentionally entering the scene of a disaster.

This really is the heart of Buddhist meditation:

to move toward pain, opening to it, rather than running away from it.

From the contemplative perspective, there is only one approach to the distress caused by this arrow. As Pema Chödrön teaches, that approach involves “moving toward painful situations with friendliness and curiosity, relaxing into the essential groundlessness of our entire situation.”

Thankfully for us, there are folks around who follow this path of radical self-examination. They find that arrow embedded in their heart and remove it, choosing to no longer be driven by their reactions to a pain that doesn’t have to be there.

When I look at the world and feel deeply moved by the persistent violence, conflict, and suffering that grip so many corners of our planet, I can’t help but feel love, care, and hope for the real peacemakers of the heart.

The Buddhist path encourages us to be such a peacemaker.

This journey starts with us looking deeply within and removing the arrow embedded in our own heart—even though we may not always recognize it is there to be removed.