“The best discipline is taming your mind stream.” 

The fourth cause of afflictions that arise is detrimental influence, which chiefly refers to “bad friends”. It does not necessarily have to be friends, but whoever negatively influences you. It could even be a family member. In fact, very often the people we consider “bad friends” are people whom we are very friendly with and whom we want to be our friends in a worldly idea of friendship.

In a Buddhist context, a bad friend is somebody who is going to incite your afflictions: they want to take you drinking, gambling, and out to the movies and a show to have a good time. They are the people who say, “Ah, save your money, don’t make a donation to the charity or the temple, keep it for yourself, we’ll go on a cruise in the Caribbean, we’ll go backpacking in the Himalayas.” These are the people who, in a worldly way, wish the best for us. They want us to have a good time. But because they do not have the Dharma perspective on life, their idea of happiness is not the same as the Dharma idea of happiness. They are not thinking about our future lives. They are not thinking about what kind of karma we are going to create. They are just looking at, “You’re my friend and I want you to be happy right now.” That criteria for Dharma friendship does not work, because that criteria can take us away from the Dharma.

A bad friend would be somebody who criticises the Three Jewels, or tells you to go get a life and not waste your time going to a retreat, or not waste your time being a monastic, go out and have a boyfriend, have a career, and make a life for yourself. We should be careful about who we associate with because those people can either trigger our virtuous seeds or our non-virtuous seeds to arise. We must be careful about this.

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