Test Everything

It’d be really useful someday to make a collection of fake Buddha quotes, things attributed to the Buddha that had nothing to do with anything he really said, or only a very glancing relationship. One I remember seeing was, “Doubt everything—the Buddha,” which is hardly what he said. Doubt, after all, is a hindrance. It’d be better to say, “Test everything,” because that changes the dynamic: When you’re free to doubt everything, you’re the one who has to be satisfied by somebody else’s explanation. But if you’re asked to test things, then you’re the one who has to put things to the test, and you have to put yourself to the test. And some things, in order to test them, require a lot of effort on your part.

This is why conviction is one of the strengths on the path, because the only way you’re going to test the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment is if you put a lot of effort into them, a lot of time, make a lot of sacrifices. That’s why mundane right view includes, as one of its propositions, that there are people who know this world and the next. They know the principle of karma through direct knowledge and through right practice. In other words, there are people who know more than you do. That’s a matter of conviction. Conviction is something that has to be tested. But it’s your working hypothesis. It’s what gets you going to begin with, and keeps you going—because there are times when the practice hardly unfolds on its own.

Someone raised an issue recently saying that the practice is something that just happens naturally. You don’t really do it. You just allow it to happen, in the same way that when you open your hand, the cool breeze that blows across it is not something you created.

It’s not that opening your hand is more natural than using it to grasp, it’s just that it’s easier. But the Buddha never said that the practice would be easy for everybody. There are some people, he said, who have a quick and easy practice. There are others whose practice is quick but it’s painful. For others, slow but easy. And for others, slow but painful. Of course, if we could choose, the way you choose on a menu, everyone would go for the quick and easy practice. But you can’t choose. A lot of it has to do with your past karma, the strength of your defilements. The stronger your defilements, the more painful the practice is going to be. You can take it as pretty certain that most of the people whose practice was going to be quick and easy were collected by the Buddha when he was alive. So here we are, left with a long practice.

That requires faith, a sense of conviction. This has to do with the sense of authority that the Buddha assumes. He has the authority of an expert. He didn’t create us. He doesn’t claim to be a god. So he can’t simply tell us what to do and have us feel obligated to do it because he created us. But he does present himself as an expert. He’s gone through many paths. He’s explored lots of paths. And he can remember them all. He can see which path works and which paths don’t. So he’s willing to give us advice based on his experience, based on the skills he developed. So conviction means accepting the fact that the Buddha seems to be an expert and you would do well to try to develop his skills to see if they lead to the happiness that he promises.

So it’s not a matter of changing the Dhamma to suit our preferences. We have to change ourselves to fit in with the Dhamma. This is one of the principles that Ajaan Suwat would talk about an awful lot. He said that it was one of Ajamn Mun’s favorite topics: practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. In other words, the expert tells you this is what has to be done, and you say, okay, “I’m going to give it a serious try.” And you do it with respect. You do it with conviction. You know that you don’t really know yet. Knowledge is something that comes only with awakening—real confirmed knowledge. Confirmed conviction comes with stream entry. Confirmed knowledge comes with arahantship. But you look at the path and it seems likely that this is going to lead somewhere good. At the very least, it’s a good path to be on. It may have its difficulties, it may have its barren stretches, but what does it ask you to do? It asks you to have conviction. Be persistent. Develop mindfulness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, gratitude. All of these are good things to be developing.

So we approach the path with a certain humility. On the one hand, the Buddha is encouraging us to have faith in our own abilities to test the path—it’s something we can do—but at the same time we have to remember that there are people who know more about this than we do, people more experienced on the path.

At the very beginning, when the Buddha asked Rahula to test the teachings in his actions, he said to make sure that when you’ve done something unskillful, you talk it over with someone who’s more advanced on the path than you are. You want to tap into their experience. So you’re not left with trying to reinvent the Dhamma wheel every time you make a mistake. At the same time, you need to compensate for your own blind spots. This is the way in which admirable friendship is the whole of the practice. Without someone to point out your blind spots and to suggest possibilities that might not have occurred to you, it’d be a long uphill slog. It’d be hard to maintain it, hard to keep it up.

So we take refuge in the Buddha as an example, we take refuge in the noble Sangha as an example: that this is what human beings are capable of, this is what human beings can accomplish. Then you try to internalize their qualities to see if they really work as promised. Sometimes this means patience, and the results are not going to happen as quickly as you wanted them to. Sometimes the results seem to disappear, and you find yourself back at square one. But you have to remember that the mind is a complex thing. You go back to square one because there’s some unfinished business back there.

And there’s another kind of patience, the patience that, when the mind does get into concentration, and you say, “Okay, what’s next, what’s the next step?” the patience requires that you stay with that state of concentration. This is what requires heedfulness, because sometimes it’s all too easy to say, “Well, the mind is rested enough for now. Now I can think about something else or do something else.” But the concentration has to be mastered. That requires sticking with it, well past the point where your immediate need for rest or refreshment has been taken care of. You’re working on a skill here. You want to keep the mind focused on the spot that you’ve determined for it to stay. After all, when you’re going to try to develop insight, it requires that the mind be very, very steady and not be moved even in the slightest way by the currents that come through it.

So the practice of meditation is not just a matter of technique. It’s a cultivation of good qualities of the heart: conviction, humility, respect, gratitude, patience, a willingness to test yourself as you’re testing the Dhamma.

And to give the test everything you’ve got.