Protecting Yourself Against Yourself (sony)

One of the purposes of the Buddha’s teachings is to train you to be a good friend to yourself, to genuinely wish yourself well, and—as the chant said just now— to point yourself to worthwhile things. In another passage where he talks about the qualities of a good friend that’s not mentioned in that chant, the duty of a good friend is to look after you when you’re heedless.

The question is how you’re going to look after yourself when you’re heedless.

This is where it’s useful to think of yourself as many people. There’s a roundtable discussion going on in your head all the time. The question is always posed, “What to do next? What to do next?” Different members of the roundtable will have their different suggestions, and some of them are pretty heedless. You’re not paying attention to important things in life, and you’re getting distracted by something that’s minor, or you get totally wrong-headed notions into your head.

It’s good to have somebody inside who can alert you to this and to point out a better policy, something that’s safer and actually more in your true best interests.

As the Buddha said, “The self is its own mainstay.” The word for “mainstay” here—nātha—can also mean “protector.” You have to be your own protector, looking after yourself. This is one of the reasons why we have to develop mindfulness and alertness, along with a sense of heedfulness. Mindfulness can just keep things in mind. Heedfulness has to remind you of what’s really important, where the dangers are. So we develop mindfulness and alertness as part of the meditation, but heedfulness is what brings us to the practice to begin with.

The Buddha describes the point where he started to get on the right path. After having spent many years wandering off into the weeds, one of the first questions he asked himself was, “How about dividing my thoughts into two types, skillful and unskillful?”

The two types were based on where the thoughts would lead, what they would do to the mind, what kind of ruts they would create in the mind. If you keep thinking thoughts of sensuality again and again and again, it gets easier and easier to think those thoughts. If you think thoughts of renunciation again and again and again, it gets easier to think those thoughts. So, which is the better rut to get into?

He realized that thoughts imbued with sensuality, imbued with ill-will, or imbued with harmfulness would cause you trouble and cause trouble to others as well. Whereas thoughts imbued with renunciation, lack of ill-will—i.e., goodwill—harmlessness, compassion, would lead in a skillful direction. These are basically the thoughts of right resolve.

But then he noticed that even the skillful thoughts, if you thought them for a night and a day, wouldn’t cause any trouble for the mind, but the would get the mind tired with all that thinking. So he realized the mind needed a place to rest, and that’s how he started bringing it into concentration.

This shows the direct connection between right resolve and right concentration.

There’s another sutta Buddha talks about mundane right resolve and transcendent right resolve. Mundane right resolve is avoiding thoughts of sensuality, ill-will, and harmfulness. Transcendent right resolve is the factors of directed thought and evaluation that get you into concentration.

So there has to be a motivation to do the concentration to begin with, and the motivation comes from the realization that if you don’t train the mind, it’s going to get into some pretty unskillful habits.

Concentration gives you a better place to be. It’s your refuge from those thoughts but it also provides you with many other strengths as well—such as the strength of mindfulness, the strength of alertness, the strength that comes from knowing you have an internal source of well-being. This you can tap into when you need it. This becomes an important refuge on the path. This is when you’re beginning to provide yourself with a good refuge.

So it’s the concentration together with the factors of discernment that provide you with your protection. They show you the reasons for why we’re doing this, and they develop the qualities of the mind that will keep you circumspect.

It’s interesting that in the normal Thai definitions of the four bases of success, the fourth one, which is sometimes translated into English as “powers of analysis,” in the Thai translation, is “circumspection”—you look at things from all sides and don’t get carried away with just one topic to the point where you’re really ignoring something important. This is why concentration needs the protection of discernment. When you’re in concentration, you’re focused on one thing.

Now, right concentration has the qualities of discernment built right into it, with that directed thought and evaluation. You’re looking at the breath, evaluating how the breath is going, and then figuring out how to breathe in a way that’s more comfortable, that allows the mind to settle down. When you have a sense of comfort, how do you use that?

Similarly, in the stages of breath meditation, the Buddha points out at one point that the difference between tranquility and insight is that tranquility is developed by trying to get the mind to settle down and indulge in its object—in other words, indulge in the pleasant breath, really let yourself enjoy it—whereas discernment is developed by looking at the whole process of fabrication. What is the mind doing that shapes your experience of the body? What is it doing that shapes your speech, shapes the states of your mind?

There are three kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. Bodily fabrication is the factor that fabricates the body, which is the breath; the factors that fabricate speech are directed thought and evaluation; and the factors that fabricate the mind are perceptions and feelings—perceptions being the labels you put on things, and feelings being the feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain.

You notice, as you focus on the breath, that you’ve got all three of those right here. There’s directed thought and evaluation aimed at the breath, and the perception of breath that you hold in mind.

This afternoon, I had to explain—for the umpteenth the time—that “breath” here is not just the air coming in and out of the lungs; it’s the energy flowing through the body. You’ve got to keep that perception, that label of breath in mind, because it really helps as you focus on the breathing. When you’re trying to breathe in a comfortable way, think about the breath and evaluate the breath in a way that gives rise to a sense of pleasure, a sense of fullness, a fullness that doesn’t get squeezed out when you breathe out.

You’ve got all these fabrications here as you focus on the breath. The Buddha mentions this as well in his instructions on breath meditation. After focusing on short breathing and long breathing, you can breathe aware of the entire body.

The next step is to breathe in such a way that you calm down bodily fabrication, which means that you calm down the breath. In the section on feelings, he recommends ways of breathing that give rise to pleasure, give rise to rapture, and then you notice how those factors fabricate the mind. Then you try to calm that effect down as well—by trying to find feelings that are calming to the mind, ways of perceiving the breath, ways of perceiving what’s going on in your meditation in a way that calms down the mind.

The reason we focus here on the breath in this way is to sensitize ourselves to this element of fabrication that’s going on. We’re trying to develop tranquility and insight together, because they need each other. If you’re just tranquil, it’s very easy to get complacent. If you just do the work of insight, the mind doesn’t have the mental tools it really needs to see things as clearly as it could. It might have all the concepts in mind, but in order to see things really clearly, the mind has to get really still.

It’s these two qualities working together that give you your protection, so that you really can be your own best friend. The discernment is the friend who looks after you when you’re heedless. The concentration is the friend who’s sympathetic, shares food with you. It’s in this way that the tranquility and the insight become your friends and protectors. They offer you the refuge and support you need.

We like to often think of the quality of refuge as being protection from the world outside, but the dangers that come from the world outside are nothing compared to the dangers that can come up in the mind when it’s heedless, when it’s hungry. So we feed the mind well and we place a guard over it so that it doesn’t pose so much danger to itself. It’s right here that the genuine protection lies.

As in that sutta where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha: In many of the suttas, King Pasenadi is presented as kind of a spiritual innocent, someone who spent all of his life amassing power, never really thinking much about spiritual issues until one of his queens got him interested in the Buddha. Every now and then he comes to see the Buddha and says, “You know, I’ve noticed something in my dealings with people.” Many of the things he notices are things that all of us take for granted.

One day he comes after a really bad day in court. He was king, and back in those days the kings were also the judges. They were the ones who decided cases. He had to spend the day listening to rich people lying so that they could get more money. He says, ”You know, even rich people will lie to get more money. Isn’t that amazing?” Of course, neither you nor I are amazed by this, but for some reason he was.

Another day he comes to see the Buddha and he says, “You know, I’ve noticed that people who don’t behave well in terms of body, speech, and mind leave themselves open to danger, even if they have armies and all the other sorts of protection around them. Their own lack of skill, their own lack of care and circumspection of their actions, leaves them open to danger on all sides, even with all the armies that they have.” And the Buddha affirms that, “Yes, that’s true.”

So this is something that even King Pasenadi noticed: that the real dangers come from your own actions. This is why, by training the mind in tranquility and insight with the breath, you’re protecting yourself against the most important dangers in life. When you have this protection, you’re really safe.