Nobility through Inner Strength

Get your body in position—in a posture you can try to maintain for the whole hour without putting too much strain on any part of the body—because the mind has work to do.

Getting the mind into position is not all that hard, but keeping it there is going to be the work for the hour.

Getting it in position simply means focusing on the breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the sensation of the breathing. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change the rhythm: short in-breaths and long out-breaths, or long in and short out; short in, short out; deep or shallow, heavy or light, fast or slow. Try to get a sense of what breathing feels good for the body right now. If you’re feeling tense, try to breathe in a way that’s more relaxing. If you’re feeling tired, try to breathe in a way that gives you more energy. If you find that the needs of the body change, you can let the breath change, too, to accommodate them. Try to stay on top of things.

We’re trying to develop three qualities of mind as we do this. The first is mindfulness, which means keeping something in mind. In this case, keep in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. Why stay with the breath? Because it gives you an anchor in the present moment, and when you’re firmly in the present, you can watch the mind and see what it’s doing. When you see what it’s doing, you can see if anything needs to be changed.

That seeing is the second quality we’re trying to develop: alertness. We’re in the present moment not just to hang out. We’re here to watch what we’re doing, because what we do shapes our lives more than anything else. Your decisions about what to do, say, or think are the big forces shaping your life, so you want to do them with alertness. You want to know what you’re doing.

Then there’s the third quality: ardency. You want to do things well, because you realize that if you act in unskillful ways, you’re going to suffer, and the people around you are going to suffer, too. It’s not worth it. When unskillful thoughts come up in the mind, you know you don’t want them to get out into your words or deeds, so you try to stop them before they have that kind of influence.

One way of preventing them is to give the mind a good place to stay. All too often, the reason we do things that aren’t in our own best interest—or anyone else’s—is because we feel ill at ease inside: afraid of something, or just irritated by something. We don’t want to stay here, so we head out someplace else. The meditation is meant to make you feel comfortable here.

Once the breathing starts feeling comfortable, you can start letting that sense of comfort spread through the body. When the Buddha talks about breath, there’s the in-and-out breath, but there’s also the energy flowing throughout the body, and they’re connected. Once the breathing feels good, think of that breathing energy affecting the other energies in the body: energy going down the spine, down the arms, down the legs, out through the hands and the feet, energy circulating around in your head. Try to get a sense of how much movement there is in the body right now, and see if there are ways that you can bring all those movements into harmony.

With a sense of well-being right here, it’s a lot easier to say No to thoughts you know are unskillful. You look at the energy that would go into unskillful actions and the bad results that would come, and you say, “It’s not worth it. I’ve got something better here—a better place to stay.” That gives you strength.

Concentration is one of the ways, the Buddha says, that you strengthen the mind—by just staying in one place. There are five strengths altogether, used to counteract anything unskillful coming up in thought, word, or deed.

The first strength is conviction: the conviction that your actions really do matter. You’re not apathetic; you don’t say, “What the hell.” You realize that if you do something well, the results will be good, and that’s something no one else can take away from you. Your actions are your true possessions. Ajaan Suwat would often comment that the Buddha talks about not-self, not-self, not-self, but when he gets to karma, he says we’re the owners of our actions, like we chanted just now: “All living beings are the owners of their actions.” So you hold on to good actions, and staying right here gives you a good place to get more skillful in your actions.

Once you have conviction that your actions matter, the next quality is persistence—basically the ardency we mentioned just now. You want to do it well, and the wanting is important. You have to learn how to motivate yourself. The Buddha didn’t say all kinds of desire are bad. Some kinds are on the path. The desire to be careful about your actions, to look at what you’re doing and saying and thinking, and give some importance to them, give some weight to your actions: That’s a good desire.

So you learn how to motivate yourself in different ways, starting with the reflection we had just now, that we’re the owner of our actions, so we have to be careful. That’s called heedfulness. Based on that is compassion. You don’t want to harm yourself, you don’t want to harm others.

There’s a passage in the Canon where a king is in his private chambers, alone with his queen. In a tender moment, he turns to her and asks, “Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” And of course, you know what he’s hoping. He’s hoping she’ll say, “Yes, your majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” But this is the Pali Canon, so she doesn’t say that. In fact, she says, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself. And how about you? Is there anybody you love more than yourself?” And the king has to admit she’s right: There’s nobody he loves more than himself. So that’s the end of that scene. It didn’t go where the king wanted it to go.

Instead, he goes down to see the Buddha and reports the conversation. The Buddha says, “You know, she’s right. You could search the whole world over and you wouldn’t find anybody that you loved more than yourself. At the same time, everybody else loves themselves just as fiercely.” And then the conclusion the Buddha draws from that is not that this is a dog-eat-dog world. Instead, he says, because of that, you shouldn’t harm anyone or get them to cause harm.

You think about his reasons. One is that if you love yourself and mistreat other people, it’s not fair. Secondly, if your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for your happiness. They’re going to do whatever they can to destroy it. So if you truly want to be happy over the long term, you have to take other people’s happiness into consideration as well. That’s the basis for compassion. That’s one of the ways we motivate ourselves to want to practice. We see the harm that we’ve done with our lives, things we’ve said, things we’ve done, and we don’t want to cause that harm anymore. That’s a good motivation for the practice.

The next strength is mindfulness, which, as I said, is the ability to keep something in mind. Here you try to keep in mind the fact that you want your mind to stay under control, but you don’t want the control to be tight or oppressive. Learning how to keep the mind with a sense of well-being in the body is a really good way of controlling it, because it has a sense of freedom even in the control, being where it wants to be. In the beginning, it requires a little bit of forcing it, but after a while, it’s like training any animal. Eventually, the animal decides that being well-trained is actually happier than being not-trained. Then it’s willing to behave. The mind is the same way.

But you’ve got to keep this in mind: that what really matters is your actions. All too often, it’s tempting when you see other people behaving in outrageous ways—ways that are threatening, ways that are unfair—for fear to take over, for anger to take over, and you forget everything that you may have known about what’s skillful and what’s not. It just gets pushed to the side. Mindfulness is what keeps reminding you: “No, no, you’ve got to stay here. Be careful about what you do.” If there’s a choice between breaking your precepts to gain something, or sticking with the precepts and having to lose something, remember that the better choice is to stick with the precepts and lose whatever has to be lost. Things outside can always be replaced, but the virtue of your mind, once you’ve destroyed it, is hard to repair. The things you do with the mind when you lose your virtue, you regret for the whole rest of your life. Remind yourself of that when you’re tempted to do something like that. That way, you can save yourself a lot of regret.

So mindfulness takes the lessons you’ve learned about the importance of your actions and whatever skills you’ve developed when developing skillful qualities in the mind and abandoning unskillful qualities, and it keeps those lessons in mind so that you can apply them all the time, not just when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed.

The fourth strength is concentration, the ability to keep the mind with one topic, regardless of whatever else comes up inside or outside. You hold to your conviction, you hold to your sense of well-being inside that you develop here, and that strengthens you. You remember that this is your territory here, the energy inside the body. You don’t have to let anybody else invade that space. The more fully aware you are of the body and of the breath energy throughout the body, the more this really is your space, your safe space inside. Having that sense of solidity inside makes it a lot easier to do what you know is right.

This is where discernment, which is the fifth strength, comes in. You can hear a lot of things about what the Buddha said or what others say about what you should do and shouldn’t do, but you’ve also got to learn how to observe things on your own. Notice when you’re doing something unskillful that you can stop and correct it. This is one of the things we learn in the course of meditation, even in simple things like staying with the breath. If you find that you’re losing your focus, you bring the mind back to the breath, and then you try to figure out how to keep it here the next time. If there’s an impulse to go away, how do you say No to the impulse? How do you learn to keep the mind here with a sense of well-being?

That way, you’re developing your own discernment. It’s through trying to be skillful that our discernment develops. Otherwise, we can learn about all kinds of wise things in the books, but they just stay there as wise words. They don’t become our wisdom until we realize, “Okay, if I can change the way I act in a positive direction, that’s wisdom in action.” Whatever skills you need in learning how to talk yourself into doing the skillful thing and abandoning the unskillful thing, that’s all discernment. It’s a strength because you can carry that with you wherever you go. You see the results in your own actions, and it becomes a lot clearer and a lot more convincing. Your conviction in the power of your action grows as your discernment about your actions grows as well.

All these qualities work together. We can take this potential we have, our ability to make choices, and focus it in the right direction, the direction that gives us the life we want to lead—a life in which we can behave in an honorable way, regardless of what people around us are doing, knowing that there’s a nobility that comes with that. It’s an innate nobility, innate in the sense that it comes naturally with acting skillfully. It doesn’t come from being born in this clan or this family or whatever. It’s the nobility of doing the right thing, regardless of situations around you. That requires strength, and this is how the strength is developed.

Simple things like developing these qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency: You can apply them not only when you’re focusing on your breath, but also when you’re focusing on any task that needs to be done. These are the qualities that keep you strong in protecting your most important possession, which is that state of your mind. Even though there may be slips and falls as you try to stay on the breath, just keep coming back, coming back, coming back, because the rewards are really fine.