Priorities in Life

One time, King Pasenadi came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day. You may know the story.

The Buddha asked him, “Where are you coming from? What have you been doing?” And the king very frankly says, “All the sorts of things that someone who’s been made a king would do, someone who’s obsessed with gaining power and maintaining power.”

The Buddha asked him, “Suppose someone were to come from the east, someone you trust, and would say to you, ‘There’s a huge mountain moving in from the east, crushing all living beings in its path.’ Suppose someone else you trust came from the south, saying that there was a mountain moving in from the south, and the same from the west and the north: altogether, four mountains moving in, crushing all living beings in their path. Given this horrible destruction of human life, and how hard it is to gain a human birth, what would you do?”

The king says, “What else could I do but right conduct, Dhamma conduct?”

And the Buddha continues, “Well, I tell you, aging, illness, and death are rolling in, crushing all living beings in their path. What are you going to do?” And the king says, “What else but right conduct, Dhamma conduct.”

The king goes on to say that he realizes that when aging and death are moving in like that, no matter how strong an army you have, it’s not going to be able to fight them off.

So you can see that the king can pick up a message from the Buddha. The problem is we don’t know how far he was able to practice it. The story ends there. But we have other stories about the king.

One day he wants to go see the Buddha and he takes along his son. He asks the Buddha a few questions, one of which has to do with a report he heard in the palace of what the Buddha had said. The Buddha said it’s not true. So the king tries to find out who brought the report, yet he can never get to the bottom of the issue. His son blames somebody else. Somebody else blames the son.

Then the king goes on to ask the Buddha several questions. You can tell by the way he asks the questions that he’s kind of muddled in his head. The Buddha helps him to straighten out the questions and answers them. The king says, “Hmm, that’s reasonable.” Then he goes on to something else, and something else, scattered all over the place.

Meanwhile, the son starts asking questions when the Buddha talks about devas. He wants to know if there are devas who can overthrow other devas. When the Buddha talks about Brahmās, the son asks if there areBrahmāswho can overthrow other Brahmās. You can see what’s on his mind.

So here’s the king: He’s got all that power yet he’s got a son who’s thinking of overthrowing him. He’s got people in the palace he can’t trust. He has no idea who’s telling the truth and who’s not. And he can’t even stay focused on an issue long enough to form a proper question or to really take the answer and do something with it. All he says is, “Hmm, that makes sense. That sounds reasonable.” Then he moves on.

It’s a picture of the drawbacks of being in a position of power.

You have to think about this as you’re going through life, choosing a career. What kind of life do you want to look back on when it ends? What kind of opportunities do you not want to miss? What opportunities can you figure out that “It’s okay if I miss those.” You want to make sure you live a life where you can practice the Dhamma and you can see more than just that it makes sense. You want to be able really to see that it makes a difference in your life.

Otherwise, it just becomes something winsome. It sounds nice, but it doesn’t really go that deep. You have to create a life where you can let these things go deep.

I received a message from someone yesterday who’s sightseeing in Thailand right now. She was saying that as she goes around sightseeing, she begins to sense sensual desires beginning to flare up in her mind. She wanted to know what the problem was. I said it was a lack of restraint of the senses. When you go sightseeing, you don’t just look for the things that are pretty, you try to go look for the Dhamma lessons.

One time, when I first got here at Wat Metta, a group of laypeople came from Thailand and wanted to take a Ajaan Suwat on a trip to Yellowstone. So I stayed here and held down the fort here at the monastery. He and a couple of other monks went along with the laypeople. When he came back, I asked him what he’d seen in Yellowstone. He said, “Inconstancy.” In other words, he looked for the Dhamma.

Years later, when he went back to Thailand, people asked him what he’d seen in America. He said, “Inconstancy.” He knew how to look and knew how to listen. You want to live your life in such a way that allows you to look and listen in that way.

There’s a story of Ajaan Mun out in the forest. There was a monk from the city who was taken to see a Ajaan Mun, not because he wanted to, but because his teacher had told him to go. He asked the Ajaan Mun a challenging question: “Here in Bangkok, I run across problems in my meditation, problems in my practice. Even though I’m surrounded by wise people, people who are very knowledgeable, still there are lots of times when I run across a problem that nobody can answer. What about you out here in the forest all alone? Who can you go to for an answer? How can you hear the Dhamma?”

Ajaan Mun replied, “I hear the Dhamma 24/7, all day, every day, except when I’m asleep.” The city monk was appropriately taken aback and chastised. He said, “Well, that shows that you really know how to listen.”

So there are Dhamma lessons all around. But it’s a question of learning how to tune in to the Dhamma channel. Part of that has to do with your occupation, and part of it has to do with your general attitude.

Ajaan Fuang had some students in Bangkok who were successful in their careers but were also really good meditators. Their attitude was that any spare time they had was devoted to the practice. He had other students who had lots of time but didn’t get very far in their meditation because they didn’t have the same sense of urgency. The best cases were those who had extra time and the sense of urgency.

Where does the urgency come from? It comes from saṁvega, realizing that we’re stuck in this cycle and we go around and around and around because of our own defilements. But we don’t have to be stuck. That’s the pasāda part.* Saṁvega* basically sees, “If I don’t make any changes, this is what it’s going to be. It’s going to keep coming back, just the same old thing.”

Then there’s pasāda, confidence, when you realize, “Okay, there must be a way out.” We have to keep the two together: The confidence that there is a way out is what gets you to practice, along with the sense that if you don’t practice, there’s going to be trouble. That’s what gives a sense of urgency to it.

So as you’re practicing, you want to make sure you look at your life. Is this the kind of life that’s going to be good for the practice? If it’s not, what can you change? You don’t want to simply squeeze the practice into whatever little cracks there are in your life. Otherwise, it becomes like those little plants that you see growing out of the sidewalk in New York. They’re squeezed into the narrow confines of the cracks on the sidewalk. They come out looking all twisted.

You want the practice to have priority. After all, the way we live life normally in this society, society’s main interest is that you become a productive member of society and that you learn how to get along. But then you die. And they don’t say anything about what’s going to happen to you after you die. They’re not concerned about that. That’s where you’re on your own.

So, seeing that nobody else is going to do anything for you in that area, you’ve got to do something for yourself. You’ve got to devote your time and energy to seeing that what the Buddha said was true: There really is a deathless, something you can touch with the mind. And you can bring the mind to that threshold through your own efforts.

That’s the big issue of life. After all, that’s the issue that inspired the young Bodhisatta to go out into the wilderness to begin with. It’s because he wanted to find that deathless that we have the Dhamma. It’s a pretty audacious desire on his part. There was no guarantee there was any such thing . The concept was there, but nobody had found the answer, whether it was true or not.

We at least have the reports of some people who say that it really is true, and they seem to be reliable. But we can’t prove it until we prove it for ourselves. So that issue should take top priority, and the rest of your life should be ordered around it. That’s how you can guarantee that you live a life well—and that when you leave this life, you leave it without any sense of regret.

So we take the story of King Pasenadi as a cautionary tale. Here he had access to the Buddha. He could discuss the Dhamma with him. But we have no idea about how far he was able to get. We should take that as a warning, that it is possible to learn about the Dhamma but not to benefit fully from it. But it’s also possible to benefit from it. To whatever extent you can make the choices about your life, try to make them in such a way that you open up the opportunity to benefit as much as you can from what the Dhamma has to teach.