Practice Without Gaps

When you meditate, you’re setting up an intention. Here, the intention is to stay with the breath. Then you want to maintain that intention. The original intention is not so hard, but maintaining it—that’s where you run into difficulties, because the mind does have a tendency to jump around. Then it’ll come back, and then somehow it jumps again without your even realizing that it’s jumped. So you have to train yourself to be more alert to what’s going on in the mind, and try to make your alertness and mindfulness continuous. Only then will they have a chance to grow.

These are qualities we have already, just that they’re sporadic. They tend not to be really consistent or continuous, which is why we don’t see that they have much power. It’s when you make them continuous that they develop power. So do your best to stay with the breath.

One way of ensuring that is to make the breath interesting to focus on. You can recall that the way you breathe is going to have an impact on your body and on your mind. So you want to adjust the way you breathe—see what kind of impact it has, learn from your experience as to what works and what doesn’t work in creating a sense of well-being. You begin to notice that when the breath gets more comfortable and easeful, you can think of that sense of comfort and ease spreading around the body. That makes it even more interesting to stay here.

As the concentration gets more continuous, it really does have an impact on the mind. It strengthens the mind. Concentration is, basically, mindfulness practice that has become continuous.

You remember. With mindfulness practice you set up one frame of reference—in this case, it would be the body in and of itself. The way you breathe right now is one example. Then you try to put aside all thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. That means any thoughts about the world, what you like about it, what you don’t like about it—just put those aside. Maintain your original frame of reference. As it gets more and more solid, that’s when the mindfulness practice turns into concentration practice.

As I said, mindfulness and concentration are things we already have. We just have to learn how to make them continuous so that they actually begin to make a difference. This is a principle that you find throughout the Buddha’s teachings.

You start with the precepts: There are precepts against killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants. If we say the someone doesn’t observe the precepts, that doesn’t mean he’s killing all the time, stealing all the time, or having illicit sex all the time. In fact, as the Buddha himself noted, even with people who misbehave a lot, it’s not the case that the times they’re breaking the precepts are more than the times they’re not breaking the precepts. It’s simply that there are these big, gaping holes in their precepts—that’s the problem. And because there’s a lack of continuity, the precepts don’t have much power.

As the Buddha said, when you make up your mind to observe the precepts in all cases and you actually do follow through, you’re giving universal safety to the whole world. In other words, there’s nothing anybody anywhere has to fear from you in any circumstances. And when you give universal safety, you get a share in that safety yourself.

At the same time, as you keep reminding yourself that you’ve got to observe the precepts, you’re strengthening your mindfulness. And, in order to make sure that you are observing the precepts, you have to be alert to what you’re doing and saying and what your intentions are—because, as you know, if you break a precept unintentionally, it doesn’t count as really breaking the precept. So you have to be especially careful about your intentions, making sure they’re always skillful. If any unskillful intentions come up in the mind, you just say No. You don’t go with them. In that way, as your virtue becomes more continuous, it becomes a good foundation for your concentration. You get used to not making exceptions for your likes and dislikes.

This is one of the problems of the world right now. There are people who say they honor the precepts and the principle that you shouldn’t be harmful—except for these cases or those cases, and the list of exceptions keeps getting longer and longer and longer, until the precept has no meaning. It’s basically, “I’ll observe it when I feel like it and not when I don’t.”

In that case, the precept hasn’t been given the honor it deserves because, remember, the Buddha said we have to respect the triple training, and that means respecting the precepts. When we respect our likes and our dislikes more, there’s no training there, except for training in being devious with yourself, training in not being consistent, in not being true to yourself.

What this means, of course, is that when you observe the precepts, it’s not just a matter of mindfulness and alertness and ardency. It’s also a matter of honesty and discernment. There will come times when you suspect that if you observe the precepts, some kind of harm will happen. Now, in some cases, the Buddha says, remember that the things that might be harmed—in terms of your wealth, your health, even your relatives—are less important than the precept. But there will also come times, say, when you have some informatio somebody wants that information, and you know they’re going to abuse it: You have to learn some way not to give the information but at the same time not to lie, not to misrepresent the truth. That’s going to require discernment—on how to change the subject, how to avoid answering the question. Learning that kind of discernment will be useful when you start dealing with your own defilements as you try to get the mind into concentration. You have to learn how to think strategically to outsmart the strategies of the defilements.

So we don’t wait until our precepts are perfect before we practice concentration or develop discernment. The more consistent we can make our precepts, the easier it will be to get the mind into a good, consistent concentration—the kind of concentration that will make a difference in the mind. And the more discerning we are in observing the precepts, the more we develop the discernment that will outsmart our defilements.

When Ajaan Suwat was leading a retreat back in Massachusetts, on the last day of the retreat they asked about how to take meditation practice into daily life. He responded by talking about observing the precepts. Some of the people got upset. They thought his implication was that laypeople couldn’t practice in daily life, so they shouldn’t even try—they should just content themselves with the lowly precepts. But as he later explained, he said, “No, an important part of mindfulness practice and concentration practice is creating a good foundation in the way you live your life.” As you get practice in not making exceptions in instances where the precepts might be awkward or cause you to suffer some financial loss or loss of your health: When you’re used to not making those exceptions, then when the time comes to meditate, you’ll get used to not making exceptions when the mind says, “Hey, I’ve got a whole hour to meditate here. Let me take five minutes to think about x or think about y.” The mind will have developed the habit of staying true to its intentions, and the factors of the path will have a chance to build up momentum as they become more and more continuous.

Let the gaps in your precepts, the gaps in your concentration, get smaller and smaller, until finally, the precepts do become a normalcy for your behavior, and concentration becomes a normalcy for your mind. The Pali word for precept, sīla, can also mean normalcy. That’s what you want—a mind that’s consistently normal, not just normal from time to time; concentration that’s normal consistently and not just from time to time.

So develop this habit of being true to the practice and giving the practice respect over and above your likes and dislikes, because your likes and dislikes are pretty fickle. They can change from moment to moment. But the principles of the practice don’t change. What they were in the time of the Buddha, they are now. Those are things you can depend on.