The Best News in the World

Tonight’s Visakha Puja. We’re commemorating the birth, awakening, and passing away of the Buddha, all of which happened on the date of the full moon in the month of Visakha. The awakening took place 35 years after his birth; his passing away, 45 years after his awakening. That’s the Visakha. Puja is paying homage.

What we did just now is called amisa-puja, paying homage with material things: flowers, candles, incense, walking clockwise around the sala. In the old days, that was a way of showing respect to someone. When you left that person, you didn’t just walk off. If you really wanted to show respect for him, you would walk around him three times, keeping your right to him, then go.

But as the Buddha said, the best way to show respect to him is not through material things, but through the practice: practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. So that’s what we’re trying to do now.

When the Buddha finally found the path to awakening, he started with right concentration. So let’s start with right concentration.

Focus on your breath. Keep your thoughts connected to the breath. Then evaluate the breath. How does it feel? You might try some long breathing for a while to see if long breathing feels good and energizing. If it does feel good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try shorter breathing. Or in short, out long; in long, out short. Heavy, light; fast, slow; deep, shallow. Experiment for a while to see what way of breathing feels best right now. We already use our powers of evaluation in the world, so bring them inside to use with something really close to you: how your breathing feels, to see what would feel good.

You’d think that this is something we’d know pretty well. But for a lot of us, we have trouble deciding, “Does this breath feel better than that breath?” So pay attention. Look at what you’ve got right here, right now. After all, the Buddha was focusing on his breath the night of his awakening. There’s no difference between his breath and your breath. The difference lies in the qualities of mind he brought to the breath. And you can develop the qualities that he did. So it’s good to think about how he developed those qualities.

By all accounts, he was a very sincere and dedicated person. Think about it: someone whose pleasures of his life were quite extensive—he was a prince, his father was king, and, as he said, the pleasures of his life were pretty refined—but still he realized that those pleasures were subject to aging, illness, and death. He himself was subject to aging, illness, and death. If he looked for his happiness in things that were no better than him, nothing would be accomplished. So he was willing to sacrifice everything, go out into the wilderness, to see if he could find something deathless.

That was a pretty audacious desire, a pretty audacious aspiration. And looking at him from the outside, the idea that he would succeed might have seemed very unlikely. Here he was, a prince, used to only the most refined pleasures. How was he going to live off of alms? How was he going to endure the dangers and fears that come with living in the forest? Well, it turned out that he had more character than it might have seemed from outside.

But as he said, those qualities of his character were things that anybody could develop: heedfulness, ardency, resolution. Heedful in the sense of realizing that if you don’t really pay careful attention to what you’re doing, you’re putting yourself into danger. But if you do pay careful attention, you can avoid dangers.

Ardent in willing to do whatever needs to be done. As he said, his quest was the quest for what is skillful. Whatever was skillful, he would do his best to develop it. He wouldn’t content himself with second best. Whatever was unskillful, he would do his best to abandon it. And as he said, in later years, when he abandoned something, he really abandoned it for good.

Then resolution: Once he took on a path, he stuck with it, so that he could judge whether it was a good path or not. He tried several false paths: with two different teachers at first, then off on his own, practicing austerities. The austerities lasted for six years. He got to the point where he realized that if he continued with the austerities, he would die but wouldn’t have attained anything special. So what was he going to do?

This involved a fourth quality, which he didn’t discuss much in terms of his own practice, but it must have been there: the conviction that there must be something deathless, and that there must be some way it can be attained by human effort.

So he cast about for another possible way. He came across right concentration. He had entered right concentration spontaneously when he was a child. He recollected that. Could this be the way? Something inside him said, “Yes.”

So he stuck with it. As he stuck with it, he developed other qualities as well: right resolve, right mindfulness, right effort, ultimately all eight factors of the noble eightfold path, finally developing right view, realizing that the issue that he was trying to solve was the problem of suffering, and that to get to the deathless, first you had to understand suffering, figure out its cause, develop a path of practice so that you can abandon the cause, and then realize the cessation of suffering. In other words, instead of going straight to the deathless, he had to first turn around and look at the opposite of deathless: his immediate experience of suffering.

This, too, would have been unexpected. Nobody else at that time taught anything like this. And in following this path, there was no one to encourage him. The five brethren who had looked after him as he was going through his austerities got upset when, in order to practice right concentration, he started eating more normally again. They decided, “He’s gone back to luxury. He’s given up on this path.” So they left him.

So there he was, all alone, with no one to encourage him. But again, he didn’t get discouraged. And he found that he could arrive at the answers to the questions he wanted to know.

To begin with, he found out, in the first of the three knowledges that led to his awakening, about his own previous lifetimes. The question was, if you’re looking for something deathless, what if you’re going to end anyhow with death, and that would be it, with no more death after that, nothing would be attained through trying to find the deathless. The end of death would come when you died.

So he asked the question: Had he been born before? Had he died before? And he saw, over the course of many, many eons, that he had been born and had died again and again and again. So he saw that this process wasn’t going to end on its own. It kept going. And it kept going up and down, up and down. At first it appeared to be totally random. As he said, it was like a stick thrown up in the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it falls splat in the middle. It looked pretty random. But the question was, was there a pattern to this? Was there a cause for the ups and the downs?

That question led to a second knowledge: knowledge of how beings die and are reborn in line with their actions—skillful actions leading to good destinations, unskillful actions leading to bad ones. The basic principle is simple, but he saw that the working-out was very complex. Sometimes you could do some good in this lifetime but if you had some bad karma from a previous lifetime or you gave up on your good actions or developed wrong view at death, then even though you did have some good karma, you’d get pulled down to a lower rebirth. And vice versa: Some people could do some pretty bad things but then they developed good karma afterwards, or developed right view at death, so that they could delay those bad consequences. Which is why simply looking at his own lives hadn’t taught him the pattern. He had to see it played out across the whole cosmos.

Now, some people back in those times had had similar insights in their meditation and had stopped right there, set themselves up as teachers, teaching rebirth, teaching karma. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. He was still looking for the deathless.

It came through his third knowledge, when he saw that getting to the deathless would require understanding the intentions that drove his actions. The question was, was there a way of understanding action? Was there a way of directing the mind so that it could act in a way that would actually lead to the deathless?

Again, that’s kind of unlikely. The deathless couldn’t be caused, so how could you cause it through your own actions? What he saw was that you didn’t cause it through your actions, but you could follow a path of practice that would lead you there. Like a road going to a mountain: The road doesn’t cause the mountain to be, your following the road doesn’t cause the mountain to be, but if you follow the road, you get there. And that’s what he did.

So he found the deathless. He found what he had been looking for.

This is the event that we commemorate: that night when he gained those three knowledges and then found total release.

There are many names for the deathless. Nibbana is the best known. Nibbana means the extinguishing of a fire. To understand that image, you have to understand how they saw fire back in those days. There was a belief that there was a fire element that permeated all things and that, if it was agitated, would cling to some fuel. As long as it was clinging to the fuel, it would burn—agitated and hot. But if it let go, it would be freed to go back to a cool, peaceful state. In other words, the freedom came not from the fuel letting go of the fire, but from the fire letting go of the fuel.

The image there means that you gain freedom not because you’ve stopped being held back by the things you cling to. It’s your clinging itself that’s causing the problem. When you stop the clinging, that’s when you’re freed. As he saw, we think about suffering as pain—mental pain, physical pain—but he saw that the suffering was in the clinging itself. again, something very counterintuitive, but it worked. And because it worked, that was what he ended up teaching for the rest of his life: how other people could find the same dimension that he had found.

This is why his awakening is such an important event in human history. He proved that human beings, through their own efforts, could put an end to suffering. He had been very reflective in how he had followed his path so that he could teach it well. So, as we chant, “Svākkhāto bhagavatā dhammo”—the Dhamma of the Blessed One is well taught: There’s nothing in the teaching that has to be improved, nothing that has to be brought up to date. It’s universally true and beneficial across space and time.

As he said, there are some truths that are categorical: truths that are true and beneficial across the board no matter what. One of them is that skillful actions should be developed; unskillful actions should be abandoned. The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths: what suffering is, what its cause is, the fact that it can be ended by putting an end to the cause, and that the way to put the end of the cause is through the noble eightfold path, which boils down to three things. Some of the factors are factors of virtue, some are factors of concentration, some are factors of discernment. As we practice these things, they lead to release.

So the Buddha would tell the story of his quest for awakening and what he learned on the night of his awakening. As he said, there were many more things he learned on the night of his awakening that he didn’t talk about. After he gained awakening, he stayed for seven weeks in the area of the Bodhi Tree where he’d gained his awakening, experiencing the bliss of release and probably learning a lot more things in his awakened state. But he taught just those three knowledges and especially the fact that following the third knowledge led to release, led to the deathless, because other people could use that teaching and do that, too.

So we reflect on how he got there, the qualities that he developed, the audaciousness of his quest—and the confidence with which he never let himself get discouraged or, if he did get discouraged, how he found ways of getting past it. That’s how release is found. That’s how freedom is found.

This is one of the reasons why you should keep on practicing. Never get discouraged. There may be setbacks. but there’s got to be a way around them. Remind yourself: Whatever the setbacks you may face, other people have faced with the same combination of strengths and weaknesses that you have—sometimes with more weaknesses than you have—but they were able to find their way around those obstacles.

If the story of the Buddha’s awakening seems a little bit too far away from your own experience, think about all the other people he was able to teach: lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds, but they were able to do it.

As the Buddha said, one of the important skills you learn as part of the path is not to let your mind be overcome by pain, not to let it be overcome by pleasure. In other words, whatever pain there may be—and here we’re talking not only about physical pain but also mental pain, and the pain of discouragement is one of them: It can be there in the mind, but don’t let it take over.

As for pleasure, there are going to be some amazing things you meet with on the path. But again, the Buddha provides an example. Think about how amazing it would be to recollect many eons of your own past lifetimes, or to see the whole cosmos and understand why beings are born the way they are. But as he said, he didn’t let the pleasure of those knowledges overcome his mind. He kept up with his quest, with the thought that there’s got to be something better than this. That’s why he said one of the secrets to his awakening was discontent with regard to skillful qualities. If he hadn’t attained the ultimate release, he wouldn’t rest content. There must be something better. He kept to that aspiration. And that’s why we have the Dhamma that we have now. We have the news that there are people who can do this. That’s the best news in the world.

Think about all those eons and eons where there are no Buddhas, and about how dark life must be in those eons. We look around us and the world looks pretty dark as it is, but there’s still the brightness that the Buddha showed can be found. He found it. He taught other people to find it. They’ve passed this knowledge on. Now it’s arrived to us. What are you going to do with it?

If you have any fighting spirit, you’re going to decide: “This would be a good goal to aim at.” And you learn to develop the same qualities the Buddha had. They’re all possible.

As he said, he wouldn’t teach impossible things. All the things he taught were possible. If we accept his challenge, they can become possible in our lives. If we don’t accept his challenge, then we’re making them impossible. But there’s no good reason to do that. So don’t let the bad reasons overcome your mind.