Discernment Is in the Doing
August 23, 2024
There was a book a while back that discussed the Buddha’s teachings in the context of the four noble truths. The author didn’t know where to put the brahmaviharas in the context of those truths, so he just tacked them on at the end as a separate section.
Actually, the brahmaviharas are an important part of the noble eightfold path. They’re there in right resolve, which is a part of discernment. Once you’ve learned why there’s suffering and how suffering can be ended, you make the resolve to act in ways that will put an end to suffering.
So insight isn’t just a matter of registering facts. There’s a determination, a realization that something has to be done based on those facts—and you want to do it well.
The three resolves are: resolve on renunciation, resolve on non-ill will, and resolve on harmlessness. Non-ill will, of course, is goodwill. In fact, all the brahmaviharas come under that.
As for harmlessness, the expression of harmlessness is compassion. In other words, you see people who are down—they’re in a position of weakness and suffering—and you’re not going to pile on. You want them to get out of that suffering.
Of course, that applies to you, too. You see that you’re suffering, so you want to get out of that suffering. This is the motivation for our practice. You might say that of the two wisdom or discernment factors, this is the “heart” part—the heart, of course, being not only your emotions, but also your will, your determination that you’re going to do something about what you’ve learned. After all, what you learn in the four noble truths in terms of right view—the “head” part—is that there’s work to be done. The reason why there’s suffering is not because of anything else that someone else has done. It’s because of things you’re doing. So you’ve got to change your ways.
This is going to require effort, because lot of things you do are based on what you like to do. After all, the suffering itself is clinging. The cause of the suffering is craving. We cling to things that we want, we carve things that we want, things that we like. So lot of the path has to go against the grain.
This is why the Buddha, when he illustrated the path with images, used, one, warriors going into battle and then, two, craftspeople learning a craft like cooking or carpentry. There’s no image of anyone relaxing their way to nibbana.
So you have to have the right attitude, the attitude of a warrior.
What is the attitude of the warrior? One is that you’re going to take on battles that you’ve a chance of winning and that will be worthwhile to win. You don’t just jump into every battle. You ask yourself, “What’s to be gained by taking on this fight?” In this case, of course, the Buddha says that total end of suffering is totally worth the fight—and it’s a fight you’re going to have to do yourself. Nobody else can do it for you.
So as you’re sitting here, working with the breath, you’ve got to learn how to evaluate the breath on your own, to see what kind of breathing feels good for you right now. You won’t have a monk wandering through the room, telling you, “Now you’ve got to breathe in long, now you’ve got to breathe in short, heavy, light”—whatever. You’ve got to ask yourself what kind of breathing feels good. Then you try different alternatives. Then you learn how to pass judgment in a skillful way. This is where you get into developing a skill—because, remember, warriors need their skills, too. They have to be skilled at archery; they have to be skilled at strategy; they have to learn how to read a situation.
It’s like the people who go into the woods in Alaska, deciding that they want to have a pure wilderness experience, a pure nature experience. The ones who survive, though, are the ones who realize that sometimes you have to use modern skills and sometimes you have to use ancient skills. You’ve got to read the situation for what is needed. You can’t go in with dogmatic ideas. This is why the Buddha never taught, say, “an insight practice” or “an insight technique.” He said, simply, that there are questions you raise about how to get the mind still to begin with. Then there are questions about how to gain insight into the process of fabrication—in other words, your participation in creating your own experience: That’s what fabrication is. He raises the questions, and you’ve got to learn how to come to the answers.
This is a large part, again, of what a skill requires. So you think of the three attitudes that the Buddha said you have to bring to the practice. One is ardency—the desire to do this well. He puts that first. Then, you’re alert to see what you’re actually doing. Then you’re mindful, which means you bring in your memory of what you’ve done in the past, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. Then when you find yourself presented with a problem, you ask yourself, “What is the nature of this problem?”
Say that something unskillful comes up in the mind: “Is this something I should accept? Or something I should try to understand first and then get rid of it? Have I ever had dealings with this particular problem before? Have I been able to overcome thoughts of lust before or thoughts of anger before?”
You bring in your memory. If you can’t remember having dealt with this particular problem before, you try to use your ingenuity to figure out what might work.
Again, the Buddha gives you some ideas: Maybe you can change the way you breathe. Maybe you can change the way you talk to yourself. What perceptions are you holding in mind? Could you change them?
Those are some of the parameters. But you’re going to have to learn for yourself. When you’re alert to see something’s actually working, then you remember it for the next time around.
Now, of those three qualities, the one that’s most closely associated with discernment is the ardency. This again relates to right resolve—your determination to act on the proper way based on what you’ve learned. We’re not here just passively watching a process that’s being presented to us, ready-made. We’re in the process of shaping those things—which is why the Buddha said that when you’re practicing, you not only commit yourself to the practice, you also reflect.
This is where a lot of people fall down. They get some doctrinaire ideas from reading and then they just stick with them, stick with them, stick with them. They’re not really judging what’s working, what’s not working. They’re not using their ingenuity as to what could work better. They’re just putting the mind through a meat grinder. The meat grinders don’t give insight. Insight comes from looking at what you’re doing: suddenly seeing things that you’re doing that you never saw before, but you’ve been doing them all along. Now you can see whether they’re helping or whether they’re not.
So you exercise your discernment by acting on it. You strengthen it by using it. It’s like exercising your body. You don’t wait till your body is strong and then take it down to the gym. You take it down to the gym when it’s weak and then you learn how to strengthen it by using it. And, ideally, you don’t leave your strength at the gym. You use it in your other activities in your life.
The same with meditation: You’re not here just to have a nice meditation hour. You’re here to learn skills that you’re going to use as you go through the day, skills that require you to be active.
So, these are the active applications of wisdom, of discernment. You take what you’ve learned, you put it to use. You take the attitude of the craftsperson; you take the attitude of a warrior. There are a lot of things you’re going to learn from what you’re told, but a lot more things you’re going to learn from doing and observing what you’ve done.
And where are you going to get the strength to do all of this? From the concentration. That’s why we work so much in getting the mind still. It gives you strength so that you don’t simply give up, but it also provides you with an area in which you can watch what’s actually going on in the mind with a minimum of interference.
It’s like tuning a radio. If you tune into a station and you’re not quite there with the frequency, there’s going to be a lot of static, a lot of interference from other stations. But when you get the radio tuned just right, the static goes away, the interference goes away, and you can hear clearly what’s being said or the music that’s being played.
In the same way, when you get the mind really still, you can hear a lot of things in the mind, see a lot of things in the mind, that you wouldn’t have seen when it was running around.
So it’s not just work, work, work in terms of right effort. After all, when right resolve becomes noble, it turns into right concentration. The renunciation, the non-ill will, and the harmlessness all come together when the mind settles down in the right way.
So try to bring the mind to stillness. For some people, it’s very easy—just drop everything and there you are. But other people have trouble dropping things. They need to have reasons. They need to work through certain defilements before the mind can settle down. But whichever the case for you, realize that the pursuit of stillness is an important part of the path.
The Buddha, after all, put it as the central factor of the path. The other factors, he said, are its requisites, its aids. But right in the middle of the path is right concentration. It’s not in the middle of the list, but in the actual practice, that’s where it is.
So the effort to bring the mind into concentration and then to reflect on it, seeing what you can learn from a mind in concentration: A lot of the path is right there.