A Timeless Foundation

Ajaan Lee compares meditation to being in conversation with the properties in your body.

For example, with the breath: You ask questions, and in the beginning it doesn’t give many answers. But you keep on asking questions, and after a while it’ll start giving you some answers. In other words, you ask, “What kind of breathing is good for you right now?” In the beginning, you may not be too sure.

So experiment—try longer breathing, shorter breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light, and see how the body responds. Give yourself different types of breathing to compare. You begin to see that one feels better than the other. Or one may feel good to begin with, but not in the long term.

The important point is that you take a friendly interest in the breath, and after a while you get to know it. Then you can use it as a foundation, both while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed and as you go through the day. While you have your eyes closed, while you’re meditating, you want to get the mind as quiet as possible. Have as few disturbances inside as possible.

One of the ways of doing that is to take an interest in the breath. If it’s just in-out, in-out, pretty soon the mind goes out and doesn’t come back in.

Try to think of the breath as a whole-body process. Think of all your nerves breathing, all your blood vessels breathing. Get down to the little details.

As you start exploring in the present moment, there won’t be much room in your mind for distracting thoughts. They may come in, but if you’re really interested in the breath, they have no place to stand. You’re not feeding them, because you’re feeding your interest in the breath.

Then you can think of the different tetrads that the Buddha taught in the instructions on breath meditation. The first three tetrads are actually meant to be done together. You’ve got the breath, you’ve got feelings, you’ve got the awareness of the mind, and you want to bring those together. Be fully aware of the whole body. Be fully aware of the whole breath. Have the whole breath fill the body. Have a sense of ease fill the body.

Then what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication will begin to grow calm. Your mental fabrication—different perceptions and feelings—will begin to grow calm as well. The mind moves from a sense of being glad to be here, to getting concentrated, and then being released from disturbances.

Ideally, all three tetrads work together. If there’s any disturbance, if your mind can’t settle down, you can ask yourself, “Is the problem with the breath and the body, or is the problem with the feelings, or is the problem with the mind?”

Then you begin to investigate. Again, you take a friendly interest. That’s how you learn. That’s how the breath becomes a good place to be. That’s how it becomes your foundation.

As it gets more and more quiet inside, you can see events in the mind a lot more clearly. This is why the stillness of concentration, getting fully absorbed in the breath like this, is such an important part of gaining discernment.

To begin with, when the mind is more quiet, if there’s the movement of any thoughts, you’re going to see them a lot more clearly.

It’s like having mice in the wall of your house. If you’ve got the television blaring, the refrigerator going, the vacuum cleaner going, you’re not going to hear the mice. But if everything in the house is really quiet, you can hear the mice scratch here, scratch there, and get a sense of where they are. Then you can do something to get them out of the house. Just getting the mind really still is important for gaining discernment. It helps you see things that are subtle.

At the same time, there’s a sense of well-being in the concentration that makes it easier not to side with your defilements. As the Buddha said, there are defilements that, when they arise, you feel dispassion for them if you just look at them, and they go away on their own. Other defilements, though, don’t go away so easily, because secretly you side with them. They have their appeal.

But if you’ve got a sense of well-being going with the breath—it feels good coming in, it feels good going out, it feels good even when it’s not going in, going out, when it’s very still—then you’re not so hungry for your defilements. You’re able to step back from them and see that they really exist and they really do cause trouble in the mind.

So both for the sake of the stillness and for the sake of the sense of ease and well-being that you can create, you want to get the breath as interesting as possible, as pleasant as possible, as steady as possible, both for a pleasant abiding and for enabling you to see your defilements so that you can do something about them. This applies not only while you’re here sitting with your eyes closed, but also when you get up and move around.

For most of us, meditation is like a very fragile object that we’re holding in our lap. And as soon as we get up, it falls out of the lap and crashes on the ground, and it’s smithereens. You want to learn how to hold it even as you get up and as you walk around. In other words, try to maintain a sense of well-being with the breath.

At the end of the meditation, as you open your eyes, be very careful to remind yourself that even though the world of your visual range may become predominant, there’s still a sense of the energy in the body. Don’t let that get pushed out of the way. Think of it framing your visual field.

Otherwise you’re like the grasshopper I got when I was studying biology in high school. We had to dissect these enormous grasshoppers. I opened mine and it turned out that my grasshopper was pregnant. Her eggs filled her body, and her digestive system had shriveled up and been squeezed down into a little tiny corner.

That’s the way it is with the breath for most of us as we go through the day. We’re so interested in things outside—how we’re getting engaged with the world—that our awareness of the breath gets pushed into a little tiny corner, squeezed out.

So try to maintain as full a sense of the body as you can as you move around. This is going to require that you move around mindfully, with a lot of alertness.

The image the Buddha gives us of a man with a bowl of oil filled to the brim on top of his head. He’s going to have to walk between a beauty queen who’s singing and dancing on one side, and a crowd of people on the other side who are excited about the beauty queen singing and dancing. Behind him there’s a man with a raised sword. If the first man drops even one drop of oil, the second man is going to cut off his head.

So the Buddha said that if you see yourself in a situation like that, you’re going to put a lot of mindfulness and a lot of alertness into maintaining that balance of the bowl.

Of course, the beauty queen stands for all the attractive things in the world, and the crowd stands for your mind’s reactions to those attractive things in the world. You have to maintain your stillness in the midst of that. It’s going to take time, and it’s a skill that you want to develop.

In another image, the Buddha says, as you go through the day, it’s like having six animals on leashes. You’ve got a crocodile, you’ve got a bird, you’ve got a snake, you’ve got a dog, you’ve got a jackal or a hyena, and you’ve got a monkey.

If you tie the leashes together but don’t tie them to a post, then the animals will pull here, pull there, and usually the crocodile will be the one that’s the strongest, so it’ll pull all the other animals down into the river where they drown.

But if you have a strong post, then you tie the leashes to the post, and they can pull and pull and pull as much as they like, but they all have to end up lying down next to the post.

In the same way, as you go through the day, you want to be able to watch your mind’s reaction to its engagement with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. It’s so easy to get pulled out into sights that you like, or sights that you don’t like, sounds—any sensory input that has a pull on the mind. You may say, “I’m just going to be aware of what arises and passes away,” but it’s very easy to slip off into what you’re watching, because there’s nothing to hold you here.

But if you maintain your awareness of the breath—being mindful of the breath energies in the body, keeping that awareness as full as possible and not letting it get squeezed—then you have something good to stay with. At the same time, because the breath feels nourishing, you’re not going to be so hungry to feed off of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas.

That’s how you maintain restraint of the senses, and that’s how you carry the practice into daily life. You’re not just here to see things arise and pass away. You’re here to see when the mind goes out after something, why does it go out? What’s the allure? Why does the mind, for example, find those sights appealing?

Sometimes it’s not so much the sights themselves, but it’s whatever greed you may have, or whatever desire you may have, or whatever anger you may have about these things. That’s where the appeal lies. That’s why you need an alternative source of food that enables you not to get pulled into these things.

As the Buddha said, you want to see, when you look, why? Why are you looking? When you listen to something, why? Who’s doing the listening? That’s what Ajaan Lee would have you ask. “Are you doing the listening and looking, or is greed doing it? Is anger doing it?”

If these things are doing the looking and listening, they’re going to have a bad impact on the mind. But if you have an alternative sense of well-being, an alternative sense of food through staying with the breath, then you begin to see these things as they function and you don’t have to side with them. You don’t have to get pulled along with them.

What this means, of course, is that you take the breath as your foundation when you’re sitting here meditating formally and when you’re going out through the day. You want your sense of the breath to be as full as possible, as easeful as possible. When you’re walking around, you may not be able to sense whether the breath is coming in and going out. It may be a little bit too much to keep track of that, but you can sense the general quality of the breath energy in the body.

Make that your foundation. Make that your post.

You find over time that you can carry that bowl of meditation, the bowl of mindfulness, without spilling anything, or at least spilling as little as possible. And that, in Ajaan Fuang’s terms, is how you make your practice timeless.

In other words, you don’t wait to meditate only when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed or doing walking meditation. It’s an all-day affair. When you do it all day, it can build up momentum. Otherwise, it’s start, stop, start, stop, like traffic in a city.

You want it to be something that runs continuously, smoothly, regardless of the time of day.