Refuge & Strength

In Thailand, when people come to Buddhism, they come with a very strong sense that they’re coming for protection. People ask for amulets. People ask for gatha, which are protective phrases to repeat over and over again. Other people come for training in how to train their minds, realizing that the big dangers from which we need protection are not only outside, but also inside.

Now, we do live in a dangerous world. But we’re also dangerous people. We have to keep that in mind.

A question today: How can we maintain our goodness when there’s so much evil in the world? The answer is, you maintain your goodness in spite of the evil of the world. The Buddha didn’t live in a perfect time. There was warfare, there were famines—all kinds of outside dangers. But as he said, these are not the really serious ones. The serious ones are things that we can do inside that are unskillful. We can often make the outside world our excuse for doing unskillful things. But that just keeps us coming back again and again and again to the same old imperfections. We want to lift our minds above that.

That’s why the Buddha recommends that we develop strength inside. The strengths we develop here will be our refuge—and they start with the conviction that what we do is the most important possession we have.

We often repeat that chant, reflecting, “We’re subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation,” which, if we stopped there, would be very depressing. But the way out is suggested by the fifth reflection, which is that “We’re the owners of our karma.” We take this on conviction.

When the Buddha taught karma and rebirth, he didn’t say that he could prove these teachings to anybody, but that we could be find through the practice that these things are true. So we have to have conviction in the practice first: conviction that what you do makes a difference, and that you’re responsible for your actions. That’s placing something of a burden on you.

I was talking with someone last weekend who was saying that the thought that your actions have consequences makes you feel very stressed out. And you wonder what kind of world that person would want to live in, where actions didn’t have consequences. The fact that our actions have consequences means that there’s hope: that we can learn how to develop our actions in a way, perfect our actions in a way, so that we’re not causing danger to anybody. And it’ll provide protection: We protect others, and our actions then protect us. So we should take joy in the fact that we do have this agency.

Think of the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula when Rahula was seven years old. Before you do something, ask yourself, “This action that I want to do, will it cause any harm?” If the answer is yes, if you think that it’s going to cause harm, you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, go ahead and do it. While you’re doing it, you ask yourself, “This action I’m doing, is it causing any harm?” If you see any harm, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, continue. When the action is done, ask yourself, “This action I’ve done, did it cause any harm?” If it did, go talk it over with someone who’s more advanced on the path. Make up your mind not to repeat that mistake again. If you don’t see any harm, then the Buddha says to take joy in the fact that your training is progressing, and then keep on training.

Notice the agency in there: This action that I want to do, that I am doing, that I have done. The Buddha is teaching responsibility from the very beginning.

Some people ask, “But what about the teaching on not-self?” Well, the Buddha never taught that there is no self. In fact, there was a time when one monk tried to create a no-self teaching out of what the Buddha taught about not-self: The actions done by what’s not-self wouldn’t affect anybody, ao nobody’s responsible, nobody’s harmed, and you can do what you want. The Buddha called the monk a fool.

When the Buddha talked about self and not-self, he talked about them as actions, strategies. You claim certain things to be your self because you feel that it’s worth it in your quest for happiness. Other things that are not worth laying claim to are not-self. We do this all the time. The Buddha is basically saying, “Learn how to do it skillfully.” What things really are worth holding on to? What things really are worth laying claim to? You’ll find as you progress in the practice that that value judgment will change, the boundary lines between self and not-self will keep moving, until you reach a point where you don’t need a sense of self anymore because you’ve found the ultimate happiness. You don’t need to label things as not-self, either, because you’ve found the ultimate happiness, so there’s no question of having to decide what to hold on to and what not. So “self” and “not-self” are both strategies that you no longer need to use at that point.

But as you’re getting started on the path, you have to develop a sense of responsibility. As you look into your sense of responsibility, the actions for which you claim responsibility, you learn. This is how you purify your mind, the Buddha said.

So this is our strength: We have our actions; we have our thoughts, our words, our deeds. And we can make them skillful, partly by depending on the teachings that have been handed down, and partly through our own investigation of what we observe as we try to put those teachings into practice.

That relates to another strength, which is the strength of discernment. The Buddha puts that strength at the very end of the list of strengths, but they all work together. As you discern what your actions really accomplish, you begin to notice which ones are skillful in which situations, and which ones are not. That becomes your own knowledge, your own strength. So take advantage of that.

The principles of causality are right here, showing themselves all the time. It’s one of the reasons why, when the Buddha gave his shortest explanation of what knowledge he had gained in his awakening, it was a principle of causality: Some things happen as the results of actions from the past; other things come from choices you’re making right now; and those choices right now don’t have to be determined by the past. You can always make a fresh beginning. You can then use that knowledge to develop the other strengths.

Like the strength of the persistence. In other words, when you put an effort in, you realize that your habits are unskillful, and it’s going to take an effort to overcome them, to change them, but you realize it’s worth it. So you make the effort.

Strength of mindfulness, realizing that you have to keep this principle in mind: that your actions really do make a difference for your happiness. And you have to depend on yourself. The Buddha points the way, but you have to do the walking.

We find this especially as we develop the strength of concentration. You can start, say, with thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for those around you, realizing that you’re doing this because you need that goodwill as your protection. If you can have ill will for anybody, it’s going to be very easy to act unskillfully around that person, and that then becomes your karma. So you develop goodwill for people not because they’re good, not because they deserve it, but because you need it. It’s your protection.

We tend to think of goodwill as being soft and fluffy. But you read the teachings of the ajaans, and they were living in the jungle. There were dangers all around. And they often had to depend on their goodwill, dealing with the bandits who lived in the forest, dealing with the wild animals. Again and again and again they found that their protection was in the strength of their goodwill.

I think I’ve told the story of one of Ajaan Fuang’s students. We had a visitor to the monastery one time, and her friend who lived in the monastery had told us ahead of time that this woman had a strange problem. Every time she tried to meditate, she would start shaking. So she came, sat down to meditate in front of Ajaan Fuang, and sure enough she started shaking.

Ajaan Fuang had another student, Pensri, who was quite psychic, and he said to her, “Check her out. See what’s happening.”

So the Pensri got into meditation and she saw two beings behind this woman, shaking her violently. She tried to stop them, but they turned on her. It scared her so much that she ran out of the room and vomited.

She came back in and told Ajaan Fuang what had happened, and Ajaan Fuang said, “You fool, you have to protect yourself.”

His recommendation was that she fill her body with light—or if you lack any sense of light inside, fill the body with good breath energy—and then spread lots of goodwill. Then talk to the beings. The beings were a lot more cooperative then.

She asked them, “Why are you shaking this woman?”

They said, “In a previous lifetime, she was our daughter and she killed us. We don’t want her to get away.”

“Is there anything that she could do now to please you so that you could stop this?”

They said, “Have her build a Buddha image.”

Well, we were building a Buddha image at the monastery at the time. So when Pensri told this to Ajaan Fuang, he said, “You can’t say that to her. It’ll sound like we’re trying to use our powers to gain money. So we’ll have to let her go.” But the lesson there, of course, is you protect yourself with your goodwill. People are a lot less likely to harm you if you have goodwill for them. And even if they do try to harm you, you can protect yourself.

Remember the Buddha’s image of the bandits who are sawing you into little pieces. He said, “Even in the case like that, you need to have goodwill for them as your protection.” Not protection from being sawn into pieces, but protection from going to a bad place after you die. If you have ill will for them, that becomes a motivating force for your rebirth, which becomes revenge, which is not a good force to have determining your rebirth. So for the well-being of your mind, you need to have goodwill all around.

The image the Buddha gives is of a conch player. In those days, trumpets were made out of conch shells, which you would blow like a horn. The sound goes in all directions. It doesn’t go only to the people you want to have hear it, or only to the people you like. It goes to everybody. All around. That’s the shape of goodwill—all-around—and that way you protect yourself all around. It’s a form of strength.

So you want to work on your strengths—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—doing whatever needs to be done to strengthen these qualities in the mind.

If you have trouble getting the mind to settle down, sometimes you have to think your way to settling down. Ask yourself, “What’s the problem?” Is it the breath? Well, work with the breath. Is it attitudes you’ve picked up from the day? Try to counteract them. There are different ways of contemplating that can counteract, say, lust, anger, or doubt. The best way to counteract doubt, the Buddha said, is to investigate what in your mind is skillful right now, what in your mind is unskillful. See what happens when you follow the skillful impulses, see what happens when you drop the unskillful ones. You see for yourself.

But just looking at the qualities of the mind, if you find that the mind seems to be out of control, remind yourself: The mind is like a committee. There are lots of different voices in there, but you don’t have to listen to all of them. You don’t have to identify with them. Let them be other members of the committee. You identify with the member that wants to settle down with the breath. And then you just hold on to the breath. Even as those other voices are chattering away, you don’t have to get involved in the chatter.

It’s in this way that you strengthen your concentration through strengthening your discernment. So even though there’s a list—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—and it’s explained in ways that make it sound like you go from the first to the second to the third, fourth, fifth, there are also other ways in which their relationship is explained. For instance, the discernment comes back and then strengthens your conviction, and each of the different strengths fortifies the rest. In this way, you provide yourself with the protection that comes from within: from the strengths of your mind.

So you focus here to keep yourself safe everywhere. After all, what does it mean to be safe? It means you have something of value inside and you can protect it. Fortunately, it’s something that no one else can take—but you can throw it away, so you have to be careful. This is why these strengths, the Buddha said, are supported by heedfulness: realizing that what you do really makes a big difference, so you have to be careful in what you do. There are dangers there, but there’s also the possibility of avoiding those dangers. That’s what heedfulness means, and that’s where our true safety lies.