Endurance & Restraint

Tonight’s Māgha Pūjā. Māgha is the name of a month, roughly corresponding to February. Pūjā means homage. We’re not paying homage to the month, though. We’re paying homage to the fact that, on the full moon of this month, during the very first year of the Buddha’s teaching career after his awakening, there was a spontaneous meeting in Veluvana, the first monastery given to him. 1,250 arahants all met with him spontaneously, without any prior arrangement. They were probably the 1000 arahants who comprised the three Kassapa brothers and their followers, plus the 250 who had followed Moggallana and Sariputta in leaving their previous teacher and becoming students of the Buddha. All of these arahants were in the vicinity of Rajgir—Rājagaha—and they all came to see the Buddha that afternoon.

Basically, he gave them an account of his various teachings, from the most basic up to the most advanced, before sending them out to teach. It’s called the Ovāda Pāṭimokkha. We don’t have the full text of the talk, but we do have the verses that the Buddha stated at the end, in which he summarized the main points.

This is an important event in his teaching career. Nine months after his awakening, he now had more than a thousand students to go out and help him teach, to spread the Dhamma. So it’s an event that we remember, along with Visākha Pūjā, on which we remember the night of his awakening, and Āsāḷha Pūjā, on which we remember the day he gave his first sermon and gained his first disciple. Now seven months after that, he had more than a thousand.

We commemorate events like this to remind us that we live in a year that we can make special, just as the Buddha made his year special. It’s probably one of the most special years in the history of the world. It’s good to bring that year and place it on top of our year, to remind ourselves of the tradition we belong to. We’re not just here, meditating on our own. We’re part of a larger, longer tradition.

So it’s good to look at the teachings the Buddha gave to set out that tradition. He doesn’t mention the four noble truths. He starts with patient endurance—the ability to be with difficult things and not react in unskillful ways.

You could say that most of the talk that he gave that afternoon was about endurance and restraint. The talk recommends restraint as an expression of your endurance—you endure harsh words, you endure pains, you endure all the difficulties that come with living with other people.

You may remember the simile of the acrobat and his student, in which the Buddha said that when you practice—you’re gaining control over your mind through the practice of mindfulness—you’re helping others. And when you help others, you’re gaining for yourself.

It’s interesting that the Buddha talks about equanimity and patience as being two of the main qualities we have to develop in dealing with others. He wasn’t some starry-eyed Pollyanna thinking that we’re all going to love one another. He recognized that living with other people is difficult, and one of the main problems is how you talk to yourself about the difficulties. You have to learn to talk to yourself in more skillful ways.

Remind yourself that you are, as the Buddha said, burning away your defilements. There were other people, other teachers, at the time who talked about tapas—the practice of trying to burn away your karma or whatever. The Buddha didn’t believe in burning away karma, but he did believe in burning away your greed, aversion, and delusion. And you do that through patient endurance.

But the trick to patient endurance is not just putting up with things. You learn how to talk to yourself in a way that makes you eager to be enduring, eager to have that strength, because you know that’s going to lead to something really important. That’s expressed in the next line in the summary, which was about nibbana. Nibbana is the ultimate goal; patient endurance is the ultimate means to that goal. Think about that.

We sometimes think that by putting up with difficult situations we’re being weak and unassertive. But here the Buddha is saying that that skill is connected with something really high: the total unbinding of the mind. And it’s expressed in restraint. As the next lines in the summary say, you don’t harass others, you don’t oppress them, you don’t scold or revile them, you don’t injure them; you treat one another well.

And where are you going to get the strength to do this? The final line in the talk was about the heightened mind, adhicitta, which is another term for the practice of concentration.

You practice restraint, not only in your dealings with others, but also in your own consumption of food. You have restraint in terms of the Pātimokkha rules: for the monks, the rules of the monastic code; for laypeople, the rules of the five and the eight precepts. You try to find a quiet place to live so that you can focus on the real work that needs to be done, which is inside. So the more you’re able to maintain harmony as a group, your ability to put up with the difficulties that other people provide and not respond with difficulties—they may be throwing things at you, but you don’t throw things back: That gives you the space you need to focus on the mind.

The central part of the verse that summarizes the talk is sometimes called the heart of the Buddha’s teachings. It states three principles.

Sabba-pāpassa akaraṇaṃ, the non-doing of all evil. Whatever you know is not skillful, even if it’s a minor thing, you don’t do it. It may seem tedious focusing on the minor things, but this is where your defilements show themselves most easily, especially in your speech. You really have to be careful about what you say, to make sure that it’s true, beneficial, and timely, because your speech often reveals defilements inside. Sometimes you distort the truth a little bit to please other people, or to look good in their eyes. And what is that if it’s not a defilement? It’s the little things like that that the Buddha wants you to be careful about. As Ajaan Mun used to say, nobody ever got a log in their eyes, but when you pulverize the log down into saw-dust, it’s very easy to get it into your eyes, and it can blind you. So you look after the little things. Watch out for the little things. Avoid anything you know that in any way is unskillful.

Kusalassūpasampadā, the development or the consummation of all that is skillful. Here again, you want to focus on what you’re doing. Look at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds as an area that you want to master as a skill. We’re born into this human realm, we have these human abilities, we should try to think of all our activities as an attempt to be skillful in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds, to look for every opportunity to be skillful. You may say, “Oh, I’m too tired today to be so meticulous.” Well, what can you do to overcome that tiredness or that attitude of tiredness or the attitude that you’re being harassed or too much put upon?

Learn to talk to yourself in new ways, because this is so much of the practice. So much of the training of the mind is just talking to yourself in different ways. You may complain that it’s artificial, but all our inner conversation is artificial. Think about the Buddha and all those ways he has you talk to yourself. He didn’t recommend them just because they sounded nice. He wants you to actually see that these are good ways to talk to yourself. Take them on, make that part of your inner conversation, the dominant part of your inner conversation, and see what happens.

We’re here to train—not just to express ourselves or just to be ourselves. After all, the selves we’ve been for such a long time have been creating suffering. We want to learn new skills and, as we develop the new skills, we become new people: Harmless to those around us. Steadfast in the face of difficulties. Not weighing ourselves down unnecessarily.

Here again, think about the principle of endurance: How you talk to yourself makes a huge difference. When I first came back from Thailand, people would ask me what was the most difficult part of being in Thailand. I had to stop and think, and I couldn’t think of anything in particular. Then I realized that that was because I didn’t constantly harp on what was wrong: That’s what got me through.

Think about the ajaans in the forest. They had to face much harsher difficulties, yet they were able to maintain a positive attitude. So take them as your example. And they were not super-human beings. They were human beings just like us, but they were willing to train—not just be themselves, but to submit to the training. We don’t like that word “submit,” but that’s a part of what we have to do, so that we’re not creating more suffering for ourselves.

Finally, there’s the purification of the mind, making the mind bright and pure, bright and clean—sacitta-pariyodapanaṁ. We train the mind to be pure in its thoughts and its words and its deeds, particularly through raising the level of the mind.

Here, again, think about the fact that the word “mind” here, citta, can also cover the heart. We try to lift our hearts, lift our minds, until we’re above the ordinary back-and-forth of the human realm. We spend so much time picking up the news of other people, picking up the moods of the people immediately around us. We should learn how to lift ourselves above those things. This is an image the Buddha uses again and again: When you’re discerning, it’s as if you’re in a tower. You’ve raised yourself above the issues around you, and the mind is no longer a slave to them, no longer takes them as its food. You feed off of something better: You feed off of wisdom, you feed off of discernment. It’s in this way that you can aim at that goal of unbinding, total freedom.

It’s all too easy, as we go from day to day to day, to forget our larger goal, especially when there’s a lot of work around the monastery, a lot of work in our homes. But we can’t let the work run us. As Ajaan Fuang used to say in Thai, “We learn to do the work so that the work doesn’t do us.” Learn to do it in a way that it’s not doing you. Do your jobs, you do your duties as a gift to yourself, as a gift to others: a gift to yourself in the sense you’re developing really good qualities inside, like patience and determination, and those are going to be your food.

So when the Buddha said that patient endurance is the ultimate austerity, that’s because it’s what burns away our defilements. You realize that you can survive difficult things. You don’t have to be totally oppressed by the work you have to do. You can raise your mind above it, largely through the way you talk to yourself. So talk to yourself into seeing patient endurance as something you want to develop. Learn to see it, not as a weakness, but as a strength.

It’s also one of your major tools in developing discernment. You’re not going to understand the mind’s relationship to pain until you’re able to put up with some pain. You’re not going to understand the mind’s way of talking to yourself unless you put up with the way other people talk to you. So learn how to be eager to develop this quality of patient endurance. After all, the Buddha singled it out as the beginning point of his teaching. There’s got to be a reason for that.

Try to develop these qualities as your way of paying homage to the Buddha for all that he’s done for us. Think about that: For 45 years after he gained awakening, he spent his life teaching, teaching, teaching. Sometimes he’d go off into the forest to be alone, but we don’t know whether that was just to be totally alone or whether he was teaching devas at the time. But we sense that if there was somebody who could benefit from the teaching, he went there—even to his very last day.

Of these days that we commemorate—Visākha Pūjā, Āsāḷha Pūjā, and Māgha Pūjā—two of them were important not only in the Buddha’s first year after he gained his awakening, but also in the very last year of his life. Māgha Pūjā was the day when he gave up the will to live further. He called the monks together and gave another summary of the teachings—in this case, it was the 37 wings to awakening. Then he said that after three months he was going to pass away. Three months later, on Visākha Pūjā that year, that’s what he did.

So let his years inform your years. Think about it: the fact that we have an awakened being—someone who awakened to how to put an end to suffering—and he taught the way to awakening as freely, as much as he could. We should see that as the main event in human history and adjust our lives around it, adjust our attitudes around it. Let it inform the way you approach every day, and you won’t go wrong.