Guardian Meditations

The Buddha talks of times when you meditate, you try to focus on the breath or any of the other topics in the body, but there’s a fever—a fever in the body, a fever in the mind. It doesn’t allow you to settle down.

In cases like that, he says, try to find another theme that’s inspiring. Focus on that. Find something that the mind likes to think about. If it’s not going to watch the present moment, at least it can think about things that are related to the Dhamma and gradually get itself in the mood to settle down.

If your mind is like that, it needs what Ajaan MahaBoowa calls discernment fostering concentration. You have to think your way to stillness, think your way to a place in the mind where the mind is willing to stop its thinking and settle down.

There are lots of different lists of topics in the commentaries—40 different meditation topics in all. And there’s a standard list that’s very popular in Thailand. It’s called the guardian meditations. There are four of them. You can try them on for size.

The first one is recollection of the Buddha. Think about the person who found this Dhamma. He was wealthy, he had power, everything that you could wish for back in those days, and he saw that it wasn’t enough. No matter how powerful you were, no matter how much wealth you had, no matter how well your life went, it was going to end. Then where would you be? All the effort you put into pursuing things that would age, grow ill, and die, would mean that when you died you wouldn’t have anything to show for all the effort that went into your life.

He wanted to find something that was deathless. That’s how he framed his search. He called it the noble search for something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die. He left his palace and went out into the wilderness, lived off alms, tried whatever method he could think of to purify the mind. After many years of trial and error, he finally gained awakening.

He gained awakening because he was so determined that whatever skill there might be, he was going to master it. If the mind wasn’t skillful enough, he’d keep on trying, trying, trying.

When he found that Dhamma, he taught it for free. He walked all over northern India, teaching whoever might be available, whoever might be ready to hear the teaching and benefit from it. A wide range of people: everything from kings down to lepers and very poor people. He sounds so good that he seems almost unreal. But it’s because of someone like that that we have this amazing Dhamma.

So, think about that. You can think about events in his life. You can read up on his life and focus on events that you find inspiring. One of the stories I find inspiring was when Devadatta, his cousin, was trying to take over the Sangha. He tried various methods. Nothing worked. So he finally decided to arrange to have the Buddha killed.

He had the king hire some archers. The first archer was told to go in, shoot the Buddha with a bow and arrow, and then go by a certain route to get away. Two other archers were placed at that route to ambush him and kill him. They were told after they’d done their dirty duty, they should go down a certain route. Four archers were placed there to kill them. Then eight to kill the four. Sixteen to kill the eight. Lots and lots of archers.

The first one comes in. As soon as he gets in the presence of the Buddha, he’s struck with fear. The Buddha says, “You can put down your bow and arrow and come in. I’ll teach you.” So, he does as he’s told. The Buddha teaches him what’s called the graduated discourse: about generosity and virtue, the rewards of generosity and virtue in heaven, the drawbacks of those rewards, and then how to see renunciation—in other words, the pleasure of concentration—as rest for the mind.

You can imagine, being someone who was a hired killer, listening to this Dhamma, being the focus of that teaching. I’ve always thought it was a shame that we didn’t have the text of what the Buddha taught him. All we have is the general outline. At any rate, the archer was able to gain the Dhamma Eye and became a noble disciple. The Buddha saw that this person had, buried someplace in him, the potential.

Even though he’d been willing to accept a little bit of money to kill the Buddha, the Buddha didn’t hold that against him. He taught him. Then he told him, “Don’t go the way you were told to go. Go another way.” So, the man was saved.

Then he did the same thing with all the other archers, as they were curious: What happened to the archers they were supposed to kill? They came in, group by group by group, and the Buddha was able to teach all of them to become stream-enterers. That’s pretty amazing.

But whatever other incidents in the Buddha’s life that you find inspiring, you think about them. If your mind is inclined to like to tell stories, tell yourself these stories until you’ve convinced yourself that you’d like to practice the Dhamma found by this person.

The second guardian meditation is goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness—true happiness—which means it’s happiness that comes from within. As we know from the Buddha’s teachings on karma, people are going to be happy, not because you simply wish them to be happy, but because they create the causes for happiness in the skillfulness of their thoughts, their words, their deeds. Which means that when you’re extending goodwill to yourself, extending goodwill to others, there’s no question of whether you or they deserve goodwill, whether you or they deserve happiness.

When the Buddha was teaching the end of suffering to people, he didn’t ask them first, “Do you deserve to suffer?” Everybody he met had karma that could induce them to suffer, but they didn’t have to suffer from it. That’s what the teaching was all about. You don’t have to suffer.

And again, he didn’t hold people’s past against them. This is the way out. That should be the attitude you have to others as well. There are a lot of people out there who are behaving in really bad ways, and your wish for them should be, “May they understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Which in many cases means, “May they voluntarily stop doing what they’re doing and get on the right path.”

Now, that’s a thought you can have without hypocrisy for anybody. There may be part of your mind that would like to see people suffer a bit for their past misdeeds, especially people who’ve been intentionally cruel. But then again, you think back on the Buddha. He taught many people, probably people who had killed him in previous lifetimes, people who had mistreated him, but he never held it against them. He wanted to teach everybody who had the potential. That’s the nature of his goodwill, and you want to learn how to develop that kind of goodwill as well.

Send your thoughts out in all directions. As the Buddha said, make this immeasurable, as far as you can imagine.

One of the standard practices that was developed centuries immediately after the Buddha passed away was to think of specific directions, one by one: east, west, north, south, south-east, north-west, north-east, south-west, below, above. You can send your mind out in those directions, with you right in the middle, with the sense that there’s no direction, in any direction, where there’s anyone that you have ill will for.

That can settle the mind down. As long as you want to maintain that perception, hold that perception in mind.

The Buddha compares it to a person who plays a trumpet. You blow on the trumpet, and the sound goes in all directions. You don’t say, “This sound is going to go to that person, that sound is not going to go to this person.” Everybody gets to hear the sound.

The third guardian meditation is contemplation of the unattractiveness of the body. This is usually taught as an antidote to lust, but it also can be an inducement to saṁvega as you think of how much of your life is devoted to looking after this body.

But what is there in there? If you took the skin off and took all the different parts and arranged them on the floor here, you’d run away. But when you sew them up together, put them back in the body, it’s perfectly fine, perfectly attractive. Why is that? How can the mind see these things, know these things, and still turn a blind eye to them?

The purpose of this contemplation is to see that whatever thoughts of lust or pride or attachment you have for the body are really misplaced.

The problem, of course, is not with the body. It’s not making any claims on you. You’re the one making claims on it. But you want to teach yourself to see that it’s not worth the attitudes you’ve developed around it, so that you can then turn on the attitudes themselves.

What is this desire for sensuality? What is this desire for pride? When you look at the mind straight on like that, you can put aside thoughts of the body, and you might be willing, at that point, to settle down with the breath.

Finally, the fourth guardian meditation is recollection of death. You start with the fact that no matter what you gain in this lifetime, you have to leave it behind. You don’t know when death is going to come. So, what will you be able to take with you? You’ve got your actions. You’ve got your state of your mind. That’s what you have to focus on.

Recollection of death is not just thinking “death, death, death” all the time. It’s reminding yourself there’s work that needs to be done. You don’t know how much time you have to do it, but you do have right now.

But it is good to think of all the death all around you. They say, what, 200,000 people die every day? Yet the world keeps going on, going on, going on. And beings keep on going on being reborn.

What do you take with you? Your state of mind. What kind of state of mind would you have if you had to die? Are you ready to go? The answer usually is No.

So, the next question is, what are you holding on to? What’s keeping you from being ready? Ajaan Lee compares death to suddenly being told that you have to emigrate. You can no longer stay in this country, you’ve got to get out. You just take whatever you have near at hand. Yet what do you have near at hand? What else but the qualities of your mind? That’s what you can take for sure. The things of the world, you have to leave them behind.

So that thought gets you more and more inclined to want to develop the mind, to see the importance of the mind—getting it trained, getting it under your control.

At that point, you might be willing to meditate on the breath, telling yourself, “How can I get the mind to stay here in the present moment?” The purpose is not just to be with the breath, but once you have the breath as an anchor, you can start seeing the processes of the mind.

That’s what the meditation is all about. We spend our lives looking at the products that the mind keeps creating. We very rarely turn around and ask, “What’s the process? Why is the mind so avid to create stories that it tells itself and then lets go?”

The stories hold your interest for a little bit and then they get boring. So you have to find something else, something else, something else. What is the process? And why do we get so addicted to it? That’s what you want to see as you get settled down here with the breath.

Use the breath as an anchor. As the forest ajaans would say, we look at the breath not to get the breath, but to get the mind and to understand these processes by which it keeps creating things. Then it finds them lacking, empty, and it moves on, creates some more, moves on, creates some more. Maybe there’s an alternative way to find happiness through learning to see the processes and figuring out how to get beyond them.

That’s what the Buddha promises. That’s what he found. That’s why he had the compassion and the goodwill to teach everybody. So, these guardian meditations come together, in the sense that they make you want to meditate. They protect you from yourself. That’s why they’re called guardian meditations. But they also turn you in the right direction.

So, if you find that sitting down and focusing on the breath just doesn’t capture your imagination, doesn’t capture your mind, try some of these themes until you get the mind into the state where it really is willing to settle down and learn about itself in the present moment.

That’s how these themes guard you and offer protection.