To Disturb Your Complacency

Our evening chanting frequently has that contrast: chants about aging, illness, death, separation. Chants about the parts of the body. Chants about how the world is swept away, does not endure. When you die, you can’t take anything with you. And then we say, “May I be happy.”

We put those together to remind ourselves that our search for happiness has to be done in this world, where the facts of aging, illness, and death are all around us.

This morning I talked to a person whose mother is dying of cancer. Someone else this morning said, “Oh, by the way, I had a heart attack last Friday.” Fortunately, she was able to get to the doctor in time. They gave her the proper shots, and she was able to survive.

We live on a knife’s edge. We’re intoxicated with our life, with our health, with our youth, yet we can so easily lose these things. We need to find something inside that’s more solid.

That’s what the meditation is for. What the Buddha proposes really is solid. There’s a dimension that you can touch, he says, or that you can see with your body—interesting idea, “see with your body”—and it’s outside of space and time. Which is why when the Buddha talks about things in space and time, he tends to focus on the negative—because there’s something better.

He’s not being negative just to show how negative he can be. He’s negative with a purpose—for you to want to find a happiness that’s better than this, a happiness that’s not subject to aging, illness, and death, that’s not swept away. That means that our search for happiness has to be clear-eyed. A lot of people, when they search for happiness, tend to put blinders on.

I was talking with someone one time who had built a very large house in Florida. I asked him, “What about the rising sea levels?” He said, “We don’t want to think about that.”

That’s not how the Buddha would look for happiness. He would look squarely at whatever dangers there are and do his best to prepare for them.

There’s a sutta where he has the monks reflect on the dangers of living in the forest. Death could come easily. The thing is, it’s not only in the forest where death can come easily. In the middle of a city, in the middle of a hospital, it can come at any time. They say most deaths in the house occur in the bathroom, and yet we don’t think of it as a dangerous place.

The Buddha has you think about these things so that they’ll stir you up to practice, as he says, to attain the as-yet-unattained, to realize the as-yet-unrealized. There’s something really good at the end of the path, and it’s perfectly fine to have a goal orientation.

I think I mentioned the letter that came to me the other day: someone saying that he thought he could detect a subtle goal orientation in some of my writings, as if that were a blemish. Well, look at the Buddha, he was extremely goal-oriented, probably the most goal-oriented person who ever was. He was willing to leave his home, leave his palace, go into the wilderness because he had a goal.

When he attained his own personal goal, then his goal was to teach in a way that was effective. As he said, there were two types of assemblies: one, the assembly where the teacher teaches empty words that are beautiful but he doesn’t want to be questioned as to what they mean, doesn’t want to be challenged; and then, two, the assembly where the teacher is willing to be challenged. He’s open to questioning: “What does this word mean? What does that word mean? How is it supposed to be used?”

The Buddha said his assembly was the second kind, because he wanted to teach in a way that was understood, and then when it was understood it could be put into practice.

One of the things he said that can get in the way of awakening when you’re listening to a talk is that you think you understand when you don’t. So if you have any misunderstandings or anything that’s not really clear, you want to ask.

So much of the teaching of the Dhamma is in questions. I’ve been going through the suttas, collecting the different passages where the Buddha or his disciples give a teaching and the people listening to the teaching gain either the Dhamma eye—in other words, one of the lower levels of awakening—or they gain full awakening while listening.

What’s striking is how many of these teachings are in a question-and-answer format. In most cases, it’s the teacher asking questions, basically asking you to look at actions in your mind: What’s this? What’s happening here in your mind right now? What’s your experience of form right now? What kind of feelings do you have right now? What are your perceptions right now? What are your thought constructs, your intentions? How about your consciousness right now? How do you experience these things? Are you suffering from them? If you are, what are you doing in relationship to them that’s making you suffer?

In other words, he would have you take an inquisitive attitude toward what’s going on in the mind. After all, that’s how he found awakening, and that’s how we can all find awakening, too.

If we’re not inquisitive, if we just sit there and say, “Well, this is just the way it is, and that’s just the way that is, and we have to accept it,” if we don’t try to figure it out, we just stay where we were.

The image the Forest ajaans like to use is of someone in a prison. There’s a key to get out of the prison, but instead of using the key to get out, the prisoner just hangs it on the wall, admires it, and tries to make the prison cell as comfortable as possible.

This is why we have that reflection on aging, illness, and death. These things are a prison cell, and we should want to get out.

So try to be audacious like the Buddha. There is something really valuable inside that will take a lot of work to get. The Buddha was willing to put in the work. He’s made it easy for us in the sense that he’s shown that there is a path. He’s shown what kind of questions we should ask as we follow the path, to spark a sense inside that we can’t just rest here.

There’s something very wrong about the way we engage with our world. But we don’t have to engage in that way. What is it?

He lays it out. There are the three kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings. You’re engaging in these things all the time.

In fact, your sense of “who you are” usually has a lot to do with these things. You want to learn how to learn how to question that, take it apart. Usually when we hold on to something as us or ours, we’re very protective of it. We don’t like to see it challenged. But if we don’t challenge it, who’s going to challenge it for us? Aging, illness, and death are going to come and challenge it, but they get us when we’re down, when we’re weak. So you’ve got to prepare while you’re still strong, while you’re young, while you’re healthy, while you’re alive.

Don’t be intoxicated by youth, health, and life. Take the opportunity that they provide you to peer inside, to question what you’re doing, the way you’ve been doing things all along, to see that there’s something incongruous there.

The way we engage in these types of fabrication is for the sake of happiness, yet we’re creating suffering. Sometimes we recognize the fact, sometimes we don’t. We have to remind ourselves the Buddha’s there to stir us up, to get us to question what we’re doing.

So he brings up the facts of suffering, he brings up the facts of aging, illness, and death, and says don’t look away from these things, look* at *them. Use them to motivate yourself to practice, to find what you haven’t found before, to attain what you haven’t attained before, to reach what you haven’t reached before.

We’re looking for something unexpected, so we’ll have to do some unexpected things, ask some unexpected questions.

The Buddha gives us some guidance, but we have to take his guidance and figure out, “How does this apply to me?” Use some ingenuity in how you do it. That’s the way out.