Delight in Persistence

We often have that contrast in the evening chant: “The world is swept away. One has to pass on, leaving everything behind,” followed by the chant, “May I be happy.” The earlier chants sound like a lot of bad news, but the bad news is there to serve something good: that it is possible to find happiness, it’s just a matter of looking in the right places. If you’re looking into the world, what does the world have to offer? There’s material gain, but then there’s loss. There’s status, loss of status; praise, criticism; pleasures, pains—good things mixed with bad. As Ajaan Lee liked to say, the goodness of the world isn’t true, and the truth of the world isn’t good—the point being that you need to focus your attention in another direction to find happiness. You need to focus on developing good qualities inside.

We have potentials inside that can accomplish a lot, but we tend not to develop them because we’re looking for happiness in the flowers and the trees—anything but developing good qualities inside. So we have to learn how to appreciate this process of developing and abandoning. That’s the Buddha’s shorthand for the path as a whole, and for right effort or persistence in particular.

The strength of persistence is something we have to develop, and it’s good to learn how to enjoy the process. After all, the Buddha said there are different ways of taking delight that actually are conducive to the practice. One of them is taking delight in abandoning; another is taking delight in developing. So learn how to take delight in what you’re doing here. As you find that part of the mind is trying to stay with the breath but another part is trying to go someplace else, there’s going to be a struggle. So learn how to enjoy the struggle. See it as an opportunity to develop some abilities you didn’t have before.

As an artist, there are some techniques that you haven’t mastered yet, and it’s going to take work, but you can do it. Once you’ve done it, there’s joy in doing things you couldn’t do before. If you’re lifting weights or running races, you’ll find you can lift weights you couldn’t lift before, you can go faster than you could before. Whatever the skill is, it’s good to learn how to enjoy the process of putting up with the difficulties and learning how to master them, figuring them out.

How do you figure things out? First you have to develop the desire to master the skill. You think about how important it is.

They’ve done studies about people who become really, really good at certain skills. In every case, those people have a very live sense of the advantages that come from mastering the skill, and the dangers that come from not. If you feel that “It doesn’t make much difference whether my mind is concentrated or not, whether I understand my mind or not,” you’re not going to put in the effort. But if you see that it really does make a difference, that’s how you motivate yourself, that’s how you give rise to the desire.

Then you stick with it. You give it a lot of your attention. In the Buddha’s terms, this is citta, which means intent. You’re really intent on what you’re doing.

I was teaching a retreat in France a while back, and there were a lot of questions on what to do with the different energies in your body, what to do when there’s a persistent headache when you’re trying to settle down, pains in the back, pains in the legs: a lot of nuts-and-bolts kind of questions. Those are the questions that show that people really are trying to master things. After all, concentration and mindfulness are not abstractions. They’re skills. And skills involve a lot of technique. You’ve got the values, you go through the desire, and then the persistence: You work on the techniques. This is where you get down to the details. Still, someone raised the question: “Here we are, trying to understand the deathless dimension of the mind, and what are we talking about? Pains in the knees.”

Well, pains in the knees are among the things you need to master in order to get to the deathless. You need to understand pain and your mind’s relationship to pain if you’re going to get past it. If you can’t get past it, you’re not going to get to the better stuff. Or as Dogen used to say, the realization of the third noble truth is the same thing as the development of the fourth noble truth. What he means is that you focus on developing the good qualities of the path, and there, in the act of developing, you’re going to see things you didn’t see before. You’re going to see the goal.

So, as you encounter the details, don’t feel that they’re tripping you up.

Years back, I was teaching another retreat where one of the retreatants was from a Zen background. We’d been talking about skillful and unskillful actions, and in a similar vein he said, “Why this emphasis on minutiae, when the empty nature of the mind is all around you?” He was there with his girlfriend. I noticed in the periods between the meditation sessions that he was not treating her very well. I thought to myself, “If anybody needs to learn something about skillful and unskillful actions, it’s him. He’s using abstractions to avoid looking at his own behavior.”

So as you’re sitting here and there’s a pain in the knee, don’t regard it simply as an obstacle. Try to understand and take joy in understanding it. “I’ve been dealing with my pains for years and years. Here’s my chance now to turn the tables on them: to understand what it is to be aware of pain, and to figure out how to be aware of pain and yet not let it invade the mind.” Which means learning to see the pain and your awareness as two separate things.

That comes down to seeing the pain and your body as two separate things, too. The body, as you experience it, is composed of the elements of earth, water, wind, and fire. In other words, earth is the solidity, water is liquid cool sensations, wind is the breath energy, and fire is the warmth. That’s how you experience the body from within. You might say, “The real elements are oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and all the other chemical elements.” But how do you feel carbon? How do you feel oxygen? You don’t directly feel these things but you do feel the warmth. You feel the solidity. You feel the coolness. You feel the energy. So you work with what you feel.

Then you ask yourself, “Is that the same thing as the pain, or is the pain something else?” It’s something else. “And how about your awareness?” Well, the awareness is something else, too. How do you get them to separate out? One of the ways is to start asking questions about the pain. In other words, you take a lot of interest. You’re really intent on what you’re doing. You’re intent on the details: Where is the sharpest point of the pain right now? If you look for it, instead of running away from it, you find that it runs away from you. So you chase it around. And even though you’re sitting in pain, you find that changing the balance of power inside is enjoyable. What used to scare you is no longer so scary. And you can take joy in that fact.

Finally, there’s analysis, where you try to analyze what’s going on. That’s the asking of the questions.

These are the qualities that the Buddha says are the bases for success. They’re also part of right effort. The definition of right effort is that you generate desire, you exert your persistence, you uplift your intent. Those three are bases of power right there in right effort. Then you’re trying to figure out what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. That’s the analysis.

So we’re developing a strength of the mind here, the strength of persistence. We find that we’re learning things that may seem little to begin with, minor minutia, but they open up a lot of bigger issues in the mind.

After all, your relationship to pain is something that’s been murky for a long time. You first encountered pain when? In this lifetime, it was in the womb, and especially coming out of the womb. There were all those months and months before you could understand language. You had nobody to explain the pain to you. You had to explain the pain to yourself in whatever pre-linguistic images you had in your mind. You can imagine all the misunderstandings you developed about pain. A lot of them are still lurking around in there because you keep running away from pain.

So there’s an exhilaration when you can say, “No, I don’t have to run away anymore.” You’ve got a good foundation with the breath, so you now have a place to retreat to when the pain gets really bad.

You start poking into it. Prodding it. Learning about it. Learning how to take joy in that process. This is called delight in persistence. Delight in effort. It’s what gives energy to the path.

So, learn how to delight in abandoning, delight in developing. When you do that, the path goes a lot easier, even when you face difficulties. You think about the difficulties you’ve faced in the past and you’ve been able to overcome them. You have the confidence that, yes, you can handle this one, too. And that’s just dealing with things in the body.

The same goes with difficult emotions in the mind. You used to be a slave to them. But now you’re getting your freedom. You’re figuring them out. You’re learning the skill from using your concentration, both to make the mind quiet enough so that you can detect things you didn’t detect before, and also to focus attention on the steps in the process of getting the mind to settle down.

You’re focusing your attention on the breath. You’re maintaining an intention to stay with the breath. You’re holding a perception in mind: how you picture the breath to yourself. You’re trying to develop feelings of pleasure. Well, all those mental acts come under the factor what the Buddha called “name” in name and form. If you bring knowledge to these things, they turn from causes of suffering to the path to the end of suffering—and you bring knowledge to them as you use them to get the mind in concentration.

So there’s a joy in seeing yourself being freed from things that you were afraid of before and being brave enough to face things that you ran away from before. So learn how to take joy in the practice. Take joy in the effort, mastering skills that you didn’t have before, doing things you couldn’t do before, so that you end up knowing things you didn’t know before: the kinds of things that can set you free.