Why We Practice the Way We Do

The chant just now listed the factors of the noble eightfold path. You may have noticed that the description of the last three was the longest. Those last three also have to deal with the practice of concentration: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration itself.

You make an effort to get rid of unskillful qualities and to develop skillful ones. Now, you start that with the practice of generosity and the practice of virtue. You try to get rid of your greed and your stinginess—the narrowness of the mind that doesn’t want to help other people—by being generous with your time, generous with your things. That way, you develop skillful qualities in place of unskillful ones.

The same with the practice of virtue: You abstain from harming others and you develop a mind of goodwill. Not only is it a mind of goodwill, but it finds its expression in what you do and say around other people. You develop good qualities in this way and you abandon unskillful ones. You’re getting the mind ready to practice concentration, because virtue in particular is one of those things that’s virtuous only if it’s continuous. If it has big splotches and big gaps, you’re not different from anybody else out there in the world. But if you can make it continuous, it becomes a force in the mind. Then, as you take that principle of being continuous and apply it to trying to do what’s skillful and abandon what’s not, that becomes your right effort.

As the Buddha said, to maintain skillful qualities in the mind requires energy, requires nourishment. This is where mindfulness and concentration come in. Here the Buddha defines the factors that lead you from mindfulness to concentration, and he lists them in another place as the seven factors for awakening. You start with mindfulness, in other words, you keep in mind the fact that you want to have one topic here, like the breath. Or you could think about the different parts of the body. The Buddha has a list of thirty-two parts, and you can visualize them to yourself. Start with the first five: hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin. Those are the ones you see outside. Think about it: These are the parts that make the body attractive, yet if you had those things separately—little piles of hair here, nails here, teeth there, skin there—you’d run away.

So much of our attachment to the body is determined by these five things. You think about this to get a sense of dispassion and saṁvega, a sense that you’ve been looking for happiness in the wrong places—and that if you don’t change your ways, you’re going to keep on going to the wrong places.

So you choose one topic, and then you put aside all thoughts about the world outside. To do that, you have to develop three qualities: mindfulness, ardency, alertness.

Mindfulness is keeping things in mind. Here you keep in mind the fact that you want to stay here, and then remember that when skillful and unskillful things come up in the mind, what you should do.

Alertness is what watches what’s actually going on in the mind: What are you doing right now? Are you staying with the breath? Are you wandering off?

If you find yourself wandering off, that’s when ardency comes in. Remind yourself you’re not here to wander, you’re here to stay. So you bring the mind back.

Then while you’re here, ardency means that you try to get as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels right now, how your body feels right now. Does the body feel at ease? Can you create a sense of ease by the way you breathe? What rhythm of breathing would do that? What texture? Heavy or light? Deep, shallow, fast, slow? Experiment for a while to see what feels best.

When you get a sense of ease with the breath, think of the whole body breathing—all the nerves, all the blood vessels—this energy of the breath running through the whole body in this way. This allows the mind to settle down with an expansive sense of ease.

Now you’ve done that by analyzing what’s going on and what can be adjusted: That’s analysis of qualties. Then you do what needs to be done. That’s persistence, or right effort. A sense of refreshment comes from that, then a sense of calm. From the calm, the mind can get concentrated. The more deeply it goes into the concentration, it finally arrives at a state of equanimity where it’s really solidly based. It’s not easily shaken by anything. It’s on that basis that you can look at things really clearly in the mind.

The Buddha divides these seven factors for awakening—mindfulness, the analysis, right effort or persistence, a sense of refreshment, calm, concentration, and equanimity—into three categories. Mindfulness is what governs everything else. It’s always appropriate. Then you look at the mind with the aim of trying to get it into what’s called a state of jhāna.

The word jhāna, absorption, relates to a verb that also means to burn with a steady flame. Pali has lots of different verbs for burning. Jalati describes the burning of an ordinary fire, with flames that flicker here and there. Jhāyati, which is the verb associated with jhāna, means to burn with a steady flame, like an oil lamp. You can read by an oil lamp because the flame is steady. In the same way, you want a steady focus in the mind, a steady focus in the body, so that you can read the body and mind. To get that flame just right, you have to look at the state of the mind. If it’s sluggish, it’s like a flame that’s about to go out, in which case you have to give it more energy. That’s what the factors of analysis and persistence, and refreshment do. They give more energy to the mind. If the flame is burning too strongly, you calm it down with the calm, the concentration, and the equanimity.

So you read your mind, look at what’s going on, and then you make adjustments accordingly. This is an important part of the practice. Sometimes it’s understood that you gain insight into the mind by simply watching whatever comes up and noting it, letting it go, noting it, letting it go, but the Buddha never teaches that. He says you learn about the mind by trying to do something with it. You get it into concentration. It’s like learning about eggs. You can sit there and watch eggs go past, go past, like eggs on an assembly line. But what do you learn about eggs that way? Nothing much. You learn what color they have, what shape they have. But if you really want to understand eggs, you have to try to make something with them: soufflés, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, shirred eggs, steamed eggs.

I read about a research institute in France—this is very French—that studies cooking. They discovered the ideal temperature for soft boiled eggs, the ideal temperature for hard boiled eggs by doing things with them. In the same way, you learn about your mind by doing something with it, getting the mind into concentration and balancing it. When the energy is too high, you calm it down. When the energy is too low, you give it more oomph.

In doing that, you learn a lot about your mind: what it needs, what works, what doesn’t work. That’s when you gain real insight. The Buddha makes another analogy. He says it’s like being a goldsmith. If the goldsmith were to put the gold in the fire and just leave it in the fire, it would burn up. If he were to simply look at it, nothing would happen. If he were to blow on it, nothing much would happen, either. But he knows when to put it in the fire, when to take it out and blow on it, when to look at it to figure out what needs to be done, decide whether it’s ready or not to make into a ring or an earring. It’s having that combination of skills—the blowing, the putting in the fire, and the looking: That’s what enables him to be a skillful goldsmith.

In the same way, as a good meditator you have to know when to put extra effort into correcting what’s wrong with the mind right now, when to calm it down in concentration, and when to look at it with equanimity. That’s when you can get the mind in the state you really want.

Now, all of this has to be driven by the motivation to want to get the mind trained. This requires seeing the need for having a trained mind. That’s why we have that chant every now and then: “The world is swept away, it does not endure. It offers no shelter, there is no one in charge. One has nothing of one’s own, one has to pass on leaving everything behind. And then it’s a slave to craving.”

It’s good to reflect on these things, because no matter how well our lives are going, we’re going to die. And death is like a trap door: You fall through suddenly and you’re out. What’s going to receive you as you go through the trap door is going to depend on your actions. And how you handle the whole situation depends on the state of your mind. Ideally, you want to get to a state that doesn’t die. That’s what the Buddha’s good news is, basically. When he decided to teach, the first thing he said was, “Open are the doors to the deathless. Let those with ears show forth their conviction.” In other words, he had found something that doesn’t die: a happiness that was not touched by death because it’s outside of space and time. It was an amazing discovery.

We hear talk about the deathless, the deathless, and it’s become just kind of a buzz word that begins to mean very little because it’s just left that way. But when you really think about it, the big problem in life is that no matter what pleasures we have, no matter what wealth we have, what relationships we have, we’re going to die at some point. So we have to prepare. The best way to prepare is to find something that doesn’t die. In other words, the body can die, but there’s something that’s touched by the mind that doesn’t die at all, and that’s safe. So think about that possibility and then look at all the things that you go for in the world that would get in the way of that possibility. It all comes down to the fact that the mind isn’t trained.

Those four reflections come from a sutta where a king has asked a monk why he ordained. The king was of the impression that people would ordain if they were poor, if they’d lost their relatives, if they were sick, if they were old. But this was a healthy young monk he was talking to, one who came from a wealthy family, and his relatives were still fine. So why did he ordain?

The young monk answered with these reflections. He’d heard from the Buddha: “The world is swept away, it does not endure.” So the king asked, “What do you mean by that?” The young monk said, “When you were young, were you strong?” The king said, “Yes, I was very strong. I knew no one else as strong as I was in battle.” “How about now?” “Oh no, now I’m 80 years old. Sometimes I mean to put my foot in one place and it goes someplace else.” Aging, inconstancy: That’s what we find in the world.

The second reflection: “The world offers no shelter, there’s no one in charge.” Here, of course, the king thinks he’s in charge, so he asks, “What do you mean by that?” And the monk says, “Do you have a recurring illness?” The king says he has a recurring wind illness, which means shooting pains going through the body. In Thailand, it’s usually associated with heart disease. He says, “Sometimes there are times when I’m lying in bed full of pain, and courtiers are standing around saying, ‘Maybe he’s going to go this time, maybe he’s going to go this time.’” Think about that. Courtiers depend on him, but they also can’t wait for him to go. So the young monk says, “Can you order them to take some of that pain and share it out among them so you don’t have to feel all the pain on your own?” The king says, “No, I have to bear all that pain myself.” So here he is, even though he’s a king, he can’t get out of the pain that comes from having a body when he gets old and sick. So there’s the truth of illness, stress, suffering.

Then the third reflection: “The world has nothing of its own. One has to pass on leaving everything behind.” Here of course the king has treasures of all kinds. So, “What do you mean nobody has anything of their own?” The young monk asks him, “All that wealth you have: Can you take it with you when you die?” The king says, “No, I have to leave it behind and just go on in line with my kamma.” Death, not-self: another characteristic of the world.

And finally the fourth one: “A slave to craving.” The king says, “What do you mean by that?” He doesn’t like being called a slave, so the young monk asks him, “If there were someone to come from the east and say there’s a kingdom to the east that has lots of wealth with a very weak army, and you could take it with your army. Would you go and do it?” The king says, “Of course I would.” Here he is, 80 years old. He’s been made to reflect on the fact that he’s going to die and can’t take anything with him, his body is falling apart, yet he’d still go for another kingdom. “How about a kingdom to the west?” “Of course.” “North?” “Yes.” “South?” “Yes.” “Other side of the ocean?” “Yes.” The monk says, “That’s what I mean by a slave to craving.”

The world is marked by all these things: aging, illness, and death; inconstancy, stress, not-self. Yet we keep coming back for more. Aging, illness, and death again. Aging, illness, and death again. It was the prospect of getting out of that—that’s why the monk ordained.

This kind of reflection is meant to induce a state of what’s called saṁvega—when you’re hit by the fact that if your mind doesn’t get trained, this is what life is going to be. And the next life, and the next life, and the next. You keep coming back for more aging, illness, and death again and again. That should induce a sense of dismay.

Of course just having dismay would leave you in depression. But the Buddha offers the alternative. There is this deathless dimension that can be found through our own efforts. It’s not created by our efforts, because otherwise it wouldn’t be deathless. But there is a path that leads there. Like the road to the Grand Canyon: It doesn’t cause the Grand Canyon, but if you follow the road, you get there.

So have confidence that there is that road, and it’s humanly possible to get to the goal. The choice is yours. Do you want to keep coming back again and again? Or find something that offers safety? This is why we train the mind, because it’s through a trained mind that that safe dimension can be found. And as the Buddha said, it’s the ultimate happiness.

As he once told somebody, if you have any idea that there would be any pain or regret or sorrow after you go there, that’s wrong view. It’s the highest happiness—higher than you can even imagine.

So this is why we train the mind. We don’t just observe the mind, watch the mind as it does its thing. We try to bring it to a state of good, solid concentration. In the course of doing that, we learn a lot about it. And in learning about the mind, we learn to see through the ways in which it prevents itself from realizing that deathless state, and how it can overcome those obstacles.

All these potentials are right here. Make sure you master the full set of skills—not only the watching, but also the cooling down and the heating up: adding fuel to the fire when it’s wavering, putting some dust and water on it when it’s burning too high, so that you can get that steady flame of the mind in right concentration that allows you to watch it clearly, so that you can read your mind. That’s when you have a chance of discovering and developing the good potentials it has.