An Auspicious Night

On the last night of the old year, on the first eve of the new year, we want to have an auspicious night. There’s actually a sutta called An Auspicious Night, although the meaning is a little bit different. Back in those days, they used the lunar calendar. Just as we, using the solar calendar, call a 24-hour period a day, they called the 24-hour period a night.

Of course, the principles that make an auspicious night can extend to the whole year. If you want to have an auspicious year, you follow these instructions: The first is that you don’t hanker after the past—i.e., you don’t get nostalgic about what’s in the past—and you don’t place all your hopes on the future. You focus on what’s arising here in the present moment—right here, right now—and ardently do your duty there.

This means that you’re not here in the present moment only to be in the present moment. The Buddha never said that being in the present moment was the goal, or that your present-moment awareness was somehow the goal.

Some people say that they sense a spacious awareness around all the objects of their senses in the present. Every time they turn their minds there, there it is—so it must be unconditioned; it must be timeless. That’s like saying that every time you open the refrigerator door, the light is on, so it must be on all the time. The act of turning your mind to that spacious awareness is what creates your perception of that spacious awareness. You have to look at what you’re doing.

In fact, that’s the whole point of being in the present moment: to look at what you’re doing. The present moment is something you’re constructing, and you want to know if you’re constructing it well. As the Buddha says, you ardently do your duty with regard to what’s arising in the present, right here, right now, because tomorrow death may come.

What are your duties? The duties of the four noble truths: Suffering is to be comprehended; craving—its cause—is to be abandoned; its cessation is to be realized; and the path of that cessation is to be developed. So, there’s work to do, especially in the abandoning and the developing.

As the Buddha says twice in the poem, you have to be ardent in doing this. Back in those days, they didn’t let you repeat a word in a poem unless they really wanted to emphasize it. So again: ardent, ardent—there’s work to be done. After all, we’re going against the stream. There are things that the Buddha wants us to do that will be for our long-term benefit, but we don’t like doing them. There are other things he warns us against that will be for our long-term harm, but we like doing them.

It takes effort to follow his advice, and it takes your discernment to learn to want to do the things that will be for your long-term benefit, even though you don’t like them, and to want not to do the things that will be for your long-term harm, even though you like doing them.

It’s a skill you have to develop, and you want to know if it’s working: because, after all, our focus in the present moment doesn’t mean that we don’t think about the past or the future; it’s just that we relate to them in the right way.

You don’t hanker after the past, you’re not nostalgic about it, but you do remember what you’ve done. That’s what mindfulness is for: remembering what was done and said a long time ago, with specific reference to whether it worked or not in helping you along the path. And you think about the future: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” That’s the essence of discernment.

So mindfulness and discernment require that you take the past, the present, and the future all into consideration as you decide what to do in the present, remembering the Buddha’s statement that the Dhamma is nourished through commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to doing your best, and then you reflect on the results. It’s good to stop every now and then to reflect. This is one of the good things about having New Year’s. It’s a convention. Why tonight is the beginning of a year, it’s hard to say. In other cultures, they begin the year at other times. But this is the convention we have, so let’s use it skillfully.

Reflect back on the past year. How did your practice go? What went well? What didn’t go well? The Buddha gives you a checklist—six qualities, he said, for knowing yourself.

First, ask yourself how far you’ve come in conviction. How genuine is your conviction that the Buddha was really awakened? How much are you convinced about the lessons he learned in that awakening—particularly about the power of your actions for good or for evil? Is that conviction enough to get you out of bed early on a cold morning; to keep you up at night, meditating late into the night, even though there may be pain, there may be sleepiness? How strong is your conviction? What could you do to make it stronger?

Next on the list is your virtue. How consistent are you in holding to your precepts: the five, the eight, the 227? Where are there gaps?

A big gap tends to be around the precept against lying because it’s so easy to tell white lies. They seem so innocent, so harmless. You can tell yourself you’re being compassionate to other people. But often it’s just your own saving face—or wanting to please other people.

Ask yourself: Would you like someone who wants to simply please you and tell you things that you want to hear—or they think you want to hear—that are actually not true? Of course not. So why would you want to do that to other people? That’s virtue.

Next on the list is generosity. How generous are you with your time, with your belongings? If you have something, do you see it as an opportunity to give it away? If you don’t have things, what non-material gifts can you give? We live together. We know that there’s the ideal for us to go off and meditate alone, but that’s not the only ideal we have. Look at the way the year is divided up. For the monks, we have three months when we live in the rains retreat, and we’re often encouraged to live together so that we can learn from one another, encourage one another, benefit from one another’s mindfulness, discernment, wisdom, and skills.

If you want people to be happy to share their skills with you, you have to show respect, but you also have to show that you’re generous. They see that it’s worth their while to share with you because they know that you will then share with others.

The next quality is knowledge of the Dhamma. As one of my ajaans told me very early on, here in the Forest Tradition we don’t put too much emphasis on learning a lot of Dhamma, but we do emphasize learning the four noble truths, the noble eightfold path—all the Wings to Awakening.

So make sure that you’re well-educated in those things, because there are so many areas where the Dhamma is paradoxical.

Like the role of desire: We know that to comprehend suffering, you try to overcome any passion, aversion, and delusion around the suffering. Abandoning craving requires that you develop dispassion for craving. The cessation of suffering is dispassion in and of itself. But then the path requires passion; it requires desire.

To solve that paradox, learn how to think strategically. Notice where the passages in the Canon seem to be paradoxical—where they’re teaching you to think in a strategic way: picking up a tool, using it, and then putting it down. The Dhamma is consistent, but it’s consistent in its goal.

We’re not all coming from the same place, but we’re going to the same place. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is consistent; it has a single taste: the taste of release. That comes at the end. All the various techniques, all the various approaches, are designed to take you to that end.

So when something seems paradoxical, think it through. Ask questions: “How can I use this teaching to help me along the path?” That way, your knowledge of the Dhamma actually becomes a help rather than a hindrance.

The fifth quality is ingenuity. How ingenious are you in taking the basic principles of the Dhamma and applying them to your specific circumstances? You don’t have to look very far away: Look at your breath. The Buddha gives sixteen steps in breath meditation. Then look at what Ajaan Lee had to offer. He points out that there are more things you can play with. The Buddha presents some riddles in his instructions. He says: “Once there’s a sense of ease and well-being, let that spread throughout the whole body.” How do you let it spread? Ajaan Lee found that you can do it through using the breath energy: thinking of the breath energy being connected to the in-and-out breath and permeating all the nerves of the body, out to every pore. It’s not written in the texts, but it helps get the same results that we want from the texts—that we want from the Dhamma.

Or if you’re doing body contemplation, the Buddha simply lists 31 parts of the body and the ways you can visualize how the body disintegrates after death. But for those contemplations to really hit home, you have to be ingenious in how you imagine the different parts of the body and how incongruous they are.

Years back, when they began to put photographs in Dhamma books in Thailand, one of the most riveting was a picture of a very beautiful woman. Half her face was as a beautiful woman, and the other half was the skull that lay beneath the skin. It was a lot more shocking than just thinking about the skull. So in various ways, you can use your imagination to gain a sense that this body that you desire—or this body that you’re proud of—other bodies you desire, are really not worth it. Use your imagination to get the right results.

As Ajaan Maha Boowa says, the Dhamma in the texts is like a doctor’s basic tonic. Back in the old days, the old-style doctors would have a basic tonic. Then, for specific diseases, they would add or subtract this or that ingredient in the tonic.

So the Buddha gives us a basic tonic. But for our specific diseases, we have to learn how to add or subtract different medicines: which ones to emphasize, which ones to de-emphasize. That’s all a matter of ingenuity: seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t work. And if something doesn’t work, what can you do to flip it around so that it does?

Finally, there’s discernment. How clear are you on the amount of stress or suffering you’re adding to your experience? The image the Buddha gives for discernment is that it’s like a mirror. You want to look at yourself and particularly what you’re doing. How are you constructing the present moment? We know the basic principle: Part of what we experience is the result of past karma, but then that’s shaped into an actual experience with the three types of fabrication: by the way we breathe, the way we talk to ourselves, the perceptions and feelings we focus on.

You want to be really clear about, one, the fact that you are doing this; and two, the question of how well you’re doing this. You want to bring more and more awareness to this process, because those fabrications—if they’re done in ignorance—lead to suffering. If they’re done with knowledge, they can be part of the path.

So these are the qualities you want to check: your conviction, your virtue, your generosity, your learning of the Dhamma, your ingenuity, your discernment. On a night like this, it’s good to reflect back on the past year. Where were you last year at this time? How have you changed in the meantime? What’s gotten better? What hasn’t gotten better? These are things you can check.

You can’t tell how close you are to getting to the end of the path. There’s that image the Buddha gives of the carpenter’s adze. An adze is like a little hatchet that a carpenter would use, except that the blade is perpendicular to the handle. As the Buddha says, the carpenter uses it every day, every day, and sees that the handle is wearing down. Eventually someday, it’s going to wear out. How much longer it’s going to take, he doesn’t know, but he does know the process is wearing the handle down. Someday, it’ll wear through.

In the same way, you can know that you’re headed in the right direction even though you don’t know how close you are to the goal. It’s like learning that the Grand Canyon is up to the north of us. You can’t see the Grand Canyon from where you are. There was even a case in the past—back in the eighteenth century—when a Spanish expedition went just within a few miles of the Grand Canyon but didn’t see it at all. What you know is that you’re to the south of the Grand Canyon and you’ve got to head north. You can tell if you’re heading north. How close you are to the Grand Canyon, you don’t know, but you do know that you’re heading in the right direction.

That’s the kind of reflection we can do—and we should want to do. We commit ourselves to doing the path as best we can. If you don’t do it as best you can, you don’t learn very much. You commit yourself, you devote yourself to doing what you can, acting on your best intentions. And then when you learn how and why your best intentions are not good enough, you really learn something.

This is how you relate to the past and the future. You don’t get nostalgic for the past. You just look objectively: Where were you then? Where are you now? What have you done in the meantime to make the difference? Has it taken you in the right direction? If you see you’re heading south, away from the Grand Canyon, okay, you’ve learned things you’ve got to change. If you’re heading north, you’ve also learned—and you’ve given yourself some energy. You reflect back and you say: “Yes, that was done well. That was done right.”

As the Buddha said, you take joy in what you’ve done right, but you don’t rest content there. You use that joy as an incentive to keep on training. When you relate the present moment to the past and the future in this way, that’s when you have an auspicious night.

When you do this every night, every day, the year becomes an auspicious year. It doesn’t depend on the stars. It doesn’t depend on what other people do. The world could go to hell in a handbasket, but you can still have an auspicious year.

If you keep focused on doing your duty ardently here in the present moment and stopping every now and then to gauge how well you’re doing, you’re following the Buddha’s example. That’s how the Buddha gained his awakening. Nobody taught him the path to awakening. He found it by doing the best things he could imagine doing and then looking at the results.

We have his example so that we can be warned off a lot of wrong paths. But to get on precisely the right path requires that we engage in the same sort of commitment and reflection as well.