The Wisdom of Ardency

The standard formula for mindfulness is that you keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. You do the same with feelings in and of themselves, mind-states in and of themselves, and mental qualities in and of themselves. There’s a large sutta devoted to explaining part of that formula: what it means to keep track of something in and of itself. Because the sutta is so long, many people assume that it’s describing the entirety of mindfulness practice. But there’s a large part of the formula that the sutta doesn’t treat at all. Particularly, what does it mean to be ardent, alert, mindful? And how do you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world? The sutta doesn’t say.

It may be because of this lack that people think that mindfulness means just noticing the presence of things without passing judgment or doing anything else about them. And it may also be because of this misunderstanding that when Ajaan Lee wrote about satipaṭṭhāna, the establishing of mindfulness, he decided to focus on the three qualities of being ardent, alert, and mindful. They form the structure for his treatment, and he carries that theme all the way through to awakening—how ardency, alertness, and mindfulness correspond to different aspects of the knowledge of awakening.

He translates these three terms pretty much as they’re used in the Canon. Ardent means exerting right effort: abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones. Alert means watching what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

Like right now, you’re focused on the breath. You’re alert to what the breath is doing, and you’re also alert to what the mind is doing as it tries to stay focused on the breath. The ardency here is to keep at this. If you find yourself wandering off, you come right back to the breath.

Mindful means keeping something in mind. In this case, you keep in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. You also keep in mind whatever lessons you’ve learned from the past as to how to stay alert and how to be effective in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones.

Now, of those three qualities, Ajaan Lee identifies ardency as the wisdom faculty, the one that burns into things and understands them. This is related to the fact that the Pali term for ardency, ātappa, is related to tapas, which means to burn, both in a physical sense and in a mental sense. It’s here that Ajaan Lee parts ways with the commentary. The commentary identifies *sampajañña—which I translate as alertness—*as the wisdom faculty.

The way the commentators explain it explains why sampajañña is usually translated in other places as clear comprehension: You comprehend a situation, and in particular you comprehend it in terms of the three characteristics. The commentary does mention that there are some people who say that sampajañña means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it, but it gets pretty snide about that interpretation. It says that even jackals know that they’re howling when they’re howling; babies know that they’re sucking at their mother’s breast when they’re sucking at their mother’s breast. There’s nothing special about that.

But when the commentary gets snide, it’s usually a giveaway that its explanations are on shaky ground. The suttas consistently define sampajañña as knowing what you’re doing—in body or mind—while you’re doing it.

So I think it’s wise to look into why Ajaan Lee would identify ardency as the wisdom faculty.

Ardency relates to wisdom in two ways. The first is that simply trying to do your best is wise. You start out with right view, realizing that the causes of suffering lie inside. They come from what you do. So the wise thing to do with that teaching is to try to develop skillful qualities inside so that you’re not creating suffering. In this way, the simple fact of wanting to be ardent is wise in and of itself.

Then, as you’re ardent in developing skillful qualities, your wisdom grows, your discernment grows, as you learn new lessons that you don’t learn simply from reading the texts or thinking about them.

For instance, you learn the point of “just right.”

We talked about this the other day. The Buddha’s path is the middle way, but that doesn’t mean you’re middling in everything, that you put in a middling effort in your sitting meditation, a middling effort in your walking meditation, a middling effort to fight your defilements. What it actually means is that you have to find out through your own powers of observation—through your own experience, testing things and learning from your tests—how much effort is just right for a particular situation.

As the Buddha said, there are some causes of suffering that go away when you simply look at them. Others require what he calls the fabrication of exertion, where you have to figure out how the way you’re breathing is contributing to the problem, how the way you’re talking to yourself is contributing to the problem, how the perceptions you hold in mind, how the feelings you pay attention to are contributing to the problem.

From there, you learn how to change those fabrications. Breathe in a way that’s more calming if you’re angry. If you’re thinking about how much you want something or someone, think about the drawbacks of having that thing or that person. If your perceptions around something make it attractive or disgusting, can you change those perceptions? Can you find counterbalancing perceptions that are equally true? After all, no perception can represent the totality of anything. So what’s missing in your perception of something that could help calm down whatever the defilement is?

You learn this from trying to be skillful. This requires a lot more of your own powers of observation than simply going to an extreme in something. Extremes are pretty easy. They’re also easy to blame on other people.

If you follow an extreme path and it doesn’t work, you can blame the person who told you to follow the extreme path. But if you’re told to follow a middle way, a path of just right, then the responsibility is yours to find what is just right. That’s the kind of wisdom, that’s the kind of discernment, that’s responsible. It becomes yours through the fact that you try to do your best in being ardent in the practice.

Being ardent also teaches you how to think strategically. There are a lot of things in the path that you have to develop first before you let them go. You have to develop a strong sense of self, a healthy sense of self—that you’re capable of following the path, that you’re going to be responsible in doing it, willing to look at your actions, take responsibility for them, pass judgment on them, and change them if you see that they’re not skillful, and you’re confident that you will benefit as a result.

That sense of self is something that eventually you’ll have to let go of, but you need to use it to begin with. All too often, you hear people saying, “Because the Buddha said there is no self, just let go of your sense of self and that solves the problem.” It doesn’t solve problems. It actually can create a lot of problems. First you’ve got to develop a strong sense of self that’s trained in the practice. Then, when it’s fulfilled its function, you can let it go.

There are other issues that require thinking strategically, too. For instance, there are times when you’re angry at someone and you hear that you should have thoughts of goodwill, but you find it really hard to have goodwill. Well, the Buddha gives you an alternative: Remind yourself that when you’re angry, you’re going to say and do stupid things, and if your enemy finds out, the enemy is going to be pleased. Do you want to please that person? No. Then try to get your anger under control.

That’s using spite to control your anger. Spite may not be a very skillful mental state, but it’s better than giving in to your anger. Controlling your anger out of spite is a skillful use of spite. Then, as the mind begins to calm down, you can drop the spite and realize, “Okay, goodwill really is for your own well-being.” Then you can use goodwill to let the anger go.

So that’s the second thing you learn from being ardent: You learn how to think strategically.

The third thing you learn is to look around. We’re following a path here, which is like following a trail in the wilderness. You may have a wilderness guidebook that says, “Go to this trailhead here. This is where it’s located. This is how you get there. This is how you follow the path. Watch out. There are these places where you might get lost. So turn left here. Turn right here. Look for this sign. Look for that sign.” It tells you how to follow the path, but it doesn’t tell you everything you’re going to see as you hike along the path. It may point out a few major landmarks that you’re going to see, but there are a lot of other things you’ll see, some of them really interesting, that will depend on your own powers of observation.

This is especially important in the practice of establishing mindfulness. As the Buddha himself points out, when you’re focused on the breath, you’ve got the body in and of itself, but you also have feelings: The fact that you’re alert to the breath creates a feeling of pleasure in the breath. Your mind state is also there, the mind state of mindfulness. The equanimity of putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world is a mental quality.

So you’ve got body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities—all four frames of reference for establishing mindfulness—all right there. You can see their interactions, and seeing their interactions is what enables you to gain insight. Remember, insight is not just seeing things as they are. It’s seeing things as they come to be, how they’re part of a causal chain. When you see them that way, you can learn how to manipulate the causal chain, become more and more interested in things as they can be. In other words, you can make things into a path. You learn how to manipulate causes and effects to make a path to something that’s beyond cause and effect.

Those are some of the ways in which ardency is wise. Just the simple desire to give rise to what’s skillful is already a wise desire. As you follow through with that desire and use your powers of observation to see what works and what doesn’t work, you learn a lot of lessons that you wouldn’t have learned simply by reading the books.

It’s in this way that you’re able to borrow the Buddha’s wisdom and make it your own. This is how you become wise right where the problem is—not in the books, not in the concepts, but in the actual motions of the mind as you learn how to train them in the right direction.