Don’t Practice in a Row

One of the favorite teachings of the ajaans is that things in the mind don’t come lined up the way they do in the texts. This applies both to your defilements and to the factors of the path. It’s not the case that you first have gross defilements and then subtler ones. They come in a mixture, willy-nilly.

It’s not the case that you attack only the gross ones first and let the subtle ones wait for the time being, because sometimes the subtle ones can trip you up pretty badly. If you can detect them, you attack them. You may realize that some of the big ones like anger and lust are not going to go away. You may have read that they’re not fully conquered until you reach non-return, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until non-return or stream-entry to deal with them. They can come at any time, so you have to be ready to deal with them all the time.

This is why we need to work on all the factors of the path, all the time—because you require some discernment to undercut your lust, undercut your anger, on a day-to-day basis. You can’t say, “Wait until I perfect my concentration, then I’ll attack lust, then I’ll attack anger.” When you’re creating problems for yourself right now, you have to bring out whatever discernment you have. That’s how your discernment gets strengthened—as you use it.

You may lose the battle sometimes, but as you lose battles, you learn about your enemies. If you don’t engage the enemies at all, then you’re never going to learn about them. This is why the path also requires that we work on all the factors—virtue and concentration and discernment—all at the same time.

In the texts, they’re lined up. There are many suttas where the Buddha talks about the practice step by step by step. But think about this in terms of the two main descriptions of the path. One is the triple training of virtue, concentration, and discernment. The other is the noble eightfold path.

In terms of the triple training, we have virtue, then concentration, then discernment. In terms of the path, we start out with discernment factors, then virtue factors, and then concentration factors. The training lines things up in terms of the order in which they’re mastered. The path lines things up in terms of the order in which you begin to practice them. Even then, it says there’s more complexity.

There’s a sutta, Majjhima 117, which talks about how, with every factor of the path, right view, right mindfulness, and right effort circle around that factor. This applies not only to the discernment factors, but also to the virtue factors. Right mindfulness and right effort are concentration factors, but you have to apply them to the practice of virtue for your virtue to be clean.

So you work on them all the time, work on them all together. This is indicated in several places in the Canon. When the Buddha talks about the attainments of stream-entry, non-return, and arahantship, he doesn’t say that stream-enters have mastered only virtue and haven’t mastered anything at all in terms of concentration or discernment. He says they’re wholly accomplished in virtue but moderately accomplished in concentration and discernment. Non-returners are wholly accomplished in virtue and concentration, moderately accomplished in discernment. They have some discernment, so it’s a sign they’ve been working on it all along.

And the definition of the stream is all eight factors of the path coming together—which includes virtue and concentration and discernment. Stream-entry, of course, is the noble attainment where virtue has been mastered, but you have to have the other factors in order to master it.

The Buddha states this simply in a couple of places. In the Dhammapada, he says there’s no jhana without discernment and no discernment without jhana. For the mind to settle down, you need to have some understanding of the processes of fabrication in your mind. You’re not going to fully see the fabrications in the mind until the mind has settled down to some extent.

It sounds like you’re being put in a double bind, but that’s not the case. In the practice, you just practice success through approximation. If you want to be strong, you go down to the gym and you work with whatever weak muscles you’ve got. You don’t sit around waiting for the muscles to get stronger on their own and then do the workout. You do the workout with your weak muscles, and by doing the workout, the muscles get stronger. In the same way, you start using your concentration, using your discernment, all along. That’s how they grow.

After all, for the practice of the precepts, you need to have mindfulness, alertness, ardency—being mindful to keep the precept in mind, alert to see what you’re actually doing, and ardent to make sure that you stick with the precepts and abandon any ideas that would pull you away. Those are all qualities that are developed in concentration practice. The more you have them, the better your virtue is going to be, the more thoroughly you’re going to understand your intentions.

We talked about this the other day—there are times when you’re not totally sure about the purity of your intention. You work with what you’ve got, what you can see. Then, as your powers of observation get sharper, you begin to see that there may be some unskillful motives lurking behind what seems to be skillful.

But you’re not going to see them until, one, you’ve been trying your best to work on skillful intentions and, two, you learn how to get the mind really quiet so that you can see the various layers of conversation going on inside.

In a similar way, discernment is needed for concentration. Evaluation is one of the factors of the first jhāna. As Ajaan Lee points out, that’s the beginning of your wisdom and discernment, as you learn to evaluate what’s working in your concentration, what’s not working, and what you might do to make it work.

You also need discernment to help you with your virtue. There are times when what you want to do, what you like to do, is going to go against the precepts. As the Buddha said, it’s going to be a measure of your discernment: how you can talk yourself into sticking with the precepts despite your likes and dislikes.

So all three qualities—virtue, concentration, and discernment—help one another along.

There’s another simple way in which the Buddha states this: It’s like your hands washing each other. Your right hand washes your left hand; your left hand washes your right. In the same way, he says, your virtue washes your discernment; your discernment washes your virtue. In the passage where he says that, he includes concentration under discernment. So you have your concentration and discernment on one side, your virtue on the other, and they’re washing each other. That’s how they both get clean.

It’s important that you realize that we’re not here just to practice virtue until it’s perfect, and then we work on our concentration. Our virtue not going to get perfect that way. And we’re certainly not going to wait until our concentration and virtue are perfect before we start dealing with issues of discernment, because you’ve got defilements coming up in your mind all the time, on a day-to-day basis. If you want to minimize conflict in the community, minimize conflict in your mind, you’ve got to start working with whatever discernment you’ve got, based on whatever virtue and concentration you’ve got. As you work on all three all together, they all begin to grow. They all get more useful. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to live with one another. We wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves and with any real joy.

But as we begin to see that as all three of them help one another along, they all get strong, and everything inside the mind gets washed. Whatever comes up in the mind, you want to deal with it. There are times when you deal with it and you don’t totally come out victorious—or sometimes you actually lose. But as I said, at least the fact that you’ve dealt with these things, challenged these things, means you’re going to learn from taking up the challenge. Your discernment grows, your virtue grows, your concentration grows, and everybody benefits.