Understanding Contentment

Start with thoughts of goodwill. Make something good out of your mind. As we’re sitting here, you can think about anything you want to think about, but you can ask yourself, “What kind of thoughts would give long-term happiness and well-being?” One kind would be thoughts of goodwill. Start with goodwill for yourself: Tell yourself, “May I understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” And then thoughts of goodwill for others: “May they, too, understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.”

You want to extend those thoughts to everybody, without limit, without choosing only this person or that person. The image the Buddha gives is of a person playing a conch trumpet: The sound goes in all directions. The person playing the trumpet doesn’t say that the sound should go only in this direction and not that one, or only to this person and not that person. It goes to everybody in all directions. That’s making something good out of your mind.

Now bring your attention to the breath and make something good out of the breath. It’s already coming in and going out, but what could you make out of it. Start with how it feels as it comes in, how it feel as it goes out. Wherever the breath is most obvious, wherever there are sensations in the body that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, focus there—remembering that “breath” means not so much the air coming in and out through the nose, but the flow of energy throughout the body.

Where does it feel good? Focus there. Then the question is: Could it be better? You can experiment with breathing longer or shorter; faster, slower; heavier, lighter; deeper, more shallow. See what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now.

You may not realize it, but as you’re doing this exercise, you’re embodying a principle that the Buddha praised, which is called contentment.

Contentment means being happy with what you’ve got. Now, there are two main misunderstandings about this. The first point you have to understand is that when the Buddha’s talking about contentment, he’s talking about being content with material things. In terms of the monks, it means being content with whatever food you get, whatever clothing, shelter, medicine you get. If it’s good enough to practice, it’s good enough.

For lay people, it means not wasting your money on unnecessary things, because you want to be able to use your money not only for your material well-being, but also for the well-being of your mind. In a case like that, if you can do with fewer material possessions, you’ll have more that you can give to others, more that you can stash away for the future.

But this doesn’t mean that you’re content with whatever comes up in the mind.

This is the first misunderstanding: Some people think that you have to be content with whatever comes up in the mind as well. If the mind is full of hindrances, full of defilements, well, you just accept that fact and live with it. But that’s not what contentment means. Contentment doesn’t apply to the mind.

The Buddha said you shouldn’t tolerate anything unskillful coming up in the mind. If it’s something you can get rid of quickly, you get rid of it quickly. If it’s something that’s going to take more time, you have to watch it for a while to understand it. In other words, you let it be there, you watch it, but with the thought that you’re going to look to see where its weak points are.

After all, every unskillful thought that comes into the mind has its reasons, has its excuses as to why it’s okay to think this thought now, or why you have to think this thought now.

But look at it. Can you believe those excuses? Can you believe those reasons? Sometimes this will take time: If you just try to squash every thought that comes up without understanding it, it’s going to come back. But remember what the Buddha said: The secret to his awakening was not only being discontent with unskillful qualities, it was even being discontent with skillful qualities. As long as his level of skill hadn’t reached the point of full awakening, he wasn’t going to rest.

This is in the attitude he taught to his son. He told him that if you see you’ve done something well, take joy in that fact, but don’t be satisfied. Continue training; try to get better. Of course, if you’ve done something unskillful, you’re going to try to figure out some way not to do it again.

So that’s the first point you have to understand: Contentment has to do with material things. You learn how to practice discontent skillfully with regard to your mind.

If you’re very discontent unskillfully, you can make yourself miserable. So, as I said, when you see that you’ve done something good, take joy in that fact.

For example, if you have some unskillful thoughts coming into the mind at night—say, there’s a temptation to break a precept—but you get past that without giving in, remember how good you feel the next day. That’ll be encouragement for you the next time around: One, you’ve learned that you can withstand it; and two, you can think of how happy you’ll be that you did. So you take joy in what you’re able to do, but you keep reminding yourself that there’s more to be done. And you learn how to take joy even in that fact: that you’re willing to do what’s required, you’re willing to do more.

You don’t talk about how tired you are being on the path, how long the path is. You take joy in the fact that you have this path. You have the opportunity to practice with more skill, more detail, more precision. That makes this a joyous path. You’re a conscious agent and you want to be a good conscious agent—to act more skillfully in improving your powers of judgment.

That’s the first point to understand.

The second point: Even with material things, you learn how to make the most out of them. Take this method of breath meditation we’re doing right now. You make the mind content to be with the breath, realizing that this is the path. But you don’t just stop there. The Buddha says that there are potentials in the breath. There are ways of breathing that can give rise to refreshment; there are ways of breathing that give rise to pleasure, ways of breathing that gladden the mind, steady the mind.

What are those ways? You take the raw material you have and you ask yourself, “What’s the most skillful way to develop it?” Years back, in the 1950s, there were social scientists who went to Thailand from America. They were concerned that Thailand might become communist, and they tried to understand how to prevent that. So they figured they had to study Buddhism—what the Buddha taught—to see what kind of attitudes Thai people were learning from their religion. And one of the things they came across was this emphasis on contentment.

They thought, “This is bad; this is not going to help the country develop.” So they asked the government to ask the monks to stop teaching contentment. Well, the monks all laughed, because just sitting there idly is not what contentment means. It means that if this is what you’ve got, you learn how to make the most of what you’ve got. You don’t sit around dreaming about having more. You dream about what you can make out of what you’ve got, and then you do it.

As with your breath here: You can do all kinds of different things with the breath. Breathe down through the torso. Breathe down through your legs. Breathe down through your arms. Try to develop what you’ve got.

Take the case of Ajaan Lee. He discovered this method when he was off in the jungle. He’d walked three days into the jungle; he was going to spend the rains retreat near a little hill tribe village. He got there and a few days after he arrived, he had a heart attack. No medicine, no doctors. There were no roads. The only way he was going to get out was walking out, and he certainly wasn’t in any shape to do that. So what did he have? He had his breath.

He said, “Well, let’s see what we can do with the breath.” He worked with the breath energies in the body, strengthened the breath energies, and strengthened the heart. At the end of the rains retreat, he was strong enough to walk out. He had been content with what he had, but he didn’t just sit with what he had. He learned how to develop what he had.

So contentment means that you look at what you’ve got and ask yourself, “What’s the best thing I can do with this?”

Sometimes you have things and you realize that the best thing you can do would be to give them away. You develop the virtue of generosity. In other cases, you figure out how to fix them so that they actually are more useful in more situations. You use your ingenuity to make the most of what you’ve got. That’s an important element of contentment. People who are not content with what they’ve got but want more just sit around dreaming, or sometimes they go stealing, or they go borrowing things.

As the Buddha said, if you borrow things, you get yourself in debt. You place yourself under a huge burden. What you should do is to look at what you’ve got—this applies to your talents, to your material possessions—and ask yourself, “What’s the best thing that can be done with this?” Use your ingenuity as much as you can. And you won’t be accused of being discontent.

You’re learning how to use what you’ve got wisely.

Or take the example of Ajaan Mun. He lived in the forest, and the forest can be a pretty unpleasant place to be. So he would take the area where he was staying and make it really clean: clear out the brush, sweep every day, so that the forest became a very civilized place to be.

Again, it was through his efforts, through his ingenuity, that his small resources became livable.

So look at what you’ve got with the thought of making the most of what you’ve got. When you do that, then you really understand the Buddha’s teachings on contentment. You don’t just sit there. You develop your resources so that when the time does come to sit with your eyes closed, you can sit down with a sense of ease and well-being, and work on what really needs to be fixed, which, of course, is the state of your mind.

When we have the habit of learning to make the most of what we’ve got, we bring that habit inside. We ask ourselves: When the Buddha gained awakening, what did he have? He had his body and he had his mind. You have a body; you have a mind. What’s the difference? He made the most of his breath, he made the most of his mind—and you can make the most of yours.