Appropriate Attention

As I mentioned this morning, today marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of Ajaan Suwat’s passing. Twenty-four years in the Thai calendar is a significant date. They group years into twelve-year cycles. This means two complete cycles since he’s left. So it’s good to think about what he left behind.

Of course, he left the monastery and the schedule we follow, the way we run the monastery. We try to hold to his practices as much as we can.

Then, of course, he left teachings.

I remember when he was talking about how—when he had malaria one time, and was contemplating the state of his body and the state of his mind—it suddenly occurred to him that he had a direct experience of three out of the four noble truths: the first—suffering; the second—the cause of suffering; and the fourth—the path to the end of suffering. But he didn’t have experience yet of the third, which meant he didn’t have complete knowledge of those truths. That piqued his curiosity: How could he really know the other three if he didn’t know the third?

So he devoted himself more to the path and, apparently, that’s how he gained stream-entry. Now, he didn’t say make that claim. But when he described the insights he got, it sounded like stream-entry.

It reminded me of Ajaan Fuang’s story.

He’d been suffering from severe headaches. Chinese medicine didn’t work. Western medicine didn’t work. Thai medicine didn’t work. It was getting chronic and so severe that he had to have novices or monks staying in his room when he slept at night, in case he woke up and needed hot compresses or other medicines.

One night, he woke up, and the monks who were supposed to be looking after him were all passed out, fast asleep. The first thought that went through his mind was, “Who’s looking after whom here?” But then he told himself, “Well, as long as I’m up, I might as well meditate.” So he did. Suddenly he realized he’d been going about things the wrong way. He’d been trying to get rid of the pain, when, pain, dukkha, is something you’re supposed to comprehend. So he analyzed it, tried to comprehend it as best he could. And again, what he said about the insights he gained that night sounded an awful lot like stream-entry. He didn’t claim it to be that it was stream-entry, but that’s what it sounded like. He said that one of the realizations was that as soon as you engaged with the senses, as soon as you opened your eyes, there was pain already, which indicates that the experience of stream-entry is something so pleasant, so easeful, that the mere opening of your eyes would be painful in comparison.

In both cases, they took the four noble truths as their guide and asked questions in line with those truths. This is called “appropriate attention”: You apply the four noble truths to your experience with each moment, unlike some traditions where they say every moment is a new moment, totally fresh and unique, and should be approached with totally fresh eyes.

The Buddha taught that you approach each moment in the framework of the four noble truths, in the framework of appropriate attention. That means you try to do the duties appropriate to each of the truths. You try to figure out: What does it mean to develop the path? What does it mean to comprehend suffering? What does it mean to abandon the cause? What does it mean to realize the cessation of suffering? In a way, that is something you do approach with fresh eyes, because these are questions that demand fresh, immediate answers. But the framework stays the same.

We’ve heard the duties many, many times. We’ve heard the truths many times. The question is: Do we really understand them? The framework is there. It gives us guidance as to what questions to ask. The first truth is dukkha, or suffering. By the way, *dukkha *means “pain.” Some people say that it should be translated as “unsatisfactory.” But that strikes me as an unsatisfactory translation. I don’t see how you have “an unsatisfactory” in your arm, or “an unsatisfactory” in your head. You have “a pain” in your arm, “a pain” in your head. If you translate dukkha as “unsatisfactory,” it makes it sound as if it’s something subjective, that if you tell yourself to be satisfied with the way things are, you’ll be okay.

But that’s not the Buddha’s point. Things are painful. We don’t say aging is unsatisfactory, illness is unsatisfactory, death is unsatisfactory. These things are painful. The Buddha never defines dukkha, just as he never defines sukha, pleasure; or citta, mind. He talks about training the mind to get rid of dukkha and to find true pleasure, but he doesn’t define any of those terms—except for the training. He goes into a lot of detail about how you train the mind.

In the course of the training, your sense of your mind is going to develop; your sense of what accounts as sukha—pleasure, dukkha—pain, is going to develop as well. Things that you regard as pleasurable right now, as you get deeper and deeper into the practice, you begin to realize are actually stressful. Engaging with the senses, having to construct aggregates around your sensory experience, involves a lot of stress.

Even in pleasant experiences, a lot of construction has to go on. The more you get sensitive to this—the work the mind has to do in order to fabricate its experience—the more your understanding of what dukkha is, is going to develop, to the point, as I said, that Ajaan Fuang mentioned. When you’ve had the experience of the ultimate happiness, the happiness of the unconditioned, and you come back to the engagement with the senses, the first impression you get is that it’s painful, even in the areas where you’re looking for pleasure.

So we are working with dukkha as suffering, stress. And when we contemplate it in terms of the three perceptions, the purpose of those perceptions, of course, is to make you see that the things you’ve been clinging to are not worth it; the things you’ve been craving are not worth it. In that sense, the whole set—inconstancy, stress, not-self—is meant to make you see that things are unsatisfactory. But, the dukkha part, the suffering part, the painful part—that’s an important realization. The things you take for granted as being okay, when you get really sensitive, you begin to realize are burdensome. They place a weight or a squeeze on the mind. It’s a good reason to want to find something better.

The same with inconstancy: We work with the breath, we work on getting the mind into concentration to make it as constant as possible. We look at the distractions that would pull us away. We want to see that they’re very inconstant and unreliable in comparison to concentration. But as you get deeper and deeper into the concentration, you see that even levels of right concentration that you’ve enjoyed in the beginning begin to seem gross, stressful. Your sense of what counts as dukkha and sukha, pleasure and pain, gets more refined.

So you begin to see that inconstancy is there even in the concentration. It’s something that constantly has to be maintained. You can’t just let it ride. It’s not the case that you push a button and you’re done with it. You have to keep looking after it, tending to it. Part of the mind wants to say, “Isn’t there something you don’t have to keep tending to all the time?” That’s when you begin to dis-identify with these things.

So there’s a certain psychology to seeing the inconstancy, the stress and pain in the inconstancy, and the perception of not-self in what’s stressful and inconstant, all in the context of the four noble truths. It’s part of the duty of comprehending suffering and abandoning its cause.

So as you’re sitting here meditating, you’re trying to develop your sensitivities—to the breath, to the way you feel the body from within, to the way you sense your mind from within. We tend to run roughshod over these things as we stampede out to look at the world outside, engage with the world outside, or fascinated by what’s happening with the world outside.

Our culture has taught us to be de-sensitized to the precise areas where we should be most familiar, which are also the precise areas where awakening is to be found.

So try to bring some sensitivity to your practice. That’s one thing I noticed about Ajaan Suwat and Ajaan Fuang: Even though they were the sons of peasants, they were very precise people, very observant. They had very refined sensitivities. It’s something that anyone can develop, no matter what your background. Work on that. That’s where discernment comes—not from knowing the terms, not from being able to label things correctly. It comes from being sensitive: “There’s stress there. Why is there stress?”

One of Ajaan Suwat’s most striking talks was when he talked about getting the mind into concentration: He was saying that wherever there’s stress in the concentration, that’s where avijjā, or ignorance, is going to be found. So you look there, try to clear it away, and things get more refined. Then you look there again. As you get more sensitive to what’s going on, you find more things to clear away. He said that’s how the deathless is found, that’s how you find the goal of this practice.

So look at things in terms of the four noble truths and in terms of appropriate attention: the questions around the four noble truths, what the truths mean, what their duties are. That’s the training.

As you train the mind to get past suffering and to find genuine happiness, your sense of the mind will grow, your sense of what counts as stress and pain will grow, your sense of what counts as true happiness will develop. We’re not here to arrive at an ultimate definition of these things. We’re here to use these things to arrive at the ultimate. That’s the tradition our teachers have left for us.

As Ajaan Fuang once said about Ajaan Lee, his teacher: “Ajaan Lee showed me the brightness of the world.” Ajaan Fuang and Ajaan Suwat: They’ve shown us the brightness of the world. That brightness is something we can find inside. We follow their example. We follow their instructions. But to see that brightness is going to require that we get really, really sensitive to what we’re doing, and that we develop higher and higher standards for what we find acceptable. That’s what this is all about.