Remembering Ajaan Lee

Tonight is the 65th anniversary of Ajaan Lee’s passing. Because he was the person who formulated the breath meditation method we’re pursuing right now, it’s good to reflect on what kind of person he was.

There’s a chedi, a 13-spired monument, at Wat Asokaram, one of the monasteries he founded. Inside, there’s a large room with statues of the different ajaans. Each statue has a little phrase about what was distinctive about that ajaan. I must admit, there’s something wrong about distilling a person’s whole life into one little phrase. In Ajaan Lee’s case, the phrase is that “he had high mental power (phalang cit soong).” In Thai, this usually means strong powers of concentration and in Ajaan Lee’s case, that’s certainly true. There are stories not only about the strength of his concentration but also about the various psychic powers he developed based on his concentration.

But there was a lot more to Ajaan Lee than just the power of his concentration. As Ajaan Fuang said, Ajaan Lee had a very large heart that encompassed all kinds of people. In the year 1957, Wat Asokaram held a celebration of the 2,500 years of Buddhism. A lot of young men were ordained, and many of them stayed on for the rains retreat. Ajaan Fuang, who was put in charge of training them, told Ajaan Lee that they were really difficult to train. As he put it in Thai they were lya khaw, which means the kind of things that are left over after everybody’s taken what they want. Ajaan Lee’s comment was, “Well, even if they can’t grasp the Dhamma, maybe if a few grains of sand stick to their hands, it’s still good.” In other words, he wanted to give people what Dhamma they could comprehend—and if it was only a little bit, well, it was better than nothing.

But to get back to the high mental power: In Ajaan Lee’s case, it also meant that he was very, very intelligent. Of the various forest ajaans, he was the only one who wrote systematic treatises about the Dhamma, laying things out very clearly and consistently. He also gave a lot of insight into the practice of concentration. Not only did he have strong concentration, but he also understood it really well. He solved a lot of the issues that we have in Theravada, about the relationship of mindfulness to concentration, what mindfulness is, what concentration is, the meaning of some of the terms in the standard formulae.

As in the case of describing right mindfulness: He wrote a whole book on the topic, and as in most books on the topic, he focused first on dividing the material into being mindful of the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, and mental qualities in and of themselves. But throughout the book, the main emphasis is on the three qualities you bring to that process of establishing mindfulness on these four things: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. He defined these terms very much in line with the Canon, not so much in line with the commentaries. Mindfulness, for example, means keeping something in mind. Alertness means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it and seeing the results of what you’re doing. Ardency is the desire to do this well.

Now, in the commentaries, they define alertness, sampajañña, more as clear comprehension, and for them that’s the wisdom quality among the three: comprehending things in terms of the three characteristics, comprehending them in context. The problem is, the commentary gets very snide about defining alertness as knowing what you’re doing, while you’re doing it—even though that’s clearly how the Canon defines it. Of the three qualities, Ajaan Lee taught that the wisdom quality was in the ardency. You don’t just watch things as they are, you see things as they function and you cultivate the desire to make them function in the best way they can—not so much as “things as they are” as “things as they can be.” The desire to do this well is the source of wisdom.

As Ajaan Lee said, not all desire is bad. When you see that you have ignorance, the desire to get past that ignorance is a good thing. Why are we meditating here? If it weren’t for the desire, we wouldn’t be here. So, skillful desire is wise. It’s also wise in the sense that you understand how best to use the Buddha’s teachings in line with their purpose. You can read about the teachings and you can talk about them, but if you don’t have the desire to put them into practice and actually master them as skills, you can’t be said to be wise.

That was another one of his insights—that the practice of meditation is like a skill. He compared it to making a pair of pants, weaving a basket, making clay tiles, making objects out of silver. You learn by working with what you’ve got, trying to make something good out of what you’ve got. With the cloth, you’re trying to make a pair of pants. With straw or vines, you’re trying to weave a basket. Then, after you’re done, you look at what you’ve done and you evaluate it. This is where we get into his explanation of concentration.

For him, the line between mindfulness and concentration is really very vague. The purpose of mindfulness is to get you into concentration. When you get into concentration, starting with the factors of the first jhāna—directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, pleasure, and rapture—the ardency and alertness that get you from the practice of mindfulness into the practice of concentration get embodied in the evaluation.

And here, Ajaan has a really good explanation for evaluation in this state of concentration—another one of the big issues in Theravada meditation practice, one that’s widely misunderstood. You use your powers of observation to see what you’re doing and then figure out how to do it better. That’s what you’re evaluating: How can you get the mind and the breath to stay together?

I remember when I first learned his method of meditation, I found it really liberating. I’d been meditating in a way where you were supposed to stay focused just on one spot, the tip of the nose. You were supposed to let the breath do whatever it’s going to do. You were not supposed to manipulate the breath in any way at all. I found myself getting headaches and feeling confined.

Reading Ajaan Lee—where he encouraged to play with the breath, experiment with the breath, trying to see which kind of breathing feels best, and then to spread that comfortable breath along with your sense of awareness throughout the whole body—I found it liberating. At the same time, you’re learning how to use your powers of observation and develop your powers of judgment.

People often complain, “How do I know what kind of breathing is better than another kind of breathing?” Well, you just breathe and then you observe. If you don’t trust your own powers of observation, if you want somebody else to explain it for you, you’re never going to get anywhere. You have to evaluate for yourself what feels best right now. If you’re not really sure, well, you take a stab. Just stick with one way of breathing for a while. After a while, you begin to realize, “This feels really good,” or else, “This doesn’t feel right at all.” If that’s the case, you can change. Ask yourself, “If it’s not right, what felt not right?” Were you putting too much effort into the in-breath, too much effort into the out-breath? Well, reduce the amount of effort. You shouldn’t try to force the breath.

When Ajaan Lee talks about experimenting with the length of the breath or spreading the breath energy throughout the body, he uses a Thai word that basically means “allow.” Allow these things to change. See what happens. In this way, you get the most out of the breath as an object of concentration, because it feels good to be here. Instead of thinking about the task of concentrating, you’re thinking about the opportunity to enjoy the way you breathe and allow that enjoyable breath to fill the whole body.

Of the various forest ajaans, Ajaan Lee is the one who spoke the most about whole-body awareness, in line with the Canon. The images in the Canon are of a bathman who’s mixing water with soap powder, or of a cool spring at the bottom of the lake, filling the whole lake with its cool waters. The advantage of this kind of awareness is that it feels good to be here and your concentration gets really solidly based. If it’s based just on one point, then if you move from that one point, the concentration has been lost. But if the framework for your concentration is the whole body, then whatever may come in or go out of the mind doesn’t have to disturb your frame. That way, your mindfulness is established; your concentration is established.

So these were just some of the issues that Ajaan Lee was able to clear up, bringing them in line with the Canon, based on his own experience. That’s when you know the practice is going well—when you take what you experience and check it against the Canon, and you begin to see, “Oh yes, that’s right. I didn’t understand that passage in the Canon before because I hadn’t developed the skill yet. But now that I’ve developed the skill, I know what the Buddha is talking about.”

In my own case, when I first started meditating, we didn’t have many suttas around. What translations there were, were old and stodgy. All I had was basically Ajaan Lee: Keeping the Breath in Mind, the collection of his Dhamma talks, and his book on mindfulness. I followed them. Then years later, as I came across the suttas, especially Majjhima 140 and Majjhima 121—where they talk about being observant of your meditation—and everything fit together.

We do have this idealized vision of the forest ajaans, just going out and practicing without any formal training, but that’s not the case. They got a good training in Vinaya. And those like Ajaan Lee who were really curious did read in the texts. Ajaan Fuang tells of how, when they would have their evening meditation at one of the monasteries that Ajaan Lee founded, where Ajaan Fuang was number two in command, they would have a meditation session in the evening that lasted from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., chanting followed by meditation, sometimes a talk, sometimes a reading. Once a month, a magazine would come from Bangkok. It was called Dhamma Caksu, the Dhamma Eye. It had articles on the Dhamma, translations from the suttas, because at that point the Pali Canon was being translated for the first time—the whole Canon—into Thai. On the day when the magazine came, that night it was what was read aloud to everybody—the whole magazine. So Ajaan Lee did study, passed the basic exams, what they call the “Dhamma Experts,” exams, which cover a pretty basic knowledge. But then he also kept studying, on throughout his life. He said he wanted to be a storehouse, to expand his knowledge, so that he could be a better teacher.

But still it’s pretty amazing that someone with a very basic education was able to deal with the large issues in Theravada meditation, clear them up, based both on his experience—the skills he developed—and on the texts. That was another aspect of his high mental power—not just the power of his concentration, but also the power of his discernment. His discernment was subtle and all-around, very circumspect, very organized. As we practice his method, those are the qualities we want to bring to our own practice as well—subtle, observant, circumspect—so that we carry on this tradition not only in name, but also so that we can fully embody it.