No Extra Arrows

The Buddha says that awakened people feel pain, and unawakened people feel pain. So what’s the difference? He gives an analogy. He says that for most people, when you feel a pain, it’s like being shot with one arrow, but then you shoot yourself with a second arrow. You get upset, you get distraught, you beat your breast, he says. As for awakened people, though, there’s just the first arrow: the pain. They don’t get upset.

That second arrow stands for the suffering covered in the four noble truths. That’s the suffering we can do something about. That’s the suffering that weighs down the mind. Without that suffering, the pain comes, the pain goes, but the mind doesn’t suffer.

After all, the Buddha had backaches, he endured other pains, but he didn’t suffer. He just had the pains, experienced them, and they went past. That’s the skill we’re trying to develop.

When the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, it’s the clinging to the aggregates. Clinging, he says, is desire and passion. It’s focused on form — the form of the body — feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness. And it comes from craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion. The relationship between the two is like this: The word for craving in Pali is “thirst.” The word for clinging — upādāna — is “to feed.” So the desire and passion that’s looking for something: That’s the craving that causes suffering. When it lands on something and feeds on it, that’s the clinging. We tend to think that by feeding we gain pleasure, we gain satisfaction. But in the feeding there’s a lot of suffering.

Look at a dog that’s eating, especially a stray dog that’s caught something. He’s always afraid that people are going to take it away. There is that fear that what we’re feeding on, because it’s always changing, could be taken away at any time. So we hold on even more tightly. That’s where the suffering is.

We hold on in terms of our sensual fantasies. We hold on in terms of our views about the world, our ideas of how things should and shouldn’t be done, and our sense of self. When you talk about these things, people say, “Oh yes, I do hold on to those things.” They can’t imagine not holding on to them.

But the Buddha is saying, “Look carefully at what you’re holding on to. Those things are made out of those five aggregates.” When you look at them in those terms, then you see they’re really ephemeral, something that can’t provide real satisfaction. That’s when you’re going to be more inclined to want to let go of the things you cling to. That’s when you look to the path, because the path shows that by getting rid of the desire and passion of the craving, you get rid of the suffering. So the path involves getting the mind into concentration to see these things clearly.

That brings up two other points. In that image of the two arrows, when you look at other parts of the Canon, you realize that the image of the second arrow is not complete. One, there’s not just one second arrow. You keep shooting yourself again and again and again. That’s what clinging means. Even though these things add to the suffering, you find some satisfaction in them, so you feel a need to keep shooting yourself again and again. It’s like an addiction. You find some pleasure, even though there’s a lot of suffering that goes along with it. Often, you tend to deny the suffering. This is one of the reasons why good, solid concentration is an important part of the path. You can’t just be mindful of things. You have to get the mind really settled in so that it’s willing to see what’s actually going on.

The other point is that, in line with dependent co-arising, we don’t shoot ourselves with the second arrow only after the first arrow. We also shoot ourselves before, in preparation. If you look at dependent co-arising, there are a lot of factors that come before sensory contact, before feeling. If those factors are done in ignorance, they prime us to suffer, no matter what comes in at the stage of contact or feeling.

One of the main factors at the very beginning, right after ignorance, is fabrication. This is another reason why we practice concentration. We want to get to the mind before it feels different pains, so that it’s primed not to suffer by the way we engage in fabrication.

If you’re fabricating in ignorance, you’re priming the mind to suffer. And what are fabrications? There’s the in-and-out breath, which is bodily fabrication. There’s verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation—in other words, it’s the way you talk to yourself. You choose a topic to focus on, and then you ask questions, make comments, explore the topic, speak to yourself in full sentences, either questions or answers.

Then there’s mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, identifying what they are, what they mean, and how important they are. Like with the traffic light: If it’s red, you identify the color as red, you identify that red means stop, and if you know your traffic laws, you know that you’ve got to give some importance to that red light, otherwise you’re in trouble. Well, we apply the same perceptions to ourselves — to our minds, to our bodies — labeling things inside. And then there are the feelings we focus on inside.

Those are the three kinds of fabrication.

Because fabrication comes first, before contact, if you’re knowledgeable about what you’re doing, you can prime it so that when the contact comes, you’re not going to shoot yourself with that second arrow. At the very least, you’re going to hold back.

Here again, this is why we get the mind into concentration. One, to get the mind still enough to see these three fabrications clearly. And two, to create a sense of well-being, that feeling in mental fabrication.

Think back to the discussion of feeling in right mindfulness. The Buddha talks about feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Then he divides feelings into two sorts: feelings of the flesh — which are basically pleasures, pains, neutral feelings that just naturally happen at the senses — and then feelings not of the flesh: again, pleasant, painful, and neutral. Those don’t just happen on their own. Those are things that you intentionally create.

Now, sometimes the intentions may be buried. Sometimes we create feelings of pain going through our body without realizing what we’re doing. But with concentration, you can consciously create feelings of pleasure: a pleasure not of the flesh. As the Buddha says, you breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, gives rise to pleasure. Breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to the whole body, and you allow the rapture and pleasure to go through the whole body as you think of the energy flow that allows these feelings to flow. When you’ve developed feelings like this and can carry them around with you, then when pains come, you have an alternative. You don’t have to focus on the pain. You’ve got something better to focus on so you don’t feel entirely consumed by the pain.

A lot of people, when they get a pain some place in the body, find that the pain fills the whole body. But that’s just a bad habit. If you have an alternative center to focus on and you can make that center pleasurable, then you have another place to stand in the body. You realize it’s not the case that the whole body is consumed. As Ajaan Lee said, if the whole body were consumed with pain, you’d die. There’s got to be someplace in the body where you can create a sense of ease, someplace in the breath.

Remember that when we talk about the breath, we’re talking about the flow of energy through the body and* around* the body. Sometimes, when things are bad in the body, you can go to the sense of energy cocoon around the body. Hang out there, in the sense of space that surrounds the body and permeates the body. You can focus on these things. Create a pleasure not of the flesh that gives you an alternative to focusing on whatever pains may come up through the other senses.

That’s one of the reasons why we practice concentration: one, to get the mind still enough to see things clearly; and two, to provide it with a sense of well-being that allows you to step back from the pain, and not be consumed by it. And then three, when you’re creating a state of concentration, you’re dealing directly with these three kinds of fabrication.

You’re focused on the breath as your topic. Well, that’s bodily fabrication. You talk to yourself about how the breath is going, how the mind fits with the breath, and how the breath fits with the mind—and where they don’t fit, what changes need to be made. You change the way you breathe, the rhythm of the breath: In long, out long. In short, out short. In long, out short. In short, out long. Heavy, light. Fast, slow. You can talk about the texture of the breath, whether it’s smooth or rough, coarse or refined. Then you can adjust these things. That’s part of the evaluation. It’s part of verbal fabrication too.

And then with mental fabrication, you’ve got the perceptions of the breath: where the breath flows in the body, how it flows, where it comes in, where it goes out, where it starts. Does it start at one point, outside, and come in? Does it come in from all directions into the body as you breathe in? Or does the breath start in the body itself? After all, when you see breath as energy, the energy is in here. Where’s the signal that tells you now to breathe in, now to breathe out? Where does that first get started? One spot in the body? Two? Many spots? Every cell? There are lots of different ways you can perceive the breath energy in the body, and lots of different ways you can perceive where your mind is focused in the body. All these things together create that state of concentration.

So as you’re creating the concentration, you’re getting hands-on experience in fabricating these three kinds of fabrication. You’re not just looking at them, observing them. You’re actually manipulating them to create this feeling of pleasure not of the flesh. That allows you to at least step back from any pains in the body so that you’re not consumed by them.

This is how you learn now not to shoot yourself with arrows before the pains, and it makes you less likely to shoot yourself with those arrows after the pains.

Getting into concentration is not a state of awakening. After all, awakening is another dimension entirely: outside of space, outside of time. With concentration, you’re still in space, in time. Even though you’re right here in the present moment, you’re still in time. But the fact that you have another place to stay, another place to focus, allows you to understand the suffering you’ve been creating, and how not to create that suffering. So give some importance to this practice of concentration.

We focus on meditation both to get the mind still and to give rise to insight. As the Buddha said, if you want to have stillness and insight, you’ve got to get the mind into jhāna. And then from the stillness and the insight, your jhāna goes deeper. They help each other along. That way, you find yourself shooting yourself less and less and less with these arrows.

With the combination of stillness and insight, you finally reach the point where you learn how to stop. There may be some arrows coming in from your past karma. Those are first arrows, but those aren’t the ones that weigh down the mind. As long as the second arrows, either prior to or after the first arrow, don’t get shot, then there’s nothing to burden the mind at all.