Learning from Determination

Before I met Ajaan Fuang, my knowledge of Buddhist meditation came largely from books. They taught that you had to get the basic concepts down, understand what the different terms meant, and then observe your mind to see that what the terms said was true. With Ajaan Fuang, though, the approach was very different. We didn’t discuss basic terms. He gave me a little booklet on Ajaan Lee’s Method 2 and told me to go meditate.

I began to realize that his basic approach was that you learn a skill. In the course of learning that skill, you’re going to understand what the teachings are all about. In fact, it’s the skill that allows you to understand. You can’t just understand through thinking. There is some understanding that comes through thinking, but the primary emphasis was to get the skill down.

Now, in the teachings that said you had to understand the concepts, it was all about learning that you’re nothing but the five aggregates. The five aggregates are inherently suffering. And you’ll see automatically that they’re not worth coming back to. They’re not worth desiring. Nothing’s worth desiring.

When you’re learning a skill, though — and I noticed this with Ajaan Fuang — you’re very upfront about the fact that there is desire, and desire is going to be a necessary part of learning. It’s okay to desire. As for who you are, that was left unanswered.

I remember really being curious about this, and I began to read some of the books from the forest tradition, especially during my year back in the States. I had a copy of Ajaan Maha Bua’s biography of Ajaan Mun. I came to the last talk where Ajaan Mun is talking about how being a meditator as like being a soldier. The important part is the soldier’s weapons — discernment — supported by the food supplies and other things that go into an army. I remember thinking as I was reading the passage, “Well, what is a soldier?”

Then Ajaan Mun said, finally, “The soldier is the determination never to come back and be the laughingstock of the defilements ever again.” So while you are learning the skills, you are the determination. You are the desire.

Of course, remember the image that Ven. Ananda gives to the brahman. The brahman has come to him—Ananda is staying in a park—and the brahman asks, “What is the purpose of this practice of yours? Does it have a goal?”

Ananda says, “Yes. The goal is subduing desire and passion.”

“What’s the path to that goal?”

Ananda says that one of the ways of expressing the path is through the four bases of success, starting with concentration based on desire.

The brahman says, “Well, in that case, it’s an impossible path. How can you use desire to put an end to desire?”

So Ananda cross-questions him. He says, “Before you came to the park here, did you have the desire to come here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have the desire while you were on your way here?”

“Yes.”

“Now that you’re here, where is it?”

“It’s gone. The desire has been fulfilled.” He had to hold to the desire as he walked along. Then, when he arrived, he let it go withouto even thinking about it.

Well, that’s how we treat desire here on the path. It’s okay to desire concentration. It’s okay to desire insights. It’s okay to want to attain *nibbāna *as a future goal. Just make sure you focus your desires on the causes that will get you there.

All too often we’re told: “Don’t have any future goals. Having future goals separates you from being fully in the present moment.” But where did the Buddha say that being fully in the present moment is the goal? Where did he say that just accepting what comes up, having choiceless awareness, is how you practice? Or that the practice is the goal? Nowhere.

The practice is all about the things you learn in the course of mastering the skills the Buddha taught. Generosity is a skill. You’re free to give wherever you want, but if you want to approach gift-giving as a skill, you think about where your motivation is aimed, what the appropriate gift is, who the appropriate recipient is, what your mind state is before, during, and after giving the gift. As you approach it as a skill, you learn a lot.

The same with virtue: The precepts are not just Sunday school rules that you have to quietly obey as you follow them. You have to be observant as you try to stick with them. You learn about your intentions when they run up against a precept. You learn that you have to develop theh skills of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency: mindful to keep the precept in mind; alert to make sure that your actions actually are in line with the precept; and ardent in your desire to stick with the precepts, even when it’s difficult, even when you’re challenged, even when it goes against your likes and dislikes.

You especially learn a lot as you try to hold to the precept against lying. When somebody asks for information that you think they might abuse, how do you not give the information but without lying at the same time? This is a challenge. It forces you to develop your discernment, your strategic mind.

Then, of course, in the meditation: Get the mind to settle down. You’re going to learn a lot about the aggregates as you get the mind to settle down. Remember: The aggregates are activities, not things. The translation “aggregate” for khandha is kind of unfortunate. It sounds like they’re bits of gravel. They’re actually activities.

You see that the first aggregate is form, so you might wonder: How is form an activity? If you weren’t breathing, you wouldn’t sense the form of the body. It’s constantly in motion. There’s an intentional element in the way you breathe. Without that intention, you wouldn’t have form.

The others are more obvious. Feeling is something you do. Perceiving is something you do. Fabricating thoughts is something you do. Consciousness: You may not be aware that you’re doing it, but there is an intentional element in being conscious. You’re not going to find it until you get really well along the path. But without that intentional element, you wouldn’t have consciousness of the senses at all. You wouldn’t have consciousness of the present moment at all. Consciousness is something you do. It’s not just an ultimate reality. It’s an activity.

But to get back to form: You see that your sense of the body really does dissolve away when the breath stops. It stops not because you force it to stop. It’s simply that the breath energy feels so full in the body. You’ve learned how to breathe in and breathe out without squeezing the breath out, without squeezing it between the in-breath and the out-breath to make a little marker. The in-breath flows into the out-breath, the out-breath flows into the in-breath, and you breathe out with a sense of fullness.

After a while, the body feels fully connected inside. All the breath-energy needs of the body are being met, and you find that you’re not breathing. You also find that you can stay there without needing to breathe in and out. You maintain the intention to be percipient of a full body, full of awareness. But then you realize that if you drop that perception, that mental note, that mental label, that little image in mind that there is a boundary to your body, the boundary disappears. That’s how you get into the formless attainments, not by going anywhere else, just staying right here, but finding that the sense of a boundary goes away because you’re not breathing. When you’re breathing in and out, that reinforces a sense of exactly where the body is, what space it occupies.

As for the determination not to be the laughingstock of your defilements, you find that that determination takes you far. It forces you to be circumspect. You come to realizations in the course of your meditation, and if you hold on to them, if you’re not circumspect, they’re going to blind you. Once this happens once or twice, you begin to get more wary, but also more wise.

This is learning through doing, learning—through acting on your desire—what can be attained through desire and where the desire has to be let go.

You don’t let go right away. Otherwise, as Ajaan Lee would say, you let go like a pauper. You don’t have a Cadillac, so you let go of your Cadillac. Well, you still don’t have a Cadillac. If you develop the inner wealth that’s needed to get a Cadillac and then you let the Cadillac go, it’s there for you to use whenever you need it. You simply don’t have to lug it around.

This is why the ajaans and the Buddha talk without embarrassment about developing inner wealth, becoming wealthy inside. Wanting to win a battle. Wanting to master a skill. Making the effort to search for something. It all involves desire, there’s a goal, and that goal often in the future. But in learning how to live maturely with your goals — in other words, realizing that that’s where you want to go, so now you focus on what needs to be done right here — that’s how you get there.

So beware of the people who say, “All you need to do is relax into the present moment.” They’re like the grasshopper that tells the ant, “Why work during the summer? The summer days are nice.” There’s work that needs to be done. There’s a goal that’s worth putting a lot of effort into attaining. It’s not right here right now yet. Someday it’ll be right here, and there will be a moment of right now, but then it takes you beyond right now. That’s something you can’t attain at all by just accepting the present moment or pursuing it without any desire. This is a path of skillful desire. This is a path that’s understood through the effort of mastering a skill.