Deconstruction

Ajaan Fuang wasn’t the sort of person who liked to discuss controversial issues. When people brought up controversies of the day, especially in areas of the Dhamma, he’d tell them, “Close your eyes, meditate, focus on your breath.”

But there were a couple of issues that he would bring up himself. One was the idea that the path is all about letting go, letting go. He’d say, “That’s not the case. You have to do some developing first before you can totally let go.” You let go in stages, but as you let go, you have to construct something good to hold on to in the meantime. Otherwise you’re lost, you’re set adrift. Khaad loi was the Thai phrase he would use.

Unfortunately, the attitude that the practice is all about just letting go is still very much with us. You find it in different guises. It usually comes from the idea that the fruit of the path should be visible here and now, so it should be something you can experience right here, right now. Don’t think about developing a path that will take time. Don’t think of having a goal in the future. Everything should be right here, immediately. Just learn how to recognize what’s already here. That’s making discernment do all the work.

You tell yourself you’re going to let go—so whatever comes up, you just let it go, let it go. You say you don’t want to pass judgment, because passing judgment involves some craving, some clinging to what’s good and what’s bad.

But think about it. The Buddha said the main internal factor for gaining awakening, especially the first level of awakening, is appropriate attention. Appropriate attention makes distinctions. It’s basically seeing things in terms of the four noble truths.

Suffering is to be comprehended—and not just witnessed or acknowledged. You have to understand what is it. The Buddha was very precise in defining it: clinging to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. The clinging is in the desire and passion you have for those things. The suffering is the clinging-aggregates altogether.

Think of this in terms of the image of feeding. You’re hungry: That’s the craving; that’s the desire and passion. You find something you want to eat, so you latch on to it, hold on to it as you eat it. There’s still desire and passion involved in the feeding. That’s the clinging-aggregates, that’s the suffering—which is really counterintuitive. We tend to think that we find our happiness in feeding. Of course, here the Buddha is talking about not only physical feeding, but also mental and emotional feeding. These are areas where we tend to find our happiness, and yet he says that’s where we suffer, because it’s all very unstable. As you’re eating things, you’re using them up, which means you’re destroying the things you’re going to need to feed on into the future—which further means you have to keep on looking for more food. It’s a very precarious state to be in. Your duty is to *comprehend *that.

And you don’t comprehend it by just telling yourself to let go, let go. You have to let go precisely, because as the Buddha said, you don’t let go of the aggregates, you let go of the clinging, the desire and passion.

The second noble truth, craving, is desire and passion, and that’s to be* abandoned*.

The third noble truth is the total abandoning of that, asesa virāgā: total dispassion without any trace of passion left at all. We’re not talking about temporary rest from a particular desire—that’s something that’s neither here nor there. Ordinarily, when you let go of one desire and there’s no new desire immediately following it, there’s a sense of nothing. Some people claim that that’s it, that’s the cessation of suffering. But they also admit that it’s boring, it’s not interesting. The earth didn’t quake because the Buddha found something boring and uninteresting. It quaked because he had found the absolute end of passion and desire. That’s to be realized, and it can be realized only by developing the path—and the path takes work.

You’ve got eight factors. They all come together as you get better and better at them, but in the beginning it’s going to take some strategic thinking. Because it is a path, it’s going to take time. There is a goal that you have in the future. You focus on doing what you have to do right now, but you know you’re headed in a good direction. Whether the path is long or short is not the issue. The issue is doing it—and doing it all.

So when concentration comes up, you don’t just let it go, let it go. When mindfulness comes up, you don’t let it go. Everything in the path has to be developed—and that takes work.

Once, when the Buddha was talking about breath meditation, there was a monk named Arittha who said, “I do breath meditation.” And the Buddha asked, “What kind of breath meditation do you do?” Arittha replied, “I don’t hanker after things in the future, I have no nostalgia for things in the past, and I mindfully breathe in and breathe out, putting aside any passion in the present moment.”

The Buddha said, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation, but it doesn’t give the best results.”

The best results, he said, come from the sixteen steps he recommends, and they involve learning how to breathe in and out conscious of the whole body, then calming bodily fabrication—in other words, allowing the breath to calm down. You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure, sensitive to mental fabrication, calming mental fabrication. You breathe in and out gladdening the mind, concentrating the mind, releasing the mind. There’s a lot of constructive work you have to do. So you’re not just settling in and being really quiet—because that can be another wrong extreme of letting go.

Some people say, “Well, who cares about discernment, just reject everything.” The mind rejects, rejects, rejects, and it goes into a very dull, dark, heavy kind of concentration where you’re totally oblivious to your body, oblivious to the world outside. You can determine ahead of time how long you want to stay. You come out, and you can tell yourself that you gained discernment as you came out. But there’s no discernment in that concentration. It’s just brutally beating the mind down. Some people get addicted to this because they like the quiet. They don’t like going back to breath meditation, because it requires work; it’s not as quiet.

But the Buddha is teaching you his sixteen steps for breath meditation because he wants you to develop discernment at the same time you develop concentration. As you calm bodily fabrication and mental fabrication, you’re going to be engaged in his five-step program:

seeing the origination of things,

seeing how they pass away,

seeing their allure, why you go for them, why you want to feed on them, and then

seeing the drawbacks, comparing the drawbacks with the allure, and seeing that the drawbacks way outweigh the allure.

That’s when you can develop dispassion and gain your escape.

Concentration can’t do this all for you. You have to contemplate these things. And where do you contemplate them? In the course of doing the construction—constructing concentration. You learn by building—and asking questions about what you’re building as you build it.

The Buddha gives the image of a house. You’ve been building houses for who knows how many eons. Now he says, “Focus careful attention on how you build this house.” When you understand how you build this house, then you can start taking it apart, and that way you can take apart all other forms of house building.

So there’s work to develop, work to be done, not just letting go.

This relates to the second controversial issue that Ajaan Fuang would talk about. There was a teacher in Thailand who said that nibbāna is nothing other than the mind when it has no sense of “me” or “mine.” He called it “temporary nibbāna.” And as Ajaan Fuang said, “Temporary nibbāna!? How can nibbāna be temporary? It’s permanent. It’s unconditioned. That temporary state is just a state of quietude.”

This relates back to those people who say that the third noble truth is any moment of the mind free from desire, that boring freedom from desire. Nibbāna isn’t boring. Nibbāna is something extraordinary. As the Buddha said, it’s the ultimate happiness. He didn’t say it’s the ultimate boredom. He didn’t compare it to oatmeal porridge. All of his images are extraordinary because what happens is extraordinary. You learn to see how you construct things—all things you construct. You work on the aggregates in their best form, i.e., the form of the mind in solid concentration, which you’ve observed carefully to see how you put things together.

Then you start taking it apart. And you can take it apart precisely because you’ve been the one who put it together. When you see that even the best aggregates have their limitations, the mind will incline to something that’s totally deathless, something unfabricated—because even in those moments of quiet between one desire and the next, there’s fabrication going on. The consciousness of those moments—that’s a fabricated thing. As the Buddha said, it’s dependently co-arisen. It depends on conditions. But now you see these conditions because you’ve been using them as your building blocks.

So you let go, not just by telling yourself to let go. You let go through careful deconstruction, after having done the work of constructing, so that you know really well where the pipes are, where the air conditioning ducts are. Like our new ordination hall: I was here every day, every day, when things were put together. I know where everything is. If I had to take it apart, I’d know where to start. That’s when you can really let go—when you’ve been carefully watching yourself as you construct.

You deconstruct not through just the power of stilling the mind. You deconstruct not just by telling yourself to let go. You deconstruct because you’ve been thoroughly aware of how you construct things, where their limitations are, and why you would want to deconstruct. That’s when you find a nibbāna that’s not temporary at all. You find the real thing.

So I can see why Ajaan Fuang would focus on these issues—because they really are important. They make the difference between people who simply tell themselves they’ve seen the Dhamma and those who’ve actually seen it—and gained the full benefits of seeing it in their hearts.