Taking the Long View

Discernment begins with the question, “What will I do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Notice that. It doesn’t begin with the question, “How do I get into the present momentband stay in the present moment?” It’s not a question of being, and not a question of just being right here, right now.

Discernment is a matter of taking responsibility for your actions, realizing that your actions are what will shape your potential for happiness or unhappiness. You’re assuming that long-term happiness is possible, and of course it’s better than short-term. You realize that what you do right now will shape not only the present moment, but also the future.

And you are shaping the present moment. What comes in from the past is just potentials from your past karma, but what you experience in the present moment will depend on the skill with which you put those things together. This principle applies in life outside as well as to life in the mind.

The Buddha divides the answers to that question, “What will I do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” into three levels. One is happiness in this lifetime; two, happiness in future lifetimes; and three, the ultimate happiness of nibbāna. In every case, it’s based on something you do.

In terms of this lifetime, there are four qualities he recommends. One is initiative. You don’t just sit around waiting for things to happen. You’re going to steer your ship and try to steer it in the best direction. Now, as we know, life out in the ocean has rogue waves and storms. You do your best to avoid the storms, but even then you need extra provisions in case the storms do come.

So, in addition to initiative, the Buddha recommends taking good care of what you’ve got, the things that you’ve gained through your right livelihood. Look after them, treat them well.

Ajaan Fuang tells us about living with Ajaan Mun. Even old rags: Ajaan Mun would take and clean them, sew them together, to make cloths for wiping your feet. Ajaan Lee tells us about the time when he saw Ajaan Mun kicking a pair of old pants down the road as he was going on his alms round. Then, when no one was looking, he picked them up, secured them under his belt, and a few days later those pants had been converted into a shoulder bag and a belt for Ajaan Lee to use. So the message is: Take good care of your things. Even if they may not be all that fancy, not all that special, still you keep them clean, keep them neat, mend them when you can.

The third principle is living comfortably within your means, not too frugally, not too much of a spendthrift. It’s obvious that the Buddha would not want you to be a spendthrift. What may surprise you is that he says, “Don’t be too frugal.” If you can’t enjoy your wealth, you’re going to resent other people who do enjoy their wealth. You’re going to resent the happiness of other people. It’s not going to be good for developing a sense of empathetic joy. So take some enjoyment in your well-earned wealth.

There’s a passage where the Buddha recommends dividing your wealth into four categories, although they don’t have to be equal. One of them is for your present enjoyment. Two is for the enjoyment of your family and friends. Three is for stashing away for the future—again, wisdom looks not only to the present moment but also to the future. And then four is making merit, which is looking toward the future in the very long term.

Then the fourth quality that the Buddha recommends for finding happiness in this lifetime is to engage in admirable friendship. This means not only finding admirable people as friends but also trying to develop their admirable qualities within your own behavior. The qualities you want to look for are conviction in the principle of karma, virtue, generosity, and discernment. Find people who embody these qualities, associate with them, try to pick up their good traits. If there’s something you don’t understand about how to be more virtuous, how to be more generous, you ask.

Now, these four qualities are alsothe qualities that the Buddha also recommends for finding happiness in the future lifetimes. So by engaging in admirable friendship, you become an admirable friend to yourself, as you plan for your future lifetimes. You’re looking for wealth that doesn’t get wiped out when you die.

Those four qualities of an admirable friend are also listed in what the Buddha calls the seven noble treasures. The other three qualities are a sense of shame, a sense of compunction, and knowledge of the Dhamma.

Shame here is healthy shame, the opposite of shamelessness, in which you see that certain activities, even though you might benefit from them, are actually beneath you. You think of the people you respect and what’d they think if you stooped to those kind of activities—and you’d be ashamed to do them. The Buddha calls this type of shame a guardian of the world, in that it protects us from a lot of unskillful behavior.

Compunction is when you realize that there are certain actions you might like to do but they would cause suffering down the line—either for yourself or for other people—and you recoil from the idea of doing them. You realize you’ve had enough suffering in your life already and don’t want to pile on any more.

The third extra quality is knowledge of the Dhamma. Listen to the Dhamma and try to memorize some of it if you can. I’ve had a number of people talking about how they have songs going through their head as they try to meditate while going through the day. Well, replace those songs with chants. Even though there may be some chanting going in the background of your head, it’s better than the messages of stupid pop songs. Think about the meaning—it keeps you in line.

So these are the principles for happiness in this lifetime and in future lifetimes—happiness in the long term.

But then you realize any happiness that’s subject to time is going to be subject to aging, illness, and death. Even the treasures you amass for future lifetimes are going to run out at some time, too, if you’re not careful. It’s also easy for people to get reborn in comfortable circumstances and get heedless. As the Buddha said, the number of devas who are reborn as devas or as human beings is very, very small. Most devas, when they leave their heavens, fall to the lower realms.

So you realize that if you want to be truly safe, you want to have a happiness that goes beyond long-term, a happiness that’s not subject to time. That’s why the Buddha teaches you the four noble truths. Again, he’s not teaching you the one truth of being in the present moment. There are four truths because there are four activities you have to do, four duties you have to follow.

Think of the four truths not so much as statements but as categories: If something comes up in the mind, does it qualify as suffering? Does it qualify as the cause of suffering? Could it be the cessation of suffering? Or could it be the path to the end of suffering?

Once you’ve sorted things out, then you know what to do with them. Suffering is to be comprehended. In other words, you want to understand it till you get past any passion, aversion, or delusion for it. Its cause is to be abandoned. Its cessation is to be realized, and you do that by developing the path.

So, again, you’re taking initiative here, exercising your agency. After all, the present moment is not just a given, as I said. It’s a construction site. You’re putting things together. It’s good to have the Buddha’s recommendations on how to put them together well.

When he defines suffering, he doesn’t say that “Life is suffering” or that simply “There is suffering.” That’s not comprehending it. To comprehend it means trying to figure out, “What am I doing to create suffering?” The Buddha says it’s passion and desire for the five aggregates. Now, we know that we don’t usually think in terms of aggregates. The real clinging, there, comes in four kinds:

clinging to sensuality—your fascination with sensual fantasies;

clinging to views—your ideas about how the world is and how it works, what’s real in the world, what’s not real in the world, what’s important, what’s not important.

Third is clinging to habits and practices—your ritualistic ways of doing things.

We all have our rituals. Someone said that rituals are things we simply learn from other people, but that’s not necessarily so. Even animals living alone have their rituals. The most obvious, of course, are their mating rituals, but you see examples of animals doing things repeatedly in a certain way.

Finally, there’s clinging to your sense of who you are, doctrines of the self.

Those things are very obvious, so we cling to them. But the Buddha is saying that if you really want to comprehend clinging, you have to see that all of those things are composed of just form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—things that are pretty ephemeral.

When you see how ephemeral they are, you realize that this reality you cling to so much may not be so real at all, not so dependable at all. This is where the Buddha would have you think in terms of three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, so that you’ll realize that anything built out of the aggregates is unreliable. When something is unreliable, it’s stressful. And if it’s unreliable and stressful, is it worth claiming as you or yours? No. That’s a value judgment the Buddha is asking you to arrive at.

We come to this comprehension because we’ve practiced the path. The big factor in the path—starting with right view and leading to right concentration—is right concentration, what we’re trying to do right now, because it’s here that all the other factors become clear. You get the mind still and you realize that there’s some craving here to get it still. Well, it’s part of the path. It’s part of the desire in right effort.

And there’s some clinging as you hold on to the object of your meditation. And where do you cling to it? In the beginning, you’re clinging to the sense of well-being. There’s a sense of ease that comes as the mind finally gets to settle down. And it’s something you work on. You take on the path, but not because you think you’re going to get instantaneous results. You realize that you’ve been creating the causes for suffering for a long time, so it’s going to take a while to undo them. But you do find that there’s a sense of well-being here in the present moment. That’s your food on the path.

As you get to know this better, as you get more and more skilled in the concentration, you begin to realize that it, too, is made out of those aggregates:

the form of the body as you feel it from within;

the feeling of pleasure as the breath gets more comfortable and you can spread that comfortable breath throughout the body;

the perceptions—the mental images you have of how the breath flows in the body, your mental images of where you are in the body;

fabrication—talking to yourself about adjusting the breath, how to make the breath just right, not too long, not too short, not too fast, not too slow;

and then consciousness, which is aware of all these things.

You’ve got all five aggregates right here.

Gradually, you develop a sense of dispassion for this, that even this has to be maintained all the time. Isn’t there something that doesn’t have to be maintained? You’ve made the best thing you can out of these aggregates. You’ve done the best things you can do for the sake of your long-term welfare and happiness, but you realize it has to be maintained.

This is when the mind inclines to the deathless. Up to this point, you’re still enamored of the pleasures of the world, but as you get more and more attached to the concentration, you ask yourself, “Isn’t there something better?” That’s when the mind inclines to the deathless—to something that lies beyond time. That’s the ultimate answer to the question, “What will I do to lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” It’s the ultimate answer because it goes beyond long-term, and you don’t have to do anything more about it. It’s just the happiness.

So, the essence of wisdom is not just being in the present moment. It’s realizing that you have agency. You have the power through your actions to put an end to suffering, and you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, however long it takes, because this is the most noble and most amazing thing there is—the happiness that the Buddha promises at the end of the path.

But be willing to follow the path. You have to be earnest in what you’re doing, yet you also have to be patient at the same time, because it does take time. Still, it’s all time well spent. As the Buddha said, if you could make a deal that you would be speared in the morning with a hundred spears, speared at noon with a hundred speared, speared in the evening with a hundred spears, every day for a hundred years, but be guaranteed that you’d gain stream-entry at the end of that hundred years, he said it would be a good deal. The goal at the end of the path is that amazing.

So keep asking yourself that question, “What will I do, what can I do, right now, that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” And give the answers the Buddha recommends a chance.