Construction Techniques

If the present moment were just a given, over which you had little or no control, then meditation would be very simple.

It’d be like watching a TV set. You’re strapped into a chair. The TV’s on all the time. And you realize after a while that if you get excited about what you like on the TV or upset about what you don’t like on the TV, it’s going to keep changing, changing, changing regardless. You might come to the conclusion that it’s best simply to register what’s there and drop it, register what’s there and drop it.

Maybe you could find some aesthetic pleasure in seeing things fade—-a kind of wistful, bittersweet feeling. But otherwise, equanimity would be the best response, because no matter how you felt about things, you couldn’t stop them.

Fortunately for us, we’re not in that situation. The present moment is not a given. Some raw material is given to us through our past actions, but how we experience the present moment is something we shape from that raw material through the process of fabrication.

Fabrication has an arrow in it, pointing in a certain direction. It has a purpose. We fabricate things for the sake of happiness. The problem is that often we do things thinking that they’ll lead to happiness, but they don’t—either because we’re not aware of how we’re fabricating things, or because we just don’t understand the process of fabrication very well.

This is why it’s good that we have recommendations from those who’ve mastered this, who’ve learned how to fabricate well, and learned how to take apart this process of fabrication so that they can get to something beyond fabrication.

But first, be sensitive to the fact that you are shaping things right now. The Buddha talks about three kinds of fabrication.

There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe.

Verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself. The Buddha calls this directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to a certain topic, and then you make comments on it, formulate questions, try to find answers, pass judgment, reconsider what you’ve judged.

And then finally, mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things that tell you what they are and what they mean. Feelings are feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

These are things we do all the time. It’s through these activities that we shape our experience, not only right now, but also on into the future.

The Buddha also talks about three fabrications on another, larger and longer level.

Bodily fabrication on this larger level is just any intentional bodily act you do that will have an impact on your future lifetimes.

Verbal fabrication would be any verbal act you do, which again will have an impact on your future lifetimes.

Mental fabrication is any mental act that you intentionally do, and again it has an impact on you later in this lifetime and on into future lifetimes.

Some people say that these two different levels of fabrication are totally unrelated, but that’s missing an important and useful insight. The fact that they’re actually related is one of the reasons why we focus on the present moment—not because it’s the only thing there is, but because it’s where things start.

After all, any bodily action you do is going to start with the breath. Any verbal action will start with directed thought and evaluation. Any mental action will start with perceptions and feelings. So you’re at the starting gate right here, which is why it’s so important to focus on the present moment.

We do have a goal in the future. There’s a possibility of putting an end to suffering. If there ever was a goal-oriented person, it was the Buddha. And he found his goal not by giving up on goals, but by getting very skilled in these processes of fabrication and understanding them.

Where did he understand them? He understood them in the present moment, at the moment where they start.

And he taught a technique. Again, if the present moment were totally a given, you wouldn’t need much of a technique to say, “Well, that’s how it is, that’s how it is,” or “Is that so? Is that so?” It’d be very simple to maintain your equanimous distance.

But that’s still a technique. When you apply that technique to a process where you’re actually fabricating things through the way you breathe, through the way you talk to yourself, and through the perceptions and feelings you hold on to, it applies a lot of verbal fabrication. But it’s pretty much one note: “It’s like this, like this, like this.” All the other forms of fabrication go underground. The problem is, they’re already done in ignorance, which is why we suffer. And denying that you’re doing them just adds more ignorance and more suffering on top.

So you need a technique that allows you to be more sensitive to these fabrications, which is probably why the Buddha chose the breath as an ideal meditation topic. You focus directly on bodily fabrication—how you breathe—and then you engage in directed thought and evaluation about how you breathe.

Take the image of the bathman. He mixes water with the bath powder so that the mixture is just right, as if he’s making bread… He kneads the water into the powder. In the same way, you knead the breath energy through the body.

Once you know that the breath is comfortable, you allow it to spread. How do you know it’s comfortable? Well, you’ve tried out various ways of breathing. Again, through directed thought and evaluation, you pose certain questions: How about this way of breathing? How about that way of breathing?

Then you try to answer your questions, not by just coming up with a theory, but by testing the theory: Would long breathing feel better? Short breathing? Or in long, out short? In short, out long? Heavy, light? Fast, slow? Come up with a hypothesis and then test it.

And then what perceptions of the breath are most useful? The Buddha said to try to breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure and rapture. To do that, you have to have certain perceptions in mind about how you’re breathing, and you have to talk to yourself about how you’re breathing.

All of his breath meditation instructions are forms of verbal fabrication. But you don’t do things mechanically. You try to be sensitive.

This is why this is such a good technique, because it gives you room for play, room for experimentation. You breathe in a way that gladdens the mind, breathe in a way that steadies or concentrates the mind, breathe in a way that releases the mind, breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to mental fabrication—what your perceptions and feelings are. In other words, get the mind really quiet with the breath, and then you begin to see that you have certain pictures to hold in mind about how the breath is going. If you’re not sure about what the pictures are, you can make up some pictures and see how the body responds.

You can also focus on certain feelings. There are potentials for pain some places in the body. There are potentials for pleasure some places in the body. Search those out, especially the potentials for pleasure. See how you can maximize them.

As the Buddha said, you give rise to feelings not of the flesh. In other words, these are feelings that you consciously give rise to. Then when you have something pleasant and rapturous or refreshing, let it spread throughout the body so that the whole body is saturated.

So this is a technique that doesn’t just tell you what to do. It focuses you on areas where you can explore. It encourages you to become more and more sensitive to how you’re doing these forms of fabrication, and you’re learning how to do them more skillfully. It’s in this way that these fabrications become part of the path, and not just the cause for suffering.

The Buddha recommends that you get really good at this. When you get skilled at using your concentration to give rise to the feelings and physical states that you enjoy, there comes a point when you decide you want something better, something that’s not fabricated. To get there, you use the breath as well. You breathe in and out focused on inconstancy. You breathe in and out focused on dispassion, cessation, and relinquishment, where you relinquish everything, including the path and your passion for the goal.

So the Buddha gives you advice on how to become more sensitive to how this present moment is fabricated. Then he gives you advice on how to get beyond the fabrication.

But you have to understand first that it is fabricated, this present moment. You’ve been doing it all the time. The purpose of the technique is not just to push your mind through a meat grinder or to anesthetize it. It’s to get you more sensitive to these facts so that you can make the most of them.

Instead of leaving you strapped in a chair, subjected to a TV set that you can’t control, the Buddha shows you how you’ve been keeping yourself tied down, and also shows you how you can find your own freedom.

There’s a technique involved. It requires an understanding that, yes, you are fabricating things, and yes, you do have goals. The Buddha simply wants you to develop better goals, have a more mature attitude towards your goals, and then he gives you the tools for attaining them. That’s the best kind of teaching there is, especially when the goal is total freedom.