The Problem Is Birth

Years back, I went to a Brazilian faith-healer and watched him in action. There were long lines, people came in with various illnesses. I asked myself, “What’s the Buddha’s perspective on this?” The answer that came was that the healer was solving the problem too late. People afraid of death, afraid of illness, afraid of aging, suffering from these things—and they need him to solve the problem at that stage. But where do these things come from? They come from birth. Once there’s birth, there’s got to be aging, there’s got to be illness, there’s got to be death. The Buddha saw that the solution to the problem was not in trying to stop someone from dying—although he did recommend that you give treatments for illness. The real solution came from preventing birth.

From his point of view, what happens at birth? He compared it to going from one house to another. In fact, in one image it’s a fire leaving a house, and as the fire goes out, what’s its sustenance? Its sustenance is the wind. In the same way, when a being leaves this body and goes to another, what’s its sustenance? Its sustenance is craving. Notice that when he was asked, “What happens when a being goes from one body to another?” he didn’t say, “There’s no such thing as a being.” He said that wherever there’s attachment to the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—there is a being. It’s in taking on that identity as a being: That’s why we keep on getting born again and again.

So the solution, as he said, is to figure out why we keep on building these houses. Here again, an image: little children making “little mud houses,” as he called them, but what we’d call “sand castles.” In India, you’ve got a lot of mud by the rivers, so that’s where kids would make little houses. As long as they’re infatuated with the houses, they keep on protecting them. But when they lose their fascination, lose their affection, then they destroy them. In the same way, he said, we have our passion for the aggregates, we’re protective of the aggregates, and we have to learn how to destroy that passion. We do that by getting to know these aggregates really well, to see their drawbacks. And how do we do that? We meditate.

As you’re sitting here trying to get the mind into concentration, you’re creating a state of becoming where there’s something you want, you see the world in which that thing is located, and then you move into that world. In this case, what you want is stillness. It’s in the world of the body, as you breathe in, breathe out, as you sense the body from within. Then you take on the identity as a meditator. That’s a large becoming that gives you the point of view from which you can observe all the other little becomings that the mind gets involved in.

I was giving a retreat a while back. I discussed this pattern of becoming in one of the talks, and a question came up afterwards, in which one of the listeners realized that he or she was engaged in this process all the time and she hadn’t realized it. She felt trapped.

As you go through the day, a desire comes up, something you want to think about, and you go into that little world. It falls apart, and you create another little world, with another center of interest.

We stop the process by understanding it. The best way to understand it is to prevent the mind from going into those little worlds. This why concentration is so important. Meditation is not just a matter of following the mind wherever it wants to go. You have to put up some walls.

Mindfulness is sometimes thought to be a matter of allowing the mind to go wherever it wants, just being aware of where it goes. But even mindfulness, the Buddha says, has to avoid getting involved in sensuality. Think of that image of the quail who wanders away from his field and gets caught. The field stands for the four establishings of mindfulness. The area outside of the field stands for sensuality: That’s where it gets caught by the hawk. If it stays in the field, it’s safe. So even just developing mindfulness, you’re trying to put some boundaries on the mind.

You have the same boundaries for concentration: We’re not going to go into thoughts of greed or distress with reference to the world. We’re not going to go for sensuality or any unskillful qualities. We’re going to stay right here. As we stay right here, we begin to see that these distractions are composed of those aggregates that we like to identify with. We begin to see that this is the process of how birth happens. The only difference is that as you die from this body, you gather up some aggregates and you go, land on another set of aggregates—land on a new house. So you want to see the process and solve the problem at the point where it can be solved. You’ve got to do it right here.

So sense the importance of trying to put the mind into concentration. If it’s not willing to settle down, realize that you’ve got to do what you can in order to get it to settle down. That means finding a topic you like.

If the breath is not appealing to you or if it’s too subtle, you can try contemplation of the different parts of the body. Just visualize the different parts—hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh—and on inside to the different organs. Visualize these things to yourself and have a sense of, say, when you’re focusing on the liver, where in the body is the liver right now? What does it look like? What is it bathed with? It’s bathed with blood. In the beginning, you don’t have to focus on the unattractive side of these things. Just be objective—“What have you got in here?” As the Buddha said, it’s like opening a sack filled with beans and rice and seeing what kind of beans you have, what kind of rice you have.

Or you can develop thoughts of goodwill. Get the mind to settle down with thoughts of goodwill for all beings, wishing happiness for all, realizing that the wish in and of itself will not be enough to bring happiness, but at the very least it cleans your mind.

So find a topic that you find that you like, that you find interesting, that you find engaging, and then protect the mind. Then keep it there. Don’t let it wander off. If it wanders off, the more quickly you can stop it, the better, and you’ll see more and more clearly the processes of how it happens. You have to be determined ahead of time that you’re not going to wander. Otherwise, you just slip into these things and realize what’s happened only after you’ve been traveling around in those little worlds for quite a while. That’s kind of late, but at least you notice, “Okay, I’ve left the topic of my concentration. I’ll come back.” That’s a good sign right there. And you just keep coming back, coming back.

In seeing these processes as they happen, you begin to see, “This is how birth happens. I create myself as a being and go.” What you want to see is the drawbacks of these things—because these worlds will collapse on you.

Then question yourself, “What happens if you don’t make yourself a being? First, just don’t worry—it’s not an annihilation. There’s an awareness that has nothing to do with the aggregates. But you won’t find it unless you learn how to let go of everything.

And letting go has to be done in stages. For right now, you hold on to the concentration, you hold on to the path. You’re in the process of using a raft to cross over a dangerous river: the flood of sensuality, views, becoming, ignorance. You’ve got to hold on to the views and practices of the noble eightfold path to get you across. Once the raft has gotten you across, then you can think about letting it go. And on that side of the river, there are no houses—and you don’t need any.

So we try to solve the problem at birth, and this is what we can watch as we’re sitting here meditating—how the mind takes on birth as it goes from thought world to thought world. As you get more and more skilled at stopping those processes, you have a chance of stopping the bigger problems of aging, illness, and death at the right place: at the cause.

As you destroy your passion for the aggregates, you’re like those little kids who destroy their houses—the little houses they were so protective of, so defensive of before—when they lose their infatuation. That’s what we’re trying to do: lose our infatuation with these things, destroy our passion for them. That’s when we have a chance of finding something better, because we’ve solved the problem at the right place.