Pay Attention to Some Things

How you pay attention is an important part of the practice.

Sometimes we’re told to practice bare attention, receive everything without judgment. Just notice that things are like this, things are like this. You give equal weight to everything.

But the Buddha never taught bare attention. After all, we’re not tourists in the world, just gathering experiences. We have a problem. We’re causing ourselves suffering.

When you have a problem, you have to pay attention to things that will help you understand the problem and solve it. That’s why the Buddha taught what he called “appropriate attention,” yoniso manasikāra. It’s basically learning how to pay attention to the right things, the things that are useful, and learning how not to pay attention to things that are not useful.

So we have to exercise our judgment and develop our powers of judgment in choosing what to attend to. Those powers may not come right away. But if you notice, you’ll see that the Buddha sets a good example. If there were any questions that got in the way of understanding the problem of suffering, he just wouldn’t answer them. He didn’t want to waste his time or other people’s time.

There’s that famous story of the man shot with an arrow. His relatives bring him to the doctor, and the doctor gets ready to pull the arrow out. But the man says, “Wait a minute, first I want to know who shot the arrow, I want to know what the arrow is made of— what kind of wood the arrow was made of, what kind of feathers”— things like that. If they tried to track down all that information before they pulled the arrow out, the man would die.

So you focus on what’s really important. The Buddha sets the principles out when he explains appropriate attention. You focus on the four noble truths: What is suffering? What’s causing it? Can the suffering be brought to an end? He says Yes. So, the next question is, how do you do that?

Each of those truths has a duty. There’s something to be done. Try to comprehend the suffering. In other words, see that it really is. As the Buddha says, it’s clinging-aggregates. We’re clinging to things. When we hear about the aggregates, we tend to zone out because they sound kind of abstract, but he’s basically talking about things you do with your mind, activities of the mind. You feel feelings, you perceive perceptions, you put thoughts together, you’re conscious of things, and all this is based on your sense of the body. We hold on to these activities.

And out of these activities, we create the things we consciously cling to:

We cling to sensuality, our fascination with sensual fantasies.

We cling to our views about the world, who’s good, who’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong.

We cling to habits and practices, certain ways of doing things. Some people call this clinging to rites and rituals, and sometimes we say, “Well, we don’t have any rituals here in this modern world.” But actually, we have lots of strong ideas about what should and shouldn’t be done and how things should be done.

And finally, we cling to our sense of who we are.

The Buddha says all this is suffering. We think we’re clinging to reality, holding on to reality, but our ideas about these things, if you look at them very carefully, are just made out of feelings and perceptions and thought constructs, acts of consciousness based on the body, none of which are very reliable, none of which are very lasting. So, we cling even harder.

Why do we cling? Because we crave some certainty in our lives. We crave pleasure. We crave something that we think will bring us pleasure. We see what kind of world it’s located in and we take on an identity in that world. We do this all the time. In the Buddha’s analysis, this kind of craving is causing us to suffer. Or sometimes we’ve got a world and our identity that we don’t like, and we want to see it destroyed. But in trying to destroy it, or hoping to see it destroyed, we take on a new identity.

The way out of this is to develop some dispassion for all these cravings and clingings. We do that by developing the path. So that’s where our main interest should be: How do we develop the path?

Some things we learn from other people; some things we have to notice on our own. This is why we have to be very careful about how we treat comments from other people.

If someone passes judgment on us, we have to ask ourselves, “Is it true?” There are times when people who pass judgment point out our genuine errors, point out our genuine faults. They don’t mean us well, but they’re actually right about how we’re doing something wrong. So we have to ask ourselves, “Is that really true, what that person says?”

Sometimes people we trust are well-meaning but they may be off target. So you have to develop a sense of fairness in looking at yourself.

If you’re the sort of person whom people can’t criticize at all, then you’re never going to learn. Criticism is part of being a human being. It’s part of learning from other people. It may not always be pleasant, but if it’s true, as the Buddha said, if someone points out a genuine fault, they’ve pointed out a treasure. You have something to work on; you can focus your efforts to put an end to suffering by saying, “This fault I have here may be part of the cause. Let me look into it.”

Then there are the things you tell yourself as you go through the day. You have to be very careful to sort things through, because the mind is full of all kinds of chatter. Some of the chatter comes from your intentions right here, right now. Some of it comes from past intentions, past habits, old ways of thinking, old ways of managing your mind. This is where it’s good to hold to the Buddha’s standards.

How do you judge things inside? If you act on something, what kind of qualities does it develop? Does it make you more persistent? Does it make you more content with things outside, so that you can focus more attention on what’s going on inside? Does it tend to get you entangled with other people? Or is it the kind of thing where, when you’re working with other people, things go smoothly, so that the work goes fast, becomes lighter, and everyone can go back to his or her meditation spot and work on the mind?

When you work on something and you see how you are clinging to something and how you don’t have to: That’s the real test.

As for other things that are irrelevant to the problem at hand, you just let them go. Again, as I said, we’re not tourists here, just gathering experiences. After all, when you gather experiences, where are you going to put them? What kind of basket do you have to put them in? You’ve got a basket that’s full of holes, and someday the whole basket is going to fall apart.

That attitude that allows you to just say, “Well, it’s like this, it’s like this,” and just let it go, let it go: Actually, there are things you have to develop, things you have to comprehend. It’s not just a matter of noticing, “Oh yes, there is suffering.” That’s not comprehending suffering. Comprehending suffering is seeing exactly where the clinging is.

You’ve got a real problem here and you don’t want to be distracted from the problem. So learn how to pay attention sometimes. In other words, you have to have standards for what things you pay attention to—when and where—and what things you don’t pay attention to. Give priority to the things that will really help you understand suffering and put an end to suffering.

Take that principle from the Buddha. As he said, “What I teach is only suffering and the end of suffering.” He picked up a handful of leaves and said, “All the things that I came to know in my awakening could be compared to the leaves in the forest. What I taught was the handful of leaves.” And what’s in the handful of leaves? The four noble truths.

As Ven. Sariputta said, that just as the elephant’s footprint can encompass all the footprints of all the other animals on earth, in the same way, the four noble truths encompass all Dhamma teachings.

And look at the Buddha’s policy in answering questions. He was asked about whether the world was finite or infinite, eternal or non-eternal, whether your soul was the same thing as your body, and the body was different from the soul. What happened to an awakened person after death? Did that person exist or not exist? Both? Neither? Are we all a oneness or are we all totally separate things? Do you have a self or do you not have a self? Do you exist or do you not exist?

With all these questions, the Buddha said, “Just put them aside. They get in the way.” These are questions about who made the arrow and what the arrow is made out of. What’s important is to get the arrow out. Pay attention to things that are relevant to doing that. Try to keep them foremost in mind.

At the end of the day, make a survey of the day. What important things did you learn about suffering and the end of suffering? Try to keep those in mind. Don’t clutter your mind with things that are irrelevant. That way, you maintain your focus, and the problem gets solved.