Discernment Requires Concentration

When the Buddha first introduced his teachings to the group of five monks, he said that he had found the deathless, and he would teach them the way to get to the deathless themselves. When they were willing to listen to him, he gave his first sermon and yet he didn’t mention the word “deathless” at all. He focused instead on the path. The question is, why didn’t he mention the deathless? Because thinking about the deathless, talking about the deathless, was not going to get you there. The path there required that you think strategically: What are you doing that’s giving rise to death? Basically, it comes down to the clinging and craving that lead to more aging, illness, and death, based on birth. So you’re doing something that’s getting in the way. Then he teaches you the skill of the path: how to stop doing those things that are getting in the way of the deathless.

So he’s telling you to think strategically. Simply contemplating the idea of the deathless, or telling yourself that what you experience right now is the deathless and you’re just going to contemplate it: That’s not going to cut it. You’re actively causing a problem, and you’ve got to learn how to stop causing that problem. So the path there requires first that you understand the problem and the solution. The problem is the craving that causes the clinging, which is suffering. The solution is a path out that starts with right view and ends with right concentration.

In fact, when you look at the different factors of the path, once you’ve got things set out in right view, all the other factors aim at right concentration. Right resolve is to resolve on renunciation, non-ill will, harmlessness. Think about the definition of getting the mind into the first jhāna: “secluded from sensuality”—i.e., renunciation—“secluded from unskillful qualities”— i.e., secluded from ill will and from harmfulness. So you start out resolving on those things. Then in your actions—your speech, your deeds, your livelihood—you act in ways that are more conducive to maintaining those intentions. You expend right effort to abandon the unskillful qualities that would get in the way of concentration and to develop the skillful qualities that would lead you there.

Based on right effort, you get into right mindfulness, which is basically instructions on how you get the mind into concentration. Here again, you have to think strategically. You’re going to get into jhāna, but you don’t get into jhāna by thinking about jhāna. You get there by focusing your attention on the breath, the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves, all of which circle around the breath. You’re ardent, alert, mindful. Ardency, of course, is right effort continued. Alert means watching what you’re doing while you’re doing it, because after all, what you’re doing is the problem. As I said earlier, you’re doing things that lead to birth, aging, illness, and death. So you want to see what you’re doing clearly. Then mindfulness—keeping in mind all the lessons you’ve learned.

You’re also putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you’re not thinking about anything in the world outside. You’re focused right here.

That’s how you get the mind into right concentration with a sense of ease, refreshment. At first, you engage in directed thought and evaluation as you adjust things to get everything settled down. It’s like fitting two pieces of wood together. You sand them here, sand them there, see if they fit well. If they don’t quite fit well, you sand them some more, making sure that you don’t sand them too much. You want to get them just right, snugly together. When the mind is snug with the breath like this, then it can watch itself. You want to watch it because what the mind is doing is the problem.

Look at dependent co-arising. There are a lot of things that are happening prior to sensory contact. Those are the things you learn about as you get the mind to be still. Otherwise, it all happens in ignorance. All the aggregates are here prior to contact: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. You see these things most clearly as you’re getting the mind to settle down and stay right here.

So have some respect for concentration. It’s not just a matter of being dull and dead or unmoving. You’re actively trying to understand how to keep the mind still. And in that stillness, you begin to see things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise—because normally you’re just running around. Everything is a blur. You run past a tree, and the tree is a blur. You run past people; people are a blur. Here we are, running past events in our own mind, and they’re all a blur. You’ve got to get the mind still. Then when these things move, the movements are subtle, but you’ll be able to see them, and you can begin to see how they’re causing stress.

All these things that you thought were really solid inside—your views of the world, your views of yourself, your views of how things should be done: These things are not as solid as you thought they were. You begin to see how the mind constructs present-moment experience.

There’s raw material coming in from the past, which presents opportunities and limitations, but what we do with it in the present moment is what makes all the difference. Think of the Buddha’s image of the salt crystal in the river, as opposed to the same salt crystal in the cup. If it’s in the cup, you can’t drink the water in the cup because there’s so much more salt than water. But if you throw that same salt crystal into a wide river, you can still drink the water. In the same way, how you experience things coming in from the past depends on the state of your mind right here, right now.

So you want to watch what you’re doing right here, right now, because it’s this process of fabrication in the present—the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the feelings and perceptions you focus on: This is how you create more suffering if you do it in ignorance. But if you learn how to do it with some knowledge, you begin to get better at it so that it’s not creating suffering. It’s not creating more birth, aging, illness, and death.

This is where you’re going to see things—with the mind still, with an active intelligence, questioning things: the part of the mind that likes to question, that likes to think about things in the abstract. You keep the questioning part, but the abstract part gets thrown away. You’re looking at events in the mind as they’re happening: This is how you do things. This is how you create more birth, aging, illness, and death. This is how you’re causing the problem. But if you do it with knowledge, you begin to see that this is how you can stop causing the problem.

It all becomes apparent when the mind is really still. So put aside your interest in more abstract issues, thinking about the reality or the unreality of things. As the Buddha said, suffering is real. Its cause is real. Its cessation is real. The path is real. These things really are truths. That’s why they’re called noble truths. And if you don’t solve the problem, there’s going to be more real suffering.

So we get to the deathless not by thinking about the deathless. We develop discernment not by thinking about discernment. We develop concentration not by thinking about jhāna. We do all this by thinking about the breath. Focus on what you’re doing right here, right now, and try to be really still. And as you’re still, it’s like going into the forest. When you first arrive, the birds and the animals are very quiet because they know there’s somebody here. But if you sit very, very still, after a while they don’t know you’re there. Then you can observe them.

So have some respect for concentration because it’s what allows you to solve this problem, the problem of birth, aging, illness, and death that you keep on creating more and more and more of all the time. Keep your focus on the problem. Keep your focus on what you can do to solve the problem. As Ven. Sāriputta said at one point, you have these duties with regard to the four noble truths—to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize the cessation, and to develop the path—and the first three duties are accomplished by doing the fourth. In other words, you work on developing the path, which, as I said, starts with right view and then focuses all of its energy on getting the mind into right concentration. When the mind is in right concentration, then you can apply the insights of right view and see them in a much subtler way, focusing directly on what you’re doing, the real thing, right here, right now.

So ultimately you can abandon whatever you’re doing that’s causing suffering, and then the reality of the deathless will appear without your thinking about it ahead of time, without your planning it, without you having any preconceived notions about it—which is probably why the Buddha didn’t talk about the deathless in the first discourse. More important than what you may think about the deathless is actually learning the skills that take you there. Again, think of the story of getting the arrow out of the man who’s been shot in the chest. You don’t have to know the name of the arrow, the name of the wood, the name of the maker, the name of the feathers. Just focus on the skill of pulling it out.