Joy in the Process

When the Buddha lists the factors for awakening, right after analysis of qualities, which is the discernment factor, comes persistence, which is the factor for right effort. This shows that discernment is not simply a matter of understanding the fact that there are skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. It’s also a matter of motivation. You realize you have the power to develop what’s skillful, to abandon what’s unskillful, and you want to make the best use of that power. That desire is part of discernment. It shows that we’re not here just to learn some words and discuss the words. We’re actually here to use that information to make a difference in our own minds.

This is where right effort begins, as the Buddha said, with the desire. You generate the desire to do what’s skillful and to abandon what’s unskillful. And you have to decide how to motivate yourself best. After all, you know your mind better than anyone else.

So what works? What gets you to sit down here and close your eyes, put up with a little bit of heat from the day, instead of getting into an air-conditioned car and driving off? You see there’s something good that comes from this. But you want to have more than just the idea that there are going to be good results down the line. It works best if you enjoy the process of figuring out the reasoning behind your unskillful thoughts and learning how to get around them—learning how to outsmart your unskillful motivations, how to see right through them, and how to get yourself energized with the idea that you want to do something skillful.

After all, here you are, a human being. You’ve done a lot of good things in order to become a human being. You don’t want to have this human state go to waste. You want to make the best use of your human capabilities.

At the same time, you realize you’re born with this problem: that the mind knows how to create suffering for itself and is very good at that. In fact, it actually clings to things that make it suffer, craves things that make it suffer. It likes things that make it suffer. So you have to understand: What’s the appeal? Why are we so blind to the fact that our likes are actually leading us to more and more suffering? Take that as a challenge.

If, in the course of this, you get outsmarted by your defilements, don’t get discouraged. Just say, “Well, if I put up a fight, it’s better than not fighting at all.” Because if you put up a fight, you begin to realize that your defilements have their weak points. The more you know them, the better you’re able to take advantage of those weak points and to actually get the mind to want to do what’s skillful, to enjoy what’s doing skillful. That, the Buddha said, part of the culture of the noble ones.

Ajaan Suwat commented that when he was a young monk staying with Ajaan Mun, that was one of the themes that Ajaan Mun stressed the most: the customs of the noble ones. We tend to think of the Thai forest tradition as being very, very Thai or very Lao. But Ajaan Mun was criticized during his lifetime for not following Thai and Lao customs. Unlike ordinary Thai or Lao village monks, he didn’t practice as a doctor. For a long time, he wouldn’t even accept people’s invitations to eat at their homes. It was only when a layperson said, “Look, I’ll allow you to eat out of your bowls in my home,” that he finally accepted invitations to go there.

There were a lot of things that over the years had become more and more lax, and yet he was strict. There were people who didn’t like this, and they accused him of not following Thai and Lao customs. He said, “I’m not interested in Thai and Lao customs or the customs of any country in the world, because the customs of the world are the customs of people with defilements. I’m interested in the customs of the noble ones. If you want to be a noble one yourself, you have to follow their customs.”

That was saying quite a lot. He wasn’t here just to carry on the old traditions. He was here to find release. Some people were not inspired by that, but other people were. They enjoyed the fact that he was now reopening the path.

So we should take joy in the fact that we’re still part of his tradition. People back in those days said that the road to nibbāna was closed, the road to even jhāna—right concentration—was closed. We’re talking about people all over Thailand, all the way up to the Royal Palace. Here, though, Ajaan Mun was saying, “No, the path is wide open for anyone who wants to practice.” There are people who took joy in that, took advantage of the opportunity that he opened.

We should see that it’s an opportunity that sometimes gets closed. But right now it’s open, so let’s take advantage of it.

As I said this morning, when the Buddha taught, he would teach giving instruction and also rousing, encouraging, urging his listeners on, wanting them to find joy in the fact that, yes, we can develop skillful qualities, abandon unskillful ones. When you see that there’s a defilement that you used to follow very quickly, very easily, without thinking much about it, but now you realize that you don’t have to follow that, there should be some joy there.

All too often, we enjoy following our defilements. In other words, we enjoy developing unskillful qualities and we enjoy ignoring skillful ones—saying, “Well, that’s the way of the world,” and finding all kinds of excuses for ourselves. But what real joy is there in that kind of practice? It just goes around and around and around in the same old place. It goes nowhere.

Well, here’s a chance to get out. To see where you used to be a slave to greed or aversion or delusion or jealousy or fear or lust, but now you can step back and say, “No, I don’t want to follow that. I’m above that”: That kind of joy is really worth cultivating.

One of the reasons why we meditate, getting the mind into concentration, is that if the currents of the mind begin to flow out but we’re solidly enough with our breath, solidly enough with our sense of the body in the present moment, and can see a mind state go out like a current in a river, but we don’t go with it—we’re separate from it—there’s a real joy in seeing that we’re not under its power.

So look at this as learning a skill, the skill of freedom. And as with any skill, you have to enjoy not only the product at the end, but also the process of getting there. There will be struggles with your defilements, and sometimes you lose, but you learn how not to get discouraged by that. Just be more determined to say, “Okay, what lesson did I learn when I lost this time? How can I use that so I don’t lose the next time?”

As Ajaan Maha Bua said, “If you just totally give in all the time, how can you say that you lose? You didn’t even fight. You’re certainly not going to learn anything, just giving in.” If you put up a fight, maybe your defilements will kick you around, but you learn that you can kick back.

Some people say you should be gentle and kind with your defilements: Take your anger, sit down, have a little bit of tea, chat things out. And it is good to get to understand your defilements. But then again, the Buddha said, with your anger, this is the one thing whose killing he condoned.

So you don’t have to treat your anger gently all the time. There are times when you have to be ruthless. That’s part of learning the skill: finding out when to be gentle, when to be firm. There comes a sense of agency. And agency is one of our most important ways of finding joy in life. If we feel that we have no choices in life, everything is predetermined, it gets very depressing very fast.

They did a study of infants years back. One psychologist in particular was interested in finding out what makes little babies happy. He found that if they could do something again and get the same results again, they enjoyed it. That’s one of the reasons why they make noises again and again and again, or hit something again and again. They’ve realized: You do this, you get that as a result. And you have the choice to do this. You have some power. Otherwise, babies are pretty much helpless. But when they begin to realize they can have some control over their world, they really enjoy exercising that control.

Well, that sense of joy in agency isn’t confined only to babies. It’s how we find joy in life as a whole. We see that we have potentials in the present moment that we can develop. A large part of our skills lies in learning to see more potentials that we didn’t see before and learning how to develop them.

Years back, when I was in Japan, I was watching a TV show of one of their living national treasures. It looked like he was just squiggling some lines on a piece of paper. I didn’t see what was worth treasuring in his skill. But then he worked with it more and more and more, and that little squiggle actually became the basis of a very intricate design. He saw the potential in the squiggle that I didn’t see.

That’s the sign of a craftsman: You see potentials in the world. A carpenter looks at a piece of wood and can think of lots of different ways that it can be used, ways that an ordinary person just wouldn’t see at all.

Well, it’s the same with the breath. There’s a lot to be learned in the breath. The breath can be used in lots of ways: to give you energy, to calm you down, to soothe your frayed nerves, to give the mind a good place to settle down in the present moment where it can know itself.

The Buddha saw a lot of potential in the breath. The breath is something everybody sees—we all see our breath—but most people didn’t see much potential there, aside from just keeping the body alive. But he saw there was a lot, not only in understanding the physical process of the breath, but also in understanding the mind—and understanding the mind in a way that you can see when you’re causing unnecessary stress or suffering here, you can stop.

That’s what agency is all about: seeing potentials and learning how to develop them. The wider the range of potentials you can see, the wider the range of your skills, then the more joy there is in life. You’re not just a victim of events. You can make things happen. And as the Buddha pointed out, you can make really good things happen, too, all the way to the end of suffering.

This is why, following on discernment, the right response is persistence, right effort. The Buddha points out why we’re suffering and how we don’t have to. So we take his instructions and we use them so that we don’t have to suffer. That way, we find joy in his teachings, joy in the practice, joy in the results. That’s what gives energy to our practice.

So learn how to find joy here. There’s a huge potential for joy. If you look carefully, you’ll see it and be able to develop it. Just have confidence that the Buddha was right, and confidence in yourself that yes, you can do this. That opens a door, and then you go through, to the point where the confidence turns to knowledge: “Yes, the Buddha was right. Yes, you have been able to follow his instructions.” That’s the brightness in life. As Ajaan Fuang once said, this was his debt to Ajaan Lee: that Ajaan Lee had shown him the brightness in life. And this is the brightness he was talking about.