In Training

There’s a story in the Canon. A nun is coming out of the forest near Vulture Peak Mountain after having spent the day trying to meditate but without much success. Down by the river, she sees an elephant trainer with an elephant. The trainer says, “Give me your foot.” The elephant lifts his foot. The trainer uses the foot as a stair step to get on the elephant’s back. The nun says to herself, “See that animal brought under human control, thoroughly trained!” Her mind gets under control and calms down, which was why she’d gone to the woods in the first place.

When we see an animal trained like that, especially a large one like an elephant, it gives us a sense that they’re close to being human beings. That’s interesting. It’s the training that makes them close, which indicates that part of being a genuine human being is that you get trained, too.

The Buddha talks about how difficult it was to train elephants: You captured a wild elephant, and it still had its wilderness resolves, its wilderness desires, its wilderness habits, and you had to train them out. You offered grass, offered water, played the lute for it, until it finally decided that it was actually okay to be with human beings. It could take the training.

It sounds like we’re going against the elephant’s nature, but we’re actually going against part of the elephant’s nature. Training basically means that you develop an animal’s useful potentials and try to get rid of the useless ones. After all, if the elephant didn’t have that potential for intelligence, you couldn’t train it. What we’re doing is trying to find ways to make those potentials useful.

It’s the same in the training that the Buddha offers. Again and again, he talks about this as a training—like the training, say, that an athlete or anyone trying to master a skill would go through. You’re taking your good potentials and highlighting them, emphasizing them, strengthening them. You learn to overcome your potentials that would go in the other direction. This is all for your long-term welfare and happiness. And that, the Buddha said, is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of intelligence—the intelligence that makes us human.

You realize that some things you have to do and some things you have to avoid if you really want to be happy over the long term. And again, you have to see that it’s not going against your true nature—because all too often it feels like that. Say, when you’re exercising sense restraint, that there are things you want to look at in a certain way or listen to in a certain way, and the training says, “No.” Part of you says, “This is going against my nature,” which may be some of your potentials, but you have other potentials, as well. You have the ability to think in the long term, to want a well-being that’s long-term. That’s part of your nature, too.

So don’t see the training as something unnatural. It’s simply highlighting part of your nature that will be for your long-term welfare and happiness. As with sense restraint: You go through the day, you look at things, you listen to things. You have to ask yourself, “Why?” You’ve got eyes, of course; you’ve got ears. You can’t help but hear; you can’t help but see.

But when you’re looking, when you’re listening, that indicates it’s more intentional. So, what are your intentions? Sometimes greed wants to look, or anger wants to listen, jealousy, fear: Are these parts of your nature that you want to encourage? Or would you rather encourage a desire for a true happiness that lies beyond these things? After all, we as human beings can conceive of that happiness. And the Buddha said we can find it. He’s setting out the training that can make that happiness a reality.

So when you look, ask yourself, “Why am I looking?” If it’s for the sake of greed or lust, can’t you look in another way, for the sake of non-greed, non-lust? When you listen, if your anger is listening, can you listen in a way that makes you see that anger is really stupid? It is possible. So think in these terms. It’s not nature versus training, it’s nature versus nature. Which nature do you want to encourage?

The same applies to not only to the things that come into your senses, but also to the things that come out of your mouth, out of your body, out of your mind, in terms of the actions you do.

As with right speech: When you say something, ask yourself, “Why am I saying this? What’s my purpose?” If your purpose is to misrepresent the truth, well, don’t say it. If your purpose is to hurt somebody’s feelings, don’t say it. If your purpose is to divide people—to make x hate y, out of fear that if x and y get together, you’re going to be in trouble—don’t say those things. Particularly with divisive speech: This is so prevalent in our world right now. It seems like every voice in the media is trying to engage you to hate somebody or to side with somebody. You’ve got to realize that that’s all wrong speech. You don’t want to pick up that habit.

Then there’s random chatter. There is some purpose for social grease to make things go smoothly in a group, but as with any engine, if you have too much grease, the engine stops. So when you open your mouth to say something to make things go smoothly in a group, ask yourself how much is necessary, and then stop when you’ve accomplished your task.

In other words, have a purpose, a good purpose, for your speech, for your actions, for your thoughts. Think of Ajaan Lee’s image of the house with windows and doors that you open and close. When something bad flares up inside the house, you close the doors, close the windows, so that it doesn’t get out. When something bad flares up outside, you close the windows, close the doors, so that it doesn’t get in. Be very selective as to what you open and close, and when Otherwise, our minds are like bus stations—anybody can come in, anybody can go out, all kinds of things can happen. What usually happens is that the unskillful parts of your nature get developed and the skillful parts get wasted away.

Remember, part of being a human being is training, because as human beings we have all kinds of potentials, and if you have any intelligence, you want to develop the good potentials —the ones that will be for your long-term welfare and happiness. As long as you frame the issue in this way, it’s a lot easier to submit to training. At least you don’t feel like your nature is being squashed or denied. It’s just that some aspects of your nature have to be subdued. Other parts have to be brought out and encouraged.

An important part of being a human being is being intelligent enough to see that training is necessary and that it’s going to be for your own benefit. The Buddha’s offering us the best training there is—training in how to find the deathless, a happiness that’s not subject to conditions, at all, of any kind. His genius was in seeing that you find the deathless not by conceiving the deathless or hoping for it, but by solving the problem of suffering, because the tendencies in the mind that create suffering are the tendencies that lead to birth and becoming. Anything that leads to birth and becoming is going to lead to more aging, illness, and death. That’s going to get in the way of the deathless. But if you can tame the parts of your mind, the natures of your mind, that go for becoming, so that you don’t go in that direction anymore, you’re not creating the causes for birth. When you’re not creating the causes for birth, there’s not going to be aging, illness, and death.

It makes a lot of sense, but it took a genius like the Buddha to make this connection and then to figure out that rather than talking a lot about the deathless, he should talk more about solving the problem of suffering. To solve the problem, he talked about the training and gave it to others.

So this training has a high goal: There is that potential within us to find something that’s totally unconditioned, unfabricated, and we can fabricate a path to go there—if we train ourselves.

So focus on the training. Focus on the aspects of your mind that want that kind of happiness and that want you to be intelligent enough to see that whatever is needed is get there, whatever sacrifices, they’re all worth it.

Once you’ve found it, you’ll realize that there’s nothing else that can compare. While you’re in training or while you’re being trained, you may not know it yet, but have some confidence that there are people who do know this.

As the Buddha said, the people who are genuinely in training are those who have seen the deathless already. They know where this is going and they can train themselves. Those who finally, totally attain it are beyond training. They don’t need any more training.

For those of us who haven’t gotten there yet, wisdom lies in having conviction in the value of training ourselves, seeing that parts of our nature have to be subdued so that the better parts of our nature will be allowed to blossom.