Potentials

One aspect of the Buddha’s teachings that tends to be underappreciated here in the West is the teaching on dhātu. This word can be translated as element, as property, or as potential. Physical events in the world are explained by the provocation of the different elements or properties or potentials—the fire potential, water, wind, earth. Of those three, earth is not provocable. The other three can be provoked. It’s when the fire potential is provoked that there are fires. When the water potential is provoked, there are floods. When the wind potential is provoked, there are wind storms. When the provocation ends, these phenomena end. But the potential stays latent and can be provoked again.

The mind has dhātu as well. The Buddha analyses them in different ways. One lists three potentials: the potential for sensuality, the potential for form, and the potential for the formless. As we’re meditating, we’re trying to provoke and sustain the provocation of the potential for form: our sense of the body as we feel it from within. How do you feel your head right now? How do you feel your shoulders from within? Your arms? Your torso? Your legs? You can pay attention to these things and then drop that awareness right away and go back to your old sensual provocations if you want. But if you’re trying to develop concentration, you want to provoke your awareness of the body and then sustain that awareness of the body as you feel it from within.

It’s important to keep this in mind. Some people say that the purpose of meditation is just to be with whatever comes up. But here we’re trying to develop a path, develop right concentration. To do that, you take advantage of the fact that your experience is not just a dead letter. It’s full of potentials, so you want to provoke the right ones and not provoke the wrong ones.

So think of the body as you feel it from within. Try to sustain that awareness as consistently as you can, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. We focus on the wind property in the body as our main topic because, of all the physical properties, it’s the easiest to manipulate. You can think of short breathing, long breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow—any combination of those—and the breath will respond. Then judge to see what feels best. Adjust things when one combination doesn’t feel so good anymore, and you can keep on adjusting when you have to.

This is the potential we’re trying to cultivate, so think in those terms: potentials that you cultivate. You’re not just looking at the body as it presents itself. You’re actively provoking your awareness of the body. If you notice that, when you focus too strongly on one part of the body, it begins to feel uncomfortable, then adjust your focus.

Think of the image the Buddha gives of holding a baby quail in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, it’s going to die; too loosely, it’s going to fly away. What’s the right amount of pressure to maintain as you try to give rise to a sense of ease and well-being and maintain it?

Again, it’s not just a matter of watching feelings come and go willy-nilly. You’re actively cultivating a sense of ease, a sense of rapture, as the Buddha said in his instructions on breath meditation: “Train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture.” If it’s not there yet, well, what is the potential for rapture? Where is it? What kind of feelings, if you protect them, lead to a sense of fullness in your sense of the body?

“Train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure.” Again, if the pleasure isn’t yet there or if it’s not yet strong enough, then what potentials *are *there?

Usually, it’s good to start with just a sense of feeling okay as the breath comes in, the breath goes out—wherever you’re focused. Try not to push things too much. Don’t force the breath in or force the breath out. Hover around it until you get a sense that it feels just right. You’re provoking this aspect of your awareness and then trying to maintain it in a way that feels really good.

Here, the problem is that sometimes, when you feel really good, you get excited and you drop it. That’s another potential you’ve got to watch out for: the potential for delight. All too often with our pleasures in the world, if we don’t delight in them, they just disappear. They seem to be nothing. If you want to get attached to things, you’ve got to delight in them.

In the beginning of the meditation, you have to delight in it, but it has to be a balanced delight—enough to make you want to enjoy and explore further what can be developed here, but not so much that you drop the breath and just focus on the delight, because that destroys your concentration. You’re trying to keep your mind at an even keel as the pleasure comes. This is called being developed in body.

Other schools of thought, in the Buddha’s time, talked about being developed in body as simply being healthy. But for the Buddha, being developed in body had to do with your relationship to the body: Pleasure comes, but you’re not overcome by it. This is part of your training in restraint. This is why we have restraint of the senses as a foundation for the meditation.

Usually, you tend to go around delighting in sensual pleasures in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. That habit of exclaiming over something—cultivating delight, sustaining delight—will then get carried into the meditation. So when you’re exercising restraint of the senses and you see something you really like, your immediate reaction has to be, “Okay, it’s nice, but I can’t continue with this, sustaining it.” You have to look at the object in another way so that you don’t cultivate lust, you don’t cultivate desire, you don’t cultivate greed. Then, when that restraint becomes habitual, it’s easier to transfer that new habit into the meditation.

The same with restraint over your speech: If you find yourself exclaiming over things—even if it’s just internal speech—then, when the time comes to meditate, you’ll be doing the same thing. So when something comes up, you see it, you comment, and you drop the comment. It’s like Ven. Sāriputta’s image of dealing with unpleasant sounds at the ear. You tell yourself simply that “There’s contact arising. When the contact ends, that’s the end of it.” The same principle should apply to pleasure that would otherwise pull you in: The contact is there, and when the contact ends, that’s it. You don’t have to continue make it reverberate in your mind. When you can develop this habit, then when the time comes to meditate and things feel really good inside, you can comment, “Yes, they’re good,” and then you drop the comment.

Think of Ajaan Lee’s image of the dirt falling off the plow. The plow goes into the earth. The dirt comes up and falls off the plow. If you’re stupid, you gather it up in a bag that you drag behind you and that just weighs you down. So just think of it as, “The dirt falls off the plow and there it goes. Let it go.” Pleasure comes from the meditation, you notice there’s pleasure, then you let it go—because you don’t have to delight in it for the pleasure to do its work. The pleasure that appears in the sense of the body as you feel it from within really is nourishing, really is sustaining. It’s going to provide a good foundation for you. But you have to learn how to maintain that foundation without destroying it by aggravating the potential for delight.

So when something really good happens in meditation that really pervades the sense of the body from within, you comment on it and then you let the comment dissolve, disperse. You don’t try to hold on to it, you don’t try to replicate it, because these things will disperse on their own—that’s the nature of comments in the mind. Our fear is that if we don’t hold on to our joy, don’t hold on to our delight, we’re not going to get enough out of it. So we keep on creating more and more and more replicas of the joy, replicas of the delight, and they just weigh us down. They get stuffed into that bag we’re dragging behind us.

Notice simply that there is pleasure and then let that notice dissolve, and you’ll be back where you were—with the pleasure and the breath. It’s a different kind of relationship—it doesn’t require delight. All it requires is that you maintain the causes, which are being focused on the breath—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, putting aside greed and distress with reference to your breathing, sticking with the training of being sensitive to the pleasure as you breathe in and sensitive to the pleasure as you breathe out. Let it do its work.

It’ll do its work without your having to interfere. You just make sure that you focus on the causes, and the results will come. The cause here, of course, is maintaining that sense of the body as you feel it from within. Don’t lose that sense of whole-body awareness—that’s the potential you’re trying to develop.

So this is a really useful way of looking at things: the potentials that you aggravate; the potentials that you don’t. The potentials start with an impulse, and then the question is, “Is it worth sustaining the impulse?” The impulse to stay with the sense of the body, the potential for form, is to be sustained. As for the potential for delight, you let it come, you let it go. You’ve got work to do—good work, pleasant work. If you have a matter-of-fact attitude toward it, then the pleasure stays with you.

So cultivate this potential—the potential for form. As for other potentials that might build up around it and destroy it, just let them go.

When you see things as potentials like this, then you get a better sense of what you’re doing in the present moment. It’s all part of the pattern that the Buddha said nourishes the Dhamma: You commit yourself to doing these things, and then you reflect on which potentials are working and which ones are not. Then you act on what you’ve learned. In this way, you become more and more skilled in making the most of what you’ve got.