Your Discernment

Close your eyes and watch your breath coming in, going out. Try some long breathing for a while and see how long breathing feels. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You could try shorter breathing, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, more shallow. See what kind of breathing feels good for you right now. Try different kinds of breathing. Experiment for a bit. And then read the results of your experiment.

This is how you develop insight. This is how you develop discernment—by doing something and then looking at the results—and then learning how to judge the results as to whether they’re good or not. The basic principle for discernment in the Buddha’s teachings is sometimes thought to be very abstract. They talk about emptiness, dependent co-arising, not self.

But when the Buddha talked about how discernment begins, he said it begins with a simple question: What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term suffering?

So you’ve got to look for the long term. You’ve got to know how to look at the results of your actions. Anybody can go for a quick fix. Even dogs can go for the quick fix. But to see the long-term results of your actions takes using your powers of observation and looking at your actions. Because those are the things that shape your life. We’re not just passively watching a TV show. We’re playing an interactive game here where the choices we make will change the game. We can read about this; we can think about this.

As the Buddha said there are three kinds of discernment. There’s the discernment that comes from listening. When you hear something and it makes sense. The discernment that comes from thinking—you take what you’ve listened to, and you think it through until it makes even more sense. But the kind of discernment that gives you real knowledge is the discernment that comes from the practice, when you actually put what you’ve learned into practice and see what results you get.

Then you have to make adjustments. Because sometimes, maybe, you misunderstood things. And sometimes your powers of judgment are not all that good. But if you do this again, again, and again, thinking about the long-term results of your actions, you begin to see that there are certain actions that you just don’t want to do.

The Buddha gives you some help—this is why we have the precepts. He says just don’t go there. But there are other areas of life where you have to learn how to use your own discernment to figure out what’s the right thing to do. You learn that through trial and error, and trial and error—and then trial and success. And you learn how to judge your actions by their long-term consequences. That’s when you can be said to be really discerning.

This is one of the perfections that the Buddha himself developed. How did he gain his discernment? Through trial and error. He made a number of mistakes, but then he learned from his mistakes so as not to repeat them. Again, he was looking for the long-term consequences. Even when his early teachers taught him very refined levels of concentration, he realized, “In the long term, these are going to fall apart. I’ve got to find something better.”

And it was his quest to keep on finding something better that led him to the ultimate. If he had contented himself with only second best, we never would have had a Buddha. It’s because he wanted to perfect his actions, perfect the skill of his actions through acting and then reflecting, acting and then reflecting—and then making adjustments: That’s how he became the Buddha. And that’s how he learned the Dhamma that he came out to teach us and has been teaching the world ever since—more than 2,600 years now.

So that’s how the Buddha learned. And he set an example for us. We don’t just copy his knowledge. We don’t just listen and think about it. We actually take the lessons he learned and put them into practice ourselves to see if we can get the same results. That’s how the knowledge becomes ours. That’s how the discernment becomes ours and not just borrowed goods.