Halfway Through
September 03, 2024
Today is the middle of the Rains. We’re halfway through the three months, and it’s a good time to reflect what determinations you made, what vows you made at the beginning of the Rains. How are they going? If you’re having trouble keeping up, well, you’ve got the rest of the Rains to accelerate your efforts, to make sure you hold on to your determination.
If you find that the determination is getting easy, maybe it’s time to step it up a bit. Look at your precepts. Look at your generosity. Look at your meditation. Where is it getting easy? Where can you make it harder for yourself? That’s the whole point of making vows: to stretch yourself. If you don’t stretch yourself, the vow is pretty useless. You’re trying to learn new things, so you have to take on some hard things, particularly with your precepts.
You want to make sure that you really stretch with your precepts because these form the foundation for everything else. It’s in following the precepts that you develop qualities like mindfulness, alertness, ardency. You have to be mindful to keep the precept in mind, alert to watch what you’re doing, and ardent to try to do things well. The precepts also teach you to be very careful about your intentions, because the precepts can be broken only intentionally. We’re talking about the five and the eight precepts.
So you have to be very careful about what you mean when you do something, what you mean when you say something, what you mean when you think something. What do you hope to get out of this? It develops your discernment as you start thinking about the long-term consequences of your actions. So you don’t just do what you want and then make excuses for it. You look at the actual results. In this way you grow.
We can learn things from the books, we learn things from thinking about them, but it’s in the actual practice that we learn the Dhamma, and we learn its meaning. Sometimes we think we can just explain the words and that gets you the meaning. But the real meaning is making a change in your mind, lifting the quality of your mind, raising the quality of your mind.
Some people don’t like that idea. They think their minds are perfectly fine. But then ask yourself, is there still any stress in your life? Still some suffering? Someone once asked me, “Why do Buddhists talk about suffering so much?” He said he didn’t suffer in his life. I asked him if he had any stress. “Oh yeah, lots of stress.”
That’s what we’re talking about. The stress doesn’t come from outside; it comes from inside. You’ve got to look into that. As long as there’s still stress in your mind, it’s a sign that something still needs to be done. So take this opportunity at the halfway checkpoint to see if it’s time to accelerate your efforts even more.
If you’re struggling with the determinations you’ve made, keep up the struggle. Keep on trying to figure out why it is that it’s hard. Other people can observe the precepts. Other people can meditate. You have to tell yourself, “They can do it; they’re human beings. I’m a human being; I can do it too.” That has to be your attitude. Whatever problems you’re facing, someone else has faced in the past and has gone past them. So there must be a way around the problem. So look for it. Have the confidence that it’s there and have the confidence that you can find it.
This convention we have in the Rains retreat, even though there’s no rain—we had just a little sprinkle about a month ago—that it’s is a time to accelerate our efforts, is something they’ve been doing for over 2,500 years. It’s a good tradition because it encourages us to become better people. So keep it up and benefit from it. That’s how we live wisely in the world.