Endurance with Discernment

When the Buddha gave a summary of his teachings to the arahants that he was going to send out to teach at the beginning of his career, he began with the word khanti, endurance. It’s an important part of the path, learning how to endure things that you ordinarily wouldn’t endure—pain, heat, cold, unfriendly words. You have to make sure your mind is not affected by these things.

A monk I know who was a student of Ajaan Chah tells the story of how one day he was coming back from the alms round, and one of the other monks was gossiping about some of the other monks in the monastery. It put the first monk into a bad mood, so he tried to get away from the second monk. But then as he came back to the monastery, he happened to run into Ajaan Chah, and Ajaan Chah said, “Good morning,” in English, and the first monk’s mood flipped 180 degrees.

That night, as he was giving a foot massage to Ajaan Chah, Ajaan Chah took his other foot and stamped him in the chest and said, “Don’t ever let your mind be affected by the words of others.” As the monk said, he’s remembered that lesson to this day.

One of the things you have to deal with in life is people’s words—others, of course, include the weather, pains in the body. The trick is not just to endure, but to use your discernment to make the endurance light so that it’s not a heavy burden. If you just grit your teeth, then it gets harder and harder and harder. But if you learn how to give the mind some way of focusing on things that are actually good, then you can endure a lot of things that you wouldn’t have endured otherwise.

Like right now, you’ve got your breath. You can breathe in a way that feels good. Try to find the spots in the body that are most sensitive to how the breathing feels. And nourish them. Please them. Figure out what they would really like to feel and provide that. Then think of that sensation spreading throughout the body so that the pleasant sensation fills the whole body, fills the whole mind.

There’s that old saying that the Devil makes work for idle hands. Well, your defilements make work for idle minds.

Give the mind work to do—something good—and you find you can endure a lot of things. If the mind is filled with a sense of the breath, it doesn’t have any idle hands to grab on to other things. Or if it’s filled with contemplation of something that’s been bothering you, and you’re beginning to see clearly what the problem is, then your mind doesn’t have any idle hands to grab on to how difficult it is to be with the heat, how long the heat has been going on, how much longer it’s going to go on. It’s because we grab hold of the wrong things and stab ourselves with them—that’s why we find that endurance is hard. It would make it a lot easier if you use your discernment.

You’ve probably noticed: You sit and meditate for an hour, and you can focus on the pains here, the pains there, and they really consume your awareness. Yet you can sit for that same hour watching a movie, and the pains of sitting still don’t bother you because you’re occupied with the movie. Well, occupy the mind with something else besides what’s bothering you. You might say, “Well, I’m running away from the problem.” No, you’re actually giving the mind something better to do so that it gains insight. When it turns around and looks at the problem again, you can see the problem is not as big as you thought it was, not as difficult as you thought it was.

If just pure endurance could make us awaken, then chickens would have gotten there a long time ago. Water buffaloes would have gotten there a long time ago. But they’re far away from awakening. We need to use our discernment in addition to endurance. That’s how we teach ourselves how not to suffer.