Magha Puja

Today is Magha Puja. It was on this day, in the year after the Buddha gained awakening, that 1,250 of his arahant disciples all came to meet him. There hadn’t been any prior arrangement. They were all monks because they had been ordained by the Buddha himself. So this is very early on in his career. He gave them a Dhamma talk, called the Ovada Pāṭimokkha, then sent them out to teach.

A lot of the principles in the talk were pretty basic—about not harassing others, not verbally abusing other people. You’d think they would already know. And they probably did already know. But the Buddha just wanted to remind them what the basic teachings were, because in many cases they had come to him, listened to one Dhamma talk, and became arahants right away. So he wanted to fill in the details, what should be taught to people at large. Je concluded with one statement: One should be devoted to the heightened mind.

Now the heightened mind is the word for concentration practice. You remember that the word for “mind” in Pali also means “heart.” You lift your heart. You lift your mind above its ordinary concerns as you bring the mind into concentration, bring it to oneness. This is an image you see again and again in the Canon: that you try to lift yourself up above the affairs of the world.

Think about it—what does the world have to offer? It has material gain, material loss. There’s status; there’s loss of status. Praise, criticism. Pleasures, pains. That’s it. And these things whirl around, and around, and around. If you go chasing after them, you get all dizzy. But if you can lift your mind up above them, you can see that they go around, but you don’t go around with them. Then you’re safe.

So try to lift your heart, lift your mind, above the concerns of the world. The world is very concerning right now. But if you let yourself get tied up in that, your important business doesn’t get done. Otherwise you go running around, and you die from this world and go to another world. It’s got the same sort of stuff over and over again. You keep running around, running around. And where do you go? What do you accomplish? You gain some things, then you lose them. You gain them again; you lose them again.

As Ajaan Fuang said, think of all the sensual pleasures that you would really like to experience. He said it’s a sign that you’ve had them before. If you think about this for a few minutes, it gives rise to a sense of real saṃvega. If you gain them again, you’re going to lose them again; you’re going to miss them again and try to get them again. And nothing gets accomplished that way.

The real accomplishments are when you lift the mind above these concerns, lift your heart above these concerns, bring it to oneness, and then look at what you’re doing. What would incite you to want to go running around again? See that you don’t really want to fall for that allure ever again. That’s when the mind is free. Because that’s what the teachings are all about as he said elsewhere: All the teachings have a single taste, just as the ocean has a single taste—that of salt. All the true teachings have the taste of release. That’s what we’re here for. It’s always good to keep that in mind.