Capable & Circumspect

Close your eyes and ask yourself: Where do you feel the breath in the body when you breathe in? When you breathe out? Where is the sensation of breathing clearest? We’re not talking about the air passing through the nose, we’re talking about the flow of energy in the body. Where do you feel that? You can feel that anywhere. So focus wherever it’s most prominent and then make sure your mind stays there.

This requires that you be alert to what the breath is doing, but also what the mind is doing, so that you can keep them together. You have to have this double focus.

There’s a passage in the commentary where they talk about the word sampajañña, which we translate as “alertness.” As it’s used in the Canon, it means basically knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. But the commentary takes issue with that interpretation. It says even a baby sucking at his mother’s breast knows what it’s doing. A jackal howling in the night knows what it’s doing. When the commentary gets snide like this, you know that its argument is weak. It’s trying to say that the word sampajañña means something more esoteric, that you see things in terms of the three characteristics.

But before you see that, you’ve got to see what you’re doing. Most of us go through life on automatic pilot. We decide to do something and, as we start doing it, we’re already planning our next action. We’re not taking too much care to see what the results are going to be. We take some, but often everything gets confused because we’re doing so many things at once.

So when we meditate, we’re trying to do one thing at a time and be very circumspect about it. In other words, look all around. Look at the breath. Look at the mind. See how well they’re going together. Then do what you can to keep them together well. When you have an all-around perspective like this, that’s when you can begin to depend on yourself. You can make corrections.

There’s a passage in King Asoka’s Edicts. We got a Thai translation of it one time. I don’t know what the English translation would be, but the Thai translation was that King Ashoka was saying that all the good that he had done was not going to be dedicated to becoming king again. All he wanted was to become capable in himself—in other words, to have the abilities to look after himself, to support himself.

To take care of yourself also means that you have to be self-correcting. That requires that you step back from what you’re doing and watch it carefully. You may have some ideas of what you want to accomplish, but is what you’re doing actually accomplishing that? Is there any fallout? Are there any drawbacks to what you’ve done? When you look all around like this, that’s when you can depend on yourself, and that’s when you can be capable in yourself.

That means you can go anywhere and you’re safe, because the main safety you have to be concerned about is safety from your own defilements, being safe in your actions. The things that the world can do to you are nothing compared to what you can do to yourself, both in terms of how good it can be and also how bad it can be. So be very careful to watch over your actions, watch over your mind. Then you’ll be capable in yourself as well.