The Skills of Right Concentration

A crucial part of the Buddha’s solution to the problem of unskillful desires and the conflict among desires is to bring knowledge to the process of how desires are formed and judged. This is a process that happens in the actions of the mind in the present moment, so an important part of the solution is to learn how to watch your mind in action. The mind’s actions are easiest to watch when, one, you’re doing something good; two, you’re trying to master a skill; three, you feel nourished with a sense of non-sensual well-being; and four, your mind is quiet. So the best way to observe the mind is to try to master the skill of doing something good and pleasurable, and in particular, the practice of concentration, as the mind is quiet, focused directly on the mind itself.

This is most definitely a skill.

Once I was teaching a group of people who were practicing another tradition. They asked me to explain kamma, so I told them that the Buddha’s explanation of kamma is directly related to explaining how we can master skills. In other words, some of the things we experience come from the past, and some of them come from actions we do in the present moment. This allows you room to change your actions so that you can actually master a skill—and in particular, the skill of meditation.

When I got to this last point, I got a lot of blank looks. Afterwards, people told me they had been told there was no skill to meditation, that you simply watched whatever came up in the mind without trying to change anything.

That is most definitely not how the Buddha taught meditation because the Buddha himself uses images of skill to illustrate what’s involved in meditating.

For example, with mindfulness, your mindfulness is like a skilled gatekeeper to a fortress on a frontier who is able to recognize disguised enemies and can keep them out, and to allow friends in to the fortress. As for concentration, the Buddha compares it to being like a skilled cook working for a king who would observe the king as he’s eating. The king is not going to tell you, “I like this, I don’t like that.” The good cook has to observe for himself what the king reaches for, what he eats a lot of. Then he can prepare more of those foods, and less of others. In that way, the cook satisfies the king and gets a reward. In the same way, you have to observe your mind, to see what it likes so that it will settle down in concentration. Then you get rewarded with a sense of peace and well-being.

The Buddha also compares a good meditator to a goldsmith who knows when to heat the gold, when to cool it, and when to examine it. In other words, you know when to put forth effort, when to cool the mind down with concentration, and then when to examine it with equanimity.

As for discernment, the Buddha compares it to being like an archer who can shoot long distances, fire accurate shots in rapid succession, and pierce great masses. In other words, you can see the past and future implications of what you’re observing in the present. You can quickly see things in terms of the four noble truths. And you can pierce your ignorance.

In fact, all the Buddha’s teachings can be seen as a body of skills. Remember that all four noble truths carry duties that are associated with them, and your task in each case is to master the duty. The primary cause of suffering, in Pāli, is called avijjā. It’s usually translated as ignorance, but it can also mean lack of skill.

Of the forest ajaans, as I mentioned this morning, Ajaan Lee is the one who speaks most often of meditation as being a skill. He says that mastering your breath is like learning how to make things: a pair of trousers, baskets, silver ornaments, and clay tiles. As you work with these things, the object you work with becomes your teacher. You have to be sensitive to what you’re doing so that you can connect the areas where you need improvement to specific actions you did so that you can correct them.

So tonight I’d like to talk about a set of the Buddha’s teachings that most clearly treats concentration practice as a skill. The Pāli term is for this set of teachings is iddhipāda, which can be translated as bases for success or bases for power. The four are:

The other night I told you the story of Ven. Ānanda and the brahman when Ānanda was staying in a park. The brahman comes to the park and asks Ānanda, “What is the goal of this practice you’re doing?” Ānanda says, “One of the goals is to put an end to desire.” Then the brahman asks him, “How do you do that?” Ānanda lists the four bases for success, starting with desire. The brahman says, “Well, in that case, it’s impossible, because you can’t use desire to put an end to desire.”

You may remember how Ānanda answered him. Ānanda first asked him, “Before you came to the park here, did you have a desire to come?” “Yes.” “Now that you’re here, where is that desire?” “It’s no longer there.” “How about the effort you made?” “I made the effort, but now I’m not making any more effort because I’ve arrived.” And so on down with the four bases for success.

We use the four bases for success to arrive at the goal, and then we can put them aside.

So let’s look at them more in detail.

• The Buddha says that the first base for success, desire, has to be balanced: not too strong, not too weak. In other words, if you think about how much you want to get to the goal but you don’t do anything to attain the goal, that desire is too strong and actually gets in the way. If the desire is too weak, then you’re not going to make the effort to do what you need to do. So it has to be just right.

It also has to be focused on succeeding at the causes. We all want the peace of concentration, but to get that peace, we have to learn how to enjoy the work involved in getting there. The work may not always be peaceful, but it can produce peace, in the same way that fixing a meal and eating it can make you feel satisfied and full. You’re not full as you fix the meal, but you won’t get full unless you fix it and eat it.

In this case, you use the qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency as you stay with the breath. Mindfulness, in turn, is nurtured by two qualities: virtue—holding to the precepts—and what the Buddha calls “views made straight.”

You have to remember that mindfulness means keeping something in mind. If you’ve been holding to the precepts, then when you look back on your actions, there’s nothing you need to feel embarrassed or ashamed about, and nothing that you might try to deny. So there are no walls in your mind. This makes it easier to reflect back, back, back on your actions. When you do something harmful, you tend to put up a wall to deny it, and that makes mindfulness difficult.

Having “views made straight” means believing in the basic principles of kamma. In other words, you are responsible for your actions and you believe that to improve your life, you have to change your actions.

Another one of the bases for mindfulness is restraint of the senses. You keep watch over what you’re looking at, listening to, tasting, etc. And particularly, you’re keeping watch on how you look at things and how you listen, so see what effect it has on the mind. You might ask yourself, “Actually, who’s doing the looking here? Is wisdom doing the looking or is anger doing the looking?” As when you turn on the computer: Who in your inner committee turned on the computer? The computer doesn’t turn itself on. You have to ask yourself, “What is my motivation for looking here?”

• The second base for success is persistence, which basically means that you keep engaged in right effort and you keep encouraging yourself along the way. When I was in Thailand, I had to learn how to sharpen a knife without a knife sharpener. Here in the West, you have a machine, you go zip, zip, and you’re done. In Thailand, they have a big stone and some water. That’s it. You have to very carefully sharpen the knife against the stone without putting too much pressure, without putting too little pressure, all along the blade. It takes about half an hour. I found an important part of the process was talking to myself as I did it. “I’m one-sixth of the way, I’m one-fourth of the way, I’m one-third of the way,” and so on. That’s how you do it.

For many people, especially those with a harsh inner critic, this can be a difficult part of the practice because your inner critic tends to discourage you. So you have to retrain your inner critic. If you have no inner critic at all, you can’t improve your actions. So you have to learn how to critique the critic. In other words, say, “I’m not going to listen to you unless you give me positive criticism.” After a while, it actually obeys.

The important part of the persistence here is that you have to keep encouraging yourself even though you haven’t seen the goal and you can’t see it approaching on the horizon. It’s like driving to the Grand Canyon. The road doesn’t look like the Grand Canyon. And you can’t see the Grand Canyon ahead of time. It’s not like a mountain. As you drive to a mountain, you can see the mountain ahead of you, but you don’t see the Grand Canyon ahead of time.

Sometimes you’re told that moments of stillness in your mind are a foretaste of nibbāna. But that’s not true. You can’t see nibbāna ahead of time. It’s as if you’re traveling to the Grand Canyon having been told that it’s like a big ditch. You see a big ditch on the side of the road, and the person driving you there says, “Do you see that ditch on the side of the road? That’s your taste of the Grand Canyon.” But it’s not. When you get to the actual Grand Canyon, you’ll see that it’s something totally different and much more impressive.

So don’t content yourself with the ditch. You have to place some confidence in the map or the travel guide or on the signs along the side of the road that say, “Grand Canyon, 10 miles.” That’s an important part of your persistence: giving yourself some encouragement and not settling for something less when you’re capable of something more.

• As for the third base for success, you have to be really intent on what you’re doing. In other words, instead of just thinking, “I want the Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon. When do I get to the Grand Canyon?” you focus on the road. That’s what gets you there. In this case, you have to observe how you’re engaging with the three fabrications: how you’re breathing, how you’re talking to yourself, and the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath. For example, with perceptions: Where does the breath originate? There are times when you perceive the breath as coming from outside of the body. Other times, you have a sense that the breath is coming from inside. Actually, it’s the energy from your body, so it starts inside. Then you ask, “Where in the body does it originate? Is it one spot? Is it in every cell in the body?” Try these different perceptions and see what it does to your experience in the breath.

You also can experiment with the perceptions of how the breath flows and what needs to be done to make it flow more smoothly. You also have to pay attention to how you handle physical and mental feelings. For example, for some people who tend to suppress their emotions, breath energies can easily get stirred up and then stuck in different parts of the body. So you have to know how to unblock them through their escape channels. As I said today, you can think of the energy going out the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, or out the eyes.

• As for the fourth base for success, analysis, you have to look carefully at the results of your actions and then use your ingenuity to figure out how to make adjustments, in terms of your desire and your persistence and your intent, to make sure that they’re balanced and focused in the right places. This relates to the two terms Ajaan Fuang would use most frequently when giving meditation instructions. One was, “Be observant” and two was, “Use your ingenuity.”

There are a lot of blanks left in the Buddha’s teachings on meditation, and in some cases, the blanks seem to be intentional. For example, he says, “Look for the potential for a rapture in your body.” Then he says, “Where is that to be found?” He says, “It’s to be found in the potential for rapture.” So you’ve got to find it yourself. Basically, he’s teaching you to like learning how to be observant.

These four bases for success are line with the Buddha’s instructions on how the Dhamma is to be nourished. One, through commitment: In other words, you really do it. Then two, you reflect on what you’ve done.

We can compare this with an attitude that’s been picked up by a false reading of the Kālāma Sutta. Some people interpret it as saying, “I won’t believe anything unless it’s been proven to me.” But the Buddha’s attitude is you’re in no position to truly judge the Dhamma until you’ve committed yourself to actually doing it well. This is called practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. Then you can train yourself to be really good at reflecting. In other words, you have to commit yourself before you can really be a good judge.

You may notice that these four bases for success would apply not only to the practice of concentration, but also to any skill. You have to want to really want to do it. You have to stick with it. You have to be intent and focused on what you’re doing, and use your powers of analysis to get better.

Now, if you noticed that, you’re not the first person to notice that. It’s interesting that when the Buddha gave a list of his most basic teachings, the bases for success are included in the list, but in the West it’s hardly ever taught. In countries like Thailand and Burma, though, it’s one of the basic teachings and it gets applied to any skill in life. If you want to succeed in anything, you have to develop these four qualities. When you go to school, they tell you, “Develop these qualities.” In fact, someone once went to visit a military helicopter repair place near Bangkok, and there on the wall was: “Desire, persistence, intent, analysis”: “Chanda, viriya, citta, vimaṅsā.” Can you imagine that in a restaurant kitchen or aircraft hangar in Paris?

I have a student whose son is a professional athlete, and recently I gave him a book on the four bases for success. He looked at the cover and he said, “The basis for success is working your ass off.” I told him he was right about one of them, which is the persistence. Then he agreed that the other three were necessary as well. If fact, I figured out that you can use the language of sport to cover all four: “You gotta wanna win.” “Work your ass off.” “Lock in.” “Use your brains.”

You can also use these four bases for success to succeed with your defilements. If you really want to seduce somebody, you have to really want to do it. You can’t think of the unattractiveness of the body at that point. Then you have to really stick with it and be focused. And you have to think through how you’re going to do it, reflecting on what’s worked and hasn’t worked in the past.

However, the Buddha doesn’t encourage you to use these bases for success for your defilements—with good reason. One, they’re usually focused outside, rather than on the mind inside, so they pull your attention away from your real problem. Two, they agitate the mind so that it can’t see clearly. And three, they often involve a lot of lies.

Just listen to the words of any love song. When I was in Thailand, there was a period when one song in particular was very popular. Every morning when I went on my alms round, I would hear it. And the refrain of the song was, “Though a star may be so far, so far away, I’ll get it and put it in your hand.” It’s an obvious lie. And it’s saying, “I want you so much I’m willing to lie to you.”

So, to get back to the topic: On the path we use desire to bring the mind to concentration because we want to see the mind in action, and it’s more transparent when it’s brought to stillness. We also base our concentration on virtue to make it more honest, with a sense of the worth of what you’re doing, which is why virtue and views made straight are an important part of the foundation not only of mindfulness, but also of concentration.

Now, as you master any skill, your sense of self begins to fade away as your actions fall more and more in line with what you want them to do, and you can be more and more focused on the actions rather than on yourself. This is when you get “into the zone.” This point will be important as the path progresses, as you direct your thoughts away from your attachment to self and toward your actions. We’ll discuss this point more later in the retreat.

As for the strategy that’s required for this task, remember those three types of craving that lead to suffering: craving for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming. The fact that the craving for non-becoming is part of the problem creates a practical dilemma as you’re trying to bring an end to the craving that leads to becoming. Remember what non-becoming means: the destruction of a becoming that’s already there. The Buddha’s solution is not to try to destroy a state of becoming that’s already there, but to let it fall away on its own. Meanwhile, you focus on the processes that would lead to a new becoming, and then develop dispassion for them before they create a new state of becoming.

When you bring the mind to concentration, you’re actually getting hands-on experience with the steps that lead to becoming. In the Buddha’s description of dependent co-arising, some of the factors that come before becoming include the three fabrications. They also include a factor called name-and-form.

Form is the body as you sense it from inside: the properties of coolness, warmth, solidity, and energy.

Name includes different mental actions: perception, feeling, intention, and attention.

When you’re doing concentration, you’re focused on these things and activities in and of themselves. For form, you’re focusing on the breath. As for name, you have the perception of how you visualize the breath to yourself. There are the feelings of pleasure or pain that you feel as you meditate. You have the intention to stay in the breath. And you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the body, what’s going on in the mind, focusing on questions that help bring things to stillness.

So as you’re getting focused on the breath, you’re beginning to see these processes before they become a state of becoming. The state of concentration itself is a type of becoming, but as you get more and more skilled at it, you get more and more sensitive to the processes that lead up to it. As you get to see them in action, you gain a sense of how ephemeral they are and how they require constant attention. Eventually, you begin to develop dispassion for them. That’s how you get past becoming without falling into the trap of craving for non-becoming.

That’s where the path is headed.

But before we explore that topic more fully, we have to look at some of the Buddha’s other teachings on how to use desire to develop the path. And that will be the topic for tomorrow night.