Mindfulness

Last night we talked briefly about the role of mindfulness in developing persistence. This morning, I’d like to discuss that point in a little more detail because there’s a lot of misunderstanding around the topic of mindfulness.

We often hear that mindfulness is an accepting and non-reactive state of mind, that it’s very closely related to equanimity. But actually, in the way the Buddha teaches mindfulness—as a faculty of memory—mindfulness is purposeful. You keep certain things in mind because you have a purpose—the purpose being to protect your behavior and your state of mind from being unskillful. As the Buddha said, when mindfulness is in charge, its purpose is that if there’s any skillful behavior in thought, word, or deed that you haven’t yet mastered, you’re mindful—i.e., you keep remembering—to try to master it. If you have mastered it, you try to protect it, maintain it, and bring it to full development. In other words, instead of simply watching skillful qualities come and go, you keep remembering to try to make them come and to prevent them from going. That’s the role of right mindfulness.

The Buddha frequently talks of the practice of mindfulness as a kind of protection and refuge, and he uses a variety of analogies to illustrate the various kinds of protection that mindfulness provides.

First, it keeps you in bounds. To illustrate this role, the Buddha gives the analogy of a quail. Normally, quails live in fields that have been plowed, with stones turned up. But one day a quail wanders away from its territory. A hawk swoops down and carries it off, and the quail laments, “Oh, my lack of merit! If only I had stayed in my ancestral territory, this hawk would have been no match for me!” The hawk hears this and is irritated by this upstart quail, so it says, “But where is your ancestral territory?” And the quail says, “A plowed field where stones have been turned up.”

The hawk lets the quail go: “Go. Go to your territory, but even there you still won’t escape me.” So, the quail flutters down to the field, stands on top of a stone, and starts taunting the hawk, “Come, get me, you hawk! Come, get me, you hawk!” The hawk swoops down again, and as soon as the quail sees that the hawk is coming at him full speed, he slips behind the stone. The hawk shatters his breast there on the stone and dies.

The Buddha says the field here stands for the establishing of mindfulness, whereas the area outside of the field stands for thoughts of sensuality. The hawk stands for your defilements. If your thoughts don’t stay in bounds, then your defilements can get you. This is one of the things that mindfulness does: It keeps your thoughts in bounds. You remember what is skillful, you remember what is not skillful, you remember that you’re safe only when you stay within what is skillful, so you remember to do whatever is needed to keep your thoughts within safe bounds.

Another image the Buddha used to make the same point is that of a gatekeeper at the gate of a fortress. The fortress is located at the frontier of a country, and there’s always the danger that enemy spies may try to get into the fortress. So, the gatekeeper has to recognize who’s a friend and who’s not, and to keep out those who are not friends. Now, if mindfulness were simply acceptance, the gatekeeper would just stay there at the side of the gate, noting who came in and who went out. If a spy came in, it would simply say, “Oh, there’s a spy.” Now, some spies, when they’re recognized, might run away, but a lot of spies would just walk on into the fortress. The point of this analogy is that mindfulness has to be very active in recognizing what’s not skillful and in keeping it out. This is another analogy to illustrate the role mindfulness plays in keeping your thoughts within bounds.

The second way in which mindfulness protects you is to keep you focused on what’s important. It reminds you that the most important thing that you have right now is the state of your mind, and if any unskillful thought comes in, your first priority is to get it out. The Buddha illustrates this point with an analogy of a man whose head is on fire. His mindfulness is focused on putting the fire out right away. He doesn’t simply watch the flames and note their pretty colors; he remembers that he’s got to put them out, and he can’t let anything else distract him. That’s the second way in which mindfulness helps protect your mind: It keeps your priorities in mind and keeps you focused on your task.

The third way is that it keeps reminding you always to stay observant, to learn from your actions what works and what doesn’t work. In other words, it doesn’t just keep you in bounds. It also reminds you that your best protection is knowledge, and the best way to gain knowledge is to learn from your own actions. This relates to that point we made earlier: that the Buddha looked for two qualities in a student—one, that the student be honest about what he has done and two, that he be observant about what the results are. These two qualities underlie this role of mindfulness.

The Buddha illustrates this point with the simile of a cook. The cook works for a prince, and he has to notice what kinds of food the prince likes to eat. Sometimes the prince will say what he likes, but sometimes he won’t. But if the cook is observant, he notices what the prince likes to reach for. He’ll make more of that kind of food, and in that way he’ll get rewarded. In the same way, you have to learn how to be observant as to what helps your mind gain concentration and other skillful states—in other words, what ways of meditating the mind likes and that give good results—and you also have to remember the lessons you’ve learned, so that you can apply them each time you meditate. That’s how your meditation becomes a skill you can rely on. And that’s one of the ways in which mindfulness provides a refuge.

These, then, are some of the ways in which mindfulness gives you protection as you go through life making choices. Because remember: We don’t live in a deterministic world where all our actions are pre-determined. We do have a range in the present moment for choosing what to do and what not to do, remembering that the suffering that weighs most on the mind is the suffering that comes from our own choices. This is why it’s so important to know about the different ways in which we fabricate our experience of the present moment—by the way we breathe, by the way we talk to ourselves, and by the perceptions and feelings we focus on and hold in mind—because they’ll play a big role in leading us to suffer or not to suffer. Remember that you do have the ability within you to make a difference in whether you’re going to suffer or not, and you can be more in charge of how you conduct yourself on the path.

Now, this doesn’t mean that there’s no room for equanimity and acceptance in the practice. Most of the Thai ajaans noticed that for Westerners, our biggest weakness is that we don’t really understand equanimity and acceptance. The main point that we don’t understand is that these mental qualities are skills and that we have to be selective in using them: when to apply equanimity and when not, when to be accepting and when not. If unskillful states are taking over your mind, you can’t be equanimous about them. You can’t simply accept them. You have to do what you can to get rid of them. As for other issues in life, you have to see where you can make a difference and where you can’t, and also evaluate where it’s worth the effort to try to make a difference and where it’s not.

The Buddha often compares a person who’s practicing the Dhamma to a warrior. Like any good warrior, we have to choose our battles, realizing that we don’t have the energy to solve every problem in life. That means we need to apply our main energy to solving the problems within our own minds. The most important thing for us to accept is responsibility for our own suffering. This is the main lesson of the four noble truths. It is possible for us to make a difference for the better, and the question we should always be asking ourselves is, “What is the most skillful thing to do now?” We meditate to make the answer to this question more and more clear, and then when we’ve learned what’s skillful, we meditate further in order to give ourselves strength to carry through with what we’ve learned.

Questions

Q: What is the difference between mindfulness and concentration?

A: Mindfulness practice as the Buddha described it is actually how you get the mind into concentration. In other words, you stay focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—and you put aside any distractions with regard to the world. That’s the description of mindfulness. When you succeed in doing it well, you bring the mind into concentration.

Q: Are mindfulness and vipassanā the same thing?

A: No. Mindfulness is the act of keeping something in mind. Vipassanā is insight, a quality of seeing the fabrications of the mind clearly, so clearly that you develop dispassion for them. Now, mindfulness is one of the practices that can lead to clear insight, but clear insight also requires concentration and right view.

There’s one passage where the Buddha says that for the mind to develop concentration, you need insight and tranquility, and to develop tranquility and insight, you need to develop concentration. The image is of two hands washing each other. The left hand cleans the right hand, the right hand cleans the left hand, and that way both get cleaned.

Q: You’ve said that mindfulness is to always keep something in mind. I thought that mindfulness was to be aware of the present moment, but if I’m keeping something in mind, I might not be aware of the present moment. I get a little confused. Could you say more about it?

A: There is mindfulness and there is right mindfulness. Mindfulness in general means keeping something in mind. Right mindfulness means remembering which qualities are skillful, which ones are unskillful, and remembering to be alert and ardent about recognizing and developing skillful qualities in the present moment.