… right above the navel, the base of the
throat, the tip of the breastbone, the middle of the head, top of the
head. Think of breath energy emanating from any one of those spots,
and if anything seems to be getting in the way of its spreading, let
it dissolve away so that the breath energy flows smoothly throughout
the entire body: That’s …
… But the
Buddha had to make those mistakes before he was able to find the
middle way.
And it wasn’t the case that after six years of really strong effort,
he just gave up and said, “Well, effort doesn’t get anywhere. Let’s
have a practice of no effort.” Fortunately, he didn’t go in that
direction. If he had, we probably …
… It
might be around the heart, around the stomach, in the neck, or in the
middle of the head. Keep directing your thoughts to the breath energy
there.
Ajaan Lee’s image is of holding on to a post. You can run around the
post, and as long as you hold on, you don’t get dizzy, you don’t fall
down. But if …
… change. And it didn’t necessarily go up. Sometimes it
would go down. Way down.
An analogy he used later was that it’s like throwing a stick up into
the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that
end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle.
So his question was, is there a pattern to the ups and downs …
… success in doing detailed work, with a sense of urgency, but also with
a sense of patience, because each of the bases for success has to be
done in a balanced way. We are, after all, on a middle way here, and
that requires a lot of discernment.
If we were on a path that involved a lot of extremes—say, just do
without …
… This way you get to see things you didn’t see
before inside, both in the body and in the mind. Because as the mind
begins to gather around the breath like this, and you give it one
thing to stick with, you begin to see other movements in the mind:
other intentions that may come up, other thoughts referring to the
past, referring …
… Could there be another way? Because self-torment obviously wasn’t getting results.
He recollected a time when he was a child and had naturally entered the first jhana. He asked himself, “Could this be the way?” And something inside him said, “Yes.” “If so, why am I afraid of that pleasure?” Because prior to that he had lumped all pleasure together as bad …
… Now, the Buddha did admit that there are various ways of conceiving
the path, but there are a limited number of variations. And they all
basically contain the same factors: virtue, concentration, and
discernment, sorted out in different ways.
When you look at the different lists in the Wings to Awakening, you
see that the factors are sometimes listed in different orders. For
instance …
… With some pains, if you breathe in
a particular way, the pains get worse. If you breathe in another way,
they go away. With other pains, the breath has nothing to do with
them. They’re just there.
How do you learn this? You learn by experimenting; you learn by trial
and error, by trial and success. We’re bringing the mind into a …
… Resembling a ball of sealing wax,
set in a hollow,
with a bubble in the middle
and bathed with tears,
eye secretions are born there too:
The parts of the eye
are rolled all together
in various ways.’
Plucking out her lovely eye,
with mind unattached
she felt no regret.
‘Here, take this eye. It’s yours.’
Straightaway she gave it to him.
Straightaway …
… He recommends instead
the middle way, the noble eightfold path. That’s a value judgment
right there.
Toward the end of his life he was asked if there were awakened beings
in other teachings, and he said any teaching that has the noble
eightfold path can give rise to awakened beings. If there’s a lack of
the noble eightfold path, then no awakened …
… men, women, children, young, old, middle-aged,
wealthy, poor, sick, healthy, smart, dumb in the ways of the world.
But they’ve all taken the practice and they taken it to heart, and
they have all been able to benefit from it in the ways that the Buddha
promised.
At some point in their practice they all had the same strengths and
weaknesses that …
… Everyone comes up here wounded in one way or another, suffering either from things outside or from things inside. At the time of the Buddha people were suffering from greed, anger, and delusion just as we are. With modern culture, modern society, it seems as if we have more diseases of the mind, more complex ways of getting involved in creating delusion, but they …
… This, combined with mindfulness, is probably your best guarantee of getting the mind into balance, so that when things aren’t going the way you’d like them to, you don’t get upset, you don’t get flustered. You simply take it into account and see what you can do to balance it out.
So try to think in ways that are encouraging …
… The
breath, when you’re not watching it, just comes in and out every which
way. But take some time to notice: What kind of breathing really feels
good for the body right now? You can focus on the body in any one
spot: the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, at the abdomen.
Those are the three main spots, but …
… We’re already shaping our experience—through the
way we breathe, through the way we think about things, the perceptions
we apply to things, the labels, the ideas we impose on our experience.
These are all active processes. And as the Buddha said, we do these
things out of ignorance for the most part, and as a result, even
though we’re looking for …
… But it’s a good hypothesis, because if it is
true that your actions can accomplish a lot, this is a hypothesis that
doesn’t get in the way of your potential for genuine happiness. It
actually opens the way to accomplishing as much as you can. So why
choose the hypothesis that closes off the doors?
The problem is that our desires go …
… Whether you’re focused on the chest, the
middle of the head, wherever, there’s some spot in the body where you
should feel most natural in your focus. And some ways of breathing are
particularly conducive to get your mind to settle down. If you notice
that, make a note of it. As you sit down to meditate the next time,
remember what …
… in the middle of
the jungle just using his breath. There was no one there to tell him
how to do it. He had to use his own ingenuity. So when you find
troubles coming up in your meditation, don’t just give up. Tell
yourself: There must be a way around this. When you believe that there
is a way, you’re going …
… If the new sensations aren’t helpful in that way, you can throw the new tool aside.
For example, if you have a sense of being on one side of a blockage, try thinking of being on the other side. Try being on both. Think of the breath as coming into the body, not through the nose or mouth, but through the middle of …
2 : Sensuality | The Buddha Smiles: Humor in the Pali Canon
… Resembling a ball of sealing wax, set in a hollow, with a bubble in the middle and bathed with tears, eye secretions are born there too: The parts of the eye are rolled all together in various ways.’ Plucking out her lovely eye, with mind unattached she felt no regret. ‘Here, take this eye. It’s yours.’ Straightaway she gave it to him. Straightaway …
