ePublished Dhamma Talks

Volume III

by

Thanissaro Bhikkhu
(Geoffrey DeGraff)

2
copyright 2011 thanissaro bhikkhu
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. To see a copy of this license visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. “Commercial” shall mean any
sale, whether for commercial or non-profit purposes or entities.

questions about this book may be addressed to

Metta Forest Monastery
Valley Center, CA 92082-1409
U.S.A.

additional resources
More Dhamma talks, books and translations by Thanissaro Bhikkhu are
available to download in digital audio and various ebook formats at
dhammatalks.org.
printed copy
A paperback copy of this book is available free of charge. To request one, write
to: Book Request, Metta Forest Monastery, PO Box 1409, Valley Center, CA
92082 USA.

3
 Anchored by Skillful Roots
March, 2003

From all accounts, the world is going to go through a bad period: war,
economic problems, insecurity of all kinds. Of course we’ve never really been all
that secure. But apparently our insecurity is going to become much more
obvious. It’s like a big storm coming through. When you know a storm is coming
through, you’ve got to do what you can to hunker down, to withstand it, so that
you don’t get blown away and the things around you don’t come crashing down
on top of you. In a similar way, when life doesn’t go as you like, it’s like a storm
coming onto the mind, and you need to develop your powers of resilience. If you
compare your mind to a tree, you want to have deep roots, widespread roots,
healthy roots, the kinds of roots that will keep the tree from getting blown over
and killed.
Traditionally, the Buddha talked about roots for the mind. There are
unskillful roots and skillful roots. The unskillful roots are greed, anger, and
delusion. The skillful ones are lack of greed, lack of anger, lack of delusion.
Unskillful roots are like rotten roots. They don’t hold your tree up and they don’t
give you much nourishment. So those are not the roots you want to depend on.
The roots you want to send out are roots based on lack of greed, lack of anger,
lack of delusion. There is a phrase Ajaan Lee quotes—I don’t know where it
comes from, I haven’t found it in the Canon yet; maybe it’s from the
commentaries, but it makes sense: He says, generosity nourishes the roots of lack
of greed, precepts nourish the roots of lack of anger, meditation nourishes the
roots of lack of delusion.
These are the activities that we have to engage in order to prepare, in order to
withstand the storm—not just before the storm hits, but all the way throughout
the storm. Being generous, observing the precepts, and meditating keep us
strong, keep us from getting blown away. If your survival is accomplished
without generosity, without virtue, without meditation, it’s not worth much. It’s
not the sort of survival that keeps you healthy and well-nourished. You look at
survivors of war, who had to go and kill and steal and cheat and bomb, and then
go into a lot of denial about it. Look at all the veterans of past wars, emotionally
scarred for life. They did survive, but at a huge cost, the cost of the skillful roots
in the mind. It’s by nourishing the skillful roots that the health of the mind
survives. Even if we have to leave this particular body, at least the mind has the
potential for sending out skillful roots wherever it finds itself the next time

4
around. It’s nourished with its inner sense of well-being, truthfulness, self-
honesty. You look at your behavior and there’s nothing you have to hide from
yourself. That’s important. At the same time, when you reflect on your behavior,
you realize you’ve been helpful to other people. Practicing generosity is like
sending good roots out, spreading abroad in all directions, so that you’re survival
is not just for your own sake, but it helps other people well.
The same with the precepts: If you’re very selective about who you’ll treat
kindly and who you won’t treat kindly, or there are circumstances under which
you’re going to hold by the precepts, and other circumstances under which
you’re not going to hold by the precepts, your roots cover a very limited range.
But if you decide that under no circumstances are you going to break the five
precepts, the Buddha says that you’re giving unlimited safety to unlimited
numbers of beings. In return you get a share in that unlimited safety as well. So
again your survival is not just a selfish thing. It’s not based on the kind of roots
that are going to rot or dry out, or get pulled up easily, get blown away. These are
healthy roots that spread out and keep you secure in the storm.
As for the deep roots you need, those come from meditation. These are the
roots that grow deep down in the mind. It’s through the meditation that you
realize how your true happiness doesn’t have to depend on situations outside
because you’ve found a source inside. Your tap root has gotten down that far. It’s
tapped into something special. It’s like the water in earthquake faults. A friend
who has done a study has found out that there’s water in earthquake faults, and it
doesn’t depend on rainfall at all. It seems to be coming up from the fault itself;
maybe it’s a result of a chemical reaction—Who knows?—but it’s a type of water
that’s independent of rainfall. If you can tap into that, you’ve got a good source
of water that doesn’t depend on the vagaries of the climate.
Similarly with meditation: When you’ve got a taproot that goes way down
into the mind—in terms of concentration, in terms of discernment—you find a
source inside that’s nourishing. That’s the source that can feed your need for
happiness so that it doesn’t have to depend on anything else.
In other words, your goodness doesn’t have to depend on outside conditions.
When that’s the case, it’s a goodness you can trust. After all, outside conditions
are always changing. If there isn’t a war here, there’s a war someplace else. If
there are not economic problems here, there are economic problems someplace
else. If they are not in this house, they’re in somebody else’s house. And then they
come back here again. Back and forth like that. If our goodness depends on these
things, it’s a goodness we can’t trust. Other people can’t trust us; we can’t trust
ourselves.
That’s probably one of the scariest things in life: to realize that you can’t trust
yourself. You would like to look at yourself and say, “I’m the sort of person who

5
can be depended on to do the right thing regardless of the circumstances. But
then when circumstances get really challenging, you find suddenly that you can’t
depend on yourself in that way. That’s very unsettling, very unnerving, because if
you can’t depend on yourself, who can you depend on?
So you’ve got to dig down inside with the meditation and find that source of
nourishment that doesn’t depend on the rainfall, doesn’t depend on the vagaries
of the outside world: that inner source of happiness that comes as you take your
attachments apart. You sit here focusing on the breath, and learn to pry the mind
away from the distracting thoughts that fly off in all directions. You sit here
learning how not to get involved in them, in the worlds of that the mind creates,
that pull it here, pull it there.
Then, as the mind finally settles down, you find that it’s like an onion: There
are layers and layers and layers to its concentration. You peal them away, one by
one. You don’t have to be in a great hurry to do this. Many people have a
problem that. Once the mind begins to settle down, they’re in a hurry to know,
“Okay, what’s the next step?” Well, the next step is staying right where you are,
getting really used to that, getting well settled there. Because it’s through this
habit of getting well settled that the mind can begin to relax into the breath even
more deeply, so that it’s not always tensed and ready to jump. You can gain a
greater and greater sense of reliance on what’s here inside.
As you settle in here, the superficial layers of the onion begin to fall away.
You get to deeper ones, and deeper ones, not because you’re jumping from one
spot to another, but because you’re really staying right here, getting more and
more solid right here. Then, after a while, there comes a point where the
activities of thinking about the breath, adjusting the breath, and evaluating the
breath, can be put aside because the breath has gotten as good as it can be. As
Ajaan Fuang once said, it’s like putting water into a water jar. You put it in bit by
bit by bit, but there comes a point where you can’t add anymore to it. It’s as
much as the jar can hold. If you keep putting more water into it, it just spills out
over the edge. That’s the point where we can let go of the evaluation, because it’s
no longer needed, and we can just be one with the breath.
From there you work deeper and deeper, just by staying here, and settling in
with more and more solidly. Have a sense of breath energy filling the body, so
that every nerve is involved in the breathing process and they’re all working
together, from the central nerves out to the tips of the nerves. The whole body is
saturated with the breath energy, so that the pores open up. All the oxygen you
need is coming in and out through pores. Your brain is using less and less oxygen
all the time, so the need to keep pumping things in and out gets less and less.
That way you eventually get to the point where the breath can stop.
When the breath stops, you can see the mind clearly, because the movements

6
of the mind become more obvious. Before, the movement of the breath was
getting in the way; you couldn’t see the movements of the mind, because the
breath was so much more obvious. It’s like static when you’re tuning in to a radio
station. It’s like a background hum in the room that keeps you from hearing any
subtler sounds, because the hum is always there. But once the breath can settle
down and be still like this, then the movements of the mind become very
obvious. You can start peeling them away as well. You get deeper and deeper
inside, until ultimately you find, after the final peeling away—of the peeler—
that’s when things open up to a new dimension.
The tap root has hit something that’s totally different from anything else it
has been feeding of off before. But even if you don’t get that far, the sense of ease
that comes from a concentrated mind, if you tend to it well, can give you the
nourishment you need. So if the wind blows outside, when the rain falls, when
storms come, when the earth quakes under your feet, you’ve got something
deeper than that, something more solid than that, and that’s the basis for the
goodness of the mind, the well-being of the mind, something you can depend on.
Your roots are deep, your roots are spread wide, and they’re healthy roots,
nourishing roots. Those are the roots that enable you to weather the storm,
because the worst thing that can get blown away is the goodness in the mind, the
well-being of the mind. It doesn’t require outside events for it to get blown away.
Your own inner choices to nourish unskillful roots or to cut your good roots:
Those are the things that destroy you, even more than the death of the body.
So have a very clear sense of where your true roots are, the roots that are
going to keep you firmly anchored. The roots that are going to continue to
nourish you no matter what the windstorms are. The roots that make it
worthwhile to survive, to keep going. Survival in the sense of the goodness of the
mind: That’s your primary survival. As the Buddha said, the heedful never die.
The goodness in the mind never dies. People who are heedless, who don’t look
after the proper roots, the skillful roots: Those are the ones who are already dead.
So when you have a clear sense of what it means to survive in the true sense,
and what the roots are that are going to keep it possible to survive, then it’s a lot
easier to hold on. We always talk about the practice as one of letting go, letting
go. Well, you do let go of the unskillful roots, you let go of the things that would
come crashing into you from wind and pull you away. You let go of those things.
But you hold on to your skillful roots, because they keep this vital connection to
your inner nourishment going. Holding on in this sense is what keeps you alive.

7
 Limitless Thoughts
December 20, 2003

Every evening before the meditation, we have that chant of goodwill:

goodwill for ourselves, goodwill for the people around us. But it’s not just a
chant. We’re trying to develop the attitude that goes along with the chant, really
wishing for your own true happiness, wishing for the true happiness of the
people around us. Because this is one of those thoughts that doesn’t need to have
a limit. However much true happiness you gain, you’re not taking anything else
away from anyone else. However much they gain, they’re not taking anything
away from you. It’s good to be able to put the mind in an unlimited state by
thinking of unlimited things like that.
The Buddha talks about greed, anger, and delusion as things that make a
limit. Pamana-karana is the Pali term. As long as we allow greed, anger, and
delusion to hold sway over our minds, we’re limiting ourselves. Then there’s a
whole question of self identification: That too is a limit. The Buddha says that
whatever you identify as your self, that’s a limit on you. If you identify with your
body, you’re suddenly limited to your body. If you identify with your feelings,
perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness, you’re limited by those things as
well.
So as we’re meditating, we’re trying to strip away the limitations we place on
ourselves, for those limitations are much more confining than the ones that other
people place on us. We counteract these limits with limitless thoughts, starting
with thoughts of good will or any of what they call the sublime abidings or
limitless attainments. In other words, while your mind is dwelling on the idea of
goodwill for yourself, goodwill for other people, you’re not creating any opening
for the limitations of greed or anger to come in to the mind. That way you help
to open things up, open up the windows in your head, let the air come in.
That puts you in the right frame of mind for meditation, focusing on the
breath. After all, why are you here just watching your breath coming in and
going out, when you could be doing so many other things? It’s because you want
true happiness. You’ve seen the happiness of other things that the world has to
offer, and it’s not much. It comes and goes. Ajaan Suwat often liked to ask: The
sensual pleasures you had last year, where are they now? They’re gone. And what
have they left behind? They’ve left behind a few memories. Sometimes they
haven’t left even that much behind. There’s so much you forget. And of the
things you do remember, what kind of memories are they? Either you miss those

8
things and wish they could come back again, or you think of what you had to do
in order to get those things, and sometimes there’s regret involved in thinking of
those things as well. A bad aftertaste. So you as you reflect on this, you realize
that that’s not the direction you want to go if you want true happiness.
Psychologists talk about how human beings really tend to forget around the
issue of happiness. They’ve looked someplace for happiness, they didn’t find it,
but then they go back there and look again, they go back and look again, as if
somehow it’ll spring up. It’s like the story about the man who was eating a whole
bushel of peppers and crying. People asked, “Why you are crying?” “Because
they’re so hot.” “Then why are you eating the peppers if they are hot?” “I’m
looking for sweet one.” That’s the way sensual pleasures are in life. You keep
hoping that a sweet one will come along, one that will last, looking in the same
places where you’ve found nothing but fleeting pleasures before. You forget that
what determines the pain and pleasure in the mind, the stress and ease in the
mind, the sorrow and happiness in the mind, comes from our actions. It doesn’t
come from things.
So as we’re meditating, we’re learning how to focus on our actions to see
what we’re doing, to see where there are slips in our awareness, lapses in our
mindfulness that allow us to do things that are not in our best interest . This is
why meditation focuses so much on developing continual mindfulness and
alertness. These are the two most helpful qualities in the mind. And they’re very
basic: Mindfulness simply means keeping something in mind. That’s a basic,
basic skill. Alertness means noticing what you’re going, and what’s happening
around you. We already have these qualities to a certain extent, but we’ve never
fully developed them to see how far they can take us.
So as we’re meditating, that’s what we’re doing: developing these two most
helpful qualities in our mind. Keep the breath in mind and watch the breath, be
sensitive to the breath. The more sensitive you are, the more you’ll see, not only
in terms of the breath, but also in terms of the mind. Because alert sensitivity
requires being fully present, and also being very open to noticing what’s coming
in through your nerve endings. Think of all the nerves in your body opening up.
Keep that picture in mind for a little while. Throughout the brain and all the way
down to the feet, down the shoulders and arms, out to the hands: Think of your
whole nervous system opening up. Then notice what you sense in terms of the
breath, how the process of breathing feels.
In order to do that, you have to be fully present. In being fully present, you
bring all of the mind along with you. When you’re not really paying that much
attention to the present moment, there are lots of little hidden corners where
other things are going on, and they fragment your attention. But the more fully
you can immerse yourself in the present moment, the less room there is for those

9
hidden corners. This is why being fully sensitive to the breath also allows you to
be more and more sensitive to the mind. The mind becomes more fully here so
that you can observe it, so that you begin to watch it in action.
The Buddha’s approach to dealing with the problems in the mind is not so
much tracing things back to what you did as a child, as they do in psychotherapy.
He has you focus more on looking at your habits right now, as they keep coming
back again and again and again. You don’t have to ask, “What happened when I
was a child, why did this happen?” You just have to look at what you’re doing, to
see the unnecessary suffering you’re causing yourself. Or you can keep an eye out
for any lack of openness and honesty in the mind: What’s that doing to the mind?
Do you want to do that? Do you continue wanting to do that as you see the stress
that it’s causing?
Sometimes this may seem threatening, opening up these hidden boxes, but as
you’re dealing with the breath, working with the breath, making it comfortable,
you’re also developing an attitude of gentleness, being gentle with the breath, not
forcing it too much, just allowing it to feel really good. And that gentleness, as
Ajaan Suwat used to say, is a paradoxical gentleness. The gentler you are with the
breath, the more solid the mind gets. The more solid the mind is, the more you
can really look into what’s going on, with a gentleness that doesn’t scare these
things away, and a solidity that doesn’t get swayed by them. That way you don’t
have to be afraid of the things that get dug up. You don’t have to deal in denial.
You can acknowledge, yes, there is that the mind. If it’s something you can deal
with right now, you do it. If you realize you’re not up for that yet, well at least
you know it’s there. You can be confident that as you develop the meditation,
you’ll eventually develop the skills to deal with whatever comes up.
So watching the breath is a simple exercise, but it does a lot of good things
for the mind. It puts the mind in a really good place, so that we can see what
you’re doing. We get into the present moment not because the present moment
is a wonderful moment; after all, a lot of things that happen in the present are
not wonderful at all. But the present moment is an important moment, because
it’s where we’re making decisions that shape our life. Decisions that were made
in the past are things you can’t change anymore. They are done. Decisions that
you’re going to make in the future will depend a lot on what you’re doing right
now. So this is the most important place to be.
The world tells us that things other people are doing on the other side of the
world are the most important thing going on. But you don’t have to believe that,
because your world is being shaped by your actions right now. You want to
understand this process of acting. What does it mean for the mind to act? What’s
the difference between a simple event in the mind, the appearance of a feeling,
and an action, the intention? How are intentions formed? What goes into that

10
process? What kind of perceptions, what kind of questions do you ask yourself?
What kind of contact in the mind and the body forces your decisions?
Often you’ll catch yourself doing something, and you’ll say, “Wait a minute,
what did that come from?” The decision seemed to be made by itself, and little
tiny things triggered it. That’s what you’ve got to look into, so that you can be
more sensitive and actually see the trigger. Often the trigger, on closer inspection,
won’t seem worth it. Why on earth did that trigger spark that intention, spark
that action? This is probably one of the scariest things about our own minds: Our
minds are shaping our lives, and yet we don’t know how and why they’re doing
it.
As meditators, we’re putting ourselves in a better position to see the how and
to see the why, and get more control over what those actions are. But before you
can see the movements of the mind, you have to be very still. This is how we get
the mind into that stillness: focusing on the breath, being mindful of the breath,
being alert to the breath. Try to immerse yourself in the breath as much as you
can in the present moment. The more immersed you are, the more difficult it is
to pull away and start wondering about someplace else. So allow yourself to be
immersed totally in the body right here right now: breath coming in, breath
going out, whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out. Aware of the
whole body, the whole nervous system opening up, all your blood vessels, all the
little tiny, tiny muscles in your blood vessels: allowed them relax so that the
breath energy has a free rein to flow anywhere in the body at all.
This is a very immediate way of showing goodwill to yourself, because it’s
both a good place to stay and it’s a process of developing the mindfulness and
alertness you’re going to need to learn even more as the meditation progresses.

11
 Trustworthy Judgment
March 8, 2006

One of the basic principles of the practice is that we take refuge. Formally
this is called taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. This is
why we have those chants about the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha every
evening, to keep our refuge in mind. We think of them, we think of the Buddha’s
life, the lives of the members of the noble Sangha. We think of their qualities.
And it’s not so much that we take refuge in people way in the past. We take their
qualities and try to develop them in ourselves right now. The Buddha was wise,
so we try to develop our own wisdom. The Buddha was pure in his behavior, so
we try to develop purity in ours. The Buddha was compassionate, wanting true
happiness for himself, true happiness for all living beings, so we try to develop
compassion as well, for ourselves and for the people around us. Only when we’ve
developed these qualities in our minds do we really have a refuge. Because there’s
another principle in the teachings: that you have to be your own refuge, your
own mainstay. The only way you can do this is by developing reliable qualities in
your mind.
Most people can’t really depend on themselves. They say they want happiness
and than they turn around and do all kinds of things to cause misery. They want
peace but they create war. They want the world to be a good place to live in, and
yet they make a mess of it. This is called being a traitor to yourself. And yet that’s
the way most people live, because they haven’t trained their minds. It’s only
when you train the mind that you can learn to depend on it.
It’s like training an animal. If you have an untrained dog in your house, it
causes a lot of problems. It’s going to pee on the rug and create messes all
through the house. You tell it to come, and it doesn’t pay any attention. You tell
it to go sit, go to bed or whatever, it doesn’t any attention at all because it’s not
trained. Well, the mind that’s not trained creates a lot more problems than a dog.
It can mess up your whole life, not just your house. You suddenly get a notion in
your head this might be good, that might be good, and without really looking at
it carefully, just because it feels right or you have a hunch, you can run with it. In
this way the mind ends up being a traitor to itself. It can’t depend on itself
because it doesn’t know how to test its ideas. It doesn’t know how to test its
notions.
As we practice meditation we’re trying to make the mind more reliable, more
trustworthy. Just this simple process of focusing on one object: Can you do it for

12
a whole hour? You make up your mind to stay with the breath, and two breaths
later another mind has taken over, wants to think about this problem or that.
Sometimes the problems are big and important problems, but how can you trust
the solutions you come up with if the mind can’t even stay with one object for a
while?
So this is basic training in learning how to be more reliable, how to be more
trustworthy, so that you can trust yourself. To begin with, just stay with the
breath. If you find the mind wandering off, just bring it right back. If it wanders
off again, bring it right back, again. The same as with a little puppy: You tell the
puppy to come, and if the puppy doesn’t come, you have to pull the leash. The
next time you say, “Come,” and it doesn’t come, you pull the leash again. After a
while, the puppy gets the idea, not only because you pull the leash but also
because you have a reward for it. When it comes, you give it a little piece of food.
It’s the same way with the breath. You try to make the breath as comfortable as
possible, so that when the mind comes back, it feels good, feels right.
In this way the mind becomes more and more your own mainstay, so that
when you have to make big decisions about your life, you have a mind state that’s
capable of making the decisions. And you can trust your ability to judge what’s a
good decision, what’s not. This requires all of the skills involved in
concentration: mindfulness, alertness, discernment, tranquility. If an idea comes
in your mind, you don’t get swept away. You watch it for a while. You think
about it. If you were to make that decision, where would it lead you? Go through
the steps. If something strange comes into the mind, learn how to recognize it as
a strange idea.
Several years back when I had my last visit with Ajaan Suwat, he had been in
a car accident and suffered some brain damage, but his training in meditation
hadn’t abandoned him. He was able to tell when the mind was sending him
weird perceptions, skewed perceptions. As he said, that thing he got from his
meditation, that didn’t change; but he began to notice that his brain wasn’t
working properly. What saved him from falling for those perceptions was the
mindfulness and concentration he had developed in his meditation. Even in his
last months, he could recognize when the mind wasn’t functioning right.
In contrast, a couple years back I was visiting my father for the last time. He
was suffering from Parkinson’s dementia. His case was very different. He hadn’t
meditated much—a little bit, but nothing really continuous. And in his dementia
when he saw things, he couldn’t tell that they were illusory. He’d see big black
dogs coming into the house, and no matter how much you told him there were
no big black dogs in the house, he insisted that there were, because he had seen
them.
The difference between these two people was that one had trained his mind

13
and the other hadn’t. The person who had trained his mind to be reliable was the
one who could trust his mind. He could know if weird things were coming in,
and could trust his judgment that they were weird. If you don’t train your mind,
you have no standards for judging things. This doesn’t mean that an untrained
mind can’t have good ideas; many times it does have very good ideas, but the
problem is it can’t sort through its ideas in a really trustworthy way to see what’s
reliable and what’s not. Because it can’t trust itself.
The Buddha, who was a master of similes, once said that there was one thing
for which there is no easy simile, and that’s how easily and how quickly an
untrained mind can change. He said that there is nothing else you can think of
that’s nearly as fast. The untrained mind can turn on itself. What you like one
moment turns into something you don’t like the next. And unless you develop
good strong concentration, you don’t have a solid foundation for noticing when
the mind has changed, when it’s turned on itself, when you can rely on it and
when you can’t.
So this is how we find refuge in life, for ultimately we can’t depend on
anyone outside. We can depend on the Buddha to be a good example, but he
can’t do the work that needs to be done inside us. We have to do that work
ourselves. He can’t do it for us. He sets the example, but it’s up to us to be
inspired by the example and do the work that’s needed to be done so we can have
the same virtues in our mind that he had in his. Once we can learn to trust
ourselves, we can find refuge in our own reliable mind. Because we’ve trained it,
we’ve made it reliable.
This is why when you have big decisions to make in life, it’s a good idea to sit
down and be very, very quiet. Set up the question in your mind and then put it
aside, focus on the breath, stay with the breath. Get the mind so that it’s really
solid and still, and then from that perspective you can start contemplating the
issue. Then do it again, and then again, just to make sure. You want to develop
the kind of habit where you don’t jump for a quick answer. You wait and you test
things again and again and again until you know you can really rely on them. In
that way, you learn how to rely on yourself.
So make sure as you’re meditating that you don’t become a traitor to your
initial intention. The intention is to stay here with the breath, make it
comfortable, make it a good place to stay. Learn to simply put aside anything else
that comes in the way. That way you can begin to see through all the tricks that
the mind uses to deceive itself. And that ability to have a steady gaze, a
penetrating gaze through all the subterfuges of the mind: That’s where you’re
going to find your refuge. That’s where you can begin to find what’s certain in
life.

14
 Informing the Whole Committee
March 16, 2006

One of the strangest things about the mind is that it talks to itself. You’d
think that if the mind were a single thing, it wouldn’t have to talk to itself.
Everything it knows, it would know, without having to communicate. But the
fact is there are a lot of different power centers or knowing centers here in the
mind. It’s like a committee, and the different members have to send messages to
one another. They have to inform one another of what’s going on. Sometimes
one part of the mind will know something, and another part won’t know. Part of
the reason for this is that we actually build walls inside the mind. In some cases
the walls are necessary in order to function. When you’re paying attention to a
particular task, you have to blot out everything not related to that task.
Sometimes the walls are very, very impenetrable, sometimes they’re not.
They’re more permeable. In other words, you’re working on a task but there’s the
possibility that if some emergency comes up, you can get a message through so
that you can drop the task and turn to whatever else is more pressing. Say you’re
focused on reading a book, but there’s a sudden sharp pain in your stomach.
Okay, the message can get through so that you can stop reading and focus
attention on the pain. Which means that there’s part of the mind that’s still
surveying the body to make sure nothing really painful or horrible is happening,
while another part of the mind focuses on reading the book.
But the walls can also be problematic. This is one of the reasons why we have
our problems with the mind. It’s not thoroughly informed. You can make up
your mind to stick with the meditation. You can make up your mind to do
something that’s really truly going to lead to true happiness. But soon afterwards,
you find yourself off wandering looking at something else. So this multiplicity of
the mind can be a real problem.
Still, it’s also part of the solution. In fact, it’s what makes the solution to the
problem possible. If the mind were a totally monolithic thing, if your sense of
self were monolithic, you’d play right into the hands of that question of “How is
it possible for something that’s so unskillful and so ignorant to gain knowledge?”
If the mind were a single thing, if your sense of self were a single thing, it
couldn’t change itself. That’s the basic premise of the old issue of self power
versus other power. The idea being that if the self is so screwed up, if your ego is
so screwed up, you need some help from outside. It’s only through surrendering
yourself to some outside power that you’ll be able to find true happiness, or to

15
save yourself from yourself.
This is the basic premise in a lot of the Mahayana, in the Pure Land schools.
You need the saving grace of Amitabha or some Buddha outside to come and
save you, because your ego is so corrupt that it can’t possibly abandon its
corruption. Any of the forms of religion that require you to focus on an outside
power to come in to save you have as their premise the idea that your self is a
single solid thing that’s corrupt and can’t possibly save itself. That’s where the
question of self power and other power gets born.
But the fact is that your self, your mind, your ego, is not a single thing. There
are lots of different selves, lots of different minds, lots of different egos going on
here. This committee going on here: It’s because it’s a committee that you can
change yourself. One member of the committee can look at another member of
the committee and say, “Your policy isn’t working, your strategy isn’t working.
You’ve got to change.” Because there is no one, overarching sense of self, the
different members of the committee have learned that they’ve got to listen to one
another. The people in whom the different members of the committee don’t
listen to each other—they get schizoid. The normally functioning human being
has different parts of the mind and they listen to one another, and they know
they have to listen to one another in order to function. This is what makes the
practice possible. The difficulty simply is in taking the side of the mind that
wants to practice, that wants to meditate, that wants to stay focused on the
breath, and giving that member of the committee strength so it starts having
influence over other members of the committee, so they all can sit down
together.
So when someone asks us what kind of Buddhism we are practicing here,
whether we’re the other power kind or the self power kind, the answer is,
“Neither.” It’s the committee power kind. You can apply this point immediately
as you focus on the breath. There will be part of the mind that’s intent on
actually doing the work, focusing on the breath. And you notice there is another
part of the mind that’s watching, that can be alert both to the breath and to the
conscious effort to stay focused. So learn to make use of that observer. That’s the
observer that allows for alertness, get all these different parts working together,
the intention to stay with the breath, the ability to remember that intention, then
the part of the mind that watches.
Once you’ve got those three parts working together, then there is going to be
progress. They help one another along. And the more they learn to cooperate,
then the more they are going to be able to get other parts of the mind in this
together. So more and more members of the committee sit down and participate.
You notice when the Buddha describes the process of meditation, it’s not one
quality acting alone that’s going to make all the difference. He never said all you

16
need is mindfulness, or all you need is concentration. It’s always clusters of
factors. It’s in the clustering that we gain strength in the practice.
So don’t be surprised when you find that there are lots of different voices in
the mind, or there’s parts of the mind that know, and other parts that don’t know
what’s going on. That’s to be taken for granted. And he said that’s part of the
problem, but it’s also part of the solution. Once you understand what the actual
problem is, then you can work on gathering more and more members of the
mind. The part that wants immediate gratification, well, you give a little
something to that by making the breath comfortable. The part that gets easily
bored, you give something to that by asking yourself questions about the breath,
exploring this whole issue of the breath energy in the body. The part that wants
to talk, well, you give something to talk about, talk about the breath. If you’re
skillful, you can give all these different voices, all these different urges some form
of gratification so they’re willing to pitch in with the effort. And as with any task,
the more people you have working on the task, the quicker it gets done.
So think of this as a group effort. You keep surveying to see which parts of
the mind are not getting in on the effort. You can see what you can do to get
their cooperation. Because it is this way, bit by bit by bit, we get more skillful in
this whole issue of trying to find a way out of suffering. We catch ourselves in
different ways of creating suffering, and learn to convert the various tendencies of
the mind to this one goal so that when there is a state of oneness in the mind, it’s
one in a good way, it’s one on the path. And then when it’s one, you can really
teach it. This is why concentration comes before discernment. And there is an
element of discernment that is needed for the concentration itself. But the
discernment that’s actually going to break through the mind’s misunderstandings
has to be based on getting as many members of the mind in on the message. I
mean you can read a book and learn all about the basic teachings. And then as
you put the book down, you find that you forget about them. Or even if you
remember them, you start acting in other ways. You go back to your old habits.
It’s because not all the mind was there.
You want to bring your full attention to the breath. You want to bring your
full attention to this issue of getting the mind gathered in a comfortable place.
And the more the different factions, the more the different committee members
are there, then when the message comes and they’re all in a mood to listen, that’s
when it has a very pervasive effect on the mind. In many cases the insights that
really make a difference in the mind are not anything new, nothing you’ve never
heard before. It’s simply that not everybody was there to listen, not everybody
was there to see the truth of that particular insight. Once you’ve got the whole
mind gathered together, then one single message can seep through everything.
This is why as we are meditating, it’s not just a matter of getting the mind

17
focused, the body’s got to be involved as well. That image in the Canon of taking
the sense of ease and pleasure that come from the concentration, that come from
a comfortable breath and allowing it to permeate throughout the body, working
it, kneading it throughout the body, so that every part has a sense of belonging to
the concentration, that’s really important. Without that the messages don’t get
thoroughly transmitted. Some parts of the mind will hold back. But when
everyone’s working together, when everyone’s feeling a sense of ease, gratification
and fullness, then they all hear the lesson. They are all happy to hear the lesson
because they can see how true it is. This particular insight that you gain really
does make a difference, really does cut through ignorance, really does cut
through this problem of random members of the committee causing problems.
Try to get everybody involved, try to get everybody to cooperate, so that the
committee as a whole gets free from suffering.

18
 Equanimity
April 16, 2006

Those five reflections we chanted just now—we are subject to aging, illness,
death, separation, and we have karma as our arbitrator: Actually that’s only part
of the contemplation that the Buddha recommended. He said to go on to think
about the fact all beings—men, women, children, lay or ordained, past, future,
no matter what their level of being—are subject to aging, subject to illness,
subject to death, separation; they all have karma as their arbitrator. The two sides
of the contemplation are meant to lead to two different reactions. The side we
chanted just now is to make you realize that you’ve got to get your act in order,
to straighten out your life, because what you do is what makes all the difference
in the world.
The second side of the recollection, though, is to give you more a sense of
samvega, a sense of dismay over the nature of the human condition, to expand
your perspective, to want to look for a way out, and also to get a larger sense of
compassion. When you realize that everybody is subject to these same problems,
it gets you thinking in terms of the sublime abidings, the brahma-viharas—
limitless goodwill, not just for your friends and family, but for everybody,
because everybody is subject to these same problems. Limitless compassion,
appreciation, limitless equanimity. We’re not the only ones subject to aging,
illness, and death. The Thai translation of this passage is interesting. It says that
aging is normal, illness is normal, death is normal, separation is normal. We
forget about that. So it’s good to expand your perspective to realize how normal
these things are.
There’s that famous story of the woman whose child died, but she couldn’t
accept the fact that it was dead. She went around asking people for medicine for
her sick child. So people sent her to the Buddha. The Buddha said, “Okay, it
would be possible to make a medicine for your child, but it has to be made out of
mustard seeds.” Well, mustard seeds are easy, they were the cheapest thing you
could find in India. “But,” he said, “it has to be mustard seed from a family where
there has never been a death.”
So the woman goes from house to house to house, asking for mustard seed.
Everybody’s willing to give her mustard seed, but when she adds the conditions,
they say, “Oh, no, we’ve had a death. My mother’s died, father’s died,
grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, children”—and after a while, it hit home.
Her child was dead. She was willing to accept the fact because she realized this

19
was a normal part of the human condition.
If we had a decent education system, it would teach us how to deal with
aging, illness, and death. But we don’t have much training in that. Our education
system is designed to make us producers and consumers. And the skills we
develop in that direction are not necessarily good for the mind, and not
necessarily helpful for dealing with aging, illness, and death when they come.
This is what the Buddha’s training is all about. You go to a monastery in
Thailand, that’s the first thing you hear: We’re all subject to aging, illness, and
death, and the lesson is to learn how not to suffer in the face of these things.
We’re all subject to separation. How do we not suffer in the face of that? That’s
the real issue.
Here’s where the teaching on equanimity is important. It’s the one of the
brahma-viharas that helps keep the other ones from causing us to suffer. We want
all living beings to be happy. Yet we see some are suffering and we want to help
them. Sometimes we can, but many times we can’t. That’s where equanimity has
to come in. Put your mind in a larger frame of reference – that we are all subject
to our actions. So the question is, what can you do? Equanimity doesn’t teach
there’s nothing you can do. It just points out the areas where you can’t do
anything, so you can focus on areas where you can be of help.
It’s basically the reality principle. Notice in the statements for the four
brahma-viharas. The first three start out: may all beings be happy, may they not
be deprived, may they be released from stress and suffering. It’s may, may, may.
It’s a wish. But equanimity is the reality principle: All beings are the owners of
their actions. There’s no “may” in there at all. It’s just a statement of what is.
So you take that as your foundation for then looking to see where can you be
of help, both in terms of your own suffering and the suffering of other people.
Then you can act accordingly. That’s when you really can be helpful.
One of the principles of equanimity is to just accept the fact that aging,
illness, death, and separation are normal. The question is how not to suffer.
That’s what you can do something about. You know the old story about the man
shot with one arrow who then shoots himself with another arrow. The first arrow
is the suffering that comes as part of the way we live, the nature of having a body,
of having a mind. These things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. That’s the first
arrow when pain comes up.
But then there’s that second arrow. It’s not just another arrow. Many times
it’s hundreds of arrows that we shoot ourselves with as we get all wound up
around the suffering. Those are not necessary. And it turns out that those are the
ones that really cause a big burden for the mind. If we didn’t have those other
arrows, just the first arrow itself would not reach the mind. It’s our

20
misunderstandings, it’s our tendency to get all upset around the suffering— those
are the arrows that really hurt based on craving and ignorance. So those are the
ones we want to learn how not to shoot ourselves with. When we stop shooting
ourselves with those, the mind feels no suffering at all.
So you have to sit down and face the fact of aging, illness, and death. These
things are inevitable, so what do you do? The Buddha says there are four reasons
why death scares us, has us in fear. First is attachment to the body. Second is
attachment to sensual pleasures. Third is the knowledge that we’ve done cruel
and horrible things to other people, to other beings, and fear that after death
we’re going to be punished for it. And the fourth reason is not having seen the
true Dhamma, having doubts about the true Dhamma. If we can learn to
overcome these four causes of fear, death won’t bring suffering.
And it’s only when we’ve got a handle on these things that we can really be
helpful to other people. Now this doesn’t mean that you’ve totally overcome the
fear, but if you learn to deal with your fear of death so that it doesn’t freak you
out, then you can help other people as they approach death, too. This is why it’s
not a selfish training. It really does put you in a better position to be of help. If
you’ve sorted through your attachments to the body, sorted through your
attachments to sensual pleasures, learned to focus on the positive things that
you’ve done, realizing the punishment for the bad things is not necessarily
inevitable, and even better if you gain vision with what they call the Dhamma
Eye—vision of the true Dhamma—you can totally overcome your fear of death
and then you can really be helpful to other people. But this doesn’t mean you
have to wait until that point before you can actually help them.
Take this issue of being afraid of the harmful things you’ve done in the past.
The Buddha says that it’s not inevitable that you’re going to have to suffer from
them. He gives the analogy of a crystal of salt. Say you’ve got a crystal of salt the
size of your fist. If you put it into a glass of water, you can’t drink the water. It’s
much too salty. But if you find a large clean river and throw the crystal of salt
into the river, you can still drink the water from the river because the salt gets so
diluted by the quantity of the water. That’s an analogy for the mind that’s
developed the four brahma-viharas. When you develop this limitless quality of
mind, the mind becomes very expansive. And it’s the nature of such a mind that
the results of past bad actions just don’t touch it. At least they don’t have such an
impact, they don’t impinge on the mind as much.
This is one very good reason to develop these qualities of mind: so that when
the results of past bad actions come, they don’t hit you so hard. And you can then
train other people in the same skill. Get them to develop this larger, more
compassionate, more equanimous state of mind. You can begin by reminding
them of their generosity, the good things they’ve done for other people in the

21
past, the bad things they’ve avoided—these are forms of generosity, forms of
compassion and good will. Because they open up the mind, make it more
expansive. When the mind is in a more expansive state like that, the amount of
suffering grows less.
So it’s good to develop these qualities in the mind. One way of developing
them is learning how to develop these same attitudes toward your breathing.
Have good will toward your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity
towards your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so
that you can have a foundation. Where it’s not comfortable, work at making it
more comfortable: That’s compassion. Where it is comfortable, appreciate it.
Sometimes, especially in the very beginning, the states of comfort seem to be very
minor and not impressive at all. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the
potential to be more impressive. You’ve got to give them a little space.
It’s like oak trees. They start out as tiny little acorns. Or even better, think of
coastal redwoods. They start as the tiniest little seeds, and yet the tallest trees on
earth come from these tiny, tiny seeds. Develop the conditions, allow them to
grow and they become a huge forest.
It’s the same with a sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are
simply not in pain, that seem okay. That’s good enough. Just be very careful to
keep them okay. Don’t let the way you breathe push them or pull them, or
squeeze them or anything. Just let them be all right, continuously, all the way
through the in breath, all the way through the out breath, and they’ll begin to
grow. They develop a sense of fullness, and then you can allow that sense of
fullness to expand throughout whatever parts of the body can pick it up. As for
equanimity, when there are areas that you can’t improve, develop equanimity for
those. Focus instead on the areas where you can make a difference. Don’t get
worked up over the things you can’t improve, because that gets in the way of
seeing where can you make a difference, where can you be of help.
Once you get practice in dealing with the breath in your own body in this
way, then it’s a lot easier to develop these attitudes toward other people, because
you’ve got a sense of well-being inside. You realize that no matter how bad things
get outside, you’ve still got a safe place where you can go. From that position you
can see more clearly and you have the strength to be of help where you can.
So, reflecting on the nature of the world, try to develop these qualities. Partly
as your own protection so you don’t have to suffer more than is necessary, and
partly so that you can help other people. You put yourself in a better position to
be of help because you’re coming from a position of strength and well-being.
This is just one of the most basic lessons you need in what would be a decent
education—learning how to deal with aging, illness, death, and separation.
Fortunately even though they don’t give us much of an education like this in

22
school, we can educate ourselves.

23
 Appropriate Attention
April 29, 2006

Focus on your breathing. It’s a simple exercise: Just be with the sensation of
the breath all the way in, all the way out. Notice where you have a sense of the
breath, which parts of the body have the energy movement or the physical
movement that let you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is
going out. And it may be in unexpected places. Just try to be sensitive to what
you’ve got right here, right now. If the mind wanders off, bring it back. Wanders
off again, bring it back again. It’s a simple exercise but it’s not easy. It takes
concentration, it takes mindfulness, it takes alertness, all of which are qualities
we have to develop.
Everybody goes through the process of finding that you focus on the breath
and then all of a sudden you’re someplace else—as if someone had come up with
a big sack and put it over your head, dragged you off, and then dumped you out
of the sack someplace else. You wonder how you got there. Well, you have to
find your way back to the breath and fortunately it’s right here. You don’t have to
retrace all the steps. Just come right back to the breath. And then you find
yourself getting kidnapped again. It’s important that you not let yourself get
discouraged. Realize that this is the stage that everybody has to go through.
Sometimes you hear people complain that “I can’t meditate because my
mind is too distracted.” It’s like saying, “I can’t go to the doctor because I’m too
sick.” No matter how sick you are, you’ve got to go to the doctor, because that’s
how you overcome your sickness. And the same way with the distraction. You
overcome distraction by meditating: noticing it every time it happens and
bringing the mind back. Try to be quicker the next time in noticing when you’re
distracted. See if you can sense the warning signals, the hints in the mind that let
you know that the mind is about to go someplace else. Try to be very, very alert.
The powers of mindfulness and alertness are things that will develop over time.
It’s like going down to the gym. You can’t expect to lift the heaviest weights
right from the very beginning or to do the most strenuous exercises. You
gradually work up to them. In the same way, you work up to concentration. You
bring the mind as long as you can to the breath. And the next time you bring it as
long as you can then. Just keep doing your best and your best will get better and
better.
So be very clear about what’s happening, and at the same time develop the

24
proper attitude, realizing that this is a problem everybody goes through. It
doesn’t mean that you’re a bad meditator. It’s just one of the stages that we all
have to go through. This is the pattern that the Buddha himself followed on the
night of his awakening. If you’ve ever read about his awakening, there were three
knowledges that he developed before he attained nibbana. The first was
knowledge of his past lives. He was thinking about eons and eons: That was
where he lived, this was his name, this was his appearance. It’s interesting what
the texts focus on: his name, his appearance, the food he ate, his pleasure and
pain that he experienced in that lifetime, then how he died and moved on to the
next life. That’s life pretty much: name, appearance, food, pleasure and pain,
death, birth again. Name, appearance, food, pleasure and pain, death and birth
again. Principally it was knowledge about his own personal narrative, how he
had come to where he was right then.
But then he didn’t stop at his own story. The next question was does this
apply to everybody?
In second knowledge he gained between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., he saw that all
beings die and are reborn. And he had the further realization that when they die
and are reborn, the nature of their rebirth is dependent on their past actions. The
unskillful and skillful actions that they did set up the conditions for being
miserable or happy. He saw the larger pattern by moving from his own personal
narrative to a more universal view, realizing that it wasn’t just him, everybody
went through the same process. We had that chant just now: “I’m subject to
aging, illness and death, subject to separation. I am the owner of my actions.” In
the actual sutta that the chant is drawn from, the contemplation doesn’t stop
there. It goes on to reflect that all living beings are the owners of their actions. All
living beings are subject to aging, illness and death. That larger perspective puts
things into perspective.
That’s what the Buddha did with his second knowledge. He got things in a
larger perspective. But that didn’t constitute awakening either. After all, memory
of past lives, visions of the universe, visions of beings dying and being reborn:
That’s not proof that these things actually happen. The Buddha wanted to know
how to test the proof of these things. So he focused on that principle in the
second knowledge, the principle of action. What was action? Action primarily is
intention. It’s a mental factor. He realized that your actions are determined by
how you view things. So how about just looking at action in and of itself,
intention in and of itself? Where do you look? Well, you look at the present
moment.
This is what brought him to the present moment, to focus on what was
happening in his mind right then and there—in particular, how his actions led to
suffering and how other actions might lead to the end of suffering. That’s how he

25
framed his approach to the present moment, by looking in terms of cause and
result, skillful and unskillful. That way of framing the issue led to his awakening.
It’s important to reflect on this as we go through the same process as well.
We start with our own personal narrative and try to get into the present moment.
If your narrative is messy, one thing to do is start cleaning up your narrative. In
other words, if you try to get the mind to be quiet and start thinking about all the
ways in which you were stingy or harmful to other people, it’s hard to settle
down. This is why meditation is part of a larger training, training in being
generous and being virtuous, abstaining from things that are harmful, and
helping people in whatever ways you can. That brings a good narrative to the
meditation cushion.
But even then, before you get into the present moment, the Buddha
recommends that you start thinking in a more universal way because otherwise
there’s that problem I mentioned just now. You sit there you think, “Gosh, I’m a
miserable meditator. I can’t do this.” But when you realize that everybody faces
the same problems, it’s a lot easier to stick with it. There’s less personal
recrimination and more of a balanced, equanimous, objective view. And not just
that. The questions you’re bringing into the present moment depend on what
your larger view is.
Often we hear that mindfulness is enough. Like the Beatles’ old song: All you
need is love. The refrain in a lot of Buddhist circles is: All you need is
mindfulness. Well why? What’s good about mindfulness? What is mindfulness?
How does it function? You’ve got to have a view about these things. This is why,
when the Buddha identified the most important internal quality in the practice,
he didn’t say mindfulness. He said appropriate attention, something we hardly
ever hear of in Dhamma talks. “Attention” means how you frame the issue, how
you frame the way you approach the present moment, how you look at things,
the questions you ask. This attention can either be appropriate in terms of
putting an end to suffering or inappropriate if it’s not effective at all, if it actually
creates more suffering. And the appropriate way to attend to the present moment
is the same way the Buddha did: getting a sense of your intentions and seeing
where they’re skillful and where they are not.
Now intentions can be pretty slippery things. This is why we start the
meditation with a specific intention: Very consciously say to yourself, “I’m going
to stay here with the breath.” Only when you set up an intention like that and try
to maintain it do you start seeing other undercurrents of intention in the mind.
The intention that wants to think about issues from the day, saying, “Here we
have a whole hour free time, let’s think about family issues or let’s think about
work issues.” You might not have noticed that intention if you hadn’t set up the
prior intention to stay with the breath. You would have slipped off to those other

26
thoughts without realizing that there was any conscious intention there at all. So,
for the time being, the skillful intention you want to maintain is the one that
stays with the breath, that makes the breath comfortable. This is an important
aspect. If the breath is uncomfortable, you won’t to want to stay. You may have
the intention but it won’t have any friends. It’s facing what they call the armies of
Mara.
So you need allies. One way of creating an ally is to make the breath your
friend. See what kind of breathing feels good in the body right now: long
breathing, short breathing, heavy breathing breath feels right. You can
experiment to see. This makes it more interesting. And right there, you’ve got a
lesson in skillful and unskillful intentions. Some intentions to change the breath
end up with an uncomfortable, tight, restricted, or tense sense of the breath. You
don’t want that so you drop those intentions. Other intentions create a greater
sense of ease. You realize that your intentions don’t always shows their results
only in a next lifetime. Often your intentions show their results right now. That’s
an important lesson. Because the breath is so sensitive to events in the mind, it’s a
good way of testing this principle.
As Ajaan Lee used to say, when you meditate you want the right intention,
the right object, and the right quality. Here the right object is the breath. Because
it is so sensitive to the mind—it’s where the mind and the body meet—that
makes it an ideal object to focus on. The right intention is the intention is to stay
there with the breath. And then the third factor is the right quality: the quality of
the breathing that feels good, the quality of the mind that’s willing to be friendly
with the breath, explore the breath, learn about the breath, it’s willing to test
things and then observe the results.
When my teacher Ajaan Fuang taught meditation, those are two words he
liked to use a lot: Test things, he would say, and then be observant. And at first,
you might not be too confident in what you’re observing, but over time you
begin to develop a sense, “Oh, this little hint shows that the mind is about ready
to go. This is how I can recognize breathing that’s good for the body, this is how
I can recognize breathing that’s good for the mind, this is how I can recognize
breathing that’s good for neither.” You learn to interpret the clues. At first your
conclusions have to be tentative. But remember, we are working on a skill here. It
takes time to develop a skill but these are the qualities you need. You want to
have the desire to work on the skill, you want to be persistent, stick with it, and
be intent on what you’re doing. Be really observant. Then finally use your
intelligence to ask questions, bring that property of appropriate attention to what
you’re doing. When things don’t work, use your imagination, use your ingenuity
to figure out other ways of making them work. You can’t expect all the
instructions to come in the book.

27
 It’s like learning any skill. In the beginning you start with instructions that
come in the book or what the teacher says. Ajaan Lee’s example is of weaving a
basket. You weave a basket as the teacher tells you to, then you look at: It looks
pretty crummy. But instead of giving up, you say, “Let’s weave another basket.”
Try to learn from your mistakes with the first one. Why was the weaving uneven?
Does the basket look too short? Too fat? Does it look crooked? What can you do
to make it better? This is where instead of learning from the teacher, you start
learning from the straw or whatever it is you use to weave the basket. You start
learning from your basket, you learn from your efforts, you learn from your
mistakes.
People who tend to engage in a lot of self recrimination find this hard. This
is why it’s good to think about that universal principle, that everybody has to go
through this stage. And it’s an important stage because you refine your
discernment as you do this. Discernment is the quality that’s going to purify the
mind. It’s going to lead you to awakening. You can’t sit here and simply hope for
awakening to come out of the sky and whap you across the head. It comes from
refining your discernment so that you see what’s going on. You see where your
intentions are skillful, you see where your intentions are unskillful. And
ultimately you see what lies beyond intention. Because it’s in your freedom to
make choices right here in the present moment: That’s the spot where freedom
should be investigated. The potential for freedom is going to be found right
around here.
This is why the Buddha has you focus on issues of your actions, your
intentions, and their results. The really liberating potential of your awareness lies
right around there. So this is where you want to look. This is why appropriate
attention is the most crucial factor in the practice, the approach that looks at all
of this as a skill that you’re working on in the hopes of becoming more and more
skillful in how you act, more and more skillful in how you evaluate the results of
your actions, and how you learn from your mistakes.
When you bring this quality of appropriate attention to the present moment,
you’re setting your practice on the proper footing. And then in that context you
develop mindfulness. In other words, you try to keep the breath in mind. You try
to keep this perspective, the perspective of trying to be skillful in mind. And then
you can be alert to what’s actually happening, interpreting it within that
framework of what’s skillful and what’s not, the framework of that larger view
that helps make sure that you don’t get tied up in how you’re a miserable
meditator, or how this is never going to work. You just drop that. Everybody goes
through the stage of being a miserable meditator. The good meditators are the
ones who don’t stop there. They learn from their mistakes. So keep that
perspective in mind.

28
 That’s how the skill of meditation can begin to show its stuff, what it really
can do for you. Every time you sit down to meditate, always try to keep that
framework in mind, that perspective in mind. Because that’s what makes progress
possible. That’s what focuses you in the present moment in the proper way. We
always hear that meditation means being in the present moment. It doesn’t mean
just being there. You’ve got to know what to look for, what questions to ask. And
that’s where the faculty of appropriate attention points you in the right direction.

29
 The Balance of Power
May 13, 2006

There’s a balance of power in the mind, in the same way that there’s a
balance of power in the world outside. We have a lot of different desires, and
there’s a tension among them. But as long as each of them has its say in one way
or the other, things are relatively peaceful. Not really peaceful inside, there’s a lot
of pulling and pushing. And there is a lot of hype and desires come along. Each
of them says, hey, I am your friend. I can bring you happiness. And when you
give in, the desire doesn’t seem all that bad. Whether it really gives you happiness
or not, that’s another matter.
Psychologists have found that we are really bad at figuring out what’s going
to give us true happiness. We tend to overestimate almost all of our desires.
That’s what keeps us going, going, searching for this, searching for that, keeping
on looking for new things. And then every once in awhile, things begin to break
down. We begin to realize that the desires we’ve been befriending all along are
not really our true friends. Like that chant just now on friendship—it wasn’t
referring only to outside friends and non-friends. We have inside friends and
non-friends, the ones who flatter and cajole, our companions in ruinous fun,
some of our desires are like that. When you realize that, you want to switch to
other desires. A desire comes into the mind for some real peace. Wouldn’t it be
good if we could find true happiness? A happiness that doesn’t cause any harm to
ourselves, doesn’t cause any harm to anybody else, seems like a perfectly
reasonable desire. But then you see parts of the mind will rebel. They’ll fight
back.
It’s the same as with the world outside. Look on the TV and it’s like every
corporation in the world is your friend. They bring the good things to life as they
say. But then if you start looking into their business practices, you find they are
pretty nefarious. Some of them make their money off genuine suffering of other
people. And some of them actually find that war is to their best interest. If you
try to imagine a world order in which everybody could live together peacefully, it
seems sensible, why can’t we live together peacefully? Why can’t people not cause
harm to one another? But there are interests out there that would actually lose if
there were peace, if there were no suffering. And they fight back. The more you
try to cause a revolution in the world outside, the more these powers fight back at
you, try to divert your attention from the real issue. If they can’t do that, then it’s
out-and-out battle.

30
 So you need allies. It’s the same in the mind. If you are going to create a
revolution in the mind where the mind can actually function without causing
any harm to itself or other people, you need allies in the fight. This is why we
meditate. This is why we develop right concentration. This is our main ally. In
the comparison they have of the different qualities on the path, concentration is
your food. It’s what gives your nourishment.
So you want to develop these allies as much you can. In other words the idea
of being peaceful, a mind that causes no harm, it sounds nice but if it doesn’t give
you some immediate visceral pleasure, it’s going to be a hard uphill battle.
Because your other desires say: quick, look, here is a quick fix. Just do this, do
that, you’ll feel great. Even though the feeling great may not last long, there is a
part of you that gives in very easily. That finds it hard to wait for results way
down the line. So in order to get that part of the mind on your side, you say,
here, here’s a nice comfortable breath, breathe in a way that feels good, breathe in
a way that feels refreshing, gratifying. Experiment to see what kind of breathing
will do that for you. You make the breath your friend. The pleasure that comes
from comfortable breathing, that can be your friend as well.
So figure out how to experiment with the breath, because sometimes just the
process of experimentation takes a while before you can do it skillfully. In other
words sometimes you push too much, you stretch the breath too much, you try
to force things too much. You find tension in different parts of the body and you
try to attack it too directly, then it fights back. What this means is you’ve got to
learn to develop some more finesse, that’s something that comes with time. At
the very least try to get at least one part of the body that feels good. Try to find
the part that feels central, that you are on really intimate terms with. At least
make this part good. So it feels comfortable as you breathe in, you are not
squeezing or pushing it or pulling it, and then allow it to maintain that sense of
ease as you breathe out. If there’s any tension or tightness that you can detect
there, allow that to dissolve away. In this way you begin to find a friend inside.
Then the parts of the mind that want some immediate gratification, they’ll
become your friends too, they’ll like it. Then you work on allowing that sense of
ease to spread to different parts the body.
And this is something each of us has to find our own way of doing. In some
cases you maintain your center on that original spot and just think of expanding
your frame of awareness, your field of awareness to be larger and larger and
larger, and then think of the ease spreading along with your awareness. That’s
one way of doing it.
Another way is to go through the body section by section. Ajaan Lee has you
start at the back of the neck, going down the back. Some people find that easy,
other people find it hard. If you find it hard, you might want to start, say around

31
the navel, because the movement of the breath is easier to see there. So make sure
that your abdomen is relaxed as you breathe in, relaxed as you breathe out. Then
go around to the back, the small of the back, keep that relaxed. Any parts of the
back that seem to be pulling you out of a nice straight posture, allow those to
relax. So again they stay relaxed as you breathe in, relaxed as you breathe out.
And then move up, solar plexus, then around the body from the solar plexus to
the back at the same height, and back to the solar plexus again. Then move up to
the middle of the chest, and the same way around the body in the chest area, then
the base of the throat, and the head. You can go down the shoulders to the arms,
and then start at the hips, going down the legs to the toes. Work through the
body, section by section, making sure that whatever section you’re focused on
feels at least undisturbed by the breath. And there may actually be a sensation
that’s related to the breathing process, so allow it to feel comfortable as you
breathe in, comfortable as you breathe out. And you can go through the body
like this as many times as you like, until you are ready to settle down. Then find
one spot then spread your awareness out from that spot. So you are aware of the
whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. And it feels good, it feels
connected.
This way you are beginning to get a friend, you’ve got your allies in this
revolution. Because there will be parts of the mind that start complaining. They
don’t get to wander around as they used to. They don’t have the run of the place
that they are used to having. But with the sense of full body awareness, it feels
good, feels refreshing just to breathe. That begins to change the balance of power.
This is not to say that it will gradually all become more and more peaceful
without problems, there will be ups and downs. But over time you find that there
is a shift and when there is this sense of ease, you have to be careful not to just
wallow in it and forget where it comes from. It comes from your alertness and
your mindfulness. Mindfulness is keeping the breath in mind, keeping the
various techniques that you are going to use with the breath in mind. Alertness is
checking to see how things are going. In terms of right concentration or what
they call jhana, these then develop into directed thought and evaluation. Directed
thought is when you keep your thoughts on one topic. And then evaluation is
that you check how things are going and making adjustments as you need to.
Then the other factor is singleness of preoccupation, means you really are one
with the breath. It feels like the breath is filling the whole body, your awareness
is filling the whole body. Everything is one, it’s not splitting off into two, three,
four, five, the way it normally does.
So those are the causes. Make sure you’ve got the causes right. Then the sense
of ease, sense of refreshment, of rapture, those will come. And as long as you stay
with the causes, the ease and rapture will just keep on coming. It’s like having a

32
job. As long as you stick with the job, your wages keep coming. If you decide I’ve
had enough of this working, I want to enjoy the wages, well there is no more
income. And you find yourself soon at the end of your money. But if you keep on
working, the results keep on coming. This is work in pleasure. You are working
with your very intimate sense of the body. You are working in a way that makes
it feel good.
This is why the Buddha said this is such an important part of the practice,
because it gives you your allies. And also opens your mind to new possibilities. It
is possible to find a sense of happiness, a sense of ease, refreshment without
following your old sensory desires. The passage we looked at today during the
study group, where the Buddha says it is possible that someone will know, have
insight into the drawbacks of sensual desire. But if they don’t know a pleasure
that lies outside of sensual desire, it just won’t make any difference, they’ll just
keep going back to their same old ways. But if you provide the mind with this
alternative, there is a sense of ease and refreshment that comes simply from
breathing, fully inhabiting your body, not running out after other things. Once
you have that alternative, then it’s a lot easier to look at the pleasure you used to
get from indulging in sights, sounds, smells and tastes and tactile sensations.
Seeing the drawbacks, being frank with yourself about the drawbacks. In the past
it was hard to be frank about them, because you felt that, gosh, if you couldn’t
find pleasure here, where would you find it? There would be no pleasure in life at
all.
But now you’ve got an alternative. That changes the balance of power. So you
see right here, there’s a sense of ease and refreshment. You don’t have to spend all
that time and money and effort chasing down things that just turn into shadows
and mirages. And even when you do get what you like in the outside world, it
doesn’t always stay with you. The Buddha compares it with borrowed goods. The
original owners can take that away at any time. The pleasure, say, you get out of
another person, doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to that other person. If
they decide they’ve had enough of you, that’s it. You don’t have any rights.
There is the image of the man sitting in the tree. He comes to a fruit tree,
there’s no fruit on the ground but there is fruit in the tree. He knows how to
climb the tree. So he goes up and he stays in the tree eating the fruit. Another
man comes along, who also wants fruit, but he doesn’t know how climb the tree,
but he has an ax in his hands. So he is going to chop the tree down. There are lots
of drawbacks to sensual desire and it’s easy for us to see them. But part of the
mind refuses. It’s afraid, because if we don’t allow ourselves to get totally
immersed in sensual desires, to really get carried away by them, we fear there is
going to be no pleasure in life at all.
So it’s important that you learn how to develop this sense of absorption in

33
the breath, pleasurable, refreshing, feels really good just being here. That changes
your sense of the range of possibilities. There is a pleasure that doesn’t depend on
those things outside, it’s perfectly fine right here. It’s nourishing. And even
though simple concentration is not going to totally solve the problem of the way
the mind causes itself suffering, it really changes the balance of power. You’ve got
more allies in this revolution you are trying to create in the mind. Where the
mind can live at peace with itself without causing any harm for you, any harm for
anybody else. That’s your desire.
As for the peace in the world, as the Buddha said, the world never has
enough. It’s insatiable. It’s a slave to craving. But you don’t have to be a slave to
craving. You can free yourself by finding new allies in the fight. This is your path
to freedom. It seems simple just watching the breath. It is not easy, but as you
work with it and really approach it as developing a skill that may take time, it
may take effort, but it’s really worth all the time and all the effort. Because it does
create that possibility that living without causing suffering, living without
causing harm, living with true peace, at the very least with peace inside—that’s a
genuine possibility. And because it’s possible, it’s worth all the time and effort
that goes into finding it, developing it, changing this balance of power in the
mind.

34
 People Suffer from Their Thinking
July 4, 2006

A passage in the teachings of Ajaan Dun describes an incident when a

woman came to him and just poured out her soul about the problems in her
family—worried about her son, worried about this, worried about that—and so
he tried to console her as best he could. After she left, he commented to one of
his students, “People these days suffer because of their thinking.” It’s interesting
the way he said that—“people these days”—as if people didn’t suffer from their
thinking in the past. Maybe he meant that prior to that time, Thailand was poor
and most people were just worried about eating, surviving. Now that people have
become wealthier, food is easier to get, jobs are easier to get, their thinking takes
over and that makes them suffer.
This is certainly true in spades about people in the modern world because so
much in the modern world teaches us harmful ways of thinking. The mass media
are predicated on the idea that you are lacking and you need what we’ve got to
sell. That’s the message they’re constantly trying to get through to you. And
when you’re exposed to that message long enough, you start believing it.
The first step in the cure is to get away from the media, so that the message
isn’t being drummed into you all the time. But even then, once you’ve been used
to thinking in those terms, it’s hard to get them out of your system. This is why
we have to train the mind. There are basically two ways of approaching the
problem. One is to stop thinking, and the other is to learn to think in different
ways, ways that are actually helpful to you to put an end to suffering rather than
piling on more suffering.
As a meditator, you’ve got to learn how to use both approaches, learning to
let the mind rest so that it doesn’t have to be occupied with thoughts all the time;
and then, when the time comes when you really do have to think, learning how
to think in ways that are helpful rather than harmful. And even when you’re
trying to get the mind to be still, it requires a certain amount of thought
beforehand. You’ve got to convince yourself this is a worthwhile activity, sitting
here focusing on your breath. Then you have to think about letting the breath be
comfortable, trying not to force the breath too much, just noticing what kind of
rhythm of breathing feels good right now. This requires some thought, but it’s
constructive thought. It’s okay to think and pose questions around this issue,
because that kind of thinking and questioning gets you more absorbed in the
breath.

35
 It’s not a matter of forcing the mind to stay with the breath no matter what.
If you put too much force on the mind like that, it’s going to rebel. It’s like trying
to hold a beach ball under water. As soon as your grip loosens up a bit, the ball
goes shooting up out of the water. What you’ve got to learn is how to get the
mind interested in the breath. Realize that this energy in the body that goes along
with the breathing is an important factor in keeping the body healthy: not just
alive but healthy as well. If the energy flows smoothly, if all the nerves in the
body get bathed in the breath, that’s going to be good for the body. When the
body is more comfortable, it’s easier to settle down and stay right here. It feels
good. There’s a sense of fullness, a sense of ease that you can develop just by
thinking of the energy flowing through the body all the time. As soon as the
breath starts coming in, the energy is already flowing through all the nerves. As
soon as it goes out, it’s dispersing out through all the pores of the body. Thinking
in this way helps the mind to settle down and gives it a place to rest when it
doesn’t have to think.
But there may be a part of your mind saying: “What are you doing? This is a
waste of time. You’ve got all these other issues you’ve got to worry about.” And
sometimes you can say, “No I’m sorry, this is not the time for that,” and it’ll stop.
Other times though, you’ve got to reason with the mind. This is why we have the
chants before the meditation. This is why the Buddha gave so many discourses to
help you see that it really is important to train the mind, that this is the most
important thing you can do in life. As for all the other issues you might carry
around, you’ve got to learn how to look at those from a distant perspective. All
too often we’re much too close to the issues in our lives, dealing with issues in
our family, issues at work, our own frustration with ourselves, and we get our
nose right into it. When you get too entangled in these issues, it’s hard to get a
perspective.
So the purpose of the Dhamma is to help give you a perspective that will help
you step back and look at these issues in the long-term. Get a better sense of
what’s really important in life and what’s not important in life. The Buddha talks
about four Guardian Meditations. These are things to think about if you have
trouble getting the mind to settle down. There are four topics in all: the Buddha,
goodwill, the foulness of the body, and mindfulness of death.
There are different ways you can think about the Buddha. If you find that the
mind needs some consoling and reassuring—in other words, it needs some gentle
treatment—just think about the fact that the Buddha proved with his life that it
is possible for human beings to find true happiness. That’s the basic message his
life sends. And it’s an important message. Because for most of us, we look at
human life and what is it? People get born, they go through all this trouble to get
an education. Some people get married, have kids. Sometimes it works out,

36
sometimes it doesn’t. Then what happens? They get old. Their body stops
functioning. And sometimes death and illness don’t happen quickly. There are
these long lingering illnesses and then they die. And you wonder, “What is that
all about?” All that needless suffering. You look around and that seems to be
everyone’s life.
The Buddha’s life story is very different. He found that it’s possible through
your own efforts to attain a happiness that’s not affected by aging, illness, and
death. In other words, there is a part of the mind that lies beyond these things.
You can look at aging, illness, and death as little issues. It also helps to look at a
lot of the other issues in your daily life, to see them as little things as well—and
to remind you it is possible to find true happiness. It may take a long time, but
that possibility is there. Things are not hopeless.
That’s one way of thinking about the Buddha. Now if you find that you’re
getting lazy in your practice, the other way you can think about the Buddha is to
remind yourself that the Buddha was here 2600 years ago teaching this lesson.
You were probably here someplace too. Why didn’t you take the lesson to heart
back then? Why are you still hanging around now? How much longer is it going
to take you? It’s very rare that we have Buddhas in this world. The texts talk about
how many thousands of years it’s going to be before the next Buddha appears.
And in the meantime his teachings are going to be forgotten. What are you going
to do then? When you think in this way, it gives a little more oomph to your
practice, more encouragement to put more effort in.
So, you can think about the Buddha either in a way that’s consoling or in a
way that lights a fire under you. Look at your state of mind and see which way of
thinking about the Buddha is helpful right now and then apply that. One of the
big tragedies of human life is that we have this power to think and yet for the
most part the mind seems to have a mind of its own. A useless topic can absorb
you and obsess you and it seems like it’s got hold of you and won’t let you go.
Actually that’s not what’s happening. The thought isn’t holding onto you. You’re
holding onto the thinking, even the thinking that seems to be the most
frustrating and maddening. One part of the mind actually gets some pleasure out
of it, otherwise it wouldn’t hold on—the sense that it has to do this kind of
thinking or has to browbeat itself or whatever. You’ve got to learn how to
question that: “What pleasure am I getting out of this thinking that’s driving me
crazy? In what sense do I feel I have to do it? Is there going to be a reward for me
if I do this obsessive thinking?” Look into that. And when you can catch sight of
something of that sort happening, then it’s a lot easier to let go.
The other three Guardian Meditations operate in a similar manner. You can
think about them in ways that are consoling or in ways that give you more of a
push. For instance, thoughts of goodwill: It’s good to think thoughts of wishing

37
happiness for everybody, starting with yourself and then spreading it around,
because that kind of thought holds no harm. It reminds you that you don’t gain
any advantage from anybody else’s suffering, so why would you want to wish
suffering on anyone else? This helps give you a larger perspective on the issues of
life. Particularly if there’s a cycle of revenge someplace in your life, this helps pull
you out. Helps you step back. Of course the more stringent side of metta is that if
you really do wish yourself happiness, what are you doing? Why are you living
this way? Why do you do these things? Why do you say these things? Why do you
think these things? If you were really serious about your happiness, you’d change
the way you live. In this way, thoughts of goodwill can act as a carrot or a stick,
depending on what you need.
The third Guardian meditation: the foulness of the body. You can think
about that in a consoling way or a more stringent way. The consoling way is to
remind yourself that many of the heavy issues in life are based on meeting the
needs of the body. But look at the body. What is it? Just a few organs that are
going to function together for a while and then fall apart. And a lot of these
heavy issues around the body are really not all that important. Why make the
body such a big deal?
As for the stringent side, when you see that you’re really attached to the
body, ask yourself: Well, what is it here in the body that’s really worth being
proud about? The Buddha once said, after cataloging all the different things that
the body does, all the stuff inside the body, and then what happens to the body as
it ages and dies, “Whoever would think of exalting himself or disparaging others
on the basis of this body: What is that if not blindness?” In other words, your
body may be stronger, more fit, more beautiful, whatever, but so what? It’s still
made of disgusting things and oozes disgusting things, and is subject to all sorts
of diseases. It dies. So what’s so great about that?
Recollection of death functions in two ways as well. The consoling side is
that whatever the issues you have in life, there will come a time when they don’t
matter anymore. You pass away, the other people pass away, everything’s all
going to be forgotten. So the issues that loom so large in your life right now: You
can look at them as something a lot smaller. They’re not so overwhelming. On
the other hand, you can use thoughts about death to realize you don’t know
when you’re going to die. The Buddha has his disciples reflect every evening at
sunset: This may be the last sunset you’ll ever see. Are you ready to go? The
answer is usually No. Then the question is, how can you best prepare your mind?
The best thing you can do is to train the mind to have more mindfulness, more
discernment, more alertness, so that if death does come, the mind doesn’t have to
suffer. He has you think the same way every morning at sunrise: This may be
your last sunrise. Are you ready to go? No. If not, then train your mind. It’s not

38
the case that when death comes we have no way of helping the situation. The
body may die, but the mind doesn’t have to suffer with the body’s death if you’re
mindful enough, if you have enough concentration, if you have enough alertness
and discernment. So work on building these qualities now, while you can.
These are some of the ways in which thinking can actually help you. It gives
you the right attitude. The question is learning how to apply these different
topics in a way that’s appropriate for your needs right now. That requires
learning how to look at your own mind to see what it needs. A good rule of
thumb is usually to start with the more consoling side and see if that works, if it
gives you the energy you need to practice. If the consoling side doesn’t work, you
can use the more stringent side, to see if that works. Once you see that the mind
is willing to drop all of its outside concerns and settle down, then you can drop
that thinking and just be with the stillness.
A lot of the meditation goes back and forth between being still and thinking,
investigating and then being still again, investigating, being still again. The more
solid your concentration, then the more subtle your thinking can be, the more
subtle your powers of observation and analysis in the present moment can be.
Meditation practice is not just a matter of forcing the mind to be still. You’ve got
to learn how to reason with it so that it can let go at least enough to allow the
mind to settle down for a while. Once it’s settled down for a while, then you can
reason with it again so that it can let go even more, of more subtle things, the
things you missed when the mind was bouncing all over the place like a ping-
pong ball. Now that it’s more still, you can begin to see more subtle attachments.
Learn how to investigate them. Then when you let go of those, the mind will be
still on an even deeper level. Learn how to pursue it back and forth like this.
Thinking and being still. Thinking and being still. So these two processes can
help each other along.
When you understand the meditation in this way, the results go a lot deeper.
And they really do help you find the happiness the Buddha found, the happiness
that isn’t dependent on anything all, but just simply is. It’s there. The potential is
already there in the mind. The issue is simply learning how to use the faculties in
the mind—its ability to be still, its ability to investigate, its ability to think—in a
way that really is helpful rather than the normal everyday way we use them,
which just piles more suffering on top of suffering.
So look at your mind right now and see what it needs. Does it need
consoling, does it need the stick rather than the carrot, or is it ready just to settle
down? Learn to observe your mind then provide it what it needs.

39
 Discernment
August 6, 2006

If you ever had to tackle a large or overwhelming job, you’ve had to learn the
basic principle that if you want to get anywhere with it, you have to break it
down into little jobs, into manageable pieces. Then you tackle the pieces bit by
bit by bit, and after a while you find the job gets done. You need the large
overview so that you know how to break it down into manageable pieces, but
when you actually do the work, you focus on the little bits and pieces.
This job we have here of tackling suffering is the same sort of thing. It seems
overwhelming. You can think of it as this huge big mass, and the Buddha
sometimes talks about it as a mass of suffering—because that’s how most of us
experience it, especially when it gets really big, when it really weighs down on
the mind.
But the whole purpose of discernment is to be able to break it down into
little pieces so that you can see how it’s constructed and how it doesn’t have to be
constructed. This is what the Buddha’s teachings on the five aggregates, the six
sense spheres, the four or the six properties, dependent co-arising, are for. They’re
all designed to take suffering and to break it down into manageable pieces. The
reason we call this discernment is just that—its ability to see subtle distinctions—
because the pieces are subtle and the distinctions between them are subtle.
This is why we have to practice concentration as a basis for this kind of
discernment. If your mind isn’t really still, if your awareness isn’t really sharp and
quick, you’re going to miss all the subtleties. Everything gets glommed together.
It’s all right here, but if you don’t see the distinctions, everything is going to stay
just as a big lump right here, a big mass right here in the present moment.
Say, for instance, that you’re feeling a sense of depression, a sense of sadness.
There’s a physical side to it and there’s the mental side. The mental side is made
up of lots of little thoughts that are all glommed together. So the Buddha
recommends that you take it apart in terms of the khandhas, in terms of the
aggregates. Look for the feeling, and then look for the perception. An important
perception is saying, “This is my suffering, this is happening to me,” which may
be true but you don’t have to think it. It’s an optional thought. You could simply
say, “This is suffering,” and leave it at that. That would adequately describe the
situation and would also be more helpful. The thing is, you have to catch the
mind in the act of applying that particular perception. It will do it repeatedly

40
again and again and again. That’s what clinging is. It’s holding onto a particular
thought and just repeating it over and over again.
When you can see that happening, you realize that you’ve got the choice to
drop it. You don’t have to keep hitting yourself over the head. This is the same
principle that applies to right speech. As the Buddha said, there are things that
may be true but if they’re not useful, if this is not the right time for them, we
don’t say them. Take that principle and apply it to the mind, to your inner
conversation. There may be perceptions that in one way or other are true enough,
but they’re not useful and this is not the right time for them. They’re actually
causing you suffering, so why bring them in?
If physical side of the suffering is what seems oppressive, take things apart in
terms of the properties: earth, water, wind, and fire. Suppose there’s a pain in
your knee. The sensations you’ve got around that pain in the knee: Which ones
are just physical sensations and which ones are feeling? In other words, which
ones are rupa, or form, and which ones are feeling? Any sense of heat is form, any
sense of movement is form; coolness, solidity: these things are all form. But then
there’s the feeling of pain that sort of flickers among them. It’s something
different. It’s a different aggregate. This is where the aggregates and the elements
can get together, and this is where we can distinguish among them. But one way
of distinguishing between feeling and form is just that: try to see which
sensations in that sensation of pain are simply the aggregates of form, the
properties of the body, and which are the actual feeling. Try to tease these things
out. This is the work of discernment. It discerns distinctions, it see things clearly.
This is why it’s called discernment. You could translate the term pañña as
wisdom, but that has an entirely different connotation. I remember the first year
when I was practicing with Ajaan Fuang. He kept saying, “Use your pañña,”
which is both the Pali word and the Thai word. At the time all I knew was that
pañña is wisdom, so I told him, “I don’t have any pañña. He said, “Of course you
do. If you’re a human being, you’ve got some .” I began to realize maybe he was
talking about something else besides wisdom. And I finally realized it was
discernment: seeing distinctions, being able to tease things out.
So we’re not here trying to gain the wisdom that lets us simply accept things.
Sometimes people think that that’s the ultimate wisdom of Buddhism: learning
to be equanimous, patient, accepting of everything. Suffering comes, and you tell
yourself that that’s just the nature of experience, that’s the way it is. Craving
comes, well, just accept the craving, that’s the way it is.
Now that is the beginning part of discernment, the ability to admit what’s
going on. But then as the Buddha said in his first sermon, discernment is not just
knowing the truth, that this is the way things are. There is also a duty or a task to
do with each of these truths. When there’s suffering, you try to comprehend it.

41
And comprehending it doesn’t mean simply accepting it. It means ferreting out
the bits and pieces from which it’s constructed. What are the raw materials of
suffering? It is just these things: form, feeling, perception, fabrication,
consciousness. If you look at the suffering in those terms, takes a lot of the sting
out. Because as you see the perception that it’s “my” suffering or that “I’m”
suffering is just that: it’s a momentary event in the mind. But it brings a big sting
with it. So you have the choice not to say that to yourself, not to think in terms of
those perceptions. Then you find that as you take the events apart, tease them
apart this way, there’s less and less and less suffering. That big mass of suffering
gets broken down into little bits. And as in the image in the Canon, finally it gets
winnowed into a high wind and blown away, because you realize that you were
the one who’s been gluing all these pieces together, and then weighing yourself
down with them.
The primary ingredient in this glue is the sense that “I am the one who is
suffering, this is my suffering, this is happening to me, I’m in the midst of the
suffering, or I am the suffering, or the suffering is in me.” The Buddha has you
take this sensation of suffering and tease it apart in terms of the aggregates and
then ask of each of these aggregates: “Is this something in me or am I in it? Is this
mine? Is this me?” And as you’re able to look at these things—and it’s not going
to be a little block that you could sit there and watch. It’s going to be a very quick
event in the mind, especially the mental khandhas. But if you learn simply to
observe that, “There is this, there is this, that’s all,” you see that as you encounter
difficult situations—pain in the body, anything difficult, anything that would
make you suffer—you have the choice to think in ways that would make you
suffer or not, because you can see these events happening simply as events. That’s
all.
That’s what discernment is all about. Ferreting these things out, realizing that
they’re individual events in the mind and you don’t have to glue them together
in the old way. You can look at them from a different standpoint.
This is what the Dhamma does. It gives us a new frame from which to look at
things. This is why Dhamma talks are not just here for information. They’re here
to help you look at things in a whole new way, applying the four noble truths to
your experience. That’s the framework the Buddha gives you.
It’s not only the framework for his teachings, but also the framework he’d
like you to apply to your experience. It’s hard to shift frameworks. We’re used to
our old frameworks, so we tend just to bring the four noble truths in as new
information. If that’s all they are, just a piece of news you’ve heard, they really
don’t make that much difference. But if you make up your mind that you’re
going to look at everything from this perspective, and keep at it, keep at it, you
find that it’s really useful. It not only points out the way things are, but also

42
shows what you can do so that you don’t have to suffer from the way things are.
So try to get the mind still enough to allow your discernment to get more
and more refined, more and more subtle. It works in stages. The more still the
mind can be, the more refined your discernment can be, the more subtleties you
can see—and the more you can put an end to your suffering. Ajaan Fuang used to
say that the discernment that comes from concentration is special. It goes deeper
into the mind than discernment not based on concentration. When you’ve heard
the topics of discernment—four noble truths, five aggregates, six sense spheres,
the properties, dependent co-arising—you can hear them, you can think about
them, you can talk about them, but if you don’t actually see these things in
action, they don’t go to your heart. The whole purpose of concentration is so you
can see them in action. They are very quick, they are very subtle so you have to be
very, very still. But if you see them in the stillness, the understanding goes
straight to the heart. That’s where it really can make a difference.

43
 Right Livelihood
August 7, 2006

Of all the factors in the path, right livelihood is probably the one that
receives the least attention. And so it’s good to pay some attention to it. The
definition in the Canon is pretty simple: you avoid wrong livelihood and you
support yourself with right livelihood. It’s hardly even a definition at all, because
it doesn’t explain the term.
In other parts of the Canon, though, the Buddha does describe right
livelihood for monks: no hinting, no scheming, no trading gain for gain. In other
words you don’t promise to give a reward to someone who gives something to
you. This is the way the monks live. It’s very different from the way lay people
live. For lay people, trade is the basic mode of livelihood. If you give me
something, I’ll give you something in return. That’s the basic mode of operation
throughout lay life. But when you ordain, you drop that. And you don’t even
hint, don’t even scheme. You don’t even try to plan to get anything out of
anybody or think how can you attract support, or how can you attract donations
from people. There are lots of rules to make sure that one monk, say, doesn’t try
to monopolize all the generosity of the lay people at the expense of the other
monks. So that’s right livelihood for monks. It’s a very pure livelihood. You take
what you get. You content yourself with what you get. It’s purely an economy of
gifts.
For lay people, there are a couple of examples in the Canon where the
Buddha says to avoid certain kinds of trade. Trading in poison, trading in meat,
trading in weapons, intoxicants, trading in slaves: The Buddha says to avoid these
things entirely. And then there are a couple cases where people come to the
Buddha and say that they have been told that their particular livelihood actually
has a place for it in heaven. In one instance, it’s a professional soldier who comes
and he’s been told by his teachers who taught him the trade of being a soldier,
that if you die in the battle, you’re going to the heaven of the heroes who die in
battle. He wants to know: What the Buddha has to think about that? The Buddha
avoids the answer. The guy asks him three times and the Buddha finally says,
“Well, since I can’t get past you, okay, I’ll tell you. If you’re in the midst of a
battle and are consumed by the thought of trying to kill other people, either from
greed, anger or delusion, that intention is an unskillful intention. If you die with
the state of mind, you go to hell. Or if you have the wrong view that this is going
to take you to heaven, you still go to hell, you go to the hell for people who die in

44
battle. Instead of going to heaven, it’s a hell.
There’s another case where an actor comes, and he says, “I’ve been told that
when you entertain people, give them enjoyment, you go to the heaven of
laughter where everybody’s enjoying themselves.” And he wants to know what
the Buddha thinks about that. Again the Buddha avoids answering until the guy
asks him three times. The Buddha says, “Okay, I can’t get past you, so I’ll tell you.
If you’re trying to inspire passion, aversion, and delusion in people through your
acting, then when you die, you go to the hell of laughter, i.e., they’re not
laughing with you, they’re laughing at you.
So if your livelihood involves inspiring greed, anger, and delusion either in
yourself as you do it or in other people—think about advertising, all the greed
that it inspires in some people—it’s not right livelihood. That’s the question of
right and wrong livelihood outside.
But then there’s the whole question of how you support your mind. In other
words, by engaging in right livelihood there are many times you have to go
without. Especially as monks, you can’t try to figure out ways of attracting
donations, you can’t figure out ways of scheming or hinting or promising
rewards for people who give donations, in terms of giving them things in return.
That means that there are going to be times when you have to do without. When
that happens, it’s important to think of your other means of support: You
support the mind. The mind does have its own belongings, all the karma it
creates. Those are the belongings of the mind. That’s what supports the mind.
And just as your physical belongings can either weigh you down or support you,
in the same way your actions weigh you down or support you. When you think
about the fact that your livelihood is not placing a burden on other people that
they don’t want, it gives energy to the mind. The knowledge that your livelihood
is pure, the knowledge that your livelihood is honest: All of these things give
energy to the mind. These are belongings for the mind.
Ajaan Lee gives the example of the mind being like a tape recorder.
Nowadays of course it would be an MP3 recorder. Whatever you do, it just gets
recorded, gets stashed away, stashed away in the mind. So think about what
you’re stashing away. If you’re stashing away honesty, or are stashing away any of
the other the good qualities of the mind, this is a support. These things will
actually contribute to the long life, the health of the mind. It’s just the opposite
of the principle where you gain your livelihood in ways that are unskillful. Even
though you may have lots of things, things are not really supports for the mind at
all. If you get them in a way that’s dishonest and you start thinking about the
dishonest things you did to get them, these things actually weigh the mind down.
So even though you may have material belongings that seem to support the body,
they are a weight on the mind, they eat away at the mind.

45
 So remember the important place to look for the livelihood of the mind.
Right livelihood, on the inner level, is what you’re doing, the quality of what
you’re doing. Does it support you? Does it give you energy? When you can reflect
on the things that you’ve done skillfully, that really is energizing for the mind.
So keep this in mind. If things get difficult physically—look at the state of
the world right now. It seems like there are people who want to destroy
civilization. They want to make life difficult for other people. And it’s the nature
of human civilization that no matter how good it gets, it’s going to have to
deteriorate. It could happen in our lifetime. So make sure you have your values
straight, so that when it gets difficult to gain support for the body, at least you’ve
got support for the mind. And that’s much more important because that’s the
treasure you take with you when you go.
The image they give in the Canon is that the good actions you’ve done are
like relatives waiting for you on the other side. They’re happy to see you, they
come up and they greet you. They support you. That’s much better than being
weighed down by what you have to do in order to scrape together some support
for the body, which is going to die anyhow. Another image they give in the
Canon is throwing a rock in the water. No matter how much you try to pray for
the rock to rise up, it’s just not going to rise up. As opposed to floating oil on
water: The oil will float on top of the water. No matter how much you curse it, it
won’t sink.
So keep this in mind if things ever get difficult physically. The supports for
the body are not your true treasures. The treasures that are lasting are the ones
the mind records away, records away, through its actions. So make sure you’re
recording good actions, things that will support the mind, energize it, provide for
its health and livelihood: things like the meditation we are doing right now.
Ajaan Suwat was once asked why we didn’t have a God in Buddhism. In fact
the guy who said this said, “You guys would have a really good religion here if
only you had a God, so you’d have a sense of support when things get difficult.”
Ajaan Suwat’s response was really good. He said, “If there were a God who could
ordain that when I eat, everybody in the world gets full, I’d bow down to that
God.” In other words, the nature of supporting the body is that everything just
goes into the body and disappears, disappears, as opposed to the support that you
make for the mind. Not only do you benefit, but the people around you benefit
as well if you support the mind wisely.
So that sense of well-being, the sense of self esteem that comes from knowing
you’ve done something right: That’s an important part of the path. Not only are
you energized by it, but it also energizes the people around you. That’s a real
treasure. So make sure that you treasure it.

46
 The Thinking Cure
September 18, 2006

The Buddha once said that he got started on the right path of practice when
he learned to observe his thinking, noticing which kinds of thoughts were
skillful, which kinds were unskillful. In other words which kinds of thinking lead
to harm, which kinds of thinking didn’t lead to harm. Notice that: He didn’t say
he got on the path when he learned to stop thinking. He got on the path when he
learned to observe his thinking and to see it as part of a causal process. This is
important, because a lot of meditation has to do with thinking. There’s a popular
misconception that meditation means not thinking at all. But if you look at all
the descriptions of the noble eightfold path, you see that they all start with right
view. Then they continue with right resolve. In other words they start with
thinking: learning how to think in the right way.
This is why we have Dhamma talks. If thinking weren’t involved in the
practice, if your views weren’t important in the practice, Dhamma talks wouldn’t
serve any function. You’d have to teach by example by not saying anything at all.
But meditation doesn’t work that way. You have to learn how to think in the
right way as you come to meditation. This is a thinking cure.
In psychotherapy they have talking cures. And they note how amazing it is:
Sometimes simply talking over a neurosis—getting it out in the open, learning to
be very clear about the presuppositions behind it—can disband it. It loses its
power. In a similar vein, meditation is learning how to watch our thoughts, to be
very clear about how the mind thinks. Learn how to bring up its assumptions—
the unexpressed assumptions or the ones just barely expressed—so that you can
see them in the light of day. Then you can see what kinds of thinking you really
do believe in, what kinds of thinking you don’t. Often you’ll find that things that
have been having the most power over the mind are the ones that, if you really
look at them, don’t really make any sense at all.
So it’s important as you meditate that you have a sense of the role and power
of thinking in the meditation. For example, as we’re doing breath meditation, try
to get the mind to settle down with the breath, get concentrated on the breath.
As the Buddha said, every state of concentration depends on a perception, a
mental label you create, a little message you can carry from one moment to the
next, one that you can remember, that you can be mindful of. Here that message
is: “breath.”

47
 So what is your concept of the breath? How do you relate to it? We talk about
forcing the breath, but the breath isn’t the sort of thing you can force. You can
force the blood to different parts of your body, and that’s often what we do when
we think we’re moving the breath around in the body. We’re simply changing
the way the blood circulates. We can get ourselves into some pretty strange
physical states this way, and they can have an effect on the mind because you’re
forcing the blood too much. In other words, you’re playing around with what the
texts call the liquid element, or the liquid property, and you’ve missed the breath
entirely.
But this is the way we often relate to our body. An emotion comes up and a
lot of the physical side of the emotion has to do with the fact that our blood
circulation has changed. When we were little children, before we learned any
language, we ran up against pain, and one of the ways we dealt with it was try to
force it away. We actually used a change in the blood circulation to try to force
the pain away. That became our instinctive way of relating to the body: to force
the blood to circulate in a different way. This is why so much of the imagery of
psychotherapy is from hydraulic mechanics. Emotions get pushed underground
and then they force their way here, force their way there, the same way that
liquids under pressure get forced around and break the pipes.
But as a meditator you’ve got to realize there are other ways of relating to the
energy in the body. In fact, the only way you can really get in touch with the
breath is to reconceive the whole way you relate to the body. The best way to deal
with the breath is simply to think: allow. Think of the breath going down the
back. You don’t push it down the back. You allow it to go. When you think of
the breath going to the different parts of the body, don’t try to push it. You allow
it. If you push it, you’re pushing the blood. You’re pushing the liquids in the
body. What you can do is just think: open up, open up. Keep your wrists relaxed,
keep your ankles relaxed. All your joints: Keep them relaxed. Think of opening
up the passages by which the breath can flow. You can’t make the breath flow. It’s
something it’s going to do on its own once you’ve opened the channels.
So you maintain the thought of just “breath.” You might want to picture the
body and, say, think of breath going down the back, out the legs, down the
shoulders, out the arms, spreading out in all directions. You can keep that
picture, that perception in mind, but try not to force anything in the body. As
soon as you start forcing things, it gets difficult.
This is part of the thinking cure: getting a new conception of the breath and
learning to hold on to that conception. And you need a new conception of
yourself as well, of what you can do. Often this is a huge part of the meditation. I
remember looking through collections of Dhamma talks from the forest ajaans,
and this applies to all of them: So much of their talks is spent not in explaining

48
things, but in encouraging. Reminding people that this is something you can do.
You can relate to the body in a different way from the way you’ve been doing it.
You can relate to the mind in a different way.
As the Buddha once said, if it weren’t possible for people to change their
ways from unskillful to skillful, he wouldn’t have taught the practice of
developing skill. It wouldn’t have served any purpose. But it is possible. When
you’ve been doing something unskillful, you can change. You realize that there is
another way of doing things and that you’re capable of doing it.
This requires a certain amount of imagination. That’s the beginning of any
change in your behavior: allowing yourself to imagine that you can change the
way you behave. This is another part of the thinking cure.
This applies to all aspects of the practice. You start with generosity. When
you make up your mind to give a gift, you’re imagining yourself as someone with
something to spare. Up to that point, you may have been thinking that you’re
hungry and lacking, and all you could think about was gaining, gaining, gaining,
getting, getting, getting. But when you allow yourself to think that you have
more than enough, you can give. And you begin to realize that this has very little
to do with how much you may have materially. Poor people can often be more
generous than rich people because they have a different idea of “enough.” When
you make this simple change in your thinking, you put yourself in a new place: a
place with more dignity, a place of more inner worth.
The gift of forgiveness is the same sort of thing. Someone else has harmed
you. If all you can think about is how much you’re a victim, you make yourself a
smaller person. But if you think of yourself as large-hearted enough to forgive,
you suddenly become a larger person. That gives the mind more space to move
around.
And so on down the line. You learn that you can observe the precepts. You
learn that you can meditate, simply by changing the way you think about
yourself and your capabilities.
So remember that this is a thinking cure. There do come parts of the practice
where you learn not to think, but you have your reasons for not thinking. You’re
doing it with specific aims in mind, so be clear about your aims and where your
aims come from. What are the values that lie behind them? What’s your
understanding of suffering and the end of suffering that lies behind how you do
things? Make sure to straighten out your thoughts. Once you straighten out your
thoughts, realizing how suffering comes about and how you can put an end to it,
you’ve got everything you need to put an end to it. It’s simply a matter of
allowing yourself to think in those ways.
Notice that the emphasis is on allowing. You don’t have to force yourself.

49
You allow something better than what has been happening to happen.
Ajaan Fuang once said that if we could force our way into nirvana, everybody
would have arrived there a long time ago. But it’s not something you can do by
force. You ultimately get there only through discernment. And discernment
starts with learning how to think in the right way. It doesn’t cost anything,
doesn’t require a lot of energy: just allowing yourself to think in skillful ways.
That can turn you around right there, and head you in the right direction. So
before you stop thinking, learn how to think in ways that are really helpful, allow
yourself to think in ways that are really helpful, and it will make all the difference
in your practice.

50
 Energy & Efficiency
September 24, 2006

There is a famous story of the young man who was very delicately brought up
—so delicately brought up that he even had hair on the soles of his feet. When he
ordained as a monk, he tried practicing meditation really hard, sitting long
periods of time, doing walking meditation long periods of time. But because his
feet were so tender, all that walking got his feet bloody. He thought to himself,
“Here I’ve given all the effort I can, and nothing is coming of it.” He thought of
disrobing. The Buddha sensed this and appeared right in front of him, and asked
him, “Back when you were a layperson, did you play the lute?” The monk said he
had. He was skilled at playing the lute. And the Buddha asked him, “When you
tightened the strings too tight, what happened?” It didn’t sound right at all.
“How about too loose?” Didn’t sound right either. And the Buddha then said, “In
the same way, you should tune your energy to the point where it’s just right and
then tune the rest of the strings of your practice.” In other words, conviction,
mindfulness, concentration, discernment: Tune those to the level of your energy.
In that way the practice will come out right.
So keep this in mind as you’re meditating. Look at the level of energy you
have—this can be both physical and mental energy—and tune your practice to
that level. Everything else has to be tuned to that. In other words when you’re
sick, when you’re not feeling well, the practice goes one way. You may spend less
time putting physical energy into the practice, and you may not be able to gain
the levels of concentration or very precise mindfulness that you want, but do the
best you can given the circumstances. When your energy level is high, don’t be
too quick to say, “Well, I’ve meditated enough today. It’s eleven o’clock, that’s
my usual time to go to bed, I’ll go to bed then.” When your energy level is high,
stick with it. Tune your practice to the level of energy that you have. And do
what you can to increase the energy. This is one of the roles of right mindfulness:
gaining a sense where you’re doing the practice inefficiently. It’s like increasing
the gas mileage on your car. You may have a limited amount of gas, but if the car
is more efficient you can go further.
So try to do the practice as efficiently as you can. Look for areas where you’re
causing yourself unnecessary stress, placing unnecessary obstacles in your way.
Clear those away. This is where mindfulness and discernment come in—
mindfulness here including alertness, watching to see what’s going on, how
things are going with your practice. Use them to look for areas where you’re

51
expending wasted energy.
There was once a woman, a student of Ajaan Fuang, who had chronic cancer.
It was amazing. She would get cancer on one part of the body, they’d take that
out, then she found it in another part of the body. This went on for years and
years. As far as I know, she is still alive. This started twenty plus years ago. One
time, she developed a form of cancer that required radiation, but she was allergic
to the anesthesia. So she told the doctors, “Look, I’m a meditator. I can handle
pain. Let me just use my power of concentration.” So they tried it, and she got
through, but it took all her energy, and left her feeling drained. But she was able
to make it through without any anesthesia. Ajaan Fuang went to visit her the
next day and as she told him this, he said, “Look, you’re wasting your energy. Try
to use your discernment, too.” In other words, get a sense of what’s awareness as
opposed to the object of awareness, and keep that distinction in mind. Just being
able to make that distinction makes it a lot easier to deal with the pain. You don’t
have to use simply the brute force of your concentration.
So an important principle in discernment is learning what to let go of so that
you’re not wasting energy. This is especially important as you find yourself
physically ill, as you grow old, as you approach death. A lot of wasted energy gets
spent in your idea of who you are and what you’re responsible for, and what you
want to salvage out of all this. If you can remind yourself that the important
thing to salvage is the state of your mind, keeping the mind as bright and
centered and clear as possible, then you can come through a lot more intact.
That’s your responsibility, everything else is optional. So even though you may
have been identifying with your body, you find there comes a point where it’s an
unnecessary burden. You may have gotten some use out of identifying with it but
there comes a point in the practice where that becomes an obstacle to any kind of
happiness. So before that point comes, you want to learn how to let go, realizing
that any concern about the physical state of the body is ultimately going to have
to meet up with the fact that the body has to grow old and ill and die, regardless
of how worried you are about it. So the worry accomplishes nothing. It becomes
a distraction and an unnecessary burden.
This is where it’s important that you learn how to adjust your sense of who
you are, and trim it down. It’s like trimming down your luggage. You know
you’re going to have to travel, so carry only what’s necessary. It’s like going
camping. You don’t want to carry so much that you can’t walk. At the same time
you don’t want to have so few provisions that you can’t keep yourself going.
To begin with, make sure you just hold onto this ability to be mindful, alert.
Get your concentration as solid as you can. In other words, hold onto good
qualities. As for your other responsibilities, you have to keep practicing letting
them go. Whatever work you’ve got to do, whatever responsibilities you’ve got to

52
look after, learn how to let any ideas of those responsibilities down. Learn how to
dis-identify with the body. You may have to pick it up again at the end of the
meditation, but for the time being, just learn how to reflect on it: What in here is
something that you can really carry with you, that’s really worth carrying with
you? It’s all physical elements. That list of the 32 parts of the body we chanted
just now: Which of those do you want to take with you? They serve their function
while the body’s alive, but you’ll have to let them all go. Besides, who would
want to carry urine around or feces or contents of the stomach or lungs? They’re
useful while the body’s alive, and you want to take care of the body so that it can
continue functioning as best as it can, but there will come a time when it just
can’t do this anymore. So learn how to practice letting it go ahead of time,
putting it down. At the very least you find this is a lot more efficient way of
keeping the mind calm, keeping the mind still, clear, bright.
It’s in this way that discernment is an issue of maximizing efficiency,
husbanding your resources, learning what to let go of so you can hold onto
what’s valuable. If you try to hold onto too many things at once, you end up
dropping them all. It’s like juggling too many things in the air all at once. If
they’re eggs, they’ll come splattering down because you can’t keep track of them
all. Juggle what you can manage. If you can manage one egg, stick with one egg.
Don’t get too grandiose about what you’ve got to look after. Keep things
trimmed down, pared down, so that you’re holding on only to what’s essential.
That way, you find that the issue of suffering and stress gets more manageable as
well.

53
 On Not Being a Victim
September 26, 2006

The mind has two basic functions. One is that it registers data coming in
through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and intellect. And the other is that it
wills things, tries to exert an influence on things outside. You might think of
these as the passive and the active functions of the mind or the reactive and
proactive functions, because even as the mind is receiving sense data, it’s not
totally passive. The willing function shapes the things you notice. Sometimes
people complain about this: This is one of the reasons why we miss a lot of things
in our lives, because we’re intent on something else. That is a problem, but it can
also be used to our advantage. When the Buddha describes dependent co-arising,
well before he starts talking about sensory data, he talks about issues of attention
and intention and perception. These factors influence the way you see and hear
and experience things. And they can have an influence either for suffering or for
the end of suffering.
So one of the functions of the path is to learn how to take this willing side of
the mind—the side that has ways of attending to things and perceiving things
and intending things—and turn that into the path.
One of the first things you notice as you meditate is that the mind does tend
to switch back and forth between these two functions: the function that’s simply
registering what’s going on and then reacting to that, and the other side that’s
more proactive. And you can see this very directly in the breath. You can simply
watch the way the breath already seems to be, or you can put up a mental picture
of how you would like the breath to be. Just a thought, don’t try to force it in
that direction, just think about it. Think about the breath coursing through the
body. As soon as you breathe in, it goes all the way through the body, out to
every pore. Just hold that image in mind. After a while, you begin to notice
which sensations in the body seem to be corresponding to that picture you have.
And you can try encouraging them a little bit.
In the beginning it should be just that, a little bit. Don’t force things too
much. Simply holding that different picture in mind helps you to read your
experience in a different way, and also to shape your experience in a way that’s
more skillful. There may be a pain in the body in some place, and if you breathe
in reaction to the pain, many times it just compounds the problem. In this way,
the business of both reacting and then being proactive can get into some pretty
nasty feedback loops. You feel trapped by a particular pain and then you breathe

54
in reaction to that sense of feeling trapped, and then it makes the pain worse.
You feel even more trapped and everything just spirals down.
But you could think in other ways. You see that even though there may be
pain sensations in that part of the body, is that all there is in that part of the
body? Are there other sensations that are not painful? And your proactive side of
the mind begins to change the way you experience things.
In some cases, pain is a little hard to tackle straight on, so you work first with
the breath. Just think of the breath going well through the body. Think of the
body as being light, filled with breath energy, healthy breath energy, luminous
breath energy. Just hold that thought in mind. Don’t be too impatient to see the
results, because after all, the power of thought depends on a consistent strong
thought that you can carry on over time. If you think a little bit and then
scramble around looking for results from the thought, that’s just a sign of
impatience. The thought doesn’t have time to exert any power, have any
influence. So you learn how to hold that thought in mind and then look very
gradually to see if there are any sensations in the body that would correspond to
light breath energy, full breath energy, free-flowing breath energy, then you can
encourage those. This helps you begin to see how much power the mind can
have over shaping your experience.
In this way you take the willing part of the mind, the proactive part of the
mind, and use it to your own advantage. This is why appropriate attention is such
an important part of the path. When you could think about things in terms of
who you are, what kind of person you are—you’re the kind of person who’s lazy,
the kind of person who never finishes anything, the kind of person who is always
a victim of events—and that just creates a vicious cycle. This is why the Buddha
doesn’t encourage you to think about what you are. Instead, he has you think
about, “What’s an action? What’s the result of an action? What’s an intention?
What’s a skillful intention?”
You can have all kinds of intentions that free up your mind. There are lots of
different ways you can intend to focus on the breath. So find an intention that
seems to get good results. It may not be the sort of intention that your
preconceived notion of “you” would ever think of, but why confine yourself?
Why make yourself a victim? Why leave yourself in that position? You can learn
how to be proactive in a more skillful way. After all, all the elements of the path
are fabricated. Your experience is fabricated through your intentions to begin
with. And the path, everything from right view on down to right concentration:
These are all fabrications. Right view means learning to look at things in a certain
way, learning to look for certain things. So learn to look for some concentration,
look for some stillness, look for mindfulness. Their potentials are there.
This is the Buddha’s basic teaching on dhatu, or element or property. There

55
are physical and mental potentials just waiting to be nourished, just waiting to be
activated. But if you sit there as a victim all the time, you’ll never activate the
proper things. You’ll activate all the wrong things.
So it’s not like you’re totally passive. You are shaping events, but at the
moment you’re shaping them under the influence of an unhealthy feedback loop.
Following the path means taking the power of the mind that shapes things and
using it for good purposes. Remember the kind of person the Buddha was. He
didn’t just react to events. He had a very strong sense of what should be: There
should be an end to suffering. He focused his conviction on that. And the power
of his conviction made a difference. It reshaped his mind, reshaped his experience
of things. It shaped his mind until it reached a point where it could see things
very clearly in terms of why there is suffering and how you can put an end to
suffering. It didn’t just happen; it happened through the force of his will. Not
blind will, but strong will.
So put some conviction into the path. Put some conviction into yourself.
Realize that you can fabricate the path in your own mind, put together all the
various elements, find the potentials in your mind for mindfulness, alertness,
concentration, insight, and develop them. The mind has a power, and the
problem is we tend to misuse it. We take that power and use it to create suffering,
even though we don’t want suffering. We just get into reactive modes, not
realizing that we have the power to reshape our experience. Some people shape
their experience in ways that are really harmful, but you can also shape your
experience in ways that are conducive both to your happiness and the happiness
of people around you. Conducive to understanding, conducive to release. So
learn to take advantage of those powers, because that’s the only way you’re going
to find your way out.

56
 Doing, Maintaining, Using
October 4, 2006

Ajaan Fuang once said that there are three stages to concentration practice.
The first is learning how to do it. The second is learning how to maintain it. And
the third is learning how to put it to use. The doing is not all that hard—focus
the mind on the breath. The breath is right there. You don’t have to go
scrounging around. You don’t have to go to the ends of the earth to find your
breath. It’s right next to the mind. It’s simply a question of learning to be more
sensitive to it. That’s the hard part of doing it: having a clear sense of when the
breath is coming in, when it’s going out, having a clear sense of when you are
making it unnecessarily uncomfortable.
This involves watching it for a while, and then adjusting it. Think, “a little bit
longer,” think, “a little bit shorter.” See how the breathing responds, and how it
feels as it responds. You can think, “deeper,” think of your whole body all the way
down to your toes breathing in, breathing out. Think of the breath all around the
body. Think of the body as being like a big sponge and the breath is coming in
through all the pores. See what way of conceiving the breath feels best.
Once you learn how to do this, then the trick is learning how to maintain it.
In other words, learning how not to slip off. Learning how to make it
comfortable is one of the tricks in learning how to maintain it, because the mind
is always looking for food. What we’re doing as we’re meditating is giving it good
food to eat. The sense of comfort that comes with being familiar with the breath
helps get the mind more and more inclined to keep coming back. It’s like feeding
a stray dog. If you give it good food, it’s going to come back.
The mind has a tendency to stray, but as long as you feed it well, it’ll learn
more and more that this is a good place to be, a really good place to feed. You can
think of the meditation techniques as cooking techniques—you’re learning how
to feed yourself well. Most of us are the kind of person who just goes rummaging
through a garbage heap, then eats whatever, anything that even remotely
resembles food. And of course you get sick that way. Sometimes you get good
food, sometimes you get bad. You hear stories about restaurants throwing out
good food. So sometimes you get good food as you rummage around, but a lot of
times it’s garbage, really bad garbage. Sometimes it’s spoiled. But you keep on
eating it because you don’t have better food. You don’t know how to cook.
There was a homeless shelter in DC years back. They went around to all the

57
embassies and all the really good restaurants in DC and just asked for their
leftover food. Then they took that and served it at the homeless shelters. All of a
sudden the homeless people were eating French food and other exotic dishes.
This got the homeless people interested in this kind of food. So right next to the
soup kitchen the people who ran the shelter opened a cooking school where they
offered to teach the homeless people how to cook French food and other exotic
dishes. As a result, many of the homeless people became really good chefs. They
were able to get jobs. This is a good metaphor for our meditation. We learn how
to eat well, how to feed the mind well, so we don’t have to go running through
garbage bins. As the mind learns to feed well, it’ll have a tendency not to want to
go back to its old ways.
This leads naturally to that third step: using the meditation. The mind needs
strength in all kinds of situations, and not only while you’re sitting here with
your eyes closed. In fact, it especially needs strength when you’re dealing with
difficult people, difficult situations, situations that give rise to anger, situations
that give rise to fear. One of the important uses of concentration is to learn how
to keep the mind with the breath in the midst of all kinds of strange situations,
all kinds of challenging situations. Instead of leaping out, putting all your
awareness outside, you try to keep your awareness centered inside as you deal
with whatever’s hard to deal with. That way you’re coming from a position of
strength. So you learn how to stay with the breath and keep the breath
comfortable when there’s fear, when there’s anger, when there’s greed, when
there’s uncertainty, when there are all kinds of things happening around you, or
happening inside the mind.
This is where the concentration really shows its benefits, in that you can keep
feeding and strengthening the mind even in the midst of difficult situations. It’s
also by learning how to feed the mind in situations like this that you gain more
and more insight into the mind. You begin to see how it slips off into its old
habits, what tempts it to slip off. Sometimes it’s fear. You’re afraid if let our old
defenses down, this new defense is not going to help us. But as you get more
confident in your meditation, you begin to realize this is a much better defense,
coming from a position of strength. When the mind is calm and centered, you
can think more clearly. Then you learn how to apply it. In situations where you
would tend to get depressed, you can cheer up the mind simply by the way you
relate to the breath, by the way you relate to your sense of the body. Other times,
when the mind seems scattered all over the place, you can learn how to focus it
and settle it down, and just keep it really, really solidly based.
The Buddha talks about three important skills in learning how to keep the
mind centered. One is gladdening the mind, another is steadying the mind, and
the third is liberating the mind. Whenever you find that a particular feeling has

58
taken over, you learn how to pry the mind loose from that, from its grip, so that
the mind is free even in the midst of situations that would normally tie it down
or oppress it.
So all of these are techniques in the proper care and feeding for the mind. As
you feed the mind properly like this, it leads naturally into gaining insight into
the various component factors of your meditation. You’ve learned that in this
situation you have to add more pleasure, in that situation you have to change
your perceptions, in this situation you have to change the way you think about
these things. Well, these are all different aggregates: feeling, perception, thought
constructs. And as you learn how to use them in different ways to deal with
different situations, they begin to stand out more clearly because you see them in
action, you’ve used them in action.
This is when you’re going to gain real insight into them, how you can relate
to them in a way that’s healthy rather than just grabbing on and gobbling them
down. This is how the mind begins to gain insight into its attachments. Because
it sees the component factors, it’s learned how to use them in a way that it’s really
on familiar terms with them, and it’s changed its relationship to them. They now
become tools rather than things that you would identify with or things that you
are constantly chewing on, because you’ve learned how to feed the mind better,
feed it more skillfully.
So wherever you are in the practice, if you find that you haven’t been able to
do the concentration, work on just bringing things together here. Once you’ve
learned how to do it, then learn how to maintain it. And when you learn how to
maintain it, the way to gain insight into it is not to try to take it apart yet. It’s
through learning to apply it to all kinds of different situations so that you get a
really good feel for it. As you gain that feel for it, then the various elements of
form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness begin to
separate out. You can watch them for what they are. Then when you let them go,
it’s not that you throw them away. You’ve simply learned that you don’t have to
identify with them. You can pick them up when you need them, put them down
when you don’t. So this is how the practice of concentration leads to
discernment. It teaches you how to eat well, how to feed the mind well, to the
point where ultimately it doesn’t have to feed anymore.

59
 Before Your Face Was Born
October 8, 2006

Back when I was in grade school, my mother was chairman of the local
school board. It wasn’t much of a school: just three classrooms, grades one
through eight, sixty kids in the school. My first grade teacher, also second and
third grade teacher, would stop by at the house every now and then after school
to talk things over with my mother. One day they got onto the topic of religion.
My teacher was Roman Catholic, and she said something that even when I was
six years old sounded odd. She said, “Well, if being Catholic doesn’t make you
better than other people, what good is it?”
When you stop and think about it, that’s what a lot of people do in this
world. They do something because they think it makes them better than other
people. Sometimes really crazy things—and often the crazier the activity, the
more they have to justify it by saying that it makes them better than other people.
That whole mindset—the idea that there are people who are better than others or
worse than others or equal to others—is a real trap because it tends to swing you
back and forth between extremes: either exaggerated self-esteem or exaggerated
self-hatred, back and forth, back and forth. And either extreme can make you
miserable because the idea of self, of who you are, becomes the big issue in life.
You have to do everything you can to shore it up. Then when you find yourself
doing things that are not up to that high standard, you feel like a failure.
It’s good to remind yourself that all those issues are useless. They don’t
accomplish anything at all. They are what Ajaan Maha Boowa calls the fangs of
unawareness, the fangs of ignorance: this whole issue of conceit.
So remember: We’re here meditating not because it makes us better than
anybody else, but simply because we want to be happy, and we want to have a
happiness that’s worth the effort that goes into it. We know that for our
happiness to last, it has to be a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody else. So
we’re compassionate to others—again, not because it makes us a better person,
but because it leads to true happiness. When you keep the issue close to the
ground in that way, you don’t have to go swinging back and forth between
extremes of self-esteem or self-hatred. You can focus simply on the question of
whether your happiness is true.
Think back on the forest tradition. It was started by sons of peasants up in
northeast Thailand, which is the poorest part of the country. And one of the

60
issues Ajaan Mun found himself dealing with again and again was students
feeling that they didn’t have what it takes to really do the practice. He kept
reminding them: You’ve got a human body and you’ve got a mind that doesn’t
want to suffer. That’s all you really need. As for how well you’re going to do in
the practice, you start where you are.
This is one of the reasons why we have the recollection of the Sangha to set
our standards right. You look at all the people who’ve been practicing: There
have been men, women, and children; rich people, poor people; healthy people,
sick people. And what do they have in common? They wanted true happiness and
they were willing to do what it takes. That’s all you really need in the practice.
The question of whether this makes you better than anyone else is not an issue.
That issue of pride tends to come in when you do crazy things and then have to
justify them to yourself. You look at all the rituals and rules that used to be a big
part of religion, and still are part of a lot of religions: They make no sense at all.
And yet people keep on doing them because they have the idea that these things
make them better than other people. The more unreasonable the rule or ritual,
the better they are for their willingness to submit to it. It makes no sense at all.
So fortunately in the Buddha’s teachings, we don’t have rules like that. There
are a fair number of rules but they make sense. You think of the Buddha himself
prior to his Awakening: When he was trying to find the path, he spent six long
years in austerities. And what can keep you going through six long years of
austerities? The idea that the austerities make you better than other people. That’s
what kept him going for six years. But then he realized: All those sacrifices were
really for nothing. When you can admit that to yourself—that what you thought
made you special was really a waste of time—that’s when you learn humility.
And when you learn humility, you’re ready to learn what you really need to
know.
So it’s good to come to the practice with an attitude of humility. We’ve been
making mistakes all along. It’s good to be able to admit the mistakes and to
realize that, Yes, the mind does need training. Ok, here is an opportunity to do it.
A lot of my training with Ajaan Fuang consisted of his pointing out to me where
my weak points were. He wasn’t doing it all the time, but he did it at strategic
times. He once commented on how Westerners are very stubborn. I had to
reflect, well, how many Westerners had he ever met in his life? I think I was the
only one.
So that was the prime lesson I had to learn: how not to be stubborn, and
especially not stubborn in trying to shore up my exaggerated sense of myself. And
it really helped. I found myself having to do things that I knew I wasn’t really
good at. When he was sick, I had to look after him. I wasn’t especially good at it,
but there was nobody else there. Even though I wasn’t doing a perfect job, it was

61
better than nobody helping him at all. That thought was enough to keep me
going. So finding myself spending a lot of time working on tasks that I wasn’t
automatically good at was very good for me. I learned a lot.
So it’s important that you come to the meditation without the idea that
you’re already going to excel at it. In fact one of Ajaan Fuang’s strongest terms of
criticism was for somebody who thought he was already good before he had even
tried it. Ruu kawn koed, loed kawn tham was his phrase. You know about things
before they happen, and you’re excellent before you’ve even tried your hand.
That attitude, he said, sets you up for a fall. All that’s asked is that you realize
you’re suffering, you realize your actions are the important cause for your
suffering, and you’re willing to learn. Any attitudes that go beyond that set you
up for a fall.
This is why right view focuses on the issue of suffering. There’s no question
about making you a better person. It’s simply a matter of seeing where there’s
suffering and where there’s a cause of suffering. That motivation goes a lot deeper
than your self-image. When you were a little baby, you didn’t have a self-image,
but you did know you were suffering and you tried to figure out some way to
stop it.
So try to dig back into that attitude: That’s your face before you were born.
You weren’t concerned about your face or what it looked like, or what other
people would think about what it looked like. There was just that plain old issue
of suffering and you knew that something had to be done about it. Well, here’s a
path to do something about it. So dig back into that attitude—even before your
face was born. There was just the issue of suffering and the need to overcome it.
When you have that attitude, that’s all you really need. And the questions of who
you are or how your performance as a meditator reflects on you: Those are
thoughts to put aside. It’s not the case that we don’t pass judgment on our
actions, but don’t let the issue of who you are or how good you are become the
object of judgment.
There’s a difference between being judgmental and being judicious.
Judgmental is when you’re impatient and you want to come to a decision really
fast without putting any effort into finding out the facts of the case. That’s
judgmentalism. It’s harmful. It can lead to a lot of unskillful behavior. Being
judicious is when you look at an action to see: Does this action really help put an
end to suffering or does it cause more suffering? You look at the results and then
adjust your next action accordingly. You’re not here to judge you as a person;
you’re here to judge your actions and learn from them. That’s being judicious,
and that’s where your powers of evaluation, your faculty of judgment, really are
appropriate.
When the issue of your identity or your self-image gets in the way, put it

62
aside. If you find it hard to put it aside, don’t say, “This is something really wrong
with me,” for that gets you into a tailspin. Don’t worry about that. Just notice
each time it comes and then say, “I know this one; I know where it goes,” and do
your best to let it go. That’s when you can focus on the issue at hand, which is the
fact that there is suffering, but there is a potential, there is a path to put an end to
it. You’ve got the opportunity to follow that path. That’s all that really matters.

63
 The Riddle Tree
October 12, 2006

There’s a story of a young American monk ordained in Thailand who went to

study with one of the famous forest ajaans. He asked the ajaan, “What meditation
object is going to bring calm and peace to my mind?” And the ajaan said, “I don’t
know. You have to find out.” The young monk hearing, “I don’t know,” thought
it meant that “I don’t know anything about meditation.” He ended up disrobing
and going someplace else. But that’s not what the ajaan meant. What he meant
was that each of us has to find out what’s going to work for us as we meditate.
You have to find the object that’s most suitable for you, and the best way to relate
to it. The whole purpose of developing concentration is to get the mind to settle
down, and the way to get it to settle down is to give it a place where it likes to
stay settled. What’s going to work for you is going to depend on your
preferences, on your background, on all kinds of factors that are purely personal.
For each of us, the process of developing concentration is an individual
thing. So you have to explore. There’s no telling exactly what kind of breathing is
going to be good for you, or whether there are times when you need to focus on
something else instead: like recollecting the Buddha, recollecting the Dhamma,
the Sangha, contemplating of the body, developing thoughts of goodwill,
compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. It’s really a personal matter which of
these is going to work for you.
There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of meditation. Breath meditation comes the
closest to a universal object because, after all, we all have a breath, and for all of
us it’s an important part of our lives. Ajaan Lee recommends taking it as your
home base. It’s the safest of all meditation objects. But there are times when you
need to forage around in other areas. You may find yourself way off in left field
and have to find your way back to home base. It may require thoughts of
goodwill to get back there or it may require contemplation of the body. This is
something you have to explore for yourself. You have to experiment. You have to
learn how to observe to see what works.
This is why being observant is so essential to the practice. There’s a lot that
even the most psychic teacher who can read minds cannot tell you. Ajaan Fuang,
who I firmly believe could read my mind and the minds of many other people,
said one time, “Even when you can read minds, you can’t tell what’s going to
work for somebody: how they’ll respond to your words, what technique is going
to work for them. That’s something that they have to find out from within.” So

64
be willing to explore.
The same principle applies not only to tranquility,[ but also to insight.
There’s a sutta called The Riddle Tree in which a monk goes to different senior
monks and asks them, “What topic do you contemplate in order to gain
awakening?” One monk says, “the five aggregates,” another one says, “the six
sense media,” another one says, “the six elements,” another one says “dependent
co-arising.” The monk was not satisfied with all these different answers, because
he couldn’t understand why their answers should be so different. So he went to
see the Buddha. And the Buddha said that the different answers were like the
Riddle tree. Apparently there’s a tree in India that’s kind of like the coral tree:
During some seasons it has leaves, and at other seasons it has no leaves at all, and
when it has no leaves it puts out red flowers. It’s called the Riddle tree because
people would say, “What’s black like coal in the winter and red like meat in the
spring?” That sort of thing. In other words, the appearance of the tree depends on
which time of year you’re talking about. “In the same way,” the Buddha said,
“those different monks answered in different ways because for each of them a
different topic worked, so they talked in line with what had worked for them.”
So again with regard to insight, there’s no one-size-fits-all, no one technique
that’s going to work for everyone. But if you’re observant while you calm down
the mind, you begin to see the way your mind works. That’s really what you want
to know. Some people as they are meditating tend to focus on the issue of feeling:
which feelings are pleasant and how to relate to pleasant feelings. Sometimes you
find it easy to stay focused on the breath and have a pleasant feeling alongside the
breath, and yet not get distracted. Other people have a real problem. As soon as a
pleasant feeling comes up, they drop the breath, run to the pleasant feeling, and
end up losing their focus. So in that case, it’s going to be important to gain
insight into the nature of feeling just to get the mind to settle down.
This is how discernment fosters concentration. The typical pattern, of course,
is that concentration fosters discernment. But as the Buddha said at one point, to
get the mind to settle down to good strong concentration you need both
tranquility and insight. Sometimes you’ll depend more on one side than on the
other. And it will vary from day to day, from session to session, even from right
now to five minutes from now. Sometimes when you’re starting to get the mind
to settle down, it’s simply a matter of getting it calm and not thinking about
anything else. All you have to do is allow the meditation object to do its work. At
other times, you have to understand what you’re doing, understand the problems
that are arising, learn how to ask questions and attempt answers.
So if you notice that you’re having a problem slipping off into feelings of
pleasure and finding yourself in a nice hazy spot where you don’t really know
where you are – you’re not asleep, but you’re not really focused on anything—

65
you know you’ve got a problem with pleasure. You’ve got to back up. What can
you do? Well, when there’s a pleasant rhythm going in the breath, you’ve
immediately got to work on developing your frame of reference, spreading your
awareness so that it fills the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you
breathe out. In other words, you have to change your perception of what you’re
focused on in order to overcome the attraction to the feeling.
This of course then gets you into issues of perception—sañña in Pali—and
the role it plays in meditation. In cases like that you may find that the perception
becomes the issue on which you have to focus in order to gain insight. This is
particularly true as you’re shifting from form levels of concentration to the
formless. It’s a shift in perception. You’re right here when you go from, say
focusing on the breath to the point where the breath gets really still. You begin to
notice that the boundary of the body begins to disappear. It’s as if your sensation
of the body is just a cloud of little sensation droplets or little sensation points,
and you learn how to stay there for a while.
Sometimes you feel afraid of the fact that the breath isn’t coming in and out,
so you switch back. You have to learn how to not get fooled by that thought
construct. When you get past that, then you realize that instead of focusing on
the little droplets or points of sensation, you can focus on the space in between.
Now if you find yourself suddenly visualizing infinite space, you might get
disoriented, because your mind stretches out to the limits of infinity of that
space. That can be calming, or you might find it disturbing. If it’s disturbing, ask
yourself: Which sense door are you focused on? Are you focused on the visual
sense door or the bodily sense door? This is where you switch from issues of the
aggregates to issues of the sense doors. Stay simply with the bodily sensation of
space. Don’t go off into the visualization of space, because the sensation of space
can be really pleasant but the visualization can be disorienting.
Then from there on in, it’s more an issue of perception again. How are you
going to label this experience? You can label it as space, or you can label it simply
as infinite consciousness: what’s aware of the space. Or the sense of oneness in
that infinite consciousness. What happens if you drop the perception of oneness?
Nothingness. And what happens when you drop the perception of “nothing”?
And so on down the line. You see that as you get the mind through stages of
concentration, you’re going to be shifting around among issues of thought
fabrication or perception or feeling or consciousness or form, the body: all the
aggregates.
Or you may find that the issue is how you visualize things as opposed to how
you feel them: those are issues of the sense media. Or you start looking into
questions of causation: What are you doing that’s causing stress in any particular
state of mind? You can’t let go of the stress. As the Buddha said, your duty with

66
regard to stress is to comprehend it. But you can figure out what thought
formation, what craving is causing it; then you can stop that. It’s like finding
yourself choking on smoke. You can’t put out the smoke, but you can put out the
fire. And you find that this kind of analysis works on getting you from one stage
of concentration into another.
So simply putting the mind through its paces as you get it to concentrate
begins to throw up certain issues about the aggregates, sense media, causality.
And the issues that you tend to find most fascinating or those that cause you the
most trouble: Those are the issues you should focus on for the sake of insight, the
insights that first lead to stronger concentration, and then lead to release.
No one can tell you beforehand what’s going to be the topic on which you
can settle down—what kind of breathing is going to be best for you, or when
there are times you have to focus on something else in addition to the breath or
beside the breath. No one can tell you what’s going to give rise to insight. There
are all sorts of insight techniques out there, but they’re really just sophisticated
forms of concentration. The actual insight has to come from seeing how your
own mind works. And the best way to see it working is to put it through the
laboratory experiment of getting it to settle down.
It’s like learning how to cook. You can just throw some ingredients in the
pot and hope that it comes out Ok. Or you can begin to notice what kind of
cooking techniques work best, so that the thing gets cooked through without
burning. Or if you’re fixing a stew of different vegetables, which vegetables have
to go in first, which vegetables go in later, so that you don’t end up with some
undercooked and others overcooked. Looking for the technique that works:
That’s what gives rise to insight, gives rise to understanding about the food. And
the same principle works in the mind. You’ve got to notice what works and
where you have problems; learn how to question the problems and figure out an
answer. The basic terms of analysis in terms of the aggregates, the sense media,
the elements, dependent co-arising, are there to give you ideas. But as to what’s
actually going to work in any particular situation depends on your own
proclivities, your own powers of observation, your own ingenuity.
That’s when the insight becomes not just a topic you read about or
something you try to impose on the mind, but something that grows naturally
out of the practice of learning how to bring the mind to a sense of peace, a sense
of calm. The more natural the questions and the experience, the deeper the
insight is going to go, and the more relevant it is to the actual suffering that’s
going on in your mind.
So this is why meditation is a process of exploration. You’re not trying to
clone enlightenment. You’re trying to explore cause and effect as they reveal
themselves in the process of bringing your own mind to peace.

67
 Close to What You Know
October 16, 2006

Our minds are filled with all kinds of knowledge, but exactly how certain is
that knowledge and how useful is it? Right now as you’re meditating, there’s not
much you need to know. You’re sitting here focusing on your breath, so notice
how the breath feels. If it doesn’t feel comfortable, see what you can to do to
make it more comfortable. In other words, notice what you’re doing and notice
the results. That’s a very direct kind of knowledge. The sensation of ease or stress
or whatever you’re feeling with the breath: that’s something you experience
directly. That’s the sort of thing you experienced back when you were a child
before you knew language at all. It’s a very direct kind of knowledge. As you
move away from this level of experience, things get less and less certain.
To function in many areas of life, we have to deal with uncertainties. But for
the time being, let’s stick with what’s really certain: just what you’re doing with
the breath and the results you’re getting. Notice when you’re putting too much
pressure on the breath, or not enough pressure – “not enough” meaning that the
mind just starts floating away. As you do this, you’re learning a very important
principle: the principle of action. This, for the Buddha, is a basic truth—cause
and effect, the actions you do and the results you get. When he described his
Awakening in its simplest terms, he put it as a principle of causality, which
applied directly to this issue. What are you doing and what results are you
getting? In particular, what are you doing that’s causing suffering? What can you
do to put an end to suffering?
Those are his basic building blocks. As for other issues that come up in the
practice, they should all be related back to those building blocks. Like the whole
question of self: We’re often told that the Buddha taught that there wasn’t a self,
but then immediately the question is: Who’s doing the actions? Who’s receiving
the results? What goes from one life to the next? But that’s putting the cart before
the horse, assuming that this teaching on not-self, which is an interpretation, is
the primary teaching. We forget that the primary teaching is the fact of action
and result, skillful and unskillful. If you take that as your context, then the issue
of self becomes a question of: What kind of activity is self? And what are the
results of selfing in different situations?
When you look at your sense of self in that way, you begin to realize that it’s
something you do, something you put together given certain circumstances. You
perceive a certain world out there, and again, that’s an assumption based on some

68
things you’ve done. Then you assume a self acting in that world. This selfing is
not just metaphysical, it’s often psychological. You sense certain motives that
other people have, and you react to those assumptions. And what often happens
is that you often suffer. If it’s the four-year-old you you’re selfing, you suffer a lot.
So you’ve got to remember that we need to be able to take those worlds
apart, take that sense of self apart—see them both as actions. You create your
sense of that particular world. You’re reading the data, you’re reading certain
things into it, and you’re coming out with suffering. So you need to learn how to
read the data in a different way, a way that’s not going to lead to suffering.
This is one of the reasons why the breath is so useful, because you can step
outside of a lot of your thought worlds by stepping into the world of the breath.
You can always tap into the breath because it’s always here as long as you’re alive.
And from this perspective you can look at action and its results in a very direct
way, because your intentions are right here next to the breath. There’s nothing in
the body, nothing in the physical world, that’s any closer to your mind than your
breath. You keep looking away, out there, out there, making assumptions about
the world outside and neglecting some very important data right here.
You’ve probably heard those reports they’ve had of discovering planets
around other stars beside the sun. Well, nobody so far has actually seen any of the
planets. They have certain data that indicate regular fluctuations in the star’s
brightness that would suggest that there’s a planet there. But what do they really
know for sure in those experiments? Well, they know what they did to get the
data they got, they know the raw data, and they know the assumptions and
principles they used in interpreting the data. That’s all they really know. But the
conclusion that there’s a planet depends on the assumptions, which may turn out
right, may turn out wrong.
But notice how they do that. The actual knowledge they’re gained is the
knowledge of how they ran the experiment and what kind of data they got—the
raw data, the numbers that come out—and then what they did with those
numbers. As for whether their conclusions are true, that’s another matter. But
what they know for sure is what they did, and the raw data they obtained
through their doing.
As you meditate, you want to keep your focus that clear, that close. What are
you doing with the breath? What are you doing with the mind? What
assumptions are you using about the breath and the mind? And what results do
you get?
Sometimes you find yourself creating a sense of self around the breath. As
you get more and more used to the breath energy in the body, you develop a set
series of ways of identifying yourself as the breather, which will create certain

69
patterns of tension in the body that are really, really tenacious. Some patterns of
tension come and go with each breath. Others last a bit longer, but the ones
associated with the breather, those tend to last. Which is why it’s good to loosen
up your conception of what it means to breathe—where the breath is coming in,
what needs to be done for it to go out. You can think of the body as a large
sponge, with the breath can come in from all directions. You don’t have to pull it
in through the nose. And breath energy is not something that you have to fight
to pull in. It just comes in, goes out. It’s all ready to come in if you just let it in.
Think of it that way and you find yourself breathing in a different way. That
shows you the power of your thought, the power of your assumptions, what they
call attention, or manasikara, in the texts.
So again, the knowledge here is knowledge of what you’re doing and the
results you get: that’s the basic data, that’s where your knowledge is clearest.
When you move out away from that and make assumptions, you get more and
more into the world of uncertainty. As I said earlier, you need some assumptions
to function. Say you’re dealing with a table. You learn that if you try to walk
through the table, you can’t. You bang your shins. So you learn to make some
assumptions about the solidity of the table. But exactly how solid is that table?
We think of solid mass as being that totally solid, totally filled, but it’s not.
You’ve probably read about all the atoms in the table, and how each atom
contains a lot more space than hard matter. And even with the protons and
electrons: are they really hard? Are they just electromagnetic vibrations?
Vibrations of what? Or are they just little distortions in space-time? You could
keep on asking questions like this, but for the purpose of walking around the
room all you need to know is that if you try to walk through the space between
the atoms, you can’t do it. You keep bumping up against that sense of solidity.
So which of these assumptions is true? They’re all true. The question is which
one is useful, and for what purpose? If you simply try to walk across the room
and find a table in the way, remember the solidity of the table, so you don’t bang
your shins. If you want to develop psychic powers and walk through tables, that’s
another matter.
But the important thing is that you realize all your knowledge of the world
comes from your actions and the results you get from those actions. That’s the
basic data. And for the Buddha, that’s the basic data too. It’s just that he keeps
reminding you: keep looking back at your actions and don’t get too sucked into
your assumptions, into the worlds you create out of these things, or the different
senses of self that you create around these things. Learn to look for the ones that
are useful, the assumptions that are useful, for any given purpose. But also learn
how to take them apart to remind yourself they are just that, assumptions—so
that when they start causing harm or suffering, you can drop them. Realize that

70
that’s not the right time, that’s not the right place for those assumptions.
The Buddha’s assumptions about what’s useful to know, what’s not useful to
know, parallel very closely his ideas about what’s useful to speak about, or what’s
right to speak about. He says you speak about things that are true. But just
because they’re true doesn’t mean you have to speak about them. You also have
to look for whether they’re useful. And even that’s not enough. You have to look
at what’s the right time and the right place to speak about these things.
Well, the same thing applies to truths. There are lots of truths about the
world out there, just as there are lots of radio waves going through the air right
now. Which truths are useful to tune into right now, given your sense of time
and place?
This is why the Buddha avoided questions about whether there is or isn’t a;
whether the world is eternal or not, because he realized that these questions are
constructions. There are times when a sense of self is useful. When you want to
be responsible, when you want to learn how to delay your desire for immediate
gratification for the sake of long term gratification: Those are times when you
need a clear sense of self. But there are other times when a sense of self actually
gets in the way of a deeper happiness. So you look at your “self” as an activity,
something you do, and then you can stop doing it when it’s not useful. It’s like
having different perceptions of the world – the physical world, the psychological
world, whatever worlds you are involved with: Tune in to the frequency that’s
helpful right now, and let the other ones go.
This is why we focus on the breath, because the breath is an area where you
can establish an awareness that can begin to see these activities: how does the
mind create a sense of self, how does it create a sense of world, what are the
actual data that it’s got right here, what are the assumptions that it builds things
out of? When you’re with the breath, you can see these things a lot more easily,
because the breath is one of the building blocks from which these things are
created. The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine
how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the
energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there
is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to
walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away.
This doesn’t mean that you can create anything you like out of anything at
all. The results of your past actions place some limits on the realities you can
create in the present. But when you stick with this level of: “Just what are you
doing, and what are the results?” that’s when you stay closest to the truth. That’s
when you see most clearly what the possibilities are. What, at the present
moment, is the most skillful way to interpret your experience of reality? What can
you shape, what can you not shape? When you keep things on this level, you find

71
you can deal with reality, shape your reality, in a much more skillful and
beneficial way.

72
 Practicing Your Scales
October 19, 2006

Developing skill as a meditator is very similar to developing skill as a

musician. You start out with the scales—say you’re learning the piano—and you
want to play beautiful music, but they have you playing these dumb scales and it
can be pretty boring. But if you don’t stick with the scales, you can’t play the
music. Over time, as you develop your ear, you begin to realize that there really is
a skill to running your fingers up those notes. One of the signs of a really good
pianist is his ability to make his runs sound like water, totally effortless—and yet
a lot of effort goes into getting there.
It’s the same with the meditation. Meditation is work, and there’s a lot of
grunt work in just getting the mind to settle down and stay still. It’s important
that you not get bored by it. You sit here with the breath and sometimes it seems
like it’s the hardest place to stay. The mind is off someplace else, and you’ve got
to pull it back. It stays for a breath or two, and then it’s off someplace else again.
You’ve got to pull it back. It’s the pulling back that’s an important part of the
meditation. That’s mindfulness and alertness in action. That’s directed thought
and evaluation in action. Directed thought means just keeping your thoughts
with the breath. In the process of strengthening those qualities in the mind, that’s
when you develop the foundation for good concentration practice.
So there are two ways of meditating. One is just sitting here hoping that
you’ll hit the lottery, because there are times when things just come together on
their own. But that can get frustrating, just wondering what tonight’s meditation
lottery is going to be like. Are you going to come in first, are you going to come
in last? There’s no skill there at all. The other way of approaching it is to realize
there’s work to be done. It may not be fun, but keep reminding yourself that this
is how good meditation is built. This is how you develop an understanding of the
mind, by understanding that process of how the mind slips off.
It’s really amazing. The mind can create all kinds of thought worlds for itself.
How does it do that? How does it conduct it’s discussion of where it’s going to
go, how it’s going to get there? And then how does it cover all that up, so you
don’t notice it? It all seems to happen just on its own, but if you can see into that,
you learn an awful lot about the mind. You learn about ignorance, for one thing,
which is the big cause of suffering. You learn about craving: What does the mind
crave as it’s creating these worlds? It’s craving pleasure. It can be sensual pleasure:
the idea of thoughts of beautiful things, thoughts of nice-sounding things, so on

73
down the line. Or it’s craving a sense of identity that comes in with this, when
you’re in the world—you’re functioning in a world here—fighting off
annihilation, you fear that if there are no thoughts in the mind, the mind is just
going to disappear, your awareness is going to disappear. As long as you’re
thinking and knowing the results of your thoughts, you know you exist. And
there is the potential for happiness there. We learn at a very early age that by
developing a sense of self, we can use it to provide for pleasure in one way or
another. If we were deprived of that sense of self—and this is why so many of us
resist the idea of letting go of that sense of self—we’d feel that we’d be deprived
of our potential for pleasure, or of the sense of self that’s experiencing the
pleasure. The craving for this kind of identity is called craving for becoming.
So just in this process of the mind creating thought worlds, you see a lot
about ignorance and craving, and all the other factors of dependent co-arising.
You watch them in action. It’s all happening right here. But instead of having to
memorize the lists of dependent co-arising, the best way to learn about these
things is just to get your hands dirty, deal with the causal chains that go on in the
mind, and learn how to cut them. You’ll find that you cut them in different spots
depending on how quickly you notice what’s going on. This way you learn about
the mind. You learn about the processes in the mind in the same way that you
learn about eggs by cooking with them; or you learn about a piano by sitting
down and playing it, seeing what you can get out of it, what kind of sounds, what
kind of satisfaction.
So it’s important, as you sit down and meditate, that you realize you’re not
here just for stress relaxation, stress reduction, or for chilling out. There is work
to be done. This is your concentration work, as Ajaan Lee called it: the directed
thought and evaluation, keeping your mind with the breath and learning to
watch it, to see which ways of breathing help keep you there with the breath,
alert and mindful; which ways of breathing make your restless. You learn this
through the evaluation, i.e., evaluating times when the mind gets restless and
wanders off. Go back and say, “Okay, gotta try something else.” You’ve got to be
willing to learn, and it can be frustrating. Any learning experience involves some
pain, some effort and frustration, and your ability to deal emotionally with the
frustration is what’s going to see you through.
So learn how to give yourself pep talks. You have to keep yourself up for the
practice. This is why there are times when it’s useful to reflect on the Buddha, the
Dhamma, and the Sangha. What kind of person was the Buddha who found this
path of practice? Everything indicates that he was an extremely truthful person,
very realistic, always willing to learn. And he taught purely out of compassion.
After his awakening, he didn’t need anything from anybody. If there wasn’t
enough food to keep his body going, he would be perfectly happy to die, because

74
he’d already found a deathless happiness. So the fact that he kept the body going,
kept having to deal with people forty-five years, was a total act of compassion.
And the Dhamma he taught, as they say, was totally heartwood. In other
words, there wasn’t a lot of rhetoric, a lot of unnecessary teachings. He focused
on the big issue in life: Why is there suffering? Why do people create suffering for
themselves when they want happiness? What can they do to learn to put an end
to that suffering? And he focused on that issue in a way that’s still very relevant
thousands of years later.
As for the Sangha, he instituted an order where people live totally on gifts.
The Buddha’s teaching was a gift. The way the Sangha is arranged, monks live on
gifts. They don’t sell the teaching, they don’t have to raise kids, meet mortgage
payments, all the other things that would crimp their style of really being true to
the Dharma. You look at the stories in the Theragatha and Therigatha, telling of
the monks and the nuns struggling with their meditation, and some of them
were in a lot worse places than you are right now. And yet they were able to gain
awakening. So that gives you encouragement that it can be done. Not just
amazing people like the Buddha who can do it, all kinds of people can do it.
When you reflect on these things, it gives you encouragement for the
practice. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha also prefaced meditation
practice with practicing generosity and observing the precepts. As you follow the
Buddha’s teachings in ways that are simpler and easier to follow and see the
results that come, it gives you confidence in the teaching: that even though some
of the instructions may seem counterintuitive, they work. When you come to the
practice fortified by these practices and fortified by your understanding of where
this teaching came from, that can help get you over the dry periods when all you
seem to be doing is dragging your mind back and forth, back and forth, back and
forth, up and down the notes of the piano.
But that sense of confidence has to be augmented also by your willingness to
be observant. There’s a book in our library on learning how to swim. It’s there
not because the monks are planning to swim, but because it describes the
learning process so well. It talks about how to practice swimming, and the
principles apply to any kind of skill that when you’re practicing. You don’t just
go through the motions or put in the time. You have to observe what’s the most
efficient way of getting through the water. How do you hold your head, how do
you watch your stroke to see how you can make your stroke more efficient, so
you can use less energy and at the same time go faster, go longer? It’s the same
way with working on those scales: What’s the most efficient way of holding your
hands, your arms, your torso to get the best-sounding notes out of the piano? This
way, what in the beginning is a very effortful process really does become
effortless as you streamline your understanding of what you are doing.

75
 It’s the same with the meditation. You find that you have to learn how to
streamline your understanding of what it means to keep the mind focused. You
start out by basically doing too much: You tense up the body, you engage all
kinds of other parts of the mind to try to keep the mind here, and yet you can’t
maintain that amount of tension. The mind is sure to slip off. Then you try to
have no effort at all, and of course it’s going to slip off again. What you’ve got to
do is notice, “Which part of the effort is necessary, which part is not? Where’s the
excess energy that’s being expended on this that’s making it more difficult than it
has to be? What’s the most efficient way of staying with the breath? What’s the
most efficient place to focus? The most efficient way of understanding the breath
that helps you stay there so that the amount of effort you put into each moment
of meditation is totally possible, totally sustainable? That way you really do
develop a sense of ease with being with the breath. So you’ve got to be observant.
It’s in this way that directed thought and evaluation eventually lead to a sense
of ease, even a sense of rapture, and the mind can really settle down. Because it’s
not just a matter of forcing, but it’s also a matter of understanding what you’re
doing and looking through that lens of where’s the unnecessary stress, where’s
the unnecessary amount of effort that’s being expended? When is the effort too
much, when is too little, when is it just right?
This is why only so much of the meditation can be taught in terms of words
saying, “Do this, do that,” the technique they tell you to do. A lot of it has to
come from your own input, your own willingness to observe, to learn from your
mistakes. The process is not necessarily pleasant, but it’s the only way to learn.
And it has the advantage that it develops your powers of perception, your powers
of discernment while you do it.
So just as when you learn how to play the scales well, you’re learning a lot of
the other skills you are going to need to play music well, in the same way when
you learn how to keep the mind with one object in spite of all those other
temptations to create worlds that you want to inhabit, you’re learning the precise
skills that are needed to get the mind to settle down. You’re learning the skills
that enable you to understand the workings of the mind. This is what’s meant by
that saying that the path and the goal are not different. In other words, in doing
the path well, you find right there in the doing of the path that the goal starts to
appear.
So don’t just put in the time, saying, “I hope I win the lottery this time when
the results will come on their own.” You’ve got to watch, you’ve got to observe,
you’ve got to be willing to learn. Even if it means going back and relearning the
steps that you think that only beginners have to do, everybody has to learn these
things many times over. And the more attention you pay to them, the more
lessons you learn.

76
 Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising
October 23, 2006

The Pali word for the worlds we create in the mind is bhava, which literally
means becoming. We keep creating these worlds. And if you look at dependent
co-arising, you see that they’re based on two things. The immediate prerequisite
is clinging, upadana; and clinging in turn is based on craving, tanha. But both of
those words have another meaning. The word for clinging can also mean feeding,
taking sustenance; and the word for craving means thirst. The mind is thirsting
for things, and so it latches on to the five aggregates and tries to feed off them.
Form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and sensory consciousness: These
are the things we feed on.
When we’re meditating we’re trying to create a good bhava, a good place for
the mind to stay in the present moment. If you create a world for yourself that
maintains its reference to the present, then it’s a lot easier to see what that world
depends on in the present as well. In other words, you can see the process of
thirsting and feeding as it’s happening. That enables you to see through the
process, so that you don’t get misled by the worlds you create.
When you create worlds of the past and future, though, you have to block
out large parts of your present awareness in order to stay focused on those little
worlds. That’s why they’re not helpful in the meditation. They’re helpful only to
the extent of enabling you to remember things you did in the past or anticipate
in the future that help focus you back on the present. In other words, you can
remember the times when you were mindless, not very alert, and you can reflect
on the damage it caused. Or you can reflect on the dangers that await you in the
future if you’re not mindful and alert. This kind of thinking is helpful because it
motivates you to get back to the present moment to develop your powers of
mindfulness and alertness right now.
But if you want to see these processes in action, you’ve got to watch in the
present moment. So you create the world out of the breath, your inner sense of
the body. Take the sensations you feel in the legs and the arms, etc., and try to
fashion them into a basis for concentration, a place where the mind can stay, that
you can take as your dwelling. The sense of ease and fullness you can develop
through the breath can help to alleviate your thirst. It gives you something good
and nourishing to feed on.
The texts actually talk about feeding on rapture. In the midst of a world of

77
hungry people, the Buddha said, we feed on rapture like the radiant gods. And
he’s not just talking about hungry in the sense of hungry for physical food. If you
look at what’s going on in the world, if you read the newspapers and news
magazines, you see what people are doing from their sense of psychological
hunger, and it’s not a pretty sight. So when we say that in the midst of hungry
people, we’re feeding on rapture like the radiant gods, it’s not a selfish or narrow
pleasure. We’re trying to get ourselves out of that feeding frenzy.
This process of psychological feeding is a process we have to understand in
the mind: How does this happen? The Buddha says that there are four ways of
clinging or feeding inside. One is simply feeding on sensual desire. You can think
about situations you’d like to have in your life that would make you feel pleasant,
that you would derive some pleasure from. You can think about times in the past
when you had pleasures, or about pleasures you anticipate in the future. And the
mind feeds off of that. There’s also feeding on views, clinging to views. Then, as
you’ve probably noticed, there’s a strong sense of me or mine around the
clinging, feeding on the identity you build around your views. “I’m the person
who has the right views; I’m the person who understand things better than other
people; my take on things is right.” And there’s feeding on certain ways of doing
things, your habits and practices, your particular way of doing things that you
feel is the right way of doing things, in and of itself.
Now, some of these forms of food are actually part of the path. You need to
have views for the path, you need to develop certain habits and follow certain
practices as part of the path. And you need to develop a certain sense of yourself
as capable of following the path. The Buddha doesn’t criticize these things, at
their proper time and place. What he does criticize is feeding on these things as
ends in and of themselves.
And why does the mind feed on these things? Because it feels empty without
them. Sometimes it feels lost without them, deprived of its bearings. We create
our bearings for ourselves through our views, through our ways of doing things.
What it comes down to is that we think we need these things for our happiness.
Without them, we feel lost. These are our means—we think—for obtaining
pleasure. These attitudes are based on thirst: the thirst for sensuality, the thirst for
becoming, or the thirst to destroy what we’ve got. But all these things are
motivated by a desire for happiness, by a desire for wellbeing. The thirst in turn is
conditioned by feelings of pleasure or pain or neither pleasure-nor-pain, a neutral
feeling. And these come from sensory contact.
So one way of understanding the processes in the mind is try to trace them
back: Exactly what contact triggered them? Was there a thought? Was there a
sound? Was there an idea that suddenly triggered you into creating these worlds?
That’s one thing you’ve got to look for: What are the triggers? Sometimes, you

78
find, the triggers can be very small. But dependent co-arising digs deeper than
that. It says that the issue is not just the contact. We come to sensory contact with
a lot of preconceived notions, a lot of attitudes ready to pounce on things. This is
why contact is not the beginning of dependent co-arising. Prior to contact you’ve
got the senses, and prior to the senses you’ve got name and form. Name and form
are crucial here, particularly name, for it includes feelings, perceptions,
intentions, attention, and the contact among these things in the mind.
This is why the Buddha focuses the practice of the path right here, at the
processes of name. You’ve got to change your intention. You’ve got to change the
way you understand things, which things you pay attention to, which things you
ignore. Our usual approach for happiness is that you identify with certain things:
your sense of who you are, who’s going to benefit from these efforts you’re
making to create happiness, and exactly what things you have under your power,
under your control, that can be used to create that happiness. That’s all an issue
of attention: how you attend to things, how you look at them, what your
perspective is, what questions you ask. And that big question, the question of
“I”—“Who am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?”—that’s a constant question, and
we’re always coming up with different answers. And because that question eats at
us, we try to create an identity to stuff into its mouth. But you can learn to stop
feeding on it if you can keep reminding yourself that that’s not the issue. The
issue is simply what can be done to lead to happiness—which sometimes requires
a sense of self, but sometimes doesn’t.
This is why right view is the beginning of the path, because it focuses
particularly on the most skillful way of attending to things. Once you’ve got a
skillful way of attending to things, that changes your intentions. So the focus of
your attention should be to understand: “What is the cause of suffering? What are
the causes for the end of suffering? If I see myself doing something that leads to
suffering, how can I stop? If I see that there are states of mind that lead to an end
to suffering, how can I encourage them? How can I develop them?” Those are
intentions that you’ve got to nourish. Otherwise, when the usual triggers for
craving and clinging or thirst and feeding come along, you go right back to your
old feeding patterns.
So to help strengthen the new way of giving attention, or the new way of
developing intentions, the Buddha has you develop certain perceptions. You’ve
probably heard of the three characteristics, but it’s interesting to note that the
term “three characteristics” doesn’t appear in the Pali Canon. The Buddha talks
about anicca, dukkha, and anatta, but he doesn’t use the word for characteristic
—lakkhana—to go along with them. He uses the word perception or mental
label: anicca-sañña, dukkha-sañña, anatta-sañña. You learn to label things as
inconstant, stressful, not-self. The other word he connects with them is

79
anupassana, or contemplation: aniccanupassana. To contemplate is to look for
these qualities in your experiences. In particular, you look at the raw materials
that you ordinarily use to build your sense of yourself, to build your sense of the
world, to see how they’re inconstant. When the raw materials are inconstant,
how are you going to build anything solid out of them? It’s like building a house
out of frozen meat. The meat seems solid, you can stack it like bricks, but it’s
going to melt. Who would want to live in a house like that? It’s stressful. It’s
asking for disaster.
So you look for the stress inherent in trying to find happiness in things that
are inconstant. When you see the raw materials as stressful, ask yourself: “What
can I build out of stressful things that would really provide true security?” And
when you see that they’re not totally under your control, when they’re anatta,
what sense of reliable self could you build out of these things? You can build a
temporary sense of self, and there are times when you need that, but ultimately it
doesn’t give the satisfaction you want. That’s because these thought worlds, once
you’ve set them going, start doing things on their own; they have a logic of their
own, which you can’t always anticipate. So how can you trust them?
These are the factors the Buddha has you focus on—attention, intention, and
perception—so that when you catch the mind jumping at the opportunity to
build a thought world, you can ask yourself: “Why am I doing this? What am I
going to get out of it?” You look at the raw materials and you see that they’re not
the sort of things you could build anything reliable out of. Then you look at your
motivation: “Why are you doing this? What do you want out of this?” You start
asking the Buddha’s questions: “Does this activity lead to suffering or does it lead
away from suffering?” These are the things you’ve got to keep in mind.
One way of doing that is to develop a good solid foundation here in the
present, so that it’s easier to stay in the present. The longer the mind stays in the
present, the easier it is to be mindful and alert. There more mindful and alert it
is, the more clearly it can see these processes as they’re happening.
Dig down a few more steps into dependent co-arising, and you come to
fabrication. Fabrication comes in three kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily
fabrication is the breath; verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation;
and mental fabrication is feeling and perception. When you’re focused on the
breath, thinking about and evaluating the breath, you’ve got all these things right
there. You’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself thinking and evaluating the
breath, and you’ve got the feelings of pleasure and pain that come from the
breath, along with perceptions that keep you focused both on the breath and on
the pleasures or the pains that come from the breath. When you learn to look at
things in these terms and can maintain this world, you’re in a much better
position to watch the process of how the mind creates other worlds. When it

80
forgets, when it tries to block out this world of the present, that’s the ignorance
that sets those other thought worlds into motion.
So you’ve got to keep reminding yourself stay here, stay here, stay here. Try
to get as interested in the breath as you can. Try to understand: What is this
bodily fabrication, this breath energy, anyhow? How does the in-and-out breath
relate to the sense of energy in the different parts of the body? How can you
create a sense of ease here that helps to satisfy you, that helps get rid of that
hunger to go out and create other places, other worlds to go foraging in? The
greater the sense of fullness you’ve got here—the fullness that comes from
learning how to relate properly to the breath—the more you can cut through the
hunger, the thirst, that would force you to create other worlds of being, other
worlds of becoming.
So when you look at dependent co-arising, it’s not just an abstract exercise. It
actually explains a lot of the reasons why the Buddha teaches meditation the way
he does, why he tended to teach breath meditation more than any other kind of
meditation, and why the path begins with right view. Right view helps redirect
this causal process away from the ignorant clinging and thirst that ordinarily we
feed on—or that we try to feed on, trying to find some satisfaction—and focuses
it in a direction where it provides more satisfaction, a greater sense of fullness.
Dependent co-arising not just a map about abstractions; it’s actually a map of
your feeding frenzy. And even though the map has lots of factors that even the
Buddha admitted are all entangled, it does make one clear and simple point:
When contact hits, it’s not just making a mark on a blank slate or a passive
mirror. The mind is already primed to go looking for food even before contact
happens; when we encounter contact, our main question is whether we can eat it.
This is why we have to meditate: The causes for suffering are inside. And this is
why the Buddha has us focus attention on our intentions, perceptions, and views,
because as long as we’re ignorant of these things, that ignorance keeps driving
our feeding frenzy
Which is why dependent co-arising is also a guide to what you can do to help
abort this process of constantly creating unsatisfactory feeding worlds in the
mind, worlds that lead to suffering, worlds that lead to stress. It teaches us new
feeding habits. When we learn how to feed on the breath, we don’t have to create
the different identities that need to go out and engage in a feeding frenzy on
other people. And it’s good not just for us, but also for everyone around us.
So develop a taste for the breath. Learn how to be a connoisseur of your
breathing. When you learn to feed here, you really develop the various strengths
of the mind—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and
discernment—that can strengthen it to the point where ultimately it doesn’t need
to feed anymore. And that’s a great gift right there, both to yourself and to

81
everyone around you.

82
 Goodwill All Around
November 2, 2006

Every evening before the meditation, we chant the four brahmaviharas.

Actually just chant the words that are meant to be conducive to these sublime
attitudes. And they are meant to remind you that it’s good to actually cultivate
these attitudes as part of your practice. They are the context for what we’re doing,
thoughts of goodwill. If the Buddha’s teachings weren’t based on a motive for
goodwill, he wouldn’t have focused on the issue of suffering, the issue of stress.
He wouldn’t have focused on the question of how to put an end to suffering and
stress as the primary point of the Dharma. So we have to assume that that was the
underlying motive, both for his teaching and for the practice of his teachings.
That’s what we are doing right now, we are looking for an end of suffering,
trying to find a true happiness.
So cultivate that attitude. May I be happy. May I be truly happy, with the
emphasis on the truly because that places some demands. Ordinary happiness,
the pleasures that come from eating and sleeping and having fun aren’t all that
hard. There is no need to sit for a whole hour, and put up with the pains and
other difficulties in meditation if all you want is a quick fix, if a quick fix is good
enough. But it’s not, because a happiness that turns into something else doesn’t
turn into happiness. It turns into regret, remorse, actual pain. So we want a
happiness that’s true, a happiness that lasts.
But think about it. You are not the only one who wants happiness. The
people around you want happiness too. If your happiness were to depend on
their misery, there’s no way they would allow it to keep going. This is why
oppressive people have to hire bodyguards, have to have special security forces to
protect a very fragile oppressive happiness. And it can never last. So you want a
happiness that doesn’t take anything away from anyone else, doesn’t cause
anyone any suffering or harm. And that requires that you look inside. And to
keep you looking inside, it’s good to remind yourself that you do wish happiness
for other beings, other people, because your happiness depends on at the very
least you’re not causing them any harm. And the world would be a much better
place, a lot easier to find happiness, if everybody were looking for true happiness
inside.
And so the Buddha advocates spreading thoughts of goodwill in all
directions. As they say in the text, first direction, in other words, the east; the
second, third, fourth: south, west, north; above and below and all around. Let

83
your thoughts of goodwill go out in all directions, radiating. The image they give
in the texts is of a hornblower, you blow the conch horn (there was a conch shell
that they used as a horn). And the sound goes in all directions. It doesn’t choose
just the east or just the west, goes everywhere. In other words, your thoughts of
goodwill should extend not just to your tribe or to your group, but to everybody
regardless. Not only human beings, all kinds of beings. Beings you know about,
beings you don’t know about. Try to make your wish for happiness all-inclusive.
The Buddha recommends this as an attitude to develop as a context for the
practice. Because one of the big problems we run across in our meditation is
thoughts of greed, anger and delusion. And one way to overcome them, or at
least to keep them in check, is to remind yourself you’ve already wished
happiness to these other beings. So why do you want to be greedy for their
things? Why do you want to get angry at them? Why do you wish them ill? How
can you let yourself be deluded as to what’s going to be skillful and what’s not if
you really want to be happy? In other words, you’ve got to take the issue of
happiness seriously. Most people, you’d think they would take happiness
seriously, it’s something everybody wants. But if you look at the way people go
about trying to find happiness, they don’t really think about it. They don’t reflect
on where true happiness would lie, how it could be brought about. They just go
for the quick fix.
So thoughts of goodwill are meant to prevent you from going for that quick
fix, remembering that your actions do have results and you want to make sure
those results are not harmful. If you run across anyone who you have trouble
thinking thoughts of goodwill for, ask yourself why? How would you benefit
from their misery? How would there be any benefit from their misery at all? Why
are you stingy with your thoughts of goodwill? In other words, the development
of goodwill is not meant to be nonreflective, spreading thoughts of cotton candy
out in all directions to smother your true feelings about people. They are meant
to bring up the issue, is there anybody out there whom you don’t feel goodwill
for? And if so, why? Then you have to think about it, you have to reflect on it
until you realize there’s no reason that you would benefit in any way from their
suffering.
So this provides the context. Then from goodwill there are the other three
attitudes. Compassion, in other words, when you see someone suffering you wish
them freedom from that suffering. When you see someone who is happy, you
appreciate the fact that they are happy. You don’t get resentful, you don’t get
jealous. Those are natural outgrowths of good will. And then there’s equanimity.
Because there are going to be cases where you wish for people’s happiness, and
they’re not happy. You try to show compassion for them, and they can’t gain
freedom, they suffer. Other people who are happy, but then they use that

84
happiness to abuse other people and there is nothing you can do about it. That’s
why you’ve got to develop equanimity. Without equanimity goodwill can be a
cause for suffering in and of itself.
So that’s when you have to reflect: all beings are the owners of their actions.
Some people have karma that’s going to force them to suffer for awhile, or at
least have bad circumstances. The issue of how they respond to those bad
circumstances, that’s something they can do something about, perhaps in that
way you can help them. In other words, our experience is not totally shaped by
past actions, it’s also shaped by our present intentions. This applies to other
people, applies to you too. There are going to be times when you are in difficult
circumstances and you’ve got to be careful about your intentions, how you
respond to those difficulties. There are going to be times when you’re in really
good circumstances, and again you have to be careful. You can’t let yourself be
heedless. Other times people, when things are going well—they are wealthy and
in a good mood—then they tend to get sloppy, complacent, and that’s a cause for
suffering right there.
So equanimity is there to remind you, there is this principle of karma that
places limitations on what you can do for other people, what you can do for
yourself. The purpose of that reflection is to remind you to focus on the things
where you can make a difference. Sometimes given the situation, all you can do is
just work on how you’re reacting to bad circumstances. This is why we have to
train the mind. This is how the brahmaviharas lead us into the development of
mindfulness and alertness.
There is a passage where they talk about how the brahmaviharas lead to
awakening. It’s the brahmaviharas imbued with the seven factors for awakening.
And the first of those is mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. In
this case keeping your basic attitudes, your basic attitude of goodwill in mind.
And your knowledge of the principle of action, principle of intention—that
you’ve got to be careful about what you will, what you do, what you say, what
you think—got to keep that fact in mind. And then train the mind so it’s more
and more careful all the time, more mindful all the time. This is why we use the
breath or use the word buddho, or 32 parts of the body, whatever object we find is
easy to keep in mind as a way of getting the mind to settle down. Once the mind
settles down, it can see things a lot more clearly. And that’s how it can be more
careful in what it chooses to do.
This is how the four brahmaviharas or the four sublime attitudes bring us
right here. You’ve got work to do. You’ve got this mind that keeps churning out
intentions, so we’ve got to be very careful about what those intentions are, which
ones we choose to follow, which ones we choose to let go. We’ve got to keep that
in mind. It requires mindfulness, requires alertness. We’ve got to work on these

85
qualities, we’ve got to exercise them. This is why we are sitting here meditating.
These are qualities that need strengthening, they need to be made more and more
consistent, more lasting.
So as you work with the breath, try to be as quick as possible in noticing
when the mind slips off the breath. As soon as you sense that it’s slipping, then
bring it right back. This is the work of the meditation. This is how mindfulness
and alertness are exercised, and with exercise they get stronger just like the body.
If you exercise it the right way, if you feed it the right way, you can keep the body
in relatively good shape so that it can do what you want it to do. Same with the
mind. You feed the mind with these thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of the
sublime attitudes and you exercise its mindfulness and alertness. Try to develop
its concentration in that way, to develop its discernment into what’s going on in
the mind: what you choose to do, what you choose not to do. And you gain
insight also into this whole question of what does it mean to intend, what is an
intention, what is this karma we are doing all the time?
Once you see that clearly, then you are in a much better position to act on
that basic motivation for goodwill. You can get the mind to do what you want it
to do, and it’s strong enough to do what you want it to do. You’ve got that desire
for true happiness. For true happiness you need a well trained mind, a mind
that’s not afraid to comprehend suffering, let go of its cause, develop the factors
of the path, so it can realize the end of suffering. Otherwise even though we all
desire happiness, we just keep creating more and more suffering, which is the big
irony of life. But it’s possible to train the mind. So keep at it. Keep remembering
your intention, try to maintain that intention and try to develop the skills that
are needed to keep acting on that intention. So you can test whether the Buddha
is right: there is an end to suffering, and it can be attained through human effort.

86
 Truths of the Will
November 5, 2006

Someone once said that there are basically two kinds of truths in the world:
truths of the observer, and truths of the will. Truths of the observer are things
that are true regardless of what you do, that have nothing to do with your ideas
about things, what you want, what you don’t want. They’re just the way of the
world. This is what science is all about. And to learn these truths, you can’t let
your wants get in the way. This kind of truth also describes a lot of things you see
day to day.
As for truths of the will, those are things that exist only if you will them into
being. They depend on your wants. You decide that this is something you want
and you act on it. Say you want to be a concert pianist. That’s going to become
true only if you decide that this something you really want, that it’s worth
working on, and you stick with that decision.
When you look at the things that mean the most to us in life, most of them
are truths of the will. If you just looked at the world from the point of view of an
observer, everything would be pretty pointless. We get born, we grow up, we
struggle to survive, and then we die. That’s pretty much it. What’s the point of all
that? Many times you look back on your life and you think of all the things that
you fought over, all the things that you worked hard to get, and even if you got
them, they just slipped through your fingers. You wonder: What was that all
about? Many people look back on their whole lives and that’s all they see. “What
was that all about? Why all that suffering?”
So if you want to have a point to your life, you have to will it into being.
Many of the Buddha’s teachings explain why this is so. Your experience of the
present moment comes from what? The results of past actions, your current
intentions, and the results of your current intentions. That’s an interaction
between truths of the will and truths of the observer. I.e., you willed things in the
past, and then that set into motion certain causal forces, some of which came out
in ways you didn’t intend. But that’s simply because that’s the way the world is.
That’s how causality works. You didn’t work the process right. But now you’ve
got your current intentions and they’re having an effect right now, and they are
going to have an effect on into the future, and they offer you the chance to get it
right this time.
So it’s up to you to decide: Is there going to be a point to all this? Is there

87
going to be a direction to all these different intentions? Or are you just going to
muck around in your life, and at the end wonder what was that all about? Even
the way we suffer comes under these two kinds of truths. There’s the truth of the
three characteristics which is that anything willed is going to be inconstant,
stressful, and not self; anything that’s subject to conditions is going to be
stressful. But then there’s also the suffering that comes from craving, especially
unskillful craving.
The first kind of suffering you can’t do much about, but you can make a
difference with that second kind. This is an area where your will has a lot to say,
has a lot of impact if you focus it properly. Putting an end to suffering is a big
job, but it is humanly possible. And because it is possible, it’s really worthwhile
to focus your energies in that direction. That really does give a worthwhile
direction to your life. Some people decide they want to be a concert pianist, but
then when they become a concert pianist, they find that it’s not really as fulfilling
as they thought it would be. Someone wants power, gains power, and then
abuses it, misuses it, creating a lot of suffering, both for himself and for a lot of
other people, which is going to have consequences for a long time down the line.
So for your life to have a point, you have to have a goal and you want to
choose a wise goal. This is why the Buddha’s seems to be the wisest: a total end to
suffering. That requires developing a lot of important qualities in the mind,
things you have to will into being. You look at your life and it doesn’t seem like
there’s much opportunity to put an end to suffering, but again you’re looking at
the things that an observer would look at. The end of suffering is a truth of the
will, and if you focus your energies in that direction, it does become possible.
You look at all the verses of the elder monks, elder nuns and a lot of them
started out in really miserable circumstances. If you just looked at the facts of
their lives, you would have thought, “No chance for this person,” and yet
somehow they pulled themselves together and decided that this is what they
wanted out of life. After all, desire is a factor of the path. It’s right there in right
effort: You generate desire to develop skillful qualities, you generate the desire to
abandon unskillful qualities. That kind of desire is good. You just need to learn
how to focus it properly, to create the right conditions.
I was reading a book a while back on analyzing people who had started out
their adult lives in really bad shape psychologically, and yet they were able to pull
themselves together. Tolstoy was an example. As a young person he looked pretty
hopeless, and then he somehow pulled it all together and became a great novelist,
an inspiration to a lot of peacemakers. In the book I was reading—it was basically
psychotherapy applied to history or psychoanalysis applied to history, which
often is a pretty sordid affair. Usually they want to ferret out who had strange
sexual desires, and who had strange psychological problems, and just leave it at

88
that. But in this case the analysis was meant to derive lessons on how is it that
some people who start out in really bad shape manage to get it together? That’s
psychoanalysis applied to history with a real point.
The conclusions were not anything really surprising, but it’s important to
remember that some of the basic facts of life, the most important ones, are things
we tend to overlook. The conclusions here pointed out basically two things: First,
in each case the person found someone who really believed in him or her and
encouraged him or her to develop skillful qualities. Second, that person had a
belief system that emphasized that it really was important to make something of
yourself, something of more than just ordinary value.
This is what we have in the Dharma and the Sangha. For the Sangha, you’ve
got people who believe in the worthwhile endeavor, the value of developing
skillful qualities and encouraging other people to develop skillful qualities. It
creates the right social environment for learning how to mature. And then
second, there’s the system—the belief system or the values of the Dhamma—that
if you develop skillful qualities in your mind, it really does make a difference not
only for yourself, but for all the people around you. There is a value to learning
how to will, or to intend things in a skillful way. It really does make a difference.
Science can’t teach you that. Science tells us that the sun is going to go nova
some day, so all your efforts to do something with your life are going to get
burned up anyhow. Scientists just are concerned with truths of the observer.
We’re dealing with truths of the will: What do you want to make with your life?
It’s possible to make all kinds of things given the raw materials you have.
Often you may find that, given your past kamma, current circumstances are
not all that good. But remember several things: One, past kamma is not totally
determining what’s going to happen in the future; you make decisions from
moment to moment. Two, what you see right now is not the sum total or
running balance of your kamma account. Think of your past actions more like
lots of accounts, or lots of seeds that can sprout and grow and blossom at
different times. You may be going through a fallow period right now when not
many good seeds are blossoming and some bad seeds are blossoming instead, but
that doesn’t mean you don’t have good seeds in your kamma accounts. So what
you want to do is to work right now on what the skillful decision is right now.
As for what’s going to come from your past kamma, learn how to treat
whatever it is with skill. Associate with people who will encourage you in that
direction, encourage within yourself the beliefs and understandings that give
value to that way of approaching your life. Because one of the things about truths
of the will is that often you see people for whom you think, “There’s no chance
that this person is going to be a concert pianist; there’s no chance that this person
is going to make anything out of his or her life.” That’s what it looks like from

89
the outside. But a lot of very unlikely people have managed to succeed given the
right conditions, as I said, finding the right people to associate with and having a
strong belief in the importance of their actions.
This is why faith in the Buddha’s awakening is such an important thing,
because the Buddha was awakened by what? By his own actions. And it wasn’t
any special divine quality that he had and we don’t have. He simply developed
the qualities that he had that we can develop as well.
So look at your life and see what qualities need to be developed in that
direction. The traditional list of the perfections is a good one to think about,
because it can apply not only to monastic life but also to lay life. And not only to
times when you’re on retreat like this or times when you’re in the monastery, or
times when you’re meditating, but to all your activities throughout the day. Look
at all your activities as opportunities to develop good qualities in your mind,
because those of the things that last. The Buddha calls them noble treasures
because when you develop good qualities in the mind they stay with you, not
only in this lifetime but on into future lifetimes.
What are the perfections? Generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment,
energy, tolerance or endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity.
Sometimes when conditions are difficult, you’ve got to work on the equanimity
and the endurance. Other times when opportunities are good, you have to work
more on the energy, not to let good opportunities pass you by. When you keep
these qualities in mind, you find that you’ve got the opportunity to practice the
Dhamma, to develop qualities that should work in your dealings with other
people.
Now you may look at your life and feel that your circumstances are not
conducive enough. That’s when you may decide that you have to change the
circumstances of your life. But the basic conditions you need are the two I
mentioned just now. Learn to associate with people who believe, one, in the
importance of developing skillful qualities and, two, in your ability to do it.
Building on that, hold to the conviction that if you want your life to have a point,
you have to give it a point, and you can do that. No matter how discouraging the
facts you can observe in your life, don’t believe that the observable facts are
telling the total story or that your future is already cast in concrete. You
constantly have the ability to change your mind, to develop more skillful
intentions, to learn from your past mistakes, so that you can bring those truths of
the will to fruition.

90
 Taking Responsibility
November 9, 2006

The Buddha once said there are two things that can spark awakening. One is
the voice of another, and the other is appropriate attention. This parallels another
teaching where he said that the most important external factor for awakening is
friendship with admirable people; the most important internal factor again is
appropriate attention. In other words, sometimes something you’ve seen or heard
from another person inspires you to think in new ways, to question things in new
ways, to look in new ways. And other times you simply start asking questions
yourself. The Buddha defines appropriate attention as this ability to put aside
fruitless questions and to focus on the ones that are fruitful. As for the voice of
another person, that can give you instructions as to what to do, advice for the
meditation, and at the same time hopefully raise some questions. But again
you’ve got to filter what those other voices send. Sometimes your filter is good;
sometimes your filter is bad.
So you’ve got to be very careful about how you listen to the Dhamma to
make sure that you’re filtering it in the right way: getting the points that are
useful to you, that will open up new perspectives, that will question some of your
basic assumptions. We all come to the practice with assumptions. Some of them
are skillful, some of them are not. Some of them we’ve learned from what we
think is the best authority: We’ve read them in the suttas, we’ve read them in the
writings of great masters from the past. But again, even our reading is filtered
through our assumptions. So you have to learn how to question them. This is
why it’s good to have the voice of someone from outside because things that
appear perfectly obvious to us may not appear obvious to them. They may want
us to question them.
One of the ways we can fight against delusion in the practice is by getting
perspectives from outside. But as Ajaan Lee once said, what’s really important
ultimately are the questions you learn to ask. Meditation is like a skill. The
teacher can teach you the basic techniques. It’s like a skill of learning how to
weave a basket. The teacher can teach you lots of different weaving patterns, but
whether you will weave well or not is up to you: your own powers of observation,
learning to look at what you’ve done and see what needs to be changed, learning
how to see the connection between the state of mind that you bring to the
weaving and the results that you get. Sometimes it’s simply a question of learning
to make your fingers more nimble. Other times it’s a question of learning to be

91
more and more attentive to your own actions.
There’s no teacher who can tell you, “Okay, do this, this, this, and you’re
going to get awakened.” You can’t abdicate responsibility. You have to be
responsible for how well you understand the teachings, and for how well you
observe what you’re doing. Your powers of observation are going to make all the
difference in the world. The Buddha didn’t claim to invent, say, the different
levels of jhana, but he came up with a new idea for how to use them. He tested
the idea and found that it worked.
It’s in this way that Buddhism is like a science. Sometimes that analogy can
be overdone, but there are some important parallels. On the one hand, science is
partly an issue of technique: how you go about trying to test a thesis, the proper
steps and scientific procedure. But then there’s also that wild card part of science:
which questions are worth asking. That’s not just a matter of technique. Some
questions can go unasked for generations until somebody has a crazy idea to start
asking a question everybody else thought was too unimportant to ask. And it
turns out then though that great discoveries come as a result of asking the new
question.
People in the Buddha’s time thought that getting into strong states of
concentration was an end in and of itself. He mastered their techniques, did what
he was told, and found that he still wasn’t satisfied with the results. So instead of
trying to find someone else to tell him what to do, he realized he had to ask some
new questions. He tested other techniques on his own, virtually starving himself
with all sorts of austerities for years—six years they say. Then he finally realized
that that wasn’t working. He had the good sense to ask the question: Might there
be another way? That was when he thought of the time he’d been sitting under a
tree when he was young, entered the first jhana, and instead of just getting
nostalgic about it, he asked another question: Could this be the way to
awakening? Notice here that, unlike his earlier teachers, he didn’t take the jhana
as an end in and of itself. He wanted to explore it as a path. That was a whole new
way of thinking about these states of mind. It was because he was able to ask
those questions that he ultimately got himself on the path and gained awakening.
So even though the Buddha’s teachings are all laid out, it’s important to
remember how he went about his practice: by asking questions. Because we can
hear the teachings, we can understand them, we can think about them, but if you
don’t start asking questions, nothing happens. It just becomes plain technique
without any real insight. This is why Ajaan Fuang always said to observe, to
watch. And his attitude when he gave meditation instruction was not, “Just do
this and don’t think, and come back when you’ve got guaranteed awakening.” He
said, “Try this out. If it doesn’t work, we can work with it.” He wanted you to
take responsibility for your actions. He wanted you to take responsibility for your

92
meditation.
You see this in the teachings of all the great ajaans. Ajaan Mun would
sometimes say things in his Dhamma talks, and Ajaan Maha Boowa would listen
to them and think about them, because they just didn’t make sense. He reports
one time coming back to Ajaan Mun and saying, “That point you made in your
Dharma talk the other day, I tried to figure out what you meant.” And Ajaan
Mun kind of smiled and said, “Oh, there’s someone who is trying to figure out
what I say?” And Ajaan Maha Boowa would give an answer to what he had
figured out, and Ajaan Mun wouldn’t say whether the answer was right or
wrong. In other words, he wanted Ajaan Maha Boowa to be responsible for what
he was doing, for the questions he asked, and the answers he got.
You look at the Buddha’s path and it’s all a matter of questions. He advises
Rahula to ask questions about his actions, to ask questions about his intentions. If
you plan to do something, ask yourself: What are the results going to be? Are they
going to be harmful or not? While you’re doing an action, ask yourself: Are the
results of what I’m doing right now harmful or not? When the action is done:
Were the results harmful or not? Wisdom, he said, starts with that question: What
will I do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? And when you’re
meditating, he says, you go to a teacher and you ask questions: How can I get the
mind to be more still? How can the mind be focused? How can it be settled
down? These are useful questions to ask for the purpose of gaining tranquility.
For the purpose of insight the questions are: How should fabrications be
regarded? How should they be analyzed?
You get some answers but then again you have to take those answers and
apply them in your own practice to see if they work. If they don’t work, you
come back again. Maybe get some more advice, or else figure out you’ve got to
figure them out on your own. For getting insight, one of the series of questions
the Buddha would have you ask is: Is this constant or inconstant? Sometimes you
get into very strong states of concentration, and it seems about as solid as
anything can be in your experience. You’ve got to ask: Is it constant or not? And
if it’s inconstant, is it stressful or not? If it’s stressful, can it be taken as yourself?
There’s a whole series of questions that can lead to insight, and from insight to
release.
But the Buddha doesn’t throw everything up into the air. He gives you
techniques for getting the mind to settle down, to be in a position where it can
profit from the questions. You settle in with a sense of well-being, a sense of ease.
Then you can start questioning because the mind is in a much better mood to
question things. When you’re feeling exasperated or beset upon, victimized, you
tend not to want to ask questions or not want to question yourself, let’s put it
that way. Especially when you feel that you’ve been treated unjustly: That’s one

93
of the strongest senses of self there is in the world. When you’re in that position,
you don’t want to hear any questions about whether you’re really justified in
your anger or not.
So you need to put the mind in a much better place where it can start asking
questions about: where do you like to find your pleasure? This afternoon we
talked a little bit about lust. Most of us are very firmly entrenched in lust, and
we’ve got a lot of defenses around it. As the Buddha said, for most of us the only
alternative to pain is sensual pleasure. We feel that if we’re being asked to give up
our attachment to sensual pleasure, we’d have nothing left but pain. One of the
purposes of the practice is to show you that there is an alternative. You can get
the mind into good strong states of concentration that don’t depend on sensual
passion.
So there is another alternative, but the Buddha doesn’t have you stop there.
Once you’ve attained that alternative, then he has you look back on the other
ways you are used to find pleasure. Because for most of us, this pleasure of
concentration becomes one more dish on the smorgasbord. We like to have
concentration and we like to enjoy our old pleasures as well. But when you get
the mind in a good solid state of concentration, you’re in a much better position
to look back and say, “This pleasure I get from the concentration: How does it
compare to, say, the pleasure that comes from lust? That comes from sensual
passion? Are the two compatible? Can you have them both, or do you have to
give up one for the other?” It’s a pretty radical thing, learning how to see that lust
is not your friend, learning to look at all its drawbacks. Now you’re in a much
better place to do that. You can ask questions of all your different defilements:
your pride, your anger, your deluded fears.
The whole problem of delusion is that usually you’re too deluded to see it.
This is why the Buddha has that teaching on the voice of another person or
friendship with an admirable person—to help you learn to see new possibilities.
For me, meeting Ajaan Fuang was a very radical experience because it opened up
a whole door on what was possible in life. There’s more to life than just
scrambling round for pleasures and then dying. There’s more to life than a lot of
what my preconceived notions told me was possible.
So this is largely the role of admirable friendship: to open your mind to new
possibilities. The teacher is not there just to tell you what to do so that when you
simply obey you’re going to get guaranteed results. That doesn’t give you any
insight at all. It just turns you into an automaton, a robot, a computing machine.
You put in the data and you get the results. The machine is not responsible for
whether the data is any good. It’s not responsible for the software; it just does
what it’s told and doesn’t gain awakening. The purpose of the teacher is to
suggest new possibilities. Then you have to explore them and learn how to

94
suggest new possibilities for yourself, because the teacher is not always going to
be there for you.
So an important element in training in the meditation is learning how to be
responsible for your own meditation, responsible for being a good technician,
and also learning to be responsible for asking the unexpected question, being
responsible for willing to experiment, and being responsible for learning how to
judge the results of your experiment. Because ultimately nobody else can judge
those for you.
So reflect on the topic of appropriate attention, this ability to ask questions
that give you insight into why there is suffering and how it can be stopped.
You’ve got your laboratory right here: the body and the mind. These things have
been showing their truths for who knows how many lifetimes, but you haven’t
noticed. If you learn to observe, the truths are there. There’s nothing mysterious
about them. It’s simply a matter of learning how to look.

95
 Overwhelmed by Freedom
March 18, 2007

When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, I ran into a paradox: I was there
because I wanted some freedom, freedom from the issues eating away at my
mind. But I found I didn’t know how to handle the freedom I had found. This is
just conditional freedom. It wasn’t the unconditioned freedom that the Buddha
was talking about, just the conditional freedom of having a whole afternoon with
nothing to do, no duties, no responsibilities. As Ajaan Fuang made clear, my only
responsibility was to stay with the breath. And my mind was overwhelmed at the
prospect of that kind of freedom: overwhelmed in the sense that I didn’t know
what to do with it, didn’t know if I could handle it—a whole afternoon with
nothing to do—and I watched my mind as it was trying to find ways of filling up
the time.
This is a common problem we all find as meditators. We think, “If only I had
more time to meditate,” and then when we do get more time to meditate, it’s
overwhelming. We fill up our days—looking for chores to do, looking for things
to read—because we can’t face the freedom. Part of us is afraid we’ll feel bored
with nothing to do but focusing on the breath; nothing to do but sitting and
then walking, and then sitting and walking. And part of the fear comes from the
sense that we don’t know how to measure progress. The mind has this tendency
to go up and down, it seems to make some gains and then it loses them, and
makes some more gains and then loses them again, back and forth like this. Your
mind wants to measure things in terms of what was gained by this hour of effort,
the next hour of effort, and yet it doesn’t know what to measure. It feels lost and
begins to thrash around.
This is where discipline comes in. You have to learn how to discipline
yourself not to waste the free time you have. The first thing is to remind yourself:
You don’t really know how much free time you have. You never know when
illness will come, or death: your own death or death of someone else around you,
which will cut short your time here. All sorts of things can happen. Crazy people
may decide they want to have another war, and it won’t be just their own
personal war; it’ll drag lots of people into chaos along with them. So you don’t
know how much more time you have before that kind of chaos hits again.
This is why the Buddha’s reflections on the world are important. He defines
the world simply as your world of sensory impressions, but it’s not a monadic
little world. It’s going to be influenced, it’s going to be touched, by other people.

96
And although he said that reflections about whether the world is finite or
infinite, eternal or non-eternal are a waste of time, the reflection on the fact that
the world is swept away, does not endure, offers no shelter—that passage we
chanted just now—is an important reflection. You have no guarantee how much
more time you have here or how much longer social stability is going to last.
In one of the passages that King Asoka singled out as important for Buddhists
to keep reflecting on, in the series called “future dangers,” the monk reflects: “I’m
young now, healthy now, alive now. Society is peaceful. The Sangha is
harmonious. But when these things change, it’s not going to be easy to practice.
So while I have the time, I should practice and try to attain that which I haven’t
yet attained, to see what I haven’t yet seen, so that when I do face aging, illness,
death, social unrest, or a potential split in the Sangha, my mind will still be at
ease.” This is what heedfulness is all about: to remind you that you don’t have all
the time in the world. You may not even have all the time in a day.
So use these thoughts to focus your mind on the present moment. You’ve got
this moment right now. Don’t waste it, because you don’t know how many more
present moments you’re going to have. You sit down and think about a whole
day with nothing to do, and the mind begins to fill up the day with all of its
paisley patterns. So stop that thought right there, and remind yourself that you
don’t know how much time you have. What you do know is that you’ve got the
opportunity right now to be with this breath.
There’s a famous sutta where the Buddha reminds the monks to be heedful,
to reflect on death every day. And not just every day. He asks the monks how
often they reflect on death. Some monks say once a day; others say twice a day.
Finally he gets to the monks who say, “While I’m eating, I remind myself, ‘If only
I get to live as long as it takes to swallow this morsel of food, I’ll have the
opportunity to practice the Buddha’s teachings.’” Another monk says, “If only I
can live for one more in-breath, one more out-breath, I’ll have an opportunity to
practice the Dharma.” The Buddha comments that only those last two monks
really count as heedful. Everybody else, he says, is heedless. You’ve got this time
to practice but you just throw it away, throw it away, because you spend the time
thinking about endless vistas of days, or a whole day here just with nothing to do,
no pressures.
Many of us who are used to the pressures of work, of having limited time,
who learn to thrive within the confines of those pressures, find that when
suddenly the pressure is off, the mind loses its bearings. Your mind, which is
normally very active and proactive, becomes passive, loses its direction. This is
why the Buddha’s perspectives on karma, his perspectives on time in the world,
are an important part of the practice. There are no passages in his teachings that
are there just for abstract speculation. They’re all part of the training. He talks

97
about eons of time, but he always brings the discussion back to the fact that the
experience of where you’re going to be in those eons of time depends on what
you do. And where are you going to see what you do? You see right now; you
don’t see it anywhere else. Right here and now is where you can see how the
mind fashions its realities, how it fashions its worlds.
So you have to be as sensitive and as precise and meticulous as possible in
looking into the present moment, having a very strong sense that this is very
important right here, right now. It’s a rare opportunity even when you have two
whole weeks or three whole weeks to do nothing but this. That time passes and
when it’s gone you don’t want to be the sort of person who says, “Gee, I didn’t
take advantage of it. I got sloppy or careless. All I could think of was filling my
time with styrofoam peanuts, shredded paper”—i.e., all the stuff with which we
fill up time when we don’t know anything better to do.
But here we do have lots of better things to do. The problem is this is one of
those jobs where you can’t measure your progress with a ruler or a stopwatch.
You churn out papers or have projects—it’s one of the useful ways we have,
especially for the monks, of maintaining our sanity. As Ajaan Fuang once said, if
you do nothing but meditate all day, you’re going to go crazy quickly. It’s for this
reason that we try to do our chores meticulously and well. But if you do have
chores, make sure they don’t occupy your whole day. Have a little time every day
for a chore to give yourself something tangible to show yourself something that
got accomplished today. As the Buddha noted, the job of wearing away your
defilements is like wearing down the handle on an adze—a small ax for carving—
that you use every day. You know that over time your use of the adze will wear
away the handle, but you can’t see it being worn away from day to day to day.
But don’t let the projects take over. Make sure you have plenty of time to stick
with the intangibles.
This is why conviction is such an important part of self-discipline. Even
though you may not see it, you know some good is being done each time you
bring the mind back to the breath. Each time you try to focus as precisely as
possible, you’re creating new habits. That’s a long-term process, a long-term
project. So you have to know how to give yourself pep talks along the way to
keep yourself going. You don’t want self-discipline just to be the ability to push
yourself through drudgery. You want to be able to make the meditation as
entertaining as possible, as interesting as possible, as enjoyable as possible, to
bring as much enthusiasm as you can to a process which, without the
enthusiasm, simply dries right up.
So squarely face the fact that you’ve got a big project here: all these huge
defilements of the mind. But they don’t come as an avalanche of huge boulders
all at once. They’re little tiny things, one by one by one, as they come through

98
the mind. And they come in lots of different guises. Anger for instance: There’s
not just one reason why we’re angry, which means that when you work through
one type of anger it’s not going to get rid of all the kinds of anger you may have.
But your experience in dealing with one kind of anger will give you some ideas
on how to approach other types of anger as well. Anger gets built up from lots of
different narratives in the mind, and different narratives will get activated by
different events. When you’ve seen through one kind of narrative—i.e., the way
certain events recall a type of relationship you had when you were a child, and
you realize that you’re not being forced back into the restricted place where you
were when you were a child by this new event—okay, you’ve seen through that
particular narrative. But there are many other narratives for anger just as there are
many narratives for greed.
So there are lots of these things you’ve got to learn how to work through. Just
because you see through anger once, don’t get discouraged when you find anger
returning in another guise. Keep reminding yourself that this is a long-term
project. There are lots of ins and outs. As the Buddha once said, you look at the
animal world and it’s all so variegated: all the different kinds of animals, each
with its own special little niche, its own coloring, its own peculiar tools and
shapes and forms, its own ways of behavior. And yet the human mind is even
more variegated than that. So we’ve got a lot to deal with here. It’s not an
impossible task, but it does take time. Fortunately we have the time now. So
make the most of it. These windows in time won’t come all the time. You’ve got
the window right now. Make the most of it.
It’s a paradox: discipline leads to freedom because it helps you make the most
of your free moments. Without it, everything falls apart. Remember Shackleton’s
expedition to Antarctica. There were so many times when things looked hopeless,
but the men were well disciplined. They knew that if there was any hope at all, it
was going to lie in maintaining their discipline. That was what saw them
through. Looking back on it, we can see that Shackleton made a lot of wrong
judgments, but the discipline of the party got them through even his
misjudgments.
So your mind, in the course of the practice, is going to make some false
starts. There are times when some issues come up in the mind and they really are
worth looking into, but other issues turn out to be distractions. How are you
going to know beforehand? You don’t know beforehand. But you give things a
try.
Your first line of defense as you’re practicing concentration should always be:
Any other issues that come up are not what you’re here for right now. But if they
come up persistently, you have to look into them to see why they have such
power over the mind, what their drawbacks are, and why you really shouldn’t

99
have to listen to them. Learn how to see through them. That requires getting
involved with them for a little while. If you find that getting involved with them
is useful, if your involvement helps you understand some deeper issues in the
mind, then pursue them. But also learn how to read what’s going on in the mind
so that you know when it’s just turning into a major distraction and all you’re
doing is reliving old garbage. That’s when you have to pull out. Learn how to
read those telltale signs, but you can learn the tales told by the telltale signs only
from trial and error. We don’t like trial and error, but it’s the only way you’re
going to learn about the mind.
So even though there may be false starts and wrong decisions, the element of
discipline is what’s going to see you through. It’s the discipline that makes the
most of freedom and actually yields in a higher freedom. You learn through trial
and error how to apply that discipline, how to develop that sense of self-
discipline. You’ve got the time now, so do it now. The results may not come
instantly, but working on the mind is what you can do now. There’s no other
way it can be trained.

100
 A Refuge from Modern Values
March 20, 2007

There is a passage in the Canon where Ven. Ananda comes to the Buddha
and says: “You know, half of this holy life, half of the life of the practice, is to
have admirable friends.” And the Buddha says, “Don’t say that, Ananda. Having
admirable friends is the whole of the holy life.” Everything in the practice
depends on having admirable friends. And the Buddha gives us an example: If it
hadn’t been for him as our admirable friend, where would we be? How would we
know anything about the noble eightfold path? How would we know anything
about the path to the end of suffering?
And the practice unfolds in the context of our friendships, which means that
you have to choose your friends well: the people you hang around with, the
people whose values you agree with. The problem is that we often pick up the
values of the people around us through a process of osmosis, hardly even aware of
what we’re doing. We live in a society where everything is measured in terms of
monetary worth. It seems normal. We forget how abnormal it can be. How can
money be the worth of a person? The worth of a person lies in qualities of mind,
the goodness of the heart, the goodness of that person’s actions. There are lots of
worthwhile things in the world that really shouldn’t have a price on them.
I remember when we were in India. Sometimes we’d find ourselves out in an
Indian village and we wanted some water to wash with or to drink. If we saw a
well or a pipe in front of a house, we’d ask the people in the house if we could
use their water. They looked at us very strangely. Later we discovered that it was
expected that you could just take water. Water was something without a price;
you didn’t have to ask permission for it. It was common property. Of course
that’s not the way it is now. They want to privatize all our water supplies; people
keep finding more ways to make money off of water. And that becomes the
norm, because “everybody’s doing it.” So you have to be very careful to choose
your “everybody,” because a lot of activities that everybody is doing can cause a
great deal of harm.
So the practice of meditation is not just mastering a technique. It’s also
learning to pick up the right values. This is why the Buddha created the monastic
Sangha. Not only is this a community where the monks and the nuns help one
another maintain the right set of values; it’s also a place where laypeople can
learn values from the monks and nuns. The fact that the monastics depend on
laypeople means that the laypeople need to have close contact with the

101
monastics. That hopefully causes the values of the monastic life to rub off on the
laypeople. The mere example of someone who can live happily on very simple
things without a salary, without owning any money at all teaches good lessons to
the society at large. It challenges you to look at your values, to look at your life.
Which attitudes, which values and ideas that you’ve picked up from other people
really work against your own best interests? It’s good to examine those attitudes,
because a lot of defilements usually hide behind them.
“Defilement” is one of those traditional Buddhist words that have had
trouble finding their way into Western Buddhism. It’s a very common word over
in Asia. People freely admit that they have defilements, and can talk openly about
their defilements all the time. But over here, people don’t like to hear about it.
This is because we tend to regard our greed, anger, and delusion as our friends.
We live in a society where everybody takes it for granted that people are going to
be greedy, angry, and deluded, and the society actually is arranged to take
advantage of that. It becomes not only the norm but it’s also encouraged—as
when they tell you that greed is good. I don’t know how many times people have
complained to me, saying that if you live content with very little, the economy is
going to collapse. Well, if the economy is built on greed, anger, and delusion
maybe it should collapse. It’s causing people to do unskillful things, to think and
act in unskillful ways. It’s not good for us. You might say, “How can we live
otherwise?” Well, have one foot outside of the “real world” so you can step back
and look at these things from a more detached perspective—detached in the
sense of looking at them in terms of the larger picture.
There’s a chant we often chant here: “We are subject to aging, subject to
illness, subject to death, subject to separation. And I’m the owner of my actions:
whatever I’ve done, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.” The Buddha says
that these are things we should all reflect on whether we’re lay or ordained. We
should reflect on them every day, remembering that our actions have
consequences, and the consequences are determined by the quality of the
intention that goes into the action. Once you take this perspective, you can look
at the things you “have to do” to get ahead: If they’re done out of greed, anger
and delusion, you’d be better off not doing them because they have long term
consequences down the line.
Of course that calls into question the idea of “getting ahead.” It’s easy for us
to look at people in other cultures—the things they do to get ahead, the things
they value as signs of social status—and to see them as kind of strange. The
insignia, for example, that go with wealth and power: If you’re from outside the
culture, and look at how people clamor after those ribbons and fans and medals,
it’s all pretty bizarre, and not a little sad. Well, remember that our signs of status
seem bizarre and sad to them. So learn to have that kind of attitude toward the

102
culture in which you live. Step outside of your culture and realize how bizarre it
is.
This is one of the reasons why the Buddha encourages people to go off into
the wilderness, because it’s a very natural way to pull out of the frenzy and rat
race of daily life. Ask yourself: “Do you want to be in a race with a lot of rats?”
You see this reflection filling the literature on wilderness, yet it often happens
that people who go into the wilderness and think about this for a while, don’t
have the skills required to maintain that wilderness attitude when they return
into society. So this is one of the things we try to cultivate through the
meditation: the ability to carry a sense of an inner patch of wilderness, a sense of
separate center. You stay with your center regardless of what’s happening outside.
That gives you your separate perspective where you can step back and look at
things. This is why it’s so important to develop this as a skill.
We were talking today about the concept of refuge as a home for the mind.
It’s also your own internal wilderness. It’s good to have a wilderness home in the
midst of the city, in the midst of all the frenzy of modern life—to have that place
where you can step back even while you’re in the midst of people whose values
aren’t really helpful in training the mind.
So the values and the techniques of meditation go together. This is why it’s so
important to work on this skill until you really have it mastered—so that no
matter what, you can stay with the meditation. This is why your values, the
reasons you come to the meditation or your motivation for meditation, have to
be more than just relaxation or stress reduction. You have to do it for your sanity,
for your safety, knowing that there are dangers out there. This is why the Buddha
stressed heedfulness as the basic mind state underlying all skillful qualities.
“Heedfulness” means a very alive sense of the dangers that await you out there, all
the stupid things you can do if you fall in line with general run-of-the-mill values.
It also means having a sense how crucial it is to develop the ability to step back so
you don’t run with the herd mentality, don’t get caught up in the stampede.
It’s dangerous out there because it’s dangerous in here. The mind so quickly
picks up through its greed, anger, and delusion the ideas out there that foster
greed, anger, and delusion. If our minds were truly pure, if you really did have
that wonderful Buddha nature, that deep down inside is so true and good, this
wouldn’t happen. It would be incorruptible. But the mind is corrupted, it is
defiled, so what kind of Buddha nature is that? How can you depend on it? We
like to think that we’re basically pure yet corrupted by society, but if we were
basically pure we wouldn’t be corruptible.
So you do have to take a jaundiced eye not only to values out there but also
to these false friends inside who are here only to cheat you. They’re good only in
word; they flatter and cajole; and they lead you to ruinous fun, like we repeated

103
in the chant about false external friends just now. You’ve got to protect yourself
from those dangers as well. They’re a fifth column: Mara’s armies inside you.
So realize that you have to be very careful about who you choose as your
friends both inside and out. Sit down with yourself and ask, “What do you really
value in life? What really is important in life?” Then develop the qualities of
mindfulness, alertness, and ardency needed to give yourself the refuge where you
can stay true to your values and develop a sense of genuine security, genuine well-
being. That way your values help the techniques of meditation, and the
techniques help your values. So look for admirable friends. When you find them
outside, follow them. If you can’t find them outside, the Buddha says, go alone,
but try to maintain your internal friends wherever you go.

104
 Two Kinds of Middle
March 28, 2007

This path we’re following is called the Middle Way, and it’s important that
you understand that there are two kinds of “middle”: One is the midpoint on a
continuum; the other is a point off the continuum entirely. And the Buddha
teaches both.
For example, in terms of the effort you put into the practice: You know the
story of the monk with very tender feet. He was doing walking meditation so
much that his feet started to bleed and he began to have thoughts of disrobing.
The Buddha, reading his mind, levitated and appeared right in front of him.
Don’t you wish you had the Buddha coming to appear right in front of you while
you’re meditating? It would make things a lot easier. In this particular case the
Buddha asked him, “Back when you were a lay person, were you skilled at
playing the lute?”
The monk answers, “Yes.”
“What happened when the string was too tight? Did it sound good”?
“No.”
“When it was too loose, did it sound right?”
“No. You have to tune the string so it’s just right.”
“In the same say,” the Buddha said, “you tune your effort, the level of energy
you put into the practice, to what you can handle. Then you tune all the other
faculties of your practice to that.” It’s like tuning a lute, you tune one string first
and then you tune the other strings to that first one. You tune your conviction,
mindfulness, concentration, and discernment to the level of effort you can
manage. In that way your practice stays in tune.
In this case, the middle is a midpoint on a continuum. You can slide up or
down the continuum and it’s not all that difficult. The question of how much
you push, how much you pull back: There are just two directions to choose from.
But with the other kind of continuum, there are more directions, more
dimensions. Take the noble eightfold path. The Buddha teaches it as middle that
avoids sensual indulgence and self torture. This doesn’t mean that you lead a
middling life halfway between torture and indulgence, torturing yourself a little
bit and allowing yourself a little pleasure. The path actually involves a very
intense level of pleasure in right concentration. But it’s a different kind of

105
pleasure, and you relate to it in a different way from how you normally relate to
pleasure. That takes it off the continuum.
To begin with, it’s a pleasure based not on the pleasures of the senses, but on
the ability of the mind to settle down and be still. This is off the continuum of
sensual pleasure and sensual pain. It’s a pleasure that comes simply from
inhabiting the form of your body, being with the breath, the breath energy all
around the body, all through the body, experiencing it from the inside. That’s
form. It’s also a pleasure that can come as you learn how to direct the energies in
the body—finding out where they’re flowing well, where they’re not flowing
well, what ways you think about the energies that help them to flow better,
where you focus your attention to loosen up the tension. That’s a pleasure that
doesn’t depend on sensory input or sensual desire. It’s a different kind of pleasure
and, as a result, a much clearer pleasure. The mind is less intoxicated by it
because you’re not harming anyone. The pleasures where we have to intoxicate
ourselves are the ones where the mind intentionally puts blinders on itself.
You’ve probably had the experience of lusting after somebody. If you step
back and looked at the lust, you’d realize you’re focusing only on a few things in
a narrow narrative that includes a few details of the other person’s body—and
your body—but the narrative excludes an awful lot. After all, there’s an awful lot
of oppression that goes on even in a consensual sexual relationship, but we don’t
like to think about it, so we just block it out. There’s also the whole question of
what that person contains right under the skin, what you contain right under your
skin. Is that really worth lusting for? Again we block that out. So many of our
sensory pleasures are just that: a blocked out, narrow, confined range of view.
That’s why they’re intoxicating.
But the pleasure of concentration isn’t intoxicating in that way. You can get
attached to it, but it’s putting you in a position where you can see the attachment
clearly and learn to let go. But notice that it’s off the continuum. It’s not halfway
between sensual pleasure and sensual pain. It’s something of a different order
entirely. And the way you relate to it is different as well. This is important. We
tend to simply receive our pleasure: rab, is the word in Thai. We’re on the
receiving end of the pleasure; we’re on the receiving end of the pain. We’re the
ones who are being afflicted by the pain. We’re the ones who are allowed to
enjoy the pleasure. That puts us on the passive side. When it’s pain, we’re the
victim. When it’s pleasure, we’re the person enjoying the pleasure. We identify
ourselves as the taster, the enjoyer, the experiencer.
But with the path, that’s not the relationship you want. You want to learn
how to use the pleasure of concentration as a tool. This means you’re able to
create a sense of pleasure with the breath. You’re not just going to wallow in the
pleasure, because that takes you back to your old ways of getting intoxicated with

106
pleasure. You’ve got to think of it as: “This is something I’ve got to work with.
What can I do with this pleasure?” First, you can work on areas of tension or
tightness in the body. Get yourself into the body. Inhabit it fully. Then start
asking yourself: “Where am I in the body? What fabrications have I built up
around that sense of where I am in the body?” You can begin to take these things
apart. In other words, the pleasure becomes a basis for understanding a lot of the
mind’s strange perceptions, replacing them with new perceptions, trying out new
perceptions to see how they fit.
This is how you get off your normal continuum. Ask a different question.
Look at things from a different way. Get outside the box. Pleasure is something
you can actually use as a tool rather than something you simply experience or
don’t experience, something you run after as much as you can and then, when
you’ve got it, you just hold onto it. Here we’re learning how to be with it, but not
just simply to grasp at it. We learn to use it. So when pleasure comes up in the
meditation, don’t let yourself lose focus. Don’t abandon your focus on the breath
to wallow in the pleasure. Think of the pleasure as something you’re going to use
as a tool. And then start using it as a tool. This way you develop the mindfulness
that keeps you from getting waylaid by the pleasure, carried off by the pleasure.
And it becomes part of the path.
There’s another version of the Middle Way where the Buddha points out that
saying all exists is one extreme; all doesn’t exist is another extreme. He teaches the
Middle Way: dependent co-arising. This is another case where the Middle Way is
off the continuum because, as he said, most people think in terms of a polarity.
Things either exist or they don’t exist. The word “all” here covers all the senses
and their objects. Basically the question leading to this polarity is: is there
something really existing there or are we just experiencing just phantasms? Is
there something really there behind the sight, the sound, the smell, the taste? Is
there nothing behind the sight, the sound, the smell, the taste? And the Buddha
says, try to drop both.
Where does that put you? It puts you in a position where you can actually
experience what’s arising and passing away. He says look at it as just that: arising
and passing away. As you see things arise, the idea that they don’t exist doesn’t
occur to you. As you see them passing away, the idea that they do exist doesn’t
occur to you. You put yourself in a position where existing and not existing are
not the issue. The issue then turns into what? It turns into the fact that there’s
stress arising and passing away. Whatever arises, it’s a form of stress. Whatever
passes away, it’s just a form of stress.
Once you look at your experience in those terms, then the imperatives of the
four noble truths kick in. Where there’s stress, you’ve got to comprehend it. In
other words, you look at your experiences, not with the question of “Is there

107
something behind there? Is there nothing behind there?” “Behind there” is not
the issue. The issue is what you’re directly experiencing. Try to comprehend that.
Then you can see the craving that causes the stress to rise and pass away. Learn
how to abandon that. Develop the path, so that you can realize the ending, the
cessation of stress. This is another case where the Middle is off the continuum. It
requires that you think in new ways.
So when you find yourself with problems in the meditation, sometimes it’s
simply a matter of sliding back or forth on the continuum: heavier effort, lighter
effort; more analysis, less analysis; more quiet, less quiet. But there are other
times you have to get off the continuum. That requires that you use your
ingenuity, to think outside the box, think off the continuum. This is why some
teachers like to use paradox in their teachings, the unexpected answers. Like the
rhetorical question Ajaan Chah asked, “What is the mind?” His answer: “The
mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” The answer’s not grammatical, but the fact that it’s not
grammatical means you have to stop and think. What does it mean? “The mind
isn’t ‘is’ anything.” Or another way of translating it: “The mind isn’t a what.”
Teachers answer in this way to alert you to the fact that sometimes we ask the
wrong questions. That’s why they’ve got to frame the answer in a new way.
So when you find yourself sliding back and forth on a continuum—the
extremes don’t work, the middle part of the continuum doesn’t work—maybe
you’ve got to get off the continuum. Look at what questions you’re asking.
Maybe it’s time to reframe the question, so you can get that other kind of middle:
the middle that avoids both extremes and avoids even the middle point between
the extremes, because it’s off the continuum entirely.

108
 Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
April 3, 2007

There’s a passage where the Buddha describes how a wise person and a
foolish person differ in the way they react to pain. They both feel pain. Awakened
people get sick, they grow ill, and they die just like regular people. But they react
in a different way. The foolish person, when struck by a pain, reacts in a way that
adds more pain. The classic analogy is of being shot by one arrow and then
turning around to shoot yourself with another arrow—although it’s always struck
me that the classic image is too weak. Actually, you shoot yourself with your
whole quiver. Whatever arrows you’ve got, you shoot yourself with them all, and
no wonder you suffer. The wise person, however, doesn’t fire those extra arrows
at all.
What this means is that when you find yourself suffering over something,
you’ve got to look at which arrows are coming from outside and which ones are
the ones you’re shooting. This comes down to a fairly abstract principle that the
Buddha mentions in another passage—that when you experience a feeling of any
sort, pleasant or painful, part of it is just a potential for the feeling coming from
your past karma; the rest is the way you actualize that potential with your present
intentions, your present karma. You fabricate the potential into an actual feeling
of pleasure or pain.
In other words, we’re not totally passive in our experience of pleasure and
pain. Life is not a TV show, where you passively watch whatever’s going to
happen, and the show will go on whether you watch it or not. It’s more like an
interactive video game. Only when you participate can the game progress. Some
things you can’t change in the game, such as the ground rules, but some things
you can.
So as a meditator you want to focus on what you can change. You want to
take advantage of your ability to fashion your experience in a positive way. In
fact, a lot of the path of the practice is learning how to shoot yourself not with
arrows but with pleasure, to shoot yourself with wisdom. One of the ways we
fabricate our experience is with the way we breathe, so you can shoot yourself
with pleasant breathing. You can change your experience of the body by
consciously breathing in ways that feel good and gratifying. The other way we
fabricate our experience is through the way we think, so you can shoot yourself
with skillful thoughts. Learn to think about the breath in a way that makes it
easier to breath. For example, you can try holding in mind the perception that

109
your body is like a big sponge, and the breath is coming in and out every pore of
the skin. Think of the breath as an energy field that fills the body, and see what
that does to the way you actually breathe. This way you begin to see how your
perceptions shape the feelings you feel.
One of the lessons you learn as you watch your breathing is that when a pain
comes up in the body, you don’t have to just sit there and put up with it. You can
try breathing around it, breathing through it, changing the rhythm of your
breathing in different parts of the body. This will have an impact on how you
experience the pain. Sometimes there will be little germs or seeds of an actual
physical cause for the pain, but if you change your attitude toward the pain, it’s
like shooting it with pleasure, shooting it with mindfulness, shooting it with
good breath sensations, so that the germs don’t spread, the seeds don’t grow.
Sometimes by changing the way you breathe, changing the way you think
about what your body is doing as it breathes, you can actually change the
physical cause of the pain. At other times the physical cause is still there, but as
you surround the pain with comfortable breath sensations, the pain won’t spread,
won’t grab hold of your body or of your awareness. You’re on top of the process
of fabrication. Instead of shooting yourself with more arrows, you’re shooting
yourself with good breath sensations, with new perceptions of how the breath
moves in the body.
This principle applies to issues outside as well, such as your relations with
other people. How many arrows do they shoot you with, and how many times do
you shoot yourself with your whole quiver of arrows? They may say one thing
that gets you upset. They say it once, but then you say it over and over and over
in your mind. If you could fire arrows in rapid succession with the speed with
which you can think these harmful thoughts, you’d be a great archer.
So you’ve got to learn how to replace that tendency to shoot yourself with
more pain, more arrows, and to shoot yourself instead with some wise
perceptions. Get some perspective on that other person; get perspective on what
happened. Instead of focusing on all the sorrows and pains and difficulties in
your life, you might look at where things are going well right now. This is not to
say that you don’t have to deal with the negative issues, but you do need to learn
how to put things into perspective so that you’re not shooting arrows. You’re
shooting wisdom. You’re shooting discernment.
The purpose of all this is not simply to make life livable but also to put
yourself in a position where you can really practice. You’re not focusing all your
energy on adding to your pains. You’re getting the mind in a position of inner
strength where it doesn’t feel the need to go out and straighten out the world
before it’s going to practice. If you had to straighten out the world before you
could practice, nobody could practice on the human plane.

110
 You need to get some perspective on this issue. There are crazy people out
there; there are insane people out there. A lot of them have power. But you don’t
have to allow that power to extend into your mind. You can learn how to keep
your attitude as much under control to the best of your ability.
Again, it’s like an interactive game. There are some things you can’t change
in your situation, but there are a lot that you can. Sometimes you make one
choice in the interactive game and it changes the whole plot. Other times it can
simply dispose of one or two of the bad guys. But at least you can play an active
role. You can get the mind into a position where it’s able to practice, able to turn
around and look inside and see that the real cause that makes your pains
burdensome is what you’re doing right now.
This again connects with the Buddha’s insight that feelings of pain and
pleasure are not necessarily a given. We’re not simply passive recipients of these
things. We take an active role in forming them. And the best way to understand
that active role is not to try to be passive and say, “I’m not going to do anything
at all. I’m just going to accept what happens.” Because what really happens is the
active role you’re playing then goes underground where you don’t see it.
Bring it up into your conscious awareness: that you have at least some ability
to fashion that pain, to fashion that pleasure. What direction are you going to
fashion it into? Are you going to shoot it with more arrows or with wisdom?
You’ve got the choice.
As you develop skill in this process of fabricating your experience, you gain
more insight into the role that fabrication plays in your life as a whole. You’re in
a better position to decide how to fabricate things: which areas are worth getting
involved in, which ones are not. Learn how to fabricate good states in the mind
—the pleasure, the rapture of right concentration—for those are good
fabrications. The directed thought and evaluation that bring those feelings about:
Those are good fabrications because they bring you to a point where ultimately
you see that there is something unfabricated, that doesn’t arise, doesn’t pass away;
it’s just there. As the texts say, you can touch it with your body, see it with your
body—i.e., sense it with your entire awareness. That’s when you can stop all your
shooting because the awareness of what you’ve totally touched is so totally
overwhelming. It’s such a total form of happiness that doesn’t require you to do
anything with it at all.
Some people think that the deathless is just a nice spacey feeling around your
sensations, that you tend to miss it if you don’t look for it, but it’s there: a
neither-pleasure-nor-pain kind of space around things. But that’s not the
deathless; it’s is just another kind of feeling: the neither-pleasure-nor-pain of
equanimity, of the dimension of space. Dressing it up as the deathless is not a
skillful way of dressing it up. It may make you feel good for a while, but it gets in

111
the way of your seeing through the process of fabrication. After all, that sense of
space that you create around things is something you’ve fabricated. You were the
one who turned your attention there and highlighted it in your awareness. You
were the one who tried to make something out of it, tried to shoot it with fancy
labels. The fancy labels may seem reassuring, but they’re not the skillful shooting
that the Buddha has in mind.
He wants you to shoot yourself with the pleasure and bliss of concentration,
with the directed thought and evaluation; to shoot yourself with discernment so
that you can really understand how even a state of equanimity is fashioned. He
wants you to see what you’re shooting yourself with as you hang out in a state of
equanimity, so that you ultimately can see through to what’s not fashioned at all:
“not-made-of-that-ness,” as the Pali word for “non-fashioning,” atammayata,
literally means. You’re not making anything out of it. You can get there, not by
simply telling yourself not to fashion anything, but by mastering the process of
fashioning: learning how to shoot yourself skillfully, shoot your pain, shoot your
pleasures, shoot your feelings of equanimity with insight—until you get so
skillful and thorough in your shooting that that there’s nothing left to shoot. You
can stop. The bows and arrows fall from your hands.
But even before you reach that point, take advantage of the fact that your
pains and pleasures are partly the result of past karma, partly a result of what
you’re doing right now. So look at what you’re doing right now. Get really
sensitive to that. You’ll find that even though you’re living in the same place as
you were before, it’s like being in a different game, a different world entirely. The
external situation may be the same as it was, but your experience of it is very
different. Even though other people can shoot at you, you learn how not to get
hit. Even though there are pains in the body, you don’t let them hit your mind.
So learn to use these factors and perceptions—i.e., the ways you label things,
the narratives you build up around them, the things you focus on as important,
the things that you put aside as unimportant. You’ve got a lot of choices here, so
make sure that you make them well.

112
 Wilderness Wealth
April 20, 2007

Ajaan Fuang used to tell the story of a time when he was on tudong with
Ajaan Lee. They went out with a fairly large group. Ajaan Fuang, from his years
with Ajaan Lee, had learned a very important lesson: Ajaan Lee never really
seemed to be concerned about whether anyone was going to be able to keep up
with him. He walked very fast in the forest. So Ajaan Fuang did his best to keep
up with him. It turned out that on that trip someone else was carrying Ajaan
Lee’s bowl, another person was carrying his shoulder bag, another was carrying
his umbrella tent. So when evening came, Ajaan Fuang and Ajaan Lee found
themselves on top of a mountain with nobody else around. They had left the
crowd way behind. So Ajaan Fuang strung up his umbrella tent and they had to
share the one tent that night. Ajaan Fuang gave his teacher a brief massage and
then sat in meditation for a while. He thought of the passage in the Canon where
the Buddha talks about the monk who is content just with his robes, his bowl, his
basic requisites; and who—like a bird who wherever he goes—carries his wings as
his only burden.
This contentment is a kind of wealth, a wealth that doesn’t weigh you down.
The wealth that comes from material things is heavy, both literally and
emotionally. You’ve got all these ties and all these responsibilities. But if you can
find happiness in just a few things, that kind of wealth is light. This is one of the
reasons we go into the wilderness, to remind ourselves that we don’t really need
all that much—just some basic shelter, just enough food to keep going. If you can
train the mind to be happy in a situation like that, that’s genuine wealth. There’s
a real lightness that comes from being able to find happiness simply sitting here
breathing. It means that your happiness is dependent on very few contingencies.
The people with money, the people with investments, are the ones who have to
read the newspapers every day to figure out what’s safe, what’s not safe out there
in the world. But if your investment is in the skills of the mind, then no matter
what the situation, you’re secure.
There’s a sutta where the Buddha talks about the sense of lightness—he calls
it the emptiness—that comes from going out in wilderness and just having the
perception of wilderness, dropping all your everyday concerns, the concerns of
your family and society at large. Just realizing that you’re in the wilderness,
you’re in the wild: There are no clocks, no timetables. And he recommends that
you indulge in that perception of wilderness, that mental label that says “the

113
wild,” because that makes the concerns of human society seem very small, very
far away.
Then, while you stick with that perception, not allowing your mind to stray
back to issues with this person and that, you can see that a lot of the disturbances
of social life fade away. The only disturbances remaining are those based on that
perception of wilderness. In other words, there can be a great sense of ease,
openness, lightness that comes from being out in the wild, but it’s not entirely
carefree. You still have to worry about your physical safety, about what you’re
going to get to eat, about what might want to eat you, all the issues that come
from identifying with this body, the survival of the body, in a very dangerous
place. The mind in that situation is still not entirely free, still not entirely empty
of disturbance.
So the Buddha goes on to recommend a more refined perception. In this case
it’s the element of earth. He says to think of “earth” without paying attention to
its hollows and irregularities—just its earthness, like a hide that’s stretched free of
its wrinkles with a hundred pegs. Don’t think of any particulars of earth, but just
remember that everything around you, everything within the body, is all earth.
And as far as you can think out in any direction, it’s earth. Actually you can do
the same with any of the other elements or properties as well: wind, fire, and
water. Wind is the energy that permeates everything. Fire is the warmth; water,
the coolness and cohesion. These perceptions apply inside your body and out.
When you’re not thinking of yourself as a being in wilderness, but just thinking
of the body and what it has in common with everything around it, it blurs the
distinctions.
First you blur the distinctions inside the body. So often we think of ourselves
as a little spirit that inhabits the head, and the body is just a lump. But you want
to create a sense of unity there as well. Remember that your head is earth, you’ve
got bone all around it: the muscles and skull. You’ve got blood vessels, you’ve got
blood in the vessels. All this material stuff here in the head is exactly the same as
the material stuff down in the body. Think about that for a while. Try to
maintain that perception, that mental label. There’s no real distinction. What’s
up is the same as what’s down. This is one of the applications of the bases of
power: Up and down are basically the same. You’ve got blood in your head,
you’ve got blood in your feet. The blood that’s in your feet right now was in your
head a little while ago. The blood that’s in your head right now is in your heart,
your intestines. It’s all part of the same thing. Just keep that perception in mind
to help erase any sense of distinction.
From there you spread it all around you. There’s earth all around you, wind
all around you. Fire, water: All of these properties stretch out in all directions.
When you keep that perception in mind, the thought of being in wilderness

114
seems coarse because that’s always concerned with survival: where you’re going
to eat, what kind of shelter you’re going to find. If you were out in the woods
right now in the rain tonight, that would a big issue: how are you going to keep
warm? But if you just keep your mind on the perception “earth,” then the
question of your survival, the question of your comfort fades into the
background. You can actually use the perception of fire to warm yourself up, or
at least warm the mind up. You can think of the fire element permeating the
whole body, not only around the skin, but down into the organs. The potential
for warmth exists in everything. Sometimes using that label can accentuate that
particular property, so the mind is less concerned about the chill of the rain
outside.
What this shows you is the power of your perceptions. The way you perceive
things can create disturbance in the mind or can drop the disturbance. That’s an
important lesson right there. Even just these thoughts of wilderness, thoughts of
elements, are the beginning of the Buddha’s teachings on how to induce a lack of
disturbance in the mind. You go to more and more refined perceptions: from the
physical properties, you go to infinite space; from space to infinite consciousness,
consciousness permeating everything; from there to nothingness; and then on to
neither perception nor non-perception. And then to what the Buddha calls the
themeless concentration of awareness.
At that point you’ve gone even beyond the notion of oneness. Oneness
actually takes you only as far as the infinitude of consciousness. To get beyond
that to nothingness you have to drop the thought of the oneness: in other words,
the sense of one consciousness permeating everything. You go beyond the
oneness, then you go beyond even any theme, any nimitta for the meditation at
all. The Buddha’s definition of nimitta doesn’t have to do with seeing lights or
hearing sounds. For him the nimitta of right concentration is the four
establishings of mindfulness, the four satipatthana: body, feelings, mind states,
mental qualities, in and of themselves. Yet there’s even a state of concentration
that doesn’t focus on those themes at all. It’s totally independent: No object
whatsoever, but awareness is concentrated.
But even that, he says, is fabricated. When you realize that—that there is even
an element of effort that goes into that, that it’s inconstant, stressful, not-self—
you can let go of that as well. That’s when there’s a true awakening. Even though
emptiness has its gradations, awakening doesn’t happen until you’ve totally let go
of fabrication of all kinds.
The ability to do this starts with the ability to notice the power of your
perceptions, what the mind is doing. In other words, you get into a state of
concentration and at first you indulge in it, you enjoy it, based on the perception
you’ve chosen. Then you step back a bit and look at it to see what disturbance is

115
still there. You can get started on that process by going out in the wilderness and
seeing the different effects of your perceptions when you’re in the wilderness,
and then when you’re back in the monastery. For lay people, when you’re here in
the relative wilderness of Metta as opposed to your homes, that reflection gets
you started in the right direction. You see that the problem of suffering is not
anything “out there.” It’s largely in the way you perceive things, the way you
fabricate things. And the process of meditation is a progressively refined
understanding of that teaching—an understanding that goes deeper and deeper,
gets more and more subtle, but it follows the same basic principle all down the
line.
So learn to appreciate the power of these perceptions: wilderness as opposed
to society, the elements as opposed to wilderness. Once you’ve hit the higher
levels of emptiness, you look back on these early ones and see how crude they are.
But you also appreciate them because they’re useful in getting you to where you
want to go. The more you’re able to content yourself with little, keeping your
possessions few, your responsibilities few, the better the situation you’re in to
observe these things, to learn from them, to discover wealth that’s even greater
than contentment, a wealth that’s no burden at all.

116
 Disenchantment
April 29, 2007

One of the traditional principles of the teaching is that when the mind gains
concentration, it’s able to see things as they are. Actually the Pali term means
“seeing things as they’ve come to be.” There’s an interesting passage where the
Buddha makes a distinction between bhava and bhuta. Bhava means a state of
being, becoming, the process of becoming, which is a combination of past karma
plus our present karma. But then bhuta means things as they’ve come to be: the
raw material that comes in from the past before we’ve added our hype, added our
salt-and-pepper and mustard and ketchup to make it what we want.
The trick is in learning how to see things as they’ve come to be before you
dress them up, so that you can move on to the next step, which is
disenchantment. Because as long as all you see are the things that you’ve dressed
up and put all your condiments on, you’re going to want to eat them. But if you
see the raw material before it’s been dressed up, before it’s been fixed up, you lose
your taste for it. It’s like that Far Side cartoon. A group of cows is out in the
pasture. One of them lifts up her head and spits out the grass and says: “Wait a
minute. This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” It’s the same with us human
beings. We’ve been eating form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and
consciousness. This is a lot of what clinging means. It means feeding and taking
our sustenance off these things. But if you look at the raw materials and you
think of what kind of happiness you’re trying to build out of them, you realize
you’ve set yourself up for a fall. The raw material simply can’t provide it.
One of the biggest issues in life of course is lust. If you actually look at what’s
involved in the sexual act, it’s pretty disgusting. And so people spend a lot of time
dressing it up. This last week I heard a group of people complaining when they
heard about the whole idea of disenchantment and dispassion: Can’t we still have
sex? In other words, if I get to the point where I don’t want it any more, can I still
have it? This is the kind of thinking that comes from focusing entirely on how
you can dress things up, taking pleasure in the dressing up without really looking
at the raw materials that you’re dressing up. If you look carefully at just what’s
there, without all the hype, without all the added condiments, you really lose
your taste. And it’s very difficult for people to look at what’s already there,
because there’s so much involved in the adding on.
Look at dependent co-arising. It’s interesting to note that the Buddha doesn’t
start everything out with sensory contact, because contact comes at least one third

117
of the way through all the factors. A lot of other things come even before you’ve
had your first contact at the senses. There are all these attitudes, these intentions,
ways of paying attention, and all the different forms of fabrication: These already
color the way you’re going to approach sensory contact. And these are the factors
that make all the difference between whether it’s going to cause stress and
suffering or whether it’s not.
So normally we bring this huge parcel of attitudes to apply to the present
moment, to shape the present moment. And one of the main purposes of
concentration is to learn how to pare that down, so at the very least you know
what you’re bringing. You look at fabrication. The bodily fabrication is breath.
Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. Mental fabrication is
feeling and perception. These are the basic elements the Buddha has us focus on
as we concentrate.
First, of course, we learn how to dress them up in a new way. In other words,
bring the directed thought and evaluation to the breath, to create feelings of
comfort. You use your perceptions to maintain that sense of comfort. So these
elements—the fabrication and intention that we normally bring out of
ignorance: We’re now shaping them with knowledge, with awareness, so at the
very least we can be clear about what we’re doing. It’s only when we’re clear
about what we’re doing that we can begin to pare away the unskillful things in
what we’re doing: the intentions that lie to us, the mental verbalizations that lie
to us. We begin to see right through them. “Okay, this is a lie. This is not the way
things actually are. This isn’t how the way things work.” We begin dropping
those things, dropping those things. We’re looking at the nuts and bolts. We’re
looking at the processes that we bring to the present moment, that we bring to
sensory contact. And as we look more directly at the processes, we begin to see
how false and artificial they are. This is what helps to bring about yatha-bhuta-
ñana-dassana—the knowledge and visions of things as they’ve come to be.
So you look at the raw materials and you realize you’ve been eating grass.
You thought it was something really special, but it’s just grass or even worse. And
when you can let yourself look at that consistently enough, that’s when
knowledge leads to disenchantment. The word nibbida sometimes can be
translated as disgust: the kind of disgust that comes not because things in and of
themselves are disgusting, but simply because we were trying to feed on them.
We haven’t really been paying careful attention to what we’ve been feeding on.
We begin to see that the things we’ve been drawing nourishment from really
don’t have the nourishment we thought they provided.
As Ajaan Lee once said, it’s as if most of the flavor comes from our own
saliva, like a dog chewing on a bone. The only flavor the bone has to offer is the
dog’s own saliva. That’s what we’ve been bringing to it. You see that it’s a futile

118
process, and seeing that is what leads to dispassion. The reason why dispassion
makes such a difference is because we’ve been so involved in the activity of
dressing things up and making them into something that they’re not. When you
develop dispassion for that process, you don’t want to get involved in that
makeup, make-believe dressing up kind of activity. And so your own experience
of what’s actually going on really changes. You see things from a totally new
light, and the whole thing just stops because you’re no longer keeping it going.
It’s not that you’ve been watching a TV show and you decide you don’t like it,
and so you turn it off. It’s more like realizing you’ve been in an interactive game
and you’ve been playing it really poorly. The game itself doesn’t have that much
at all to offer anyhow. So you lose interest in the game. And the game stops.
So the reason we’re concentrating the mind here is to get more sensitive to
what we’re bringing into the present moment, seeing all the hype that we add to
the raw material that our past kamma has created for us. We realize no matter
how great we are in hyping things, the raw material simply cannot provide what
we’re looking for. No matter how skillfully we try to make it into something
that’s lasting and reliable, the materials are ready to fall apart all the time, all the
time.
One of the reasons why we don’t stop it is that we’re afraid that there would
be nothing, life would be pabulum, it would be porridge without any
condiments. That’s what our fear is. This is why we are so loath to let go. But the
Buddha’s great discovery is that when you stop dressing things up you open up to
something that doesn’t require any dressing up at all. It’s much better to begin
with. And all this effort to make things delicious was getting in the way of the
happiness you actually wanted. This is when things open up, this is where
dispassion leads to release. And it’s a release that you can know. It’s not like
you’re blanking out. If that’s all it was, if we just blanked out totally, what would
you know? Nothing. But the happiness of release is something you can know.
You can know this freedom. It comes from taking all these processes apart.
So this is why we meditate. This is why we bring the mind to concentration.
Not so that we can just hang out here and have a good time, but so we can see the
processes of the mind: how they try to create happiness out of raw materials that
simply can’t provide it, or at least not in the really lasting reliable way that we
want. The Buddha’s advice is to use them in a new way, to create a path. After all,
what else are you going to work with? How would you create a path unless you
took those aggregates that you were using for one purpose and use them for
another? Meditation is a different way of dressing up the present moment using
form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness as tools. You dress
them in a different way. But in the process of dressing them in a different way,
you get to see processing as it’s happening. You come to realize that this kind of

119
happiness that you create by following the path is much greater than what you
had before. Ultimately it will take you to a point where you even let the path go.
As Ajaan Lee said, that’s where it gets really good.

120
 In the Land of Wrong View
June 11, 2007

You probably know the passage in the canon where Ananda comes to see the
Buddha and says, “You know, half of this holy life we’re leading, half of this
practice is having friendship with admirable people.” And the Buddha says,
“Don’t say that, Ananda. The whole of the practice is having friendship with
admirable people.” This doesn’t mean that other people can do the practice for
you. It simply means that having the right people around you, associating with
the right people, enables you to get on the path to begin with and to stay there.
There’s another passage where the Buddha says he doesn’t see any external
factor that’s more helpful for awakening than friendship with admirable people.
Of course the primary example of the admirable friend is the Buddha himself;
he’s the example. Which sets up the challenge: He claims that he was able to find
true happiness—a happiness that wasn’t dependent on conditions—through his
own efforts, and that we can attain it through our efforts, too. Simply keeping
that claim in mind and looking at the example of his teaching, the example of his
behavior as it’s recorded, and the examples of people who’ve followed his
teachings down through the centuries: Keeping that claim in mind puts your life
into perspective.
You can ask yourself: “Do you want to accept that challenge to see if it’s true
or do you just want to turn your back on it? Or are you going to be very selective
in thinking about it sometimes and hiding it away at others?” It’s a choice you’ve
got to make. It’s best to keep it there in the background all the time because it
enables you to live your life to its highest capacity. We talk about getting the
most out of life; well, finding true happiness is certainly getting the most out of
life.
This is where we begin to see the importance of having genuinely admirable
people as friends because there are a lot of other theories out there about what it
means to get the most out of life and they’re especially strong in our society. We
have little boxes in our houses that teach us all kinds of weird things about where
happiness lies, what kind of happiness is possible, and what kind of happiness is
desirable. You have to ask yourself: “Are those boxes—TVs, radios, computers—
your friends or not?” When you hang around with them, what kind of friends are
you hanging around with? What kinds of ideas, what kinds of values are you
picking up from them? Because it’s not just the flesh and blood people you
associate with who create your mental environment. You also associate with the

121
people who wrote the books you read, who produced all the shows you see, who
made the video games you play. The question you always have to ask is: “Why is
there somebody out there who wants me to believe this? And exactly what are
they asking me to believe? What assumptions am I accepting when I accept their
ideas or even start thinking in-line with them?”
Yesterday I was talking with some businessmen who were saying that when
you’re in business, you’ve got to be aware of people who are unscrupulous—but
even when you’re associating with people who are scrupulous in their business
dealings, what assumptions are you picking up from them about the best way to
spend your time, the best kind of values to have? You’ve got to question those
values. Are they really in-line with your own true interests? Do they clash with
the Buddha’s basic teaching that happiness comes from training the mind?
There are a lot of different areas out there in the world where we could be
competing with one another. Some people try to compete in being smarter.
Some people compete in trying to be wealthier, better looking, stronger, more
powerful—in the sense of being able to influence a lot of people. And you’ve
always got to ask, “Is that really good for you? When you hang around with a
group of people, what are the basic assumptions that underlie your friendship,
underlie your interactions?” If you’re serious about your practice, you’ve really
got to cordon off an area of your heart through the meditation so that when
you’ve been dealing with people, you come back home and sit quietly and say:
“Okay, what did I pick up? What germs of ideas did I pick up from these people?”
Even something as innocent as listening to the news: There’s not only the
bias of the particular newscaster but also a deeper bias that underlies all the news
that you get through the media—which is that the most important things
happening in the world right now are things that other people are doing
someplace else. And that right there flies in the face of the Dhamma. The
Buddha’s teaching is that the most important thing in life is what you’re doing
right now. And you want to be skillful about it.
You don’t want your attention to be distracted by other people’s behavior. At
most you look at them as examples: Is this person’s behavior a good example? A
bad example? But your primary focus has to be on what you’re doing right now.
That’s one of the questions the Buddha has the monks ask themselves everyday:
“Days and night fly past, fly past. What am I doing right now?” And it’s a good
question not only for monks but for all people who are trying to train the mind,
trying to find true happiness.
So it’s important that you ask yourself: “Who are your true friends and who
are not?” The Buddha gives some examples in the Canon of the people you want
to hang around with. One, people who have conviction, i.e. conviction in the
power of human action, the power of training the mind, that it really is

122
important, that your actions are not just throw away, that you can’t be apathetic
about what you’re doing. That’s the first prerequisite.
The second one is that you want to find people who are generous—not only
because they’ll be generous to you, but also because they’ll teach you generosity
by example so you can pick up some of that habit. If you’re going to be
competing with one another, learn how to compete in being generous rather
than in accumulatimg.
The third prerequisite is that you want your friends to be people of virtue,
people who have strong principles about certain types of behavior that they won’t
engage in because they know that those things are harmful. Again, you benefit
not only because they’re not going to harm you, but also because they’ll teach
you how to be harmless. And they’ll remind you that this is important.
And finally, you want friends who are wise and discerning in terms of seeing
what really does cause suffering and what doesn’t, what leads to true happiness
and what doesn’t.
So those are the four qualities: conviction, generosity, virtue, and
discernment. These are the people you want in your inner circle of friends, the
ones you go to for advice, the ones whose values you really feel at home with.
Of course there’s the question of how many of those people can you find. If
you have trouble finding them outside, you’ve got to develop this set of friends
inside. This is one of the reasons that Ajaan Lee, for example, talks about having
the breath as your friend—because being able to stay in touch with your breath
helps you watch the motions of your mind. It helps to alert you to when you’ve
picked up germs from other people.
And in terms of your reading and the things you listen to: Read Dhamma
books, listen to Dhamma talks. Be selective in your reading of the Dhamma
because there are all kinds of dhamma out there, true and false. The Buddha gives
some examples to help you sort out which is which. True Dhamma teaches you
to be unburdensome. It teaches you to develop dispassion rather than passion,
thinking and acting in ways that will loosen your fetters rather than tie them
tight, acting in ways that don’t lead to entanglement, don’t lead to self-
aggrandizement. This last is a big problem in America.
These are some basic principles to watch for in your behavior, to watch for
when you’re trying to decide what’s Dhamma and what’s not. Just because a
book says it’s a Dhamma book doesn’t mean that it is a Dhamma book. And
conversely, there are a lot of books out there that may not be “Dhamma books”
in an overt way but they do teach good lessons. So learn to be alert to that.
But ultimately the best test is for you to develop as much integrity and as
many admirable qualities within yourself as you can, and to be very clear about

123
what your values are. If you’re going to be competing with other people, compete
in being virtuous, compete in being generous, in having conviction, in being
wise. Ajaan Lee tells a story about when he was a young monk competing with
his other young monk friends to see who could sit longer in meditation, who
could walk longer in meditation, who could do with less food. It may seem kind
of childish but it did develop good qualities. He eventually got over the need to
be competitive, to measure himself against other people, but when you live in
society it’s hard not to measure yourself against other people. So learn to measure
yourself in terms of the right standards.
There’s another passage where Ananda is talking to a nun and says: “We’re
practicing this practice to overcome conceit, but conceit has its uses.” You see
that other people are practicing and you say: “They are human beings. I’m a
human being. They can do it. I can do it.” So as long as there’s going to be
conceit in your mind—i.e., the idea that you define yourself in a certain way and
you define yourself against other people in a certain way—try to use standards
that are wise. Look in terms generosity, virtue, conviction, discernment. At the
very least be your own best friend in terms of your values and try to keep those
values clear and articulate so that you notice when you’re deviating from them.
So that even though we’re living here in a land of wrong views, you try to create
an island of right views around yourself.
Sometimes I feel like we’re living on a moon colony here. We have to be very
careful to make sure we stay within our support system and carry our own
oxygen around with us. Make the Dhamma your oxygen as best as you can in
terms of what you listen to, what you read, and how you sort out the germs and
other things you pick up from outside. In other words, look for admirable friends
and learn to internalize them so you can carry them around with you. That’s one
of the most important things you can do in the practice.

124
 Right Mindfulness
December 25, 2007

The term mindfulness on its own is something neutral. It can be put to good
uses or bad. All it means is simply keeping something in mind. You can keep in
mind the fact that you want to put an end to suffering, or you can keep in mind a
decision to rob a bank. In either case, it’s mindfulness. Mindfulness becomes
right depending on the task to which you put it, it becomes wrong depending on
the task to which you put it. There is such a thing as wrong mindfulness and
keeping the wrong things in mind.
So as we’re practicing here we want to make sure that our mindfulness is
right mindfulness. There are two spots in the Canon where the Buddha defines it.
The best known definition is in terms of the four satipatthanas, the four
establishings of mindfulness. In fact there are two whole huge discourses on the
topic. But it’s also good to keep in mind there’s another definition of right
mindfulness, a lot more simple. It’s simply keeping in mind the fact that you
want to develop the skillful qualities of the path and to abandon their antitheses.
In other words you want to keep in mind the fact that you want to develop right
view and abandon wrong view, develop right resolve, abandon wrong resolve,
and so through the right and wrong factors of the path. In other words, you’re
not simply observing without preference whatever comes up. You’re keeping in
mind the fact that there are skillful qualities you want to develop and unskillful
qualities that you want to abandon. You keep that fact in mind and apply it to
what you are doing. That’s right mindfulness.
It’s important to keep this context in mind. Sometimes you see people
interpreting the teachings on the establishings of mindfulness out of context.
Right mindfulness builds on right effort, the effort to develop skillful things, the
desire to develop skillful qualities in the mind and to abandon unskillful ones.
You just keep that in mind. Now, to keep that in mind effectively you’ve got to
give yourself a framework that will lead to right concentration. So as we’re
practicing mindfulness, remember that that’s the context. You try to develop a
skillful understanding of what’s skillful in the mind and what’s not, along with
the desire to develop what’s skillful, to abandon what’s not. That’s what we’re
going to keep in mind.
The best way to remember something is to have a good solid framework, a
good solid foundation, a good frame of reference, which is where the
establishings of mindfulness come in. Sometimes you see these listed simply as

125
body, feelings, mind. and mental qualities. But actually the establishing of
mindfulness is a process. To begin with, you try to remain focused on the body in
and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with
reference to the world. That’s the process we’re working on here as we focus on
the breath. It’s the first of the establishings. To remain focused is called
anupassana. It means you choose something to watch and then you stick with it.
In this case, what you watch is the body in and of itself. In other words, not the
body as a part of the world or how it might be measured in the context of the
world—whether it’s good looking or bad looking, whether it’s strong enough to
do the jobs you need out in the world or not. Just simply the body in and of itself
on its own terms.
In doing this, you’re ardent, alert and mindful. Ardent is what carries the
process of right effort into the practice: You really want to do this skillfully. Alert
means you’re watching what you are doing, paying close attention to what you’re
doing and the results you’re getting. And then of course mindful, keeping the
body in mind. Putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world means that
any time you might switch your frame of reference back to the world, you try to
remind yourself, No, you don’t want anything out of that and you’re not going to
let issues of the world get you worked up. You’re going to stay right here with
your original frame of reference, i.e., the body in and of itself, and then try to
carry that frame of reference into all of your activities.
In other words instead of jumping around to other frames of reference, stay
with this one, stay with the sense of the body as you’re sitting here watching the
breath, as you get up, as you walk around. Try to keep the body in mind all the
time and be alert to how the breath energy feels. As for anything else that may
come up—whether it’s a thought, a feeling, or an interaction—try to see how it
relates to the body. This is how you strengthen your frame of reference and turn
it into an object of concentration. When you’re talking with someone else, notice
how your body is reacting during the talking. When you’re working, notice how
your body is reacting, how the breath is reacting during the working. Always
refer things back to the breath. That way your frame of reference becomes really
established and you start gaining insights you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
That’s because establishing the body here as your frame of reference helps to keep
the mind inside instead of flowing out.
Luang Puu Dune once said the mind that flows out to its objects is suffering.
So you want to keep it inside. Of course what will happen is that occasionally it
will flow out, and maybe after a time you’ll be able to see it flow out as you’re not
flowing out along with it. In other words, one mental state is flowing out but the
observer is staying right here with the body. When you don’t go out with that
flowing state, it stops. It goes out a little ways and then just falters and dies away.

126
That’s an important insight, the realization that you can observe states of mind
without getting entangled with them. That’s the point where you can start using
other frames of reference.
Ajaan Lee makes the point that when you stay with the breath you’ve got all
frames of reference right there. There’s the feeling associated with the breath,
there’s the mind state trying to maintain concentration, and then there are the
various mental qualities: either the hindrances that are coming in to interfere
with your concentration or the factors for awakening that are helping it along.
You want to be able to make use of all four. Staying with the body helps you to
observe the mind, helps you observe feelings and mental qualities without
getting sucked in by them.
This is why the meditation begins with the breath. This is why when the
Buddha gave instructions in how you could develop concentration in a way that
brings to fruition all four establishments of mindfulness, he said to stay with the
breath. As you stay with the breath, you focus on the breath in ways that deal
with feelings, that deal with the mind, that deal with mental qualities, but you
never really leave the breath. You simply train yourself to observe things in
conjunction with the breath. So of all the various places you can establish
mindfulness, the breath is the most important, the most crucial, the one you
really want to work on the most.
There’s a passage in the text where the Buddha says you can focus on the
body internally, externally, or both internally and externally. This fits into a
pattern that we see many times in the teachings: that when you look at yourself
you want to also remind yourself that whatever is true about the inner workings
of your mind and body is true about everybody else’s body and mind. This helps
puts things into perspective. When you’re having trouble with your hindrances,
remind yourself that you’re not the only one. Other people have trouble with the
hindrances as well. When you have pain in the body, remind yourself everybody
else has pain in the body as well.
This follows the pattern of the night of the Buddha’s awakening. He first
started with knowledge about his own past, his own stories. And if you think
you’re carrying around a lot of stories, well, think about someone who could
remember back many eons, all the stories he could have carried around. But he
didn’t carry them around. He just watched them. He observed them. His next
question was, “Does this truth apply only to me or also to other people? What’s
the principle that determines how you go from one life to the next?”
So in the second watch of the night he inclined his mind to knowledge of the
passing away and rebirth of all beings. He saw that this happens to everybody:
People die and are reborn on all different kinds of levels of the cosmos. What’s
essential to know, though, is that the nature of your actions is what determines

127
where you get born. Skillful actions done under the influence of right view lead
to good rebirths. Unskillful ones done under the influence of wrong view lead to
bad rebirths as a general principle. Notice that the Buddha started with himself
and then moved to other beings.
Only then did he get to the third insight, which was to focus directly on the
present moment in and of itself. It may seem like a detour but it’s important to
put things into perspective before you start watching the present. Otherwise
you’re sitting here meditating, facing your problems, and it seems like you’re the
only one sitting here in pain or the only one sitting here with distraction. It’s
good to remind yourself that everybody goes through these things. No matter
how bad the pain, there have been people who have sat through worse pain and
yet come out on the other side. So the idea of keeping in mind not only your
body, but also the bodies of others, seems to be designed to put things into
perspective as an aid to putting aside greed and distress with reference to the
world.
All of this is designed to put the mind in a position where it’s ready to really
settle down. The mindfulness and the alertness protect the mind, provide a good
foundation. The quality of ardency is what helps make it skillful. And when you
reflect on the universality of suffering, it gives you the right motivation for
practicing. All these qualities together get you ready to settle down and stay really
solidly with the breath.
That’s what right mindfulness is all about. It’s not simply about observing
what arises and what passes away and just letting it arise and letting it pass away.
It’s not so much about allowing, as about directing the mind in a skillful
direction toward right concentration. When you’re observing things arising and
passing away, whether in the body or the mind, it’s not just a matter of being a
passive observer. You want to observe them so you can understand them, and you
want to understand them so that you can learn to have some mastery over them
—so that you can direct the states of mind, you can direct issues that arise in the
body in the direction of right concentration. If there are pains in the body, what
can you do? How can you relate to the pains in such a way that they don’t knock
your concentration off course? How do you breathe in a way that helps spread
some pleasure around in the body? What attitudes do you develop toward what’s
going on in the body and the mind to help get you over any difficult patches?
That’s what you want to keep in mind.
So right mindfulness is not only a matter of having the right place to focus
your attention; it’s also a matter of bringing the right attitude, remembering the
right attitude: the attitude that motivates right effort, the desire to do things
skillfully and let go of unskillful habits. When you have that attitude in charge,
your mindfulness does become right mindfulness, the kind of mindfulness that

128
helps bring all the factors of the path together.

129
 The Best of a Bad Situation
December 26, 2007

If you ever go to Thailand and spend some time in the Buddhist world over
there, you’ll be struck by the emphasis placed on the issue of protection. People
make merit because they feel the merit will protect them. One of the most
popular sayings there is that the Dhamma protects those who practice the
Dhamma. People go to monasteries hoping for protective blessings. There’s a
huge market in protective amulets. What it comes down to is that people there
have a very strong sense of how unstable society is, that there are lots of dangers
all around. So they look to the Dhamma for protection on one level or another.
And living over there, I came to take that attitude for granted. But on coming
back to the States in the early nineties, I found a huge difference. Over here the
Dhamma was mainly concerned with how to make the best of a good situation.
Society seemed stable, the economy was thriving, everybody was happy. People
wanted to meditate so they could learn how to make the most of their pleasures.
How to not hold onto them too tight. Learn to accept the fact that these
pleasures were impermanent but basically learning how to let go of one pleasure
so you could embrace another. That seemed to be the main attitude.
Then there came the airplane attacks and everybody’s attitude changed. All of
a sudden people were suddenly aware of danger. And it’s interesting to see how
people who were so complacent reacted with such terror to the fact that their
lives might be threatened, their society might be threatened—as if it hadn’t been
threatened before and if it had suddenly become a possibility. I mean, the
immaturity of people’s reactions was amazing to see. That’s what happens when
people who expect nothing but good things to come their way suddenly find
something bad comes their way. They haven’t learned the skills to deal with bad
situations. Some people said that the attacks burst their complacent Buddhist
bubbles. Of course that’s an oxymoron, a “complacent Buddhist.” But that was
the kind of Buddhism we had back in those days. It was very complacent. People
were used to consuming good things, not learning how to produce good things
in their life even in the midst of a bad situation.
This is what the practice of meditation is all about. In fact, all of Dhamma
practice consists of how to make the best of a bad situation. We have that chant
regularly—we are subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to
separation—and yet we want to be happy. The Buddhist teachings are precisely
instructions on how to be happy in the midst of impermanence, in the midst of

130
inconstancy, stress, things that lay beyond our control. In other words, we gain
training not just in being consumers of happiness but in being producers of
happiness. This is what the teaching on the power of kamma is all about. So that
no matter what the situation you know how to find happiness. It’s like being a
good cook. A good cook can walk into the kitchen and no matter what food is
there in the kitchen can make something really good out of it.
So this should be our attitude as we meditate. As you sit down to meditate
you’ll find some days that things are going well and other days things are not
going well at all. You’ve got to pull out your toolkit to see what tools you have to
deal with that particular problem. Sometimes it’s just a problem of a bad mood;
some days nothing seems to go right. You want to think of these things as
training opportunities because worse situations are going to come along—serious
illness, unexpected accidents, death—and they’re not pretty at all. Remember in
the old days how they would talk about how life is good, death is a part of life,
therefore death can be good? Death is no good. You lose control of the body, all
kinds of things happen. So you really need to prepare for it.
This is why we practice concentration, why we practice discernment, so that
we’ll have the tools we need at that point. We also want to practice the right
attitude that no matter how bad things get, there’s still something we can do
about it. If you haven’t developed the skills to deal with this particular problem
facing you right now, well, use your ingenuity. Try to remember what different
Dhamma teachings you’ve learned and see what might be relevant. The attitude
that one meditation technique can cover all situations is a definite mistake. The
Buddha himself never taught that. It’s just part of our modern assembly line
approach to meditation: Just give people one method and all their questions will
be answered; all you have to do is whatever you do in the course of the day, just
stick with that one method and it will see you through. It’s like Henry Ford’s old
statement—we’ll give people whatever color they want as long as it’s black. One
car for everybody’s needs.
As meditators we have different needs. And even as an individual person,
you’ll find you have different needs as you go through the day, as you meditate,
deal with other issues that come up in your life. So it’s good to have a full set of
tools and then to gain a sense of what tools will work for you right now. When
the mind is reluctant to practice, what can you do to get it back in the mood to
practice? If it seems scattered, with lots of frenetic energy, how can you put that
frenetic energy to good use? If it seems sluggish, how can you wake it up? Instead
of looking at these problems as obstacles, look at them as challenges, as
opportunities to develop new skills, to learn how to produce a really great meal
out of unpromising ingredients.
One of my students in Asia was a chef before he became a monk. He told me

131
about one time when they had a set meal at this club where he was working and
cream of asparagus soup was on the menu. They ended up having a lot more
people come than they had anticipated and they were running out of soup. So he
went into the kitchen and said, “Don’t anybody come in, don’t see what I’m
doing.” He went and got all the asparagus scrapings and peels out of the trash,
put them in the blender, seasoned it well, and came up with a perfectly
acceptable asparagus soup.
So you want to have that same attitude toward your meditation. Sometimes
the materials are not promising. You’ve got the body and it’s got pain. Well,
remember that someday further on in your life, the pain is going to be a lot
worse. It’s not going to just be an issue of pain at that point. You’ll actually be
facing the end of your life. And it may happen that the people around you will be
getting all upset as well. You want to learn how to not pick up their mood and
how not to go with the story of how you’re going to miss this and miss that.
You’ve got to learn how to put those things aside. You have to figure out how to
deal with the pain so that it doesn’t overcome you, so it doesn’t sap your strength.
So often the way we deal with pain is what saps the strength that we really
need to use at a time like that. How do you learn not to go with all the stories
that are screaming through your mind? Well, it turns out that these are the skills
you learn as you meditate: how not to go with a vagrant train of thought no
matter how insistent it may be, no matter how relevant it may be to certain issues
in your life. When you realize that this is not useful at this very moment, as a
good meditator you should learn how to put it aside even when it’s screaming in
your mind again and again and again. Your attitude has to be, okay, maybe I
can’t get you out of the mind but at least I’m not going to let you have the whole
mind. I’m going to hold onto just the simple fact of awareness. That way you can
fend off a lot of the power of those thoughts.
And the same with the pain. Sometimes you can use the power of
concentration to deal with the pain and sometimes it just wears you out. My
teacher had a student who had cancer. She’s had cancer for many years now, it’s
taken different parts of her body. It’s amazing that she’s still alive. And a lot of
the fact that’s she’s still alive has to do with the fact that she is meditating. There
was one time when she had to undergo radiation treatment and they discovered
that she had an allergy to the anesthetic. So the question was what to do. She
said, “Well, I’m a meditator, so let me try just dealing with the pain raw.” So they
tried it. She kept using the power of her concentration to fend off any reaction to
the pain. She was able to get through the treatment, but she came out exhausted.
Ajaan Fuang visited her the next day in the hospital and she told him what had
happened. He said, “If you use just the power of concentration, it’s going to wear
you out. You’ve got to use your discernment, to see the pain as something

132
separate, hold that perception in mind. The awareness is one thing, the pain is
something else, your body is still something else.” In other words, the sensations
of body are the earth, water, wind, fire sensations. The pain is something else.
Learn how to see the distinction.
Exactly what is the pain? You sit here with your awareness of the body from
within, which is made up of these four elements, or four properties. Then when
the pain comes you tend to glue the pain onto those different properties, as if
they become one and the same thing. As an observant meditator you should learn
how to undo the glue. The pain sensation is one thing and the body sensations
are something else. And you begin to notice that the pain moves around; it arises
and passes away. It’s a lot less solid when it’s separated out like this than it was
when it was glued, say, to the earth sensations, your sense of the solidity of the
body or the pressure of the blood flowing through that particular part of the
body as it runs up against the solid parts, or whatever.
So no matter how bad things get, remember that the skills of meditation are
there to make the best of a bad situation: How you can still find happiness in the
midst of birth, aging, illness, death, and all the craziness that tends to go on
around us. How you can maintain your sanity in an insane world. And having
the confidence that no matter how bad it gets, there’s always an approach, there’s
always a tactic, there’s always a strategy, there’s always a skill.
This is why the Buddha made dukkha—pain, suffering, stress—his first noble
truth. He pointed directly to the issue that most people like to run away from. He
said, “Look, you’ve got to comprehend this. Only when you comprehend pain
can you put an end to it.” So he was willing to face down the pain, face down all
the facts of aging, illness, and death. He talks about these things not because he’s
pessimistic but because he’s optimistic. He has a solution.
So try to keep that optimism in your own mind—that there is a solution for
every bad mood that comes through the mind, every bad situation there is
around you. There is a way to respond skillfully, there’s a way to maintain a sense
of well-being no matter what. That’s going to require that you change the
boundaries of what you claim as you and yours. Remember that those boundaries
were simply part of an attempt to find happiness. It’s not like you’re abandoning
anything essential. You’re just putting your true happiness first, which is why you
had those boundaries to begin with. You claim certain things as yourself, certain
things as belonging to you because you feel that you have some control over
them and they can help you find true happiness. But in many cases you find that
you’ve got to abandon these things because they actually weigh you down. When
the Buddha has us let go like this, he doesn’t have us let go and just be deprived.
He has us let go because he’s got better tools.
So have that confidence. And if you find that you haven’t developed the skills

133
that you need to deal with these particular issues, well, when times are good work
on them. And even when they’re not good, work on them. I don’t know how
many times people have come to me saying, “There was a period when things
were pretty bad in my life and I didn’t have any time to meditate.” Well, that’s
precisely the time that you need to meditate. And even if you don’t have time to
sit with your eyes closed, the breath is still there. All the mental skills that you
need in the course of meditation can be developed in any situation. It’s just that
it’s easier to develop them when you are sitting here with your eyes closed. But
they are meant to be used no matter how bad the situation gets. That’s a sign of
how good they are.

134
 Five Strengths
February 20, 2008

Close your eyes, sit up straight, put your hands in your lap. Think thoughts
of goodwill—goodwill for yourself, goodwill for all the people around you, for
all the living beings everywhere. May we all find true happiness. And then focus
on your breath. Know when the breath is coming in, know when it’s going out.
Stay with the sensation of the breathing as consistently as you can all the way
through the in-breath, all the way through the out. Don’t let any distractions pull
you away. If you find that you are pulled away, just drop whatever the distraction
is and come back to the breath. Each time you come back, notice: Is the breath as
comfortable as it could be? Could it be more comfortable? Would slower
breathing be better, or faster? Deeper or more shallow? Longer or shorter? You
can experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now.
You’re not just tying the mind down to the present moment. You’re
exploring the present moment, you’re learning about it. Because here it is: this
breath. It’s been coming in and going out ever since you were born. Have you
gotten the most out of it? If it’s left unattended, it simply keeps you alive. But if
you pay attention to it, you’ll find that it’s a lot more helpful than you might
have imagined. If you breathe in a comfortable way, it helps to erase stress
diseases and it’s calming to the mind.
More importantly, staying with the breath develops a lot of good and very
useful qualities in the mind. And this is important because it’s the nature of your
mind, that the skills of the mind determine the shape of your life. Essentially we
meditate for two reasons: one is to live a better life, and the other is to die a better
death. The two go together. We’re not just engaging in a little stress reduction
here. We’re training the mind to deal with the issues of life and death in a much
more skillful way.
The strength of your mind lies its conviction in the importance of its own
actions, its ability to stick with what it knows is skillful; its qualities of
mindfulness, concentration and discernment. These are the qualities of mind that
determine how you’re going to deal with issues in life as they come up. The more
mindful you are, the stronger your concentration, the more likely you are to deal
in a skillful way because you’re coming from a position of strength. You not only
know what the skillful action is, but you’re also strong enough to actually do it.
Often we know the right thing to do but we just simply don’t have the

135
strength to do it. And if that’s the way we live, imagine what it’s going to be like
when we die. The body will be a lot weaker, the mind will be distracted by all
kinds of things—your thoughts of this, you’re going to miss this and miss that,
you’ve only a little time left for this or that. The people around you are all in a
turmoil. The mind has to be really strong to put up with a situation like that and
not buckle under. And the shape of your mind at that point is going to have a
huge impact on how you are reborn. The life you’ve lived is going to have a huge
impact as well.
They compare dying to falling asleep and dreaming, except that in this
particular case you can’t come back to the body anymore. When you fall asleep, a
little dream world will appear in your mind and you go into it: That’s your first
dream. Now the nature of that dream world could be something realistic or
something totally fantastic, pleasant or unpleasant. The nature of the dream
world that appears has to do both with your past actions—issues that have been
weighing on your mind for a long time—or your current state of mind. The
principle that applies as you go to sleep applies at the moment of death as well,
except at that point the mind does tend to be a lot weaker, a lot more desperate.
It will jump— especially if it’s untrained—it’ll jump at anything. If you can train
the mind to be more mindful and alert to what’s going on, then if you see
something unpromising coming up, you don’t have to jump for it. You realize
that you’ve got the choice, and if you learn how to keep in mind the good things
you’ve done in life, that makes it easier for good dream worlds to appear at the
time. But regardless, the important thing is that how you die is determined by
how you live. That’s the issue right now. And so you need the meditation to
develop these five strengths.
The first one, as I said, is conviction: conviction in the principle that what
you do is really important, the choices that you make have a big impact on your
life. You’re free to make those choices. We’re not automatons, we’re not wired by
fate. We always have the opportunity to choose to do the skillful thing in any
given situation, and those choices, whether skillful or unskillful, really do shape
our lives. If you’re convinced of this, you’re going to pay a lot more attention to
what you do and say and think. It encourages you to be more careful about your
choices and at the same time to value your good choices when they come.
So that conviction makes it a lot easier for you to do the right thing, say the
right thing, think the right thing. That’s a form of strength.
The second form is persistence, as when you’re sticking with the breath here.
Each time you slip off, you just come right back. Don’t let yourself get
discouraged, don’t get frustrated. Just keep coming back again and again and
again. That quality of coming back again and again is going to strengthen all the
good qualities of your mind. So when things get difficult, you can still keep on

136
course regardless of distractions, regardless of what other people may say. If you
know that something is really right, really skillful, then you stick with it.
The third strength we’re developing here is mindfulness: the ability to keep
something in mind. It’s often paired with alertness, the sharpness of your ability
to see what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing. These qualities are
important because it’s so easy for us forget. We make up our minds to do
something good, then two minutes later we’re off doing precisely what we told
ourselves we wouldn’t do. That kind of state of forgetfulness just keeps
destroying itself, destroying you. But if you can keep remembering that “This is
the right thing to do, this is where I want to be right now”—for example, when
you decide to stay with the breath—you just keep that in mind, again and again
and again. Don’t let yourself get dissuaded by anything else. This quality of
mindfulness and alertness again will see you through a lot difficult situations and
enable you to remember the importance of your actions and the importance of
doing what’s skillful. It’s enable you to remember the skills you’ve learned from
your past experiences.
The fourth strength we’re developing here is concentration: the ability to stay
with one thing consistently, with a sense of ease, with a sense of well-being—
learning how to settle down with the breath in a way that really does feels
gratifying to the mind, feels easeful to the body. Have a sense of being at home.
The state of concentration is what gives you the good solid foundation you need
for making all those right choices that need to be made.
And finally there’s discernment when you begin to detect here on a very
basic level what kind of breathing is good for the body, what kind of breathing is
good for the mind. Who told you that? Well, you learn from your own powers of
observation. You learn the most efficient way of getting the mind to settle down.
All of this comes from discernment. This efficiency—the ability to cut right
through confusing issues to get to the heart of the issue—is going to see you
through a lot of things. Because there will be times, say when you’re sick, when
you’re weak physically, when it’ll be difficult to get your powers of concentration
as strong as they might be when you’re healthy. But if your discernment is sharp,
it helps you use whatever strength you do have a lot more efficiently and it’s a lot
more to the point.
You see right to the issue. And what is the big issue? The fact that the mind is
causing itself suffering, keeps creating these new worlds, and each world has its
seeds of suffering within it. So you want to comprehend that. How does that
happen? Why does that happen? When you trace it down, you see that there’s
clinging, craving, and ignorance. These are the things that cause us to do things
that give us precisely the opposite results of what we want. We want happiness,
but we cause suffering. It’s because we are ignorant. We crave things that are

137
unskillful, that are not good for us. We cling to things that are not good for us.
When you can see that, then you have to develop the qualities of mind that
enable you to let go of that craving and clinging, that can replace that ignorance
with knowledge. This is why we have the path. You develop qualities of virtue,
concentration, and discernment to give yourself something better to hold onto.
As long as the mind is going to hold on, hold onto something good, something
that will eventually develop its strengths to the point where it doesn’t need to
hold on to anything anymore.
When you see that these are the big issues in life, and that this is how to deal
with them, that cuts through a lot of the confusion that people bring to their
lives, that they bring to every aspect of their being.
So as we meditate we’re trying to develop these five strengths—conviction,
persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—because these are the
qualities that will enable us to choose what to do and to say and to think so that
we will live a better life and, when the time comes, we will die a better death. A
life and a death that cut through all the confusing issues that distract us and go
right to the point, the point of learning how not to create suffering anymore.
In this way, this path starts from some very basic exercises, some very basic
teachings and trainings, but it goes on to accomplish a lot. And as with any large
project, it’s important that you get the basics right. Once you’ve got the basics
right, then everything else will follow.

138
 The Humble Way to Awakening
March 3, 2008

When you compare the Buddha’s teachings to the other teachings being
taught in his time, one thing immediately stands out: how humble the main
topic of his teachings were. Other teachers were talking about the universe as a
whole, whether it was eternal, not eternal, finite, infinite. Or about the nature of
the human personality: Is the body the same as your life force, or is the body
something separate? How would you describe an awakened person? What are the
basic building blocks of the universe? Those kinds of issues. Big issues, Abstract
issues.
The Buddha, on the other hand, taught something very immediate, concrete,
and quite humble: the problem of suffering, the problem of pain. Something that
we don’t like to look at, something that we tend to run away from. Something
that we wish would just get out of the way so we could deal with the larger issues
of life. But the Buddha had the insight to see that dealing with this very
immediate, very humble issue really does open you up to the larger issues of life.
Even though the main topic of his teachings was suffering, it wasn’t limited just
to that. What he saw was that if you focused on this one issue, all the other issues
get cleared up. Either you find that they get answered or you realize that they
weren’t worth answering to begin with.
It’s important that we realize this as we practice. Some people say that our
suffering is such a small selfish issue to be dealing with. Why can’t we be dealing
with larger issues like compassion, the world as a whole, the interconnectedness
of everybody? Why? Because those issues tend to be vague and abstract. They
really don’t get to the main issue in life: why it is that the mind creates suffering
for itself. That’s the big issue. If, through our compassion, we could save other
beings, then that would be a useful topic to focus on. But the problem is that
each of us suffers because of our own lack of skill in dealing with pain. If we’d be
willing to learn from the pain, then each of us could take care of our problems
and there wouldn’t be issues in life at all.
So as you meditate, keep reminding yourself that you’re preparing yourself to
deal intelligently and insightfully with issues of pain, suffering, disease in body
and mind. Particularly in the mind. Pain in the body, as it turns out, is not the
issue. We make it an issue that spreads into the mind. If pain simply arose in the
body without our connecting it to any suffering or disease in the mind, it
wouldn’t be an issue.

139
 The problem is that the mind has laid claim to the body. After all, it needs
the body to help manipulate the world to get what it wants out of it. So it has a
sense of ownership, or at least it tries to assert ownership. But then it turns out
that the thing it wants to own, the thing it wants to manipulate, has problems.
And so it’s stuck. It can’t really let go but can’t really control it. As the Buddha
pointed out, your sense of self comes from this sense of control. We can, to at
least some extent, control the body. That’s why we assume that it’s us or ours. But
then you run into the fact that your control isn’t complete. This is the source of a
lot of the conversations and arguments and complaints in the mind. Why is this?
As the Buddha once said, your normal reaction to pain is twofold: one,
bewilderment as to why is this happening; and then, two, the search to find
somebody who knows a way out of this pain. Because those two tendencies occur
together—the bewilderment plus the search—the search tends to go off in the
wrong directions, like the story they tell of the man who jumped on his horse
and rode it off in all directions. The mind thrashes around, grasping at this,
grasping at that. So the Dhamma that explains the cause of suffering and the path
to its end is the Buddha’s contribution to end our bewilderment so that our
search actually leads to the end of suffering. In the course of following his path,
you’ll also find that other issues get settled as well.
Suffering is like the watering hole in the savannah. If you’re going out to
shoot a documentary on the animals in the savannah, you don’t range over the
savannah looking for them, them because for the most part you wouldn’t find
them. They’d see you coming and they’d hide. But if you station your camera
next to the watering hole, everybody’s going to have to come to the watering hole
at some point during the day. That’s when you get to see them. And it’s the same
with pain and suffering: All the issues in the mind will gather around here, so
this is where you get to see them. If you’re in the right position—which is what
were trying to create here as we meditate, putting the mind in a position where it
has enough sense of security and solidity through its practice of mindfulness and
concentration—you can resist your normal reaction to pain or at least drop the
normal reaction to pain and react to it in a new way. As the Buddha said, the way
beyond suffering is to comprehend it. Comprehending means that you
understand it so thoroughly that you can let it go. You develop a sense of
dispassion for it. So to comprehend it you have to watch it again and again and
again. The more you watch it, the more you learn.
This ability to learn is an important part of the meditation. When you
meditate, you’re not simply putting the mind through the meat grinder: i.e.
imposing a particular technique on it that’s supposed to do all the work for you.
The technique puts the mind in a position where it can observe itself, where it
can observe its tendencies and learn from what it watches. This involves feedback

140
loops. In other words, you deal with the pain in a certain way and then you
watch and see what happens. Then you do it again and see what happens again. If
you’ve watched enough to realize that this particular approach doesn’t work,
then you stop to consider what other approach might work. This is how you
learn about things. You don’t just sit there and look at them. You poke them.
It’s like coming across a little animal in the forest and it’s all curled up. So
you poke it a little bit to see whether it’s alive. If you really want to learn about it,
you take it into the laboratory. When I was taking biology in college, our first
experiment was to take some little rabbits and put them in a glass box, and then
change the temperature in the box to see how the rabbits’ respiration responded.
Afterwards I really felt sorry for the rabbits—they hadn’t volunteered for the
experiment—but at least we didn’t torment them, and we did learn something.
When we lowered the temperature, they breathed more slowly. When we raised
the temperature, they breathed more quickly. In other words you change the
conditions and see how things respond.
It’s this ability, one, to act and two, to observe: That’s how we learn about
things. If you simply acted without observing, you’d be like a machine. If you
simply observed without acting, you wouldn’t know anything for sure. Things
would come and things would go and you wouldn’t know what the connections
where.
So you learn how to sit here and watch and do things with the pain. And
sometimes the doing means simply treating it with equanimity, trying not to
identify with it. Simply watching it as an event that comes and goes. That is a
kind of action. You decide to take that approach and then watch what happens as
a result. You may notice that there are changes in the pain. Sometimes it flares up
and sometimes it dies down. Sometimes the mind is perfectly fine; other times
the mind is aggravated, irritated by the pain. Well, what happened? When the
aggravation comes, what comes along with the aggravation? When the
aggravation goes, what goes along with that? Pose the question. Even the posing
of a question is a kind of action. It’s a part of your experiment with the pain.
This is why the Buddha has us divide things into the aggregates, because the
comings and goings of perceptions, the comings and goings of thought
fabrications are going to have an impact on the pain. You see that the perception,
the label you place on the pain, acts like a bridge. Certain perceptions come and
they make the anguish flare up. When you can catch that happening, you realize
that the perception doesn’t have to be there. Anything that arises can pass away.
So in this way you poke the pain. You change the environment around the
pain to learn about how it acts. This is the way you learn about it, through the
combination of the doing and the watching. That’s the feedback loop. The
watching helps you change the doing, and the changes in the doing helps you

141
understand what’s connected with what.
You come to see how a lot of the narratives of your life, a lot of your world
views, come flaring up. I once had a very sad conversation with a man who’d
been a martial arts expert and had been able to do amazing things with his body.
Yet as he got older he developed really bad arthritis and he was convinced that
God was doing this to him. Of course the idea that God, the creator of the
universe, was dumping on him, was a horrible story, a horrible world view to
carry around. Yet he wouldn’t let it go. So of course he was going to suffer.
If you have that kind of world view, it makes it difficult to look at the pain
with curiosity, with the simple desire to comprehend it, because you’re also
carrying around the idea that the basic principal underlying the universe is
dumping on you in an unfair way. But if you simply have the attitude that
whatever comes up and causes pain and suffering, you’re going to let that go, you
quickly see which narratives and world views aggravate the pain and which ones
are helpful. That’s how this humble topic of pain can start addressing a lot of the
bigger issues that you carry around.
So as you deal with both physical and mental pain in your practice, realize
that it’s not something you just want to push out of the way or get past so you
can get on to the real work. Dealing with the mental pain is the real work. And
all the other issues in your life are going to come gathering around here as well.
You’ll be able to see them in action. They’re all part of the complex you want to
comprehend to the point where you can gain dispassion and let go. Whatever is
causing the suffering, you let go of it. At the same time, you develop the qualities
that allow you to stay there and watch and probe and learn.
This way you don’t get overwhelmed with the desire to push the pain away
and get rid of it. You’ve got yourself in a position where you can watch for long
periods of time and not load yourself down with the pain. The other day we were
talking about dealing with aggravations that last for hours and hours. Well, one
of the tricks for dealing with aggravations that last for hours and hours is not to
think about the hours and hours. The pain has been here for two hours; don’t
think about the past two hours of pain. Think about what there is right now,
right now, right now. When you wonder how much longer it’s going to
last….don’t ask. “How much longer will I have to sit here?” Don’t ask. Simply
asking that creates that story, that world in your mind that’s going to weigh
things down. If you deal just with the pain in the present moment, it doesn’t
weigh the present moment down to point where it’s going to break.
So if you allow yourself to be humble enough to deal with just what’s going
on in the present moment, to watch when the pain comes and when it goes and
what comes and goes along with it, you find that your willingness to be humble
will open things up to something really grand.

142
 Ignorance
March 12, 2008

There’s a question the Buddha has us ask ourselves every day. It’s this:
”Days and nights fly past, fly past, what am I doing right now?” That’s the big
issue. Notice the question is not, “Who am I?” That’s a question the Buddha says
is not worth asking. If you try to answer that question you end up getting lost in
what he calls a thicket of views, a jungle of views, a tangle of views, a fetter of
views.
So the problem is not that we don’t know who we are; we don’t know what
we’re doing. We want happiness—everything we do, say, and think is motivated
by the desire for happiness, the desire for well-being—and yet often what we do,
say, and think leads to suffering. That’s the real problem in life. That’s precisely
the problem the Buddha proposes to solve.
He wants us to understand why we don’t know what we’re doing and how
we can learn to do things skillfully. The reason we don’t know what we’re doing
is because we’re bewildered by suffering. Suffering is complex. It doesn’t come
from one single cause. It comes from many causes acting together. And the
principle behind those causes is complex. It’s not the case that if you do
something unskillful, lightning will immediately strike out of the sky. Sometimes
the suffering you experience comes from actions you did a long time ago and you
don’t see the connections.
So as he said, our normal everyday reaction to suffering is twofold: On the
one hand we’re bewildered by it, and on the other we start searching: Who is
there out there who knows a way out of this suffering? As children we go
immediately to our mothers, our fathers. We find that there are some kinds of
suffering they can help us with and others they can’t. So we go looking for other
people. And because our quest, our search outside is based on bewilderment, it
often leads us to the wrong people, to the wrong ideas of what we can do about
suffering. So we have to learn how to look very carefully at what we do and what
comes about as the result of what we do.
That’s why the Buddha said the basic distinction in his teachings is the
distinction between what’s skillful and what’s not. What are you doing that leads
to well being and what are you doing that leads to suffering? He said that when
he learned how to divide his thoughts into two types, skillful and unskillful, that
was the beginning of getting on the right path. In other words, he learned how to

143
look at his thoughts not so much in terms of their content, but in terms of the
causes behind them and the results to which they lead. He looked at his thoughts
as events in a causal pattern.
This is why, when we meditate, we learn how to step outside of our thoughts.
Focus on the breath to create a foundation from which you can then look at
other thoughts as they arise, to see them simply as events, arising and passing
away as part of a causal stream, so that you don’t get carried away in the stream of
what they might mean.
It was from this basic distinction between skillful and unskillful that the
Buddha drew out the four Noble Truths: skillful causes, the path; unskillful
causes, craving; the results of skillful causes, i.e., the end of suffering; and the
results of unskillful causes, i.e., continued suffering. Those are the four categories
of the four Truths. And this, the Buddha said, is precisely what we need to know
if we’re going to put an end to suffering. We have to learn how to look at our
actions in these terms.
To begin with, the four Noble Truths are like a framework for looking at the
issues of your life. When anything comes up, ask yourself: Is this suffering or is it
the cause of suffering? Or am I on the path to the end? Which part of the path to
the end?—because, after all, the path is eightfold, and you want to know which
folds you’ve got. Then when you know which category you’re dealing with, you
have an idea of what to do with it. If it’s suffering, you have to learn how to
comprehend it. That means watching it carefully to see how it arises, how it
passes away, so that you can develop a sense of dispassion for it.
Often the things we like turn out to be forms of suffering, but we’ve
desensitized ourselves to the fact. But if we learn how to look carefully, we begin
to see how these things we like are really stressful. You want to learn to see them
from that perspective so that you can develop a sense of dispassion toward them.
Otherwise you just keep on creating more suffering without realizing what you’re
doing. But once you realize that there’s suffering, you look for what you’re doing
that’s causing the suffering, what else arises in the mind at the same time as that
suffering or stress. In particular, you look for where the craving is, what kind of
craving it is – it can be sensual craving, craving for a state of becoming, or craving
to see whatever becoming has come into being be destroyed—because that
craving, too, leads to more kinds of becoming. That’s one of the paradoxes in the
Buddha’s teaching.
If you recognize any of these kinds of craving, your duty is to abandon them,
to let them go. Now this often goes against our old habits. Just as we often
mistake stress for something that we actually like, we tend to see our forms of
craving as our friends. We like them, we nourish them, we take them as our
companions. But as the Buddha said, these things are like someone who’s worked

144
his way into our confidence, into our trust, and then someday plans to kill us. So
you have to be very wary of these things. When you recognize them, let them go.
No matter how much you’ve liked them in the past, you have to realize that if
you want to put an end to this suffering you’ve been creating, you have to learn
how change your habits. You let these things go.
As for the path, that’s something you want to develop. Mindfulness is
something you want to develop, concentration: all the factors of the path. Don’t
simply watch them come and go. If you see that mindfulness has arisen, you want
to maintain it, you want to develop it. If it’s lapsed, you do what you can to
reestablish it. Keep working at this, bring it into being. This is a form of
becoming, but it’s the kind of becoming you need in order to get to the end of
the path. Because as you learn how to understand the process of becoming
through creating skillful states of becoming, you develop the sensitivity that
allows you ultimately to let go of any kind of becoming.
And finally when you see the ending of suffering, i.e., dispassion for the
craving, you watch that. In other words, you’re not only letting go, you’re
watching the letting go, you witness the letting go at the same time to see what
happens.
When you learn how to look at your actions and your experience in this way
—in terms of this framework and of the duties that come from the framework—
that’s when you’re on the path. You’re practicing what’s called appropriate
attention: looking at the really important issues of what’s happening in the
present moment and what you need to do in response. It’s not the case that you
see suffering once and comprehend it and that’s all you need to do. Your powers
of comprehension grow stronger as you develop the path, and you need them to
be stronger to see the subtleties that surround the issue of suffering. All these
factors are really interrelated and they’re all skills that you develop together.
This is why the path is a gradual one. You need to develop your sensitivity
over time—which is why the work put into being skillful not only as you’re
meditating but also in the course of the day is effort well spent. It’s worthwhile
work. You’re not distracting yourself from the unconditioned as you focus on
these things; you are actually sensitizing yourself to the area in your awareness
where eventually the unconditioned will be revealed. As the Buddha said, you
touch the deathless with the body. In other words, the same place where you’re
experiencing the body right now is where the deathless will be touched. The
body itself is not the deathless, but that area of your awareness is where you will
see, where you will touch the unconditioned. And the only way you can see it
there is to sensitize yourself to the area through becoming more and more skillful
with the way you breathe, the way you think, the way you deal with your feelings
and perceptions.

145
 All these processes of fabrication are conditioned by ignorance. This is why
paying attention to that simple question of “What am I doing right now?” is not
just a means for being heedful, which is one of the reasons the Buddha has you
ask that question. It’s also directing you to the spot that you need to work on in
order to put an end to suffering: the spot where intention happens, the spot
where results of your intentions are experienced. You really want to become
sensitive to these processes so that you can take them apart.
So it’s not a question of who you are. It’s a question of what you’re doing.
What are the results of what you’re doing? How can you do it more skillfully?
How do you apply the different duties of the four Noble Truths so that you get
more and more skilled at them? Those are questions worth asking and worth
finding an answer for. Once you’ve fully understood those answers, fully
mastered all the procedures needed to find those answers, you’ve reached the end
of questioning. You know true happiness, which was the reason you’ve been
acting all along. That’s when all your ignorance will end. You may still not know
the answers to a lot of other questions, but answering these questions takes care
of all the really important issues in life.

146
 In Terms of the Four Noble Truths
May 18, 2008

The Buddha once said that there’s no one internal quality more useful for
awakening than appropriate attention: asking the right questions, looking at
things in the right light. And appropriate attention essentially comes down to
seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. And the truths here are not issues
of just saying, “Well, there is suffering, there is the cause, there is cessation, there
is a path.” It’s expressed in this way: “This is suffering.” In other words, you look
directly at what suffering is or what stress is. You try to identify in your
immediate experience what the cause of suffering is. This is the cause of suffering,
the origination of suffering, what arises together with suffering. This is cessation.
This is the path. In other words, you look for these things in your direct
experience. This is the framework of questions you bring to the direct experience
—where is the stress? Oh, it’s right here. Where is the cause? It’s right here too,
but you have to look closely to find it.
When you’re looking in this way, you try to apply the duties appropriate to
each of these experiences. When you experience stress, you try to comprehend it.
Comprehending means knowing it so well that you develop dispassion for it.
When you can identify the cause of stress, or the origination of stress, the duty is
to abandon it. The cessation of stress, which is dispassion for the cause, that’s
something you want to witness, to see for yourself: sacchikaatabbam. And finally
the elements in your experience you can identify as path are things you want to
develop. You want to nurture them, strengthen them, bring them, as they say, to
the culmination of their development.
As the Buddha points out, while you’re engaged in this project, issues of self
and not self, and ultimately even being and not being, are irrelevant. You try to
look at experience purely in these terms, the terms of stress and the other Four
Noble Truths. Questions of, “Do I exist? Do I not exist? What will I be? What have
I been?” Those all fall to the wayside. You try to develop the factors of the path, in
particular, Right View, Right Mindfulness, and Right Effort, to bring the mind to
a state of Right Concentration so that you can comprehend stress. One way this
works is when the mind is really concentrated and then you leave concentration,
it’s useful to ask yourself, “Where is the stress coming in? As soon as I leave
concentration, what additional stress is there?”
That’s one way of developing dispassion for those forms of stress outside of
the concentration: attachment to the body, to feelings, perceptions, ideas, even

147
attachment to sensory consciousness. You want to notice that when you leave
concentration, these things get heavier, more burdensome. The stories you build
around them, the sense of who you are that you build around them, the sense of
the world that you build around them, all of which is called becoming: It
becomes a burden. It becomes, to use Ajaan Mahaboowa’s phrase, a squeeze on
the heart. And you want to see that, you want to appreciate that, detect it every
time it happens so you can really comprehend the stress and suffering. In other
words, really develop a sense of dispassion for it.
So that’s developing the path for the purpose of comprehending suffering.
And then as you comprehend it, in the act of comprehending it, you start letting
go of the cause. You feel dispassion for the craving that leads you there, and you
want to witness that dispassion—for that makes you more and more willing to
look at even subtler levels of stress. You’ve seen the pattern in operation that
when you let go of the cause, you really do experience great relief, a sense of more
spacious well-being. And ultimately when you’ve taken care of all your
attachments outside of concentration, that’s when you turn on the concentration
itself.
Ajaan Mun has an interesting teaching. He says there comes a point in the
practice where all four noble truths turn back into one. Everything is to be let go.
Everything is to be comprehended to a point of dispassion, so you let go even of
the path itself. For you see that even in concentration there is an element of
stress. There is inconstancy, stress, a fluctuation in it, because it’s conditioned.
And when you develop dispassion for that, you totally let go. And because your
passion for doing it was what kept it going, in the letting go that also brings
about cessation.
Everybody wants to know what happens after cessation. Well, there’s no after
cessation. What’s left, what’s not left, it’s called objectifying non-objectification.
Because with cessation, there’s another dimension, which is outside of space and
time. And outside of space and time, there’s no after. There is no left over or not
left over. Even the concepts of existence and nonexistence don’t apply.
There’s a passage where the Buddha is talking to Kaccayana Gotta. Kaccayana
Gotta has asked him what really is Right View, and the Buddha gives the subtlest
of all of his definitions of Right View. When you are simply watching stress arise,
the idea of nonexistence doesn’t occur to you. As you watch stress pass away, the
idea of existence doesn’t occur to you. You put your mind into a position of
simply watching stress arising, stress passing away. At that point, the concept of
being, like a being, satta, doesn’t occur. Notions of existence and nonexistence
don’t occur. And in that state of mind, the idea of whether a self would exist or
not exist is totally irrelevant.
It’s not one of the issues you’re meant to ask when you are dealing in the

148
subtlest level of Right View. You’re simply meant to ask, is this stress? Yes. This is
stress arising and passing away. Anything that you see arising and passing away,
you learn to see it all as stress. That of course would include the path. And at that
point, in Ajaan Mun’s phrase, when all the four noble truths become one,
everything gets let go. The motivation for wanting to do this is the Buddha’s
statement that fruition is the ultimate happiness. And as Ajaan Suwat once said,
once you attain ultimate happiness, you don’t care whether there is existence or
nonexistence, or if there is somebody there, or nobody there. Those issues are all
irrelevant. Because existence and nonexistence basically have meaning in the
context where there’s still suffering. We cling to the question of the existence or
nonexistence of a self because we hope the answer to the question will lead us
away from suffering to true happiness. But when the true happiness has been
attained and realized, those concepts are no longer relevant.
There’s a passage where the Buddha once said that belief in annihilationism
is the highest of all wrong views, because it helps lead toward dispassion. But we
don’t want to hold on to the highest of wrong views. We want to hold on to right
view, which rephrases all the questions in terms of the four noble truths, and has
you look simply at, “Right now, where is there stress?” When you can identify it,
try to comprehend it. Develop whatever qualities are needed to comprehend it.
And as you comprehend it, you develop the kind of knowledge that leads to
dispassion. You realize you don’t want to continue creating this and feeding it. As
you stop the process of feeding it, the suffering disbands. That’s all that really
matters.
For as the Buddha said, all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering,
stress and the end of stress. And it’s all an issue of doing. Suffering is something
you cause, through the activity of the mind. The path to the end of suffering is
also something you do, something that takes you to the end of suffering. So the
Buddha’s not concerned with the whatness of things. He’s more concerned with
the howness of things, how you do it: how you cause suffering, how you bring it
to an end. It takes some major shift of our mental universe to be concerned more
and more with the howness, but it’s a shift that really pays off.

149
 Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
May 19, 2008

Focus on your breath. Know when it’s coming in, know when it’s going out.
And allow it to be comfortable going in and going out. Experiment to see what
rhythm feels best right now. As you stay with the breath, you’re staying in the
same place where the Buddha was staying when he gained awakening on the full
moon night in May more than 2,600 years ago. We’re commemorating that night
tonight. In fact we’re commemorating three events in the Buddha’s life. It was on
the full moon night in May that he was born. And 35 years later on the full moon
night in May, he gained awakening. And 45 years after that, on the full moon
night in May, he passed away into total Nirvana.
It’s good to remember these events because they help put our own lives into
context. What did the Buddha prove on the night of his awakening? He proved
that there is a true happiness that doesn’t have to depend on conditions. It’s not
touched by aging, illness, or death. And he proved that this happiness can be
found through human effort. Now the effort required qualities that were not
special to the Buddha, qualities that we all share to some extent, simply that he
had taken those qualities and developed them to their fullness.
And so what does this mean for our lives? There is that potential for true
happiness and it can be found by developing qualities within the mind. This is
why the beginning of the path is having faith in the Buddha’s awakening. In
other words, he can do it, we can do it. So when we pay homage to the Buddha,
we are also paying homage to this potential within ourselves. We’re showing
respect for our desire for true happiness.
It’s a good thing to show respect for, because the world tells us that that kind
of happiness is impossible: “Don’t even think about it. Buy our things. Pretend
that they make you happy. Settle for a happiness that’s fleeting and
compromised.” So you can ask yourself, what kind of potential do you want to
respect? The potential for fleeting happiness based on material possessions,
relationships, travel experiences, whatever? A happiness that comes and goes? We
know it’s going to go, so to enjoy it, we have to close our eyes to huge areas of
life. Or are we going to look for an open-eyed happiness that admits the
drawbacks of our worldly pleasures? Where we devote ourselves to the effort
that’s required to develop those qualities inside the mind? That’s our choice.
What are those qualities? Well, they start with mindfulness and alertness,

150
qualities we’re developing right now. As we keep the breath in mind, that’s
mindfulness. And as we watch the breath, we also watch the mind to make sure it
stays with the breath. That’s alertness. If we catch it wandering off, then we bring
with a quality called ardency, which means that as soon as we catch it wandering
off, we bring it right back. While the mind is with the breath we try to be as
sensitive as possible to the breathing. Think of the breathing as a whole body
process. Your entire nervous system, from the top of the head down to the tips of
the toes, every part of the body is involved to some extent with the breath. And
think of the breath not just as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but also as
the movement of energy throughout the body. Try to be sensitive to that. As
you’re sensitive to it, use your powers of evaluation and observation to see what
feels best, what kind of breathing feels gratifying throughout the body.
This is a good path to follow because it doesn’t save all of its pleasures to the
end. There is pleasure in the meditation. There is also the pleasure of knowing
that the path doesn’t ask anything ignoble of you. All the qualities you develop
are good qualities of mind, noble qualities of mind, which is why they say that
the Dhamma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.
The quality of ardency is especially important. It’s what helps the other good
qualities of the mind grow. It’s part of right effort. Right effort involves three
issues. First is simply the amount of effort, the amount of effort that you’re up
for. There is a famous story of a monk who had been very delicately brought up.
His life was so refined that hair was growing on the soles of his feet. He never
walked on anything rough. So when he decided to ordain and was doing walking
meditation on a sandy path, his feet started bleeding. He began to get
discouraged. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe I should disrobe. Go back and be a lay
person.” The Buddha saw what was going through his mind, so he appeared right
in front of him. He said, “Are you thinking of disrobing?” The monk—his name
was Sona—said Yes.” And the Buddha said, “Sona, when you were a lay person,
were you skilled at playing the lute?” Yes, he was. “And when you played the lute
and the strings were too tight, did it sound good?” No. “When the strings were
too loose, did it sound good?” No. “In the same way you have to tune your effort
to what you’re capable of: not too tight, not too loose, just right for what you can
do.
That’s the first issue in of right effort: exerting the amount of effort that’s
right for you right now. You have to gauge what’s too much, what’s too little. But
it’s not just any old effort. That’s the next issue. The Buddha defines right effort
as generating desire: You have to have the right attitude; you have to want to do
it. In other words, you have to value the path, you have to value the goal.
Sometimes when the practice gets dry you have to give yourself a good pep talk,
remind yourself of why it’s a good thing to do.

151
 To do what? That’s the third issue, which is the type of effort. If unskillful
qualities based on sensuality, ill will, or cruelty, arise in the mind, you try to
abandon them. If they haven’t arisen, you do what you can to make sure they
don’t. In other words, you can anticipate sometimes that these things will arise,
so you try to restrain yourself ahead of time. If you know that looking at
something is going to give rise to greed, anger, delusion, lust, or fear, you don’t
look at it. Or you try to look at it in a different way so as to prevent those
qualities from arising. As for skillful qualities, if they haven’t arisen yet, you try to
give rise to them. When they have arisen, you do what you can to develop them
as fully as you can.
So there are four types of effort: abandoning unskillful qualities that have
arisen, preventing unskillful qualities that haven’t yet arisen, giving rise to skillful
qualities and then developing them. So all in all, right effort has these three
aspects: One, what’s the right amount of effort you can handle right now? Two,
what’s the right attitude to learn how to give rise to desire so that you want—
three—to develop good qualities, you want to abandon unskillful ones. Even
though there are times when we take lust, anger, and greed to be our friends, we
have to realize these are not our friends. They turn on us. They make us do stupid
things and then when we reap the results, they run away. If you had friends like
that, you wouldn’t hang around them very long. But here they arise in the mind,
so you identify with them and you fall for them.
This is an important lesson in the path. Just because something arises in the
mind doesn’t mean that you have to follow it, that you have to believe it. As they
say, don’t believe everything you think. Try to develop qualities that are your
friends, that will lead you to do things that you will be proud to have done.
Qualities like mindfulness, alertness. Or the qualities that are traditionally
associated with the Buddha: wisdom, compassion, and purity. These qualities
may seem far away, but as the Buddha points out, they can be developed simply
by taking true happiness seriously. Wisdom begins with the question: What
when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? That question is
wise because you realize that happiness depends on your actions. You can’t just
sit and hope for it to come floating by, or expect your Buddha nature to suddenly
arise and do everything for you. You have to create the causes. And then you
realize that long-term happiness is better than short-term. That’s how wisdom
begins. As the Buddha once said, when you see an abundant happiness that
comes from sacrificing a lesser happiness, you should be willing to sacrifice that
lesser happiness for the greater one.
It sounds obvious but when you look at the way people live their lives, it’s as
if they’d never heard of this idea. Everyone goes running for the quick fix. So
always try to keep in mind that the long-term happiness is the one that’s

152
worthwhile.
Then you reflect on the fact that if you want your happiness to last, it can’t
depend on the suffering of other people, because they want happiness too. So you
have to keep their happiness, their well-being in mind. At the very least, make
sure that your happiness doesn’t oppress them. That’s the beginning of
compassion.
And finally purity is the willingness to look at your actions and see if they
actually do lead to true happiness. Before you act, try to anticipate the results. If
you anticipate any harm, don’t act in that particular way. If you don’t anticipate
harm, go ahead and do it. While you’re doing it, watch to see what actual results
come, because sometimes your actions give immediate results. If you see that
they’re harmful, you stop. If not, go ahead, continue with the action. Finally,
once the action is done, reflect on the longer term results. And if you see that
they caused harm, go talk it over with someone you respect and resolve not
repeat that action. As the Buddha said, this is how you purify your actions—so
what you do and say and think actually does lead to true happiness.
So all these qualities of the Buddha—wisdom, compassion, and purity—
come from the simple principle of taking your true happiness seriously. You’d
think that would be what we would all want to do: to take our true happiness
seriously. But again you look around and it’s very rare. This is why it’s useful to
think about the Buddha, his example. This is why having faith in his awakening,
that he really did it, and the happiness he found really was true, is such an
important motivation in the practice. We can’t know that for ourselves until we
put his path into practice. This is why it requires a sense of conviction. Some of
the results we can see along the way, but the ultimate result comes only after
we’ve learned how to apply this principle of right effort.
So take the Buddha’s awakening as your working hypothesis. And as you
show respect for the Buddha, remember you’re also showing respect for your
desire for true happiness. And it’s a good kind of respect. When you think of all
the other things in the world that you could respect, this is really the most
worthwhile.

153
 Fabricating against Defilement
May 20, 2008

Last night I talked about three aspects to right effort: the right amount of
effort in terms of what you’re capable of at any particular time; the right attitude
to the effort, the ability to generate the desire required for whatever the effort is;
and the right type of effort, trying to abandon or to prevent unskillful mental
qualities, to give rise to or to develop skillful ones.
There is a fourth, though, which is the right amount of effort required by the
particular task. As the Buddha points out, there are some unskillful qualities
arising in the mind that don’t require any effort at all. You simply watch them
and they go away. After all, everything that arises from conditions will have to
pass away at some point. And some of these things when they go away, really do
go away. That’s the last you see of that particular problem. But others come back.
And it’s not enough to say, “Well, it went the first time, it’ll go away the second
time. That’s the way things are.” That’s not the type of attitude the Buddha took.
If they keep coming back it means you have to actually apply serious effort, what
he calls “exerting a fabrication.” It’s a technical term. Fabrication is of three
kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental.
Bodily fabrication is the breath. Exerting the breath against an unskillful
mental state means checking to see how that mental state has had an effect on the
body, and how it gains strength from the effect. For instance, sometimes anger
arises in the mind and it gets into the way you breathe, into your heart rate, into
the hormones. And because that’s such an unpleasant physical feeling, or series of
physical feelings, you’re overwhelmed with the desire to get it out of your system.
You think that by expressing the anger, saying something harsh or clever,
whatever, will keep the feeling from staying bottled up in the body. But that
doesn’t work at all. It just creates new habits: that you have to give in to the anger
every time it comes, otherwise it’s going to, as they say in Thai, squeeze your
nerves. So you give in and act on the anger and become a fool as a result.
The same with lust: If you feel you’ve got to get it out of your system by
acting on it, it simply becomes another unskillful habit. The Buddha, however,
offers another alternative: Use the breath to counteract that impulse, that belief.
Find where the breath has been changed by that emotion, and consciously
breathe in a different way. It doesn’t necessarily make the emotion go away, but
it does weaken it. It also gives you a place to stand. You can stand in a much
more comfortable sense of the body and look at the anger, look at the lust for

154
what it really is. But your ability to do this also depends on the verbal fabrication
and the mental fabrication.
Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. Your anger may direct
your thoughts at what a bad person that is, but you can consciously direct them
in another direction, thinking for instance of the person’s good points. Then you
can evaluate the situation to see which way of thinking is better for you, better
for the situation. In other words, you learn how to think in a different way, focus
on different issues. And actually talk yourself out of the anger, talk yourself out of
the lust.
This depends in turn on the mental fabrication, the feeling and the
perception that go along with the original defilement. This means first actually
perceiving it as a defilement. This is one of our big problems. As the Buddha said,
the main problem with the hindrances, for instance, is you see things in line with
them. When sensual desire arises, you think that the object of the desire really is
something worth desiring. Ill will arises and that person really is despicable,
really should suffer. Sleepiness arises and you think, well, it’s a good time to
sleep. Restlessness and anxiety arise, and you think that the issues they focus on
really are things you have to worry about. Or doubt arises, and you think your
doubts are justified. In other words, these things hoodwink you into seeing
things in their terms. If something likable arises in the mind, all you can see is its
attractive side. If something you don’t like arises, all you can see is its unattractive
side.
To pull yourself out from under the influence of these things, you have to
recognize that they are defilements. Then you have to learn how to perceive the
issue in a different way. Look for the stress. Look for the results of going after
that attractive thing. And see that it doesn’t lead anywhere. Many times it leads to
actual negative results. You want to keep that in mind.
That’s what we have mindfulness for. Remember, mindfulness isn’t just
being aware of the present moment. If you were solely aware of the present
moment and nothing else, you would have no memory of what had worked and
hadn’t worked in the past, what was skillful, what wasn’t skillful. You’d be totally
at sea. Mindfulness actually means keeping things in mind, reminding yourself
that when something looks attractive, it’s not necessarily good for you, may not
lead you to happiness. And remember your experience with those thoughts in the
past: Where did they lead? If you give in to lust what happens? You get worn out,
the level in the mind just falls and falls and falls. If you give in to anger, you’re on
fire all the time. Yet somehow we forget this. And the next time the impulse
arises, we go with it again. It flashes a little gold our way, and we just run after it.
It turns out, of course to be fool’s gold, but we forget.
This is one of the reasons why we develop mindfulness—keeping the breath

155
in mind, keeping the Four Noble Truths in mind. It means just this:
remembering what led to suffering in the past is probably going to lead to
suffering again, no matter how attractive it may seem right now. Other practices
that did lead the mind to clarity in the past will probably do it again. So even
though the practices may seem difficult, you learn to inspire a sense of desire in
yourself to do them. This is what the right attitude toward to right effort is all
about. As the Buddha said, one of the customs of the noble ones is to delight in
abandoning, and to delight in developing. This means, of course, to delight in
abandoning unskillful mental states, and to delight in developing skillful ones.
Which is just the opposite of where most of us go. We delight in the unskillful
things, we want to keep developing them. And we don’t delight in developing
the skillful ones.
Ajaan Suwat once had a comment. He said, “Look right there at the things
you like, that’s where you’re going to find the cause for stress, the cause for
suffering.” So you’ve got to learn how to look past the appearances of things, and
realize that this really does require work. When the Buddha talks about seeing
things as they really are, it doesn’t mean simply accepting that the way we are is
the way we’re going to have to stay forever. We should also see that we have the
potential to get rid of unskillful states. As the Buddha said, if it weren’t possible
to get rid of them, to totally be free of them, he wouldn’t teach us to do it. But he
did teach that. You can be free of these things.
There’s some confusion around the phrase “knowledge and vision of things
as they are.” Actually the phrase is “knowledge and vision of things as they’ve
come to be.” It’s a special kind of knowledge in which the results of past karma
arise, but you don’t create any new states of becoming out of them, and you don’t
try to destroy them, either. This knowledge comes at the very end of the path
after you’ve gotten rid of greed, anger, and delusion, so that you can see these
things as they actually arise. If greed, anger, and delusion are still arising, you
can’t see things as they’ve come to be, because you’ve already jumped in and have
gotten involved in creating a state of becoming around them.
So as long as there are defilements in the mind, we have to admit that, yes,
these are defilements. It’s one of those words that we here in the West don’t like.
“There’s nothing defiled about my mind,” most people say. Of course that’s the
defilement of pride right there. So you have to admit, yes, these things do defile
the mind, they make it darker, they make it more obscure, and some of them
require real work before we can get rid of them. But once you get the hang of it,
it’s pleasant work as you’re developing mindfulness, alertness, concentration,
discernment. These are good qualities to have in the mind. They do depend on
desire but it’s good desire. The Buddha didn’t say that all desire was bad. After
all, the ability to generate the desire to engage in skillful effort is an important

156
part of right effort. It’s a desire to be developed, to be praised, to be encouraged.
So although it is true that some defilements go away simply by watching
them, that’s only one of many approaches you’ll need, only one of many aspects
of right view. If you try to make it a blanket approach, you turn it into a wrong
view, wrong effort, wrong all down the line. Right view sees that many different
approaches are needed in the practice, to deal with the many tricks of the
defilements. And right effort is willing to do whatever is needed for that
particular case, that particular defilement, or that particular skillful quality in the
mind.
You have to broaden your view. Don’t hope that simply having a hammer in
your toolbox is going to enable you to build a house. You need the hammer and
the saw and the chisel and all the other tools, and the Buddha provides us with a
full range. An important part of the skill, an important part of right view is
learning how to master all the tools and how to read the situation so you can
figure out what’s needed. In that way when you have a well-rounded
understanding of right view and right effort, it helps all the other elements of the
path to become right as well.

157
 Feeding your Attack Dogs
May 27, 2008

A couple of years back I read an account by a woman who had been on a

meditation retreat. You’ve probably heard about vipassana romances, and she had
a really bad case. She suddenly fixated on a young man who was also on the
retreat a very strong sense of desire. She found that she couldn’t be in the
meditation hall with him, so she went off to meditate in her own room. And
that’s when she realized, or so she said, that it wasn’t just her personal desire she
was feeling. It was desire as a cosmic force running through her. And she wasn’t
responsible for it, so it was all okay.
It’s scary to think that this person is now a meditation teacher, teaching
people about cosmic desire, or whatever. She’d missed an important point in
what the Buddha taught about desire: that when these things come into the
mind, it’s not cosmic forces acting through you, it’s your old karma: these
thoughts that spring up over you and suddenly take you off in different
directions. You’re sitting here meditating, minding your own business, very
dutifully working with the breath, and then suddenly you find yourself off
someplace else. The fact that there was the initial impulse to go someplace else:
That’s past karma. The present karma is your decision at some point to go along
with it. You’re hardly conscious of it, the fact that you did make a decision, is
because these things operate so far below the radar level of the ordinary mind.
This is one of the important issues you have to face in your meditation: that a
lot of decisions are going on behind the walls you’ve erected in the mind, and
you don’t like to think about the decisions you’re making. But the fact is, you are,
and you’ve got to bring your radar down so that nothing can go below it. So
prepare yourself for the fact that the mind is going to leave the breath. There will
be a lot of vagrant intentions that don’t fall in line with the initial intention,
which was to stay here with the breathing, to try to stay concentrated all through
the hour. You’ve got to watch out for the present karma of when you decide to
suddenly slip off to contemplate what you’re going to do next week—or what
you did last week, or what you’d like to have for a meal tomorrow, or how you’re
upset about something somebody said or did, or how you’re embarrassed about
something you did a while back. These things are going to come up. And you’ve
got to be prepared to notice the stirrings in the mind when they’re just an
incipient form, so you can catch them in time and reaffirm your intention to stay
here with the breath, to enjoy the breath.

158
 So you’re dealing with a complex issue: a combination of past karma and
present karma. While you’re here, you want to watch out for the past karma.
While you’re here, you want to watch out for the present karma. Where does that
past karma come from? All too often when we think about past karma, we think
about previous lifetimes where you don’t know who you were, or what you were
doing, or why you’re developing the habits you have. But past karma is often
karma from today: thoughts you had in the course of the day that you allowed
yourself to wander with for a while. Well, that becomes a habit. And then that
habit gets carried into the meditation.
So when you’re working on the mind, it’s not just a matter of what you’re
doing while you’re here sitting with your eyes closed, but also of what you do
and think about during the rest of the day. The Buddha talks about anusaya,
which is sometimes translated as latent tendency, sometimes as obsession: these
latent desires, latent drives in the mind that we keep feeding, throw them little
scraps in the course of the day so they get used to being fed. It’s like a team of
attack dogs that we keep penned up in the house. You don’t want them to be too
well fed, because then they get lazy and fat, and they won’t attack intruders when
you want them to. But if they stay too hungry, you’re afraid they’ll attack you. So
you’re constantly throwing them little scraps; if you don’t, they’re going to turn
on you and eat you up. But actually, of course, they’re gnawing on you all the
time. And the more you feed them, the more they actually eat you up. If you
don’t want them to attack during the meditation, you have to learn how not to
feed them at all, so that they ultimately die.
There are seven in all: sensual passion, irritation, views, uncertainty, conceit,
passion for becoming, and ignorance. These are the things we keep feeding over
the course of the day. If you find yourself getting interested in something really
attractive, you’re throwing a little scrap to sensual passion. Thinking about things
that you feel righteously angry about, you are throwing some scraps to irritation
and to views. And you do the same with ignorance and conceit: comparing
yourself with somebody else to feel that “I’m okay as a person.” It’s amazing how
in the course of the day, how often we compare ourselves to this person and that
person, always finding somebody who is at least a little bit worse off than we are,
so we can comfort ourselves with the idea that we’re okay. Or you can focus on
people who are way better than you are, and get yourself down in the dumps.
Why the mind does that? What sort of satisfaction it finds there? Maybe it wants
to say, “Well, I can’t be expected to do such and such, because I’m nowhere near
where that other person is.” That fulfills a nefarious role in your attitude toward
the meditation.
Passion for becoming, the desire to think about this little world of thought,
that little world of thought: We keep these thought worlds, these attack dogs,

159
either for the purposes of using them against other people or for our own
entertainment. Because part of us feels if we didn’t have these forms of passion,
we wouldn’t have the impulse or the ability to survive. If we didn’t nurture our
sense of righteous anger, we wouldn’t be able to fend off injustice. One of the
lessons the Buddha taught is that you don’t need to have these defilements in
order to survive. You don’t need to have them in order to work for what’s right.
And they’re certainly no help in training the mind.
There are a few you can use a little bit—as when Ananda talks about using
conceit to give you confidence in your ability to handle problems in meditation,
or when you use your passion for becoming to create good states of
concentration, or irritation with your unskillful mental thoughts to get rid of
them. So they do have their role, but you’ve got to watch out for the totally
unskillful roles you give to these attack dogs. If you keep feeding them, they’re
going to expect to be fed all the time. When they find they can’t get fed in your
meditation, they attack. And part of you pretends that you haven’t been doing
anything, you don’t know where they came from, these are cosmic forces over
which you have no control. But you’ve been feeding them all throughout the
day. You’ve got to watch out for that. Remind yourself: You’re not Snow White
living with seven cute and helpful little dwarfs; you’re a suburban menace raising
seven attack dogs over which you have no control.
This is why the Buddha taught restraint of the senses. As you look and listen
and think in the course of the day, ask yourself, “Is this really helping in the
practice, or am I feeding these attack dogs?” Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was
asked about how to bring meditation into the course of your daily life, he focused
on the issue of precepts and virtue: Sila is the Pali word. Ordinarily when we
think about precepts, we think primarily about the five precepts. And that is one
level of restraint, which is important for reining in some of these attack dogs. But
sila has other levels as well. Restraint of the senses is a kind of sila, as is purity of
livelihood. Reflection on how you use the requisites is a kind of sila: Before you
use food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, you ask yourself, “Why am I using so
much? Is it really necessary for the purpose of the practice?” As the Buddha
realized when he was leaving his period of austerities, you do need to feed the
body and treat it well enough so it has the strength to give rise to good states of
concentration. But you have to be careful not to overindulge, because otherwise
the anusaya—this obsession—of sensual passion gets fed and gets used to wanting
more food.
So these various levels of sila are important parts of the meditation. We do
the reflection on the requisites after as a group at the end of the day here. But it’s
important to keep that reflection in mind as you go through the day. That,
combined with restraint of the senses and your general observance of the

160
precepts, is what helps keep these attack dogs in line. It forms the kind of past
karma that will be useful past karma when you’re sitting here and meditating. If
you haven’t been feeding the dogs all day, and you’ve been alert to noticing when
you’re tempted to feed them, then you’ll be more alert to them as you sit here
and meditate. And that way they won’t suddenly take over your meditation and
devour it.
Which means that this is an all-day, all-life practice. Many of us start out
thinking, well, it would be good to have some stress reduction, or good to
meditate in order to calm the mind down a little bit. But as you calm the mind,
you find more and more that the peace coming from meditation is the only true
form of happiness. Natthi santi param sukham, as the Buddha said: There is no
happiness other than peace. The more you appreciate that, the more you realize
what a full-time job it is to keep the mind peaceful, especially in modern society
where there are so many demands on our time—and the media use so many
tricks for feeding our attack dogs, because they want to make money off of our
attack dogs, and rarely care who gets bitten in the process. You’ve got to watch
out for that.
At the same time, there’s the general modern tendency to want to simplify
everything. “Meditation is just stress release,” or “Awakening is just getting the
mind really still.” There is that story of the woman who had a stroke, who
describe it as her “awakening,” and everybody likes to believe that’s all it is, just
cut off the left side of your brain, and everything will be okay. But the practice
has lots of ins and outs, because past and present karma interact in lots of
complex ways, requiring that we give them our full attention if we’re really
serious about finding true happiness for the mind.
And after all it is your true happiness that you’re after here. It’s not like
you’re being sucked into some brainless cult. You’re being asked to take your
true happiness seriously, which you’d think people would do naturally. But they
don’t. The culture mitigates against it, and a lot of our own internal dishonesty
mitigates against it. So it’s going to take a while. It’s a complex process to undo
these tendencies, to undo these habits, these obsessions that we’ve developed. It’s
a full-day, full-lifetime process, but it’s worth it. Because you ask yourself, if
you’re not giving yourself over to true happiness, what are you giving yourself to?
You’re just becoming food for your attack dogs.
If you don’t learn how to stop feeding them, they’ll just keep feeding on you
again and again and again, all day long, all life long, endless numbers of lifetimes
long. You have to ask yourself: Do you want to be subject to this all the time, or
would you rather be free? When you’re free, you’re not the only one who
benefits. There’s an interesting passage in the Canon where Mahakassapa was
talking to Ananda, saying that during his first seven days as a monk, he ate the

161
alms food of the country as a debtor. But beginning with the eighth day, when he
gained full awakening, he was no longer a debtor. That’s because as an arahant,
he had a totally different relationship to food. When he was eating food, it wasn’t
his attack dogs eating. He was simply eating out of the knowledge that he was
going to stay alive long enough to live out his time, and was feeding to keep the
body alive and useful during that period.
A standard phrase in the Theragathas is one the arahants say: “I don’t delight
in living, don’t delight in dying; I live out my time, waiting my time as a worker
waiting for his wage.” So the arahants eat without obsession and in doing so, as
they use the requisites, the people providing the requisites gain a huge amount of
merit. In fact, that’s supposed to be one of the motivations we have for the
practice, is that those who support us will gain a great reward so that our
consumption of things is actually a gift. That’s an amazing thing. For most of us
consumption is just consuming then it’s gone, taking, taking, taking. And then to
compensate for that, we try to give back something. But with the arahants, just
the fact that they are so pure means that as you provide them with the requisites,
anyone who is in any way involved in providing the requisites will gain huge
rewards.
So their consumption is actually an act of generosity. It’s an act of giving. It’s
a very special way of living, so that instead of attack dogs eating, it’s all giving,
giving, giving. As that comment Ajaan Suwat made once, when someone told
him, “This Buddhism you guys teach would be really good if you had a god to
give you a sense of comfort, support, as you go through difficult parts of the
practice”: Ajaan Suwat’s response was that “If there were a god who could decree
that by my eating everybody else would become full, I would bow down and
worship that god.” Well, awakening does that to some extent. The arahants,
when they consume, they are giving. And if that’s not miraculous, I don’t know
what is.

162
 Against Your Type
June 22, 2008

There’s a passage in The Craft of the Heart, which is one of Ajaan Lee’s first
books, where he talks about six different personality types—in Thai the word is
carit; in Pali, carita. There’s the passion type, the aversion type, the delusion type,
the intellectual type, the gullible type, and the worrying type. In listing these
types, Ajaan Lee is obviously uncomfortable with them. He treats them because
they were in the standard Dhamma textbooks that had been disseminated all over
Thailand by that time, and which in turn were based on the commentaries. In
fact, one of his reasons for writing The Craft of the Heart was to take a lot of the
teachings from the Dhamma textbooks and treat them from the point of view of
the forest tradition.
So because these concepts were in the books, he had to treat them. He talks
about them, and about the idea—again from the commentaries—that each has a
particular type of meditation suitable for it. But then, at the very end of the
discussion, he erases the distinctions. He says that, actually, all of us have all of
these tendencies. It’s not that people are types. We may have certain tendencies,
certain habits that we develop over time, but we each have the full range of
defilements. So we all need to have a full repertoire of techniques, a repertoire of
skills, for dealing with them.
This principle applies to meditation, and it applies to daily life as well,
because we have the tendency to type ourselves. And either we like the type or we
don’t. If you like the type, you just say, “Well, I’m the person I am and you have
to accept it, that’s the way it is, that’s the way I’m always going to be.” As for the
people who don’t like the type they’ve assigned themselves, they say, “Well,
maybe I’m too assertive all the time, maybe I should be less assertive,” or “Maybe
I’m not assertive enough and I should learn to be more assertive all the time.”
All of this misses an important part of the teaching, which is that instead of
looking at things in terms of the sort of person you are, you want to look at each
situation and ask, “What’s the appropriate action to do right now, in these
particular circumstances?” Again, this applies both in the meditation and in your
practice outside of the meditation, where you practice in dealing with other
people. You don’t want to wake up in the morning and say, “I should be more
assertive,” and then go through the day just being more assertive willy-nilly. You
need to read the situation: In which types of situations and with which sorts of
people do you need to be more assertive, in which do you need to be less

163
assertive, and how you can do it skillfully?
I don’t know how many warriors I’ve run into, people who just want to pick
up a cause and fight no matter what; who haven’t realized that the first principle
of being a warrior is learning to choose your battles, realizing that some battles
are just not worth fighting so that you don’t waste your time and energy on
unimportant issues, and can give all your strength to the important ones. In other
words, you want to be able to play lots of different roles, whichever role is
appropriate for this particular set of circumstances, this particular defilement of
the mind, or this particular situation outside. There’s a skill to bowing out, just as
there’s a skill to fighting. Learn to develop a full range of skills. Instead of
looking at yourself as a type of personality, see the issue more as a question of
what range of skills you have, where your skills have not yet developed, and
where they need more work. Because the fact that you’ve learned to be, say,
unassertive in particular situations may be due to the fact it was the appropriate
thing to do in those situations. So you don’t want to drop that ability entirely.
Just learn that there are other situations where you have to be more assertive. Or
if you tend to have kind of a rough and ready personality, realize that there are
times when it’s better to be a little bit more refined, a little bit more restrained.
So instead of acting out of the force of habit, you want to look at the
situation outside and apply this approach. There are two reasons for this. The first
is that the habits you develop outside are going to apply to your meditation. The
second is that, whether we like it or not, as Buddhists in the land of wrong view
we often stand for Buddhism in our actions. Whether people know we’re
Buddhist is not the issue. Someday they’ll find out, and they’ll ask, “Oh, is that
how Buddhists act?” You don’t want them to ask that question with that scathing
tone of voice. You want them to say, “Oh, Buddhists tend to act in very
appropriate ways.” That’s the impression you want to give because it helps them.
And it’s part of your training too. As you get more sensitive to situations
outside and learn that you can approach them with an expanded set of skills, you
start applying the same principle inside as well. Sometimes as you’re meditating
and things get dry, it might be wise to drop the breath for a little while and think
of a topic that gives you a little more joy, a little more inspiration in the practice.
Sometimes thinking thoughts of goodwill can help provide that sense of
inspiration. Or you can recollect the Buddha and what a wonderful teacher he
was. Here was someone who, after his awakening, had no need for anything from
anybody, and yet he spent 45 years walking all over Northern India to teach
anyone who was ready to be taught. And he taught not because he wanted fame
or recognition or approval from people. He taught because he had something
good to share. It’s really hard to find a teacher like that. The fact we have that
kind of teacher is something we should take joy in. There’s nothing in the

164
Dhamma designed to rake money our way, or to appeal to the defilements of the
teacher. It’s all straightforward truth, all straightforward beneficial teaching. As
the Buddha said, things he would teach were, one, true; two, beneficial; and
three, timely. So even though he’s not here where we can see him in action, to see
which teaching he would pull out for any particular situation, we can still apply
his standards to learn from our own efforts.
So if you find recollection of the Buddha inspiring, use it when you need it.
Other times, when the mind is getting a little bit too carried away with itself—
you’ve probably heard that there are times when desire can be part of the path,
and you say, okay, any desire must be okay; well, that’s going beyond bounds—
you’ve got to learn how to rein yourself in, exercise more restraint.
In the teachings on breath meditation, the Buddha talks about times when
the mind needs gladdening, in other words, you need to give it more energy.
There are times when it needs steadying, and this can include giving it more
restraint, making it more solid, more still, more circumspect. And then times
when it needs releasing, when you find yourself burdening yourself down with
unnecessary worries, unnecessary cares: Learn how to drop them, release yourself
from those burdens.
So it comes down to learning how to watch your mind and see what needs to
be done, realizing that sometimes the amount of energy you need to apply to a
problem is not the sort of level you normally apply. There are some people who
really like to take a macho approach that whatever defilement comes up in the
mind they’re going to starve it. They go without food, they work themselves
really hard, thinking that somehow the austerity is going to burn the defilement
away. And that does work with some problems. That can be one tool you use,
one tool that you keep in your tool chest, but it can’t be the only tool. There are
other defilements that require more precision, less brute effort, but demand a lot
more from your powers of observation, so that you can understand where they’re
coming from.
You want to have a wide range of skills. Instead of thinking of yourself as a
particular sort of person who has to behave in a certain way, or is miserable with
the way he innately is, just look at things in terms of your range of skills to see
where they need expanding. You’ve got to develop other skills as well, which may
seem less in character. But you’re not here to stay in character. You’re here to
expand your character, expand your range of skills. Because that’s a lot of why we
suffer in life: We don’t have a full range of skills for dealing effectively with
greed, anger, and delusion; for dealing effectively with difficult people; for
dealing effectively with friendly people; for dealing effectively with the mind
when it’s down; for dealing effectively with the mind when it’s up.
Instead of simply acting out of force of habit, or deciding to change your

165
habits in a very general way, you want to develop specific skills for specific
situations. Learn how to read a situation and get a sense of what’s needed. As you
develop your powers of observation in this way, you benefit in lots of ways—and
the people around you benefit too. Your actions are more appropriate, and you’re
not tied to the force of habit. In this way, defilements that were recalcitrant
become a lot easier to deal with—because they have their skills too, you know. If
you apply only one approach to them, they’ll know you. They’ll see you coming
from three miles down the road because you telegraph your moves. They have
their tricks, so you need to have your tricks, too. There are times when they’ll
respond to harsh treatment, other times they’ll respond only if you treat them
very gently.
So don’t let yourself be limited by your sense of who you are. Know your
range of skills and see where you need more practice. But think of it as that: a
range of skills. You need more skills to deal with more situations. The question of
who you are just gets put to the side because ultimately it’s really irrelevant. The
Buddha’s teachings focus primarily not on types of people but on types of
actions: the types of action that gives rise to suffering, the types of action that can
put an end to suffering. Dependent co-arising, the four noble truths, emptiness:
All the really big basic teachings are questions of action and result. That’s how
the Buddha wants us to look at things. That’s what right view is all about: seeing
things in terms of actions and their results. Then you take that insight and use it
to develop all the skills you need, as wide a range of skills as possible.
When I first met Ajaan Fuang, I had a dream. I looked in his closet and saw
that it was filled with all kinds of hats, each for a different role. He had a cowboy
hat, a baker’s hat, all kinds of hats in his closet. Then as I got to know him in real
life, I realized that that’s the sort of person he was: He had lots of different skills
and could play lots of different roles. You could never really predict what his
reaction would be at a particular time. You could depend on it in the sense that
he would try to act in the most skillful way possible given a particular situation,
but sometimes his sense of skillful was hard to predict.
That’s an aspect of right view that we tend to overlook but it’s really
important. Work on your range of skills, work on your range of strategies.
Because the defilements have their skills, they have their strategies. And if you
establish yourself as a particular type of person, you’re an easy mark for them.
The wider the range of skills you have, the harder it is for the defilements to catch
you.

166
 Thoughts with Fangs
June 24, 2008

There’s a passage where the Buddha teaches Rahula how to take joy in the
practice. He says, “If you reflect on the things you’ve done, the things you’ve said,
the things you’ve thought and you see that you didn’t harm yourself, you didn’t
harm other people, that in and of itself is reason enough to take joy.” Notice he
doesn’t say that if you reflect and see that you did better than somebody else, take
joy in that. Because how do you measure “better”? If you’re going to measure
“better,” look at yourself. Are there areas where you used to act in a harmful way
but now you’ve learned to act in a less harmful way? Are there areas in which you
used to act unskillfully and now you are more skillful? If you are going to make a
comparison, make that kind of comparison.
Because the practice after all is the practice in learning how to overcome
suffering. Your suffering is a totally private matter in the sense that only you can
experience your own suffering. Nobody else can look into your mind and
measure how much you’re suffering. And you can’t look into other people’s
minds to see how much they’re suffering. So whatever basis you might have for
comparing yourself in the practice with other people is totally nonexistent. Or to
put it in another way, it can’t be measured in any way at all.
So if you find your mind slipping into that old issue of whether you’re better
than other people or worse than other people, realize that both sides have fangs.
When you feel that you’re better than other people, you tend to get complacent.
When you feel you’re worse than other people, you tend to get depressed. It’s one
of those perceptions of papanca: proliferation or complication. There’s contact at
the senses, and from contact there arises feeling. It’s an interesting passage in one
of the suttas, where the Buddha starts out in a totally impersonal way like this.
There’s contact, and from the contact comes feeling. And then what you feel, you
then label—all of a sudden you’ve come into the picture. And what you label, you
think about. And what you think about, you tend to complicate. And then the
complications turn around and bite you.
You’ve been bitten by the categories of thought that tend to complicate
matters or to proliferate in this way. The big category is thinking about yourself
in comparison with other people. That really has fangs. It gets you worried about
issues that really are useless. The real issue is, “Are you getting more skillful in
learning how not to create suffering for yourself?” This is not a narrow or selfish
issue. After all, you hear about all the abuse that people inflict on others, and it’s

167
usually because they themselves are suffering. If they weren’t suffering, they
wouldn’t inflict abuse. To the extent to which you can learn not to suffer, you are
much less likely to harm others. That’s the big issue. It has nothing to do with
comparing yourself as better than or worse than or even equal to other people.
The whole comparing mindset is out of order here.
It’s often related to the way we judge ourselves. Something doesn’t go well in
your meditation, something doesn’t go well in your life, and you tend to judge
yourself as a bad person. Something goes well and you tend to judge yourself as a
good person. The reading, the judging of your self is what gets in the way.
When the Buddha was teaching Rahula how to look at his actions, at his
words, at his deeds, the point was that he should try to purify the thoughts, the
words, and the deeds. He wasn’t focused on making himself a better person; the
point was to learn how to respond to situations in a more skillful way. That’s
something you can evaluate, something you can learn from. If you make a
mistake, you learn from the mistake and learn how not to repeat that mistake. If
you do something well, remember that, take joy in that, and keep on training.
In other words, when you look at your actions, don’t make them a gauge of
how good a person you are. That’s where the fangs begin, and then they start you
thinking about, Well, am I better than that other person over there? Do they do a
better job? Are they more generous? Are they more virtuous? Are they better
meditators? Am I better than they are?” However you answer those questions,
that kind of thinking has fangs because it really obscures what you’ve actually
done and what actually can be done to improve your habits, or improve that
particular action the next time that particular situation comes around. That’s
what the real issue is. Everything the Buddha teaches gets analyzed down into
actions, intentions and their results. The intention you can gauge as to whether
it’s skillful or not, the results you can gauge as to whether they are skillful or not.
What kind of person you are, how good or bad you are, that’s not anything you
can gauge at all. If you try to do it, it really gets in the way.
So your duty here is to look at your intentions, and then to see how well
those intentions play out when you act on them. And learn how to judge the
results. Look at things simply in terms of cause and effect, and measure the
effects in terms of whether they’re harmful or not, whether they lead to
happiness or whether they lead to stress and suffering. It’s all very simple, but we
don’t like things simple in that way. We like to complicate matters. And when
we complicate things, our thoughts turn around and attack us.
Learn to keep things pared down and simple. While you’re sitting here and
meditating, for instance, how is this breath? And then how is this breath? How
about this one? How is your focus? Where are you focused? Is it working? Is it
getting results? If you like the results, stick with what you’re doing. If you don’t

168
like the results, you can change. As for the issue of how good a meditator you are,
if that somehow pops into the mind, just let it pop out of the mind. It’s really
irrelevant. And it can get into the way of deeper insights.
There’s a passage where the Buddha mentions that it’s a sign of an untrue
person who, on gaining strong concentration, uses that attainment to measure
himself against other people. “I’ve got this attainment; they don’t have this
attainment. I’m better than they are, I’m a better meditator.” That right there
blocks the insight that could come from that attainment. The true meditator
should reflect: “The Buddha teaches non-fashioning even with regard to states of
concentration and attainments along the path.”
“Non-fashioning” here means that you don’t fashion a sense of self around
these things. You simply see them as action and result. You look at the meditative
state, not so much as a state, but as a product of what you’re doing to create that
state. And to what extent does it still involve stress and suffering? In what way
could you create less stress and suffering? This reduces everything to actions and
results. The type of person you are just gets put aside.
So when you find the mind coming around and attacking you with those
thoughts with fangs, learn to remind yourself, “You’re not here to compete with
anybody else. You don’t know who else is suffering and how much they are
suffering.” Even when they try to make a science out of happiness—they ask
people to measure their happiness on a scale of zero to ten. Well, happiness
doesn’t come with little numbers like that. It’s all very subjective. It’s not really a
science at all. So on the one hand, you can’t really measure how much someone
else is suffering, and two, it’s really irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is how
much suffering are you creating right now? And how can you learn to create less?
That’s the only issue that matters.
Remember that point and use it to cut through any other thoughts with
fangs that come and attack you. And you find that just this simple analysis, cause
and effect, action and result, can clear away a lot of problems and keep you
focused on what’s really important.

169
 A Slave to Craving
August 5, 2008

Ajaan Suwat once made the comment that we have everything all mixed up.
We look at suffering or pain as an enemy. And we look at craving as our friend.
When suffering comes, we push it away or we run away from it. But when
craving comes, we tend to tag along.
There’s a sutta where the Buddha says that everywhere we go, we go with
craving as our companion. So we think that craving is a friend. It’s always there
with its arm around us. But as that passage we chanted just now reminds us,
we’re actually slaves to our craving. It’s as if everywhere we go craving has us on a
leash, pulling us this way, pulling us that. And as the Buddha noted, craving takes
its delight now here and now there. There’s nothing really steady or dependable
about it. You want this taste here. You want that sight there. You want this
experience over there. It’s as if it’s yanking you around all the time.
And it’s because of your likes and dislikes that it has you on that leash. You
want pleasure, so it promises you pleasure. You’re afraid of pain, so it threatens
you with pain. If you don’t follow your cravings, it’s going to be horrible. You’re
going to be miserable: That’s what it says. And we’re not helped by the fact that
modern psychology tells us if you don’t go along with your desires, you’re going
to get all twisted and weird. And so we run along after the craving, even though
it’s never really produced anything that we could really hold onto for any length
of time.
Where are the pleasures that you experienced yesterday? Or last week? Or the
year before? They’re like the vapor of your breath on a lacquer tray. You breathe
on the lacquer, and barely a second later it’s gone. But the vapor on the lacquer
tray at least doesn’t leave a trace. Sometimes the memory of your past pleasures
actually leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The things you did to get those
pleasures, or simply the fact that they’re not coming back.
So what can you do to get beyond this slavery to craving? You’ve got to learn
how to look, take a good hard look at pleasure and pain. Where is genuine
pleasure and what is pain like? Why are you so afraid of it? To really understand
these things, you have to get the mind in the right place. This is why we’re sitting
here meditating, so we can take a good look at pleasure, we can take a good look
at pain, and come to understand them.
When you really understand, then craving doesn’t have any power over you.

170
You cut the leash. You see how empty its promises are, and you see how empty
its threats are. In other words, when you understand pleasure, you realize where
genuine pleasure lies—and it doesn’t lie in the pictures you create of it. Real
pleasure is very different. It’s something very quiet and cool here in the mind. It
requires training to experience the pleasure that’s really dependable and
blameless, one that doesn’t harm you, that doesn’t harm other people, doesn’t
lead to intoxication. It’s cool pleasure. It comes simply allowing the mind to be
still for a while, not yanking it around.
Or you can stay with the breath and the breath is interesting enough,
gratifying enough, pleasurable enough, so that the promise of other pleasures
doesn’t really pull you off course. This is part of the Buddha’s strategy to show
you there really are better pleasures that you can find here inside that don’t cost
any money. You don’t put yourself in a position where somebody can catch you,
like that peacock the other day. If that peacock hadn’t been addicted to that
birdseed, we would never have gotten it into the cage.
And you look at the human society, the way people cheat other people: It’s
usually the person who’s looking for a quick buck or a quick pleasure who gets
taken advantage of. So you’re a lot safer if you can find a sense of pleasure inside.
As the Buddha says, when the mind is settled in concentration and is satisfied,
when it has a sense of enjoying being here, Mara can’t find you. Mara can’t see
you. This is even before you’ve gained awakening.
So this is a safe pleasure. Once you see a safe and blameless pleasure, then you
can look at the other pleasures you’ve had, and weigh them for what they really
are. All those images the Buddha has in the Canon about the drawbacks of
sensual pleasure: It’s like carrying a torch against the wind. If you don’t let go of
it, it’s going to burn you. Or like a hawk that’s found a piece of meat. It flies off
with the meat, and all the other hawks and kites and crows come and attack it. If
it doesn’t let go of the piece of meat, it’s going to get killed. It’s going to become
a piece of meat itself.
A lot of these images are pretty harsh. I know a lot of people don’t like them,
because they really want to stay stuck on their old pleasures. But when you come
from a different position, there is something really gratifying about listening to
those images. It confirms what you’ve already seen, that the pleasure of jhana, the
pleasure of concentration, is really a much better form of pleasure. And you are
better off not running after those other things.
This is one way in which you begin to cut the leash that craving has on the
heart. When mind is solid enough, then you can start looking at pain, either
physical pain or emotional pain. If you’re coming from a position of wellbeing so
that you’re not pushing it away, you can actually see it for what it is. For example,
pain in the body—we tend to get everything all glommed together. If there’s a

171
pain in your hip or a pain in your back, the pain and the hip and the pain and the
back tend to get melded together so that the hip seems to be pain, and the back
seems to be pain.
What you’ve done is you’ve taken different sorts of sensations and glued
them together. On the one hand, you’ve got physical sensations: sensations of
solidity—what they call earth; liquidity—water; warmth—fire; energy—breath,
or wind. Those things are purely physical. And then on top of that, there are the
sensations of pain. If you glue the pain to the earth element or the sense of
solidity of your body, the pain seems solid and it becomes a lot more unbearable.
But if you actually look at it, and say, “Okay, which is the actual pain and which
is the sensation of solidity?” you see that they are different things. And the pain is
very erratic. It moves. Comes and goes, very, very quickly. If the mind is still
enough and you can look carefully enough, you can begin to see: Okay, when it
moves in this way, it’s because there’s this perception in the mind. When the
perception gets dropped, that particular pain gets dropped as well. Even though
there may be a physical cause for the pain, it moves around a lot. And your
perceptions try to keep up with it. And they form a bridge, from the physical
pain into the heart.
If you can cut that bridge, sometimes there’s the weird sensation of the pain
actually going back into the heart and disappearing. In other words, it’s the threat
of pain that comes out of the heart that’s been making you suffer. And even if the
actual physical pain doesn’t go away, when you can cut the bridge, you find that
the heart can sit there in the midst of physical pain and not really be disturbed by
it.
This way you come to understand the pain, you come to understand pleasure.
When you understand these things, the promises of craving lose a lot of their
appeal, the threats lose a lot of their power. You can cut the leash, so you’re no
longer a slave. You’re not being yanked around here and there. You’ve seen this
false friend for what it is: your slave master and a very heartless and demanding
one at that.
But if you can really understand the principles of pleasure and pain and the
actual motions and activities of pleasure and pain, you can get yourself out of
slavery. This is why, as Ajaan Suwat said, you have to take pain as your friend,
because you’re going to learn an important lesson from it. But to be friends with
pain, you need skill. That’s the skill we’re working on right now: the skill of
getting the mind to be still, getting it to be mindful, concentrated, discerning.
I know a lot of people who don’t like these teachings because they sound
harsh, but the only way you’re going to get the mind out of its complacency is to
show it stark reality. You think you’ve got this friend, but it’s your slave master.
And the thing you’ve been running away from all the time is the thing if you

172
actually turn around and look into it, is going to set you free.

173
 The Wounded Warrior
August 14, 2008

The practice of the Dharma is often compared to being a warrior doing battle
with your defilements. And it’s important to have a realistic view of what it
means to be a warrior. The romantic view sees the warrior as someone who is
always strong, always ready to take on the enemy no matter what, no matter
where, no matter when. But that’s not a very realistic view of how warriors
operate.
Warriors have to choose their battles. And they also have to know their own
strength. If they’re wounded, they have to know that they’ve got to escape
someplace where they can rest, recuperate, deal with their wounds. In other
words, instead of always taking on the enemy, there are times when you have to
run away from the enemy, find a place where you can gather your strength. An
intelligent warrior admits his or her weaknesses. When you find that you’re
weak, you do what you can to make up for it. At the same time, you don’t take
on more than you can handle.
Ajaan Lee talks about going to the forest for lessons. When people got to be
too much for him, he’d go out into the forest to hide out for a while, to rest,
recuperate, deal with his wounds. And so even someone like him—with that
much strength of concentration, strength of mindfulness—had to run away
sometimes. We’re not even anywhere near where he was, so we have to find
places of rest, too—places of solace where we can work on building our
strengths.
One of the lessons he learned one day in the forest came when he and some
monks and novices were going on alms round, and they saw a wild hen. The hen
saw them coming, made a squawk, and all her little chicks went running into a
pile of leaves. So Ajaan Lee had some of the novices go out and stir the pile of
leaves around with a stick to see what would happen, if chicks would run out.
But they didn’t. They all lay there very still. That was their protection.
So learn a lesson from the chicks. Sometimes when issues in life get very
difficult, we’ve got to find some stillness. As you’re sitting here meditating, part
of you may say, “There are these issues I’ve got to deal with.” So ask yourself: Are
you up to it? If you are, go ahead. If not, just stay there in the concentration.
Concentration is a form of strength. It’s one of five ways the Buddha lists for
strengthening the mind.

174
 The first strength is to have conviction, first, in the awakening of the Buddha,
that it really did happen, he really did awaken through his own efforts. The
message there being that he was a human being. He could do it. And even
though he was a special human being, he said that he wasn’t using any qualities
that other human beings didn’t also have the potential for. So we have the
potential for awakening within us as well. We’ve got to hold onto that
conviction, whether it seems especially realistic right now in terms of the state of
your mind right now. You can take comfort in the fact that you too have those
potentials, that you too can develop them through your actions.
Which is the second part of conviction: that your actions really do make a
difference. They are real. And the quality of your intention is what determines
the results of the action that you’re going to experience in terms of pleasure or
pain. The solution to whatever problem there is in life starts primarily with
looking at your own mind, admitting the fact you may have acted in unskillful
ways in the past, but you can also train the mind to be more skillful now and on
into the future. If you find that you’re not ready for the other ways of
strengthening the mind, you may want to sit around and just think about that for
a while, gain a sense of confidence that this is true. And that will energize you.
The second way of strengthening the mind is to develop persistence, the
ability to stick with something. It doesn’t mean just gritting your teeth and
enduring. It means learning, once you’ve determined what the skillful course is,
how you can keep yourself on that course. You learn how to make it more
attractive, more pleasant, so it’s not just a matter of barreling through, because
that kind of energy, that kind of barreling-through persistence wears out pretty
quickly.
The Buddha made the analogy of playing a lute. You tune the main string on
your lute so that it’s not too tight, not too loose. And then you tune the other
strings to that first one. In other words, the level of energy you have is the main
determinant of what’s too tight or too loose at any one time. So you figure out
how much strength you have, and then how you can maintain that level of
strength.
This is one of the reasons why in the breath meditation we’re taught to find
as much ease and fullness and energy as we can in the breath, because it’s one of
our allies for strengthening the mind. When the breath energy feels good in the
body, the body gets stronger, and the mind dwelling in a comfortable place finds
it easier to stick with the skillful path.
And then there’s mindfulness: What things can you keep in mind right now
that are healing to the mind? Sometimes simply reflecting on the body: If you
start thinking about your emotions about this person or that person or this issue
or that issue, it gets you all riled up. Just say, “I’m sitting here with a body

175
breathing, that’s all I have to think about. That’s the range of my awareness right
now: being with a body in and of itself and trying to make the sensation of being
with a body as pleasant as possible.” Just keep that in mind.
This is what mindfulness means: keeping something in mind. You keep the
body in mind. You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any
world issues, you just put them aside right now. You don’t have to go there. If
you go there, Mara will get you.
The Buddha talks about this being your ancestral ground, your safe place,
your haven: right here the breath in and of itself. If you go out thinking about
this issue or that issue outside, you’re leaving your safe place. The Buddha makes
two comparisons here. One is of the quail who wanders away from his safe place,
a field where clods of dirt and rocks are all turned up by the plow, where he has
hiding places. He leaves that and goes out to a more exposed place, where a hawk
gets him. And as the hawk is carrying him away, the little quail says, “Gosh, this
is my own lack of merit. I shouldn’t have wandered away from my safe area. If I
had stayed there, you wouldn’t have been any match for me.”
The hawk, being piqued a bit, says, “Well, what is your safe area?” The quail
says, “It’s a field where the stones and clods of earth have been turned up by the
plow.” So the hawk says, “Okay, I’ll let you go. You can go there if you want, but
you still won’t be able to escape me.” And so the quail flies down and gets on top
of a rock, taunting, “Okay, now, come get me, you hawk! Come get me you
hawk!” And the hawk, without saying anything, folds his wings and dives down
after the quail. As soon as the quail sees that the hawk is coming after him in full
tilt, he slips behind the rock. The hawk crashes against the rock, and that’s the
end of him.
In other words, see the body in and of itself as your safe place, where you can
escape any issues that otherwise would overwhelm you. Just be very firm: “I’m
going to stay right here. I’ll try to get as much ease and comfort out of the breath
as I can so I can maintain this state. For the time being, I’m not going to go
anywhere else.”
When you do this, you put the mind into concentration. After all, what they
call the foundations of mindfulness, the establishings of mindfulness, or the four
frames of reference: These are the themes of Right Concentration. If you stay here
consistently enough, it turns into concentration in the mind. Then you can feed
off the sense of ease and rapture that comes with the concentration: That’s your
food for the mind. And the body gets nourished as well, because you let that
sense of ease and rapture spread throughout the body.
This provides a basis for discernment to arise: the ability to look at those
thoughts that were wounding and hurtful, the issues in the outside world that

176
have you all upset, and to see them simply as thoughts arising and passing away.
You have the choice: Do you want to go into that world, or not? If you feel
obliged to go into that world, ask yourself why. “Am I ready for that world right
now? Can I handle it?” If you’re not ready, try dismantling whatever values would
lead you there. You’re not obliged to think about these things. And if you’re not
ready to think about them, why burden the mind?
Start questioning all the assumptions that would pull you out there, whether
they’re pride or whatever. Again, remember you’re a warrior. A warrior can’t let
his or her pride get in the way of the healing process. You may want to look
strong, to be strong, but hey, you’re not strong right now. You’re wounded.
You’ve got to deal with your wounds first. That’s the attitude of an intelligent
warrior, a warrior who will come out winning in the end—the warrior who
knows that you’ve got to look after yourself. You can’t just go squandering your
strength, squandering your troops, and think that there’s an infinite source of
strength someplace. You realize your strength has its limits.
I’ve told the story before of the Chinese martial arts master whose students
were going to have a demonstration of their martial arts skills in a pavilion out in
the forest. At one spot along the road through the forest to the pavilion was a
donkey, a donkey well known for being very obstreperous, always in a bad mood,
always ready to kick anybody who came anywhere near. And so some of the
students who were on the way to the pavilion said, “Hey, here’s a great chance for
us to show off our skills at martial arts. We can deal with this donkey.”
And so the star martial arts student goes up first and takes one of his stances,
and the donkey just kicks him across the road. The number two student comes
up, says, “That’s not how you it.” He tries a different stance, but he gets kicked
across the road too. And to make a long story short, everybody gets kicked across
the road. So they decide, “Wait, let’s see how our master will handle this. Maybe
he’s got a skill he hasn’t taught us yet.” So they hide behind bushes on the side of
the road to watch. Finally the master comes along, he sees the donkey, and he
just walks way around it. Doesn’t get anywhere near.
This is part of being an intelligent warrior. You know to choose your battles,
which dangers to expose yourself to, which dangers to avoid. The first lesson in
Thai boxing is learning how to retreat, how to get out of a difficult situation
without exposing yourself to danger. So as a good warrior, you have to know
your strength. When you’re ready to take on the battle, take it on. If you’re
wounded or weak, hide out someplace and figure out how to heal your wounds
and build up your strength. That’s the kind of warrior who comes out winning in
the end.

177
 The Ennobling Path
August 17, 2008

The path we follow is called a noble path, both because the activities of the
path are noble activities, and because it turns the people who follow the path into
noble people. In other words, it’s ennobling. It fosters noble qualities in the mind
—qualities that make us mature, that make us adult. Qualities that in Ajaan Lee’s
image place us on a throne, so we’re not slaves to craving out there, bending
under the whip of wherever our desires may send us. It’s a path that puts us in a
position where we’re above the desires, above our cravings. We can direct them,
seeing which desires are skillful, which desires are unskillful. And learn the
persistence and wisdom that enable us to follow the skillful desires and put the
unskillful ones aside, seeing what truly is in our own best interest.
In other words, we sort through the imperatives our appetites place on us,
and the imperatives that society places on us, learning to figure out which ones
really are skillful. We need to sort out both areas because we come here with a
head full of all kinds of notions—from what our parents have told us, our
teachers have told us, and the mass media have told us, and our basic desires, our
hungers, our appetites. That combination can be particularly dangerous because
there are parts of society that would want us to follow our appetites. What was
that old commercial? “Obey your thirst” so that you buy our Sprite or whatever.
We have to put ourselves in a position where we can sort through those things.
What lessons have we learned from society are good lessons, what impulses do we
have that are good impulses? How do you foster those and how do you learn how
to say No to the bad lessons and the bad impulses, the ones that are unskillful?
It’s interesting that the Buddha’s take on maturity is very similar to what
psychotherapy has to say about maturity: the good functioning of the wise ego.
Its teaching parallels a lot of the Buddha’s teachings. We’re often told that ego is
a bad thing. Ego, in the sense of egotism or selfishness, is a bad thing. But the ego
in the sense of learning how to function in a way that figures out what is really in
your true best interest, and learning how to filter out your impulses and the
voices of society: That’s a very necessary function. It has to be developed if you’re
going to be able to stay on the path.
Psychotherapy talks about five healthy ego functions. Tonight I’d like to talk
about three. All five of them have parallels in the Buddha’s teachings, but these
three in particular work together in ennobling the mind.

178
 The first one is anticipation: You’re able to look ahead into the future and see
the results of your actions. This is a sign of a healthy ego so that you don’t simply
give in to your spur-of-the-moment impulses: the desire for the quick fix, the
inability to delay gratification. Someone was telling me that psychotherapists
have discovered that children who are trained to delay gratification do well in
life. Well, that’s one of those obvious things we don’t need psychotherapists to
tell us. You see it all around you. Kids who are encouraged to give in to their
impulses are the ones who have real trouble in life. The ones who learn how to
tell themselves, “No, this is not good right now; I’ve got to put aside my desire
for the immediate pleasure for a longer-term pleasure down the road”: Those are
the ones who function well in life.
And it’s an important part of the practice. You have to see the danger that
comes from giving in to your desires. In Buddhist terms, that’s heedfulness. As
the Buddha said, heedfulness lies at the basis of all skillful qualities. It was so
important that it was his final lesson before he passed away. You realize that there
are dangers waiting out there. If you act in certain ways, they are going to have
bad consequences, both for yourself and for the people around you.
So you want to develop that ability to look at your actions and see where they
lead to down the line. Think, for instance, of the consequences of breaking the
precepts. It’s so easy to break a precept, especially when you feel that you’re put at
a disadvantage by the precept. We saw all that insanity after 9/11, where people
were willing to throw morality out the window because they were so scared.
There was even that Buddhist teacher who said, “This principle that hatred is
never appeased by hatred, that it’s only appeased by non-hatred, i.e. goodwill,”
was totally useless. Didn’t have any practical application when things were so
uncertain. Actually, though, that principle was designed for times when people
really are seething with hatred, when they have to be reminded that you can’t put
aside your principles in a situation like that. When life is in danger, your first
impulse may be not your best impulse at all. You need clear-cut precepts to keep
reminding you that under no circumstances would you kill, steal, have illicit sex,
lie, or take intoxicants. That’s why the precepts are so simple, to be easy to
remember in difficult situations.
And they are meant to remind you to be heedful. Think about the
consequences of your actions and learn how to foresee danger. That ability is
what makes you mature and it helps to ennoble you so you don’t give in to your
impulses. Once you see that something is going to be unskillful down the line,
you have to learn how to suppress it if that desire is coming up in your mind. We
don’t like the word suppression. We tend to confuse it with repression.
Repression is the unhealthy way to react to unskillful mental states. In other
words, you pretend that they’re not there. And because you pretend that they’re

179
not there, you’re in huge denial. Large parts of your awareness get cut off. Those
impulses are allowed to fester in their little hidden corner of their little locked up
room. But they don’t stay locked up for long. That’s why repression doesn’t really
work.
Suppression is something different. It’s the ability to say No to a desire as you
know it’s happening. You know it’s there but you simply learn how to say no.
Now the approach here is not, “Just say No.” The Buddha gives you ways of
thinking that help you say No: the two qualities that he says are treasures of the
mind, the protectors of the world—a sense of shame and a sense of compunction.
Shame is when you have enough self-respect to be able to tell yourself: I don’t
want to do that because it would be beneath me. This is where a strong sense of
self is very helpful; a sense of self respect is very helpful here. And it includes
respect for your teachers and all the people who’ve helped you along. You’d be
ashamed to have them know that you had done that particular thing, or you’re
ashamed of yourself that you’ve taken your good training and simply thrown it
away. And so shame here is not a debilitating sense that you’re a bad person and
that you are ashamed of yourself. It’s a sense that you’re a really good person.
You’ve received good training and yet you might be thinking about following a
bad action, so you realize it’s beneath you. It’s not in keeping with what you
know to be true. That sense of shame is very helpful in suppressing unskillful
desires.
Compunction is the ability to foresee a dangerous or to foresee an
undesirable result of an action and say, “I just don’t want to go there.” This
quality is based on goodwill for yourself, realizing that the little bit of pleasure
that comes from an unskillful impulse now is not really worth all the danger, all
the sorrow and suffering, that will come down the line. You care for yourself.
This is where you show good will for yourself. This is why it’s also possible to
translate this quality as “concern.” In other words, you’re not apathetic. You
don’t have a “who cares?” attitude. You care. Because you realize that once you’ve
done something unskillful, you can’t buy it back.
There is that line in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on. Nor all your eloquence nor wit can lure it back
to erase half a line. Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it.” In other words, the
moving finger that writes the story of your life is you, your choices. You’re the
one who is writing the story. And if you’ve written a bad action in the story or a
bad chapter in the story, you can’t go back and erase it.
So keep this in mind: that your actions do have consequences and you really
do care about yourself. You don’t want to destroy your happiness. If you can
develop that sense of concern and compunction, together with a sense of shame,
they really help you to say No to unskillful desires.

180
 When you’re saying No to these things, you’ve got to find other things that
you can say Yes to. That’s what the third principle is about. It’s called
sublimation. You take your desire for pleasure and channel it in skillful ways.
This is why we have the practice of right concentration. That’s the aspect of the
four noble truths where the Buddha talks very openly about pleasure, rapture, a
sense of fullness in the body, allowed to spread and permeate throughout the
body, the way the cool water of a spring can fill an entire lake. Or lotuses
growing immersed in the lake are thoroughly saturated in the water of the lake.
It’s really intense pleasure, really intense sense of well-being. And when you can
tap into that, it makes the ability to operate on heedfulness, a sense of shame, a
sense of compunction, a lot easier. You’re not just denying yourself. You’re
learning where to channel your desire for pleasure in a skillful way.
The Buddha’s realization that this was the path came after he had spent six
years undergoing all sorts of self-inflicted tortures, afraid of pleasure of any kind.
When he realized that that wasn’t the path, he asked himself, “What might be the
path?” And he remembered the time when he had been practicing jhana. He
hadn’t been intentionally practicing jhana, but had just sat under a tree when he
was a child and his mind naturally settled into the level of the first jhana, with a
sense of rapture and ease.
So he asked himself: Could this be the path? And he had an instinctive
answer: Yes. “But that pleasure,” he said, “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? After
all, it’s blameless, it’s not harmful. It’s not unskillful.” So he made up his mind
not to be afraid of it. That was the first factor of the path that he realized. If
you’re going to be doing concerted work on your mind, you have to be able to
tap into a sense of well-being whenever you need it. Otherwise the work gets dry.
As Ajaan Fuang once said, the meditation loses its lubricant. Like an engine that
runs out of oil, it just seizes up.
For the path to stay alive, for you to stay on the path, requires being able to
tap into this sense of well-being. Simply sitting here breathing in, breathing out,
it feels good all over the body. That’s the skill of right concentration. That’s
where you sublimate your unskillful desires and you direct them here. There is a
phrase someplace in the Canon, I don’t know exactly where, where the different
levels of right concentration are called “the sport of the noble ones.” This is
where they have their fun. They find their pleasure, they find their sense of well-
being, they find their enjoyment here.
So remember: The process of getting the mind to settle down should be an
enjoyable process. If you find that it’s getting dry, learn how to think in ways that
give it a little more moisture, a little more lubricant. The Buddha talks of a
person working on the process of establishing mindfulness, either in the body in
and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind in and of itself, mental qualities

181
in and of themselves. You focus on these things and sometimes it gets dry, and he
says, there’s a fever in the body, or a fever appearing in the mind. Even though
these are the themes of right concentration, you’re not finding them very easeful
or rapturous. So he says to focus on a topic that you do find inspiring. It might be
the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha; qualities of generosity, goodwill, any of
the brahmaviharas; the practice of virtue. Contemplate these things until the
mind feels inspired. Once it gets lubricated, you can settle down with the breath
again. And you find that the mind is willing to settle down and be still.
So the practice of concentration is designed specifically to give you that sense
of pleasure whenever you need it, because the work of insight is sometimes very
difficult. The mind is going to resist unless you learn how to put it in the right
mood.
All of these skills are the skills of a mature mind. The ability to anticipate
danger, the ability to say no to unskillful desires, and the ability to channel your
desires for pleasure in a harmless direction are all noble activities that bring
dignity into our lives.
Years back when I first came back to the States, I was giving a Dhamma talk
one night, and there was a Russian emigrée in the group. And I had mentioned
the topic of dignity in the talk. After the talk, she came up to me and she said,
“You know, I’ve been in America all these years now. I learned the word dignity
when I was studying English in Russia but I’ve never heard the word dignity
come out of an American’s mouth until today.” That’s something to think about.
This is why we so sorely need this path in our country, this ennobling path.
That’s why we so sorely need it ourselves, because it’s the only way that we’re
going to find a happiness that’s noble, harmless, blameless, a happiness that
allows us to maintain our dignity and our nobility.
So this is a very precious path. Learn to value it. And allow it to do its work
on you, so that whatever noble qualities you have can be brought, as the texts say,
to the culmination of their development.

182
 The Wisdom of Tenacity
August 22, 2008

We come to the practice because we’re looking for some wisdom in our lives.
We’ve heard that by meditating, the mind gets to calm down; when it’s calm and
still it can see things more clearly. But then the question arises, what kind of
wisdom are we looking for? And it’s important to understand right off the bat
that wisdom is not a matter of being smart or stupid. Rather, it comes from
conviction in the importance of your actions. It’s as simple as that. Just learning
how to apply that principle across the board turns conviction into wisdom.
Normally we sometimes believe in the importance of our actions and
sometimes don’t. We dither around. Sometimes we don’t like to think that our
actions are going to yield results because we know that our actions have been
unskillful. Then there are other times when we hope very sincerely that they will
yield results because we went to the effort to do something good. And so we
dither back and forth this way. As a result, wisdom doesn’t arise.
Einstein once noted that if you look at the history of science, a lot of major
discoveries came from young scientists, but then the same scientists tended to
peter out as they got older. As he understood it, it wasn’t because they got more
stupid as they got older. It was simply that, as a young scientist, you’re not afraid
to hang on to some line of questioning to see how far it goes. You have tenacity.
Whereas older scientists see lots of potential lines of inquiry and can never really
settle on one or the other. Part of the problem, of course, is their sense of their
impending death. They’re afraid that if they latch on to something wrong, then
they will have wasted their later years. Of course, if they don’t latch on to
anything at all, they’re sure to waste their later years. But the younger scientists
aren’t afraid to latch on to something just to see how far it goes.
That’s how the qualities of conviction and tenacity make all the difference.
There’s a story in the Pali tradition of two brothers, Mahapandaka and
Culapandaka. The Canon doesn’t tell much about them aside from the fact that
they were brothers and eventually both became arahants. But in the commentary,
you learn that Mahapandaka was very intelligent and Culapandaka very dumb, so
dumb that he embarrassed his older brother. Still, Culapandaka eventually
became an arahant. The stories vary as to how, but in each case it’s a matter of
Culapandaka’s finally settling down with one meditation topic and really
carrying through with it. It was through his tenacity that he finally figured things
out.

183
 So as you approach this question of how to give rise to wisdom in your life,
you can compare the very basic wisdom teachings with the more refined ones,
and you find that they’re pretty much all of a piece. One of the Buddha’s basic
definitions of wisdom is knowing which tasks are really your business and which
ones aren’t, and then focusing on the ones that are your business and avoiding
the ones that aren’t. It sounds simple and basic, and it is. But if you really carry
through with it, the implications can take you far.
What are your tasks? Well, if you want to find true happiness, one of the tasks
is to develop the path. That’s what we’re trying to do right here: to give rise to a
state of concentration. The mind could be giving rise to all kinds of other states
right now, but you’ve got to choose. These are the states that are really worth
getting the mind into. They may seem fabricated and constructed, and sometimes
you wonder how something constructed like this could be worthwhile. But the
mind is used to constructing things, and as long as it has this habit you might as
well construct things that help take you further.
That’s part of the genius of the path. You could be sitting here creating all
kinds of narratives in your mind, all kinds of theories about yourself and the
world around you, but where do those theories lead? If you have the idea of
yourself as a bundle of needs that have to be met, that are going to pull you away
from the path, you have to learn how to question those needs. Are they really
needs, or are they just ideas that you stitch together out of impulses?
This is a lot of what addiction is about. You have an impulse here and an
impulse there, and the mind starts stitching them together, saying, “Oh, there’s a
message here from my body that I really need X,” even though it may be
something really unskillful, really unhealthy. But it tends to take on a life of its
own so that every time the impulse arises, you say, “Oh, that’s a sign that there’s
this big massive need.” In cases like that, you want to undo the theory behind
that interpretation, undo the narrative, learn how to cut it up into little bits and
pieces. In other words, each time an impulse comes, see it just as an impulse and
watch it in and of itself.
This is where one of the more abstract wisdom teachings comes in. As the
Buddha says, the strength of discernment is knowledge of arising and passing
away—which we tend to equate with one of the more advanced stages of practice,
but it doesn’t have to be. You see an impulse arise, you see an impulse pass away,
that’s it. And whether there’s a need lurking behind it or not, don’t ask. Just
watch it as an event in the present moment, and you can begin to deconstruct
your belief in that massive need. You’re following the task of abandoning the
cause of suffering—in other words, your tendency to create enemies in your
mind, ideas, urges, narratives, that really go against your own best interests—so
to stitch those needs together is not your duty right now. It’s not one of your

184
tasks. Learn to deconstruct it, to let it go.
As for what is your task, you learn to stitch together moments of
concentration. To begin with, they may seem like momentary blips on the
screen. The mind settles down for a bit and, oops, there it’s gone, off someplace
else. It all seems so hopeless and inconsequential. But you want to learn how to
appreciate those little blips of stillness. They’re small and unassuming to begin
with, like house elves, but without them the mind would go crazy. Many people
come to meditation wondering, “When is the mind going to settle down? I don’t
see any concentration at all.” The problem is that it does settle down in little bits
and pieces, but then we trash those little bits and pieces of concentration, those
little bits and pieces of stillness. They don’t seem impressive. They don’t seem
like anything we could rely on, so we throw them away.
This is where conviction comes in. It’s not a matter of being smart or dumb,
simply a matter of holding onto the conviction that these are skillful mind states.
And the task is set out: If you want to find a way to true happiness, you learn how
to stitch these things together. So you focus on arising and passing away, but
with a specific purpose. When those moments of stillness come, you want to
understand why. What did you do? When they go away, you want to understand:
What did you do? You’re not just watching them arising and passing away, and
leaving it at that; you also have an agenda. Once you begin to notice skillful
patterns of mind, you want to stitch them together. What can you do to give rise
to these moments of stillness again and again and again? What can you do to
keep them going once they are there?
Ajaan Lee once commented that there are three stages in the meditation. One
is learning how to do it. The second is learning how to maintain it. And the third
is learning how to put it to use. The doing is not all that hard. You focus on the
breath, and there you are. The maintaining is what’s hard. You go shooting past
the breath off in the other direction to something else. Then you come shooting
past it again. It’s like a little kid running into the house, grabbing a sandwich,
and running back out again, and then finding that he’s dropped the sandwich as
he’s running along.
What you need to do is learn how to get a sense of balance there when you’re
with that moment of stillness. And this will take time. In the beginning, you put
a lot of energy into it. You wonder how on earth can you ever maintain it. But as
the stillness grows, it begins to give energy back to you. It becomes a positive
feedback loop in both senses of the term. In other words, the more you do it, the
more energy you have. The more energy you have, the more you can do it. And
it’s a good, positive thing.
So when you’re thinking about developing wisdom in your practice, don’t
overlook the basics: simple things like the Buddha’s comment that the difference

185
between a wise person and a fool is that the wise person sees the need to train his
or her mind. What makes a person foolish is not seeing that need. You’ve got lots
of smart people out there in the world who don’t see that need. Their training of
the mind is simply teaching it how to think in different ways and to memorize
different things. When the Buddha’s talking about in training the mind, he’s
talking about developing good qualities—qualities like honesty, persistence,
tenacity, conviction—which are not a matter of being smart or stupid, but simply
a matter of wanting sincerely to find long-term happiness.
That’s another one of his basic definitions of wisdom: It begins with the
question, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”
It’s a wise question because you realize that long-term happiness is a lot better
than the quick fix, and that it’s going to depend on your actions.
So the basic wisdom teachings are often the wisest. If you start getting off in
too advanced theory, it’s very easy to get lost and not even know you’re lost,
because you think you know more than you do. In fact, one of the most basic
wisdom teachings is this: knowing that your own foolishness is foolishness. The
fool is the person who doesn’t recognize his foolishness, who feels that only the
subtle, abstract teachings are good enough for him. If you remember that
wisdom begins with your willingness to recognize your foolishness, that teaching
will carry you far.
Ajaan Lee once made the comment that we tend to confuse things. We think
the teachings that seem basic and simple aren’t deep. We think the deep
teachings are the ones that are abstract and obscure. But a lot of times, those
abstract and obscure teachings are just words; the fact you can say them doesn’t
mean anything at all. The deep teachings are the ones that give us advice that’s
useful all the time, right here right now. Because what use is wisdom if it can’t
lead to long-term happiness, if it can’t stop you from causing yourself to suffer?
Ajaan Lee’s uses the analogy of a person who wants to find gold. He knows
there’s gold in the rock in the mountain. The person who thinks he’s smart tends
to think, “Well, all I have to do is just go out there, take a little pick, and get the
gold out. I don’t want the rock, I want just the gold. I’d be stupid to take the
rock.” But you can’t get the gold out of the rock with a pick. In other words, you
can’t gain the Dhamma by figuring things out too much in advance. The person
who’s going to succeed is the one who’s convinced that there’s gold here, but it
may take time and it may take work. But he’s willing to put in the effort. He’s
willing to use his tenacity. You take the rock, you carry it home, and you throw it
in the fire. Eventually the fire reaches the melting point of the gold, and the gold
comes out on its own without your having to pry it loose from the rock.
In other words, you hold to a few basic principles and apply them across the
board—in particular, this principle of knowing what’s your task and what’s not.

186
If you know what your task is, you just stick with it. As for all the other work you
could be doing, you can let it go. You don’t have to waste your time.
So as you sit here stilling the mind, it’s like taking the rock and subjecting it
to heat. Just sit here and watch as precisely as you can what’s going on. If there
are unskillful mental states that threaten to stitch themselves together, you learn
how to cut, cut, cut all the connections. As for the skillful ones, you learn how to
sew them together. That much right there is going to solve a lot of the problems
of the mind.

187
 Arising & Passing Away
August 25, 2008

The Pali word for clinging, upadana, has been taken into the Thai language
and given an interesting meaning. The Thai word is upataan. And the meaning
that they give is best illustrated by an example. You’re sitting alone in a hut in the
forest and you hear sounds outside—maybe the sound of a person walking
around your hut, a little sound here, a little sound there—and the mind stitches
it together to the point where you’re convinced that there’s a ghost outside.
That’s upataan. You create a whole narrative, you create a whole other being out
there, simply out of little bits and pieces of sounds. You can stitch it into
something that’s really scary, overwhelming.
For a long time I didn’t understand how that was related to the Pali word
upadana, clinging. But if you stop and consider how we cling to our addictions,
you begin to see the relationship. If you’re addicted to a certain type of behavior,
you create a whole narrative around your need for that behavior. You’re a person
who has that kind of need. But what do you create that sense of need out of?
Little tiny sensations in the body, little thoughts that flit through the mind.
Say that you’ve been addicted to cigarettes. There are certain symptoms in the
body that you tend to try to treat with a cigarette. After awhile, you begin to
interpret those symptoms when they come as a sign of a need. You’ve created the
need out of whole cloth. Not quite whole cloth, there are little sensations in the
body, sensations in the back of your hands, and sensations in your chest,
whatever. But you take these little impulses and you make them more than they
are. You also create a sense of yourself around that: you are the person with that
addiction, you are the person with that need.
This is a very direct way of illustrating the Buddhist principle that our sense
of self can lead to suffering because we create a sense of self that actually wants
something unhealthy, even though it knows it’s unhealthy. The way to work
around that is through the discernment that cuts through your clinging. One of
the Buddha’s definitions for the strength or faculty of discernment—“faculty”
here being a bad translation for the Pali word indriya. It means more like a
dominant factor in your mind, something that’s powerful and strong in your
mind. One of the definitions for the strength or faculty of discernment is
knowledge of things arising and passing away, or simply knowledge of arising
and passing away without even the “things”—just the process of arising and
passing away. It’s usually interpreted as a very advanced stage of vipassana or

188
insight.
But you don’t have to wait until you’re in an advanced stage. You can simply
look at what’s going on. What are the sensations that trigger the whole storyline
that says, oops, there’s that need showing itself again. Can you look just at the
sensations arising and passing away? Because part of that storyline is that when
they arise and pass away, they’re going to come back, and they’re going to keep
coming back until you finally give in to them, which is a very unskillful storyline.
Yes, they will come back, but they’ll go away. And they’ll come again and they’ll
go away again. If you resist giving in to them, it’s not the case that they’re going
to grow bigger and bigger each time they return. They’ll simply go away again.
Of course it’s helpful to have an alternative way of dealing with those
sensations. That’s why we practice concentration, to give the mind a ready access
to a sense of well-being that it can tap into whenever it needs. And around that
sense of well-being you will create a different sense of self. You’re the competent
person who can access this well-being.
So you provide yourself with a different storyline, a different standing point
for the mind. It’s not a precarious place that’s pushed around by the slightest
little impulse. It can stand firm and begin to question those interpretations that
you used to build around the little impulses, the storyline that says, since those
impulses are going to come again, you might as well give in to them now so they
don’t come back stronger. But even when you give into them, they’ll still come
back again, and then you give in to them again—although it’s hard to say that
you give in to the sensation. The sensation just comes and goes. You give in to
the storyline. You give your credence to the storyline that says, “I need this.”
The sex drive is a great example of this. Certain symptoms arise in the body
and the mind. You say, “Oops, there it goes. Got to give in.” But those symptoms
come and then they go. It’s not that the body needs sex. It can survive perfectly
well without it. The mind creates a story, a sense of self, a sense of what’s out
there in the world, a sense of what’s inside in here that would induce you to give
in to the desire for sex. But the actual impulse—if you sit through it and learn
how to breathe through it, and learn how to relax the body around it—is not that
overwhelming.
We talk often about this in terms of physical needs, but the body doesn’t
really have that many needs. It’s perfectly content to die. We’re the ones who
want it to survive. We’re the ones who want it to feed and do all the other
functions we like.
So you have to look into the mind to see how the mind stitches things
together in this process of upataan, stitching little sensations together and
making a bigger deal out of them than they have to be.

189
 This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has us focus on just arising and
passing away; what’s immediately apparent, immediately present to the mind
without going into the stories of whether there’s something behind it out there,
or something experiencing it, or some agent in here that’s experiencing it and
reacting to it. Just look at the sensations coming and going in and of themselves,
and you begin to realize that they don’t have the force you attributed to them.
The only reason you attributed that force to them is because you wanted to use
them as an excuse, but when you can begin to see that they lead you in to
unskillful behavior, you don’t have to play along with those attributions
anymore.
So the Buddha gives you a two-pronged approach here. One is to get the
mind into concentration. This is why strong concentration is so essential to the
path. As the Buddha said, even though you may see the drawbacks of sensual
desires, if you don’t have the sense of pleasure that comes from jhana, you can’t
withstand them. You’ve got to have an alternative source of happiness, an
alternative source of pleasure and ease. And at the same time, you need the right
way of looking at things.
When the Buddha set out dependent co-arising, he wasn’t trying to impress
people with what a complex idea he could cook up. Some of the most important
features of dependent co-arising are right on the surface. And one of those
features is just that: you look at things on the surface without trying to guess at
what lies in the depths. You reduce these things to simply, “There is passing
away, arising again, passing away on the surface.” You see that they are not nearly
as powerful as you thought they were. They are not nearly as compelling as you
thought they were. That puts you in a position of greater strength.
When you learn to look at these things simply as stress arising and stress
passing away, realizing that you have better ways of dealing with those simple
sensations, it goes a long way toward overcoming whatever addictions you may
have. The deep-seated drives you attribute to the mind are powerful because you
think that they’re deep-seated. When you learn to see them simply as constructs
that you’ve placed on top of very superficial and ephemeral sensations, things
that come and go very quickly, it may seem disorienting because your sense of
who you are is often based around the so-called needs you’ve created. But when
you’ve got an alternative way of functioning, an alternative way of seeing
yourself, you’re not so threatened by the idea of letting go of those old ways.
So the combination of right concentration and right view can help you pass
these issues. I remember talking to a scholar who was very concerned that
Buddhism not be treated as a psychology. It was more serious than that, he said,
it was a philosophy, it’s a metaphysics. He didn’t like the idea that it was just a
therapy. And I countered it by saying that I don’t like the idea that it’s just a

190
philosophy. Therapy is more important. Right view, right concentration: These
are meant to be therapy for the ways the mind creates suffering for itself. Because
addiction is a way it creates suffering, you want to be able to use these tools to get
past your addictions: your old ways of clinging, the stories you create about the
being inside and the situations outside that you stitch together out of sensations
that—when you really look at them—are really not that powerful at all. When
you learn how to let go of that habit of stitching things together, you find that
your problems are not nearly as overwhelming as you thought they were. You
can gain the upper hand.
So keep this point in mind. The Thai way of interpreting upataan may not
quite correspond with what’s in the Pali Canon, but it does give a good insight
into the process of how clinging works, and how to take the clinging apart so you
don’t have to keep suffering from it.

191
 Turtle Meditation
August 27, 2008

One of the reasons concentration is so central to the path is that the mind
can see things more clearly when it’s still. Not only that, it can feel things more
clearly as well. As you get more sensitive to the breath, you become more
sensitive to the whole range of energy in your body. You can see where you’re
holding things in, where you’re covering things up.
You can also see the impact of your actions. When you’re really sensitive
inside—if you do something unskillful, say something harsh, or you harm
somebody else—you feel it more intensely inside. That old saying that your
parents often said when they were hitting you, that “This hurts me more than it
hurts you,” and you didn’t really believe them: It really does apply to meditators.
Sometimes you say something a little bit harsh to someone else and they hardly
notice it, but you feel it. It hurts.
We were talking today about some of the basic principles in the path that
allow you to be more compassionate, and this is one of them: the fact that, as the
mind gets more and more still, you are more and more sensitive to the energies
in your body. You sense the repercussions of your words, your deeds, and your
thoughts. You see that even a thought, as it appears in the mind, will have an
impact on the energy in the body. In fact, when it first appears, it’s on the
borderline between the two.
When the mind is really still and fills the whole body, you sense little
thoughts beginning to form, like little cysts or knots in your energy field. And
when a thought first appears, it’s hard to say whether it’s physical or mental. It’s
both. Or it has both aspects. And if you’re on the lookout for thoughts, if you’re
wanting thoughts, you can turn that little knot of energy or cyst of energy into a
full-blown thought world. Once you get into that little world, you can travel
around. Which is why we like these thought worlds. They seem to take us places.
But they keep coming back to the same old place. And the thrill of the ride
often disappears very quickly. If a thought was unskillful, if involved greed,
anger, delusion, lust, jealousy, fear, or whatever, it will have an impact on the
mind. The mind will quiver in a certain way that lets you know that this was
unskillful. And the quivering doesn’t last just for a few seconds. Sometimes it
goes on for a whole day. If you let yourself get involved in unskillful thoughts,
spinning out thought worlds of lust or anger, then when the time comes to sit

192
and meditate, you find that the mind is still reverberating.
So the stillness here is a good check on your actions. One of the basic
principles is that following the precepts helps your concentration, and your
concentration helps strengthen your discernment. But the influences go in the
other way as well. The more discernment you bring to your concentration, the
stronger it’s going to be. The more concentration and discernment you bring to
your precepts, the less harmful your actions are going to be. Because the restraint
you exercise becomes something that’s not just a matter of the precepts. Anything
that’s unskillful, any intention that would have a harmful effect, you notice. You
feel it. And it doesn’t feel right.
Ajaan Suwat often commented on how when you get the mind concentrated,
it becomes both tough and tender. Tough in the sense that it can withstand all
kinds of unpleasant sensory contact. When the body is in pain but the mind is
strong, you can be with the pain and not suffer from it. When people are being
harsh with you, you can develop an energy field around the body by staying with
the breath, letting the breath fill the whole body so that their energy can’t
penetrate your energy field. When you fully occupy your body in this way, their
negative energy goes right past you. You don’t suck it in. You don’t absorb it. So
in that sense, the concentrated mind is tough.
But it’s tender in the sense that it becomes very sensitive. And particularly,
you become sensitive to your own actions so that your virtue is not simply a
matter of the precepts. It becomes a deeper quality of the mind so that even
though the things you do may not be against the precepts, but if they’re harmful,
you know. And that knowing helps refine your restraint.
This is a point Ajaan Lee made in his book The Craft of the Heart. And I think
he picked it up from Ajaan Mun, because a lot of the Dharma in The Craft of the
Heart comes from Ajaan Mun. The precepts help concentration and discernment,
concentration helps your precepts and your discernment, and your discernment
helps your concentration and your precepts. These three aspects of the path help
one another along.
This combination of tenderness and toughness: A good image for a meditator
is a turtle. The turtle’s body is one of the most sensitive bodies in the whole lizard
kingdom. So it needs that shell for its protection. In the same way, you want the
toughness of concentration to protect you from being weak in the face of adverse
conditions, so you don’t pick up negative energies, so you don’t get knocked off
course by unpleasant sights, or sounds, or smells, or tastes or tactile sensations or
ideas. That’s the toughness you want.
As for the tenderness, it’s a tenderness inside, where you’re sensitive to the
slightest thought, the slightest word, the slightest action. It’s possible to meditate

193
and get concentrated and not have this kind of sensitivity because your
concentration isn’t imbued with discernment. There are people who can get their
minds thoroughly concentrated and still be very harmful to others because their
concentration is one-sided, narrow, loaded with denial.
But when your concentration is the sort that fills the whole body and it’s
imbued with discernment—this is the kind of concentration you’re developing
here as you work with the breath—the more sensitive you get to the slightest
variations in the breath, the more sensitive you are to the least little bit of stress
that you’re causing yourself, the more you’re imbuing your concentration with
discernment. Then as you spread the breath to fill the whole body, or spread that
sense of ease to fill the whole body, the range of your concentration is such that
your gaze becomes all around. The text talks of the Buddha as an all-around eye.
And what they mean is that his whole body was sensitive. The range of his gaze
was 360°. That’s the kind of quality you want to develop in your concentration so
that it becomes a basis for skillful action in every aspect of life, both inside and
out.
As you meditate, you’re exercising the four brahmaviharas. Goodwill, in
terms of the concentration practice or focusing on the breath, means that you
want the breath to be as comfortable as possible. Compassion here means that
when you find that it’s uncomfortable, you do what you can to make it more
comfortable, make it more pleasant. If it’s already pleasant, then you exercise
empathetic joy, appreciating the fact that you can do it. You hear of some
meditators who feel that they don’t deserve the pleasure that comes from
meditation. They feel uncomfortable feeling happy. If you find that you have that
problem, recognize it as a problem. You’re not being realistic, you’re being one
sided. Learn how to appreciate the fact that yes, you can get the breath to be
comfortable, and the body can be filled with a sense of ease and well-being, and
that there’s no issue of deserving or not deserving this pleasure. It’s something
that you can learn how to use skillfully, both for your own sake and for that of
others, so don’t shy away from it.
Then there are areas where you can’t make the breath comfortable no matter
what: That’s when you exercise equanimity. If there are parts of the body that are
painful and the breath can’t do anything for the pain, you learn how to exercise
equanimity there. This way you’re getting practice in the brahmaviharas, learning
how to develop a goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity that are
universal, limitless. Then you learn how to apply these different emotions as
appropriate.
So as you get more sensitive inside, it puts you in a better position to be more
sensitive to what you’re doing outside, more sensitive to what the appropriate
approaches might be. In this way the practice of meditation is not selfish. The

194
idea that it’s selfish is based on the idea that your well-being has to conflict with
the well-being of others, that you have to choose one or the other. The Buddha’s
insight was that if you look for genuine well-being, you find that it doesn’t
conflict with anybody else’s well-being. It actually fosters theirs. One common
image is of candles. Each person is holding a candle. You have a lit candle. The
fact that yours is lit means that you can help light other people’s candles. Your
flame is not diminished. And over time, as more candles get lit, they bring more
and more brightness for everyone.

195
 True Protection for the World
August 31, 2008

People sometimes ask: With all the evil out there in the world, with people
willing to kill in order to maintain their power and wealth, how can you sit here
with your eyes closed? There are two answers to that. One is that we’re not just
sitting here with our eyes closed. We’re training the mind. When you understand
that, the other answer is: How can you not sit here and train your mind given all
the bad examples out there in the world, all the dangers out there in the world?
Where else are you going to find the strength to maintain your virtue, to keep
your goodness alive? The nourishment that keeps your goodness alive has to
come from within.
Your goodness is something that has to be independent of whether other
people are good or bad. Otherwise your virtue is not dependable. And that’s one
of the scariest things there is in the world: when you realize you can’t depend on
your goodness. You can’t depend that you will always be kind and
compassionate. If the mind’s food source is outside, there can always come a
point where when you feel that your food source is threatened, and you’ll want
to fight back.
When your happiness depends on things outside, it’s not just the case that
your happiness can be threatened from outside, but your goodness—your
determination not to harm anyone, not to engage in violence—can also be
threatened from within. You run up against lines that you’ve drawn: “As long as
this isn’t threatened, I’m okay. If this gets threatened, then there’s trouble.”
But if your happiness base is within, it’s secure. Your goodness is secure. And
that’s important. Because what do we have as our treasures in life? Our own
actions. The material things that we use, the relationships that we have, those are
not really ours. We use them for a while, and we take care of them for a while,
but then we get separated. Sabbe sankhara aniccati. All things fabricated, all things
conditioned, are inconstant. They’re stressful, not self. You have to think long
and hard about that.
When you do, you realize that the only way to respond to that reflection is to
try to find something of solid worth inside. That has to be your top priority, so
that you can find a goodness that’s unassailable, something that’s truly
dependable, that nobody else can touch. Once you’ve got that, you’re safe. You
can trust yourself as you go into the world and deal with untrustworthy

196
situations or untrustworthy people, knowing that they can’t touch what’s really
valuable inside. The world needs more people like this. If the Buddha had waited
until the world was straightened out before he was going to go for awakening, he
never would’ve gotten there.
You have to work for awakening, for inner perfection, in the midst of an
imperfect world. You’re as generous as you can be. You’re as virtuous as you can
be, both because it’s good for the world and because it’s good for you. You spread
goodwill to all beings without thinking about whether they deserve your
goodwill, because you need your goodwill. You need your goodwill for all beings
because that’s the beginning point in learning how to be trustworthy in your
dealings with everybody, people good or bad. If there are people out there that
you think don’t deserve good treatment, don’t deserve your goodwill, you’re not
going to treat them well. Then that becomes your karma: your lack of skill. Some
people believe that you have goodwill for other people because everybody has
Buddha nature, as if only Buddhas were deserving of your goodwill. But if you
realize that anybody out there is going to be subjected to your actions, you want
to make sure that the impact you have on that person is harmless. Only then are
you safe.
This is why all the Buddha’s teachings are considered to be protections.
They’re part of our refuge to protect us from ourselves, from our own lack of
skill. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, not in hopes they
are going to come down and save us, but because they’re good examples. You
think of the example they set, or the hardships the Buddha went through in order
to find awakening, and the standards of the Dharma that he left behind, and that
inspires you to find protection in those standards, to follow his example, as well.
There’s that famous simile of the two-handled saw. The Buddha said that if
bandits were to capture you, pin you down, and to saw off your limbs with a two
handled saw, anyone who would direct ill will toward those bandits, would not
be doing his teaching. This is an extreme example but it’s meant to be extreme so
that it will stick in your mind, so that when other people say harsh things, or do
harsh things to you, or to those you love, or to those you feel sympathy for, you
can’t wish ill to those people, because you realize they’re creating a lot of bad
karma for themselves. This is a part of compassion. When you see people who are
creating the causes for suffering, you’ve got to have compassion for them, even if
they haven’t yet started suffering yet from that.
This is an extension of goodwill. The four brahma-viharas, or sublime
attitudes, basically come down to two. There’s goodwill and then there’s
equanimity. Then goodwill gets applied. When you see people are suffering or
are creating the causes for suffering, you feel compassion for them. When people
are happy or creating the causes for happiness, goodwill means that you rejoice in

197
their happiness, or the wisdom of their actions. You appreciate what they’re
doing, or what they’re experiencing. That’s goodwill applied.
Then there’s equanimity. When you realize that certain things are beyond
your control, either because of that person’s past karma or your past karma—
people for whom you wish well but they keep on doing unskillful things or they
are suffering in ways that you can’t stop—you have to have equanimity there so
that you don’t waste your time trying to change things you can’t change. That
way you can focus your time and energy on areas where you can make a
difference.
This is one of the reasons why we have that chant on the four brahmaviharas
every evening before meditation, to remind us of our motivation in the practice.
We need those attitudes, both to help immediately in the course of the
meditation, and to carry into our daily life to protect ourselves from our own
unskillful impulses, our unskillful intentions—so that we can become our own
refuge.
In other words, when you internalize the example of the Buddha, and the
Dharma becomes part of your daily behavior in your thoughts, your words, and
your deeds, there will come a point where you touch the Deathless. And from
that point on you become a true refuge for yourself, and a refuge for others.
Again, you can’t save them from their unskillful behavior. But you become an
example for them. You’re part of the Sangha refuge, or the gem of the Sangha.
So this practice of sitting here with your eyes closed training your mind is
not a selfish thing. It’s protection for yourself so that you eventually become a
refuge for others. We can’t wait until the world gets straightened out before we
straighten out our own minds, because the cause is in the mind. The world out
there is the realm of effects. The realm of causes is in here: That’s one of the basic
lessons of dependent co-arising. All the causes of suffering come prior to your
engagement with the world. If you want other people to change their behavior,
you’ve got to straighten out your behavior. You have to walk your talk, so that
your talk is compelling. You can’t force other people to follow your example, but
at least you establish that example here in the world. It’s good to have these
examples in the world. Otherwise the world would be a totally depressing place.
So as you remain true to the practice, you learn the truth of the practice.
That’s what’s special about the Dharma. Unless you are true, you can’t find the
truth of the Dharma. And then you can embody that truth in your actions, in
your words, in your thoughts. That’s when it becomes a kind of protection.
There’s a passage in the Canon where King Pasenadi comes to see the
Buddha. Pasenadi is an interesting character. He starts out totally clueless, but he
gains faith in the Buddha, begins spending time with the Buddha, and starts

198
thinking about the Dharma on his own. He comes to the Buddha every now and
then, and he reports, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this, and I realized x,
x, x,” whatever the issue is.
In this instance he’s been sitting in judgment on a court case. That was what
kings did back in those days. They didn’t have judges. The kings themselves were
the judges. He told the Buddha he had been sitting on a court case where people
who were wealthy and had everything they should need were still willing to lie
and cheat and kill in order to get more wealth. He said, “I’m sick and tired of
judging this human race. People never have a sense of enough.” And the Buddha
said, “Yes, that’s the way it is. You will never get people to a point where they
have a sense of enough unless they start looking elsewhere for their happiness
aside from material things.”
At another point Pasenadi tells the Buddha that he’s suddenly realized that
people who spend all their time building up armies aren’t really protecting
themselves. As long as they’re still acting on greed, anger, and delusion, they
leave themselves wide open for suffering. And the Buddha says, Yes, that’s right.
Armies are not a protection. Your good karma is your protection. Your good
thoughts, your good words, your good deeds: those are your protection;
protection against yourself, your own unskillful habits and protection against the
unskillful habits of other people.
So as you meditate, you’re creating protection: protection for yourself,
protection for the world. The best protection that a human being can create.
Don’t ever let yourself be swayed from this practice.

199
 To Be Your Own Teacher
September 3, 2008

Once when I was in Thailand, I happened to attend a funeral for Ajaan

Kokaew, who had been a student of Ajaan Sao. During the funeral I met a monk
who mentioned to me that he knew he couldn’t live with any ajaan. He was too
bullheaded and would get into a lot of trouble. He wanted to go off and stay in
the forest by himself. So he had gone to Ajaan MahaBoowa and asked him, “How
can I make sure that my practice doesn’t go off course?” And Ajaan MahaBoowa
responded with a standard teaching in the Canon about three practices that can’t
go wrong: restraint of the senses, moderation in eating, and wakefulness.
So as you’re looking after your own practice, learning to be more and more
responsible for looking after yourself, it’s good to keep these three principles in
mind. When you keep them in mind, you’re a lot less likely to go off course.
The first one, restraint of the senses, is defined as learning how to see the
little things that set the mind off. When you look at something, what are the
details that set you off? And then you learn how not to focus on those details.
Notice this means that instead of putting blinders on yourself and not looking or
not listening to things at all, it means that you really examine the way you look
and the way you listen, trying to find, when you look at something, what exactly
is it that excites your lust, or excites your anger? And the same when you listen.
What precisely are the features of what you’re listening to? It may be the tone of
voice that sets you off, or it could be the actual things that are being said. And so
on down the line with all the senses. You try to look more carefully at how you
look and listen, sniff aromas, and taste flavors.
When you do that, you begin to see that the little details don’t really amount
to much.
There really isn’t much there to get worked up about. You start looking
around the details and you begin to see that there’s a lot of stuff that, instead of
exciting your lust, would discourage it; instead of exciting your anger, would
calm your anger. Which means that you have to look in a more all-encompassing
way; you have to listen in a more encompassing way. Note, though, that if you
find the little details still set you off, just learn not to focus on those details. Focus
on something else, something that might be neutral or actually counteracts the
response you have to the original details.
But as you work more and more with this principle of restraint of the senses,

200
you come to see how the little details that set you off are really very minor, very
incidental. If you look at the process of how the mind goes about looking and
listening, you see that the details themselves are not that much. Your motivation
to go looking and listening to begin with: That’s one of the big problems.
In this way this practice turns you back more and more on the mind and its
intentions. That’s when you begin to see that process of flowing out that Ajaan
Lee talks about. He says, you have your basic awareness, then the mind goes
flowing out. And the flow is the asava, it’s the effluent there. It’s either sensuality,
views, becoming, or ignorance—one of these four—that causes you to go flowing
out after sights and sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas.
So when you engage in this practice and keep after it, you find that there is
lots of material for practice all throughout the day, even when you’re doing other
things aside from sitting and meditating. There’s a lot to contemplate about how
you’re going through life, what motivates the way you engage in the world. If
you see something unskillful, you figure out ways to keep it in check either by
simply saying No to it, or after a while of saying No again and again and again,
you begin to see there’s a kind of pressure that builds up behind the impulse.
And the more you acknowledge the pressure, the more it will explain itself. The
mind will start making demands. If it insists on that piece of candy—eye candy or
ear candy or nose candy, whatever—you can start understanding it better, where
it comes from, and why.
So this is a good practice, not only for getting the mind to learn how to avoid
the issues that would disturb its concentration, but also to gain understanding,
gain discernment into how it tries to look for food in the senses, and learning
how to do it more skillfully.
Moderation in eating means that you watch what you’re doing while you eat.
Notice your motivation for wanting a little bit more of that food, a little bit more
of this. It’s a good exercise for figuring out: Exactly at what point are you really
full? And the mind will say, “Well, I need more. After all, there’s just one meal a
day. I’ve got to stuff in a little extra for the evening, a little extra for all the work
I’m going to be doing.” And try saying No to that voice.
Ajaan Chah says to eat until the point where you know that in five more
mouthfuls you’re going to be full. Stop at that point and then just fill yourself up
with water. To do this requires real sensitivity, noticing not only when you are
full, but also when you’re five mouthfuls away from full. And remind yourself of
the advantage of not overeating. You’re not weighed down. It’s a lot easier to
meditate soon after the meal. And you can begin to question what the mind’s
demands are on how much it needs and how much what it eats is going after the
flavor.

201
 This connects to restraint of the senses, in the sense of taste. When you’re
eating something, exactly how long does the good taste last in your mouth? Not
that long. It’s very short. At the same time, if there’s a demand—“I need X-
amount of calories, or X amount of protein or whatever”—experiment to see how
much you really need. Try doing with less and less for a while, and see how the
body responds.
So in this way too, moderation in eating gives you a chance to improve the
conditions for concentration and to gain some discernment into your
motivation: why you eat, what you’re looking for when you sit down and start
putting food into your mouth.
Wakefulness, in the texts, is defined as follows: During the day, divide your
time between sitting and walking as you practice. In other words, give the whole
day to the meditation. And then at night, spend the first watch of the night
sitting and walking, trying to banish any sleepiness from the mind. During the
second watch of the night, which is roughly 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., you rest. But when
you lie down, you lie down mindfully, with the intention that as soon as you
wake up, you’re going to sit up. You’re not just going to turn over and lie there,
enjoying the posture of lying down. Then you spend the last watch of the night
sitting and walking again, trying to banish sleepiness from your mind.
Now you may find that you have to adjust this in terms of how many hours
you personally need. But two points are important. One is that when you lie
down, you lie down with the intention that as soon as you wake up, you’re going
to get up and immediately try to continue with the meditation.
During the rest of the day if you’re not meditating, ask yourself why. You
may have some good reasons. You’ve got chores to do, this and that, but you can
meditate while doing the chore. And if you don’t have a good reason for not
doing formal meditation, make it a habit that you just drop whatever it is that
you’re planning to do. This way you can ride herd on yourself, so the ajaan
doesn’t have to ride herd on you. You become more responsible in your
meditation.
Ajaan Fuang describe this as being like a teacher who keeps after the
students, making sure that they do their lessons in line with the lesson plans for
the day. Other people can’t ride herd on you in anyway near the way you could
ride herd on yourself if you really wanted it. You have to learn how to do this in
such way that you don’t push, push, push and then snap. Part of being a
responsible mature meditator is knowing how much you can take. But you don’t
want to push your limits; you want to push the envelope. Our general tendency is
for our idea of moderation to be pretty slack. So you could learn how to push
yourself too hard for a while, and then back off from that a little bit until you
find the point that’s just right. And for each of us, this is going to be a different

202
point in terms of how much sleep you need, how much you can push yourself in
the practice. But the important principle is you learn to be responsible for
yourself—because this is how discernment is developed.
All these practices are aimed at developing discernment. That’s why they can
be a guideline for someone who’s practicing on his own or on her own. This is
not just a matter of setting up rules and abiding by them, but it’s also learning
sensitivity to what’s actually going on: what pushes you when you’re looking at
things, what pushes you when you’re eating things, what pushes you when you’re
making your choices for what you’re going to do each hour of the day. Learn
how to question any impulses that seem to be unskillful, how to encourage the
ones that are skillful, and how to ride herd on yourself in a way that really is
sensitive to what’s just right. For this ability to find what’s just right is an
extremely important principle in developing discernment.
So the more you can become your own teacher, the better. The discernment
that’s involved in becoming your own teacher is going to be essential for release.
Discernment is not just a matter of seeing things in line with the texts; it’s a
matter of learning how to watch your own mind, question your impulses, look at
your intentional input into any situation. And the best way to see that intentional
input is to start asking questions about when it’s skillful and when it’s not. As
you get more and more sensitive to what’s skillful, more and more sensitive to
what’s unskillful, your powers of observation become more and more refined.
You become sensitive even to the slightest intentions. And it’s in seeing those
intentions, skillful or unskillful, allowing them to disband at the appropriate
time: That’s when your practice allows you to see something more.

203
 The Context for No Context
September 16, 2008

The Buddha once said that if you look back at your life or your many
lifetimes, you won’t be able to find a point where you could say, before this there
was no ignorance and then ignorance began. We’re all coming from ignorance,
which in technical terms means that we’re coming from a position where we
don’t really see the four noble truths. We don’t see our life in terms of the four
noble truths. We have our own terms, our own narratives of who we are, our
beliefs about the world, all kinds of knowledge and theories that actually get in
the way of looking at where there’s stress and suffering, what’s causing it, and
what we can do to put an end to it.
So ignorance is not just a lack of knowing. Sometimes it’s composed of
different kinds of knowledge, but knowledge that doesn’t look at things in terms
that will actually put an end to suffering. When you begin to realize that your
knowledge isn’t working: That’s the beginning of true knowledge. As the Buddha
once said, if you recognize your own foolishness, that’s the beginning of wisdom;
to that extent are you wise. Regardless of how much you may know, if you realize
that your knowledge is not putting an end to suffering, there must be some better
way of looking at things: That’s the beginning of wisdom. And you can cut
through your ignorance by learning to look at things as they happen simply as
events, whether they’re things outside of you or things in your own body and
mind.
The Buddha says, practice looking at these things simply as things that are
separate. You see your body as something separate, your feelings as something
separate; your perceptions, your thought constructs. Even your sensory
consciousness: You have to see that as something separate—separate both in the
sense that these are individual events that arise and pass away, and in the sense
that they’re separate from your awareness, your sense of you. You want to pare
back your sense of you because as long as you claim something to be you or
yours, you can’t really see it clearly. There’s bound to be a liking or disliking, or
holding on that prevents you from seeing when something arises, exactly why
does it arise? And what effects does it carry in its train?
This is why the beginning of meditation starts with simply looking at the
body in and of itself, simply as a body; or feelings in and of themselves, mind
states in and of themselves, mental qualities in and of themselves, simply as
events that are happening, something separate from your awareness of them. This

204
allows you to begin seeing how they fit into the causal pattern that either leads to
suffering or leads away from suffering. In other words, we take our experience
and take it outside of its ordinary context, our narratives about who we are and
how we interact with other people, or our views about the world as a whole.
One of the interesting things about the Buddha’s teachings on the four noble
truths or on dependent co-arising is that the contain long list of causes and
effects, but they’re not placed inside a context. “Who is this happening to?” The
Buddha says, Don’t ask. “Is there nobody there?” Don’t ask.” Is there somebody
there?” Don’t ask. “Do these things exist or not exist?” Don’t ask. Just look at
them as events arising and passing away. Which means that we have to learn how
to get our minds out of their ordinary context where we have a view of the world,
and based on that view of the world we sort everything else out in those terms.
The Buddha wants us to erase that context so we can just see things as they arise,
as they pass away, and how they influence one another, simply as events that you
can watch in the present moment. He even has us view our world views and self-
views in terms of their arising and passing away.
So in that sense, while we’re meditating, we’re trying to get our minds
outside of their normal context. But getting the mind outside of that context
requires a certain kind of context as well. When the Buddha talks about the
ability to put the mind in this position where you’re seeing things arising and
passing away, it requires a whole series of aids in the practice, many of which are
not just meditation techniques. They go back through the way you act in your
day-to-day life: what you listen to and give credence to, what you respect, and the
people you hang around with. These things help put the mind in the right
context where it can then drop the context.
For example the Buddha talks about how it’s necessary to have right conduct
in body, speech, and mind. This is why we have the precepts, because if you don’t
hold by the precepts it’s hard to be really honest about what your actions are and
what their results are. If you’ve been harmful to other people, you don’t like to
think about it. And as we all know, what happens then is either that you think
about how you’ve been harmful and you start getting depressed and tied up in
remorse; or you start going into denial: You didn’t really hurt them, or they don’t
really matter—that kind of thinking, which makes it difficult for you to see
things as they actually arise and pass away.
So the precepts are meant to support meditation practice. And we listen to
the Dhamma as a support for our precepts to keep us on the right path. To listen
to the Dhamma, we have to associate with what they call admirable friends,
people who exemplify the Dhamma in their actions. This is for two reasons. First,
it’s hard to listen to the Dhamma and believe it if you see that the person
teaching the Dhamma isn’t abiding by the Dhamma. Second, there’s more to the

205
Dhamma than just words. There are habits, attitudes that can’t be put into words,
but can be sensed. You pick them up just by hanging around a person.
So there’s a social context for the Dhamma, a social context for the practice
that puts an end to ignorance: a social context for the ability to develop a mind
state that goes beyond social context.
This means that as you’re practicing there are two things you want to keep in
mind. One is your ability to make the mind strong enough to meditate in any
context. And two, you make sure that you’re creating the right social context
both for yourself and for the other people who are here. Ideally we’re here to be
admirable friends to one another, to be exemplary in our conduct. We don’t have
to teach one another the Dhamma. In fact it makes life a lot more difficult for me
if you’re out there teaching one another.
It’s like the man I met from the Yukon. He said if he’s out in the forest and
he encounters a bear, he’s a lot more comfortable if he’s the only person there. If
there are other people, he finds it harder to read the bear. So you don’t have to be
teaching the Dhamma to one another, but in your actions you should be
examples of the Dhamma to one another. It makes it a lot easier for us to practice
together.
This starts with simple things like showing respect for the place we have here.
We’re living off of other people’s generosity. Always keep that in mind. I’ve been
told over the past week or so that people have been very careless about leaving
the lights on. You may have noticed that the generator gets turned on every
morning automatically when the batteries go too low. Solar electricity is
essentially free, but when we use too much of it, we have to generate electricity,
which uses up fuel.
So pay attention to simple things like that. Show respect for the situation
around us, for the things that people have provided for us so that we can practice.
The practice starts there, and it builds up. When you talk with one another, try to
be frugal in your words. Remember that each of us is here to learn how to
develop quietude. If your speech is going to disturb someone else’s quietude,
make sure there’s a good reason for it.
Ajaan Fuang always said, before you say anything, if you want your words to
help in the practice, ask yourself: Is this really necessary? If it’s not, don’t say it. As
we go through the day, look for the little things you can do to help one another.
If you notice some slack anywhere, take up the slack. We’re operating on a
voluntary system here, what they call an economy of gifts—which means that
some things get done, some things don’t. If you see that something is not getting
done and you’re in a position to do it, go ahead and do it. If something’s not
clean, something’s not in order, you’re not here serving anybody. We’re all here

206
developing good qualities in our minds, and cleaning up a mess is a good way of
developing those qualities. In this way our mutual presence becomes admirable
friendship, which helps us in the practice.
So you want to help create an ideal environment for the practice, and then
use that environment to strengthen the mind so ultimately it doesn’t have to
depend on a particular environment, a particular context. You can meditate
anywhere regardless of the situation. This is a really necessary quality of mind
because life is uncertain. You can’t always guarantee that this place will continue
to be as quiet and as conducive as it is right now. We can’t always guarantee that
we will stay here. Some of us have to go. Some of us think we’re going to stay,
but who knows what’s going to happen?
This way we’re using our context to develop the quality of mind that can
drop the context. For example, as you’re sitting here right now: As Ajaan Lee
used to say, don’t think that you’re sitting here in a meditation hall. Think that
you’re sitting way out in the wide open, all alone. There’s nobody around for you
to worry about. There’s simply you and the breath, you and the body. As you
focus on the breath and on the body, that sense of “you” sitting there is going to
get pared away, too, as you begin to recognize more and more the factors of mind
that keep you with the breath, keep you with the body, and the factors of the
mind that pull you away. If anything pulls you away, learn how not to identify
with it. No matter how intriguing it may seem, no matter how much it may just
seem to be your habitual way of thinking, you’ve got to learn how to drop it,
drop it, drop it; step back from it, look at it as something separate, simply as an
event that’s conditioned by other events and is going to condition other events
down the line.
This way you learn how to cut through the ignorance that keeps you
suffering. You begin to see how the different contexts you create around these
events place burdens on you, whether they’re actively unskillful or just relatively
skillful. The fact that you have to create these contexts means that you’re
constantly keeping them alive, keeping them going. If you don’t maintain them,
they pass away.
You want to learn how to put the mind in a situation where it’s totally free
from context, simply looking at events as they arise and pass away. As he Buddha
says, ultimately right view gets to the point where you don’t see things as existing
or not existing. No sense of self gets built up around them. Even the concept of
existence or nonexistence doesn’t get built up around them. There are just pure
events: stress arising, stress passing away. And that’s when you learn to see what
lies beyond the stress.
In this way, we’re trying to create a context here in which the mind can get
free of contexts. It may seem strange that we have this double duty, but this is

207
what works. Have a sense of time and place, of when to work on keeping the
context here as conducive as possible, and when to drop the context. We all have
chores. We all have duties and responsibilities here to some extent. But you have
to learn how to wear them lightly. Think about them when things need to be
thought about; and otherwise, drop them. Just be with the breath, just you and
the breath. Over time there will be less and less you, and even less and less breath.
That’s when things get really light, because we see that we don’t have to keep
maintaining ignorance the way we have been for so long. As Ajaan Suwat once
said, ignorance is like darkness. Even though the darkness may have existed for
eons, as soon as you light a light, the darkness doesn’t have any right to say,
“Look, I’ve been here for a longer time, the light doesn’t have any right to drive
me away.” As soon as knowledge arises, it can cut through the ignorance that’s
been here for so long. So do what you can to give it the chance to arise, this light
of knowledge, both as you sit here with your eyes closed and as you go through
the rest of the day.

208
 The Uses of Equanimity
September 24, 2008

When the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son, Rahula, he first gave
him an exercise in developing patience and equanimity. It’s important to see how
the two practices are related, because they show that equanimity doesn’t mean
passivity, or simply accepting things as they are and leaving them at that. Rather,
it’s meant to serve a purpose—to allow you to see more clearly, to learn how to
accept what can’t be changed, but also to look for what can be changed, where
you can make a difference. Even when you accept the fact that there’s a lot of
suffering in life, it doesn’t mean that you stop there. You look for the area where
there is no suffering, where suffering can be put to an end.
When the Buddha taught Rahula, he said, “Start out by making your mind
like earth. When disgusting things are thrown on the earth, the earth doesn’t
shrink away.” We can also add that when wonderful things are thrown on the
earth, the earth doesn’t get excited. The Buddha then said, “Make your mind like
water. When water has to wash away disgusting things, it doesn’t get disgusted.
Or like fire: when fire burns disgusting things, it doesn’t get disgusted. Or when
wind blows away disgusting things, the wind isn’t disgusted. It stays unchanged.
Make your mind like that.”
But the Buddha didn’t stop there, simply with acceptance. He wasn’t
teaching Rahula to be a clod of dirt. He went on to teach breath meditation, and
breath meditation isn’t simply accepting the breath whatever way it is. It’s very
proactive. “Learn to breathe,” he said, “sensitive to the whole body. Calming the
way you breathe. Train yourself to become sensitive to where there’s pleasure, to
where there’s a sense of refreshment or rapture in the breathing. Notice how
these feelings have an effect on the mind and then allow them to grow calm.”
What this means is that, building on equanimity and patience, you become
proactive. In other words, the equanimity and patience are designed to make you
see clearly. When you lack equanimity, you react immediately to whatever
happens and you don’t get to see, “Well, what happens if I just sit with this for a
while? Where does it lead?” When you’re equanimous, you can begin to see cause
and effect more clearly over the long term, without being blinded by your knee-
jerk reactions. You can watch stress with the purpose of seeing what causes it,
what arises together with the stress. The stronger your equanimity, the more you
can see.

209
 So equanimity and acceptance are not an ends in and of themselves. They’re a
means to knowledge, the knowledge we develop around the four noble truths:
looking for the stress, trying to comprehend it to the point where you can see
what’s causing it, what activities you’re engaged in that are contributing to the
stress, and learning how to stop those activities, to drop them. That’s where you
let go.
Essentially, equanimity allows you to learn the terrain. When you know the
terrain, you can find the path. Life doesn’t necessarily follow your wishes, but if
you’re patient enough and observant enough, you begin to see that it does offer
opportunities for an end to suffering. That’s essentially the Buddha’s message.
You want to develop your powers of observation so you can see that for yourself.
This is why we practice concentration: to get the mind solid in the face of
whatever comes up. But that solidity has to come from learning how to develop
strengths: a sense of well-being, a sense of ease inside the body, an ease inside the
mind, so as to assist in keeping you solid.
The secret to patience or endurance is to focus not on the hard things you
have to endure, but on where you can still find sources of help, sources of
strength. Learning how to be with the breath in a way that induces feelings of
pleasure, feelings of rapture or refreshment is an important source of strength
both for the body and for the mind.
This provides you with a general pattern that you can use throughout life.
When you run into limitations, you test them first to make sure they really are
limitations. If you find that they are, you look for other areas where you can
make a difference.
There was an old woman in Thailand, a doctor, who went with a friend to
see Ajaan MahaBoowa. The friend was suffering from cancer, and the two of
them stayed with Ajaan Mahaboowa for several months. While they were there,
Ajaan Mahaboowa gave a Dhamma talk almost every night for the woman
suffering from cancer because she knew she was going to die. The woman with
cancer taped every Dhamma talk, and after she died, they found she had left
behind a lot of tapes. So the old woman doctor set about transcribing the tapes,
and ended up with two very large books. As she said in the preface to the books,
one of the lessons she had learned from Ajaan Mahaboowa was that as you grow
old and find yourself running into limitations, look for the areas are where you
still have strength, where you still can make a difference, where you can still offer
something of goodness to the world. She was still strong enough to transcribe the
tapes, so that was her offering.
There’s a similar lesson in the Canon. A couple of old brahmans go to see the
Buddha, and say, “We’re now old. How should we live as we are old?” And the

210
Buddha replies, “You can still be generous.” Even though there are limitations on
your strength, there must be some ways you can be generous to the world. Look
for those. This principle applies all throughout the practice. You’re sitting here.
You find that there are areas in the body that are painful. You can ask yourself,
“Which parts of the body aren’t painful? How can you breathe in ways that will
induce a sense of ease in those parts the body so that sense of ease becomes
stronger?” Then you can begin to use those parts as a foundation, as a source of
strength in dealing with the pain.
So things don’t just stop with equanimity. The purpose of equanimity is to
see more clearly. When your mind is more even and still, it’s less likely to be
swayed by events. That way it can watch things as they actually happen. And you
see that there’s still an opening. Even when you face death, you realize there’s
part of the mind that doesn’t die. As for the things that do die, you have to
develop equanimity for them. And more than just equanimity: You have to learn
how not to identify with them.
The Buddha talks about different levels of equanimity. There’s the
equanimity that simply comes from intentionally keeping your mind calm and
balanced in the face of input of the senses. He calls that equanimity based on
multiplicity, i.e., the multiplicity of the senses. Then there’s the equanimity based
on singularity, when you get the mind to a sense of oneness in strong
concentration. This is more solid, more secure, because you have something
really singular and solid to base the equanimity on, and not just a reminder that
you want to stay equanimous, or should stay equanimous. You’ve got a real
foundation that lies beyond the reach of a lot of sensory input.
But even that isn’t enough, because if you don’t go further you’ll start
identifying with that solid sense of equanimity. As long as you have to identify
with something, it’s a good thing to identify with, but if you want real freedom,
the Buddha recommends learning how to see where you’re creating a sense of
“me” and “mine” around that equanimity, in the narratives you build about
where you are.
First you can practice applying this sort of analysis to other things. Once the
mind is still, you can look at other affairs in your life to see what kind of
narratives you’ve built around them—your identity as a painter, a cook, a
carpenter, a musician. Of course, aging and death can get in the way of those
identities. So you can ask yourself, “Does my happiness really have to depend on
maintaining that identity?” Because that’s originally why you created that identity
to begin with. You developed those skills in search of happiness. And they do
provide some measure of happiness, but that happiness has its limitations, for it’s
based on skills that will have to deteriorate someday.
Learning how to identify with the equanimity helps you step back from those

211
identities, because it gives you something more solid on which to take your
stance. But eventually you have to step back from the equanimity itself, because
even it is fabricated. This is when the mind goes beyond equanimity to non-
fashioning: not fashioning a sense of “I” or “mine” around even your highest
attainments. And hopefully the practice you’ve had in learning how to cut
through your old narratives can help you in this step as well.
When death comes, if you’ve had practice in learning how not to identify
with the things you’re been identifying with up to now, it’s going to be a lot
easier to let them go. Then you can learn to look at the situation where you are at
that moment: “Where are the escape routes here?” As Ajaan MahaBoowa told the
woman who was dying of cancer, when the time comes, have a very clear sense of
your awareness as something separate from the pain. Now, you don’t want to
wait to the last moment to develop that sense. Develop it as much as you can
while you’re still strong, realizing that your awareness of the pain is one thing,
the pain itself is something else.
One way of helping this along is, when you see a pain in the body, to remind
yourself that there are body sensations and there are pain sensations, and the two
are different sorts of things. Body sensations are things like earth, water, wind,
and fire; in other words, your sense of solidity, liquidity, warmth, energy in the
body. That’s one level of sensation. Then there’s the actual pain sensation, which
is another level of sensation. They’re there together, but they’re separate. You can
learn how to see them as separate. That’s when you can really observe the pain.
The problem is that we tend to glom these things together. If you glom the pain
with the warmth, it becomes hot. If you glom it with a sense of solidity, it
becomes solid, heavy. And then it’s just like a big immovable lump. But if you
see that solidity is one thing and the pain is something else, the pain just seems to
flit around. Even if it’s strong, it’s very erratic, and not nearly as monolithic and
scary as it originally seemed.
So even though the pain may be there, you realize that it’s not the same sort
of thing you thought it was. You can see that it’s something separate. The two
things are there in the same place, but they’re different things, on different levels.
Then you can apply the same principle to your awareness of both of the pain and
the body sensations. The awareness is right there too, but it’s separate. Then
when the time comes, you can ask yourself, “Which is going to stop first, the pain
or the awareness?” And there’ll be an awareness in there that doesn’t do anything
and doesn’t die. You have to peel away different layers of mental activity around
it, but there is something in there that doesn’t die. You can be confident of that.
Confident enough to let go of everything else.
This is why the Buddha has us develop equanimity, patience, and acceptance.
It’s not the case that mere acceptance is all you need to do, or all you can do. If

212
that were the case, there wouldn’t be four noble truths with four different duties.
There’d be only one: There’s pain, suffering, stress, and your duty is to learn how
to accept it. Once I heard someone say that the Buddha claimed to teach only one
thing—pain and the ending of pain—meaning that in accepting the fact of pain,
you’re doing all you can to put an end to pain. But that doesn’t really end the
suffering. And that’s not what the Buddha taught at all. He didn’t claim to teach
only one thing. He taught suffering and the end of suffering as two different
things. There is a way out. There is an escape. Suffering does end. But you have to
learn to accept where there is suffering and what’s causing it; you have to learn
and accept the things you can change, the things you can’t. Then focus on what
you can change to make your escape.
That’s what equanimity is for: so that you can find the escape. The more solid
your mind is, the more clearly the escape will appear. So when you run into areas
where you’re no longer in control, you no longer have the strength you used to
have, look for where you still do have strengths. Make the most of them. Because
it’s in that fighting spirit, your unwillingness to admit total defeat: That’s where
freedom is found.

213
 There is This
September 30, 2008

There’s a famous simile in the texts where a man is suffering from pain. He
gets tied up in anxiety and misery around the pain. And the Buddha says it’s like
being shot with an arrow and then shooting yourself with a second arrow. The
physical pain is the first arrow; the mental pain is the second one. And it’s the
mental one that’s important. As the Buddha says, the enlightened person, the
awakened person, may still get shot with those first arrows but doesn’t shoot him
or herself with the second.
The second arrows are important because they get shot right into the heart,
into the mind. The first arrow can only go as far as the body. The arrows that go
into the mind are the ones that really hurt. They are the subject of the four noble
truths. That’s the suffering in the first noble truth: the suffering that craving and
ignorance shoot into the heart.
So our training is learning how not to shoot ourselves with that second
arrow. Although it’s always struck me that there’s more than just one second
arrow. Lots of arrows get shot into the mind. The question is: How do we learn
not to do that?
The clue to the answer is given in another passage where the Buddha talks
about a person who has gained very exalted states in meditation and responds by
saying, “I am at peace. I am released.” As the Buddha comments, the “I am” in
those statements is what’s causing the problem. It shows that this person still has
some connection, still has some clinging. After all, craving combined with
clinging is what causes the suffering. And the “I am” that you build around
things is one of the four types of clinging: doctrine-of-self clinging—your idea of
who you are. You impose that on all kinds of experiences. You like to impose it
on the ones where things are pleasurable, but once you set up the mold of the “I
am” and stick in a nice pleasurable feeling, that pleasurable feeling can change
and be replaced by an unpleasant feeling. So there you are. You’ve still got that
sentence “I am this,” but suddenly the “this” is something unpleasant. You’ve got
a pain in the mold that you had created to contain pleasure.
This is where the teaching on not-self comes in to help. Learn how to view
things without creating that sense of self—because after all, that sense of self is
something that we do. We make this sense of self. And it does have its functions.
As the Buddha said, when you want to understand something, you have to see

214
both its allure and its drawbacks. You don’t just watch it arising and passing
away. You want to understand when it arises why you hold onto it? So if you
want to understand why you make a sense of self, you have to look for its allure.
And the allure here is that the sense of self is useful in a lot of contexts. When
you’re eating food, you know which mouth to put it in. You know how to plan
for the future. You know how to anticipate future dangers: that if you don’t
practice now, you’re going to have trouble down the line. In that way the sense of
self is useful.
But as with any activity, you’ve got to see when it’s skillful and when it’s not.
And particularly if you find yourself shooting your heart with arrows, you’ve got
a problem. To indicate the solution, the Buddha compares the case of that
meditator placing the words “I am this” around his meditative experiences, with
someone else who simply says, “There is this.” When there’s the perception of the
infinitude of space, he doesn’t equate himself with the infinitude of space,
doesn’t create a sense of pride around it. He simply says, “There is this: infinite
space. There is this: nothingness. There is this: neither perception nor non-
perception,” or whatever the state may be. That’s one of the tools for getting
around this habit of building a self all the time.
This is a theme that recurs many places in the Canon. The monk who’s
dwelling in emptiness and practicing concentration looks at the perception in his
mind—it might be the perception of the breath or whatever—and notices that
there are these disturbances here, but also that there is a lack of disturbance
compared with other perceptions. For instance, if you’re sitting here with a
perception of all the people sitting around you, you start thinking about the
stories of what this person said today, and what are you going to have to do with
that person tomorrow. There’s a lot of disturbance connected with the perception
of “people.” But if you can hold onto the perception simply of “breath,” the
“people” disturbances go way. And you notice that. There is a level of disturbance
with the breath because you still have to maintain it, you still have to work with
the breath. So you notice, “There is this.” As for what’s not here, you notice,
“Okay, that’s absent.”
When you’re working with the frames of reference, you want to build up to
the ability to simply notice, “There is the body; there are feelings; there are mind
states; there are mental qualities,” without building a lot of stories around them.
And you can work in that direction. You’re sitting here; it’s warm tonight. And
you could be thinking about the fact that it’s a lot warmer tonight than it was last
night and what does that mean for tomorrow? How am I going to get through
the night? How am I going to get through tomorrow? You may even think up
some project that requires you to go down to the library, to find some air
conditioning, and off your thoughts go in that direction. But then you realize

215
you can’t do that, so you start suffering. You could simply say, however, “There is
this,” and then look at what you’ve got here.
There are aggregates, there are sense media, and the properties of the body:
earth, water, wind, fire. Okay, we’ve got more fire tonight than normal. Is your
body all fire? Well, no. It’s got other elements as well. There’s liquidity, there’s
the motion of the breath. And there are the solid parts. Things are feeling too
warm. Is everything warm? No there’s still some water in there; some sensations
in the body are cooler than others. Where are those cool sensations? Which part
of the body feels cooler than the others? Focus on that.
As you stay with that sense of coolness, notice: Can you spread it around?
This way you learn how to make use of what’s there. There is this, there is
warmth, but there’s also the “this” that’s not so warm. Or you can forget about
the issue of hot and cold all together, and focus on the breath: how is the breath
moving? Is the breath moving in a healthy way? Is it obstructed? Is it
unobstructed? You can look at that.
As long as you stay simply on the level of elements, you’re not shooting
yourself with those second arrows. You’re simply staying on the level of, “There is
this.” You’re not creating stories around it. More precisely, you see more clearly
what is there when you say, “There is this.” You begin to see that you’ve taken a
few details from the present and were stitching them together in a story that was
making you suffer. You can ask yourself, “Thy should I do that?”
You’ve got the choice of what you’re going to focus on, which give you a lot
of freedom right there. And as you sense the “I” building up around planning for
tomorrow, or thinking about what happened today, you can cut through it.
There is the thought of “I,” but is it helpful now? No. If you’re not carrying
around the assumption that you’re something, if you’re not objectifying yourself,
things are a lot lighter. Stay on the level of, “There is this” and explore, “Well,
what is the “this”? How many thises are in here right now? There are lots of
thises. And you’ve got the choice of which this you’re going to focus on.
So the sense of self you have: Learn how to use it appropriately. Realize that
it’s an optional storyline, an optional concept that’s helpful in some
circumstances and harmful in a lot of other ones. Practice looking at the “There
is this,” to see what’s going on, to see what role your present intentions are
playing in shaping what’s going on. The storylines, the assumptions, all the other
things you tend to cling to: What do you have to let go of in order to stop that
suffering?
When you look at things on this level, simply arising and passing away
without carrying the storylines around all the time, it’s a lot easier to let go of the
things that the storylines would require. If you don’t have to identify something

216
as “me,” then you don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to me
tomorrow. If the thought of “me” and “I” tomorrow comes up, you realize that’s
optional. It’s not built into the way things are.
This is one of the reasons why we get the mind concentrated because as the
Buddha said, once the mind is concentrated, you can see the aggregates as they
arise, as they’re originated by conditions. You can see events at the sense spheres.
You can analyze your sense of the body into aggregates and properties. When the
mind is still in the present, you can simply look at things as they present
themselves to your awareness here in the present moment. You get to see what’s
really there and what’s not. If you take it just on this level, you can see that what’s
really there is not nearly as oppressive as the stories made it out to be. Even when
there’s severe pain, it’s a lot easier to take when you’re taking it just as what’s
right here right now. You’re not weighing yourself down with thoughts of how
long you’ve been in pain and how much longer you are going to be in pain, or
that it’s been caused by somebody else, why is that person causing it…. You
simply look at, “Here is the pain, here is the sensation, what can be done about it?
Where should I focus my attention so I don’t have to suffer?”
One thing you could do is watch the pain pass away, pass way, because from
moment to moment, it just keeps passing away. It’s like the difference between
riding in a car facing forward and riding the car facing backward. Facing
forward, you seem to take on everything coming at you; you become weighed
down by everything that’s coming in, coming in, coming in at you. But if you
turn around and face the back of the car as you’re riding along, just see things
passing away, passing away, passing away. The actual impact is the same, but your
attitude has changed. You see things passing away; you’re not gathering them in.
Ajaan Lee gives the example of a person plowing a field. Stupid people try to
take the dirt as it falls off the plow and stick it in a bag. Of course they’re going to
get weighed down. But if you simply watch the dirt as it falls off, falls off, falls
off, you’re not carrying anything around with you. You don’t get weighed down.
You can complete the plowing.
So that’s the other thing to think about as you’re watching pain as, “There is
this.” You want to say, “This is passing away.” You don’t have to collect the pains,
or gather them up to store them anywhere. And if that’s the way you can see
things, that first arrow is really not so painful at all.

217
 Facing Your Responsibilities
October 1, 2008

One of the ironies of our culture is that people who meditate are accused of
running away from their responsibilities, running away from life, running away
from reality, running away from the world. Actually as you sit here, you’re sitting
and staring face-to-face with your responsibilities: your intentions from moment
to moment. One of the lessons you learn as you meditate is how many
defilements you have, how much suffering your intentions can cause. And the
whole point of the meditation is to take responsibility for your intentions and
learn how to shape them into something better, something more responsible,
more harmless—to admit that not every thought that comes into your head is a
good thought, and that you are responsible for creating a lot of suffering for
yourself and sometimes for people around you as well.
The people out in the world are the ones who are running away from these
issues. They get buried in issues of making money and raising a family. Some of
that work is necessary but a lot of it is just busy work. As they get old and face
death, they look back at their lives and say, “What was that all about? What do
you have to show for having been a human being?”
As you meditate, you’re making changes in the big issue in life, which is the
mind, the activities of the mind. These issues are right here right now. There’s
nowhere else you’re going to see them. People out in the world, for the most
part, have trouble sitting still. If they’re not busying themselves with something,
they feel empty, at loose ends. There’s something wrong if you can’t just sit with
your mind and be quiet.
As we sit here, we’re trying to figure out what that “something wrong” is and
also figuring what to do about it. The breath gives you a handle, gives you
something to do in the present moment so that you can stay here and not feel at
loose ends. In the beginning stages it’s difficult to look your mind straight in the
face, or to even figure out where you would look for it.
So the breath gives you something to do. You work with the breath. As long
as you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present moment. And after a
while you begin to learn a very important lesson: that if you’re going to watch
the mind, you watch it in its actions. You watch it in the act of dealing with the
breath, trying to stay with the breath and then wandering off, coming back,
trying to stay with it again and suddenly losing all sense of where you are and

218
finding yourself someplace else.
That’s the way it is in the beginning. But as you work with it, you begin to
notice that you can observe things in the mind you wouldn’t be able to observe
any other way: how it changes its mind, how one intention can sneak up on you
to sabotage a previous intention. If you’re careful, you can see these things. If
you’re alert and mindful, you begin to notice the tricks the mind plays on itself.
As you get better and better at the meditation, you learn how to undo those
tricks, work your way around them, find exactly what it is in the mind that wants
to wander off anyhow. You start entering into a dialogue with all your different
skillful and unskillful ideas, your skillful and unskillful intentions. And you start
converting more and more of your mind to the skillful side. That right there is an
important achievement. Bit by bit you begin to figure out all the different ins and
outs of the mind. You develop a greater sense of unity, not only in getting the
mind to stay with the breath in a state of good strong concentration, but also in
getting more and more of your mind on the side of wanting to do this. That’s
what right effort is all about, learning how to generate desire to do what’s skillful
and to drop what’s unskillful.
This way you cause less suffering for yourself, less suffering for others. And
your life has a very clear sense of direction. There’s so little in the world that you
can really straighten out, but you can straighten out your own mind. When the
mind is straightened out, then the effect that you have on the world is not
colored by greed, anger, delusion, jealousy; all those other unskillful states that
can come along in the wake even of your generally well-intentioned efforts.
Because as long as the mind doesn’t really know itself, unskillful states can sneak
in in all kinds of disguises.
And the amazing thing is that, as you take time off to be by yourself, the
world comes running after you. You see this in the lives of the famous ajaans.
Once they’ve straightened out their own act, lots of other people want to be
around them because those people sense the beneficial impact of a pure mind, a
mind that has been straightened out, realizing that it’s a rare thing in this world.
It’s one of the things we lack in our culture, which is probably why people don’t
understand meditators. The more we can straighten out our own minds, the
more proof we have that meditation is a useful activity. It’s the most important
activity in life. Even if nobody else sees the benefits, we see the benefits within
themselves. We can face the end of life with no fear, because we’ve seen the true
Dharma.
As the Buddha once said, that’s one of the reasons why people fear death:
They’re very uncertain about what is the true Dharma. Is there a deathless, is
there no deathless? Is death just annihilation? Once you’ve seen the true Dharma,
you have no doubt about it. When there is no doubt about this issue, death

219
doesn’t hold any fear.
So realize that as you’re sitting here, you’re not running away from anything.
You’ve actually got yourself cornered. You’ve got to face your own mind. As
someone once said, there is wisdom in this technique of no escape. Now that
you’re sitting here, you’ve got to face your mind: How are you going to train it,
how are you going to make this not a miserable experience but actually a blissful,
happy, meaningful experience? Those are the skills that most people in the world
never develop. But they are among the most important skills that you can
develop, because they make life a meaningful life with a direction. A life that, as
they say, goes in a good way.

220
 Xtreme Drama
October 16, 2008

One of the forest ajaans, talking about the early years of his practice, talked
about how his mind would progress, progress, progress, then the whole thing
would come crashing down, with nothing left. Then it would start progressing
again, and it would crash again. He began to notice there was a cyclical pattern to
the ups and downs. He learned to anticipate them—and in particular, the
crashes. And the way he got around this was to decide not to pay any attention to
this idea—he didn’t care whether it was progressing or regressing, he was just
going to stick with his practice. In his case it was repeating the word buddho.
In other words, he decided he wasn’t going to buy in to the drama that had
begun to infuse his practice. He had developed quite a narrative of how things
would go up and then down. And because he had bought into the drama, that
just reinforced the pattern. The way out was not to buy into it, to have a more
sensible attitude toward the whole thing. Whatever ups or downs there may be,
you don’t have to take them all that seriously. You just stick with your practice.
You have to find the middle way between the extremes that the dramatic side of
our personality likes to read into things.
The Buddha had a similar problem. In his case, he started out with the
extreme of sensual indulgence. Then in order to get away from what he saw as
the problem of sensual indulgence, he went totally into self torture. He was an
extremist. If it wasn’t one extreme, it was going to be the other. Thinking that
deals in large abstractions tends to push us to extremism. And the type of
thinking that likes to deal in drama goes in the same way as well.
So there’s an ordinariness to the practice that sometimes we resist. It’s like
the poets and artists of the 19th century who despised the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie were prudent and sensible, and the poets hated them. There was
nothing dramatic in their lives. But living a dramatic life could be pretty
miserable. It may make for great art, but it’s a miserable life. I read a novel one
time in which a guy had been put in prison for murder. He was reading letters
from his wife who was going through psychiatric counseling, in which her grief
counselor had taught her to go step by step through the stages of her grief. And
you could tell from tone of the narrative that the novelist despised grief
counseling. It didn’t have the drama, didn’t have the excitement or grandeur of
someone who gets excited enough to go out and kill somebody and then has to
suffer the consequences.

221
 Again, that’s the kind of mindset that deals in extremes. Would you like to be
somebody who is constantly going through one extreme or the other? Part of the
mind enjoys it. It makes life more interesting. But it doesn’t really help in terms
of finding a solid happiness. There’s nothing dramatic about solid happiness.
There’s nothing dramatic about a sensible attitude that learns how to deal
pragmatically with issues as they arise. The ????(4:43) refuses to be blinded by
extremes. That’s when you learn to get past the romanticism and the drama of
the extremes. That’s when you really get on the path, and your practice really
matures.
If you have a tendency to extremes—we usually don’t have just one extreme
in our practice, we go from one extreme to the opposite extreme, back-and-forth
—you’ve got to find ways of modulating that. This means modulating both your
physical experience of extremes, and your mental attitude toward them.
I once had a student who was manic-depressive. She found that a large part of
the problem was anticipating her ups and downs. The anticipation in and of itself
would exacerbate the extremes. But she also found that in her extreme moods,
the experience of the body was very different. This is where the breath became
helpful. When she was feeling down, she could breathe in a way that would add
more breath energy, make the body lighter, lighter, lighter, so she didn’t feel so
weighed down all the time. And without the physical experience of being
weighed down, her depressive mind states didn’t have so much to latch onto.
This began to cut through the pattern. Similarly, when she found she was getting
more manic, she could breathe in a way that made the body heavier. She would
think a lot about the earth element, find whatever sensations in the body were
solid, still, heavy, and substantial, and just focus on those sensations. That would
balance things out. It would balance out the energy both in body and mind. So
gradually the wild mood swings became a thing of the past. And her life wasn’t as
dramatic as it was before, but it was a more reasonable life, a more manageable
life.
That’s the physical side. There is also extremism in our thoughts. If it’s not
total sensual indulgence, it’s total abstinence. When the mind looks at abstinence
as wrong, so it goes running to the indulgence without really realizing that there
is a middle way. There are sensual pleasures that are innocent, that are harmless.
Mahakassapa, who was one of the strictest of the Buddha’s monks, has verses
talking about the beauties of nature, how much he enjoys getting out into the
wilds. Apparently this is the first wilderness poetry in the world. And so even the
strictest arahants have room in their practice for pleasures that are innocent. As
he said, being in the forest refreshed him. And the mind does need refreshing.
You’ve got to find ways of dealing with its moods without giving in to them, and
realize that you don’t have to think in extremes. There are ways of enjoying some

222
of the pleasures of the senses, because they gladden the mind.
That’s one of the duties we have in the meditation. Look at the Buddha’s
instructions on breath meditation. When you find that the mind is getting down,
its energy is low, you figure out ways of gladdening it. Part of that can mean
learning how to think about the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha in ways that you
find inspiring—anything that gives enjoyment to the practice, that doesn’t get
you all tied up. It’s not that sensual pleasures are bad. The beautiful things, the
nice things in the world are not the problem. The problem comes from these
obsessive plans we build around them: “This is going to be really great, this is
going to be really good, this is going to be worth whatever effort goes into it.
Whatever harm it may cause on the side, who cares? This is what I want.” That’s
the problem, a very unrealistic attitude toward what sensual pleasure will do for
us. That, you’ve got to watch out for.
But the pleasure that comes from a harmless activity—any activity in which
you’re actually doing good for yourself and other people—is perfectly okay. It’s
not that the breath is the only way of finding pleasure in the practice. There’s a
pleasure in generosity. There’s a pleasure in being virtuous. There’s pleasure in
finding time alone with nature. All these are perfectly legitimate ways of looking
for happiness, legitimate ways of gladdening the mind.
The same with steadying the mind. If you find that your thinking is running
away with you, you’ve got to figure out ways of just settling down and being
really, really still, so that the extremes of your thinking don’t pull you away from
your center. It can happen that your thinking begins to follow from an innocent
conclusion to the next conclusion, and to the next conclusion, and then runs
away with you. This is a problem with being logical without being reasonable: It
can totally pull you away from the practice.
In Thailand, they have a term, “Thinking a lot,” and it’s not a good thing. It
means your thinking is taking over. The logic is there but without the reason.
Reason is when you think about things with a sense of balance, a sense of
proportion.
So if you find your thinking running way, what ways do you have of getting
your awareness to be still, settled down, solid, solid, solid? Think of the Buddha’s
meditation on the elements: making the mind like earth; making it like water,
undisturbed by whatever it washes; wind, undisturbed by whatever it blows
away; fire, undisturbed by whatever it burns. And you’ve got those qualities in
your body. So whichever quality seems the best to make you feel solid and
grounded—it’s most often earth, but not necessarily—work on that quality.
This takes a lot of the drama out of life, but it’s a much more sensible,
reasonable, happier way of living. The Buddha was nothing if not sensible. He

223
had explored all the extremes and he realized that there was nothing there. And
his life story makes for great drama, the first part at least. After he became the
Buddha there wasn’t as much drama, at least there was no emotional drama for
him, but it was a much happier life.
There was once a cartoon in the New Yorker with man sitting in his living
room, meditating. His wife was off in another room, looking in the door at him
together with a friend, and complaining to her friend: She said, “George used to
be such an interesting neurotic before he learned meditation.” It’s one thing to
be interesting, another thing to be happy and wise. So watch out for the extremes
and the type of thinking that indulges in extremes, for it will drive you off the
path.
This is why the Buddha has that phrase: having respect for concentration.
The concentrated mind is solid, still, stable, extremely undramatic, but with a
very strong sense of well-being. That’s why it was the first factor of the path the
Buddha latched onto after he had explored all the various extremes. Here is a
form of pleasure that’s harmless, and you can then use that as your test case. Any
pleasure that doesn’t pull you away from this, that doesn’t make it difficult for
the mind to settle down, can be something to energize you on the path. Any
form of thinking that doesn’t pull you away from this, helps you to settle down,
can be part of the path. And you find that that kind of thinking makes a lot more
subtle distinctions, doesn’t go running off after extremes.
There are some teachers who criticize idealism, but it’s not the idealism that’s
bad. It’s the extremism, the absolutism: that’s the problem. There are a lot of
ideals that are really, really worth exploring, really worth following. Ajaan Mun
in his last sermon mentioned the determination not to come back ever again to
be the laughingstock of the defilements. Hold on to that determination, he said.
Never let it go. And the determination requires, one, that you believe it is
humanly possible. Convince yourself that it’s possible to follow this path to get
results. Hold onto that. That’s an ideal you never want to abandon. And two,
convince yourself that it’s not only humanly possible, it’s possible for you and
you are going to do it. You stick with that ideal. If you find any extreme forms of
thinking getting in the way of that, those are the things you’ve got to drop. Focus
on what helps to get you to understand better and better exactly what are these
defilements that are laughing at you. They pull you off into the extremes, and
they laugh at you for being so gullible. You run back to the other extreme, and
they laugh at you again.
It’s when you’re on the path that they can’t see you. As the Buddha said, this
is the path where Mara can’t detect you, Mara can’t see you. You’re invisible. This
requires a lot of skill, but it’s an interesting skill to develop. It may not be
dramatic, but there comes a strong sense of well-being and accomplishment

224
when you’ve mastered it. That’s what you’re looking for.

225
 In Charge of Your World
October 19, 2008

There’s a story in the Canon, where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha
in the middle of the day. And the Buddha asks him, where are you coming from
in the middle of the day? The King says, “Oh, I’ve been meeting with my
ministers and talking about the sorts of things that people obsessed with their
power talk about:—which is a remarkably frank statement. You can imagine a
press conference where a President is asked, “What have you been doing today?”
and he says, “Talking about the things that people obsessed with power talk
about.”
The Buddha asks the King, “Suppose someone were to come from the East
saying, ‘This enormous mountain is moving in from the East crushing all living
beings in its path.’ Another person comes from the South saying, ‘There’s
another mountain coming from the South crushing all living beings in its path.’
Another person comes from the West, a person comes from the North. ‘There is a
mountain moving in from the West and another mountain moving down from
the North,’ all four mountains crushing all living beings in their path.
The Buddha then asks him, “Given this great destruction of human life, and
remembering about how rare it is to gain a human birth, what would you do?”
And the King says, “Well, what else could I do but practice the Dharma, train the
mind, and do good?” And the Buddha says, “I announce to you, great king: Death
is moving in, crushing all living beings in its path. So what are you going to do?”
And the King says, “Well, what else can you do but practice the Dharma?”
We look at the situation in the world right now and there’s a lot to be
worried about. But we can be confident about one thing, that the best way to
respond to whatever the situation is in the world is to practice the Dharma, to be
generous, to be virtuous and to meditate to train the mind. Because whether the
situation in the world is good or bad, there is always aging, illness and death.
There is no point where the world is so totally free of insecurity that you can
really trust that the situation is going to be good. Even if the economy is great
and everybody agrees to lay down their arms, people are still going to get sick,
still going to get old, and still going to die.
But the empowering thing in all this is that your actions do shape the world
you experience: the world you’ve experienced, the world that you’re experiencing
now, and on into the future. So no matter what anybody else does, you always

226
want to practice the Dharma—to hold by your ideals, to hold by your principles
—because you create your world through your actions, and you want that world
to be a principled one.
One of the misunderstandings we pick up from the media is that the
important decisions in our world are made by other people over whom we have
no control. But it’s a fact that even though we’re sitting here in the same room,
each of us lives in a different world. And the world of our experience is created
by our own actions. We’re the ones who are creating it, and we continue to create
it with our actions each moment.
So basically you’re in charge of your world. You’re not a monad totally
independent from influences from outside, but the choices you make are the
ones that shape your life. If you make wise choices, generous choices, you protect
yourself and you protect other people. On the surface it may sound selfish. Here
you are trying to make sure your little world is okay, but the only way you can
make sure your little world is okay is to act in a way that you’re not harming
anybody else. And influences spread around. If you act in a noble way even in the
midst of danger and destruction, that’s a good example to other people. Other
people want to join in.
Being a human being is not really worth much if it’s all just scrambling after
wealth, scrambling after things that other people have to be deprived of. The
Buddha saw this prior to going out practicing. He said the world was like a
puddle that was drying up, and there are all these fish in the puddle fighting for
that little last bit of water. He found it really dismaying. That kind of life is not a
human life, it’s an animal life. Human life is one in which, regardless of what the
situation is outside, you know you shape your world through your actions, and
that the actions shaping a good world are ones that are honorable,
compassionate, wise. And you can hold to that principle.
Some people were commenting this evening that the crowd here today was
one of the gentlest crowds they had ever seen. That’s because we came together to
do good, to be generous, and to rejoice in one another’s generosity. This is
something that’s been typical of the Buddhist tradition ever since the very
beginning. Back in the 19th century when Westerners were beginning to read
some of the Buddhist texts, and all saw was suffering, death, aging, illness, As a
result, they wrote Buddhism off as a very pessimistic religion. But when they
went to Asia, they saw that Buddhists in general were very happy people. The
temple fairs, the various observances in the course of the year, were always very
happy gatherings. And the Westerners came to the conclusion that Buddhists
didn’t understand their own religion. If they really understood what the Buddha
taught, they would be morose and horribly depressed. But instead they were
happy.

227
 So Westerners came up with a theory of what they called the great tradition
versus the little tradition, i.e. the great tradition being what was in the texts and
the little tradition being Buddhism on the ground. But what they really missed
was the central message in the texts, which is that your happiness is in your
hands. And that true happiness comes from behaving in a way that’s totally
harmless. And not just harmless in the sense that you’re not going to hurt other
people, but also that you’re going to positively do good by practicing generosity
as an important part of the path. This is how the Buddha’s message is
empowering. You can create a happy life by acting in ways that are noble and
good.
You see this in the Buddhist tradition all the way from the time of the
Buddha’s funeral. Even though the Buddha had just passed away, there was
singing and dancing at his funeral in honor of him. On the one hand, people
were sad that he had gone, but on the other, they were honoring the fact that
they had been alive when there had been such a wonderful human being in the
world. The same with the temple fairs in the very early centuries: They were very
happy occasions because everyone got together to do good. Social caste didn’t
mean anything. Everybody was working together, helping in line with their
talents and abilities.
So it is possible to create a good society. Whenever one gathers around the
principle that true happiness comes from being harmless, being helpful, training
the mind—that’s empowering. And you don’t need to have political power in the
world outside. You have the power to create your own world right here, right
now through your actions.
One thing that would frequently strike me when I was in Thailand was that
I’d be on my alms round, walking past a little tiny grass shack, just big enough
for two people to sleep in. And sure enough there were two people in the grass
shack, a newlywed couple, still very poor. One of them would run out of the
house and want to put something in my bowl. When you’re the beneficiary of
the generosity of poor people, it really goes to the heart. I’d come back from my
alms round and tell myself, “You can’t be lazy today. A poor person has been
generous with you.”
The Buddha’s teaching gives that opportunity to be generous, to be virtuous,
to everybody, regardless of their position on the world. Regardless of how rich or
poor you may be, no matter what society may think of you, you have the ability
to train your mind. And you can shape your world through that power. The
teachings talk about becoming: It’s basically your sense of the world in which
you live, and your identity within that world. That becoming is based on your
actions. Your actions are the field in which a particular sense of the world can
grow. You keep on doing things that you know are good, and that creates a good

228
field. The possibilities in that field are always replenished. That’s something
totally within your power. The world at large may have political strife, economic
collapse—all kinds of negative things may be happening but in your world—but
you’re creating a good world. And you’re not the only one benefiting from that.
So this is why we train the mind. Regardless of the situation outside, it’s
through training the mind that we’re shaping the world—the world in which we
live and the world in which the people around us live as well. So even though the
mountains of aging, illness, and death may be moving in, we can still train the
mind. Because as the Buddha pointed out, death is not the end. It’s one incident
in a very long story. Poverty is not the end. Famine, the four horsemen, are not
really the end. The four horsemen have been stampeding all over the world for
who knows how long. But we can still do good.
And in doing good, we protect ourselves. As the Mangala Sutta points out,
your protection lies in the good you do. There was another time when King
Pasenadi went to see the Buddha. He had commented that the more he thought
about it, the more he realized that people who act in harmful ways in what they
do, in what they say, in what they think don’t really protect themselves. They
don’t really love themselves. They leave themselves open to attack from all sides.
The people who are well protected are the ones who behave well in thought and
word and deed. With that kind of protection, you don’t need an army. Or as the
Buddha said in the Dhammapada, if your hand doesn’t have a wound, then you
can pick up poison and not get harmed by it because you haven’t done the sort of
thing that would leave an opening for the poison to seep into.
In the same way, when you train your mind, you’re giving protection to
others and to yourself as well. This is how we can live together in peace and
harmony. So on a day like this when people have come together to do good, it’s
something we should rejoice in. Because that rejoicing helps to remind us where
true happiness lies.

229
 Giving Meaning to Life
November 7, 2008

There are passages in the texts where the Buddha gives a pretty bleak picture
of life and the world at large. Like that chant just now: “The world just passes
away. There is no one in charge. It’s a slave to craving.” In other words, there is
no grand design to give meaning to life or the world. Things are simply driven by
blind craving. There is another passage where the Buddha talks about the way
beings wander on in this world. 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. No real pattern. No real direction. This doesn’t mean
that life is hopeless. But it means simply that life doesn’t have a meaning unless
you give it a meaning. So that’s the real question. It’s not what is the meaning of
life, the question is: What kind of meaning do you want to give to it?
This is where the practice comes in, because the practice gives direction. You
want to understand the mind so you can understand why it is that even though
everything we do is aimed at producing happiness, we often end up causing
suffering, pain, and disappointment instead. Why is that? And as the Buddha
pointed out, it’s within our power to learn, to understand why. That quest to
learn and to understand is what gives meaning to life, gives direction to life in a
way that nothing else can.
You look at the things that people try to accomplish in life, in the world
outside. The world seems designed to just grind everything down. You want this
kind of relationship, but the relationship just falls apart. You want to develop a
nice strong body, well, it gets strong for a while, then it starts getting sick, then it
gets old, and you’re left with nothing. You want to accomplish something large
in the world, but then the economy collapses. War comes. Famine comes. All
kinds of things can happen. So looking to the world for meaning is a frustrating,
very frustrating experience.
But when you look inside for meaning, you find that there is a lot to learn,
there is a lot to understand. Things do get accomplished. As you work on the
path, you begin to see how the mind creates a thought world and you realize that
you have the choice to go into that thought world or not. As you develop more
and more mindfulness, more and more alertness, you understand these processes
of the mind. Through understanding them, you can free yourself from them. You
don’t have to be their slave. The world that’s a slave to craving: You don’t have to
get into that world.

230
 As the Buddha said, the process of learning about these things is not
accompanied by disappointment and sorrow. It’s accompanied by joy, a sense of
release that comes when you realize that you’ve been doing something really
stupid for a long, long time, and now you’ve seen through it. You’ve understood
it. You’ve gone beyond it. You really can cut through and free yourself from the
defilements of the mind. When the path comes together in the mind, you see on
the one hand that there is such a thing as the Deathless, and on the other hand
that you’ve attained it through mastering your own intentions, understanding
the process of the mind. There is more to experience than simply the conditioned
and fabricated things we normally experience. That right there cuts through a lot
of fetters.
It’s like cutting off your arm, which may not be a pretty idea, but once the
arm is cut off, it’s off. And even though the doctors may try to sew it back on, it’s
never quite the same. There is such a thing as a permanent change. And even
without getting to the noble attainments, you find that having more mastery and
more understanding over the processes of the mind puts you in a much better
position. You understand yourself better. You cause less suffering for yourself.
You understand other people better, and cause them less suffering as well.
So this is a project that’s really worth giving your life to. And it gives
meaning to your life. It gives a direction to your life. You develop a new
relationship to yourself. Ultimately you get to the point where you don’t need a
sense of identity. But in the meantime you develop a skillful sense. There is a
sense of self-esteem that comes with knowing that you can learn. No matter how
old you are, no matter how little or how much time is left to your life, you can
still learn.
The issue came up a while back: People who are really driven to accomplish
things, really driven to develop a sense of self around their accomplishments, are
noticing that that causes a lot of stress, a lot of pain and anxiety. But the answer is
not to have no accomplishments, or to have no desire for accomplishments. The
answer lies, first, in really getting a strong sense of what is a genuine
accomplishment in life, and second, gaining a skillful sense of yourself around
the process of trying to attain that accomplishment.
What this comes down to is two things: The first is having a willingness to
learn. If that’s where your sense of identity, your self-esteem is focused, it’s
skillful. The gain the ability to look at something you’ve done and realize that
there may be something wrong here, but that doesn’t have to threaten your
identity. It just calls forth your desire to learn more about what did you do
wrong, why was it wrong, what could you do in the future not to repeat that
mistake. A second aspect of this more skillful sense of self is a sense of self that
understands what’s an important question: what’s an issue that’s worth pursuing

231
and what are the issues you don’t really have to pursue.
Here again, the practice gives you a good strong direction. Any issue related
to why there is suffering and what you can do to put an end to it: That’s an
important issue. You hear about people who are suddenly told by their doctors
they have, say, three months or three weeks to live, and they suddenly develop a
very strong sense of what they really want out of the remainder of their life. They
clear away all the distractions and focus on what’s really important. And it’s good
that they do that, but it’s sad that they had to wait for a death sentence before
they do. We have to remember we are all here with a death sentence. It’s simply
that we don’t have the days marked out for us, how much longer it’s going to be.
But we do know that we have a limited amount of time, yet we tend to forget
that. We act as if we didn’t know.
So keep that in mind. Death is down the line. Maybe even before death,
illness will come and make it more and more difficult to practice. So the question
is: What are the really important things you want to take care of while you’ve still
got the chance? This is the big issue: looking at your own actions to see where
they cause suffering and stress, and to figure out how you can act in a way that
doesn’t. And the skills you learn in the process of focusing on that important
issue will serve you in good stead all the way through aging, all the way through
illness, and all the way through death. The ability to keep your mind focused on
what’s important and to put aside unimportant things, the willingness to learn all
the time--those abilities will always serve you in good stead.
So this is how we give meaning to life: finding an issue that gives direction
and focuses on the really important problems in life, that has the potential to take
us to someplace where real changes can be made, changes that make a true
difference. It’s one of the reasons why Dharma practice is something you really
can give your life to, because it gives meaning back to your life.

232
 The Brahmaviharas on the Path
November 13, 2008

The Buddha often used images of gradual practice, a gradual change to

illustrate the path of practice. There’s one passage where he says it’s like a
stairway. You go from one step to the next, to the next, without jumping up a
whole set of stairs. There’s another passage where he talks about the floor of the
ocean gradually getting deeper and deeper, till it finally hits a precipice.
In other passages, he talks about developing virtue and then, once you’ve got
your virtue, you develop mindfulness and contentment; and from mindfulness
and contentment, you work on the hindrances, develop concentration, and
finally develop discernment—which makes it sound like you have to perfect one
step before you can get to the next.
But you have to remember that the point in the practice where virtue is
perfected is when all eight factors of the noble path come together. One of the
results of the first stage of awakening is that you’ve completed all the work you
have to do in terms of virtue, but you still have work to do in terms of
concentration and discernment.
That doesn’t mean, however, you didn’t work on concentration and
discernment to get there. You needed them both. After all, they’re there in the
path, which means you can’t wait until your virtue is perfect before you work on
meditation. All three parts of the training help one another along.
So you don’t have to wait until your virtue is perfect, or you’ve got loads and
loads of merit, before you start meditating. You start it right now. And you’ll
notice as you work on the meditation that the more virtuous you are—the more
you can exercise restraint in the course of the day, the more you can be generous
and develop other good qualities throughout the day—the easier it will be to
meditate. The fact that you’re meditating, strengthening your mindfulness and
concentration, makes it easier to develop those good qualities throughout the
day. It’s like washing your hands: Your left hand washes you right hand, and your
right hand washes your left hand. That way they both get clean.
So as you’re sitting here, don’t worry about how much you have or haven’t
completed the other factors of the path. Focus on the ones you’re working on
right now. At the same time, when you’re going through the rest of the day when
you’re not sitting with your eyes closed, when you’re engaged with other
activities, don’t worry about sitting with your eyes closed. Just keep asking

233
yourself, “What’s the skillful thing to do now?” Try to bring some sense of ease
with the breath into all your other activities. It’ll make it easier to do the skillful
thing and step back from unskillful mind states that pop up, where you get upset,
where you get flustered, angry, whatever. You’ll develop more resistance to those
mind states.
It’s in this way that all the elements of the practice help one another along,
and the whole day can be devoted to the practice of developing the mind.
There’s a passage where the Buddha says that a stingy person cannot attain
the noble attainments, can’t even attain jhana. But he also says that the quality of
your generosity will grow as your meditation advances. In other words,
generosity helps your meditation, your meditation makes it easier to be generous
in ways that grow more and more large hearted. This is particularly true when
you’re working on developing the brahmaviharas.
Ajaan Lee describes that the brahmaviharas as food for your precepts. And
that’s how the Buddha presents them as well. There’s a passage where he talks
about reflecting on the fact that you’ve made mistakes in the past. You’ve broken
the precepts, harmed other people. The proper attitude to have toward that, he
says, is to realize that you can’t go back and undo the mistake, and sitting there
stewing about it is not going to help, either. So you resolve that you’re not going
to repeat the mistake. You’re going to exercise restraint in the future.
Then, to strengthen that resolve, you develop the brahmaviharas: unlimited
goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. This helps to ensure that
you’re going to stick with that resolve to exercise restraint, because if you really
feel goodwill for other people, you’re not going to harm them. If you feel
goodwill for them, then when you see them suffering, you want to help. That’s
compassion. If you see that they’re already happy, you want them to continue
being happy. That’s empathetic joy. If you realize that there’s nothing you can do
to help them or the situation that you yourself are encountering, then the kindest
thing is to develop equanimity toward the things you can’t change, which frees
you to focus on the things you can. So goodwill underlies all four of the
brahmaviharas. It’s the essential one. It helps you maintain your precepts. It helps
develop concentration.
The Buddha also talks about the levels of jhana you can attain by developing
goodwill and the other brahmaviharas. And if you do it right, it’s also an exercise
in discernment. You can’t just sit there beaming out nice thoughts and think that
that’s going to take care of the problem. If, when you get up from meditation,
you see that somebody has done something outrageous, then if you haven’t really
thought the matter through your immediate reaction will be to get upset again.
Here it’s important to understand that goodwill doesn’t mean that you’re

234
going to like people. You simply don’t want them to meet with harm. You want
them to meet with true happiness. You’ve got to learn how to develop that
attitude in a proper way. That means both understanding the principle of karma,
and also understanding how you fabricate feelings in the mind so that they really
are genuine. This is where the brahmavihara practice leads to discernment.
Part of the discernment also lies in the exercise of equanimity, realizing when
it’s appropriate to develop equanimity as an act of kindness to yourself and to
others as opposed to when you focus more directly on the other brahmaviharas.
But you also have to understand what it means to wish for people to be happy.
You want them to do things that lead to happiness. It’s not like you’re pretending
you can take a magic wand and wave it over their heads and they’ll immediately
be happy. That’s not how it works. The principle of karma says that if you’re
going to be happy, you have to do things that are skillful. So if you want to
imagine people being happy, you have to imagine them doing skillful things,
being generous, being happy in being generous, being happy in exercising
restraint. And if it’s not too much of a stretch, think of them being happy
meditating.
In the Metta Sutta in the Sutta Nipata, where the Buddha talks about how to
express a thought of goodwill, he doesn’t simply say, “May all beings be happy.”
That’s part of what he has to say, but not all. He goes through all the various
categories of beings: long, middling and short; seen, unseen; big and small. But
he also says, “May all beings not despise anyone.” In other words, may they not
create the causes for unskillful actions. So you have to think about cause and
effect, and realize that if the people you don’t like could actually understand the
causes for happiness, the world would be a much better place. This is why you
can’t have your likes get in the way of universal goodwill. Goodwill is one thing.
Liking and disliking other people: that’s something else. We’re not pretending
that everybody is okay, or that everybody is nice. We simply realize the world
would be a much better place if everybody understood the causes of happiness
and would act on them. That’s something you can wish without feeling
hypocritical. It’s not make-believe.
So that’s one area in which you start developing right view in the process of
developing goodwill. Then you take it further, by learning how to develop a
feeling of goodwill that you really feel down into your bones. How are you going
to do that? You can’t simply repeat goodwill phrases. There’s more to a genuine
feeling than that. As the Buddha said, you fabricate your emotions through three
kinds of fabrication: physical, verbal, and mental. The breath counts as physical
fabrication. Directed thought and evaluation count as verbal fabrication. And
feelings and perceptions count as mental fabrication. The breath is what actually
takes an emotion and makes it real in the body. So a good way to start with the

235
brahmaviharas is to learn how to breathe in a way that feels really good. You have
to develop some sense of wellbeing within yourself before you can wish it for
other people.
Ajaan Lee’s image is of a water tank. If there’s no water in the tank, then
when you open the faucet, all that comes out is air. In other words, you have to
have the water of well-being inside before you can offer real water to other
people. So you work on breathing in a way that feels really good, and use your
directed thought and evaluation, the verbal fabrication, to help with that. But
that can help with other issues as well. You can start thinking about how, if there
are people out there who you really have trouble feeling goodwill for, it’s in your
best interest to develop goodwill for them.
One of the images the Buddha gives is of a person walking across a desert, hot
and trembling with thirst, coming across a little tiny puddle of water in a cow’s
footprint. He realizes that if he’s going to drink the water, he’ll have to get down
on his hands and feet and slurp it up. If he tries to scoop it up with his hand, it’s
going to get muddy. So he very carefully puts his mouth down on the ground
and slurps up that little bit of water.
This image describe you when you’re angry. Notice your position. You’re hot
and trembling with thirst; you can’t afford to focus on the bad points of other
people because that’s going to get you even hotter and thirstier. Your goodness is
going to burn away. You look at the human race, and don’t see that there’s
anything good out there, there’s no reason to treat people kindly, because they’re
all selfish or whatever. If that’s your thinking then you’re going to make it harder
and harder to develop your own goodness. So your goodness requires that you
think about the goodness of other people, no matter how little it may be. It’s not
that you’re pretending that they have a lot of goodness, but you have to focus on
it realizing that there is some goodness in these people. You don’t have to wait
for everybody to have Buddha Nature before they’re good enough for you to treat
well. Just a little bit of goodness is enough to nourish your own goodness.
Because it’s not a question of their deserving your goodwill. You need to develop
goodwill for your own well-being.
So when you think in these ways, holding these perceptions in mind, you can
develop a more and more genuine feeling of goodwill, a feeling that’s not
threatened by the fact that other people are going to continue to act in sometimes
really outrageous and horrible ways. Because when you see them acting in
horrible ways, you’ve got to have compassion for them. They are creating causes
for suffering.
As you develop these thoughts of goodwill, you’re giving yourself a stronger
foundation for your own virtue, creating a stronger foundation for
concentration, and gaining some practice in understanding this process of

236
fabrication, which is what discernment is all about: to see how states of mind are
fabricated, how emotions are fabricated both in body and mind, and to get more
and more sensitive to how this process takes place.
So it’s not the case that you work on virtue and then, when it’s all taken care
of, you move on to concentration. Or that when that’s all taken care of, you move
on to discernment. You have to work on developing the mind in such a way that
all three parts of the training work together, help one another along. So even
though the process is gradual, it’s gradual in a sense that all three develop
together.
Keep this point in mind. As you sit down to meditate, working on
developing your concentration, it’s not only concentration that’s going to get
developed. If you learn how to carry the concentration into your daily life, you’re
going to gain help with your virtue, looking after the precepts and helping with
your discernment.
So learn not to compartmentalize the practice. Remember it’s all of a piece
and that all the different facets of the practice help one another along.

237
 Goodwill First & Last
November 20, 2008

It’s traditional to begin and end each session of meditation with thoughts of
goodwill for all beings without exception. The purpose in each case is different.
In the beginning, you start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill as a way of
putting the mind in the right frame, in the right context to meditate. You want to
pull yourself out of your own little personal narrative, the events of the day, and
take a larger view before you settle down and look at the present moment. If you
don’t, it’s very likely that you’ll take your narrative into the present moment with
you. If it’s an unpleasant narrative, it makes the present moment unpleasant as
well. If it’s been a bad day and you sit down and try to get the mind into the
present moment to stay with the breath and you find it doesn’t stay with the
breath: If you’ve been down on yourself in the course of the day, you get down
on yourself even more. You’re a miserable meditator. You can’t do it. See? you
keep wandering off the breath. More proof that you’re miserable.
So a good way to break that connection is to start thinking a few thoughts of
infinity, of all beings everywhere without exception. Like that character in
Through the Looking Glass who says he likes to think of two or three impossible
things every morning before breakfast: Think about infinity a couple of times a
day. It changes your perspective. And you’re actually following the pattern of the
Buddha on the night of his awakening. The three knowledges that he gained,
part of full awakening, follow this pattern as well.
The first knowledge was recollection of his past lives, all his narratives going
back many eons. And notice: He didn’t go from that knowledge straight to the
present moment. The second knowledge had to do with all living beings. He’d
seen in his first knowledge that he had gone through many lifetimes, in many
different roles, many different levels of being. But that knowledge left some
questions unanswered. Was he the only one who had those many levels of being?
And why were there so many? Why were they so varied?
So in the second watch of the night, he inclined his mind to the knowledge
of the passing away and re-arising of all beings everywhere. And he saw that
everybody goes through this process of death and rebirth. Everybody changes
roles, changes levels. If you look simply at the individual narrative, these changes
seem to follow a very erratic course, up and down. The Buddha himself said that
it was like throwing a stick up in the air: Sometimes it lands on this end,
sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle. But it

238
doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason.
But as he saw things in the larger context, he began to see there was a pattern.
People took rebirth in line with their karma, in line with their actions. And their
actions were based on their views. People who had acted on wrong views, had no
respect for the noble ones, tended to go to bad destinations. People who had
acted on right views, who had respect for the noble ones, went to good
destinations. So there was a pattern. The pattern was determined by view and
intention.
And it was only after seeing the larger pattern that he was ready to focus on
the present moment with in the proper terms—events in the mind viewed as
causes and effects—and with the proper question: How do view and intention
operate in the present moment? Is there some way that this knowledge can be
used to put an end to suffering? In the third watch of the night, that’s what he
found. Looking at intentions as skillful and unskillful, looking at views as right
and wrong, and applying those perspectives to the question of suffering, he
discovered the four noble truths. He applied them, followed the tasks appropriate
to them, and gained awakening.
So notice the pattern. It starts with his own narratives, moves to the larger
picture, and then focuses in on the present moment. This is what we have to do
as we settle down to meditate. You remind yourself that you’re here for the sake
of goodwill, for the sake of true happiness. And you realize you’re not the only
one out there who has to train his or her mind. Everybody has to train the mind.
It’s not an easy process for anybody. Some people may find it easier than others,
but that’s because they did the work in the past.
So taking this larger view reminds you of your intention for being here and it
also reminds you that when things aren’t going well in the meditation, you’re not
the only one for whom they are not going well. I’ve been counseling some people
in a Dharma study program. And their experience with retreats up to this point
had been that you go in, you don’t talk to anybody, and you go home. So as
you’re sitting there in the retreat hall meditating, everybody else looks so calm
and still, and yet you’re fighting with your hindrances, with your defilements.
You seem to be the only person who is suffering that way.
But when these people come on a study retreat, they get a chance to talk with
one another and they discover that everybody goes through the same thing.
Everybody has the same problems. And instead of being discouraging, it’s
actually encouraging. You realize that even though things may take a lot longer
than you had hoped, the fact that they take long doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It’s
the common pattern throughout the world. When you see the larger pattern and
understand it, you’re in a much better position to focus on the present moment
with the right attitude, with the right sense of balance.

239
 So spreading thoughts of unlimited goodwill help in this direction is a way
of preparing you to settle down with the breath. Then actually being with the
breath is a very good way of showing goodwill for yourself right now. There’s
enough suffering in life. You don’t have to compound it by breathing in a way
that’s harsh, uncomfortable, or unhealthy. So you look at the breath and see how
it’s affecting the body in different parts: where the breath energy seems
comfortable, where it seems strained, what you can do to make it comfortable
throughout, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out, and
all the way through all the different parts of the body. You start seeing which part
of the breath cycle you push too much: Are you squeezing out breath energy too
much as you breathe out? Are you making the breath too long as you breathe in?
Notice how you relate to the different parts of the cycle.
Notice also how you relate to the different parts of the body as you breathe
in, the different levels of breath energy in the body, because the breath enters the
body at different rates. There’s the breath coming in and out of the lungs, which
takes a while it to fill the lungs. But there’s also the energy that flows in the
nerves, which goes a lot faster. In fact, as soon as you’ve started to breathe in,
before you even notice it, the breath has already gone through all your nerves—
unless there’s a blockage someplace. Some people say as they breathe in and try to
get the breath to go to the different parts the body, they can’t get it all the way
down the body, say all the way down the legs by the time the lungs are full.
That’s because they’re trying to force a harsh breath or a heavy breath down the
legs, which is not actually good for the legs. Think of the breath in the nerves and
the blood vessels as a lot subtler, a lot lighter, a lot faster. See how that works.
You have to do a lot of experimenting because each of us relates to the breath in
different ways, relates to the energy in the body in different ways. And so each of
us has different habits we have to learn how to correct.
This is one of the reasons in the forest tradition the ajaans are sometimes
seemingly so harsh with their students as the students are not observant about the
little things going on in daily life. And the reason for this is that the ajaans want
to make the point that you have to be very, very observant. If you can’t observe
the little things in daily life, you won’t be able to observe the even littler things in
the course of your meditation.
So that’s what we’re doing here in the present moment: exploring how the
breath in the body feels right here in this world of the body right here, without
reference to the world outside. Just this world of energy. The more you can get
into it, the more you can get yourself immersed in it, the more you begin to
notice the subtleties of the energy, the better. The body feels better. The mind
gets more and more concentrated, feels less and less frazzled.
Which puts you in a good position at the end of the meditation to spread

240
thoughts of goodwill again. This serves two purposes. One, it reminds you, when
you leave the meditation, how you want to relate to other people. You want to
relate in a way that’s conducive both to your happiness and to theirs.
Two, the force of a concentrated mind can actually make that wish for
goodwill more effective. I know many stories of people who’ve sensed when
somebody’s been meditating and spreading thoughts of goodwill to them
specifically, and they realize it, they sense it. The power of a concentrated mind
gives a lot more energy to the thoughts that you focus on as you are leaving
meditation. So you want them to be thoughts of goodwill. They’re good for you.
They’re good for the world.
So when you spread thoughts of goodwill at the beginning of the meditation,
it’s primarily for your own sake; when you spread them at the end of the
meditation, it’s primarily for the sake of others. But notice that “primarily”: It’s
not exclusively just for you or just for them. When you show goodwill to others,
you’re helping yourself. And when you help yourself in the right way, you’re
helping others as well.
Try to make this a regular part of your meditation: at the beginning,
thoughts of goodwill for everyone, everywhere; and as you leave the meditation,
again, thoughts of goodwill for everyone, everywhere. This creates the right
framework, the right context for the meditation. It keeps you on track. You find
that good breathing helps with goodwill and goodwill helps with good
breathing. This is a common pattern throughout the Buddha’s teachings. It is
possible to find a happiness that’s good for you and good for others—the kind of
happiness where everybody benefits. Internally this means both body and mind.
Externally it means both you and everybody around you. That’s the kind of
happiness we’re working toward.

241
 A Stranger to Your Thoughts
November 21, 2008

As we’re meditating, we’re working toward two things: One is stillness and
the other one is discernment. They go together. They are not two radically
different processes. Because after all, to get the mind to settle down and be still,
you have to discern what’s going on in the mind. And to discern really clearly,
you have to get the mind to be still. But this is not a Catch-22. These two sides
develop gradually. It’s not an all-or-nothing kind of affair. As the mind gets
gradually more still, you gradually see more. As you see more, it enables the
mind to get even more still.
You simply find yourself leaning to one direction or the other as you
practice. It’s like walking. You lean to the left, you lean to right. You use your left
foot, use your right. And as for whether you start out with your left foot or start
out with your right, that’s not something you can choose. When you sit down
you may find that the mind is ready to get still, so you just follow it, allow it to be
still. Other times, it’s not.
So each time you sit down to meditate, take stock of the mind. How is it
doing? Is it feeling inclined to settle down? Or is it not? And if it’s not, what is it
getting worked up about? What thoughts are preventing it from settling down?
You have to work with those first. And how do you work with those thoughts?
Try to make yourself a stranger to them. In other words, when you see the mind
incline in a certain direction, ask yourself why on earth would you want to think
about that. Allow yourself to be surprised. Look at things with new eyes, like a
scientist who takes a common assumption and questions it, like Isaac Newton.
Back in his days, it was believed that things fell to earth because it was simply
their nature to go down. That explanation of, “it’s their nature to do that” covers
up a lot of ignorance. So he asked, “Why do they go down?”
And he came up with an unusual conclusion, as with the apple. Apparently
he didn’t really watch an apple fall. But suppose an apple falls from a tree. Not
only is the earth pulling the apple down, but the apple is also pulling the earth
up a little bit. But because the earth is so much bigger, it’s the apple that falls. But
it wasn’t the nature of matter to go down necessarily as much as it’s the nature of
matter to attract. Of course we still don’t understand that attraction. Einstein
came along and said, well, actually it’s a warp in space-time. He took a number of
other basic assumptions and questioned them too.

242
 It’s when you question your assumptions that you see new things, because for
the most part we don’t even see our assumptions. A thought comes up about
something that would be good to eat, or good to see, and we immediately think,
well, it must be good to eat, it must be good to see, it must be good to think
about. So ask yourself, “Why on earth? Why regard that as good to eat or good to
see? Why should I be thinking about that now?” Pose those questions in the mind
and see what comes up. Sometimes the simple act of putting that little question
mark next to your thought is enough to kill it. It’s the kind of thought that
survives only because it’s subterranean. As soon as it sees the light of day, it dies.
Like certain worms that live underground, as soon as they are exposed to the
outside air they die.
Other thoughts don’t die quite so quickly, so you have to keep probing:
What’s the underlying assumption here? And as long as you’re dealing with a
thought that has a pull on the mind, but without allowing yourself to get pulled
along with it, there is a chance you will see some interesting things. And when it
finally strikes you that the thought is strange, and it doesn’t really have that pull
anymore, then the mind is ready to settle down.
Here again you can use your discernment in the other direction to remind
yourself of why you want to settle down, what’s to be gained from getting the
mind still. And there’s a lot to be gained. You see things more clearly, you are less
a slave to your thoughts. The mind gets to rest. We use the mind all day long.
Even when we’re asleep we dream about all kinds of things. The mind needs time
just to be by itself. And then you will find after a while it gets tired of being still,
it wants some more action. You can either question that, or else you can make
use of the mind’s willingness to think by actively questioning whatever else is
coming up. It depends on the situation.
So it goes back and forth like this: stillness, questioning, stillness,
questioning. Sometimes the mere fact of stillness allows you to see things you
didn’t see before. Sometimes it doesn’t. You can’t always trust whatever comes up
in the still mind. One of Ajaan Lee’s techniques for testing insights is to ask, “To
what extent is the opposite true?” For example, you start seeing how inconstant
things are. He says to look for the aspect that’s constant. Where it’s stressful, look
for the aspect that’s pleasurable. And vice versa. Things that are not self—all too
often we believe that if our insights fall in line with what the book says, then they
must be true insights. But that’s not always for certain. Turn around and question
your insights. Flip them over and see to what extent the opposite is true. That
way you add some nuance to your insights. And it protects you from running
away. Because this can often happen. You get an insight and it starts adding on to
that insight and connecting with this insight and all of a sudden you find
yourself way off in the Andromeda galaxy far, far away from what’s actually

243
going on.
The whole point of insight is you want to be able to watch the process of
thoughts arising in the mind, to see where there’s the intentional element to go
with the thought. That’s where the defilement is hiding out. Why do you want to
go with a particular thought? What’s its appeal?
This is why the Buddha said that seeing things arising and passing away is
only part of insight. The other part is to see their allure: Why do you like the
thought? What pulls you in? Then look at the drawbacks. What happens when
you get pulled in by that thought? And finally what understanding allows you to
escape from it? If it’s something that’s not arising and passing away right now,
you can just put it aside. Look for the things that are arising and nibbling away at
your concentration, or actually blocking your concentration. Because those are
the important things to analyze.
You can read about how everything in the world is inconstant. The trees are
inconstant. The mountains are inconstant. But if you’re not attached to the trees
or the mountains, then their inconstancy doesn’t really mean anything. It’s not
the issue. It’s where you’re trying to find your pleasure, where you’re attached:
That’s what you want to analyze in these terms. Because again, those ways of
analysis make you a stranger to your thoughts, which is precisely what you want:
to see them in new eyes.
Suppose someone else were looking in your head and watching your
thoughts right now, and would ask you, “Why are you thinking that? Why this?”
Try to be that stranger so that you don’t simply take your thoughts for granted.
The same with your assumptions, which contain within them all your
defilements: Don’t take them for granted. See them as strange. See them as
curious. “Why would you believe that? Why would you want that? Why would
you like that?” And when you gain some insight, question that as well until the
mind has had enough of this questioning and it’s ready to settle down.
This way you find your meditation leaning a little bit to the left, leaning a
little bit to the right. And that way you walk along. And you find that the breath
is an ideal place to do this walking. Because you can use the breath as an object to
settle down and be still with, and you can also use it as a grounding for your
analysis. When a thought comes up, notice how it affects the breath. Or when
you breathe in a certain way, notice what that way of breathing does to the mind.
If you can locate the part of the body that’s tensed up around the thought,
breathe through it and see what that does. This way you can walk in your breath.
Leaning to the left means you lean towards investigating and questioning; you
can question the breath or use the breath as a handle for the questioning. If you
feel a need to lean toward the right, to get the mind to settle down and be still,
okay you use the breath as a means for settling, for fully inhabiting the present

244
moment.
So remember that the meditation has these two sides. It needs both in order
to be complete. The Buddha never made any radical distinction between the two
sides. He says to get into jhana or strong absorption, you need both tranquility
and insight. And to develop tranquility and insight, you need jhana. They’re all
part of the same whole, it’s simply that you’ll be leaning in one direction or the
other at any one point in time. But he never has you hop all the time on one foot.
Whichever foot you start out with and however long you spend on either side,
that’s up to you. Learn how to read the mind and its needs, and you’ll find that
the meditation will take you where you want to go.

245
 Achieving Balance
November 22, 2008

An important principle in meditating, in getting the mind to settle down

properly, is to develop a sense of balance so that your desire isn’t so strong that it
runs away with you or so weak that you don’t really care. Your effort isn’t so
strong that it wears you out, but not so weak that you don’t accomplish anything.
And so on down the line. You don’t want to think too much because that
destroys your concentration. But it’s also possible not to think enough—as when
you have a problem and don’t try to think it through to discover the cause.
So we’re looking for balance here. But remember that balance doesn’t come
automatically. Think of those old-fashioned scales. Before they reach balance,
they have to tip first one way and then the other and then back and forth, back
and forth, gradually tipping less and less until they finally achieve balance.
This means that if you find yourself tipping one direction and then the other
in your meditation, that’s going to be natural. The skill lies in learning how to
balance things out, so that you’re tipping less and less and less.
First off, you have to realize which direction you’re tipping in. This is why
it’s good to take stock as you sit down and meditate: How is your mind right
now? What does it need? Does it need encouragement? Does it need energizing?
Or does it need to be calmed down? Is it too sluggish? If it is, you have to do a
little thinking to stir it up a little bit. Remember the Buddha’s reflection, that this
evening’s sunset may have been the last one you’re going to see. That big
earthquake they keep warning about could happen. The new fault that just
opened just to the north of us could suddenly do something strange. So the
question is, if that were to happen, would you be ready to go? And for most of us
the answer is No. All this unfinished business, all these things we’d still like to
do. Okay, what’s the most important unfinished business? Getting your mind in
shape, so that it’s not your own enemy in the face of sudden events. Which
means that you’ve got to work on your meditation.
Sometimes that thought will help stir you up. Then look at what you need to
do to energize the mind even further to keep it awake. You might decide that you
need to go through the parts of the body. Think about the different bones in your
skeleton. What have you got? Imagine all the bones starting from the toes coming
on up: Where are those bones? In other words, when you think about the bones
in the toe, focus on the feeling in the toe. With the bones in your feet, focus on

246
the feelings in your feet; and so on, up through the body. This way you give the
mind work to do.
If your mind won’t settle down with the bones, survey the breath energy in
the different parts of your body. Start, say, at your navel, go up the front of the
body, down the back, out the legs. Start again at the back of the neck, go down
the shoulders and out the arms. Section by section. How does the body feel as
you breathe in? How does it feel as you breathe out? If you notice any sense of
tension or tightness anywhere, allow it to relax. This gives the mind work to do
so that it doesn’t start drifting off as it stays with the breath.
If you find, though, that your problem is in the other direction—that the
mind is too active—try to stay in one place and put all your energy in trying to
protect that one place. If you find your thoughts wandering off, ask yourself,
“Why do I need to think about that now? Isn’t it more important to get to work
here?” If you’re worried about situations in the future, remind yourself that your
best preparation for the future is to become mindful, alert, clear about where
your mind is going. All the more reason to stay focused right here to develop
those qualities. And then be very protective of the spot you’ve chosen.
As you focus on that spot, allow it to become comfortable. A sense of
comfort is important, because it helps you stay. If there’s a sense of dis-ease and
blockage in the body you’re going to try to get out and run away from it, because
the mind doesn’t see any advantage in staying here. But if you see that as you stay
here, things begin to dissolve away these patterns of tension, grow less and less
solid, less and less rigid, just the fact of being in your body is going to feel a lot
more attractive. You see immediate results—that the meditation is not simply
aimed at results on and off into the future, but also gives results right here and
now. And while working on blockage in one part of the body, if you’re focusing
right on the spot of the blockage and it doesn’t seem to work, focus on other
parts of the body because sometimes the blockage or pain or tightness may be
caused by a blockage someplace else. It’s common, for instance, that a pain in
your lower back is actually caused by blockage in your upper back; or pain in
your legs is caused by a blockage in your lower back or the base of the spine. Or a
pain in the right side of the body is caused by a corresponding tightness on the
left, something in front may be caused by something in back.
So check around, and notice how you’re talking to yourself as you do this. If
you have a tendency to get really harsh and negative with yourself, remind
yourself we’re not here to be harsh and negative. Putting in proper effort doesn’t
require that you hold a whip over yourself all the time. Again it’s part of balance
learning how to know when to use the carrot and when to use the stick. If you
find yourself harsh and negative, remind yourself, “Okay, the fact that you’re here
meditating is good in and of itself; the ideal approach is simply to be a matter of

247
fact.” The mind is wandering off, okay, just bring it back. If it’s wandering off
again, bring it back again. However many times it wanders off, just keep bringing
it back and try to keep a good humor about the whole thing. 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. When you catch yourself
wandering off, at least you’ve caught yourself. Most people wander off and never
catch themselves. Their whole days, their whole lives are spent just wandering
around aimlessly with no control over the mind at all, or just enough to get by.
But each time you catch yourself and bring yourself back, you’re strengthening
your mindfulness, you’re strengthening your alertness. That in and of itself is a
good thing. It’s an accomplishment.
Reserve the stick for the times when you’re really careless and lazy. And the
stick, of course, is recollection of death, something we don’t like to think about,
but it’s there in the background all the time. And it’s not going to go away by our
not thinking about it. So remind yourself that meditation is your best
preparation for the time when you’re going to die because at that point the mind
will grasp at anything. It can’t stay in the body anymore. You’re afraid of what’s
going to happen if you let go of the body, but you’ve got to let go of the body so
you grab at whatever comes up in the mind—and then there it goes, heading
who knows where? So the question now is, Can you train the mind to be more
composed even in that kind of circumstance, and not go flailing around?
The way to do that, of course, is to learn how to sit with the breath, and learn
how to be patient with the breath, and to let go of everything else. Develop the
quality of consistency. Develop your mindfulness. And keep in mind the fact that
whatever comes up, you don’t want to grab onto the things that are going to be
harmful. If you’re going to hold onto something, hold onto things that are
skillful: the attitudes that will see you through whatever the difficulty. That won’t
get blown away. If you find yourself blown away now by a little bit of pain or a
little bit of distraction, it’s going to be really difficult when big pains and big
distractions come. That thought is the stick to remind yourself that you’ve got
work to do.
So achieving balance means that, when you find yourself leaning to the left,
you’ve got to lean hard to the right. If you’re leaning to the right, lean hard to the
left. Finding balance doesn’t mean using middling effort all the time. If you’ve
gone to far in one direction, you’ve got to lean hard in the other direction until
you reach the point of balance. Use the principle they call negative feedback,
which doesn’t mean being negative about yourself. It means that if you find

248
yourself going too far in one direction, you learn to balance things out. All too
often the mind gets into what’s called positive feedback, which is not necessarily
a positive thing. Positive feedback means that you’re going in one direction, and
you just keep tipping more and more and more in that direction. You find
yourself angry, then you get angry at yourself for being angry, and then angry at
yourself for being angry two times. That doesn’t help. Or you find yourself
getting kind of lazy and blurred out, and you say, “Well, this is kind of
comfortable. I like this.” Then you just go for the lazy, blurred out state of mind.
You’ve got to be able to step back from whatever the situation in the mind
and say, “In what direction are we out of balance and how can we put it back
into balance?” You’ll find yourself tipping to left, tipping to the right, back and
forth, but it’s normal. It’s natural. Over time you develop the skill so that the
tipping gets less and less, gets more and more subtle, until finally you’ve achieved
balance. There’s a sense of just right. The mind fits into the body like a glove. It
stays with its object, with a sense of ease and belonging. You feel like you’re here
at home, at last. And then all you do is simply maintain that balance.
In the course of developing that sense of “just right,” you develop a lot of
good qualities of mind. This is where a lot of the skill comes in the meditation.
This is what the learning in the meditation amounts to: learning how to lean left
and lean right when you need to, so that ultimately you get into balance. Then
you learn how to stay in balance. You’ve probably noticed, when you watch an
acrobat walking across a tightrope, that there are times when the acrobat is
perfectly balanced, other times there will be a slight slipping off of balance. But
the acrobat has learned how to correct for it. That’s how acrobats don’t fall. It’s
not that they never tip, but they know immediately how to tip in the other
direction, back and forth, back and forth, until they are balanced again.
In the same way, even though there will be a lot of back and forth in the
meditation, it aims toward balance. And it maintains your balance. So don’t get
upset by it. Learn how to use it to bring the mind to that state where it feels really
at home: settled, secure. Or as we say in that chant, so that it “looks after itself
with ease.” It gains a sense of maturity, a sense of good humor and confidence
that comes from experience: that you can deal with whatever comes up.

249
 Beyond Inter-eating
November 26, 2008

In Pali the word for enjoying something is the same as the word for eating it.
When you’re enjoying a mind state, you’re feeding on the mind state. If you
enjoy a relationship, you’re feeding on the relationship. And as the Buddha
points out over and over again, to be in a position where you have to feed is to be
in a position where you have to suffer. And not only are you suffering, but the
people or whatever it is you’re feeding on suffers as well. We’ve got to keep this
point in mind: that as long as the mind needs to feed, it’s causing suffering. And
the greatest act of kindness both to yourself and other people is to put it in a
position where it doesn’t need to feed.
We tend to forget this. We think that sitting here meditating, trying to get
the mind under control, is a selfish thing because we don’t see how other people
benefit. But actually it’s one of the kindest things you can do, because if the mind
is in a position where it needs to feed that means it needs a constant food source.
And if you don’t get the food source you want, you start scrambling around
trying to find another food source, and at the same time you feel threatened,
fearful. And we know what the mind does when it feels threatened and fearful:
its stupidest things, most heartless things, thoughtless things, mindless things.
Someone did a study of prisoners, people who tend to live in fear not only
while they’re in the prison, but also when they’re out on the streets in a position
where they feel fearful, threatened, and commit their crimes. They did brain
scans of these people and discovered that they don’t use their frontal lobe very
much. The lizard brain is more in action because once you’re in fear, that’s the
part of the brain that takes over. In a situation like that, when you use the frontal
lobe it’s basically to rationalize what you’ve already done: the decisions that the
lizard brain made. So the frontal lobe is there for rationalizations; it’s not for
reasoning. Reasoning is basically the thinking you do before you make a
decision, the thinking you do that actually weighs things as to whether they’re
right or wrong, wise or unwise. That kind of thinking can happen only when
you’re not feeling threatened.
So think about it, what state is your mind in? Is it in a position where it has
to feed? If so it’s going to feel threatened at some point or another because all our
food sources are limited, whether physical food or emotional food, mental food.
If you let the mind continually feed on its thoughts, it’s developing bad habits.
It’s in that feeding mode. So what you’ve got to learn how to do as a meditator is

250
to feed in a new way, in a way that eventually gets the mind into a position where
it doesn’t have to feed anymore. You have to strengthen it.
First you have to have the conviction this is something you can do, that you
have it within your power to strengthen the mind in this way—in other words,
that your actions and decisions really do make a difference. This conviction is
what gets you started on the path. And it gives you strength you need to get
started. Until you start seeing results, you need to operate on the principle of
conviction, because the path requires effort and persistence. You’ve got to stick
with it because the mind has its old habits and it’s easy to slip into its old habits.
You meditate for a while and things aren’t going well, and you want to give the
mind a hit of whatever pleasure it’s used to feeding on. When that happens, you
have to keep reminding yourself, no, come back, come back, come back to the
breath. This is where mindfulness comes in: to keep reminding you that sitting
around and thinking about whatever kind of thought you like to feed on—
whether it’s thoughts of kindness or thoughts of anger; skillful thoughts or
unskillful thoughts—you’re continuing the mind’s old habits. It likes to take on
an identity in these thought worlds, and that taking on an identity is precisely
what needs to be fed.
So you try to develop a new identity: the meditator who’s mindful, who’s
heading in a different direction. This is an identity that needs to be fed as well,
but it’s one of those identities that ultimately leads in the right direction. So keep
reminding yourself, “Come back to the breath,” so you can be in a position
where you can watch those thought worlds, pull yourself away from them. The
stronger your mindfulness, the more you get into good solid states of
concentration. Again this is a skillful kind of feeding. You’re feeding on the sense
of ease, on the sense of rapture and refreshment that can come in the
concentration. It’s good food and relatively harmless. Blameless. There’s nothing
unskillful about it. If you can feed on this, that takes a lot of the weight and
pressure off your relationships with other people, which is why concentration is
an act of kindness. You’re not feeding on them in the same way. You’ve got a
better source of food inside, a more reliable source of food inside.
And it’s one that can allow you to watch this process of how a thought world
arises in the mind, and how you take on an identity in that thought world.
Where it is that you make that decision to slip into this different world as you
move out of the world of the breath and the world of the body into the world of
your thought? Why do you do that? How does it happen? You’ve already got
some practice in pulling yourself out of these thoughts simply as you develop
mindfulness and concentration. But the concentration allows you to see them
even more clearly as processes. You see how they form; you can see how they
disband. You see the precise points where you’re making a decision to move in

251
and continue creating more and more form and feeling and perceptions and
thought constructs and consciousness in that thought world, all of which involve
taking on an identity—which in turn takes a lot of food.
So only when you see the harm of that process do you realize this is what
you’ve been doing all along. Your interactions with other people have been a
kind of feeding. We don’t like to think about it but interbeing, the idea that
we’re all connected, basically comes down to intereating. We feed on other
people. Even when we’re nice to them, we feed on them. And the feeding seems
to come first. The niceness comes second.
This is why I see so many cases of people being nice to people in the ways
they want to be nice to them, but without much thought as to what the people
on the receiving end really need. It’s only when you don’t have to feed on people
that you can really see what they need, and provide it if you can.
So these five strengths that provide food for the mind also bring it to the
point, ultimately, where it sees through the need to feed; sees something even
more lasting in which you don’t take on a state of being, which means that you
don’t need to feed. There is one verse in the Canon where they talk about feeding
on nibbana. You feed on it freely in the sense that there’s no cost, there are no
drawbacks—you’re not harming anybody, you’re not harming yourself, you’re
not harming other people. But most of the descriptions that discuss the issue of
feeding with regard to nibbana say that it’s a state of no hungering. You don’t
need to feed at all, because you’re not taking on the identity in that thought
world or in the world outside.
This is why meditation is an act of kindness. You’re putting the mind in a
position where it doesn’t have to be threatened by a lack of food, because you
don’t need food. And even on the path, you’re developing sources of food inside
that require less and less and less from other people, and place less and less of a
burden on yourself, less of a burden on them. So that you’re less likely to be
coming from that part of the lizard brain that always wants to feed, and is afraid
when there’s no source of food around. So that the more reasonable part of your
mind can continue reasoning and not just rationalizing what you’ve already
done. You reason about what you see as the proper thing to do in the future, or
here in the present. That’s the proper use of that part of your brain, but you can
use it that way only when there’s no sense of threat, no fear.
So when you start wondering what you’re doing for the world sitting here
enjoying pleasant sensations in the body—well, you’re feeding on the pleasant
sensations in the body, which means that you’re not having to feed on other
people. That in and of itself is something of a gift, but it also puts you on the path
where you can go to a more advanced level, where ultimately you don’t even
need to feed on these pleasant states of mind, pleasant states of the body. They’re

252
helpful and they’re harmless, but the most harmless thing is a mind that doesn’t
have to eat, doesn’t have to feed, doesn’t have to enjoy things, doesn’t have to
indulge in things, because it has everything it already needs.
This way you’re not only placing less of a burden on other people; you’re also
providing them with a good example: that it is possible not to feel threatened,
not to feel fearful—not because you suppress your fear, but you put yourself in a
different position entirely. You find a different position entirely, a position that
nothing else can assail.

253
 The Karma of Pleasure
November 29, 2008

A couple years back, when the psychology of happiness was beginning to

become popular, I was asked to review a book on the topic to give a Buddhist
perspective on the issue. I said one of the things the book was missing was an
understanding of karma, that in your pursuit for happiness, you do things that
have an impact on other people, and have an impact on yourself. And so you
have to weigh the happiness that you get from those actions against their long-
term results. And the editor of the magazine that I wrote this for said he was
surprised that I had focused on that as the Buddhist issue, while I was surprised
that he was surprised.
Because the principle of cause and effect is what the Buddha said lay at the
heart of his awakening When he summarized his awakening in one sentence,
he’d state it as the principle of “when this is, that is; when this isn’t, that isn’t;
from the arising of this comes the arising of that; from the cessation of this comes
the cessation of that.” Then he would expand on what that meant. But that for
him was the essence of his awakening, in particular “the arising of this” or the
“when this is.”
One of the big issues, of course, is the arising of your intentions. When
intentions arise, what happens? These intentions have both an immediate impact
and a long-term impact. We have to take both into consideration as we look for
happiness, because sometimes the things we do will give a short-term happiness,
but then in the long term they cause trouble for ourselves and for other people.
I was amazed that the book on happiness didn’t consider at all how people’s
conception of happiness would actually have an impact other people. The book
was trying to be scientific. It said, well, sometimes torturers and terrorists have
their views on happiness, and who are we as objective observers to pass judgment
on them? But of course you have to take into consideration the impact these
activities have on other people, because other people aren’t going to just sit still
and let you enjoy a happiness that’s going to cause them suffering. Even if they
die from your efforts, they’re going to come back. Their relatives and friends are
going to come back at you. That’s built into the way things are.
So as you look for pleasure and happiness in life, you’ve got to take into
consideration what you’re doing to get that happiness, and what the long-term
impact of that doing is going to be. Pleasure, happiness, bliss, ease: the Pali word

254
for all of those things is sukha. And as you look for sukha, what is it? It’s a feeling.
Feelings are fabricated. In other words, even in the experiencing of a feeling,
there’s already a certain amount of intention. We have potentials that come in
from our past actions and then our present intentions shape those potentials into
a feeling. That’s what the mind spends a lot of its time creating all the time.
We’re doing it right here as we meditate. We’ve got a body that’s relatively
healthy. We have a certain amount of experience with the breath. That’s the past
karma we’re working with. And then we’re trying to fashion that past karma into
an experience of well-being in the present moment. In the beginning, you focus
on trying to create a sense of ease and well-being with the breath. To get
established in that sense of ease, you have to indulge in it. That too is a type of
action, a type of karma. You create the feeling and then you settle in it. But the
trick is that if you simply wallow in the feeling of pleasure and let go of the
breath, the pleasure’s not going to last very long.
Ajaan Lee’s image is of a person who works and gains a salary. Some people,
as soon as they get their first paycheck, skip work and spend their money. To
keep getting your paycheck, you have to keep on working. If you want to get a
raise, you have to keep on working well. The same principle applies to the
meditation. If you stick with the breath, even in the midst of the pleasure, the
pleasure keeps on coming. If you get more skilled in how you stay with the
breath, the pleasure increases. Even when you don’t wallow in it, it’s still there,
doing its work for your wellbeing. And you’re allowed to enjoy the pleasure
because this is a blameless pleasure.
The Buddha, like so many rich people, led a life of total indulgence when he
was still a prince. When he left the home life, he went off to the other extreme.
He was afraid of pleasure. He had seen the impact of pleasure on his mind, that it
made him intoxicated, blurred his understanding. So he ran off in the other
direction: total self-torture. He would go into a trance where he wouldn’t allow
himself to breathe; and even though it caused huge pains in the body, he just
stuck with it. He would eat as little as possible, till he would faint each time he
would urinate or defecate. And finally, after six years of that, he realized that this
was as far as you can go in self-torment: fainting and growing weak. It didn’t lead
to awakening. The question was: 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. He asked himself, “Is there anything
blameworthy about that pleasure?” “No. It doesn’t harm anybody else. It doesn’t
intoxicate the mind, doesn’t blur your awareness.” He said, “Okay, this is a

255
pleasure I can pursue.” But he realized also that he would have to eat if he was
going to have the strength to do that. That’s how he got onto the middle path,
realizing that there are some pleasures whose pursuit is blameless.
So that’s why we’re here: to develop this blameless sense of pleasure and then
to use it further. You don’t just stop with the pleasure. You try to use it as a basis
for understanding the mind even further. Particularly, you want to understand
the issue of suffering. You want to comprehend it. That’s the duty the Buddha
says we have with regard to suffering and stress: You want to comprehend it. You
comprehend it by knowing it so thoroughly that you become dispassionate
toward it. Ordinarily you might not think that we have passion for suffering, but
we do. So many things that we enjoy in life involve suffering and stress. Yet we
get quite passionate about them.
So you want to understand the process through which you’re creating a lot of
unnecessary stress, a lot of unnecessary suffering, both for yourself and for others.
See the drawbacks of that kind of attachment, that kind of passion. And the only
way you’re going to see those drawbacks is to give yourself a more blameless form
of pleasure, so you can look at, say, sensual pleasure, and not be so hungry for it.
If you’re hungering for it, it’s got to be good. That’s the attitude we have.
But if you can appease that hunger for pleasure with the pleasure of a well-
concentrated mind, then you can look at these other pleasures and willingly
admit that they do have their drawbacks. They involve intoxication. You have to
blot out large areas of your awareness if you’re going to enjoy them. It’s like
listening to a concert of music. The concert hall is designed so that you lose your
awareness of other people. It’s dark. Everybody is supposed to be quiet. You don’t
want anything interfering with your experience of the music. And so you have to
blot out large areas of your awareness: your awareness of the people around you,
your awareness of any background noise. That’s one of the drawbacks of that
kind of pleasure. The mind becomes less attuned to a lot of things. It has to blot
out huge areas of awareness so that it can wallow in what it wants to focus on.
That’s a metaphor for a lot of our lives, and the pleasures that we have. We
have to pretend that a lot of things aren’t there so we can focus exclusively on the
details we like. That’s pleasure.
And then there’s pain. How do you deal with, how are you going to
comprehend pain? Because for most of us, our experience with pain is that we
want to push it away. We feel threatened by it, invaded by it. And the only way
you’re going to actually comprehend it is to have this alternative foundation for
the mind, a place where you take a stance and can feel at ease, settled, secure—
secure enough that you can then look into the pain and not feel so threatened by
it; have a certain amount of objectivity in the way you look at it, so you can really
comprehend, “Oh, pain comes from this, and this is what I’ve been doing to

256
create it.” Only when the mind has this sense of an inner security from the
concentration can it really perform our duty with regard to stress, which is to
comprehend it to the point of dispassion.
So that’s the skillful way to deal with pleasure, the skillful kind of karma
around pleasure. Try to create a pleasure that’s harmless, then use that experience
of pleasure for a further purpose. That’s not the way we usually relate to pleasure.
We like to indulge in it. And we don’t like to hear that there’s karma associated
with that. We want our pleasures to be free. The only pleasure that’s really free,
though, as the Buddha said, is nibbana. Even the practice of jhana requires that
we have a body that’s alive and needs to feed, so there’s a certain amount of
burdensomeness placed on other people, other beings. The only truly free
pleasure is one that’s not even a feeling. As the Buddha says, it’s a pleasure that
doesn’t come under the five aggregates. It’s known by a consciousness that
doesn’t come out of the five aggregates, and isn’t known by means of the sense
media. That’s something really special.
But the only way to find that is, first, to develop this ability to create a sense
of ease and well-being within the body through the breath, a sense of ease and
well-being that come from secluding the mind from unskillful states, getting the
mind concentrated, and really seeing the karma of pleasure. This is what you’ve
got to do in order to create a sense of well-being that’s relatively blameless. Then
you can use that pleasure for the purpose of even higher pleasure, an even more
blameless pleasure: free both in the sense that you don’t have to spend any
money for it, you don’t have to do anything for it, and in the sense that you’re
not harming anybody at all because it’s totally outside of the patterns of cause
and effect.
But to get there, you have to understand how pleasure—our usual experience
of pleasure—is totally enmeshed in cause and effect. Then you have to weigh the
things that you’re doing to give rise to that pleasure, the things you do as a result
of that pleasure, and then the impact they have on other people. All those things
have to be weighed very carefully. But when you approach the issue with wisdom
and understanding, you finally can get to the thing we all want: the pleasure
that’s totally free.
So as you go through life and find yourself consuming pleasures, realize that
there’s an intentional activity even in the production of the pleasure, in the
experiencing of the pleasure, and in the enjoyment of the pleasure. Try to
become as sensitive as possible to what that intention is, and what its effects are,
so that your attitude toward pleasure can become more responsible, and more
productive on the path that leads to a pleasure that’s totally free.

257
 The Rivers of Karma
December 7, 2008

When you’re meditating, you’re engaging in a form of karma, which the

Buddha identified with intention. The intention here is to stay with the breath,
to try to be fully aware of the breath element in the body, throughout the whole
body. You want to maintain that intention in the face of all the other intentions
that are going to come up in the course of the hour. It’s to be expected. Vagrant
thoughts will come into the mind about tomorrow, about today, yesterday. And
you’ve got to realize that those thoughts are not in line with the original
intention. No matter how useful or important they may seem, they’re not what
you want right now. You’re trying to be very clear about what your intention is
right now and how to stick with it.
Because this is really all you’ve got: your present intention. Think about
times when you’re ill, when difficult situations come up in life, and you look
around and there seems to be no means of escape. Actually, though, there is an
escape. Your one escape will be the intentions in your mind at that time. Say that
there’s a pain coming up. You’re ill, and no matter what painkiller the doctors
give you, there’s still pain. How are you going to deal with it? Your best way of
dealing with it has to do with your intention. Remind yourself that if you think
about how long you’ve been in pain, or how much longer you’re going to be in
pain, that’s going to weigh the mind down unnecessarily. You want to simply be
aware of the sensation of the pain right now, without all those other narratives.
As for the questions of why there’s pain and whether it’s just or how frustrated
you may feel about it, you’ve got to learn how to put those aside as well. In other
words, as you’re sitting here meditating putting aside random thoughts, you’re
getting practice for a skill you’re really going to need as aging, illness, and death
come closing in.
As the Buddha said there are two ways of developing qualities of mind that
are really helpful in cases like that. One is to learn how to develop unlimited
goodwill for all beings, yourself included, and the people around you. He says,
when the mind has that unlimited quality it’s like a huge river. Someone may
come along and try to make the river stop, but they can’t make the river stop
because the river is so large. They can try to make the river be without water,
they’ll try to dump it out with pails, but they can’t do that because there is so
much water in the river. Even if you put a lump of salt in the river, you can still
drink the water because there is so much more water in the river.

258
 As you’re able to maintain that unlimited state of mind, the issues that come
up with pain and illness, or as death approaches, will seem a lot smaller than if
your mind is limited and concerned only with the narratives that you’ve been
carrying around all the time. This is another way in which meditation is good for
you. You learn how to step out of those narratives. When aging, illness, and death
come, you see it as an opportunity to handle them skillfully. Because part of that
unlimited frame of mind reminds you that everybody goes through these things.
You’re not being singled out. This is a universal process. That helps take some of
the sting away.
The other skills you need, as the Buddha said, are learning how to keep the
mind from being overcome by pain and being overcome by pleasure. And again
these are among the skills you learn as you’re meditating. Pain comes up in the
body, and you learn the appropriate ways of dealing with it. In some cases that
means focusing on another part of the body that’s not in pain to give the mind a
sense of safe haven here in the present moment. When it has developed a sense of
strength, the sense of well-being that can come from that sense of have, then you
can start looking into the pain. To what extent is the pain affected by the way you
breathe? To what extent is it affected by your concepts about the pain? If you
regard the experience of pain as a total given, it’s hard to get away from it. But if
you realize you’re involved in constructing the pain, your concept of it is going to
have an actual effect on how you experience it.
The mind is built in this way. You’ve got all these pain receptors in your
body, along with the various parts of your nervous system that make the decision
as to which little pains you’re going to pay attention to and which ones you’re
going to ignore. Most of this happens on a sub-conscious level, but as you
meditate you train yourself to become more conscious of it. You learn how to
take that ability to focus and ignore, and use it deliberately for the purpose of
keeping the mind from suffering. This is a skill we learn as we meditate.
At the same time, we learn how not to be overcome by pleasure. First there
are sensual pleasures, which we tend to go running to as our main escape from
pain. And as long as we see them as our only escape, we don’t like to look at their
negative side. But it’s an important skill in the meditation. If you really want the
mind to settle down and gain good solid concentration to develop insight, you’ve
got to learn how to look at the downside of sensual pleasures—how unreliable
they are, and how they make you do all kinds of stupid things, or how you make
yourself do stupid things just to keep them going.
But to really let go of these pleasures requires more than just seeing their
drawbacks. It also requires that you find an alternative pleasure. That’s the
pleasure that comes from keeping the mind still. As the Buddha said, there’s no
true pleasure aside from peace. So you look for your pleasure, for your happiness

259
in the mind at peace, allowing it to be still, allowing it to be centered, and
learning how to maintain it—that stillness, that sense of being centered—
regardless of what comes up.
Some of your first practice in this is when you finally settle down and the
breath is calm; it feels refreshing. When that happens, it’s very easy to lose your
focus on the breath and move over to the sense of pleasure. It’s like falling into a
hole. You’re skating on ice, and all of a sudden you skate off to where it’s too
thin, and fall through the ice into water. In other words, you’ve abandoned the
cause, because you’ve gotten so infatuated with the effect. But if you can realize
that the effect is still there, the pleasure is still there in the body, and you don’t
have to go rushing after it, you don’t have to go gobbling it down, it will still
have its good effects on the body and its good effects on the mind even as you
stay focused on the breath. You see it as not something that you’re going to jump
on, but simply as a sign that the mind is beginning to settle down. You’re
beginning to see results in the meditation.
It’s like a sign on the road. When you pass a sign that says you’re entering
such and such a town, or there’s a town ex-number of miles ahead, you don’t
leave the road to drive on the sign. You stay on the road.
In the same way, you stay with the breath. In this way you learn how to use
the pleasure of concentration without being overwhelmed by it. Now, it’s not
that you’re afraid of the pleasure of concentration. I don’t know many times you
hear the topic of jhana or concentration introduced, and almost the first thing
they say before they’ve even told you what it is, they tell you it’s dangerous.
That’s a really perverse approach. Right concentration is not dangerous in that
way. It helps separate you from the dangers of being sucked in by sensual
pleasures; it provides you with an alternative to sensual pleasures. As the Buddha
points out, there’s no abandoning our attachment for sensual pleasures until we
can develop the sense of ease that comes from getting the mind still, centered,
solidly based in the present.
This is how you teach the mind not to be overcome by pleasure or pain. Pain
becomes a tool an opportunity to learn about how the mind creates unnecessary
suffering for itself around the pain. Pleasure too becomes a tool, part of the path.
You don’t want to see pleasure and pain as things to run away from or to run
toward, but as tools you can use to give the mind more and more freedom. That
way, if the body begins to wear down and the rest of your life begins to unravel,
you don’t lose your bearings. You realize that your happiness isn’t based on a
particular narrative. It doesn’t have to be based on the body. It has a deeper
foundation inside. And whatever the results of past bad actions you’ve done, if
you develop these tools of having a sense of limitlessness in the mind—limitless
goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, and a proper understanding

260
of pleasure and pain so you are not overcome by them—you’ll have your escape.
These are precisely the tools we learn as we meditate, teaching the mind to
stay with the breath, and then using the breath as a tool for gaining greater and
greater understanding.
This is why when the Buddha explains issues of karma, he doesn’t use
mechanical images. His images are all fluid. We all have unskillful decisions,
unskillful intentions that we’ve acted on in the past, but it doesn’t mean we have
to suffer from them. They will have their effects but their effects are going to be
mitigated or amplified by your present karma. It’s as if we have two rivers
coming together. If you’ve ever been at the spot where the Little Colorado joins
the Colorado, you see two very different kinds of water. The Little Colorado is
very muddy; the Colorado is clear. And right at the spot where they join it’s a
mixture of the two. But as you go downstream, the muddiness disappears and the
water is all clear. That’s because the Colorado is bigger than the Little Colorado;
the muddiness is overcome by the clarity of the water the larger river.
This is what you want to do in your meditation. You want to make sure that
your present karma is a bigger river of clear water. It’ll take care of the silt that
comes in from the little river if you develop the skills that can keep your present
intentions clear and in focus. So this is our opportunity right here as we meditate,
to keep this river of present karma as clear and as large as possible.

261
 The Luminous Mind
December 8, 2008

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha says that the mind is
pabhassaram: luminous or radiant. He says that when people don’t realize this,
they can’t develop their minds; they can’t train the mind. When you realize that
the mind is luminous and that its defilements are visitors, then you can train the
mind.
In other words, if you believe that greed, anger, and delusion permanently
stain the mind, then you believe you can’t train yourself. You can’t develop the
mind. You have to depend on outside forces, outside agents to come and save
you. But when you realize that the defilements of greed, anger, and delusion
come and visit it—in other words, they don’t necessarily own it, they don’t leave
a permanent stain—then you can train it.
And notice: The Buddha’s not saying that the mind is naturally good or that
its luminosity is its awakened state. Luminosity here simply means that it knows.
Ajaan Maha Boowa has noted that if the Buddha had said the mind is pure by
nature, you could argue with him: If it’s pure, how can defilements come into it?
But the Buddha simply says that it’s luminous, which means it can know. Each
moment we are able to be aware of things. No matter how many times greed,
anger, and delusion have come into the mind, they go. There’s always the
possibility that you can notice their coming and going, see the effects of their
coming and going, and realize that you have the choice of siding with them or
not.
That’s what enables you to train the mind. No matter how thick the darkness
of the mind, it’s possible to shine a light in it. And once you shine the light, the
darkness can’t say, “I’ve been here for long a time; a tiny little light has no right
to drive me away right away.” That’s not the way light and darkness interact. As
soon as light comes, the darkness is gone.
Now you’ve probably noticed in your practice that there are many times
when light comes and then disappears, and the darkness comes back again. That’s
because your clarity of mind is not yet continuous. But it is something that can
be developed. As the Buddha says, we suffer from ignorance partly because of
internal causes. In other words, hindrances like sensual desire, ill will, sloth and
torpor, restless and anxiety, uncertainty obscure the mind. And they keep
ignorance going. There’s also inappropriate attention. When looking at the

262
hindrances, or looking at the world, we’re not really interested in the question of
suffering or how to put an end to suffering. We’ve got other issues, other things
we’re more interested in. This is related to the external causes that keep ignorance
going. We hang around with the wrong people. We don’t listen to the Dhamma.
Or even when we do, we don’t take it seriously.
So these are the things that keep the darkness going: inappropriate attention
and lack of noble friends. Even though the mind has the potential where it can
know and be aware, these other factors influence it, which is why we need to
train the mind in concentration to overcome the hindrances. To do this, of
course, depends on seeing at some point that the reason we’re suffering is not
because of somebody else somewhere else, or the economic conditions, or the
environment or whatever. It’s our own ignorance. The moment of clarity that
makes us realize we’ve got to work on ourselves: That’s why we look for the right
people, want to listen to the Dhamma, want to understand it, and want to
practice.
It’s during those moments of clarity when you really see the connection
between your actions and the suffering you experience—when you recognize
your own foolishness: That’s when you’re less willfully ignorant and can start
willing in the other direction. As the description of right effort says, you generate
the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities. You generate the desire to develop
skillful qualities in their place. These are all activities in the mind. That word
“qualities” here, dhamma, can also mean actions. Remember that actions are not
just things you do with the body, but also things you do with the mind. The path
is something you fabricate. It’s something you will—a truth of the will. In other
words, if you don’t will it, it won’t become true for you.
So this is what we’re working on right now, trying to give the desire for
what’s skillful more power over the mind, so that there can be more moments of
clarity, so that we can begin to weaken the causes of ignorance. And ignorance
here is not just a general lack of knowledge. It’s very closely connected with
inappropriate attention. We’re looking at the wrong things. We know the wrong
things or we frame the issues of our life in the wrong way. We need to become
more and more consistent in looking at things in terms of the principle of skillful
action, and then in terms of the principle of where there’s suffering, what’s
causing it, what we can do to put an end to it. We want to make those questions
the big questions in life. Ordinarily we miss out on these questions because so
many other questions really seem insistent—the things we pick up from our own
random ideas or from the general values of society—which is one of the reasons
why meditation requires that we learn to question the values we were brought up
with, the ideas we picked up in the past, our narratives about the past, the way we
cast those narratives.

263
 When you look back on your life, learn to recast the narrative. You can’t just
drop the old narratives of your life, pretend that they didn’t happen, that you’ve
shut the door on them and you’re no longer involved. They’ll just keep sloshing
around in the mind in the same old terms in which you’ve been framing them
before. So you’ve got to reframe those narratives. Look at them in terms of where
there was suffering, why there was suffering, what activity kept you suffering on
and on and on in that particular way, and when you finally began to realize that
you had to drop that kind of activity—that you could drop that kind of activity.
When you can look at your life in that way, it’s a lot easier to look at the present
moment in the right way as well.
So the process of meditation is not just pinning the mind in the present
moment and putting it through the grinder of a particular technique, regardless
of how you’ve been living your life. It’s learning to reframe the issues of life,
getting a stronger sense of the importance of the questions the Buddha asked, and
of the need to develop the path that can put an end to the suffering you’ve been
causing and experiencing. In the process of developing the path, we’re going to
be developing skillful qualities, learning how to abandon the things that get in
the way of knowledge and to encourage qualities like mindfulness and alertness
that strengthen your knowledge, strengthen your awareness, strengthen your
insight and discernment.
These things, like the defilements, are not part of the nature of the mind.
Ajaan Lee has a good passage where he points out that the mind is neither good
nor evil, but it’s what knows good and evil, and it’s what does good and evil, and
ultimately it’s what lets go of good and evil. That luminosity of the mind is
neither good nor evil, but it does allow you to know. It creates the circumstances
in which skillful qualities can be brought into being, in which they can do their
work to bring the mind to a place where it goes beyond both the good and the
evil, beyond that luminosity.
Which means that the path is not inevitable. A brahman once asked the
Buddha, “Is everybody going to gain awakening?” And he refused to answer. Ven.
Ananda was afraid that the brahman would go away misunderstanding, thinking
that the Buddha was stymied by the question, and so he took the brahman aside
and said, “Suppose there was a fortress with a wise gatekeeper and only one gate
into the fortress. The gatekeeper would walk around the walls of the fortress and
wouldn’t see any other means of entry into the fortress, not even a hole big
enough for cat to slip through. He wouldn’t know how many people would
eventually come into the fortress, but he would know that everybody who was
going to come in and out of the fortress had to come in and out through the
gate.” In the same way, Ananda sai, the Buddha realized that whoever was going
to gain awakening would have to come through the path of the noble eightfold

264
path, the seven factors for awakening, and the different sets in the wings to
awakening. As for how many people would follow that path, that wasn’t his
concern.
So it’s not inevitable that we’re going to gain awakening. In other words, we
don’t have an awakened nature that forces us to gain awakening at some point.
What we do have is a desire for happiness, and a luminous mind that can know.
It’s capable of knowing that there is suffering and it’s capable of watching,
developing the qualities that allow you to see where the suffering comes from,
and to see that it’s not necessary, that you can put an end to it.
This is important—because sometimes when people gain a luminous state of
mind, or a wide-open state of mind, they think they’ve hit their awakened nature.
But the luminosity is not part of awakening. It’s a condition that allows the mind
to see, but the awakening comes from our determination not to keep on
suffering. That was Ajaan Mun’s last message to his students: You’re a warrior
doing battle with defilement, with discernment as your prime weapon. And what
in the mind is the warrior? The determination not to come back and be the
laughingstock of the defilements; the determination not to suffer again. Don’t let
go of that determination, he said, until it has done its job.
So there’s a necessary element of willing in the path. Without that willing, it
just doesn’t happen. The luminosity of the mind is what allows the will to do its
work, allows us to straighten out our own minds, to train our own minds. We
don’t have to go around hoping for some outside power to come and save us.
We’ve got our ability here to see the connection between suffering and its cause,
and to find the path to the cessation of suffering, with which you can let go of the
defilements. When there are no more defilements, you can let go of the path,
which is composed just of activities, because you’ve found something that’s not
an activity, something that’s not fabricated. That’s what we’re working on.
But you can’t clone the unfabricated. You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got
to develop the factors that give rise to clarity of mind, clarity of vision that can
push away those clouds of defilement. When you get the causes right, the effects
will take care of themselves.
So try to be very clear about what you’re doing, because that’s a huge area
where ignorance lies: around what we’re doing and the results of what we’re
doing. We tend to be very willful about not wanting to admit to ourselves what
we’re doing or what our intentions are. We also tend to be very willful about not
wanting to see the unfortunate effects of some of our actions. This is why the
Buddha, when he was giving instructions to his son, focused on just this issue,
telling him, “Look at what you’re going to do, look at what you’re doing, and
look at what you’ve done. Try to be very clear about the results of your actions.”
That reflection is how you begin to see through the clouds of delusion that

265
otherwise keep moving in, moving in, moving in all the time. When you can see
through your delusion, you realize that it doesn’t have to be there all the time.
This principle is what allows us to practice. This principle is what gives us
hope, confidence, that there is an end to suffering. If you act on it, there will
come a day when it’s not just a hope or confidence; it’s actual knowledge that
there is a deathless and it’s totally free from suffering of every kind.

266
 Values
December 20, 2008

When you focus on the breath and try to stay focused on the breath, it’s
partly a matter of technique and partly a matter of your values. The technique
can be explained in just a few pages—Ajaan Lee’s seven steps take just two or
three pages. And they cover a lot of the territory in the technique: focusing on the
breath, finding a spot in the body where you can stay centered, and then working
from there to let the breath energy feel good throughout the body, so that it’s all
connected together, noticing what kind of breathing then can maintain a sense of
connectedness and comfort in the body. That’s pretty much the technique.
But there’s also the question of values—why you’re meditating. And
sometimes you can see your sense of values influencing the technique. If you
come with the idea that you want to gain a vision, you’ll find yourself pushing
the technique in the direction of a vision. If you want to clamp down and have
no awareness of your body at all, you can do that. You can push the technique in
that direction as well.
So it’s important to understand that as we’re developing concentration, the
important element is balance: a sense of ease, comfort, well-being inside. It’s not
as flashy or as extreme as we sometimes want to go in the meditation. But it’s got
a lot more value. Value for what? Value in that it allows you to observe the mind,
to understand what drives the mind, and particularly what drives the mind to
create suffering. We all want pleasure. We all want happiness. Yet we find
ourselves doing things that lead to unhappiness. And even though we may know
better, we tend to persist with our old bad habits.
This is where our values come in. Understanding why it’s important to focus
on training the mind, why it’s important to have this sense of centered well-
being: This comes in with the element of right effort called generating desire.
You have to make yourself want to do this in order to do it well. And there are
times when it’s easy to want it. You find that things click. Everything falls into
place. It feels really good being with the breath, really good being centered right
here. You can’t imagine why you would ever leave. But then you find yourself
leaving, even when things are going well—which means you have to dig deeper
to find out why.
As for when things are not going well, that’s when your sense of values has to
kick in, to understand why you stick with this even when you leave the

267
monastery and go back home. Why would you want to stay with the breath as
you’re dealing with other people, dealing with your work? Or even if you’re
staying here, there are times when you find it hard to stick with the practice. This
is where it’s good to remind yourself: Exactly what is this all about?
That chant we had just now on the nature of the world—basically it’s
undependable, inconstant, stressful, not self. And what people do is so much
driven by their craving. Now, part of the mind says, So what? That’s the part of
the mind you’ve got to look into. What does it want to do? Why does it want to
stay a slave to craving? We all know about aging, illness, and death. The passage
we chanted just now draws the parallels between aging and inconstancy, stress
and illness, not-self and death. These things go together. And they can’t be
denied. That’s the way the world is.
But part of the mind says, “Well, I want to do this or that in spite of all that.
This training of the mind is getting in the way.” And one of the questions you
can ask in response is, “How much more do you want to suffer? Do you really
love yourself?” If you really love yourself, you try to figure out how to find a
happiness you can depend on. But then the mind will say, “Well, I’ll wait for that
later. There are some other things I want to do in the meantime.” This is where
the quality of heedfulness comes in, realizing there may not be a later. You may
not have that chance any time soon to come back to the practice. And your
willingness to see what your true best interests are—that’s a lot of the wisdom of
the practice.
A while back I was reading a history of the 19th century that discussed one of
the favorite types of literature back in those days: biographies of great people.
People really enjoyed reading lives of great people. The typical story was that
someone started out with a lot of handicaps and yet was able to make his way up.
Most of the stories were about “him,” men. But the novels of the time were also
filled with women who were willing to make sacrifices for the sake of a greater
happiness. Then some time in the 20th century, the taste changed. We liked our
antiheroes: the people who saw through the sham of trying to make yourself
something better than what you currently are. We’re now more concerned about
the honesty of people admitting their true feelings right now. Rather than trying
to make themselves into something, they just want to stay where they are and
explore where they are. And the honesty of that approach is presented as an ideal.
Now they did see through a lot of the sham in the Victorian era, but they
really misunderstood what it means to be true to yourself. It doesn’t mean that
you just stay the way you are, or accept the way you are. It means that you really
look at yourself and see what potentials you have. Where is the potential for
suffering in your life? Where is the potential for happiness in your life? And
maybe that is a noble quest: to find a true happiness, to develop all the good

268
qualities of mind that at the moment you have only in a rudimentary form, or
potential form, to try to actualize them. In other words, it’s not a matter of
pretending to be something that you aren’t, but simply realizing that you do have
a potential to make something more of yourself.
One way of helping that process is to get yourself out of your individual
narratives and go look at the larger shape of things. This may be one of the
reasons why, on the night of his awakening, the Buddha started out with that
knowledge of his past lives. But then from there, he didn’t go straight into the
present moment. He inclined his mind to that second knowledge as well, seeing
all beings throughout the universe die and then be reborn in line with their
karma. It was in seeing the larger picture that he also saw the larger pattern. The
way our lives go is dependent on our actions. Where do our actions come from?
They come from our views and our intentions, the two acting together. So he
realized that that was the area where his mind really needed to be trained, in
terms of how he looked at things, and how he aimed his actions, his motivations,
his purposes in acting, speaking, thinking.
Once he saw the larger picture, it was a lot easier get into the present
moment and to stay there, to focus on the right things in the present moment.
Where is the potential for greater understanding in the present moment? He said
it was looking at the question of suffering. Where is there suffering right now?
What’s creating it? What can you do to put an end to it? His willingness to look at
the world at large was what got him focused properly and kept him going on the
path.
The same with that passage we chanted just now from the Ratthapala Sutta. It
was Ratthapala’s reason for ordaining. Notice he didn’t say, “I am subject to
aging, illness, and death.” He said, “This is the way the world is, the world as a
whole.” You go out and look at it. It’s swept away. It does not endure. It offers no
shelter. There is no one in charge. It has nothing of its own. It’s a slave to craving.
That’s the way things are everywhere.
Again and again, the Buddha points this out as an important part of growing
up and developing a more mature attitude, a more mature set of values: looking
at the world as a whole. Where is it going? We have that chant frequently: “I am
subject to aging, illness, death, and separation. I am the heir to my actions.”
That’s part of a sutta where the Buddha goes on to say that you should also reflect
that it’s not just you. Everybody, no matter where you go, no matter what kind of
life you live: All people are subject to aging, illness, and death. Everybody is
subject to separation. Everybody is the heir to his or her actions. And that
principle of action is what provides the escape.
So what this means is that, as we’re meditating, we’re not pretending to be
somebody we aren’t. We meditate because we love ourselves. We have

269
compassion for ourselves. We realize that making some sacrifices now will lead to
good results down the line, the results we want. A part of this is taken on faith.
We hear about the Deathless. We hear about Nirvana. And sometimes it sounds
like a story, a fairytale or, as one person said, an archetype. And we have to take it
on trust that this is an actuality. Ajaan Maha Boowa was saying that if he could
bring Nirvana out and show it to everybody, everybody would want it. No
questions asked. We take that on faith. But then we look around us. What is life
like without that possibility? It’s a pretty depressing prospect.
When Ratthapala decided to ordain, it wasn’t because he just stopped with,
“The world is a slave to craving,” as if that were the end of everything. That’s the
way things were, but he was also looking for another possibility, a way out. It’s
because we value the possibility of freedom, that possibility of a true happiness:
That’s why we make the sacrifices we do. It may be something as simple as
dealing with a difficult person, and realizing that you should stay with your
breath first, rather than getting absorbed in the drama. Or dealing with the desire
to indulge yourself. There’s a modern tendency to believe that by indulging
ourselves, we show our love for ourselves. Well, in some sense, the Victorians had
it right. If you really love yourself, you want to make something more out of
yourself than you are at the moment, which may mean making sacrifices. It’s
learning how to make the sacrifice in a way that’s intelligent. You’re not denying
the existence of your other urges. You’re fully aware that you’ve got these other
desires, these other tendencies, these other cravings. But you also realize that no
matter how real they are, they’re not your true friends. Either you have to do
battle with them or you have to convert them.
So this is what heedfulness teaches us. That’s one of the main motivations the
Buddha gives for generating desire to stay on the path. The other, interestingly
enough, is a sense of pride: “I’ve come this far. I’ve learned this much about the
Dharma. It would be a shame if I dropped it.” So pride has its uses on the path as
well. Only it’s not the false pride of pretending to be someone you’re not. It’s the
pride of someone who doesn’t want to be a traitor to him or herself; of someone
who wants to be able to look in the mirror every morning and say, “I’m doing
my best.” There’s that question asked in one of the passages: “Days and nights fly
past, fly past. What am I becoming right now?” Hopefully not -just becoming an
older person. Hopefully doing something with this in-and-out breath to gain
some deeper understanding as to why there is suffering, and what can be done to
stop it. And realizing that finding an answer to that question is one of the most
important things you can do.
In the process of developing the path, we’re going to be developing skillful
qualities, learning how to abandon the things that get in the way of knowledge
and to encourage qualities like mindfulness and alertness that strengthen your

270
knowledge, strengthen your awareness, strengthen your insight and discernment.
These things, like the defilements, are not part of the nature of the mind.
Ajaan Lee has a good passage where he points out that the mind is neither good
nor evil, but it’s what knows good and evil, and it’s what does good and evil, and
ultimately it’s what lets go of good and evil. That luminosity of the mind is
neither good nor evil, but it does allow you to know. It creates the circumstances
in which skillful qualities can be brought into being, in which they can do their
work to bring the mind to a place where it goes beyond both the good and the
evil, beyond that luminosity.
Which means that the path is not inevitable. A brahman once asked the
Buddha, “Is everybody going to gain awakening?” And he refused to answer. Ven.
Ananda was afraid that the brahman would go away misunderstanding, thinking
that the Buddha was stymied by the question, and so he took the brahman aside
and said, “Suppose there was a fortress with a wise gatekeeper and only one gate
into the fortress. The gatekeeper would walk around the walls of the fortress and
wouldn’t see any other means of entry into the fortress, not even a hole big
enough for cat to slip through. He wouldn’t know how many people would
eventually come into the fortress, but he would know that everybody who was
going to come in and out of the fortress had to come in and out through the
gate.” In the same way, Ananda said, the Buddha realized that whoever was going
to gain awakening would have to come through the path of the noble eightfold
path, the seven factors for awakening, and the different sets in the wings to
awakening. As for how many people would follow that path, that wasn’t his
concern.
So it’s not inevitable that we’re going to gain awakening. In other words, we
don’t have an awakened nature that forces us to gain awakening at some point.
What we do have is a desire for happiness, and a luminous mind that can know.
It’s capable of knowing that there is suffering and it’s capable of watching,
developing the qualities that allow you to see where the suffering comes from,
and to see that it’s not necessary, that you can put an end to it.
This is important—because sometimes when people gain a luminous state of
mind, or a wide-open state of mind, they think they’ve hit their awakened nature.
But the luminosity is not part of awakening. It’s a condition that allows the mind
to see, but the awakening comes from our determination not to keep on
suffering. That was Ajaan Mun’s last message to his students: You’re a warrior
doing battle with defilement, with discernment as your prime weapon. And what
in the mind is the warrior? The determination not to come back and be the
laughingstock of the defilements; the determination not to suffer again. Don’t let
go of that determination, he said, until it has done its job.
So there’s a necessary element of willing in the path. Without that willing, it

271
just doesn’t happen. The luminosity of the mind is what allows the will to do its
work, allows us to straighten out our own minds, to train our own minds. We
don’t have to go around hoping for some outside power to come and save us.
We’ve got our ability here to see the connection between suffering and its cause,
and to find the path to the cessation of suffering, with which you can let go of the
defilements. When there are no more defilements, you can let go of the path,
which is composed just of activities, because you’ve found something that’s not
an activity, something that’s not fabricated. That’s what we’re working on.
But you can’t clone the unfabricated. You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got
to develop the factors that give rise to clarity of mind, clarity of vision that can
push away those clouds of defilement. When you get the causes right, the effects
will take care of themselves.
So try to be very clear about what you’re doing, because that’s a huge area
where ignorance lies: around what we’re doing and the results of what we’re
doing. We tend to be very willful about not wanting to admit to ourselves what
we’re doing or what our intentions are. We also tend to be very willful about not
wanting to see the unfortunate effects of some of our actions. This is why the
Buddha, when he was giving instructions to his son, focused on just this issue,
telling him, “Look at what you’re going to do, look at what you’re doing, and
look at what you’ve done. Try to be very clear about the results of your actions.”
That reflection is how you begin to see through the clouds of delusion that
otherwise keep moving in, moving in, moving in all the time. When you can see
through your delusion, you realize that it doesn’t have to be there all the time.
This principle is what allows us to practice. This principle is what gives us
hope, confidence, that there is an end to suffering. If you act on it, there will
come a day when it’s not just a hope or confidence; it’s actual knowledge that
there is a deathless and it’s totally free from suffering of every kind.

272
 The Freedom to Give
December 28, 2008

As you sit down to meditate, one of the first things you want to do is to
establish a sense of well-being. This is easiest if your life has been conducive to
establishing a sense of well-being. If you’ve been making a practice of being
generous, if you’re clear about the principles and precepts that your want to
follow in your behavior of not harming other people, not harming yourself, then
that right there creates a sense of well-being as you reflect back on your
generosity, reflect back on your virtue, think of the times when you went out of
your way to be good to other people, when you went out of your way to avoid
doing harm to other people. And that’s food for the mind.
This is why generosity and virtue are part of the path. As the Buddha said
when he started teaching Right View on the most mundane level, it starts as
simply, “There are gifts.” That sounds strange, that that would be a principle of
Right View. But he was countering a thought that was widespread or at least had
some adherents in that time: that everything in life was deterministic, that
causality was a mechanical process, that the stars acted through you, or there
were other outside forces that had totally determined from the very beginning
from the design of the universe, that things were going to have to work out a
certain way. Therefore whatever you did was meaningless. It was simply part of
the machinery. For that reason, an act of generosity doesn’t have any special
value;, it’s just written into the way things are going to have to be. And so to
counter the idea of determinism, the Buddha started out by saying that there are
gifts, meaning that people actually choose to give gifts and that the gifts really do
have meaning, both for the donor and for the recipient.
In one way you could say that he staked his whole teaching on the
connection between freedom and generosity. When people would come to ask
him, “Where should a gift be given?” he would answer, “Wherever your mind
feels inspired, wherever you feel it would be well used.” In other words,
generosity is free. No restrictions. No “you should give here, you shouldn’t give
there.” In fact when monks are asked, “Where should this gift be given?” That’s
the response they are supposed to give: “Wherever your heart feels inspired;
wherever you feel the gift would be well used.”
In exercising that freedom, we create a sense of well-being in the mind. So it’s
a basic principle of our freedom and also a basic principle of the practice, how
you take advantage of that freedom. Because when you give a gift that doesn’t

273
harm yourself, doesn’t harm other people, it is food for the mind, food for other
good qualities in the mind.
This is why, when you look at the history of Buddhism across the centuries,
you see that when people misunderstand the idea of generosity, the Dharma gets
twisted as well. There is a series of texts called the Apadanas, the very last addition
to the sutta section of the Pali Canon. It was obviously written at a time when
monasteries were growing large and monks wanted donations. They did what
they could to encourage people to be generous, more generous than if they were
left to feel freely inspired to be generous. The monks promised huge rewards for
generosity. “Give a little gift, and you’re guaranteed to become an arahant at a
time of a future Buddha. And in the meantime you’re not going to experience
any of the lower realms. You get to be king of the devas, queen of the devas. For
many, many eons you get to be kings or queens on earth countless times. And
after a good long joyride through samsara, when you’ve decided you’ve had
enough, okay, then you’re ready to become an arahant. And if you want to
become a special arahant, well, it’s going to cost you a little extra but it can be
arranged.” The going price to be an arahant with special distinctions was seven
days worth of meals for the whole Sangha.
You can see what’s happening here. The monks are beginning to take the
teaching on generosity and twisting it to their own ends. And as generosity gets
twisted, the teaching as a whole gets twisted as well. The eightfold path
disappears into the background. The fact that you are generous in what they call
the Buddha field, the field of the Buddha’s potential for creating lots of
meritorious rewards for a little tiny meritorious gift: That becomes the important
thing. You do service to the Buddha and then awakening is guaranteed. So the
eightfold path turns into a onefold path: generous service in the Buddha field.
Once generosity gets screwed into strange shapes like this, the Dharma gets
screwed into strange shapes as well. So it’s good not to overlook the basics. It’s
good to have a right understanding of what the basics are all about. That way you
keep the rest of the practice in line. Generosity is a freely given gift where you
feel inspired. The Buddha does note that some gifts give greater benefits than
others, but it’s up to you to decide what you want to give, where you want to give
it. And the monks have lots of rules for how to behave as they receive gifts. They
can’t go out of the way to attract gifts to themselves that might otherwise go to
other monks. When they’ve been given a gift, they can’t turn around and give it
back to lay people. They can share it among other monks, but they aren’t
supposed to take something given to them and give it to a layperson they’re
trying to please.
Sometimes we have a tendency to disregard the Vinaya, thinking well, it’s
just a bunch of rules from old times that may or may not be applicable now. But

274
a lot of the rules have to do with this: how to behave in an economy of gifts, in a
culture of gifts. Because the principle of gift giving goes way back much earlier
than the Buddha. Sometimes in those dana talks they say that dana is a 2500 year
old tradition. Well it’s not. It’s a much older tradition than that. It goes back to
the beginning of human society. Human society is based on gifts.
I read once that the very first book on anthropology was an analysis of gift
giving in different societies. It focused on how much you can understand about a
society by the way people give gifts, the gestures with which they give gifts, the
expectations that surround gift-giving. It tells you a lot about how that society is
organized. The same idea applies with the principles of the Buddha’s teachings.
He created a culture of gifts so that the practice of the Dharma can be surrounded
by gift giving. This is because one of the good features about giving a gift is that it
breaks down barriers. When you place a price on something, saying, “I’ll do X for
you in exchange for Y,” that’s creating a barrier. X is not going to happen until Y
comes. But when you give a gift, it’s like being part of a family. And it involves
the same network of responsibilities and connections that you find in a family,
which is a good environment for practicing the Dharma, teaching the Dharma.
The Buddha said at one point one of the ideal features of a Dharma teacher is
not to expect material reward for the teaching. He never said that the Dharma is
priceless. That’s another misinformed phrase you hear a lot in dana talks. What
he did say was that the teacher should not expect material reward. In other
words, the teaching of Dharma should be a gift. When it’s given as a gift, people
receive it as a gift. If it’s given as something you’re expected to get payment for,
people will expect something for their payment, and start making demands.
Sometimes the demands may be subtle. When a teacher looks out across the
audience and starts talking about things that the people don’t like to hear, you
can see it in their faces. And if the teacher is concerned about how much money
is going to come from the Dharma talk, he’s going to start avoiding things that
are difficult to talk about, that people don’t want to hear.
There have been periods in the history of Buddhism when monks would put
fans in front of their faces so that they wouldn’t read the reaction of the people
out there, the idea being that the audience would be more likely to actually hear
the genuine Dharma when the speaker isn’t trying to read the audience and
please them.
So this is another one of the arrangements that the Buddha created: the
situation in which people who practice the Dharma can depend on gifts. They’re
supposed to live a frugal life. And the gifts are not contingent on teaching. That
way the teaching can be free, and less likely to be distorted.
So gifts are freely given, but there are things incumbent on understanding
the right relationship there. Once the gift is given, it’s given. Those rules in the

275
Vinaya aren’t designed only for the monks; they’re also designed for the donors.
When a gift is given, there is no expectation of services in return. This is a lesson
that a lot of people not only here in the West have trouble understanding. It’s
something that constantly has to be reiterated back in Asia as well. As for the
monks as recipients of the gifts, they have the responsibility to behave in a way
that’s deserving of gifts. Because, after all, they as individuals are benefiting from
a larger system. And one of their responsibilities is to keep the system going. If
they accept people’s gifts but start behaving in ways that are uninspiring, that
starts drying up the gifts for the other monks as well. And it breaks a sense of
trust. Because that’s what giving relies on—that you trust one another. This is
probably one of the most important aspects of creating this culture of giving. The
Dharma is a lot more likely to survive in an atmosphere of trust.
This is one of the ways we create a sense of well-being even before we sit
down and close our eyes, trying to understand this culture of giving and to
participate in it as we feel so motivated—because it does emphasize our freedom.
That’s the beginning of training the mind. We are free to train the mind. No
requirements aside from the fact that we’re suffering from aging, illness, and
death can force us. But there are lots of people out there who choose not to
practice. And the Buddha was wise enough to see that you can’t force people to
practice the Dharma. But you can invite them. And the best way to invite them is
to practice the Dharma yourself so the results become apparent and other people
get interested. In this way, the practice is done in the same spirit as giving a gift:
You feel so motivated to do this.
So each time you sit down to meditate, you realize on the one hand that
aging, illness and death are breathing down your neck, so you’ve got to do
something. But on the other hand, as you think about it, you realize that this is a
good thing to do. If you practice with a sense of being inspired to practice, the
results are much more likely to come. Ajaan Chah is famous for saying that when
you feel like practicing, you practice. When you don’t feel like practicing, you
practice. And how do you do that? If you look at yourself and you say, “I’m just
not in the mood to practice,” you have to think yourself into a position when you
realize that deep down inside, yes, you really would prefer to practice, regardless
of whatever vagrant moods are coming through the mind. So at least part of you
feels inspired. Part of you realizes this is the way to freedom, by exercising your
freedom to practice.
One of the things we’re going to explore as we practice further is, “What is
this element of freedom in the mind?” We do have this choice. What is it to make
a choice? This is why we practice meditation is to understand the process of
making a choice, to see our intentions. This is why we practice concentration to
establish a firm intention of the mind and then watch it, to see what happens

276
when other intentions come in, and we make the choice to stick with our
original intention, again and again and again. There is an element of freedom in
there, and that’s what we’re trying to catch sight of, because it leads to a
dimension of total freedom.
So in this way, the freedom that we’re looking for that’s free from suffering,
totally free from any burdens for the mind, any restrictions for the mind at all,
starts by exercising that freedom to give.

277
 The Lotus in the Mud
January 5, 2009

One of the traditional images of the mind in concentration or of the

awakened mind is of a lotus growing out of the mud. In the tropics the mud is
pretty rank. And yet out of the mud you get this lovely flower with a very gentle
smell and leaves that repel the water, flowers that repel the water, so that they can
grow up in muddy water and yet when the flower opens, it’s very white and pure.
The same with the mind. As it gets past its greed, anger, passion, aversion,
and delusion, it can blossom. Or you can compare the lotus in the mud to the
mind living in this body, which, as the chants said, is full of all kinds of unclean
things, and yet the mind can be clean. The mind can be pure. In fact you can use
the contemplation of the body as a means of purifying the mind—because the
more you see that the body isn’t yours, the more the mind stands out on its own.
So it’s useful to contemplate the body. Sometimes it’s forced on us like today:
all that stuff that came out of the sewage pipe, where did that come from?
Human bodies. Ajaan Fuang once had a pair of students—a husband and wife—
who were interesting, in that they would tend to have very similar experiences in
their meditation at the same time. And there was one period when they both got
really disgusted with food. The wife had to work in the kitchen to feed the rest of
the family, and so one day she was fixing a piece of liver, and a dog came into the
kitchen and so she threw a little piece of liver to it. And the dog was so eager to
get it. She watched the dog devour the liver, and she felt disgusted both by the
liver and by the dog’s eagerness to eat it. How could you take such disgusting
stuff inside you? And it turns out that the husband was beginning to feel the
same way about food.
So they came to a point where they really couldn’t eat. They mentioned this
to Ajaan Fuang, and he said, “Well, being unable to eat is not the purpose of the
contemplation. After all, what do you have in your body? You’ve got a liver too.
You’ve got a stomach too. You’ve got this stuff in your intestines. Your body’s no
different from the food. So in what way is the body too pure to eat this kind of
thing?” When he said this, both of them were able to overcome their sense of
disgust.
The purpose of the contemplation is not to get you so that you can’t eat. But
it is to get you to the point where you have a sense of dispassion. This body
you’ve been carrying around and been so proud of and so protective of, and the

278
mind has so much invested in it: You’ve got to get to a point where you can step
back from it, and say, “Oh, that’s just the way the body is. It’s not really worth
holding onto.” You use it as a tool. And the best use of the body is to use it in the
practice. But beyond that you’ve got to question the mind’s eager holding onto it.
This way you can learn to let go of those concerns about the survival of the body.
That lightens the mind a great deal.
But as Ajaan Lee was fond of pointing out, the filthiness of the body is
nothing compared with the filthiness of the mind when it’s not trained. The
body’s filth is just the nature of the body. It’s not pretending to be anything that
it isn’t. But the mind filled with passion, aversion and delusion: that’s really what
you’ve got to cleanse away. Defilements, hindrances, all these forms of ignorance,
and all the manifestations of ignorance in all of it’s different ways: Those are the
things that really prevent the mind from being luminous, from being pure. So
you’ve really got to work on those things. You’ve got to learn how to question
whichever defilements you tend to invest in. Look at all the harm that they cause.
We don’t like to look at this. As Upasika Kee often comments, these things
we prefer not to see. We’d rather focus on how good and pure we are. But if we
don’t look at the other side, we’re won’t be able to cleanse it away. Like that pipe
today, if we had just let it happen, let it stay the way it was, it’d continue to fester,
and just get worse and worse and worse. So it’s good to dig out those roots of
unskillful behavior: greed, aversion, delusion. Try to get the mind as still and
independent as you can in the present moment, so you can look back on the
times when you’ve given in to these roots of unskillful behavior. Reflect on how
much harm you’ve done to yourself, how much harm you’ve done to other
people. That way you can value the opportunity to say No to those defilements,
to call them into question, and see where you can uproot them. You can’t just
simply let go of these things by hiding the mind away in concentration. They will
be quiet for a while, but they’re still there, just like the roots in the septic system.
There’s a tendency sometimes, when the mind does get quiet, that you just
don’t want to look at these things. You’d rather pretend that they’re not there,
that they’re gone. And that attitude, of course, just allows them to fester. So when
the mind does settle down and is still, learn to look at it and see where the seeds
are that would make you still want to go after greed, aversion, or delusion. What
kind of attitudes does the mind have that fosters these things, that likes to stay
invested, likes to keep them around as pets?
This ability to question your old allegiances is an important part of the
meditation, an important part of training the mind. This is why they say the lotus
grows in the mud. You have to learn to look at your own defilements. You have
to learn how to look at your own weak points—not so that you get down on
yourself, but so that you learn how not to identify with those things. You say,

279
“Okay, they’ve been there in the mind, but they don’t have to be. I’ve sided with
those things in the past, but I don’t have to in the future. I don’t have to right
now.”
You have to understand their allure. We had a discussion awhile back in
which someone was saying that the only pure Buddhist practice is just watching
things arise and pass away. If you do any more analysis than that, you’re mixing
in Western psychoanalysis, and that sullies the practice. But that was not what the
Buddha said. He said that watching things arise and pass away was only part of
liberating insight. You watch to see when there’s greed or no greed, aversion or
no aversion, delusion and no delusion. You do this not as an end in and of itself,
but so that you can notice what comes and goes along with them. You realize
that they’re not necessarily part of the innate nature of the mind. They’re just
events that come and go—but they come and go in patterns. The reason we latch
onto them is because they have a certain allure. And as we all know, much of that
allure is something we give to them. We paint them in nice colors. We like the
way they look once they have been painted up to our taste.
As long as we keep painting them, we’re not going to let them go. So you
have to see that the paint is illusory. It’s hiding what these things actually do to
the mind. What this means is that you’ve got to see the drawbacks. These things
really do cause harm. They wreak havoc in the mind. They wreak havoc in
relations with other people. You can begin to compare the allure with the
drawbacks, seeing that the gain is nowhere compensating for the cost, so that the
mind gets more motivated to see the escape from these things.
That’s the mud that you have to go through. But by going through that mud
and analyzing these things and understanding them is what gives rise to the
discernment that can cleanse the mind. As the Buddha said, the mind is cleansed
through discernment. It’s not cleansed through concentration. Concentration
allows the discernment to do its work, gives it a place to stand, but the
discernment is what makes all the difference.
There’s a tendency, however, to try to avoid this mud. As we get into
concentration we want just to hang out in the concentration, thinking that we’ve
found something pure. But the Buddha compares that attachment to
concentration to a cesspool outside of a village of paupers. It’s just allowed to
grow and grow and grow, all that stagnant water. It doesn’t get to flow away until
you make a breakthrough through ignorance. Only when you’ve made that
breakthrough can it all flow away.
The concentrated mind that just allows the defilements to stay there—it
doesn’t want to touch them, it doesn’t want to deal with them: That’s the
cesspool. For discernment to grow, it has to grow out of all that mud. Only that
can purify the mind and lead to awakening.

280
 So use the concentration to get the mind in a position where it’s willing to
look at its own drawbacks, instead of focusing on things outside. Ajaan Maha
Boowa makes a comment about how we have a tendency, if there’s mud in our
minds, to sling it around on other people: “There’s something wrong with this
person or that person, the teacher is no good, my fellow Dharma practitioners are
no good.” The mud gets slung around. But you have to see, where does it come
from? It actually comes from inside. Learn how to turn around and look at it, and
see what’s really there. It really is mud. But as you learn how to analyze it and see
it for what it is, the mind gets clearer and clearer. This is the nourishment for the
lotus.
Concentration is here as a tool. It’s not an end in and of itself. This can be
discouraging when you’re having trouble getting into concentration, but it’s
good to be forewarned anyhow. When the concentration comes after a lot of
difficulty, you tend to really hang onto it. And as long as you’re hanging on for
the purpose of developing it as a tool, that’s perfectly fine. There will come the
point, though, where you have to start turning around and doing more work.
The concentration isn’t the lotus. It’s food for the lotus. It’s there to give you the
energy, the solid foundation needed to get the work done, so that the actual lotus
can bloom.

281
 Balancing Tranquility & Insight
January 12, 2009

For some people, the practice of meditation involves two very different kinds
of activities. One is getting the mind to be still, and the other is giving rise to
insight. And for them, these are very sharply divided. In order to get the mind
still, you simply just force it to stay with one thing and don’t allow it to think at
all. Then when it’s rested, then you allow it to do some thinking. Give it a
specific topic to deal with, like the 32 parts of the body, the problem of pain,
whatever happens to come up in the mind as a specific problem. You analyze it
and deal with it. After a while, you find that your analysis starts getting fuzzy or
blunt. It’s like using a sharp knife. You use it to cut things, and cut things, and
cut things, and finally you find you can’t cut through things anymore. That’s
when you’ve got to get the mind to stop, be still again. And the stilling is what
sharpens the blade so that it’s ready to come out and do some more cutting.
For other people though, the development of insight and tranquility is
something that happens together. This is specifically true of the way the Buddha
teaches breath meditation, because he defines tranquility as a matter of getting
the mind to settle down, whereas insight is a matter of learning to see things in
terms of fabrication: how they get put together, what the processes are, and how
to develop a sense of dispassion toward them. And it only stands to reason that as
you develop a sense of dispassion, the mind is going to get more still. And the
more still you are, the more clearly you will see things in these terms, if you’re
looking for them in these terms. That’s what breath meditation is all about.
Of the four tetrads in breath meditation, the first tetrad corresponds to the
body and the second one corresponds to feelings. The third corresponds to mind,
or intent—the word citta here can also mean intent. And then finally the
dhammas or mental qualities is the fourth. In each case, you’re sensitizing
yourself to some aspect of fabrication. In the first tetrad, the fabrication is the in-
and-out breath itself. You sensitize yourself to when the breath is short, when it’s
relatively long. The text only says that much, but what you’re actually doing is
learning how to notice how short breathing affects the body, how long breathing
affects the body. On the other hand, you also become sensitive to how the state of
the body affects the way you breathe.
Then the Buddha has you get sensitive to the entire body, after which he tells
you to calm bodily fabrication, that’s the fourth step in the tetrad. What this
means is to calm the effect of the breath on the body. The breath calms down, the

282
intentional element of the breath calms down as well. This can involve a lot of
things. It can actually get to the point where the breath stops. In the course of
this, you begin to gain some insight into how much intentional element there is
in the breathing.
I’ve had a lot of people who’ve practiced mindfulness methods where they
were told simply to let the breath do it’s own thing. And then they come to the
Ajaan Lee method, where he actually tells him to adjust the breath, play with the
breath, work to get it comfortable. At first, they resist. But after a while, as they
actually try the method, they become more and more sensitive to the element of
intention in the breathing, and they begin to realize that even when they thought
they were allowing the breath to do its own thing, they were actually
manipulating it unconsciously. They’d been taught to overlook the extent to
which they were already fabricating the breath.
So an important part of the meditation is to sensitize yourself to how much
you are shaping things so that then you can actually let that process of shaping
things calm down to a level you might not have imagined before. In the case of
the breath, this means calming the breath to the point where all the breath
energies in the body seem to connect up, and you’re getting enough oxygen
through the pores of your skin so you don’t need to do any in and out breathing.
And right there you’ve gained some insight into the process of fabrication at the
same time that the mind is beginning to calm down. This is how tranquility and
insight develop together using the body as your frame of reference.
You learn many of the same lessons in terms of feelings in the second tetrad.
The Buddha starts out by telling you to be sensitive to rapture, sensitive to
pleasure. And those feelings can be based on lots of different things: the sense of
well-being that comes from developing virtue, developing generosity; the sense of
confidence that arises from contemplating the Buddha, the Dharma and the
Sangha; or recollecting on your own past virtues, your own past acts of
generosity, and, as they say, the qualities of the devas that you’ve been
developing, which include generosity and restraint. When you think about these
things, you develop a sense of confidence. You’re not just a weight on the world.
And you’re also worthy of doing this practice.
So sometimes those thoughts can give rise to a sense of pleasure that then can
become the basis of concentration. Once you allow yourself to be sensitive to the
pleasure and the rapture, then the Buddha tells you to be sensitive to the effect
that these are having on the mind—not only the feelings, but also the perceptions
that go along with them. These shape the mind. These are mental fabrications.
And as you notice that, you allow them to calm down. For instance, if the rapture
feels too intense, you allow it to calm down. You tune in to an area of your
awareness that’s more refined than the rapture.

283
 When the pleasure seems superfluous, and you simply want to settle in and
be very, very still, you get the mind to a state of equanimity. What you are doing
is allowing the mental fabrication of feeling to calm down. At the same time, you
allow your perceptions to calm down, and this can actually take you deeper into
the formless jhanas. If you see that holding onto the perception of the shape of
the body is a burden on the mind, you can drop that. You’re left with space: the
space inside the body, the space outside the body. It all connects. It has no
boundary.
From that you become aware of the awareness of space, and that changes
your perception from “space” to “knowing.” The mental fabrication—the effect
of the perception on the mind—gets more and more refined: just knowing,
knowing, knowing. Then even the oneness of that knowing begins to seem
burdensome. So you drop that. And you’re left with the perception of the
dimension of nothingness. You can pursue this all the way up through the
formless jhanas, as you allow mental fabrication to calm down.
So what you’re doing is that you’re developing tranquility and insight at the
same time. The mind gets more still, and as things calm down, you gain more
and more insight into this process of fabrication.
The same principle applies to the third tetrad, when you’re directly aware of
the mind. Again, the tetrad starts out by telling you to be sensitive to that aspect
of your awareness. Here “mind” can also mean “intent,” the intent you have to
stay with the breath. You’re clear on that. You’re clear on the state of your mind,
the state of your awareness. And then you see what it needs. Does it need to be
gladdened? Does it need more energy? You think about things that give it
gladness, like the recollections. Or by adjusting the breath, or by adjusting your
perceptions of the breath, the perceptions of what you’re focusing on.
Then you allow the mind to get more and more steady. What perceptions
allow it to get more steady? Perception of the breath as a whole body process gets
it more steady. Your perception that you’re not separate from the breath, that
you’re not in one part of the body or inhabiting one part of the body and
watching the breath in some other part of the body, but you’re actually one with
the breath, immersed in the breath, bathed in the breath, surrounded by breath:
That perception helps steady the mind even further.
Then you check to see how you can release the mind. This begins with
releasing it from thoughts of sensuality and all the other hindrances that eat away
at your meditation. Once you’ve released it from them, you find yourself in the
different levels of jhana. And you begin to release yourself from the coarser levels
to the more refined ones. Or you can release yourself from the activity of
intending concentration and get ultimate release. So the mind gets more and
more still at the same time you’re getting hands-on experience with the process of

284
fabrication, seeing how much intention shapes your awareness, and how you can
change your intentions and see how that creates different levels of gladness,
steadiness, and release in your awareness. So here again, tranquility and insight
go together.
The same principle applies to the fourth foundation. You start out being
aware of impermanence or inconstancy. In the early stages of the meditation, this
means focusing on the inconstancy of anything that would pull you away from
your concentration, so that you can develop a sense of dispassion for whatever it
is: all the stories we bring with us; all the concerns we bring with us that tend to
pop up as we try to get the mind to settle down. We have a whole hour, and part
of the mind says, “Let’s think about this. “You suddenly find yourself planning
next month, or regurgitating events of last month or whatever. You’ve got to
realize that those things are impermanent, stressful, and not-self. There is really
no meat there for you there, no nourishment.
As Ajaan Lee says, it’s like a dog chewing on a bone. There’s no meat left on
the bone, so all it tastes is the taste of its own saliva. Or, he says, it’s like licking
the bottom of yesterday’s soup pot when there’s no soup left. That’s thinking
about the past. Or licking tomorrow’s soup pot where there’s no soup in it yet.
That’s thinking about the future. There’s no nourishment there at all.
So as you learn to see the impermanence of these thoughts, it develops a
sense of dispassion. And because you are feeling dispassionate for them, you are
no longer involved in their creation, so they stop.
It’s important to understand that relationship between dispassion and
cessation. Dispassion means being dispassionate toward the activities that you’re
doing, the things that you’re creating. Once you feel dispassion, you don’t feel
the need to create them anymore and they stop. If your insight goes deep enough,
you can actually end that particular activity, that particular defilement. As the
Buddha says, you relinquish it. You give it back. Whatever you are laying claim
to, you just give it back. Ajaan Lee’s term is spitting it out. Something you’ve
taken into your mouth and you realize you don’t want it anymore, you spit it
back out.
As I said at the beginning, this applies at the beginning to all the topics that
would pull you away from your concentration. As your concentration begins to
develop, and you get more and more sensitive, it starts applying to the
concentration itself. You see the inconstancy of one level of concentration, and
once you let go of whatever inconstancy you can detect in it, that takes you to a
deeper level, then a deeper level, until finally you can abandon your attachment
to concentration altogether. That’s when the dispassion is total, the cessation is
total, and the relinquishment is total. You even give up the whole path.

285
 So in following the steps of breath meditation, you’re developing
concentration by developing tranquility and insight at the same time. You’re
getting the mind to settle down at the same time you’re learning how to look at
fabrications and regard fabrications in a way that gives rise to dispassion. As the
Buddha said, to gain good strong concentration, to attain the jhanas, requires
that you develop both tranquility and insight.
Once the concentration has gotten solid, if you want to gain total release,
again, use the concentration, use the jhana as a basis for deeper tranquility and
deeper insight. In this way they all go together. And as for the question of how
you balance them, as Ajaan Lee says, when you’re working with the breath, you
find that you’ll sometimes be stressing the tranquility side more, and sometimes
the insight side more. But there’s always some insight in your tranquility. There’s
always some tranquility in your insight. It’s just a question of which side you’re
going to stress more at any one particular time, which the mind seems to need
more. That involves learning how to read your mind, that third tetrad. Does it
need more gladdening? Does it need more release? Does it need more steadying?
But as you get more and more sensitive in how you read your mind, read the
processes of fabrication—either in terms of body, or feelings, mind, mental
qualities—learning how to develop that balance, that’s an important part of
insight as well. You see when you need to let go of certain things, and which
things you need to hang on to in the mean time. You don’t want to be the sort of
person who has a few moments of concentration and lets them go, saying, “Okay,
I’ve gotten beyond concentration now.” That goes nowhere. It short-circuits the
whole path. You need to use fabrication to get to the end of fabrication. Seeing
that is an important element of insight right there.
And as your skill develops in developing both tranquility and insight, the
whole path comes together. Even for people for whom insight practice and
tranquility practice are two radically separate things, they find that as the path
begins to reach fruition, everything comes together. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks
about how at that point, it’s hard to draw a line between insight practice and
tranquility practice. They both reach balance.
So you can’t determine ahead of time which sort of person you’re going to
be, the sort with two radically separate practices, or the sort with a more
integrated practice from the very beginning. But the integration is where we’re
all headed. And it’s a matter of learning how to read your own mind, to figure
out how the balance is going to be developed. Think of those old-fashioned
balances. They don’t always stay in balance. Sometimes they have to swing back
and forth before balance is reached. The same with the mind: Sometimes it starts
out in a balanced state that it can maintain steadily, other times it swings widely
from one side to the other before the balance finally settles down to its balance

286
point. But the balance point is where we’re all headed.

287
 Success on the Path
January 13, 2009

To stay with the breath, you first have to want to stay with the breath. It’s the
first basis of success in the practice. Some people object to the idea that there’s
success and failure in the practice. But this is a path that leads to a goal. That’s
something we always should keep in mind: that we’re going someplace. Willy-
nilly, we’re going someplace. We’re heading to aging, illness and death—but you
want to ask yourself, is that the place you want to head? Or the only place you
want to head? The body does have to age, grow ill and die, but does the mind
have to do that? Does the mind have to suffer from those things? Is there a place
where you can go where you don’t suffer from those things? As the Buddha said,
it’s not found by going anywhere in the physical universe. But it is found by
going inside.
And the fact that there is that possibility, that potential for going in a
direction that doesn’t age, doesn’t ill, doesn’t die: that’s why we have the
Buddha’s path. That’s why there are the right factors of the path, and the wrong
factors of the path. And that’s why there’s success and failure. If it were the case
that there wasn’t that potential for putting an end to suffering, that life was
simply a matter of learning how to accept what’s already here, then the practice
would be very different.
But what the Buddha is asking you to do is to accept something else, that
there is a potential to put an end to suffering. And it’s going to demand a lot out
of you. There is one place where he says that even if the practice involves
suffering to the point where there are tears streaming down your cheeks, you
stick with it, because the path ultimately does lead to a goal that more than
makes up for all the tears. The few tears running down your cheeks are very few
compared to all the tears you’ve been shedding already. If you drive up Interstate
5 along the coast and look out across the Pacific Ocean, you realize that there’s a
huge amount of water there. It stretches out to the horizon, and you know it goes
far beyond that. And yet the amount you see is nothing compared to all the water
in all the oceans, and all the water in all the oceans is nothing compared to the
volume of the tears you’ve been shedding over all these many lifetimes. If you
don’t follow the path, there are probably going to be that many more tears
waiting for you in the future.
So there are two reasons to have the desire to focus on the path. One is
realizing that the path leads you away from a lot of suffering. There are many

288
comparisons in the Canon. The Buddha picked up a little bit of dirt under his
fingernail one time and said, which is greater, the dirt under my fingernail, or the
dirt in the earth? Of course, the dirt in the earth was much greater. He said, in the
same way, for someone who has seen the Dharma, has broken through the
experience of the Dharma Eye—in other words gained the first level of
awakening—the amount of suffering that remains for that person is like the dirt
under the fingernail, whereas the amount of suffering that awaits those who
haven’t is like the dirt in all the earth. So that’s one reason for following the path,
is that it’s a way to avoid an awful lot of suffering.
The other reason for engendering desire for the path is that it’s a good path
and it leads to a really good destination. The destination is something we can’t
see yet, but we can see the path. Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right
Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration:
These are all good things to do. The Buddha is not asking you to do anything that
you’d be ashamed of, not asking you to do anything that’s going to be harmful to
anybody. He’s asking you to develop good, honest, upright qualities of the mind,
things you can be proud that you can develop.
So as you think about the rewards of the practice, and all the dangers that the
practice takes you away from, it can help give energy to your practice. This is why
recollection of the Dharma is one of the recollections the Buddha recommends.
He says that when you’re focusing on one of the frames of reference, or
establishing mindfulness based on the body, feelings, mind, mental qualities,
there may come times when the practice starts getting difficult. As he says, there
may be a fever in the body, or a fever in the mind. That, he says, is when it’s good
to put that topic aside and think about something inspiring. And the practices he
recommends that are inspiring are recollection of the Buddha, the Dharma, and
the Sangha; recollection of your own generosity, virtue; recollection of the
qualities of the devas, thinking about the fact that you’ve been developing those
qualities as well. And you think about those themes as much as you need to get
rid of that fever in the body and the fever in the mind, to get the mind feeling
inspired and uplifted.
In this way you develop the desire to get back on the path. It’s not that these
recollections are off the path, but they’re supplementary reflections. They can get
you back into the practice of Right Mindfulness, Right Effort, and on into Right
Concentration.
When things start getting dry, remember that it’s wise to gladden the mind
to give rise to that sense of desire. It’s part of learning how to read your own
mind, to diagnose its diseases, and then provide the medicine it needs. If that the
desire is lacking, stop and think: What would your life be like if there were no
prospect of putting an end to suffering? Think of how fortunate we are that we

289
have the path, that it hasn’t been forgotten. We don’t have to forge the path
ourselves in a very uncertain world.
Think about the Buddha, about how uncertain things were at his time. A lot
of people were saying that there was no way to put an end to suffering, that you
should just accept things as they are. Others were saying that there was an end to
suffering, but nothing you could do about it. It was just going to happen
naturally, just like a ball of string unwinding and eventually you’d get to the end
of the string. But in the meantime, you’ve got to put up with all the suffering
that’s entailed in what remains of the string. The Buddha had the courage not to
accept either of those ideas. He thought, Maybe there is something that can be
accomplished through human effort. And so he put his life on the line to test that
idea. At present we have the example of many people in the past, the Buddha
himself and all of his Noble Disciples. So it’s not quite so uncertain. We may still
have our doubts about it, but at least there’s a path laid out. And a lot of very
honest and upright people have said that it works.
When the practice gets dry, it’s useful to think about these things, so that you
can work through any hesitation you may have in focusing on the breath or any
reluctance, any sense of weariness. As Ajaan Fuang said, you lubricate the mind
so that it doesn’t seize up the way an engine would seize up when it runs out of
lubricant. You give rise to the desire to stick with the path. From that desire
develops persistence: the energy, the stick-to-it-iveness that’s required in training
the mind. After all, the mind has a lot of old habits. And it’s going to take time
and persistence to deal with these things.
So it’s important to learn how to give yourself energy all along the way.
Persistence as Ajaan Lee says, goes together with your powers of endurance. And
the best way is to keep yourself on the path, keep yourself strong on the path, is
not to weigh yourself down with unnecessary doubts about yourself, unnecessary
complaints about how difficult things are. It’s always good to focus on where
things are going well, and not to keep obsessing about the things that are difficult
or wearisome. We may distrust the Pollyanna approach of always looking for the
bright side, but it makes the practice a lot lighter to keep reminding yourself that
there are a lot of positive things about being on this path. And you find that they
give you energy. You can save your doubts for your defilements. Learn how to be
skeptical about your defilements. In other words, you really look at them and
question the assumptions that get in the way of the practice.
Of course that means you have to learn how to recognize them. This is where
the quality of citta or intent interest comes in. As you give yourself to the
practice, look to see what keeps pulling you back: What nagging doubts do you
have? What complaints does the mind have? Learn to question them. This is
where citta merges in with vimansa, your powers of analysis, your powers of

290
discrimination, your ability to question the thoughts that come into your mind.
You can ask yourself, Exactly where does that thought come from? Can you
identify the person who in your past would think in that way? Can you identify
the tone of the voice that thinks in that way? Is it a tone of voice that you want to
adopt? And you can look at that thought in terms of the issue of freedom. Do you
want to be a slave to that kind of thinking?
This is one of the reasons we try to keep the mind with the breath: so that it
can look at its thoughts with a certain of detachment, from a certain amount of
distance, get some perspective on them. One really effective way of dealing with
them is to refuse to go along with them and see how they complain. Then ask
them, “Why should I believe that complaint?” And try to see what kind of reasons
that part of the mind comes up with. Keep pushing your questioning until you
find the point where the reasons break down.
When you can develop these four bases for success, you’re in a position
where you can be your own teacher, read the situation in the mind and not fall
for it. Or to use another analogy, you’re your own doctor. Learn to recognize the
illness, and recognize the cause of the illness, and give the right medicine—
because as the Buddha said, he merely points out the way. It’s up to you to follow
it. As a doctor, he is the one who prescribe the medicine. It’s for you to find the
various herbs that he prescribes and then to take the medicine. The Buddha can’t
give you a shot and cure your illness. But he can tell you what the right herbs are
and how you take them. And he gives you some explanation of the cause of the
illness so you can understand how the herbs are related to the cause. In other
words, he teaches you how to become your own doctor.
So try to develop this sense of what’s needed to be your own doctor, to be
your own teacher, so that at the very least, the dialogue in your mind can be
more helpful, more intelligent, more wise, and actually head in that direction
that we want to go—to the end of suffering. At the very least, test to see if what
the Buddha had to say is true. The only way you’re going to know is if you give it
a good honest serious test. If you don’t give it that test, then all the sufferings of
life begin to move in on you. They don’t promise a way out at all. The denial of
any way out: that’s what’s so insistent about the way life normally is. And that
defilements that go along with that denial are what keep us trapped.
So we owe it to our desire for happiness to give the path a serious try. And to
try to develop whatever qualities are needed to see us through.

291
 Inconstancy
January 16, 2009

One of the basic principles of insight or clear seeing is that all compounded
or all fabricated things are inconstant. They don’t last. They waiver. They change.
And as someone once said, So what else is new? Things change. And if that’s all
there was to the Buddha’s insight, there wouldn’t be much to it. But it goes
deeper than that. It’s not just that things change, but that things change in line
with their conditions. And you want to be able to see that changing in line with
their conditions—in other words, to see that this arises when that arises, this
ceases when that ceases.
Even that’s not much of an insight until you realize that we’re also trying to
feed in those areas where things arise and pass away. We’re looking for our
happiness there. And if we look for happiness in these things in and of
themselves, we’re going to be disappointed. And if we can’t figure out the
pattern, we are going to be neurotic.
I once read about a test they ran on some pigeons. They put each of them in a
box and in each box there was a green lever and a red lever. In some of the boxes,
when you pushed the green lever, you’d get food; and sometimes when you
pushed it, you wouldn’t get food. Sometimes when you pushed the red lever,
you’d get food and sometimes you wouldn’t. Then they compared the birds in
these boxes with another set of birds placed in boxes where the levels behaved in
a predictable way: When you pushed the green level, you’d food; when you
pushed the red level, you wouldn’t. The birds in the second set of boxes were
perfectly normal. The birds in the first set of boxes went crazy and began
behaving in very neurotic ways—for two reasons. One was the only way they
were going to get food was by pressing levers. And yet, two, they couldn’t figure
out when a lever was going to work and when it wasn’t. That drove them to
distraction.
So as long as we’re looking for food in things that arise and pass away, we’ve
got to learn the pattern of how we’re going to get good food for the mind from
these arising-and-passing-away things. This is part of the Buddha’s other insight
into inconstancy: that even though some things arise and pass away and can’t
give an ultimate happiness in and of themselves, they do function as a path to the
ultimate happiness, whereas other things don’t. This is the pattern. The things
that can function as a path to true happiness are skillful. Those that don’t are
unskillful. An important part of insight is learning, through observation, which

292
is which.
So we look for inconstancy not just to see how things arise and pass away,
but how we can learn how to manipulate the process so we can actually find the
food that we want, and ultimately, of course, get to the point where we don’t
need food anymore. But the only way you get to that point is by feeding on the
right things. This is why we meditate.
When you start out meditating, and you see that states in your mind are
arising and passing away, you’re already dealing in what’s called the frame of
reference of mental qualities in and of themselves. Even though your focus is on
the breath, you can’t help but notice that there are times when the mind is
concentrated on the breath and times when it’s not. You’ve got to learn how to
figure out both sides of the question: which things are helping to foster
concentration, and which things are getting in the way of concentration. And
you have to learn how to encourage the first sort of conditions, and get rid of the
second.
So even though we’re focusing on the breath as our primary frame of
reference, there’s this other frame of reference going on at the same time. You
have to learn how to recognize which qualities are hindrances and which are the
factors for awakening. The hindrances are the primary set of unskillful qualities;
the factors for awakening are the primary skillful ones. In fact, the factors of
awakening are the ones that get you started on this path to begin with, for they
help you in sorting all of these things out.
The factors for awakening begin with mindfulness. Once you’re mindful of
the breath, for instance, you begin to see that there are skillful and unskillful
qualities arising in the mind and that you’ve got to learn how to distinguish
them. That’s called analysis of qualities, the second factor for awakening. Then
you foster the effort to do away with the unskillful ones and to encourage the
skillful ones, which is the third factor for awakening: persistence. So right there
you’ve got the first three of the factors for awakening. You want to encourage
that ability to observe your mind, because even though you’re trying to stay with
the breath, or trying to stay focused on the breath, you’re not going to be able to
do it unless you’ve got these other faculties helping you along. As Ajaan Lee
explains it, analysis of qualities is directly connected with directed thought and
evaluation, which are factors of jhana. Those are things you need to help you get
into the meditation, to get solidly with the breath.
So you’re dealing with two different frames of reference right there: the body
in and of itself and these mental qualities in and of themselves. So when any of
the hindrances arise—sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and
anxiety, or uncertainty—your first duty is simply to recognize them for what they
are, to see that they are hindrances and they deserve to be let go. That right there

293
is quite an accomplishment because for the most part, when a hindrance arises,
we’re already with it. We’re on its side.
For example, when sensual desire comes along, we see it as a good thing.
We’ve got decades of Western psychology to prove that sensual desire can’t be
thwarted. If you thwart it, it turns into The Thing and goes underground. At least
that’s what the mind tells itself when it decides it’s going to go along with the
desire. There are all kinds of reasons the mind can produce for its actions, but
you’ve got to learn how to look past them and ask yourself, “What does this
desire actually do to the mind?” This is not just a matter of watching it arise and
pass away. You’ve got to see, when it arises, what does it bring along with it?
What does it do? When it passes away, what’s it like? And you begin to realize
when it’s present it really does cloud up the mind. It creates a lot of disturbance,
a lot of stress, makes it impossible to stay with the breath. And you’ve got to
decide whether you’re on the side of the sensual desire or on the side of the
breath.
The same goes with ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety,
uncertainty and doubt. You’ve got to decide whether you’re on their side or on
the side of the breath. And the best way to decide is just to watch these things,
step back from them. Ask yourself, when they come, what comes along with
them? When they go away, what goes away with them? And when they come,
why do they come? What intentions underlie them? Can you trust those
intentions?
At this stage in the practice, this is how you use the principle of inconstancy:
not just watching things arise and pass away, arise and pass away—because, after
all, you’re trying to feed in these areas, so you want to find good food for
yourself. What kind of food do the hindrances provide? If they give you bad food,
poisonous food, spoiled food, what can you do to clear them out of the mind? So
you’re not engaged in just a passive watching. You watch with a purpose. You
want to get past these things.
A similar principle applies to the factors for awakening. Once you’ve
analyzed things and seen what’s skillful and unskillful, you’ve got to figure out
why it is that the skillful qualities arise; when they’re there, how you protect
them, how you maintain them—in Ajaan Fuang’s words, how you “prakhawng”
them. The Thai word prakhawng means that you nurture them along, protect
them, support them.
So even though you know that they’re inconstant, you try to use the principle
of inconstancy—i.e., seeing that they depend on causes and conditions—in order
to nurture those conditions because you know you’re going to depend on them.
These qualities are going to be your food on the path, the good kind of food that
strengthens the mind.

294
 The Buddha compares the states of jhana to different kinds of food. You’re
off in a fortress at the edge of a frontier. The enemy is all around you, but you’ve
got food in the fortress, so even though the enemy is laying siege, you still can
stay well fed, strong, and keep up the fight. You’ve got water, rice, sesame seeds,
all sorts of good food, all the way up to the fourth jhana, which is compared to
butter, ghee, sugar, and honey.
And because these things are good food, you don’t just watch them arise and
pass away. You do what you can to grow the food and then to keep the food
because without it, the practice dies. Only when you’ve used that food to
strengthen your concentration, strengthen your insight, strengthen the
tranquility of the mind can you get to the point where you’ve fully mastered that
process of cause and effect. That’s when you turn to look at it and see, “How far
does it take me?” It’s brought you a long way, but it can take you only so far.
You’re not yet at the other shore. That’s when you start looking at everything in
terms of arising and passing away, and try to develop the dispassion that comes
from not wanting to eat any of these things, even good food, anymore. The
Buddha uses the word nibbida, which means disenchantment but also disgust,
distaste. You’ve had enough of that food. That’s when you can let go of
everything. That’s when there’s final release.
This is the stage where you treat all compounded things in the same way,
whether they’re obstacles or part of the path, because you don’t need to feed
anymore. The mind doesn’t have any hunger. But as long as it still does have
hunger, your relationship to inconstancy is going to be different. You want to be
like those healthy well-adjusted pigeons, knowing which lever gives food and
which lever gives no food, or which lever gives good food and which lever gives
bad. When you figure it out, you can really nurture yourself, really nourish
yourself. Then the mind stays strong.
So there are many stages in this understanding of inconstancy. Not just, “Oh,
I saw concentration last night and I saw that it was inconstant, so I let it go and
that was that. What’s next?” That kind of insight goes nowhere. The insight that
does go somewhere is the insight that sees, “Oh, when this arises, it arises because
of this. When it passes away, it passes away because of that.” And if the “this” is a
skillful quality, you want to nurture it. If it’s an unskillful quality, you want to
figure out the principle of cause and effect so you can stay away, let these things
go. Because you still need to feed properly. You’ve got to take care of yourself.
You still have those four duties with regard to the four noble truths. The path is
to be developed. Suffering is to be comprehended. The causes of suffering are to
be abandoned, so that the cessation of suffering can be realized. So for the time
being, you use the principle of inconstancy to figure out what are the causes for
the path, and how you keep them going, even though they are inconstant.

295
 It’s only when you get to the end of the path that the duties change. Ajaan
Mun makes an interesting point. He says, there comes a point in the meditation
where all four noble truths are one. What he means is they all come to have the
same duty, whether it’s stress or the path or whatever. It’s all compounded. It’s all
inconstant. It’s all to be abandoned.
But as you practice you need to know where you are in the practice and what
the duties appropriate to that stage in the practice are. That’s how you use insight
into inconstancy with wisdom and discernment, so the teaching fulfills its
intended purpose.

296
 The Will to Awaken
January 22, 2009

There’s a passage where the Buddha describes his knowledge of the fate of
other people, or the destinations of other people. He says it’s like watching a man
walking along a path that doesn’t fork off in any other direction. It goes straight
to one destination. And the Buddha notes that if the man continues to follow
that path, he’s going to end up at that destination. Notice: It’s contingent on the
man’s continuing on that path. After all, he might choose not to follow that path.
He might change his mind, turn around.
There’s another passage where the Buddha is asked, “Is the whole world
going to release? Half the world? A third?” And he refuses to answer. Ananda,
who’s afraid that the man who asked the question is going to get upset, takes the
man aside and says, “It’s like a gatekeeper to a fortress. There’s only one gate to
the fortress. The gatekeeper walks around the fortress and he doesn’t see even the
slightest opening in the fortress wall, not even one big enough for a cat to slip
through. So he comes to the conclusion—he doesn’t know how many people are
going to come in to the fortress, how many people will leave the fortress—but he
does know that if they’re going to come in or leave, they have to go through the
gate. Again, the point here is that we have the choice to go into the gate or not go
into the gate. It’s up to us. It’s a free choice. It’s not imposed on us by our nature.
We have to will it.
To get on the path to Awakening, you have to desire it. It’s an act of will. It’s
a truth of the will. William James talks about two kinds of truths: truths of the
observer and truths of the will. A truth of the observer is the type where you see
cause and effect that are totally independent of your desire for them to be in a
certain way: knowledge about astronomy, say, or about the laws of nature. You
have to take your desire out of the equation if you’re going to see these truths.
You have to be, as much as possible, a non-interfering observer. You interfere a
little bit here and there in order to test cause and effect, to see exactly what cause
is connected to what effect, but you have to accept the results whether you like
them or not. If your likes get in the way, you’re not really going to see those
truths.
Truths of the will, however, are a different matter entirely. You have to want
them to be true in order for them to become true. If you’re going to become a
good pianist, a good carpenter, you have to want those things in order for them
to happen. It helps if you have some natural inclination in that direction or some

297
natural talents. But to be really good, you have to have a strong desire. Without
that desire, they’re not going to happen. In this case, your likes and dislikes are
important. They’re actually a part of the truth.
This is the way it is with the path. We’re not here just simply watching things
passively. What we’re learning is not a truth of the observer, it’s a truth of the
will. Awakening is something that has to be pursued. The deathless, of course, is
not created by your desire. But the path is. It’s something fabricated.
When you look at the qualities that lead to awakening—things like the ten
perfections—they come under the headings of what the Buddha talks of as the
adhitthana dhamma, things that are willed. There are actually four: discernment,
truth, relinquishment, and peace or calming. All of these are things that we have
to will in order to find them.
Now the problem with will of course is it can be blind, which is why
discernment comes first. You want to will discernment for it to happen. It’s not a
question of whether you’re born smart or not smart. It comes from developing
two qualities. One is having conviction. Again this is where that issue of the truth
of the will comes in. You have to be convinced that this is a worthwhile activity:
trying to develop your discernment, trying to find awakening. You have to be
convinced that it’s possible. If you don’t believe it’s possible, it’s not going to
happen. It’s like the person stuck in the woods. If you don’t believe that there’s a
path out of the woods, you’re not going to try to look for it. If you don’t try to
look for it, you’re not going to find it.
So conviction that your actions really do make a difference, conviction that
the Buddha really did gain awakening: these are an important part of
discernment. The five strengths that end in discernment begin with conviction.
As one of the ajaans in Thailand once said, it’s not the case that discernment
begins with perceptions or ideas or concepts. It begins with conviction, that there
is a way out, and that it can be found through your own actions.
The other aspect of discernment is that you see what the important questions
are. As the Buddha said, the big question is seeing where there’s suffering, where
there’s stress, what’s causing it, and what actions put an end to it. Those are the
important questions in life. When you learn how to focus on those, it cuts
through a lot of garbage. And then when you look at what qualities need to be
developed in order to put an end to suffering, you find that they’re also qualities
required to improve your discernment. You need to develop more mindfulness,
more alertness, more concentration. And part of that quest for the end of
suffering involves goodwill—goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people
around you—because you realize that if your happiness depends on their
suffering, it’s not going to happen. They’re going to try to block it or undo it. So
you have to find a happiness that’s harmless to everybody.

298
 So that’s the first thing you will: the will to discernment. It helps you see
what goal is a good goal, and also what is clearly a good way to attain that goal.
You’re going to have to learn a lot of this path on your own as you go along. It’s
something you discover. All too often we read a book saying what it’s going to be
like: You’re going to gain this insight, and then that insight. The problem is,
when you’ve read those descriptions, you can force the mind in such a position
that it starts having those insights. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re
true, that they’re genuine insights. You have to learn how to be more observant
on your own, more alert, to see what insights actually bring freedom from
suffering. This means you have to look all around you, and all around your
insights.
As Ajaan Lee once said, when you gain an insight, you have to turn it over to
see to what extent it really is true, to what extent it’s false, to what extent the
opposite would be true. Only then can you know that you’re not just
programming yourself or trying to clone what you’ve read. Again that would be a
case of trying to make your discernment grow from your concepts, as opposed to
the conviction there’s got to be a way out. You’ve got to find that way for
yourself, with the Buddha’s directions of course, but it’s based on your own
powers of mindfulness and alertness so you catch yourself to make sure that your
defilements don’t get in the way. So that’s how we will discernment.
The next thing we will is truthfulness. Part of truthfulness is the quality of
self-honesty. As the Buddha said, “Let a person comes who is honest and no
deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” This is the first prerequisite for
getting on the path: to be truthful. This doesn’t mean just telling the truth, but
also means deciding which you’ve got to do and sticking with it, being true to
your intentions. This is where the precepts or virtue as a perfection comes in.
Once you’ve realized that you don’t want to harm anybody, you’ve got to follow
through and really abstain from activities that are harmful, whether it’s easy to
abstain or not. Discernment helps here, in its practical mode. When you find that
a precept goes against your desires, you’ve got to use your discernment to find
ways of making yourself want to stick with it, making it easier to stick with it,
learning to cast a jaundiced eye on your desires, realizing that they promise all
kinds of things, but can you really trust them? You use your discernment to stay
true to your intention and to find skillful ways of taking the wind out of the sails
of your unskillful desires. That way you can hang on to what you know is really
in your best interests, and in the best interests of the people around you.
The third thing that we have to will is relinquishment, learning how to let
go. This is where the perfections of renunciation and giving come in. Giving here
means giving away not only material things, but also our unskillful desires,
giving up our unskillful ways of holding onto things. Sometimes it comes

299
naturally, easily, and sometimes it doesn’t. And again this is where you need to
use your discernment, learning strategies to make you more and more inclined to
give up things you have to give up, things that get in the way, the lesser pleasures
that get in the way of greater happiness.
This is not a matter of just giving up things that are obviously unskillful. I
did a survey once on the topic of relinquishment in books of American
Buddhism. In the few cases where they actually talk about relinquishment, they
focus on relinquishing unhealthy relationships and relinquishing your
controlling mindset. We don’t really need the Buddha tell you relinquish those
things. Your parents can tell you to relinquish unhealthy relationships. If you
have a psychotherapist, the therapist will tell you to relinquish your controlling
mindset. There are a lot of things that are really pleasurable, that society actually
encourages you to look for, But the Buddha says, look, you’ve got to give them
up as they lead to unhealthy attachments down the line. Your attachment to
sensual pleasures and sensual desires: that’s the big one. Your attachment to
thoughts about, plans about sensual pleasures. That’s what you have to learn how
to renounce.
An important step is learning to see the rewards of renunciation. It’s not
going to leave you deprived. It really is restful to the mind. It really gives peace to
the mind. There’s a famous story about the monk, a former king, sitting in the
forest exclaiming, “What bliss! What bliss!” And it turns out he’s not pining after
the joys he felt when he was a king before he became a monk. He’s exclaiming
over how blissful he is now that he can sit under the tree without having to worry
about all the people who wanted to kill him when he was a king, all the people
who wanted to take away his pleasures and wealth. That’s one of the pleasures of
renunciation, that sense of freedom, and nobody’s going to try to steal that from
you. And as the monk said to the Buddha, his mind was now like a wild deer: It
was free. You’ve got to learn how to think in those ways when the desire for
sensuality really gets strong, to see that when you can renounce it, you’re free.
And again you have to will that. It doesn’t come naturally. As the Buddha
once said, even he didn’t find it easy to will renunciation. His mind didn’t leap
up at the idea. But his desire for a deathless happiness was strong enough and he
coupled it with the discernment that could help him find ways of reasoning with
his mind, find tactics for giving the mind pleasures that didn’t have to depend on
sensuality—primarily the pleasure of jhana, the pleasure of concentration. When
you have an alternative source of pleasure like that, you realize that you’re
trading candy for gold. But the ability to make that trade is something you have
to will.
The fourth thing is peace. The Pali word upasama also means stilling, or
calm. And there are two perfections that are associated with that: patience and

300
equanimity. The word patience can also mean endurance: the ability to put up
with difficult things. Here again you use your discernment to find strategies to
strengthen that ability. One of the primary strategies is learning not to focus on
the difficulty but to find ways of encouraging yourself, giving yourself energy.
This is closely related to relinquishment and renunciation. You learn how to see
the areas, the advantages of enduring. The mind becomes stronger, it can live in
more difficult situations. It’s not such a slave to its desires as it was before. There’s
a freedom that comes with endurance.
And equanimity, too, is something you have to will—the ability to stay
unperturbed with the things you like and the things you don’t like; not getting
excited when things go well, not getting depressed when they don’t. In other
words, you train yourself to have a certain amount of independence.
Discernment is needed to perfect and understand this quality, and the
equanimity helps foster the discernment, allowing you to see things more clearly,
as well. The two qualities go hand-in-hand. There are times in the meditation
where you do simply have to sit and watch. Some of your defilements really will
go away just when you watch them—but not all of them. One of the points of
developing equanimity is so you begin to see where the difference lies.
So the Buddha is not recommending a blanket passivity here. He’s telling
you to develop equanimity when it’s appropriate. You develop equanimity when
you need to see things that you don’t yet understand. When you understand,
sometimes equanimity is still appropriate, and sometimes you need to do
something more forceful to deal with the problem at hand.
All of these are things we have to will if we want to make progress on the
path. The if there is important. We’re free to will these qualities, we’re free not to.
This is why the Buddha never talked about Buddha nature, the idea that
somehow our inherent nature is going to lead us to awakening. We do have
freedom though, the freedom to choose. And the Buddha was a great respecter of
that freedom. It’s a little scary to think about the fact that awakening is not
inevitable, for it’s so easy to fall off the path. Sometimes the idea of inevitable
awakening is much more reassuring—but it will make us complacent, which is
precisely the quality that will lead us astray. We need to develop the heedfulness
that comes when we realize that we are free to choose, that we can make right
choices and wrong choices, and that we have to live with the consequences. This
is why the Buddha said that heedfulness is what lies at the basis of all that is
skillful. So try to develop that and learn how to live with that and not get scared
by it; learn how to make it energizing, so that it keeps you alert while at the same
time developing the sense of patience and equanimity, the calm that protects the
effort of the path so that it doesn’t get you all frazzled and worn out.
So these are the qualities that we will on the path. These are the qualities that

301
lead to awakening. If we learn how to respect our freedom, then that puts us on
the path so that we understand what’s going on. Ultimately, of course, all of these
qualities will bring us to something that’s not willed at all, but we’re not going to
really see it, we’re not going to be able to test it and understand what’s willed and
what’s not willed until we learn to understand our will very thoroughly—how far
it goes, what subtle levels of willing can happen in the mind. In other words, we
have to push the envelope of our will.
So ultimately this truth of the will does finally lead to something totally
unwilled. This is one of the paradoxes of the teaching, but one that the Buddha is
very upfront about—you’re looking for something unfabricated, but you have to
fabricate the path. As he said, the highest of all fabrications—which is another
word for the highest of all things you can will—is the noble eightfold path. There
is a dhamma higher than that—totally unwilled—which is dispassion, the rest
that comes when you’ve succeeded in putting in the energy that’s needed to will
the path in a skillful way.
What this means is that the choice is up to us—which path we’re going to
follow—for there are many paths. There is a path that leads to hell. There’s a path
that leads to the animal rebirth. There is a path that leads to the human rebirth,
and divine birth, and there is a path that leads to total awakening. The Buddha
set them all out. But it’s up to us to choose.

302
 The Limits of Old Kamma
January 29, 2009

Focus your attention on the breath and see how it feels. Where do you notice
it in the body first? Where does it seem most prominent? You might notice the
passage of the air through the nostrils, the rise and fall of the chest, the expansion
of the rib cage: There are lots of different places in the body where you can sense
the movement of the breath. Whichever area seems most prominent, focus there.
And notice if the breath feels comfortable there. If it doesn’t, you can let it
change. Let it be longer or shorter, or think of it as becoming longer or shorter.
You don’t have to make it be that way or force it to be that way. Just pose that
thought in mind: What would longer breathing be like? And you’ll find the body
will breathe longer. What would shorter breathing be like? Heavier, lighter,
faster, slower? Explore the possibilities of the breath right now. Think of the
breathing as a whole-body process and see what that does to your sense of what
kind of breathing feels best or what the body needs in terms of the breath.
Sometimes it needs to be energized, sometimes relaxed. Get a sense of the breath
potentials right now.
We’re sitting here with lots of different potentials—potentials in the body,
potentials in the mind. As we meditate we explore to see which potentials lead to
the greatest happiness, the greatest pleasure. Allow the breath to be pleasurable
and also notice what your mind is doing, what potentials you have in your mind:
What thoughts could you be thinking right now? What qualities could you
develop? At the moment we’re trying to emphasize the thoughts that focus you
on the breath in the present moment; and we’re trying to be inquisitive, trying to
learn about the breath.
Those two factors—thinking of the breath or focusing on the breath, and
being inquisitive—count as directed thought and evaluation, two of the factors of
jhana. Use them to see how you can stay with the breath in a way that feels
comfortable, giving rise to feelings of refreshment and pleasure. And as you
probe and explore, you begin to realize that there is this potential right here for
the body to feel comfortable from the inside, for the mind to be willing to settle
down. There are lots of other potentials you could have focused on right now,
but you don’t have to. Make the most of your freedom to focus on your ability to
expand skillful potentials.
Occasionally you’ll find yourself running up against some blockages, or pains

303
that, no matter how skillfully you breathe, are going to stay as pains. Or there
may be some chatter away in the mind that won’t go away. You don’t have to
focus on it; just let it be there in the background. But it does impinge a little bit
on your awareness.
In other words, you find yourself running up against old karma obstructions.
Fortunately, though, the present moment is not totally shaped by old karma. If it
were there’d be no point in practicing. There’d be nothing you could do.
Everything would be determined by something that went before, which of course
would have been determined by something that went before that and on back in
an infinite regress. This is why the Buddha rejected the idea that everything was
determined by a creator, or everything was determined by old karma. Otherwise
the practice would be pointless.
But it’s not pointless. We do have a measure of freedom here in the present
moment. There may be some restrictions that come from past karma, but you can
learn to work around them. This is a principle that applies across the board in the
practice, not just while you’re sitting here meditating, but in your activities
throughout daily life. You find yourself running up against difficulties that, no
matter how skillfully you try to respond to them, are still there. You have the
choice of focusing on the difficulties to the point where you can’t do anything
about them, and get more and more entrapped and frustrated by them. Or if you
try to ignore them and pretend they’re not there, that doesn’t work either. So
you’ve got to find another approach. And fortunately, the best approach is always
possible.
The present moment is a limited moment but it does have its openings. It
does have its potentials. The wise approach is to admit the limitations but also to
want to explore the potentials for what’s skillful. If you have certain
responsibilities, learn how to carry them out but at the same time, you’re
working on the qualities of the mind. That’s what the Buddhist teachings about
the paramis or the perfections are all about. Even as you go through your
everyday responsibilities, you have the opportunity to develop good qualities of
mind—patience, persistence, determination, truthfulness.
Some of us have a romantic notion about the ideal situation to meditate.
You’re off by yourself. No responsibilities at all. Totally free to meditate all day
long. But even in places like that, you find there are limitations, difficulties. And
if the meditation is not going well, what do you have to blame it on? Can’t blame
it on anybody else. It’s just yourself. I know a lot of monks who’ve been out in
the forest. They say sometimes they can go for months and months and months
with no progress in the meditation. So it’s not the case that going off alone and
having no responsibilities is going to solve everything. If you do have
responsibilities, remind yourself that you don’t have to carry them around in the

304
mind all the time. Your outside work is your outside work. Your inside work can
always keep going on—learning patience, learning to have a good humor about
the whole thing.
A couple years back, we had a problem in the electric room here. The county
inspector came and said that it was totally unacceptable. Everything was going to
have to be torn out and redone within just a few days. So a couple of the
Americans came and worked on it and complained the entire time about how
difficult it was, how much they were having to do without sleep, and just on and
on and on. And it wasn’t helping the job at all. I kept thinking about how things
were over in Thailand when we’d have difficulties like that. People there seem to
have a much better humor about things. They seem to have a better
understanding of the perfections, that even when things are difficult outside or
inside, you’ve got the opportunity to develop good qualities of mind. Whatever
the situation, you want to figure out the skillful way to approach it so that you
minimize the difficulties and maximize your potentials for freedom.
If you’re dealing with more than just present responsibilities—say, with the
results of past mistakes where you’ve harmed people—the same principle applies.
You admit the mistakes. You admit the limitations that they place on you now,
but then you try to work around them. Don’t let yourself be hemmed in by your
past mistakes or be hemmed in by your past karma, because these things don’t
have to totally shape the present moment. We have some freedom right here,
right now, and a lot of the practice is learning how to recognize that fact and
maximize it to get the best use out of it.
Because all the aspects of the path are possible, whatever the limitations from
your past karma are. You can learn how to be generous. You can learn how to be
virtuous. You can learn how to develop good qualities of mind. When you’ve
made a mistake, you admit the fact. And you say, “I’m going to learn from that.
I’m not going to repeat that mistake.” And that’s as far as you have to go. You
don’t have to punish yourself, that somehow by feeling really, really sorry the
punishment will go away. That’s a dog’s way of thinking. It knows it’s done
something bad. It gets on its back and wags its tail and looks really sorry, and
hopes that by doing that it’s going to appease you. But you’re not a dog. You’re a
human being. As a human being, all you’re asked is to recognize the mistake,
resolve not repeat it, and then try to develop goodwill for yourself and for
everybody else—for the people you’ve already wronged, for the people you might
potentially wrong in the future. Spread goodwill to them, maintain that attitude
of goodwill, and you’ll be less likely to wrong them.
Or even just the fact that you’re sitting here in a human body: That has its
limitations but it has its potentials as well. If you’re feeling trapped in the body,
ask yourself, “Why are you trapped?” Well, you have this perception that it’s you

305
or it’s yours. You picked up the perception because there were times when it felt
useful to identify with the body. It was a means for gaining pleasure. But now
you’re beginning to realize that identifying with the body has its drawbacks as
well. As you get older, illness comes. Pains come. Even just the illness of hunger,
the Buddha said, is the foremost illness. That’s something we all suffer from every
day, every day. This is why we have the reflection on the four requisites. If we
didn’t have food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, the body would die. We’re
born with these gaping needs.
But at the same time, you can learn how to use the body as a basis for the
practice. You can focus on the breath. As you get more and more sensitive to the
breath, you can use the breath as a mirror for the mind. If you get into difficult
situations with other people, you’ll notice that there will be a change in your
breath. What can you do to work with the breath in a way that you’re focused
not on the difficulties posed by that other person, but on the fact that you can
still maintain your evenness of mind regardless of the situation outside? You can
use the breath to help you with that.
As you work with the breath, you begin to see the power of your perceptions
in that the way you conceive of the breath is going to have an influence on how
you actually breathe. If you think of the body as a big solid that you’ve got to
push the breath through—it feels like this big lump of fat sitting here and you’re
trying to force air through the fat—it just doesn’t work. It’s laborious. It’s tiring.
But if you perceive the body as an energy field—when you breathe in, it’s just
more energy joining with the energy already there—it all flows in smoothly, and
you don’t have to push anything through anything else. It changes the way you
breathe, changes the sensation of the breath.
As you think of all the different energy channels in the body connecting
together, it gets easier and easier for you not to have to breathe at all. The
different parts of the body aren’t fighting with one another. Your pores feel open.
The breath comes in, goes out. Everything feels connected. Everything is charged
with breath energy to the point where the breath gets more and more gentle,
more and more gentle, and finally grows still. A lot of this has to do with the
perception you hold in mind.
You begin to realize, as the sense of boundary around the body begins to
dissolve, that your perception of being in the body was something you’ve chosen
to do. You’re not really trapped in the body. You’ve trapped yourself, but you can
free yourself. You can focus on space: around the body, permeating throughout
the body, between all the atoms. You can focus on the awareness that
encompasses everything. Your sense of what’s happening in the body is going to
change. And that’s just a concentration practice. But the potential for
experiencing infinite space or the potential for experiencing infinite

306
consciousness is all right here. You learn how to ferret it out and make the most
of it.
So this is how we live with our past karma: Accept whatever limitations there
are, but also look for the areas that are not limited, to see in which direction
freedom lies. This means that when you’re accepting the situation in the present,
it’s partly accepting the limitations and learning how to be equanimous about
them, but also accepting that there are lots of potentials for freedom here. If you
really want true happiness, you try to make the most of those. The Dhamma is
not for people who want to be told they just have to accept the way things are,
and that’ll be totally fine. The Dhamma doesn’t stop right there, because the
present moment is not always a wonderful moment. It can be pretty miserable.
Ask the victims of torture, of natural disasters. But even in extremely miserable
situations, the same principle holds: You accept your limitations but you also
accept that there are potentials for freedom, potentials for true happiness that can
be developed. There’s work to be done but it’s good work, regardless of the
situation. If you keep that attitude in mind you can practice the Dhamma and
benefit from the Dhamma wherever you are.

307
 The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
February 16, 2009

As you focus on the breath and stay with the breath, you’re developing good
qualities of mind: mindfulness, alertness. As you apply these qualities to the
process of breathing, you’ll see that it’s a kind of fabrication. There’s a willed and
intentional element in there. And because there’s an element of will, you can
change it. You can find ways of calming it down. This way you give rise to
discernment as well, leading to concentration. These two qualities – discernment
and concentration, as they’re supported by mindfulness and alertness – bring the
mind to greater and greater stillness, greater and greater clarity. So as we’re
working with the breath, we’re not just working with the breath. We’re also
gaining insight into the processes in the mind.
This is a very useful and important investment of our time and energy.
Sometimes you hear it said that when you meditate you’re not supposed to have
any sense of gaining or getting anything out of the meditation. But that teaching
is simply an antidote the impatience we normally bring to the meditation. You
do a little bit of meditation and you want to get lots and lots of results right
away. So you’ve got to learn how to put that attitude out of your mind. But, still,
there are returns, there are benefits that come from meditation. And it is an
investment—an investment in something reliable: these qualities of mind. They
stay with you whether the economy goes up, whether the economy goes down.
And whether the body gets healthier, gets sick, or when it dies, the qualities
you’ve invested in will stay with the mind.
And so, given the fact we have a limited amount of time, a limited amount of
energy, we want to make sure that we invest our time and energy in the most
reliable things. If you invest in your attachments, you’ll find that they give you
some support for a certain amount of time, and then they start changing on you.
As the Buddha said, everything fabricated – which means everything put together
by causes – is inconstant. When you find yourself latching on to something
inconstant, it can give you support only as long as it lasts, and then it’s going to
change. Even good qualities of the mind are inconstant, but the more you invest
in them, the longer their impact, the longer their ability to support you, all the
way through the process of aging, all the way through the process of illness, all
the way through the process of death. These things stay there. And they can help
you. The body is something you’re going to have to let go of, and eventually
you’re going to have to let go of your memories, your thoughts, everything

308
having to do with this life. At that point, the irrevocable quality of time really
pushes itself on you.
In terms of our day-to-day life, we tend to live in our narratives, our stories
about this person, and that person, and the relationships we have with them, the
things we’ve done. The reassuring quality of a narrative is that you can tell it
again and again and again, and it seems to put this constant flow of time at bay
for a while. But as things close down with the body, those narratives don’t
provide any help. In fact, they can make things even worse. The things you’re
going to miss, the things you’re going to regret having done, will come pressing
in on you. And you have to let go. If you haven’t had any practice in letting go,
it’s going to be hard.
So this is an important skill to invest in: learning how to let go. The Buddha
talks about different forms of wealth in the mind that you can invest in – in other
words, qualities you can develop that can see you through – and the ability to let
go is an important one.
Discernment is another. The Buddha had a very pragmatic approach to truth.
As we talk about the truth of our statements, the things that we say, to what
extent can you encompass the truth of the experience in words? Poets struggle
with this all the time, and are constantly admitting that words are poor when it
comes to capturing the actual experience of something. Pictures are a poor
rendition of experience. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, but it
can lie much more than a thousand words, too. What’s really real in life are the
processes happening right here, right now, the way we create words, the way we
use words, the way we use ideas, and then the impact they have in terms of
causing stress and suffering, or alleviating stress and suffering: That’s a truth,
that’s a reality, much truer than the words themselves.
So you want to focus on really getting in touch with that reality. This doesn’t
mean that words are totally false. They convey some truth, and they’re useful as
tools. The impact they have on the mind is real. You look at the story of the
Buddha’s Awakening. They say he had three knowledges in the course of that
night. The first was looking back on his past lifetimes. You think you have
narratives to deal with in your life: He suddenly remembered eons and eons of
narratives—where he had been, what he had been, his name, his appearance, the
food he ate, the pleasure and pains that he’d experienced in that life, and then
how he died. And then he moved on to another life, then another life.
But that knowledge wasn’t his Awakening. So he went on to the second
knowledge, which was knowledge of beings dying and being reborn all over the
cosmos. In other words, moving from his own personal narrative, he went to a
more general look at the cosmos as a whole, seeing that he wasn’t the only one
who was going through this process of repeated birth and death. Many, many

309
beings all the way from beings in hell, beings up to the various levels of heaven,
even Brahmas, in states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness,
neither perception nor non-perception: They are all dying and being reborn, and
moving around from level to level. Seeing all these movements, he was able to
see that there was a general principle to them all, by looking at the cosmos as a
whole. The general principle was that people suffered pleasure and pain because
of their actions – their intentions – which in turn were determined by their
views. If their views were wrong – in other words, if they felt that actions didn’t
have any impact, that it didn’t really matter what you did, what you said, what
you thought – they were going to suffer, because they were going to act on that
belief and suffer from their lack of skill. If they believed that their actions did
have an impact, were important, and it was important that you looked at your
intentions, at your actions, and at their results, they’d experience pleasure.
Even seeing that, though, still didn’t put an end to his own suffering. But it
did give him some clues. Views and intentions are important. And so in terms of
the third knowledge that night, he started looking at his views, looking at his
intentions, right in the present moment, seeing them as activities in the mind:
These intentions, based on a misunderstanding of what suffering is, where it
comes from, how it can be ended, lead to more suffering. The views that do
understand where suffering comes from, lead you to make the intention of the
path, to put an end to that suffering, based on correct understanding of how
you’ve got to look at the processes here in the present moment, particularly
seeing how craving arises and how the mind flows with the craving, from
moment to moment. As the Buddha later said, the way craving goes from
moment to moment in this lifetime is the same process that’s going to flow from
the last moment of this life to the first moment of the next.
So you’ve got your laboratory right here. We’re not concerned with what you
are; the concern is with what you do. And you can see that. What you are is an
abstraction, but what you can do is something you can watch right here, right
now. That’s something you can always watch if you have the intention and the
understanding that helps you realize that this is something important to look at.
Most of the time, though, we tend to look at other things. We get wound up in
all our other narratives, all our other views, which tend to deflect our intention
from the present moment. The mind is like a politician: The politician is doing
his dirty work, but he keeps diverting our attention, pointing out that “Those
other people are horrible; look at those horrible things other people are doing.”
But if you keep looking right here, right here, right here, staying with the breath,
then because the breath is the closest thing to the mind, you begin to see the
movements of the mind. You see how they cause suffering, and how they can put
an end to suffering. That understanding is real. That process is something you

310
really see and it really happens. That’s something you know for sure.
William James, the philosopher, talks about what’s called a pragmatic
approach to truth. You realize that the truth of a statement can only be
approximate: Words can never give a totally comprehensive account of reality.
But watching the mind in the process of creating a statement, watching it in the
process of creating any of its views about reality, you see that it really does have
an impact. So the statement – even though it may only be an approximate truth –
does lead to a certain type of action, and the action leads to certain type of result,
which you can experience directly. The experience of that process is a truth of a
different order.
So it’s important that you learn how to develop the ideas that will lead you to
act in ways that put an end to suffering. If you encounter any idea that leads to
more suffering, more ignorance, more craving, you don’t have to hold onto it.
You can let it go.
So as we’re sitting here, trying to stay focused on the breath and noticing
when the mind wanders off: That ability to drop a thought mid-sentence, drop a
thought even when it’s all loose ends, is an important skill. You catch yourself in
the middle of creating a little reality there but then you can reestablish your
frame of reference in the present moment. You get more and more skillful at
letting go, able to catch yourself in these various processes more and more
quickly, and you gain a deeper understanding of why you go for these things. All
of these skills are going to stand you in good stead. They’re good skills to invest
in.
So you need to make the time—the time isn’t going to happen on its own,
you know—you have to make the time to practice. Create the time to practice.
Open that space in your life, so you can invest that time in the skills that are
really going to be helpful all the way through. Because suffering is real – but the
end of suffering is also real. That’s why the time spent investing in understanding
these things, mastering the skills for putting an end to suffering, is time well
spent. You suffer less. The people around you suffer less as well. As you go
through the process of aging, illness, and death, if you can manage your mind,
the other problems that come up are going to be minor.
So this is the Buddha’s investment strategy – invest in good qualities of the
mind, develop a mind that you can trust not to go flailing around when things
get difficult. That’s the wisest investment of all.

311
 A Soiled, Oily Rag
(Three Perceptions in Context)

April 20, 2009

Back when I was with Ajaan Fuang—this is after I had started translating
some of Ajaan Lee’s books and sending them around—a group of people in
Singapore who had received some of the books started a correspondence. One of
the first letters we got from one of the members of the group was from a bank
official who was saying that his practice of meditation was to see everything in
terms of the three characteristics, that everything was inconstant, stressful and
not-self. Whether he was at work, meditating, watching the TV, whatever, he was
trying to see everything in terms of those three characteristics.
I read this to Ajaan Fuang, translating it for him. And he said, “Write back
and tell him to look at what it is that’s saying those things are inconstant,
stressful and not-self, because the problem lies with that part of the mind.” In
other words, just seeing those things in terms of those three perceptions is not
enough. We have to use those perceptions within the larger context for the
practice, which is the four noble truths. Turn around and look at what it is that
wants to crave those things, wants to desire those things. Because the reason we
look at them as inconstant, stressful and not-self, is to remind us that you can’t
find any true happiness in them. They change. They’re stressful while they
change. And you don’t have any ultimate control over them, so why would you
want to try to build a happiness based on those things? What kind of happiness
could you get based on those things? It’s bound to wobble. It’s bound to fall
apart.
We have to keep hammering this message into the mind because it’s always
looking for happiness in terms of those things. And you have to keep reminding
it, No, that’s not where happiness is found. For happiness to be true it would
have to be something long-term with no stress, and not outside of your control.
These are the reflections that lead to the question that the Buddha said is the
beginning of wisdom: What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and
happiness? My—long-term—welfare and happiness. The three perceptions are
related to those three parts of that question. If something is inconstant, it can’t be
long-term. If it’s stressful, it can’t be your ultimate welfare and happiness. And if
it lies outside of your control, it’s not yours.
So you’re trying to train that part of the mind that’s looking for happiness

312
there. You’re trying to develop a sense of dispassion around the raw materials
from which you usually build your sense of the world, your sense of who you are,
and the happiness that you’re going to find in the world. Ajaan Maha Boowa
compares these three perceptions to a stick for beating the hand of a mischievous
monkey who always likes to grab things. As it reaches out to grab something, you
hit it with a stick and say, No. It reaches out again, you hit it again. Until finally
it realizes it can’t hold onto those things.
When you see that these things can’t provide a true happiness, the other
question is: Where else are you going to look? This is where the role of conviction
in the practice comes: that if we learn how to let go of these things, there will be
a true happiness. In other words, you’re sticking with that original question:
What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? We’re not
giving up on the idea of true happiness. We’re not saying, “Well, I guess I should
just accept things as they are, and not try to have any unrealistic desires for
anything lasting or true.” That’s not the kind of teaching the Buddha would give.
He’s just telling us, “You’re looking in the wrong place.”
This is why the duty with regard to the first noble truth is that we should
comprehend it. We’re trying to comprehend what suffering is so that we can stop
looking to it for happiness, so that we can start looking someplace else.
To comprehend suffering includes comprehending what causes it. Because
suffering includes clinging that comes from a combination of clinging and
craving, you’ve got to look at why you want to continue to crave these things.
As Ajaan Suwat once said, we crave these things because we like them. Our
likes and dislikes get in the way. So look very carefully at what you actually get
out of these things. The Buddha said to look both for the arising and passing
away of these things, and then for their allure—the satisfaction, the gratification
you get out of them—as well as for their drawbacks. If there weren’t some allure,
you wouldn’t reach for them. You wouldn’t grab at them. You wouldn’t hold on.
And there are many things that we hold on to but we don’t like to admit that
we’re getting a certain amount of pleasure from them. Anger, for instance. Most
people say, “Oh, I don’t like my anger. I wish I could get rid of it.” Well, one
reason you can’t get rid of it is because there’s a part of the mind that is actually
getting a little bit of food, a little bit of nourishment out of the anger. There’s
some enjoyment that comes with the anger. And if you don’t ferret out that part
of the mind and see what that enjoyment is, you’ll never be able to let go.
So that’s an important part of comprehending the stress and suffering: to see
what incites you to cling in the first place, to keep holding on and to hold on
again and again even as these things keep slipping out of your grasp.
Now to do this, you’ve got to observe the other duties that go along with the

313
four noble truths. In other words, as you’re learning to comprehend suffering,
there should come a point when the mind realizes: This is not worth it. The
image the Buddha gives is of a blind man who has been given a soiled oily rag.
The person giving it to him tells him that it’s a clean white rag, so the blind man
is very protective of it. He folds it up, and takes very good care of it because he
thinks it’s a nice white piece of cloth. Later, when he’s finally he is treated by a
doctor and gets his eyesight back, he can see what it really is: It’s just a soiled old
rag.
So this is why we try to comprehend the five aggregates, the six sense media
in terms of those three perceptions: to see that they’re just soiled old rags. At the
same time, we’re looking for where the gratification is in holding onto them—
our ignorant misunderstanding that they’re something of value. Then you want
to comprehend the drawbacks of craving these things until you really do develop
a sense of dispassion. With the dispassion, you start letting go of the craving.
That’s the second duty with regard to the noble truths: to let go of the cause of
suffering.
To get the mind in the right place to be able to do this and not feel
threatened by the idea of letting go, you develop the path, a healthy sense of self
that comes with virtue, the sense of well-being that comes with concentration
that also allows you to settle down and look at things clearly. You look first at
your other attachments—to things aside from the path—so that you’re ready for
the insight that sees, “Oh, this isn’t worth holding on to. All these things that I’ve
identified as me or mine: They’re just soiled, oily rags. Or like that Far Side
cartoon of a cow, out in the pasture with a lot of other cows. It suddenly jerks
back its head, with a startled look on its face, and it spits out a mouthful of grass,
saying, “Grass! This is just grass! We’ve been eating grass!” You see that the things
you’ve been holding on to are just that: grass. Nothing really worth holding on
to, especially considering all the effort that goes into trying to create a reliable
happiness out of these things.
Because ultimately that’s what it comes down to: Our attachment comes
from the belief that no matter how much effort goes into it, it’s worth it, because
the happiness outweighs the effort. But when you really look at these things
carefully, you begin to see, No, the effort way outweighs the little taste of
happiness, the little taste of pleasure that you get from holding on to these things.
And having the mind in a good solid state of concentration helps you see that
because you’ve got a more solid state of well-being, a more lasting sense of
pleasure, a well-being that can permeate the whole body, so that compared to the
pleasure and ease of concentration, these other pleasures are really not worth it.
Whereas the effort that goes into the concentration really does pay off.
So you work on developing that even further, until you get to the point

314
where you’re ready to let go of that too. You begin to see that even concentration
is composed of aggregates to which you’ve been holding on to. And the same
principle applies. These things arise and pass away too. They’re stressful.
Inconstant, stressful, and you see them as not-self. You’re not looking at this in
terms of some abstract theory of whether there is or is not a self. You’re looking
at where you’re feeding for your pleasure and you realize, even this is not worth
it. As the Buddha said, if the aggregates didn’t give some pleasure, we wouldn’t
hold on to them. We wouldn’t crave them. But we also have to see that there’s
stress involved in holding onto them as well. Once the aggregates as they have
been shaped into right concentration have done their work, you no longer need
the effort that goes into them. You can let them go. That’s when the mind opens
up to something that doesn’t require any effort at all: the ultimate happiness.
Notice that that’s not the ultimate equanimity. The Buddha never said
nirvana is the ultimate equanimity. He said it’s the ultimate happiness. You don’t
turn your mind into a resigned oatmeal kind of state. You find that by letting go,
things open up immensely. No limits of space or time. And no need to put in any
effort. As to whether you’d call that a self or not, you don’t want to call it a self,
you don’t want to say, there is no self, because that issue is totally irrelevant. One
of the ways of getting to that state is, as the Buddha said, to put aside your ideas
about existence or nonexistence by just watching things arising and passing away,
and seeing them simply as stress arising and passing away. You see that it’s just
that—stress, arising and passing away—so you can let go of it. You let go of any
attempt to build a happiness out of those things.
Having put the mind into a state where ideas of existence and nonexistence
are irrelevant, where they just don’t occur to you, there’s no reason why you’d
want to go around banging people over the head with the idea that there is no
self, say, or that there is a true transcendent self. There’s simply a dimension that
lies beyond even the concepts of existence and nonexistence, and it can be
experienced, it can be touched. That’s all that really matters. That’s the
attainment we’re working toward.
All these teachings have their strategic purpose. And it’s important that we
keep using them for their strategic purpose. We’re not here to argue, we are not
here to establish the one right view about reality. We’re here to find ways of
putting an end to suffering.
So remember those three perceptions. And that’s what the Buddha called
them, “perceptions”: the perception of inconstancy, the perception of stress, the
perception of not-self. He never called them characteristics. He never talked
about three characteristics. You do a search for the term, “three characteristics” in
the Pali Canon, and you’re not going to find it. The Buddha’s talking about a
way of perceiving that helps you see through your attachments, that helps you see

315
through your delusions about where you can find happiness, so that the question
that lies at the beginning of wisdom—What when I do it will lead to my true
long-term welfare and happiness?”—finally gets its answer in the skills you’ve
developed. And part of the strategy in mastering those skills is to master the tasks
that are appropriate to the four noble truths. That’s what we’re doing: We’re
working on those tasks so that we can handle them skillfully. We want to
skillfully comprehend stress and suffering, so we can understand why it is that we
keep feeding on these things, even though they ultimately lead to
disappointment. That helps us develop dispassion for the craving that keeps
pushing us in that direction, so that we can let it go. At the same time, we’re
developing the path that puts the mind in a position where it can do this without
feeling threatened, until it no longer needs that particular position, that
particular center. Then you can take that apart as well.
Then when you’ve arrived at the ultimate happiness, nirvana, you’ve used the
Buddha’s teachings for their intended purpose. That’s what it’s all about.

316
 Taking Charge
July 21, 2009

The passage we chanted last night: Atano loko, the world offers no shelter.
Anabhissaro, there is no one in charge. When you think about it in one way it’s
scary. There is no greater power that you can turn everything over to. There’s no
guarantee that everything is going to come out all right in the end. That’s the
scary interpretation. The other interpretation sees this as an opportunity: You’re
free to choose. You are free to write the story of your own life because there is
nobody up there taking down the narrative from their point of view. You can
write the story of your life right now. You can write one little bit of it right now.
But sometimes that little bit can be very important. It can change the whole plot.
If you look back at your past, there are many actions that point in different
directions. The story could head off in all kinds of directions from here. And so
with each choice, you’re deciding which parts of your past are relevant, which
parts get stitched into the overall story, and which parts are just extra bits and
pieces left over. So what do you want? What kind of life do you want? Now
unfortunately, not everything is totally there for you to make up. There are
certain givens in your life. Some things you can’t change. And there’s also simply
the fact of action, the fact of cause and effect. If you want a good life, you have to
create the causes for the good life. If you want happiness, you have to create the
causes for happiness. It’s up to you. As always, freedom entails responsibility.
So it’s important, as you contemplate your path that you fully appreciate
both sides, both the freedom and the responsibility. Sometimes we underestimate
the freedom. We see that our lives have followed certain patterns and we just
kind of let them go into the same old ruts over and over again, regardless of
where those ruts are going to lead. We don’t appreciate the freedom of choice we
have to choose our identity. Every time the mind takes on an identity, that
identity is already ready to fall apart, which means that if you’ve been taking on
unskillful identities, you don’t have to stick with them. You can change.
The thing about change here, though, is that it depends on your actions. This
is where the responsibility comes in. You have to be responsible. You have to be
totally honest with yourself about what your intentions are, so that you recognize
an unskillful one when it comes up. You recognize a skillful one when it comes
up. And then do your best to strengthen the skillful ones, weaken the unskillful
ones.

317
 As the Buddha often said, the things you keep thinking about form the
inclination of the mind. And so as with any new habit, it takes a while to get used
to the new habit. But you can lay down these new patterns in your brain, you can
lay down these new patterns in your actions.
So you should ask yourself, what kind of life do you want? And then what
choices does that kind of life require right now? If you’re honest with yourself,
you want a life of true happiness, a life that harms nobody. That requires that you
develop a lot of qualities in the mind: mindfulness, alertness, compassion,
goodwill, discernment, concentration, conviction in the principle of action.
These are going to be related in one way or another to what are called the five
strengths. For to move your life in the direction you want it to requires strength,
especially if you’re having to change directions.
So you need to have conviction in the principle of action, that your actions
really do make a difference. When the Buddha talks about knowing yourself, it’s
largely knowing your actions. Because your actions are the results of choices that
come and go, you can change yourself through changes in your actions. And
these changes are important. The choices you make are important. You need to
have conviction in that principle. If you’re not convinced of the importance of
your actions, your actions start getting careless. So keep reminding yourself:
You’re the one in charge. If there’s nobody else in charge, you can take charge.
And you actually are taking charge each time you make a choice. So you can’t
abdicate your responsibility, saying, “Somebody else told me to do this. I am just
following orders.” The fact that you choose to follow orders is your karma right
there. So you need conviction in the principle that your actions are important,
and you can change them. It may take time. It may take effort. But they can be
changed.
The next strength is persistence. You really stick with this. Once you’ve
decided that a certain quality needs to be developed in your mind, you stick with
it. You do whatever needs to be done. If you need to work on concentration, just
keep coming back, coming back, coming back to the breath. If you find that
certain defilements are getting in the way, you have to work on them, figure out
ways to think around them so you don’t constantly follow their song, their
voices. So regardless of the quality that needs to be developed in the mind, or
whichever one you’re focusing on, you’ve got to keep coming back, coming back,
coming back, to make sure that it’s strong, that it really has become a new habit,
a new skill.
This requires mindfulness, keeping in mind what you’ve got to do.
Mindfulness is always paired with alertness, watching what you’re actually doing
to see if it does fall in line. This is where the principle of honesty comes in,
because there is nobody up there to whom we can turn to give us the final word

318
on what’s right and wrong. We have to be really honest with ourselves. When I
do X what are the results? Do they cause harm, do they not cause harm? Look
very, very carefully. This is why, when the Buddha taught Rahula this principle,
he first started with the principle of truthfulness. If you’re not truthful, he says,
there’s no quality of a practitioner in you. It’s been turned upside down, thrown
away. It’s empty and hollow. Your own honesty is your one authority, your one
refuge.
So you keep in mind what you’ve got to do and then you keep checking your
actions to make sure that they fall in line with that. This is a process that gets
more and more subtle as it develops. The duty here is not something imposed
from without. When the Buddha talks about duties, the only duties he really
describes as universal are the duties appropriate to the Four Noble Truths. He
doesn’t impose them on you, but once you’ve decided that you want to put an
end to suffering, you’ve taken on those duties yourself. You want to comprehend
the suffering and abandon its cause. So wherever you look in your mind,
wherever you look in your actions, make sure that you’re following in line with
these duties, trying to develop the path. If you find yourself wandering off, okay,
more persistent effort is required.
And as your effort gets more and more skillful, it moves into right
concentration. This is the culmination of your effort to renounce sensuality, to
renounce ill will, to renounce harmfulness. When it’s really resolved on those
things, where else will the mind go but into good concentration? Then as the
mind is really concentrated, it’s able to be secluded from unskillful mental states.
And when unskillful mental states come back, you can see them clearly. This is
how concentration fosters discernment.
And, in turn, the discernment fosters your concentration. You begin to
notice that the way the mind is concentrated is not as effortless as it could be, it’s
not as refined, it’s not as solid as it could be. You work on adjusting those causes,
adjusting your choices: where you focus, how you focus, how you manipulate the
object, like the breath, to get the mind to settle down further. When you know
that you’ve reached the point where you don’t need to manipulate it any more,
that you can just be with the breath: All of this requires discernment.
So if you look carefully at all five of these strengths, you realize that they’re
very much interconnected. It’s not just 1-2-3-4-5 bingo! Discernment comes back
and helps your effort. After all, you need to have some knowledge of what’s
skillful and not for your right effort to be right on course. Discernment helps
your conviction, so that it doesn’t go running off into strange ways. The image
the Buddha gives is of building a house. You put the rafters up to support the
main roof beam, but only when the main roof beam is in place are the rafters
solid too. So discernment builds on the other strengths and then it turns around

319
to make those strengths even stronger by ensuring that they really do work
together.
So if you’re going to be responsible, if you’re going to have freedom, you
need strength. The strength to make the right decision, the strength to keep on
making the right decisions.
When you think about that passage, that there’s no one in charge, what it
means is that here’s your opportunity to take charge in your life. It carries
responsibilities. You have to be honest. But it also brings a lot of freedom. On a
very deep level, there’s nobody out there you have to please. You act kindly
because it’s your choice. You’re generous because it’s your choice. You’re
virtuous, you meditate, because it’s your choice.
So take full advantage of your freedom. Really appreciate the fact that we are
free to choose, and that that freedom can lead to a freedom going beyond simply
the freedom to choose. Absolute freedom, absolutely unlimited: That’s the
happiness the Buddha promises. But you can find it only if you take charge.

320
 Views & Vision
July 29, 2009

The mind spends a lot of its time talking to itself. And so when we come to
the practice, it’s important that we learn how to use that habit in a skillful way,
so that it actually helps the practice and doesn’t get in the way.
If you’ve read any of the texts, you know that when the mind gets into deep
concentration, the sentences and dialogues that go on in the mind get pared
down really far to the point where there’s just a mental note, like “infinite space,”
the sañña of “infinite consciousness.” That’s all the talking that’s going on in the
mind.
But right now, if you feel harassed by all the chatter going on in the mind,
that sounds pretty good. Just hold on to one thought, one object, and get away
from all the torment of what’s being said inside the mind. But you can’t get there
until you’ve learned how to train the mind how to talk to itself skillfully, what
sorts of things are important to talk about, and what sort of things are not, what
attitude to take. And unfortunately for most of us, we’ve learned lots of unskillful
ways of talking. If it’s not from our family, then it’s from school, or from the
media. We talk about all the wrong topics, or talk about things in ways that
actually discourage us from practicing, either specific ideas about ourselves, or
attitudes in general.
One of the most virulent attitudes going around is the only way you’re going
to find happiness is through sensual indulgence. You can cite Freud. You can cite
all these other psychotherapists as authorities, but then again, what kind of
authority are they? It just so happens that their opinions fit in with the needs of
the economy. And so those thoughts get pounded into our heads again and again
and again: their idea of what’s important to talk about. So we’ve got to learn how
to retrain these voices in our minds, what sort of issues are important to talk
about and what sort of issues are important to just leave aside. And as for the
important issues to talk about, how do you talk about them? How do you
encourage yourself in the practice?
The Buddha recommends ten topics for recollection for the purpose of giving
you energy, counteracting any unskillful chatter in the mind and replacing it
with skillful chatter. You can recollect the Buddha, to remind yourself that it is
possible to find true happiness through human effort. After all, when the Buddha
talked about his awakening, he didn’t say it was because he was some special

321
being beamed down from the sky. He simply developed qualities of the mind
that all of us have in potential form. So that raises our sights as to what we can do
with our lives.
You can think about the Dharma, in that it recommends a totally harmless
form of happiness, a happiness that doesn’t pose any danger to you, doesn’t pose
any danger to anybody else, doesn’t harm anybody. This is why they recommend
that when monks are in the forest, and they start getting scared about the dangers
in the forest—the animals, the people who might be lurking in the wilderness,
the diseases that can come, the fact that you are far away from doctors, anything
of any comfort—simply remind yourself you’re there in a totally harmless way.
And that can give you confidence.
You can recollect the Sangha. If comparing yourself to the Buddha seems like
a far stretch, you can think, “Well, there were people who studied with the
Buddha who were really like us. Some cases a lot worse off than we are right
now. And yet they were able to pull themselves together, gain awakening.”
So these are recollections to overcome fear and lack of self-esteem. Similarly
with the recollection of your virtue, times in the past when you could have
harmed somebody or done something against your principles, but you decided
not to. Your principles were more important. Think about that. You have worth
as a human being because of that.
The same when you were generous. For many of us our first real experience
of freedom was when we realized we could give something to somebody else not
because we had to, or it was their birthday or Christmas or anything. Simply
because you wanted to share. Something you could have used yourself, but you
said No, I want to give it to somebody else. It’s good to reflect on that.
You can think about the qualities that would make you a deva, things like a
sense of shame at the idea of doing something really harmful, other good
qualities of the mind. You have those at least to some extent. So reflect on that.
Again, these reflections are meant to give you a sense of self-confidence, self-
esteem. To remind you that even though you may have done a lot of unskillful
things in the past, you do have your skillful potentials. And it’s up to you to
decide which past actions are the important actions in your life story.
We all have a mixed bag in the past. You can think about this as if someone
were writing your life story. And if you decide to stick with the skillful path, that
means that the skillful qualities you had in the past are the important ones. If you
stray away from the skillful path, that means the unskillful qualities, the
unskillful things you did in the past are the important ones.
So as you shape the present, you’re not only shaping the present, but also
highlighting different things in your past. So why not highlight the good things?

322
If you find yourself focusing on the bad ones, remind yourself, “At least I had
some good qualities in the past and those are the ones that eventually won out.
At least they are winning out right now.” If a part of your mind retorts, “While
you may be winning out right now, you’re going to lose out further down the
line,” you respond, “I don’t care about further down the line. I’m not responsible
for further down the line right now. I want to make sure that at least right now I
make the right choice.” So at least there is a little uptick in the general line of
your life. And once you’ve decided to do that once, you can do it again, and you
can do it again, until it becomes a habit.
Then there are the reflections to make sure that you don’t be heedless and
complacent. There’s recollection of death: the fact that death could come at any
time and that you’ve got to prepare because death isn’t the end. As long as there’s
craving in the mind, it jumps onto another life. The image the Buddha gave is of
a fire burning one house that then jumps across to another house, burns the next
house, then the next. So what kind of house are you going to? The image kind of
breaks down here, but the craving is what pulls you on.
What kind of cravings are you nurturing in your mind right now? What
cravings would be more skillful to nurture? What habits do you want to take with
you as you go on? You realize there is work to be done in the mind. You can’t just
put it off to tomorrow or the next day or next week or next month or next year.
Because you don’t know if you have a next day or a next month or a next year.
But you do know that you have right now. This breath coming in and out right
now. If it so happened that you suddenly died right now, wouldn’t you prefer to
be in a moment of mindfulness and alertness rather than wandering around
thinking about who knows what? So that’s a recollection to make you more
heedful, to help overcome laziness.
There’s mindfulness immersed in the body, which is to help you remember,
“Do you want to keep coming back as a human being, or would you rather come
back as something better?” There’s always that issue at death when people are
really possessive of their bodies. They come back as a spirit hovering around their
dead body. Would you like to do that? This body may seem okay while it’s alive,
but when it’s dead, it’s really not that attractive a place to be. Can you learn how
to develop a sense of detachment from your own body now, so you’re not afraid
to let it go when you have to?
And then mindfulness of the breath is a practice for developing all those
good qualities that you need to make your aims a reality: mindfulness, alertness,
ardency, concentration, and discernment. This is the recollection that you can
make your home.
Then finally there’s recollection of peace: the peace of nirvana. Remind
yourself that this is really the direction you want to go, that there is an

323
attainment of true happiness. Keep reminding yourself of the direction where
true happiness lies so that you don’t get distracted by other ideas about
happiness.
Now if you find yourself having trouble settling down with the breath,
you’ve got these other topics to think about. They should always be there in the
background where you can draw on them when you need them. As long as the
mind needs to think, have it think about something that’s really useful. As long
as it’s going to talk to itself, make sure the conversation is actually a skillful
conversation. Otherwise, you can spend all your time in views, without any
vision. It’s a distinction the Buddha makes in the Metta Sutta. He describes the
ideal meditator as “not taken with views, but consummate in vision.” We spend
most of our time talking about, “I think this about that, I think that about this,
this is my opinion on politics, this is my opinion on the Michael Jackson feeding-
fest in the media and whatever.” But does it really matter?
A while back I was reading Mark Twain’s autobiography, and occasionally he
talks about political issues of the day. His political opinions are really the least
interesting part about Mark Twain. His more interesting opinions are those
about the universals of human nature. You should have that attitude towards
your own thoughts. Your really interesting thoughts are about the more universal
things, particularly this issue of vision, which means that you actually see what
the mind is doing, see how it’s creating suffering for itself. And this may not be a
topic that you can talk about with other people, but at least it doesn’t lead to
controversy. And it’s the most important issue you can talk about with yourself.
As the Buddha said, the source of all conflicts in the world comes from a type
of thinking he calls papañca, mental proliferation, where your thoughts just get
out of control to the point where they come back and attack you, i.e. they put
you into difficulties, they create trouble for you. These thoughts come from one
basic notion: “I am the thinker.” You want to establish your identity through
your opinions about things. The Buddha did not encourage this kind of thinking.
Questions that come from this—“Who am I? What am I? What will I be?”—are,
he said, questions that are inappropriate if you really want to put an end to
suffering, because instead of freeing you, they get you more tied up with views
and opinions.
For instance, the question about what happens to an awakened person after
death: Does the person exist? Not exist? Both? neither? If you’re asking these
questions because you’re worried about what’s going to happen to this “I” who’s
been doing the thinking, the Buddha wouldn’t answer you. He didn’t want to
encourage that kind of thinking. He wanted to encourage the type of thinking
that looks at: “Is there suffering here right now? Where? What am I doing that’s
causing the suffering? What can I do to put an end to it?”

324
 It’s interesting to reflect that here we are, learning about ourselves through
meditation, but what kind of self-knowledge is this? The questions, “Who am I,
what am I, what was I in the past, what am I going to be in the future?”—those
questions the Buddha said to put aside. The self-knowledge he was more
interested in is, “What am I doing right now? What are the results of what I’m
doing? What when I do it will be skillful, leading to good results? What when I
do it would be unskillful, leading to harmful results? What would be for my long-
term suffering, what would be for my long-term happiness? Those kinds of
questions are worth asking. In other words, seeing yourself as having the power
to create long-term happiness and then asking yourself, “How can I develop that
potential?” But you should also learn to see that you have the potential for
creating a lot of harm and suffering, so how can you avoid that potential?
That kind of self-knowledge: that’s vision. And ir’s really useful.
Unfortunately, our society encourages us to have views about things yet doesn’t
encourage much vision. But you can train yourself. You can drop the ways that
society teaches you to talk to yourself, and train yourself in new ways that point
you in the direction of vision. You’re not simply a product of social pressures and
social influences, because there is something that really is totally yours, which is
suffering. No one else can experience your suffering. Nobody knows how much
you suffer, how you suffer. That’s something only you can know, but you can
really know it. And as the Buddha points out, you can also learn how not to
suffer. That kind of self-knowledge: that’s vision. And you have the freedom to
develop that if you want.

325
 No Happiness Other than Peace
October 9, 2009

N’atthi santi param sukham, there is no happiness other than peace. This
saying of the Buddha has an interesting history. Over time, the translation turned
from “there is no happiness other than peace” to “there is no happiness higher
than peace,” which totally changes the meaning. Perhaps people thought that
there are other kinds of happiness not related to peace at all-—the happiness of
winning out over somebody else, the happiness of sensual desire, even the
happiness that goes along with being angry. People like to be angry. There’s a
certain amount of pleasure with that and all the other defilements, and there’s
certainly no peace there.
But if you look carefully, you’ll see that even in the defilements there is a
moment of rest, a moment of certainty, a moment of settling in, even if just for a
second. And sometimes it lasts longer. After all, the Buddha did recognize that
it’s possible to get into very strong states of absorption based on greed, aversion,
and delusion. They’re wrong concentration but they are absorption and there’s
an element of peace, an element of stillness there. Whatever pleasure those things
contain, it lies in those moments of peace, those moments of certainty. Of course
the problem with those kinds of peace is that they don’t last very long and they’re
very toxic, because they can lead to all sorts of disturbance afterwards.
This is why the Buddha said we have to search for the highest peace together
with the highest happiness. They go together. And this is why the search for the
highest happiness is not a selfish thing. The Buddha honors our desire for true
happiness. Everywhere, he says, this path is for happiness and we should take our
desire for happiness seriously. It’s not something we should be ashamed of. We
don’t have to say, “Well, I’ll delay my own happiness and make other people
happy first.” That’s not the Buddha’s approach at all. He says that if you take your
search for happiness seriously, and find a happiness that really is reliable, it will
take you to peace—to the highest peace where you are not harming anyone
anywhere.
And in the course of developing that happiness, we have to develop really
honorable qualities of mind. There’s the wisdom that sees that long-term
happiness is better than short-term, and that it has to depend on your actions.
That’s why the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom or discernment is,
“What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The
wisdom lies in the long-term, and it lies in the fact that you recognize you’ve got

326
to do something for this happiness to come about.
Then there’s the compassion that comes as a corollary of that, which is you
realize that if your peace is going to last, if your happiness is going to last, it has
to depend on not causing any harm to anybody else. Otherwise they’ll try to
destroy it. So you have to take their desire for peace, their desire for happiness
into consideration.
There’s a passage where the Buddha tells King Pasenadi that you can search
the whole world over, and you’ll find no one who doesn’t have fierce love for
themselves. You have fierce love for yourself. Everyone else has the same fierce
love for themselves. So if your happiness gets in the way of their fierce love of
themselves, they’re not going to stand for it. There’d be no peace.
So you have to look for a happiness that doesn’t depend on harming anybody
and that requires purity in your actions: the purity of genuinely causing no harm.
You have to look very carefully at your actions. What are you doing that could be
causing harm to yourself, harm to other people? It’s certainly not wise if you’re
doing that. And although there may be general instructions about which kinds of
actions are harmful and which ones are not, there are a lot of little details that
can’t be put in books, that you have to learn to observe for yourself. So you have
to watch each action by watching your intention first, checking that out to see if
it’s an honorable intention, and then watching your action as you’re doing it to
see what immediate results it’s producing. If it’s producing harmful results, stop.
If not, you can continue. After you’re done, look at the long-term results. If you
find out only afterwards that you’ve caused harm, then you have to make up your
mind not to engage in that kind of action ever again, that kind of intention ever
again. Then go talk it over with someone whose insight you trust.
This is an important part of the Buddha’s instruction on what we now call
self-knowledge. For him, self-knowledge doesn’t mean knowing yourself as a
thing, it means knowing yourself in terms of actions. And he provides a context in
which you can do this effectively. This is why he set up the monastic Sangha, so
we’d have a group of people who are following the Buddha’s teachings, that
anybody can come and consult with and say, “I did this, and I got these results.
What should I do?” In other words, you don’t have to reinvent the Dharma wheel
every time you find you’ve made a mistake. You can tap into the knowledge and
experience of people who are further along on the path. This is how we develop
purity. As the Buddha told Rahula, all those in the past who purified their
thoughts, words, and deeds did it in this way. All those in the future who are
going to purify their thoughts, words, and deeds will do it this way. And all of
those at present who are purifying their thoughts, words, and deeds do it this
way.
What this means is that if you take your search for happiness seriously, you

327
have to develop wisdom, compassion, and purity, the virtues that are traditionally
ascribed to the Buddha himself. This is part of his skill as a teacher to show that if
you take your happiness seriously, you have to develop good qualities of mind.
It’s not a purely hedonistic pursuit, nor are you simply learning how to indulge
in pleasure in a sophisticated way. You realize that happiness is something
important, and if it really is important, then you have to develop important
qualities of mind.
As we do this, we find that our actions become less and less harmful; there is
less and less cause for conflict. On the one hand, that makes it easier for us to
practice. On the other hand, it makes the world a better place to be in general—
and in particular, in terms of our thoughts, the world of our own mind becomes
better, too, because, of course, our actions and words come out of our thoughts.
This is where the Buddha finds the source of conflict to begin with.
There’s a sutta where Sakka, the king of the devas, comes down to see the
Buddha with some questions to ask him. It’s an interesting sutta. It starts out
with Sakka trying to get the Buddha in the right mood to talk with the deva king.
So he sends down one of his musicians. It’s one of the nicer pieces of humor in
the Pali Canon. The musician comes down, he sings a song about the Buddha,
the Dharma, the Sangha, and lust. The song is directed to his ladylove, telling her
how he loves her as much as the arahants love the Dhamma, cataloging her body
parts, the parts he loves as much as the arahants love the Dhamma. You can
imagine the Buddha smiling to himself with the thought, “This is a totally
deluded little deva here.” But at the end of the song, he compliments the deva on
having written a song where the melody goes well with words, and the words go
well with the melody. After all, the Buddha had been a prince, a connoisseur of
music, so he would know.
Then Sakka comes and asks the Buddha questions about conflict. I don’t
know if you know the story, but Indian mythology has a story very similar to one
in Greek mythology. There’s a story of how the devas fought the asuras for
control of heaven and finally beat the asuras—just as the Greek gods had to fight
the Titans. And so Sakka, having had to wage war even when he was a deva king,
was very concerned about conflict. “What are the roots of conflict?” he asks. The
Buddha traces them back—through acquisition, desire, all the way back to
papañca, or objectification, the type of thinking where you turn yourself into an
object and then turn everybody else into an object. As an object or being, you
need a place to stay in the world, a place to take the food that will keep you going
as a being. So you have to stake out your territory in the world—whether it’s
physical territory, material territory, emotional territory, even your views. This
leads to conflict. After all, as you move into the world, you run into other people,
other beings who are involved in the project of objectifying themselves and they

328
may not like the role that you assign to them. There is conflict right there.
Psychologists talk a lot about objectification, how we turn other people into
objects, and the Buddha’s insight was that we start out by turning ourselves into
objects first. To stop the process, we first have to change the way we view
ourselves. This is why the path to peace and calm—upasama, as they say in the
suttas—starts with right view. Instead of looking at your experience in terms of
yourself and other people or the world, i.e., objects in the world, you look at
things simply in terms of the four noble truths—as stress, its cause, its cessation,
and the path leading to its cessation—terms that don’t refer to people at all. But
each of these terms carries a skill.
In the case of stress, you have to comprehend it, which means knowing it so
thoroughly, seeing it so thoroughly, that you finally get dispassionate toward it.
In the case of the origination of stress, you abandon it, which means not
continuing to do it anymore. The cessation of stress is to be witnessed, or verified,
and the path is to be developed.
Each of the four noble truths has three levels of knowledge: knowing the
truth, knowing the duty or skill appropriate to the truths, and then knowing that
you’ve completed the duty, mastered the skill. Three times four gives you twelve
aspects of the knowledge of awakening, which is what the Dhamma wheel stands
for. Back in India when they combined sets of variables and list all the possible
combinations, they would call it a wheel. So this is the Dhamma wheel. And it’s
interesting that the first sermon is the only place in the whole Canon where the
Buddha mentions this. It’s his most important teaching. You’d think it would be
all over the Canon. But it’s just in the context of this one talk. There are a few
reflections on the topic in a few other places, but this is the only place where he
sets it out clearly. But it’s a teaching we have to keep in mind all the time.
This is why he has us divide our experience into the four noble truths: so we
can know what to do with whatever comes up. If we still think in terms of selves
and the world, our duty is to stake out our part of the world that we claim for the
self, and then to defend it. But here he has us look at things in other terms, with
other duties. For instance with stress, if you think of yourself as a self, you don’t
like having the stress in yourself. You try to get rid of it. But getting rid of it is
not the duty under the four truths. The duty is to comprehend it, to know it.
That requires you to develop the path—with the mind in good strong
concentration, mindful and alert, imbued with right effort—so you can develop
the skill needed to comprehend stress. Because each of the tasks is actually a skill.
This is why the path is a gradual path, because it takes a while to develop the
skills. After all, nibbana is very, very subtle. And even though it’s immediately
present, and the possibility of reaching it is theoretically available at any moment
in time, our powers of perception are not up to it, our skills are not skillful

329
enough, not subtle enough.
So we have to raise the subtlety of our mind as we develop these skills until
finally we reach the level where we can have that sudden awakening into the
ultimate peace. The image the Buddha gives is of the continental shelf off of
India, a gradual, gradual slope out and then, all of a sudden, a sharp drop. The
reason the path has to be both gradual and sudden is because nibbana is both
present and subtle.
So we have to gradually develop the subtlety of our minds so that we can
then see, “Oh, it’s right here.” As the Buddha said, it’s something you touch with
your body, see with your body. The synesthesia there is interesting. There’s no
more division among the six senses. There’s just an awareness that’s outside of the
six senses, but it’s known right where you had your sense of the body.
And that, he says, is the ultimate peace. It causes no harm to anyone. It’s a
dimension of no objectification at all. Even the question of what happens to you
when you reach that doesn’t occur anymore, because the “you” that you created
as an object, or the world that you created as a place for objects, applies only as
far as the six senses. The concept of there being nothing, no objects, also applies
only as far as the six senses. When you move beyond the six senses, those concepts
have no more meaning.
But right now we still live in the six senses. We’re still objectifying. So
sometimes the Buddha would answer in an objectifying way the kinds of
questions he ordinarily would not answer, such as, “What was I in the past? What
am I going to be in the future?” Ordinarily he would put those questions aside.
Yet there are occasional passages in the Canon where he talks to people about
what they were in the past. But he speaks in ways that are designed to give rise to
the sense of dispassion that comes with comprehension, i.e., you see that this
really is a lot of suffering. Going through this process of samsara-ing is pretty
miserable.
You’ve probably heard the comparison of all the water in the oceans as being
less than the tears you’ve shed. Well, there’s a sutta where the comparison is even
more dramatic. He says that all the blood you’ve lost by having your head cut off
is greater than the water in the oceans. The water in the ocean is less than the
tears you’ve shed, and it’s less than the blood you’ve lost. He goes through all the
different ways you might have lost blood by having your head cut off—for
example, when you were a cow, the number of times you’ve been a cow and have
your cow’s head cut off—the amount of blood you’ve lost from just your cow
lives is still greater than all the water in the oceans. The number of times you’ve
been a sheep and had your sheep’s head cut off: the blood you lost then is greater
than all the water in the oceans. And so on through different beings, different
kinds of animals. Then he goes into the times that you were a thief and had your

330
head cut off, the times you were an adulterer or adulteress and had your head cut
off. It’s an awful lot of blood and it’s an awful lot of miserable existences. Just
thinking about the fact that you’ve been equipped with a cow’s head that many
times, or a sheep’s head that many times, is overwhelmingly dismaying.
So he answers the question of what were you in a way that really does lead to
dispassion, a comprehension of suffering—this is enough. The sutta states that all
the monks who listened to that particular Dhamma talk all became arahants right
away—because they saw that in objectifying yourself, these are the kinds of
objects you come up with. You become a thief, you become a highway robber,
you become an adulterer or adulteress, you become cows, sheep, goats, what not.
There are constant opportunities to objectify yourself in really awful ways.
There’s constant conflict.
The Buddha’s insight is that if you learn how to stop objectifying yourself,
then you don’t turn other people into objects. You can live with them with a lot
greater peace. And once you find the peace of nibbana, you’ve found a happiness
that doesn’t require that anybody suffer at all.
So this is where we find the ultimate happiness, because it’s also the ultimate
peace. It’s a gift not only to ourselves but also to everyone else, which is why this
is such a good path to be on. There is some stress on this path, there are some
difficulties in following this path; we haven’t totally gotten to the place where
we’re not placing a burden on other people; and we have to make the effort to be
as unburdensome as possible. The simple fact that we’re here with a body that
needs to be fed, clothed, sheltered, given medicine does place a weight on the
world. So there’s no real reason why we should want to come back even if we
have altruistic reasons, for it still imposes a weight, a burden on other people just
to maintain this body. So a happiness that doesn’t require that kind of weight or
that kind of burden is a very precious thing. And the path leading to that
happiness and the peace that comes with it is precious as well.

331
 Insight into Pain
June 5, 2010

Pain is a fact of consciousness. It’s what distinguishes us from robots. Robots

can have sensors, but they don’t feel pain. It’s our main subjective burden—
which is why the Buddha’s teachings are such a gift. There’s a principle in
postmodern thought that every attempt to teach people something is an act of
aggression, because you’re trying to make them submit to your view of things.
But the Buddha’s teachings are a huge exception to that. He didn’t force anybody
to accept his teachings. He offered his teachings as therapy. You can take them
and use them, or you can put them aside, pay them no mind. He didn’t need
anyone’s approval. He didn’t need to exert power over anyone, because he had
already found a true happiness that nothing could change. He simply offered his
teachings as a gift to the one problem that everybody shares. Now it’s true that
we don’t share one another’s pain--I don’t feel your pain, you don’t feel mine.
When a politician says, “I feel your pain,” you wonder what he’s feeling. But each
of us knows what pain is like, and each of us wants a solution to it.
The Buddha says that the primary reaction to pain is twofold. One is
bewilderment, not understanding where it comes from or why it’s there. The
second reaction is a search: Is there anyone who knows a way or two to get rid of
this pain? Particularly with animals and young children who can’t speak yet,
there’s not much comprehension. There’s the sensation of pain, the definite
feeling of pain, but there’s a huge question that goes along with it: “Why, why,
why? What is this? Why, why is this happening?” That’s the bewilderment. As we
begin to find that there are other people who can help assuage our pain—starting
with our mother and father—we start looking outside. Some pains they can take
care of, but a lot of pains they can’t. So we look to other people beyond them.
The Buddha is there to fill in that gap, because bewilderment often leads to
really mistaken ideas—looking to the wrong people, taking up the wrong ideas
about how pain can be overcome. So the Buddha gives us his expert advice. He’s
like a doctor—but not one who simply gives us a shot and sends us home. He’s
like an old-fashioned herbal doctor who gives you a prescription. It’s up to you to
find the herbs, make them into medicine, and take it. And you have to adjust
your life: avoiding certain foods, eating other foods, avoiding certain activities,
exercising in certain ways. In other words, the actual treatment is up to you. The
same with the Buddha: He’s not going to take the pain away for you but he does
tell you what you can do to overcome the suffering.

332
 In particular, he talks about two kinds of pain, two kinds of suffering. There’s
the pain in the three characteristics and there’s the pain or suffering in the four
noble truths. The pain in the three characteristics is something universal.
Wherever there’s a process of fabrication where conditions come together to
create other conditions, there’s going to be stress: the stress inherent in the fact
that things arise and pass away, the stress in the fact that their coming together
contains tension and can’t be permanent.
But that’s not the suffering that weighs down the mind. The extent to which
it does weigh down the mind comes from the fact that we have craving. The
craving is what really weighs us down. That’s the suffering, the pain in the four
noble truths. That’s the type we can do something about. It’s optional suffering.
And the path to put an end to that optional suffering is the noble eightfold path,
or the threefold training: virtue, concentration, discernment.
Virtue here starts with our activities in terms of speech and physical activities.
But it points to something really important in the mind: that those activities are
based on our intentions. There are several purposes for this aspect of the practice.
One is that if you harm others, it’s going to be hard for you to practice. The
karmic retribution creates difficulties. Then there’s the regret you feel when you
realize you’ve harmed yourself or somebody else. As the mind is trying to settle
down in concentration, that becomes a thorn in the mind, making it hard to
settle down. Training in virtue is a way of avoiding those difficulties.
But at the same time, training in virtue is also training in mindfulness,
training in alertness, training in compassion, all of which are good qualities of
mind you’ll have to use in meditation. As you do this, you’re getting very
sensitive to your intentions because the intention is what determines whether
you’re breaking a precept or not. We go through life being so ignorant of our
intentions and covering them up with denial, especially the unskillful ones.
When you ask people why they did something, they often have to stop and think
for a little while and reconstruct it. They weren’t really there as the decisions
were being made. So the precepts try to make you more and more present to your
intentions, more sensitive to the results of your actions.
Then the same principle gets carried into the mind. When you’re practicing
concentration, you want to be very clear that this is an action, an activity you’re
engaged in. You’re thinking and evaluating a single object. You’re holding a
single perception in mind. As the Buddha said, the levels of concentration are a
series of perception attainments, all the way from the first jhana up through the
dimension of nothingness. At each level, there’s a perception you hold in your
mind, a mental label you apply to your object. That’s what keeps you in touch
with the object, such as the breath. There are many things that you could be
sensitive to in your awareness of the body right now, but the Buddha’s asking

333
that you be sensitive to the dimension of breath energy: the in-and-out breath
and the other breath energies in the body. You try to stay tuned to that level of
awareness, that aspect of being sensitive to a physical body sitting here.
When the Buddha talks about being aware of the body, he’s also getting you
to be aware of the four properties: the wind property, the fire property, the water
property, and the earth property. These are all aspects of how you sense the body
from within. The wind is the energy or motion. Earth is the solidity, fire the
warmth, and water the cool sensations that go with the flow of the blood
through the body, for example. As you focus on those aspects of your body, you
find that there are also feelings of pain or pleasure. It’s important that you learn
how to distinguish those feelings from the four properties, because otherwise
they get glommed together, especially the earth, the solid aspect of the body.
When there’s a pain, you tend to glom it on with the solid sensations. That makes
the pain seem solid and hard.
Here is an area where you can get some important insights into how
perceptions can create problems. The perception of the pain has glued the pain to
the solid sensations of the body, making the pain seem a lot more solid than it
actually is. To see this, you have to stay concentrated, to stay with the sense of the
body and not keep flying off to other mental worlds. Then, when you’re solidly
here, you can start making distinctions: which sensations are the earth sensations,
which ones are the water, fire, breath, or wind? And then which sensations are
the pain sensations? They’re different things.
When you can see that distinction and learn how to apply different labels to
those different sensations, you take a huge burden off the mind. Even though
there may still be pain in the body, the mind doesn’t have to be pained by it. You
begin to see that the perception is the bridge between the physical pain and the
sense of suffering or being burdened in the mind. How does this perception
create craving? Because we lay claim to the body. The whole mass here is us or
ours. As soon as pain comes in, our territory has been invaded. We sense the pain
as aiming at us. It’s trying to do something to us, trying to move in on our space.
But if you can practice holding different perceptions of what’s going on,
there can still be pain, but it’s not invading your territory. When you’re not
trying to take possession of that territory, you’re not opening yourself up to
attack.
So that’s another level of perception that you want to be able to distinguish:
that when you’re aware of something, you also tend to take possession of it.
However, it’s possible to be aware without having that sense of possession. Just as
you’re aware of the mountain over there on the horizon, the sun on the
mountain, the trees, the chaparral: You look at them and you’re aware of them,
but there’s no sense of possession. They’re not yours. As long as mountains and

334
chaparral don’t do anything to invade your space, there’s no suffering.
But if you were to invade them, there would be. If you went out and tried to
take possession of Mount Palomar or Mount Pala, there would be problems with
the legal owners. But as long as you don’t take possession of them, there’s no
problem. So learn how to apply that same principle to your sense of inhabiting
the body. Your awareness can be here, the body can be here, but there doesn’t
have to be a you inhabiting it. There’s just this sense of the body that you’re aware
of.
Now, to see the movements of the mind as it’s applying these perceptions to
things, creating the bridges that allow stress to come into the mind: That requires
a lot of stillness, which is why the Buddha said that genuine insights really do
require strong concentration. You can have insights about other things without
much concentration—you see little movements in the mind here and there in a
random kind of way, and draw interesting conclusions. But the insights that
really go deep into the mind, that really have an important impact in freeing the
mind, are the insights that come from seeing how you’re trying to take control of
something so you can gain pleasure out of it, but it turns around and it bites you.
As in Ajaan Chah’s image: the tail of the snake looks pretty, and the teeth are way
on the other end, so we figure that it’s safe to grab hold of the tail.
It’s when you realize that the teeth and the tail are all part of the same body:
Those are the insights that are really important, that make a big difference. For
those you have to be very quiet because that movement of mind that tries to take
over something so that you can feel that you’re in control of it, convinced that it
can lead you to happiness and pleasure: It’s so instinctive, so under the radar.
There’s such an of-courseness about it—of course you’d think that this is your
body, of course you’d feel this way, of course you’d have those perceptions—that
it’s really hard to catch.
This is an important aspect of insight: learning how to question the “of
course,” learning to see things with new eyes, getting out of your old habits of
looking and understanding, and then turning around to look at those old habits.
“Oh my gosh, they really do cause a lot of unnecessary suffering and stress.”
So an important aspect of concentration practice is learning to get out of
your old habits. Instead of thinking about things as you normally do or focusing
on things as you normally would, try to hold onto your perception of the breath
regardless. The mind may say, “This is stupid; you’re not getting any insights,”
but you can say, “Sorry, whether it’s stupid or not, I don’t care. I’m just going to
keep on doing this.” You’re here to learn something new. As the Buddha said,
you’re practicing to realize what you haven’t realized before, to attain what you
haven’t attained before, and that means you have to do things you haven’t done
before.

335
 So you stick with the breath regardless of how tempting it may be to go
thinking about other things, focusing on other things. You stay right here, right
here, right here. Develop the strength of mind that can stick with something
regardless. The image Ajaan Fuang used was of a red ant. In Thailand they have
big red ants that bite so tenaciously that if you try to pull them off, sometimes
their heads detach before their jaws will let go. That, he said, is the kind of
tenacity you want as you’re sticking with the breath, because it rearranges
priorities in the mind. The part of the mind that says, “I’m bored. I’d like to
think about something else”: You have to say No to it—“No, no, no, just stay
right here.”
In doing that, you get the mind out of its normal conversations, its normal
ways of doing things and approaching things. Only when you get out of your
normal ways can you turn around and look at your normal ways and get some
perspective on them, to see that even though the pains of conditions are a normal
part of the world, the suffering that the mind takes on is totally optional. It’s
because of our own lack of skill that we suffer.
So this is why discernment is so crucial for seeing the distinctions between
things we otherwise glom together—glomming the pain onto the solid parts of
the body, glomming some me onto that pain in the solid parts of the body—so
that it’s all a big, solid, sticky mess. When you learn how to distinguish things,
make distinctions, see the differences—say, that a feeling of pleasure or pain is
not the same thing as a sense of solidity, or that being aware of the body doesn’t
mean that you have to lay claim to the body—there can be a sense of separation
between the mind and its object. When you can see these distinctions, that’s how
release comes.
After all, the threefold training is not the end of the story. The end of the
story is the fourth of what the Buddha called the four noble dhammas: virtue,
concentration, discernment, and release. These four noble dhammas give a more
complete picture of what we’re about here than you get from just the list of the
triple training. We’re here for release. You recognize discernment as genuine
discernment by what it does: It brings release. You see something radically
different, something you didn’t see before. You understand something you didn’t
understand before, and in the understanding, there’s a release from suffering.
That’s the kind of insight we’re looking for. Other insights may be useful along
the way, but you don’t want to stop with them.
This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Fuang said not to go around
memorizing your insights, because if the insight is genuine, it brings freedom
right there. It does something. It’s not just information. It’s an insight that makes
a difference, serves a purpose, accomplishes something. That’s when the
discernment is noble and leads to noble release.

336
 Metta Means Goodwill
March 9, 2011

Every morning, every night here at the monastery, we repeat a metta chant,
expressing goodwill, limitless goodwill, for ourselves and all other beings. And
there’s a reason why we do it so often. It’s part of the motivation for why we
practice. We want to find true happiness. We want to make sure that we act on
the intention not to harm anyone in the course of finding that happiness. There
are two reasons for wanting to keep this intention—a desire for harmless
happiness—uppermost in our minds. The first is that if our happiness depends
on somebody else’s suffering, it’s not going to last. They’ll do what they can to
destroy it. The second reason is the plain quality of sympathy: If you see someone
suffering, it’s painful. It’s hard to feel happy when you know that that happiness
is causing suffering for others.
But developing goodwill for everybody doesn’t come naturally. It takes work
because there are a lot of people out there who are doing hurtful, despicable
things. It’s hard to feel friendly toward them. So we have to sit down and think
about why we might want to have goodwill for them.
First, we gave to understand the quality of goodwill itself. There are three
places in the Canon where the Buddha recommends what you might call metta
phrases—phrases for directing thoughts of goodwill. These are a good guide for
gaining a clear idea of what metta means. One is that set we chant every day:
“May all living beings be happy, free from stress and pain, free from animosity,
free from oppression, free from trouble. May they look after themselves with
ease.”
Notice that last statement: “May they look after themselves with ease.” We’re
not saying that we’re going to be there for them all the time. And most beings
would be happier knowing that they could depend on themselves rather than
having to depend on others. I once heard a Dharma teacher say that he wouldn’t
want to live in a world where there was no suffering because then he wouldn’t be
able to express his compassion—which you think about it, is an extremely selfish
wish. You need other people to suffer so you can feel good about expressing your
compassion. The best attitude to have is, may all beings be happy. May they be
able to look after themselves with ease. That way they can have the happiness of
independence and self-reliance.
Another set of metta phrases is in the Karaniya Metta Sutta. They start out by

337
saying, “May all beings be happy at heart, whether they are long or short, big or
little, strong or weak,” but then they go on to say, “May no one harm anyone else
or despise anyone else or wish them harm.” In saying these phrases, you not only
wish for beings to be happy, but you also wish that they avoid the actions that
would lead to bad karma, to their own unhappiness. You honor the principle
that happiness has to depend on action: For people to find true happiness, they
have to understand the causes for happiness and act on them. So again, you’re
not saying that you’re going to be there for them all the time. You’re hoping that
people will wise up and be there for themselves.
The Karaniya Metta Sutta goes on to say, when you’re practicing this, you
want to protect this attitude in the same way that a mother would protect her
only child. Some people who misread that, thinking that they’re supposed to
cherish all living beings the same way a mother would cherish her only child. But
that’s not what the Buddha is saying. He’s saying that you try to protect your
goodwill as a mother would protect her only child, looking after it all the time,
making sure that it doesn’t waver. Because again, you don’t want to harm
anybody. It’s usually during those waverings that the harm happens, so you do
everything you can to protect this attitude. So, as the Buddha says toward the end
of the sutta, you should stay determined to practice this form of mindfulness: the
mindfulness of keeping in mind your wish that all beings be happy, to make sure
that it always informs the motivation for everything you do.
Finally there’s another passage where the Buddha taught the monks a chant
for spreading goodwill to all snakes and other creeping things. The story goes
that a monk meditating in a forest was bitten by a snake and died. The monks
reported this to the Buddha and he replied that if that monk had spread goodwill
to all four great families of snakes, the snake wouldn’t have bitten him. Then the
Buddha he teaches the monks the chant for expressing metta for all snakes—and
not only for snakes, but also for all footless beings, two footed beings, four-footed
beings, many footed beings. May all beings—whether they have no feet or two
feet, or four feet or many feet—meet with happiness, may they be free from
suffering. Then he goes through a list of all kinds of creeping things: rats, snakes,
scorpions, lizards. May they all be happy. May they meet with good fortune. And
may they go away. In other words, this expression of metta takes into
consideration the truth that living together is often difficult, especially for beings
of different species that can harm one another, and the happiest thing for both
sides may often be to live apart.
Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, once discovered that a snake had moved into his
room. So for three days they lived together. He was very careful not to startle the
snake or make it feel threatened by his presence. But finally on the third day, as
he was sitting in meditation, he addressed the snake quietly in his mind. He said,

338
“Look, it’s not that I don’t like you. I don’t have any bad feelings for you. But our
minds work in different ways. It’d be very easy for there to be a
misunderstanding between us. There are lots of places out in the woods where
you can live without the uneasiness of living with me.” So he sat there, spreading
goodwill to the snake, and the snake left.
These different ways of expressing goodwill show that goodwill is not
necessarily the quality of lovingkindness. You’re not there to cherish these beings
or to look after them. You wish them well, sometimes realizing that the best
thing for everybody would be to live separately, with each of us understanding
the causes for happiness and each being able to look after him or herself with
ease. This is an attitude you can extend to everybody, regardless of how much you
like or dislike them, or of how good or bad their current behavior. If we were
told to love everybody and to want to be kind to everybody, to look after them,
there are a lot of people out there that are pretty unlovable. The Buddha is not
asking you to love them, just to wish them well: May they be happy. May they
understand the causes for happiness. May they avoid the kind of behavior that
causes suffering. May they look after themselves with ease. That way the whole
world could be at peace.
Although these are good attitudes to develop at all times, the Buddha
recommends two situations where they’re especially important to develop. One is
when you’re being harmed by other people, or feeling threatened with harm.
You try to develop an attitude of goodwill for those people and then, starting
with them, you spread that attitude out to encompass the entire universe of
beings. Try, the Buddha says, to make your mind as large as the River Ganges, or
as large of the earth—in other words, larger than the harm they’re doing or
threatening to do to you. May they be happy. May they stop causing suffering.
May they stop suffering themselves. You’re taught to think in this way so that you
don’t react in unskillful ways to their unskillful behavior.
Another time the Buddha recommends developing an attitude of infinite
goodwill is when you realize that you’ve harmed others. You realize, he says, that
getting tied up in remorse is not going to undo the harm. So remorse is no help.
If you tie yourself up in remorse, it’s very easy for you to weaken yourself and as a
result, end up doing harm to others again. So you simply note the fact that what
you did was a mistake and then you wish that person well. Then you wish all
beings well, as a way of helping to guarantee that you would never again
intentionally try to cause harm. And then you have to act on that determination.
You can’t just stop with that wish and then pretend that you’ve taken care of
everything. You’ve got to look at the situations in which you live. You have to
keep your thoughts of goodwill in mind. Where do you tend to cause harm? Is it
through your words? Is it through your actions? How can you act in different

339
ways? How can you speak in different ways?
In other words, try to be a fair judge of your actions. If you see that your
instinctive way of reacting to the situation is unskillful, sit down and ask yourself:
What would be a more skillful way of handling the situation the next time it
comes? This fits in with the Buddha’s teachings on preventing unskillful states
from arising. These are times when you really do have to think about the past and
think about the future, i.e. where you’ve made a mistake in the past and what you
can do in the future not to repeat it.
The same principle applies to observing the precepts. Once you know that
you’re not going to kill anything, you have to sit down and look at your house.
How can you arrange things in your house so that you’re not attracting ants,
cockroaches, or whatever. Don’t treat these pests as a surprise when they come.
They are things you can anticipate. So it’s a useful exercise to sit down and look
at your life to figure out in what ways can you be less harmful. If situation X were
to arise, how can you prepare yourself ahead of time so that you don’t respond in
your old unskillful ways?
This teaches you to be meticulous, scrupulous in following your wish for all
beings to find happiness, true happiness. In other words, your goodwill, to be
most effective both inside and out, can’t be just a floating sort of general idea.
You have to apply it to the nitty-gritty of all your interactions with others. This
way your goodwill becomes honest. And it actually does have an impact, which is
why we develop this attitude to begin with: to make sure that it actually does
animate our thoughts, our words, and our deeds.
As the Buddha said, the development of goodwill is one of causes for true
happiness, a happiness that’s good for everybody. And that kind of happiness is
really special. All too often, the pleasures of the world require that if somebody’s
gaining, other people have to lose. But with this cause for happiness, everybody
gains.
So develop it as much as you can.

340
Table of Contents

Titlepage 2
Copyright 3
Anchored by Skillful Roots 4
Limitless Thoughts 8
Trustworthy Judgment 12
Informing the Whole Committee 15
Equanimity 19
Appropriate Attention 24
The Balance of Power 30
People Suffer from Their Thinking 35
Discernment 40
Right Livelihood 44
The Thinking Cure 47
Energy & Efficiency 51
On Not Being a Victim 54
Doing, Maintaining, Using 57
Before Your Face Was Born 60
The Riddle Tree 64
Close to What You Know 68
Practicing Your Scales 73
Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising 77
Goodwill All Around 83
Truths of the Will 87
Taking Responsibility 91
Overwhelmed by Freedom 96
A Refuge from Modern Values 101

341
Two Kinds of Middle 105
Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom 109
Wilderness Wealth 113
Disenchantment 117
In the Land of Wrong View 121
Right Mindfulness 125
The Best of a Bad Situation 130
Five Strengths 135
The Humble Way to Awakening 139
Ignorance 143
In Terms of the Four Noble Truths 147
Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening 150
Fabricating against Defilement 154
Feeding your Attack Dogs 158
Against Your Type 163
Thoughts with Fangs 167
A Slave to Craving 170
The Wounded Warrior 174
The Ennobling Path 178
The Wisdom of Tenacity 183
Arising & Passing Away 188
Turtle Meditation 192
True Protection for the World 196
To Be Your Own Teacher 200
The Context for No Context 204
The Uses of Equanimity 209
There is This 214
Facing Your Responsibilities 218

342
Xtreme Drama 221
In Charge of Your World 226
Giving Meaning to Life 230
The Brahmaviharas on the Path 233
Goodwill First & Last 238
A Stranger to Your Thoughts 242
Achieving Balance 246
Beyond Inter-eating 250
The Karma of Pleasure 254
The Rivers of Karma 258
The Luminous Mind 262
Values 267
The Freedom to Give 273
The Lotus in the Mud 278
Balancing Tranquility & Insight 282
Success on the Path 288
Inconstancy 292
The Will to Awaken 297
The Limits of Old Kamma 303
The Buddha’s Investment Strategy 308
A Soiled, Oily Rag 312
Taking Charge 317
Views & Vision 321
No Happiness Other than Peace 326
Insight into Pain 332
Metta Means Goodwill 337

343