Enjoying the Path

“Strong respect for the training”: We chanted that just now. It’s one of the factors that brings you into the presence of nibbana. What it means is that you see the value of what you’re doing in the path, not only in terms of the goal that it takes you to, but also the fact that it’s a good path to be on. In another passage, we chant every day, ādi-kalyāṇaṁ majjhe- kalyāṇaṁ pariyosāna- kalyāṇaṁ: admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. Not only is the goal admirable, but the path that takes us there is an admirable one as well. You lead a good life when you’re on the path. You harm no one. You develop good qualities in the mind.

Simply speaking, it’s good to be on a path, because most people’s lives are on no path at all. Buddha once said it’s like throwing a stick up in the air. Sometimes it lands on one end, sometimes it lands on the other end, sometimes it lands in the middle, with no real pattern. It doesn’t get anywhere. You wander here for a while, wander there for a while.

This is why the process is called samsara, or the wandering on. For most people, it’s pretty aimless. The things they end up doing, finding themselves in bad situations, where the only way out they can see is through doing more harmful actions: That’s no place that you really want to be at all. Whereas when you’re on the path, there’s a direction. You stick with it and you find that your awareness of things gets more and more subtle as you’re developing qualities of mindfulness and alertness. And although the path doesn’t go anyway aside from right here right now, still, the nature of right here right now is that time passes. Over time, your understanding grows more subtle, as you stay on the path. And as I was saying this morning, it’s not that the path saves all its good stuff for the end. There are lots of good along the way.

Ajaan Lee’s analogy is walking along a path through the forest, and there are trees and plants and flowers and things on the side of the path. As you get familiar with the path, you begin to realize which plants are edible, which ones are not, which ones are medicine for which diseases. This is when you clear the path, you can lie down on the path. In other words, you can find rest along the way.

So an important part of following the path is to learn how to enjoy the path. It’s one of the reasons we work with the breath, the way we do. Not only does it provide a comfortable place for the mind to stay while you’re walking on the path, remember what the Buddha said, that right concentration is the heart of the path. The factors of right concentration include ease, pleasure, rapture, equanimity—good qualities to have in the mind. It’s meant to be enjoyable. There are some places where the Buddha talks about painful practice, but it’s not always painful. There’s the element of pleasure as well. This is what makes the path, even though it may be a long path, seem a lot shorter.

As you explore what’s going on in the body. It’s not just an idle pastime, working with the breath energy in the body. It’s not a distraction, because as you work with the breath energy, you begin to see the results of the movements of the mind. The breath energy may be flowing perfectly fine for a while, and then suddenly your mind goes running off to something else. You come back and you see that, in running off to something else, it trampled all over the work you had done. That gives you an interesting insight into the movements of the mind, what they do, what they leave in their wake. You may have hardly even noticed that the mind was wandering off, or that it was oblivious to certain things, but then you come back and you see it.

That gives you a lesson in ignorance: how the way the mind deliberately closes things off may not be that much thought out, but that’s part of its way of moving around. It’s focusing its interest here, focusing its interest there, and it blocks out other things in doing so.

You begin to see that there are certain ways of breathing that are associated with skillful states of mind, and others that are associated with unskillful states of mind. The relationship goes back and forth. Sometimes it’s the breath that encourages the skillful or unskillful state, and sometimes it’s the state that encourages a particular way of breathing.

So you can get a handle on it from either end. You can either change the way you think or you can change the way you breathe when you notice this happening. Then you get more and more into that line between physical and mental phenomena. It’s important to see what’s on either side of that line and how the influences go back and forth.

So it’s not a distraction, this work with the breath. It’s an important part of the path, and it’s important that we have respect for that part of the training. In following the path, it’s important to realize that there are stages. A lot of people seem to think it’s an all-or-nothing thing. Either you’re totally unawakened or you’re totally awakened and there’s nothing in between. That screws up more meditators than almost anything else. When that’s the attitude, then you keep throwing away perfectly good steps along the path. For example, the directed thought and evaluation that are necessary to get the mind to settle down: Part of you says, “Why should we be doing this? This is thinking, and we’re not supposed to be thinking on the path.” Or, “This is the discriminating mind. We’re not supposed to have the discriminating mind.” There’s no way the mind can settle down without a certain amount of thinking and evaluating. So have respect for these tools, even though there comes a point at the end when you will let them go.

Meanwhile, you take good care of your tools along the way. It’s like a carpenter. You’re going to build a house, and thinking about the fact that, well, someday the house is going to be done, and at that point the tools won’t be necessary. If you use your tools, you never get the house. And if you don’t look after your tools, it’s going to be hard. After a while, the saw gets dull, things get rusty, and they get harder and harder. It’s because you don’t have respect for them. Good carpenters have respect for their tools. Any good craftsperson will have respect for his or her tools, because it’s the tools that get the job done.

And there is a job to be done. The Buddha talks about the path as being one of both developing and abandoning, or developing and letting go. We like to think it’s simply a matter of letting go, but you also have to develop good qualities in the mind if you’re going to let go properly. You have to develop mindfulness. You have to develop right effort. Concentration is a matter of development. In fact, the word for meditation is just that, development. You learn to develop right view. And it’s through the development of these good qualities that you can let go of your cravings, let go of your clinging, and detect more and more subtle levels of craving and clinging, so that you can let those go as well.

One of the customs of the noble ones is to delight both in the developing and in the letting go. So an important part of the path is just that, learning how to delight in what you’re doing. So don’t think that if you don’t get to the end of the path, it’s a worthless process or it’s a waste of time. It’s time well spent, no matter what kind of life you’d be leading if you weren’t on the path. Think of what it would be like to look back on your life and say, “You had the opportunity to follow the path, but you threw it away.” An important part of being on this path is to learn how to make it enjoyable, have a good, strong sense of the goodness of the path—not only that it’s wholesome for you, like vitamins, but also that it’s an enjoyable path to be on.

You’ve got all this opportunity to look into your mind, to understand what it is that drives the mind. There’s a lot of discovery, a lot of exploration, and a lot of discovery that’s really gratifying. And the process of the exploration is fun as well. You get to see what these properties of the body can do. They can do all kinds of things that you wouldn’t have suspected if you didn’t explore.

So it’s a matter both of respecting the path, having a strong sense of its innate goodness, and also enjoying the path. As Ajaan Fuang once said, “If the path gets dry, then it’s like an engine that seizes up.” You need, the sense of pleasure, the sense of well-being, the sense of rapture that comes from the practice to keep things lubricated, to keep them going—so that your enjoyment is not just an abstract enjoyment, but it’s visceral as well.