Dhamma in Line with the Dhamma

As a society, we’re used to being treated as consumers. There are people trying to sell us their product, and if we don’t like their product, they’ll change the product until they find something that sells. But when you come to the Dhamma, we can’t think of ourselves as consumers. We’re presented with a path. We’re presented with a series of truths that the Buddha said are noble, both in the sense that they’re ennobling when you take them on as your guide, and in the sense that they’re true everywhere. That’s one of the meanings of the word ariya in Pali: a universal standard. So the path is not simply for our consumption. It’s a challenge that holds you to a high standard: Are you noble enough to follow it?

The Buddha had a very clear sense of what was Dhamma and what was not Dhamma, what worked and what didn’t work. This is why he said that when you want to show respect for him and for the Dhamma, you practice in line with the Dhamma. Recently I was talking with someone who had been talking with someone else who cited a passage toward the end of the Buddha’s life where he said you have to make yourself your refuge. That other person was saying that this means you can just do whatever you want, interpret the Dhamma any way you like, it’s all up to you. Everybody’s free to choose whatever way they like. Well, we are free to choose, but the question is: Is it going to work or not?

Of course, that other person was taking the Buddha’s teaching out of context. He said further that to make yourself a refuge, to make yourself an island, you have to make the Dhamma your island. And how do you do that? You practice the establishings of mindfulness. For example, you’re here with the breath. It’s called being with the body in and of itself. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful: mindful to keep the breath in mind, alert to see what’s actually going on with the breath, alert to what you’re doing around the breath and the results that you’re getting. And then ardent: This is where you have to put in some effort.

In other words, if you see that you’re doing something unskillful, you’ve got to change. If you’re doing something skillful, you try to maintain it and develop it further. You don’t just sit there and watch things come and go and say, “Oh, this is arising and passing away.” You have to actually sort out things in your own mind and the results that are arising in the body and mind as you’re focusing on the breath. Is what you’re doing leading in a good direction or a bad direction? If it’s leading in a bad direction, you’ve got to make course adjustments. If it’s leading in a good direction, what do you do to maintain it? You don’t just sit there and watch it come and go.

As the Buddha said, when mindfulness is in charge, it tries to give rise to skillful states and maintain them, i.e., make them arise and keep them from passing away. As for unskillful states, it tries to keep them from arising, and if they’re there, make them go away. You’re not just sitting here passively, observing. You realize that you’re an agent, acting right now, and you’re going to be reaping the results of your actions, so you want to make sure they’re skillful.

We’ve got the guidance of the Buddha, we’ve got the guidance of all the great ajaans, to give us some sense of what the skillful directions might be. That’s help from outside. The sense in which you are your own refuge, your own island, is that you have to do the work yourself, and you have to learn how to train yourself to be a good observer, a good judge of how things are going. Again, you don’t suspend your powers of judgment, just learn how to use them in a new way. This is what it means to make yourself a refuge.

In other words, you have to change, but it’s for your own good. If you take a look at the four noble truths, the duties with regard to them are all there to put an end to your suffering. The Buddha doesn’t tell you you’re here to serve some purpose that somebody else has decided for you.

This is one of the reasons we don’t go with the idea that we’re all one. If we were all one, then there were some oneness out there deciding what the general purpose of things is, we would have to just follow that, to fall in line. As for our desire to put an end to suffering, that would have to take a back seat to somebody else’s plan for us, or some larger scheme of things.

But actually, the larger scheme of things has no purpose. It just arises and passes away, and it goes through many, many cycles of arising and passing away. We’re free to choose whether we want to stay and keep on participating or not. If you want to stay, there’s going to be suffering. If you want to get out of the suffering, you’ve got to learn how to stop feeding on things.

When the Buddha says “practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma,” he defines it as practicing for the sake of disenchantment and dispassion. That may sound a little cold, but you remember his basic image for suffering is that we’re feeding on things—and we tend to feed without really looking carefully at what we’re sticking into our mouths.

Now, “feeding” here, of course doesn’t refer just to physical food, it includes emotional food and mental food as well. We’re pretty indiscriminate in all the ways we eat. We try to gobble down, and then we suffer. And, of course, the beings that are being fed on are suffering as well. Even when we can make a nice arrangement with somebody else, “I’ll feed emotionally on you, you feed can emotionally on me, and we’ll try to look after each other,” it can’t last.

There’s a lot of instability in this feeding process, and a lot of suffering. So we should learn how to get beyond our hunger—in other words, find something that will enable us not to have to feel hunger ever again. There will be a sense of fullness, a sense of completeness, and it’s from that completeness that we learn how to develop dispassion. In other words, we’re not starving ourselves. We train the mind so that we can find something better than the way we’ve been feeding on things, something that enables us to let go. That’s how dispassion happens, that’s how disenchantment happens.

It starts with meditation, although meditation lies in a larger context where you’re learning to be generous and virtuous as well—practicing good qualities and seeing how happiness comes from being generous, from being virtuous, from being willing to follow whatever the dictates of your sense of what the appropriate way of generosity would be, and the dictates of the precepts as to how you should behave. You have to be willing to stretch yourself more than you normally would.

Especially in terms of the precepts, you learn mindfulness, you learn alertness, you learn ardency, all the qualities you’re going to need to use in the meditation. You’re mindful to keep the precepts in mind, alert to what you’re actually doing, and then ardent in finding ways of sticking with the precepts in a way that doesn’t lead to unfortunate results.

I was reading a while back someone saying that to approach the precepts with wisdom means you know when to follow them and when not to follow them. But that’s basically not following them, and it’s not wisdom. Wisdom is learning how to follow the precepts in a wise way. You stick with your principles, you stick with the promises you make to yourself, but at the same time you do it in such a way that you’re not causing harm to anybody. You learn that that stretches you, forces you to think more carefully about things that you would normally slough off.

So even though there may be some pleasures that come from breaking the precepts and some difficulties in observing them, if you stick with the precepts you find that the rewards more than make up for the difficulties. The sense of well-being that comes from sticking with the precepts is much greater than the momentary pleasures that come from breaking them.

The same with meditation: Meditation is not necessarily easy. You’re not here to follow just wherever the whims of your mind are going to take you. It’s a training.

The Buddha compares it to training an elephant. When you bring the elephant in from the forest, at first it’s going to rebel. It’s not going to be happy. But you treat it well even though you keep it tied to a post. It doesn’t like being tied to the post, but you can’t let it go. Yet you try to get it to realize that there are rewards from becoming trained. You feed it well; you play music to soothe it. Gradually, it becomes more and more willing to be trained.

In the same way, even though it’s difficult in the beginning to get the mind to stay here, you try to reward it with interesting breaths and pleasant breaths. You try to find different ways of working with the breath energy in the body that get you interested and that give you a sense of well-being inside.

After a while, this becomes your default mode: staying here. That’s because you realize it really is a better place. You may have been used to wandering around as much as you liked before, but now you realize it’s a lot better just being here and really getting to know this territory here in the immediate present: what potentials it has and how you can make use of those potentials.

Then you can start thinking about the things you would otherwise be doing and you realize they’re not as interesting or as enjoyable as they used to be. You see where you’re feeding on things that lead to difficulties down the way, lead to hardships, lead to oppression, lead to all kinds of unskillful things. Lead to disappointment.

Here we’re not just bad-mouthing the world or bad-mouthing life in general. We’re just looking at the relative rewards that come from practicing and not practicing, from having a mind that’s trained and having a mind that’s not trained. You realize a trained mind is a lot better, both for yourself and for the people around you. This is what enables you to develop a sense of dispassion and disenchantment with the things that used to enthrall you. And this is just on the level of concentration. As the concentration gets deeper, you find there are deeper and deeper levels of realizing that old ways of doing things, old ways of thinking, old ways of behaving, just don’t hold the same old appeal they used to. You’re growing up.

Ajaan Chah has a nice way of expressing the term, “disenchantment.” He says it’s like sobering up. You’ve been intoxicated with things and as a result you didn’t see things clearly. Or you can compare it to growing up. You understand the implications of your actions better because you’ve got a better vantage point. You’ve got a higher pleasure, a higher well-being. And you gained it because you followed the path. You trained yourself. You wanted to do whatever needed to be done. That’s the attitude that makes the difference. That makes it Dhamma in line with the Dhamma, not Dhamma in line with your moods or your whims.

In paying homage to the Buddha this way, we’re also paying homage to our own desire for true happiness. Being a consumer, as we have been for so long, we’ve gotten used to the idea, “Well, I’ll put up with a lot of difficulty so that I can get this little thing and that little thing. It won’t be totally satisfying, but at least it’ll be entertaining for a while.” We’ve been led to believe that that’s the best that life has to offer. Whereas the Buddha speaks to our deeper desire: We want a happiness that’s genuine, a happiness that’s true, a happiness that won’t let us down, a happiness that’s totally harmless. Something that’s good all around.

So we’re paying homage to that desire. The Buddha doesn’t make us feel embarrassed to desire this happiness. He doesn’t say, “Well, you should be doing this for everybody else, not for yourself.” You can’t do the practice for everybody. The reason we suffer is our own lack of skill, our own need to feed. We learn how to overcome that need to feed by developing our skill. That’s the only way it can be done. You can’t develop skills for anyone else. But you’re not the only person who benefits from your own skills. You’ve pulled out of the food chain as one less mouth, and you’re giving good examples to others to show that they can be free, too.

So when you make yourself your refuge, what it means is that you turn yourself into something you can really depend on, and something that others can depend on, too. The path is here to show you how to do it.