Take Heart

We tend to be impatient at the practice. We hear that the Buddha says there are four kinds of practice—fast and pleasant, fast and painful, slow and pleasant, and slow and painful—and we’d like to put in an order for the fast and pleasant. But getting on the path isn’t like planning an itinerary, saying, “I’m going up north in California.” You can decide if you’re in a hurry, you can take the 5. If you’re not in a hurry, you want to do a little sightseeing, you can take the 101 or the 1. The path of practice is not like that at all, because a lot of it has to depend on your habits, your background. Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a path that’s slow, and it’s very easy to give up. The results don’t seem to be coming.

But you have to remember, a path that seems slow takes a lot less time than life without a path. Life without a path has no real purpose, no real direction, and it goes on and on and on. Think about all the eons you’ve been through. And if you don’t get out, there’ll be more eons like that: up and down, up and down, with a lot of suffering.

Remember that image the Buddha had of the tears you’ve shed over the loss of a mother, the loss of a father, brother, sister, daughter, son. In each case, it’d be more than the water in the oceans. So how many more tears do you want to shed? This is why it’s good to think on a regular basis about large time, deep time, to get your practice into perspective.

You get a little sense of that coming here to the monastery. If you’re used to having your days filled with activities, all of a sudden the day seems awfully long when there’s nothing to do in the afternoon except meditate. Yet strangely, these long days, when you look back at them, seem to go by very quickly—in the sense of the past week, the past month. Your sense of time in the monastery is very different from your sense of time out in the lay world. And it’s good to carry a little bit of that monastic standard time with you, so that you’re not living by the rhythms of the news cycle or the rhythms of the week. It gets your practice into perspective.

You can also think about the ajaans. Ajaan Mun, they say, practiced for 25 years before he gained any of the noble attainments. But he kept going. Part of it was his conviction. Part of it was his heedfulness. And part of it was desire. As he said, he didn’t want to come back and be the laughingstock of the defilements ever again.

So think of those lists that the Buddha gives to the different stages of the practice in the Wings to Awakening. The first members of the lists are good ones to underscore, to ask yourself, “If the practice isn’t going well, how do I keep myself encouraged on the practice, to keep at it?”

In terms of the bases for success, you start with desire. You realize that you’ve suffered a lot. In fact, how much you’ve been suffering is actually beyond your comprehension, but there’s an awful lot. And you want to get out. That desire is to be encouraged.

I don’t know how many times you hear people say, “The desire to change things is craving, and craving is a cause for suffering.” But the Buddha divided desire into two types: skillful and unskillful. Skillful desire is the desire in the factor of right effort in the path: the desire to keep unskillful qualities from arising, or if they have arisen, the desire to abandon them; the desire to give rise to skillful qualities if they’re not there, and if they are there, then the desire to maintain them and develop them further. That kind of desire the Buddha praised.

The image that Ven. Ananda gave was of going to a park. The practice, he said, is to put an end to desire, but desire is part of the practice. He had mentioned this to a brahman, and the brahman said, “In that case, it’s an endless path, because how can you use desire to get rid of desire?” So Ananda gave the image of going to the park. You go to the park because you want to go to the park. Once you get there, what happened to your desire to go to the park? It’s already been fulfilled, so it can be put down.

It’s the same with the path. If you desire to develop the path, then that’s a good thing. The desire will go away on its own when you reach the goal. Just make sure that it’s focused on the steps that lead to the goal. If you think too much about where the path is going and focus all your attention on the fact that you’re not there yet, that kind of desire can get in the way. Tell yourself, “Okay, this is a path that goes in this direction, and the next step is going to be right here, and the next step is going to be right here,” and you focus on each step as you’re doing it. And whether the path is long or short, you know it’s going to a good place. So you develop patience, you develop endurance, and you stick with each step as it comes.

In the five faculties or the five strengths, the list starts with conviction. You’re convinced of the Buddha’s awakening. And what does that mean? One of the things you’re convinced of is that he did it through the power of his own actions. And as he said, it wasn’t the case that he had anything special that other people couldn’t have. He said it was through qualities of ardency, heedfulness, and resolution. In other words, if you really stick with it, you develop those qualities within yourself, and you can do it, too.

That, too, is another topic that Ananda talked about. We practice in order to get rid of conceit, but we use conceit in the practice. The conceit here is: “Other people can do it. They’re human beings. I’m a human being, and if they can do it, I can, too.”

We look at the ajaans and we see them at the end of their practice. Sometimes we read their biographies, and there’s a tendency in the Thai biographies to extol the ajaans and not talk about their weak points or weak times in the practice. But they had them. Everybody goes through difficulties. It’s your attitude toward them that makes the difference.

If you’re approaching the difficulties as reasons to stop, then they’ll stop you. But if you take them as challenges, you figure out, “There must be a way around this. Other people have gotten around this particular obstacle.” It’s not the case that you have any defilements that nobody else has ever had. They’re the same defilements and they can all be solved. Whether it takes a long time or a short time, have that confidence.

That’s another aspect of conviction: that to do it, you’ve got to learn how to maintain your confidence. You have to realize that by allowing yourself to get depressed, allowing yourself to get upset about how long the path is taking, you’re destroying your sole means of succeeding at the path. So you can’t indulge in those emotions. You have to see them as a danger. They’re defilements. You have to learn how to pull yourself out of your bad moods or out of your discouragement.

The Buddha gives lots of ways of thinking about that. You think about your generosity, the things you’ve freely given in the past. You think about your virtue, the times when you could have behaved in unskillful ways but you chose not to, even though there may have been a sacrifice involved. But you managed to do it.

The Buddha says you can think about the qualities that make people devas. Okay, you’ve got those qualities as well: conviction, virtue, generosity, learning, discernment. You have those to at least some extent, so nurture them, work with them, find happiness in them. Because that’s part of the practice, too.

There’s been this tendency in the last century or two to divide meditation from the rest of the practice, making it totally an affair of the head: figuring things out, gaining insights. But originally it was all part of a larger whole. The practice of merit was nothing antithetical to the practice of insight. In fact, by developing generosity, virtue, and goodwill, you make it a lot easier to observe your own mind. You get used to cultivating thoughts of, “How can I be generous? How can I hold to the precepts more consistently? How can I have goodwill for larger and larger numbers of people more consistently?” If you have a mind that’s thinking in those directions, it’s a lot easier to watch that mind, observe that mind.

That’s how insight is based, not on aversion, but on a sense of dispassion, which is different. Dispassion is when you’ve had enough of something. You’ve gained the benefits of a particular practice. You see that it’s good, but it can take you only so far. The Thai ajaans compare it to growing up. The games you used to play as a child, that used to hold fascination for you: You look at them now and they seem awfully simple-minded. Or you think of the food that you used to like as a child. I can think back on Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies. I used to save up my money to buy those things. Total garbage. There comes a point when you realize it is garbage and you can move on—not through aversion, but simply saying, “I’ve had enough.”

Well, it’s easier to say, “I’ve had enough,” when you’ve been doing good things and appreciating the goodness that comes from that.

Now, that quality of conviction is based on heedfulness, one of the qualities the Buddha developed, realizing that if you don’t do this, who’s going to do it for you? Nobody else can do this practice for you. And if you don’t do it, you’re leaving yourself exposed to the possibility of long, long-term harm and suffering.

But heedfulness also means that you don’t underestimate things. On the one hand, you don’t underestimate the dangers that are there if you don’t train the mind. But at the same time, you also don’t underestimate the good you’ve done and the good that can be done. Always have confidence in that, because that is the message of the Buddha’s awakening: The goodness we do is not wasted. It has power. And whether it shows its results quickly or slowly, part of knowing its power is learning how to appreciate goodness while you’re doing it.

As the Buddha said, the phrase, “acts of merit,” is another name for “happiness.” Not so much that it causes happiness: the action itself is a happy action.

So generosity is happy. Virtue is happy. Meditation is happy. Learn how to appreciate that kind of happiness and you’ll find that the mind is more and more inclined to want to develop it even further.

If all you can see is how little progress you’ve made, that spoils your mood for putting in any effort. You say, “All this work I’ve done hasn’t shown any progress. Why should I do any more work?” That’s a huge defilement, and a huge obstacle. And it’s an obstacle that you’re creating. What you want to do is look back on progress you have made and appreciate it. Sometimes it’s hard to see because it’s gradual. But it’s there.

So learn to take heart. That, in and of itself, is a good way of fighting off your defilements. They want to defeat you, and when you take on the mood that this is going nowhere or it’s awfully slow, you’re siding with them. You have to realize they’re not your friends. Your real friends are the voices of encouragement that you can muster up inside.