Capable

There’s a story in the Canon where Citta, a householder, is dying. Devas come to see him and tell him, “Set your mind on becoming a universal monarch.” He asks them, “Why do you say that?” They say they have two reasons: One is that he’s a virtuous person, and it would be good to have a virtuous person in a position of power in the world. The second reason is that, because he is a virtuous person, whatever determination he made in his mind would be bound to come true.

He rejects their advice. He says he wants something higher than being a universal monarch. After all, he’s a non-returner. He’s not going to come back to the human world.

But because of what the devas said, it’s become a tradition in the Buddha’s teachings that if you make merit—the devas limited it to the people who make merit by being virtuous, but other people have expanded it to include making merit through generosity—then you can make a determination. You can dedicate the merit to a particular result that you would like to see.

Ajaan Fuang didn’t recommend that his students do that. He said, “Trust in the practice you’re doing. If you’re doing the practice well, the results will have to be good.”

But one time someone gave him a book on King Asoka. The part of the book he said he liked the most was when, toward the end of his life, King Asoka, said that all the merit that he had made through his gifts to the Sangha, he didn’t want to dedicate it to becoming a king ever again. What he did want was “capability within himself”—in other words, enough knowledge and enough skill to be able to depend on himself wherever he went.

That kind of dedication, Ajaan Fuang said, was worthwhile because it means you want to master the Buddhist teachings as a skill. And you’re willing to develop the qualities of the mind that can make you a reliable person, so that no matter where you go, you don’t need to rely on other people. You have your own inner integrity that you can depend on.

Now, the qualities that make you dependable like this are the four bases for success: desire, persistence, intent, and ingenuity. So it’s good to think about how you develop these qualities of mind and heart as you’re practicing.

You start out with desire. We’re told again and again that desire is the cause for suffering, but it’s also part of the path to the end of suffering. Under right effort, the Buddha says, you have to generate desire to develop skillful qualities and to abandon unskillful ones.

In other words, the path works best if you can convince yourself that you want to do it. This involves talking to yourself in the right way.

As for the parts of the mind that don’t want to do the path, that find it hard to do the path, you have to ask yourself, “Why are you listening to them? They’re just creating trouble for you.” They talk to themselves in unskillful ways. Well, you can talk to yourself in skillful ways.

The important thing about desire is that you focus it on the causes, and not so much on the results. The desire for results is there in the back of your mind, of course, but you realize if you just focus on the results, it’s a floating desire that doesn’t accomplish anything and actually gets in the way. If you focus your desires on the causes, that you want to succeed in the causes, the results will have to come.

Our desire right now is to get the mind to settle down. So what can you do to get the mind to settle down? The Buddha gives his instructions in his description of right mindfulness. You keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

So you stay with the breath. That’s part of the body and it’s already there. What’s going to make a difference is developing those three qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency.

Mindfulness is the ability to keep in mind what you want to do and what you should be doing. Alertness is what watches what’s actually going on—what you’re actually doing in the present moment. Are you sticking with your original intent or not? If you’re not, bring the mind right back. If you are, try to be as sensitive as possible to the breath. This is where you bring in the ardency—you’re trying to do this well.

Of these three qualities, ardency is the one that Ajaan Lee focused on as connected with discernment. You realize that true happiness is not going to come through your simply sitting here waiting for it to come, or accepting things as they are, or reading and thinking about the Dhamma. There are things that have to be developed; there are things that have to be abandoned. You see that, you realize that, so you realize you’re going to get the most out of these teachings only if you put them into practice: That’s genuine discernment, genuine wisdom.

Then you just keep at it. Anything unskillful comes up, you learn how to let go of it. Anything skillful that hasn’t come around yet or is still very weak, you try to strengthen it. That’s where the persistence comes in. As long as the results aren’t what you want, you keep at it.

But in keeping at it you don’t just push, push, push. There’s an example in the Canon of someone who wants to get milk out of a cow, so he twists the cow’s horn. Of course, you’re not going to get any milk. But think about it: Sometimes, as a meditator, you’re twisting the cow’s horn and you think, “Maybe I’m not twisting hard enough, or long enough, or with enough force.” That kind of persistence is not right* *persistence. It’s blind.

You want the kind of persistence that says, “Maybe I’m doing something wrong here. What else could I do instead?” In the case of the cow, you see that it has an udder, so you pull on the udder and you get the milk.

Some people would say, “Why don’t you just give up? Stop twisting the horn, and then you’ll be fine. You won’t be harassing the cow; you won’t be wasting any effort.” You’re not wasting any effort, but you’re not getting the milk that you want. When you pull on the udder, then you get the milk.

That’s what persistence is about. It’s a matter of making your effort right, focusing in the right place, doing the right things. And being happy to do this, seeing it as your sport.

All too often, we identify with our defilements and we get upset when our defilements get thwarted. But maybe it would be better to change your allegiance: See these defilements as false friends—the kind of friends who get you to break the law and then, when the police come, go running away, leaving you with the stolen goods. You’re the one who gets punished.

In other words, the defilements can get you to do things that are going to cause you to suffer. They’re not suffering at all. You’re the one who suffers, and yet you believe them.

So change your allegiance. This requires the third basis for success, which is intent. You really give your full attention to what you’re doing, full attention to what the results are. You’re not just going through the motions. You put your whole heart into this.

Give the breath one hundred percent of your attention. After all, it’s all around you: Wherever your focus is located in the body, there’s breath in front of it, breath to the left, breath to the right, breath behind, above, and below. You can think of the whole body as being breath. This way, you give the mind one object, a single object that fills your whole awareness. That’s the quality you’re looking for in the concentration.

Then you contemplate it.

This is where the fourth quality comes in, vimamsa, which is usually translated as discrimination or ingenuity. Ajaan Lee translates it as circumspection. You look all around what you’re doing to see if the results are really* *good all around, and if there’s anything lacking, you try to figure out what the lack is and how you can make up for it. This is where you’ll have to learn how to depend on yourself.

You think about the ajaans living out in the forest. They had two big problems. One was that visions would sometimes come in their meditation, and they’d have to figure out, “Is this something I can believe or not? And exactly how much of it should I believe?”

Ajaan Mun taught a basic principle, which is that if something comes up that you’re not sure about, just stay with your sense of simple awareness. Don’t brand the vision as true or false. Just say, “This vision is there, and let it pass.” You can protect yourself from a lot of things in that way.

The other problem, of course, was that their minds would refuse to settle down sometimes, and there was nobody they could run to for advice. So they had to use their own ingenuity: “What is it that the mind likes to settle down with? How can I give that to the mind? Where is that potential in the body right now?”

The Buddha talks about a possibility for a sense of rapture, refreshment, a sense of ease in the body. Ask yourself, “Where is that potential right now? Or is there something I’m doing that’s hiding it? Can I breathe or focus in a way that doesn’t hide those things, that doesn’t create unnecessary tension?”

So you use your ingenuity: See if the problem is with the mind or with the breath, and try to figure out ways of changing things so that you get better results. It’s in this way that you learn how to depend on yourself.

You get better and better at reading the mind and you can self-correct. When things come up, there are two principles that the ajaans recommend: One is that if something comes up and says, “This is this and that’s that,” you have to ask yourself, “To what extent is that true? And to what extent is it false? What would be the opposite of that insight? Where would that be true? Under what conditions?”

A lot of the insights that come up are specifically for particular situations. But if you try to memorize them and apply them to everything, you can often create more trouble for yourself. So you have to ask yourself, “What are the limits of this particular insight?”

The other thing the ajaans recommend is that when an insight arises, watch what happens right after it arises in the mind. Is there any pride? Any kind of defilement that can come up around the insight, watch out for that.

So you’re intent and you’re circumspect. This is how you learn how to depend on yourself; how you develop a capability within yourself so that wherever you happen to be, you have within you the resources you need for coming out safe and sound.

We live in this world with dangers all around us—and dangers inside the mind. So we have to figure out how to keep ourselves safe. When we do, that’s how we develop capability within ourselves.

What it comes down to is that you train yourself to be your own teacher. When a problem comes up in the mind, the first question is, “If the teacher were around, what would he or she say?” If you can think of something the teacher said that’s relevant, okay, apply it. If it turns out that it doesn’t work, you say, “Okay, now what else might be possible?” In that way, you develop your own ability to be a teacher inside.

This is how the ajaans were able to teach others: because they had learned how to teach themselves. They could see through other people’s defilements because they had to learn how to see through their own. When your wisdom and discernment are independent in this way, that’s when you have full capability within yourself. No matter where you go, you’re safe, you’re fine.

Ajaan Lee, in a discussion of the seven noble treasures, once said that of the seven, the most important is discernment. He explained, “If you have discernment, the other ones are there in the discernment. And no matter where you may happen to be reborn, if you’re reborn only with a single machete, you can still set yourself up in life.”

There are a lot of people out there who’ve made a lot of donations, a lot of merit in that direction, but with not much discernment. Their wealth, their prosperity could actually come back and destroy them, because they don’t have the discernment to use it well.

So work on developing your discernment, which is basically your ability to reflect on your actions and their results. Figure out what’s going well, what’s not going well. If it’s going well, how do you maintain it? If it’s not going well, what do you do to change, to get better results?

That kind of discernment is the discernment that can really help you all the time. We hear so much about the discernment of the Buddha in terms of emptiness and dependent co-origination, but those teachings count as discernment only if you know how to use them wisely.

And your sense of how to use them wisely has to begin with a sense of how to use simpler things wisely. Simpler principles like: What’s skillful, what’s not skillful? How do you abandon what’s unskillful? How you develop what is skillful?

You start with those questions, and then by the time you reach issues around emptiness or dependent co-arising, you’ll know what to do with them, because you will have developed a capability within yourself.

So if you’re going to dedicate your practice to anything, dedicate it to that.