Reflect on What You’re Doing
September 25, 2023

When the Buddha first started teaching the Dhamma to his son, Rahula, at that point Rahula was still a novice. One of the first images the Buddha used was of a mirror. He said, “Just as you use a mirror to reflect on your face, reflect on your actions.” This is a theme that runs throughout the entire practice. You want to look at what you’re doing—because ultimately, as you find out, what you’re doing is causing suffering and you want to learn how to stop. Largely, the practice is about getting more sensitive to what you’re doing.

In the beginning, the Buddha told Rahula, “Before you act, reflect first on the intention. This act that you want to do: What are the results you expect?” This could be a physical action, a verbal action, or even a mental action. “If you expect any harm, don’t do it. If you don’t expect any harm, go ahead.” That’s passing judgment right there. This is an important part of reflection: learning how to pass wise judgment on your actions. And it’s easiest to pass judgment on your actions when you act only on skillful intentions. That’s when you’re going to learn that your skillful intentions may not be skillful enough. If you act on an intention you know is harmful, you don’t learn much from it. You caused harm because you planned to cause harm. What did you learn? But if you caused harm when you didn’t intend to cause harm, then you’ve learned something.

The next step is to reflect on your actions while you’re doing them, because there are times when your actions give results right away.

This is a really important principle in the teaching. We hear about the teaching on karma, and all too often we’re taught that your actions in some past lifetime lead to what you are right now, and your present actions will lead to what you will be in the future. But the Buddha himself attacked that idea. He said if your present moment were entirely shaped by your past actions, then if you do something unskillful right now, it would be because of your past actions. You wouldn’t have any choice.

The Buddha was so adamant about this point that even though he wasn’t the sort of person who would go out and seek other people to argue with them, there were cases when he found out that someone was teaching that everything you experience right now is the result of past actions, and he would go argue with that person. First he’d ask, “Is this what you really teach?” If the other person said, “Yes,” then the Buddha would say, “Then in that case, people kill because of their past actions and they steal because of their past actions. And they would have no idea for how to decide what was skillful or what was not.” In fact there would be no concept of skillful versus unskillful actions, no idea of what should or shouldn’t be done. Everything you did would be predetermined. He added that you leave the person bewildered and unprotected—in other words, defenseless against intentions that come up in the mind, urges that come up in the mind.

So it’s an important principle that you want to look at what you’re doing while you’re doing it and see what the results are. This is what the quality of sampajañña or alertness means in the practice of mindfulness leading to concentration. The commentary argues against this. It’s one of those rare cases where the commentary gets blatantly snide about something that’s actually in the Canon itself—but then maybe that’s why it’s snide. It knows its on weak ground. It says, “Even babies sucking at their mother’s breast or jackals howling know what they’re doing while they’re doing it.” But how much do they know? And how much do you usually know about what you’re doing while you’re doing it? You’re here to learn by reflection on your actions. So while you’re doing the action, if you see any harm coming up, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, you can continue.

When the action is done, then you reflect on the long-term results. If it turned out that you didn’t anticipate any harm and you didn’t see any harm while you were doing it, but it turned out to have caused harm over the long term, then you go talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path. This reinforces the quality of honesty that we talked about last night. And you also learn that maybe that person will have some advice for how not to repeat that mistake. But if you realize that you didn’t cause any harm, or at least you don’t see any harm, take joy in that fact and continue practicing.

This principle applies not only with outside actions, but also actions in the mind. It applies to your concentration practice. It applies to your development of discernment.

It’s always interesting to watch the Buddha teach children. He didn’t have a special watered-down Dhamma just for children, aside from the fact that he wanted to make things very clear and to get them started off on the right foot. So he taught a lot of good principles right from the beginning: honesty, compassion, wanting not to cause harm, and this principle of reflection on what you’re doing.

Keep that image of the mirror in mind, because when you’re practicing concentration, the same issues come up. You get the mind to settle down. The two activities the Buddha recommends in his description of right mindfulness, which we’ve talked about as being the recipe for right concentration, involve two things. One, you focus on an object in and of itself, like the body in and of itself or the breath in and of itself. And two, you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you focus exclusively on the breath, as it is right now, without reference to anything outside at all. Just what have you got here with the breath?

Then the Buddha says you apply three qualities: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. The mindfulness keeps you directed, reminding you of what you should be doing. The ardency means you’re trying to do it well. And the alertness is what watches over, enables you to reflect: “What am I doing? What are the results?”

Another image the Buddha uses is the image of the wise, experienced cook. Just as a wise cook learns to read his master—if the master likes salty food, the cook notices; if he reaches for a lot of sour food, the cook notices, then provides more salty and sour food for the master—in the same way, when you’re trying to get the mind to settle down, you find that sometimes it likes a certain way of breathing—or may not like the breath at all. It may want another topic. You give it what it wants, so that it does settle down. You can gain a sense of what’s working and what’s not working.

So here again, commit yourself and reflect. Use that mirror to see what you’re doing. Then the question is, not so much about causing harm here, but where are you causing disturbance? The Buddha recommends that you let the mind settle in when it finally finds an object that it likes and can maintain its concentration. Then you reflect on it. Where’s there still some disturbance? You might want to look for what’s causing the level of stress in the concentration to go up, what’s causing it to go down. When it goes up, what did you do? When it goes down, what did you do? Reflect. If you see that a particular action is related to a rise in a level of stress, drop it. It’s in this way that you go through different levels of concentration by observing what you’re doing and trying to do it as skillfully and with the minimum disturbance possible.

It’s also the principle by which you gain discernment, as ultimately you get to the point where you see that no matter what the level of concentration, it’s made up of aggregates. In the case of the form jhanas, you’ve got the body, which would be the breath. Feelings would be a feeling of ease, well-being, or equanimity. The perception would be the mental image you have of how the breath comes in and out of the body. Fabrication would be your intention to stay here. It starts out with directed thought and evaluation as you talk to yourself to get the mind to settle down, but even as you drop those activities, you’ve still got the fabrication of intention to keep it going. And then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things.

You begin to see that the state of ease and well-being even in the best state of concentration is still not perfectly easeful. There’s still the effort that goes into maintaining it. You start looking at those aggregates for the concentration in terms of their being stressful, inconstant, not-self. The mind is then inclined to let go.

Here again, you have to be careful about letting go. The mind inclines to something deathless and unfabricated. You may actually have an experience of the unfabricated. But if you’re not careful about how you relate to that experience, that gets in the way of total awakening.

There are other cases where the focus isn’t so much the concentration, but more on right view. You start getting insights, but here again, you don’t want to look at the insight just in terms of its content. You also want to look at it in terms of, “What am I doing around this insight?” Sometimes an insight comes, and there’s pride: “I’ve gained this important understanding.” In a case like that, don’t focus on the insight, focus on the pride. There’s still something wrong.

Or there’s just conviction: “This is just got to be the way it is.” Here again, focus on the conviction: Do things always have to be that way? This is where you can think about Ajaan Lee’s question, “To what extent is this insight true and where would it not be true?” It’s like the insight that all cars drive on the right side of the road. That’s true in some countries but not in others. In England, in Thailand, they drive on the left. When you check yourself in his way, as Ajaan Lee says, you learn to be a person with two eyes.

You also begin to observe yourself, your tendency to latch on to something and get convinced of its truth before you really have proof, before you’ve really thought it through. So even the insights that come up in the course of the concentration, whether they’re verbalized or come in terms of images or feelings, can’t necessarily be trusted. What you can learn is how you react to those insights. The more sensitive you are to what you’re doing, the more you’re likely to see ways in which there’s still something wrong.

Here again, you have to use your powers of judgment. There’s so much said about meditation as putting the mind into a non-judging state, but the Buddha never said that. Judgment is an important part of the path, an important part of reflection. You’re trying to get your judgments more mature, more focused, more useful. Instead of simply saying, “Well, my powers of judgment are harmful,” you realize they may be immature, but you work on them because you’re going to need them. After all, the ultimate judgment in all these things is: “This activity I’m doing, is it worth it?” With virtue, concentration, and discernment, there are a lot of areas where holding on to the path really is worth it. But then as you get more and more refined in your perceptions, more refined in your sensitivity, your judgments get more refined as well. Things that seemed skillful in the beginning don’t seem so skillful now. You’ve learned this by constant reflection, looking at what you’re doing, reflecting on it, passing judgment, reflecting on your judgments. As everything gets more refined in the virtue, in the concentration, in the discernment, you get deeper and deeper into what the mind is doing to create its experience of the present moment—until finally everything gets so sensitive inside that you say, “I don’t want anything fabricated, not where I am, not anywhere else I could go.” If everything then falls together just right, things open up. You reach something that is unfabricated, and you know it’s unfabricated because you’ve gotten sensitive to your fabrications.

That’s where the insight is. “Everything subject to origination is subject to cessation”: That thought occurs naturally to the mind only when you’ve seen something that’s not originated. Remember, origination means, one, something caused, and two, the cause came from within the mind. Because you’re so perceptive and so alert, you can tell when something is caused by the mind and when something is not caused by the mind.

So here again, you have to be reflective to make sure that you don’t latch on to that realization. But even if you do latch on to it, it changes everything in your life. You see what the Buddha taught is true. There is a deathless element, and it can be attained through the path he taught. You have no more doubts. The sense spheres are not there in that experience. The aggregates are not there. There’s no tendency to identify yourself with any of them. So as they say, the fetters are cut. It’s not that you try cutting the fetters. The fetters are cut by the experience. And your sensitivity in committing yourself to what you’re doing and reflecting on what you’re doing, being really sensitive to your actions, is what guarantees the truth of what you’ve seen.

But at the same time, you see deeper. When there’s no fabrication in the present moment, there’s no present moment. There’s no fabrication of here or there. There’s no space of going or staying. There is no time.

Now, you can’t clone this ahead of time. What you can do is remember those instructions to Rahula and think of carrying them all the way through. Think of the image of the mirror. When anything comes up, look at what you’re doing and get really sensitive to the many levels on which you’re doing things. That sensitivity is what will see you through.