In Training

The Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation start with two steps where you develop your discernment, and then the remaining steps are trainings. The things you discern to begin with are very simple. When is the breath long? When is it short? Then you can discern subtler things. How does long breathing feel? Does it feel right for you right now? How about short breathing? Or you can try in long, out short; in short, out long. Fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow. Trying to discern where you feel the breathing in the body. What kind of breathing is comfortable?

And from there you train.

You train to be sensitive to the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. You train to breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of well-being, a sense of fullness, or refreshment. You train yourself to be sensitive to how feelings and perceptions are having an impact on your mind, and how to calm that impact.

At the same time, you’re calming the breath and training yourself to be sensitive to the state of your mind, and then adjusting it to get it to settle down: gladdening it to make it happy to be here, getting it more concentrated, steady, still, focused, centered, so that it doesn’t wander off. If other thoughts do come into the range of your awareness, you get so that you’re just not interested in them. You train yourself to release yourself from them.

Those are the basic steps. There’s more, but these are the ones that you work on to begin with. The fact that this is a training means that you play two roles. You’re the student who’s learning how to do this, and you’re the teacher who sets the goals and judges your results. In the course of learning how to meditate, you have to train both sides—both the student and the teacher inside—because the teacher basically comes out of our commentator. And for a lot of us, our inner commentator is pretty unskillful.

We set unrealistic goals and then punish ourselves when we can’t reach them. Or we take a vacation and say, “Hey, whatever you want.” Neither of those is a good teacher. As for the student, the student has to learn how to take instructions from the teacher, to be consistent in sticking with them, so that you can really know, when you’ve made a decision to breathe in a certain way or think in a certain way, what the results are.

If you don’t stick with the assignment, you’re never really going to know. You spend a little time here and then wander off. Then you come back a little bit more, and then you wander off again. How are you going to be able to judge whether it was a good assignment or not? You didn’t really do it.

And particularly in learning how to observe your mind, how are you going to know when it needs to be gladdened? There are times, as the Buddha said with regard to outside speech, when it’s right to speak in kind, gentle ways, and other times when it’s right to speak in disagreeable and harsh, unpleasant ways. You’ve got to figure out when. In the same way, when does the mind need to be gladdened? When does it need to be chastened? You’ve got to work on this teacher inside. Otherwise, the mind just goes with its moods.

We were talking this afternoon about how the middle of the afternoon is like a big valley full of marshes and swamps. If you just wallow in your moods, you just wallow in the swamps. You need somebody inside to say, “Okay, out, out. This is not good for you”—and to do it in a way that’s effective. So you may be intent on doing this well but if you don’t train yourself, you can come with all kinds of ideas, which may be perfectly right, but you don’t really know if they’re true, and you don’t know their impact.

The Dhamma has what the Buddha calls an attha: its goal, its purpose, its profit, its good results. It’s an interesting word. It contains so many different meanings. In fact, one of its meanings is “meaning.” The attha of the Dhamma can mean two things: meaning in the sense of, “What do the words mean?” And also purpose: “Where does the Dhamma aim? When you really stick with these teachings, where do they take you?” The second sense is related to the fact that this really is a training that we’re doing here.

Ajaan Lee, of a different forest ajaans, seems to be the most explicit in stating that we’re working on a skill. First, you learn from the teachers outside. But then you have to learn how to be your own teacher, set a task, do the task, and then look at the results. If the results are not good, ask yourself, “What could I change?”

The way the Buddha divides up the instructions on breath meditation, the problem could be with the body—in other words, the way you’re breathing. Or the problem could be with the physical feelings you’re generating by the way you breathe. Or it could be with the feelings in the mind, the impact these things have on your mind. Or the problem could be with the mind itself. Its thoughts are going off in another direction, and it’s got some issues from the day that it just won’t let go. Or sometimes it’s not issues from today or any recent day. Things from way back in the past suddenly come up. These issues that have been buried for who knows how long, and all of a sudden they seem really real, really important, really urgent. And yet they can then disappear again for a long time. This is a real problem.

When you’re alone in the afternoon, when you have a long stretch of time with yourself, you can really get things out of perspective. In the Forest Tradition, they talk about monks going off and living alone and sometimes going fung saan, which means basically they get obsessed by a certain line of thinking, and it can pull, pull, pull them down. In fact, your mind is conversing with itself, and it’s as if it’s in a resonant room like this. That makes it sound like there are lots of different people, and they all agree that things are miserable. So you’ve really got to find that sense of the teacher inside and do some teacher training.

Remind yourself that the comments you want from the teacher should be true, beneficial, and timely, just like with the Buddha’s rules for his own speech. You’ve got to learn how to develop those standards inside yourself. And you have to learn how to read yourself.

The Buddha gives six questions you might ask yourself, or six qualities you want to look for in yourself. How is your conviction? Do you really believe the Buddha was awakened? Or is it just some story from a distant past in a different country? And if you have conviction of the Buddha’s awakening, what does that mean to you? What possibilities does it open? What demands does it make on you? After all, we live in a world where there has been someone who gained full awakening, he taught the way, and the way is still with us. One of the important things he taught us is that when you look at the present moment, you’re not here just for the sake of the present moment. You’re here because what you do in the present moment is really important. It’ll have an impact both in shaping the present moment and in having long-term consequences.

In some ways, it’s like that old tale about the ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper is singing, singing, singing away in the summer sun. He sees the ant busy working, carrying things here, carrying things there. He says, “Why are you working? The sun is great. The weather is beautiful.” The ant keeps saying, “I’ve got to prepare.” Then, of course, when winter comes, the grasshoppers all die and the ants survive.

What this means, in terms of what you’re doing right now, is that you can’t just say, “Well, I feel like doing x,” or, “I feel like doing y.” You have to ask yourself, “If I do x, if I do y, what are the consequences going to be down the line?”

This is where the trainer comes in and says, “Look, you’ve got to think about the future. You’ve got to be heedful. If you really believe what the Buddha awakened to, you can’t just follow your moods.” So that’s conviction.

Then there’s generosity. Are you a generous person? This doesn’t necessarily mean being generous with things, but are you the sort of person who feels inspired to help other people with your time, your energy, your knowledge, your forgiveness?

Forgiveness should be the easiest of all because it’s free, but it’s often the hardest, partly because we misunderstand it. In the Buddha’s teachings, forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to love the person who wronged you, simply that you decide, “I’m not going to pose any danger to that person. I’m not going to try to get back.” We’re not here to gain closure om our relationships with other people. The only closure there is in samsara is nibbāna, and that’s an individual thing. So we forgive others. That doesn’t erase their past actions. What it does, though, is that it gives you the right attitude so that you’re not going to create new bad karma yourself. That’s generosity.

Virtue: How are your precepts? In particular, the precept against lying: The Buddha held that as having the most importance. As he said, if you have no shame at telling a deliberate lie, then the idea that there are other things that you shouldn’t do just doesn’t occur to you. All kinds of things become open to you. You’ve really got to be on top of your precepts. The more you are, the more you learn about your own intentions, because we’re not following the rules just for the sake of following the rules.

These precepts keep pointing back into the mind. How do you make your decisions as to what to do and what not to do? This is the big issue. What we’re doing inside, how our minds work, is causing trouble. But we can study that, learn about it, and make changes. And you learn about that first by following the precepts, because you have to be very careful about your intentions.

That leads straight to discernment. How clear are you on watching things arise in the mind, pass away in the mind, and seeing what’s really skillful and what’s not? This builds on your learning, what you’ve learned from the past, especially what you’ve learned about the Dhamma. But the question is, how do you apply that learning to the processes in your mind?

So many of the Buddha’s teachings are about what one scholar called psychological ethics—in other words, how the mind works, and what the ethical implications are of how the mind works, in terms of what’s harmful and what’s not. It would be really good if Western psychology were built on this principle of trying to learn the psychology of harmful states and unharmful states. That would be something really worth exploring.

Western psychology may not be doing that, but you can do it. And the Buddha’s teachings are there to give you some ideas about what to look for, what dangers you might run into, and what ways of deluding yourself you might run into. So it’s good to have some knowledge about what the Buddha taught, and then use your discernment to apply it.

That involves the sixth quality of the Buddha has you look at, which is your ingenuity. How you take those teachings, which were given 2,600 years ago, and make them alive and applicable to what you’re doing right now? The Buddha said one of the qualities of the Dhamma is that it’s pertinent. It points you inside to what your mind is doing. And its main terms of analysis are basically the processes of the mind.

We’d like to produce lots of things in the mind, but we’re not really that sensitive to the process of production in and of itself. But that should get us fascinated. Why is the mind so fascinated with creating things? We create stories as we go through the day. You’re picking events here, picking events there, and turning them into narratives. Those stories can make us miserable, they can make us happy, they can make us complacent. So, how do you get some control over that process?

Rather than looking at the story itself, look at how you go about creating it. That’s where the Buddha’s teachings become universal, which is what’s so amazing about them. Something 2,600 years ago still applies to our greed, aversion, and delusion, to our fears, to our jealousies, the processes by which we create these things right now. Those processes haven’t changed.

The details of what we create may be very different. You look at literature. The literature of that time is very different from our literature now. That’s the product. But the process by which the product is made is pretty much the same, a question of what you focus on, what you don’t focus on, what details you notice, which details you don’t notice, how you stitch things together.

It can be something simple, as when you’re sitting here with pain. How do you stitch the pain of one moment together to another moment to make it seem like the pain of the second moment is carrying both the pain of that moment and the pain of the previous moment, and the previous moment and the previous moment? It keeps on building and building and building. Can’t you cut the chain?

Or how you take a pain in one part of the body and connect it to another pain in another part of the body, and all of a sudden, it’s like strips of rubber bands all over the body, tightening, tightening, tightening: Why do you do that? How do you connect things that way? Why? That question should be really fascinating. Something really worth looking into.

When we talk about practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, it doesn’t mean just following the rules and the precepts. When you get into the meditation and you look at the Buddha’s instructions on how you train yourself, it gets more and more into the issue of: How do you use your ingenuity?

So these are the areas the Buddha would have you be sensitive to as you take stock of your inner teacher and your inner student to get some idea of how they’re doing—and also to give them some ideas of how they could do it better, what areas you would really want to focus on to improve.

When you take this attitude, that you’re here to train, think about how athletes train. There are certain things they have to give up, but it’s for the sake of winning. There are certain things they focus on developing. They have to look for where their weak points are, how they can strengthen them, and how they can build on their strengths to strengthen them. When you think about this metaphor of training, which the Buddha himself used an awful lot, you see it gives you a much better idea of what we’re about here.

You train your inner teacher, you train your inner student, so that you can get to know both. And both, of course, come down to your mind. So when you consciously take on these roles of inner teacher and inner student or inner coach and inner student, you find they help you get through those long periods of drought in the practice—the long periods of just listening to this reverb, reverb, reverb in your mind—and can get you out, get you on track. And the track will take you eventually to a point where you don’t need the inner teacher anymore, you don’t need the inner student, because the skill has been mastered. But in the meantime, make the most of them.