Learn from the Ants
July 24, 2024

You can take a lesson from the ants. Their nests were around an area where it was getting hot and dry. If you told them to simply accept the fact that things change—sometimes they get hot, sometimes they get cold, sometimes they get dry, sometimes wet—they wouldn’t listen to you. They’d want to find a place right now that’s cool and wet. That’s why they came up and got into the orchids.

It’s the nature of any mind that when you find yourself in a bad situation, you look for something better. And the Buddha never said that’s bad.

Think of him. He was in a palace, but he saw that the pleasures of the palace, even though they were nice, were not going to last. So, he didn’t just accept the fact that, oh yes, things are inconstant. Put up with them. He looked for something better. His whole quest was premised on the idea that there must be something better: something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die. There must be a happiness that doesn’t change. He wouldn’t accept anything less than that.

So even when he was studying with the teachers who taught very high levels of concentration—the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception and non-perception—he saw that they’d developed conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. They devoted good qualities of the mind to this, but they rested content with something that wasn’t ultimate. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. So he looked further.

He tried austerities. Maybe by getting the mind totally free from the dampness of sensuality, as he saw it, he might set it on fire—just as when you take wood out of a wet place, let it dry, and then you can use it to make fire. But that didn’t work either. As he said, he could have died if he continued on that path.

So, he kept looking, looking, looking.

And his characterization of it was the noble search. He didn’t criticize other people for searching. Once he had found the goal, he encouraged them to search for it, too. He compared their quest to a person looking for heartwood: He looks and finds bark; he finds leaves and twigs. If he satisfies himself with the bark and the leaves and the twigs, the Buddha would criticize him. He’d say, “There’s something better. Look for it.”

I was listening the other day to a Dhamma talk in which someone was saying that the expression of stream-enterer, the expression of the Dhamma-eye, is that whatever arises passes away. The end of suffering comes when you just accept that. Look for the fact that whatever you love and hold on to is going to leave you someday. Accept that, and then when it leaves you, you’re okay.

That’s accepting suffering and claiming it to be the end of suffering. Again, that wouldn’t have satisfied the Buddha.

And don’t let it satisfy you. There is something better. There is something higher. There is a deathless element—what the Buddha calls the deathless state, the deathless dimension—and it can be attained through the practice.

This is why he said the two secrets for his awakening were, one, not resting content with skillful qualities, and two, strong determination, strong effort. The effort here doesn’t always mean sitting longer hours or sitting through pain, but it does mean putting an effort into understanding your mind and seeing where you’re causing suffering.

It’s going to be a battle because you’re going to have to fight against your old tendencies. This is why when the Buddha describes the path and the people following the path, the analogies and similes he uses often deal with martial imagery: an elephant going into battle; a soldier hearing the approach of an army and growing faint or not growing faint; a soldier in hand-to-hand combat, either succumbing or not succumbing. The idea is that you want to come out victorious.

Even though there’re some cases where the martial imagery carries all the way through in the Buddha’s description of the practice, in a lot of cases, especially when you get to concentration and discernment, it switches over to craftspeople developing skill.

A cook getting good at observing his boss, seeing what the boss likes, and then providing more of that: That’s the Buddha’s image for your meditation as you try to figure out, “What’s a good topic for my meditation? Once I’ve settled on the breath, how do I make the breath interesting? How do I make it delicious? How do I keep it continually delicious? What variations do I have to make to keep it interesting?”

Or a marksman shooting arrows at a target: As the Buddha said, you want to be someone who can shoot accurately, shoot your arrows in quick succession, and pierce great masses.

Shooting in quick succession means seeing things in terms of the four noble truths—being very quick to see, when something comes up in the mind, what’s the suffering? What’s the craving? Which mental states are part of the path?

Piercing great masses is piercing ignorance.

So, the work gets subtler. But there are still things you have to overcome, still battles you have to fight. Even craftsmen have to overcome their laziness, their lack of being observant sometimes.

What this means right now is that when the mind wanders off, you don’t just accept it. You don’t just follow it wherever it’s going to go. You bring it back. You bring it to the breath. You don’t strangle it when you bring it back, but you bring it back. If it wanders off again, realize that you just have to drop whatever it was that distracted it, and you’ll come back right to the breath.

Other times though, you have to think through why you don’t want to follow that thought. When you decide that it’s really not worth it, then you come back.

The point is, you don’t just give in and you don’t just accept, “Well, this is the way my mind is tonight, so I’ll just sit with it the way it is.” The whole thrust of the teaching is that you can change what you’re doing. If what you’re doing is not getting good results, try to figure out something else you might try. And keep at it again and again and again.

Like with the ants: We’ve thwarted their desire to create a nest in with the orchids, but they’re not going to give up. They’re going to find some other place to make a nest. You should have the same attitude towards your meditation. If you get thwarted in one way, just figure out something else. There’s no problem in your mind that hasn’t been solved by somebody, someplace, so there must be a solution to the problem you’re facing now.

Even though cultures change over time, and the way we frame a lot of issues in the mind will tend to change over time, still the basic problem is the same. Suffering is still clinging to the aggregates, and the aggregates are basically the same now as they were then: form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. Once you read the definitions, you realize that these are things you do, and you’re doing them all the time. How the mind functions, how the mind works: That’s a constant. If it works certain ways, it’s going to cause suffering. If it works in other ways, it’s going to lead to the end of suffering: That’s a constant.

And the particular problems that you come up with have been dealt with by other people in the past. They figured out a way around it, so there must be a way around. You have to find it too.

So, learn from the ants. Don’t give up easily. Once you realize that the desire for awakening is a healthy, skillful desire, follow it as far as you can.