The Skills of Truth & Calm

The Buddha’s most basic teaching is the four noble truths. It’s a teaching about action: cause and effect in your actions. To understand it, you have to get very sensitive to what you’re actually doing.

This is why we watch the mind right now. It’s hard to observe a past action or a future action, so you have to observe present actions right here. As the Buddha indicates through many images in the Canon, we’re working on a skill. He compares meditation to being a skilled archer, a skilled cook, a skilled carpenter, a goldsmith. It’s good to think about what that imagery means. When you’re working on a skill, you get really sensitive to what you’re doing. If you’re going to see what you’re doing, work on a skill. You get very conscious about what you do, the results you’re getting, and you’re learning how to judge the results so that you can get better.

We’re working on something good here, to get the mind to settle down. Here again, the mind is easiest to observe when it’s doing something good. When you’re being devious or underhanded and not quite honest, you hide things from yourself—and you hide from yourself the fact that you’re hiding things from yourself. But when you know that you’re doing something good, it’s easy to be open and honest about when you’re doing it right and when you’re not. And because we’re focused on getting the mind to be still, that makes what’s going on in the mind really transparent.

Remember the Buddha said that our trouble is that we have cravings that lead to becoming. With every problem that comes up to us—about what we want, about what we don’t want—we create a state of becoming around it. We’re like beavers. Whatever the problem facing the beaver, his solution is one thing: build a dam to make a lake and then put a lodge in the lake. Even beavers that haven’t been raised by their parents, that were separated from their parents as children and raised in captivity: When they’re released into the wild, they build dams and build lodges. That’s their solution to every problem.

Our solution to every problem is to create a state of becoming: a sense of you in a world of experience around something you desire. But as long as you’ve created one of those, there’s going to be suffering. If you try to destroy what you’ve created, there’s going to be suffering, too. The trick is to catch the process before it’s turned into a state of becoming. That’s what we’re doing as we meditate. If you look at dependent co-arising, even before there’s sensory contact, there are some factors that we actually focus directly on as we meditate. Under the factor of fabrication, you’ve got the breath. Okay, we’re focused on the breath. You’ve got direct thought and evaluation, which means you’re talking to yourself. Well, you’re talking to yourself about the breath, about the mind settling down with the breath, trying to get them snugly together. Then you’ve got perceptions and feelings. You’re trying to create a feeling of ease, well-being. And you’ve got certain perceptions about how the body relates to the mind, the mind relates to the body. Where is your mind right now in relation to the body? And there are perceptions about the breath. When the breath comes in, what’s actually happening? You’ve got air coming in through the nose, going into the lungs. But there’s also an energy in the body that allows that to happen—and it’s the energy that the Buddha wants you to focus on. That’s the perception you’ve got to hold in mind.

So there you are: As you’re working on concentration, you’re dealing directly with this first factor in dependent co-arising, right after ignorance: fabrication.

If you work your way down, you get to name and form. And here you are again. Form is the body as you experience it in terms of its properties. One of those properties is the wind property, and an aspect of the wind property is the in-and-out breath. But as you settle down, you may notice you’re also sensitive to the warmth in the body, the liquid feelings in the body, the solidity of the body. So again, you’ve got these raw materials right here.

As for name, that includes perception again, feeling again, attention, intention, and contact. Attention: You’re paying attention to the breath, and the question you’re asking yourself is, “How do I get the mind to settle down? Once it’s settled down, how do I get to understand the process of fabrication?” It’s all right here.

The intention, of course, is your intention is to stay with the breath, to stay with one object, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world so that the mind can settle down.

Contact is the contact between these mental events.

In this way, these processes that we tend to slip through very quickly are now being laid out. And we’re getting a handle on them by trying to do something skillful with them.

As Ajaan Chah once said with regard to the different factors of dependent co-arising, normally it’s like falling out of a tree. You go past lots of different branches, but they’re such a blur that it’s hard to see which branch is which. But when you’re settling down and being still, that gives you a chance to examine the different branches more closely and carefully.

At first you get attached to them because these are the raw materials from which you create a state of concentration. But then you’re working here not only with the idea of creating a state of concentration. There are also what the Buddha calls the four determinations. You’re determined on discernment. You’re determined on truth, relinquishment, and stilling or peace. So you’re trying to use your discernment to understand how to get the mind to settle down. You’re true to yourself in trying to master this and in being very honest about when the mind is wandering off, so you that can do something about it. Relinquishment: You’re letting go of anything that’s going to get in the way of the concentration. And calm: You’re trying to bring the mind to greater and greater states of calm. So these determinations give some direction to this skill.

Another aspect of developing a skill is that when you first get started, it’s awkward. You’re not quite confident in what you’re doing. You’re not familiar with the tools. That develops a very strong sense of self. Wherever you encounter any resistance, any obstacles, there’s going to be a strong sense of self. And either you give in to the obstacles or you overcome them. To overcome the obstacles requires that you develop a healthy sense of who you are and what you can do.

The Buddha starts by saying that this is something that human beings can do. It may not be easy for everybody, but it’s something that everybody can do, and it’s worth doing. If it weren’t possible or if it weren’t worthwhile, the Buddha said he wouldn’t have taught this. Simply the fact that you’re a human being means that you’ve got what it takes. Have confidence in that.

Ajaan Mun, when he was teaching his students, would repeat this again and again, that we as human beings are in the ideal position to master the teachings. Most of his students came from very poor families in the Northeast, which is the poorest section of Thailand. They were at the bottom of the ladder in the Thai social structure. So he kept encouraging them to be confident. The Buddha himself would urge, rouse, and encourage his students in addition to just instructing them, to remind them that, yes, they can do this.

So as you’re dealing with the obstacles of trying to master this skill, and things don’t quite fit—the mind doesn’t fit with the breath, the breath doesn’t fit with the mind, different members of the inner committee seem to be rebelling—you have to have a strong sense that, yes, you can do this. You don’t let setbacks get you down. You learn how to talk to yourself in a way that’s encouraging, rousing, and urging, so that you want to do this.

After a while, you begin to have occasional tastes of what mental peace is like. You have to learn how to use those tastes to encourage yourself, and not to get discouraged. Don’t be a voice in the mind that says, “Ah, this’ll last for just a little while, and then it’ll go away. It’s not worth it.” You can’t listen to those voices.

What you’re doing is planting seeds. Seeds may start out small, but the important thing is that you protect them to give them a chance. What’s especially interesting as you get better and better at the skill is that you need less and less a sense of self in order to do it, because the obstacles grow fewer. It’s like sport, when they say that the athlete is in the zone where everything seems to click and go just right. There’s very little sense of self there, because it’s not running into anything. It’s there, but it fades into the background.

The Buddha has you take advantage of this fact as you approach the training of your mind. You learn how to look at events in the mind simply as events, rather than as you in a world in the mind, or you in the world outside. These are just events, causes and effects. You begin to see that even in the state of concentration there’s going to be some stress, there’s going to be some disturbance. You think about that determination for truth and determination for calm. You use your discernment to figure out what needs to be let go—for the sake of truth, for the sake of calm.

Those determinations are interesting. They function both as means and as ends, particularly the determinations for truth and calm. You let those be your guiding examples. So when a state of mind comes up, you ask yourself, “Is this something I can truly rely on? Is there any disturbance here?” If you can detect the disturbance, you realize that you’ve got to drop something, you’ve got to relinquish something. You have to discern what the problem is. So you’re working with all those determinations to make progress on the path.

Finally, you get to the point where even the best state of concentration you can master, you realize, has its drawbacks, because you have to keep it going. That’s the disturbance. You have to keep fabricating it. That’s the disturbance. It’s not truly calm. So for the sake of truth and the sake of calm, you let go.

That’s how this skill leads beyond itself to something that’s not fabricated. With whatever sense you do have of yourself talking to yourself, or putting up images in the mind, perceptions in the mind, you begin to ask yourself, “Who’s talking to whom in here? And these messages that are being sent with the different perceptions: Who’s sending them? Who’s receiving them? Why does there have to be a sender and a receiver? Why is the mind divided like this?” You begin to look askance at these fabrications and any potential for becoming that you might develop around them. When you drop them, and there’s nothing else being fabricated, you realize that these are the fabrications that are creating your sense of the present moment. When they’ve been dropped, something else appears that’s not in the present moment, not in time or space at all.

And you’re able to get there because the idea of self, or of things that you have to hold on to, gets weaker and weaker. You’re just interested in the skill of how to find truth, something that’s not the least bit deceptive, and how to find calm, the ultimate calm. You use your discernment, you use your powers of relinquishment, but even they are just ultimately means. You let them go.

These are some of the reasons why the Buddha has you work on this skill to become more sensitive to your actions, and in particular to actions in the mind. The fact that you’re doing something good makes it easy to be open and aboveboard with yourself. And although it requires building a healthy sense of self to begin with, the sense of self begins to get more and more attenuated as you go on until you’re looking simply at actions, cause and effect. When you’re looking on in those terms, then when you see that an action is causing stress, disturbance, it’s easy to let it go. You begin to see even your sense of self as an action, built up around these mental and verbal fabrications. In that way, it’s a lot easier to let go of your attachments, your clinging. And that’s how this skill leads beyond itself.

So it’s a good skill to master. We’re fortunate we have the time. Just make sure that you maintain the inclination and that strong sense of values that this is really worth it—because there’s nothing better than what this skill can accomplish.