Surprise Yourself

It’s possible to focus on the breath and not learn much of anything.

One of Ajaan Lee’s friends, who was also a student of Ajaan Mun, complained to Ajaan Less one time, “Why do you teach people to focus on the breath? All there is in and out, in and out.” And as Ajaan Lee replied, “If that’s all you can see, then that’s all there is.”

The implication being that the problem is not with the breath, it’s with the way you look at it. The Buddha says that one of the qualities you want to look for in yourself as a meditator is ingenuity. He doesn’t explain it much. It’s one of those terms that’s very rarely mentioned in the Canon, but it is listed as an important thing to know about yourself: how far you’ve developed in terms of ingenuity. Which means that you have to be ingenious in how you interpret that.

When I stayed with Ajaan Fuang, the two things he said you have to develop most in your meditation are, one, your powers of observation, and two, your ingenuity. You have a clear idea of what you want here. You want to get the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being. But then you run into obstacles, and some of the obstacles are things you didn’t expect.

Look at the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation. They’re just 16 steps. It’s not much to go on. You have to fill in the blanks. What’s clear is that we’re practicing mindfulness of breathing to get the mind into concentration, and the 16 steps fall into four tetrads. One tetrad deals with the body, one with feelings, one with the mind, and one with dhammas. In other words, they deal with the frames of reference that we use to establish mindfulness. But the question is, do you follow them 1 through 16?

The way the Buddha describes how they embody mindfulness practice suggests that you could focus on any one tetrad all the way to awakening.

As with the first one: You discern when the breath is long. You discern when the breath is short. You breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body. You breathe in and out calming bodily fabrication. The word “bodily fabrication” there means the in-and-out breath.

The question, of course, is: Why did the Buddha use a technical term there? The answer seems to be that he wants you to think in terms of fabrication. He’s trying to direct your ingenuity: To what extent is the breath a fabricated process? “Fabrication,” here, means that you’re working with intention. To what extent is the breath intentional? It is one of the processes in the body that can either be automatic or intentional. The question is, how much of the automatic side of it really is automatic? How much of it is directed by intentions that have become subconscious?

One way to learn about that is to try to adjust the breath. Find a way of breathing that feels good. The Buddha himself suggests this in one of his analogies: You’re a cook working for a king or a king’s minister—people who are not easy to please.

So you prepare different kinds of dishes and see what the king or the king’s minister likes. Now, the king may say that he likes this or that dish, but it’s also possible that he won’t say anything. In which case you have to look: What does he reach for? What does he take more of? Then you provide more of that. When you do and you satisfy the king, then you’re going to get a reward.

In the same way, as a meditator, you want to find something that the mind likes. That means you have to experiment. You can try long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow. See what the body likes. Ajaan Lee shows his ingenuity by expanding on the analogy. He says that you not only have to find what the king likes, but you also have to change what you make, because it’s not the case that the king will want the same thing day after day. In the same way, there are days when long breathing feels good, and other days when it’s not so interesting anymore. So you have to change. Vary your offerings. That’s when you get a reward.

When the breath feels good, what do you do with it? There’s another sutta where the Buddha says that you take whatever sense of ease or well-being that comes as the mind begins to settle down and you work it through the body, the same way that a bathman would work water through a ball of bath powder.

Back in those days, they didn’t have bars of soap. They had a soap powder that you’d make into a dough by mixing it with water, working the water through the whole ball of dough. So how do you work the ease through the body? How do you knead the ease through the body? If you push it too hard, you start kneading dis-ease through the body, so you have to be observant.

Ajaan Lee talks about the breath energies in different parts of the body: the flow along the nerves, the flow along the blood vessels. When you think of the property of the wind element, and the fact that the in-and-out breath is also a property of the wind element, you work the two of them together.

There’s nothing in the Canon that says to do this, but it’s a solution to the problem posed by the fact that the Buddha doesn’t explain how to work the pleasure through the body.

So, what way of working with the energies in the body will work for you? How do you perceive the energies in your body? A common problem is that when the mind begins to settle down, there’s a feeling like a band of tension around the head or centered between the eyes. Often it seems pretty resistant to any way of breathing around it or through it. The question is, how do you perceive it as you breathe through it? Do you think that it’s got a surface that you’ve got to push through? And when you’re breathing through, where are you breathing from? And where are you breathing to? Maybe that’s aggravating the tension.

I’ve personally found that it’s good to imagine that band of tension not as a band, but as a cloud. As with all clouds, there’s no clear surface and there’s a lot of space between the water droplets. So let that space do the breathing.

In other words, you don’t let the tension do the breathing, you let the space inside the tension do the breathing. And you’re breathing into that space from all directions. That changes the way you feel the tension in the head. It becomes just a heaviness and not a pain.

Think about the fact that when you’re sitting here and the mind gets calm, the areas of the head that tend to get tensed back and forth, back and forth, tensed and released, tensed and released as you think in the course of the day: Suddenly they’re released entirely. So, of course, the blood is going to flow into those areas. If you push the blood around, of course you’re going to get headaches.

So don’t think of blood, don’t think of surfaces, don’t think of bands. You can think of a knife cutting through the bands until it’s all just little pieces, and each little piece is breathing in and breathing out. It’s breathing for its own sake. You’re not trying to push the breath through it to get to someplace else. What does that do?

In other words, you play with your perceptions. That’s how ingenuity works.

First, you’ve got to alert yourself to what your perceptions are, then you challenge them and think of alternatives. One of the easiest ways to think of alternatives, of course, is to ask yourself the opposite. If the in-breath seems to be going in one direction, what if it’s actually going in the opposite direction? If you can just think of it going in another direction, what happens? Learn to play with things like this.

You’ll come to see the extent to which your perceptions actually shape what you experience, and how they don’t have to be written in stone. They can be changed. In fact, that’s what the Buddha’s teachings all come down to: the fact that you can change things.

If you couldn’t change things right now, he said, the path to the end of suffering would be impossible. But the fact that things are not totally shaped by the past gives you some leeway right now to make a difference.

So play with that. Ask questions that you never asked before. Try to use perceptions you never used before. That’s how we learn things we never learned before. We borrow the perceptions we learn from the Buddha, from the ajaans, and if they don’t work for us, we don’t say that they were bad, simply that they were not quite the solution to our problem. So how do we play with them so that they do become the solution?

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation are so sketchy. We have to learn how to fill in the blanks, and in doing so, we exercise our ingenuity. The way you fill in the blanks, and the way somebody else fills in the blanks, may not get the same results, even if you do the same things. So you have to make adjustments. You have to fill in.

So just as Ajaan Lee recommended ingenuity and also showed ingenuity in how he played with the Buddha’s teachings, you should learn to show some ingenuity to yourself. Surprise yourself with the questions you ask. You may get some surprisingly useful answers.

After all, if insight were something you could anticipate, it’d be something you could read in a book and that’d be the end of the problem. But the insight that’s going to work for one person may not have the same effect for another person. That’s because the way you’ve created your own problems may differ in its particulars from how other people create theirs. Again, the Buddha talks in large terms. You have to bring them down to the specifics if you really want them to work. Which means that the Buddha doesn’t do all the lifting for you. You have to do some of the lifting yourself.

I had a student one time who wanted to have the path laid out for him ahead of time and just be told what to do, so that he could follow instructions and do it without having to think too much. He got frustrated when I told him, “Well, try this. Try that. See what works.” After his fifth year here, he went to Thailand. He found out that that’s how the ajaans over there taught as well.

There’s no one insight technique that’s going to work for everybody, no one penetrating question that’s going to penetrate your particular defilements, your particular misunderstandings. You’ve created your misunderstandings, so now you’re going to have to use your ingenuity to take them apart.

There are certain general principles that work across the board, but a lot of the practice lies in the details, the specifics. That’s where you have to use your ingenuity. That’s where you have to play.