Your Tranquility & Your Insight

The Buddha didn’t have a single insight technique—or a single tranquility technique, for that matter. He would talk most about the breath as an object of meditation. Of all the various topics he taught, that was the one he taught in the most detail. But even that is pretty sketchy.

You start out by being aware of long breaths and short breaths, then being aware of the whole body as you breathe in, breathe out, and then you try to calm bodily fabrication.

When he lists the steps, he doesn’t explain them very much. But given the images he provides of the state of mind you’re trying to attain—a state of good strong concentration—being aware of the long breaths and short breaths seems to involve trying to find a way of breathing that feels good, feels comfortable, gives a sense of refreshment, a sense of ease, pleasure, because that’s the feeling tone you’re trying to develop.

Then he talks about being aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. That relates to the fact that you’re trying to be aware of the whole body, and when that sense of ease and refreshment arises, you want to spread it throughout the whole body.

Then, as he explains elsewhere, calming bodily fabrication means that the in-and-out breath gets more and more subtle to the point where it stops in the fourth jhana. Now, you don’t try to suppress it. If you try to suppress it, it gets very uncomfortable, and then you’re spreading dis-ease and dis-refreshment around the body. Basically, when there’s a sense of ease and refreshment, then a sense of fullness comes. When you’re feeling full of good breath energy, the need to breathe in and out gets less.

Remember that when we talk about breath, the Buddha doesn’t class it as a tactile sensation. In other words, he’s not talking about the contact of the air moving in and out of the nose. He classes the in-and-out breath as part of the form of the body, part of the wind element, which you feel inside the body, and which permeates the whole body as you feel it from within. So the breath comes from within. As the breath gets more gentle, more subtle, you hold in mind the perception that the breath originates from inside, so that you don’t feel so much the need to pull it in from outside. You let it radiate from within. As good breath energy fills the body, the need to breathe in and out gets less.

Of course, as the mind settles down, the brain is using less oxygen. Whatever physical triggers there are that would cause you to breathe in are not being set off. So, you’re not being starved of the breath when the in-and-out breath stops. Breath energy is still there, but the in-and-out breath goes calm.

Just those four steps can take you all the way to the fourth jhana. But again, there’s a lot to those four steps that you have to learn to fill in for yourself.

The Buddha recommends that if you have trouble settling down, you ask someone who’s good at concentration: How can the mind be made to settle down? In other words, how can it let go of whatever hindrances are disturbing it? How can it be unified, to the point where the sense of the body and the mind become one? How can it be concentrated, fully focused? You learn from the techniques that other people have tried and found successful, and then you learn to observe on your own what works for you.

So there’s a lot of room for experimentation. Of course, as you experiment, you’re developing your powers of awareness, powers of observation. This is precisely what you need in order to become discerning. There’s no foolproof method for giving rise to insight. If there were, then even fools could gain insight and still be foolish.

You have to practice getting more and more discerning, asking the right questions, exploring, trying things out, so that your concentration becomes your concentration, not somebody else’s idea of what concentration should be, imposed on your mind.

The same applies to insight. The Buddha never taught any one insight technique. As he said, there are lots of different ways you can contemplate what’s going on in the mind. Just with the word “fabrication”—which is the central issue in insight—you’ve got the five aggregates, all of which are said to be fabricated. In particular, you’ve got the fourth aggregate, fabrication itself, which plays a role in shaping all the other aggregates, too.

Or you can talk in terms of the three fabrications: bodily fabrication, the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, how you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the perceptions you hold in mind, the images or words that have meaning in the mind, plus feelings: feeling tones of pleasure and pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

The point of insight is to separate yourself out from these processes. When you can see these things as separate, the Buddha said, that’s when you have insight. This goes against what we hear so much about the wisdom of oneness or non-duality. Actually, oneness is an affair of concentration. Before we get to really good, solid states of oneness, we have to learn how to separate ourselves out from the things that disturb the concentration. Here the questions are: How to regard fabrications? How to investigate them? How to see them with insight?

Regarding them as fabrications basically means seeing them as events in the mind. Doubts come into the mind, restless thoughts come into the mind, lustful thoughts come into the mind, and we tend to just jump into them. They become little becomings. A thought-world appears, there’s something you want in that world, so you go into it. It’s because you go into it that you can’t see it clearly.

You have to learn how to step back and just say, “This is an event.” It may be a thought about the past or a thought about the future, but it is a thought-event happening in the present moment. That’s the first thing you want to see. That’s how you regard these things: just as events.

Think of the Buddha’s statement of how he got onto the path when he divided his thoughts into two types: those imbued with sensuality, ill-will, and harmfulness on the one hand; and those imbued with renunciation, non-ill-will, and harmlessness on the other. To do that, he had to step out of his thoughts, observe them from outside—what psychologists call metacognition: observing the processes of the mind as they’re happening. It requires stepping back, separating yourself out. And you can do that through an act of will. That’s the beginning.

Then there comes the investigation. You want to see why the mind tends to slip back in. Those worries you may have: Your mind can tell you that there’s really a lot to worry about. Simply the fact that you’ve got a body in this world: As the Buddha points out, you’re subject to all kinds of mistreatment, the potential for mistreatment. So, you can give yourself lots of good reasons for being worried. But what does worrying accomplish?

In this way, you’re asking yourself: What’s the allure? With thoughts of worry, it’s usually the sense that if you worry enough, you’re being responsible; you’re doing what has to be done to prepare. But you’ve got to argue with that. This, too, is part of the investigation. Is it true that worrying a lot is going to prepare you? Most of the time, no. In fact, you’re better prepared for the future if you develop your powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment right now so that you can use them when the need arises.

Investigation requires a kind of dialogue inside, as you ask questions and see how the mind responds. Sometimes you can just pose a question in your mind and try to watch. When the mind goes again for a thought—for any of the hindrances, for lust or ill will or whatever—what triggered it? Some of the triggers are outside, but the really important ones are inside. There’s something in the mind that thinks the thought is worth going for.

This is where, when you’ve seen the allure, you also want to look for the drawbacks. This gets to the third step: how fabrications should be seen with insight. You see that if you go for these thoughts, they’re going to have this, this, this drawback. And you really want to take that seriously.

So, it’s a back and forth, looking for the allure, and then doing what you can to counteract that allure by focusing on the drawbacks.

And again, no one insight technique cando this for you. We all know that the three perceptions are the fallback. If you see that something is inconstant, it’s stressful. If it’s inconstant and stressful, it’s not worth claiming as you or yours. That’s how you can employ the standard way of looking for drawbacks. But sometimes that doesn’t seem to really hit home.

So you have to look carefully. Do a lot of observing on your own. Again, this is how you develop discernment, your discernment. If you could do it just by rote, it wouldn’t be very discerning at all. It would be like a factory process. But the mind is not a factory. And your attachment to things: Even though there’s a common denominator in all attachment, the particulars of your attachments are going to be yours.

Think about that statement that Ajaan Mun made to Ajaan Fuang one time: that we people are all alike, but then we’re different, but when you come down to it, we’re really all alike. We’re all alike in that we have the same basic problems. We’re different in the particulars of those problems and the particulars of the techniques that are going to work for us.

Now, the techniques do fall into some standard patterns. But how you investigate inconstancy, how you investigate stress, and how you investigate this whole question of not-self: That’s going to be yours, because you’re dealing with your problems. You’re not dealing with generic problems, you’re dealing with your problems. So you learn how to take the Buddha’s general remarks about the kinds of questions you should ask and learn to tailor them for your own particular issues. It’s going to take time, which is why you have to be patient and not get frustrated.

All the ajaans talk about how you have to go back and forth between letting the mind rest so that it gains some strength and then going back to asking questions. Then when the questions start getting fuzzier and fuzzier, and the answers get less and less precise, you’ve got to drop the issue and come back to rest again.

It’s like working at any job. If you do nothing but work, work, work, work, work, you run out of energy. So even though it may seem to be a waste of time to rest, you need to rest.

So, when the time comes to rest, rest fully. As for any questions that come up about defilements in the mind at that point, you say, “not now.” And be strict with yourself.

But again, this requires that you be observant as to how much energy you have, how much you have to rest, how far you can go before you have to rest again. This is what it all comes down to: Learn to be observant. Learn to see things as separate, and your sense of separation will grow.

Until finally, as the Buddha said, there comes a point where you’re totally disjoined from the events of the mind. That’s the mind of an arahant, disjoined not only from defilements, but even, in meditation, disjoined from the body, feelings, mind states, or mental qualities that are the theme of the meditation—disjoined not in the sense of being alienated, but simply in the sense of no longer feeding on them, no longer feeling any need to feed.

So, learn how to step back, step back, step back. When the time comes to get into concentration, plunge into the concentration, gain the strength you need, and then step back again.

Ajaan Fuang’s image of the practice is of being both the teacher and the student. You’re training your inner teacher to run this process in a wise way. So remember that your teacher is a student-teacher. You try teaching the students and then you learn what works and what doesn’t work, until you solve this problem of why the mind wants nothing but happiness but keeps on doing things that cause suffering. When that problem is solved, you can really rest.