The Power of Your Actions

Years back, I was talking to a vipassana teacher who was telling me that at the center where he taught, they would have a two-month retreat every year, and they’d have three or four people gain stream entry as a regular occurrence. I asked him what those people had learned about karma in the course of their awakening experience. He said, “Oh no, they didn’t learn anything about cultural beliefs”—as if belief in the power of action was a strange cultural belief.

Look at the Buddha’s descriptions of his own awakening: It’s all about the power of action. He found a path of action that led to the end of action, and in doing so he really had to understand action. The insights he gained were not so much into the way things are, but more into the way things function, and particularly about how the power of human action functions—how we can create a lot of suffering for ourselves through our actions, but how we can also act in ways that put an end to suffering.

He wanted to teach that to other people, because issues of karma and rebirth were widely misunderstood at that time. There’s a strange belief that everybody in India in the Buddha’s day believed in karma and rebirth, but that’s not the case. There were a lot of teachers who actually taught that human action was unreal, didn’t even exist. Others taught that it did exist, but it was powerless; that the world was going to just happen the way it was going to happen regardless of human action. Others taught that you have some actions you did in the past that shape your present, but you have no choice in the present about how you can shape the present moment. So there were a lot of teachings about the powerlessness of human action.

Which means that when the Buddha came and taught the power of action, he was actually teaching something very new. It’s important that we realize that, because all of his teachings are about that: what you can do to put an end to suffering. And the fact that human action can do that—that’s saying quite a lot.

Of course, it requires strong power of the mind to maintain this path of action, which is why the Buddha taught five strengths to keep you going, because an important part of the practice is that you consistently try to act in skillful ways. That means going against a lot of your inner tendencies, a lot of your old habits, a lot of your old preferences. That requires strength.

It starts with having conviction in the Buddha’s awakening—that, yes, the Buddha did gain awakening—and conviction in the* how* of his awakening, that through the power of his own actions, he learned a lot about the* what*, in other words, what action is. He said it’s your intentions.

There were people at the time who taught that action was basically physical, that mental action was very weak. The Buddha turned that upside down—or actually, right-side up. He said that it’s your mental actions that are really important. The intentions that you act on are going to shape your life—not only your life now, but also the lives into the future.

So, looking at the Buddha’s awakening, we learn about the* how* of his awakening, how he gained awakening, and he teaches us about the* what* of action. He focuses particular attention on your actions in the present moment. Even though your actions from the past can influence the way things are coming into your senses right now, you don’t just sit there and receive these things. Your mind processes them. Its ability to process and filter and shape things is what makes the difference between suffering and not suffering.

Not everything in the present moment is determined by past actions. You have some freedom of choice here and now. Just that belief right there, being convinced of that, gives you a lot of energy because it makes you pay more attention to what you’re doing right now, and see the importance of what you’re doing. You’re going to be more willing to put more effort into developing skillful qualities, which is the second of the strengths that the Buddha taught—persistence in developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, realizing that if what the Buddha taught about the power of your actions is true, you have to be really consistent in looking at the long-term.

It’s interesting that discernment, of the five strengths, is listed as the last, but it also plays a huge role right here in the second one. After all, as the Buddha said, discernment begins with that question, “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” This focuses on the power of your actions and the fact that long-term happiness is possible, long-term pain is also possible. So you have to be heedful. You have to be as consistent as possible in acting on your skillful intentions.

Another aspect of discernment that plays a role in persistence is knowing that there are four kinds of action: There are things you like to do that will give good long-term results; things you would like to do that will give bad long-term results; things you don’t like to do that will give good long-term results; and things that you don’t like to do that will give bad long-term results.

Two of those are easy: Things you like to do that give good long-term results—it’s very easy to do them. Things you don’t like to do that give bad long-term results—it’s very easy not to do them.

The difficult ones are the ones where the things you like to do will give bad long-term results, and the things you don’t like to do will give good long-term results. In cases like that, and the Buddha said, the measure of your discernment is your ability to talk yourself out of wanting to do things you like to do that will give bad results, and to talk yourself into wanting to do things you don’t like to do that will give good long-term results. You do have to know how to psych yourself out. So it’s not just a matter of doing as you’re told. You have to want to do what the Buddha said is skillful.

He lays out some basic rules in terms of the precepts, but then the issue of skillfulness goes beyond the precepts. There are a lot of areas in life that are not covered by the precepts, but you really have to be very careful about what kind of intentions you’re acting on.

Again, this requires a consistent effort. You have to be as persistent as possible—as with the precepts. When we say that somebody breaks the precepts, it’s not that he’s killing all the time or stealing all the time, having illicit sex, lying, or drinking all the time. In fact, as the Buddha said, it’s very rare that you would find someone who, in terms of the amount of time, breaks the precepts more than he doesn’t break the precepts.

The problem with people like that, though, is that their precepts are inconsistent—they have lots of gaps. When your precepts have gaps, they have no power. It’s learning how to make things consistent: That’s when this principle of acting on skillful intentions and abandoning unskillful ones begins to develop a power.

And as the Buddha noted, as you try to be constantly skillful, you’re safe, but it wears the mind down. The mind needs to rest. You could spend some time sleeping, but that’s not necessarily skillful. This is why he says that you want to bring the mind into concentration. That’s where we get the third of the strengths, which is mindfulness.

What the Buddha calls the establishments of mindfulness are not exercises in simply being aware of what’s happening or being non-judgmental or accepting about what’s happening. You’re keeping something in mind, a frame of reference: the body in and of itself, feelings, mind, or mental qualities, in and of themselves. And you’re putting aside any greed and distress with reference to the world.

That’s basically a recipe for concentration practice—keeping one topic in mind, keeping focused on it, like the breath, that you’re doing right now. “Breath in and of itself” means just the breath as you experience it directly. Any other thoughts that would come up about the world, you put them aside. So you’re developing a singleness of mind here.

To do that requires three qualities, starting with mindfulness, i.e., the ability to keep things in mind. Here, you’re keeping in mind both your frame of reference and the instructions of right effort or persistence. Anything unskillful comes up, you want to put it aside. Anything skillful, you want to maintain it and develop it. So you have to be alert to watch what’s actually happening and ardent in carrying out the duties of right effort or persistence.

Here, again, we see how the different strengths infiltrate one another. They’re all of a piece. As you do this, you stay centered. And as the Buddha said, these establishings of mindfulness are the themes of concentration. The mind can settle in, develop a sense of ease, well-being, just by sitting here, breathing, being aware of the breath.

And you’re not just aware of what’s happening with the breath. You adjust long breathing and short breathing until you find a way of breathing that feels refreshing, pleasant. Then you let that sense of refreshment and pleasure spread throughout the body. One of the images he gives is of a spring at the base of a lake. The spring has cool water coming up, and it cools the entire lake. That’s the quality you’re trying to develop. This is how the mind rests in a way that strengthens good qualities inside.

It also allows you to see more clearly what’s going on, because you don’t want to just stop with the resting. As the Buddha said, if you really get to know the mind, really get to know your intentions, you can start seeing how there are still subtle ways—even when you’re being skillful—subtle ways in which you create stress for yourself. You see that by looking at this state of concentration you’ve developed. Here again, it’s something you’re doing.

There is sometimes a tendency, when the mind gets still, to think you’ve locked into some cosmic principle. Some people say they’ve found the ground of being, they’ve found the ultimate reality with the stillness of their awareness. But the Buddha never talked on those terms. He kept saying to look at what you’re doing, to see the concentration as a bunch of activities.

There are five types of activities altogether: There’s the form of the body, and that’s an activity in the sense that you have to actually consciously keep reminding yourself that there is a body here—because as the breath gets really comfortable, it begins to blur out. The sense of where the body begins, where it ends, where the surface is—that begins to disappear. But for the time being, you don’t want it to disappear. You want to maintain this sense of being in the body, with your awareness filling the body.

And you want a sense of pleasure—so you’ve got feeling.

You have a perception that allows the cool feelings, the pleasant feelings, to run through the whole body. It’s a mental image, a label that identifies that this is how things are happening.

Then you have the directed thought and evaluation—that’s fabrication, as you direct your thoughts to the breath, adjust the breath, and read the results of your adjustments, deciding what you like and don’t like, and deciding what would be a better way to get the mind even more concentrated.

Finally, there’s consciousness: the act of being aware of all these things.

These are the five aggregates. They’re activities. Again, there’s this principle of action the Buddha wants you to see: what your mind is doing as it creates this state here. It’s one of the best states you can create in the mind.

As you get to know this state, you look at other mental states you experience as you go through the day, and you realize you’re creating those, too. It’s not that they come fully made. There’s some assembly required. You’re adjusting them, shaping them.

So there’s the question: “Are you doing a good job?” When you can get the mind in concentration, that’s a good job. Then the question is, “Is there better?” If you have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, if you take that as your working hypothesis—which is what conviction means in this context—the Buddha says there’s something that is totally unfabricated, something much better than a state of concentration.

So you start looking at the drawbacks of even these good aggregates you’ve got going here, so that you can develop a sense of dispassion for them. Remember, this is how the Buddha defined suffering: as clinging-aggregates, clinging to these activities of creating the form of your body, creating feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, acts of consciousness.

We cling to these in four ways: We create sensual fantasies about the sensual pleasures we would like—these are created out of aggregates. We have our views about the world—these are created out of aggregates. We have our ideas, habits, practices that we should follow, what we should and shouldn’t do—those ideas are created out of aggregates. And even our sense of self is created out of aggregates.

So these things that tend to have a lot of strong reality—our sensual desires, seem to have a lot of reality, a lot of solidity to them; our views about the world, we can confirm that, “Yes, our view about the world is correct”; the same with our ideas about what should and shouldn’t be done; our ideas about what we are—these all seem to have a solidity to them. But the Buddha says to look at them carefully. You’ll see they’re made out of these same activities, these aggregates.

“Aggregates” may be an unfortunate translation, but the Buddha is basically talking about the activities of the mind as it feeds on these things. When you can begin to see that these aggregates are pretty ephemeral and unreliable, you start calling into question the pleasures that you get out of sensual fantasies. How much can you really rely on those? We cling to the idea that we like these things, we find pleasure there. But when you start looking at them from the point of view of a mind in concentration, you can see they’re pretty miserable. There’s a lot of make-believe, there are a lot of blind spots in our sensual fantasies and, as the Buddha said, they don’t really satisfy.

The same with our views about the world: They may be true about some things, but our views are made out of perceptions, and as the Buddha said, perceptions are like mirages. They contain a little bit of reality and a lot of unreality—but that’s what our views are made out of.

The same with our ideas about habits and practices that we should and shouldn’t do.

Even our sense of who we are is made out of these mirages.

The Buddha compares the aggregates to foam on a water, or the bubbles that appear on a river when it rains—as soon as they appear, they’re already gone. He compares them to a magic show. He compares them to a banana tree, which, if you look for the heartwood of a banana tree, there’s nothing there.

Yet these are the things we use to build up our ideas of what we’re going to hold on to for happiness. The whole purpose of this exercise is to get a sense of dispassion for these activities that we’re so actively doing. It’s in this way that we begin to take apart the activities we’ve done to create our sense of the world, to create our sense of ourselves, because when there’s dispassion for these actions, then there’s a possibility for opening something unfabricated. And that’s something that doesn’t have to be maintained. Up to this point, everything has to be maintained.

In fact, this is what finally drives you crazy about even states of concentration: You seem to be resting, but there’s work that has to be done to maintain that state of rest. As for the unfabricated, there’s nothing that needs to be done; there’s no duty with regard to it. Nothing at all. As Ajaan Lee says, “Nibbana is easy,” in the sense that it doesn’t have to be maintained.

So these are the strengths that keep us going, based on our conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, that what he learned about human action is true, and that we can actually apply it to our own attachments, our own clingings.

Then when we let go of the things that are weighing us down—the areas where we think we’re finding happiness—we finally realize, they’ve been bringing us a lot of burdens—this constant burden of knowing that if you don’t keep doing things that are skillful, they’re all going to fall apart. And then you’re going to start going for unskillful things.

You look at the Buddha’s knowledge on the second knowledge of the night of his awakening. Beings rise and then they fall. They do a lot of good and then they fall for the rewards of all the goodness they’ve done. They ride on the momentum of their past good deeds, and that eventually runs out. Meanwhile, they’ve developed some bad qualities as they’ve become careless. They have to start all over again.

So it’s good that you contemplate what the Buddha has to say about how to find strength for the mind, so that it sees the power of its actions, and can use that power for the best possible purpose, which is to go beyond action. That’s when the mind is really strong. And that’s when it can genuinely rest.