Delight in Striving

One of the Thai idioms for meditating is tham kwaam phien — to make an effort. This goes against the grain with a lot of the Dhamma taught here in the West.

I was reading an interview just today with a teacher saying that, even after many years of practice, every now and then he catches himself striving. He has to remind himself that he’s already there. There’s no place to go, he’s already where he has to go—which is sad, because that’s certainly not how the Buddha talked about his awakening.

He said that there were two things that led to his awakening:

One is the attitude that even if his flesh had to dry out, and there was nothing left but skin and bones, he still wouldn’t have a lapse in his efforts. That was one.

The other was not resting satisfied even with his skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities in the mind.

He didn’t practice “radical acceptance.” If something in his mind was unskillful, he would try to get rid of it. If he had done something skillful, he would take joy in that fact but he wouldn’t rest satisfied. He would try even harder, so that he could find the total end of suffering.

So awakening is something that requires effort.

The same teacher who was being interviewed wrote a book years back in which he basically said there were two ways of approaching the practice. One is that we’re going to create the goal through our efforts, which of course doesn’t make sense. If you’re trying to find the unfabricated, you can’t fabricate it, no matter how hard you try or how hard you don’t try. The alternative was to realize that the goal was already there, and the practice was a matter of just relaxing into it.

He presented these as the only two alternatives that we face as we practice. Of course, if you frame the issue that way, it’s obvious that the second choice makes more logical sense. It’s also more attractive.

But Ajaan Lee presents a third alternative that’s actually more realistic. In his image, the mind is like seawater. There’s fresh water in the seawater, but just letting the seawater sit is not going to get the fresh water separated out. You have to boil the seawater. You have to distill it. It’s only through the distilling that the salt and the water separate out.

In the same way, you have defilements in your mind, and it’s going to take effort to get rid of them. Sometimes the effort can be minimal. As the Buddha said, some of the causes of suffering go away simply when you look at them steadily—but even looking at them steadily requires some effort.

Most of us aren’t very steady in the way we look at our minds. When we run against something that we’d rather not see, our glance veers off. You may have tried an experiment where you sit in a room that has a window, and you try to run your eyes very steadily across the window ledge. You begin to realize that your eyes don’t move steadily. They jump from point to point. In the same way, our mind jumps as we look at things. And because it jumps, we miss important details.

But then there are the causes of suffering that don’t go away even if you stare at them steadily. Those, the Buddha said, require that you exert a fabrication.

In this case, it would be the three kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily being the way you breathe in and out. Verbal being the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha defines as direct thought and evaluation—you pick a topic, you focus on the topic, and then you ask questions about it and come up with answers. And then there’s mental fabrication, which is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you’ve put on things—that identify what they are, what they mean, how important they are. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

These are things that we *do *fabricate. We may think that our feelings just come at us ready-made, but they’re not. There are potentials for pains, potentials for pleasure, in the body and in the mind. But how we actually experience them is going to depend on how we prepare them. It’s like food. You can fix your food in a way that it’s really good or in a way that it’s pretty miserable—same ingredients, but the product comes out differently.

So if you have, say, greed, aversion, or anger coming in and taking over the mind, and they don’t go away when you look at them steadily, then you have to look at how you’re breathing. Especially under the influence of anger, our breathing tends to get irregular and very uncomfortable. All we can think about is how we want to get that anger out of our system.

Then there’s the way you talk to yourself. What are you saying to yourself about the anger?—either about the anger itself or about the object of the anger. You can talk about how what you’re angry at really is wrong—and there are plenty of wrong things going on in the world right now. But is getting angry about them going to solve the problem? Part of the mind will say, “Yes, if you don’t get angry you’re not going to do anything”. But you have to think about it—recognizing that something is wrong doesn’t require that you get angry in order to do something about it. In fact, you have to put the anger aside if you’re going to see things clearly and come up with a genuinely good and intelligent response.

So you learn to breathe in new ways. Breathe easily and calmly through the anger. Talk to yourself in different ways about the anger and the object of the anger. Then look at the perceptions you hold in mind, the images you have, the way you label things. You can change those. The feelings you focus on: Again, with anger, you can breathe in ways that make things really miserable in the body, or you can breathe in ways that are more calming, soothing.

Then, when you’ve reconstructed the state of your mind, you look more calmly at the situation and figure out what needs to be done.

So effort is required. We’re not here just accepting, accepting, accepting things, because a lot of things are pretty unacceptable—particularly with the problem of suffering.

If the Buddha had us just accept suffering, he himself would have gone back to the palace and never would have become a Buddha. If he had accepted aging, illness, and death, he wouldn’t have found the deathless. These are things about which most people say, “We just have to put up with it. There’s going to be aging in life. There’s going to be illness. We can fight a little bit against it.” We get some people who think that maybe they can find ways of becoming immortal by extending the life of the body—but the body’s not going to cooperate.

But there is a dimension that is deathless that has nothing to do with the body at all, nothing to do with any of the six senses—but it is touched at the mind. That can be found. The Buddha put forth a lot of effort to find it and he found it. All the ajaans talk about the effort that they had to put out—but they also say they were amply rewarded.

And the rewards didn’t come only at the end. If you’re going to exert an effort, you have to learn how to delight in exerting an effort. You can delight in the fact that we have the Dhamma that tells us that we do have the power to act and that through our efforts we can act in ways that lead to the end of action.

And we can do it in a way that’s honorable. You look at the things that are involved in the path, and they’re all good things, honorable things. You’re virtuous. You’re honest. You’re mindful. You develop your powers of concentration and discernment so that you can be a more reliable observer and see things clearly. These are all good things to be doing. You look at the things that other people are doing in the world right now to make themselves happy, and they can make you despair.

So take joy in the fact that we have this Dhamma, and that you have the ability to abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. Learn how to delight in seclusion—the fact that you’re able to get away and look at your own mind and deal with the problems that are here, without being interfered by a lot of other unnecessary things. Delight in the fact that the goal that we’re aiming at is harmless, involves no conflict.

So it’s not a path that gives good things just at the end. It saves the very best for the end, of course, but there are a lot of good things along the way—things that are worth delighting in, so that whatever striving is involved is not too much of a burden. To whatever extent it is a burden, you make it one that you’re happy to bear. That way, you can maintain the effort. You can distill the seawater inside your mind and you can find where the fresh water is. Then you can enjoy it.

In the meantime, enjoy setting up your distillery and learning about the process of how it works, because it is fascinating—this path. It holds a lot of surprises along the way. As I was saying the other day, it’s like the directions for a trail, say, in Zion National Park. The directions will tell you where the trailhead is, where to turn left or right, where to place your feet, but they don’t tell you what you’re going to see as you follow the directions. They may say that you’re going to see this or that, but what you’re actually going to see is more than just the words.

You’re not going for the trail. You’re going for what you can see as you follow the trail. And there’s a lot to see along the way.