Reading & Meditating

Ajaan Fuang tells a story of a time when he had a really severe headache, going on for weeks and weeks. He tried Western medicine, didn’t work. Thai medicine, didn’t work. Chinese medicine, didn’t work.

It got so bad that he had to have other monks staying with him at night, in case he woke up in the middle of the night in a lot of pain. They could give him hot compresses and other things to help alleviate some of the pain, but still the pain was insistent. Then one night he woke up, and all the monks who were looking after him were fast asleep.

The first thought that went through his mind was, “Who’s looking after whom here?” But then he told himself that as long as he was awake, he should sit up and meditate.

So, he meditated for a while. Suddenly he realized he’d been doing everything he could to get rid of the pain, whereas the Buddha taught that pain, suffering, was something to be comprehended. So, he changed his approach. He tried to comprehend exactly what was the suffering. He said he was able to attain something he’d never attained before in his meditation that night.

The important point here is that what he had learned of the Dhamma in the basic textbooks came in handy. It turned him in the right direction—which is a sign that an important part of being a meditator, an important part of practicing, is knowing how to read and how to use what you’ve read. There are lots of ways of using what you’ve read that are going to get in the way, but there are also ways that can actually be helpful.

One of the prime uses of reading the Dhamma is that it gives you a vocabulary. It’s like the vocabulary that professional tasters and professional scent experts develop. The more refined and precise their vocabulary, the more sensitive they become to how things smell, how things taste.

It’s the same with your own mind. The Buddha provides a very clear vocabulary for what’s going on inside the mind, in terms of feelings and perceptions, thought-fabrications, acts of consciousness, and all the other many elaborations on those basic terms. It’s good to have those terms in the back of the mind as you meditate.

For example, what he has to say about the three kinds of fabrication in dependent co-arising: We tend to think of dependent co-arising as something too abstract to get our heads around to apply to our own minds, but it’s better to look at it as a list of possibilities. As you’re working with your meditation, you’ll come across the fact that you’re actually doing something that’s described by those terms.

Then you can ask yourself, how do those terms help illuminate what you’re doing? One thing, of course, is that they illuminate what might be causing what you’re doing. The list of causes may be complex, but it’s not random. One of the lessons you’ll learn looking at dependent co-arising is that feeling occurs in many places. It’s associated with many different things. So when there’s a pain or a feeling of pleasure in the body or in the mind, there’s a variety of things that you can question. How is it related to these other aspects of what’s going on in the mind?

Sometimes, say, a pain might be bothering you because of a perception. Well, feeling and perception are together in the factor for fabrication, and they’re together in the factor for name and form. Sometimes the feeling is invading your mind because of the way you talk to yourself: directed thought and evaluation, also in the factor of fabrication. Sometimes the feeling is related to sensory contact. Sometimes it’s related to craving. Sometimes it comes about as a result of clinging.

So, when a pain is bothering you, you can ask yourself, which of these many opportunities or potentials could be a useful way of looking at that particular pain so that you don’t have to suffer from the pain? That may require some discursive thinking, and that’s perfectly fine, as long as it doesn’t discurse too far away from what you’re actually doing. But you can ask yourself these questions.

This is a lot of what the texts are good for. They spark questions in your mind about what your mind is doing. I’ve been looking at some different passages where the Buddha gives a Dhamma talk, and the people listening to the talk gain awakening. I’ve been struck by how many of those talks involve him asking questions of his listeners, questions that may not have ever occurred to them before.

In that way, the readings are good for giving you a vocabulary, and then asking questions, giving you an idea of what questions might be useful.

So, it’s important that we not look down on reading. It has its uses.

A question came up when I was teaching in France a while back. Ajaan Lee, Ajaan Chah, went out in the forest. They didn’t have much knowledge of the Dhamma, and yet they were able to attain the Dhamma. Whereas we’re highly educated in the Dhamma and it’s getting in the way. So should we stop reading the texts?

Actually, that’s not the case. Both Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Chah read a lot. Ajaan Chah spent years studying the Dhamma. Ajaan Lee, when he set up the monastery in Chandaburi, became a subscriber to the magazine Dhammacaksu, which had translations of suttas and articles on the Dhamma. When the monthly issue arrived, Ajaan Fuang said that that evening the meditation period would be handed over to Ajaan Lee reading the magazine aloud to everybody. So, they did get an education. They didn’t find that being well-read in the Dhamma was an obstacle.

The important thing is that they learned how to use what they had read. One of the ways of not using what they had read was trying to force things into a mold. For example, you may have heard that your pain, your sense of your pain, should be separate from the sense of the body. But you can’t just force them to be separate. You can’t drive a wedge between the two of them. As Ajaan Fuang once said, “If nibbāna were something we could take by force, we’d have all gone there a long time ago.” It requires getting the mind really still and seeing what happens when the mind gets really still. When you’re very observant of what happens, you’ll find that things begin to separate out on their own.

It’s like having a bottle of salad dressing, vinegar and oil. You shake the bottle, and they’re going to get mixed. And you can’t separate them out by pouring part of the mixture into an oil bottle, and part of the mixture into a vinegar bottle. Yet when they get still, they separate out on their own.

This is an image that’s used a lot in the forest tradition. That’s a lot of what has to be done: getting the mind really, really still, and then observing what happens in the still mind. After all, all those factors for dependent co-arising are showing themselves all the time, but they show themselves more clearly, more distinctly, when the mind is really still. You see their connections more clearly when the mind is really still.

So you have to know, one, how to get the mind still and, two, what to look for when it is still. Ajaan MahaBoowa points out that one of the ways of getting a pain to separate out from your sense of the body is to see that the pain is a feeling aggregate, whereas the body, of course, is a different aggregate, made up of earth, water, wind, and fire. Those are two very separate things—the feeling of the pain, and the sensations of the elements—but we tend to glom them together. You can’t pry them apart, but if you ask questions about the pain—one of which would be, where is the strongest point of the pain?—you start chasing it around and you find that the pain separates out on its own. You don’t have to separate it out. It just goes away from the body on its own.

That’s an example of getting a result without forcing it, without pre-designing it. Sometimes it won’t separate out as you chase it around, in which case you have to try another tactic, because pain is related to lots of different factors of the mind. You never know, without experimenting, which of the many factors that are related to the factor of feeling in dependent co-arising would be the ones that are in play right now.

But if you have a good repertoire of concepts, a good vocabulary, and a good series of questions to ask, you can try them all out and see what works. Then you can use your ingenuity. You begin to gain an intuitive sense for the mind from dealing with it directly.

So reading about the Dhamma is an important part of practicing the Dhamma, but the important thing is learning how to use what you’ve read right.

And when to use it and when to put it aside. Ajaan Mun would tell his students to take whatever knowledge they had of the Dhamma and put it away in a chest, because there was so much bad Dhamma being taught back in those days. But it was also because there are times when you just need to get the mind really, really quiet, and then you reflect on what you got when it’s quiet. That’s when you can begin to pull out your knowledge to see if it’s helpful. If you pull it out when you’re trying to quiet the mind, it can get in the way.

So, learning from your reading is a skill. It’s not something you can just force on things. As with all aspects of the practice, you have to see what works and what doesn’t work. Gain a sense of time and place, and then you find that what you’ve read can be a great help.