Restraint Leads to Freedom

The mind, when it’s in a state of concentration, is expansive. Your awareness fills the whole body. The object you’re focusing on, the breath, fills the whole body.

But to get there, you have to start out with restraint. The mind has to stay with the body in and of itself, and you have to put aside all thoughts with reference to the world. That’s the description of mindfulness practice, but it’s also the description of how you get into concentration.

Sometimes we hear that mindfulness is an open, accepting, non-judgmental state of mind, but that’s not how the Buddha described it. The images he uses are those of restraint, like the quail that has to stay in its field. If it wanders away from the field, it’s going to get caught by the hawk. Or the monkeys that have to stay in their own territory in the mountains: If they wander into the territory of human beings, they’re going to get trapped and killed.

So, to get the mind expansive, first you have to make it small, focused on the breath, focused on what’s right here, what’s right now, and say “no, no, no” to any thoughts that would wander away. It’s only when you exercise some restraint like this that the mind gains some solidity, some focus. Once you’re established the power of the focus, that’s what gets expansive.

The same principle applies outside as well. When you’re dealing with the outside world, you’ve got to exercise restraint. It’s from restraint that the practice of goodwill can grow. In fact, the Buddha calls goodwill a type of restraint. It starts out by being very careful about what you take in and how you take it in. When you look at something, why are you looking at it? Who’s doing the looking? For what purpose? Is greed doing the looking? Anger? Delusion? Or is wisdom doing the looking? What is your purpose in doing these things?

This is one of the insights you’re going to have to develop as you meditate as it gets deeper and deeper and more and more subtle. You have to see that you’re not just on the passive, receiving side of things. It’s not the case that the mind is sitting around very innocently, free of greed, aversion, and delusion, and then something sparks it, provokes it. It’s out looking. It’s got a purpose.

The problem is that its purposes are not always very clear: a muddled idea of maybe what happiness might be, and where you might look for it.

But it starts even before you do things outside. Just getting engaged with the senses has a purpose. You want to get clear about that. If you allow greed, aversion, or delusion to do the looking and the listening and the tasting and the touching, then they’re going to come out in your thoughts, words, and deeds.

In other words, you have to exercise restraint both on things that come into the mind and on what goes out of the mind. When you’re careful in this way, that’s when you have a good foundation for the practice of metta, or goodwill.

That sutta we chanted just now talks about the things you have to do to create the right environment.

You have to be easy to talk to, in other words, easy to instruct.

You have to be gentle. Otherwise, the things you do will be at cross purposes with the meaning of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness. It’s not loving kindness. There are a lot of animals out there that don’t want to be loved by us, a lot of people who don’t want to be loved by us. They just want our goodwill.

Often, goodwill means, “May we go our separate ways, peacefully.” And think of that phrase: “May all beings look after themselves with ease.” You’re not saying, “I’ll be there for everybody.” You’re basically saying, “May all beings have the capacity to be there for themselves. May beings be skillful.”

Of course, you’re included among all beings as well. That’s why we start out with the thought, “Ahaṁ sukhito homi, May I be happy.” That means, “May I understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Those causes include developing skillful qualities and being restrained in unskillful qualities, to the point where you can abandon them.

But before you can abandon them, you hold them in place. The image the Buddha gives is that our emotions are like a stream, and the restraint provided by mindfulness is like a dam that holds them in check. Discernment is then what traces back, “Where does the stream come from?” and stops it at the source. You’re not going to find the source until you’ve first learned some restraint.

Of course, when your mind is restrained like this, part of it is going to rebel because it’s used to looking for its food in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations as it likes. It’s looking for its food in greed, aversion, and delusion. Even though the Buddha says that these things are like fire—they’re like the kind of spicy food that burns all the way down—still, that’s what we like. We’re like hell beings that like to eat fire.

So, we’ve got to find an alternative source of food. This is why we practice concentration, again, starting with mindfulness immersed in the body. The image the Buddha gives is of a post. You’ve got six animals, and each of them is on a leash. Now, if you just tie the leashes to one another, then the animals are going to pull in their various directions.

The bird is going to fly up to the sky. The snake is trying to go down into a hole in the ground. The dog is going to the village. The jackal or the hyena is going to a charnel ground to feed on some corpses. The monkey is going to go up to a tree. The crocodile is going to pull everybody else down into the river. Whichever one of your emotions is strongest, at any one time, is going to pull the whole rest of your mind in its direction—if you don’t have a good post to tie the leashes to.

You need the post provided by mindfulness immersed in the body. You tie the leashes of the animals to that. Then, pull as they might, they’re not going to go anywhere. They end up lying down right here next to the post.

So the practice of restraint requires that you feed the mind well. Here again, you start with the restraint of focusing on one topic in and of itself. Once the mind gets settled in there, that’s when it can get expansive in the present moment.

All too often, it’s like an amoeba that sends its pseudopods out into the past, out into the future, but they get sent out and they die. You send some more out and they die. Here, though, you want them to stay in the present moment. This is where they can live. This is where you gain your strength.

So as you go through life, realize that the mind wants to be expansive, it doesn’t like to be limited. But first, before it can get securely in an unlimited state, it has to put some limitations on itself—being careful about what you look at, listen to, being especially careful about what you think.

Here the Buddha gives the image of the cowherd—again, an image of restraint. When there’s rice in the fields, the cowherd has to keep beating the cows back to make sure they don’t go in the fields and eat the rice. In the same way, when there are unskillful thoughts in the mind, you’ve got to restrain them.

But then once they are under restraint, then the mind can expand itself freely. That’s the paradox of the practice: with restraint comes freedom. By imposing some limits on the mind, you can take the mind to a place where it’s unlimited in the present moment. And from being unlimited in the present moment, you can get so that it’s unlimited outside of space and time entirely.

But it starts with restraint. This is why, when one of the people back East asked Ajaan Suwat about how to carry the practice into daily life, he started with the five precepts and restraint of the senses—because the restraint in not letting the mind wander off into its defilements is what allows it to expand in other ways that are more nourishing, that are better for you, better for the people around you.

So be willing to put up with the limits, because they’re for the sake of freedom.