Protection

We look at the world around us and we can see that it’s a dangerous place. People are getting killed, things are getting stolen from them. All kinds of things can happen to you.

Think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening. He saw that the world was even more dangerous than that. He saw that people do the things that actually lead to miserable rebirths. And they do them willingly, because they don’t know. They associate with the wrong people. They don’t have any respect for the noble ones. They act on wrong views. They think they’re doing something right, but then it pulls them down. And the depths of how they can be pulled down are much worse than what we see here in the human world, or even with animals.

So the Buddha said we have to be heedful. He said all skillful qualities come from heedfulness, and particularly the five strengths based on heedfulness that we need in order to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves.

The first of the five strengths is conviction. You believe in the Buddha’s awakening, that what he saw on the night of his awakening is true. Not only that, but he gained freedom from the knowledge that he gained on that night. As he said, it came from qualities that anybody can develop: heedfulness, ardency, resolution. We all have these qualities to some extent in some of our activities. But he said if you develop them in full, they can take you to full freedom.

So, believing in his awakening is not just a matter of believing that something happened in the past. The belief is that it also has implications for what you’re doing right now, how you can protect yourself right now.

And what he saw, as he said, was that you can act on good intentions, and they’ll lead you to good places. You can act on unskillful intentions, and they’ll lead you down.

Now, all of us have quite a mix. So we have to be very careful about what we do, what we say and what we think. That’s how we protect ourselves. Because as the Buddha saw, the dangers are not so much coming from outside, it’s the dangers that come from within that can really pull us down.

If somebody kills you, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to go to hell. But if you give into greed, aversion, and delusion, and you kill somebody else, that could pull you down. So the main dangers are inside.

When you have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, all the other strengths follow, if you’re heedful. You realize that you have to do what you can to abandon unskillful qualities in your mind, because that’s where the danger comes from, and to develop skillful qualities. Be confident that you can do that.

All too many people have a negative inner critic that criticizes everything you do. Now, the Buddha said that you do have to be your own, as he said, prosecutor. You do have to charge yourself when you make mistakes. But that should be paired with another voice that says, “You can do this.” The reason you should recognize your mistakes is so that you can learn from them.

So you want to be persistent in doing what’s good. Like right now, as you’re meditating, you can stay with the breath for a few minutes and then decide, “Well, I’ve had enough now, I’ve rested, I can now start thinking about something else.” But you don’t gain anything. You don’t gain the skills, you don’t gain the clarity that comes from being still for a long time, keeping watch over your mind.

So you stick with it again and again and again, because you realize that the law of karma is not like a traffic law that says, “Don’t park here between 3 o’clock to 5 o’clock on the afternoons, on this day or that day.” The law of karma is 24/7. It’s always in force. And so, you have to be careful 24/7 as well.

That means you have to be mindful, too. As the Buddha said, ass you’re working on keeping at this project of developing skillfulness and developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, you have to keep remembering. But at the same time, the mind needs to rest. So you have to work on the skillful qualities that take you to a place where you can rest for a while in concentration. That starts with mindfulness.

Mindfulness doesn’t mean non-judging awareness, as we sometimes hear. It means keeping in mind what you need to do. Right now, you need to get focused on the breath, or as the Buddha calls it, “the body in and of itself.” In other words, look at the breath on its own terms. You don’t even need to think about who you are or where you are. It’s just breath coming in, breath going out. You want to make it smooth and comfortable: energizing if you’re tired, relaxing if you’re tense, soothing if you’ve been feeling frazzled.

That’s the good thing about the breath. You can play with it. You can use it to create a sense of well-being and comfort here inside. Now, at the same time that you focus on the breath, you’re also putting aside any thoughts that would pull you out into the world. This is your frame of reference right here.

Again, sometimes we hear that mindfulness doesn’t mean just non-judging awareness. It’s also all-encompassing, allowing you to go wherever you want. But the Buddha says that right mindfulness knows its boundaries. There are some areas where you don’t go, as in his image of the monkeys. If the monkeys stay in the part of the mountains where only monkeys go, they’re safe—at least, safe from human beings. But if they go into the place where monkeys and human beings go, then they’re in danger.

That place, the Buddha said, stands for thoughts of sensuality—fantasizing about the pleasures you can get out of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. You just don’t go there. You keep yourself in bounds.

As Ajaan Maha Bua would say, you place a fence around the mind. You make sure the fence is solid. If there are any holes in the fence, then even though you have a nice fence in front of your house, if there are lots of holes in the fence behind the house, anybody can come in.

So, you’re mindful all around.

Keep in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. And you’re alert to both the mind and the breath. What’s the mind doing right now? Is it staying with the breath? If it’s not, bring it back. If it is, try to make it as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels.

This is a quality called ardency—trying to do this well. And in doing it well, you get the mind into concentration. The alertness, together with the ardency, turns into evaluation. You evaluate what you’re doing and figure out what’s working, what’s not working as you try to give rise to a sense of well-being.

This is what gives you the strength to keep going. Because if you just tell yourself, “I’ll just think nothing but skillful thoughts and try to abandon unskillful ones,” the part of the mind that wants some pleasure right now is going to rebel. All too often there are skillful things that will give good results in the long term, but you’re going to have to put up with some hardship in the short term. Part of the mind will be willing to make that trade, and part of the mind will not.

So it’s good to have a sense of well-being right now, so that the part of the mind that wants instant gratification has something to feed on.

It’s in this way the mind gains strength. And again, you do this because of heedfulness. You need to learn how to train the mind so that when the time comes to think through things, it’s ready, it’s been rested.

The image that the ajaans like to give is of a knife. If you just keep chop, chop, chopping away with the knife, after all it gets dull. You have to stop and rest, sharpen the knife. Then you can continue with your work. So the mind does need to rest, but the best rest is not sleeping. The best rest is getting the mind in concentration, because you’re not only resting. You’re also strengthening these qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency.

Those are the qualities that will see you through all the way to the fifth strength, which is discernment.

You remember what the Buddha said: It’s because people don’t see the distinction between what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, that they can end up doing a lot of unskillful things and causing themselves a lot of danger. So, to protect yourself, you want to see what’s skillful not only from having heard it from the Buddha, but also from having seen it for yourself. You also want to know how to talk your mind out of wanting to do unskillful things; wanting to do skillful things, regardless of how hard they are.

All these are aspects of discernment.

Often we hear of discernment being about the three characteristics and emptiness. But the Buddha also talks about discernment in very practical terms: understanding your mind, being able to convince the mind when things are difficult that it can do skillful things, even when it’s feeling weak or threatened.

That’s how your discernment grows.

These are your strengths and these are the things that keep you protected. Once you’ve seen for yourself what really is skillful, in other words, it does lead to happiness, and what really is unskillful, in that it does lead to pain, then you’re not just going on conviction. You’re going on experience. And you’ve made yourself a reliable judge of your experience by being more mindful, developing your powers of evaluation. This is where you can protect yourself.

There’s a story in the Canon of King Pasenadi, who tends to be something of a naif, but likes to visit with the Buddha and talk about Dhamma matters. He comes to see the Buddha one day and says, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this. Those who have a big army but who don’t observe the precepts, are leaving themselves unprotected, no matter how big the army is. Why is that? Because of the influence of their karma, shaping what they’re going to experience. On the other hand, even those who don’t have a big army, but who observe the precepts and who behave in skillful ways, protect themselves, because they’re not doing anything that would cause harm.”

Of those precepts, the Buddha said, the most important one is the precept against lying. The more you lie, the more you’re going to be exposed to other people’s lies. You live in a world where nothing is for sure, nothing is certain. Everybody accuses everyone else of creating fake news. What’s important is that we don’t create fake news for ourselves, because if you do get used to lying to other people, then it gets easier and easier to lie to yourself. Then everything inside becomes fake news.

But if you hold to this one precept—this is the big one, that you’re not going to tell lies, you’re not going to misrepresent the truth—then you’re protecting yourself.

Of course, telling the truth has other aspects as well. You have to know the right time and place, which truths are beneficial to talk about, which ones are not, and when to talk about them, who to talk about them to. There’s a real skill in being truthful.

In fact, all the teachings that the Buddha gives are matters of skill. You have to be skillful in being generous. In other words, acting on the right motivation, giving gifts that will be useful, giving gifts to people who use them well. You have to be skillful in being virtuous, ss in the case of telling the truth, knowing when to stay silent, when to change the topic. You never say anything that you know is false. But there are times when you hold some information back.

Think of the Buddha the day he walked into the forest, picked up a handful of leaves, and asked the monks, “Which is more, the leaves in my hand or the leaves in the forest?” The monks said, “Of course, the leaves in the forest are more.” The Buddha said, “In the same way, the things I learned through my awakening are like the leaves in the forest. What I had taught, the four noble truths, is like the leaves in my hand.”

And here is someone who knows the truth 100%. Yet even then, he knows when to hold it back, because those other leaves would not be helpful in putting an end to suffering.

So, you may know the truth, your opinions may be true, but how true are they compared to the truth of the Buddha? He knew when to hold things back. It’s good for us to know when to hold things back, too.

In that way, truth-telling becomes a skill.

It’s in this way that we protect ourselves. As the Buddha said, what an enemy might do to you is nothing compared to what evil things the mind can do to itself, if it’s not trained. At the same time, what a loved relative, someone who really loves you, can do for you, is nothing compared to what you can do for yourself, when you do train the mind.

When you’re looking for protection, have a clear idea of where the danger is coming from, and also a clear idea of what needs to be protected. As the Buddha said, you can lose your relatives, you can lose your health, you can lose your wealth, and that’s not going to pull you down to hell. You’re going to lose those things anyhow. But if you lose your right view, if you lose your virtue, that can pull you down to hell.

So those are the things you want to protect. And the important point is that when you protect them, nobody can take them away from you. You lose them only when you throw them away.

So know where the danger comes from—it comes from inside—and know what needs to be protected: your virtue, your right views.

When you’re clear about this and you’re heedful, then you’re safe.