Two Guardian Meditations

Ajaan Lee has a nice image. He says that breath meditation is like your home—vihāra-dhamma. It’s a place where you can settle in, gain a sense of well-being, allow your awareness to fill the body. Your breath fills the body; a sense of ease fills the body. That’s where you can live. But you don’t stay home all the time.

The mind has other needs as well. It has specific defilements, specific hindrances. And sometimes the breath just doesn’t cut it. That’s when it’s good to know other meditation topics as well.

When the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son, Rāhula, he didn’t start right out with the sixteen steps. He had Rāhula contemplate the four elements. Think about it. Your body is composed of what? The same thing as the dirt, and the water, and the wind, and fire outside—in other words, the same physical elements. Then he had him think about making his mind like those elements—in other words, solid, non-reactive—because if you’re going to learn anything in your meditation, you have to be willing to put up both with good things and bad things coming up, not getting excited about the good things, not getting knocked off course by the bad ones.

So make your mind like earth. People can throw disgusting things on the earth, and the earth doesn’t shrink away. They can pour perfume on the earth, and the earth doesn’t rise up to greet it. The same with the other elements: You can use water to wash away garbage, use fire to burn the garbage, let the wind blow it away. They don’t shrink away from the garbage.

The Buddha also recommended the brahmavihāras—the sublime attitudes—for dealing with problems of ill will, harmfulness, resentment. Equanimity is there to deal with passion, but it can also deal with all kinds of other unhealthy attitudes. You just don’t react.

There are many levels of equanimity. The most basic is the level that comes simply from making up your mind that you’re not going to react to anything that comes up in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. You aren’t going to let yourself get upset by the negative things that are happening in the world, the negative things that are happening in your own mind. You want to be able to watch them, to watch them carefully and not be blown away by them so that you can understand them and then respond skillfully to them.

Those are some of the things the Buddha would say augment and provide a good basis for your breath meditation.

There’s another list that developed over the centuries. It’s called the Four Guardian Meditations. These are for dealing with specific defilements as they come up. Two are inspiring: recollection of the Buddha and the development of goodwill. Two are more chastening: contemplation of the body and recollection of death.

We’ll talk about the inspiring ones tonight.

When you think about the Buddha, what is it about him that inspires you? This is an area where you can think in any way that you find inspiring. There’s no set way. The passage we chant just now is standard—Arahaṁ Sammā Sambuddho Bhagavā. But those terms may not speak to you. So, what is it about the Buddha that you find inspiring?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed the pillar out there. There are four animals at the base of the capital. They represent qualities of the Buddha. There’s the elephant and the horse, which are animals that can be tamed to do all kinds of difficult work. In the same way, the Buddha did a lot of difficult things. He tamed his mind. There’s a verse that comes from a later tradition that says, “Tamed, he was the foremost tamer of others.” He was able to get his defilements under control. That means that the teaching he gave wasn’t influenced by any greed, aversion, or delusion. That’s one of the reasons why we can trust that teaching.

Then there’s the bull, which is a symbol of his strength. As he said, as he was practicing different practices while trying to find the way to awakening, he developed qualities of conviction, persistence, or energy; mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, as they were required for each path. Then when he taught the path that he discovered was the right path, he recommended these same five qualities because he had found that they really were important for succeeding in any endeavor.

You have to learn how to depend on yourself in the practice. We rely on the teachings of the teachers, the ajaans, the teachings of the Buddha himself, his noble disciples, because without them we wouldn’t know anything about this path at all. If the Buddha hadn’t mentioned focusing on the breath as a useful way of training your mind, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to a lot of us. And the fact that he was able to recognize that concentration itself was not enough, that needed more discernment—that was a strength, too. The fact that he’s found these strengths, used them, and developed them, recommends by way of example that we develop them, too. So, you can take him as inspiration.

Finally, there’s the lion. That represents his fearlessness. Think about him going out into the forest after having been raised in the palace. He was willing to give up all his usual comforts. Whatever the difficulties were, he didn’t shrink away from them. One of the difficulties you deal with when you go into the forest, out in the wilderness, is fear. There are the wild animals. There are the thieves that hide out in the forest, the diseases that exist in the forest, the non-human beings. But he was able to overcome his fear of those things.

Then when he found the Dhamma, he tested it thoroughly. As he saw it, most of us have our ideas about truth that come from conditioned things. He had found something unconditioned, which didn’t depend on perceptions or thought constructs or any of the aggregates. It was totally independent. He came from there, he came back from the deathless, which is a grand achievement.

So there was no reason for him to fear anything that anybody might say about how he was teaching wrongly or hadn’t attained the deathless. There are many cases where Māra comes up and tries to taunt him, tries to insert doubts into his mind. He immediately recognizes Māra for what he is—the forces of the world that don’t want people to be awakened. So he had no fear from any quarter, as they say. That’s how he was like a lion. That’s the person who taught this teaching that we’re following. So it’s good to be inspired by him.

You read accounts now that are trying to “humanize” the Buddha—in other words, drag him down to our level. There’s a book called The Historical Buddha, which would have been more accurately titled The Neurotic Buddha. You wonder why people would bother.

The Buddha’s trying to show us that there’s something about being a human being that’s more than we are right now, but we can develop those qualities within ourselves. Instead of dragging him down to our level, we should try to lift ourselves up to at least the level that’s capable of following his teachings.

So think about the Buddha in a way that you find inspiring, that lifts your energy, makes you more fearless in the practice, stronger in the practice, more able to tame your defilements.

That’s a useful way of augmenting your breath meditation, giving the mind, as Ajaan Lee would say, a good place to forage for food.

Another way is the development of goodwill. Goodwill is the wish for happiness—for true happiness. And it’s to be extended to all. Again, this is to lift your mind up above ill will for anybody, no matter how poorly they’ve been behaving. You’re not saying, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” Goodwill has to be understood in the context of karma. Happiness has to be understood in the context of karma. You extend goodwill to others, not because they deserve it, but because you need it. If you have ill will for anybody, you’re probably going to behave in unskillful ways around that person. That’s going to become your bad karma.

So when you extend thoughts of goodwill, there may be a lot of people you think don’t really deserve to be happy. But the Buddha never taught in those terms.

When he taught people about the path to the end of suffering, he didn’t first say, “Only those who deserve not to suffer can listen to this.” Everybody has karma in their background that could cause them to suffer. The whole point of the teaching is that not everything you experience is shaped by past karma. There’s your independent present karma right here, right now. And that can make a difference. That’s where he’s focusing.

In the same way, you want to focus on people’s potential to change their ways. There are a lot of people who don’t want to change their ways. They’re perfectly happy doing whatever stupid and heartless and cruel things they’re doing—in which case your goodwill has to be backed up by equanimity. But you remember that you’re doing it for yourself.

You also have to realize that extending thoughts of goodwill doesn’t stop with those thoughts. You have to live in a way that’s congruent with your goodwill.

It makes you stop and think also about happiness.

Where does it come from? It comes from acting skillfully. What does it mean to act skillfully? How do you develop skill? Well, you look at your actions, and before you do anything, you try to make up your mind that you’re not going to harm anybody. If there’s any intention that would cause harm, you don’t follow it. Act only on the intentions that you don’t think are going to involve harm.

While you’re acting, look at the results that are coming up right now. If you see any harm coming up, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, you can continue.

When the action is done, you look at the long-term consequences. If you see that you caused harm, you develop a sense of shame around that action: healthy shame—the opposite of shamelessness.

You go talk it over with someone who’s more advanced on the path to get some ideas for how you might avoid that mistake again. In other words, you’re not embarrassed to talk about your failings. When you admit your failings, you’re providing an opportunity for others to give you good advice.

But if you notice that you didn’t cause any harm by your action, you take joy in that fact and then continue training. In other words, you’re joyful about what you’ve done, but you’re not yet satisfied. There’s more to be done. That’s how you develop skill. That’s how you find happiness.

We here in the West have a very schizoid view of Buddhism. On the one hand, the Buddha is criticized for being a pessimist, talking about suffering, suffering, suffering all the time. But then you also get the pictures of him blissing out, all sweetness, hardly living in a real world at all. And you wonder, which is it? Well, the answer is neither.

The Buddha is very realistic about what dangers there are in life—and the dangers are here in our own mind—but also about what possibilities there are for happiness even while fully cognizant of the dangers.

That’s how these two inspiring guardian meditations work together. The Buddha is an ideal example of goodwill—goodwill for himself, goodwill for others. He teaches us the path because he has compassion for us. Sometimes it seems like he has more compassion for us than we have for ourselves.

But he’s there as an example: This is what human beings can do. And even though you don’t aspire to going all the way to become a Buddha yourself, still you can follow the path that he said leads to the end of suffering. If people couldn’t do this, he said, he wouldn’t teach it. And if it didn’t lead to true happiness, he wouldn’t teach it, either. But we can change our ways. Think about that image where the Buddha says, “Someone who’s been heedless but then becomes heedful, brightens the world like a moon released from a cloud.”

So, no matter what your background, there is this possibility—you can change your ways for the sake of your happiness—a happiness that’s totally harmless, totally reliable. So, when working with your breath gets dry, you can nourish the mind with thoughts like these to uplift your heart.

It’s in this way that the practice develops. You have to learn how to see for yourself what’s needed, and then try to take advantage of all the different tools and tactics and strategies that the Buddha provides for your long-term welfare and happiness. You brighten your mind, and in that way, you brighten the world as well.