Reflect

One of the saddest cases I encountered in Thailand was a monk who had been meditating in the forest. He had gotten into good, strong states of concentration, with lots of bliss, lots of rapture. He went to the monk who was in charge of the area where he was staying, told him about it, and the monk warned him, “You’re going to get stuck in concentration. You’ve got to do discernment practice. You’ve got to develop insight.” So the monk abandoned his concentration and focused entirely on insight, but he found that he was getting more and more distracted, more and more scattered. He was getting no joy from the practice.

He came to see me, and I told him, “You’ve got to get back to your concentration.” He said, “I can’t. I was warned so strongly against it that I just can’t settle down again.” He ended up disrobing. That’s a sad case of people being told to give up their concentration before they’d actually solidified it, made it strong enough, made it reliable enough, and learned how to use it in the development of insight.

So when we hear stories of Ajaan Mun allowing Ajaan Maha Boowa to get stuck in concentration for eight years, you can understand why. Some people really need to get very, very strong in their concentration so that their discernment work doesn’t get carried away. As Ajaan Maha Boowa himself said, when Ajaan Mun did finally whip him into developing insight, he got lopsided the other way—doing nothing but discernment work, analyzing this, analyzing that, trying to strike out this defilement, that defilement—and his mind got frazzled.

He realized that you need both concentration and discernment, and they have to work together. In his case, it was a matter of doing strong concentration and then coming out, analyzing things until the analysis was getting dull. In his image, it was like using a knife: You cut, cut, cut, but after a while the knife is no longer sharp, and if you try to keep cutting through things, they just don’t cut. That’s when you have to rest. Rest in concentration—that’s sharpening the knife. Then, when it’s ready, you come out again.

Other people find that the concentration and discernment work together. In fact, that was the theme of one of Ajaan Maha Boowa’s books, that there are some people who find that they can settle down only when they’ve done some analysis, and that their concentration, even though it gets really solid, continues to contain an element of insight. Ajaan Lee is a perfect example of this. His powers of concentration were extremely strong, but his concentration included discernment.

As he said, when you get the mind into the first jhana, you’ve got directed thought and evaluation. The directed thought and singleness of preoccupation are the concentration side of the jhana practice. The evaluation is the beginning of discernment as you evaluate: How does your breath feel right now? Is it a good breath to settle down with? You’ve got to learn how to get the mind and the breath to settle together snugly, the same way that a carpenter would try to work with two pieces of wood so that they would fit snugly together.

Sometimes you work on the breath—changing the way you breathe, changing the way you focus on the breath, changing the different ways of directing the breath energy through the different parts of the body. Other times, you work on the mind. If you find that the mind doesn’t want to settle down with the breath, okay, what’s the problem? Maybe you need to give it something else to work with first, like contemplating the body or developing thoughts of goodwill.

Maybe there’s a specific issue coming up from the day that you’ve got to deal with first, looking at it from the point of view of the Dhamma. Then you can settle down. This is one of the reasons why we have those chants at the beginning of the meditation session: the 32 parts of the body, recollection of death, aging, illness, death, the fact that your karma is the only thing that’s really yours. They’re to give you a Dhamma perspective on the events of the day, so that you can let them go.

For example, you bring in the issue of karma. Where is your karma being created right now? It’s being created in the mind as you sit and meditate. So this is where your focus should be. All the other things that you might be interested in right now or worked up about right now are subject to aging, illness, and death. You’re going to have to let them go at some point, so learn how to let go of them now.

So, the evaluation is part of the concentration, but it’s also the beginning of discernment. As the Buddha said, there is no jhana without discernment, there’s no discernment without jhana. Right here is where it happens. Ideally, your concentration should contain that element of discernment, but it doesn’t happen to be that way in every case.

You’ve got to notice the way your mind is. If your mind is the type that can do concentration as a separate activity—in other words, just pound the mind into stillness and then bring it back out and use it to analyze things—make sure you learn how to read your mind. This is the important issue in both cases. Read your mind: When does the mind need to rest? When has the mind rested enough? When is it ready to go out?

When you’re doing analysis in the concentration, you direct your thoughts, but when does the point come where you don’t need to do the analysis anymore? In Ajaan Fuang’s image, you’re raising a water buffalo. You call the buffalo, and when it comes, you don’t have to call it anymore. Once things have settled down and are steady together, then you drop the directed thought and evaluation and learn how to maintain that steadiness in all sorts of different situations.

The mind will present you with different situations; your body will present you with different situations. A lot of the skill in meditation is learning how to get the mind to be still in all situations. So you learn to read your mind, learn how to reflect. It’s this element of reflection that lifts you up beyond plain concentration practice, beyond plain stillness, and beyond ordinary analysis of things.

When you’re doing, say, contemplation of the thirty-two parts of the body: At some point you’ll have to realize that the problem is not the body, the problem is the perceptions of the mind, the intentions behind the perceptions of the mind. Why would you want to perceive the body as beautiful even after you’ve contemplated its unattractive aspects?

Keep that image of the mirror in mind. In the very beginning when the Buddha was explaining the Dhamma to Rahula, that was the image he gave him. You look at your actions as you’d look in a mirror. That means you look in your concentration, you look in your meditation, as you’d look in a mirror, and you begin to see what you’re doing at that moment. That’s where the real insights come: when you see how you’re fashioning things in the present moment.

Without that insight, you can do all the analysis you want, all the concentration, all the stillness you want, and gain all sorts of insights into the nature of things, but you’re still stuck in either way. Even your discernment, if it goes no further than discernment into how to maintain and master concentration, is still lacking something. You want to see how you can get beyond concentration, beyond your insight.

So it’s really important, this ability to read your mind, to reflect on what you’re doing, to have that “all-around eye” that the Buddha was reported to have.

The monks who lived with Ajaan Mun said he had that characteristic: He was very circumspect. He held very tightly to the rules, but not in a blind way. He had all kinds of images and visions in his meditation, but he learned how to deal with them in an all-around way, too. That’s how he maintained his sanity as he stayed alone in the forest.

So the lesson is: Learn how to read your mind. Reflect on what you’re doing. Notice what kind of mind you have. Be alert to the pitfalls that that particular mind-type can fall into, but also realize there are ways beyond those pitfalls. Other people have come to the meditation with the same problems you’ve had and they’ve learned how to master them, they’ve gained awakening. If they can do it, why can’t you?