The Six Properties

When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he had me chant the Divine Mantra every evening as a way of getting me used to the six elements or the six dhātu—the properties of wind, fire, water, earth, space, and consciousness. It was an important part of the way he taught meditation.

Here in the West, it’s a topic that people rarely focus on. It’s one of the topics of mindfulness immersed in the body, but people tend to avoid it because they think the elements here are a primitive form of chemistry, whereas we know that the real elements are things like oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, iron.

But the Buddha’s talking more about how you feel the body from within. How do you feel the oxygen from within, hydrogen, carbon, or iron? There’s no way that you can sense them directly. What you do sense directly is the fact that the body has a sense of energy, which is the wind; there’s warmth, which is fire; coolness—water; solidity—earth; space; and consciousness. These are part of your direct experience. And it’s good to get to know them that way.

I remember one evening when I was chanting the Divine Mantra and it suddenly hit me that these were not just foreign concepts that were being imposed on my mind. It was a way of looking at things that I was directly experiencing: my consciousness, right here, right now; my body, right here, right now.

So these properties are good to know. They get us away from our ordinary ways of looking at our body and help us to see the body as really strange. In fact, that’s one of the purposes of this meditation.

You see it, basically, in two main contexts—in the Canon and in Ajaan Lee’s teachings. The Canon talks about it as one of the preliminaries for getting the mind to settle down with the breath. Even before you do breath meditation, you focus on the elements. This is how the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son, Rāhula.

You think of the fact that the body has things that are solid, things that are liquid. There’s the fire in the body, the warmth; the coolness, the water. There are various liquids in the body, like blood, pus, lymph, and urine. And you realize that your body is made out of the same things that everything else in the world is made out of. So there’s nothing special about it. It’s subject to the same laws as the world outside.

Even in the big version of the elements, these properties are very unstable, subject to a lot of change, totally beyond your control. Floods can come but then everything can dry up and become a desert. Sea levels rise and fall. Fires can sweep through huge areas of wilderness and then go totally out. Windstorms can come and then there are days when there’s no wind at all— when, as they say, “Even the grass ends in the thatch don’t move.”

So when the large versions of these elements are so changeable and unstable, what about the versions you’ve got here in the body? What of it is really reliable? What of it is really yours? It belongs to the world. You’ve come in and commandeered it, laid claim to it as yours, but at some point you’ll have to let it go. This kind of refllection helps induce concentration because it inspires a sense of samvega, dispassion.

The Buddha then goes further to tell Rāhula, “Make your mind like earth. Make your mind like wind, water, fire.” People throw disgusting things on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react. Wind blows trash around, but it’s not disgusted by the trash. Fire burns trash, water is used to wash trash away, but they don’t get disgusted, they don’t get reactive.

As you meditate, you want your mind to be that impervious to the things it doesn’t like. When things come up in your meditation that you don’t like, you want to be able to be with them, to watch them, to understand them. If you’re constantly shrinking away from them, you’re not going to understand anything.

Now, being non-reactive doesn’t mean you’re not pro-active. After all, when the Buddha goes on to teach breath meditation, he gives the sixteen steps, and those are very proactive. You train yourself to breathe in certain ways. You breathe in ways that give rise to pleasure or rapture. You breathe so that you’re aware of the whole body, so that you calm bodily fabrication, i.e., calm the in-and-out breath, even to the point where it stops. You breathe in ways that gladden the mind. You breathe in ways that concentrate the mind, release the mind. That’s proactive.

It’s a skill you’re developing, but you can’t develop the skill unless you have that ability to be non-reactive, so that you can be with mental states and physical states that you don’t like, and you can look into them, try to understand them, see why they invade the mind, and see what you can do so that they don’t invade the mind.

That’s element meditation or property meditation as a preliminary for getting the mind to settle down with the breath.

Ajaan Fuang would have you also use this kind of meditation as a method for solidifying your concentration. I just mentioned states where the breath stops in the body, not because you’ve suppressed it, but simply because you feel no need to breathe. The breath energy fills the body. Everything seems satisfied, saturated. The mind seems satisfied to be just here, very still. And you begin to realize that you don’t have to breathe.

Some people get scared at this point, but you have to remember that the body will breathe if it has to. You’re not clamping down on anything. Why the body doesn’t need to breathe right now, it’s hard to say. Some people say there’s an exchange of oxygen at the skin. Some people say there’s not. But something’s happening that doesn’t trigger any felt need to breathe. The brain, which is one of the main users of oxygen, is very, very still. So maybe there is an oxygen exchange going on, and that’s all the oxygen you need.

At any rate, when you get to this point where there’s no felt need to breathe, Ajaan Fuang would have you then switch over to the topic of fire. Think of the warmth in the body. Which spot in the body is the warmest? Focus your attention there, in the same way that you would focus your attention on the most comfortable spot in the body when you breathe. Then think of the warmth spreading from that spot to fill the whole body until you’re sitting there very still, very warm.

Sometimes the warmth gets too much. I know one of the Ajaan Fuang’s students who complained that the weather in Bangkok was pretty hot and this was making things even hotter. In that case, he said, cool things down. Think of water. Your body has water all over the place. There’s blood, there’s lymph, there’s urine, there’s gall: It’s saturated with water. So focus on whichever spot in the body is coolest, then spread that sense of coolness throughout the body.

Then he would have you focus on earth. Think of the solid parts of the body, like the bones. Think of the whole body becoming solid. I remember one of the Ajaan Fuang’s students complaining that he felt like his body was made out of bronze at this point.

When any of that gets oppressive, then you balance things out—not too warm, not too cold, not too heavy, not too light. You’re sitting there balanced. The earth and the wind elements balance each other out. The water and the fire elements balance each other out. You try to maintain that sense of “just right-ness”.

After a while, you begin to notice that your sense of the boundary of the body begins to disappear. It’s a perception that you’ve imposed on this mass of sensations that you’ve got here, but now you let that perception dissolve away. What you’ve got left is like a cloud—a mist made of little droplets of sensations. Focus on the space between those droplets. Hold on to that perception of space. You’ve moved into the element of space or the property of space—and that has no boundaries. It’s not bound by the body; it’s not bound by the room in which you’re sitting or any of the things that surround you. It permeates everything and extends out in a way where you have no sense of any boundary or limit to it. Try to maintain that sensation, maintain that perception, as solidly as you can. You’re learning how to make your perceptions solid and steady, without the benefit of the breath. This makes your concentration even deeper and stronger.

Then, when you’re ready, you can move on to the next question: What is it that knows the space? Consciousness—knowing, knowing, knowing. You stick with that perception of “knowing” and have a sense that the knowing permeates everything, surrounds everything.

Some people mistake this for the ground of being. It’s not. After all, your perception of knowing is what keeps you there, so it’s conditioned by what you’re doing. But it’s a really good state to know, a good state to master, because when your awareness is very clear and all-around like this, you see subtle things arising and passing away in the mind that you wouldn’t have seen when you were working with the breath because the movement of the breath was getting in the way.

So this is a good foundation for gaining insight. You’ve also learned about the power of perception. This body that you’ve got here: You can perceive it as all fire, as all wind, all earth, all water, all space, all consciousness. And the actual sensation of what you’ve got here will change depending on your perceptions.

That’s a lesson worth taking to heart: how much your perceptions change things; how much your perceptions come before your sensations of these things, as is explained in the dependent co-arising. Name-and-form comes before contact. Perceptions are part of name-and-form. And there are perceptions in the factor of fabrication that comes before that.

So you can use these topics on various levels: as means to gain a sense of dispassion and saṁvega, to induce a sense of solidity in the mind, to solidify your concentration, and to learn lessons about the power of perception.

So it’s not a primitive chemistry that’s being imposed on us. We’re actually being told to look more carefully at what we directly experience and to see how clearly we can shape our experience through our perceptions. These are all good lessons to learn.