Mindfulness Aims at Concentration

In the various lists of the Wings to Awakening, some of the factors come in different orders.

In the noble eightfold path, discernment comes before effort, mindfulness, and concentration, while effort comes before mindfulness. In the seven factors for awakening, mindfulness comes before effort, and discernment comes after mindfulness. But there’s one pattern that’s consistent in all the sets: Mindfulness always comes before concentration.

When you look at the description for mindfulness, it’s easy to see why. It’s basically describing how you get the mind into concentration. “Keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” That’s taking the body as your frame of reference. You can also do the same with feelings in and of themselves, mind states in and of themselves, and mental qualities in and of themselves.

To take them “in and of themselves” means you’re looking at them directly, not in the context of the world, because that’s the second activity—“putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” Any thoughts that would come in to pull you away from your focus on the body or feelings, you put aside. And you’re ardent, alert, and mindful. This is how you get the mind into concentration—keeping track of one thing, putting aside thoughts of everything else, and being ardent, alert, and mindful in the practice.

You’re trying to get into strong concentration, because the strong concentration gives rise to a sense of intense well-being. Some people don’t like the word “concentration” as a translation for samādhi. They say it sounds too tense. Well, think of it as meaning, literally, “with-a-center.” The mind is centered and it’s strongly focused. Without that strong focus, people like Ajaan Lee wouldn’t be able to develop psychic powers based on samādhi. You have to lure the mind into that state—you can’t just force it—which is why, when the Buddha talks about using the breath as an example of the body in and of itself, he talks about breathing in ways that give rise to rapture and pleasure, gladdening the mind, making it happy to be here.

You’re trying to create a mind state that’s obviously superior to other mind states that you can create so that you can get attached to it. You can then use it as a point of comparison as you look at the other things that you might be going for. When the concentration gets really pleasant, you wonder why you’d want to go for something else. It’s really, really good.

So that’s the purpose of mindfulness practice: to get the mind into good, strong concentration. In fact, that first stage of mindfulness described by the formula, in some cases, functions as the first jhana. There’s a sutta that compares training a monk to training an elephant. Just as you would feed a captured elephant and treat it well so that it gets over its memories of the forest, you get the monk to keep track of the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reverence to the world, so that he can put aside his attachments to thoughts of home, memories of home, his desire to go back home. That’s going to happen only if you’re getting the mind into a really pleasant state.

Then, once that happens, the next step is to keep track of the body in and of itself, but don’t think any thoughts about the body or of any other frames of reference. That gets you into the second jhana, which is free from directed thought and evaluation. Which obviously means that before that, you were in the first jhana. You’re getting more and more centered all the time.

So the practice is meant to be pleasant, intensely pleasant. It takes you to a point where you really are happy to be settled here, strongly settled here.

Which is why it’s so ironic that, when mindfulness is usually taught, one of the first things you’re told is, “Don’t get the mind into strong states of concentration, because you’ll get stuck.”

And, secondly, you’re taught, “Look at things in terms of the three characteristics.” In other words, “Jump over the concentration. Then go straight to discernment practice.” In fact, they often make discernment practice part of mindfulness itself.

Sometimes you’re told, “If strong states of concentration do come up, notice how they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self. Let them go. You’ve gained an important insight, that even concentration is impermanent.” But that’s not what you’re supposed to do with concentration. You’re supposed to develop it.

Now, it is true that there are passages where the Buddha says, “Before you do breath meditation, contemplate inconstancy.” But, that’s for the sake of putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, you’re clearing the decks.

You’re sitting down to meditate. You’ve got lots of issues coming in. You’ve been reading the news or you’ve been dealing with other people, so you’ve got to clear the decks before the mind has a good, comfortable place to settle down. That’s when it’s good to think about the inconstancy of whatever is going on out in the world or the inconstancy of your relationships with other people.

You realize that if you want to find something solid and reassuring, something reliable, you have to get the mind focused on keeping track of, say, the breath in and of itself. So you don’t apply the perception of inconstancy to the breath or whatever your meditation object is. You don’t apply it to the concentration yet.

You’re trying to develop these things, so you focus on their more constant side. As Ajaan Lee says, you take what’s inconstant and you make it constant. You take what’s stressful and you make it pleasant. You take what’s not under your control and you bring it under your control. You’re actually fighting against those three perceptions.

If you just let go of everything before you’ve established anything, he says you’re letting go like a pauper, someone who doesn’t have anything—you didn’t have anything before you let go, and you don’t have anything after you let go. Nothing’s been accomplished.

But if you develop something good and strong inside, you get to use it, as I said, as your point of comparison as you contemplate the inconstancy of the things that would pull you out of concentration. You can focus on their stressful side. You can focus on the extent to which they really don’t lie under your control. So you get more and more focused here, inside, more and more centered.

That’s when you get really good at the concentration, when you’ve loosened up a lot of your other attachments outside—and that’s when you can turn and use the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self on the concentration itself, which is your only attachment left.

It’s worth noting that in the Canon, when the Buddha talks about applying the three perceptions, he doesn’t talk about it in the context of his description of the establishing of mindfulness, and especially not when he’s introducing the topic. He does talk about the three perceptions in step number thirteen of his steps for breath meditation: “Breathe in and out, keeping track of inconstancy.” But then again, this applies first to things that would pull you away from the breath. Then, when your focus on the breath is really solid, that’s when you apply the perception of inconstancy to your focus.

When the Buddha talks the what state of mind you want to be in when you apply these perceptions in a way that gives rise to awakening, it’s concentration: the four jhanas, the formless states. You see that they’re better than anything else you could create, anything else you could hold on to, but then you realize they, too, have their drawbacks. You’ve heard that there is a cessation of suffering that comes when you let go of all fabrications. You realize any stage of concentration, any topic of concentration you could focus on, is fabricated, and so would be inconstant. And the mind has had enough of that.

How do you induce that sense of enoughness? By doing the concentration again and again, clearing out the mind as best as you can, again and again, until it reaches a point of fullness. It’s like a well that has a slow spring at the bottom. The water comes bit by bit by bit, and finally reaches the point of fullness.

So it’s important that you realize that mindfulness is meant to take you to concentration. And although you do apply the different perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self at different stages in the path, you apply them in different ways—and certainly not in ways to destroy your concentration before you’ve actually mastered it.

So have a sense of how the different parts of the path fit together. After all, as the Buddha said, to develop the establishings of mindfulness requires all the factors of the path, including right concentration. And only in the fourth jhana is mindfulness actually pure.

The four establishings of mindfulness are the topics of concentration, so these practices are tied together. Don’t see them as separate. When you put them together, they get strong and can perform the functions they’re supposed to perform in providing a path to the end of suffering, taking you all the way.

The reason they take you all the way is because you’ve got all your desires focused on this state of concentration. It’s only when you apply the three perceptions to things that you’re really attached to that they have any power.

You can think about the world outside and how it’s inconstant, and those thoughts don’t have much impact if you’re not attached to things outside. If you have lots of different potentials where you could go, then when you lose your attachment to one thing, there are other things that you could get attached to.

But when you focus all your desires on this state of concentration, having seen the drawbacks of other things that would pull you out of concentration, then when you finally let go of the concentration, that’s when the letting go goes deep.

Now, there is a stage in mindfulness practice called “the development of establishing of mindfulness,” where you’re focused on origination and passing away with regard to your frame of reference. Sometimes people say, “Right there is where we’re talking about inconstancy.”

But the Buddha’s not saying, “arising and passing away.” He’s saying, “origination and passing away.” “Origination” is an understanding of how things are caused. You don’t understand how things are caused until you’ve manipulated different potential causes and see what affects what. If you see things just passing by, passing by, you have no idea what’s connected to what.

Which is why when you’re focusing on this stage of mindfulness practice, you really are trying to master concentration. You’re trying to understand what originates good states of concentration, what originates unconcentrated states of mind. So you’re trying to understand the process of causality. That, of course, connects with the four noble truths.

In the standard formulation for arising in the Dhamma-eye, you’ve seen that everything that is subject to origination is subject to passing away. Again, it’s not “everything that arises passes away”—it’s “things that are caused,” and we’re talking about causes coming from within the mind. You’ve learned about those causes because you’ve seen cause and effect, and you’ve seen cause and effect because you’ve tried to make something good out of your mind, which is a state of concentration.

Which is why another standard expression for the arising in the Dhamma-eye is seeing, “This is suffering,” “this is the origination of suffering,” “this is the cessation of suffering,” “this is the path of practice leading to the cessation of suffering”—seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, cause and effect.

So there’s a lot more going on here than just watching things arising, passing away, and being inconstant. You’re trying to manipulate causes to get the mind into concentration and then see where, even in that state of concentration, there’s still some craving, there’s still some suffering, there’s still some stress. You search out the cause. You let that go. Then the letting go goes really deep.