Habits & Practices

It’s something we chant every day—the Buddha’s formula for comprehending suffering, the five clinging-aggregates—but it tends to go right past us even if we read the translation: the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrications, consciousness clinging-aggregate.

That’s because we’re not familiar with our clinging on this level. It’s easier to relate to the different clingings that the Buddha says get applied to these five aggregates. In fact, that’s what the whole issue of comprehension is. First, to get familiar with how you experience clinging, and then to realize that what you thought you were clinging to was actually just these very ephemeral aggregates.

Altogether, there are four types of clinging: clinging to sensuality, clinging to views, clinging to habits and practices, and clinging to views or doctrines about the self—what you are.

Of those four, the one we tend to misunderstand the most is the one about clinging to habits and practices. Part of the problem may be that for a long time the phrase has been translated as “clinging to rites and rituals.” We feel that that’s not a problem for us, because most of us nowadays don’t have many rites and rituals, especially religious ones.

But that’s not what the term means. It’s good to think of the Thai word for ritual, phithii, which comes from the same root as the word, vitthi, which means method or procedure. People who believe in a particular way of doing things see it as a method, a procedure that has to be followed for a good reason. People who are disabused of it tend to see it as a ritual, a rite, something with only symbolic value.

That should alert you: What you may see as your correct method or procedure for doing things may strike someone else as ritualistic, in the sense that it’s not connected with their sense of cause and effect. To them, the effect seems to be imaginary.

Actually, the word sīlabbata is translated best, I think, as habits and practices.

Sīla, of course, is the word we use for virtue, but it also means a habit, something you normally do. In fact, the Thai ajaans like to point out that meaning of sīla: normalcy. What is your normalcy? How do you behave on a regular basis?

As for bata, it’s related to vatta, as in the Thai phrase khorwat: procedures for doing things, the protocols for doing things.

Notice, of course, that our practice of the Dhamma and Vinaya revolves around sīla and bata. The Buddha gives us good things to hold on to in terms of our habits, good things to hold on to in terms of our practices, learning how to develop right view, the right attitude toward them.

I’ll give you an example. A couple years back, I was invited to give a Dhamma talk to a group of middle-level management people in a tech company. I gave a guided meditation, gave a short talk, and then I fielded questions.

One of the managers asked about a problem he had in his office: his feeling that the workers were not working up to his standards, yet as he was trying to get them to work to his standards, he would find himself yelling at them all the time. It created a really bad atmosphere in the office.

He asked my advice, expecting me to say, “Well, don’t be so tough on your workers. Give them a little slack. Be more accepting.” That was not the advice I gave him. I said, “After all, the phone I use, the iPad I use, the computer I use, are all made by your company. I want them to be really good, so I do want their work to be up to standard.”

The question is, how do you go about effectively getting your workers to work up to your standard? If you yell at them all the time, that’s not going to be effective. You’ve got to find some other way of doing it, some way of making them want to do good work.

In a case like that, the standards to which he held them were good standards that should be held to. His method for getting them to meet those standards was not. He was clinging to his only known ways of doing things, which was to yell at people. He had to open his mind to the idea that there might be other ways of being more persuasive and creating a better atmosphere in the office. But as for the standards, he should hold to them.

This is the attitude we should take toward our habits and practices as we’re practicing.

The Buddha is recommending, as our habits, that we should follow the precepts, because we learn a lot about ourselves and create a good world around ourselves as we hold to them. As for practices as protocols, there are protocols for the monks. A whole chapter in the Culavagga in the Vinaya is devoted to them.

And it’s interesting that the protocols and the precepts are slightly different in how they’re put into practice.

With the precepts, the Buddha said, you hold to them across the board. He even extols monks who are willing to put their life on the line in order to maintain their precepts.

As for the protocols, there’s some leeway. If you have a good reason for not following a particular protocol—say, around how you clean your hut: As long as you have a good reason, and you’re not breaking the protocol out of disrespect, then it’s okay not to follow it in that instance.

So the Buddha wants you to get a clear sense of which things you really hold to regardless, and which should depend on time and place. The ones you really hold to—and the ones that you’re expected to hold to if there are no other extenuating circumstances—are there because they teach you a lot about your mind. This is especially true for the precepts. You can break a precept only if you do it intentionally. There are a few rules for the monks that can count as broken even if you break them unintentionally, but they deal with areas where you should be very mindful.

Either way, you’re going to learn a lot about your intentions as you hold to the precepts. Any intention that would go against the precepts, you have to question, you have to examine: Why would you want to break that precept? What’s your motivation?

There are whole schools of Buddhism devoted to the idea that you can break a precept any time you feel that, by doing so, you can be compassionate to others or to yourself. But that kind of precept, you don’t learn anything from. All you do is give in to your defilements.

Here we’re not calling the precepts into question. We’re calling the defilements into question—because the Buddha’s precepts and protocols are good precepts, good habits to follow. They’re a necessary part of the path because they make you more sensitive to your actions and more skeptical about your intentions. As you become more sensitive to your actions and intentions, then it gets easier to get the mind into concentration.

After all, to hold to a precept, you have to be, one, mindful to keep it in mind. That’s what mindfulness means. Two, you have to be alert to watch what you’re actually doing. And three, you have to be ardent. You have to put out effort.

These are the three qualities that also go into establishing mindfulness. When mindfulness is well-established, it takes you into concentration.

So these are the precepts that prepare you for concentration practice, getting you sensitive to your intentions. Concentration practice, of course, gets you even more sensitive to your intentions. You try to maintain one intention against whatever else may come to bump into it. It’s precisely there that you’re going to gain your discernment.

So these are precepts with a reason. These are habits and practices with a reason. You’re holding on to them not blindly; you’re not grasping at them. You’re holding on to them as training rules. You commit to them and then reflect on the results. They’re keys to understanding cause and effect, keys to understanding your mind, seeing how it’s causing itself suffering and how it doesn’t have to.

Now, as the path progresses, you need to have a sense that you are responsible for observing the precepts. This is why the Buddha talks about the self as its mainstay, the self as a governing principle, to give you a good reason to stick with the path. And you develop a strong sense of you as being responsible.

When the Buddha was teaching Rāhula at the very beginning of the practice, he said, “When you plan to do something, ask yourself, ‘This action that I plan to do, what are the results going to be?’ While you’re doing something, ‘This action that I’m doing, what are the results?’ When the action is done, you ask yourself, ‘This action that I’ve done: What were the results?’”

Notice the I, I, I. There are people who tell you that you have to practice the path without any sense of “I” or “I am”—and that if you have a sense of “I am,” you’re on the wrong path.

Well, tell that to the Buddha. He wants you to develop a very responsible sense of “I.” Otherwise, who’s going to do the practice? Who’s going to do the path? There are a lot of “I”s in your mind who have a lot of other ideas of what they would prefer to do.

So you have to strengthen the “I” that says, “No, I want to stick with the path.”

As the path comes together, and you reach the first level of awakening, one of the things you let go of, as a result of reaching the deathless, is the fetter of grasping at habits and practices. But this doesn’t mean that you give up on your practices, give up on your precepts.

As the Buddha defines your mind state at this point, you’re still virtuous, but you’re not made of virtue. In other words, your behavior still stays in line with the precepts, but you no longer have to identify yourself around the precepts. You don’t need the pride, you don’t need a strong sense of “I,” in order to maintain them, because you’ve directly seen the value of skillful behavior.

You realize that your unskillful behavior was what prevented you from seeing the deathless before that. So there’s no reason to break the precepts again. As a result, you no longer need the sense of “I” to protect your precepts.

Up until then, though, maintain your sense of “I.” Hold to these precepts and practices because they’re good for you.

And from this perspective, learn to look at other precepts and practices, other habits and practices you’ve picked up over who knows how many lifetimes, and question them. See that, from the Buddha’s point of view, they are rites and rituals: in other words, ways of doing things that don’t get the right results.

For the time being, hold on to the things that do get the right results, that do open up your mind to itself, so that you can see yourself clearly. There will come a point where you let these things go, and to let them go you have to see that your ideas about what should be done, how things should be done, are made up of feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, acts of consciousness. They’re made up of those aggregates. It’s like finally seeing that water is made up of molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. At that point, you see through these things entirely.

But before you reach that point, you’ve got to learn how to hold on to the aggregates well, to get really familiar with them. That’s the solid road to comprehension. You don’t just erase your sense of “I am” right from the start.

If you do, you just flounder around. All of a sudden, it’s just you as a part of nature. Nature is doing the path. Nature is a system that self-corrects and you just get out of the way—all of which is wrong view.

You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to take responsibility, because you have to clean out the many unskillful you’s in your mind. It’s going to require strengthening of the skillful ones. The path doesn’t happen on its own. It has to be willed. So, for that reason, you hold on to these habits and practices that the Buddha recommends. Use them to take yourself across the flood.

Think of that image of the raft. The flood is composed of these unskillful ways of clinging. That’s what carries you off to disaster. But the raft itself is composed of skillful ways of clinging. You’ve got to hold on to it to reach safety. When you get to the other side, then you can let it go.

Meanwhile, hold on tight, because there’s a lot to push you off and sweep you away if you’re not careful.