Observant & Ingenious

When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang at Wat Dhammasathit, there was a year-and-a-half period when we built a chedi. And when I say “we,” I mean “we”—it was done almost all by volunteer labor, Ajaan Fuang’s students, both monks and laypeople. Some construction monks came to the monastery to help. On weekends, people would come out from Bangkok. Ajaan Fuang’s students would gather together, drive out Friday night, work through the weekend, drive back early Monday morning, go back to work. This kept up, on and on, for a year and a half.

We learned a lot of lessons while we did it. I was somewhat on the periphery of the construction. Ajaan Fuang wanted me to focus more on my meditation, so I looked after the people who were coming, sunning their pillows and blankets, making sure the bathrooms had water. I would pitch in with the construction, though, whenever I was needed.

We learned a lot of lessons. One was in the blasting for the foundation of the chedi. Ajaan Fuang had chosen a spot on a slight rise in the hill above the monastery, but it needed to be flattened out. So two guys came to do the blasting. All they had was a hammer and a spike. They’d sit there*, tap, tap, tap* on the spike, and then rotate the spike a little bit, tap, tap, tap some more. I remember, on first seeing that, I thought, “How many years is this going to take?” But by the end of the first day, they had tapped down to about a foot and a half into the rock. After two days, they had holes deep enough to do the blasting.

When the blasting was done, one piece of rock came out an almost perfect rectangle. So Ajaan Fuang decided that inside the chedi, which was going to be an open chedi, there would be a sculpture of a Naga, supporting this rock, and on the rock would be a chiseled footprint of the Buddha. On one side of the rock, we inscribed the year in which it was done, 1982. The other side said iddhipād si—the four iddhipādas, or bases for success—because that, Ajaan Fuang said, was how the chedi got completed.

There had been times when it looked like the project would fall through. The chief carpenter among the construction monks just left, halfway through, upset that he couldn’t design the chedi the way he wanted to. He had to listen to the architects. But people pitched in, and the project was done.

The word iddhipād is partly a pun in Thai. The word pāda, which means “base,” can also mean “foot” or “footprint.” But I think there was a special meaning for the word, because Ajaan Fuang focused especially on the last two iddhipādas as favorite themes for his meditation instructions.

The four iddhipādas are concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intent, and concentration based on analysis. The intent there is, the intentness with which you observe things. As Ajaan Fuang liked to say, “Be observant. Use your powers of observation.”

When he taught meditation, he would hand out the seven steps in the breath meditation in Ajaan Lee’s “Method 2.” Then, as he said, when people would come to meditate with him, he’d find that people had all kinds of problems, sometimes problems he had never encountered before in his meditation. But if he could apply the seven steps, he’d always figure out, “Oh, one of the steps that was missing. That was causing the problem.” Sometimes people weren’t breathing in a way that was comfortable. Other times they were not staying with the full length of the breath. Sometimes they were not allowing the breath energies in their body to mingle well. There was always something in those seven steps.

Although I remember noticing the way he applied the seven steps seemed very ingenious—which gets to the fourth iddhipāda. The powers of analysis are not just a matter of analyzing things. You observe what you’re doing, and if something is going wrong, you’re trying to figure out why. Then you have to figure out what you could do instead, how you could solve the problem—and that requires ingenuity. It’s not just analyzing a problem. It’s also solving it. And that requires some independent intelligence.

As I said, Ajaan Fuang seemed to have so many variations on Ajaan Lee that I asked him one time why he didn’t write his own guide to meditation. He said, “Why should I? Everything is there in Ajaan Lee’s instructions.” And as he also said, “If you hand everything to people on a platter, they never develop their own ingenuity.”

Of course, this is approaching meditation as a skill. You’re not just here to confirm what the Buddha said, “Yes, everything is inconstant, stressful, not-self.” You’re here to develop your mind, to get your mind to settle down. When you get your mind to settle down, you get to see these things for yourself, instead of just following by rote.

It’s easy enough to look at your mind as it doesn’t settle down, and say, “Yes, it’s inconstant, so I’ve learned that lesson, and it’s stressful, so I might as well just give up on trying to get it to settle down.” That’s not the right attitude. After all, the right attitude with regard to concentration is that you develop it. That’s your duty, in line with the fact that right concentration is part of the fourth noble truth.

The next question is to figure out how to fulfill the duty. You have to have a goal. Those people who say you shouldn’t have a goal in the future: I’ve never understood their approach, I’ve never understood their reasoning. Their reasoning is this: The Buddha said, “The Dhamma is visible here and now, so awakening must be visible here and now.”

Well, the Dhamma is not just awakening—the Dhamma is the principle of cause and effect. You can see that operating right now. But as for when you’re going to get the causes right so that you can go beyond causality, that can take time. After all, some people will have a fast practice; other people will have a slow practice.

The Buddha’s own image for the practice is the continental shelf off of India. There’s a gradual slope and then, after a while, a sudden drop. The gradual slope is as you develop your skills. The sudden drop is when things click and something really radically different occurs.

So yes, we are here trying to achieve a goal in the future. We have to figure out why we’re not at the goal yet. That’s a lot of the work in the meditation—observing what you’re doing, the results you’re getting, seeing the connection, and then trying something else, seeing the connection, then trying something else, seeing what the results are, seeing the connection there, until you get things right.

When the Buddha gave his shortest description of his awakening, it wasn’t that consciousness was the ultimate reality or that your everyday mind was the enlightened mind. It was a principle of causality—and it’s a complex one. Two simple principles, but they work together to become complex: “When this is, that is. When this is not, that is not.” Then, “From the arising of this comes the arising of that. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.”

The first of those two principles is immediate causation—when the cause appears, the effect immediately appears; when the cause goes away, the effect immediately goes away. The second one is causality over time. In any given moment, those two principles are intersecting. So what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of things coming in from the past plus independent decisions you’re making right now.

Well, they can be independent. All too often, we just follow through with old habits, but it is possible to have an independent observation and an independent idea of what to choose to do in any given moment—and you want to take advantage of that possibility. That’s the way in which the mind is luminous: You can see yourself in action, you can see the results of your actions, and you can see the connection. If you couldn’t see these things, there’d be no way to develop the skills of awakening.

That’s what we’re working on—a skill.

As Ajaan Lee points out, the teacher can give you the basic principles, tell you what to do. But how well you’re going to do it is going to depend on your own powers of observation and your own ingenuity. You weave a basket, you follow the teacher’s instructions, but your basket doesn’t look like the teacher’s. You have to figure out why. What did you do that was wrong? Then you try another one. Keep at it until you finally get one that is ideal.

Then if you want to get really good, you go beyond the teacher’s ideal—you try to figure of new ways of doing things, to get baskets that are not like any baskets that have been done before. This is an attitude you find throughout the forest tradition. There’s a lot of experimentation.

We talk about practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. It doesn’t mean just doing what you’re told. It means practicing for a certain purpose—the purpose of dispassion. You’re given the basic instructions, but as the Buddha said, it’s up to you to follow the instructions, to figure out what they mean, where they apply, and how to adjust them to fit your own circumstances—while, at the same time, you’re adjusting yourself to fit in with the teachings and arrive at dispassion. So it’s a process of trial and error.

One of the basic principles of the forest tradition is that if you come up with something new and independent, but it gets the results as the Buddha described them, then it’s Dhamma. For instance, in the breath meditation, Ajaan Lee does a lot of work with the breath energies, and Ajaan Fuang seemed to explore those breath energies even further.

People have complained that Ajaan Lee got the idea of breath energies from something that was non-Buddhist—by observing yogis in India. But Ajaan Lee was able to use the breath energies to solve a Buddhist problem that you find in the Canon, which is that you’re supposed to develop a sense of refreshment and pleasure in the breath and then allow that pleasure and refreshment to spread throughout the body. But, how does it spread throughout the body?

One way is by developing full-body awareness. If you’re focused on the breath just in one spot, say at the nose, it’s hard to have a breath at the nose that’s really refreshing. The breath there feels all pretty much the same no matter how you breathe. But when you think of the movement of the energy throughout the body—the muscles moving, the bones moving—you realize that some movements in the body feel good from within, others don’t feel so good. So you work with the ones that feel good. That’s the breath energy. And when you get the breath energy to flow throughout the body, then when there’s a sense of ease and pleasure in the breath, that goes throughout the body as well.

So there are cases where the Buddha’s instructions are like riddles. In some cases, Ajaan Lee’s instructions were like riddles. Ajaan Fuang’s were like riddles, too. You have to figure out what they meant, how they applied, and how you might solve them. That way, you develop your own discernment—because that’s what discernment is. It’s not just seeing things that you’re supposed to see. It’s also being more active in employing your ingenuity.

There was a monk in the Canon who explained a point of Dhamma to one of his relatives. He then went to see the Buddha and asked if he had explained it rightly. The Buddha said he had, but then the Buddha gave him some analogies that he could have used to make the point clearer—such as the analogies about the trying to get milk out of a cow by twisting the horn as opposed to pulling on the udder. The monk said, “How could I have thought of those similes when I’ve never heard them before? I don’t have your ingenuity.”

Well, ingenuity is a quality you can develop. If you’re doing x and you’re not getting good results, well, there should be opposites. What would be the opposite of *x? *Try that. If the opposite of *x *doesn’t work, then maybe the problem is someplace else. Well, look around. What else are you doing? What else are you not doing?

Fortunately, we have those seven steps in the “Method 2,” so we can go back and check things. Ask yourself, “How am I not applying these steps well?” or “How have I misunderstood this?” As you think in these ways, ask questions in these ways, experiment in these ways, that’s how you develop your ingenuity.

So. Be observant. Be ingenious. This is a tradition of experimentation—sons of peasants, out in the woods, working with some very basic concepts, and otherwise, exploring those concepts, pushing the limits, seeing how far they go.

Remember your major duties—to comprehend suffering, abandon the cause, realize its cessation by developing the path—and then follow those duties by being observant, by being ingenious. That’s how awakening becomes your own, because you’ve developed the powers of your own mind.