Resolute Good Humor

When you read the biographies and autobiographies of the ajaans, or if you actually have some experience living with more than one ajaan, you notice that their personalities are very different. Some are gentle; some seem to be harsh. Some seem to have a more relaxed, good-humored attitude toward the practice; others are more serious.

In my own experience living with the Ajaan Fuang and Ajaan Suwat, who were very different in terms of their personalities, I found that they had a couple of characteristics in common. One is what the Thais called det khaat. The image comes from picking something off of a plant. You cut it—det—so that it totally disconnects—khaad. The best translation for the quality of people who are det khaad is “resolute.” They make up their mind they’re going to do something, and they cut off all doubts, cut off all excuses that say, “That’s too hard, that’s too much.” When they see that something is right — and both the Ajaan Fuang and Ajaan Suwat had a very strong sense of right and wrong — when they saw something was right, something needed to be done, they would do it.

In line with that old teaching from the Third Patriarch of Chan that “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” This doesn’t mean you don’t prefer right to wrong, or that you don’t prefer the end of suffering to suffering. You do prefer these things. But when you see that something has to be done and it may be difficult, you don’t let your preferences get in the way of doing it.

At the same time, they both had another quality in common, which is that they both had good senses of humor. You can see this in all the ajaans—even the ajaans that are supposed to be really strict, like Ajaan Maha Bua. I’ve been told that he had a very sharp and quick sense of humor. Ajaan Fuang’s sense of humor was more sly. Ajaan Suwat’s sense of humor was more gentle. But they both had a sense of irony. They could see foolishness, starting out by seeing their own foolishness, learning to laugh at it, and they try to get you to laugh at your own foolishness. That way, you can be resolute without snapping—because it takes a certain amount of determination to overcome pain, boredom, and tedium and not get worn down by them.

So the two go together. If you’re resolute, you actually have to see through the excuses made by your weakness. And the best ammunition to use against them is to laugh at them. See where they’re foolish.

When they say that they’re helping you, they’re like Mara coming to see the Buddha while he was undergoing austerities, saying, “You poor thing, why don’t you let up a little bit?” The Buddha recognized that as the voice of Mara. He wasn’t going to be fooled. In fact, it’s your determination not to be fooled by these things that allows you to see through them.

So the sense of humor and the resoluteness are not two disconnected qualities. They’re closely connected. And they help to avoid two extremes that you sometimes see here in the West, two extreme approaches to the path. One is that you push, push, push until you snap, like some of those vipassana methods that put you in a pressure cooker and basically want you to explode. But what happens when you’re put under a lot of pressure like that is not that you reach for awakening.

It’s like a musical piece that was composed by a member of my class back in college. He went on to become a famous composer, but in his student days, there was one piece that he composed where it was just unrelenting noise, unrelenting ugliness. He said that was its purpose. But I found, listening to it, that I just tuned out. In the same way, the mind, when it’s put under a lot of pressure, just tunes out. It goes into a state of non-perception. That’s not awakening. That’s just blanking out.

You need to know how to pace your mind, because we’re not here to explode. We’re not here to blank out. We’re here to wake up, to see ourselves doing things we didn’t realize we were doing, and to see that we can stop. That requires a certain amount of stability, which is why the Buddha taught right concentration: pleasure, rapture; more pleasure, more rapture; pleasure without rapture, but still very pleasant; and equanimity, which was also a form of pleasure. That’s food along the path.

Now, the other extreme is the idea being that we’re coming to a goal that’s totally relaxed, totally without tension, totally without any kind of stress, therefore we shouldn’t have any stress on the path. It should be a gentle path. A path of lucid calm. Just don’t push yourself too much.

But the practice is like an arrow and a bow. If there’s no tension in the bowstring, the arrow’s not going to go anywhere. And this attitude also confuses the goal with the path. It’s not the case that a cause has to be like its effect. After all, fire is bright; smoke is dark. The path is one thing, but the goal at the end of the path is something else. The factors of the path include right resolve and right effort. You generate desire, uphold your intent, exert yourself. That provides the tension that’s needed in order for the arrow to fly. Now, at the very end of the path, that’s when you get to the moment where there’s no effort to go, no effort to stay. At that point, you drop all effort, you drop all views, you basically drop the whole path. But you don’t get there by dropping the path.

Some people say, “Well, as long as we’re going to drop the path at the end, why don’t we drop it now?” That’s like saying, “We’re going to take the food off of the flame after we’ve cooked it, so why don’t we just not cook it at all?” The mind needs to be cooked. Then, when it’s cooked, you can take it off the flame. The mind needs to be developed, brought to the point where it makes sense to abandon all efforts. At that point, your sense of right and wrong, existence and nonexistence, get put aside, because there’s no action to be right or wrong. But in the meantime, you need a strong sense of right, a strong sense of wrong. What is the right path? What is the wrong path? Make every effort you can to follow the right path and avoid the wrong one.

As the Buddha said, you have to be heedful, ardent, and resolute. But you have to do it — he doesn’t say this much — but you have to do it with a sense of humor. He himself had a sense of humor. Look at the Vinaya, the origin stories for the rules. They show the incidents that caused the Buddha to formulate a rule. Many times the stories are very humorous, the point being to see how foolish that behavior was that the Buddha was trying to rule against.

Take the story of the monk who has psychic powers and gets carried away with his powers, teaching the nuns from the afternoon well into the night. Then the nuns need to go back to their nunnery in the city, but they can’t go back because the gate is closed. They spend the night outside the city gates at a rest house. Then the next morning, as the gates are open, they come filing into the city, and people say, “Oh, here come the nuns back from spending the night with the monks.” So, even though the monk had psychic powers, he didn’t have the wisdom he needed to know how to use those powers well.

So there’s a lot of humor in the Canon. It’s in the service of being resolute in the practice. There will be some tension in the practice, but you know how to release it with a sense of humor. That’s what humor is, it’s seeing something incongruous and there’s a release of tension. And there’s a stepping back. You learn how to disidentify with your defilements by seeing how foolish they are. That’s the best way to disidentify with them. Which is why when people gain awakening, they’re not proud. Awakening taught them how foolish they were.

Awakening is not something you attain simply through the force of effort or through thinking that you’re clever enough to figure out that since the goal is one without stress, you’re going to follow a path without stress. You have to find the middle way: resolute but with good humor.

This is the tradition of our teachers, and it’s good that we maintain this tradition. It’s so easy coming back to the West to think about Western ideas toward practice, which tend to fall into those two extremes. And not only in the West: That also happens in the East. But it’s easy for Westerners to pick up one of those two extremes.

Try to find the middle way: resolute good humor. There’s no forest tradition technique, aside from, say, Ajaan Lee’s breath meditation technique, which not everybody in the forest tradition followed. But there’s this commonality, starting with Ajaan Mun, a very resolute person, teaching his students to be resolute, but also having a good sense of humor about it. That’s how the path becomes just right.