The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner

“Patient endurance is the utmost austerity.” That’s the beginning of one of the Buddha’s famous Dhamma talks. Unfortunately, we don’t have the whole text of the talk, just the topics, so we don’t know exactly what he meant. But we can infer it from other passages in the Canon.

Austerities back in those days were usually seen as means of burning off defilements. *“Tapas,” *the word the Buddha is using here, actually means “heat.” But the kind of endurance the Buddha is recommending here is a special kind of endurance.

There’s the endurance of running shoes, and then there’s the endurance of an endurance runner. Running shoes just take, take, take a beating until they break. That’s not what the Buddha is recommending. Endurance runners know how to talk to themselves, they know how to control their breathing, they know what images to hold in mind, they know what feelings in their bodies to focus on, so that they can keep on running for a long distance. For this, you need to train yourself so that have the strength, and you have the inner resources you’ve developed, the potentials you’ve developed through being really observant. That’s the kind of endurance the Buddha wants you to develop.

To begin with, he wants you know what to endure and what not to endure. He doesn’t want you to endure unskillful mental states in the mind. You don’t just sit there and say, “Oh, this is what greed is like; this is what anger is like,” and just leave it there. You try to do something about it. If you watch it for a while, you watch it for the sake of getting past it, for understanding its weak points.

Think of that five-step program we talk about: seeing how it originates, what sparks it in the mind; seeing it pass away, seeing that it does go away; and then when it comes back again, why do you grab hold of it? What’s the allure? What’s the appeal? Then you can compare the appeal with the drawbacks until you see that the drawbacks really do outweigh the appeal. That’s when you develop dispassion for it, and you stop doing it.

That’s the important thing. You realize that the state that comes into the mind is not just there. It may appear because of past karma, but it stays only if you keep it there. You want to know what you’re doing, and why.

So the kind of endurance you’re developing here is based on discernment. You don’t just put up with these things. You watch them for a while—you have to endure them sometimes for the sake of seeing through them—but you don’t just sit there and accept the situation and take it, take it, take it.

As for the things the Buddha says you should endure, those boil down to two things, generally: painful feelings, and harsh, hurtful words. Here again, you’re not just a running shoe, pounding, pounding, pounding on the pavement. You’re the long-distance runner. You notice how you breathe. You notice how you talk to yourself. You notice the perceptions you hold in mind, and the feelings you focus on so that you don’t have to suffer from these things. They’re there, but they don’t invade the mind. That’s the important thing. We endure them as they happen to us in the body, in our ears, but we don’t allow unskillful thoughts to develop around them in the mind.

Here again, it’s a matter of what the Buddha calls the three kinds of fabrication. The first factor in dependent co-arising, after ignorance, you get fabrication. Fabrication is what shapes your experience of the present moment. The Buddha does point us to the present moment all the time, but he doesn’t just say, “Well, look at it and see that it’s like this.” He says, “Look at it with this vocabulary in mind, or this set of concepts in mind. See how you’re putting it together and where you’re putting it together in an unskillful way.”

With hurtful words, the Buddha gives different ways of talking to ourselves, different perceptions to hold in mind. To begin with, we hold in mind the perception that this is the nature of human speech. There are going to be true words and there are going to be untrue words. Kind words, unkind words; useful, useless; said with goodwill, said with inner hate. It’s a natural part of human speech. If you don’t want there to be unkind words, you’re in the wrong place.

And it’s not the case that you’re the only person being subjected to this kind of speech. We see it all around us now. Now that we have the Internet, now that we have social media, the opportunities for hurtful speech, lies, useless speech, just multiply, multiply, multiply. We turn off the media as best we can, but still there are going to be human beings who say these things.

So the Buddha says that the next thing is to hold in mind is the perception that your goodwill for all beings is like the earth. Solid. Large. The efforts of other people to hurt your feelings or to lie to you are like a little man coming along with a little shovel and a hoe and saying, “I’ll make this earth be without earth.” He digs here, digs there; spits here, spits there; urinates here, urinates there, saying, “Be without earth, be without earth.” He’s so puny he’s comical. That’s the whole point. His efforts are so useless because the earth is so much bigger. You want your perception of your goodwill to be that big.

Or like the river Ganges: The river Ganges is wide, cool, wet. Someone comes along with a torch saying he’s going to set fire to the river Ganges. Here we’re talking about the river Ganges back before it was polluted. There’s no way it’s going to set on fire. Perceive your goodwill as being like that.

Or like space: People can come and try to write words on space, but the words don’t stick. Try to have an unsticky consciousness where the things that people have said just don’t stay there.

You begin to realize that a lot of the pain of other people’s words is in how you participate in making them painful, making them stick, making your mind flammable, making your mind weak and puny, when it doesn’t have to be. It all depends on your perceptions and on how you talk to yourself. When you use these kinds of fabrication in a skillful way, you’re enduring like an endurance runner.

The same with physical pain: The Buddha doesn’t give any explicit instructions on how to deal with physical pain, but he does give you a general outline in the instructions on breath meditation, in the second tetrad, dealing with feelings: You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture; to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure; to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—perceptions and feelings; and to breathe in and out calming perceptions and feelings.

Learn how to apply that framework to physical pains. For example, when there’s pain in the body, the first thing you want to do is to learn how to breathe comfortably. If the way you breathe adds to the pain, you’re adding to the suffering. You’re like a long-distance runner who doesn’t know how to breathe.

So breathe into parts of the body that are comfortable. Make them as comfortable as possible. And start using some perceptions. Think of that comfortable breath energy going from the comfortable parts of the body through the pain and then out the other side. Say the pain is in your knee: The comfortable breath energy runs down the leg, through the knee, and out through the foot, so that there’s no perception of a wall there in your knee.

Then you can further investigate your perceptions. Is the pain a solid block, or can you see it as individual moments? Try to hold the perception of individual moments in mind. When it’s individual moments, are those moments coming at you or are they going away? Think of yourself as being on a train, sitting with your back to the engine. As you look out across the countryside, anything that comes into your range of vision is already going away from you. When you see the pain like that, then you’re not the target.

Or you could ask yourself, “Where is the sharpest point of the pain?” Instead of cringing away from it, chase it down. You’ll find that as you try to pinpoint it, it moves. That teaches you several things. One is that your perception of the pain is very, very fluid. A lot of it depends on whether you’re cringing away from it or actually confronting it. Secondly, when you confront it like this, chase it down like this, you’re not just an easy target. It can’t shoot you.

Or if the pain is in the knee, is the pain the same thing as the knee, or is it something else? The knee as you feel it is just physical elements: earth, water, wind, fire. The pain is not earth, it’s not water, it’s not wind, and it’s not fire—even though we sometimes think that it’s hot. The bad thing is when we glom it on to the earth element and make it solid. Try to see the pain as one thing, on a different frequency from the physical elements. They’re there, but they’re a little bit separate. Look in this way until you can see that they separate out.

It’s in these ways that you can make good use of these fabrications of how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind, the perceptions you hold in mind, the feelings that you focus on, how you focus on them. Learn that there are pleasant feelings in parts of the body. If the whole body were nothing but pain, you’d be dead. There has to be some part of the body that’s comfortable. Take that as your position of strength and then use that feeling to help deal with the painful feelings.

When you use these fabrications in this way, you’re learning the right kind of endurance, the endurance of a long-distance runner. You stick with what you’ve got to do, not just taking, taking, taking it. After all, you’re the one who’s putting out the energy to run, and you want to be able to stick with it all the way to the end of the race. So learn how to pace yourself and learn how to deal with the pains and the tiredness, whatever comes up, with the right attitude: that it’s not going to kill you.

I’ve told you the story about the first time we were going to sit and meditate all night at Wat Dhammasathit and Ajaan Fuang was going to have me sit alone. He was going to go sit with a group of laypeople. I’d never sat alone all night long. I didn’t think I could do it. So I told him so.

He said, “Is it going to kill you?”

“Well, no.”

“Then you can do it.”

Totally different attitude, totally different perspective from what I’d grown up with. But that’s a lot of what the Buddha is teaching us: how to look at your immediate experience—your immediate experience of what the present moment is like—in new terms, with new eyes. You look at the present moment, not to say, “It’s like this.” He says, “Look at it like this. Look at it in this way, in this way. Breathe in this way. Talk to yourself in this way, apply these perceptions, focus on fostering these feelings, and your experience of the present moment will change.” You begin to realize how much you really are fabricating this. It’s not total fabrication, because you’re dealing with raw materials that come from past karma. But you can develop new skills in how you shape that past karma into the present moment, so that you can not only endure, you can also thrive. Whatever you set your heart on, you can attain. You can make it all the way to the finish line.