Don’t Sell the Buddha Short

Sometimes we’re told not to have a goal as we practice. And in one sense, that’s right. To practice, you don’t keep staring at the goal, hoping to get there. You focus instead on following the path, trusting that the path will take you there. But then the question is, why are you following this path? To answer that, you need to have at least some sense of what the goal is, and that it’s a worthwhile goal.

As the Buddha describes it, it’s hard to get your head around it, but fortunately, you don’t need to get your head around it to get there. But still, he states in very strong terms that it’s a very positive goal: The ultimate. The total end of suffering. Freedom. Purity. Permanent.

He himself was very goal-oriented. Look at his life. He sacrificed everything for the sake of finding the end of his suffering, for finding the deathless. Then he set himself the goal of establishing the Dhamma and Vinaya so that it would last. When he taught, before explaining the path, he told where it led: to knowledge, to stilling, to unbinding. When he set forth the four noble truths, he put the goal before the path. The third noble truth: total dispassion without any trace for any craving. Release. The end of nostalgia. Having set forth the goal, then he said, “This is how you get there.”

So it’s sad that, when you hear people talk about the goal, they seem to be selling the Buddha short. All too many people will say, “It’s not all that strange. It’s all very ordinary.” But considering all the effort that the Buddha put into finding the goal, it would be very disappointing to learn all he came up with was something very ordinary.

As he said, you gain verified confidence in the Buddha when you have your first taste of the goal. Now, some people take that as meaning that you simply decide that you agree with the Buddha about his teachings on impermanence, suffering, not-self. But is that really “verified confidence”? What would count for him as “verified”?

Agreement through pondering views, he said, doesn’t count as verified. Just deciding that you like what he has to say, that’s not verified. For your confidence to be verified, it would have to be based on something outside of dependent co-arising, because the factors of dependent co-arising are pretty unreliable. It’s not a matter of agreeing to a particular perception of reality, because perceptions, as he said, are like mirages. You can’t trust them. They show only a partial image of what they represent. You need something more.

Some people say that the first taste of the deathless is blanking out. But the Buddha himself said that blanking out is something that the non-percipient beings do. And they’re not anywhere near a noble attainment.

Some people say that it’s your ordinary consciousness of the present moment: That’s the ultimate reality. But again, the Buddha said that that consciousness, too, is fabricated, even when it seems pure. When something is unfabricated, unconditioned — and by “unconditioned” we don’t mean simply that it’s not subject to your social conditioning — it has no conditions of any kind. So it’s an astounding achievement when you gain your first glimpse of the Dhamma.

In the case of the Buddha, when he had first taught the five brethren, the earth shook. It was an earth-shaking realization that the Buddha could find the deathless, and it was amazing. When he was able to teach other people how to find the deathless, they found it amazing as well.

So don’t sell the Buddha short. The goal he teaches is a radically different kind of thing from your ordinary awareness or simply blanking out. As he said, it’s a type of consciousness that’s not known through the six senses. Now, our six senses tell us about the present moment. They’re the world as we know it. But there’s something beyond that. So be confident that this is really a worthwhile goal and it’s worth all the effort that goes into finding it.

All the ajaans who have talked to their students about their attainments say that it’s totally, radically different. When you’ve had an experience of it, you come back to the six senses and you realize that even the pleasures of the six senses are very stressful in comparison.

So don’t be misled by people who try to cheapen the goal, who make it something you can get your head around, something you can do on a weekend retreat. The genuine goal is worth giving your life to. And fortunately, there is a way there.

As I said, the Buddha talked about the goal first, but then he said, “Focus on the path.” As he set out the duties for the four noble truths, the duty with the goal is to realize it. How is that done? By developing the path—what we’re doing right now: working with the breath, talking to ourselves about the breath, holding perceptions in mind about the breath, creating feelings around the breath. These are all forms of fabrication. These are the ways in which we fabricate the present moment. If we’re going to take apart the present moment, we have to know these fabrications well.

So when you’re convinced that the path is aimed at a goal that’s really worth pursuing, then you can focus your full attention right here.

Some people ask, “Why is it that, when we’re trying to understand the mind, we’re focusing on the breath? Why are we focusing on the body?” It’s because the mind needs something to focus on if you’re going to get it gathered enough and still enough so that you can see it. Otherwise, it’s scattered all around. But you can gather it in one place — at the breath, at the body — and you have the mind in a state that’s called, ekagga, having one gathering spot.

Then all your fabrications around the present moment are right here. You’ve got the breath coming in and going out: That’s bodily fabrication. You’re talking to yourself about the breath, how the breath is or isn’t comfortable, what can be done to make it more comfortable, what can be done with the comfortable breath, spreading it around the body: That’s verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation.

Then, finally, mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things that tell you what they are, what they mean. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain.

These fabrications are all right here. You’re dealing with them all the time. They’re the means by which we put together the present moment, whether we’re meditating or not. We get raw material coming in from the past and we use these three kinds of fabrications to make something edible out of it, something we can cling to.

Well, now we’re going to cling in a more skillful way, creating states of concentration, because when you’re in concentration, you can see these processes clearly. You consciously have to do them in order to get into concentration, and when the mind is still, you see them a lot more clearly. Then it’s simply a matter of getting deeper and deeper into concentration.

The Buddha talks about how you can go from one level of concentration to the next by noticing where there’s disturbance in the concentration you’ve got: in the state of ease, the state of well-being. When you first get into a good, solid concentration, there seems to be no disturbance there at all. But as you get to know it well, your sensitivities get sharpened. You see more clearly, “Oh, there’s still some disturbance here in the concentration itself. There’s still a little excess fabrication going on.” Can you drop it? When you can, that takes you deeper and deeper into concentration.

The first thing that gets dropped is verbal fabrication, as your inner chatter grows still and you have just the perceptions, the feelings, that keep you with the breath. You get deeper into that, and the in-and-out breath gets still as you enter into the fourth jhāna. Your breath energy is filling the body, but it’s all very, very still. Ultimately, though, the last things to go are perceptions and feelings. You peel them away, layer by layer.

Now, you do that by focusing right here, being very much in the present moment, hovering around the present moment. It’s interesting that the present moment is not a spot. It’s a creation. It’s a construction site. And as in any construction site, there’s activity going on all around. But when you’re in concentration, the activity is focused. When you can see that certain activities are no longer needed in order to stay focused, you can drop them. Then you get more sensitive to other ones that are not needed and you drop them, too.

So it’s step by step by step. How many steps is it going to take? You can’t tell beforehand, but you know you’re headed in the right direction.

You finally get to the point where you can’t stay where you are. You know there’s stress where you are, and any other state of concentration is going to be stressful, too. At that point, the mind inclines to something that’s not here, not there, not fabricated at all, because its sensitivities have been sharpened. That’s when things open up. You see that there’s something outside of the present moment. It’s outside of space and time entirely. You realize space and time are a construction of the six senses, and what you see is beyond them.

That’s what verifies your confidence in the Buddha. You see that what he said about the deathless is true. This really is deathless, because being outside of time, there’s no way it can change or be changed by anything. And it was by following the Dhamma that you got there. You realize all the members of the noble Sangha who got there did so by following the same path. So that confirms your confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. You’re confirmed by something that’s outside of dependent co-arising, outside of causality entirely. Now, the earth around you may not shake when you have this experience, but it shakes things up inside.

So have a strong sense that where we’re going is really worth it. And whatever effort is spent, whatever difficulties there are, they’re more than repaid, even with just the first glimpse of the goal. And as for the people want to sell the Buddha short, you don’t have to listen to them. Who knows what their motivations are? Your motivation should be to see whether it’s really true that there is a dimension where there’s no suffering at all. And you don’t have to talk to yourself to justify settling for less, saying, “Well, it’s only that. It’s only this.” Why? The possibility for something more, something really amazing, is there.

So don’t sell the Buddha short. Don’t sell yourself short. There is a dimension where there is no suffering, and it can be attained through the path. So focus your attention on the path. That’s what’ll take you there.