Virtue Nurtures Concentration
November 18, 2023

Close your eyes. Try to stay with your breath, all the way in, all the way out. Notice where the breathing is most prominent—where you can see it most clearly. Focus your attention there. And then make sure the breath is comfortable. Right there. You can start with long breathing for a while and see how that feels. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Make it shorter, deeper, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. Get a sense of what feels best for the body right now.

If your mind wanders off after some other thoughts, just drop those thoughts and come right back.

You’re training the mind here. The mind has its tendency to just wander around as it likes. But now you’ve got to change that tendency. You want to learn how to see your mind clearly. You need to get some control over your mind. As the Buddha said, this is the difference between a wise person and a fool. A fool doesn’t see that it’s necessary to train the mind. But a wise person sees that it is.

After all, you look around you—there are plenty of people who have wealth, status, fame, but they’re really unhappy. Which shows that happiness doesn’t depend on those things. There are a lot of people who are poor and yet they can be happy. It’s because their minds are trained. They know the right way to think about things. If your mind is untrained, you can get all kinds of good things, but the mind is dissatisfied because it knows that it is out of control. When you bring the mind under control, it’s like training an animal to do jobs. The animal benefits; you benefit. It’s good all around.

So train your mind. As soon as it wanders off, bring it right back.

The training of the mind isn’t something you do only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. This is why there’s more to the teaching than just meditation. But meditation is important. This is where you get to really see your mind and understand it. And only when you understand it can you change its habits—the habits that create unnecessary suffering. So you want to do everything you can to train the mind so that it can be still and can observe itself. And observe itself honestly.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that when you train the mind, it’s not just a matter of sitting here with your eyes closed. You’re also looking after your behavior—your words and your deeds. Make sure that they don’t go against the precepts that he set out: no killing; no stealing; no illicit sex; no lying; no taking any intoxicants. You take these precepts on as promises you make to yourself because you realize that the kind of behavior that they forbid you from doing is actually harmful behavior. It’s in your own interest to abstain from those things. In this case, you’re exercising bringing your thoughts, and words, and deeds under control. That makes you more sensitive to what you’re doing. If you can’t be sensitive to the harm that comes, say, from stealing or from illicit sex, it’s going to be really hard to see the harm that comes when the mind is not concentrated.

So for your concentration to be honest and really perceptive, you want to look at your life as a whole. Take on the five precepts and hold to them. As for any part of the mind that objects, that you have to recognize as a defilement, as something that’s going to cause you suffering down the line. So it’s good to dig it out and understand it. Why does the mind object? What kind of arguments does it put out? What kind of rationalizations does it make? Then you can begin to see through those things so that you’re not a slave to your defilements. You’re not a slave to your greed, your aversion, your delusion. You’ve got some control inside.

And it’s control that’s humane. It’s for your own happiness. It’s not like being a soldier where they train you to kill or do other things that are actually harmful. Here you’re being trained to do things that are nothing but skillful, beneficial for everybody around, because the Buddha is teaching you how to find happiness in a way that harms nobody. That’s a really important skill. You look around you, and you see so many people looking for happiness in ways that are actually harming themselves, harming other people. They keep on doing it again, and again, and again, and then they complain.

Complaining doesn’t make any difference. The difference comes from realizing that your own behavior is what’s making you suffer. But you can train yourself. You’ve got good qualities inside that you can develop so that you don’t have to suffer.

So you train yourself. It’s for your own advantage. It’s for the sake of your own long-term happiness. When you can see that, that’s half the battle right there.