Six Animals
January 26, 2024

When you stay with the breath, you’re giving the mind an anchor. Or in the image of the Canon, you’re giving it a post.

Ordinarily, our senses are like wild animals, running here, running there. As the Buddha said, if you took six wild animals and tied them with leashes and then you tied the leashes to one another, but you didn’t tie it to a post, then the animals would pull and pull and pull. Whichever of the animals was strongest would pull all the others where it wanted to go.

In the example he gives, there’s an alligator, a monkey, a snake, a bird, a dog, and a hyena. And of those, the alligator would probably be the strongest and would pull all the others down into the river, where they’d all drown.

What you need is a post. You tie the leashes to the post, and then pull and pull and pull as they might like, the animals are not going to go anywhere. They end up lying down right next to the post.

In the same way, you’re trying to exercise restraint over your senses. And it is important that you exercise restraint, because so many of the problems that come into the mind come from the way we deal with our senses.

It’s not necessarily only the fact that the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations are the problem, but what we do with them—whether we delight in them or whether we hate them: That can create all kinds of problems in the mind.

Then when you sit down to meditate, you’ve got to clean it all out. Sometimes there’s not enough time to clean it all out because you’ve allowed so many things in. And you’ve also made the mind more and more inclined to go in that direction, in the direction of the senses. Here we’re trying to pull back from the senses.

So it’s good to go through the day with your mind on a leash, so that it doesn’t pull you in wrong directions. You stay right here with the breath, coming in, going out. That’s the post to which you tie the leash.

Think of the Buddha’s image of the man with a bowl of oil on his head. He’s walking between, on the one hand, a beauty queen who’s singing and dancing, and the other hand, a crowd who’s really excited about the beauty queen. The bowl on his head is filled with oil to the brim, and behind him is a man with a raised sword. He has to walk between the beauty queen and the audience. And if he spills as much as a drop of oil, the man behind him is going to cut off his head. That’s another image you can keep in mind.

Of course, the beauty queen stands for interesting things outside, and the audience stands for your reactions inside. You have to learn how to not get distracted by either side. In this way, you keep the mind safe, keep the mind cleaned out. You don’t let it develop bad habits.

Then as you go through the day like this, and the time comes to sit down to meditate, everything is right here. Your awareness is right here. Your mindfulness is right here. All the good things you need for the meditation are right here. And there’s a minimum amount of cleaning up that you have to do.

So when you look at something, ask yourself: Why am I looking? When you listen: Why am I listening? If you’re looking for the sake of greed, aversion, and delusion or—in Ajaan Lee’s terms—if the greed, aversion, and delusion are actually doing the looking, you’re strengthening the enemies of your concentration in your own mind.

So have a sense of restraint. It’s not that you don’t look at all, but just ask yourself who’s doing the looking. If you look wisely, you can see Dhamma in everything because it’s all there, being displayed all the time. When the mind connects up with the Dhamma out there and the Dhamma in here, it gets a lot stronger. It’s goodness becomes what the Buddha calls an indriya, a faculty, which means something in charge of the mind.