Purity of Heart

Close your eyes; focus on the breath. Watch it coming in. Watch it going out. You might try some good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths to begin with. Then notice if long breathing feels good. If it does, keep it up. If it feels tiresome, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow. Faster, slower. Heavier, lighter. You’re allowed to play with the breath. In fact, it’s an important part of the practice that you do play with it, because that’s how you learn cause and effect.

It’s like learning a musical instrument. You’re going to learn all about the theory, but unless you try different things on the instrument, you don’t know what gives a good sound, what doesn’t give a good sound. When you figure out what gives a good sound, then you can make use of that knowledge.

It’s the same with the breath. You work with the breath in different ways. You talk to yourself about the breath in different ways. You find what works, what doesn’t work. Then you can use what works as a tool in getting to know your own mind.

This way of dealing with the breath was rediscovered by Ajaan Lee, who passed it on to Ajaan Fuang. It almost didn’t make it to us. There was one time when Ajaan Fuang was commenting that he didn’t see anybody else in Thailand who was teaching the Ajaan Lee method anymore, not even in Ajaan Lee’s monastery. When he said that, chills went up and down my spine, because we almost missed it.

It’s because of him that we’re able to maintain this practice, learn about how the mind fabricates its experience by the way we focus on the breath and learn about the breath. So it’s good, every time this time of year rolls around, the time he passed away, that we think about Ajaan Fuang and all that we owe to him. Without him, we wouldn’t have Wat Metta. We wouldn’t have this place to practice.

So. Dedicate your practice today to him. What does it mean to dedicate your practice? You make up your mind that you’re going to do this for the right motive. As he said, the purpose of the practice—whatever you’re doing, whether it’s generosity, virtue, meditation—is to purify the heart. The heart has lots of greed, aversion, and delusion—more than we’d like to admit. But this is the way of taking the heart and cleansing it, purifying it.

If you have stinginess, you cleanse it by being generous. If you’re careless, if don’t care about other people, you start taking the precepts and you learn to care. You learn to care about the consequences of your actions. The opposite of the precepts, on the one hand, is acting in a harmful way. The other opposite is just not really caring about the consequences of what you do. You just do what you want without thinking about other people, without thinking about what it’s going to do to you as well.

But when you practice the precepts, that makes you stop and think: “My actions: What kind of consequences are they going to have in the long term?” Then you try to avoid any kind of harm. That way, you become responsible; you become more of an adult, ready to meditate.

If we just stop with generosity, just stop with virtue, the rewards are good, but they don’t last very long. Then we’re often back where we were before. And sometimes the rewards of generosity and virtue can get misused if you don’t have meditation to train your mind to have a good sense of what’s skillful and what’s not—what’s proper and what’s not.

So the meditation is what makes things complete. It’s what really purifies the mind. It’s through meditation that you learn to develop your discernment and your discernment is what will allow you to see through the greed, aversion, and especially the delusion that swamps the mind. You see that greed doesn’t really get you anything good that would be long lasting. And aversion doesn’t gain anything good that would be long lasting.

You have to learn how to recognize delusion for what it is. You do that by acting on what you think are the best possible motives, and then noticing—while you’re acting in those ways—what are the actual consequences. If it turns out they’re not good, okay, you’ve learned. You’re chipping away at your ignorance.

All of this is to purify the mind. Keep that in mind as you practice, that you want your practice to be complete—and that it really does have a long-term consequence that is really good and that doesn’t change on you.

That’s what Ajaan Fuang said he owed to Ajaan Lee, who showed him the brightness of life.

Ajaan Fuang was born in a poor family. He was orphaned at an early age and, looking from the outside, you wouldn’t say there was much of a future for him. But he met a monk who was able to teach the Dhamma in a way that captured his attention, captured his inspiration, and he was able to lift himself out of his narrow environment and become a teacher to other people in Thailand and a teacher to other people in the world, so that practice is there. It’s available for all of us to do, for all of us to practice.

So. Take advantage of the opportunity while you have it. As he was always saying, once you’re born, you’re entering the line to die. You don’t know where your position is in the line. The end could come soon, it could come late, so you’d better practice right now.