Visakha Puja

Close your eyes, and focus your attention on the breath. Stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out. And then again—all the way in, all the way out. Don’t leave. If your attention wanders off, just bring it right back. Look at your breath very carefully.

Today is the full moon in the month of Visakha in the Pali lunar calendar. We commemorate it as the day on which the Buddha was born. And then 35 years later on this day, he gained awakening. And 45 years after that, he passed away in on this date as well.

Of those three events, the awakening is the important one, because he showed that human beings can, through their own efforts, find true happiness. Where was he looking? He was looking at his breath and then at his mind as it gathered around the breath.

So you can ask yourself, what’s the difference between his breath and yours? Nothing, really. The real difference is the qualities of mind that he brought to this. And he said they’re qualities that weren’t specific to him. Anybody can develop them: heedfulness, ardency, resolution.

Heedfulness means that you take really careful attention to your actions, because you realize that if you act in unskillful ways, there’s going to be suffering. So you’re constantly on guard to watch for what intentions are motivating your actions.

Ardency means trying to do this well. If you know that something is skillful, you try to develop the skill all the way. As the Buddha said, he never let himself rest content with half measures in skillfulness. How far can you be skillful? His quest was the quest for what is skillful. Then he found it, the actions that lead to a total release: freedom of the mind from all greed, aversion, and delusion, from all constraints, from all limitations.

Resolution is really sticking with this. You think of the many times he went down false alleys, hit dead ends in his practice, but he never gave up. He said there must be something that’s deathless. And a life that’s lived without looking for that is a life that’s been thrown away.

Those are the attitudes that led to his awakening. And those are attitudes that we can develop, as well. Which is why he taught. After his awakening, he spent seven weeks enjoying the bliss of release and then finally decided that it was time to teach people, because he saw that there would be people who could take his teachings and put them into practice, follow the same path that he did and reach the same awakening.

So we live in a world where the path to the deathless has been found. They say that there are many eons, which means whole universes, during which nobody finds the path to the true release. Can you imagine how dark those universes are? But ours is one that has this opportunity. The door has been opened.

So we show our respect. We’ll be doing a candlelit service tonight. As the Buddha says that’s amisa-puja, respect through material things. But for him, genuine respect was respect for the practice: practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. This is the best way of showing our respect for what that the Buddha accomplished, opening the way for all of us. If we make up our minds this is what we want, the way is open. Don’t close the door on yourself.