Still Right Here

Focus your attention right here, right where you’re feeling the breath coming in, going out—because the breath is where the mind and the body come together.

We’re commemorating today the Buddha’s first sermon. After he gained awakening, he experienced the bliss of release for seven weeks. Then he decided to teach. After thinking of people who had taught him in the past, about who had passed away, he thought of the five brethren who had looked after him when he was doing his austerities. So he went to teach them.

The question is, why would he teach? As he said at one point later on in his life, the things that he’d learned in his awakening were like the leaves in a forest. But he decided to teach just a handful of leaves, to teach how to solve the problem of suffering. In other words, he didn’t teach anything far away.

He could have talked about all the many worlds he had seen—the deva worlds, the hell worlds. But he didn’t. He talked about something right here, right now: the suffering that the mind is causing itself, and yet doesn’t need to cause itself. He taught the way to stop. And that problem is still right here, right now, 2,600 years later. That’s why we focus right here, right now in our meditation.

And we think about his compassion. When he was teaching, he didn’t want to just show off his knowledge. He wanted to teach something that would really be useful to the people listening to him. And this, he figured, was the most useful thing—basically to teach people to find awakening, too.

But it starts out by focusing on where you’re suffering in the present moment, why you’re suffering, and what you can do to stop. This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation: It’s one of the things you do to make it stop. There’s virtue; there’s concentration; there’s discernment. It’s called the triple training. As he said, this training is a middle way between two extremes: the extreme of self-torture and the extreme of sensual indulgence.

For most of us, those are the only alternatives. If we see there’s pain, we run to sensual pleasures. If we can’t find sensual pleasures, we spend our time thinking about sensual pleasures. That’s our escape. But it’s not really an escape because we keep coming back to pain.

The alternative is to find pleasure in another way, what’s called the pleasure of form: the body as you feel it right here, right now, from inside. You breathe in a way that makes the body feel good. If you can’t make the whole body feel good, make at least part of it feel good. Take that as your foundation right now. From there you can develop the rest of the path.

So we think about his compassion. As a teacher he thought only: What can be the teaching that’s most useful for this person right here, right now? It turned out that, even though there may be some variations of what was good for one person as opposed to another, the basic principles are the same. And they still hold for us. It’s still right here, still right now.

So this is how we show our gratitude for his teaching. We focus our attention right here, right now, straighten out what’s right here, right now, because that was his whole purpose in teaching: for us to benefit. When we benefit from his teachings, that’s how we celebrate the fact that he taught.