The Wheel Wright

Close your eyes and focus on the breath. Know when the breath is coming in; know when it’s going out. Ask yourself, where do you feel the breathing in the body? Because when the Buddha talks about breath, he’s not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose. He’s talking about the flow of energy in the body. And that you can feel anywhere. So where do you feel it right now?—as you breathe in, as you breathe out.

Focus your attention there and then ask if it’s comfortable. You can try longer breathing, shorter breathing, to see which is more comfortable. Faster, slower; heavier, lighter; deeper, more shallow. Experiment until you find a rhythm and texture of breathing that feels good.

This is a way of developing mindfulness, ardency, alertness. Mindfulness means keeping something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping in mind that you’re going to stay here. Alertness is watching what you’re doing. And ardency is the effort to do it well—because you need to depend on these things.

We live in a dangerous world. It’s made up out of dangers: earth, water, wind, fire. People can die from being buried in the earth. People can die from floods, from wind getting out of control, fire getting out of control. These are the things that make up our experience of the earth. So where are you going to find safety? As the Buddha said, you find safety inside, “Attahi attano natho.”

We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as examples for how we can find refuge within ourselves. After all, that’s what the Buddha did. He found a refuge within himself—a refuge that nothing can touch. He said that, as a teacher, his duty was to provide protection in all directions for his students. What kind of protection? He doesn’t protect us against earth, water, wind, or fire, but he does protect us against our own unskillful qualities. Those are the real dangers in the world, because they can pull you further down than anything earth, water, wind, and fire can do.

So you try to be mindful of what’s right, what’s wrong. Be alert to what you’re doing. And if you see that you’re doing anything that’s not the most skillful thing you can do, try to do it better. The Buddha said the secret to his awakening was not resting content with skillful qualities. Which means that, of course, he wouldn’t go for unskillful qualities, either. But until his level of skill was really good, providing him with a real refuge inside, he was not going to rest and accept it as being as far as he could go. He was going to keep on going until he found the best. He wanted the best for himself, and he wanted to give the best to other people.

There’s a story of a wheelwright who was asked by the king to create two wheels in six months. With one of the wheels, the wheelwright works on for six months minus six days. Does a really good job. Then the second wheel he works on for six days. The king comes and sees, and he says, “I can’t see any difference between the two.”

The wheelwright said, “Look at this.” He took the wheel that he made in six days and set it rolling along. After it rolled for a while, it began to stop, and when it stopped, it just circled around and fell over on its side. As for the other one, the one that took six months minus six days, he had it roll along. And then when it stopped, it stayed perfectly still, balanced. A really good wheel.

The Buddha said that was the quality he wanted to leave behind in his teachings. Something that would stay balanced, something that would stay solid and secure for thousands of years. So we have the advantage of having that Dhamma teaching us. It provides us with the safety, provides us with the example for how we can find refuge within ourselves through being mindful—how we can depend on ourselves.

So in this world that’s basically designed to kill us at some point, we’re not going to let our goodness get killed. We’re going to make sure that it stays solid and secure beyond all directions.