Your Own Discernment

When you settle down with the breath, you want to make sure it’s a good place to settle down. I’ve heard people complain that the Buddha doesn’t say to play with the breath, but the Buddha never said that he had said everything that needed to be said about the Dhamma. His basic principle was, if it gets the results—then it works. It’s Dhamma.

This is especially a principle we observe in the forest tradition, because you do have to use your ingenuity. What the Buddha gives us is a general outline. Or as Ajaan Maha Boowa once said about Ajaan Mun, “Ajaan Mun gave the trunk of the tree, and we have to work out the branches.” The Buddha gave the outline; we have to fill it in.

So. Whatever helps get your mind to settle down, with a sense of ease and well-being here in the present moment, that’s Dhamma. If you can settle right down with the breath, that’s fine. If you have to think about other things first, that’s also fine. When the Buddha taught breath meditation to Rahula, he taught lots of other topics first: contemplation of the elements, the brahmavihāras, universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, contemplation of the body—all the different parts of the body that you have. All these topics are meant to calm the mind down.

As you’re tied up in the affairs of the world, it’s good to step back and develop a sense of saṃvega, that no matter how good the world gets, it’s going to fall apart. Yet you want to have something inside your mind that’s not going to fall apart. And this is where you look for it. You look for it inside.

The Dhamma outside is there pointing you back inside all the time. And it’s for you to figure things out. What are you doing that’s causing suffering? What can you do to stop? The Buddha gives you lots and lots of directions, lots and lots of hints for how this can be done.

But you have to take his teachings, and you work out their implications as to what’s going to work for you. That’s what develops your own insight and your own discernment. If we simply borrow the Buddha’s discernment, we never develop any of our own. And it’s our own discernment that’s going to help break through things. After all, you’re the one who created the problem in your mind of how you look at things, and listen to things, think about things in a way that causes suffering.

And although the general outline is the same for everybody, the particulars are also important, so you have to figure out particular techniques, particular strategies to deal with them. In doing so, you develop your ingenuity, you develop your own discernment there.

As the Buddha said, you reach a point in the practice where you become independent of others in the Dhamma. Which means you finally understand what it’s all about, what needs to be done. From that point on, it’s up to you to figure it out.

So we listen to the ajaans, we listen to the Dhamma talks, we read the texts. But then we have to be observant. We have to be ingenious. And that quality of being observant and ingenious—that’s what’s going to set us free. Because that’s the real thing.