2 : The Skills of Concentration

Last night we talked about how the four noble truths should always be put first when you’re trying to understand the Buddha’s teachings. We also mentioned that there’s a problem when people sometimes put the three characteristics before the four noble truths, because that can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and unskillful practices.

For example, if you just focus on the fact that things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, you may decide that all you need to do is just accept the fact that things come and go, that you’ll be okay with that, and that’s how you’ll find happiness in life. But that’s defeatist. It’s the lazy way out.

The Buddha never taught that, and he wasn’t lazy or defeatist. When he taught the four noble truths, he taught that there is suffering, that there is suffering that we can cure, and that we can put an end to suffering totally through our own efforts. This is because the world is shaped by our desires, and the four noble truths give us some guidance on which desires, if we follow them, will lead to suffering, and which desires, if we follow them, will lead to the end of suffering.

So, the path is an activity for training your desires. You don’t just accept the fact that “I have desires, the desires come and the desires go, and I can watch them wash in and wash out like the waves in the ocean”— because you know how it happens with desires. The waves wash in and then wash you out to sea. You want to have a way of getting past the waves.

The image the Buddha himself gives of the practice is of crossing over a river and getting onto a bank where you’re safe from the floods of the river. So it’s important to keep in mind that there are things that we have to do and things that we have to change in ourselves in order to develop the path that would lead beyond suffering entirely.

The problem is that if you put the three characteristics first, especially in connection with the practice of concentration, then it short-circuits the practice. Some people believe that if the practice is just a matter of learning how to accept that things are coming and going, then why bother with getting into concentration? You can just practice acceptance, which they call mindfulness—which is not really what the Buddha defined as mindfulness. But sometimes that’s what you hear: Mindfulness is explained as the ability simply to accept things as they come, accept things as they go, without passing judgment. And then the question is, how does that fit in with the practice of concentration? When you’re practicing concentration, you’re not just accepting things; you’re trying to put the mind in a state of stillness and trying to maintain that stillness. You’re judging what should be focused on and what is a hindrance to your focus.

There is one teacher who actually said that the Buddha taught two different paths—the path of mindfulness, and the path of concentration and effort—and this person gave preference to mindfulness because he says, basically, the whole point of the practice is to learn how to accept that things come and go. But with concentration practice, you’re not accepting. You’re trying to make a change.

Other people object to the practice of concentration on the grounds that if you stick with one object, you’re attached to that one object, and so to practice non-attachment, you let the mind wander as it will.

Another criticism of concentration says when you practice concentration, it requires effort; it requires that you plan ahead of time, looking for the results you want to get from your actions—and that requires a sense of self. Yet, in the practice, we’re trying to get rid of our sense of self. So we should not practice concentration.

Those are some of the reasonings that people give to reject the practice of concentration. Yet when the Buddha taught mindfulness and concentration, he taught them as a single practice. You do them both together because they help each other along. The practice of mindfulness is the theme of concentration, what gets you into concentration. And mindfulness doesn’t become pure until the fourth level of right concentration, the fourth jhāna. The Buddha also taught that concentration is actually necessary for the practice and, in fact, is the heart of the path. All the other factors of the path, including right mindfulness, are there to support concentration.

So the people who reject the practice of concentration are going against what the Buddha said about the practice—which means that they’re misunderstanding something basic about what he taught. And the misunderstanding comes from the fact that they put the three characteristics ahead of the four noble truths. They start with the idea of inconstancy and run with it.

Now, inconstancy on its own doesn’t imply any clear duty. You can react to inconstancy in any number of ways: You can just sit still and accept it. Or you can try to squeeze whatever pleasure out of the present that you can, with no thought for the future, thinking that since things are going to change anyhow, you might as well grab what you can while you can. The principle of inconstancy on its own can lead to a lot of unskillful behavior.

But if you follow the Buddha and put the four noble truths first, then the perception of inconstancy has its place within the duties appropriate to each noble truth. You learn from the four noble truths which desires should be followed, and you apply the perception of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to whichever desires that would pull you away from the desires that are actually in line with the path.

Now, the desire to get the mind into concentration is an important part of the path. There are two reasons for why you need concentration. One is that concentration is good food for the mind. The mind needs nourishment. It has a tendency to feed on things, and as the Buddha said, even though you may understand that sensuality has its drawbacks, if you don’t have a higher level of pleasure than sensuality, you’re going to go back and feed on the sensuality.

It’s like the coyotes at the monastery in America. We have an avocado grove, and when the avocados are ripe and falling from the trees, the coyotes feed on the avocadoes. They get fat, and their fur gets nice and sleek. But when the avocados are gone, then when you look at coyote scat, you find that they feed on anything. I’ve seen coyote scat containing plastic rope. They actually ate plastic rope, and the rope went through them and came out the other end. Which goes to show that when they’re hungry, they’ll eat anything. And it’s the same with the human mind: If you don’t give it something better than sensuality to feed on, it’s always going to go back to feed on sensuality, again and again.

So, one of the purposes of concentration is to provide good food for the mind: a sense of pleasure, a sense of well-being that comes when you get the mind to settle down and you don’t need to think about how to gain pleasant sights, nice sounds, pleasant smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. You’ve got something better, a better pleasure, inside.

The second reason for why you need concentration is that it’s like a laboratory for understanding your mind. When that critic said that you need a sense of self in order to practice concentration, he was right. You do need a sense of self that says, “I’m going to be able to do this” and “This is something that I want to do, that I am capable of doing.” With that thought, you’re actually creating a state of becoming, and as you cultivate it, you come to understand becoming really well.

We talked about becoming last night. It’s when you take on an identity in a particular world of experience, based on a desire. For instance, suppose you have a desire for Szechuan noodles tonight. There’s going to be a certain “you” that wants those noodles, that’s going to benefit from those noodles—or at least likes the taste of the noodles. And there’s also the “you” that knows how to buy them, where to get them. Those two “you’s” are the self as consumer and the self as provider. Then there’s the part of the world that is relevant to your desire, foremost being: Where is the nearest Szechuan noodle store? That’s the part of the world right now that’s relevant to your state of becoming. Other aspects of the world—what’s going on in politics, what’s going on in the weather—are not all that relevant to that particular desire, unless, for some reason, they get in its way.

Now, all of that is your state of becoming right now. As the Buddha said, we suffer from the ways that we want to become. But the solution to the problem of becoming is not trying to not become anything at all. It’s trying to become skillful in developing our states of becoming. And concentration is one of the most skillful ways of engaging in becoming for the sake of going beyond becoming, because once the mind gets settled down, you can actually see the process: “This is how becoming happens in the mind.”

This knowledge arises on two levels. The first is when distractions come up. You see the distractions arise, how they take shape, and how you go into them. You realize: “This is how I take on an identity in the world of that distraction.”

The second level, which is deeper, is that you also understand how you take on a sense of becoming as you become a meditator, as you get the mind into concentration: You are inhabiting the whole body. The whole body is your world. You are the person who is focused on one spot and trying to gain a state of concentration. This is a kind of becoming, and because it is quiet, because it is clear, it’s a becoming that you can understand as you’re doing it. And then, by understanding it, you can potentially get beyond becoming altogether. But you need to do this first. This is a skill you have to master if you want to understand becoming well enough to transcend it.

As Ajaan Lee said, it’s like trying to learn about eggs. You learn about eggs by getting chickens and feeding them. Some of the eggs you eat—you have to feed, right?—in order to have strength to continue studying the eggs. In the same way, you develop a state of concentration, and it’s something that you feed on as you try to understand it as well. But you also have to do things with the eggs if you want to understand them. You could sit and watch an egg and learn some things about it, but not much. But if you try to fry it or steam it, you learn a lot more about the eggs—and you get something better to eat as you do.

So this is a level of becoming that you want to develop. It’s something that you actually need to do in order to understand it and get beyond it, in order to get beyond the process of becoming. So, you don’t say, “Well, I’ll just let go before I ever master concentration, and in that way I won’t be attached to concentration.” You need this attachment. You need this sense of self and this sense of the world if you want to go beyond selves and worlds.

The forest ajaans talk about this quite a lot. Ajaan Lee says that most people let go like paupers. They don’t have any concentration so they say, “I’ll just give up concentration.” It’s like a poor person saying, “I’m going to give up my BMW.” You don’t have a BMW to begin with, and giving it up is not going to bring you the benefits that come from having a BMW. You can’t take a ride in it, and you can’t give rides to anyone else. First you need to get the BMW so that you can use it. You don’t need to hold on to the BMW once it’s yours. It’s there to use when you need it, and you can put it aside when you don’t. In the same way, the Buddha developed concentration and discernment in the course of his path, and then let them go when gaining awakening. But even after he had let these things go, they were still there for him to use as he taught the way to others.

So you can benefit from this. Ajaan Maha Boowa talked about how, when we are practicing, we need to hold on in the same way as climbing a ladder. When you climb a ladder to the roof of a house, you hold on to one rung, then you hold on to the next one, and only when you are holding on to the higher one do you let go of the lower one to reach the next rung up. So there is going to be attachment in the practice. You go from one attachment to higher, higher, higher attachments. If you say, “Hey, watch me let go of everything,” you fall back on the ground. So you need to hold on, step by step by step, until you get to the roof. Then you can let go totally.

Or as Ajaan Fuang said, it’s like sending a rocket to the moon. You need a big booster to begin with, and the booster has to be attached to the moon capsule. Then, when the booster has done its job, that’s when you let it go.

So there are things that you have to hold on to as you practice, and concentration is something that you need to hold on to because, as I said, it’s food for the practice and it’s also your laboratory for understanding your mind. Once you have this one thing, concentration, then you can understand the five aggregates, you can understand the process of becoming—issues that we will talk about tomorrow night. But right now I would like to focus simply on mastering the art of concentration.

The issue about the distinction between putting the four noble truths first or putting the three characteristics first becomes very clear when you look at the four qualities that the Buddha said you need to develop in order to have concentration. These are called the four iddhipāda, or bases of success: desire, effort, intentness, and using your powers of judgment.

Often when people teach mindfulness, they say that desire is a bad thing, effort is a bad thing, using your powers of judgment is a bad thing. So three out of four bases of success get thrown away. But if you really want to succeed at your meditation, you have to develop all four of these four qualities:

You need all four of these qualities in the concentration, but you need to have them in a balanced way. So let’s go through them one by one.

The first one is desire. Desire often gets a bad rap in Buddhist circles. But actually, it’s an important part of the path. As the Buddha said, everything—every phenomenon—is rooted in desire, so if you want concentration, you have to start with the desire, “I want the mind to settle down.”

Now, if you focus simply on how much you want the mind to settle down, you’re misusing your desire. The desire has to focus on the causes. It’s like driving to a mountain. If you drive along and just watch the mountain, what’s going to happen? You’ll run into somebody or drive off the road. You have to tell yourself: “Here is the road leading to the mountain, there is the mountain, and I am going to focus on the road. Step by step by step.” Every now and then, you look up to make sure that the mountain is not back there behind you in your rear-view mirror. But otherwise, you keep yourself focused on the causes that would lead to the result. This is the right use of desire.

So when you’re sitting down to practice concentration, you don’t think, “I want the fourth jhāna in five minutes.” You think, “I want to stay with the breath. I want to stay with this breath, this breath, this breath, to keep things going.” You focus on the step-by-step-by-step process to keep the desire focused and continuous, and that’s how you get to the mountain.

In order to help with this desire, you need to think of various ways to motivate yourself. The first one is heedfulness. The principle of heedfulness is basically saying that “There are dangers in my mind that I need to protect myself from. If I don’t provide the protection, they’re going to come and cause harm.” You see the harm that can come, but you also see that you are able to foresee the harm and get out of the way or prevent the harm. That’s what heedfulness is all about. So this does involve a sense of self: the “me” who is going to be harmed by not practicing, the “me” who’s going to benefit from the practice, and also the “me” who can provide the way out. That’s your main way, your most basic way, of motivating yourself to do the practice.

So if you’re sitting meditating at night and say, “I’m getting kind of tired right now, this is enough meditation for tonight,” ask yourself, “Do I still have greed, aversion, and delusion? Yeah, the dangers are still there, so I need to meditate more.” And when can greed, aversion and delusion happen? Do they happen only when you’re meditating? No. They can happen any time at all. So you need to prepare yourself to get beyond these dangers throughout the day.

Another way of motivating yourself is a sense of compassion: “I will benefit from this. Do I love myself? If I love myself, I want to practice. Do I love the people around me? Yes. Do I want my greed, aversion, and delusion to go prowling around, biting everybody else around me? No. So I might as well show some compassion for them by getting my mind more trained.” This is how compassion is a way of motivating yourself to stick with the practice.

Another way of motivating yourself that the Buddha recommended is having a sense of shame. You’re sitting there and your mind is wandering all over the place, so you remind yourself that there are people in the world who can read minds. “What if they were reading my mind right now?” You say, “Well, I hope that the people reading minds have compassion and some understanding.” But still they will say, “Ah, this person. I don’t know about this person.” So tell yourself, “I want to have a good mind for them to read.” That’s one way of using a sense of shame.

Another way to use shame skillfully is when you know that you have an opportunity to practice the Dhamma and yet you’re sitting here thinking about tomorrow’s whatever, and wouldn’t you be ashamed of the fact that here you had this opportunity and yet you threw it away? So use that thought in order to motivate yourself.

There is also a sense of pride. When the Buddha is talking about shame, he’s not talking about the shame that’s the opposite of pride. He’s talking about the shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. His sense of shame is part and parcel of a healthy sense of pride: “This is a technique I want to master. This is a skill I want to master.” Once you develop some level of skill, you don’t want to fall back. You want to take pride in your workmanship. You want to take pride in your skill, so that when you’re in a difficult situation you don’t say, “Oh, today I can’t concentrate. There’s too much noise in the neighborhood from these crazy people next door.” They’re always making noise during the Dhamma talk, so you might as well tell yourself, “I want to show them that I can still keep my mind concentrated even if they are making noise.” This is a sense of pride that can focus you on your practice.

These are some of the various ways you can motivate yourself to generate the desire to work on the meditation, to work on concentration.

That covers the first base of success.

The second base of success is effort, persistence. You just keep at it again and again and again, trying to develop the theme of meditation and also trying to get rid of any hindrances that come up.

You may have heard of the hindrances. These are the things that get in the way of concentration. There are five major categories. There’s sensual desire. There’s ill will—“ill will” here meaning that you want to see somebody suffer. The other hindrances are sleepiness and drowsiness, restlessness and anxiety, and then uncertainty or doubt. These are the five things that get in the way of concentration. So when they come up in the mind—as the Buddha said in his description of mindfulness—you want to figure out when they come. You want to know that they are there, and you want to recognize them as hindrances, and then realize that these are things that you want to get past. These are things that you want to abandon. And then you abandon them.

There are three steps in abandoning them. The first one, when a hindrance arises, is recognizing that it is a hindrance. And when you recognize that it is a hindrance, that’s a major step right there. Because for most of us, when sensual desire comes, we don’t say, “Oh. This is a hindrance. This is sensual desire.” We say, “Hey, this is cool, let’s go with it!” So the first thing you’ve got to do is to recognize it: “This is a hindrance. It’s something I’ve got to abandon.”

Then you remember various ways that the Buddha recommended for abandoning the hindrance. There are five techniques altogether. The first one is simply recognizing, “I don’t want to be here in this unskillful state of mind.” Change the topic. Go back to your breath. “Oops, I’ve slipped off.” You come right back. That’s one technique. You just go back to your original topic of meditation.

The second technique is for when you keep coming back to the hindrance. Even though you recognize that it is a hindrance, you still like it, so you then have to look at its drawbacks: “If I thought this thought for 24 hours, where would it lead me? Not in a good direction. So why am I giving it even a little bit of time?” One of my favorite techniques for seeing the drawbacks of a hindrance is to ask myself, “If this were a movie, would I pay to watch? The acting is horrible. The storyline is very predictable. It’s not worth it. If I’m going to watch a movie, I should watch a better one.” In that way, you realize that the hindrance is not worth going with. That’s what it means to see the drawbacks of a hindrance. That helps you get out of it and get back to your breath.

The third way of dealing with a hindrance is to ignore it. In other words, the thinking is going on in the mind, but you say, “My breath is still here, and I don’t need to pay attention to that thinking. It can chatter away as much as it likes, but I’m going to stay focused on my breath”— because, after all, the breath is still there. It hasn’t been destroyed by the hindrance. You can still focus on the breath even though the chatter is going on in the background.

Think of the chatter as being a crazy person coming to talk to you while you’ve got work to do. If you turn to the crazy person and try to chase him away, he’ll pull you into his craziness. So just pretend he’s not there. For a while, he’ll get crazier and crazier and crazier, to grab your attention, but you can still say, “Nope, I am not going to pay any attention.” And after a while, he will see that you’re not paying attention and then he’ll go away.

Or it’s like a stray dog coming for food. If you don’t feed the stray dog, after a while the stray dog goes away. Even though it’s bothering you for a while, whining and whatever, you just pay it no attention. With some kinds of thoughts all you have to do is just not pay them any attention and they eventually go away.

The fourth technique—and this is one that works exceptionally well when you get more familiar with the breath energies in the body—relates to the fact that whenever a thought appears in the mind, there will also be a little pattern of tension that appears someplace in the body along with it. There’s a little stirring in the body, and then there’s a label that latches on to that spot, and from that label you start thinking about things. But this little point of tension in the body is what keeps the thought going. So if you can find that little point of tension, wherever it may be—in your face, in your arm, in your leg—you breathe through it. That dissolves that pattern of tension, and the thought—with no marker to anchor it—will go away. That’s the fourth way of dealing with hindrances.

The fifth way, if none of the others work, is to put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, press hard, and tell yourself, “I will just not think that thought.” This is where you can use your meditation word really fast: BuddhoBuddhoBuddho, really rapid-fire. Just don’t give the mind any space to think about that other thought. Now, this last technique involves the least amount of discernment, but sometimes it’s necessary. When you compare these different techniques to different tools, this one is like a sledgehammer. You bang the thought and that may knock it out for a little while. It may want to come back eventually, but at least you give a little space to the mind. So don’t be afraid to use this one when you find that the other techniques don’t work.

So these are ways that you can deal with different hindrances as they come into the mind. If you keep at this, you get more and more skilled from learning how to read the situation, that this particular kind of hindrance requires this kind of technique, and then you become more and more in control of the mind. As the Buddha said, when you’ve mastered these five techniques, then you can think any thoughts that you want, and you don’t have to think the thoughts you don’t want to think.

This is one important aspect of mastering your concentration: With the kinds of thoughts that would come into your mind and just keep driving you crazy, you realize, “I don’t have to think those thoughts anymore. I can be in control of my thoughts. My thoughts don’t have to be in control of me.” So this is one of the benefits of developing what the Buddha calls the second base of success, which is putting in effort, having persistence as you stick with the practice.

The third base of success is being intent—in other words, giving full attention to what you are doing. Meditation is not a ritual. You don’t just go through the motions. You really pay careful attention: When you do this, these are the results; when you do that, those are the results. You want to know clearly. You want to be observant, so that you can decide, “When I’m getting the results I want, I stick with it. If I’m not getting the results that I want, I’m going to try something else in the meditation.”

The Buddha compares this to being a cook working for someone else. You learn how to notice what kind of food the person likes. “Does this person like salty food? Sweet food? Sour food? If he likes sour food, I can provide more sour food.” If the person is getting sick and tired of sour food, you cook him something else. You have to pay careful attention because, as the Buddha said, sometimes your master won’t tell you outright what kind of food he likes. The master expects you to notice the subtle signs—the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice. In the same way, when you meditate, you have to pay careful attention to the mind’s subtle signs, because it doesn’t always tell you right up front, “I want this, I want that.” It just wanders off. So you have to pay careful attention. This is what intentness is all about.

And you pair this with the last base of success, which is using your powers of judgment, using your powers of discernment. If something is not working, you try to figure out why it’s not working, and you use your ingenuity to figure out what else might work.

When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, these were the two qualities that he emphasized most in the practice of paying attention: being observant and then using your ingenuity. “If this kind of breathing doesn’t work, what other kind of breathing might work? Or maybe tonight the mind just doesn’t want to be with the breath. What other topic can I try that it would be more willing to settle down with?” In this case, you try to analyse: What is the problem in the mind right now? Is the problem lust? Is the problem anger? Is the problem a storyline that came in from today?

One way of dealing with storylines is the practice we did at the very beginning of the evening: spreading goodwill for all beings.

Think about the Buddha and the three knowledges he gained on the night of his awakening. The first knowledge was the knowledge of his previous lifetimes. If you think you’re bringing lots of stories into your meditation, think about remembering lifetimes going back hundreds and thousands of thousands of eons. The Buddha had a huge number of stories that night. If he hadn’t been careful, he could have easily gotten stuck in them. And here you have just the stories of only one lifetime. The Buddha was able to let go of all those stories; why can’t you let go of yours?

Now, he was able to let go of his stories because of the second knowledge, in which he saw all beings in the world dying and then being reborn in line with their actions. So if you find that there’s a storyline eating away at your mind, try to think of all beings in all directions and all their stories—and how small your story seems in comparison. Spread goodwill to all those suffering beings, and some goodwill to yourself in the context of “all beings.” That helps to pull you out of that storyline, and you can get back to the concentration.

If the issue is lust, you can contemplate the body. If the issue is anger, you can try to develop goodwill. Use your ingenuity in getting the mind to settle down. This is a basic principle in any skill: You start out by learning the basic steps from the teacher, but then you have to use your ingenuity in order to develop a skill of your own. It’s like weaving a basket. The teacher will tell you, “This is how to weave the strands in and out,” and then you try weaving—and your basket looks awful. You ask yourself, “What did I do wrong? Is the shape wrong? Is the weave wrong? What should I change?” Then you weave a new basket—keep on weaving baskets, paying careful attention to what you’re doing, keep on observing what’s still wrong, keep on trying to make improvements. In that way, you learn from your actions. You learn from the things you do.

This is how you develop a skill, and you do it by developing these four bases of success: You want to do well. You put in effort. You pay careful attention to what you’re doing, and then you use your ingenuity and powers of judgment to figure out how to make things better. These are all qualities that you need to develop as you practice concentration to make it a skill.

Now, the Buddha said that these four qualities also go together with another list of qualities that he called the “fabrications of exertion,” which is a technical term. “Fabrication” here is the word, saṅkhāra, and it doesn’t mean lies, as when you fabricate a lie. “Fabrication” here simply means the way you put your experience together. The Buddha said there are three types of fabrication that we use as we get the mind into concentration.

So when you’re working with concentration on the breath, you start with bodily fabrication, which is the way you breathe. Now, the word “fabrication” here means that there is an element of intention in the way you breathe. So you want to use that intention skillfully. What would be a good way to breathe right now? Does the body need long breathing? Short breathing? Deep breathing? Shallow breathing? Which parts of the body are lacking in good breath energy? You decide and you make changes.

Now, in making changes, you’re using the process of directed thought and evaluation. You focus on an issue in the breath and then you evaluate what to do.

As Ajaan Lee explained evaluation, it asks questions. One, does the breath feel good? And if the answer is No, then the next question is, what do you do to make it better? If the original answer was Yes, it does feel good, then how do you make the best use of it? How do you maintain that sense of ease? When you maintain that sense of ease, how do you spread it to the body to get the most benefit from it?

Some people have asked about how to spread the breath energy in the body. The breath will actually spread on its own. All you have to do is release tension in different parts of the body, so that the breath can flow naturally. It’s like opening valves so that water can flow through a pipe. This connects with the Buddha’s teaching that when you get the mind in concentration, there is a sense of ease or well-being, and you want that sense of well-being to permeate the entire body. So you use this perception of breath to allow it to permeate.

Other people have objected: The Buddha never said anything about spreading breath energy in his meditation instructions, so why are we adding this teaching? And the answer is twofold. One is that the Buddha never said that “Dhamma” can mean only what he said or what is recorded in the Canon. If something is in line with what he said, even though he never said it, it counts as Dhamma, too. And that leads to the second answer: When the Buddha said to let the sense of ease and rapture found in jhāna permeate the entire body, he never explained how. It’s up to our ingenuity to figure that out—and here we have Ajaan Lee’s help in that he has explained how he figured it out. So as long as this practice helps in accomplishing what the Buddha said to do, it’s perfectly legitimate.

Now, allowing good breath energy to spread through the body involves the third kind of fabrication, which is feeling and perception. The feeling is the feeling of ease; the perception is the image of the breath you have in mind. If you think of the breath as just the air coming in and out the nose, it’s very difficult to get a sense of fullness or well-being out of the breath, or to let it spread through the body, because there are only two little holes here, and you’ve got a whole body that you need to breathe through. But if you think of the breath, not as air, but as energy, and of the whole body as being like a sponge, hold that perception in mind: When you breathe in, the breath can come in from all directions and go out through all directions. This is one kind of perception that makes it a lot easier for the breath to feel nourishing, to feel good for the whole body.

Another perception you may try is that if you feel you are struggling to bring the breath in, change the image: Remind yourself that breath energy starts in the body; it doesn’t start outside. It starts here inside the body, at any of the resting spots that Ajaan Lee identified, such as the tip of the breastbone or just above the navel. So you don’t have to pull the breath in. The breath starts here already, and all you have to do is allow it to spread through the body. Relax any tension that gets in the way of its spread. That will bring the air in and let it out smoothly.

In this way, you see how your perception has an influence on how the mind relates to the body: how it senses what’s going on in the body, and how it can adjust its sensations. And you learn these lessons by adjusting these three things: the breath, the way you talk to yourself about the breath, the perceptions you have in mind as you deal with the breath, and the feeling that results. These things allow the mind to get into concentration.

So you’ve got four bases of success; three types of fabrications.

Now the three types of fabrications are useful not only while you’re meditating. As you get used to adjusting your experience of your body, adjusting your experience of the mind as you meditate, you can also start doing it as you go through daily life. In this way, these three fabrications provide you with your own internal refuge as you go through the day.

We say we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that the Buddha is going to come down and lift us out of our suffering. What it means is that the Buddha sets an example: This is how people find true happiness. So you look at his example. He was a person of wisdom. He was a person of compassion. He was a person of purity in his actions. How can we develop those qualities in ourselves? When you do that, when you follow the Buddha’s example, that’s when you take him as your refuge.

So let’s look at how he recommended developing wisdom, compassion, and purity.

First, as he said, wisdom begins with the question I mentioned yesterday: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The Buddha developed wisdom by following that question, experimenting with his actions and getting better and better results.

As for compassion, that connects with wisdom in the sense that you realize that if you want your happiness to be long-term, it can’t cause anyone else any harm.

There’s a story in the Canon of King Pasenadi in his palace, one-on-one with his queen, Mallikā. In a tender moment he turns to her and says, “Mallikā, is there anyone you love more than yourself?” Now, you know what he’s thinking, right? He wants her to say, “Yes, Your Majesty, I love you more than I love myself.” And if this were a cheap movie, that’s what she would say. But this is the Pali Canon, and she’s no fool. She says, “No, there’s no one I love more than myself. And how about you? Is there anyone you love more than yourself?” The king has to admit, “No, there’s nobody I love more than myself.” So that was the end of that scene.

The king goes down to see the Buddha and tells him what Queen Mallikā said. The Buddha says, “You know, she’s right. You could go throughout the entire world and you would not find anyone you love more than yourself. And in the same way, there’s nobody out there who’s going to love you more than they love themselves. They all love themselves just as fiercely as you do.”

Then what is the conclusion the Buddha draws from that? He doesn’t say, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, just go for what you want and be prepared to fight for it.” Instead, he says, “Be very careful that you don’t harm anybody.” After all, if your happiness harms somebody else, they won’t want your happiness to last. They’re going to do what they can to put an end to it.

So this is the beginning of compassion. You have to think about other people’s happiness as you plan how to find your own.

As for purity, the Buddha taught his son the principles of purity, which focus on examining your actions, making your actions pure. Before you do something, ask yourself, “When I do this, what are the results going to be?” If you foresee any harm, don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, go ahead and do it. While you’re doing it, check to see whether there are any bad results happening right now. If you see that you’re actually causing harm, stop. If you’re not causing any harm, you can continue with the action.

Then, when it’s done, you reflect back on the long-term consequences. If you realize that you did cause harm even though you didn’t want to, learn from that mistake. Go and talk it over with someone who is more advanced on the path so that you can learn what other ways of acting you might try so as not to make that same mistake again. If you didn’t cause any harm, then find joy in the fact that you’re making progress on the path. This is how you purify your thoughts, your words, and your deeds.

Now, all of these cases—the search for wisdom, the search for compassion, and the search for purity—are based on taking seriously your desire for long-term happiness, and learning how to act on that desire at all times. This is how the Buddha developed his qualities of wisdom, compassion, and purity. This means that the search for happiness doesn’t have to be selfish. It can be done in a way that produces noble qualities in the mind, the qualities of the Buddha. So we follow him as an example in taking our desire for long-term happiness seriously, too.

Similarly with the Dhamma and the Sangha: We take them as an example, and that’s how we develop refuge. How do we do that? Through the three kinds of fabrication. Say that anger comes up in mind, and you want to protect yourself from the anger. The first thing you do is to look at how you’re breathing right now. Can you calm the breathing down? All too often when we get angry, the breathing gets really difficult. When we say we want to “get it out of our system,” it’s because the anger has hijacked the breath and made it uncomfortable. So instead of the two usual ways of dealing with that sense of discomfort—getting it out of your system by yelling at the other person, or bottling it up and getting cancer—there is a third alternative, which is to breathe through it—as we talked earlier about breathing through the tension in your body. That’s your first line of defense.

Then the second line of defense is, how are you talking to yourself about the issue that’s making you angry? Can you talk about it in another way? This is where the Buddha has you look for the other person’s good qualities, the good things that the person has done, so that you realize that even though this person is doing some stupid things right now, he has done some good things in the past. “If I just let loose with my anger, that’s going to destroy a good relationship.” Or if you can’t think of anything good about the person—and there are many people in the world whose good qualities are hard to find—then the Buddha says that you should feel compassion for that person: “Just because someone is creating a lot of bad kamma for themselves, I shouldn’t let that make me create bad kamma.”

The Buddha said that it’s like seeing someone in a desert—sick, lying by the side of the road, with no one to help: You have to have compassion for them no matter who they are, because they are suffering so much. In this way, you change your verbal fabrication, the way you think to yourself about the issue.

The third line of defense is to look at your perceptions. What perceptions do you have in mind that stoke the anger? If you perceive that you’re being overwhelmed by the person, that you’re being threatened by that person, or that the person has power over you, you’re likely to lash back. So, as the Buddha said, change your perception. One, if the person has been saying nasty things about you, remind yourself that this is the way human speech normally is. There is kind speech and there is unkind speech. There is true speech and there is false speech. There is speech that is useful and there is speech that is totally useless. So the fact that this person is saying something unkind, lying to you, saying useless things: This is not abnormal. This is just the normal human way of speech. One.

Two, the Buddha said if they say something really nasty to you, you say to yourself, “An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear.” And leave it there. How many times have you thought that? You usually don’t stop with that thought. You go on to the next thought, and then the next: “Why are they saying that? Why are they so nasty? Why don’t they treat me well? Why do they disrespect me?” And you just go on and on. But why are you suffering? Because of all this extra stuff you’re adding on top. If, on the other hand, you can say, “An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear,” that’s it: You don’t have to suffer. You’re more in control. So hold that perception in mind.

The third perception the Buddha teaches you is to try to think of your goodwill as being larger than what the other person has done. For example, think of your goodwill as being like the Earth. People can come and spit on the Earth, they can dig in the Earth, they can piss on the Earth, but the Earth is still Earth. It’s too big for them to have any effect on it. Or think of your mind as being like space. Hold that perception in mind: “People can try to write things on my mind, but nothing stays. It all vanishes, because there’s no surface for them to write on.” If you hold these perceptions in mind, you feel less threatened and overwhelmed. It’s a lot easier to deal with difficult situations and not be overcome by anger or suffering from anger.

So these are some ways in which you use these three kinds of fabrications: bodily fabrication—how you breathe; verbal fabrication—how you talk to yourself about the issue; and finally mental fabrication—the perceptions you’re holding in mind. Can you change these things so that you don’t suffer? So that you don’t act in an unskillful way?

If you learn how to master these three kinds of fabrications, they help both in the practice of concentration and in your conduct of daily life. This is how you provide refuge for yourself.

And finding refuge is what the Buddha’s teachings are all about: There is a path that goes beyond suffering. It’s not just accepting things as they are, resigning yourself to the fact that the world can’t change. That’s not the Buddha’s way. Look, if that were his attitude, he wouldn’t have gone into the wilderness. He would have stayed in the palace, thinking, “I guess this is the way things are and I’ll enjoy myself the best I can by accepting them, and then I will die.” Which is not the Buddha. The Buddha said, “There must be something that doesn’t die. I’ve got to find it.” He had that kind of lion-like determination. He tried different ways of finding it. If this way didn’t work, he tried that way. If that way didn’t work, he was going to keep on trying until he did find the way. And when he found the way, he taught it to everyone who was willing to listen: “Look, there is a way out of suffering. This is how you do it.”

That’s how he provided us with refuge. If you take his lessons and apply them to the way you shape your experience, then you can find this refuge as well. And the practice of concentration is a very important skill in finding that refuge. You learn how you gain control over your mind, control over these three kinds of fabrications, making use of the four bases of success: desire, effort, intent, and your powers of discernment, your powers of judgment, your powers of ingenuity—using the full faculties of your mind. In this way, you can find full release: the refuge that the Buddha found, the refuge he promised in his third noble truth.

So those are my thoughts for this evening.