Lessons for Aging

Tonight’s talk is on the topic of aging and the lessons that the Buddha learned about aging from his awakening.

There’s a story in the Canon about a conversation between a monk and a king. One day, the monk, Ven. Raṭṭhapāla, was spending the afternoon meditating under a tree in the pleasure garden of King Koravya. When the king learned of this, he went to Raṭṭhapāla and asked him, “Why did you ordain?” He knew the monk’s family. They were wealthy, the relatives were still alive, and Raṭṭhapāla himself was healthy. So the king didn’t understand why he would ordain.

Raṭṭhapāla told him there were four Dhamma summaries that he’d learned from the Buddha and that had inspired him to ordain.

The first Dhamma summary was, “The world is swept away. It does not endure.”

The king asked him, “What does that mean?” So the monk asked him in return, “When you were young, were you strong?” The king said, “Yes, I was very strong. In fact, I knew no one else who was my equal in strength.” Then the monk asked him, “How about now? Are you still strong?” The king said, “Oh no, I’m 80 years old. Sometimes I mean to put my foot in one place, and it goes someplace else.” So Raṭṭhapāla said, “That’s what it means: ‘The world is swept away. It does not endure.’” This is a lesson in anicca or inconstancy. At the same time, it’s a lesson in aging.

The Canon’s treatment of aging focuses on two issues. One is the loss of physical beauty and the other is the loss of physical strength. In both cases, it teaches how to compensate for these losses by developing mental beauty and mental strength. As Ajaan Lee once taught one of his students who was on her deathbed, physical strength has to deteriorate but mental strength doesn’t have to. It can continue to grow, even as the body is aging and approaching death.

The Canon’s discussion of mental beauty is fairly brief. It focuses on two main qualities. The first type of mental beauty is virtue, which means restraining yourself from causing harm. You do that by observing the five precepts: against killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants. In each case, the precept is against intentionally doing any of these things. So the emphasis is on the state of the mind with which you observe these precepts.

There’s a passage in the Canon saying that virtue makes you beautiful even when you’re old. The Buddha also says that virtue is one of your most valuable possessions. Loss of virtue is more serious than losing your wealth, losing your health, or even losing your relatives.

Now, there’s a challenge in observing these precepts. On the one hand, the ideal virtues are said to be unspotted and untorn—in other words, you never break them—but at the same time, they’re practiced in a way that’s conducive to concentration. This means that you’re strict with yourself in holding consistently to the precepts, especially around the issue of lying, but you’re not obsessed with little actions that might cause you to be worried about little details: “Did I do this wrong? Did I do that wrong?” As you come to know your intentions more clearly, you gain more and more confidence and control over them, and you can feel more at ease about observing the precepts because you can be sure that your intentions are always good. And because you get to know your intentions better as you practice concentration, this is the way concentration and virtue help each other along.

The second quality that the Buddha describes as a form of mental beauty is actually a cluster of three things: composure, forbearance, and equanimity. The challenges in life don’t grow easier as you get old. When Than Lionel was trying to get me to revive my French, he got me a lot of biographies of famous French people, and a lesson I learned from each of them is as you get older, life gets harder. You would think that as you get older, people would be more understanding and kinder. But actually that’s the time when the vultures come in and swoop down on you.

One of the most striking cases was in the biography of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Late in life, Louis took a lover—un amant—much to Richelieu’s disapproval, so the lover started plotting against Richelieu and tried to kill him. Yet in spite of all that Richelieu had done to help Louis throughout his reign, Louis just stepped back and allowed the plot to go ahead. So Richelieu had to take matters into his own hands, even though he was very old and sick. Ultimately, he managed to get rid of the lover and had him sentenced to death, but the whole process almost killed him.

And this was not just the case with Richelieu. It seemed as if, in every biography I got from Than Lionel, the older you got, the worse life became: Mazarin, Clemenceau, everybody. This is a universal pattern that you have to accept and deal with skillfully. You may not have kings and their lovers plotting against you, but as you grow older, you do have to become more dependent on other people, and it’s likely that they’re not always going to do what you want. So you have to be careful to restrain your anger so as not to drive away the people who are trying to help you.

This is the lesson of composure and forbearance: They’re a kind of endurance, in which you have the ability to lash out in anger or to punish or hurt somebody, but you don’t.

As for equanimity: Equanimity gives you the ability to draw strength from the principle of kamma. There are some things coming in from the past that you simply have to accept so that you can focus your energies or attention where they can do the most good: in the present moment.

Because this perspective comes from the Buddha’s awakening, this is where the principles of mental beauty connect with conviction, which is the first factor in developing mental strength.

The Buddha teaches two different lists of mental strengths. Each list has five factors. One consists of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. The second list is conviction, shame, compunction, persistence, and discernment. Put the two lists together, and you have seven factors:

The first three members of this last list—conviction, shame, and compunction—form a set in that they motivate you to focus on developing skillful actions.

Conviction here means conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, and particularly, what his awakening says about the importance of your actions. If you act on skillful intentions, the results will be good. If you act on unskillful intentions, the results will be bad. The Buddha also learned that the results of actions can be very complex in their working out, and often take a lot of time. Which means that you cannot give in to weakness when it seems as if your skillful intentions are not yielding results as quickly as you like. You have to be confident that the good results will come at some point, so you should always focus on what you can do that’s skillful right now, even if it’s simply focusing on your breath.

There was once a woman who was a student of Ajaan Maha Boowa who was diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer, so she asked if she could come to his monastery to meditate for a couple of months to prepare for her death. He told her, “I can help you look after your mind, but I can’t look after your body. You’ll have to find either a doctor or a nurse to come along with you.” She had a friend—a retired female doctor who was 80 years old—who was willing to come along to help look after her. They stayed at the monastery for three months, and Ajaan Maha Boowa gave them a Dhamma talk almost every night they were there. They recorded every talk.

A few months after they returned to Bangkok, the first woman died. The old doctor suddenly found herself with a big pile of more than 80 Dhamma-talk tapes. She wanted to transcribe them to make a book, but because she was old and her eyesight was bad, she felt daunted by the task. When she informed Ajaan Maha Boowa of her plans and her worries, he told her, “See how much goodness you can squeeze out of your body before you have to throw it away.” This sentence gave her the strength to complete the project, and as a result, we now have two huge books of excellent Dhamma talks on the topics of aging, illness, and death. Some of them have been translated into English in the book, Straight from the Heart.

So the basic lesson is, as you get older, don’t focus on what you can’t do, focus on what you can still do that’s good.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the American concept of the bucket list. There’s an idiom for “dying,” which is to “kick the bucket.” I’ve tried to find out where this expression comes from, and although there are a lot of theories, nobody really knows. At any rate, the idea of a bucket list is that you make a list of the things you want to do before you kick the bucket. For most people, their bucket list consists of places they want to go, foods they want to eat, famous paintings they want to see—that kind of thing. But for a Dhamma practitioner, your bucket list should be focused on the good things you want to accomplish before you die. This attitude is based on the conviction that the good that you do never goes to waste.

Shame as a strength has to be explained. In English, there are two types of shame. One is the shame that’s the opposite of pride, and the other is the opposite of shamelessness. When the Buddha talks of shame as a strength, he’s talking about the second one. Now, shame is basically the desire to look good in the eyes of the people you respect. So here the Buddha’s recommending that you try to look good in the eyes of the noble ones.

Now, remember, the noble ones—people who have gained at least the first level of awakening—will hold you to a high standard of behavior, but they do it out of compassion.

There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about various motivations for sticking with the path, and one of them is called taking the world as your governing principle. The way he explains this is that in the world there are people who can read minds, and if they were to read your mind when you’re thinking of giving up, what would they think? In other words, you can ask yourself, “If I were thinking these thoughts, what would Ajaan Chah think about it? What would Ajaan Mun think about it? Or how about Upasikā Kee, what would she think about it?” If you feel ashamed about that kind of thinking, then stop thinking it. This is how shame is a strength: It keeps you on the path.

This connects with what the Buddha said is the most important external factor for your first taste of awakening, which is admirable friendship—in other words, finding admirable people to be friends with and trying to follow their advice and example. Healthy shame is wanting to look good in their eyes.

The next strength is compunction. This is fear of the consequences of doing unskillful actions. In this context, there’s the realization that if you waste your time by doing unskillful things, you’re going to suffer later, so you’re causing yourself suffering by not using your time well. As we’ll discover later, when the Buddha talks about fear of death, most of the fears come from a sense of powerlessness in the face of death. But compunction is fear that comes from sensing your power: You realize that you do have power to make a difference, but you’re afraid of not using it wisely. This connects with the most important internal factor for your first taste of awakening, which the Buddha calls appropriate attention: yoniso manasikāra. You feel the imperative in abandoning unskillful actions and developing skillful ones.

This leads directly to the next strength, which is persistence. Persistence here is not simply brute effort. Instead, it’s the effort to generate the desire to do what is skillful and to abandon what’s not. This means that the effort here is aimed primarily at your ways of motivating yourself to practice.

One way would be through heedfulness: You realize that you can make a difference with your actions, so you really do want to do your best to act in a way that’s skillful. You remind yourself, “If I don’t act skillfully, there’s going to be trouble down the line, but if I do act skillfully, I can avoid that trouble.”

Another way of motivating yourself to act skillfully would be through compassion. Do you want to cause yourself suffering down the line? Do you want to cause other people suffering by doing them harm? If you have compassion for anyone, you say, “No, I’m going to try to be harmless by developing as much skillfulness as I can.”

Now, this will take some energy. There’s no way to relax into awakening.

Sometimes it’s said that the awakened state is peaceful, so straining yourself to get there would be counterproductive, but the Buddha and the ajaans never said that. You’re sitting here and your knees are hurting, your back is hurting, and you say, “Isn’t there an easier way to get to awakening? Can’t I just lie down on the raft to go across the river?” The Buddha says, “No.” The images they use—both the Buddha and the ajaans—to illustrate the way to awakening are of people who are developing skills, people who are struggling against hardships, or people who are going into battle. These images are meant to stir up your energy to practice in spite of the difficulties involved.

The remaining strengths are related to meditation, which we’re going to be discussing in the mornings.

Right now, I’d like to talk about some examples of how to apply these strengths to deal with issues that come directly with aging.

For example, as we get older, we might start getting discouraged about the things we cannot do, the future looks pretty bleak, so we could start dwelling in the past. These can lead to three mental preoccupations that can sap your strength, waste your time, and lead to an unfortunate future, both in this life and after death: nostalgia, regret, and resentment.

In the case of nostalgia, your strengths of conviction, shame, and compunction can help you see that this is not just an innocent pastime, because the mind tends to be pulled in the direction of the topics to which it frequently returns. Nostalgia is thinking about good things that happened in the past but are no longer here—and, actually, no longer there. Even if you went back to the same place where those good things happened, it wouldn’t be the same. Even if you were to find the people with whom you did enjoyable things in the past, they wouldn’t be the same people. Think about the story I told this afternoon about the monk and the nun who wanted to get married again and it just didn’t work out. Even if you could somehow regain your lost pleasures, you would lose them again and again and miss them again. Remember what Ajaan Fuang said about the pleasures you miss: If you get them again, you’re going to lose them again, so why bother?

As for regret, you have to realize that past kamma cannot be undone by regret. There’s a line of thought that we may have picked up from our upbringing, which is that if we show a lot of regret, then we’ll be freed from punishment. You’ve seen dogs do this, right? They pee on your carpet and they know that they did wrong, so when you come home, they just lie on their back to show that they’re really, really sorry so that you won’t beat them. Sometimes people think like that, too. But that’s not the best way to deal with regrets for past bad actions. According to the Buddha, the best response is to acknowledge the mistake and then to resolve not to repeat it: “I will not pee on the carpet ever again.”

Then you develop the brahmavihāras: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people you harmed, and then goodwill for all beings. By having goodwill for yourself, you stop beating yourself up over your past mistakes. After all, when you beat yourself up, after a while you get tired of doing that, and you say, “Well, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.” Then you could easily be tempted to make the mistake again. So, it’s best to have goodwill for yourself, and then for the people you harmed, and then for everyone else. When goodwill gets established in the mind, it’ll help prevent you from making that mistake again.

As for protecting yourself from the results of past bad kamma, the Buddha said that you can actually weaken the results of past bad kamma by your state of mind in the present moment. The best things to do to improve your state of mind here and now are to develop the brahmavihāras and to train your mind in concentration and discernment so that it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain.

Sometimes you hear people say, “Stay away from concentration. It’s dangerous. It’s very pleasant, and you might get attached or addicted to the pleasure.” But if you really develop concentration as a skill, you find that it involves training the mind so that it’s not overwhelmed by the pleasure of concentration.

You’ve probably seen this happen: You’re focusing on the breath, and the breath is really comfortable, so you drop the breath and focus just on the pleasure, and then you blur out. To stay concentrated, you have to foster and maintain the pleasure, but you can’t be focused on the pleasure. To maintain the foundation for the pleasure, you have to stay focused on the breath. In this way, you can get into deeper states of concentration, the mind has experiences of pleasure and equanimity, but it’s not overcome by them.

As for pain, you’re learning to stay focused on the body even though there is pain there, and then you learn how to analyze the pain, which is a topic we’ll talk about tomorrow.

If you have this ability to stay with pleasure and not be overcome by it, to stay with the pain and not be overcome by it, then when the results of past bad kamma come, they don’t overcome your mind, even when you’re not in concentration.

As for resentment, this is basically ill will toward the people who have wronged you. This counts as a mental hindrance, which is a topic that we’ll cover in a few days.

The Buddha’s basic message on aging is that it’s an early warning sign of problems that will get heavier as you grow older and approach death. Now, he does encourage a style of living in which you try to keep yourself as physically strong and healthy as possible. His examples would be doing a lot of walking, as a way of keeping up your strength, and eating a healthy diet, but you do these things with the understanding that inevitably the body will start getting weaker as it gets older no matter what you do. You may feel betrayed by the body, in that you’ve done everything you can to delay aging—Americans are especially obsessed with this—but the body owes you nothing. After all, it didn’t sign a contract with you. You just moved in and you seized possession of it without asking if it was willing to submit to your terms. So don’t feel betrayed by it when it starts getting weak.

I knew a Dhamma teacher in America who was very much involved in the pursuit of health for most of his life. He was one of the founders of IMS, the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. In the early days, when they would have their three-month retreats at IMS, they would end the retreat with humorous skits to lighten the mood of the retreatants. So in one of the skits, this particular teacher hops in a car and goes to Boston. He goes to see an acupuncturist, he goes to a masseur, he goes to have his colon cleaned out, he visits several other naturopathic doctors, and he’s gone for the entire day.

Now, there was someone else on the retreat who was famous for the fact that she would walk very slowly during walking meditation. So in the skit, at the same time that the first teacher hops in the car, she starts walking across the room. When he comes back after many hours in Boston, she arrives at the other end of the room.

Well, the first teacher, in his later years, suffered a stroke. He told me that, when the stroke first hit, his first thought was, “I did all of this for my body, and now it’s betrayed me.” That’s an attitude you have to drop.

Instead, you should focus on developing your mental beauty and strength, which was what he eventually was able to do. These qualities of virtue, composure, forbearance, and equanimity; conviction, shame, compunction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment will carry you through whatever happens with the body and will continue to support you after you and the body part ways.

The message here is that you don’t have to just accept the suffering that comes with aging, and you don’t accept the unskillful mental states that come as your strength and beauty fade. You can develop the inner strength and beauty that will minimize the suffering and prepare you for the bigger challenges that lie ahead.