Mindfulness of Breathing: Mental Qualities (1)

This morning we’ll begin our discussion of the fourth tetrad in the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness of breathing: the four steps dealing with mental qualities, or dhammas.

Some people have asked: What’s the difference between this tetrad and the third, which deals with the mind as its frame of reference?

There are two ways of answering that question. The first has to do with the image of the committee of the mind. If you see the mind as having lots of voices, with lots of different opinions, you might think of “mind” as a frame of reference concerned with the mind as a whole—the times when the committee has come to an agreement—whereas “mental qualities” refer to the individual members of the committee. In particular, when you’re focusing on this tetrad, your purpose is to get rid of specific members that obstruct mindfulness and concentration, and to encourage members that help the mind to settle down.

This connects directly with the second way of answering the question. Remember the Buddha’s basic formula for establishing mindfulness: “keeping focused on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” This formula describes two activities: keeping focused on the topic of your concentration, and putting aside any thoughts related to the world that would pull you away from that focus. The first three tetrads, for the most part, are concerned with the first activity, maintaining focus: keeping the breath, the comfortable feelings associated with the breath, and your awareness of the breath all together, filling your sense of the body.

The fourth tetrad is more concerned with the second activity: putting aside thoughts related to the world. In this way, it connects directly with the last step in the third tetrad. If you remember, that step is to breathe in and out releasing the mind. This fourth tetrad goes into the details of how to go about releasing the mind, first from any concerns about the world that would destroy the focus of your concentration, and then ultimately from any thoughts around the world of your concentration itself. In this way, the fourth tetrad first guards your concentration, and then guards your mind from getting stuck on concentration or even stuck on discernment. That’s how it brings total release.

The steps in the fourth tetrad are these:

First, as you breathe in and out, you focus on inconstancy, anicca, which would also include dukkha and anattā, stress and not-self. Second, you breathe in and out focusing on dispassion. Third, you breathe in and out focusing on cessation, and fourth, you breathe in and out focusing on letting go.

There’s a lot to say about these steps, so this morning we’ll discuss the first two, and save the last two for tomorrow.

So. Step one: focusing on inconstancy. The Pāli term here, anicca, is often translated as “impermanent,” but that’s not quite accurate. Anicca is the opposite of nicca, which means constant, as in an activity that constantly takes place or reliably happens. It’s possible to know that something is impermanent—like, say, the Alps—but to feel confident that they’re reliable enough so that you can visit them without too much fear that they will fall on you. But when you see that a mountain is constantly subject to earthquakes, you might decide that it’s too dangerous to visit.

So when you’re focusing on inconstancy, you’re trying to see how you can’t really rely on the things where you usually look to find your happiness. And it’s important that you understand this focus: To see how things in general—such as the breath—are changing all the time doesn’t have much of an impact on the mind. It’s like seeing houses sliding down a hill. As long as they’re not your houses, you may feel sympathy for the people who live in those houses, but it’s easy to accept that this is part of life: Things are sliding down hills all the time.

But if your own house slides down a hill, it has a much deeper impact on your mind. In the same way, when you’re focusing on inconstancy in a way that gives rise in a meaningful way to the next step, focusing on dispassion, you have to be investigating places that mean a lot to you, where you’ve looked for happiness in the past. Only then will this reflection have an impact on the mind.

In following the first two steps, it’s not the case that you can go straight from focusing on anicca to focusing on dispassion. In other words, you can’t simply say to yourself, “Gee, this body of mine is inconstant. It changes, so I’m just going to abandon attachment to it.” That doesn’t work. It’s like saying, “Food is unreliable. Every time I eat, I get hungry again, so I might as well just stop eating.” If you did that, you wouldn’t last very long. You’d either starve to death or start eating again. There are actually extra steps in between to answer the argument, “Okay, this may be inconstant, but why should I let it go?”

This is where we have to look elsewhere in the Canon to see what those extra steps might be. And we find passages where the Buddha describes five steps in the process. First, you look for origination. In other words, when anger, say, arises, you look to see what’s causing it. Now, the word “origination” has two aspects that make it different from simple “arising.” The first aspect is that you’re looking to see what’s causing the appearance of whatever it is. In other words, you’re not just watching things appear. You’re looking to see what’s making them appear. And second, when the Buddha talks about origination, almost invariably he’s talking about causes coming from within your own mind. So you look to see, “What’s the mind doing that’s causing this to arise?”

The second step is to watch that mind state passing away. Here the question is: “What’s the mind doing when it passes away? What changed in my mind?” Then watch out to see if the mind picks the anger up again.

These first two steps counteract a common impression that a particular instance of desire or anger that has come into the mind is there 24/7 when it’s actually not. It comes and it goes, but then you pick it up again. The picking it up again: That’s the problem.

You can see this clearly with anger. When anger flares up in the mind, it has a physical component: Your breath changes and hormones are released into the blood. The mind, however, can sustain a thought of anger for only a brief while, and then it fades. Yet the hormones are still in the blood, speeding up your heart rate, affecting your breath, and creating tension in your chest, your stomach, or your hands. You notice that, and you read it as a sign that you’re still angry. So you pick the anger up again. It seems natural, but if you don’t want to be a slave to your anger, you have to question that tendency. You don’t really have to pick it up again. You could simply let the hormones run their course and then fade away. So why do you want to pick the anger up again? What’s the allure?

That’s the third step: After you’ve been looking for the origination and the passing away, you look for the allure. What’s the attraction of that mind state? What makes you feel you want to go with it or should go with it? Often you find that even though there are aspects of anger that you don’t really like, there is a part of the mind that likes anger. It may feel that anger liberates you from some social constraints, so that you can speak and act as you like without caring about the consequences. Or there are times when you somehow feel obligated to be loyal to your anger. You might feel that if you dropped the anger, you’d be admitting that you were a coward, or that you were wrong to be angry in the first place. Or you might feel that you should remain true to your feelings in general.

Whatever the allure, you have to look carefully for it and admit it to yourself when you see it in action. Sometimes it’s hard to admit to yourself that you like your defilements, but this is where honesty is important. Otherwise, if you don’t understand the appeal of a particular defilement, you’ll never get past it.

Then, in the fourth step, you observe the drawbacks of that defilement. “If I follow through with this, what are the drawbacks going to be? If I keep putting energy into maintaining this feeling, how am I going to act? And even if I don’t act on it, what is it going to do to my mind if I’m constantly going back to this particular type of greed, aversion, delusion?” The Buddha says you’re bending the mind in the direction of those defilements. Nowadays, we’d say you’re putting ruts in the mind. As soon as you get near that issue again, you just go right into the rut and get carried away wherever the rut will lead you.

Another way of looking at the drawbacks of that defilement is to see that whatever satisfaction or benefit it may give you is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. It requires a lot of energy to keep the defilement going, but then the results don’t give any real, lasting satisfaction.

Once you’re clear about the drawbacks, then you can compare them with the allure. When you can see, “I’m putting all this effort and energy into this, and I’m not getting the payback that I want. I’m creating stress and suffering but getting no real satisfaction to compensate for the amount of energy I’m putting into it”: That’s when you arrive at a value judgment—This isn’t worth the energy that goes into fabricating it. With that judgment, you develop dispassion for the act of fabricating it any further. You let it go. It’s like seeing that you’re making an investment that’s actually costing more than it repays, so you withdraw your funds. Or you can compare it to a game you used to play as a child: When you see no more challenge or interest in playing the game, you outgrow it. As the Thai ajaans say, you sober up. When you can say, “I’ve had enough of this,” that’s dispassion, which is the escape from that mind state.

So that’s how you go from contemplating inconstancy to contemplating dispassion—the fifth step in this five-step process, and the second step in the fourth tetrad of breath meditation: You train yourself to breathe in and out focused on dispassion.

We’ll continue with the remaining two steps in this tetrad tomorrow morning.