Mindfulness of Breathing: Mental Qualities (2)
Yesterday, we talked about the first two steps in the fourth tetrad of breath meditation, the tetrad dealing with dhammas, or mental qualities. We discussed how this tetrad deals with ways of putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, this tetrad explores in more detail the last step in the third tetrad of breath meditation: releasing the mind.
The first step in this tetrad is breathing in and out contemplating inconstancy. We discussed how this step led to the next step—contemplating dispassion—by describing the Buddha’s five intermediary steps for getting to dispassion: focusing on the origination of whatever the mind is clinging to, focusing on its passing away, focusing on its allure, focusing on its drawbacks, and then finally coming to a value judgment: that the allure is not worth the drawbacks. That judgment then leads to dispassion, which is the escape from whatever it was that you were clinging to. Remember, in the Buddha’s analysis, we’re trapped by the things we cling to, but it’s not the case that they’re trapping us. Our own act of clinging is what traps us. So when we let go, we’re freed.
In fact, it turns out that you were actually fabricating the things you were clinging to, and you were fabricating them because you had passion—either for the things you were creating, or for the act of fashioning. It’s because of this fact that contemplating dispassion then leads to the next step in this fourth tetrad, contemplating cessation.
How does dispassion lead to cessation? To make a comparison with watching TV, you thought you were just watching a particular show, but now you realize that you’ve actually been creating the show yourself. You’ve been backstage, directing the actors, playing all the different roles, and doing all the camera work and stage work behind the scenes. On top of that, you now realize, “This is a lousy show. The lines are bad; the acting is bad. Why do I continue creating this show?” If you were just watching the show, the fact that you lose interest and turn off the TV wouldn’t stop the show. It would keep running without you. But because you’re creating the show and you lose interest, the show will have to stop when you see no reason to continue with it.
Or it’s like fixing food. You’ve been eating horrible American food, and for a long time you’ve been complaining about it. But now you realize, “I’ve been the one fixing the food all along, and I’ve been putting energy into this that I wasn’t aware of. There must be something better.” That’s when you let go. You stop fixing the food; the food ceases.
It’s at this point that you realize that what the Buddha taught about the power of the mind is true: It really is responsible for your experience of the senses. When it stops fabricating in the present moment, all experience of the senses falls away. What remains is an experience of the deathless, something totally unfabricated. You know that it isn’t originated, because you did nothing to shape it or make it happen. It’s outside of time and space, so no change can touch it. Even your first glimpse of this, at the moment of stream-entry, is really amazing.
Then, the Buddha says, after the cessation, the final step in the fourth tetrad is to train yourself to breathe in and out focused on relinquishment or letting go. You let go not only of the defilements you’ve been analyzing, but also of all the effort you’ve been putting into analyzing them. In other words, you let go of your attachment both to the defilements and to the path of practice—the concentration and discernment—that put an end to those defilements.
On an everyday level, as you’re trying to gain release from ordinary defilements in the early stages of the meditation, this is what happens: You’ve been using your tools—your mindfulness and your powers of analysis—to deal with a particular problem. Once that problem is solved, you put down your tools and get back to the topic of your concentration. When you move on to another problem, you have to pick the tools up again.
But when you’ve cleared away all the obstacles to concentration, you can start focusing on your attachment even to concentration and discernment, seeing that that attachment, too, is a problem, because concentration and discernment are fabrications. Once you can take that attachment apart, then you put all the tools of the path down for good. You let go even of your acts of discernment.
Take, for instance, the phrase, “All phenomena are not-self.” As you’ve been developing dispassion, you use that phrase to see the drawbacks of whatever you’ve been clinging to. When you use it to let go of everything else. But when it has completed its work, then you realize that the view that all phenomena are not-self is a phenomenon, too. When you gain this sort of reflective insight at this stage in the practice, that’s when you let go of all the factors of the path. That’s the ultimate letting go.
The word the Buddha uses for this step, paṭinissago, means not only letting go, but also giving back. You’ve been holding on to these things all along as your tools, but now you’re giving them back to nature with the thought, “Okay, nature, you can have them, I don’t need them anymore.” Because at that point, you’ve found something better. As the Buddha said, you’ve found the clear knowing that sees that there is something deathless. When you let go of everything, you’re released into that deathless dimension.
That briefly covers the fourth tetrad in the Buddha’s breath meditation instructions.
To summarize the sixteen steps in the Buddha’s instructions: Their purpose is to develop insight and tranquility at the same time. You develop insight by looking at things in terms of fabrication, and tranquility by calming fabrication. The Buddha mentions calming bodily fabrication and calming mental fabrication. He doesn’t mention verbal fabrication, but still, all the instructions in the breath meditation, where you say to yourself, “I will now breathe in doing this, I will now breathe in doing that”: That’s verbal fabrication. The Buddha talks in terms of fabrication because he wants you to understand how much the mind is actually participating in fashioning your experience, even with things as basic as the breath. That’s the insight part. Then the calming of fabrications is the aspect of the practice related to tranquility. The reason he doesn’t tell you to calm verbal fabrications is because there are times when you can calm them, and other times when you have to start using them again, talking to yourself as you reflect on your practice and make adjustments in it all along the way.
As you practice these steps, you’re also fulfilling the instructions for the establishing of mindfulness and developing all seven factors for awakening.
It’s in this way that the sixteen steps are a complete practice. As you practice them all together, as Ajaan Lee expresses it, you’re practicing four in one. As he points out, when you’re focused on the breath properly, you’ve got the tetrad related to the breath, you’ve got the tetrad related to feelings, the tetrad related to the mind, and the tetrad related to dhammas, all right there.
And it’s not just Ajaan Lee who says this. When the Buddha himself recommends focusing on the different frames of reference for the establishing of mindfulness as they relate to mindfulness of breathing, he always says that you’re focused on the breath even as you’re engaged with the feelings associated with the breath and the mind states associated with the breath. As for the activity of putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—which is the function of establishing mindfulness in terms of dhammas in and of themselves—that’s what keeps you from leaving your focus on the breath.
These activities are all centered right here. When everything is focused here, you get to see clearly what the mind is doing right here. That’s when you can begin to see its power. You can train it to become more skillful and, eventually, to stop creating suffering. And because the mind acting in the present was the source of the suffering to begin with, when you’ve taken care of the mind right here and now, there will be no more suffering coming from anywhere to weigh it down.
Even when death comes—especially when death comes—the insights you’ve gained into the mind’s three types of fabrication will allow you to dismantle any unskillful fabrications that would cause you to suffer at that point—such as the mind’s narratives about your life and fear of death. These insights can also put you into a position where you can detect and let go of all fabrications at that point. This is why, even though the breath will leave you at death, the fact that you’ve been doing breath meditation will give you solid support throughout.
And just because you’re a layperson doesn’t mean that you can’t attain full unbinding at the moment of death. There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha tells Mahānāma, one of his cousins who was a layperson, that a layperson can attain a level release at the moment of death that is in no way inferior to the release of a monk who’s fully released.
So take heart.
