A Tradition of Ingenuity
When I was in Thailand recently, I gave a Dhamma talk on some of Ajaan Fuang’s teachings and the two words that he stressed the most, which were “be observant” as you meditate and as you go through the day, and “use your ingenuity.” The Thai word for ingenuity is patiphaan. It’s from the Pali, patibhana. This is an important part of working with the breath, because you’ve got different energies in the body, and you can do lots of different things with the breath energies, good or bad. If you find that the energy is bad, you have to think of some ways of dealing with it.
One of the things we learn from Ajaan Lee’s books and Dhamma talks is that he didn’t stick with one paradigm for how the breath should flow in the body. He had lots of different ways of conceiving it. Where did he get them? Ajaan Fuang told the story of how Ajaan Lee, when in India, had observed the different rishis and sadhus standing out in the sun for hours on one leg or lying on beds of nails. He asked himself, “How did they do that?”
His way of getting the answer was, of course, to look into his own meditation, and he came up with the answer that they were playing with their breath. This looked like a good skill to master, so he worked on it on his own. He may have gotten some ideas from what he saw of what they were doing, but he kept coming up with new ways in later years, too, because his body kept presenting him with new problems. It presented him with a heart attack one time. He had to figure out how to use the breath to work with that, because he was out in the forest, days away from any help. That’s where we got Method Two. But the important thing is that he gives the basic principles and also shows ways of playing with them.
After I gave the talk, one of the Western monks who was there, who understood Thai well and had been in Thailand a number of years, came up and said that in all of his years of being in Thailand, he’d never heard anybody use the word “ingenuity” in a Dhamma talk. That’s kind of scary, because when you’re off meditating on your own, there can’t be somebody holding your hand all the time, telling you what to do. If there’s a problem, you’ve got to figure it out. If an approach you’ve tried in the past doesn’t work, you’ve got to figure out something new. This requires ingenuity. This has long been a principle in the forest tradition.
So that’s something to be encouraged: using your ingenuity. Maybe the ajaans nowadays are afraid that their students will go a little bit too far afield. They want to make sure that they’re first doing as they’re told. That is a part of the practice. We’ve got the Vinaya; we’ve got the rules. You don’t use your ingenuity to figure out ways of circumventing the rules. But when it comes to looking into your mind, you’ve got to learn how to think for yourself, to turn your ideas inside and out. As Ajaan Lee would say, “When you have an insight, ask yourself: To what extent is the opposite true?” He gives recommendations for having the breath flow down the spine, but there are Dhamma talks where he has it flowing up, and you have to figure out: Is this the right time for it to go up or to go down?
When I was translating Keeping the Breath in Mind, I found that there were various editions and that Ajaan Lee talked about the breath energy in the different editions in different ways. In one edition, he talked about the breath outside the body, like a cocoon around the body, which he didn’t mention in later editions. It’s a shame that he left that explanation out, because it provides an alternative for times when the breath energy inside the body seems to be a mess and nothing seems to work. You can think about it flowing around outside, think of the body as having an aura of breath energy, a cocoon of breath energy around it, and ask yourself: Where does it feel tangled? What could you do to straighten it out?
This principle of ingenuity doesn’t apply only to Ajaan Lee or Ajaan Fuang. We notice it in the Ajaan Chah and Ajaan Maha Boowa as well. They don’t use the word “ingenuity” that much, but they certainly exemplify it: Ajaan Chah in all his many similes, Ajaan Maha Boowa in the questions he asks, say, around pain or other issues that come up in the mind. He’s very good at framing unusual questions, getting at the issue of the relationship between the pain and the mind and the body in different ways, because, as he saw, you can approach pain in one way in one day and get results, and then you try that same approach the next day and you don’t get results. After all, pain can be related to different things in the mind.
Look at dependent co-arising and you see that feeling appears in the list of factors in lots of different places, lots of different contexts. In some cases, it’s included with the different kinds of fabrication—bodily, verbal, mental. So maybe the way you’re breathing has something to do with the problem of the pain. Maybe the way you’re talking to yourself has something to do with the problem, or maybe it’s the perceptions you’re holding in mind.
Feeling also appears in name and form. There it’s associated with attention, intention, perception, and contact. What are you paying attention to when you’re suffering from a physical pain? Could you change that? Pay attention to something else? Pay attention in a different way? What are your intentions around the pain, and what intentions do you think the pain has toward you? That, again, is an issue of perception. Maybe the problem lies in how these mental activities interact and are in contact with one another. So the problem of pain, from one day to the next, may be a different problem, which means you’ve got to use your ingenuity in coming up with a new approach. These things are exemplified in the teachings of the ajaans, even if they don’t talk about it.
And you find it in the Buddha’s teachings. After all, the word patibhana is a Pali term and it does appear in the Canon. It’s not in any of the standard lists, except for one very important one. The Buddha is talking about the qualities you need to develop, the things you have to be sensitive to, to have all-around discernment. One of them is having a sense of yourself. What are your strengths right now in the practice? What are your weaknesses?
You measure yourself in terms of six qualities, starting with conviction. How is your conviction? Is your conviction strong or is it weak right now? Are you convinced of the Buddha’s awakening, or are you convinced of other teachings that you’ve picked up here and there? Are you convinced that you can follow what the Buddha taught?
Then there’s the question of virtue. How meticulous are you about your precepts?
And how about your generosity? Are you truly generous with the things you have? And not just things: Are you generous with your knowledge? Are you generous with your time? Are you generous with your forgiveness?
Then there’s learning. How much do you know about the Dhamma? The Buddha said you want to take what’s in the suttas and in the Vinaya as your standard for judging what’s Dhamma. So it’s good to have a good working knowledge of those texts. You may think about the Thai ajaans not knowing much about the suttas, and in some cases that’s true, but they certainly knew a lot about the Vinaya, that’s for sure. And actually, the more you read in the suttas, the more you see that the analogies that Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Chah would use were often rooted in something in the suttas, such as Ajaan Lee’s simile of the cook. In the Canon, it simply says that the wise cook knows how to read what his master likes. Ajaan Lee adds that a good cook also knows how to vary her offerings.
It’s good to have some knowledge of the Dhamma and Vinaya so that you can compare your insights, when they come up, against that knowledge, because that’s one of the tests. Say you have a vision of a deva or the Buddha coming to talk to you. Whether it really is a deva or really is the Buddha is not the real issue. The real issue is, what are they saying? And does it fit in with the Dhamma? The more you know of the suttas, the more you know of the Vinaya, the better chance you have of figuring out if what they say is in line with the Dhamma or not. And even when it’s passed those tests, the next question is, does it really work? You have to put it to the test in your actions and learn to be circumspect in judging the results.
This is where the next quality comes in, which is discernment. How clearly do you see what’s going on in your own body and mind? How clearly do you see your own actions? And in particular, how clearly do you see where you’re causing suffering and what you can do to stop?
Then there’s the sixth quality, which is ingenuity. How good are you at figuring things out? A lot of this has to do with figuring out what’s a good analogy for framing the issue of what’s going on in your body and mind right now. There’s a whole body of thought around the idea that our thinking, even though we may use abstract terms, is never really abstract. There are hidden metaphors behind the way our language shapes things, even in the abstractions. You want to be sensitive about what metaphors you’re applying unconsciously to your practice. Are you applying the right metaphors?
This is why the Buddha would engage in cross-questioning. Someone would ask him a question, and he wanted to make sure that the person had the right paradigm for understanding the answer—as when he was asked if he’d ever say anything unpleasant. It was a trick question. A prince had been put up to asking the question by some Niganthas, with the idea that if the Buddha said yes, he would say things that were unpleasant, then the retort could be, “Then what’s the difference between you and ordinary people down in the market?” If he said he never would say anything unpleasant, they had him on record for saying things about Devadatta that Devadatta didn’t like—such as the fact that Devadatta was going to go to hell for having caused a split in the Sangha.
So the prince posed the question to the Buddha, and the Buddha said, “There’s no categorical answer to that.” But before he explained how he would determine when to say something pleasant and when to say something unpleasant, he asked the prince, “Suppose your baby son got a sharp object in his mouth, what would you do?” The prince said, “I’d hold his head in one hand, and with my other hand use a finger to get the sharp object out, even if it meant drawing blood. Why? Because I have compassion for the child.” The Buddha said, “In the same way, there are times when you have to say something harsh out of compassion.” Then, having given the paradigm, he gave the answer.
So when we read the similes in the Buddha’s teachings and teachings of the ajaans, they’re not just there for decoration; they’re there to help us understand, to give us the right pattern for thinking. It was the Buddha’s ingenuity that made it possible to see what precisely was the appropriate analogy in any given case.
There’s a sutta where a monk has been asked by a prince, who was a relative of his, if making a wish for results makes a difference in the practice. The monk answered, “Whether you wish for results or don’t wish for results, if you do the practice correctly, you’re going to get results. If you don’t do it correctly, you’re not going to get results, no matter how much you wish for the results.” The prince decided that was a reasonable answer and shared some of his food with the monk.
The monk then went to see the Buddha, and the Buddha said, “What you said was right.” Then the Buddha went on to give a whole series of analogies: If you want to get milk out of a cow, if you’re twisting the horn, no matter how much you want the milk, you’re not going to get the milk. If you pull on the udder, you get the milk. Even if you don’t wish for milk, but if you happen to pull on the udder, you’re going to get milk.
He went down through a whole series of analogies like this. Then he said to the monk, “If you had given these analogies, then the prince would have been even more impressed with your answer.” The monk replied, “How could those analogies have occurred to me? They’re your ingenuity.” It’s interesting, the verb he used there. They actually had a verb for ingenuity: “ingenuitize.” The active part of the verb is not what your mind does, it’s what the idea does: The idea comes to you. So this is part of what ingenuity means: You leave your mind open to new ideas coming in. Where they come from doesn’t really matter. The question is, are they appropriate?
So it’s good to leave your mind open for new possibilities, because after all, we suffer because of our limited range of what we think is possible. We have to open our minds and say, “Yes, true happiness is possible. It is possible for someone like the Buddha to gain awakening and to be able to teach the way to others. I’m one of those others, so it’s possible for me to gain awakening, too” That’s what conviction is all about.
Think of the Dhamma as opening possibilities in your heart and mind that weren’t there before: things that you had closed off without having even thought about it. Then try to develop this quality of ingenuity in yourself.
The Buddha encourages it in his meditation instructions. You read the sixteen steps, and they’re like a set of sixteen riddles. They start with two steps: discerning short breathing, discerning long breathing. What does it mean, to “discern”? Do you simply watch willy-nilly to see what the breath does on its own, or do you try to explore cause and effect? When the Buddha talks about discernment being penetrative, it’s more than just watching things arising and passing away. It’s understanding cause and effect. So does it mean that you experiment with the breath to see what long breathing does for you and what short breathing does for you, and you decide which is better? That’s one of the ways in which you can understand discernment. Then the question is, which way of understanding is better? Which gets better results?
Then there’s the question of training yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. What does that do? And how do you do that? He also talks about breathing in sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure. What if you don’t feel any rapture, you don’t feel any pleasure, what do you do? Where are the potentials for those things, and how do you develop them? We know that when rapture and pleasure do come you’re supposed to spread them through the body. How do you do that? Ajaan Lee gives some answers with his analysis of the breath energies. That’s something to fill in some of the blanks. But there are still a lot of blanks in the steps he gives.
The same with the factors for awakening: The Buddha says there are potentials in the body for calm and concentration, there’s a potential for energy, and you should pay appropriate attention to those potentials to develop them. Where are those potentials? He leaves it to you to find out. In other words, he’s encouraging you to explore.
We’re not here just copying and pasting the Buddha’s discernment into our minds. He’s giving us questions to ask and telling us which sorts of questions don’t get results, which sorts of questions do get results. But it’s up to us to formulate the questions for ourselves so that we can find useful answers. That’s where the ingenuity comes in.
So think of this as a tradition of ingenuity, a tradition in the sense that it directs you to ask questions, and it gives you an idea of what some of the possibilities are that following this path can do. Then it encourages you to follow the Buddha’s example in being ingenious in figuring out how to get past problems. We have the example of the tradition, that all the problems in the mind that could get in the way of awakening have been solved by somebody, someplace. So take that as encouragement. That’s a possibility you should be open to. See what that kind of openness does for your mind.
