At the Tip of Your Nose

If feelings of pain or discomfort arise while you’re sitting in meditation, examine them to see what they come from. Don’t let yourself be pained or upset by them. If there are parts of the body that won’t go as you’d like them to, don’t worry about them. Let them be—because your body is the same as every other body, human or animal, throughout the world: It’s inconstant, stressful, and can’t be forced. So stay with whatever part does go as you’d like it to, and keep it comfortable.

The body is like a tree: No tree is entirely perfect. At any one time it’ll have new leaves and old leaves, green leaves and yellow, fresh leaves and dry. The dry leaves will fall away first, while those that are fresh will slowly dry out and fall away later. Some of the branches are long, some thick, and some small. The fruits aren’t evenly distributed. The human body isn’t really much different from this. Pleasure and pain aren’t evenly distributed. The parts that ache and those that are comfortable are randomly mixed. You can’t rely on it. So do your best to keep the comfortable parts comfortable. Don’t worry about the parts that you can’t make comfortable.

It’s like going into a house where the floorboards are beginning to rot: If you want to sit down, don’t choose a rotten spot. Choose a spot where the boards are still sound. In other words, the heart needn’t concern itself with things that can’t be controlled.

You can compare the body to a mango: If a mango has a rotten or a wormy spot, take a knife and cut it out. Eat just the good part remaining. If you’re foolish enough to eat the wormy part, you’re in for trouble. Your body is the same, and not just the body—the mind, too, doesn’t always go as you’d like it to. Sometimes it’s in a good mood, sometimes it’s not. This is where you have to use as much thought and evaluation as possible.

Directed thought and evaluation are like doing a job. The job here is concentration: centering the mind. Focus the mind on a single object and then, giving it your full attention, examine and reflect on it. If you use a meager amount of thought and evaluation, your concentration will give meager results. If you do a crude job, you’ll get crude results. If you do a fine job, you’ll get fine results. Crude results aren’t worth much. Fine results are of high quality and are useful in all sorts of ways—like atomic radiation, which is so fine that it can penetrate even mountains. Crude things are of low quality and hard to use. Sometimes you can soak them in water all day long and they still don’t soften up. But as for fine things, all they need is a little dampness in the air and they dissolve.

So it is with the quality of your concentration. If your thinking and evaluation are subtle, thorough, and circumspect, your ‘concentration work’ will result in more and more stillness of mind. If your thinking and evaluation are slipshod, you won’t get much stillness. Your body will ache, and you’ll feel restless and irritable. Once the mind can become very still, though, the body will be comfortable and at ease. Your heart will feel open and clear. Pains will disappear. The elements of the body will feel normal: The warmth in your body will be just right, neither too hot nor too cold. As soon as your work is finished, it’ll result in the highest form of happiness and ease: nibbāna—unbinding. But as long as you still have work to do, your heart won’t get its full measure of peace. Wherever you go, there will always be something nagging at the back of your mind. You won’t be able to get away, for you’ll have to come back and work at your job again until it’s finished.

This is why the Buddha taught,

which means, “A job not left unfinished: That’s the highest blessing.”

Once your work is done, you can go wherever you want with ease, without any worries or cares before you or behind you.

If you haven’t finished your job, it’s because (1) you haven’t set your mind on it; and (2) you haven’t actually done the work. You’ve shirked your duties and played truant. But if you really set your mind on doing the job, there’s no doubt but that you’ll finish it.

Once you’ve realized that the body is inconstant, stressful, and can’t be forced, you shouldn’t let your mind get upset or excited by it. Keep your mind normal, on an even keel. ‘Inconstant’ means that it changes. ‘Stressful’ doesn’t refer solely to aches and pains. It refers to pleasure as well—because pleasure is inconstant and undependable. A little pleasure can turn into a lot of pleasure, or into pain. Pain can turn back into pleasure, and so on. (If we had nothing but pain we would die.) So we shouldn’t be all that concerned about pleasure and pain. Think of the body as having two parts, like the mango. If you focus your attention on the comfortable part, your mind can be at peace. Let the pains be in the other part. Once you have an object of meditation, you have a comfortable place for your mind to stay. You don’t have to dwell on your pains. You have a comfortable house to live in: Why go sleep in the dirt?

It’s not the case that we have nothing but pain in the same place all the time. Sometimes our back aches, sometimes our leg hurts, sometimes the pain moves from the leg to ache in the small of the back. Sometimes it hurts today but disappears tomorrow. Or sometimes it disappears but then it comes back to hurt us again. That’s because there’s nothing certain or stable about it. So class the bad parts as bad kamma, and the good parts as merit, and then ask yourself, “Do you want bad kamma or merit?” If you don’t like bad kamma, let it go to one side. If you like merit, stay with the parts that feel comfortable.

When you can do this, suffering will disappear. Your merit will keep on developing until all five aggregates will feel pleasant. The form of your body will feel comfortable, feeling will feel comfortable, perception will feel comfortable, fabrications will feel comfortable, consciousness will feel comfortable. When these five kinds of comfort arise, the heart will lie back eating nothing but the goodness and merit of what’s called rapture and calm. This is what comes from dhamma-vicaya, or exploring the Dhamma of the present.

When we become acquainted with what’s going on in ourselves in this way, we can keep on making an effort within our goodness or old merit, and our heart will experience nothing but the ease and refreshment of rapture. As rapture grows greater and greater, we’ll feel totally full. When we’re full, we’ll stop feeling hungry, stop feeling tired, stop feeling hot or cold. We can live anywhere at all and be at our ease. The energy of our body and the energy of our mind will grow strong and gain power. We’ll be able to sit for five hours without any aches or pains.

When the heart is full like this, it can rest—but this doesn’t mean that it dozes off. “Resting” here means that it grows quiet as it enters into concentration with a sense of ease and comfort, with nothing to disturb it. This kind of resting is called vihāra-dhamma, a home for the mind, as the mind enters into jhāna. It’s like sitting up in a bright, wide-open place where you can see everything clearly, both near and far. If you sit down in a dark place, you can’t see anything at all. In other words, the heart is obscured with the power of the hindrances. If you sit in a bright, wide-open place, the hindrances can’t sneak up and oppress the mind. Resting like this is resting with your eyes open—i.e., you’re aware with every in-and-out breath. Your awareness of things both within and without stays constant, seeing things from every side and into every corner—and yet the mind remains steady and still. The body is quiet. The mind is quiet. This is called kāya-passaddhi, physical calm, and citta-passaddhi, mental calm.

Tranquility meditation (samatha) is a mind snug in a single preoccupation. It doesn’t establish contact with anything else; it keeps itself cleansed of outside preoccupations. Insight meditation (vipassanā) is when the mind lets go of all preoccupations in a state of all-around mindfulness and alertness. When tranquility imbued with insight arises in the mind, five faculties arise and become dominant all at once: (1) Saddhindrīya: Your conviction becomes solid and strong. Whatever anyone else may say, good or bad, your mind isn’t affected. (2) Viriyindrīya: Your persistence becomes resilient. Whether anyone teaches you the path or not, you keep at it constantly without flagging or getting discouraged. (3) Satindrīya: Mindfulness becomes dominant, enlarged in the great frame of reference. You don’t have to force it. It spreads all over the body, in the same way that the branches of a large tree protect the entire trunk from bottom to top, without anyone having to pull them down or shake them up. Our awareness becomes entirely radiant in every posture: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. It knows on its own without our having to think. This all-around awareness is what is meant by the great establishing of mindfulness. (4) Samādhindrīya: Our concentration becomes dominant, too. Whatever we’re doing, the mind doesn’t waver or stray. Even if we’re talking to the point where our mouth opens two meters wide, the mind is still at normalcy. If the body wants to eat, lie down, sit, stand, walk, run, think, whatever, that’s its business. Or if any part of it gets weary or pained, again, that’s its business, but the mind remains still in a single preoccupation, without straying off into anything else. (5) Paññindrīya: Discernment becomes dominant within us as well, to the point where we can make the mind attain stream-entry, once-returning, non-returning, or even arahantship.

We all want nothing but goodness, but if you can’t tell what’s good from what’s defiled, you can sit and meditate till your dying day and never find nibbāna at all. But if you can set your mind and keep your mind on what you’re doing, it’s not all that hard. Nibbāna is really a simple matter, because it’s always there. It never changes. The affairs of the world are what’s hard, because they’re always changing and uncertain. Today they’re one way, tomorrow another. Once you’ve done something, you have to keep looking after it. But you don’t have to look after nibbāna at all. Once you’ve realized it, you can let it go. Keep on realizing, keep on letting go—like a person eating rice who, after he’s put the rice in his mouth, keeps spitting it out.

What this means is that you keep on doing good but don’t claim it as your own. Do good, and then spit it out. This is virāga-dhamma: dispassion. For most people in the world, once they’ve done something, it’s theirs—and so they have to keep looking after it. If they’re not careful, it’ll either get stolen or else wear out on its own. They’re headed for disappointment. Like a person who swallows his rice: After he’s eaten, he’ll have to defecate. After he’s defecated he’ll be hungry again, so he’ll have to eat again and defecate again. The day will never come when he’s had enough.

But with nibbāna, you don’t have to swallow. You can eat your rice and then spit it out. You can do good and let it go. It’s like plowing a field: The dirt falls off the plow on its own. You don’t need to scoop it up and put it in a bag tied to your water buffalo’s leg. Whoever is stupid enough to scoop up the dirt as it falls off the plow and stick it in a bag will never get anywhere. Either his buffalo will get bogged down or else he’ll trip over the bag and fall flat on his face right there in the middle of the field. The field will never get plowed, the rice will never get sown, the crop will never get gathered. He’ll have to go hungry.

This is the way our practice of the Dhamma tends to be. Whatever we do, we’re not really intent on what we’re doing. We walk along, looking to the left, glancing to the right, forgetting where we’ve been and where we’re going—like the old husband and wife who, one day, took their machetes into the forest to clear a field. After cutting down all the big trees, the old man came across some tall grass, so he took off the cloth he had wrapped around his head, tied it as a sash around his waist, and tucked the machete into the sash behind his back. Then he squatted down to pull out the grass. As he was pulling out the grass, he came across a stump, so he turned around to pick up his machete to cut back the stump, but he couldn’t find it anywhere on the ground. He couldn’t remember where he had placed it, so he started walking around, looking for it in the forest. After walking around everywhere two or three times, he still couldn’t find it. The old woman called out after him, “What are you looking for?” The old man replied, “I’m looking for my machete. I want to cut back a stump.” The old woman saw the machete tucked under her husband’s sash, and it struck her as so funny that all she could do was snicker to herself to the point where she couldn’t say anything at all.

Finally, her husband was at his wits’ end as to how to find his machete. So—because he was so tired and the sun was so hot—he plunked himself down on the ground. That’s when the handle of the machete tucked behind his back hit the ground with full force. Startled, the old man turned around to look—and that’s when he realized that the machete had been tucked behind his back all along.

The way we practice concentration isn’t all that different from the old man. This is why we’re taught to be persistent in directing our thoughts to our meditation object and evaluating it, with mindfulness and alertness in charge, with each and every in-and-out breath.

Buddho, our meditation word, is the name of the Buddha after his Awakening. It means someone who has blossomed, who is awake, who has suddenly come to his senses. For six long years before his Awakening, the Buddha traveled about, searching for the truth from various teachers, all without success. So he went off on his own and on a full-moon evening in May sat down under the Bodhi tree, vowing that he wouldn’t get up until he had attained the truth. Finally, toward dawn, as he was meditating on his breath, he gained Awakening. He found what he was looking for—right at the tip of his nose.

Nibbāna doesn’t lie far away. It’s right at our lips, right at the tip of our nose, but we keep groping around and never find it. If you’re really serious about finding purity, set your mind on meditation and nothing else. As for whatever else may come your way, you can say, ‘No thanks.’ Pleasure? ‘No thanks.’ Pain? ‘No thanks.’ Goodness? ‘No thanks.’ Evil? ‘No thanks.’ Attainment? ‘No thanks.’ Nibbāna? ‘No thanks.’ If it’s ‘no thanks’ to everything, what will you have left? You won’t need to have anything left. That’s nibbāna. Like a person without any money: How will thieves be able to rob him? If you get money and try to hold onto it, you’re going to get killed. If this thief doesn’t get you, that one will. Carry ‘what’s yours’ around till you’re completely weighed down. You’ll never get away.

In this world we have to live with both good and evil. People who have developed dispassion are filled with goodness and know evil fully, but don’t hold onto either, don’t claim either as their own. They put them aside and let them go, and so can travel light and easy. Nibbāna isn’t all that difficult a matter. In the Buddha’s time, some people became arahants while going on their almsround, some while urinating, some while watching farmers plowing a field. What’s difficult about the highest good lies in the beginning, in laying the groundwork—being constantly mindful, examining and evaluating your breath at all times. But if you can keep at it, you’re bound to succeed in the end.