In the Same Way

The Buddha’s Similes for Explaining the Path

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The Buddha used a large number of similes and analogies in his teachings, both to make his teachings more vivid and memorable, and also to explain points of doctrine. In fact, similes play such a prominent role in his teachings that it’s customary, when publishing translations of the Pali Canon, to provide indexes not only to subjects and proper names, but to the similes as well.

However, the Buddha never articulated a theory of the uses and potential abuses of similes and analogies, aside from saying that arguments based on analogies are not necessarily reliable guides for determining what’s true (AN 3:66).

Still, his students must have noted how useful his similes were in helping them to understand his teachings, because when they themselves started teaching, they would often introduce similes into their instructions with the following explanation:

In other words, the Buddha’s students had seen from their own experience in listening to him that similes didn’t have to be merely decorative. They were useful in establishing context to explain obscure or seemingly contradictory points of Dhamma. That’s how the Buddha used them, and that’s how they wanted to use them as well.

So there’s a lot to be learned from looking at the similes the Buddha used to explain the practice of the Dhamma. When we do, we find that they can clear up many important misunderstandings about what Dhamma practice entails.

Some of the similes indicate that there is room for relaxation in the practice: A man deciding that he would rather lie down than walk illustrates the principle that if your mind is making an effort to create unskillful thoughts, you can relax that effort (MN 20). A cowherd resting under a tree during the season when his cows are in no danger of eating the rice crop stands for the fact that you can rest mindfully when no unskillful mental qualities invade the mind (MN 19).

Similes of this sort, though, occur in the context of a much larger number of similes focusing on the need for effort and exertion in the practice: soldiers in battle, people searching for things of value, craftspeople trying to master skills. Although wise effort knows when to relax, that relaxation is in the service of providing you with the energy needed to sustain persistent effort over time.

Of the similes of effort, the most interesting ones are those related to skills, because they show the ways in which Dhamma practice requires more than brute exertion or bravery. It also requires thinking strategically and using your powers of observation to get the desired results from your actions.

Or, to use the terms the Buddha employs in AN 10:73, the Dhamma is nourished through commitment (anuyoga) and reflection (paccavekkhaṇā). You commit to doing it as best you can, and then reflect on the results of what you’ve done so that you can do it better the next time around. These are precisely the qualities of mind needed to master a skill.

So if we look at how the Buddha explains the practice of the Dhamma through similes concerning skills, we can begin to understand how best to master the skill leading to the end of suffering, which is the most advanced skill of all.

The Buddha himself makes this point in a dialog with his attendant, Ven. Ānanda:

As we look at some of the similes the Buddha used to illustrate the path of practice, we first have to note that the word “path” contains an implicit simile in itself: You’re doing the practice to attain results that you haven’t yet achieved, in the same way that you follow a path to go from where you are to where you want to be. The Buddha, contrary to some teachers, never equated the path with the goal. That would have made the image of the path a bad one to begin with. And he explicitly denied the idea that the path would lead you back to an innocent, child-like place you have been earlier but had somehow lost or forgotten (MN 78). As he said, the beginning point of the ignorance that causes suffering can’t be discerned (AN 10:61). As far as we might be able to see back through our many lifetimes, there has always been ignorance. This is why the Buddha repeatedly noted that the path he taught led to a goal, that the goal was something you had never achieved before (AN 5:26; AN 5:57), and that it was where you wanted to be.

It’s also worth noting that the Buddha’s image of the path is actually a mixed metaphor: Although he used the Pali word for “purpose” or “goal”—attha—in connection with the Dhamma, he more frequently said that the path led to a fruit: the fruits of the noble attainments. Now, the word for “fruit” in Pali—phala—was used generally to mean reward, in the same way that we say that rewarding activities are fruitful, but the association of “path” with “fruit” doesn’t appear to be idiomatic.

However, DN 2 hints at a possible reason for why the Buddha made this association. In it, a king—noting that other occupations bear fruit for those who follow them, fruits they can enjoy—wants to know what fruits a person who follows the contemplative life as taught by the Buddha can expect to enjoy. The Buddha replies with a wide range of fruits enjoyed by a monk who follows his instructions, all the way to the attainment of total release. So it would appear that the message conveyed by combining “path” with “fruit” is that even though the path may be difficult at times, you’ll enjoy the results of following it when they come.

In constructing images of the skills required to produce those fruits, the Buddha made reference sometimes to very basic skills, and sometimes to more advanced ones. Two of the most basic skills appear in similes dealing with the noble eightfold path as a whole. The main thrust of each simile deals with a search—a man seeking milk and another man seeking the safety of the far shore of a river—but in each case, the man in question needs a skill to get what he’s looking for. And the way the Buddha treats the skill makes some important points about what’s involved in Dhamma practice.

• The first skill comes in MN 126:

The skill here is so basic—getting milk out of a cow—that for anyone in a culture like the Buddha’s, so centered on cattle, the idea of getting it wrong would be laughable. This means that there’s a satirical edge to the points the simile makes. They’re so basic that it would seem to go without saying that they’re true. Yet centuries of Buddhist history have shown that it’s still possible to get them wrong.

The mains points are three:

1) There is a right way and there are many wrong ways to practice. The Buddha is unabashedly clear on this point. The doors leading to the Dhamma are not infinite.

2) The wish to gain results has no effect on whether you get them. In other words, if you follow the path incorrectly, no amount of wishing will get you the results you want. If you follow the path correctly, the wish to gain awakening won’t prevent your awakening if you use it wisely.

3) If you’ve been putting an effort into the practice but haven’t gotten results, the problem is not that you’ve exerted effort. It’s that you’ve exerted effort in the wrong way. The Buddha’s advice to the first man would not be to stop making an effort, to forget about milk, and to content himself with being effortlessly aware of the cow. After all, the man needs milk, and there’s milk in the cow. The Buddha’s advice would be to stop twisting the horn, to search for the udder, and to apply effort there.

• The second simile illustrating the path through a skill appears in two discourses, MN 22 and SN 35:197:

MN 22 focuses on the final point of the simile: The raft stands for the Dhamma, and the point is that the Dhamma is not to be held on to when it has served its purpose. Instead, it’s to be let go.

The message here is that you practice, not for the sake of arriving at right view, right concentration, or any of the other factors of the path. Instead, you use those factors to arrive at the goal, and then you put them down so that your release can be complete.

SN 35:197 fills in more details in the simile that help in drawing further lessons from it. The risky side of the river stands for self-identity, the mind’s habit of using any of the five aggregates—form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, or consciousness—to create a sense of self. The river stands for the fourfold flood of sensuality, views, becoming, and ignorance, which means that it, too, is risky. You could easily drown in these things. The far shore stands for unbinding (nibbāna). The raft stands for the noble eightfold path. Making an effort with hands and feet stands for arousing your energy and persistence.

This interpretation of the simile carries a number of implications that are not emphasized in MN 22. It centers on two skills.

1) The first is the skill of making the raft. The fact that the man makes a raft out of things found on this shore points to the fact that nibbāna is not coming to get you, and it doesn’t form the ground of your practice. Instead, you have to fashion the path out of things that you’ve been identifying with: the five aggregates. AN 9:36 makes this point explicit: Right concentration is composed of the five aggregates; AN 10:60 shows how right view has to make use of perceptions; and it’s possible to figure out how the other factors of the path have to use the aggregates as well.

2) The second skill is getting across the river. Even though you eventually have to let go of the raft, you don’t get across the river by letting go of it. You have to hold on to right view and all the other factors of the path until you reach safety. It’s worth noting that, while the river stands for the flood of views, letting go of all views won’t get you across. You have to hold on to right view strategically in order to get to unbinding. In fact, right view is the only view that contains the seeds for its own transcendence in this way (see AN 10:93).

At the same time, it’s important to note that you have to be responsible for making an effort. The raft won’t get you across the river unless you do. In other words, it’s no mistake to see that you’re the one developing the path. If you don’t develop it, wisdom and discernment, acting independently of you, won’t develop it for you. It’s your responsibility to develop the qualities of the path yourself.

When the Buddha moves from similes for the path as a whole to similes illustrating the practice of meditation, the skills mentioned in the similes grow more advanced. They’re also based on a more fully articulated theory of what’s involved in mastering a skill.

That theory—the bases of power (iddhipāda)—takes the two principles of commitment and reflection that nourish the Dhamma, and divides them into four. It describes four bases for concentration: desire, persistence, intent, and analysis. Although the presentation makes it sound as if these are four different types of concentration, the fact that all these bases appear, explicitly or implicitly, in the factor of right effort leading up to right concentration, means that all four are present in every state of concentration. The difference between one type of concentration and another is simply one of emphasis.

In this light, we can see that commitment has been divided into three bases of power: You desire to get the mind into concentration, you’re persistent in your efforts, and you’re fully intent on what you’re doing. Reflection here is represented by analysis—the Pali word, vīmaṁsa, means using your powers of discrimination in a skillful way—showing that reflection has to be active in trying to figure things out and also in holding to high standards for judging what works. If your efforts at getting the mind concentrated aren’t working, why? Be ingenious in thinking up other approaches, and discriminating in deciding whether you’re reading the situation properly or not.

With this background, we can understand the implications of some of the similes the Buddha used to help explain what happens in developing the skills of meditation practice.

• The first of these similes comes in SN 47:8:

Here the main points are two:

1) The purpose of mindfulness practice is both to get the mind into concentration and to rid the mind of defilements. The Buddha never treats mindfulness and concentration as two separate or mutually exclusive practices. MN 44 states that the four establishings of mindfulness are the themes of right concentration, while the standard definition of right concentration as the four jhānas, or states of absorption—as in SN 45:8—states that the fourth jhāna is where mindfulness is purified. MN 119 treats the jhānas under the heading of mindfulness of the body. MN 125 equates the first stage of mindfulness practice with the first jhāna. AN 8:70 shows that mindfulness practice leads ideally to all four levels of jhāna.

2) Once you realize this, then if you’re wise when practicing mindfulness, you should pay attention to which mindfulness topic the mind likes so that it will be willing to settle down with that topic with a sense of ease and satisfaction, and enter the jhānas. In other words, you devote your desire, persistence, and intent to testing a potential meditation topic. Then you reflect on the results. If focusing on the topic doesn’t yield concentration, you analyze your actions to figure out why. If you’ve been approaching the topic in the wrong way, you try a different approach. If the mind refuses to settle down with the topic, you try other topics until you find one that works. That’s how you’ll attain concentration.

• Once you’ve achieved a sense of well-being in your concentration, MN 119 gives a brief simile for what you should do with it. The simile is based on the skills of a bathman in a public bath. In the Buddha’s day, they didn’t have bars of soap. Instead, the bathman would take a powdered soap mixture and mix it with water to make a ball of soap paste, in the same way that you’d mix water with flour and then knead the water through the flour to make a thoroughly moistened ball of dough.

This is one of a series of four similes for the four jhānas. The similes have two points in common: movement stands for rapture—the Pali term, pīti, can also mean refreshment—while water stands for pleasure. All the similes speak of jhāna as a full-body experience, but this is the only simile containing a conscious agent doing something. Because directed thought and evaluation occur only in the first jhāna, that must be what the bathman stands for: directed thought and evaluation. So the lessons here are these:

1) Jhāna is a full-body experience, and not merely one-pointed. It has been argued that the Buddha doesn’t really mean “body” when he gives these similes, and in fact, there is no awareness of the physical body in the jhānas at all. But that’s tantamount to saying that the Buddha, in his use of similes, was either clumsy and thoughtless or else devious, if he would use similes that were so easily mis-read. A better way to read the similes is to take them at face value, seeing them as honest, straightforward, and accurate in making their points: They describe a full-body awareness, all the way from the first jhāna to the fourth.

2) Directed thought and evaluation are said to be “verbal fabrications” (MN 44). In other words, they’re the mind’s inner conversation with itself, as it chooses a topic to focus on and then engages in comments and questions about the topic.

Given the simile of the bathman, this would indicate that your inner conversation plays an important role in the first jhāna, as it figures out how to take the rapture and pleasure that come from secluding the mind from unskillful thoughts and works that rapture and pleasure throughout the body.

Anyone who has had experience sitting in meditation will realize that this will require dealing with pains and patterns of tension in different parts of the body. It takes some active thought to understand how to allow rapture and pleasure to relax or dissolve those obstacles away.

In the simile for the second jhāna, the water of a cool spring spreads to fill a lake. In the simile for the third, lotuses grow totally immersed in a lake, saturated with water from the tips of their roots to the tips of their flowers. In these cases, the water spreads naturally, with no human effort involved. That suggests that the work of directed thought and evaluation in the first jhāna is to open the breath channels permeating the body (MN 28; MN 140), letting the rapture and pleasure seep throughout the body, in preparation for the remaining jhānas where the rapture and pleasure of the second jhāna, and the pleasure of the third, spread through the body without effort. This allows you to put directed thought and evaluation aside, and to plunge into the unification of awareness that characterizes the higher jhānas.

• AN 3:103 explains some important points about meditation practice with reference to the skills of a goldsmith.

Uplifted energy here means engaging in right effort to abandon unskillful mental qualities and to develop skillful ones. Concentration means the practice of centering the mind on a single object, such as the breath. Equanimity means watching steadily what’s happening in the mind.

The simile makes two points:

1) For the training of the mind to get the best results, it has to involve all three of these activities. If you simply keep trying to abandon unskillful qualities and to develop skillful ones without allowing the mind to rest in concentration, restlessness will take over and the mind won’t be able to rest to gain strength. If you simply rest in concentration, you get to the point where you don’t want to do the work required to develop the discernment that will free the mind from its effluents. If you simply watch the mind with non-judging awareness, you can’t even get it into concentration.

But when you combine these skills, they reinforce one another. Equanimity can spot subtle defilements even in the concentrated mind, and uplifted energy can try to figure them out so as to remove them. Concentration, in turn, provides a place of rest and respite when the energy in your effort and discernment begins to flag.

2) You need to know not only a full range of approaches to training the mind. You also need to gain a sense of which approach to use at which time, in the same way that the goldsmith knows, from experience, when to heat up the gold, when to cool it down, and when to simply keep watching it. This sense of which approach to use at which time comes from commitment and reflection, and from applying the four bases of success to your practice.

• AN 9:36 illustrates the way in which discernment can be based on jhāna practice by using the simile of a skilled archer. When visualizing this image, it’s important to remember that the Buddha is talking about archery as used in war, with enormous bows that required great strength to use. As the simile indicates, though, the fact that these bows were used in battle also required great agility.

This passage makes several important points:

1) As we noted under the simile of the raft, the path is composed of the five aggregates. In this case, the four jhānas are composed of all five aggregates, while the aggregates of perception and thought-fabrication can do the work of discernment to develop dispassion even for the most refined experiences of the aggregates.

2) It’s possible to examine a state of concentration while in it, up through the formless dimension of nothingness. You can use that examination to develop the discernment that leads to full release. AN 5:28 illustrates this point with another simile:

This ability to step back slightly from your concentration to observe what you’re doing to keep the mind concentrated—what modern psychology calls “metacognition”—is crucial to using jhāna as a basis for liberating insight.

3) If you grasp at any sense of passion or delight arising in connection with the experience of the deathless, it’ll keep you from gaining full awakening. In other words, if you cling to any craving that arises in response to that experience, it’s a sign that you haven’t fully comprehended clinging or abandoned craving. This means that you will attain a lower level of awakening, and will have to practice further, to deepen your reflective discernment in order to ferret out these subtle levels of defilement. Still, your eventual full awakening is guaranteed.

There’s one problem with this simile in AN 9:36, which is that, aside from indicating that the ability to master concentration and contemplate it in this way is an advanced skill, it doesn’t indicate how the specific skills of an archer correspond to the skills of the advanced meditator.

However, another sutta, AN 4:181, does precisely that.

These points illuminate the meditator’s skills described in AN 9:36.

1) When seeing the aggregates as not-self, it’s important to apply that perception not only to aggregates in the present moment, but also to extend it to all possible aggregates in space—“near or far”—and time—“past, future, or present.” This is what it means for a meditator to shoot great distances. If you apply the perceptions of not-self, etc., only to the aggregates you’re experiencing here and now, the mind might latch on to a nostalgic memory of past aggregates or an anticipation of satisfactory aggregates in the future. That leaves plenty of opportunity for continued craving and clinging to grow.

2) When experiencing the deathless, your reactions can happen very quickly. It’s important to recognize right away if any passion or delight arises in the mind, and to abandon it immediately. In other words, you have to see right away that you’ve strayed from the path—the fourth noble truth—and stumbled into the second and first noble truths. You have to immediately comprehend that fact and abandon the craving expressed in the passion and delight. Otherwise, they’ll get in the way of full awakening. This is what it means for a meditator to fire shots in rapid succession.

3) Ignorance—not seeing events in terms of the four noble truths—basically means not seeing what you’re doing as you create suffering, stress, or disturbance in the mind. Seeing through this ignorance requires ardent alertness—committed and reflective—detecting what you’re doing while you’re doing it. That’s how you pierce it. And it’s precisely this combination of ardent alertness, commitment, and reflection that allows the meditator in AN 9:36 to detect the aggregates involved in creating a state of jhāna while he’s doing it. The same holds true even more so when he can detect and abandon any Dhamma-passion or Dhamma-delight before they get in the way of full awakening. This is what it means for a meditator to pierce great masses.

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These are just a few examples of how the Buddha uses images of skills to explain aspects of the practice. Taken together, they make the larger point that learning the Dhamma is not simply a matter of mastering concepts. It requires using those concepts appropriately in mastering the all-around skill of training the mind.

They also make an important point for understanding the Buddha’s teaching method as a whole. He had seen, through his own awakening, that verbal and mental fabrications—the way you talk to yourself and the perceptions and feelings you focus your attention on—can have a huge impact on the mind. If done in ignorance, these fabrications lead to suffering. If done in knowledge, they can form part of the path to the end of suffering.

This insight showed him not only how the mind works in general, but also how it works when gaining new knowledge. As a result, it influenced both what he taught to others and how he taught it. He saw that his listeners had to think in the right paradigms—visualizing what he was saying in the right terms—if they were going to understand him.

This is why he used similes so frequently when explaining points of Dhamma: He wanted to ensure that his listeners were perceiving the issue at hand in the right frame of reference, so that their inner conversation about the issue, directing their present and future actions, would be less likely to go astray.

For this reason, it’s important to know and understand the similes the Buddha used when teaching. They give us the framework for understanding the concepts, which means that they’re an integral part of those concepts and their role on the path. We’re fortunate that the Buddha’s immediate disciples understood this point. In addition to leaving behind lists of terms and definitions, they also recorded dialogues in which the Buddha showed, through his use of similes, the proper way of perceiving and framing those terms, so that we can understand how to use them for enjoying the best results.

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