Introduction The daily schedule at Metta Forest Monastery includes a group interview in the late afternoon and a chanting session followed by a group meditation period later in the evening. The Dhamma talks included in this volume were given during the evening meditation sessions, and in many cases covered issues raised at the interviews — either in the questions asked or lurking behind the questions. Often these issues touched on a variety of topics on a variety of different levels in the practice. This explains the range of topics covered in individual talks. I have edited the talks with an eye to making them readable while at the same time trying to preserve some of the flavor of the spoken word. In a few instances I have added passages or rearranged the talks to make the treatment of specific topics more coherent and complete, but for the most part I have kept the editing to a minimum. Don't expect polished essays. The people listening to these talks were familiar with the meditation instructions included in "Method 2" in Keeping the Breath in Mind by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo; and my own essay, "A Guided Meditation." If you are not familiar with these instructions, you might want to read through them before reading the talks in this book. Also, further Dhamma talks are available at dhammatalks.org. As with the previous volumes in this series, I would like to thank Bok Lim Kim for making the recording of these talks possible. She, more than anyone else, is responsible for overcoming my initial reluctance to have the talks recorded. I would also like to thank the following people for transcribing the talks and/or helping to edit the transcriptions: John Bullitt, Kathy Forsythe, Roger Fox, Gareth Fysh-Foskett, Richard Heiman, Linda Knudsen, Addie Onsanit, Nate Osgood, Xian Quan Osgood, Malcolm Schaeffer, Walter Schwidetzky, Atthaññu Bhikkhu, Balaggo Bhikkhu, Gunaddho Bhikkhu, Khematto Bhikkhu, and Vijjakaro Bhikkhu. May they all be happy. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Metta Forest Monastery

September, 2008

The Buddha's Shoulds January 6, 2008 Right concentration forms the heart of the path. The other factors of the path serve two functions. One is to get you into concentration; the other is to make sure you don't get stuck there. In other words, concentration on its own is a state of becoming that's useful on the path. Even though you eventually want to go beyond all states of becoming, if you don't first master this state of becoming you'll be wandering around in other states of becoming where it would be hard to see what's going on in the mind. As the Buddha said, when your mind is concentrated you can see the four noble truths as they actually come to be. When it's not concentrated, you can't see these things clearly. Non-concentration, he says, is a miserable path, leading nowhere useful at all. So concentration is the essential factor. Only when the mind is stable and still can it really see what's going on inside. To get into right concentration, you need the other path factors: right view all the way up through right mindfulness. Right view starts with conviction in the principle of kamma, that there are good and bad actions that give good and bad results — not only in this lifetime but also in future lifetimes — and that there are people who really know these things from direct experience. It's not just a theory. What's interesting here is that when the Buddha presents this introduction to his teaching on kamma, he focuses on two types of good actions to stress their importance: gratitude to your parents and generosity. These things really do have merit; they really do have value. The fact that your parents gave birth to you was not just a set of impersonal processes that just happened to happen. It's not the case that you don't owe any debt of gratitude to your parents for having gone through all the pain of giving birth to you and then raising you once you were born. There really is a personal debt there. They made choices, sometimes difficult choices, that allowed for your survival. Generosity is one of the ways you pay off that debt, and it's also one of the valuable ways you interact well with other beings, benefiting both them and yourself in the process. The Buddha's attitude towards generosity is instructive. He's very clear on the fact that when he's telling you what you should do, the "should" is based on a condition. After all, the Buddha didn't create you. You might resist his shoulds with the thought, "Who is he to tell me what to do?" Years back I was sitting in on a course on the Metta Sutta. The first line in the Metta Sutta starts: "This is what should be done by one who aims at a state of peace." As the teacher started out with that line, a hand immediately shot up. A man sitting in the class said, "I thought Buddhism didn't have any shoulds." And they spent the rest of the morning going back and forth over that one issue. Actually, Buddhism does have a lot of shoulds. You look at the Dhammapada and you'll see that it's full of shoulds. But each should is based on a condition, as in the first line of the Metta Sutta: "This is what should be done by one who aims at a state of peace." The Buddha doesn't tell you that you have to aim at a state of peace, or that you have to want true happiness. That's your choice. But if that is what you want, this is what you've got to do. The nature of cause and effect is such that these are the practices you have to follow. The Buddha isn't saying, "Well, this is what worked for me and it may work for you, but I'm not sure, so you have to find your own way." That's not what he would say. He'd say, "This is what works if you're aiming at this goal." And it's up to you to decide whether you want to aim at that goal. If you do, then you've got to do it this way. There's a passage where King Pasenadi comes to visit the Buddha, and his first question is, "Where should a gift be given?" The Buddha responds, "Wherever you feel inspired." In other words, there are no shoulds in this area aside from your own sense of inspiration — where you feel the gift would be well used or where you just want to give. There are no restraints placed on the act of generosity at all. But then the King follows up with another question: "Where, when a gift is given, does it bear great fruit?" And the Buddha says, "That's a different question." This is where the principle of cause and effect kicks in, placing its imperatives. You have to give to someone whose mind is pure or to an institution where the people are being trained to make their minds pure — i.e., the Sangha — if you want your gift to bear great fruit. So there are shoulds in the Buddha's teachings, but they're based on the principle of what actually works for the purpose of true happiness. As for what you want to do with your life, there's no imposition there at all. It's your choice. But once you appreciate the principle of generosity and see that it is really worthwhile, you've made the choice to get started on the path. As the Buddha said, it's impossible for someone who is stingy to attain jhana, to attain any of the noble attainments. So you start with the principle that generosity is good and that your actions matter. When you dig a little bit deeper into the principle of action, you realize that your intentions are what matter in your actions. This insight leads to the next step in the path: right resolve. You want to avoid intentions that would make it difficult to get the mind into concentration, so you want to learn how to go beyond being resolved on sensual passion, being resolved on ill will, being resolved on harmfulness — because all these things stir up the mind and interfere with its settling down. There's a passage in the Canon where Prince Jayasena, walking for exercise through a forest one day, comes across a novice staying in a little wilderness hut. He says to the novice, "I hear that when the monks really apply themselves, they can get their minds into a state of one-pointedness. Is that true?" And the novice says, "Yes." And the prince says, "Well, explain it to me." And the novice, who probably knew the prince's reputation, says, "You wouldn't understand." The prince responds, "Well, I just might." So the novice replies, "In that case, I'll explain it to you, but if you don't understand, don't harass me with more questions, okay?" So the prince agrees. But when the novice explains it to him, the prince says, "That's impossible. Nobody can get their minds concentrated like that." He gets up and leaves. The novice then goes to see the Buddha and tells him what happened. And the Buddha says, "What did you expect? That person is immersed in sensual passion, on fire with sensual fever, being chewed up by his sensual thoughts: How would he understand anything like this — something that has to be attained through renunciation?" This is why the Buddha has you put sensual passion aside, for it prevents the mind from getting concentrated. It prevents you from even conceiving of the possibility of getting concentrated. Similarly with ill will and harmfulness: If you hold ill will for somebody, if you want to be harmful to that person, then as soon as the mind settles down to be quiet in the present moment, those thoughts are sure to flare up. They obsess you. So the Buddha has you resolve to put them aside. When you want to act on those right resolves, this is where right action, right speech, and right livelihood come in. Some people find the Buddha's precepts too hard to follow; other people say they're not inclusive enough. The ones who say that they're not inclusive enough insist that we have to be more responsible. If there's a precept against killing, you shouldn't be able to eat meat. If there's a precept against stealing, you shouldn't abuse the earth's resources. They make the precepts bigger and bigger and bigger all the time to the point where they become impossible, too big to be fully put into practice. Or in some cases it is possible to practice them fully, but the Buddha said it wasn't necessary to go that far. We're working on the precepts that help the mind get concentrated, which is why they go only as far as they do. In other words, you don't want to act on an unskillful intention and you don't want to tell other people to act on those intentions. But as far as breaches of the precepts where you don't know what's happening or it's not intentional, those don't count. After all, the intention is the important part of concentration, and you want to train the mind to master its intentions in areas where you have some control over your life and over your actions. Once you've created this context for the practice, you're in a better position to follow the parts of the path that deal directly with right concentration. First there's right effort, which means generating the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities of the mind — i.e., the things that get in the way of concentration, like the hindrances — and then to give rise to skillful qualities, like the factors for Awakening. This is an area where desire is a useful part of the path. It gives you the energy you need to work on the mind and to realize that you've got to make choices. There are skillful and unskillful things arising in the mind, but right view — in terms of the principle of kamma — reminds you that the unskillful ones will lead to bad results, and the skillful ones to good results. So you can't just sit there totally passive as you watch them arise and pass away, because that doesn't lead to concentration. You've got to foster the good qualities and abandon the unskillful ones. In the next step of the path, the Buddha surrounds right effort with right mindfulness — "surrounding" it in the sense that you add two additional qualities to right effort. As the text says, you bring three qualities to bear on your contemplation: You want to be ardent, alert, and mindful. The ardency there is right effort. The mindfulness means that you keep your frame of reference in mind — as when we're keeping the breath in mind right now. The alertness means seeing what's happening in the present moment, seeing if you really are with the breath, if the mind is settling down well with the breath, and catching it when you've forgotten. You're trying to establish a frame of reference here because these four frames of reference — the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, and mental qualities in and of themselves — are the themes or topics of right concentration. Mindfulness practice and concentration practice go hand in hand on the Buddha's path. Then, as you're trying to get the mind to settle down with its frame of reference, you have to start evaluating it to see what works and what doesn't work. As your frame of reference gets more and more solid, you actually move into the factors of jhana. So that's what you should do to get into jhana — if you want it. Again, the Buddha doesn't say you have to do it, but if you want it, this is what you should do. Jhana on its own doesn't lead to the end of suffering. There are a lot of passages describing people who attain different levels of jhana and are able to maintain them, but if they don't go beyond that, they end up getting reborn in the various Brahma worlds after they die. Then when they fall from there, who knows where they're going to land? One sutta shows people falling from the Brahma worlds and doing really stupid things. They've been so blissed out for so long that they've forgotten that their actions can carry consequences, so they act in wanton and careless ways. This is why, once the mind is firmly in jhana, you've got to start applying right view again. Only this time it's right view in terms of the four noble truths: looking for the stress in your activities and seeing where it's coming from in your mind. In other words, you look at mental events and mental states simply in terms of cause and effect, what's skillful and what's unskillful. Those are the basic categories underlying the four noble truths. So as we're meditating here, remind yourself that the concentration is what we're after, what we're focusing on doing right here. Everything else on the path is aimed either at getting us here or else at making sure that once we are here we make the best use of the opportunity really to see things as they happen. In particular, we want to see this issue of how the mind is creating all this unnecessary stress all the time and what can be done to stop it. Of course, if you only want to follow part of the path, that's up to you. Remember, the Buddha never forced us to do anything. But if you want the best results, this is what you've got to do.

One Thing Clear Through June 26, 2006 A recurrent theme in the teachings of the forest ajaans is that all the steps of the practice are of a piece. In other words, having attained Awakening, they don't say anything disparaging about the early steps in the practice, that they're only elementary and that you have to drop them to move on to the more important stuff. As Luang Pu Dune put it, "The Dhamma is one thing clear through." Or as Ajaan Maha Boowa once said, one of the realizations that comes when you hit Awakening is that everything is the same teaching, starting from generosity and gratitude, all the way up through Awakening. There are different levels of subtlety, but it's all the same principle. And you could see this fact in their lives. Even having attained Awakening, they didn't just sit around and say, now that their own job was done, they didn't have to do anything further. They were very industrious people. Ajaan Fuang, even when he was sick, would get out every evening and do some chore around the monastery. When we were doing construction work, he wasn't up to doing any of the heavy jobs but at the very least he would go out and pick up the thrown-away nails. He was very frugal, very meticulous. So it's important to keep this principle in mind: that the practice here is a practice of generosity, of gratitude, of goodwill and kindness, all the way through. Look at the Buddha's teachings on the four noble truths. What are they motivated by if not goodwill? The desire for an end of suffering, the desire for happiness that doesn't place any burdens on anyone else: What is this if not compassion? And look at his teaching career. Wherever there was anyone ready to learn the Dhamma, he would go there. In those days, that meant going on foot. He traveled all over northern India on foot just to teach. Even the very last day of his life, he knew there was one more person he had to teach before he entered total nibbana. So, even though he was suffering from dysentery, he walked all the way to Kusinara — a full day's walk — because there was one more person, Subhadda, he had to teach. What this means in our practice is that we should value all levels of the practice. It's not that you put in time with the elementary levels and then drop them as you move on to the higher ones. You simply add more and more levels of subtlety to your practice, more and more levels of generosity, goodwill, and gratitude. The Buddha started his teaching with very basic mundane right view: the teaching on kamma. And he introduced kamma with two teachings: one on gratitude, one on generosity. He started out by saying that generosity is real. The gifts you give actually benefit you and the other person. This is something of real value. And you can think of the whole practice — all the way through the abandoning of greed, anger, and delusion — as an act of generosity, an act of goodwill. The less greed, anger, and delusion you have, the better off not only you are, but also everybody else. Think of all the suffering you've inflicted not only on yourself but also on other people through your anger, your greed, your delusion. You give these things up not only for your own benefit but for the benefit of the people around you as well. Then there's the teaching on gratitude. The Buddha focused on the gratitude we owe our parents — that the good they've done for us is something of value. We really are in their debt. All that your mother went through just to give birth to you: Think about that. In Thailand it's traditional for there to be a chant on this topic before an ordination. They hire somebody to come in, and he chants for a couple hours about all the hardships your parents went through to raise you, as a way of reminding you of your debt to them. In Thailand, there's a very strong sense that you ordain as an act of gratitude to your parents. You dedicate the merit to them. So right before the ordination they remind you of exactly how big that debt is. If the chant lasts for four hours, three and a half of the hours are about the pains your mother went through being pregnant with you. You're fortunate she didn't abort you — she could have done that. You're fortunate your parents didn't abandon you after you were born — they could have done that as well. They went to all that trouble to raise you, to teach you how to speak, how to sit, how to walk. There's a huge debt of gratitude you owe them. As the Buddha said, gratitude is a sign of a good person. If you don't appreciate the good that other people have done for you, it's very unlikely that you're going to do good for anybody at all. Ajaan Fuang, if he noticed that people didn't have gratitude for their parents, didn't want to associate with them. If people can't appreciate their parents, what are they going to appreciate? Gratitude is essential to every form of goodness. And it carries you all the way through. This is why we're generous; this is why we practice the precepts, why we're harmless. We meditate to train the mind so that it's harmless. Not only harmless, but also more energetic. If you're not weighing yourself down with greed, anger, and delusion, you have a lot more energy to help other people. And even though there's that popular conception of Theravada as a selfish path, as someone who had studied Buddhism both in Japan and in Thailand once said, you won't find that Thai people are any more selfish than Japanese people. In fact, it can often be the other way around. The example of the Buddha in the Pali Canon is not a selfish example. Sariputta and Moggallana were extremely helpful not only in teaching other monks but also in teaching laypeople. And look at all the rules in the Vinaya for the monks to look after the monastery. Basically, the monastery is pure generosity. If you were to open your eyes right now and look around, everything you'd see would be somebody's gift. And as for the monks, the longer you live as a monk, the more and more the very bones of your body are the results of somebody's generosity. They say that after seven years all the cells in your body have been changed, so once a monk has hit seven years, his whole body is somebody else's gift. So you've got to use it wisely, generously, in the same spirit with which it was given to you. And as for the monastery around you, you're trained to look after the place. The Buddha encouraged the monks to be clean, to be careful in the way they use things, to put a lot of energy into looking after the results of other peoples' generosity. In the forest tradition, there's a very strong tradition of keeping alive the protocols that the Buddha gives in the Khandhakas. There's a Vinaya textbook that the monks in Thailand are supposed to study, written by a city monk back at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he cut back on a lot of these rules. This textbook was never popular with the forest tradition. They preferred an older book that went into a lot of detail, particularly on the 14 protocols, most of which deal with looking after the monastery: when you come to a monastery, how you're supposed to set things in order; when you leave, how you're supposed to leave it in good shape; and while you're there, how you keep it clean. A lot of energy should go into keeping the monastery in good shape because a lot of energy went into giving the monastery in the first place. So the Buddha never discouraged people from being generous. He never discouraged people from being energetic. Ajaan Suwat liked to make this point again and again: There's no place where the Buddha encourages laziness. Even though he teaches contentment, it's contentment with the material things you already have, so that you can devote yourself to building on that, and especially so that you can devote yourself to the training of the mind. But contentment doesn't mean that if you find the place dirty you leave it dirty. Contentment means that if you just have a little shack, you're content with your shack, but you make it a clean shack. You keep it spic and span, in good repair. Utthana-sampada is the word in Pali. It means that you take initiative, you're energetic. And this translates into your meditation. The sort of person who's energetic in keeping the place clean tends to be more energetic in meditating. Once when I'd just arrived in Bangkok on some visa business, I was in the midst of cleaning my room, sweeping it, wiping it down. A Western monk who'd just returned from Burma knew that I might be there, so he came around and sure enough I had just come in. But as soon as he saw me wiping down the floor, he said, "You Thai monks! All you do is spend your time cleaning up. Over in Burma, we have other people who do that for us." And as you looked at the quality of his meditation, you could see that he was used to having other people doing things for him. His meditation had gotten slack and sloppy as well. This is a strong tradition in the forest tradition, starting from the time of Ajaan Mun. He was very diligent in keeping his place clean. His place in the forest wasn't just some hovel. Everything was neatly swept, everything in its proper place. As Ajaan Fuang said, even the rags for wiping feet at the base of the stairs to his little hut: If they were torn, he would sew them; if they were dirty, he would wash them. And this quality of being energetic and meticulous translated into his meditation as well. So don't think that the elementary practices are just for people on an elementary level. They're for everybody. That's how everybody gets started and everybody keeps going. You build on them. You don't abandon them. You build on them. You include more and more subtle levels. But the basic levels stay there as well, until, as the texts say, generosity is no longer something you do for your own sake or for the sake of other people. It becomes just a natural expression of the mind. All the steps of the practice become a natural expression of the mind once it's fully trained.

Befriending the Breath January 3, 2007 Reflect back on the passage we chanted just now: "May I be happy. May all living beings be happy. May all beings be freed from their suffering. May those who are happy not be deprived of their happiness." These are good thoughts to think. They put the mind in a good place, a place where you're not wishing ill to anyone at all. You're wishing them well. And you're wishing well for yourself, too. Sometimes people find that hard, but if you can't wish for your own true happiness, what are you wishing for? The desire for true happiness is nothing to feel ashamed about. In fact, the whole teaching of the Dhamma is based on that desire, recognizing that if you follow through with your desire for true happiness intelligently, if you really are careful about how you go about finding it, you'll actually find it and won't harm anyone in the process. It's a desire that should be respected. The world, however, teaches us not to respect it. People will tell you, "Forget about true lasting happiness; just go for the thrill of purchase, the thrill of a relationship in the beginning stages. Go for the quick and easy, but also the quick to fade. As for true happiness, forget about it." That's what they say. But the message of the Dhamma is that if you don't wish for true happiness, what are you wishing for? This is the one assumption that the Buddha makes about human beings. Sometimes you read that the Buddha assumes that everybody is basically good at heart, but you can't find that in the texts. What he does assume is that everyone wants happiness. The problem is that we go about it in confused and misinformed ways. But if we can find a path to true happiness that really works, everyone would be happy because true happiness is something that doesn't harm anyone at all. Your true happiness doesn't conflict with anyone else's true happiness. Keep that in mind. This is why we chant this passage every day. They say that Ajaan Mun spread thoughts of goodwill to all living beings three times a day: in the morning when he woke up, in the afternoon when he woke up from his nap, and at night before he went to sleep. In this way, the desire for goodwill, the desire for true happiness, framed his practice. So it's good to establish it as a frame for your practice as well. It helps remind you of why you're here. There will be barren patches in your meditation, patches where things don't seem to be going the way you want them to. When you hit these patches, remember that you're doing this for true happiness, something that goes beyond the ordinary quick fix. That helps get you over the rough spots. So always keep these thoughts in mind. Remember that goodwill and compassion are qualities you can't separate from the Buddha's teachings on wisdom and discernment. You have to understand how to go about true happiness if your desire for happiness is actually going to get results. What this comes down to is training the mind. All the Buddha's teachings — on generosity, virtue, and meditation, or on virtue, concentration, and discernment — are aimed at training the mind because the mind is what shapes our experience of pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering. A well-trained mind can deal with any situation in life and not have to suffer at all. What does it mean to train the mind? It means to look at what you're doing and to see what the results are. Then you learn to refrain from things that cause suffering, no matter how much you like doing them, and to do the things that lead to true happiness, whether you like doing them or not. Some of the things that lead to true happiness are really pleasant to do. Others require effort. They go against the grain. You have to learn not to let your resistance to the effort get in the way. You need a clear sense of cause and effect. That's what discernment is all about: seeing what really works in terms of cause and effect, what doesn't really work, and then adjusting your actions accordingly. We're here to train the mind to be its own best friend. One very visceral way of doing this is to focus on your breath. When the Buddha analyzes the way you cause yourself suffering, very early on in the list he says that if you're ignorant of what's really going to work, then even the way you breathe can lead to suffering. So let's focus on the way we breathe. Where do you sense the breath right now? When you close your eyes, what sensations let you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out? Focus on them. They can be in any part of the body at all, for "breath" here means the flow of energy. Sometimes you'll sense the breath as the feeling of the air moving in and out of the nose, but it can also be the rise and fall of the abdomen, the rise and fall of the chest. Sometimes those movements send ripples out to different parts of the body, so that you can sense even in your arms or your legs whether you're breathing in or breathing out. So wherever you find it convenient to focus, focus on the breath sensations there. Then allow them to be comfortable. In other words, don't put too much pressure on them as you focus on them. At the same time, notice how long an in-breath feels good. At what point does the in-breath start feeling uncomfortable? Just breathe in as long as is comfortable, and then allow yourself to breathe out. Breathe out only as long as is comfortable, and then breathe back in again. Try to sensitize yourself to what feels good right now in terms of the breathing. Think of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, with every cell in your body bathed with breath energy. When you think of the breath in that way, what kind of breathing feels good? You might find, as you start thinking in that way, that the breath gets deeper. If that feels gratifying, fine. If it feels uncomfortable, change the rhythm. Just think, "What would be more comfortable right now?" and see what the body does in response. Think of yourself as hovering around the breath. You're not squeezing it out; you're not forcing it in; you're just staying very close to it, watching it, letting it adjust in whatever way feels good. Give it some space to adjust. Sometimes you might want to nudge it a little bit and see what longer breathing would feel like, or what shorter breathing would feel like, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow, and then notice what happens. At first you may not sense much difference, but after a while you begin to get more sensitive to the breathing process. You become more of a connoisseur of your own breathing. You gain a sense of what kind of breathing really feels good for the body right now. The more satisfying the breath is, the easier you will find it to stay with the breathing. If the mind wanders off, just bring it right back to the breath. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. Ask yourself, "Is the breath as comfortable as it could be?" and see what you need to change. But don't browbeat yourself over the fact that the mind is wandering. Don't get upset or discouraged. It's natural that it'll wander, for that's what it's been doing for so long. You've probably heard the word samsara. It means wandering around. That's what the mind is used to doing. It's used to wandering. When you try to get it to stay in one place like this, it's going to resist. It's like training a puppy. You want it to come, and it seems to want to do everything else but come. But if you're firm with it, at the same time rewarding it when it does come, after a while it'll come willingly. So have some confidence in yourself. Remind yourself that this is a really useful skill to have, because we cause ourselves so much unnecessary stress and strain simply because we breathe in unskillful and oblivious ways. If you can master just this one skill, you change the way you relate to your body, you change the way you relate to the present moment, you have a greater reserve of wellbeing to draw on in any situation. If they threw you in prison, you could just sit there and breathe really comfortably. They wouldn't have to know. So in that way, you're not adding suffering to the pain already there. So, you have an hour to get acquainted with the breath, to try to see what kind of breathing feels good right now, and then right now, right now. The needs of the body will change over time, so you have to be on top of them. Notice how they change. Make it a game. Don't be too grim about the meditation. After all, we're here trying to find pleasure in the breath. So treat it as a sport, something you want to learn how to enjoy. As with any sport, it takes time, it takes training, it takes discipline. But there's also the element of enjoyment that comes when you're doing it well. It feels good. It feels right. After all, the breath is the process in the body that you experience most directly. You sense your body through the movement of the breath. If the breath were not moving, of course you'd be dead. But if you could somehow be alive while the breath was not moving, even then you wouldn't sense the body at all. In fact, there are stages of concentration where the breath energy stops. The oxygen coming in through the pores of the skin is enough to keep you going because the brain is very still and isn't using much oxygen at that time. When that happens, you find that the shape of the body begins to dissolve. The breath is that essential to how you know your body. In addition, the breath is also instrumental in how you move your body, by means of the breath energy running through the nerves and along the blood vessels. So here you are sensitizing yourself to your most direct experience of the body, and you're learning to relate to the body in a way that's comfortable. At the same time, you find that the breath is a mirror for the mind. A sudden emotion comes into the mind, and the breath will change. That's one of the reasons we sometimes feel that we've got to get our anger out of our system: The way the breath has changed in response to the anger is uncomfortable. So you can undo that effect. As soon as you sense a change in the breath, you can consciously breathe in a way that dissolves away whatever tension has built up in the breathing. That weakens the power of the anger. This is another way the breath can be your friend. It's like having a friend who reminds you when you get angry that it's not in your best interest to be angry. It can soothe you when you're angry, put you in a better mood. It can be your friend when you're sick; it can be your friend when you're suffering from fear or any other strong, unpleasant emotion. The breath can be there as your friend, but only if you learn how to befriend it. Get to know it. As with any friendship, it takes time. You can't just walk in and shake hands and say "Hi, you're my breath, I'm in charge of you, let's go." The breath doesn't respond well to that, just as a person wouldn't respond well to some stranger coming up and saying that. After all, you've been a stranger to your breath for who knows how long. It has been there for you, but you haven't been there for it. You haven't paid it much attention. You don't really know it well. So here's your opportunity to get on good terms with the breath. When you have your breath as your friend, you have a friend wherever you go, in any situation. As the Buddha said, to really get to know someone requires (1) time and (2) being very observant. So. Here you've got a whole hour of time. It's up to you to be observant and to see how well you can get to know the breath. To show some goodwill for the breath in a very direct and visceral way like this is to show goodwill for yourself, the wish that's expressed in that chant: "May I be happy." Here's one way to act on it. At the same time, you cause no harm to anyone else. The way you breathe doesn't directly affect anyone else at all. Indirectly, if you breathe in unskillful ways and uncomfortable ways, you're going to get irritable and take it out on other people. But if you're breathing comfortably, there's no irritation to take out on anybody at all. In this way, the fact that you're working with your breath is a way of showing goodwill for other people too. So try to make the most of this opportunity.

A Magic Set of Tools August 10, 2004 As you're sitting here, there are a lot of things you could focus on in the present moment. You could focus on the sound of the crickets. You could focus on the sound of the bombing practice off to the west, the temperature of the air — all kinds of things. The question is: Which thing are you going to focus on that's going to deliver the best results for the mind? This is where the breath comes in. It's something that's here all the time — coming in, going out, staying still — giving us our sense of the body. It's a place where we can settle down, something we can stay in touch with at all times — if we're mindful. It's important to understand what mindfulness is: It's the act of keeping something in mind. The word sati is related to the verb sarati, which means to remember. You focus your attention on one particular thing and then keep reminding yourself to stay there. This is how concentration is developed. But concentration is not just a question of memory. To be a part of the path, it has to be alert as well. We're not trying to put ourselves into a trance. We simply want to stay focused on an aspect of the present moment that's going to be helpful. Mindfulness is what reminds us to stay at that present sensation or present occurrence; alertness is what allows us to see what's going on. The third quality we add is persistence or ardency. Keep with it. No matter how loud the bombs or incessant the crickets, you're not going to send your attention after them. You know they're there. You're not going to deny that they're there, but they're simply not places you want to go. You're going to keep tabs on this one thing: the breath coming in, going out. If you prefer a meditation word, you can stay with buddho. If you want, you can focus on the parts of the body, like the bones, skin, your liver — anything that keeps you grounded here in the present moment in a way that helps mindfulness and alertness to grow, to develop. Your ability to stick with these qualities is what's going to help them grow. When you notice yourself wandering off, ardency means that you bring the mind right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. You don't give up. You don't get discouraged. While you're with the breath, ardency means that you try to be as sensitive as possible to the sensation of the breathing. The more consistent your sensitivity, the more refined the sense of comfort you'll derive from the breathing. As Ajaan Lee says, when you're mindful and alert like this, mindfulness and alertness change into the factors of jhana, or steady absorption. We often hear that mindfulness practice and concentration practice are two different things, but the Buddha never taught them that way. He said that right mindfulness leads naturally to right concentration. In all of the descriptions of the path — such as the noble eightfold path, the five faculties, the seven factors for awakening — right mindfulness always precedes right concentration. So don't think of them as separate practices; think of them as qualities of the mind that help each other along. Mindfulness turns into directed thought as it shades into the steadiness of concentration. Once concentration gets more solid, your mindfulness gets a lot steadier. When you reach the fourth jhana, the Buddha says, that's where mindfulness becomes pure. The word jhana is related to a verb jhayati, which is a homonym for a verb to burn — to burn in a steady way, like the flame of this candle at the front of the room. Pali has different verbs for the word to burn. There's the burning of an ordinary fire that flickers and flares, but then there's jhayati, which describes the burning of an oil lamp — steady, so steady you can read by it. And that's the whole purpose of getting the mind to stay steadily here in the present moment: so that you can read what's going on in the mind. In the beginning, the steadiness requires some protection, just like the candle here. If the wind outside started to flare up more than it is right now, we'd have to put a glass globe around the candle to keep the flame steady. That glass globe is directed thought and evaluation. Keep reminding yourself to come back — stay with the breath, stay with the breath, stay with the breath — consistently. And then evaluation, which grows out of alertness, looks at the breath: Is this a comfortable place to stay? What do you need to adjust? Do you need to move the focus of your attention? Do you need to adjust the breath? Do you need to adjust some of the concepts in your mind about what you're doing? If the breath is too subtle to follow, can you stay simply with the sense of the body sitting here? There are lots of things to evaluate. This is where the element of discernment or insight comes into the practice. Again, we often hear that jhana practice is a tranquility practice and insight practice is something else, but again, the Buddha didn't divide things up that way. He said that you need tranquility and insight in order to get the mind to become steady like this. The insight lies in understanding what problems you have to face and how you can get around them; the tranquility lies in the element of steadily, calmly watching things. So you use directed thought and evaluation to protect what you've got. As a sense of ease and fullness develops in the present moment, you've got to protect it even more. Stick with it, work at whatever you need to do to maintain that sense of wellbeing — learning when you're trying too hard to make it better, learning when you're not trying hard enough to notice what can be done to relax things even further, make them even more gratifying and pleasurable. That's all a function of insight: watching things, evaluating things, figuring out which causes to change to make the effects just right. This is the element of insight, the element of discernment that we're working on while we're on the path. We develop it in simple practices like this: learning what's just right in terms of the breath. That's the middleness of our middle way right now. The word middleness also applies to the appropriateness of what we're doing. Sometimes we have to be very protective of what we're doing when there are lots of external distractions, or when the mind itself seems to be rambunctious and hard to control. We have to make an extra effort during times like that. At other times, the effort doesn't have to be quite so strong: All you need to do is just watch, keep tabs on things, and they seem to behave on their own. If you mess with them too much, they're going to rebel, so you have to be very sensitive to what's needed, what's going on. This is part of the middleness of the middle way: the appropriateness of what you're doing. As you develop this sense of appropriateness, this sense of "just right," you're developing discernment in the midst of concentration practice. The Buddha said there's no discernment without jhana, no jhana without discernment. The two qualities help each other along. So if you find yourself slipping off the breath, slipping off the topic of your meditation, remember these things. When things get balanced, you don't have to think about them that much. Once you develop a sense of balance, you just maintain that balance in your practice. It'll be sub-verbal. It's like sailing a boat. When you get on the boat for your first sailing lessons and you're told to steer the boat to the left, sometimes you flip it over because you steer too hard. Or you're told to steer to the right, and again you flip it over in the other direction because you're steering too hard. But after a while you begin to get a sense of exactly how much pressure you have to apply to the rudder, and you get so that you hardly even think about it. It becomes an intuitive sense. You're alert to it — you have to be alert — but you don't have to verbalize it. This is what we're working toward in the practice: gaining that intuitive sense of what's just right for right now — when you have to apply a little bit more pressure, when you have to hold back a little bit — so that you don't need all these concepts. As the meditation gets more and more intuitive, as the mind gets more and more firmly settled right here, you can actually drop the directed thought and evaluation and just plow right into the sensation of the breath or whatever your object is. When you get there, you begin to wonder, "Why did you ever think you had to do anything more in the meditation than just be right here?" That's what it seems like from that perspective. So watch out that you don't get complacent, because you can lose this. It's simply a matter of having that intuitive sense of where your spot is and how to stay there. This is how to develop a foundation for the mind: You use mindfulness and alertness, you use your discernment to get the mind concentrated, and then once it's concentrated you use that concentration to discern things even more clearly. All the factors of the path help one another, and they all come together. There's a unity to the path. Even though it has eight folds, it's one piece of paper. So if these thoughts are helpful when you find yourself drifting off or losing balance, keep them in mind. There will come a point where you don't have to consciously remember them. All you'll have to do is be very watchful, very alert, making sure you're not complacent, and you can drop the concepts. Dropping them doesn't mean you'll forget them. They'll be there to pick up again when you need them, but you don't have to carry them around all the time. They're like a magic set of tools: They float right within reach. You don't have to carry them. Or like your shadow: It goes everywhere you go, but you don't have to carry it with you. It places no weight on you at all.

A Private Matter July 15, 2007 I once heard of a tennis pro whose game had gone into a slump. He tried everything he could imagine to get his game back: fired his trainer, got another trainer, tried different rackets. Then one day he realized he'd forgotten the number one lesson in tennis: Keep your eye on the ball. The same sort of thing often happens in meditation. You start out with a very simple process and then it gradually grows more complicated. After a while you forget the first principles: i.e., stay with your breath. So try to spend the whole hour staying with the breath, no matter what. Be really sensitive to how the breath feels, and to what you're doing to the breath. The breath is a fabrication, which means that there's an intentional element in the way you breathe. You want to be very sensitive to that, to what you're adding to the breathing process. Try to do it skillfully. As long as you're going to add an intentional element, add something good. Your relation to the breath is something very intimate, very private. Often it's hard to talk about how the breath feels, because the breath feels like the breath feels. It doesn't quite feel like anything else. So we talk about it indirectly, in terms of metaphors and similes, realizing that our descriptions are approximate. When you hear something in the instructions, learn to translate it in such a way that it relates to what's happening in your direct experience. And keep your inner experience primary. For example, I've noticed that one of the best ways of getting the breath energy in the body to be comfortable and full is not to put any effort into the out-breath at all. What effort there may be goes into the in-breath. As for breathing out, you don't need to help the body. It's going to breathe out on its own. When you don't force it out, that allows the breath energy to fill up in the body. This is hard to put precisely into words. It's not like you're trying to stuff the breath in, but because you don't squeeze it out, then each time you breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, and allow the sense of fullness to run along your nerves, the nerves begin to glow. Again, this doesn't fit easily into words, for it's not a visible glow. But there's a feeling of glow-like energy filling the nerves, radiating out from them, radiating out of the blood vessels. You try to breathe in such a way that maintains that sense of radiance. The body then feels a lot more comfortable, the blood can flow freely through all the different parts of the body. It feels really good. So try to relate that to what you're doing right now and see if you get results. If you don't, try experimenting a little bit on your own to see which way of breathing really does feel good in the body. When you do this, it sets up the issue of pleasure and pain, cause and effect, right from the start. That's what the Buddha's teachings are all about: Why do we suffer from pain? How can we use the pleasure of a concentrated mind to lead us to even greater ease and wellbeing? Often it's best not to analyze the issue too much in advance. You can read the books on jhana or vipassana, and then try to impose the words on your experience. And of course your understanding of the words comes from where? It comes from ignorance. So that takes you away from your direct experience, away from this very private matter of why the mind is causing itself suffering, how your intentions are causing suffering. So instead, try to approach the meditation from a standpoint that's more familiar: How do you feel right now? Which ways of thinking about the breath, which ways of letting the body breathe, lead to pain and a sense of constriction? Which ones lead to a greater sense of openness and ease? Start from your immediate experience and branch out from there. That's the way Ajaan Fuang used to teach meditation. He'd have people get in touch with their breath. He'd use a few analogies and similes, and then he'd listen to the words they used to describe their own experience of meditation, when the breath felt "sticky," when it felt "solid" or "dense," when it felt "full." And then he'd use their vocabulary to teach them further. For instance, one of his students would talk about the "delicious breath," so Ajaan Fuang would start his instructions to that student by saying, "Get in touch with the delicious breath." In this way, the meditation is not something imposed from outside. It's something that develops from your own inner sensitivity. Then somewhat after the fact, after you've had some direct experience with it, you can read the books and begin to relate their terms to what you've experienced. Even then, though, it's always best to take those terms and use them as post-it notes, for as you develop your inner experience further, your understanding of the inner terrain is going to change. You may have to move some of those notes around. This is a much more trustworthy way of approaching the meditation than trying to fit the mind into a mold based on your understanding of what somebody else has written or said. If you do that, it takes you away from your direct experience, from your own sensitivity. And there's always that element of doubt: Does this really qualify as what they're talking about? Whereas if you approach it from the other direction — "If I do it this way, how does it feel?" — you know better than anybody else how it feels. Now, your sensitivity may not be refined enough to see subtle levels of stress, but there's no way you're going to see those subtle levels until you deal with the blatant ones first. And it's a natural matter that over time, as you get more familiar with the breath, more familiar with the way the body feels from the inside, your powers of sensitivity are going to develop. You pick up things that you didn't notice before, both in the breath and in the way the mind relates to the breath. This way you keep the meditation very direct. It's your own private matter. Ajaan Fuang once said that he didn't want his students discussing their meditation with anybody else aside from him. When you talk to other people, they have their ideas, they have their preconceived notions. Maybe they know something about meditation, maybe they're very wise, but that in itself is a questionable thing. You don't know how experienced they are, how much they really know. Secondly, you may start taking their words and trying to fit them on your own experience. If you don't have enough inner experience, it's very easy to get messed up. Even when they simply ask you a question, the way they frame the question already embodies a certain viewpoint. And that viewpoint may be questionable. So keep your meditation a private affair. After all, the suffering you're causing yourself is a private affair, something nobody else can see. Even when we live together day in and day out, each of us is making a lot of decisions that nobody else here will know. We may see some of the outside effects, but the actual experience of suffering — your suffering, your pain: You're the only person who can feel it. And you're the only person who can know which little decisions you make from moment to moment to moment. That's what you want to learn how to observe. So try to develop your inner sensitivity as much as you can, so that you can make sure your decisions are going in the right direction. The intentional element here is to try to minimize suffering as much as possible. This is why breath meditation relates directly to the sublime attitudes we chant every evening. This is your front row seat on the question of how to bring about more happiness. "May all living beings be happy": All living beings are out there, but you're one of them, too, in here. This is the being you have the most direct impact on. So if you learn how to be kind to yourself in the way you breathe, it's going to be easier to be kind to other people. If you see that there's some stress and suffering inside, have some compassion for yourself. Try to breathe in a way, try to relate to the breath in a way, that minimizes that stress. When you learn compassion for yourself inside like this, it's a lot easier to feel compassion for others outside. The same with empathetic joy and equanimity: When the breath is going well, appreciate it. Enjoy it. As for the uncomfortable things in the breath that you can't change, you've just got to watch them for a while. The word for equanimity — upekkha — actually relates to that quality of just watching, looking on. In other words, you see that this may not yet be the time to do anything, but you never know when the situation will change, so you just keep watching, watching, watching, until you detect things. And even here the breath helps a lot. It gives you a foundation from which to watch. As you're staying with the breath, you're in the present moment. Simply being with the sensation of breathing helps pull you out of a lot of your thoughts, that ongoing committee discussion in the mind. If you're with the breath, you're like an outside observer on the committee meeting. You're not necessarily pushed around by the voices in the committee. In that way, you're in a better position to see, "Is this the time to exercise goodwill? Or is it more the time to exercise equanimity, compassion, or empathetic joy?" So these two types of meditation — the meditation that develops the sublime attitudes and the meditation on the breath — really come together like this. The breath gives you practice in the proper attitudes and puts you in a position where you can see which of these four attitudes is appropriate at any one time, always taking your inner experience of stress — something you're most intimately related to — as your touchstone. That way, your knowledge is not just words. There's a direct experience underlying it all. As your skill is being developed, you're growing more sensitive to what that experience is, and more honest with yourself about where you're still causing yourself stress. Your experience of stress is your only proof of whether the meditation is working, and even then it's reliable only if you're honest with yourself. You may want to look for an outside authority to verify things for you, but that leads to the question of who out there is awakened, who is not. You may have some ideas, you may have some intuitions, but you can't really prove anything about what's going on outside. Your only real proof is what lies inside. And until you make the inner proof as clear and as honest as possible, you'll have no proof about anything at all. So this inner sensitivity, something totally private to you, is what you're trying to develop here. That's where you start; that's what helps keep you on the path. And of course, this sensitivity doesn't necessarily have to be here only while you're sitting and meditating. Try to keep in touch throughout the day with your inner experience of what you're doing and what stress is or is not arising as a result of what you're doing, the little choices you make inside. Try to carry that awareness around as much as you can, in all your activities. Make that your first priority. When you act, act from that point. When you speak, speak from that point. When you think, think from that point. In that way the meditation becomes timeless. Ajaan Fuang once made the comment that our lives are often chopped up into little times: time to eat, time to talk, time to go here, go there, do this, do that. Instead of having more time when life has more times like this, everything gets chopped up into little tiny pieces and becomes less. But when you make this inner sensitivity as continuous as possible — you breathe in, let the body breathe out if it wants to, but you don't have to force the breath out; breathe in again, breathe in again — that inner sense of wellbeing can grow. Then as you carry it through the day, it becomes solid. It may take time to focus on it, time to get a sense of what helps it, what doesn't help it. But the sense of inner refreshment that comes: You want that to be as continuous as possible. The more continuous it is, the more strength it develops. The more resilient it becomes, the more you can rely on it, even in very difficult situations. This involves unlearning some old habits. Society often teaches us to give all our attention to things outside. What happens of course is that we lose touch with our own inner sensitivity. We become strangers to ourselves. So reintroduce yourself to this inner sensitivity. Open up this area of your awareness, and be as sensitive to it as possible. In that way the meditation will grow in an organic way — not from words imposed outside, or ideas imposed from how you understand the words outside, but from a direct experience of what's actually going on inside. What works and what doesn't work, what's skillful, what's not, where there's stress, where there is no stress: These are the questions that only you can observe and only you can know. And they can be answered only by a very honest sensitivity that's always willing to learn more.

One Point, Two Points, Many Points August 18, 2007 Ajaan Lee sometimes talks about not being aware of the breath in the whole body. He sometimes recommends focusing on one spot and just staying right there. Some people, he says, find it too distracting to deal with the breath sensations in the different parts of the body. As you're thinking about your hand, your arm, or your leg, other thoughts related to hands, arms, and legs might sneak in and carry you off someplace else. He compares this to starting an orchard. If you plant your whole orchard all at once, using all your resources, you may find that you've overextended yourself. You're faced with a drought for several days, the trees all die, and you end up with nothing. In cases like that, it's smarter to start out with one little area and to focus on planting just that, caring for that. Say you plant a mango tree. You care for it for a couple years, and then when they give their first crop of mangoes, you collect the seeds and plant them. The same with the second crop. That way you gradually enlarge your orchard until you fill your whole plot of land. So if you find that focusing on the breath here and there in the beginning of the meditation gets you distracted, just focus down on one spot and stay right there. Tell yourself: You're not going anywhere else. You may want to use the word buddho to help keep things under control. But just use one spot in the body: It might be right between your eyes, the middle of the forehead, wherever you feel is closest to the center of your awareness in the body. You stare right down, right there. The one warning is that you not tighten up around that spot. Think of the area as being open and free flowing. In other words, the blood can flow in, the blood can flow out. Energy flows in, energy flows out, but you are not moving. You're going to stay right here. No matter what happens, you're going to stay right in this one little spot. That can gather the mind together and keep it there. You're not trying to take care of too many things at once. Other people find that one spot is not enough. In that case, you might want to try two spots. There was an old schoolteacher I knew who had come to meditation late in life. After she retired, she went to stay at Wat Asokaram. She found that the easiest way to get her mind down — she told me once, well before I was ordained — was to focus on two spots: one right between the eyes, the other at the base of the spine. She'd try to keep both spots going at once. In her case, she said, it was like connecting the two poles of a battery. As soon as the two poles were connected, things lit up inside. That enabled her to get the mind into concentration really quickly. What all this shows is that concentration is an individual matter. Different people find that their minds settle down in different ways. And there's room in the practice of concentration for you to experiment and see what works for you. There's no one ideal method that's going to suit everybody, and the whole purpose of the concentration is for the mind to settle down with something it likes, something it finds interesting. The iddhipada, or bases for success, basically say that concentration will succeed by stressing one of four different qualities. For some people, it's fired by desire. For others, persistence, the energy of stick-to-it-ividness. Other people find that concentration works best when it's based on the quality of intent, when you dive in and give it your entire attention. Other people find that analysis works. It's by analyzing the breath, by making it interesting — and finding that it really is interesting, the way the breath energy flows in the body, how it can be very different from what you might expect, by playing with it, by experimenting with it — that you find yourself absorbed in the present. Not because you're forcing yourself to be there, but simply because you get interested, just as you can get absorbed, say, in painting a picture. As a child I used to find that drawing would have me absorbed for hours. I'd be working on a drawing and I'd have no sense of the passage of time. It'd be time for dinner before I knew it. And the same can work in your meditation as you learn to analyze the breath. You pull yourself into the present moment not with any force, but simply through the power of your curiosity. Some people, though, find that analyzing things like this gets them distracted: You start thinking about the breath, and then you start thinking about your stomach, and then about the doctor who looked after your stomach, and all of a sudden you find yourself thirty miles away. In that case your meditation may succeed based either on the desire to stay here, or the effort to stay focused on just one spot, or being intent on one spot, or on two spots, whatever you find works. So there's room for experimentation; there's room for you to learn what works for you. Keep this in mind as you practice. Sometimes you've got to use your ingenuity. As Ajaan Fuang once noted, all the elements in really well-balanced concentration are there in the seven steps in Ajaan Lee's instructions. The problem is simply that different people will find different steps to be the ones that really pull them in. Once they've been pulled in by one of the steps, they've got to balance out the other ones. Ajaan Lee talks about finding your one spot in the body and staying focused there, but some people miss this step because it comes after the steps that tell you to explore the breath throughout the body. But the steps don't have to be done in sequential order. Think of them as different component factors of concentration. You may have to start out with just the one spot. Once that's established, you can develop the other components. In other words, you stay focused in your one spot and then see how it's related to the area right around it. Then radiating out from there, you look at the areas right around that, until you've got the whole body in your frame of awareness, even though you're still really staring down on the one spot. You can't help but be aware of the body. In other words, you don't totally blank out the rest of the body. After all, the purpose of concentration is to be aware all around as a basis for discernment. Discernment can arise only when you're aware all around. If your concentration is the sort that blocks things out, it's not going to be a good basis for discernment. You won't see unexpected connections. You'll have huge blind spots in your range of awareness where all kinds of things can hide. So one way to start is to go right for one spot and then gradually expand from there. But if you find that too confining, if the mind rebels against being forced into one spot, you can have it range around your body. Notice how the breath feels in the toes, how it feels in the fingers, how it feels in the arms and the back, how your posture effects the breath, how your breath effects the posture. In other words, use the meditation as an opportunity to explore. This is one of the good things about the breath as a focal point for meditation. You can use it both as an object to stare at and as an object to analyze. If you find that the mind needs more tranquility before it's going to get anywhere, okay, you can just settle down and be very, very still. It's almost like you're not even watching the breath. You're more focused on the direction in which your awareness is beamed. You're preoccupied with just keeping the beam steady. The one danger you have to watch out for there, of course, is that you might clamp down on the blood circulation in that spot. So watch out for that. Allow things to come in and go out, but you stay at that one spot as consistently as possible. But as for the connections you can see when you use the breath as an object for discernment, they're infinite. We were talking earlier this morning about name and form and how they play a role in the arising of suffering. Well, they also play a role in the path leading to the end of suffering. You've got form, which is the form of the body, the four great elements, and the breath is the most prominent element. You've got perception: whatever perceptions you have of the breath, whatever ways you have of conceiving the breath. That's an effective way of getting the mind to settle down: simply by holding that perception in mind. You pay attention, which is another element of form. You've got the intention to stay. And then you've got the feeling that arises when you try to create a feeling of ease. In other words, instead of allowing these things to happen willy-nilly, you try to bring as much awareness and clarity to how they function in bringing the mind to stillness. So these elements — which if left to their own devices based on ignorance would lead to suffering: You're now playing with them, all the while being very aware of how they interact. This is one of the best ways of learning their interactions: by playing with them. You adjust your attention or your intention and see what happens to the feeling. You change your perception, and see what effect it has on the mind. What we're doing is to take the basic causes of suffering and to bring as much awareness to them as possible — specifically awareness in the form of the four noble truths: Where is there stress, what are you doing that's causing stress, and what can you change to make the stress go away? You start with blatant levels of stress related to how you're sitting here breathing, trying to get the mind to settle down. And then from there, you grow sensitive to levels that are more and more subtle. You're here right where all the action is. It's simply a matter for you individually to figure out exactly where you can get your first handle on these issues. Establish that as your beachhead, and then from there your understanding will begin to spread out. There will come times in the meditation when you begin to think that just being very still right here is kind of stupid. Nothing is going to happen. And you wonder what else is there to do next. Well, ask yourself: Who says that it's stupid? Why do you need to push the "what's next"? Those are perceptions right there. Right there you've got some issues you can work through. Everything you need to know for the purpose of putting an end to suffering is right here. Just bring a lot of alertness to it. A lot of mindfulness to it. And notice what works for you in getting the mind to settle down. That's how insight arises, by seeing what works. That's the way the Buddha tested all of his insights: Did they work? In other words, he was looking for pragmatic truth, the knowledge that would make a difference. As for truths that wouldn't make a difference, he just put them aside. He was very single-minded in his quest. Whatever was necessary for putting an end to suffering, he focused on that. Whatever wasn't necessary, he might know it but he didn't let it clutter up his mind. As he said in describing his Awakening, he learned the equivalent of the leaves of the forest. What he brought out to teach — in terms of focusing on the issue of suffering, its cause, its end, and the path to its end: That's just like a handful of leaves. But it's precisely the handful you need. If you were to make a comparison with medicine, there can be lots of medicine in the forest, but just this one handful is what you need for your specific disease. As for the other leaves, if they're not helpful for your disease, why bother with them right now? The mind has this disease of ignorance, craving, greed, anger and delusion. And if we don't take care of it, it's going to fester, going to cause a lot of suffering for a long time to come. So focus on the leaves that will cure it. As for the other leaves in the forest, you can pay attention to them after you've got this specific disease cured. So everything you need to know is right here. It's simply a matter of paying attention. See which perceptions work, which perceptions don't work, which ways of paying attention work, and which ones don't, which intentions work, and which don't. Just by exploring these issues, you can learn an awful lot about the mind — and make a big change in the mind as well.

The Stairway Up April 28, 2004 Once, soon after I had first met Ajaan Fuang, I had a dream. In the dream I was visiting Ajaan Lee's monastery. I had never been there, but in the dream they had a big museum several stories high. I had the choice to climb the stairway or to climb a ladder up on the side of the building, going straight to the top floor, and I chose the ladder. I wanted to go straight up to the top. But as I was climbing, the ladder fell down. Fortunately I was caught. The problem was that the ladder wasn't leaning against anything solid. At the end of the dream I found myself at the door again, having to contemplate going up the stairway. That's when I woke up. And that's pretty much a story of how my practice started: A lot of things happened very quickly those first couple of weeks with Ajaan Fuang but then they all unraveled, and I had to start back at the beginning, step by step by step. This can sometimes be discouraging. It happens to all meditators. Sometimes by fluke we happen to hit something very advanced — or at least it seems to be very advanced — in the meditation and then it all unravels right before our eyes. At first it can be encouraging, but ultimately it turns discouraging as we see the defilements we're still living with in our minds — that those quick, flashy experiences didn't actually make much of an impact. The follow-up work seems a lot less glamorous, and a lot of people give up right there. But it's important that you don't give up and that you don't look down on the situation where you are. Don't get discouraged, because wherever you go, those are the issues you have to deal with, that's the situation you have to address. If you don't deal with it now, you have to come back to that same situation all over again, and sometimes it gets worse. So the proper attitude is that whatever issues arise in the meditation, those are the ones you have to deal with. Don't compare them with where you've been before in the meditation, or with the issues you'd like to be dealing with now, or where you want the meditation to go. Most of us would like to be magically beamed up to a higher level of concentration or a higher level of insight. But it's often the case that our refusal to look at the situation in our minds right now is what's preventing concentration and insight from arising. So look at what you've got. Look at where you are. Don't pass judgment as to whether the problem you're facing is elementary or advanced. It's the problem you're facing. It's the problem that has to be dealt with. Bring all your powers of attention to bear right there. And be glad that you've got the opportunity to practice. Don't view it as drudgery. A lot of people are in situations where they have no inclination, have no idea what the practice is about. Or they may have an idea and the inclination but they don't have the opportunity. Here we have the opportunity. We've got the inclination. We have some idea of what the problem is all about. These opportunities are rare to find. So the teaching on acceptance means accepting where you are. It doesn't mean that you accept that you're going to stay there forever. You simply accept that this is the situation you're facing right now. Whether it's something you like or not, whether you find yourself attracted to it or not, that's not the issue. The issue is: Are you willing to work with what you've got? That willingness is an important element in all levels of practice. It starts with our willingness to help other people, and goes on with our willingness to practice the precepts. This volunteer spirit is an important part of training the mind. That's what it's all about: realizing that you've got to put energy into it if you're going to get anything out of it. When you're willing to take that first step, make that first gift of your energy, that's where the practice starts to grow. Without that attitude, it doesn't go anywhere. All we can think of is what we'd like to get out of the meditation, but before you can get anything you have to give. As for generosity, sometimes people look at what they've got and they'd like to be able to give much more. They'd like to make a more impressive offering, but their means are limited. So they have to content themselves with giving limited gifts to begin with, but the momentum builds on that. Sometimes the little gifts bring the greatest reward. Ajaan Fuang liked to tell the story of a man and his wife who had only one upper cloth between them. They each had a cloth to cover the lower parts of their bodies, but only one cloth between them to cover the upper parts of their bodies. That was back in the days in India when you didn't go out of your house unless you had two pieces of cloth around you: one wrapped around your waist, the other over your shoulders. Because they only had one upper cloth between them, they'd have to leave the house at separate times. If one was going out, the other had to stay at home. They were that poor. One night they heard that the Buddha was going to be giving a talk, so they agreed that the husband should be the one to go. The talk was basically on the rewards of generosity. The husband kept sitting there thinking, "This is why I'm so poor. I haven't been generous. What have I got to give? Nothing. All I have is this one cloth, and if I give this I won't be able to go anywhere. But if I don't give this, what can I give? I won't be able to give anything at all." So he battled back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in his mind for hours, and the Buddha, noting what was going on, just kept on talking and talking on generosity. It was originally supposed to be a short Dhamma talk, but it went on and on and on until midnight. The king was in the audience, lots of people were in the audience, and they were wondering why the Dhamma talk was going on for so long. Finally around midnight the man stood up shouting, "Victory! Victory!" He had overcome his stinginess. He was going to give the cloth to the Buddha, so he went down and gave the cloth. People in the audience wondered who this was, and why he was shouting "Victory." When they learned of his poverty, they were very impressed. The king said, "Okay, I'll give him another cloth and other things in addition" — a cloth and a horse and an elephant, all kinds of stuff. One of each. And because the man was on a roll, a generosity roll, he gave all those things to the Buddha, too. So the king upped the ante — gave him two of each. The man gave all of that. The king kept doubling: four, eight, finally sixteen. At that point the man decided to keep eight of each of these things — eight pieces of gold, eight pieces of silver, eight pieces of cloth, eight horses, eight elephants. He gave the other eight to the Buddha and went home with his remaining eight. The lesson of the story is that a small gift by a person of little means translates into a lot more in terms of its rewards than a large gift from someone of large means, because the first gift requires more of a sacrifice. The same principle applies in the meditation. When things aren't going well, you have to make a sacrifice of your pride, a sacrifice of your likes and dislikes, and get down to dealing with what's actually happening in the mind. Only when you're able to make that sacrifice can the rewards come. In the beginning they may not be all that impressive. You may not get a piece of gold, a piece of silver, an elephant or whatever, but you do make a step, you see a slight change in the mind. That's much better than just sitting around being discouraged. So whatever the issues you're facing in your meditation, be content to deal with them, because those are the real issues, the genuine issues you've got to face. They may not stack up against the things you've read about or the things you've experienced in the past, but a little solid progress is much more valuable than all the quick and flashy special effects out there in the world. Ajaan Fuang sometimes had students who would come to sit and meditate with him for the first time and gain visions of their past lives or of heavenly beings. Some of his older students felt jealous and discouraged by that. Here they'd been sitting and meditating for months with nothing special happening, and this person comes in and has all kinds of interesting things going on all at once. It often happened, though, that the quick and flashy students didn't last very long. When the visions stopped, when there was no more entertainment, they left. It's the steady progress that makes all the difference, that turns out to be the winner in the end. So sacrifice whatever attitudes get in the way of looking at the issues staring you right in the face, because those are the genuine article. They're right here. They're not abstractions. We can sit around and think about Dhamma abstractions from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, but the problems in the mind aren't composed of abstractions. They're not composed of memories. They're composed of movements in the mind right now. Look at what the mind is doing, how it moves. Can you change the way it moves? You've got to poke around in what's actually going on in your mind to see which parts of the present are made of elastic and which parts are made of steel — in other words, the things you can change and the things you can't. There will be drudgery and there will be mistakes, but these are the things you learn from. This is the kind of knowledge that really makes a difference in the mind, because this is how you develop your sensitivity, how you get a sense of how to balance excessive desire with lack of desire, how to balance excessive effort with lack of effort, and all the other balancing acts that need to be done in the meditation. You learn from falling down and picking yourself up again. And you do this not by thinking about the ideal of balance, but by gaining an intuitive feel for it by poking at this, poking at that, leaning this way, leaning that. Whatever the attitude that's coming up in the mind — the discouragement, the frustration, the irritation, whatever — you poke at it. You don't necessarily have to believe it. And whatever positive attitudes come up in the mind, no matter how small they might seem, those are what you've got to work with. After all, redwood trees come from tiny seeds. If you step on them, they never have a chance to grow. But if you look at them carefully, you can recognize them, you can see that they're different from weed seeds. That gives you an idea of what you've got to encourage and what you've got to discourage in the mind, what you've got to cultivate and what you've got to cut out, uproot. So gardening like this may not be glamorous work and it may not be flashy, but this is how all genuine work is done in this world. This is how things come to blossom. You poke around bit by bit by bit, paying careful attention, making mistakes and learning from them. That's the sort of work that gets solid results, results that build on a good solid foundation, where you take the stairway and it does ultimately get you up to the top floor — with no danger of crashing down.

Conceit January 19, 2007 Conceit is one of those qualities we all have — and it's a slippery friend. There are times when it's useful, as in that passage where Ananda teaches a nun that we practice to overcome conceit and yet we have to use conceit in the practice. The example he gives is that when you hear of someone who has put an end to suffering, has made it all the way to the goal, you can reflect, "That person is a human being; I'm a human being. That person can do it; so can I." To that extent, you need conceit in the practice. If you believe that you can't do the practice, or if it seems way beyond you, you end up giving up, you set your sights low. And as we all know, you never hit higher than you aim. So to that extent, conceit is helpful. But it has its fangs. Ajaan Maha Boowa calls it the "fangs of ignorance" when you have the conceit that, "Well, this is going to be easy," and you get careless, complacent. And conceit has another side as well. The Buddha talks about comparing yourself to other people: thinking that you're better than they are, or equal to them, or worse than they are. All of these comparisons count as conceit. In other words, the idea "I am this," "I am that" gets brought into every issue, and this is where it grows fangs: "I'm really good at everything, therefore I'm going to be good at this," and you get careless. Or you may think, "I'm not up to this. This is beyond me," and you give up. You make the practice harder than it has to be. So it's a fine line, realizing where conceit is going to be helpful and where it's going to bite. First, there's the issue of confidence. On the one hand, it's important to realize that this path you're on is a hard path to follow, so you can't go on the complacent assumption that, "This is going to be easy for me." On the other hand, you don't want to discourage yourself with the thought, "It's going to be impossible for me." The problem isn't the path, or how easy or hard it is. It's the me in there. That's the fangs. So try to put that word aside as much as you can. Remind yourself simply, "This is what has to be done." "Is it going to kill you?" "Well, no." "Then you can do it." That's what Ajaan Fuang said to me once. One evening, after a long day of work, he told me to sit up all night. This was very early on in my time with him, and I was dumb enough to say, "I don't think I can do that." He looked at me and said, "Is it going to kill you?" "Well, no." "Then you can do it." This didn't mean that it wasn't going to be hard. It was hard, but after all, this is a hard practice. It goes against all our inclinations. We like our greed. We like our anger, sometimes. We like our delusions, and yet all these things have to be put aside, let go of as we practice. But it's within human capability to do this. Even if you do die in the practice, it's a good way to die. It's better than dying without having accomplished anything or dying doing something really stupid. So try to think in those terms: Realize that even though it's hard, this is part of being a good friend to yourself. One of the definitions of a good friend is someone who is able to give what's hard to give, to do what's hard to do, to endure what's hard to endure. If you meet friends like that, associate with them. Value them. Treasure them. These are the people you really want as your friends. And you want to be able to make yourself your own best friend in just the same way. Ask yourself, "What's hard for you to give, and yet something that's actually a burden for you?" Forgiveness is one thing. It's funny how sometimes material things are easy to give, but forgiveness, which is totally free, can be very hard. Just go down the list of the people in your life who you find it hard to forgive, and try it: Forgive them. Try not to carry a grudge and you'll find that that's a really good gift to give to yourself. Do what is hard to do. Meditate longer than you might want to. Do walking meditation longer than you might want to. Put more effort into the practice than you want to, and you'll find that you benefit. This ties in with enduring what's hard to endure. Pain is hard to endure. Other people's dislike is hard to endure. Well, learn to endure it. It's not going to kill you. This doesn't mean that you sit there and grit you teeth through the pain. Learn to use your wisdom. As Ajaan Chah once said, if you could gain Awakening simply by endurance, chickens would have attained Awakening a long time ago — they can sit for really long hours. You have to use your wisdom. When something seems burdensome, why is it burdensome? Exactly what is it placing a burden on? And why do you want to identify with what's being burdened? Can you learn not to identify with it? A good way to learn these lessons is to force yourself into situations where you've got to face this difficulty head on. Okay, it's there, it's a problem, and try to use your ingenuity to get around it. It's when you're cornered that you realize that you've got to find a way out. And that you can. So learn to be your own best friend. It's not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic. It's a matter of learning to be heedful. Heedfulness involves an interesting combination of qualities. On the one hand, you're confident that your actions do make a difference, so heedfulness is not negative or pessimistic. On the other hand, you realize that there are dangers out there, dangers inside as well. There are difficulties you've got to work with. You respect those difficulties but you don't get overwhelmed by them. In other words, you've got to drop the element of conceit from your grasp. Don't bring your "self" into what you're doing. Don't bring "I can do this really easily" or "I can't do this at all." Just put them aside and see what you can do. Even if things don't work out well the first time, try, try, try again. This is how people grow. One of Ajaan Fuang's terms of criticism was of someone who was "good even before he'd tried something" — in other words, the sort of person who's got it all figured out beforehand. He didn't trust people like that. At the same time, though, if he found that you were getting very pessimistic about your ability to practice, he didn't want you to stay there, either. Being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic were, as far as he was concerned, really unskillful ways of approaching the path. They're both forms of conceit. Admit that things are difficult but do what you can. And learn to develop your discernment. Watch out for those fangs of ignorance: the "I am this" or "I am that" or "I'm not used to this," "I can't stand this," "This is hard for me." Drop the "I," the "me," and things get a lot easier. So even though it may be hard, you can do it. The things that are hard to give, you can give. The things that are hard to do, you can do. The things that are hard to endure, you discover you can endure. It may not be easy the first time. You may find yourself running into a brick wall, but even brick walls can be battered down. They have their cracks. There are ways around them, under them, over them, through them. All you have to do is find where they are. So learn the proper use of conceit: the confidence that, yes, you can do this; other people can do it, it's something human beings have done — you're a human being, you can do it too. Once you've got that amount of conviction, drop the "you," drop the "me," the "I," and then set to work. That right there makes it a lot easier. And this way you become your own best friend.

A Sense of Adventure October 20, 2007 As you embark on the practice — and as you stay with the practice — it's best to think of it as a voyage of discovery. After all, the Buddha says that the goal is to see what you've never seen before, to realize what you've never realized before, to attain what you've never attained before. So you're going into the unknown. This means that you're going to have to deal with risk and uncertainty, which require an interesting mix of attitudes. On the one hand, you need a certain amount of confidence. On the other hand, you need humility. The confidence is confidence in your ability to deal with unknown factors as they arise. The humility is the realization that you can't expect everything to follow your preconceived notions. The path is going to stretch your imagination and ask more out of you than you might originally be prepared to give. So you need the confidence that Yes, you can do this and Yes, this is a good place to go. And you need the humility to realize that No, you don't know beforehand what it's going to be like. You have to be willing to learn. Some people want to have all kinds of guarantees before they embark on this training, but you can't really guarantee anything. You can guarantee that when you reach the goal it's going to be good, but how much is that guarantee worth for someone who hasn't experienced it yet? Just one more thing to take into consideration. The Buddha, when he embarked on his quest, had no guarantee that all the sacrifice was going to be worth it, that he was going to find the deathless, or even that he was going to survive. But he had reached a point in his life where he realized that if he didn't at least try it, he would feel that his life had been wasted. And so for him it was a huge experiment. There was a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty. And yet he was willing to take the risk and to face the uncertainty. For us, it's not quite that drastic. We have people who've gone before. There's the question of whether we can trust them and believe them, but then look at the alternative: a life lived devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasures, trying to squeeze happiness out of things that are going to die and that we'll have to leave in the end — if not before the end. So at the very least you say, "Well, there's a possibility here. Let's give it a try." Try to have that sense of adventure. Be open to new things and learn how to deal with uncertainties. Earlier today we were talking about the maps for the jhanas. When you try to apply the map to your actual experience, it's going to be uncertain for a while. You read the description of directed thought and evaluation, rapture and all, and the question is: What do those terms correspond to in your actual experience? You may have some ideas, but they may be wrong. Is that going to stop you from practicing? It shouldn't. It should simply alert you to the fact that you're going to be dealing in uncertainties for a while. When you place labels on your experiences, they have to be post-it notes, signposts to use in the meantime until you get a better sense of the terrain. The surest of the signposts is the one for the fourth jhana — when the in-and-out breath stops and stays stopped for the duration of that state of mind — but that's all the way in the fourth. So how are you going to know the signposts for one, two, and three? Well, you guess for the time being and you attach a few notes here, a few notes there. And have the confidence that when you find something more certain, you're going to be in a position to rearrange the notes if need be. The sense of adventure also means that you may have some anticipations of what's going to work and what things should be like in the practice. But right anticipation is not part of the path. Sometimes your anticipations can push things in the wrong direction. The Buddha's instructions are very precise, and pretty simple, and part of us doesn't believe anything that simple could really work. There must be some secret; there must be some way you can speed the process along. But sometimes in speeding along you derail yourself. It's like sharpening a knife on a stone. If you're in too much of a hurry, you can ruin the blade. So you sit there very carefully rubbing it against the stone, rubbing it against the stone, making sure that the pressure is even all along the blade. Then you realize that you may be at this for a while. Part of the mind says, "Well, I'd like to have it done fast so I can go off and do something else." But there also has to be another part of the mind that says, "If you try to speed it up, you could ruin it. So keep doing what you're doing." Even though the results don't appear as quickly as you'd like, maybe the slow results are the ones that will be the most lasting. So you have to put your preconceived notions aside. Don't try to skip over the steps. The Buddha does teach a sense of urgency, but he also teaches patience. And you have to learn how to balance the two and be willing to learn new things. This evening I was reading a study guide to some of the suttas that raised questions about different passages in the suttas that just didn't sound right to the author, or didn't seem to fit in with his preconceived notions. But there's always the question of whether our notions, rather than the passages, are wrong. There's a lot going on in the texts, maybe more than we realize. The Buddha was talking to people in a different time, with a different range of experiences. Sometimes he was talking to people with extremely unusual meditative experiences. In other words, maybe he knew what he was talking about, why he had to address that issue in that particular way. Maybe the texts are accurately reporting what he said — even though they don't fit into our preconceived notions of what the texts would be like if they were written for a modern American audience. So what you are asked as you read the Dhamma — and as you approach the practice as a whole — is to stretch your imagination a bit. It's not the case that the Buddha will be able to prove everything to you beforehand — before you're willing to act — so that you can act with confidence and full awareness of where you're going to go and how you're going to get there. You have to be willing to live with uncertainty and to put question marks against a lot of your assumptions. Remind yourself that your assumptions are the assumptions of a person with defilement, the assumptions of a person still suffering. Perhaps it would be in your best interest to put them aside for the time being instead of demanding that everything fit into your preconceived notions of how things should be. And you should be willing to embark on this without a 100% guarantee that everything is going work out the way you want it to. Have a clear sense of the precariousness of your own position, of where you are right now. Where do you get your sustenance? Where does the mind gain its pleasures? Are those things solid and secure? When you go into the uncertainty of the path, are you leaving an area of true certainty and assuredness to go off into figments of someone's imagination? Or are you leaving the world of your current uncertainties to test some different uncertainties that ultimately promise something more certain than where you're staying right now? This is why one of the basic principles in the practice is practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma — in other words, not in accordance with your preconceived notions, not in accordance with your ideas of what you want before you're going to commit yourself to the practice. Instead of reshaping the Dhamma to fit your notions, maybe you have to reshape yourself to fit the Dhamma. There is bound to be a period of discomfort, bound to be a sense of frustration when things are not quite working out the way you wanted them to. But you need the maturity to learn how to deal with that. This is not a path for immature people. It's a path for people who know that they are in a very precarious position already, and that their ideas and assumptions are especially precarious. But the ideas and presumptions of a materialistic worldview, which is what we were brought up in, offer a very limited range of happiness, whereas the Dhamma offers a lot more. It's simply up to us to decide whether we're willing to make the sacrifices and take the risk to see if the "more" is a reality, if what the Buddha had to say is true.

On the Path of the Breath February 11, 2008 Once the Buddha was extolling the advantages of breath meditation, the benefits that could be derived from keeping the breath in mind, and one of the monks said, "I already do breath medita