7] The Joy of Effort
When explaining meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician’s tuning of a lute. Reading the mind’s needs in the moment—to be gladdened, steadied, or inspired—is like a palace cook’s ability to read and please the tastes of a prince.
Collectively, these analogies make an important point: Meditation is a skill, and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way that mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rāhula: “When you see that you’ve acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way—conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others—take joy in that fact, and keep on training.”
Of course, saying that meditation should be enjoyable doesn’t mean that it will always be easy or pleasant. Every meditator knows it requires serious discipline to sit with long unpleasant stretches and to untangle all the mind’s difficult issues. But if you can approach difficulties with the enthusiasm that an artist approaches challenges in her work, the discipline becomes enjoyable: Problems are solved through your own ingenuity, and the mind is energized for even greater challenges.
This joyful attitude is a useful antidote to the more pessimistic attitudes that people often bring to meditation, which tend to fall into two extremes.
- On the one hand, there’s the belief that meditation is a series of dull and dreary exercises allowing no room for imagination and inquiry: Simply grit your teeth, and, at the end of the long haul, your mind will be processed into an awakened state.
- On the other hand there’s the belief that effort is counterproductive to happiness, so meditation should involve no exertion at all: Simply accept things as they are—it’s foolish to demand that they get any better—and relax into the moment.
While it’s true that both repetition and relaxation can bring results in meditation, when either is pursued to the exclusion of the other, it leads to a dead end. If, however, you can integrate them both into the larger skill of learning how to apply whatever level of effort the practice requires at any given moment, they can take you far. This larger skill requires strong powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, but if you stick with it, it can lead you all the way to the Buddha’s ultimate aim in teaching meditation: nibbāna, a happiness totally unconditioned, free from the constraints of space and time.
That’s an inspiring aim, but it requires work. And the key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play: a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore.
This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation. Instead of formulating a cut-and-dried method, he first trained his students in the personal qualities—such as honesty and patience—needed to make trustworthy observations.
Only then did he teach meditation techniques, and even then he didn’t spell everything out. He raised questions and suggested areas for exploration, in hopes that his questions would capture his students’ imagination so they’d develop discernment and gain insights on their own.
We can see this in the way the Buddha taught Rāhula how to meditate. He started with the issue of patience.
Meditate, he said, so that your mind is like the earth. Disgusting things get thrown on the earth, but the earth isn’t horrified by them. When you make your mind like the earth, neither agreeable nor disagreeable sensory impressions will take charge of it.
Now, the Buddha wasn’t telling Rāhula to become a passive clod of dirt. He was teaching Rāhula to be grounded, to develop his powers of endurance, so that he’d be able to observe both pleasant and painful events in his body and mind without becoming engrossed in the pleasure or blown away by the pain.
This is what patience is for. It helps you sit with things until you understand them well enough to respond to them skillfully.
To develop honesty in meditation, the Buddha taught Rāhula a further exercise. Look at the inconstancy of events in body and mind, he said, so that you don’t develop a sense of “I am” around them. Here the Buddha was building on a lesson that he had taught Rāhula when the latter was seven years old. Learn to look at your actions, he had said, before you do them, while you’re doing them, and after they’re done. If you see that you’ve acted unskillfully and caused harm, resolve not to repeat the mistake. Then talk it over with someone you respect.
In these lessons, the Buddha was training Rāhula to be honest with himself and with others. And the key to this honesty is to treat your actions as experiments. Then, if you see the results aren’t good, you are free to change your ways.
This attitude is essential for developing honesty in your meditation as well. If you regard every thing—good or bad—that arises in the meditation as a sign of the sort of person you are, it will be hard to observe anything honestly at all.
- If an unskillful intention arises, you’re likely either to come down on yourself as a miserable meditator or to smother the intention under a cloak of denial.
- If a skillful intention arises, you’re likely to become proud and complacent, reading it as a sign of your innate good nature.
As a result, you never get to see if these intentions are actually as skillful as they seemed at first glance.
To avoid these pitfalls, you can learn to see events simply as events, and not as signs of the innate Buddha-ness or badness of who you are.
Then you can observe these events honestly, to see where they come from and where they lead. Honesty, together with patience, puts you in a better position to use the techniques of meditation to explore your own mind.
The primary technique the Buddha taught Rāhula was breath meditation.
The Buddha recommended sixteen steps in dealing with the breath.
The first two involve straightforward instructions. The rest raise questions to be explored. In this way, the breath becomes a vehicle for exercising your ingenuity in solving the problems of the mind, and exercising your sensitivity in gauging the results.
To begin, simply notice when the breath is long and when it’s short. In the remaining steps, though, you train yourself. In other words, you have to figure out for yourself how to do what the Buddha recommends.
1] The first two trainings are to breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body, then to calm the effect that the breath has on the body.
- How do you do that? You experiment. What rhythm of breathing, what way of conceiving the breath calms its effect on the body?
- Try thinking of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs but as the energy flow throughout the body that draws the air in and out.
- Where do you feel that energy flow? Think of it as flowing in and out the back of your neck, in your feet and hands, along the nerves and blood vessels, in your bones.
- Think of it coming in and out every pore of your skin.
- Where is it blocked? How do you dissolve the blockages? By breathing through them? Around them? Straight into them? See what works.
As you play around with the breath in this way, you’ll make some mistakes—I’ve sometimes given myself headaches by forcing the breath too much—but with the right attitude the mistakes become lessons in learning how the impact of your perceptions shapes the way you breathe. You’ll also catch yourself getting impatient or frustrated, but then you’ll see that when you breathe through these emotions, they go away. You’re beginning to see the impact of the breath on the mind.
2] The next step is to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshing fullness and a sense of ease. Here, too, you’ll need to experiment both with the way you breathe and with the way you conceive of the breath. Notice how these feelings and conceptions have an impact on the mind, and how you can calm that impact so that the mind feels most at ease.
Then, when the breath is calm and you’ve been refreshed by feelings of ease and stillness, you’re ready to look at the mind itself. You don’t leave the breath, though. You adjust your attention slightly so that you’re watching the mind as it stays with the breath.
Here the Buddha recommends three areas for experimentation: Notice
- how to gladden the mind when it needs gladdening,
- how to steady it when it needs steadying, and
- how to release it from its attachments and burdens when it’s ready for release.
Sometimes the gladdening and steadying will require bringing in other topics for contemplation.
For instance,
- to gladden the mind you can develop an attitude of infinite good will, or recollect the times in the past when you’ve been virtuous or generous.
- To steady the mind when it’s been knocked over by lust, you can contemplate the unattractive side of the human body.
- To reestablish your focus when you’re drowsy or complacent, contemplation of death—realizing that death could come at any time, and you need to prepare your mind if you’re going to face it with any finesse—can transfix you.
At other times, you can gladden or steady the mind simply by the way you focus on the breath itself. For instance,
breathing down into your hands and feet can really anchor the mind when its concentration has become shaky.
When one spot in the body isn’t enough to hold your interest, try focusing on the breath in two spots at once.
The important point is that you’ve now put yourself in a position where you can experiment with the mind and read the results of your experiments with greater and greater accuracy.
You can try exploring these skills off the cushion as well: How do you gladden the mind when you’re sick? How do you steady the mind when dealing with a difficult person?
As for releasing the mind from its burdens, you prepare for the ultimate freedom of nibbāna first by releasing the mind from any awkwardness in its concentration. Once the mind has settled down, check to see if there are any ways you can refine the stillness. For instance, in the beginning stages of concentration you need to keep directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating and adjusting it to make it more agreeable. But eventually the mind grows so still that evaluating the breath is no longer necessary. So you figure out how to make the mind one with the breath, and in that way you release the mind into a more intense and refreshing state of ease.
As you expand your skills in this way, the intentions that you’ve been using to shape your experience of body and mind become more and more transparent.
At this point the Buddha suggests revisiting the theme of inconstancy, learning to look for it in the effects of every intention.
You see that even the best states produced by skillful intentions—the most solid and refined states of concentration—waver and change.
Realizing this induces a sense of disenchantment with and dispassion for all intentions. You see that the only way to get beyond this changeability is to allow all intentions to cease. You watch as everything is relinquished, including the path.
What’s left is unconditioned: the deathless. Your desire to explore the breath has taken you beyond desiring, beyond the breath, all the way to nibbāna.
But the path doesn’t save all its pleasures for the end.
It takes the daunting prospect of reaching full Awakening and breaks it down into manageable interim goals—a series of intriguing challenges that, as you meet them, allow you to see progress in your practice. This in and of itself makes the practice interesting and a source of joy.
At the same time, you’re not engaged in busywork. You’re developing a sensitivity to cause and effect that helps make body and mind transparent.
Only when they’re fully transparent can you let them go. In experiencing the full body of the breath in meditation, you’re sensitizing yourself to the area of your awareness where the deathless—when you’re acute enough to see it—will appear.
So even though the path requires effort, it’s an effort that keeps opening up new possibilities for happiness and wellbeing in the present moment.
And even though the steps of breath meditation eventually lead to a sense of disenchantment and dispassion, they don’t do so in a joyless way. The Buddha never asks anyone to adopt a world-negating—or world-affirming, for that matter—frame of mind. Instead, he asks for a “world-exploring” attitude, in which you use the inner world of full-body breathing as a laboratory for exploring the harmless and clear-minded pleasures the world as a whole can provide.
You learn skills to calm the body, to develop feelings of refreshment, fullness, and ease. You learn how to calm the mind, to steady it, gladden it, and release it from its burdens.
Only when you run up against the limits of these skills are you ready to drop them, to explore what greater potential for happiness there may be. In this way, disenchantment develops not from a narrow or pessimistic attitude but from an attitude of hope that there must be something better. This is like the disenchantment a child senses when he has mastered a simple game and feels ready for something more challenging. It’s the attitude of a person who has matured. And as we all know, you don’t mature by shrinking from the world, watching it passively, or demanding that it entertain you. You mature by exploring it, by expanding your range of usable skills through play.
---
Nirvana (Buddhism) - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › Nirvana_(Buddhism)
Niết bàn. Glossary of Buddhism. Nirvana (निर्वाण, Sanskrit: nirvāṇa; Pali: nibbana, nibbāna) is the goal of the Buddhist path. The literal meaning of the term is "blowing out" or "quenching". Nirvana is the ultimate spiritual goal in Buddhism and marks the soteriological release from rebirths in saṃsāra.
Japanese: 涅槃; (rōmaji: nehan)
Vietnamese: Niết bàn
Sinhala: නිවන; (Nivana)
Bengali: নির্বাণ
----
Meditation Prep
NAVIGATIONBooks/Meditations5/Meditation Prep
January 30, 2008
Meditation isn’t a lap belt. You can’t just squeeze your mind into a single technique and expect the technique to do all of your work for you. You’ve got to develop the proper attitudes toward meditation, proper attitudes toward your mind. In addition, you’ve got to develop a range of techniques and learn how to determine which technique to use at which particular time for which particular problem, so that you can use the techniques wisely for their intended purpose. They’re not meant to be straitjackets for the mind. They’re more means for exploration. As the Buddha once said, he points out the road but it’s up to you to follow the road, to see what you learn along the way and to discover where it takes you.
In many cases, the good techniques actually present you with questions more than they provide you with answers. You’ve got to develop the right frame of mind for taking up the questions and figuring out how to get the right answers, answers that help put an end to suffering. To get an idea of what these attitudes are that you need to bring to the meditation, it’s good to look at what the Buddha taught his son, Rahula, prior to teaching him how to focus on the breath.
There are two main sets of instructions. In the first set, the Buddha started his meditation instructions not by telling Rahula to sit and close his eyes, but by telling him to develop the right attitude toward all of his actions: his thoughts, words, and deeds. In other words, Rahula was going to get practice in how to be a meditator by looking at his actions in all situations.
First, the Buddha established the principle of truthfulness. If you’re the sort of person who feels no shame at telling a lie, he said, then you have no value as a meditator. You’ve thrown your value away. If you find it easy to lie to other people, it’s going to be easy to lie to yourself. So truthfulness was the first principle, the first attitude the Buddha recommended.
Then, he said, you apply that truthfulness to your thoughts, words, and deeds before you act, and keep reminding yourself to act only on harmless intentions. This develops the qualities of good will and compassion. When an intention comes up and you’re thinking about following it through, ask yourself: “Is this going to be harmful?” If you can perceive some potential harm, don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, you can go ahead and do it. While you’re acting, look for the immediate results coming from your action, because actions can bear their results not only in the long distant future but also right here, right now, where you can immediately see them. If you stick your finger in fire, it hurts right now. It’s not going to wait to hurt you in some future lifetime. If you swallow hot soup, it’ll scald you now, not after you die and are reborn.
So if you see any harm coming from your action, stop doing it. But if you don’t see any harm either to yourself or to others, you can continue with it. When the action is done, look at its results over the long term. If you realize that it did cause harm over time, develop an attitude of shame about the action. Now, notice that the Buddha is not saying to be ashamed about yourself; he wants you to feel shame toward the action. In other words, view the action as something beneath you. That’s a healthy use of shame; it’s the companion to a healthy sense of pride. Make up your mind that you’re not going to repeat the action, and then go talk it over with someone you respect. This develops an attitude of integrity, that you accept responsibility for what you’ve done, and are open about what you’ve done. This way you can learn.
So the Buddha doesn’t start out by telling Rahula not to make mistakes. He says to try to avoid making mistakes, but if you do make a mistake, this is how you handle it, with honesty, with an attitude of harmlessness or compassion, with a healthy sense of shame, and with integrity. If, on the other hand, you look at your actions and see that they haven’t caused any harm, you can take joy in the fact and keep on practicing.
That’s how you start meditating in your daily life. Those are the attitudes you want to bring to the meditation: a willingness to look at your intentions and to look at their results. This is going to be really important in the course of your meditation, because there’s no other way you’ll be able to read your own mind.
Then, at a later time, the Buddha taught Rahula breath meditation. But before he taught him breath meditation, he taught him ten other exercises to prepare him for the breath. The first four exercises deal with the physical elements, looking at the body in terms of its elements, its properties. Earth is solidity; water, liquidity; fire, heat; and wind, motion. He said to Rahula, “Try to make your mind like each of these elements, each of these properties.” For example with earth: If you throw disgusting things on earth, earth doesn’t react. Now the Buddha is not telling Rahula to be passive or oblivious. He’s saying to be grounded, to learn powers of endurance, because as you’ll see, the meditations he taught Rahula further on are active kinds of meditation that require a lot of sensitivity. You don’t simply sit with whatever’s there without making any changes. You are supposed to adjust and change things. But if you want to make the proper changes, you first have to understand where you actually are and what the problem actually is. Then make your changes and watch to see if they actually work.
Now to be able to watch to see things clearly, you have to have powers of endurance, the ability to sit with things and watch them steadily over time. Unpleasant things are bound to come up in the meditation for sure. To comprehend them, after all, is the duty with regard to suffering and stress: You’ve got to comprehend it. And to comprehend it, there are times when you’ll have to really sit with it, to watch it over time, again and again and again. This requires endurance.
Then when you try changing something in the meditation—when you experiment with your breath and your mind in various ways—you’ve got to sit with things for long periods of time to see if what you did really works. You don’t want to be the sort of person who makes a little change, sees a little something that looks promising, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that this is the solution. The result may be short lasting. You may ultimately find yourself back where you began. So you want to see if that’s the case, which means you’ve got to be able to sit with things.
The same principle applies with the other properties. Fire can burn unpleasant things, but it doesn’t shrink away from them. Water can be used to wash away unpleasant things, but doesn’t get disgusted. Wind blows unpleasant things around, and doesn’t show distaste.
So you learn to be grounded. Remind yourself that whatever comes up, you can bear it. I remember once when I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, he told me out of the blue one day to sit up and meditate all night. My immediate reaction was that it wasn’t a good day for me to try that. I had been working hard that day, I said, I couldn’t do it. He looked at me and said, “Well, is it going to kill you?” “Well, no.” “Then you can do it.” That’s the attitude you’ve got to have—as with that saying, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. But in the midst of doing difficult things, you don’t just suffer through them. You’ve got to figure out, “How can I get through this without suffering?” That’s where you start learning how to be ingenious. But the important thing is that you remind yourself, okay, you can stand this; whatever’s coming up, you’re not going to get blown around. That way you can begin to trust yourself as an observer.
Then, to show that the Buddha wasn’t teaching Rahula to be passive, the next four meditations are about replacing unskillful attitudes with more skillful ones, essentially the attitudes of the brahma-viharas: goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—although here the Buddha isn’t asking him to develop these thoughts to the limitless extent of brahma-viharas. He’s simply telling him to replace various levels of aversion in the mind—irritation, resentment, ill will, or the desire to harm—with more positive emotions. If you notice ill will coming up in the mind, try counteracting it with goodwill. Don’t just allow the mind to stay stuck with its ill will. You do what you can to foster an attitude of goodwill to whomever the person may be. If the idea comes up that you’d like to be cruel or harmful to somebody, counteract it with an attitude of compassion, reminding yourself that you’re not going to benefit from that person’s suffering in any way at all. In fact, when other people are suffering, that’s when they tend to do crazy, ill-considered, unskillful things. You’ve got to have some compassion for people who are engaged in unskillful activities, hoping that they’ll learn the good sense to stop. Empathetic joy is the antidote for any feelings of resentment you may feel for somebody else’s good fortune. You realize that resentment doesn’t do you any good at all. People who are enjoying good fortune must’ve done something sometime that leads to happiness, so why resent it? Do you want people to resent good fortune when it comes your way? Of course not. As for feelings of equanimity, these are meant to counteract feelings of irritation. You want to be equanimous toward irritating things so that irritation doesn’t build up to the point where it makes you do something stupid. In each of these cases, you want to be skilled at giving rise to skillful attitudes when you need them so that you don’t just sit there stewing in aversion.
Then the Buddha taught two meditations for counteracting other sorts of unskillful qualities. For lust, he said to try to develop the perception of the foulness of the human body. Now this is not about having an unhealthy negative image of the body; it’s actually training in having a healthy negative image of the body. You realize that everybody is in the same boat this way. We’re all filled with blood, pus, contents of the stomach, contents of the intestines, all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t like to have on the floor here in the morning when we’re getting the meal ready. This is a useful antidote. When feelings of lust come up and you think about what lies under the skin, it’s hard to maintain sexual desire.
So again, the Buddha is not teaching Rahula to be passive, or simply to accept whatever’s coming up. He’s telling him how to counteract unskillful attitudes and replace them with skillful ones.
In the final preparation, before teaching Rahula breath meditation, the Buddha taught him something that’s usually considered to be a very advanced teaching. He said, “Try to develop the perception of inconstancy, to counteract the conceit, ‘I am.’” Now notice: The Buddha is putting this right at the beginning. One of the reasons for this is that when skillful and unskillful things come up in the mind, if you immediately brand yourself as “I’m the sort of person who’s always skillful,” or “I’m the sort of person who’s always unskillful,” that’s going to get in the way of actually seeing which actions in the mind are having a helpful impact and which ones are not. If, when something that looks unskillful comes up, and you immediately react to it, “My gosh, I’m a really bad meditator, I’m miserable, look at this, this horrible thought, I shouldn’t be thinking this”: You either feel self-hatred or you start going into denial, pretending that it didn’t actually happen. Neither reaction helps develop any insight at all. If you engage in denial, you can’t see what you’re doing, can’t see whether the intention was actually skillful or not, and can’t see the results of the action. And you certainly can’t counteract denial if you don’t admit that it’s there. Or if you build the other kind of “I am” around the unskillful thought, that “I’m miserable,” that really shoots you down, saps your ability to counteract the thought.
This is the problem with “I am”: It starts getting to issues of innate nature. If you have a bad innate nature, you can’t change it. If you have a good innate good nature, then when something that looks skillful arises in the mind, you immediately read it as a sign of your innate goodness. You start getting complacent and careless, and you don’t really see whether there’s anything unskillful lurking under the surface. Where does this particular intention really lead? What needs to be done with it? Is it really as good as it seems at first glance? If you decide that it’s part of your innate Buddha nature, you get complacent. So again, you miss out on things, don’t really see things as they’re happening, because the “I am” gets in the way.
It’s interesting: The Pali word for “conceit”—mana—doesn’t mean only a sense that you’re better than other people. If you say, “I’m worse than other people,” or “I’m equal to other people,” that’s conceit as well, because you’re still building the “I am” around things. There are several ways to get around this. The first is the Buddha’s advice to Rahula: Whatever comes up is inconstant. It doesn’t last, so it’s not enough to build an identity around. Another way around the “I am” is that, whatever comes up in the mind, you remind yourself that this happens to everybody. Remind yourself that you don’t have any innate nature. The mind is neutral. It just knows. The thinking is skillful or unskillful, but those are habits, which aren’t innate at all.
Or you can do what the Buddha did. This is something people tend to forget when they meditate. On the night of his awakening, his first knowledge was about himself, his narratives. You think you have narratives: He had narratives going way back, eons and eons. But he didn’t jump straight from there to the present moment. He took a detour and thought about all the beings in the world: How about them? He saw that they all went through the same process—all different kinds of birth and rebirth—and on seeing them in a more universal way, he was able to see underlying patterns: what kind of actions were skillful, what kind of views underlay skillful actions that lead to fortunate rebirths, and how unskillful actions lead to unfortunate ones. It was by looking at the large picture that he was able to see patterns. Only then did he look at the present moment from the perspective of those larger patterns. That helps cut through the “I am” and the individual narratives. You’re looking at events common to beings all over the world, and you’re looking at them in light of those larger patterns—not of natures but of actions. When you’re looking at greed, anger, and delusion in the mind in this way, it helps to loosen some of the sense of identity around them.
Another way to loosen that sense of identity is to think of the mind as a committee. The committee contains all kinds of members who propose all kinds of things. Just because somebody in the committee has proposed a bad idea doesn’t mean the committee is bad. The duty of the committee is to listen to the ideas brought to the floor figure out which is the best one to act on right now. If they make a mistake, they go back and undo the old decision, open the floor to suggestions, and arrive at a new decision. They don’t worry about the innate nature of the committee.
When you can see events in the mind in this way, then you’re really ready to meditate, because it allows you to deal with them just as events, as instances of intention and the results of intentions. When you put aside the “I am,” you’re in a much better position to see things for what they actually do, and then you can deal with them in the most appropriate way.
It was only after the Buddha taught Rahula all of these things that he said, “Okay, sit down. This is how you do breath meditation.”
So when you sit down to do breath meditation, it’s good to reflect on these attitudes. They’re your tools, your means for reading the events that are arising and passing away, and also for reading the results of applying different techniques. They help you figure out which technique is useful for which kind of issue, what’s getting results, what’s not getting results. That’s how you develop your discernment. You see cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, i.e., the four noble truths. You develop the path, so you can comprehend suffering and eventually let go of its cause. That’s how you realize the end of suffering: by experimenting, by exploring, by bringing the right attitudes and the right mental qualities to whichever meditation technique you choose. Those qualities are the factors that make all the difference. So do your best to bring the full set of mature qualities to meditation. That’s how you get results.
