The Fourth Frame of Reference
Ajaan Lee often made the point that when you’re focused on the breath, you don’t have just the first frame of reference. You have all four right there.
- The breath is the body in and of itself. That’s the first frame of reference.
- The feelings of pleasure or pain that you’re encountering as you attend to the breath count as feelings in and of themselves. That’s the second.
- As for the mind state you’re trying to develop, you find that it’s either defiled or not. Or as you get further into this third frame of reference, you start noticing when the mind is concentrated or when it’s not; when it’s expanded or enlarged, or when it’s not; whether it’s released or not; whether it’s ever been excelled or not.
- And then there’s the fourth frame of reference, the dhammas. Often we don’t have a real handle on how to make use of that fourth frame of reference, because it looks like little more than a list of Dhamma teachings. But it’s much more than that. It’s a list of different frameworks to keep in mind for dealing with problems that come up in the course of your practice.
You can look at things in terms of
- the five hindrances,
- the five clinging-aggregates,
- the six sense media,
- the seven factors for awakening, or
- the four noble truths.
Each list provides a useful framework for looking at what’s actually going on in different aspects of the practice. And not just looking: They also give you guidance in what to do. These are not exercises in bare awareness, because each member of each list carries a specific duty. Once you’ve figured out what’s happening in terms of that particular framework, you know what to do in response. You know what to do proactively.
For instance, as we’re going through daily life, one of the main issues in practice is restraint of the senses. This is an area where it’s good to use the framework of the six sense media. As the Buddha said in this context,
- when you’re looking, try to notice: Where is the fetter in the looking?
- If you’re listening, where is the fetter in the listening?
And the “fetter” here is defined as a sense of passion and delight for what you’re looking at, or for why you’re looking.
It’s not always the case that a sense of delight comes up only after you’ve noticed something delightful. Sometimes you have a very clear idea ahead of time of what you want to look for: You want to get riled up about something, you want to get attracted by something, so you go looking for trouble.
This is especially true with thoughts. Notice, when a thought comes up, “What’s the appeal of this thought? Why do I go for this particular kind of thinking?”
Once you’ve looked at the appeal, then look for the drawbacks.
What are the drawbacks of going along with that kind of thinking?
If you gave that particular kind of thinking free rein in your mind, where would it lead you?
If you notice a fetter—in other words, you really are delighting in something to the point where it pulls you away from your center—don’t just sit there and say, “Oh, I’m fettered,” and leave it at that.
You’ve got to do something to cut the fetter—because those fetters are the cause of suffering, which means that your duty with regard to them is to abandon them as soon as you notice them.
Of course, the big problem here is that we often enjoy our fetters. We actually create them for the purpose of enjoying them. So we have to do something we usually don’t like to do: to look squarely at our enjoyment and see where it’s causing problems. The delight may seem pleasant and entertaining right now, but where is it going to take you down the line?
That’s a framework you can use as you go through the day. And you can use it during your meditation as well. You’re sitting here focusing on the breath, and all of a sudden your mind is off on something you saw last week, something you read yesterday, or something you’re anticipating tomorrow.
Look for the fetter. Where is the sense of passion? Where is the sense of delight in that particular thinking? What can you do to see through it to pry yourself away from that enjoyment?
As the Buddha noted, the best thing is to pull yourself away from these unskillful ways of thinking and to encourage harmless ways of thinking instead. From there you direct the mind into concentration.
This is where the two frameworks of the hindrances and the factors for awakening become useful.
When you sit down and try to get the mind concentrated, it’s useful to figure out exactly, “What’s going on here? Which hindrance is bedeviling me right now?”
Once you’re able to classify a disturbance as sensual desire, ill will, torpor and lethargy, restlessness and anxiety, or uncertainty, then you know what to do with it. And sometimes just recognizing it as a problem gets you over the hump.
This is because one of the characteristics of the hindrances is that they deceive you.
When desire arises, your mind is usually already on the side of the desire. You don’t see it as a problem. The thing you desire really is something desirable.
When you have ill will for somebody, that person really is awful.
When the mind is torpid, well, it really is time to get some rest. It’s time to sleep. The mind is getting too tired.
And so on down the line.
You have to learn to see these attitudes as genuine hindrances, as real obstacles on your path, and not be fooled into siding with them.
Ask yourself, “What is this hindering me from?” Well, for one thing, it’s hindering you from learning about the potentials of concentration. You sit here rehashing your old ways of thinking and will never get out of your old ruts.
We read about the ajaans, about the people in the Canon who gained strong states of concentration.
We read about the descriptions of concentration.
But what’s the reality of concentration? Exactly what do those words correspond to? If you spend all your time playing around with the hindrances, you never get to know.
The only way to gain direct knowledge of these things is to bring some appropriate attention to the hindrance, seeing that it’s a cause of suffering. Try to look for where the stress is, look for where the limitation is, to see how that hindrance is squandering your energy. And then look for ways to abandon it.
When you do this, you’re developing the first three factors for awakening: mindfulness, analysis of qualities, and persistence.
- Mindfulness is what helps you remember to look for what’s skillful and unskillful;
- analysis of qualities—which is nurtured by appropriate attention—is what enables you to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities as they arise;
- and persistence is what carries through with the desire to develop the skillful and abandon the unskillful ones.
Analysis of qualities actually helps you in many ways. It not only recognizes what’s skillful and not, but also helps you figure out how to undercut an unskillful state of mind, like a hindrance, and how to develop the remaining factors for awakening in its place.
As a set, these seven factors for awakening are a good framework for figuring out how to use discernment to get the mind to settle down. In particular, you look to see that these factors are balanced. If they’re not, how do you bring them into balance?
There’s a sutta that compares this balancing act to getting a fire to burn at just the right level of intensity.
In other words, you’re trying to develop
- the fire of concentration,
- the fire of jhana,
- a steady flame of centered awareness.
Sometimes it looks like it’s about to go out because the level of energy is too low. In cases like that, you don’t want to emphasize qualities like calm, concentration, or equanimity.
You want to emphasize more active qualities.
Get the mind moving again. Analyze things as to what’s skillful and unskillful, and then put in whatever effort is needed to get rid of the unskillful qualities and develop the skillful ones.
In taking this more active role, you can develop a strong sense of rapture, refreshment, as the skillful qualities get strengthened. This further energizes the mind. If, on the other hand, your mind is too active and antsy, that’s when you try to soothe it. Go for calm. Get the mind to focus on easing the breath, calming the breath down, working through tension in the body, until the mind gets more solid in concentration and can come to a state of equanimity and equipoise.
So, again, these frameworks of the five hindrances and the seven factors for awakening are not just guidelines for bare awareness. They’re frameworks telling you what to do if you find yourself facing a particular type of mind state as you’re trying to bring the mind to strong concentration.
They help you get a sense of what your duty is, where you can find the path out of that particular unbalanced or unskillful state.
Or if you find that you’re balanced and the mind is doing fine, then your duty is to maintain it.
You don’t just say, “Oh, that’s what concentration is like,” and just let it drop from fear of being attached to it. You try to keep it going.
You try to understand what causes it so that you can maintain it. This is where you try to bring in an element of willpower.
A couple of years back, I was talking to a group of people in training to become vipassana teachers. I was mentioning just this element of trying to keep the mind steady, and one of them said, “Well, it sounds like you’re talking about using willpower, but I know that that can’t be what you mean.”
And I said, “That’s precisely what I mean.” The element of intention is willpower, and it’s something you’ve got to use in the practice.
But you can’t use just strength of will to get things done.
You also have to use your understanding of cause and effect so that your use of your willpower is skillful.
This is what the categories of the fourth frame of reference are for.
They’re there to help give you guidance, once a particular state comes up in the mind, as to what you’ve got to do if you really want to find true happiness.
In other words, they’re not just instructions in how to respond to situations. They’re also instructions in how to take a proactive role in giving rise to the path.
This is even clearer in the categories of the four noble truths. You analyze things first in terms of the first noble truth—the five clinging-aggregates—to understand where’s the stress here, where’s the suffering here, where and how you’re clinging to these things.
In particular, you want to learn how to identify each of the clinging-aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness—as events, activities, to see what spurs them into action and how they stop.
Then you try to notice how you’re clinging to them, how you keep compulsively repeating them. Then you take your clinging apart. If something’s disturbing your concentration, take it apart in terms of the four types of clinging: Where’s the clinging? What kind of clinging is it? Is it sensual clinging? Is it clinging in terms of habits and practices? Views? Ideas of what you are or what belongs to you? Try to comprehend it—which, after all, is the duty with regard to the first noble truth.
Once you’ve comprehended the suffering or stress, you should be able to see where its cause is. What’s causing you to cling? Where’s the craving? Try to catch it happening. When you can catch it happening, the duty there is to abandon it, to stop doing it. As for whichever aspects of the path that can help you see these things, you develop them, all eight factors of the path, and particularly right concentration. This is where you get proactive.
When you’ve mastered concentration, the framework of the five clinging-aggregates comes in handy again. When all the factors of the path are in a good state of balance, you start analyzing the concentration in terms of the five aggregates to see where it, too, is stressful. Even the equanimity of the fourth jhana has its element of stress. You’ve got to look for that so you can develop dispassion all around.
This is why, when you’ve mastered concentration, it’s useful to take these states of concentration apart in these ways. Where is feeling playing a role there? Where’s the perception? Where are the thought fabrications? Where’s the consciousness of this? Which aspect are you clinging to? Can you see the drawbacks of that clinging? It’s helpful here to look in terms of the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, or not-self—or of any of the perceptions that help to develop a sense of dispassion. You look for the inconstancy. Once you’ve perceived the inconstancy, you look to see that that’s stressful. When you see the stress, you realize that it can’t possibly be a happiness you’d like to claim as your own. Or you learn to perceive the aggregates that make up your concentration as empty, a disease, a wound. There must be something better.
This line of perceiving, this approach, is what finally gets you past all your attachments and brings you to something really solid, something unfabricated.
At that point, you can put even these strategic perceptions down, for they’ve done their work. You’ve been carrying out these skillful duties to arrive at something that doesn’t carry a duty. As Ajaan Mun once said, nibbana carries no duty for the mind at all. Each of the four noble truths entails a duty, but nibbana is something beyond the four noble truths, something outside of the framework of the four frames of reference and their attendant duties. It’s not an activity in any way.
So it’s helpful to look at this fourth frame of reference as a series of guidelines for action, as guidelines for your ardency. When a problem comes up, figure out which framework is useful for analyzing where you are in the practice and for pointing the practice in the direction you want to go.
Learn to see what’s going on in your mind in terms of these frameworks, so you can figure out what to do, what’s the duty here. This helps you to step back from just being in your thought worlds and allows you to take them apart in terms of their elements: the events and activities that put them together. This in turn gives you a much better idea of what to do with them—instead of what you have been doing, which has been to cling to them and suffer.
This is how you take apart this big mass of suffering in the mind. If you learn how to take it apart, you really see it’s not a solid mountain of rock. It’s just a pile of gravel. And each little piece of gravel is not all that heavy. You can deal with it much more easily as a piece of gravel than as part of a solid mass of rock.
So try to familiarize yourself with these different frameworks and you’ll get a much better handle on how to deal with the problems of the mind.
希修
다음 주는 The Fourth Frame of Reference (Mental Qualities)를 할 차례이고
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< The Fourth Frame of Reference – Mental Qualities >
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1. 명상할 때 올라오는 잡념 혹은 unskillful한 요소들을 알아차릴 것.
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2. 표면적으로는 그 어떤 필요나 정당성을 가장하든 무관하게, 의식에서 인정하든 않든 실은 우리가 그것들을 즐기기 때문.
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3. 때로 그 잡념은 불유쾌한 경험이나 생각인데, 어떤 측면에서 우리가 그것들을 즐기는지 찾아 볼 것. (예) 타인이 내게 잘못한 것을 떠올리는 일은 나를 세상의 중심에 위치시킴. 피해망상이 과대망상이기도 한 이유.
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4. 그 잡념을 계속 추구할 경우 어떤 결과가 될 것이며, 그런 잡념을 즐기고 추구하는 기회비용은 무엇인지 생각해 볼 것.
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5. 어떤 수단을 사용해서라도 제거할 것. (예) 알아차리기, 무시하기, 억누르기, ‘무상, 고, 무아’ 등.
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6. skillful한 방향으로 생각을 리드할 것 = Direct your thought/mind into something skillful. (예) 상대가 내게 ‘잘못’했다는 내 판단의 근거가 무엇인지 따져묻고, 상대가 실제로 잘못했다면 그의 잘못은 그의 업이고 나의 화/짜증은 나의 업임을 기억하면서 상대에게 연민을 가질 것.
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7. 내 마음에서 어떤 일이 일어나고 있는지에 대해 정직함, 정확한 판단/분석, skillful한 요소를 계발하려는 의지, 인과에 대한 이해 등이 모두 필요. 명상은 수동적 관조가 아니라 proactive한 작업.
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希修
< Right Concentration/Jhana/선정 >
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(이하의 내용은 '호흡 명상'이라는 제목의 포스팅 아래에도 댓글로 달아 두었습니다.)
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- Right concentration의 요건: (i) unskillful 요소가 없을 때 ; (ii) discernment에 의해 인도된 팔정도의 1번~7번 요소들이 바탕이 되었을 때; (iii) concentration이 1~7번 요소들의 심화/발전에도 도움을 줄 때.
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- Cause & effect( = 업 = 12연기)를 실험하고 체험하는 작업. Deliberate하고 proactive한 작업이지 수동적으로 관조만 하는 것이 아님. 멍때리기는 더더욱 아님.
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- "한 30분쯤 명상한 줄 알았는데 눈떠 보니 3시간이 지나 있더라!"거나 "명상 중 무슨 일이 있었는지를 어떻게 말로 하느냐? 이성으로 이해하거나 말로 표현할 수 있는 경지를 넘어선 경험!" 등의 얘기는, 그 명상에 mindfulness의 alertness요소가 없었음을 의미. => 잠들지 않았어도 수면과 거의 다름없는 상태였다는 얘기. 의도한 시각에 선정에 들어 예정한 시각에 정확히 눈을 뜨는 등의 '내공'을 보인다 해도 여전히 wrong concentration, wrong jhana.
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- Right jhana를 이루면 깨달음의 4단계들 중의 하나로 들어가게 됨.
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- [출처] SN 54:1, SN 14:11, AN 6:73~74, AN 6:72, MN 20, AN 3:100, MN 137, "The Wings to Awakening" (by Venerable Ṭhānissaro), etc..
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1. Form Jhanas
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1.1. 1st Jhana
- Mindfulness of body에 의해 성취되는 단계.
- Directed thought & evaluation, rapture, pleasure.
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1.2. 2nd Jhana
- Directed thought & evaluation (verbal fabrication)을 멈춤으로써 성취되는 단계.
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1.3. 3rd Jhana
- Rapture를 내려놓음으로써 성취되는 단계.
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1.4. 4th Jhana
- Pleasure를 내려놓아 equanimity를 얻음으로써 성취되는 단계.
- 호흡 (bodily fabrication)이 멈춤.
- Light or radiance (pure bright awareness) fills the entire body.
- 'Beautiful'이라는 perception.
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2. Formless Jhanas
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2.1. Infinite Space
- Form에 대한 perception을 놓고 form 이외의 space에 집중함으로써 성취되는 단계.
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2.2. Infinite Consciousness
- Infinite space에 대한 perception을 놓음으로써 성취되는 단계.
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2.3. Nothingness
- Infinite consciousness에 대한 perception을 놓음으로써 성취되는 단계.
- 여기까지를 perception attainments라고 부름.
- 空/無는 대승불교와 도교에서 절대시하는 개념. 초기불교에서는 空/無조차 그저 거쳐가는 명상 단계들 중의 하나일 뿐, 부처님은 이걸 reality나 본질이라고 보지 않으셨음.
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2.4. Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception
- Nothingness에 대한 perception을 놓음으로써 성취되는 단계.
- Perception이라는 마음 작용이 극도로 미세해짐.
- Remnant-of-fabrication attainment라고 부름.
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2.5. Cessation of Perception & Feeling
- Perception과 feeling 등의 모든 mental fabrication까지도 멈춤으로써 성취되는 단계.
- Cessation attainment라고 부름.
- 2.1~2.4 단계를 거치지 않고 4th jhana에서 곧장 이 단계로 올 수도 있음.
- 고통을 낳는 것은 의식/말/행동의 fabrication이고, fabrication을 낳는 것은 ignorance라는 것이 12연기의 내용.
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