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"Skillful Desires on the Path” with Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The following talk was given by Ajaan Thanissaro at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on September 14, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Introduction
So, now it's my great pleasure to introduce Thanissaro Bhikkhu. By my calculations, this is his 25th or 26th Sati Center meeting. I was at his first one in the very late 90s, it was '99 or 2000, and we were meeting over in another part of Palo Alto. We didn't have this building then.
A little about Thanissaro Bhikkhu. After graduating from Oberlin in 1971 with a degree in European intellectual history, he studied meditation under Ajahn Fuang Jotiko in Thailand and ordained in 1976. In 19911, he helped establish the Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, where he is presently the abbot. He's a prolific writer and translator. Many works can be found online at www.dhammatalks.org. So with that...
Okay, thank you. Can you hear me in the back? A couple of weeks back, I received an email from someone who had been reading my book, Skill in Questions, and he said that he had detected a subtle goal orientation in the book. And of course, when you have a goal orientation, it means you have desires and you have a sense of self. He had written, I think it was a 12-page essay critique of the book, and wanted to know if I wanted to read it. I did not want to read it.
Well, I should have congratulated him on finding what was one of the major points of the book, which is that the teachings of the Buddha are all united in their goal. The Buddha didn't argue from first principles and try to create a logical structure. Instead, he had a series of techniques which are all aimed at the goal of full release. As he said, all Dhammas2 have release as their taste, just as all the waters in the ocean have salt as their taste.
I would have asked him what was his goal in writing the critique, because the Buddha himself makes the point that everything we do has a goal. Everything we experience, the act of taking an experience at the six senses, is goal-oriented. When that statement where he says that all Dhammas are rooted in desire, stop and think about what that means. All Dhammas cover everything that you experience in the senses, and there's a desire that lies underneath every sensory experience, because every sense experience is not just being passive; you are engaged in doing the experience.
The implication, of course, is that this applies not only to unskillful Dhammas but also to skillful ones. The Noble Eightfold Path is based on desire. It's rooted in desire. Even the realization of Nibbāna3, the act of realizing Nibbāna, is rooted in desire. The only thing that you could possibly experience that is not rooted in desire is Nibbāna itself.
You can confirm this for yourself because the word for goal in Pāli4, attha, can also mean meaning, purpose, benefit. And you know that you've noticed periods in your life where life seems to have no meaning. You don't really want to live. Meaning is what makes life worthwhile. It's what lies at the basis of everything that we were trying to do. We're trying to find meaning. We have a goal.
You look at the story of the Buddha himself. I mean, if anybody was goal-oriented, he was probably the most goal-oriented person you can think of. Before his awakening, he was aimed at total release from suffering. Even after his awakening, he had the choice. He could have just sat around and enjoyed his awakening, or he could set up a religion. And he decided to set up the religion. That took 45 years before he could pass away. It was a huge undertaking.
And just think of all the Dhamma that he had to teach. Not only the Dhamma, but he also had to set up the Vinaya5, which is the rules for the monks and the nuns. That's the part where I have a lot of compassion for the Buddha. I feel sorry for him because he had to deal with all kinds of people. I mean, there were Brahmins who wouldn't wipe themselves among the monks. It created problems, as you can imagine. There were nuns who tried to kill a monk one time. Monks exposing themselves to the nuns. There were a lot of people doing things that they shouldn't be doing, and he had to deal with that. But he did put up with it for 45 years because he wanted to establish the Dhamma and the Vinaya in the world. He basically wanted to make a difference in the world. First, he made a difference in himself by gaining awakening. Then he wanted to make a difference in the world by setting up the Dhamma. So he gave his life to this overriding desire in order to first gain awakening and then to set up the Dhamma and Vinaya.
Seeing how goal-oriented it was, it seems very strange the way that you hear the Dhamma and the path portrayed nowadays—that the path is a path without a goal, or the path is the goal, or the path is a natural unfolding. It's not something that you do; it's something that you simply allow to happen. The Buddha wouldn't have had any use for any of these ideas. For him, a natural unfolding is the way saṃsāra6 acts. You have to go against the stream if you're going to get out. So there definitely has to be an element of will involved in that.
Sometimes you hear it said that if you have the view that you are doing the path, you have wrong view. If that's the case, then the Buddha had wrong view. He talks about how he did this, he did that, in order to gain awakening. This was not just before his awakening; setting up the Dhamma, when he reflected at the end of his life on what he had done, he laid claim to being responsible for what he had done.
So it is something, from the point of view of his life, that you do, and it is something that you have to have an overwhelming desire for. In fact, everything in his life was placed subordinate to that one overriding desire. That's how he advises us to act.
Now the question is, why is there this disconnect between this extreme goal orientation that the Buddha had and this idea that you simply just let the path unfold on its own? There are probably lots of different reasons, but I'd like to focus on two.
One is when you look at the Four Noble Truths, it's very easy to focus on truth number two, which is the cause of suffering, which is craving. It's easy to miss the fact that the Buddha is saying specifically three kinds of craving are the cause of suffering. He didn't say all desire or all craving is the cause of suffering. Three particular kinds: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. During the Q&A, we can get into the meaning of those terms if you want.
Just as an aside, years back, I was talking to a Zen person, and he was talking about another Zen person who had said that the second noble truth is that life is suffering. And he said, "Of course, it's the first noble truth." I said, "It's no noble truth." There's no place where the Buddha says life is suffering. He says certain things are suffering. Clinging is suffering, and clinging is caused by craving.
And it's also easy to miss the fact that when the Buddha lays out the path to the end of suffering, there is desire as part of the path. You get into right effort, which is one of the factors of the path. And right effort is that you generate desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, to get rid of any unskillful qualities that have arisen, to give rise to skillful qualities, and then once they're there, to try to maintain them. There's an element of desire that has to go into that, and you have to learn how to generate desire for that if it's not there. In other words, you don't simply force yourself to do the tasks of the path, but you have to learn how to make yourself want to do them. A large part of the path is learning how to motivate yourself.
The Buddha himself would give examples of how to do this in his teaching style. When they talk about how the Buddha taught, there are four verbs that they use. One is "instruct." The rest are pep talks: "urge," "rouse," "encourage." You know, one part information, three parts, "Hey, you can do it, okay? And it's good for you."
So, that's one thing that people tend to miss when they look at the Four Noble Truths: the Buddha didn't say that all craving is bad. There are certain desires that are good for you, that will lead you to the end of suffering. Now, when you get to the other side of the river, then you can put them aside. You know, the symbol of the raft. You're on this side of the river and it's dangerous. You want to get to safety on the other side where it's safe, and there's no Nibbāna yacht going to come over and pick you up. What do you do? You take the twigs and branches and leaves on this side of the river and you make a raft, and you take the raft across. Once you've gotten across, then you put the raft aside. What this means is, okay, you take things that you already have here in terms of the five aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—and your desires, and you make a raft out of that. Then you take that across, and once you've gotten across, then you can let the raft go.
The second main point I'd like to focus on has to do with the readings I gave you. If you take a cursory look at the definition of suffering, one of the examples the Buddha gives of suffering is not getting what you want. And you might say, "Well, in that case, you just don't want anything and you're not going to suffer." Try that. But you look more carefully, you see that the Buddha says not getting what you want means being subject to aging, illness, and death. You want to not have to age, not have to grow ill, not have to die or experience suffering. Now again, you might say, "Well, just don't have that unrealistic desire to get to the deathless." Again, that's not the case. Look at the Buddha himself. He was motivated from the very beginning of his path to find a dimension that didn't die, was not subject to aging, illness, and death. And that's what kept him going all the way through the path. If he found that the path that he was following at that particular point did not lead there, he would drop that and go to something else. If that one didn't work, he'd drop that and go to something else. So he was really determined.
Even on the night of his awakening, he got that knowledge of his previous lifetimes to begin with. Now, as he noted, there were a lot of people who had gained that knowledge before him, and they had stopped right there, set themselves up as teachers, and lived out their lives telling people about their past lifetimes. He realized, "But this doesn't put an end to suffering. There must be something more." So the next question is, "Well, why is there this variety in the way you get reborn?" Because the way he described it, he said it's like throwing a stick up into the air. Sometimes it falls on this end, sometimes it falls on that end, sometimes it falls splat in the middle. Why is that?
And so he got this larger view of the universe as a whole, with beings dying and then being reborn in line with their karma. It turns out karma is complex. We hear that, okay, you do good and you're going to get reborn in a good place. You do bad, you're going to get reborn in a bad place. What about those of us who do good and bad, i.e., everybody? And as he said, it is possible to do good in some areas, but then you decide that you don't believe in the principle of karma anymore. You develop wrong view either after what you've done or at the moment of death, and that will take you to a bad place. It's also possible to do bad things, unskillful things, and then change your attitude, develop right view even at the moment of death, and that can take you to a good place. Now, this doesn't mean that your good or bad karma you did before has been wiped out, but it means it delays the reaction. So karma is complex, but specifically he saw there that what's really important is the state of your mind in the present moment.
So for his third knowledge—he said again, with the second knowledge, there were people who had something like that. He said there were people who had a short memory in terms of their previous lifetimes. For him, a short memory was 40 eons. Now think about that. An eon is the lifetime of a universe. And now we've discovered that even the Big Bang was much further back, or there wasn't even a Big Bang to begin with. That's just one eon. We haven't gone through one eon yet. So 40 of those. What was that? Short memory. He had a much longer memory. That's why he was able to see all this.
So he said, "This knowledge does not put an end to suffering." But he used that insight into the power of present-moment karma to focus on his own present-moment karma, i.e., the intentions in his mind, and ask what kind of views you could bring to those intentions that would put an end to all this going around and around, which is kind of aimless. And that's when he developed insight into the Four Noble Truths to see exactly what is the suffering—i.e., it's the clinging to the aggregates—what causes it is the three kinds of craving. There is a path to the end, and the end is a dimension which is free from suffering.
So that way, he arrived at the goal that he desired, and then he encouraged other people to have desire as they pursued the goal as well. And so you look back on that point that was made earlier, that suffering is wanting not to die, not to grow ill, not to get old. And the problem there was not the fact that you had that desire. The problem is you just simply stopped at the desire. You didn't carry through and follow the path that actually would lead to that. So the problem is just wishing and not following the path.
What this means, though, is if a path of action is going to lead to something unfabricated, you've got to be strategic. Again, this is the image of the raft. The raft is not like the other side of the river, but it will get you there. And you do have to let go of the raft at some point to get onto the shore.
So, his motivation for crossing over, which he had and which he encourages in all of us, is to have this overriding desire. So what his strategy is, is to desire the best thing possible, which is the total end of suffering, the ultimate happiness, which is totally harmless and undeceptive, and arrange everything else to fit under that desire.
Now, this is pretty radical, because you think of a more ordinary way of approaching your desires, which tends to be to start with a view about who you are or what your place is in the world, and then from that, decide what desires are appropriate for you. The Buddha turned it around. He said, "Start with the absolute best desire, which is a total end of suffering, totally harmless, and then order your views about the world and about yourself around that."
And to see how radical this is, I'd like to make a few comparisons. You think of the more typical ways in which people talk about desire. It depends on, "Well, this is the nature of the world," or "This is the nature of you as a person. What's appropriate for you?" You've got people who say, well, you know, like in a materialist worldview where there are really no objective standards for good or evil, "Hey, different strokes for different folks. Pursue what you desire, whatever you want." This is the basic philosophy of American advertising. "Hey, if you want something, we've got it for you. And we're not responsible for the consequences, but don't think about consequences. Okay? Just buy our stuff."
The other extreme is that either in a deterministic worldview where your desires cannot have any impact on anything at all, so you just give up. And there are two varieties of this one. One is strict determinism. I heard one Buddhist teacher—and this is what's really weird about this, you hear this in Buddhist circles sometimes—saying that you're riding on this bus, and as you get off the bus, you're looking and there's no driver. The bus is just kind of driving itself. So you just learn to be okay with whatever the bus does because you can't do anything about it.
There's another series of thought which is that, yes, you can make changes in your life, but you're going to botch it up anyhow, so just let things flow. That's more pervasive than you might think. The analogy they give... well, when I hear that being said, I think of the Buddhist analogy of the cow. You want to get milk, and you decide you're going to get milk by twisting the horn of the cow. And you twist and twist and twist, and you don't get any milk. And you twist harder, and you don't get any milk. Then you finally decide, "Well, maybe it'd be better if I didn't twist, just sort of sat there and developed cow awareness." And you know, it's easier on you and it's easier on the cow. But there's milk in the cow, and you're not going to get it that way.
When I was trying to revive my French before I went over to France last time, I was looking at some videos of this show, Sagesses Bouddhistes. Have you ever seen this? Can you imagine, on national TV in France, they have a 15-minute interview with a Buddhist teacher every Sunday. You know, they asked me, "Why don't you do that in America?" And I said, "Well, politics." But anyway, they had this one woman on there who was talking about how your approach to life should be is you just sort of let nature flow and just go along with the flow of nature. Don't try to change it. And her interviewer, who tends to be very gentle with the people she's interviewing, got a little critical and said, "Well, isn't that kind of pessimistic and defeatist?" And the woman said, "Only if you think about it." [Laughter]
So that's one extreme: just don't desire anything at all. More typical are ways that you have to decide which desires are appropriate for you and which ones are not, and then you prioritize your desires in line with your station or your identity and the nature of the world. Same with the Romantics. Basically, you are an expression of the infinite universe. You are one with the universe. And whatever urges you have coming up within you, those are an expression of the universe. So, you just give in. That's one. The materialistic one, I said that you are materialistic, you are just your body. Therefore, you exist to meet the needs of your body and nothing more than that. There's a theistic view, which is that you are a creature of some particular god and that you have to obey whatever that god wants you to do. Those are the desires appropriate to you.
The Buddha had no use for any of these. He said that your desires really do make a difference. We do not live in a deterministic universe. Again, he said if you believe that you live in a deterministic universe, there is no path to the end of suffering. You have to believe that you have a choice, and not only just to change your life but also to change your experience of the present moment. This is why he developed the theory of karma in which what you're experiencing right now is the combination of results of past karma plus your present karma putting it together. Kind of like a cook going into the kitchen. You see what ingredients you've got, you fix whatever food you can. This is going to depend on your skill as a cook and also depending on what ingredients are showing up in your kitchen. It's possible that you have some bad karma, but you're a really good cook. You don't have to suffer. Or you can have some really good past karma, but you're a lousy cook, and you make a mess of everything. But when you believe in that, that means, "Okay, I can change my ways in the present moment. I can learn new habits in the present moment so that I don't have to suffer." That view, the Buddha said, is going to be helpful on the path.
And as for defining yourself, the Buddha says to define yourself is to limit yourself. If you start out with a definition of who you are, what you are, and what you can do, then you're going to be limited in what you can do. So his approach, again, was the other way around. Start with the belief that you can put an end to suffering. How are you going to define yourself in relationship to that? And as we can get into this in the Q&A, the Buddha would basically say you do develop a new sense of self that is going to be useful along the path. On the one hand, you as the agent are able to do things. You have choices and you can actually make those choices have an effect on your life. Two, you as the consumer want nothing less than the ultimate happiness. And then you as the commentator, your inner critic, has to be trained so it's actually helpful on the path. So it is also urging and rousing and encouraging you as well on the path.
So basically, you get to define yourself in the course of the path. And the way you define yourself will change. The Buddha doesn't talk about how to identify who you are or what you are. He said, "Identify yourself with what you can do, how this you as a self can function."
So you take your view of the world and your view of the self and you subordinate those to this overriding desire to develop the ultimate happiness or find the ultimate happiness. This is why of the different metaphysical assumptions the Buddha makes, there are only two: one is karma and the other is rebirth. Then together with dependent arising as the pattern of how cause and effect relate to this quest for the end of suffering. That's it.
Because you think about the Buddhist universe, the way the Buddha saw it on that second knowledge, he saw that the universe as a whole has no purpose. Now, that can be kind of discouraging when you're looking for somebody outside to tell you what you should be doing. Well, you've got the Buddha to tell you, "No, you can actually choose. You are free to choose the end of suffering as your goal." There's nobody who can tell you that you can't do that. So given that the universe doesn't have a meaning in and of itself, you can give meaning to your life through this choice.
So your desire for freedom becomes the overriding, governing principle in how you view yourself, how you view the world, how you view the principles that are at work in it.
Skillful Desires on the Path (1 of 3) (link)
Now, if we were doing this just in person here and not online, I'd stop there and ask for questions because I'm going to be throwing a lot more information to you in a minute. But because we're online, and once you get online, you can't stop the questions. Let's go.
Okay. How does the Buddha define this overriding desire? He defines it in terms of four determinations. The word is adhiṭṭhāna7 in Pāli. And the four are discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm. I'll say that again: discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm.
Now, these are both attributes of the goal that we're going to, and they are also qualities that you're going to have to develop on the path leading to the goal. So, first I'll start with the qualities of the goal. Basically, you've got the highest discernment is the discernment that puts an end to passion, aversion, and delusion. The highest ultimate truth or noble truth is Nibbāna. The highest relinquishment is the relinquishment of passion, aversion, and delusion. And the highest calm is the calm that comes once those things have been released. And what this means is discernment and relinquishment are steps right before the experience of Nibbāna. Truth and calm are attributes of Nibbāna itself. So those are the ultimate goals to which we have to learn how to aim: at the truth and aim at calm.
This is bad for American advertising and for the American economy as a whole. Can you imagine if everybody aimed for truth and calm? It'd be the end of AI for one thing.
As qualities to develop on the path, the Buddha expresses these as imperatives. One, first, is: don't neglect discernment. Two: guard the truth. Three: commit to relinquishment. And four: train only for calm. Let's go into what those things mean.
Don't neglect discernment. How do you neglect discernment? Have you ever had those what they call those repeating questions? Sometimes they ask, "How do you deny your enlightenment?" Well, this one is, "How do you neglect discernment?" Basically, the Buddha defines discernment as your ability—it starts with this question: "What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?" The discernment there is one, that your welfare and happiness will depend on your actions. They don't just come floating in. Two, long-term is possible. And three, long-term is preferable to short-term. It's pretty basic, but that's the beginning. Notice that we're not focused just on the present moment. We're focused on the long-term consequences of our actions. That's what the discernment is. And you neglect this discernment by saying, "I don't care about the long-term consequences. I just want what I want right now."
So the discernment is expressed in three principles. One is what I just told you, starting with that question, "What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?" Two is the recognition that sometimes happinesses that are short-term get in the way of your long-term happiness, and you have to be willing to give them up. There's a verse in the Dhammapada where it says if you see that there is a long-term happiness that can be found by forsaking a short-term one, you're willing to forsake the short-term for the sake of the long-term. There was a British Pāli scholar who translated that one time. He put a little footnote in: "This cannot possibly be the meaning of this passage because it's too brainless." I said, "Well, yeah, it's very simple, but then how many people actually live by it?" We want to win at chess and keep all our pieces.
I have a friend from college who is a novelist, Jeanne Larsen. You may have heard of her. In one of her novels, she has this scene where this young woman is playing chess with her stepmother. And the stepmother has just become stepmother, and she's trying to get on good terms with the young woman. And as they're playing chess, she's telling the young woman that if you want to be happy in life, you have to decide there's one thing you want more than anything else, and you'll be willing to sacrifice everything else for that one thing.
Now, my friend was a professor at a university back east, and so whenever she came out with a new novel, she'd be invited around to the alumni clubs to read passages from her novel. So, she decided for this novel, this was the passage she would read. And so as the young woman and her stepmother are playing chess, the young woman is beginning to notice that her stepmother is losing pieces all over the place. So she figures, "Well, the stepmother must be a bad chess player." So she starts getting more aggressive. Well, she falls for the trap, and the stepmother wins. And of course, the way she played chess is illustrating the point that she's trying to make. You have to be willing to lose a few pieces in order to win. My friend said she read that to two or three alumni clubs and realized she had to find another passage. Nobody wanted to hear the message. So there we are.
So that's the second principle for discernment: you have to be willing to give up some short-term happiness for the sake of the long-term. The third principle is that there are four types of action in the world. And the first two are no-brainers: things that you like to do that will give good results in the long term, and things that you don't like to do that will give bad results in the long term. Now, the first one, you do it, no problem. The second one, you don't do it, no problem. The difficult ones are the things that you like to do that will give bad long-term results, and things you don't like to do that will give good long-term results. The Buddha said this is a measure of your discernment, how you're able to talk yourself into not doing the first and then doing the second. In other words, thinking about the long-term results again. So that's what it means to not neglect discernment. You focus on long-term happiness and you focus on giving up what is going to get in the way, even if it involves doing things you like to do or things that make you happy right now.
Second one: guard the truth. Guarding the truth, according to the Buddha, means being very clear about what you're basing your ideas on. That's it. I don't know how many people say, "My ideas are all based on fact." Well, how many things that you really know are your things based on? The Buddha asks you, there are a lot of things that are based on belief, that are based on things that fit into your worldview, based on your respect for a particular teacher. And he goes down this long list of possible bases for what is really the truth. There's only this one thing that is a firm foundation for truth, and that's your direct experience. Now, the problem is your direct experience is reliable only when you become a reliable person. This means that guarding the truth means not only being clear about where you're getting your ideas, but also, are you a reliable enough person to be saying what's true or not? And if you're not yet, what can you do? So it's not just a question of honesty, but it's also a question of personal integrity, that I take responsibility for really checking the qualities of my mind in terms of discernment, in terms of concentration, in terms of mindfulness, as to whether I'm a reliable judge of things or not. If we held to that standard, the internet would be quiet.
Third principle: commit to relinquishment. In other words, find joy in shedding things that get in the way of the path. There are certain qualities... when the Buddha talks about shedding, he basically is talking about, get this, thoughts of pride and thoughts of revenge. Those are the two things that people have to shed. There's a great story in the canon where this young prince has lost his parents because they were killed by another king. And so he decides, "I'm going to get revenge." So he goes and gets a job in the elephant stables of the other king. And in the night, in order to entertain the elephants, he plays the lute. This is one of my favorite passages in the canon. Imagine that, playing the lute for the elephants. It's like the time when I was working in a record store when I was a teenager, and there was one... you know, I would scrimp and save just to get one record. And this guy would come in and he would buy about 30 records once a month. Classical music, Mozart mainly. Mozart and Bach. It was for his cows. [Laughter] Because if he played Mozart and Bach 24 hours a day, the cows gave lots of milk.
So anyway, this young man plays the lute to please the elephants. Well, the sound of the lute doesn't stay just in the elephant stables; it goes up into the apartments of the king. The king hears this and he says, "I'd like to hear this more closely." So he has the young man brought into his apartments. The young man plays the lute really well. The king says, "Okay, from now on, you're playing for me and not for the elephants, okay?" And the young man sort of works his way into the king's trust over time until he finally gets the king in a position. They're out in the wilderness. The king has been separated from his troops. He's tired. So, he has the young man sit down, and the king lies down with his head on the young man's knee and falls asleep. And the young man thinks, "I've got him now." So, he pulls out his sword. But then he thinks of something his father said, which is basically, "Animosity is not ended through animosity. It's ended through non-animosity." So he puts the sword away. Then he starts thinking again, "This king has done a lot of mischief to my family," and pulls it out. He does this three times. Finally, after the third time he puts it down, the king wakes up and says, "I just had this horrible dream that this young prince came out and was going to kill me." So the prince grabs him by the hair and pulls out the sword again. "You know who I am? I'm that prince." The king pleads for his life, and the young man says, "No, I plead for my life." So they agree that they're not going to harm each other.
The Buddha is telling the story to monks because the monks have gotten into a big disagreement over who did or did not flush the toilet. And he said, "Look, even noble warriors who live by the sword, they learn how to shed their thoughts for revenge. Why can't you?" So, you commit to relinquishment. We're going to get into this later on in the day in more detail. But basically, you see there's anything that is going to get in the way, you're happy to let it go. You train yourself to be happy to let it go.
Finally, train only for calm. You take on only the duties that really do fall to you. Now, the Buddha is not saying to abandon all responsibilities and just kind of chill out. If you do have responsibilities, you take them on. But you don't take on any more than you have to because you need to take the time to train your mind to be calm, and you find value in calm. It's a true state of happiness.
So, even here there's a hierarchy. You're training for calm. You're training for truth. The truth is in Nibbāna. The truth is in calm. And Nibbāna is also calm. Discernment and relinquishment are there for the sake of truth and calm. But by developing these four qualities in these ways, you can overcome the desires that are ignorant, deceptive, grasping, or agitated. In other words, you do your best to overcome desires that would one, aim primarily at immediate gratification and ignore the long-term consequences. Two, any desires in which you have to lie to yourself. In other words, desires that make promises that they can't fulfill. How many of you have had those in the past? Okay. Three, you're aiming at, you're trying to counteract desires that would aim only at acquiring more wealth or power over others, or always wanting to profit off of other people, like certain politicians we know. And finally, you want to counteract any desires that aim at goals that you would have to fight to protect. In other words, that would make you fearful that you would lose what you've got. When you have to acquire lots more wealth, then you have to hire security guards or armies to protect yourself. So basically, you're looking for a happiness that would not get anybody else jealous. Ajahn Lee makes a really nice point. He says when you gain awakening, nobody else knows that you're safe. Interesting thought.
So at the same time, in developing these four determinations, you're going against many of the common habits the world at large uses in pursuing its desires. One, going for the quick results without thought for long-term consequences. Two, your habit of using deceit when you can't get what you want through honest means. Three, the habit of accumulating as much as you can. And four, the habit of looking for happiness in variety, excitement, and change just for the sake of change.
So again, by developing these four determinations, you're going against these unskillful desires, both in yourself and the ones that you see in the world around you, which means that when you practice this, it's a countercultural act. They talk many times about trying to make Buddhism mainstream in America. I think we're better off if it's not mainstream, you know, because imagine what we would have. We'd have temples that have signs out front with stupid puns, you know, that would be mainstream. We'd have politicians invoking the Buddha for whatever. So, let's keep it not mainstream.
The implication here, of course, is that you're going to be fighting against certain desires. As I said, your desires that aim at immediate gratification, the ones that aim at acquiring, it's going to be a struggle inside. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha uses a lot of martial metaphors, metaphors of people on a quest for something, searching for something, or people trying to develop a skill. I mean, people put forth an effort, a concerted effort, and a focused effort in order to gain what they want.
I mean, there are some metaphors about relaxing. There's the story about when your mind has nothing but skillful thoughts, you don't have to be so hard on them. The image of the Buddha is a cowherd during the dry season when you don't have to worry about the cows getting in the rice. When you have a lot of unskillful thoughts, he says you do have to ride herd like the cowherd which has to keep the cows out of the rice. But during the dry season when the rice has been harvested, okay, the cowherd can just rest under the tree and just be mindful of the fact, "Okay, there are thoughts there." And then you realize, okay, even if you think skillful thoughts, that's going to tire you, so then you get into concentration, so it's even more of a restful state. Okay, so there are metaphors of rest in the canon, but there are so many more about martial training, you know, the training of a soldier, the training of elephants that have to go into battle and, as the Buddha says, beat up unwelcome sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. The metaphors of trying to find the heartwood of a tree, making sure you don't get satisfied with just the branches. And the skills of a good cook who knows how to please the person you're working for, because the person you're working for may not say, "You know, I like this, I don't like that." You just have to watch to notice, "Okay, what does he reach for? What does she take several seconds on?" Okay, then you fix more of that. The skills of an archer who can fire fast shots, pierce great masses, that kind of thing.
So, the path will be a path of struggle and a path of effort. But it promises so much at the end. This is why it does have a goal and it's very much goal-oriented, because this is the excellent goal. The Buddha found that there is a dimension where there are no limitations. I mean, totally outside of space and time. So none of the limitations of space, none of the limitations of time apply there. And he says whatever effort you put there, even if it involves going through periods when you're crying about how difficult it is, he says, "Stick with it because it's worth it." If you could make a deal that they would spear you 100 times in the morning, 100 times at noon, 100 times in the evening—300 spears a day for 100 years—but you had a guarantee of stream-entry at the end, go for it.
Skillful Desires on the Path (2 of 3) (link)
This morning we talked about the overriding desire that drove the Buddha to gain awakening, that he recommends that we all take as our overriding desire in our search for happiness. And I mentioned that some of the images he used were those of skilled craftspeople. When you think about the desire, it's basically talking about the values that you want to adopt, and then there are the skills, the techniques you need to develop, or the approach to following the path as a skill.
So this afternoon, for this first section, we're going to be talking about technique in general. When he talks about the path to the end of suffering, he always calls it the Noble Eightfold Path, never talks about just the Eightfold Path, because there are other eightfold paths besides the noble one. In fact, you think about something you seriously desire, and if you actually pursue that desire, it's going to have eight factors. One, you have to have a certain view about the world and about the object that you're looking for, that it's really worth gaining and you really can do this within the world. Secondly, you have to be resolved. Any thoughts that would get in the way of pursuing that desire, you've got to put aside. Third, you have to think about the way you speak that could either get in the way of attaining the desire or not. The way you act, the way you pursue your livelihood. You've got to think about the things that you have to abandon within yourself, develop within yourself in order to attain that desire. That would be right effort, or effort. And then you have to keep these things in mind. What's important if I'm going to not get waylaid, get distracted from this desire that I have. And finally, get focused on it. Have a sense of well-being as you continue with the path. Otherwise, it's going to get difficult.
That pattern can apply to anything. Suppose you decide, "Okay, there's nothing else in the world that matters aside from wealth." Okay, one, you have to see that wealth is that important and that you can attain it in this world. Any way of thinking that would get in the way of your pursuit of wealth... we can decide what kind of businessman you're going to be. There are the businessmen who say, "I want long-term relationships with my customers." That would involve one view. Those who say, "I just take what I can when I can get it," that's another view. And then you resolve on getting rid of any thoughts that get in the way of what you've decided is worth pursuing. Then you have to think about the way you talk, the way you speak, the way you pursue your livelihood so you could become wealthy. The efforts that you have to make to develop the qualities of mind that would focus only on the wealth, and anything that would get in the way of the wealth, you put aside. You have to keep this in mind and you have to be focused. So you've got eight factors in that path as well. But that path, if it succeeds, takes you only to material wealth, which is not necessarily worthwhile.
As the Buddha said, many of us are on paths, and we don't really realize what paths we're on. There are paths that lead to hell. There are paths that lead to an animal rebirth. Paths that lead to a hungry ghost rebirth. Speaking of which, many people think that being a hungry ghost is worse than being an animal. According to the Pāli Canon, it's not. You're better off as a hungry ghost because hungry ghosts can listen to language and understand. You talk to a dog about the Dhamma, and it wags its tail. That's as far as it gets. And many of us don't realize that we're on these paths.
So the Buddha, of course, recommends there's a better path, which is the path to Nibbāna. And again, you've got these factors you have to keep in mind: have a view about the world and about yourself that you can actually attain this and it's worth attaining. And then you resolve, basically, that anything that would get in the way of right concentration, which is another factor further down the path... It's interesting when the Buddha talks about right view, he talks about the causes for suffering: craving for sensuality, becoming, non-becoming. And you would think the right resolve would focus on getting rid of those three kinds of craving. It doesn't. It focuses on getting rid of any of the factors that would get in the way of doing right concentration. So you focus on getting rid of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness. We'll get into this a little bit later.
With right speech, you speak in ways that are harmless. You don't tell lies. You don't speak divisively. You don't speak simply with the hope of hurting people's feelings. And you don't speak in terms of idle chatter. Two of those require some explanation. Well, all of them do. In terms of lies, the way that the Buddha defines a lie is that you say something that you know misrepresents the truth. It's not the way things are. It's not necessarily with an attempt to deceive. This is where the Buddha talks about jokes that are misrepresentations of the truth but are not meant to deceive. He says you don't tell them. And I know a lot of people say, "Well, where is my sense of humor going to come from?" And it's possible to find humor in the truth of things. I mean, this is why we remember Mark Twain and other humorists of the past who really were good because they pointed out the truth.
Now, this doesn't mean that you have to divulge all information. As the Buddha said, any truths that would give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion, or that might be abused, you don't say them. Which means you have to be really careful about how you withhold information and what your motives are for withholding information. Because anything you're going to say is going to withhold some information. If I ask you, "How are you today?" and you go through every organ of your body, by the time you opened your eyes again, I'm gone. You know, so you've got to leave out some information. The question is why? What's your motivation? That's what you get into an issue with the Dhamma.
In terms of divisive speech, sometimes this is said as "no gossip." The Buddha never said no gossip. He says no speech that would divide people from their friends or would prevent a friendship. You're saying things that are actually true, but there are things about Biology that you know you wouldn't want... if you knew them, you wouldn't want Biology as a friend. I'm not going to say them to you. You have to find out for yourself.
There's harsh speech. The Buddha says that speech that hurts people's feelings is not necessarily harmful. There's a lot of this talk around that if you hurt somebody's feelings, it's harmful for them. The Buddha wouldn't have any use for that. He said, "If it's meant solely to hurt their feelings, okay, then you don't say it." But there are a lot of things that can be said that people need to hear. And the example he gives, it's an interesting story, this particular teaching. There's a group of sectarians called the Niganthas, which apparently are the Jains, and they're constantly portrayed in a bad light in the Pāli Canon. At one time, they called this Prince Abhaya and said, "Hey, you want to become famous? Ask the Buddha a question that he can't answer." And the question is going to be this: "Would the Buddha say anything unpleasant?" And if he says yes, he would say things that are unpleasant, then you say, "What's the difference between you and the ordinary people down in the market?" If he said he would not say things that are unpleasant, well, you say that he said that Devadatta was going to go to hell. And Devadatta did not find that pleasing. So it's a trick question.
So Prince Abhaya invites the Buddha for a meal. This is one of the reasons why monks have to be very careful when they get meal invitations. You never know what the intention is to have you go over to the house. I digress. One afternoon I was sitting at the monastery and one of our neighbors comes in and he says, "Can you and the only other monk at the monastery at the time, can you come and do a funeral chant for us?" I said, "Who died?" He said, "You'll see." "How can you smile? Somebody died." He said, "You'll see." So we go over, and it turns out they had planted their vegetables in the Chinese way with these raised beds where vegetables are planted very tight together. And three of the beds were totally dead. And the wife was convinced it was foul play, that someone had come in and intentionally killed their vegetables. And you may have noticed that sometimes when people receive blessings, they take water and they pour it into a little bowl. Well, she had water prepared for pouring in the bowl, but she also had salt and hot peppers in the water. The idea being that it would put a curse on whoever had killed their vegetables. So, I said, "Wait a minute. What if your husband..."—they only had one tank that they used for pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer—"What if your husband didn't properly wash out the tank after they put some pesticide in something? And he was trying to put fertilizer on the plants and killed them all. Would you want him to be cursed?" My favorite part of the story is she waited a minute. "I guess not." And one of the neighbors said, "Well, as long as the monks are here, let's go ahead and do it." So, we chanted the funeral service for the vegetables.
At any rate, Prince Abhaya has invited the Buddha to his house. And after the meal, he sits down in front of the Buddha, has got his baby son in his lap, and he asks the Buddha, "Would the Buddha say anything unpleasant?" And the Buddha says, "There's no categorical answer to that question." Abhaya realizes the Buddha has slipped out. He explains to the Buddha why he asked the question, then the Buddha explains his answer. But before explaining the answer, he says, "Suppose your baby son here got a sharp piece of potsherd in his mouth or something sharp. What would you do?" And the prince says, "Well, with one hand, I'd hold his head. With the other hand, I would take my finger and I'd get that potsherd out, even if it meant drawing blood." "Why is that?" "Because I have compassion for the child." The Buddha said, "In the same way, there are times when the Buddha would say things that are true and beneficial, but unpleasing, but because they're beneficial, he would say them." He goes down the list. First, he starts, "Is it true or not?" If it's true, the next question is, "Is it beneficial or not?" The third question is, if it's true and beneficial, "Is this the right time and place to say something pleasing, or is it the right time and place to say something displeasing?" So, he's motivated by compassion and truth all at the same time. So, you think about that when you're going to say something harsh to somebody. Is this actually going to be helpful in getting the message across? Because there are times when people don't listen unless you use really strong language. But you have to be careful about that.
Finally, about idle chatter. Fortunately, there is no precept against idle chatter because everybody would be riddled with having broken that precept. Idle chatter is chatter with which you don't have any real intention for what you're saying. You just open your mouth and see what's going to come out. If you stop and think first, "When I say this, what are the consequences going to be?" then you say it.
So that's right speech. Right action, again, there's no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex. Those don't require that much explanation. Right livelihood: don't make your livelihood in a way that would be abusive to your clients or abusive to yourself. Right effort is the effort, as I said earlier this morning, to generate the desire to give rise to skillful qualities when they're not there, to maintain them when they are, to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, and to get rid of them if they are there.
Right mindfulness: mindfulness is not a broad, accepting awareness. This is a misunderstanding that goes back to the 19th century in Burma. Right mindfulness is the ability to keep something in mind. You're remembering. Like you're saying, "I'm going to stay with the breath." Right mindfulness is actually the way to get into right concentration. You focus on one topic, like the breath, and then you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. And then you foster three qualities to do that. One is mindfulness itself, keeping it in mind. Alertness, seeing what you're doing while you're doing it and what the results are. And then finally, ardency, the effort to do this well. When Ajahn Lee explains these three qualities, he says it's the ardency that is the essence of discernment or wisdom there, because you can be mindful of all kinds of things, you can be alert to all kinds of things. But when an effort is to do it, when you're really intent on trying to do this well, realizing that having learned the Buddhist teachings, you don't just listen to them and say, "Sounds good," you actually try to put them into practice and train your mind. That's what's wise.
Finally, with right concentration, we're talking about the four levels of jhāna8. And we can get into that in more detail later.
So those are the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. You're following the pattern that you would use for pursuing any desire, and you're taking that path and you're applying it to the noblest goal of all, which is to find the deathless.
Skillful Desires on the Path (3 of 3) (link)
I'd like to focus a little bit more attention on four of these factors. First is right resolve. As I said earlier, it focuses not on getting rid of the causes of suffering; it focuses on getting rid of the obstacles to right concentration, because you need to get the mind into right concentration and then use that as a basis for getting deeper insights into your mind. What a resolve is, it's an articulated purpose. You talk to yourself in phrases or full sentences about what you want to do, what you need to accomplish, what you're aiming at.
And as the Buddha points out, you've got two levels of that. There's what we mentioned this morning, the three things that I said to avoid earlier: sensuality, ill will, harmfulness. And then on a higher level, you're trying to get into the first level of jhāna, where you have what's called directed thought and evaluation, singleness of object, and then pleasure and rapture. Those first three are the causes. You focus on a particular topic and then you make comments on the topic. Like when you're working with the breath, you're staying with the breath and asking yourself, "Is the breath comfortable? If the breath is not comfortable, what can I do to make it more comfortable? If it is comfortable, how do I maintain it? As I maintain it, what can I do with that pleasure? How do I spread it around?" That would be the resolve on a higher level. And so this can take you as far as the first jhāna, because when you're getting into the second jhāna, there is no directed thought, there is no evaluation. There's just a perception, say, of breath. There's a sense that your awareness has unified with the breath and you feel like it's one. And you're not talking to yourself in full sentences anymore.
Sometimes people ask, "How do I do directed thought and evaluation?" Actually, you're doing it all the time. It's the Buddhist analysis of how we talk to ourselves. We choose a topic and then we make comments on it, ask questions about it, make more comments. We're doing this all the time. Simply that in right concentration, you're focusing on the one object. When the mind settles down in this way, okay, that is the practice of right mindfulness and it's also the practice of right concentration on its first level. And then the Buddha says once the mind is settled down that way... the image he gives is of an elephant that you've captured in the forest and you've tied it to a post. The elephant is going to resist for a long time, but you try to... again, there's something the Indians like about playing music for the elephants. You know, you play flute music, you play lute music, you try to give it food. When it finally accepts the food, you say, "Okay, it's going to survive." In the same way, you try to put aside all of your hankerings for sensual thoughts and other thoughts, and finally the mind begins to enjoy being in concentration. And then you can put aside the directed thought and evaluation. It's interesting the way the Buddha talks about that. You remain focused on the breath, but you don't think about the breath. Interesting distinction. You're focused there, you've got a perception that holds you there, but you're not thinking in full sentences anymore.
So that's right resolve. With right effort, it's not brute effort. It's effort with right view and discernment. And discernment gets analyzed in four ways. When you have right effort, first is you discern the difference between what is skillful and what is not skillful in the mind. Years back, Bhikkhu Bodhi did a translation of some of the passages in the canon, In the Buddha's Words. And there's a passage where he talks about the seven factors for awakening, and the factor for awakening that's related to discernment is related to seeing that distinction between what is skillful and what is unskillful. And he put in a footnote, "I don't understand this. I thought this was the discernment faculty." The implication, I guess, being it's not talking about inconstancy, stress, not-self. No, no, no. Because I was always taught that the basic issue in being discerning is discerning between what is skillful and what is unskillful. And even in that case, you have to have a pragmatic sense of when to use skillful mind states to get rid of unskillful mind states, and when you have to use unskillful mind states to get rid of unskillful mind states. Because sometimes, say you're angry at somebody and you just can't muster thoughts of goodwill. The Buddha says, "Well, you can remind yourself that if you act on your anger, you're going to do something stupid and your enemy will be pleased to see you do something stupid. Do you want to give pleasure to your enemy?" That's overcoming anger with spite. Then, of course, hopefully you calm down a little bit and say, "Yes, I should have goodwill for my enemy." But sometimes you have to use unskillful mind states to get rid of the unskillful ones. So that's the first aspect of discernment with regard to right effort, is you're seeing the distinction between skillful and unskillful.
The second one is seeing the different types of effort. There are certain things that you have to prevent, certain things that you have to abandon, certain things you have to develop, and certain things you have to maintain. In other words, you prevent unskillful qualities from arising. If they're there, then you have to get rid of them, abandon them. As for skillful qualities, if they're not there, you have to develop them. And once they are there, you have to maintain them. So you've got four different duties. So it's not just a path of letting go, letting go, letting go. Some things you've got to develop. This is again where you have to work on your discernment to see, given the situation, what you have to do.
The third issue where you have to use your discernment has to do with your motivation. This is where we get into generating desire. If you're sitting there meditating, or let's say you're not meditating, you have to tell yourself, "How do I get myself to meditate? How do you talk yourself into it?" Sometimes you have to remind yourself, "Okay, if I don't do it now, when am I going to do it? It's not going to get done." That's called heedfulness, realizing there's a task that has to be done, and you've got to do it when you can. You've got compassion for yourself, is that when I'm done with the meditation, I will be glad that I had done it. So have some compassion for yourself, compassion for others. "My partner finds that I'm a better person when I meditate." [Laughter] A sense of shame here. "I've learned the Buddhist teachings and I'm not practicing. How many more lifetimes am I going to have to come back for this?" And then you ask yourself, "Where was I when the Buddha was alive? What was I doing?" So those are various ways that you can give rise to the desire to practice.
Then finally, there's a question about the amount of effort. This comes down to two things. One is that there are certain topics that require more effort than others. The Buddha divides the causes of suffering into two types. Those that when you look at them, all you have to do is look at them, and they go away. The reason they're in the mind is because you haven't been paying attention. When the mind gets a little bit quiet and this unskillful thing comes up and you look at it, "Oh, who wants that?" You let go. There are others, though, that when you look at them, they stare right back. They say, "I'm not going to go anywhere." With that, he says you have to exert a fabrication. Now what he means by exerting a fabrication... there are three kinds of fabrication that are relevant here. One is bodily fabrication: the way you breathe. Two is verbal fabrication: the way you talk to yourself, again, directed thought and evaluation. And then three is mental fabrication: the perceptions you hold in mind and the feelings that you focus on. The perception could either be mental images you hold in mind or they could be individual words that you use. And you realize, "Okay, this unskillful thought that's in my mind is something that is fabricated. What I have to do is undo the unskillful fabrications and replace them with more skillful ones." So look, how am I breathing right now? There are ways you can breathe that can really aggravate your anger. There are ways of breathing that would calm it down. There are ways you can talk to yourself about the situation that can aggravate it. There are ways that calm you down. And then there are different perceptions you can hold in mind that either aggravate the anger or calm it down. So you ask yourself, "How am I fabricating this anger?" And part of it, there's a part of the mind that will say, "This is my anger. These are my true feelings about these things." Well, your true feelings are fabricated. They're not necessarily there. They're habitual. They're easy because they're habitual, but you would be better off not following them. Can you think of new ways of fabricating in terms of the images you hold in mind? Are you the judge way up on top of the seat and the person you're angry at is that little bug down there on the floor and you're just going to squash it? The Buddha says, "Don't think in those terms. Think of yourself as someone going across a desert. You're hot, tired, trembling with thirst." And you come across a little bit of water in a cow footprint. Now, you realize you need the water, but if you try to scoop it up, you're going to get it muddy. So, what do you have to do? You have to get down on all fours and slurp it up. You know, this is not a very dignifying position. You wouldn't want anybody to come and take a picture and put it on Instagram. But you say, "Look, I need the water. To hell with Instagram." In other words, when there's somebody you're angry at, part of your mind will say, "Why should I think about their good qualities? They're horrible people." But then you realize, "Okay, if I can't think of their good qualities, all I'm going to think about is their bad qualities, and I'm going to start doing things that are unskillful. So, I need the water." So you focus on that. That's a perception you can hold in mind. So those are the four aspects of right effort that deal with discernment.
With right mindfulness, I simply want to point out the fact that sometimes we're told that mindfulness means a broad, accepting state of mind. And actually, when the Buddha talks about the similes in relationship to mindfulness, they're always similes of narrow focus or restricted focus. For example, there's this story of the quail. The quail is out wandering one day and this hawk swoops down, picks it up, carries it off, and the quail starts moaning, "Oh, my lack of merit." Not the first thing that would come to my mind. "Oh, my lack of merit. If I had been staying in my ancestral ground, this hawk would have been no match for me." Of course, that piques the hawk. The hawk says, "Okay, where is your ancestral ground?" And the quail says, "On a newly plowed field where the stones are turned up." So the hawk releases him and says, "Okay, go there, but you won't escape me." So the quail goes down and stands on one of the stones. And he starts taunting the hawk. He says, "Come get me, you hawk. Come get me, you hawk." And the hawk comes swooping down. And as soon as the hawk is right on him, the quail slips behind the stone. The hawk smashes its breast against the stone and dies. And the Buddha says this is a symbol for mindfulness practice. You notice the quail was not broad and accepting. The quail had to stay in his ancestral ground. And he says that when you leave your ancestral ground, that's thoughts of sensual pleasures. That's where Māra can get you. So you've got to keep your thoughts within bounds. Then you're going to be safe. There are some pretty violent images in the Pāli Canon.
Then there's the case of the monkeys. This is one even worse. Trigger warning. Okay. There are places where monkeys live in the Himalayas where the monkeys are safe, but only monkeys go. There are places where monkeys and human beings go. And if you're an unwise monkey, you will wander off into one of those areas. And it's in that area that the human beings set traps. And so one day this one monkey wanders in and gets caught in the trap. It's a tar trap. It's this blob of tar, and he touches it and gets stuck. And then he uses his other hand to pull it away, and that hand gets stuck. And he uses one foot to push away, and that gets stuck, and the other foot gets stuck. And then finally he just bites it, and his mouth gets stuck, and he just lies there whimpering. And then the hunter comes along, spears it, and takes it home. That's because the monkey did not stay in his ancestral ground. A symbol for mindfulness: stay within the frames of reference—the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves—and you get focused on getting rid of anything that's unskillful.
This is the second point in the similes for mindfulness, is that there's the gatekeeper at the fortress. You have this fortress at your frontier, and the wise gatekeeper knows who to let in, who not to let in. He recognizes enemies, recognizes friends. The gatekeeper is mindfulness. He's not just sitting there looking at whoever comes in. There's one scholar whose name I don't want to mention who said that that's all that gatekeeper has to do. Just as long as the gatekeeper is there, the unskillful qualities will know that he's there so they won't come in. Which is like those mannequin policemen you see on the road sometimes, you know, where they don't have enough tax money to pay a real policeman, so they put a mannequin in a police car parked on the side of the road. The first time you drive past, you slow down. Then you see that that's just a mannequin. That's the last time you slow down. You're not going to be concerned about it. So, the gatekeeper has to be very careful about who he lets in, who he doesn't let in. That's the role of mindfulness.
And finally, mindfulness is meant as a means to right concentration. You're getting focused on the body in and of itself, putting aside any thoughts about the world, and you're being ardent, alert, and mindful. That's a recipe for concentration practice. As long as you do it consistently and develop a sense of well-being there, you're going to get into the levels of jhāna. Those instructions I gave you for breath meditation this morning, those are jhāna instructions.
Now the Buddha also talks about right concentration in terms of four qualities that are needed to develop it. This is where you get into the topics called the basis of success. And the Buddha does talk about being successful in meditation. He's not embarrassed to say that. There are four qualities: desire, persistence, intent, and powers of analysis. And the way it's described in the canon, it sounds like you have a concentration that is based on desire, or a concentration based on persistence, or on intent, or on analysis. But when you look at these various factors, three of them are in right effort. Concentration is going to require all four of them. So then it's basically a question of which one you're going to emphasize.
In terms of desire, if you read the readings, you know the story of Ānanda at the park. This Brahmin comes to see Ānanda and asks him, "This path of practice you're following, what is the goal?" And one of the goals is the end of desire. And the Brahmin says, "How do you get there?" And Ānanda gives the list of the bases for success. And the Brahmin says, "It's impossible. How can you use desire to put an end to desire?" And Ānanda asks him, "I'll ask you some questions. Before you came to the park, did you have the desire to come here?" "Yes." "Now that you're at the park, do you still have that desire?" "No, I'm here." And Ānanda says it's the same in the practice. You need the desire to get to where you want. Once you're there, you don't need desire anymore.
And one talks about having balanced desire that's not too strong, not too weak. And when you're in practice, you learn that you have to keep the desire focused on the causes. If you're thinking about how much you want the goal at the end of the path, but you're not focused on what you need to do, you're never going to get there. So you take that desire for the goal and you focus it on what you're doing right now. That's the skill.
As for persistence, this is basically right effort all over again. And what makes it special is that you're really sticking with what you're doing. You don't just say, "I'm going to stay up all night tonight and let my flesh dry up and my bones dry up until I gain awakening." You want to be able to pace yourself in a way that you can keep up the practice as kind of a marathon. Learn how to pace yourself. This is where you need to train your inner critic. There's so much that has been said about getting rid of the inner critic. If you did not have an inner critic, I wouldn't want to be around you. You need an inner critic to say, "This is right, this is not. This is helpful, this is not helpful." But the inner critic needs to be critiqued. It needs to be trained so that it does urge and rouse and encourage you in the right direction so you can stick with the path.
The third quality, intent. You really are focused on what you're doing. This is where Dōgen, the Zen master, has a really useful teaching. He says the duty with regard to the third noble truth is to realize it. The duty with regard to the fourth noble truth is to develop it. Those two duties are the same thing. Now, he's not saying the goal is the same thing as the path. He's saying that what you do on the path is actually going to lead you to realize the end of suffering. Which means in practice, you don't follow the path and keep your eye down at the end of the road to see when that's going to come. You pay full attention to what you're doing right here. And you pay full attention here because that's where it's going to appear. It's not going to be anywhere else.
As for powers of analysis, you're using your powers of judgment based on what you've done to decide, "Okay, where is it going well? Where is it not going well?" This issue came up earlier about the mind not settling down. "Okay, exactly what are you doing that's keeping it from settling down?" You don't look outside. You look at what you are doing right here, right now. And then you try to figure out in terms of cause and effect what's causing the problem. And then you try to figure out—this is where you use your ingenuity. This is one of those factors the Buddha talks about not enough. He mentions it every now and then at important junctures in the path. But you do have to use your own creative powers to figure out, "Okay, if this doesn't work, what can I think of that might work?" It's using your imagination in a practical way.
So, you're trying to pass judgment on things. This is in line with... there's an interesting passage in a sutta where the Buddha gives a long, random list of things that are nourished, things that he says are hard to find in the world, but you can either put up obstacles to them in your path or you can nourish them in your life. He starts out with things like, "Wealth is hard to find, beauty is hard to find." It sounds like it's going to be all about lay concerns, and then in the end he says, "Oh, by the way, Dhamma is hard to find." And Dhamma is found how? Through commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to doing it, then you reflect on the results. And when you reflect on the results, you figure out, "Okay, what have I done wrong? Can I go back and do it again?" So unlike the Kālāma Sutta, where it sounds like all you have to do is... the Buddha has to please you first before you're going to take anything. The Buddha says, "No, you've got to commit yourself first and judge your actions and learn how to be a reliable judge." And you judge them where? In light of the third noble truth. It is possible to put an end to suffering. So when you judge your actions, if it's not good enough, if you haven't reached the end of suffering, it's not good enough yet. There's more to be done, but that is a possibility.
Now you may notice that these qualities of desire, persistence, intent, and powers of analysis can actually be used in any skill. And it's interesting that when the Buddha lists the wings to awakening, which is his list of the most important teachings he gave, this is one of the lists, but you hardly ever hear about it in Western Buddhism because desire is bad, analysis is bad. I just heard one monk say, "Don't try to figure things out." So, well, if you're not figuring things out, what are you doing? Effort is bad. But actually, the Buddha said, "These are important parts of the practice." And you go to Asia and it's all over the place. Do you want to succeed in education? Desire, persistence, intent, analysis. Someone reported they went to a helicopter repair place outside of Bangkok one time, and there they were: desire, persistence, intent, analysis. Maybe you can get Apple to put it on its... I have a student whose son is a professional athlete, and I gave him a copy of the book that we have back there, The Basis of Success. He took one look at the cover and said, "The basis of success is work your ass off." I said, "That's one of them." And so then I figured out, okay, you must have sports language for all four of them. Okay, you've got to want to win. Got to work your ass off. Lock in. Use your brain.
So the question is what? The Buddha focuses specifically on concentration, one, in general because the mind is easier to observe when it's focused on developing a skill. You get more sensitive to what you're doing, and you're trying to do things better. You're going to be paying more and more attention to your own mind naturally, and it's easier to see when it is content and also when it is quiet. So the more content you can make it, the more quiet you make it, the more you're going to be able to see what's going on. That's kind of general principles.
With specific to the path, we mentioned this earlier, that if you're trying to avoid becoming and non-becoming without falling into the trap of craving for becoming or craving for non-becoming, you've got to go back and look at, "Well, what are the steps that lead up to becoming? How do I abort the process before it happens?" And this is where dependent arising is really useful. It points out that even prior to sensory contact, there are a lot of these things going on in your mind. There's intention, there's attention, there are perceptions, there's directed thought, there's evaluation, feelings. These are the things, these are the building blocks of a concentration state. As you get more sensitive to these things as you're trying to master the concentration, you get more sensitive to the steps that lead up to becoming in general. This is why becoming is such an important part of the path.
So those are some of my thoughts about the path as a skill. The Eightfold Path is following the pattern that you would use for pursuing any desire and applying it specifically to the desire to put an end to suffering. And then the four bases of success, which are basically an expansion of the Buddhist teachings on commitment and reflection. You commit yourself by having the desire, by being persistent, being intent, and then you reflect and use your powers of analysis to say, "Okay, what did I do wrong? Let's go back and fix it."
And this is sort of this approaching the path as a skill this way helps cut through a lot of the recriminations that we have. "My meditation is not going well. I'm a horrible meditator." The Buddha recommends that you get out of your narratives when you sit down and meditate. And you don't just tell yourself, "Okay, I'm going to stop telling myself stories." You've got to get back and get a bigger perspective. Think of him on the night of his awakening. First was all his lifetimes going back many, many eons. Now you think you have narratives. Eons and eons and eons. And he wasn't always successful. You know, there are times when he misbehaved.
There's a Jātaka tale I can't resist telling. I don't think he's the character; I think he's just a witness to this, because there's one thing the Buddha was really good about in the Jātaka tales: whoever became the Buddha never lied. But this is a story about somebody who lies. There's a monkey who likes to look for fruit on the edge of the river. And one day this crocodile comes floating along the edge. And they start talking in a very friendly way. So the monkey gets more and more trusting of the alligator. And finally the alligator says, "You know, there's better fruit over on the other side of the river. You can get on my back and I'll take you over." So the monkey hops on his back. And as they go across the river, the alligator starts sinking into the water. And the monkey says, "What are you doing?" And the alligator says, "I didn't want to tell you, but my wife wants your heart." And so the monkey laughs and says, "You know, we monkeys, we don't have our hearts in our bodies when we go hunting. We leave them back hanging on a tree." The alligator turns around, goes back, and the monkey gets off and disappears into the forest.
One other story I'd like to tell. When I was a layperson in Thailand, one of the things I really wanted to see was a khon, which is this masked drama they have. They've got the music in the background and they've got the chorus in the background. You've got these people pantomiming the story of Rāma and Sītā and Hanumān and the rest. And I had a little khon fund in my bank account. I said if I ever get an opportunity to see a khon, I'll go down to Bangkok to see it. Well, they had it. So, I went down and it was telling the story about... I don't want to get into all the details, but the main scene in the story was you've got this demon general they want to get rid of, and they discover that he doesn't have his heart in his body. It's been placed in a tree. There's a magic spell on it to protect it. And so, Hanumān goes and looks for the tree, and he finally gets the tree. And so, you've got the tree on the stage, and you've got the stagehand behind, dressed as a deva, holding up the tree. So there's a tug of war between Hanumān and the tree deva over the tree. And you've got the evil demon general over here haranguing his troops, and all of a sudden Hanumān reaches in, and on this other side, the demon collapses.
So that's a little digression. Where was I? Oh, the Buddha's awakening. Why did I wander away? He has all his narratives. Does he go straight to the present moment? No. He goes to a larger view of the universe as a whole. And he looks at this is life as a whole. This is what's happening for the universe as a whole. Then he goes into the present moment. This is the reason why it's good to think of all the universe, all beings in the universe, before you focus in on yourself when you're meditating, because it gets whatever mistakes you made in the course of the day or whatever personal narratives that are kind of unfortunate, you can just put them in a larger context. And you realize, "Okay, I'm not the only one who's made mistakes. There have been lots of other beings who've made mistakes. We've all survived so far. Not very well, but we've survived." And you can think about, "And there have been good things I've done in the past in addition to the bad things I've done in the past." But you're in a much better mood, right? You have a much better perspective for looking at the present moment when you take the larger context into consideration.
Q&A
Questioner: When you mention about discernment, right? And long-term and short-term... you know, I'm also still teaching teenagers. And I have two sons still in their teenage years. Long-term is hard for teenagers. Anything beyond the next weekend, you know...
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Yes.
Questioner: That's not easy, right? I mean, you also look at the long term, but for the teenagers, with this day and the situation going on around the world, even social media... a couple of days ago, there was a situation of bullying and things like that. I mean, all this is really interrupting just the normal process for all of us, right? And for the young generation, it's even harder. And when you do small goals and long-term goals, sometimes they feel like they're in a state of depression. Like, "Whatever I can do for me right now, at least I can go for it and through it for the next day." You know, "If I'm going to look so far, it just looks simply to be impossible." So, how would you try to... I think it's okay for the young crowd or youngsters to kind of have the short-term goal a little bit, you know? For example, my younger son, he's trying for college. That's a long-term goal, but it's not easy. He's like, "I used to play games and all this, but how do I go through that long term? I want to just get better, be happy just at this moment because I'm so depressed." That is a very simple thing. But now in the whole world situation with the wars going on, just every day to go through each day is hard enough.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Yeah. And when you look long-term, you want to just survive now. How do I do that? Okay. One is remember that the path doesn't save all of its rewards for the end. I mean, it's really good. Everybody needs to learn how to develop some concentration inside so that you have a place where the mind can rest and have a sense of well-being and sort of recharge your batteries. And then secondly, given the uncertainty of the world, look, you've got to prepare. What's the best way to prepare? It is to develop powers of discernment, powers of mindfulness, these skills that whatever is going to happen, you're not going to suffer. I mean, this is how the Buddha teaches heedfulness to the monks. He says you could die easily. There could be a social breakdown in society. And what you need to do is develop the qualities in your mind that you're going to need so that you can be happy no matter what happens outside. And this means, you know, not defining yourself in terms of what the social media are saying to you right now. But again, this part of being a good parent is being on their side. "Look, I'm on your side here. I'm not trying to force this on you, but this is for your own good."
I have a student in Brazil who's been playing my Dhamma talks to her daughter since the daughter was in the womb. And so whenever she feels upset—now she's about four or five now—whenever she feels upset, she says, "Mommy, mommy, can I hear Ajahn Geoff?" You know, either that or that song from Frozen. It's one of the two. So, the kids need something centered inside so their minds are not totally defined by social media.
Questioner: Hi Ajahn Geoff. So great to be in your presence again. You've been talking about the heart of this paradox all morning, but it's not easy in practice to understand. So the desire you mentioned, the desire to become and desire for non-becoming. Is desire for non-becoming desire for non-existence or just no change in life? And also, becoming, is that like the desire to become awakened?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Okay, you've got a problem with the language here. When it's talking about desire for becoming, it's basically... what becoming is, is when you have a desire for something, and then you see, "Where in the world or which world is this in?" Like, you go into the tech world, there's the tech world. You go into the world of entertainment, there's the entertainment world. "This thing I desire, what kind of world is it in? What kind of identity can I take in that world?" That's what we're talking about when we talk about becoming. Non-becoming is you've gotten into the tech world and you say, "Got to get out." And non-becoming in this case would be trying to destroy that identity or destroy that world or both. And so the Buddha's technique for that is to ask, "Well, how did I get into this to begin with? And how is my mind creating other becomings?" I've got to go back and look at the process and develop some dispassion for the process that would lead to another becoming. That's the way out.
Now, in practical terms, you say you've gotten into the tech world. You say, "Look, I've got to create that raft." And the raft does involve some becoming. You need to use some becoming in order to get beyond becoming. You form yourself around this desire to gain awakening. Okay, there's going to be a "you," but you have to be a little bit more fluid in the "you" that you develop because that's going to develop as you go along the path. So you learn how to use becoming to get past becoming. You use desires to get beyond desires. You use becoming to get past becoming.
Questioner: Yeah. It reminds me of the sutta when the guy goes to the park and says, "Now that you're at the park..." Yeah. I think my main issue is I have a strong desire for non-existence that has been in me since childhood, and it kind of has fueled the path without me knowing, but now it has become really clear what I want from this, being a dedicated lay practitioner, is that. And now that I see it, I don't know what to do with it. I don't understand.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Non-existence would be just a total wipeout. We're going for total happiness, something that is outside of space, outside of time, totally unconditioned. Say, "Now, can I kind of adjust my sense of what's possible?" Because for people who go for non-becoming, they look at the becomings around them and say, "These all look miserable. I don't want anything at all. Just wipe me out and it'll be done." And that takes you... there's a state called the state of non-perception where you blank out for a while. You might blank out for a long time. Say you die from the human life and you become one of these non-percipient beings, you can be there for a long time. But as they say, when you come out—the Thai expression for this is really good—you're kind of bơ bơ (dazed/confused). After having suppressed your mental activities for so long, you're pretty wacko. So you don't want that because that's a false escape. So the Buddha said, "There's got to be another escape." And he found this. He found unbinding. So just try to adjust your picture of what you're aiming for.
Questioner: I'll try.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The good thing about unbinding is you don't have to maintain it. Once you've got it, you've got it.
Questioner: During the guided meditation, did you say "watching the breath" is an unfortunate term to use?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Because you're getting the sense that you're up here with your eyes looking down in the body at the breath. It's better to feel like the breath is all around you, which is why I say think about wearing the breath, like a blanket.
Questioner: I have a question about meditation. I try to follow exactly what you teach, and what I find out is that after a while, half an hour, 40 minutes, my awareness becomes, I don't know how else to say it, it becomes bright and clear, but not necessarily calm. And I don't know how to calm myself down.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Okay. You ask yourself, "What am I doing to disturb it?" When the level of disturbance goes up, what did I do? When the level of disturbance goes down, what did I stop doing? And then be very careful the next time around not to do that, whatever it was that brought the level of disturbance up. When you get that sort of under control, then you'll find there are more subtle levels of disturbance that you didn't notice before because the blatant ones were in the way. But again, it's the same process. You're kind of peeling off these levels of activities that you're doing that are disturbing it.
Questioner: So the key there is to actually be inquisitive about it during meditation?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: During meditation. Because you're going to see the answer only during meditation. If it's after the fact, then you're just going to be dealing with memories. "Was it this or was it that?" But you see, "Oh, right now the level of stress went up. What did I just do?"
Questioner: My question arose when you were sharing the analogy of the cow, twisting the horns. How...
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Horns of the cow.
Questioner: Yes. I was just wondering, during the Buddha's time, there were many arahants understanding that they know that a cow gives milk and there is a way to get it. But are we kind of twisting the horn now, and that's why we're not getting established in Nibbāna so easily?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Well, a lot of us don't know anything about cows.
Questioner: Just comparing it with practicing for Nibbāna. Are we doing things right or are we just putting in so much effort?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It's hard to generalize, but a lot of people are still twisting the cow's horn.
Questioner: How to understand in the proper way?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Go back and find the utter... you know, go back to the basics of the Four Noble Truths. People tend to overlook the Four Noble Truths. There's so much time spent on looking at things as being impermanent and suffering and not-self. I've been working on a project where I'm trying to collect all the different passages where, during a Dhamma talk, somebody gains awakening. The Buddha never gets to the three perceptions unless he's already been through the Four Truths. So go back to that. Because you hear so much about the three perceptions or three characteristics, you just learn how to accept and you learn how to not pass judgment. And then you turn to the Four Noble Truths and you say, "Well, don't pass judgment here either." Well, the Four Noble Truths are a pretty strong judgment. There's skillful and there's unskillful, and what you do is going to make the difference between whether you suffer and don't suffer. And you can't be indifferent to that. So focus on that. And again, the Four Noble Truths point to what you're doing, rather than just the nature of things outside. And so the purpose is to figure out, "Well, how do things happen so I can manipulate the causes so I can get to where I want to go?" It's more proactive, which is why they have imperatives. The three characteristics do not have imperatives built in. They get their imperatives from the Four Noble Truths. So focus on those.
Questioner: Ajahn, also during the practice, the word citta is often used for mind and also for the heart. From my direct practice and experiences, I kind of felt like the heart is more of living and being aware about whatever is happening, but the mind is more proactive in making decisions.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The heart makes decisions too.
Questioner: Yes, but it doesn't jump into taking an identity as such...
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Oh, you don't know your heart.
Questioner: I'm still a beginner, I consider myself, and I'm happy and willing to take guidance on this.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Yeah, I mean, the heart is basically the willing part, the part that wills, and the head is the part that analyzes. And you want to use your powers of analysis to basically train the heart to will the right things. And also, you use your heart to get your powers of analysis to analyze the right problems. So they have to work together that way.
Questioner: Is there such a thing as a skillful desire for wealth? Like we all want a house, food, security. Is that unskillful inherently?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. The Buddha talks about that. To find happiness in the present lifetime, you have to have some initiative, gain wealth in a skillful way, and then learn how to use it in a skillful way so that you benefit from it, your friends benefit from it, your family benefits from it, and then put some of it aside for your future needs. That's all skillful. It's just that we don't take the pursuit of wealth as being the overwhelming value in life, but something that's used for a higher purpose.
Questioner: Thanissaro Bhikkhu, thank you for taking my question. I have some anxiety about the lay life and ordination, and I'd like to hear your perspective on someone considering ordination. I think my perspective or the way I'm thinking about it is, 300 spears a day for 100 years sounds like... maybe ordination would be preferable for stream-entry. And considering that context, I'm not sure that lay life is a good approach or a good way to use my health and youth.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Okay. Well, if you have the opportunity, I'd say visit some monasteries and see what life is like in monasteries. So you're not just thinking about monastic life in the abstract. You can see this is how the monks actually act.
Questioner: What you said about starting with the end point, the desire for release, and kind of curating your life around that, that makes sense and seems like a sound strategy. And also the advice about minimizing your responsibilities. The natural conclusion would be monastic life is the way to do this. But is it more about view? Can't you see a householder life, having children, as a means to develop pāramī like mettā, tolerance? Isn't it a question of framing?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Partly it's a question of framing, partly it's just a question of time. You know, you wake up in the middle of the night as a monk, you just meditate. In the lay life, you wake up in the middle of the night, your child is screaming, "Water, water, water!" So it's largely a matter of time more than anything else. Time and energy.
Questioner: I have a question about rebirth and how to put that into practice. The background is, I was born in Thailand, and one of the first reasons that I got into Buddhism was about long-term happiness. That sounds cool. And being born in Thailand, I heard a lot of stories or even something that is beyond worldly, like people seeing different realms or what not, and also rebirth. So I think I have a lot of confidence in that. But nowadays, there are also a lot of people who claim that they can see different realms or different rebirths, but some people got into fraud or something. I've never seen anything. But how do you put the rebirth part, or the part that you aren't even able to see, and gain confidence into the practice?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Well, take it as a good working hypothesis. I mean, on the one hand, you've got the Buddha saying, "Hey, yeah, it's true." And there are some very reliable people. I mean, with Ajahn Fuang, I found somebody I really relied on, trusted 100%, and he said, "Yeah, it's true." And it's a good working hypothesis. Years back, I was here, in fact, and I made the comment that, you know, we have these clubs where people get together for a year and say, "Suppose you have just one year to live, how are you going to live your life?" And people meet on a regular basis and discuss how they're reorganizing their priorities. I said, "What would be really good is if for a year you said, 'What if you really believed in karma and rebirth? How would you live your life?'" And I came back a year later, and this one guy came up to me and said, "When you said that last year, I really resisted it. So I went back and I asked myself, 'Why am I resisting it?'" He said, "I realized I would have to become a better person." That's the whole point. What really proves this, when the Buddha talks about stream-entry as proving a lot of things, that's one of the things it does prove. You may not see specific lifetimes, but you see as you step outside of space and time that this has been going on for a long time, and not just your experience of time since your current rebirth, but a long, long, long, long time. That's what certifies it.
Questioner: A quick second question. Right now, I'm lapsed in my practice. I used to be much more strict, but now I find that maybe five in seven days I would have YouTube scrolling before I go to sleep for at least 10, and sometimes it goes to 30 minutes. Could you hit me with something?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Okay, the things you scrolled to see last week, what are they?
Questioner: I'm sorry?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The things you scrolled to see last week, are they still with you?
Questioner: No.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. It's a waste of time.
Questioner: Yeah, it's easy. Thank you so much.
Questioner: I have a question about the four kinds of foods that nurture saṃsāra: the nutrient, the contact, volition, and then consciousness. The other three, when the commentary explained it, I do understand. But the last one, it said that consciousness is compared with like a spear that pokes you in the morning 100 times, and another 100 spears in the afternoon, a total of 300 spears toward evening. How could consciousness be compared with the spear?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Because you're conscious of so many different things in the course of the day. You've been conscious of this, conscious of that. It's this constant input in the mind. The mind cannot rest. Now, the thing about these different forms of food—there's the food of contact, the food of volition, and the food of consciousness—if you were without them, your ordinary life would really be miserable. You know, we put people into sensory deprivation tanks and they go crazy. And if you feel that your will is being thwarted wherever you go, you go into severe depression. And if you're not conscious of things around you, again, the mind tends to proliferate a lot of things. So, this is why it's called food. Because this is what nourishes us and keeps us going in the ordinary way. Now, what you're going to find is in the state of the mind with total unbinding, you don't need those kinds of food.
The whole point of this, the image relates also to the Buddhist teachings on clinging. The word for clinging, upādāna, can also mean feeding. Now notice that clinging is suffering, but feeding is also clinging. So we suffer because we need to feed. Because the nature of the mind is that it has to constantly be dependent on something. A very precarious position. This is why people have a lot of anxiety about, "Where am I going to get my sustenance from?"
Questioner: But we cannot help experiencing through our sense doors.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Yeah. Well, that's why the Buddha says, you know, you're not going to be looking for your happiness here in the world around you. He says you look inside, and then you find something that doesn't need to be fed. The image he gives is of the sunbeam. He says the sun rises in the east, you've got a house with a window on the east and a wall on the west. He says when the sun rises, where does the sunbeam fall? It falls on the western wall. What if you take away the wall? It falls on the ground. What if you take away the ground? It falls on the water. What if you take away the water? It doesn't land. So this image of the sunbeam that does not land, that's Nibbāna. It doesn't need those foods anymore.
Questioner: So, there's a prevention?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Well, you have to take away your attachment to these things, which is what the meditation is all about. But it's really radical. I mean, these people who say that your current consciousness is the awakened consciousness, "just kind of rest in your current consciousness," it's kind of like taking the road to the Grand Canyon. You've heard the Grand Canyon is a big ditch. And as you get along the road, you see, "Hey, there's a ditch on the side of the road. Maybe this is the Grand Canyon. Let's stop here." You never get to the Grand Canyon.
Questioner: How can we be more mindful or practice to have more peacefulness?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: You start feeding off of the concentration.
Questioner: While we are surrounded with sensual pleasure?
Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Okay. Well, again, you find some satisfaction, some ease with the composure of concentration. You don't need to feed off these other things so much.
Footnotes
1991: The original transcript said 1921, which is likely an error. The Metta Forest Monastery was established in 1991. ↩
Dhamma (Pāli): In this context, it refers to phenomena, things, or any experienced reality. It can also mean the teachings of the Buddha. ↩
Nibbāna (Pāli): The ultimate goal of Buddhism, meaning "unbinding" or "extinguishing." It is the state of being free from suffering and the cycle of rebirth. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Indic language, closely related to Sanskrit, in which the earliest Buddhist scriptures were written. ↩
Vinaya (Pāli): The code of conduct for Buddhist monks and nuns. ↩
Saṃsāra (Pāli): The cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by suffering, to which all beings are bound. ↩
Adhiṭṭhāna (Pāli): Determination, resolution, or firm resolve. It is one of the ten perfections (pāramī). ↩
Jhāna (Pāli): A state of deep meditative absorption, characterized by profound stillness and concentration. There are traditionally four material jhānas and four immaterial jhānas. ↩