The Buddha
teaches that there are two sides to the path of practice: the side
of developing and the side of letting go. And it’s important that
you see the practice in both perspectives, that your practice
contains both sides. If you practice just letting go, you’ll throw
away the baby with the bath water. Everything good will get thrown
out because you let go of everything and leave nothing left. On the
other hand, if yours is just a practice of developing and working
and doing, you miss the things that happen on their own, that happen
when you do let go.
So an important
part of the practice is realizing which is which. This is what
discernment is all about, realizing which qualities in the mind are
skillful, the ones that are your friends, and which qualities are
unskillful, the ones that are your enemies. The ones that are your
friends are those that help make your knowledge clearer, make you
see things more clearly—things like mindfulness, concentration, and
discernment, together with the qualities they depend on: virtue,
morality, persistence. These are the good guys in the mind. These
are the ones you have to nurture, the ones you have to work at. If
you don't work at them, they won’t come on their own.
Some people
think that practice is simply a matter of letting the mind go with
its own flow, but the flow of the mind tends to flow down, just as
water flows downhill, which is why the mind needs to be trained. In
training the mind, we’re not creating the unconditioned or
unfabricated in the mind. It’s more like polishing wood. The grain
is already there in the wood but, unless you polish it, it doesn’t
shimmer, it doesn’t shine. If you want to see the beauty of the
grain, you have to polish it, to work at it. You don’t create the
grain, but the polishing is what brings out the grain already there.
If you don't polish it, it doesn’t have the same shimmer, it doesn’t
have the same beauty as it does when it’s polished.
So practicing
the Buddha’s path is like polishing away at the mind to see what’s
of real value there within the mind. That’s what the mindfulness,
the persistence, the ardency, and all the other terms the Buddha
uses that suggest effort and exertion: That’s what they’re for. This
is why we have rules in the practice: rules in terms of the
precepts, rules for the monks to follow. They provide work for the
mind, and it’s good work. They’re not just "make-work" rules. When
you hold by the rules, when you hold by the precepts, the result is
that you learn an awful lot about the mind at the same time you’re
making life a lot easier for yourself and the people around you. In
the beginning it may seem harder to have the rules to follow, but
once you start living by them, they open up all kinds of
possibilities that weren’t there before when everything was confined
by the riverbanks of your old habits, going along with the flow.
This is why
there has to be effort. This is why there has to be work in the
practice. As the Buddha said, right effort has four sides.
Abandoning is only one of the four. There’s also
preventing—preventing unskillful things from arising. When
unskillful things have arisen, those are the things you abandon.
Then there’s the effort to give rise to skillful qualities, and the
effort to maintain them once they are there. You develop these
skillful qualities and then you keep them going so that they develop
to higher and higher levels. So sometimes, when you’re reflecting on
your practice, it’s useful to focus on exactly what you’re
developing here—the good qualities like mindfulness and alertness.
At other times it’s helpful to focus on the things you have to let
go of, the things you have to work at preventing.
You see right
effort very easily when doing concentration practice because you
have to focus on where you want the mind to be, to be aware of where
you don’t want it to be, and also to be ready to fight off anything
that’s going to come in to disturb your stillness of mind. When
you’re focusing on your meditation topic, you pick it up and say
that this is what you’re going to focus on for the next hour. By
doing this you’re giving rise to skillful qualities. And then you
try to keep your focus there. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself
that this is what you’re doing here. You’re not just sitting; you’re
sitting here to develop the mind. So you keep your mind on the topic
you’ve chosen, like the breath, and then you work at bringing the
mind back whenever it slips off, bringing it here, keeping it here,
at the same time being aware that any moment it can slip off again.
This second level of awareness is what keeps you from drifting off
obliviously and then coming back to the surface five minutes later,
suddenly realizing that you were off who-knows-where in the mean
time. If you’re prepared for the fact that the mind can leave at any
point, then you can watch for it. In other words, you’re watching
both the breath and the mind, looking for the first sign that it’s
going to leap off onto something else. This is a heightened level of
awareness that allows you to see the subtle stirrings in the mind.
The mind is
often like an inchworm standing at the edge of a leaf. Even though
the inchworm’s back feet may still be on this leaf, its front feet
are up in the air, swaying around, searching around for another leaf
to land on. As soon as that other leaf comes, boomph, it’s
off. And so it is with the mind. If you’re not aware of the fact
that it’s getting ready to leave the breath, it comes as a real
surprise when you realize that you’ve slipped off someplace else.
But when you have a sense of when the mind is beginning to get a
little bit antsy and ready to move, you can do something about it.
In other words,
you can’t be complacent in the practice. Even if the mind seems to
be staying with the breath, sometimes it’s ready to move on, and
you’ve got to have that second level of awareness going as well so
that you can be aware both of the breath and of the mind together—so
that you have a sense of when the mind is snug with its object and
when it’s beginning to get a little bit loose. If you see it
loosening its grip, do what you can to make it more snug. Is the
breath uncomfortable? Could it be more comfortable? Could it be
finer? Could it be longer, shorter, whatever? Explore it. The mind
is telling you on its own that it isn’t happy there anymore. It
wants to move.
So look at the
quality of the breath and then turn around and look at the quality
of the mind—this sense of boredom, this wanting to move. What’s
actually causing it? Sometimes it comes from the breath, and
sometimes it’s just a trait that arises in the mind, a trait that
stirs up trouble. Try to be sensitive to what’s going on, to see
whether the problem is coming from the mind or the object the mind
is focused on. If it’s coming from a simple sense of boredom that’s
moved in, let the boredom move on. You don’t have to latch onto it.
You don't have to identify with it, saying that it’s your
boredom. As soon as you identify with the boredom, the mind has left
the breath and is on the boredom. Even though the breath may be
there in the background, the boredom has come into the forefront.
Your inchworm has moved off to the other leaf.
So if the mind
is getting antsy and saying, "Well, move. Find something new,"
refuse for a while and see what happens. What is the strength lying
behind that need to move? What’s giving it power? Sometimes you’ll
find that it’s actually a physical sensation someplace in the body
that you’ve overlooked, so work on that. Other times it’s more an
attitude, the attitude that you picked up someplace that said, "Just
sitting here not thinking about anything is the most stupid thing
you can do. You aren’t learning anything, you aren’t picking up
anything new. Your mind isn’t being exercised." Ask yourself, "Where
is that voice coming from?" It’s coming from somebody who never
meditated, who didn’t understand all the good things that come from
being still in the present moment.
Only when the
mind is really still right here can it begin to resonate with the
body. When there’s a resonance between the breath and the mind, it
gives rise to a much greater sense of wholeness and oneness. This is
the positive aspect of the practice that you want to focus on,
because if the mind is one place and the body someplace else,
there’s no resonance. It’s as if they were singing two completely
different tunes. But if you get them together, it’s like having one
chord with lots of overtones. And then you come to appreciate how,
when there’s this sense of resonance between the body and mind, you
begin to open up. You begin to see things in the mind and in the
body that you didn’t see before. It’s healing for both the body and
the mind. It’s also eye-opening in the sense that the more subtle
things that were there suddenly appear. You gain a sense of
appreciation for this, that this is a very important thing to do
with the mind. The mind needs this for its own sanity, for its own
health.
So when the mind
starts getting antsy and wants to move around and think about things
and analyze things, and it starts telling you that you’re stupid to
sit here and not think, remind it that not everything has to be
thought through, not everything has to be analyzed. Some things have
to be experienced directly. When you analyze things, where does the
analysis come from? It comes mostly from your old ignorant ways of
thinking. And what we’re doing as we get the mind to settle down is
to put those ways of thinking and those ways of dividing up reality
aside. For a state of concentration you want to get the mind
together with the body and to foster a sense of oneness, a sense of
resonance between the two.
Once they’ve had
chance to be together, then you can begin to see how things
begin to separate out on their own. And this is a totally different
way of separating. It’s not the kind of separating that comes from
ordinary thinking. It’s actually seeing that even though the body
and mind are resonating, they are two separate things, like two
tuning forks. You strike one tuning fork and put another one next to
it. The second tuning fork picks up the resonance from the first
one, but they’re two separate forks. Once the body and mind have had
a chance to resonate for a while, you begin to see that they are two
separate things. Knowing is different from the object of knowing.
The body is the object; the mind is the knowing. And this way, when
they separate out, they don't separate out because you have some
preconceived notion of how they should be. You watch it actually
happening. It’s a natural occurrence. It’s like the grain of the
wood: When you polish it, the grain appears, but not because you
designed the grain. It’s been there in the wood all along.
The same with
your meditation: You’re simply giving yourself a chance really to
see your experience of body and mind for what it is instead of
coming in with preconceived notions about how things should get
divided up, how things should be analyzed. There’s a natural
separation line between name and form, body and mind. They come
together, but they’re separate things. When you learn how to allow
them to separate out, that’s when real discernment comes in.
This is why the
discernment that comes with concentration is a special kind of
discernment. It’s not your ordinary mode of thinking. It comes from
giving things a chance to settle down. Like a chemical mixture: If
everything gets jostled around, the two chemicals are always mixed
together and you can’t tell that there are two in there. There seems
to be just the one mixture. But if you let the mixture sit for a
while, the chemicals will separate. The lighter one will rise to the
top; the heavier one will settle to the bottom. You’ll see at a
glance that there actually are two separate chemicals there. They
separate themselves out on their own because you’ve created the
conditions that allow them to act on their own.
The same with
the mind: A lot of things begin to separate out on their own if you
simply give the mind a chance to be still enough and you’re watchful
enough. If you’re not watchful, the stillness drifts off into
drowsiness. So you need the mindfulness together with the stillness
for this to happen properly.
With the
stillness, you’re letting go of a lot of nervous activity, you’re
letting go of a lot of unskillful things in the mind. With the
mindfulness you’re developing the skillful qualities you need to see
clearly. This is how the letting-go and the knowing coming together.
When the Buddha discusses the four noble truths, he talks about the
duty appropriate to each. Your duty with regard to craving, the
second noble truth, is to let it go. Then there’s a third noble
truth, which is the cessation of suffering. And what is that? It’s
the letting-go of the craving at the same time you’re aware of
what’s happening. So the task appropriate to the cessation of
suffering is a double process: knowing together with the letting-go,
and this makes all the difference in the world. Most of the time
when we let go of craving we’re not aware of what’s happening, so
it’s nothing special. It’s just the ordinary way of life as we move
from one craving to another. But when the mind has been still
enough, and the mindfulness well-developed enough, then when the
craving gets abandoned you’re aware of it as well, and this opens up
something new in the mind.
This is why the
factors of the noble eightfold path fall into two types: the ones
that develop and the ones that let go. The ones that let go abandon
all the mind’s unskillful activities that obscure knowledge. The
developing ones are the ones that enable you to see clearly: right
view, right mindfulness, right concentration. They all work at
awareness, so that you can know clearly what’s actually happening in
the present moment.
So there are
these two sides to the practice, and you want to make sure that
you’re engaged in both sides for your practice to be complete. It’s
not just a practice of relaxing and letting go, and it’s not just a
practice of staying up all night and meditating ten hours at a
stretch, really pushing, pushing, pushing yourself. You have to find
a balance between clear knowing and effort, a balance between
developing and letting go, knowing which is which and how to get
that balance just right. That’s the skill of the practice. And when
you have both sides of the practice perfectly balanced, they come
together and are no longer separate. You’ve got the mind in a
perfectly clear state where the knowing and the letting-go become
almost the same thing.
But the balance
doesn't occur without practice. You may ask, "Why do we keep
practicing? When do we get to perform?" Well, we’re practicing for
the time when ultimately we can master these things. When the
practice gets balanced, the path performs, and that’s when things
really open up in the mind.