Food Along the Path
November 20, 2023
When we’re meditating, we’re developing treasures in the mind. The Buddha compares it to food. The image he gives is of a fortress on the frontier, with soldiers having to defend the frontier. Those are your attempts at right effort, and you’ve got mindfulness as the gatekeeper to the fortress. The soldiers and the gatekeeper need to be fed.
Concentration is the food. You need a sense of well-being in order to stay on the path. Otherwise, things get dry. You start wandering off, looking for food off the path. It’s like looking for plants and things in an unknown forest. You don’t know the plants—or you do know some of the plants, and you know that they make you sick. But you want something to have in your mouth, something to have in your stomach, so you eat them anyhow.
You don’t want to be desperate like that. It’s like the coyotes here in the winter. During the season when the avocados are ripe, the coyotes are looking good. When the persimmons are ripe, you can find persimmons in their scat. But then there were no persimmons, no avocados, you find all kinds of things in their scat: little bits of rope, just anything to keep going. Of course it’s not good for them.
The mind can be like that. It needs food to keep going. And if it doesn’t get nourishment on the path, it’s going to go wandering off into the side roads and get lost. So stay on the path. Make sure you develop a good, strong sense of concentration—a strong sense of well-being that comes with the concentration. Tend to that. Nurture that.
When the Buddha talks about having respect, there’s one passage where he talks about having respect for the triple training. And then further on he talks about having respect for concentration. Well, concentration is part of the triple training. So the question is: Why does he emphasize it again? It’s because people tend to overlook it. The mind is still. The mind is quiet. There seems to be nothing is going on. But actually, it’s getting nourished. And as you get really, really still and really, really quiet, you can start seeing things you wouldn’t see otherwise.
So don’t overlook concentration. Nurture it. Treasure it. See it as an important part of your life. There are so many things to talk about as being requisites for life: food, clothing, shelter, medicine. We tend to forget that the mind has its requisites, too. And concentration is one of the main sources of healthy food for the mind. It’s your food. It’s your shelter. It’s your medicine. It’s clothing for the mind. It provides all the requisites you need in order to maintain the health of the mind. And it provides you with the opportunity to develop even more refined requisites: the requisites that set you free.
So. Value your concentration. And value the concentration of other people. There’s so much idle chatter that goes on around here. Remember the principle that silence is golden? That means that your words have to be worth more than gold when you break the silence. If we respect our own concentration and respect the concentration of others this way, then the path is bound to develop, both inside and out.