The Garden of Enlightenment
October 21, 2007

The Buddha gained his awakening in the wilderness. He taught his first sermon in the wilderness, and he passed away in the forest. And yet he said that one of the prerequisites for the practice is living in a civilized country—in other words, a country with enough wealth to allow people to practice and with the right attitude, the right views, seeing a life devoted to developing the mind is a good thing, something worthy of support. That’s what a civilized country is.

So the wilderness where the Buddha was awakened was a wilderness on the edges of a civilized country—or, more precisely, the civilized country was on the edges of wilderness. Back in those days, civilization was more like islands in a vast sea of wilderness, whereas nowadays, it’s the other way around. We have little islands of wilderness left in this vast sea of humanity.

But the need for a civilized country points to the fact that the practice of the Dhamma depends on very special conditions that don’t happen all the time. They’re natural conditions but they have to be nurtured, like the orchard here. The trees are natural, the soil is natural, the water is natural, but the way they’ve been put together is not quite natural. Without the irrigation, without all the work that goes into looking after the trees, they’d probably all die, and we wouldn’t get the avocados, we wouldn’t get the persimmons.

It’s the same with the practice. You have to nurture the qualities of mind that lead to awakening. They are natural things in the mind, but left to their own devices, they’ll arise and pass away in a pretty random way, good qualities followed by bad qualities, followed by good qualities, back and forth like this. Those things, if just left in their ordinary nature, will never get to awakening.

So you have to nurture the mind, treat the mind as a garden. In other words, there are some plants that you want to nurture. Other plants are weeds that you want to remove. You have to know when to water, when not to water. It takes a lot of very careful tending. At the same time, you realize that your opportunity to make a garden depends on a lot of factors that are outside your control, which means that you do your best when you’ve got the opportunity.

What this comes down to is a need for heedfulness. When you’ve got the opportunity to practice, you go for it. When things are going well, you don’t get heedless. You don’t say, “Well, I can do this any old time.” You can’t be complacent. If you start getting complacent, you start forgetting that you have to tend to these qualities of mind, and your garden starts getting overgrown with weeds. The flowers you wanted from the garden, the fruits you wanted from your orchard, just don’t come.

So even though the processes we’re working with here are natural, we can’t let down our guard. As the Buddha said, when you practice the precepts, it’s natural that you’re going to be able to enjoy freedom from remorse. If you look back on your actions, you don’t see anything to criticize yourself. And it’s natural that when there’s freedom from remorse, there’s joy, pleasure. When there’s joy and pleasures, it’s natural there’s going to be concentration, and so on down the line, from concentration to discernment, from discernment to release. These processes are natural, but they don’t just happen on their own. You’re taking a natural process and you’re training it in a particular direction, starting with the precepts, which are an important container for the practice.

Adhering to the precepts develops important qualities that you need in the meditation, like mindfulness, alertness, and the sense of heedfulness, because it’s so easy to slip. As you develop mindfulness and alertness in the practice of virtue, it helps with the practice of concentration. And again, so on down the line, through discernment to release. It’s something you’ve got to nurture, something you’ve got to train yourself in.

It was the Buddha’s great insight to see that by using the processes of causality, cause and effect in what you do and the pleasure and pain that results from what you do, you can nurture them in the direction to a happiness that lies beyond causality. There were thinkers in his time that said it was impossible, that if you do anything at all, it’s going to get in the way of freedom from doing. But the Buddha’s insight was that there’s a type of karma that leads to the end of karma, there’s a type of action that leads to a dimension beyond action. But it requires a very precise directing of the causal process.

So keep this in mind. You can never let down your guard. When you find that you have the opportunity to practice, go for it, because this opportunity doesn’t happen all the time. The Buddha himself said that the teachings are going to disappear someday. As we look at the history of Buddhism, we can see that there have been periods when the practice flourished, alternating with periods when it seems to have dried up entirely. Then there were some brave courageous individuals who revived it. And it took a lot of work for them to revive it.

We’re living in a period when the Dhamma is alive. You’ve got the example of living Buddhist masters. So take advantage of it. These causes and conditions don’t always come together. They can be wiped out very easily. And even though we’re working with natural things in the mind, and there’s a natural quality of goodness in the mind, there’s also a natural quality of not-goodness in there.

So we can’t be complacent. The practice is not just letting the mind go along with its own ordinary flow, because what’s the ordinary flow of the mind? It goes up and down, in and out, gets complacent and then falls back to square one. The same goes with the nature of the body. Left to its own devices, the body just grows old, gets ill, dies. If you want to get extended use out of it, you’ve got to exercise, you’ve got to be very careful about what you eat, how you exercise the body, keep it strong as you can, avoiding as much as possible getting into the American medical system.

Even though it’s inevitable that someday the body’s going to die, you try to get the best use out of it while you can. This requires that you be very careful in how you adjust whatever causes and conditions are in your control. Eventually, you run up against the day when things get out of your control, but while they are in you control, try to make sure that you make the best use of the window of opportunity you’ve got, so that you can develop this garden of enlightenment in your heart, this orchard that hopefully will someday produce the fruits of awakening. That depends on your being very careful and heedful, tending to these causes and conditions, and never letting down your guard.