A Friend When You’re on Your Own
November 07, 2017

One of the paradoxes in the Buddha’s teachings about training the mind is that on the one hand he talks a lot about solitude, going off alone into the wilderness. But on the other hand, he also talks about the importance of admirable friends, as in that passage we chanted just now about associating with wise people and staying away from fools. After all, wise people give you the context for your practice. It’s possible for people to go out into the wilderness and go crazy, or to pick up crazy ideas or harm themselves.

There was a book years back—*Into the Wild—*about a young man who became disillusioned with society, disillusioned with his family. He went off to live in the Alaskan wilderness and ended up dying. He left behind some notes that he had written in the margins of the books, showing he had some good ideas but also some pretty crazy ideas. As I was reading the book, I kept thinking: “If only he had lived in Thailand.” There they have a structure for that kind of thing: to go off into the wilderness but not on your own and not unguided. You have guidance. There’s actually an apprenticeship. You live near somebody for a while, pick up attitudes of the Dhamma, and then you’re ready to go into the wilderness.

In my own case, my first year as a monk I spent a lot of time alone on a mountain. Fortunately, I had Ajaan Fuang at the foot of the mountain. I found that a lot of my childhood and teenage years and college years started coming back to me: issues and resentments, memories of stupid things I had done or of bad things that had happened to me. It was always good to have him nearby to talk to about these things. Sometimes he’d give good advice and sometimes he’d look at me in a way that indicated that this was a really strange problem for someone to have. After all, we were from opposite sides of the Earth. Often just that look was better than advice. It made me realize that some of the attitudes I had picked up from my childhood were very, very strange, and that it would be good to separate myself from them.

So don’t think the practice is simply a matter of being alone, sitting with your eyes closed, or of just finding some solitude. You have to carry the right attitudes into that solitude. That’s what admirable friendship is for, so that when you go into the wilderness, you have a friend inside you, a friend with the right attitudes.

That’s why the Buddha said that the factors for stream entry start with associating with good people. It’s not just a matter of listening to the Dhamma from them but also of getting a sense of how they deal with people, how they deal with situations, how they deal with pain, how they deal with disappointment. In a forest monastery, it was also how you deal with work projects so that they can all become part of the training of the mind. You realize more and more that the training is really a matter of apprenticeship, hanging around somebody, picking up their attitudes and skills, because it’s not just the verbal knowledge. It’s also the knowledge of an attitude. It’s a quality of the heart, a way of looking at things. And some of those ways of looking at things can’t be drawn out in words.

For me one of the most helpful ways of looking at a lot of my issues from my childhood was to seem them in terms of a multi-lifetime perspective. If I was feeling victimized about something, I could remember that maybe I wasn’t just a victim. Maybe I had been the victimizer at some point in time, and this process had gone back and forth, back and forth, to the point where I just wanted to say enough. When you think in those terms, rather than trying to tally up who was right and who was wrong, you just want to say, “Enough. I want to get out of here.”

So there are some things that are contained in the words of the Dhamma that are very important. Sometimes they’re the most basic things. The teachings on generosity, teachings on virtue, teachings on goodwill and basic merit making are really important for what you’re doing as you meditate. They teach you how the life you live is shaped by your actions, how an attitude of giving is what gets you started on good things, and how the desire for happiness is something you really want to respect—that attitude of goodwill for everyone including yourself.

You realize that the search for happiness is not necessarily a selfish thing if you do it in a wise way. You actually develop good qualities of the mind.

So as part of this apprenticeship you pick up the attitude of the teacher, the happiness of the teacher, the words of the Dhamma.

After I had lived all those years with Ajaan Fuang, then after he passed away they appointed a monk from some other place to be the acting abbot. I was struck immediately that he was a very different kind of person. Having lived with someone who embodied the Dhamma so much, it was striking to find someone who actually had a lot of greed and was not ashamed to show it. I realized I couldn’t stay around that person. I didn’t want to pick up his attitudes.

That’s one of the lessons you want to take with you, both as you go into a time of solitude and as you come out of that solitude. You’ve got to be really careful about who your friends are. Who are the friends you’re taking with you into that solitude? In other words, what attitudes, what ideas, are you taking in? Then, when you leave, who are you going to hang around with? This is really important. The teachings that are basic, basic, basic are there because they’re so important, not because you’re just going to touch on them briefly and then move on. They form the foundation on which you continue to stand. So look carefully for who you take as your friend.

We miss a lot of this nowadays in Dhamma circles because the pattern has changed from apprenticeship to mass production. We have a mass-produced Dhamma for mass retreats. There are techniques that were developed in the nineteenth century. The Asians were very impressed by European abilities to produce things through mass production by stripping things down to simple steps. The idea came that “Well, maybe we can strip Dhamma practice down to very simple principles and very simple practices. We can get everything boiled down to something that can be mass-produced on a large scale.” But the Dhamma doesn’t work that way. What we miss, of course, is the personal context, the admirable friend who teaches not only through words or a technique but through actions in general, attitudes in general, so that you can pick up something really worthwhile.

When the time comes to go into the wilderness to be alone, or simply when you’re alone in your meditation, the Buddha talks about being secluded from unskilful qualities. That, too, is a kind of seclusion. Which means the friends you want to take into the meditation are the voices that are going to be doing the directed thought and evaluation—not only evaluating the relationship of the mind to the breath but also evaluating the value of being with the breath, the value of maintaining a center as you go through life, and the value of remembering the practices of generosity and virtue, how important they are for meditation.

When Ajaan Suwat was teaching in Massachusetts one time, at the very end of the retreat someone asked him about how to carry the practice into daily life. He responded by talking about the precepts. Some of the people got upset, thinking that he was implying that, as lay people, they were not ready for carrying meditation into their daily life so they had to stick with this lowly practice of the precepts. But that wasn’t his point. That wasn’t what he was trying to say. He was saying that if you want to practice meditation, you have to take the precepts with you because they form the container for your practice.

And you want to watch out about the people you hang out with. You want to make sure they’re people who follow the precepts as well, because it’s so easy to get used to their behavior and to see that what they’re doing is actually reasonable and okay. If it’s okay in their behavior, it becomes okay in your behaviour. You get sucked in bit by bit by bit without realizing it. Then your attitudes about what’s okay in your meditation start changing as well. You start getting sloppier in keeping after the mind in terms of your mindfulness, in terms of your concentration. These things are all connected.

So remember the value of having the Dhamma as your friend as you go into seclusion. Find ways of picking up the right attitudes—attitudes that are actually good for your mind, not attitudes that somebody else might think might be good for the economy or good for buying their things, making you a good consumer, which is a lot of what our education has been. You want attitudes that really do foster good qualities in your heart and then spread out from your heart through your actions and your words into the world. It’s an all-around practice that requires an all-around apprenticeship.

That way, when the time comes to go alone, you’ve got protection all around as well. That, the Buddha said, was one of the duties of a teacher: to provide the student with protection in all directions. That doesn’t mean that the teacher is going to go following you around, looking after you. It means that the teacher is going to give you the knowledge you can use to protect yourself wherever you go. That’s not just a matter of focusing on the breath or being mindful as you do walking meditation. It’s a matter of how you talk to yourself and how you talk yourself into doing skillful things and out of doing unskillful things when you’re on your own.