Determination

All things, the Buddha said, are rooted in desire. Skillful things, unskillful things, they’re all based on desire. The fact that we were born here was based on desire. As long as the mind still has desire, it’s going to keep on being reborn again and again.

The problem is our desires are so random: As the Buddha once said, the mind is so variegated it’s even more variegated than the animal kingdom. It’s capable of taking on all kinds of identities, having desires for all kinds of things.

So if you want to be safe, you have to learn how to get some control over your desires, give them some focus. This is the purpose of the Buddha’s teachings on determination. Determination is when you make up your mind that there’s a goal you want to attain, and you’re going to try to orient all your desires in that direction.

For a lot of us, this goes against the grain. I have a friend who’s a novelist and a university professor. Whenever one of her novels comes out, she’s invited to the alumni clubs. She’ll read a passage from the novel and discuss it with the alumni. Most of her novels are set in ancient China. There was one in particular, about a young woman whose mother dies. The father promises that he’s going to be a good father and he’s going to not remarry; he’s going to devote all of his time to his children. But it’s not long before he comes home with a new wife. The daughter is pretty upset, but the new wife tries to be a good mother.

There’s one night where the two of them are playing chess. The new mother is saying, “If you want to be happy in life, you to decide on one thing that you want more than anything else and be willing to sacrifice everything else to get that one thing.” The daughter is half listening, half not listening. But she’s beginning to notice that her stepmother is a very sloppy chess player, losing pieces here, losing pieces there, all over the board. So, she starts getting aggressive.

Well, it turns out it was a trap. She gets checkmated. Of course, the way the stepmother was playing chess was illustrating her point: She was willing to lose some of her pieces to win the game.

My friends said she read that passage out of the novel—she needed a passage that was self-contained, so she chose that passage—and after the second or third alumni club, she realized she had to find another passage because nobody liked the message: Everyone wants to win at chess and keep all their pieces.

To be realistic, though, you have to realize that there are certain things in life that you want that will make it hard for you to gain other things that you also want. It’s like planting a garden. There are all kinds of plants in there, but if you plant eucalyptus trees, they’re going to kill everything else. So, you have to decide, which do you want: A eucalyptus garden? Or do you want a garden of other kinds of flowers and plants?

As the Buddha said in one of the verses in the Dhammapada, if you see that there’s a greater happiness that comes from abandoning a lesser happiness, the wise person is willing to forsake the lesser happiness for the sake of the greater happiness. A British translator who translated that poem one time said in a footnote that this can’t possibly be the meaning of this verse. There must be a deeper meaning someplace because the point is just so obvious.

Well, it may be obvious, but it’s not the way most people live their lives. Everyone wants to keep everything. But you look at the Buddha himself: He had to sacrifice a lot of things in order to find awakening. But, as he decided, it was more than worth it. In fact, he once said that if you could have a deal where people would spear you 100 times in the morning, 100 times at noon, 100 times in the evening every day for hundred years, but you’d be guaranteed at the end of the hundred years to get awakening, it would be a good deal. The experience of awakening would be so joyful that you wouldn’t even think that you had attained it in pain.

His recommendation, of course, is that you aim at awakening. But he also gave directions for other goals you might have in life, determining on them.

There are basically four characteristics, or four qualities of mind, you need to bring to any determination. These four qualities of mind also contain the ten perfections.

The qualities are discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm.

You start out with discernment, trying to figure out what would be a worthwhile goal, one that, when you had attained it, would be something you could really hold on to, something of genuine essence. Then use your discernment to figure out how to get there.

In terms of the perfections, this involves the perfection of discernment, of course, but it also involves the perfection of goodwill. You have to have goodwill for yourself to aim for a solid happiness. And if you want your goal to last, you have to make sure that you don’t attain it based on other people’s suffering. You have to keep their well-being in mind. So you have to have goodwill for them, too—in fact, goodwill for everybody, so that your happiness will face danger from no one.

The second quality: truth. Once you determine what would be a good, wise way of trying to reach that goal, then you really stick with it. This gets paired with relinquishment. You have to let go of the things that would get in the way. In terms of the perfections, truth embodies the perfection of truth, the perfection of virtue, and the perfection of persistence—you really stick with this.

As for relinquishment, that involves renunciation and generosity. Renunciation here doesn’t mean just giving up on things. Specifically, it means renouncing sensuality. Years back, I was reading an article saying that people don’t like the idea of renunciation, but basically, renunciation asks only that you give up your unhealthy attachments, which is to some extent true. But at the same time you’re trying to find happiness in another way, aside from sensuality. Of course, that would be the practice of right concentration. The description of right concentration starts out by saying that you’re “secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mind states.” You focus the mind in on one topic, like the breath. Stay with the breath. As for other thoughts that would come in right now, just let them go. Stay apart from them. Try to find a sense of well-being with the breath.

This will involve, on the one hand, learning how to focus properly so that you don’t put too much pressure on the breath, but you also don’t want your focus to be so light that it slips away. The image they give the Canon is of a person holding a baby quail in his hand. If you hold it too tightly, it’ll die; if you hold it too loosely, it’ll fly away. So maintain just the right amount of pressure in your focus.

Then make the breath comfortable as well. This involves some experimentation. Does long breathing feel good? Does short breathing feel good? Deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast, or slow?—you can experiment. This is one area where you’re allowed to follow your pleasure. What kind of breathing would feel really good right now? Which parts of the body seem to be starved of breath energy or don’t get much breath energy? Allow them to have some.

Then, as the breath energy gets good, think of it spreading around the whole body. Expand your range of awareness so that it covers everything from the head down to the feet. Let the entire area of the body be open, so that the breath can flow easily everywhere. You can think of every cell in the body breathing in, breathing out. They’re all breathing in harmony. Then you try to maintain that sense of centered but broad awareness, centered but broad breath, and a feeling of ease that is also centered and broad—all here together. As you allow yourself to stay with this, it grows. The pleasure grows. The sense of fullness inside will also grow. There’ll be a sense of just-rightness, being right here.

So you can see that renunciation is not just giving up. It’s finding a wise alternative for the way you look for pleasure and happiness.

This relates finally to calm. There are a lot of things you have to give up in the course of pursuing what you have decided is a worthwhile goal, and you’ll have to keep the mind calm in the face of all that. Sometimes it gets worked up: “I can’t do this, I can’t do that anymore.” Just keep reminding yourself that there are a lot of good things that you can do now that you couldn’t do when you were following random desires.

This is an important element of patience, the perfection of patience, the perfection of endurance: focusing not on the hardships you’re experiencing, but on the benefits that come from sticking with things, the strengths you have inside, the sources of strength you have inside, the sense of well-being you’re able to develop.

This then connects with the perfection of equanimity. As we were saying last night, equanimity that’s simply a result of telling yourself, “I’m going to stay equanimous, I’m going to stay non-reactive,” can get very depressed after a while. But if you’re coming from a sense of fullness, a sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to be equanimous about the things you’re giving up—the goals you could have focused on, but you’re not going to focus on now because you’ve got something better.

This is the wisdom and the discernment that underlies all of these qualities: realizing that you may be giving up some things, but you’re getting much more in return. Renunciation is a trade: You’re trading candy for gold.

Learn how to keep that fact in mind, because these four qualities help you not only as you’re sitting here meditating, but also as you go through life. Whatever the goals you have in life, try to bring these four qualities—bring your discernment, your truth, your relinquishment, and your calm—to bear on that pursuit.

And as you’re leaving this life and going on to the next life, the same principles will apply. Lots of possibilities may appear at that point, depending on your karma. It’s like starting a video game and being offered lots of different avatars. You have to decide that the avatar that goes for awakening is the one that’s really worthwhile. The rest just keep circling around and around and around and don’t really go anywhere.

I was reading just last night of a famous intellectual who’s decided to make himself an expert on Buddhism. And the message of Buddhism, he says, is that life is meaningless and you don’t have to create any meaning. Just sit around and do nothing. He’s offering this as a positive idea. I can’t see the Buddha saying that anywhere. Our lives live by meaning. This whole process of fabrication—where we fabricate the aggregates and create a sense of ourselves, create a sense of the world—is always done for the sake of something. And the Buddha’s basically saying the best “for the sake of” would be for the sake of awakening. That does give meaning to your life, and it certainly doesn’t involve doing nothing. There are skills to develop. There are old attachments to let go.

If you keep your focus—focusing your desires on finding an end to suffering, finding an end to the way in which you’ve been causing yourself lots of unnecessary grief and pain—that goal can be attained. Be true in your pursuit of it. Learn to relinquish the things that get in the way. And keep your mind calm all the way; calm in the sense of not getting worked up about what you have to do, not getting worked up about what you have to let go but having the endurance that’s well fed by your search for a happiness that doesn’t take anything away from anyone else. We use the concentration as our food on the path. That gives us the strength to keep going—because that’s what the strength of persistence relies on. You have to have a sense of well-being inside that you can fall back on so that the burdens of the day—or whatever burden you feel from the things you have to give up—don’t feel so burdensome.

When I returned from Thailand, someone once asked me, “What was the hardest thing to endure over there?” I thought and I thought and I thought, and I couldn’t think of anything in particular. Then I realized it was because there were so many positive things going on in my practice, learning new things, that even though there were a lot of difficulties—we had a lot of material difficulties, especially in my first couple of years as a monk—they didn’t weigh the mind down, because of the positive things that I was learning.

So stay focused on what’s good about being focused, what’s good about having priorities. That’ll give you the strength you need to see you all the way through.