Firm in Your Intent
October 03, 2023

When we’re born in to this world, we’re exposed to all kinds of dangers. The simple fact of having a body, as the texts say, makes you open to the fact that people can hit you, they can throw stones at you, they can stab you, and the body itself is a nest of all kinds of diseases.

One topic of meditation is just going through the different parts of the body and thinking of all the different diseases that can happen in each part. But the Buddha goes on to say further that aging, illness, and death are not the real danger. The real danger is what comes out of the mind.

So if we don’t want to suffer from the dangers of the world, we have to look inside, because that’s where they come from. Our greed, aversion, and delusion give rise to all the circumstances that cause us to keep coming back like this. We feel a hunger; we feel a lack. One of the purposes of the meditation is to develop strength inside, so that we have a sense of enough.

The lack comes from a desire for happiness, but still, the Buddha says that that desire is something to be honored. We really want to be happy, and there is a way to find true happiness that doesn’t cause any harm at all.

So he’s not the sort of person who says to forget about your desire for happiness, just accept things as they are, or try to submerge your desire for happiness in working for the happiness of others. After all, if their happiness has value, why doesn’t your happiness have value?

Instead, the issue is simply a matter of learning to be wise in your pursuit of happiness. Choose a path that leads to the genuine article, and in the course of doing that, you develop strength, you develop wealth, you develop protection.

The Buddha gives lists of skillful qualities to develop in the mind: the five strengths, the seven types of inner wealth, and then the seven properties of, as he says, a good inner fortress that you can create for yourself, plus the concentration that feeds the soldiers and feeds the gatekeeper of the fortress: That gives you eight.

What all those lists have in common is conviction: conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. But what does that mean for you? The message of the awakening is that true happiness is possible, and it can be attained through your efforts, through your own actions.

And what are your actions? They’re your intentions. So you need to train your intentions. This is why we practice concentration, to get some control over our intentions.

As you sit and observe the mind, you realize at the very beginning that its intentions go all over the place. We’ve been riding them the way hobos ride trains. One train is running along a track, comes along parallel to another track, there’s another train, we jump on that train, and that train goes off in a different direction, gets parallel to another train. You jump off and go to that train. If you keep on doing this, you can end up in some pretty weird places.

You’ve got to learn how to stay with one intention and resist the temptation to go after others. This is where mental strength comes from: your resolve to stay with one thing.

So concentration lies at the essence here. It lies in all the qualities. Ajaan Suwat once gave a Dhamma talk in which he said all the factors in the noble path have to have concentration in them. And the same holds for the five strengths, starting with conviction. Concentration in conviction means you have to stay with that conviction.

The same with persistence: You have to stick with the program, which is that if any unskillful qualities could arise in your mind, you do your best to prevent them. If they have arisen, you do your best to get rid of them. As for skillful qualities that are not there yet, you work to give rise to them. And when they’re there, you develop them as far as you can.

Our problem is that we’re with the program sometimes and we change at other times. Unskillful qualities come and we enjoy them, we nourish them. Skillful qualities get pushed off to the side. So you have to be firm in your intent that whatever you recognize as unskillful—i.e., something that will cause long-term harm—you’re not going to go there.

Then there’s mindfulness: You keep one topic in mind. It could be the breath right now, which is how mindfulness shades directly into concentration. And then concentration leads to discernment. Here again, the concentration has to be there in the discernment. You’re trying to look to see what the mind is doing that’s causing suffering, which is why you have to stick with the duties of the four noble truths. Wherever you recognize the clinging you’re engaging in, you try to comprehend it. Exactly how is the act of clinging the same thing as suffering? As for the craving that gives rise to the clinging, you stick with trying to abandon it. You try to realize the cessation by sticking with the program: developing the path.

Ajaan Lee says that our problem is that we’re on the path sometimes, and we choose another path other times, because there are lots of paths and they don’t all go to the same place. The idea that all paths lead to the top of the mountain, applies to very few mountains. And definitely not to this one.

Or that all rivers lead to the sea: There’s the Great Basin here in the States. Or look at Australia: The whole middle of the continent is one big basin. There are lots of places all over the world where rivers just dry up and never reach the ocean. And there are many paths that go nowhere good. So you want to stay focused on this one path and the duties that are appropriate to it.

So this practice we have here of choosing a foundation—a frame of reference—and then staying with it: That’s a necessary part of all of the strengths we’re trying to develop, all the protections we’re trying to develop.

One of the points the Buddha makes in the context of conviction is that there are different losses in the world. Some of them are serious; some of them are not. But his sense of what loss is not serious flies in the face of most people’s attitudes.

He said you could lose your relatives, you could lose your own health, you could lose your wealth, and it’s not serious. I know people who lose their wealth and they contemplate suicide, they take it so seriously. The really serious loss, though, he says, is when you lose your virtue or you lose your right view.

Right view, of course, starts with conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, and then goes on to discernment: seeing things in terms of the four noble truths and carrying through with the duties appropriate to them.

Notice that the discernment is not just seeing things as they are. It’s also a matter of carrying through the right duties. All the Buddha’s teachings are meant to be acted on. A lot of wisdom lies in realizing that: that you don’t just gain an insight into the nature of reality, but you also have to gain an insight into what you’ve got to do, how you can do it, and you just do it.

That’s why he says one of the signs of discernment is when you realize there are certain things you don’t like to do but will give good results, and you learn how to talk yourself into doing them. Or things that you do like to do but will give bad results: You learn how to talk yourself out of them. Discernment is active. Pro-active.

It all revolves around this firmness of intent based on the conviction that your actions are your real treasure. This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss.

Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view.

As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that.

So you work on that—you’re firm in your intent to stick with your precepts. You’re firm on your intent to maintain right view. That firmness of intent, that’s the Thai definition of concentration: tang cai man.

So the concentration there is central to everything. That’s the strength. You stay with one good thing, and you stick with it regardless of the other things that come and nibble away at the edges of your intentions, the edges of your awareness. You stay right here. Then that quality of firmness will then strengthen all the other strengths.

So even though this may be a simple exercise, focusing on the breath, the longer you stay with it, the more discernment you can derive from it. As you make the breath comfortable, make it a good, interesting place to stay, the more strength you’ll have in all areas of the mind that really are helpful for a genuine happiness.