Respect Opens Possibilities

The Buddha sets out five conditions for getting the most out of listening to the Dhamma. The first three have to do with respect.

One, you don’t despise the speaker. You tell yourself, “Maybe this person knows something I don’t know.” Be open to that possibility. That’s a lot of what respect is: being open, not closing off your mind.

The second condition is not despising the Dhamma. Something that may not sound all that inspiring or deep in the first blush may actually have more meaning than you suspect. So listen to it.

The third is: Don’t despise yourself. Tell yourself, “I must be able to do this”—especially with the Dhamma that the Buddha teaches.

As he said, he’s not teaching anything that’s not humanly impossible. He talks about developing skillful qualities, abandoning unskillful ones—and if it were not possible for us to do that, he wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t have taught at all. He would have gone off and sat under a tree someplace, enjoying the bliss of release. But instead, he went to all that trouble.

Think about it: Walking all over India for 45 years, even up until he was eighty. Wherever there was someone who would be receptive to his teachings, he would go.

Even in the last night, there was one person who came to him with questions. At first, Ven. Ananda was reluctant to have this person see the Buddha because the Buddha was dying. But the Buddha said, “Have him come.” He taught him and that person eventually became an arahant.

Think about the compassion that went into that. That was compassion aimed at people who could benefit from the teaching.

So here you are—listening to the Buddha’s Dhamma. Try to be open to it, open to the fact that you can benefit from it, and that you can do what the Buddha is talking about.

He talks about being generous. It’s possible to be generous. He talks about observing the precepts—something that can be done. He talks about developing goodwill—that, too, can be done.

Start with goodwill for yourself—this also involves respect for yourself.

You want to be happy? Well, the Buddha says there are things you can do to be happy. So you tell yourself, “If I have goodwill for myself, I’ll do these things.”

Give them a try—because that’s all the Buddha asks from you. “Respect” doesn’t mean that you have to obey or that you have to believe. You see this in the two remaining qualities he talks about.

One is, being single-minded as you listen, really focusing all your attention on the Dhamma. The word he uses for single-minded is ekagga. It’s sometimes translated as “one-pointed.” In fact, some people, when they talk about concentration—which is defined as cittass’ekaggata, which they translated as “one-pointed-ness of mind”—they say you have to get so one-pointed that you can’t feel anything or hear anything, which would be impossible for the quality that the Buddha wants you to bring to the listening.

Eka means “one,” agga means “summit”—but it also means “meeting place,” “gathering place,” which seems to be the best translation here, because the Buddha also says that you enter and dwell in this state. So you want to gather your mind around one topic, which when you do concentration, is the theme of the concentration. When you listen to a talk, it’s the topic of the talk.

Finally, you apply appropriate attention. Appropriate attention means asking the right questions. This is where we can see that the Buddha is not asking you to simply believe everything he says. You ask questions: “How does this apply to my suffering? How does it give recommendations on how I can stop suffering?” Paying attention to these questions is, for the Buddha, what appropriate attention is all about.

It comes down to the two sets of teachings that he said were categorical.

One was that unskillful behavior should be abandoned—“unskillful” meaning leading to harm and suffering—whereas skillful behavior should be developed, to lead away from suffering.

The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths, focused first on what is your suffering, after all. The Buddha identifies it as clinging to the aggregates.

The aggregates are activities we indulge in. We chanted about them just now. Form—your body is constantly in action. Feeling—feelings of pleasure, pain, feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions—the labels you apply to things, the meanings you give to them, how you identify them. Thought fabrications—the way you put ideas together, the way you talk to yourself. And finally, consciousness—your awareness of whatever is coming in at the senses, of whatever is happening in the mind.

We cling to these things. We cling to these things for sensual pleasure; we cling to these things because they provide us views about what is world is like; we cling because they give us an idea of what should and shouldn’t be done; we cling to them because we identify with them as us, as ours—that’s the big clinging.

This means that the Buddha’s analysis of suffering is pretty radical: Your way of defining yourself has a large role in how you suffer.

Why do you do that? He says it’s because of craving.

Craving for sensuality: Craving for your fascination with your thinking sensual thoughts and fantasies.

Craving for becoming: Taking on an identity in a particular world of experience, your sense of who you are in the world you inhabit. You want to take on an identity in a world because there may be something you desire in that world that you might be capable of finding.

And then, craving for non-becoming: You’ve decided that the world you’re in doesn’t provide the pleasure you want, so you want it destroyed.

These cravings cause you to suffer.

The way out of suffering: The Buddha says there is an end to suffering—that’s the third noble truth—and the way to do it is the fourth noble truth, the noble eightfold path, which comes down to three things: virtue, concentration, and discernment.

The Buddha is asking you to apply the framework of these four noble truths to your problem of suffering.

Again, it’s not simply a matter of assent, saying, “Yes, this must be true” or “I agree with what he has to say.” Each of these truths involves a duty, and it’s in performing these duties that you gain proof of whether these things are true or not. Suffering is to be comprehended, its cause is to be abandoned, its cessation is to be realized, and that’s done by developing the path.

So the test is in the doing. When you think in those terms, then what you pay attention to in the talk is, “What advice does it give about what I can do about the problem of suffering? How I can understand it? How I can see the cause and gain the strength to let go of it?”

After all, suffering is in the act of clinging itself. Its cause is craving. The reason you cling to things and crave them is because you feel compelled to—either because you want to or because you feel you have to. So the Buddha is asking you to examine your attachments really carefully.

He’s asking a lot, but at the same time, he provides you with a path. And the path is not an onerous one. It takes effort, but it’s not superhuman effort. The Buddha, after all, was a human being. All of his noble disciples started out as ordinary human beings. They just took the good qualities we have as ordinary human beings and developed them as far as they can go.

Part of that involves developing your powers of mindfulness, your powers of concentration to give rise to a sense of well-being. The effort in developing is not all sweat and tears.

There’s a bliss that comes when you can settle down and just be with the breath—to breathe in, breathe out, and feel really good about breathing in, breathing out, and having a way of relating to your body so that the breath can nourish all the little nerves, all the little blood vessels, all the cells. Think of every cell in your body breathing in, breathing out together.

Right concentration starts with rapture and pleasure. As the Buddha said, it’s the heart of the path. All the other factors are its requisites or aids. There’s a huge emphasis on what you can do to give rise to a sense of well-being, right here, right now.

So the paying full attention, the single-mindedness, is not just in listening to the Dhamma. It’s also in paying full attention to what you’re doing, as you breathe in, as you breathe out, as you relate to your breath, as you relate to your different thoughts that either keep you with the breath or pull you away.

When you can find a sense of well-being in the way you breathe, then it’s a lot easier to hold on to the thoughts that keep you focused here and let go of the ones that pull you away.

So work on this.

There are so many people who are afraid of pleasure. I was just talking this last weekend to a woman who’d been practicing a method that taught her basically to notice that there was either pain or a neutral sensation, and to try to drop any kind of pleasure that would come up in the meditation. She said that she found it hard to do when she was away from retreats. And I replied, “Of course. There’s no reward.”

You need the pleasure, not only for the sake of nourishment along the path, but also because it sensitizes you to areas of stress in your body, stress in your mind that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. You come to see that engaging in those forms of stress or the things that cause those forms of stress is not necessary.

That’s the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teaching. This is why he has you bring an attitude of openness and respect—because he’s going to tell you possibilities that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.

You can breathe in a blissful way. You can use your mind to be quiet. All too often we use our minds to ride all over the place, hopping from one train of thought to another train of thought, ending up in Siberia someplace. But here, all our thoughts aim inwards to that meeting place: to singleness of mind.

As the Buddha said, people who live without respect, without anything to respect, really suffer because there’s nothing to open them up to new possibilities, there’s nothing to encourage them to put forth an effort with the confidence that there would be a reward for their efforts. When you look at your behavior, and there’s nothing to inspire you in terms of what you’ve been doing, that just pulls you down.

This is one of the things that’s good about the path. As you gain the strength and the ingenuity to follow the path, you look at your behavior and you find it more inspiring. All the forest ajaans talk about this: that they wouldn’t have expected that they would be able to do this. But they had Ajaan Mun’s example and he kept on encouraging them: “Yes! This is something you can do.”

The whole purpose of teaching the Dhamma is to tell you of new possibilities— possibilities that can put an end to suffering.

The purpose of listening is to open your mind to those possibilities, so that you can take advantage of them—because they are there. We have potentials in body and mind. As Ajaan Lee pointed out, we have so many good potentials within us and we use so little of them.

Part of it is because our minds are too blind and too narrow. Our education narrows our focus, and they’re threatening to make it more narrow—devoting all education to helping the economy.

The Buddha offers a different kind of education—an education that opens possibilities of what a human being can do. So as you respect those possibilities and explore them, it’s the respect that allows you to explore them. Otherwise you wouldn’t even think they were there. With respect comes openness, and this openness opens the world.