Strong-hearted

When you focus your attention on the breath, you’re focusing on something that only you can know—how you feel the breathing from inside, how you feel your awareness from inside—because this is where the problem is, and this is where the solution will be found.

The problem is that we act in unskillful ways. We let greed, aversion, and delusion take over. We look for happiness in short-term things and often forget the long-term. The solution is possible because we can see the problem. We can develop qualities inside that allow us to stop acting in those ways, to the point where we don’t have to suffer at all.

Noble people can give us advice. People like the Buddha can show us that it is possible to put an end to suffering. Without his example, without his teachings, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here, watching our breaths right now. We wouldn’t sense that the end of suffering is something that is possible, that it’s something we can attain through our efforts. It’s because we lack skill that we don’t get there.

This is the crux of the problem: No one else can make us skillful. We have to learn how to be skillful ourselves. As Ajaan Lee points out, a teacher can give you the basic instructions in how to weave a basket, how to sew a pair of pants, or how to make clay tiles, but if you’re going to make good tiles, clothing that looks good, wears well, or a basket that’s well-proportioned and will last long, that’s going to depend on your own powers of observation. Again, you have to rely on yourself. So in that sense, the practice is something that you can do for yourself, and only you can do for yourself.

Of course, other people will benefit. If you have less greed, aversion, and delusion, then less greed, aversion, and delusion will come out in your actions to bother the neighborhood. So it’s not as if you’re being selfish as you focus inside. You’re taking care of what you’re responsible for. As the Buddha once said, that’s the sign of a wise person: knowing what you’re responsible for, knowing what you’re not responsible for, and focusing your efforts on where you are responsible. This is work that only you can do. And it doesn’t get easier as you get older, so you want to do it now.

Ajaan Suwat, the founder of our monastery who passed away twenty-two years ago on this date, made a comment one time. There was a famous teacher in Thailand who had said that the essence of the Buddha’s teachings was not being selfish. Now, the Thai term for “not being selfish” means basically “not looking out after yourself.” His students even made a little drawing of a Buddha image made out of the words, “Don’t be selfish”—yaa hen kae tua. Yaa**, “don’t”— was the Buddha’s head. Hen was the neck. Kae was the torso and arms. **Tua was the legs. But Ajaan Suwat made the comment: “This is wrong. You have to look out after yourself, but you have to do it wisely.”

**And you need both strength of heart and strength of mind. Remember that, as you’re training the mind, the Pali term **citta covers not just the thinking faculty, but also a lot of the qualities that we normally associate with the heart. Unfortunately, in our culture, when we talk about someone who has a good heart, it usually means that they’re kind and gentle. But from the Buddha’s point of view, having a good heart requires a lot more. It requires a lot of strengths.

One, you’re convinced of the truth that you are responsible for your actions, and your actions can make a difference between whether you’re going to suffer or not, whether you’re going to harm other people, harm yourself, or not. And you have it within your power to stop that harm. In other words, you’re convinced of the truth of the Buddha’s awakening and the message of that awakening, and how it bears on your life. It bears primarily on the standards he sets for you, and your willingness to put aside your reservations, put aside your doubts, and just give it a try. That’s a quality of the heart, a strength of the heart.

The next strength is persistence. You stick with this. In other words, whenever anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you get rid of it. And you try to make sure that unskillful things don’t take over. As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them, and when they are there, you try to maintain them so that they grow. That requires a strong heart. You have to be patient, to have endurance, to be determined—all those good Capricorn virtues. And that’s a quality of the heart.

The Greeks used to say that we had three energy centers in the body: one in the head, one in the chest, one in the stomach. The head, of course, was your intellect. Your stomach was your appetites. And your chest, your heart. The heart had to do with your will. So a good heart wasn’t just being sentimental, having nice feelings about other people, or being kind to other people. It meant seeing that there was something really important in life, and you were willing to make sacrifices—in fact, to purify your will so that you willed things that were genuinely good.

This is exactly what we’re doing: We’re willing what’s skillful, what’s going to be harmless. We’re willing to stop the process by which we travel around, trying to create little worlds around our desires, creating identities around our desires.

Our desires are pretty blind. We can learn how to want almost anything. A lot of things, when you think about it, are pretty disgusting, but our desires and appetites can dress them up. So we want to learn how to will to overcome those appetites. That’s the quality of a good heart, a strong heart.

**Then you **will to keep these lessons in mind, because you realize that if you learn these things and then forget them or apply them haphazardly, they don’t really accomplish anything. So you’ve got to keep them in mind all the time. That’s the strength of mindfulness, and that requires having some priorities. There are a lot of the things that the world would like us to keep in mind that have nothing to do with our true well-being—or anybody else’s true well-being. We have to realize that, no, our frame of reference has to be what we’re doing right now.

**So we try to stay established with our sense of the body as we feel it from within, so that we’re fully aware of what’s going on in the body. That means we’re going to fully aware of what we do with the body. The same with the mind, the same with our speech—both our inner speech and our outer speech. **

We have to be especially mindful of how we relate to our feelings—feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain—because those can spark some pretty unskillful desires very quickly. We’re going to have to learn how to cultivate pleasures that are more skillful. There are pleasures that the Buddha calls “pleasures of the flesh”—nice sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, thoughts about these things—and there are “pleasures not of the flesh,” which are the pleasures that come from getting the mind concentrated. Those, he says, you want to develop. So we’re mindful to develop them, give rise to them, and then maintain them.

This is where the practice of mindfulness shades into the practice of concentration. This, too, is a strength of the heart: your willingness to stay with one thing and not let your other desires come in and waylay what really should have top priority in your life. You know that, so you want to be able to keep your focus strong.

You’re going to need this strong focus both as you’re alive and as you approach death, because think about it: If you’re about to die, what’s going to go through your mind? All kinds of things: memories of what this person did to you, what that person did to you, or what you wanted to do with somebody and you didn’t get to do it. Sensual cravings, cravings to take on an identity as your body is pushing you out: Your mind is going to be running off every which way if you haven’t learned how to control your focus, control your concentration. So while you’re strong, healthy, and well, try to develop these powers. This, too, is a strength of the heart.

Based on this concentration where you really get the mind stilled, you can see what’s going on inside. This provides the basis for discernment—a basis for discernment that’s reliable, or at least more reliable than it would be if your mind were running around. If it’s based on conviction, based on persistence, it’s even more reliable.

This is where the head comes in, but even here, the head is motivated by the heart. What is discernment based on? The Buddha’s framework for discernment, of course, is the four noble truths. Sometimes you hear it expressed as the three characteristics—seeing things as being inconstant, stressful, not-self—but those the Buddha calls perceptions. And those perceptions have meaning within the context of the framework provided by the four noble truths, which is that you’re trying to comprehend suffering and abandon its cause.

So anything that would give rise to the desire to cling to things—that would be the craving and the clinging—you want to see those things through the lens of the three perceptions so that you can let go of the craving, really understand what it is that’s suffering. We tend to think pain is suffering, and in Pali they use the same word for both. But when the Buddha defines suffering, it’s clinging to the five aggregates. This shows it’s not just ordinary pain. It’s something the mind is doing.

And we try to understand these things—why? Because we want to put an end to suffering. Why do we want to do that? Because we have goodwill for ourselves and goodwill for all the people around us. Here again: a quality of the heart. So now that the heart is more willing to listen to discernment, both sides get trained.

**As Ajaan Suwat pointed out, there are a lot of things that we like that are actually suffering or are going to cause suffering. We wouldn’t crave things if we didn’t think we would like them. We wouldn’t cling to things unless we thought that we liked them. The problem is that we’re deluded. Discernment is what allows us to put an end to the delusion on the “head” side. **

So your heart has to be willing to listen to your head, but your head also has to listen to your heart. If it’s going to be reliable in its calculations, it needs a good heart, a strong heart.

So we work on these strengths. As I said, even though the most that other people can do for us is to give us advice and set examples, and the work is done inside, still, the results of the work don’t stay inside. They spread out to other people.

**Think about Ajaan Suwat. He was born in a poor peasant family in northeastern Thailand. He didn’t even speak Thai when he was a kid. He was in an area where they spoke Cambodian. He got a basic education, learned how to speak Thai, and looking at him from the outside—he was one out of eight children in a very poor family—there wasn’t much hope for him. **

But he realized that the Buddha’s teachings were not just for educated people or rich people. They’re for everybody. And he saw that as an opportunity to escape the confines of what people would normally expect about his life. He trained himself both in heart and in mind. He came here to the States and ended up setting up this monastery, so that people of all nations and all backgrounds would have a good place to practice. He took care of his own internal problem, and did it in such a way that we benefit as well. We benefit because he did a really good job of taking care of his own internal problem.

So that sets an example for us. Our problem is inside, but the potentials for solving the problem are also inside: developing both a good mind and a good heart, developing these strengths of the heart—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—so that our wisdom, our discernment, has a good grounding, the kind of grounding that keeps it honest.

This is a total training, and it deserves our total attention, our total conviction. The more we give ourselves to the practice, the more we gain. That’s called looking after yourself, looking out for yourself,** in a way that’s wise.**