The Culture of the Practice

There’s an aspect of the Buddha’s awakening that often gets overlooked, and that’s the social dimension in the second knowledge he gained that night.

You may remember the second knowledge was in response to a question that came from the first knowledge: Why is it that birth goes up and down? You can be born to something good and then fall to a bad rebirth, and then go back up again and down again.

The analogy the Buddha gave was like throwing a stick up into the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle. Why?

In the course of the second knowledge, he saw that it was because of the karma of beings. Stated simply: Those who acted on skillful intentions tended to go to good destinations. Those who acted on unskillful intentions went to bad. It’s made complex by the fact that you’re not doing just one action per lifetime. You’re doing many actions, and your views in the course of a lifetime can change for the better or for the worse. So it’s possible that you can do good things now and go to a bad destination or do bad things now and go to a good destination because of the other things you’ve been doing and the views you hold.

But where do you get those views? One of the sources is how you attend to things, in other words, what you notice, what you don’t notice. The other source is other people.

Those who acted on skillful intentions tended to listen and have respect for the noble ones. Those who acted on unskillful intentions tended to have no respect, or maybe they respected those who they shouldn’t respect. It’s a result of this insight that the question of who you hang out with, who you associate with, plays such a large role in the practice. As the Buddha said to Ven. Ananda one time, admirable friendship is not just half of the practice, it’s the whole. Without having the Buddha as our admirable friend, we wouldn’t know anything about the possibility of putting an end to suffering.

He’s our most admirable friend because he pointed this out to us. But he not only pointed it out, he also set a good example. Admirable friendship is not just a question of having an admirable friend, it requires noticing what good qualities the admirable friend has and trying to replicate them in your own behavior.

The four qualities the Buddha pointed out—and these apply not only to monks and nuns, but also to lay people—were (1) conviction, (2) virtue, (3) generosity, and (4) discernment. These are the qualities that create the culture of awakening, the culture of the practice.

There has been a tendency, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, to reduce everything to technique. You learn a particular meditation technique, you follow it, and you gain awakening without really having to engage with anyone else or change your values. But the problem of focusing exclusively on a technique without the culture means that once the technique is placed in a different culture, it takes on a new meaning.

The other day I read a piece by someone claiming to be a lineage holder in the forest tradition, talking about how she had trouble one time in a meditation retreat because she had chosen a really nice zafu and a really nice place in the meditation hall, then gone to dinner, come back, and found that someone else had taken her place. She struggled with this for quite a while. Now, this is the sort of thing you might talk to a psychotherapist about. But I can imagine if she had actually talked to Ajaan Chah about this, he would’ve said, “Look, you don’t need a zafu at all. Go and sit on the ground under a tree.”

A different set of values—no coddling, no pampering. Learning some contentment: This is one of the aspects of the culture of the noble ones. You’re content with the things that come to you on an external level in terms of food, clothing, shelter, a medicine. In terms of shelter, if your zafu is in the wrong place or a place you don’t like, well, you put up with it because there are more important things you’ve got to focus on. It’s not the case that having the right zafu or the right spot in the room will make the difference between whether you gain awakening or not. It’s more a question of the qualities of mind you develop, the strengths of mind you develop.

But making a big deal about the right zafu and the place you claimed for yourself: That’s what happens when you take the technique out of the culture. Things can get distorted.

So, think about what it means to engage in admirable friendship. Conviction means being convinced of the fact of the Buddha’s awakening. Of the many different things he came to know in the course of his awakening, he pointed out three as being especially important. The first is the fact of rebirth and the fact that your rebirth goes up and down, up and down. It’s not a steady, nice progress.

The second thing you hold to is the fact that rebirth depends on your karma, as I said. Believing in that focuses you really intensely on being convinced in the power of your actions. What you do, what you say, what you think intentionally will have an impact on shaping your life, in this lifetime and in future ones. So you have to be careful about what you do and say and think.

Third, there’s the fact that you can put an end to suffering through your efforts. To take on this type of conviction means that you have respect for your admirable friend. This is why we have such a vocabulary of respect around here. We respect the Buddha for what he shows about the potential we have within us. He has us respect our desire for true happiness: (1) that it is possible in general, and (2) that we—men, women, children, young old—can do it.

That’s the message of the awakening. It is possible to find a dimension that you touch inside that’s totally free from suffering. I’ve had people ask, “Well, given that we’re conditioned beings, how can we know anything unconditioned?” That’s putting the cart before the horse. You’re defining yourself and then, in your definition, limiting yourself. As the Buddha said, no matter how you define yourself, you’re going to limit yourself. So put the question of defining who you are aside. Focus on learning from other people who are skillful how to act skillfully, how to talk to yourself, to behave more skillfully, how to stick with the path. Those things are worth thinking about.

That’s how the Buddha progressed. He tried to find what was skillful, and he didn’t rest content until he found a level of skill that brought him to something that was totally unconditioned. Given that he found out what it is possible to know, that was the first thing—that was the first principle.

Then the next question is, how do you define yourself in the light of what it’s possible to know? For the purpose of the path, you define yourself as competent to do this, confident that you can be responsible for your actions. You define yourself as someone who really desires a happiness that doesn’t disappoint, that doesn’t harm anybody. There are a lot of value adjustments there. In fact, there’s a lot to the path as a whole that involves value judgments.

We see this in all the rest of the qualities of an admirable friend. Virtue is important. In fact, it’s so important that the Buddha said that losing your virtue would be one of the most serious losses in your life. Which means that when the choice comes between maintaining the precepts and maybe having to sacrifice other things vs. sacrificing the precepts for the sake of other things, you sacrifice the other things. That’s a very strong value judgment, and to maintain it, you want to live with people who maintain those values as well.

So again, there’s a social aspect of the practice. It’s part of the culture.

The same with generosity. When you’re able to share and happy to share, you try to develop that quality of the mind where you can see that you may have something more than you need and you’re happy to give it to others. You think about their needs as well. This expands your mind.

It’s the basis for the whole culture we have here. The economy here at the monastery is an economy of gifts. You notice that we don’t have courses where you have to pay x amount or where there’s a suggested donation for how much you pay. The best way to repay the teacher is to put the teachings into practice. The teachings are given as a gift. Everything is given as a gift. You look around the room here. The money that went into building this building was a gift, every piece.

We’re living off the generosity of others, which requires that we develop an attitude of generosity as well. As the Buddha said, if you’re not generous, if you’re stingy with your belongings, stingy with your Dhamma, you can’t even get into right concentration, much less gain awakening.

The fourth quality is discernment. It’s defined as penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away. Now, you’re not just watching things coming and going and accepting them. The knowledge has to be penetrative, which means that you have to understand cause and effect. When something good comes, why does it come, and particularly, where does it come from in your own mind? When something bad comes, where did it come from in your own mind? This is the knowledge that’s meant to give you understanding into where suffering comes from and how you can put an end to it.

You also realize that your attitude toward suffering has to be noble. In other words, you accept responsibility for whether you’re going to suffer or not, and then you look into the machinations of the mind to see where they’re creating suffering.

You may say, well, it’s because there’s pain here, there’s pain there. But why do you suffer around the pain? Because of the stories you tell to yourself, the images you hold in mind, the way you grab hold of a pain.

You may notice this as you’re breathing in, breathing out, and there’s a pain in part of the body. There may be a tendency to actually try to use the pain as the part of the body that’s going to do the breathing. In other words, you’re taking on the pain and grabbing on to it for the future, for the next breath. We’re not talking about long-term future here, just the immediate future.

Do you have to do that? Can you see the pain as something that’s past, past, past, going away, going away? How does that change your relationship to it? How does that change the relationship to how much you can endure? After all, those are the values you look for in this culture. You want people who have powers of endurance, people who have wisdom. They can put up with difficulties to inspire you to put up with difficulties.

One time Ajaan Fuang was going to have an all-night sit without much advance notice. I had been working hard that day. I told him I didn’t think I could do it, and he said, “Well, is it going to kill you?”

“No.”

He said, “Then you can do it.”

Think of that question you hear every now and then in the forest tradition: “Are you afraid to die?” In any other culture, the obvious answer would be “Yes.” In the culture of the forest tradition, though, you’d be embarrassed to say Yes. They’re expecting a greater nobility out of you, which is why this is such a good culture for the purpose of becoming responsible. Respect and nobility are all part of becoming a respectable person yourself, a noble person yourself—because that’s what’s required in this path.

The culture is all part of it. The system of values is all part of it. The Buddha didn’t just discover a vipassanā technique. He discovered how cause and effect operate in the world and he also discovered the best use of that knowledge. Of all things he came to learn—about rebirth, about karma, about how suffering happens—he would all invest into: What is the best use of this? That’s a question of values. When your values are noble, you’re going to come up with a noble answer to those questions.

That’s what this culture is for.