How to Listen

The Buddha gives lessons in how to listen to a Dhamma talk. There are five altogether.

The first three have to do with respect. As he says, one, you don’t despise the person giving the talk. Two, you don’t despise what’s being said in the talk. And three, you don’t despise yourself. In other words, you open yourself to the possibility that something good might be said, something useful might be said in the talk, and that you’re up to making good use of it.

Think of all the people the Buddha gave Dhamma talks to who gained stream-entry while listening. Part of it was because they opened their hearts.

There’s the case of Yasa, who was going through a lot of turmoil. He’d been entertained by his dancing women and then he’d fallen asleep. The women said to one another, “Why are we dancing if we’re dancing for him?” So they stopped and they fell asleep, too. He happened to wake up, and he said it was like waking up into a charnel ground, people lying all over the place.

So he had to leave the house, went wandering off, came across the Buddha. Yasa had been complaining to himself about what a turmoil he was in, and the Buddha said, “Come here and listen. Right here is not a turmoil.” So Yasa wanted to listen, and the Buddha gave what’s called a graduated discourse.

He talked about the goodness of generosity; virtue, the goodness of acting in harmless ways—basically affirming what people already knew about goodness. He went on to say that generosity and virtue gave good results in this lifetime, good results in the next lifetime, even up to the sensual levels of heaven.

Then he turned the tables. He said, “But even those sensual pleasures in heaven have their drawbacks.” At any rate, they don’t last. And when you fall from heaven, you fall hard.

So Yasa followed along with what the Buddha was saying. He was already overcome with a sense of disgust for sensuality, so he was inclined to listen to the Buddha when he said that. Then the Buddha said, “There is an alternative—renunciation.”

Now, renunciation doesn’t mean you just give up. You renounce sensual pleasures to look for pleasures of a higher kind. This gets into the fourth quality for listening to a Dhamma talk, which is that you make your mind single—ekagga is the Pali word. Now, ekaggatā—the noun version of that—is a definition of concentration. So you concentrate on the talk and try to bring your mind to stillness. You find pleasure in the stillness and you learn to appreciate it.

It’s sad that of all the factors of the path, right concentration is the one that gets dropped most often. People say, “It’s too hard nowadays. And it’s not necessary anyhow. All you need is discernment. All you need is wisdom, insight. You can go straight from mindfulness to insight.” But the Buddha’s instructions for mindfulness, basically, are instructions on how to get the mind to settle down into oneness. So you’re listening to the talk and you can bring your mind to the oneness of stillness. That’s an important factor in how to listen.

Then, when the Buddha could see that Yasa was ready, he taught him the four noble truths. This goes into the fifth factor for how to listen, which is appropriate attention*—yoniso manasikāra*. It’s basically a matter of asking the right questions.

When you first get the mind to settle down, your thought is, “How can I make this last?” There’s nothing wrong with that thought. Learning how to appreciate the pleasure of getting the mind into oneness, finding pleasure apart from sensuality, is an important skill—one that should be cultivated, one that should be appreciated.

But you have to realize that it’s not an end in and of itself. It’s there for you to start asking questions about your mind, about what it’s doing, and how skillfully it’s acting. Only by bringing the mind into oneness can you actually observe it. There will be thoughts that branch out from that oneness, and you want to see them clearly. When thoughts branch out, where are they taking you? Well, back to your old ways, to more suffering. So you learn how to let them go. You realize that you’re now in a position where you can let them go.

If we were totally passive and simply had to put up with whatever comes, then it would be okay to say, “Well, just learn how to accept whatever comes. There’s nothing you can do about it anyhow, so accept the passing show.” But we do have a choice. We can say No to certain things, and Yes to others. That’s what appropriate attention is all about—learning the right standards, what counts as skillful and what doesn’t count as skillful, and seeing that the issue of what is skillful and not skillful is the important question.

At first, of course, what’s skillful is what inclines the mind to concentration. Then you can perfect that skill: You incline it to deeper and deeper levels of stillness.

You begin to realize that once you’ve got the mind firmly settled, firmly focused in a state of singleness, the thinking that got you there is now the disturbance. So you let that go. In other words, you’ve been adjusting the breath, relating to the breath, getting the breath so that the breath and the mind can fit snugly together. Now that they’re snugly together, you don’t have to think anymore, just let them stay together.

Ajaan Fuang’s comment was that it’s like raising a water buffalo. When you want it to come to you, you call its name. But when it comes, you don’t have to call it anymore. It’s there. You can ride the buffalo. In the same way, you “ride” the breath.

There will be a sense of intense refreshment, even to the point of rapture. But then that becomes a disturbance. You want the mind quieter than that. So you keep peeling away these layers, layers of the concentration itself. As you peel away, peel away, it’s like peeling an onion. You finally get to the point where there’s nothing more to peel away.

That’s what appropriate attention is all about. It gets you from the question of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful directly into the questions behind the four noble truths: Where is there stress here? You see that stress in whatever is still wavering in the mind, whatever is going up and down in the mind.

Then you see the cause: What causes it to go up and down? What causes a rise in the level of stress? What makes the stress goes down? You notice that it’s something you’re doing. And the reason you can see it now is because you’ve been practicing the path, getting the mind as quiet and undisturbed as possible.

So this question about what is skillful and what is not skillful morphs very quickly into the four noble truths. You keep peeling things away until there’s nothing left to peel away. That’s when the mind can open up to something that’s not fabricated, not put together.

It was through this process that Yasa gained the Dhamma eye: “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.” In other words, what is caused by fabrications in the mind will all have to fall away.

The question is, in what state of mind would that realization occur? It would have to be a state of mind in which you saw something that was not subject to fabrication, and did not fall away: an experience of the deathless.

That’s called knowing how to listen. You have respect for the speaker, respect for the talk, respect for yourself, you get your mind still, and you start asking the right questions inside, inspired by the talk.

Now, gaining the Dhamma eye doesn’t necessarily change your personality, but it does change your perception of what is possible in the world. It is possible through your own efforts to find a deathless happiness.

You may not fully experience the deathless—that’s what’s called stream-entry—so there’s more work to be done. But what you have experienced reorients you. You’ve seen something that’s not composed of any of the aggregates, but there is a consciousness there. So from that point on, you would never identify yourself as being identical with the aggregates, or owning the aggregates, or being in them, or having them be in you.

Your doubts about the Buddha are gone. You see that he knew what he was talking about.

And you realize it was through your own unskillful actions that you hadn’t seen this before. One of the chastening parts of the experience is that you see how you willfully ignored this aspect of your experience. So stream-entry is not accompanied by pride. It’s accompanied by a sense of your own foolishness. But at the same time, there’s an intense sense of relief that there is something that doesn’t die and you’ve found it. That’s why it’s such a momentous experience.

But as I said, it may not change your personality. There are stories in the Canon: Mahāpajāpati, after she became a stream-enterer, was still very stubborn. She even argued with the Buddha. Roja, a very self-centered member of the noble class, was still very self-centered. After he became a stream-enterer, the first thing he said to the Buddha was, “From now on, the Sangha should receive gifts from me and nobody else.” So obviously there’s more work to be done.

There’s the case of Upali, the householder. Originally he’d been a follower of the Jains, and he went one day to try to disprove the Buddha’s teachings. During his conversation with the Buddha, he kept on refusing to listen to the Buddha’s reasons, saying, “I’m still not convinced, I’m still not convinced.” Then, after the Buddha had given him many convincing reasons, he finally said, “Well, actually I was convinced by your first reason, but I wanted to see how far you could go.”

So he’s not the most appealing character. But the Buddha then leads him to stream-entry. When the leader of the Jains finds out what has happened and comes to visit him, Upali really rubs it in that he’s no longer a follower of the Jains.

So, we’re not trying to work on a change in the personality. Stream-entry can happen to all kinds of people. There’s the case of the would-be assassin who was sent to kill the Buddha, but who ended up putting down his bows and arrows, came in to listen to the Dhamma, and became a stream-enterer. There’s the case of a woman who was coming back from playing around with her serving ladies. They’d gone out for a picnic, she stopped by to see the Buddha on the way back, listened to the Dhamma talk, and became a non-returner. So it can happen to all kinds of people.

It’s from that point on that you’re said to be in training. In other words, the real work starts. You have a sense of where you’re going, what needs to be done. And the question simply is getting it done.

It’s in the course of that training that you start polishing away your defilements even further. Of course, it’s good to polish away whatever ones you can before then, to prepare yourself to get into training. After all, we’re training not only the intellect: We’re training the heart, we’re training the character, we’re training the will. It’s an all-around training.

But the real training begins when you see where it’s going. You know where the arrow is aimed, and it’s simply a matter of following the arrow all the way to the end.

It starts with knowing how to listen, and how to take the Dhamma inside and get the most out of it. So, remember these five qualities: You don’t despise the speaker; you don’t despise the Dhamma; you don’t despise yourself; you develop singleness of mind as you listen; and you apply appropriate attention, asking the right questions. That’s how you find something really special inside.