The Skill of Letting Go
September 11, 2024

You may know the story of Anathapindika, who was one of the Buddha’s main lay supporters. He was the one who founded Jetavana, the monastery where the Buddha spent more rains retreats than any other place; where he gave lots and lots of discourses.

The time finally came when Anathapindika was on his deathbed. Ven. Sāriputta and Ven. Ananda go to see him. Sāriputta asks how he’s doing, hopes he’s doing well, and Anathapindika replies that he’s not doing well at all.

So Sāriputta starts teaching him, “Train yourself: ‘My consciousness will not be dependent on the eye, the ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind; sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. Consciousness at these things, contact at these things—I will not cling to these things. I will not let my consciousness be dependent on them.” Then, he goes through the six properties: earth, water, wind, fire, space, consciousness; the five aggregates, the four formless states—anything imaginable that you could have your consciousness dependent on, that you could be clinging to—he tells him to let go.

Anathapindika starts to cry, and Ananda basically says, “Get a grip! Are you sinking?” Anathapindika says, “No! I’m not sinking. It’s just that in all these years that I’ve been coming to support the Buddha, coming to the monastery, I’ve never heard a Dhamma talk like this.” Sāriputta says, “Talks like this are usually not given to lay people.” So Anathapindika says, as a request, “Please tell the Buddha to give talks like this to lay people.”

Then he dies and is reborn as a deva, which is a sign that he wasn’t able to follow the instructions given in the talk—his emotions got in the way. If he’d followed the instructions, he would’ve been an arahant.

There may have been a good reason why the Buddha didn’t give a talk like that to lay people. If you just tell people to let go, let go, let go, he’d not be giving them a full instruction. He’d have to tell them how to let go. Because it is possible, as you focus down on things in your mind and you tell yourself, “Okay, I’m not going to focus on anything. Anything that comes up, I’m going to push it out of the way, push it out of the way”—and there’s a certain amount of aversion in that—you can put yourself into a state of non-perception, where everything blanks out.

Letting go is a skill. This blanked-out state is not where you want to go.

Some people actually think that it’s Nibbana. It seems like cessation. Based on this experience, they say, “There is no self,” because they don’t sense anything there at all. But it’s just blanking out.

The Buddha didn’t teach the Big Sleep, he taught awakening—which is something entirely different. So, it’s important that you understand the skill of letting go.

The Buddha sets it out in five steps. The first step is to look at whatever it is you want to contemplate and get beyond, and to observe: “What is the origination of this thing?” The second step is to observe: “What is its passing away?”

The origination here doesn’t mean just arising. Origination means it’s caused and you’re looking for the cause. The word origination, usually, is used for causes coming from inside the mind. So you want to see what, here in the mind, is causing it to come. And if the cause goes away, then it’ll go away, too.

So those are the first two steps, to establish the fact that these things are fabricated because, the Buddha said, wherever you find arising and passing away, change while things are in existence, it’s a sign that it’s been fabricated, it’s been willed by the mind.

We hear that so many times, but don’t stop to think how radical that is: Your experiences are something you intended.

You didn’t think you were on the planning too much. A lot of it was presented to you. But what’s been presented to you is actually is the result of your old intentional actions. So, it’s intended—but it may not be in line with what your desires intended it to be. But that realization should focus your attention inside. The source is here.

Mano pubbangamā dhammā, mano-seṭṭhā: Phenomena are led by the mind, created by the mind, dominated by the mind. So you want to look inside.

The next three steps have to do with not just the fact of fabrication but also the value of fabrication.

First you want to see, “What is the allure of this thing that I’m attached to? What do I find attractive?”

Say, with sensuality: What, about a sensual fantasy pulls you in, turns you on?

The details will change from time to time and they’re not necessarily about the details of the body you’re lusting after or the food that you’re lusting after. The appeal may have to do with your perceptions around these things, your perceptions of yourself as related to these things. Sometimes you just simply crave craving.

So look into it—what is the allure?

Then, in the next step, you compare the allure to the drawbacks: “When I cling to this, what happens? What are the negative results?”

This is where the Buddha pulls out the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. The things you’re attracted to, no matter how attractive they may be, are inconstant. This doesn’t mean that they just change. They’re really unreliable.

Sometimes the word anicca is translated as “impermanent.” But you could argue that, with some things, the fact that they’re impermanent is a good thing. When disease is impermanent and goes away, that’s good. When bad conditions go away, that’s good.

But think about things as being inconstant—and that’s basically what the word literally means, it’s the opposite of the word nicca, which means constant: If something is inconstant, you can’t rely on it. The mind wants something to rely on, it wants to have something to settle in on, yet all of its fabrications are denying that possibility. That’s one of the drawbacks.

The other is that it’s stressful. It weighs down the mind—or in Ajaan Maha Boowa’s terms, it puts a squeeze on the heart. And, if something is inconstant and stressful, why claim it as yours? Why think that it’s you? It’s not worth it. That’s a value judgment.

When you can see that it really is true, that it’s not worth it—you compare the allure with the drawbacks and the drawbacks way outweigh the allure—that’s when you can subdue desire and passion for that object, whatever it was. That’s the fifth step: the escape.

So you’re not just telling yourself, “Let go, let go.” You’re giving yourself reasons to let go. And as the ajaans all say, when you see the reasons, you don’t have to tell yourself, “Inconstant, stressful, not self.” When you see that it’s not worth holding on to, you let go.

You may remember that the Buddha said there are two types of causes for stress or suffering: one in which you develop dispassion for it simply by watching it with equanimity, and the other where you have to exert a fabrication before you develop dispassion.

The first sort are the ones where you haven’t basically been paying attention to why you’re holding on to something. When you look at it directly, you see quickly that it’s not worth it. Whatever allure it has, you automatically see it and how it’s way outweighed by the drawbacks.

But there are other cases where it’s not so obvious, or the allure goes deep. That’s when you have to dig it out by using bodily fabrication—the way you breathe; verbal fabrication—the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication—skillful perceptions, such as the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not self.

When you really see that it’s not worth it, and the desire you had for that allure just withers away, that’s when you’ve seen with insight—that act of letting go is not because you’ve been told to let go or you tell yourself to let go or force things out of the mind.

As Ajaan Fuang once said, “If nibbana could be attained by force, we would have all gone there a long time ago.” There’s no force in this, but there’s a lot of insight and understanding that goes into the letting go.

What’s amazing, of course, about those instructions to Anathapindika is how thorough they are. Everything you could possibly imagine—you’re not supposed to cling to it, you’re not supposed to let your consciousness depend on it. You can’t even let consciousness depend on consciousness. Ven. Sariputta says that several times: in the context of the six properties, in the context of consciousness of the six senses, consciousness in the aggregates, and the infinitude of consciousness in the formless states.

You have to be really sensitive to the fact that whatever consciousness you have that has an object is really dependent on that object, it’s conditioned by that object, and conditioned by your intention to latch on to that object. This is an important insight. It’s something that’s often missed.

There are people who say that “Consciousness has to be unconditioned. The consciousness you have at your senses has to be unconditioned because how can something conditioned know something else that’s conditioned?” But, that’s what knowledge is. That’s what awareness is. Awareness of objects is conditioned.

What the Buddha’s trying to get you to see is what happens when there’s no object at all, when you’ve looked at all the possible objects, you see there’s nothing there at all that you would want. You’ve seen this not because you forced yourself, but because you’ve seen it through understanding.

And if everything comes together just right, with all the factors of the path, then you open up to something that’s totally unconditioned. Again, it’s called consciousness but it doesn’t come under any of the six properties, five aggregates, six senses. It’s not known through any of these things. And it has no surface. The image the Buddha gives is of a light beam that has nothing to land on—although, even that image is limited because a light beam goes in one direction, but this isn’t limited to any direction.

If Anathapindika had followed the discourse that Sāriputta gave him that day, then he might have seen that, he might have experienced that, reached that. But he let his emotions get in the way, and as a result, he was reborn as a deva.

The commentaries tell us that he was a special kind of deva—Lady Visakha was another—who had, basically, what would amount to a “deva-pass,” where they’re going to get to visit all the levels of the devas, all the levels of the brahmas, and then leave samsara.

But as the Buddha said, just as a little tiny bit of excrement smells, he wouldn’t praise even a tiny bit of becoming. So if you take this to heart, then eventually you’re going to have to let go of everything—but before that, you have to learn how to let go. You let go in bits and pieces as you’re sitting here meditating.

Think of Buddha discovering the different levels of jhana. In each case, he said, at first his mind didn’t leap up at the idea that he’d have to give up sensuality. But then as he contemplated the drawbacks of sensuality, his mind was more and more inclined to want to get beyond that.

Then when he wasn’t leaping up at the idea of abandoning directed thought and evaluation, he’d looked at the drawbacks of directed thought and evaluation until he was ready to let them go.

So even just getting into concentration requires that you see drawbacks, and you ask yourself, of course, the opposite question: “Where’s the allure?”

In this way, you get practice in letting go through discernment, through understanding, realizing the amount of effort that you put into manufacturing your experience, and getting a sense that a lot of things you manufacture are simply not worth it.

You do that, as I said, in bits and pieces first—you let go of something so you can get something better.

An image that Ajaan Maha Boowa uses is of climbing a ladder to a roof. You hold on to one rung, and then you hold on to the next higher rung, and then you let go of the lower rung so that you go to a higher one. Up, up, up—until you finally get firmly on the roof. That’s when you let go of the ladder totally.

As long as you’re on the ladder, though, you don’t want to let go totally, because there are things you have to put together. You have to fabricate the path so that it’s complete. Then, when the path is complete, then you can let go, safely. But you do it with understanding, because there are these five steps: of looking for the origination, the passing away, the allure, the drawbacks, so that you can escape.

Eventually the same analysis gets applied to the five faculties—which is another way of saying that it’s applied to the path as a whole. You see the allure of the path and what it’s done to get you past many forms of suffering. But you also see its drawbacks—it, too, is fabricated. At that point, you can let go safely.

But in the meantime, learn how to let go step by step. As you let go of some things and hold on to others, you get practice in talking to yourself about these things. This is what exerting a fabrication means—that you talk to yourself in these ways so that you get more and more skilled at what actually has to be done: to let go in a way that opens you up to something more than you’ve ever seen before.