The Buddha’s Wisdom

When we hear the word “wisdom,” we usually think of wise sayings, the sort of thing you find in books where you have one per page. You read them, they put your mind at peace. They remind you of things that are important that you tend to forget, or things that you’re holding on to that you don’t need to. You read them and you get a sense of peace because they seem to be coming from a peaceful mind.

The Buddha has wise sayings like this. That’s one of the reasons why the Dhammapada is so popular—short sayings that you can hold in mind and that make you feel peaceful. Because the way you talk to yourself is often very unwise, it’s good to have new voices inside.

But the Buddha saw that for wisdom to stick, it had to be more than just wise sayings. There had to be a training. He saw that there was an ultimate peace in the mind that couldn’t be found simply by repeating wise things to yourself or thinking skillful thoughts. You had to take the mind apart to see what the real problem was.

He identifies the problem for you in the four noble truths: The problem is suffering—the suffering we inflict on ourselves but don’t have to. The suffering he identified as clinging to the five aggregates. And he defined clinging as desire and passion.

The cause of suffering is craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion, the difference being that the word for craving, taṇhā, is also the word for thirst—you’re looking for something to feed on. With the word for clinging, *upādāna—*also desire and passion—you’re feeding on something. You’ve found what you want, or found something that’s similar to what you want, and you’re holding on to it. The fact that you’re still feeding means you’re not full. You’re trying to take things in. There’s still desire, there’s still passion—there’s still a lack—and you think you’re filling the lack.

But the Buddha’s pointing out that that’s a really precarious position, being dependent on something like that. The fact that it’s precarious and not satisfied: That’s where the suffering is.

He said it is possible also to put an end to that suffering, which of course means putting an end to the desire and passion. That sounds kind of scary, but he promises that it’s the ultimate happiness.

We think we’re gaining something from feeding ourselves, but we’re actually getting in the way of our happiness. So as he analyzes it, he says the cause for the suffering that we feel in the world doesn’t come from things outside. It comes from within the mind.

The mind is talking to itself in an unwise way. To begin with, you have the messages that you send from one moment to the next: telling you what to watch out for, what’s important—basically, telling you where to pay attention, and how to pay attention. You’re sending messages that you then pick up.

Sometimes there are other messages that come in that don’t seem to be coming from the present moment. They’re coming from someplace else. The Buddha identifies these as voices coming from the past—your past karma.

Ajaan Lee talks about them as being, sometimes, other consciousnesses in your body. Why are there other consciousnesses in your body? Well, there are little beings in your body. Some you can see; some you can’t see. But they, too, would be a manifestation of past karma.

Or you can think of them as the committee of the mind. You have lots of old habits, old ways in which you’ve looked for happiness in the past, and they come bubbling up to join the committee and make their suggestions.

As in a Thai phrase, “suam roi,” they step into your inner conversation. And they seem to be you talking to you, they seem to be you, but they come from someplace else—maybe an old you. But still we have to learn how to not listen to these voices, not take them on.

This is one of the reasons why. when the Buddha explains suffering and the* *causes of suffering in dependent co-arising, so many things come prior to sensory contact. Before you even see or hear or think anything, the mind is already primed, sometimes by your opinions, sometimes by your perceptions—the labels you put on things. You’re already looking for something, and what you’re looking for is usually based on ignorance.

Ignorance of what? Ignorance of the real problem, which is that you’re causing suffering through your desires and passions.

What sets the Buddha apart from other wise teachers is that he offers a real training. You borrow his wisdom to train your actions and to learn how to create your own wisdom. That training, of course, is the noble eightfold path, which can also be expressed in the triple training of heightened virtue; heightened mind, or concentration; and heightened discernment.

These are the practices that help you become more sensitive to what’s going on in your mind, to help get rid of that ignorance so that you can see exactly where you’re causing yourself suffering and where you don’t have to.

He recommends the practice of virtue, beginning with the five precepts, giving you something new to tell yourself: Watch out for these actions. Don’t do these actions. Don’t kill; don’t steal; don’t engage in illicit sex; don’t lie; don’t take intoxicants.

You can break these precepts only intentionally, which means that you have to become very sensitive to your intentions. In other words, if you step on an ant but didn’t intend to, or you intentionally stepped on it but you perceived it as something else—not a living being—you don’t break the precept. That calls attention to your intentions.

At the same time, he reminds you, you’ve got to try to be as harmless as possible. You get more and more sensitive to the ways in which you do cause harm—some of which are expressed in the precepts, and others which are not, but they become part of your virtue.

After all, virtue is expressed not only in precepts, but also in principles like contentment, modesty, restraint: ways in which you can look at your impact on the world and the impact of your actions on your mind, to see where you’re causing harm, and making up your mind you don’t want to cause that harm.

The precepts also require that you become honest with yourself. Which is a really important principle in the practice because—especially as you get into concentration—you see that even in a quiet state, the mind can delude itself. So you want to be really honest about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

The practice of concentration actually begins with mindfulness: The Buddha gives you new things to keep in mind, not just the precepts, but now you’re going to focus on, say, just the breath in and of itself, or feelings or mind states just in and of themselves. But it’s good to start with the breath because everything else revolves around that.

You’re ardent, alert, and mindful. Ardent in trying to do this well. Alert, watching what you’re actually doing. And mindful to have a sense of what you’ve learned from the past about what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, so if something unskillful comes up, you recognize it as unskillful and also remember how to deal with it.

The Buddha talks about the main obstacles to concentration as being the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and doubt. The factors of right concentration, the first level of right concentration, are also five: directed thought, evaluation, singleness of preoccupation, rapture, pleasure. That’s the state you’re trying to create through right mindfulness.

The texts talk about getting rid of the hindrances first and then developing the factors of the first jhāna. But sometimes you work on the factors of jhāna first, and then you run into the hindrances.

Ajaan Lee gave a Dhamma talk one time in which he pointed out how each of the five factors of jhāna counteracts a specific hindrance. It’s the only talk I can find in all of his teachings where he tried to make that connection. The nun who was taking notes on the talk could remember only two of them.

Maybe he sensed that the correspondence was kind of artificial, because you can’t say, “I’m going to counteract sensual desire with just one factor of jhāna.” You need to have all five of them working together.

But each of them does have a specialty, and you can see that it does actually deal with a particular hindrance. For example, you start out with directed thought: That’s to counteract sensual desire. Instead of thinking about pleasures of the senses, you give yourself something better to think about.

First you remind yourself of the drawbacks of those pleasures, and drawbacks of the quality the Buddha calls sensuality in the mind. Those are two different things. Sensuality is your fascination with planning for sensual pleasures or—once you’ve had a good one, say you’ve had a good meal—then talking to yourself about what a great meal it was, priming yourself for more.

That’s what you’re actually trying to counteract, those kinds of thoughts. So the Buddha says give yourself something better to think about: Think about the breath and what it can do in the body.

Then you bring in evaluation. That’s to counteract doubt—the doubts you might have about, “Is this really going to work? Am I capable of doing this? Can I really get good results?” If you sit there doubting, nothing’s going to happen.

But you tell yourself, “Well, let’s give it a try. Let’s really evaluate what’s going on in the mind. What is skillful in the mind? What is not? What’s skillful in the breath and what’s not? What happens when you actually develop skillful qualities?” You begin to see cause and effect in action. You breathe in a certain way and there are certain results. You conceive of the breath in a certain way and there are certain results.

Try to think of the breath, not so much as the air coming in and out through the nose. Think of it in the Buddha’s terms—as part of the wind element in the body itself—the energy that flows through the body that allows the air to come in, allows the air to go out. It also accompanies the flow of the blood, the flow of impulses through your nerves. Try to get sensitive to that and see what that sensitivity does for the mind.

As you begin to see that it really does make a difference, that overcomes your doubt. It allows you to settle down, get deeper into concentration.

It also allows for singleness of preoccupation, which counteracts restlessness and anxiety. You stay with one thing. You remind yourself: Whatever happens in the world, whatever can happen in the world, you’re going to need mindfulness, you’re going to need alertness, you’re going to need the qualities you develop in concentration.

You realize that giving your full attention right here is really important, for otherwise you’re not going to learn anything. Or you’ll just learn bits and pieces. So this is your safe place. Because as you stay here, you’re developing all the good qualities you’re going to need.

When you have these three factors, then the other two come. Pleasure, which helps to counteract ill will. And rapture, which energizes you, helps to counteract sloth and torpor. When you’ve got these five factors working together, they can help ward off the hindrances, and create a real sense of stillness in the mind.

You’re going to need this stillness if you really want to see your mind. You don’t know your thoughts until you’ve gotten out of them.

You can be in what you think are really clever, skillful thoughts, but you’re not really going to know whether they truly are clever, truly are skillful, until you’ve stepped out of them and have been quiet for a while, and put yourself in a position where you can see the thoughts as a process.

In other words, instead of getting into the content of the thoughts, you see the process of how they arise. Where they begin is a little stirring in the energy of the body, which could either be physical or mental. You see how the mind slaps a perception on that, saying, “Oh, this is a thought about x,” and then it runs with it—fabricates more thoughts around it.

You’re not going to see this until you’ve stepped out of your thoughts. This is why you need to get the mind really absorbed in the sense of the breath filling the body: so that your sense of your awareness is larger than the thoughts; surrounds the thoughts, allows you to step out of them.

It also gives you a sense of well-being, which you’re going to need to stay out of your thoughts. After all, our suffering is feeding on things, and we feed on the pleasures of the senses because we think they’re the best things we can find. Well, the meditation gives you a better pleasure: the pleasures of form—the body as felt from within—rather than the pleasures of sensuality.

That way, you can begin to question your old ways of feeding—your old ways of suffering. You actually see the equation that the Buddha made: Feeding is suffering.

The concentration also allows you to get into a position where you can apply what the Buddha would often recommend, which is a five-step analysis. You might call it The Buddha’s Five-step Program: When something comes up and you see that it’s potentially harmful, the first thing you want to do is look for its origination. In other words, what is its cause in the mind? We’re not looking for the suffering that comes from unpleasant things outside. We’re looking for: What is this tendency the mind has to crave, cling, desire, go for its passions? Where does that come from?

Then you notice that, whatever it is, it doesn’t last as long as you thought. Sometimes we think that we’re angry for a long time or lustful for a long time. But these things just come and go, come and go. So you want to see the origination *passing away. *When it goes, you want to see—why? And then when you pick it up again, well, why did you do that?

That’s where you get into the third step, which is to see the allure: What’s attractive about these things? You have to be forewarned that what’s attractive about it may not be the first thing that appears. The mind has a tendency to lie to itself. And hopefully your practice of virtue and concentration has taught you to be a little bit skeptical about what the mind tells you.

Then you want to look for the drawbacks, to counteract that allure. Those desires and passions that cause suffering and constitute suffering are basically based on value judgments as to what’s worth doing and what’s not. What you’re trying to do is arrive at new value judgments inside, so you see the drawbacks, to which you’ve often blinded yourself so that you don’t see them. And you see the allure, which you’ve also blinded yourself to—you’re not admitting what the allure genuinely was. That means that now you’re in a better position to see that it’s not worth it, whatever it was that you were going for.

That’s when you can find the escape, which is the “subduing of desire and passion.” That’s the fifth step. You see that the unskillful mind state is not worth it, and you don’t want to get involved. And it was your desires and passions that got you involved to begin with.

Not only that: Desire and passion also created those five aggregates that you were clinging to. When there’s no more passion, there’s no more drive to fix those aggregates. You can think of fixing food: As long as you think you’re going to eat, and it’s good food, you fix it. But when you see that it’s bad food and not worth it, why fix any more food like that?

The mind can drop all these things and it can see that what the Buddha said really is true: That letting go of these things lifts a huge weight off the mind.

As you look further, you find that even this concentration that you were using as a basis for your discernment: That, too, is fabricated. And the right view that was pointing you there: That, too, is fabricated. So you apply the same five-step program to these things: You see their allure, which is that they’ve created a lot of pleasure that you wouldn’t have had before, but their drawback is that you still have to keep fabricating them. And you remember the Buddha’s statement that there is an unfabricated happiness that comes when you totally let go.

That’s when you can let go—the mind is unbound. It’s freed by letting go. The Buddha doesn’t talk very much about unbinding, but he does have names for it.

The names indicate that it has five properties.

One, it is a kind of consciousness, called consciousness without surface. The image is of a light beam that doesn’t land anywhere. You can think of going out into the night, looking at the night sky, and you have to remind yourself there’s light filling all of that darkness. We don’t see it because it’s not reflected off of things. When we see it reflected off the Moon, for instance, we say, “Oh yeah, there’s light.” But the beams that miss the Moon, we don’t see, but they’re there. So that’s one attribute: It’s consciousness.

Two, it’s intense bliss. The Buddha calls it safety, refuge, harbor—it’s a good, safe place to be, at your ease and undisturbed.

The third quality is that it’s truthful. In other words, it doesn’t change, because it’s not caused by anything. It doesn’t come and go with causes as the causes come and go.

Fourth, it’s freedom. It’s a radical freedom: You’re even freed from the restraints of space and time.

And the fifth quality is excellence: It’s the best thing there is.

These are the indications that come from the names the Buddha gives to nibbāna. But the names are just pointers to get you interested in going there. When you finally get there, you find no perceptions at all can do justice to it. But you’ve used perceptions—as you’ve used all the other aggregates—as part of the path to get you headed in the right direction. But the goal itself is something beyond.

That’s the wisdom of the Buddha, he points you there.

He’s training you, basically, so that you don’t have to keep borrowing his wisdom. You can start creating some of your own. And the wisdom you create will take you to this goal.

And as he guarantees, it’s the best thing there is. Which means that the wisdom that he offers you and the wisdom that he trains you to create for yourself is much better than just reading wise sayings out of a book. It actually delivers you to the real peace that you may taste a little bit of when you read wise sayings—but the Buddha shows you how to plunge fully into the real thing.