Respect for Tranquility & Insight

There’s a verse we chant very often that mentions respect for concentration. We have to realize that concentration requires both tranquility and insight. We have to have respect for both of those as well.

Some people find that they’re good at the tranquility and not so good at the insight. Others find that they’re the other way around: The insight comes easily—they can understand what the Buddha said about inconstancy, stress, not-self, the fabricated nature of our thoughts—but the tranquility comes hard.

There’s a tendency in both those cases to want to stick with the side you’re already good at. But as Ajaan Fuang would point out, we need to bring things into balance. So we have to work on whatever side we’re weak in.

The Buddha says as much as well. When someone is good at tranquility, he says, “Go find someone who’s good at insight and ask them how fabrications should be viewed, how they should be understood, how they should be let go through insight. If you’re good at insight, find somebody who’s good at tranquility and ask how the mind can be made to settle down, to be one, because you need both sides.”

You can learn the terms of insight and you can apply them. In that way, you borrow the Buddha’s wisdom. But you want to learn to create some of your own. For that, you need to get the mind really, really quiet so that you can step out of the formation of thoughts and see them as something other.

We live so much in our thought worlds, and we often can use one thought to step back from another. But, how about stepping entirely out of those patterns of thinking? What would you gain? Whatever insights you’d gain then would go a lot deeper, they’d go more to the heart, because they come directly from what you’ve seen.

So, if you find that insight is easy—you understand what the Buddha had to say—work on your concentration and have respect for that work. It’s so easy to say, when the mind gets still, “It’s kind of dumb,” to lose interest and move off. When it’s still, nothing much may be happening—nothing much obvious may be happening—but there’s still a lot of fabrication going on. You want to be able to see that, and you can’t see that unless the mind gets really still. You can see the blatant levels, but there’s a lot more going on more subtly in the mind. You’ve got to get the mind still to see that, so learn how to give yourself pep talks while you work at concentration and have some respect for it.

Sometimes you can get cynical about the practice: You work and you work and you work at it, but you don’t seem to be getting anywhere. There’s that tendency to say, “Well, maybe there’s nothing wrong with me. Maybe there’s something wrong with the practice.” That’s basically laziness speaking. Other times you say, “There’s something wrong with me. I can’t do this.” That’s also laziness speaking. You have to remember that the Buddha said that all the things he taught were things that people can do. You can develop skillful qualities. You can abandon unskillful ones. If it were impossible, he wouldn’t have taught it. This is a basic human characteristic: We can do these things. A lot of it has to do with how we talk to ourselves.

Sometimes we come to the practice tired, at a low energy level. It seems to demand an awful lot and it does. But what that means is that, for the time being, you have to focus on what you *can *do right now. And don’t look down on it.

This is especially hard for people who have skills in some areas and who want to do the things they’re skillful in. It’s hard to go back and start over with a new skill, because all you can see is how your skills are not measuring up to the skills of the Buddha.

Remember, where did the skills of the Buddha come from? They came from very basic steps in the beginning. He took a lot of wrong steps but he learned from them. And that’s the task we have: learning from what we can do.

Think about that image of the lute. If the string is too tight, the sound won’t be good. If the string is too loose, the sound won’t be good. So gauge your level of energy and work with that. Then tune all the rest of the strings in your lute to that—your conviction, your mindfulness, your concentration, your discernment.

With conviction, that means really being convinced that even tiny steps are worthwhile. You’re not going to stay with the tiny steps. As you make the tiny steps and you get really perceptive about what you’re doing, you’re going to take bigger steps, and then bigger steps. But right now you may have to focus on tiny steps.

So even though the stillness of your concentration may not be all that solid, learn from what you’ve got. Don’t try to learn from what you think should be in your mind from what you read in the books. We’re way too over-informed. We hear so many things about how this should be that way, that should be this way. And there are many different branches of Buddhism that tell us many different things. So it’s good to go back to the basics.

Ajaan Fuang used to comment that his favorite students were the Chinese merchants and who worked in the market. They hadn’t read much Dhamma at all. When they came to him, he’d say, “Do this.” So they would do this. When they had done that, then he’d say, “Well, now do this.” They’d come and report on what happened, “Well, now do this.” Step by step by step—treating it as an exploration.

Try to have that same attitude. We’ve learned a lot from the Buddha’s discourses, we’ve learned a lot from the teachings of the ajaans, but you also have to learn how to put those teachings aside. We hear so much about putting what’s in the Pali Canon aside and just focusing on your practice. It also means putting what we’ve learned from the different ajaans aside as well and just focus on what we’re doing right now. Have some basic concepts of what has to be done and then just do it. Then learn from it. That’s called commitment and reflection. That’s when you’ll begin to notice what’s going on in your mind in ways you didn’t notice before. That’s what genuine insight is all about.

As for people who find that concentration comes easily, there are similar problems. It’s fairly easy to get still; it’s harder to figure things out. So you might be inclined to go with the line of thought that says, “Well, you shouldn’t be figuring things out anyhow. Just be with your awareness—and treat that as the reality. As for the words, they’re just as words.” Well, the Buddha said the words because they imparted important information. They gave guidance. And they pointed out that just being with awareness is what? It’s your aggregate of consciousness. If you’re staying there, you’re clinging to consciousness. You’re clinging to the aggregates. The stress may be subtle, but it’s there.

In that case, you want to learn how to peer into it and see: What are you doing? When does the stress go up? When does the stress go down? When it goes up, what did you do? When it goes down, what did you do? Don’t let yourself be too easily satisfied with a state of concentration.

So there are dangers on both sides: the side that finds it easy to think and the side that finds it easy to be still. What you’ve got to learn is to balance those abilities. As the Buddha said, if you’re really going to get the mind into the stages of right concentration, you’ve got to have some insight into the workings of the mind, and you’ve got to have some tranquility. You’ve got to have both.

When he gives that image of the swift pair of messengers who bring the message of nibbana to consciousness, the messengers are both tranquility and insight working together. If you find yourself leaning in one direction or the other, take the time and have the respect that’s required to bring things back into balance. In that way, your practice becomes solid. It’s on a sure footing.