A Path of Skills

When we tore down the old sala, people regretted the loss of all the power that had accumulated over the many years of practice in the sala. Now we have a new one—a new meditation hall, a new ordination hall. So let’s create some power here through our meditation.

Start with thoughts of goodwill for all those who contributed with their work, their money, their time, their energy. May they all find happiness.

Then focus on your breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breath in the body. Wherever there are sensations that enable you to know, “Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out,” focus on those sensations.

Then notice if they’re comfortable. If they are, keep it up. If they’re not, you can change. You can make the breath shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. You can experiment to see what kind of breathing feels good. When you find a rhythm that feels good, stay with it until it doesn’t feel so good anymore—then you can change. Keep being aware of what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. We do this so that we can understand the mind.

In the Buddha’s first sermon that we chanted just now, he pointed out that the reason we’re suffering is not because of things outside. It’s because of things we’re doing, things that are happening in the mind—our craving, our clinging. The problem is that we’re not really aware of what we’re doing—which is why we blame things outside, when the real problem is in here.

So to solve the problem of suffering, we have to become more sensitive to what we’re doing, more sensitive to what’s going on in the mind. And the best way to observe the mind is to watch it as it’s trying to develop a skill. That way, you’re most sensitive to what you’re doing and the results you’re getting and seeing the connection between the two, so that you can improve.

Like right now, working with the breath, you’re beginning to notice that the way you focus on the breath and the images you hold in mind will have a huge impact on how you experience the breath and how easy or how hard it will be to make it comfortable.

The problem is in the mind, but if you want to dig out the source of the problem, you have to watch it in action—and this is the best place to do it, because breathing is our most basic function. You can live for a certain number of days without sleep, you can live for a certain number of days without water or food, but you can’t live very long without breathing. So we focus on this as our most basic skill: learning how to breathe properly. In the course of working on this skill, we get to observe the mind.

I’ve heard some people complain, saying, “Why do you choose the breath as your meditation topic? After all, when you die, the breath will leave you, and at that point you’ll be left without any help, without any support.” They say that because they miss what’s going on in breath meditation.

Look at the way the Buddha taught mindfulness. It’s not just a matter of focusing on the breath. You’re focusing on the process of fabrication—how the mind puts its experience together—through the way it breathes, through the way it talks to itself, the perceptions and feelings it holds in mind. Even when the breath leaves you, that knowledge of the other types of fabrication will be there to sustain you, because you’ll need to know how the way you talk to yourself has an influence on how you shape your experience and where you’re going to go.

The same with the perceptions you hold in mind—the images, the words you latch on to: These will have a huge impact. As we focus on the breath, we become more sensitive to these processes inside the mind, because they circle around the breath. The more we focus on doing this well, the more we’re going to learn—both about the breath and, more importantly, about the mind.

There are four qualities that go into the success of any skill—and that’s what we’re working on here: a skill. The Buddha’s images for people who practice are not of scribes who figure out a concept or philosophers who hammer things out with their logic. In other words, the practice is not just about theory. The images are of people who master skills—cooks, carpenters, archers—people who have to be very careful to notice what they’re doing and how they can improve it. This is where the four qualities that go into developing a skill come in.

You start with desire. You have to want to master the skill, but you also have to learn how to balance your desire so that it doesn’t get in the way. If you simply sit there wanting, wanting, wanting to get the results but without actually putting together the causes, the desire becomes a problem. But if you focus your desire on the causes, it becomes a part of the solution.

Here we’re trying to create a state of concentration in the mind. You have to want the mind to settle down, which means you have to want to stay with the object of concentration. You have to learn how to want to be with the breath and how to want to deal with all the issues that come up with learning how to breathe well.

The Buddha tells you to want to breathe in a way that spreads feelings of pleasure, rapture through the body. You want to figure out how to do that. It involves how you talk to yourself, how you breathe, and the perceptions, the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on. So take an interest in wanting to know these things, wanting to master these skills.

It’s the same as building the new sala. We had to want to have a new place, one that was more conducive to the practice. The old place was good, but it was being eaten up by termites. So even though there were going to be difficulties involved in demolishing the old buildings and building the new ones in their place, we had to want to do this for it to happen.

When we have that desire, we then have to want to pay attention to all the steps that are involved. That brings in two other qualities that the Buddha said go into success in any skill. One is persistence, when you really try to do it well. The other is intentness: You really focus your full attention on what you’re doing.

So, try to do this well and give it your full attention. We go through life knowing that we’re breathing, but for the most part we don’t pay much attention to it. As a result, we don’t get as much out of the breath as we could.

The same with the mind: The mind gives in to its cravings, it gives in to its clingings and then it suffers—but it doesn’t know why. That’s because it’s not paying attention. So if you want to learn about craving, give yourself something good to desire and then watch what goes into trying to attain that desire, paying full attention all along the way.

Finally, the fourth quality is analysis. You’re going to run into problems, run into challenges, and you have to figure them out.

As we were trying to construct this building, it seemed as if an issue came up every day. The plans were quite detailed, but we had to do many things that were not in the plans, many details we had to focus on, so we had to give them our full attention and figure out how to do them well.

It’s the same with meditation. If the mind doesn’t settle down, you don’t just give up. You don’t say, “Well, I’ve learned the lesson that concentration is inconstant, impermanent. Leave it alone.” You have to build a state of concentration in the mind to understand it.

Like the old principle that if you want to understand eggs, you don’t just sit and look at the eggs or think about eggs or come up with theories about eggs. You cook with them. You try soufflés, you try scrambled eggs, you try omelets, steamed eggs, and in the course of that, you learn a lot about eggs. The better the dish you can make with them, the more they can sustain you, the more you keep up your interest in wanting to learn more about eggs.

It’s the same with the mind. The more you can create a sense of well-being inside by the way you focus on the breath, by the way you understand what you’re doing, the more you’re going to want to know about the mind.

So these are the four qualities that go into success in any skill: success in building this new meditation hall, success in getting the mind to settle down so that it gains some insight and understanding into itself. You see it more clearly because it’s engaged in doing something good. That’s when you understand it.

These four qualities that go into success—desire, persistence, intent, and using your powers of analysis—can be used for any sort of activity. You can even use them to succeed in anger or to succeed in lust.

When you want to be angry about somebody, there’s the desire to be angry and then you can put a lot of effort into thinking about why it’s a good thing because you’re justified in being angry. You can focus your full attention on what you think that other person has done wrong. You can analyze ways of getting back at that person. You succeed, but do you succeed in accomplishing anything of worth? And in the course of doing it, is it easy to observe your mind? When you’re taken up with anger, you focus more on things outside, while what’s going on in the mind gets obscured.

It’s the same with lust. You focus on the object of your lust, you want it, you work at it, you give it your full attention, you try to figure out ways of getting what you want. But the mind is dark. It’s obscured.

It’s only when you’re doing something really skillful with the mind that it’s easy to observe it. So getting the mind into a good state of concentration is an important skill you need to master. The Buddha put it at the heart of the path. We start with the right view. Notice that it’s right view—it’s not right knowledge. It’s, basically, right opinions about what causes suffering and how we can go about putting an end to it. We hold to these opinions to give us guidance in what we’re going to do.

But in order for right view to become really detailed, it needs the help of all the other factors of the path—and particularly right concentration. It’s in the course of getting the mind concentrated that you begin to see where your cravings are; what you’re holding on to; the things that you hold on to that prevent you from getting into concentration; the things you crave that disturb your concentration: You see them a lot more clearly because you’re aiming at this one focal point in mind.

Without your ability to settle down like this, whatever you may know about the path is all just theory, abstractions. But as you’re getting the mind to settle down, you’re dealing with the actual events in the mind—sorting out which ones you want to focus on, which ones you want to put aside. This is why we’re working on this skill.

Of all the different forest ajaans, Ajaan Lee was the one who most often would bring in this image of mastering skills. As he said, learning how to meditate is like learning how to sew a pair of pants, how to weave a basket, how to take silver or gold and make them into ornaments, how to make clay tiles. All these skills use the same four principles of having the desire, persistence, giving your full attention, and then reflecting on what you’re doing, figuring out where it can be improved.

Then we apply that same meditative sensitivity to the problem of suffering. Why is there suffering in the mind? Well, observe it as it’s trying to do something good and you’ll see that even with its best intentions, there are still things that need to be improved. You get more sensitive to how a state of concentration is put together and you realize that it’s put together in the same way that all other states of becoming are put together.

This gives you your prime evidence for how to take these things apart. And taking them apart, as the Buddha pointed out, is like dismantling a house. One way of learning how a house is built is to take it apart piece by piece by piece. In the same way, you take this apart: these states of suffering that the mind has created for itself. Take them apart and you learn how you don’t have to put them back together ever again. That’s where this skill is special.

With the skills of the world, there’s never really any end. You build a new building, and someday it’s going to fall down and will have to be replaced. Even before it falls down, it has to be maintained, and the people who maintain it have to know something about how it was built so they can maintain it properly. The work never ends.

But with the work of training the mind, there is an end—and it’s a good end. As the Buddha said, it’s the ultimate happiness, the ultimate freedom, the ultimate truth, a state of awareness that’s totally free of all the restrictions of the world. That’s where we’re aiming.

But to get there, we have to learn how to take apart what we’re doing right now, to understand it. If we don’t understand it or if we just have a theoretical understanding, it’s not going to happen. You can read about it, but only when you actually try to master the skills of the path do you get past the ignorance standing in the way. Because, remember, the Pali word for ignorance, avijjā, also means “lack of skill.” So we overcome our ignorance by mastering these skills—and in no other way.