Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out

We live in a world whose ways are very fickle. They give you things, and then they take them away. You gain wealth, and they can figure out some way to make your wealth not worth anything, even though you’ve worked for it. They give you status, and they can take your status away. They give you praise and acceptance, and then they can decide not to accept you. They give you pleasures; they give you pain. It’s pretty much the way of the world.

There’s very little outside of ourselves that we can take as solid or reliable. But then we look inside, and we wonder if we could ever be solid or reliable, too.

We need to look for something we can rely on, so that we can make sure we’re not deluded by the world—or by ourselves.

The Buddha recommends two things. He says the best exterior help for awakening is admirable friendship. The best interior help is developing appropriate attention. The two go together.

Start with admirable friendship. The Buddha says to look for people who have four qualities: They have conviction in the principle of kamma, they’re virtuous, they’re generous, and they’re discerning. You try to become a friend with people like that, and you try to emulate their qualities. You ask them about their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, their discernment, and then you try to follow their example.

Most difficult, of course, is the discernment. You find that it comes down to the questions they ask.

Look at the Buddha teaching his son: At the very beginning, he said that if you’re going to do anything, look first at your intention. If you anticipate any harm, either to yourself or others, don’t do it. If you don’t anticipate any harm, then you can go ahead and do it. While you’re doing it, if you see that any harm is coming up, even though you tried your best not to cause any harm, you stop. If you don’t see any harm, you continue. When you’re done, you reflect again about the long-term consequences. If you see that you really did cause any harm, you go and talk it over with someone else you respect. In other words, you find an admirable friend, to get some advice on how to avoid that mistake in the future. If you don’t see any harm, then take pride in the fact, take joy in the fact, that your practice is developing, and then continue training yourself this way every day.

The trick there, of course, is to recognize harm. But the important part of all this is to get you sensitive to what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing, because this is the area where we most tend to be deluded.

We learn at a very early age that if we do something wrong but then deny it strongly enough, then our parents may believe that we didn’t actually do it. But then we start denying it to ourselves. That’s where it gets dangerous. That’s where the delusion begins to come in.

This is where it’s important to have that admirable friend and to consult with that friend when you’re not really sure, or where you begin to suspect that maybe you’re lying to yourself or to other people.

You look for an admirable friend because you want to do your best. If you’re going to learn anything, you have to start by doing your best, and by following the best examples around you. I know a lot of talented people who basically phone it in, feeling that they’re good enough, so they don’t have to put much effort into it. But they don’t learn anything.

You have to regard your life as a skill because, as with any skill, if you do it poorly, the results come out poorly, and the results can have a long-term effect.

So the Buddha’s trying to get you to be sensitive to what you’re doing and to the results you’re getting, and to keep on trying to get better and better results. This is where the example of the admirable friend comes in. To pick up this person’s discernment, you want to see: What questions does this person ask? What questions does he encourage?

There’s that story about Ajaan Sao, who was Ajaan Mun’s teacher. Luang Phaw Phut, who at the time of Ajaan Sao was a young novice living with Ajaan Sao, later recounted what it was like to watch Ajaan Sao teaching. When he taught you meditation, if you had any theoretical questions, he wouldn’t answer them. Even something simple like repeating the word buddho: If you asked him, “What does buddho mean?” he’d say, “Don’t ask.” “What’s going to happen when I do it?” “Don’t ask. Just do it.”

Then if the person went ahead and did it, and he’d come back and say, “Well, I tried what you said, and I got these results.” That’s what Luang Por Sao was interested in listening to: the results. That, and the issue of: To what extent does the person connect what he or she did with the results that he or she got.

If the results were not right, he’d say, “This is not right. You have to change what you’re doing.” And he would give some ideas of what the person might do instead.

If the results were okay, he wouldn’t say they were right. He’d just say, “Keep on practicing that way.” After all, if you were absolutely right in the training of your mind, you’d be an arahant. You’d be totally awakened. Here you’re heading in the direction of right, but you’re not there yet.

Ajaan Fuang was similar in the way he taught. He’d give instructions on how to meditate and you’d start meditating in his presence. Then, when you got so that you were a little bit more independent, he’d send you off to meditate on your own. If you had anything arising in the meditation but you couldn’t explain what you had done leading up to that, he didn’t want to hear it. The question always was, “What did you do before that happened?”

This is what discernment is all about: connecting your actions with the results, and being honest with yourself about both. This is why the Buddha said that he looked for two qualities in a student: that the person be honest and observant.

By observant, he meant noticing what you do and what results you’re getting, and being able to judge whether they’re good or not. Now, that ability to judge is something you’re going to develop. The honesty lies in saying, “Yes, I really did this, and these are the results I really got, and they really were connected.”

That’s an important part of the training. We’re not here just to have wonderful experiences. We’re here to figure out what we’re doing, with the aim of having something solid inside.

That chant we had just now: “We’re subject to aging, illness, death, separation.” The first three contemplations have to do with our bodies. The fourth contemplation has to do with things we encounter in the world: the people you love, the things you love, things you depend on, the people you depend on. You’re going to be separated from them.

So the world doesn’t offer you much to rely on.

The fifth contemplation, “I’m the owners of my actions”: This is what we have to rely on—what we’re doing—so you want to be very careful that you’re not deluded about what you’re doing. And you don’t deny what you’re doing. You have to learn how to see the connections between what you’re doing and the results you get.

In some cases, the results come right away. In other cases, it takes time, which is why you have to develop mindfulness to be a reliable judge so that you can remember what you’ve done. Mindfulness is not just being aware of what’s happening, you know. It’s keeping things in mind—most particularly, keeping in mind that when you do x, you’ve got to look for the results. When you begin to see the results, you want to check them again and again, to make sure they really are connected, because the practice that leads to awakening is going to require that you be really, really clear about what you’re doing.

Even in the refined states of concentration, we’re not there just to bliss out, say, on emptiness or space or the quality of the breath. We want to see very clearly: When you do this, when you hold this perception in mind, when you focus in this way, what are the results you’re getting? If you change the focus, change the perception, what results do you get? You want to be clear about that.

In this way, you become your own admirable friend. You establish an admirable friendship inside, which is where you really need to rely on it, because admirable friends are not everywhere. Even when you find one, you can’t guarantee that that person’s going to live long enough or be with you long enough for you to learn everything you’ll need to learn. So you try to learn your best as you can. Then you practice admirable friendship: by trying things out, and being really observant of what you’re doing.

This is why alertness is an important part of training your mindfulness: being alert to what you’re doing, the results you’re getting, and then checking them against what you’ve learned in the past to figure out what’s up to standard and what’s not. And you try your best. This way, you begin to rely on yourself, so that as you live in this body of aging, illness, and death, in this world of separation, this world of material gain and loss, status and loss of status, acceptance and non-acceptance, pleasure and pain, you can find something solid and reliable.

You’re going to find it inside. Some people provide examples outside on how to find it, and they give us some ideas, but to find what’s generally reliable, you have to look inside.

This is what I think is meant by that Zen koan about whether there’s Buddha nature in a dog. The master says No. It’s supposed to be paradoxical, because the basic Zen teaching is everybody has Buddha nature. Why would the master say No? I think it’s because If you want to see the potential for awakening, you don’t look in other people. You certainly don’t look in dogs. You’re going to have to find it in yourself. You can get good examples from other people, and there are dogs who actually give good examples in some areas—they know gratitude, often better than most human beings do—but if you want to find the real thing, you’re going to have to find it inside, using your own powers of being observant and being honest.

And learning how to ask the right questions: about what you’re doing, the results you’re getting, and how you can improve. That’s when the discernment we learn from our admirable friends becomes appropriate attention within us, so that both principles—the foremost outside practice and the foremost inside principle—become one in our thoughts, words, and deeds.

That’s why we have that fifth reflection. It teaches us to look in the right place, to look in our actions and to reflect on the results. It’s through our actions that something solid can be found.

When the Buddha talks about the knowledge that leads to awakening, it’s right here: the Dhamma eye that sees that “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.” This doesn’t mean that whatever arises passes away. Origination usually refers to causes that come from within the mind. Cessation comes from dispassion. You learn how to train yourself to look at things in such a way that gives rise to dispassion. Then from the dispassion comes the ability to open up to something that is really reliable inside, something that doesn’t change.

It’s not a world at all. That’s when you know you’ve found something solid.

In the meantime, you’re heading in that direction as long as you keep looking at your actions and doing your best to learn how to judge the results, for the sake of trying again, trying again.

We work with trial and error until we finally get to trial and success.