The One Seat

Close your eyes and stay right here—right where the breath is coming in, breath is going out. Wherever you feel it in the body, stay right there. Make this your one seat.

An image from the forest tradition is that you have a house with one seat, and the person sitting in the seat gets to tell everybody else what to do. Everybody else has to stand or run around, based on the orders of the person sitting down. So you want to make sure that discernment, mindfulness, goodwill, all of your good qualities are taking the seat.

As for greed, aversion, and delusion, when they come in, let them stand. You don’t want them to seize the seat. If they do, then they start pushing you around. They become the people in charge of the house.

I read someone interpret this image as meaning that you get to sit in the seat, and there’s a parade of all sorts of wonderful things coming in and out of your mind. But it’s not a parade; there are people there trying to take over the seat. They want you to get out of the seat so they can take it. So you want to stay right here.

Bolt yourself down. Whatever happens, you’re going to be with the breath. You’re going to be centered right here. Then if the time comes to think, you can think, but you can think based right here.

In other words, try to be sensitive to the breath energy in the body. Give yourself a good comfortable place to stay, a good seat to stay in. If the seat is filled with chards of glass, nails, or tacks, you’re not going to sit down. You’re going to get up. Then anybody who’s nearby can just grab hold of the seat and it’s theirs.

So make sure that the seat is really, really comfortable. And try to be sensitive like the princess in the story of princess and the pea in the mattresses. The slightest little disturbance in the breath, okay, you don’t want it to stay. The slightest little bit of discomfort, the slightest knot of tension, try to ease it out, comb it out, so that the breath is comfortable all the way in, all the way out, and it’s a really good place to stay. That way, you can stay in charge. You don’t feel the need to jump up and run around.

When you’re in charge, then when greed comes you can say No. When anger comes you say No. You can send them out of the house. When delusion comes, you learn how to recognize it as delusion. Send it out of the house. You want to make sure that these things don’t take over, because if they do, then they make you run around and do things that are going to harm you. But then when the time comes when the harm comes back to you, they run away. They’re not responsible.

So you have to take responsibility for your actions, which means that you want to be right there when the actions are being chosen—to make sure they’re being chosen wisely. Whatever you do, say, or think, remember you don’t want to harm yourself; you don’t want to harm others. This is why we have the precepts to remind ourselves of standards for what counts as harm, what doesn’t count as harm.

When Ajaan Suwat was asked one time how to carry the practice into daily life, he pointed to the five precepts, making the point that following the precepts is a part of the meditation. You’re training the heart and the mind. You’re training your awareness and your will so that the training becomes complete. When you’re watching yourself holding to the precepts, it’s a lot easier to watch the mind than when you’re watching it filled with greed, aversion, and delusion, or memories of harm that you’ve done.

So. Make it easy for yourself to train the mind by holding to the precepts, developing your alertness, your mindfulness, your ardency, through the precepts, and then those qualities will carry into the meditation. Then if someone comes and tries to push you off the seat, you recognize what’s happening, and you can stay firmly grounded right here.