Nothing Lacking

Years back, at the beginning of the time I was about to come back to the States, Ajaan Suwat led a retreat at a meditation center back East. I was his interpreter. At the end of the retreat, someone asked, “How do you take meditation into daily life?” His response was to observe the five precepts. The person who organized the retreat was really upset. He felt that Ajaan Suwat was implying that lay people couldn’t really meditate in daily life. But that was not his point. His point was that observing the precepts is an important part of the meditation.

After all, as the Buddha said, when you’re practicing mindfulness for the sake of concentration, you have to be mindful, alert, and ardent. And a good way of developing those qualities is through holding on to the precepts. You have to be mindful of the precepts you’ve taken. You have to be alert to what you’re doing to make sure that it’s in line with the precepts. And if you find that it’s not in line with the precepts, you have to be ardent in changing your ways.

Ajaan Fuang once had a student who had been meditating with him in Bangkok. She came out to the monastery and saw that everybody else was observing the eight precepts, so she decided to take the eight precepts, too. Then in the afternoon, she was walking past a guava tree, and the guavas, she said, looked so inviting…. And before she knew it, there were a couple in her mouth. Ajaan Fuang happened to see that and he asked her, “What’s in your mouth? What happened to your precepts?”

That’s a case of forgetting the precepts and not being very alert to what you’re doing.

So these are good qualities to develop in this way. You don’t want to wait until you sit down on the cushion to start being mindful and alert. You have to be mindful and alert all through the day. And in giving you the precepts, the Buddha is not just giving you make-work. He’s giving you a way of behaving that’s totally harmless so that when you sit down to meditate, you don’t have to think about the harmful things you did in the course of the day. Otherwise, they’ll come rushing in.

There was another time I was helping to lead a retreat. One afternoon several days into the retreat, this one man in the group starting breaking down and sobbing. I was a little freaked out because everyone else in the room was acting as if nothing were happening. I found out later that’s the etiquette in retreats like this. But this was a case of someone who had been a drug dealer, and as his mind began to settle down and got more quiet, he started to think about all the people whose lives he had ruined by selling them drugs.

When that kind of stuff comes up in your mind, it’s hard to sit and observe the subtleties of your mind. So you want to make sure that you observe the precepts all the time, so that when you sit down to meditate, there are no wounds that you have to sit on, no hard scar tissue that you have to sit around. The mind is clear; the mind is open. When there’s less regret in the mind, it’s a lot easier to look back through time, and your mindfulness grows longer. After all, that’s what mindfulness is: keeping something in mind. You have to be able to remember useful things from the past to bring to bear on the present moment. Otherwise, you learn good lessons but then you forget them. It’s as if you never learned them.

So work with the precepts. Make that an important part of your practice and you’ll find that your meditation has a good, solid foundation.

I’ve been reading about people in universities now are starting to get interested in jhana, hoping to stick jhana meditators into MRI machines to figure out what brain waves they have—to see if they can help induce that same brain-wave pattern in other people, without all the work.

Well, the work is the important part of the practice. You learn about your mind. If someone could just send brain waves into your brain, what would you learn? What good does it do? It gives you some buzz and relaxation for a while. But what have you learned? If you learn how to wrestle your mind down, learn how to keep your mind in order—both with your eyes closed and with your eyes open—you’ve learned an awful lot of important lessons.

So make sure that you take on the entire training, not just part of it. As the Buddha said, there’s nothing in excess in his training, there’s nothing lacking. So make sure that your training has nothing in excess and nothing lacking, too.