24. Herding Your Thoughts (1)

Those concentration attainments, in fact, lie at the heart of the second phase in the training to subdue desire and passion: training in the heightened mind.

In one of the Buddha’s autobiographical accounts (MN 19), he relates how he brought his mind to concentration by first dividing his thoughts into two sorts—based, not on whether he liked them or not, but on the results they would lead to. On the one side were thoughts imbued with sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness. On the other, thoughts imbued with renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness. Thoughts of the first sort, he saw, would lead either to his own affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both. They would obstruct discernment and not lead to unbinding. Thoughts of the second sort, though, would lead to affliction for no one. They would promote discernment and lead to unbinding.

So he resolved on holding thoughts of the first sort in check, but would allow thoughts of the second sort to roam free. He compared himself to a cowherd. During the rainy season, when rice is growing in the fields, the cowherd has to keep beating his cows away from the rice fields so that they don’t damage the crops. That’s how the Buddha had to treat his unskillful thoughts and desires: He would “abandon them, destroy them, dispel them, and wipe them out of existence.”

At the end of the dry season, though, the rice has been harvested, so there’s no danger of the cows’ damaging the crops. At that time of the year, the cowherd “while resting under the shade of a tree or out in the open, simply keeps himself mindful of ‘those cows.’” That’s how the Buddha could treat his skillful thoughts, simply being mindful of their existence.

He noted that he could think skillful thoughts for a whole day or night without causing any danger aside from the fact that thinking a lot tires the body. When the body is tired, the mind is disturbed and far from concentration. So to keep his mind undisturbed, he steadied it within and brought it into right concentration.

The Buddha’s account here teaches two important lessons. First, it shows how his lessons to Rāhula in how to grow in the Dhamma through commitment and reflection—commitment to the practice of skillfulness and reflection on the results of your commitment—lead directly to the practice of concentration. The Buddha judged his thoughts by their results, abandoning those that led to affliction, promoting those that avoided it. Then he further refined his standards so that he would act in ways that would avoid not only affliction, but also mental disturbance.

The second lesson is that the practice of concentration has to carry on the battle between your determination for awakening on the one hand, and your unruly desires and passions on the other. This is reflected in the many martial metaphors the Canon applies to the entire path, from the beginning all the way through the practice of concentration and discernment, to victory at awakening (SN 45:4; Iti 57, 62, 82). However, it’s worth noting that when moving from the discussion of virtue to concentration, the Buddha supplements martial metaphors with metaphors based on people developing skills—such as cooks or archers in training—apparently to indicate that the work of avoiding unskillful actions and promoting skillful ones in their place continues but gets more refined.

The need to overcome many unskillful desires before you can enter right concentration is shown throughout the Canon in two facts: (1) Discussions of the stages of the practice mention that the five hindrances, including sensual desire and the desires of ill will, have to be overcome first before entering the first jhāna. (2) The definition of the first jhāna, or level of mental absorption, starts by saying that the meditator is “secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities.” SN 45:22 defines unskillful qualities as wrong versions of the factors of the noble eightfold path, from wrong view through wrong concentration.

This is why right effort and right mindfulness are part of training in the heightened mind. They do the work of eliminating unskillful mental states.

AN 8:30, the discourse that describes the mental qualities that make you worthy of the Dhamma, defines persistence, which is equivalent to right effort, as follows:

Desire plays two main roles in developing this sort of persistence. The first role is implicit in discussions of right effort and relates to the prime duty of effort and persistence in the larger context of the four noble truths. Because the path as a whole is designed to attack the problem of suffering at its causes—unskillful desires and passions—those are the things that right effort has to attack. As the Buddha notes, these causes fall into two sorts: those for which you can develop dispassion simply by looking at them with equanimity, and those for which you can develop dispassion only when you exert fabrications against them (MN 101). “Fabrications” here apparently means the three fabrications listed in dependent co-arising: bodily, verbal, and mental.

Causes of suffering that fall into the first sort can be abandoned with minimal effort. However, it’s not the case that this requires no desire or effort at all. After all, even equanimity is a fabricated state of mind, which means that you have to want to be equanimous toward causes of this sort if you’re going to get past them. It’s simply that the strategy in dealing with them is fairly straightforward. You talk yourself into looking at them steadily, and they wither away in the steadiness of your gaze.

Causes of the second sort, though, don’t. When you stare at them, they stare right back. To get rid of them, you have to think strategically, using concerted determination and desire to foster the proper types of fabrication to do battle with them.

To help with both strategies, the Buddha’s teachings in the discourses are full of guidelines for how to develop skillful fabrications of all three types: how to breathe, how to talk to yourself, and what images/perceptions to hold in mind to develop dispassion for the causes of suffering, whatever the sort. In fact, you could say that all of his teachings are guidelines for how to apply knowledge to fostering skillful versions of these three types of fabrication so as to turn them into the path.

The second role for desire in persistence is explicitly mentioned in the standard definition for right effort, which emphasizes the need to generate desire to motivate your efforts:

All three fabrications play a role in generating the desire to practice, and the Buddha provides examples of how to skillfully employ all three.

Skillful ways of breathing will be discussed under the topic of breath meditation, below.

As for the other two types of fabrication:

The Canon recommends many similes to be used as perceptions—mental fabrications—to motivate your efforts. One we’ve already noted above: Persistence is like the soldiers defending a fortress on the edge of a frontier (AN 7:63). Another is that if you stick with your efforts all the way to awakening, you’re like a person searching for heartwood who doesn’t let himself rest content with the easier-to-attain leaves, bark, or softwood. He keeps on searching until he finds the heartwood that can best serve his true purpose (MN 29).

The Canon also recommends many ways of talking to yourself—exerting verbal fabrications—to generate skillful desires to stick with the path in general, and with the practice of concentration in particular. The primary desires it recommends are those connected with heedfulness. You see the dangers that come from not training the mind, and how they can be avoided if you do train the mind, so you want to exert right effort right now.

Other ways of generating skillful desires recommended in the Canon include developing—

goodwill with the thought that you and others will suffer less if you have trained your mind to be free of defilements, and—if you’ve attained any of the noble attainments—the gifts given to you will bear great fruit for the donors (MN 6; MN 39);

shame with the thought that when you’re on your deathbed and your fellow monks ask you if you’ve gained any superior attainments, you don’t want to suffer the embarrassment of having to say you have none (AN 10:48);

inspiration, thinking of the great meditators of the past who were able to train their minds in spite of hardships, and letting that thought rouse you to follow their example (Thag 5:8).

The Canon even shows how to skillfully use craving and conceit when talking to yourself to motivate your efforts to overcome any craving and conceit that would get in the way of following the path:

And—contrary to those who hold that the desire to attain the goal should be dropped because there’s pain when you realize that you haven’t arrived there yet—the Buddha actually recommends cultivating what he calls renunciation-based distress as motivation for doing the practice so that you can arrive at the happiness of liberating insight. In the following passage, he provides an example of how to employ verbal fabrication to induce the mental fabrication of this skillful feeling of distress:

As we’ll see, on the higher levels of the path, the desire to gain awakening can sometimes get in the way of awakening, but before you reach that stage of the practice, you need that desire to keep you going in your efforts to abandon unskillful mental qualities and to develop skillful ones in their place.

The ability to motivate yourself to practice right effort requires that you be able to read your mind, to detect what sort of motivation will work at any particular time. As we noted above, one of the measures of discernment is your ability to talk yourself into abstaining from a course of action that you like to do but will yield long-term harm, or to talk yourself into adopting a course of action that you don’t like doing but will yield long-term benefit. In this way, your determination on discernment and truthfulness work together to relinquish what has to be abandoned to bring the mind to calm.