The Pursuit of Excellence
One of the strangest ideas about the Dhamma is that it’s all about being accepting and non-judgmental. This comes from getting the teachings backwards. We understand that things are inconstant and impermanent, but we also have a desire for happiness. If you put the inconstancy first, then that means you have to learn how to scale back your desire for happiness, to realize that whatever you may want is going to be inconstant, stressful, and out of your control, so you have to learn to be okay with that.
But that’s got things backwards. Your desire for a reliable happiness should come first; if you see anything as inconstant, it doesn’t meet the standards of that desire. When the Buddha taught inconstancy, it was basically a value judgment. Anything inconstant is stressful. Anything stressful is not worthy of being held on to as you or yours—because it wouldn’t make you happy. That means you have to abandon it and look for something better to satisfy your desire for a happiness that doesn’t change.
So you should honor your desire for true happiness and give it pride of place.
That’s what the Buddha did. He wanted a happiness that wasn’t subject to aging, illness, death, sorrow, or anything negative at all. He set out to find it and he found it. So the story of his life tells us that the desire for happiness should be honored and taken seriously because it can be fulfilled without harm to anyone at all.
Now, we’re not talking here about simple hedonism, where you pursue whatever pleasure captures your fancy regardless of the long-term consequences. The Buddha wants you to take your desire for happiness seriously enough to realize that you want a happiness that’s long-term. For it to be long-term, it can’t depend on anyone’s suffering. So you have to take other people’s happiness into consideration as well. And you’re going to have to be really careful about how you act, to make sure that what you do is actually conducive to happiness, that it doesn’t harm anyone.
These are the principles underlying the basic qualities of the Buddha: his wisdom, his compassion, his purity. That’s one of the messages of the teaching: that you develop wisdom, compassion, and purity by being mature in your pursuit of happiness. You’re wise in not settling for anything changeable, you’re compassionate in taking the happiness of others into account, and you’re pure in making sure that your actions actually fall in line with your ideals.
When you look at the Buddha’s quest for happiness, you realize that he was passing judgment on his actions all along the way. He would do something and then pass judgment on it: “Is this conducive to true happiness? Is this what I want? If it’s not, what should I change?” He was passing judgment with a compassionate purpose: to change his actions, improve his actions, so that they would yield good results both for himself and for others. He was basically pursuing excellence. He trained himself to be excellent in his actions, and he ultimately reached the highest excellence of all: nibbana.
When, later on, he gave a list of other names for nibbana, the list came down to five categories that give an idea of how good nibbana is.
One is that it’s a type of consciousness. There’s an awareness, but it’s an awareness without an object. The image the Buddha gives is of a sunbeam. He asks the monks, “Suppose there’s a house with a window in the eastern wall. When the sun rises, the sunbeams go through the window in the eastern wall. Where do they land?” The monks reply, “They land on the western wall.” “What if there’s no western wall?” “They land on the ground.” “What if there’s no ground?” Back in those days, they thought that the earth was supported by water, so the monks reply, “It lands on water.” “What if there’s no water?” “Then it doesn’t land.” The image for the awakened mind is of a light beam that doesn’t land. When it doesn’t land, you can’t see it because it’s not reflecting off anything, but it’s bright in and of itself. So there’s consciousness in nibbana.
There’s also freedom. Someone commented today that the idea of being outside of space of time sounded as if you were being frozen, but that’s like imagining yourself frozen in a moment in time. That’s not getting out of time. That’s being trapped in time. “Outside of space and time” means you’re totally free of any restraints.
Another quality is bliss: total, unadulterated happiness.
Another quality is truth. In other words, it doesn’t change on you. It’s not deceptive.
And finally, the fifth quality is excellence: It’s the ultimate. It’s beyond.
So as we follow the Buddha, we’re pursuing excellence in our pursuit of happiness. Nowadays, when they talk about the pursuit of excellence, it’s usually in terms either of sport or of making fancy watches. But that’s a very limited excellence. You can devote all your energies to mastering a game or to making something that looks impressive and tells very accurate time, but there are so many more worthwhile things to be doing. The Buddha found the most worthwhile excellence to pursue, which is a happiness that’s harmless and never disappoints.
But as many people have noted, the descriptions he gave of that happiness sometimes don’t sound all that inviting. One of the first discussion groups I led when I came back here to the States, on the four noble truths, went through the truths in order: one, two, three, four. We got to the third noble truth and talked about nibbana. Then we got to the fourth noble truth and we ended up talking about jhana. Everyone in the group said that jhana sounded a lot more appealing than nibbana.
Maybe the words, or the mental images we associate with the words, are more appealing, but when you’ve really mastered jhana and started contemplating it, you begin to realize that it has its drawbacks. To begin with, you can get really addicted to the pleasure. It feels really, really good. But you also realize that in order to maintain that pleasure, that sense of stillness, you have to work hard. It requires an unending effort. When that fact hits you, that’s when you think: “Maybe something unfabricated would be better.” When the opening to the unfabricated comes, you go for it, and you realize: It is much better.
Think of Ajaan Maha Boowa comparing the state of the luminous mind that at first he thought was awakening against the actual experience of awakening that he later came to. He said—excuse me—that the luminous mind, as compared to awakening, was a pile of shit.
When you get that point in your practice, your sensitivity toward happiness, your sensitivity to what’s involved in fabricating experience gets so acute that you really do see that the unfabricated is the ideal alternative even to very bright and expansive mind states. Until then, there’s a tendency in the mind to say, “Well, I can imagine something else I’d prefer.”
But look at your imaginings. We’ve been led around by our imaginings for how long? We don’t know how long. We’ve been going around and around and around for countless eons, led by our desire to think up this, think up that: “I can imagine something better than this. I can imagine something better than that.” There’s a tendency in the mind to keep flowing out. The Buddha called that asava. We’re so addicted to our imaginings that the idea of a pleasure that doesn’t require that we do any imagining—or do anything at all—sounds very disorienting. A pleasure that doesn’t require feeding sounds very alien to our ideas of happiness, all of which depend on feeding in one way or another, either physically or mentally.
So from the outside, nibbana may not sound all that good. But the Buddha said again and again: If you think that there’s going to be any disappointment or sense of dissatisfaction at all in nibbana, that’s wrong view.
What do we do in the meantime? We follow the four noble truths in refining our powers of judgment, because the four noble truths themselves are excellent standards for judgment. Wherever there’s suffering, you’ve got to look for its cause, because it’s something you want to abandon. You want to bring about the end of suffering. It’s not something to just note or to continue playing with.
Of course, the Buddha’s analysis of suffering—the five clinging-aggregates—when you actually think about what it means, goes against the grain. It’s saying that we cling to the things we want to see as ours, want to see as us, because we like them, yet that clinging is suffering. In other words, we suffer from our likes. We have to try to comprehend what he means in saying that.
He tells us that we have to abandon our cravings, but we like our cravings an awful lot. As he said, wherever we go, we go with craving as our companion. It’s constantly whispering in our ears, getting us to do stupid things. He’s trying to wean us away from that harmful companionship by describing the pleasures of the path, especially the pleasures of concentration.
Try to make these pleasures your friends.
What you’re doing is that you’re taking some good desires and you’re making them part of the path: the desire to be skillful, the desire to find a happiness that’s not subject to the drawbacks of sensuality. So you’re continuing to foster some desires. You’re continuing to flow toward the concentration. As you get more and more used to it, you realize: “Okay, this is a better pleasure.” A value judgment, but a good one.
You find that there are layers to the concentration as you peel them away. That, too, is a value judgment: You begin to realize that some states of concentration are more solid, more expansive, more peaceful than others, and so you go for them. This is what lifts your sights as to what’s possible in terms of happiness and pleasure. All too many of us are afraid of this pleasure because we’ve enjoyed pleasures in the past and then been really disappointed by them. Or we’ve gotten really heedless as we enjoyed those pleasures, and we’ve suddenly found ourselves in danger. So there’s a part of the mind that has some trepidation around pleasure.
But when you find a more reliable pleasure like this—and it really is more reliable—after a while, you begin to let go of your fear of it. You find you can really enjoy it. There’s still a little bit of heedlessness possible with concentration as you just hang out in stillness, but it’s a lot better than hanging out with your normal pleasures: the pleasures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and sensual fantasies. So here, again, you’re making a value judgment.
We’re not here just to rest content with whatever we’ve got. As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he was discontent with regard to skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities. Anything that was unskillful in his mind, he would drop it. As for what was skillful, he said: “If there’s anything more I can do, anything I still have to master that I haven’t mastered yet, I’ll go for it.” That pursuit of excellence was what enabled him to find the true Dhamma.
This is a pursuit of excellence that really is satisfying. You see people pursuing excellence in sport, but then they get too old to play the game, and the latter part of their lives is a real disappointment. They get really good at one thing and then they can’t do it anymore.
But with meditation, you can keep on doing it until your last breath—and even beyond—and it’s still possible to achieve great things. There are stories in the Canon of people who gained awakening at while dying. One of the Buddha’s relatives became a stream enterer at death, and when the Buddha happened to mention that that was what he’d attained, his other relatives were upset. They said, “Well, if he can do it, then anybody can do it.”
That’s actually good news. This is something you can keep on pursuing and pursuing. There may be some setbacks, but you can keep at it. And if you’re observant and use your ingenuity—or as the Buddha would say, if you commit to it and keep on reflecting again and again—you find that there are better and better levels of practice that you can accomplish. And you see they really are better, so you go for the best you can manage. This is one area where going for the best will never disappoint.
So hold in mind the fact that the goal, nibbana, really is excellent. And even though you don’t focus your primary attention on the goal—the strategy of having a path is that you focus instead on each step of the path—be confident that the path is leading you to a place so good that you can’t even imagine how good it is. It’s that special. And it’s way better than anything else.
