For example one should consider that spite or pride is unworthy of oneself rather than an honest appraisal of ‘how I really am.’ Otherwise, there is no dispelling of darkness from the mind; when one comes across it, one just obsesses with it, worries, punishes oneself or tries to distract or deny. These reactions are also negative, even depressing, so their overall effect is to increase the weight of negativity. Then negativity can saturate the body, and people even become physically ill with things like doubt, depression, worry or guilt. The subtle body energy is affected by negative mind states; it dwindles and the aspiration that should carry us along goes flat.

We inherit a certain amount of bad resultant kamma from negligence and not knowing. We have probably blundered through life not being that clear, and so bashed into things and got bruised and knocked around. Then, on becoming a little more conscious in the present, we begin to experience the dents and the afflictions of the heart (citta). This is what we inherit, the vipaka. So what can we use to push the dents out of the heart? What will repair its wounds? In Buddhism, the emphasis is to create good kamma in the present moment; to do good. That engenders the strength to repair the damage, the wounds, or the afflictions from the past. That encouragement requires an act of faith: faith that the state we are in now may be afflicted and negative but we can still bring around a goodness that will increase. Of the images that the Buddha used, one of the most attractive and memorable is of a trickle of water running down a hill; how that trickles and goes over the crags and drops down the gully – and gradually other streams flow into it. That image presents something that was first of all just an insignificant little trickle, then it gradually accumulates, and as it accumulates it cuts deeper, and as it cuts deeper it attracts more water to it. Just as a big river will attract other streams to it, goodness gets fuller and bigger until nothing is going to stop it. It gets so big it sweeps down to the sea; and there it can empty itself completely.

So simply from any humble beginning, good states tend to attract other good states to them. And they wear down the mass of ignorance, and the mass of doubt, or guilt, or shame, or fear, that afflict and constrict the heart. But if we try and shift all the stuff without having even a little trickle of water, then we just feel frustrated, and that tends to increase it.

Meditation itself is a skilful mental kamma. It entails the mental activities of focussing, of refining and investigating, and of gladdening and uplifting. It enables us to see through the mass of confusion to the primary purity of the citta. Exactly how, when and where you meditate, is really dependent on whether it increases these skilful states. Now if your meditation causes bad states to increase so that you get more obsessive and more spaced-out or lost, then this is not right meditation. Meditation is not just about sitting, it’s whether the mind can be skilful. And if at any time one can’t cultivate goodness through introspective sitting this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope; it means that you should practise other skilful kamma. So there’s always some possibility. There is always some act of generosity that you can do, some act of calming, some act of service; and the result of that will be that it will increase the sense of confidence and trust in oneself. Knowing that there is something one can do for others’ well-being diminishes the sense of isolation and self-importance; it tends to open rather than constrict the mind’s perspectives.

Understanding this truth of kamma can give rise to a strong sense of saddha or confidence. This faith is paramount because then such issues as ‘how long’ or ‘when will I get enlightened?’ are swept away: you know there is only one thing you can do – which is to continue to cultivate. It doesn’t matter if it’s going to take you one year, ten years, a life-time, ten life-times. Such ideas aren’t anything you can use skilfully, they’re purely indirect notions. They do not in themselves foster good states, they tend to foster either arrogance, or impatience, or doubt, or worry.

When we consider good states and their cultivation, the kindling, arousing, and gladdening of the mind into brightness, there are many good opportunities. We can cultivate kindness, patience, clarity, generosity, renunciation, faith, concentration, mindfulness... and so on. You may think, ‘What should I cultivate? Which one should I cultivate first? Which is the priority?’

The Buddha would say: ‘Paramount is Right View, Wrong View is the most harmful state and Right View is the pre-eminent.’ Right View includes such things as understanding this law of kamma, the law of cause and effect, that if one does good one will get good results. And in terms of the general overview, the recognition that one good state will connect to other good states – that very recognition is also an aspect of Right View. Get to know this in the heart; don’t make it more complicated than that, because kamma is that which you do, so you have to make your view clear and simple enough to act out. Then cultivate what is nearest at hand and lead from your strong point, bearing the perspective of the Eightfold Path in mind.

With Right View, as one does good and acknowledges that action, the mind becomes more settled, and meditation is a lot easier. The process can be seen in terms of accessing and developing certain spiritual faculties: faith (saddha), energy (viriya), mindfulness (sati), concentration (samadhi) and wisdom (pañña). These are known as indriya – leaders – in the process of Awakening.

The beginning of any Path requires some sort of faith. So what is this? Whereas depression and despair mean that there’s no going forward – there are no results, you’re stuck – faith is the opposite: the sense of possibility and potential. All good states must arise from that and strengthen that. Any realizations or insights one has will deepen and strengthen one’s sense of faith.

At first faith is just an intuition: ‘There must be something better than this’; then it becomes: ‘There is a better than this,’ or, ‘Somebody does better than this,’ or, ‘There’s such a thing as a Buddha, or Dhamma,’ and then it’s: ‘I can do a little bit better than I did yesterday,’ and, ‘Yes there is, and I can.’ Then faith becomes confidence: ‘Yes, I have done better, I have steered away from a harmful habit, I’ve done it once, it can be done.’ And perhaps when one’s practice matures further it becomes conviction: ‘It can only be this way.’ Faith encompasses the awareness of potential, the confidence both in one’s ability and in the Path, and then the conviction that accompanies accomplishment. It is a graduated process.

In the Buddha’s teaching, you can begin with any one skilful quality and see how it ties in with all the others. I use faith because this is where we have to begin to practise, with some feeling that things aren’t right, and there must be something better. Then as the Buddha explained, perhaps one meets a teacher, or in our day-and-age one reads a book, and something sparks and kindles. Faith has arisen. Then faith naturally gives rise to an interest in applying oneself to the teachings. So one does, one applies effort. So faith conditions energy and the application of energy.

Energy that comes from faith opens and extends the heart: this is the energy associated with commitment and faith. Another primary mode of energy is that which establishes a specific focus and encourages investigation: this is the energy associated with mindfulness. These are key factors in the process of meditation, and they provide one with the strength and the inclination to investigate experience.

Mindfulness is the factor that takes up a reference point – such as body or feeling – then surveys it and refers to unbiased awareness: ‘What are you doing? What’s happening?’ That must come in, otherwise the effort and the energy don’t have a direction. Mindfulness is the foundation for concentration and wisdom; it prunes away what is irrelevant or distracting, and makes one more fully aware of what is relevant at any particular time. With mindfulness, we begin to get in touch with the reality of our minds and dispense with the regrets, doubts and confusion. These are all aspects of what meditation is about.

Samadhi is very often translated as concentration, but I find this to be an inadequate expression. Rather, it’s a mindful gathering of skilful qualities into the present that blends into something palpable. Samadhi is an established state of ease for the mind and heart to dwell upon. When the mind doesn’t have samadhi, it dwells upon a plane of reality where things are seen as distinctly different and going off in different directions; the mind can get very scattered. There is ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’, and ‘she’ and ‘him’, and ‘this’ and ‘that’, and things are going all over the place with different energies. If your mind gets hooked by that, everything you see and feel confirms the differences in things. The mind’s energy is geared to the realm in which some things are going quickly, some things are going slow, some things are out of gear altogether, so its energies are in conflict and turmoil.

The plane of samadhi emphasises the unity. For example a degree of samadhi occurs when one refers through mindfulness to what precisely is affecting the heart. This could be either a painful feeling, a neutral feeling, a pleasant feeling: a feeling associated with somebody leaving us, a feeling associated with receiving a gift, it can be a feeling associated with winning the World Cup or losing the World Cup, however instead of seeing ‘World Cup,’ ‘man, woman,’ ‘coming, going,’ you feel ‘pleasant feeling,’ ‘neutral feeling,’ ‘painful feeling.’ That’s a much more simplified reality than that in which the diversity of objects is accentuated. So in meditation we are dealing with just two or three ways in which experience manifests: a sensed or conceived object, a feeling and how we react to that.

What does it mean to feel something? It means there is a certain vibration; a certain resonance occurs. Now when mindfulness has established a preliminary level of samadhi, it can refer to the experience directly. The mind is in a state whereby its receptivity is finely attuned – rather like a spider’s web – and it vibrates when something strikes it. With mindfulness and samadhi, the emphasis is on just getting to that point of vibration, because the important thing to learn is not whether it’s a gnat or a bat or a raindrop, but whether there is aversion to it, or whether there is clarity or confusion around it. In this way mindfulness and samadhi present hindrances and joys as palpable experiences. This is a surer basis for wisdom than the many ideas and possible notions about the way out of suffering and stress.

Often in the practice of meditation the mind drops deeper into a calmer samadhi for a while but then it’s thrown out. What happened? If you don’t know what and where an obstacle is in practice, the mind loses its unity and becomes agitated. So inquire: ‘What was that about?’ and with mindfulness steer back to that point and review it. If the mind gets thrown out again, go back to a simple meditation object to calm and steady the mind, then review again and again, to really witness what threw it out. This is how mindfulness and samadhi work together. Then wisdom will arise into the momentary nature of mental stress and upheaval.

Sati and samadhi help the mind to hold onto itself. In samadhi the mind is experienced as a continuum of energy, which one can feel contract or pull out if any greed or aversion arises. But when you then investigate that greed or aversion or agitation and learn to calm or relax it, a whole personal scenario falls away. This is the process of pañña, wisdom. This wisdom is not the ability to juggle concepts, but the ability to discern the process of the mind clearly and know how to respond in order to end suffering and stress.

Wisdom deepens Right View to the understanding of the selfless nature of processes. That is, the heart can know a state as unskilful, but as just that: nothing but agitation, not a person, nothing special. And that any state is of the nature to drop away. When our problems are seen in this way, we see them more as things that affect us or that momentarily occur rather than something that we are. This gives rise to faith as self-respect, and facilitates the inquiry into the nature of the mind’s obstacles and suffering. In this way these five leaders support each other.

So mind-cultivation is not just a technique is it? It’s a process, and involves learning how to apply ourselves. It’s the skilful kamma of custodianship of faith, of mindfulness, of energy, of samadhi, of wisdom, within a changing mental realm.

Even when a hindrance like anger is flagrant, we can overlook it by focussing on the object of our anger and feeling certain that it is unfair, or horrible, rather than focus on the mental state itself. Again, often one doesn’t really know the quality of ill-will, restlessness and doubt as such: when there is a subtle resistance or a slight disdain, it’s easy to miss that and think, ‘He’s that kind of a person, isn’t he? We all know that.’ Then one can say, ‘Yes, that’s got an objective reality there,’ because it’s something we can all subscribe to. Whereas in the Buddha-Dhamma the teaching is: in whatever arises, what we have to be aware of is any quality of aversion or greed we may have for it.

One parable the Buddha gave was of the saw1. ‘Imagine bandits caught you at a cross-road and started sawing you apart with a big two-handed saw,’ said the Buddha. ‘If you experience any degree of ill-will then I don’t reckon you’ve really penetrated this teaching.’ We might think this is far-fetched – to not experience any kind of ill-will towards someone sawing us apart – but it’s only a parable for a start, and what it means is that no matter how justified one’s sense of aversion to something is, still the aversion to that is just making it worse. When bandits are sawing you apart, aversion to it doesn’t help. It is an unnecessary gloss on events and an increase in the suffering that one experiences.

In real-life circumstances our fear, aversion, or worry may have justifications that paralyse the mind from seeing the possibilities of a skilful action. I remember a bhikkhu telling me of a friend who was a doctor, a heart specialist. The doctor was out with his girlfriend, and she had a heart attack. He was so shocked that he couldn’t function properly and she died. So you can see that a hindrance is more than just a little personal blemish, it can be that which literally does hinder the mind from being endowed and actuating its fullest skills.

How many times do we find ourselves psychologically crippled by a hindrance? When we’re numb and shut down and there is something really bothering us, but we’re too angry to even talk about it? Then things continue to go along that way because we can’t get clear enough to even explain what’s going wrong. Sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it? Stress and depression can prevent us from asking for help. In ways like this, the hindrances stop us from doing the kind of thing that would bring us out of them; they can stop us from even trusting our fellow humans, so that we start to commit the spiritual suicide of destroying our faith.

Meditation practice happens in the context of this living process – of happiness, clarity, or their absence, of physical energies; and also of whatever life brings up for us. For a start, the body adapts to sitting in meditation over the years. Speaking personally, I find it easier to meditate now than I did twenty-three years ago; it gets easier to drop things. Then as some attachments drop away, there are realizations, new vistas and new challenges to be aware of.

Meditation is rather like learning to sit: on day one you can be told ‘This is how you sit, you sit in full lotus, and then bring your back up and relax your shoulders and so forth. That’s how to sit in meditation.’ So you do that, but it’s painful within seconds; you can’t even get your legs crossed. It may take a year or more to get the posture feeling comfortable and supportive. It’s the same with the mind: you can give it a teaching in a few sentences but the process described in that teaching might take five years. What you learn is to go with it, rather than setting time limits and agendas. For example, cultivating mindfulness of body entails doing it repeatedly and having faith in it. First of all having faith in just getting to your body, knowing what a hindrance feels like – not what you judge it as, but the constriction, the bondage, the pressure of a hindrance – then learning how to relax that bondage and release yourself. There’s a process to go through. When we say ‘focus on the breath’ what does it take to focus on an inhalation and an exhalation and stay with that? It’s rather like lowering yourself down a slippery rope without sliding to the bottom of it or falling off it; you have to learn to apply the right kinds of pressures so that you don’t get too tight and you don’t get too loose. It’s a maturation of know-how, not a competition.

And one can always learn from events. Recently the event for me that was most dramatic was of Ajahn Candasiri suddenly being carried out to an ambulance and whisked off to hospital. Someone tells me: ‘They came from the hospital to take her away,’ and the mind jumps. I think: ‘My goodness, what is happening?’ And then somebody says: ‘It was pains in the head, something wrong with the brain.’ And the mind goes: ‘Brain! That isn’t like a sprained wrist, this is serious!’ Then: ‘Who knows, maybe this is it, stroke, brain tumour, head fallen off – Ajahn Candasiri walking around with her head in a plastic bag for the rest of her life! What’s going on?’ ‘She could die!’ Then comes the thought: ‘What do you mean she could die, she will die. We all will die, what’s this ‘could?’ She’s got no choice, we’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of what day is it going to be.’ And the mind goes from the idea of ‘Ajahn Candasiri in pain,’ and the possibility – ‘she might die,’ to the realization that we are all on Death Row. She’s dead already in one way: the reality of her death is right there. It’s etched in stone.

So I have to look at that, and then my own death and then everybody’s death – and contemplate: ‘What actually is that about in my own mind?’ That is when I say the word ‘Candasiri,’ those four sounds evoke a picture, and then a mood. This is called sañña – perception – a mind object. The mood is one of warmth, trust, these kind of things; it’s not a mood I want to dispel. Whereas if you said ‘tarantula,’ or ‘Dracula,’ or ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer,’ the mood would be: ‘Oh no, get me out of here!’ But when you say the word ‘Candasiri’, that gives rise to a pleasant mood. And then ‘Candasiri dead,’ ‘Candasiri agony, pain, dead:’ there’s resistance to that. What one is actually dealing with is a perception. And when the perception is there of something that is known, familiar and reliable then I feel at ease; I feel there is a little bit of my world that is taken care of, and there is a pleasant mood. Then if it’s suddenly taken away there is a bit of that gone, and that’s the thing that hurts. Yet when the perception is known directly, it’s clearly not the same thing as the physical being, Candasiri, walking around, who probably has quite a different perception of herself than I do of her. Then some of you might think ‘She’s the nun who sits over there, and gives a talk now and then.’ Or her mother, ‘There was my daughter Katie who wasted her life when she could have married a banker and done all kinds of useful things.’ So those are all different things, aren’t they?

When we look here on the shrine, there is a picture which is of Venerable Anandamaitreya. There is this image of a bhikkhu, and there he is smiling at me, but he’s dead. And we look at him and he’s not dead, is he? It’s not a dead body. So we look and think: ‘Venerable ©nandamaitreya’, and then think ‘heap of dust’, which is what that body is now – so where’s Anandamaitreya? Then look at the photo of Candasiri on the shrine – ‘is she alive or dead now?’ And then, what about the bhikkhu sitting next to me here? Who’s that? When the mind is settled we recognize that that’s a Karuniko perception, endowed with fondness and familiarity. The mind feels good, feels happy with that perception. Then take it away, and something is lost. So we can begin to recognize that we’re looking at something that is part of what we are. If we’d never known Candasiri, never heard of her, there’d be nothing missing would there? But now there is the possibility to welcome or to be irritated by etc. etc., and then to lose; all that becomes possible. That’s nothing to do with this human being walking around on the planet, that’s to do with what the mind has taken in.

So I consider: ‘What now can I do that is skilful toward this person?’ Since I’m not a doctor, the perception in the mind is the thing to work on. Even more than kindness, the fundamental quality to give it is faith: not to hold or to worry, not to create unskilful mind states around that person, but to try instead to engender the mind state of faith – ‘You’ve done well; you’ve done many good deeds; you’ve accumulated good kamma, there will always be something better for you.’ Then one feels uplifted. One isn’t shutting oneself off from the issue, one is actually blessing and enriching the perceptions of that person with something that lifts one’s own heart: ‘You’re someone who does well, good states have arisen, there are good results.’

Incidents like these, which are, on an ordinary level of reality, saddening, upsetting or disappointing, can actually strengthen our faith and strengthen our view, our Right View. When we can acknowledge that we’re all dead, we’re all on the terminal ward, it gives us the chance to say: ‘We’ve done well, we’re doing well, there will be further goodness for us.’ Whereas whenever we attach to the idea on an emotional level of people being permanent, there’s the assumption that the perception we have of them in the present will persist into the future. And because of that we either take them for granted, or are anxious, or disappointed if they do not continue to support our perception of them. We’re not actually feeling grateful for them. It’s not, ‘Oh, Karuniko you’re still here! Wonderful!’ It’s ‘Here he is again, so what?’ and then we can ignore him or even think of things he didn’t do in accordance with our own opinions.

When we acknowledge the fragility of it all, there’s a sense of enjoyment in life – we’re living a miracle. And because of that, what can we do? We can only be good, we can only engender faith, we can only engender trust because there’s nothing else that’s reliable. The whole of the conditioned world is a tissue of perceptions and moods and memories, shuffled together to produce some sort of reality. We take it as solid, but it can be blown apart with a flicker of the mind.

So what is solid? Faith is solid. Mindfulness is solid. Energy is solid. Samadhi is solid. Pañña is solid. These are things to rest the mind upon. Not as a way of avoiding daily life issues, but as the core of what sustains life as a conscious human being. The rest of it we just get good luck with for a while. So we shouldn’t take that good luck for granted, or complain about the bits and pieces where it’s not perfect, but know where the core of reality is. Things such as painful feeling, pleasant feeling, neutral feeling – these are really not the issue, it’s how much we stick and get stuck to feeling. How much we need feeling. Even on the level of needing feeling, there is a way of feeling that is most secure, which is the feeling of joy in the Dhamma. This is our birthright. No pain, sickness, or death can take that away.

This Dhamma, then, is to be cultivated. And we cultivate by any good quality that’s nearby – any good quality that we’re intimate with. We can recognize it, rejoice in it, and then assimilate it, and then see how it connects to other good qualities. Then we experience that sense of the completeness, of the wheel of the Dhamma that leads us onwards.

1: Majjhima Nikaya; 21

CONTENTS

CONTENTS