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GATHER ’ROUND THE BREATH 

Talks On The Buddha’s Sixteen-step Instructions In Breath Meditation

Dhamma Paññā 240 Views

Talks on the Buddha’s Sixteen-step Instructions in Breath Meditation

The Steps of Breath Meditation

November, 2002

When the Buddha teaches breath meditation, he teaches sixteen steps in all. They’re the most detailed meditation instructions in the Canon. And the breath is the topic he recommends most highly, most frequently, because the breath is not only a place where the mind can settle down and gain concentration, but it’s also something the mind can analyze. It’s where all the insights needed for awakening can arise, while the mind is being mindful of the breath, alert to the breath, and also conscious of how it relates to the breath.

In the later stages of breath meditation, the emphasis is focused less on the breath than on the mind as it relates to the breath. In the beginning stages, though, the emphasis is on the breath itself, on using the breath to snare the mind and bring it into the present moment. In the first two steps you’re simply with long breathing and short breathing, sensitizing yourself to what long and short breathing feel like. Beginning with the third step, though, there’s an element of volition. You train yourself, and the first thing you train yourself to do is to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, aware of the whole body as you breathe out.

When the Buddha describes concentration states, he doesn’t use images of single-pointedness. He uses images of whole-body awareness. When a sense of rapture and pleasure comes from the breath, he tells you to knead that sense of rapture and pleasure through the whole body, the way you would knead water into flour to make dough. Another image is of the rapture welling up from within the body and filling the body just like a spring of cool water coming up from within a lake, filling the entire lake with its coolness. Another image is of lotuses standing in a lake: Some of the lotuses don’t go above the water but stay totally immersed in the water, saturated from their roots to their tips with the stillness and coolness of the water in the lake. Still another image is of a person wrapped in white cloth, totally surrounded by the white cloth from head to foot, so that all of his body is covered by the white cloth.

These are all images of whole-body awareness, of a sense of rapture, pleasure, or bright awareness filling the entire body. That’s what you want to work on when you get to know the breath, because the type of awareness that allows insight to arise is not restricted to one point. When you’re focused on one point and blot out everything else, that leaves a lot of blind spots in the mind. But when you try to get a more all-around awareness, it helps eliminate the blind spots. In other words, you want to be immersed in the breath, aware of the breath all around you. One of the phrases they use for this—kayagatasati—is mindfulness immersed in the body. The body is saturated with awareness, and the awareness itself gets immersed in the body, is surrounded by the body. So it’s not that you’re up in one spot—say, in the back of the head—looking at the rest of the body from that one spot, or trying to block awareness of the rest of the body from that one spot of awareness. You’ve got to have a whole-body awareness, all-around, 360 degrees, so as to eliminate the blind spots in the mind.

Once you have this type of awareness, you work at maintaining it—although the “work” here is not like other work. You work at not moving your attention, at not letting it shrink. You work at not taking on other responsibilities. With time, though, the work becomes more natural, more second-nature. You feel more and more settled and at home. As the mind settles in, its usual nervous energy begins to dissolve. The body actually needs less and less oxygen, because the level of your brain activity begins to grow calm, and so the breath gets more and more refined. It can even grow perfectly still, for all the oxygen you need is coming in through the pores of your skin.

At this point the breath and your awareness seem to have melted into each other. It’s hard to draw a line between the two and, for the time being, you don’t try. Allow the awareness and the breath to interpenetrate, to become one.

You have to allow this awareness, this sense of oneness, to get really solid. Otherwise, it’s easily destroyed because the tendency of the mind is to shrink up. As soon as we think, we shrink up the energy field in certain parts of the body to block them out of our awareness, which is why there’s tension in the body every time a thought occurs. This part of the body gets tense so you can think that thought; that part of the body gets tense so you can think this one, back and forth this way. It’s no wonder that the simple process of thinking takes a lot out of the body. According to some Chinese medical treatises, a person whose work is mental tends to use up energy at three times the rate of a person whose work is totally physical. This is because thinking involves tension in the body. Thoughts that go off into the past or into the future have to create whole worlds for themselves to inhabit, and they use physical sensations as part of the process.

When we’re getting the mind concentrated, though, we’re thinking in a different way. In the beginning stages we’re still thinking, but we’re thinking solely about the present moment, observing solely the present moment, being alert and mindful to what’s going on here, so we don’t have to create worlds of past and future. This imposes less stress on the body. In order to maintain that present focus and not go slipping off to your old habits, you’ve got to keep your awareness as broad as possible. That’s what keeps you rooted in the present moment, all the way down to your fingers and toes. When your awareness stays broad, it prevents the kind of shrinking up that allows the mind to slip out after thoughts of past and future. You stay fully inhabiting the present. The need to think gets more and more attenuated.

When fewer and fewer thoughts interfere with the flow of the breath energy, a sense of fullness develops throughout the body. The texts refer to this fullness as rapture, and the sense of ease accompanying it as pleasure. You let this sense of easy fullness suffuse the body, but you still maintain your focus on the breath energy, even if it’s totally still. Eventually—and you don’t have to rush this—the point will come when the body and mind have had enough of the rapture and ease, and you can allow them to subside. Now, there may be times when the rapture gets too overpowering, in which case you try to refine your awareness of the breath so that it can come in under the radar of the rapture, and you move to a level of total ease. Then even the ease—the sense of imbibing the pleasure—subsides, leaving you with total stillness.

After you’ve become settled in the stillness, you can start looking for the dividing line between awareness and the breath. Up to this point you’ve been manipulating the breath, trying to get more and more sensitive to what feels comfortable in the breathing and what doesn’t, so that your manipulation gets more and more subtle, to the point where you can drop the manipulation and just be with the breath. This allows the breath to grow more and more refined until it’s absolutely still. When things are really solid, really still, your awareness and the object of your awareness naturally separate out, like chemicals in a suspension that’s allowed to stay still. Once the awareness separates out, you can begin directly manipulating the factors of the mind, the feelings and perceptions that shape your awareness. You can watch them as they do this, for now the breath is out of the way.

It’s like tuning-in to a radio station: As long as there’s static, as long as you aren’t precisely tuned-in to the station’s frequency, you can’t hear the subtleties of the signal. Once you’re right at the frequency, though, the static goes away and all the subtleties become clear. When you’re tuned-in to the mind, you can see the subtleties of feeling and perception as they move. You can see the results they give, the impact they have on your awareness, and after a while you get the sense that the more refined that impact, the better. You allow them to calm down. When they’re calmed down, you’re left with awareness itself.

But even this awareness has its ups and downs, and to get you past them the Buddha has you manipulate them, just as you manipulated the breath and the mental factors of feeling and perception. The text talks about gladdening the mind, concentrating the mind, and releasing the mind. In other words, as you get more and more used to the stages of concentration, you begin to gain a sense of which kind of concentration your awareness needs right now. If it seems unstable, what can you do to steady it and get it concentrated? How do you change your perception of the breath or adjust your focus to make the mind more solid? When the meditation starts getting dry, what can you do to gladden the mind? As you’re moving from one stage of concentration to the next, exactly what do you let go that releases the mind from the weaker stage of concentration and allows it to settle in a stronger one?

When the Buddha talks about releasing the mind at this point in the practice, he’s not talking about ultimate release. He’s talking about the kind of release that occurs as you let go, say, of the directed thought and evaluation of the first jhana, releasing yourself from the burden of those factors as you move into the second jhana, and so on through the different levels of concentration. As you do this, you begin to see how much those levels of concentration are willed. This is important. Insight can come while you’re in concentration as you move from one stage to the next, as you notice out of the corner of your mind’s eye what you do to move from one way of experiencing the breath to the next, one level of solidity to the next. You come to see how much this is a produced phenomenon.

This finally leads to the stages of breath meditation associated with insight. First there’s insight into inconstancy, both in the breath but more importantly in the mind, as you see that even these stable, very refreshing levels of concentration are willed. Underlying all the refreshment, all the stability, is a repeated willing, willing, willing to keep the state of concentration going. There’s an element of burdensomeness there in the willing. Insight into inconstancy or impermanence has less to do with how you consume experiences than with how you produce them. You see all the effort that goes into producing a particular type of experience, and the question becomes, “Is it worth it? Isn’t this burdensome, having to keep making, making, making these experiences all the time?”

Then the problem becomes, “What are you going to do to let go of this burden?” If you don’t fabricate these states of concentration, is your only choice to go back to fabricating other kinds of experiences? Or is it possible not to fabricate any experience at all? All of our normal experiences from moment to moment to moment, whether in concentration or out, have an element of intention, an element of will. Now you’ve come to the point where that element of will, that element of intention, begins to stand out as an obvious burden.

Particularly when you look around to ask, “Who am I producing this for? Exactly who is consuming this?” You come to see that your sense of who you are, who this consumer is, is difficult to pin down, because it’s all made out of the aggregates, and the aggregates themselves are inconstant, stressful, and not-self. This consumer is something produced as well. This gives rise to a quality the texts call nibbida, which can be translated as disenchantment or disillusionment. Sometimes the translation gets stronger: revulsion. In all cases it’s a sense that you’ve had enough of this. You feel trapped by this process. You no longer find any satisfaction here. You want to find a way out.

So you focus on letting go. According to the texts, first there’s a focus on dispassion, then a focus on cessation, then finally a focus on total relinquishment. In other words, in the final stage you let go of every kind of doing, every kind of volition, of the producer, of the consumer, of the observer, even of the perceptions and the thought-fabrications that make up the path. When the path-factors have done their job you can let them go as well.

All of this takes place right at the breath, at the point where the mind and the body meet at the breath. This is why the Buddha never has you totally drop the breath as your theme of meditation. Progress along the path comes simply from staying right here and growing more and more aware of what’s going on all around right here. You develop a more all-around awareness, not only all-around in the body, but also all-around in the mind. You see through the blind spots that allowed you to consume experiences obliviously, forgetting the fact that you had to produce them. It’s like watching a movie—two hours of lights flashing up on a screen—and then later seeing a documentary about how they made the movie. You realize that months, sometimes years of labor went into it, and the question becomes, “Was it worth it?” A few brief hours of empty enjoyment and then you forget about it—despite all the work, all the suffering that went into making it.

When you look at all your experiences in the same way, seeing all the effort that goes into their production and asking if it’s worth it: That’s when you really get disillusioned, disenchanted, when you can really let go. You let go not only of perceptions or feelings as they come and go, but also of the act of creating these things. You see that this act of creating is all-pervasive, covers all your experiences. You’re always creating, either skillfully or unskillfully. There is constant production every time there’s an intention, every time there’s a choice in the mind. This is what begins to seem oppressive; this is what finally impels you to let go.

You let go of the producing, you let go of the creation, and the letting-go really opens things up. The mind opens to another dimension entirely: one that’s not made up, that’s not created, where there’s no arising or passing away. That, too, is touched right here, although at that moment there’s no sense of breath, no sense of the body, no sense of the mind as a functioning, creating consumer or producer. When the Buddha talks about it, all his words are analogies, and all the analogies are of freedom. That’s about all that can be said when you try to describe it, but there’s a lot that can be said about how to get there. That’s why the Buddha’s teachings are so extensive. He goes into a lot of detail on how to get there, outlining all of the steps. But if you want to know what the goal is like, don’t go looking for extensive descriptions. Just follow the steps and you’ll know for yourself right here.

Lessons in Happiness

July 16, 2007

Once, during my first year as a monk, Ajaan Fuang made the comment that sometimes you hear people describing the path as one of letting go, just letting go. But remember, he said, that it’s not just letting go. It’s also developing.

At that time, I had only a partial notion of what he was talking about. But as you live with the teaching, as you live with the path, you realize it can’t just be letting go. You’ve got to develop things. Because if you’re just letting go, often it’s letting go out of aversion, letting go out of a desire to run away, and not wanting to do any work. That kind of letting go isn’t healthy. Before you let go of anything, you have to develop it, work at it, so that when you let go, you let go out of understanding, you let go, not out of aversion, but simply out of a sense of having had enough. You let go out of a sense of fullness.

For instance, we know that we’re going to have to let go of the body, let go of attachment to the body, but what’s the first thing you focus on when you meditate? You focus on the breath, which is part of the body. You’re not letting go of the breath, you’re actually working with it. Look at those sixteen steps of breath meditation. They’re basically lessons in how to develop happiness out of the breath, a sense of well-being, a sense of ease from four different angles.

Those sixteen steps fall into four tetrads. The first tetrad deals with the body, the second with feelings, the third with the mind, and the fourth with phenomena or mental qualities. In each of the tetrads, instead of just dropping things or running away, you’re told to sensitize yourself to what you’ve got there. As you get more sensitive to it, the next lesson is in how to develop a sense of ease within that sensitivity.

You’re not blocking things out. You’re actually making yourself more aware of what’s going on from that particular angle.

For example, you start out with the breath coming in, going out. You discern when it’s coming in long, know when it’s going out long, coming in short, going out short. You sensitize yourself to the varieties of the breath, and the longness and shortness of the breath. But that’s only one facet of the varieties you’ll find. There’s also deep breathing, shallow breathing, fast, slow, broad, narrow, heavy breathing, light breathing. You want to be sensitive to the different ways you breathe, more sensitive to what kind of breathing really feels good for the body. You’ve got to make yourself aware of the whole body. You breathe in sensitive to the whole body, breathe out sensitive to the whole body. In other words, you get to know the breathing process as a totality.

Then you allow the breathing to calm down so that it becomes gentler, there’s less intentional fabrication, and the breath can get more and more quiet, more subtle. As you allow the breath to get more subtle, there’s a greater sense of fullness in the body.

One way of inducing this fullness is to remember that when you’re breathing out, don’t squeeze the body. Think of the body staying full, even as the breath goes out and comes in again, to induce even more fullness, and more and more, so that you really begin to notice that there’s something special you can do with the way you breathe. You can develop a sense of ease, a sense of well-being that’s very full, very refreshing.

That’s the pattern: You sensitize yourself to this, and then you learn how to make it pleasurable, learn to do what’s needed in order to make it a good place to stay. Only then can you let it go.

The next tetrad is working with feeling. Now that you’ve got the breath feeling comfortable, you sensitize yourself to that feeling of comfort, but you don’t focus directly on the comfort. You stay with the breath as your primary focus. You’re training yourself with the breath, but you sensitize yourself to which ways of breathing feel easeful, pleasurable, which ones give rise to a sense of fullness, rapture, refreshment. Then you sensitize yourself not only to the feeling, but also to the other member of what is called mental sankhara, mental fabrication, which is perception: the perceptions you hold in mind that induce pleasure, the perceptions that induce a sense of fullness. Which ways of visualizing the body, labeling the breath, understanding the breath, are helpful? Which ones are not? Which ones are agitating, which ones are calming? Go for the calming ones.

Here again, you follow the earlier pattern. You sensitize yourself to the fabrication of feeling and perception, and then you allow it to become more calm.

That’s when you put it aside and start focusing directly on the mind: the sense of awareness, the knowingness that’s been watching over the breath. Where are you going to find this knowingness? Right there at your awareness of the breath. You begin to notice that sometimes it gets weak and loses energy, so you find ways of gladdening it, to lift its spirits. Other times it feels shaky, so you find ways of steadying it. If it feels confined by one thing or another, you find ways of liberating it from its confinement. In this way, you become sensitive both to this quality of awareness and to what you can do to put it into good shape.

That’s when you let go of that focus and move on to just phenomenon of mental qualities in and of themselves. You see how inconstant they are. This is sensitizing yourself to them in a very deep level, seeing that even the really good mental qualities of concentration, ease, rapture: They, too, are inconstant. They, too, are fabricated. This is when you start looking at them in terms of what are called the three characteristics, or, more accurately, three perceptions. These are the perceptions you apply: You look at them in terms of their inconstancy, in terms of the stress that’s there, and in terms of their being not-self—not you, not yours, not really under your control. You can nudge them here and nudge them there, and exercise some measure of control over them, but, ultimately, they follow their own laws, which you have to respect.

When you’re face-to-face with that fact, what do you do to find happiness? You develop dispassion for it. Notice that the dispassion comes not out of anger or aversion, but out of the understanding that comes from mastery, from having really developed these things. That’s when you allow things to follow their way into cessation, and then you return everything back to where it came from. You relinquish it. In this way, the relinquishing comes not from aversion or from a desire to run away, but from having explored the full limits of what you’ve focused on mastering.

So in each of these four tetrads there’s a similar pattern. You sensitize yourself to the fabrication that’s going on, and then you find ways of finding happiness within that sensitivity by fabricating with skill. You expand your awareness rather than curling up and trying to hide. You let go, not out of aversion, but out of a full understanding, having learned the lessons of happiness, learned the lessons of pleasure that you can develop from the breath.

Even though we know that there are these three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, as Ajaan Lee points out, first you take what’s inconstant—the sense of ease and well-being—and you make it as constant as possible. You take what is stressful and learn how to find pleasure in the midst of it: How far can you push the envelope in that direction? You take what’s not-self and you make it yours through your mastery. That’s the developing side. Once things are fully developed, then you let them all go.

Keep reminding yourself, especially when the mind has this tendency to run away and be done with everything, that that’s not the Buddha’s way. The Buddha followed the path of exploring, cultivating, developing, letting go of what is unskillful, anything he could sense was a weight or burden on the mind, and then going to deeper and deeper levels, from body, feelings, into the mind, the sense of awareness, the sense of knowing, and finally, sensitive at the level of mental qualities: things that can be known by simply watching with total equanimity, so that he ultimately relinquished even the equanimity.

That’s mature letting go. It comes from developing your sensitivity, learning the lessons of happiness, learning the lessons of pleasure that the breath has to offer.

You look in the texts and you see that breath meditation and the development of the goodwill, the brahmaviharas, are listed as separate techniques, but in practice they really come together. In the process of working with the breath, you’re learning lessons in how to make yourself happy, how to develop a sense of pleasure within. Once you have that sense of pleasure, that sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to spread thoughts of goodwill in an unlimited way. Because if you’re feeling put upon, feeling simply the desire to run away, it’s hard to wish happiness for anybody, much less happiness for all living beings unconditionally.

Once you develop the sense of pleasure, the lessons in happiness that you can learn from the breath are that, one, you understand what happiness is all about, and, two, you’ve got it. You’re in a position where you want to share. You also understand what you’re doing when you wish happiness for other beings. You wish that they, too, could develop their inner resources.

At the same time, you put the mind in a good position to see where goodwill is appropriate, where compassion is appropriate, where empathetic joy and equanimity are appropriate. In other words, you’ve learned from the breath that there are times when the breath is not feeling good, and you’re not feeling good: What can you do to alleviate that sense of stress and disease? That’s compassion. There are times when it is going well, so you’ve got to learn how to appreciate that, to keep it going. That’s empathetic joy. Then there are other times where you can’t do much of anything just yet, so you’ve simply got to be patient and to develop equanimity. When you can develop this kind of sensitivity inside, it’s a lot easier to be sensitive to conditions outside as well, as to when which of the different brahmaviharas is appropriate.

So these practices go together. This is why, in the forest tradition, there’s no separate brahmavihara meditation. There are the brahmavihara chants we do on a regular basis. You can reflect, as they say Ajaan Mun did, at intervals throughout the day. When he woke up, he reflected on goodwill for all beings; in the afternoon, waking up from his nap, goodwill for all beings; at night, before he went to bed, goodwill for all beings. The rest of the day was spent focused on the body, focused on the breath. It was a seamless practice.

So when you find yourself wanting to run away from the body or away from your feelings, remember that you can’t escape from them until you’ve thoroughly developed them, until you’ve mastered them and have learned the lessons of happiness they have to offer. That’s when you’re in a position to find a happiness that’s even greater. We move from a sense of fullness to something even more gratifying. We move from fullness to fullness, to the point where you don’t need to be full anymore. You go to freedom. But it can’t be done by just running away, saying, “Things are bad, they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self, I want to be out of here.” You have to take these things and turn them into a basis for happiness, so that your liberation comes from not a sense of aversion, but from a sense of enough. That’s the only kind of liberation you can really trust.

On the Path of the Breath

February 11, 2008

Once the Buddha was extolling the advantages of breath meditation, the benefits that could be derived from keeping the breath in mind, and one of the monks said, “I already do breath meditation.” So the Buddha asked him, “What kind of breath meditation do you do?” The monk replied, “I sit breathing, putting away any desires for the past or future, and any irritation in the present moment”—i.e., developing a sense of equanimity for what’s arising and passing away right here and now. And that was it: That was his method. The Buddha responded, “Well, that is a form of breath meditation. I don’t say that it’s not, but that’s not how you get the most benefit out of the breath.”

He proceeded to teach breath meditation in a much fuller way. And it’s important to look carefully at how the Buddha taught breath meditation, because you begin to realize how proactive his method was. You also realize that many of the steps contained in his method are more like questions. He said, “Do this,” but without fully explaining how you might go about doing it, which means that you have to test and explore.

The first two steps are exercises for gaining practice in discerning the breath—discerning when it’s long, discerning when it’s short—to help sensitize you to how the breath feels. When you do that, you begin to notice which kind of breathing feels best. He simply mentions long or short, but there are other qualities you can look for as well: deep or shallow, heavy or light, fast or slow.

In other words, you want to get in touch with the physical sensations of the breath. When you breathe in, where do you feel the sensation of breathing? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? The Buddha doesn’t say that you have to focus on any particular point. He simply says, “Bring mindfulness to the fore.” In other words, be very clear about what you’re keeping in mind, which is the meaning of mindfulness. To have a purpose in mind, what you’re planning to do, and then your ability to remember that: That’s mindfulness. As for actually watching what’s going on, that’s called alertness. You need both qualities, but it helps to know which is which.

Because the Buddha doesn’t say where in the body you have to focus, you can ask yourself, when you breathe in, where you actually feel it. Put aside your preconceived notions of where you should be feeling it: Where do you actually feel the breath? Where is it comfortable; where is it uncomfortable? From those steps in learning how to sensitize yourself to the breathing, the Buddha then moves on to a whole series of trainings in which you have to learn how to do something. You will something to happen.

This is where the breath meditation gets more proactive. The first training—which is the third step—is to learn how to breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body. In other words, you try to create an expansive state of mind. You’re conscious of the breath but you’re also trying to be aware of the body as a whole, from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes. The question is: How do you do that? Some people find it very easy to go straight to the whole body. Other people have to work gradually up to it. One way of doing that is to go through the body section by section, noticing how the different parts of the body feel as you breathe in, how they feel as you breathe out. To help yourself along, you might try making the breath more comfortable wherever you focus. For example, as you focus on the back of the neck, notice: Is there tension there? When you breathe in do you build up tension there? When you breathe out are you holding on to tension? What can you do to relax it?

This is actually moving into the fourth step, which is to calm what’s called “bodily fabrication”: the effect of breath on the sensation of the body. But you can combine the two steps. As you go through the body, working up to this full body awareness, you can also learn how to calm the breath so that the sensation of breathing feels good. You begin to realize that breathing is not just a process that you feel in one or two points in the body. The entire body is involved in the breathing process, or it can be involved in the breathing process. The more it becomes a whole-body process, the more refreshing it feels.

This moves on to steps five and six: training yourself to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshment, with a sense of ease and pleasure. You build up to these steps as you try to find which rhythm of breathing is best for each part of the body until you’re ready to settle down at one spot. Think of your awareness spreading from that spot to fill the whole body. Then you go back again and follow the strict order of the steps, which is, once you’re aware of the whole body, to allow the sensations of the breathing to calm down.

You begin to notice that your ideas about the breath will have an effect on how calm it can get. You can perceive the breath in different ways. For instance, you can hold in mind the perception that it’s a whole-body process. Think of the breath coming in and out every pore of the skin. There is an oxygen exchange happening at the skin. The more wide-open your pores, the more oxygen gets exchanged. If you think of the skin as being wide open, the muscles of the rib cage can do less work. Just make the mind still and hold that perception in place: The breath can come in and go out from any direction through all the parts of your body, all the pores of your skin. It all connects on its own, without your having to massage it through the body.

You’ll notice that there are subtle sensations in the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out, that correspond to the grosser sensations of the movement of the rib cage, the movement of the diaphragm. Allow those subtle sensations to blend together in a way that feels harmonious. Think of every part of the body being connected, all the energy channels in the body being connected, so that the breath energy spreads through them instantly and automatically, independently of the in-and-out breath, without your having to do anything to breathe it in or out.

Here you’re using one of the aggregates, the aggregate of perception, to help calm the breath down. You’ll notice that it also induces a sense of piti, which is usually translated as “rapture,” although in some cases it’s not quite as strong as what we would ordinarily call “rapture.” It’s more a sense of refreshment. The body feels full, satisfied. It’s as if every little cell in the body is getting to breathe to its heart’s content, and is not getting squeezed by the other cells in the process. A sense of ease will come along with this. Once the body has been really refreshed in this way, things will begin to calm down even further.

This is where you get sensitive to what the Buddha calls mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. You’ve already noticed that changing the perception of how you breathe will have an effect on the breathing process and the feelings that arise from the breathing process. It also has an effect on the mind. It calms things down. So you can continue exploring exactly which perceptions help to calm the mind down even further.

What you’re doing here is learning both calm and insight at the same time. The Buddha never treats these two qualities of mind as diametrically opposed. He points out that they can develop separately, but ideally they should be working together. As you calm things down mindfully, you at the same time gain insight into the workings of the mind. Here you begin to see, on the one hand, the impact the breathing can have on the mind. The more soothing the breath becomes, the more the mind is willing to settle down in the present and feel soothed by it. On the other hand, you see the impact of the mind on the breath. The way you perceive the breath is going to change the way the body actually breathes. Your mental picture of the breath, of the breathing process, will have an impact on which parts of the body actually get involved in that process.

As things grow more and more calm, they lead to a point where you can sit here just looking at awareness—the awareness of the mind itself as it’s watching the breath. This is an important ability in the meditation: learning how to observe the mind. It’s almost as if there are two minds: the mind being observed and the mind doing the observing. You can watch the state of the mind as it stays with the breath. Then you begin to notice that sometimes it’s steady and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it can maintain its concentration; sometimes it can’t. Sometimes it feels refreshed and gladdened by doing the meditation; other times it feels like the meditation is more of a chore, when you’re just going through the motions. You want to learn how to read your mind in this way. Once you can read it, you can then learn to provide it with whatever it needs.

For instance, how do you gladden the mind when it’s feeling a little bit down, a little bit bored by the process? What can you do to make it more interesting? The analogy the Buddha gives is of an intelligent cook working in the palace for a prince. Now to get to be a cook working for a prince, you have to be sensitive to what the prince likes. The prince isn’t going to come down to the kitchen and say, “Hey, buddy, tomorrow I’d like fried chicken,” or “Tomorrow I’d like tofu.” The prince will sit there at his table and he’ll reach for this food and not reach for that food, take a lot of this and take only a little bit of that. So you’ve got to notice that. You have to pick up on the signs the prince is sending. Whether he’s sending them consciously or not, you want to notice them. When you can read his signs, you can anticipate his wants every day.

King Asoka once said in one of his edicts that if the people who worked for him were going to please him, they had to know what he wanted even before he knew. You have to learn how to be that quick at reading your own mind. What does the mind need right now? What is it going to need with the next breath? Sometimes it gets bored with the breath, so you can give it other things to think about. You can develop qualities of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. All of these are valid topics of meditation. They’re there to inspire the mind, to gladden the heart. You can think about the good times you’ve been generous in the past, when you didn’t really have to share something but you felt moved to share. Or of the times you could have gotten away with harming somebody or taking something away from them, but you didn’t. Think about those times. They help bring joy to the practice. In other words, like the cook, you learn how to read your mind and then provide it with whatever food it needs.

The same with the issue of steadying the mind: When the mind is feeling kind of wobbly, how do you get it fully and firmly fixed here in the present moment? You might want to go back and review some of the steps in the meditation: Which ones are you forgetting? Have you forgotten to stay with the whole body? Have you forgotten how to give rise to a sense of rapture, refreshment? Well, go back and do those things. Or you might be able to change the way you perceive the breathing. Think of the breath going down into your bones. Focus on the breathing sensations in your hands and feet. Some people find that focusing on one spot at a time is not enough to keep them really transfixed, so give yourself two spots.

I knew an old woman in Thailand when I was first getting involved in meditation. She was a retired schoolteacher and she said that one of the quickest ways of getting the mind to settle down and stay really focused in the present moment was to focus on the sensations in the head and the sensations at the base of the spine at the same time. Think of those as two breathing centers. You may find that the effort involved in keeping two things going at once—thinking of a line connecting the two to make it a single sensation—really steadies the mind, focuses it, gets it to settle down and stay still.

The next step the Buddha recommends is learning how to release the mind. Here he’s not talking about the ultimate release, but simply about how you refine your concentration. One of the important ways of gaining insight while you’re in the process of developing concentration is to be able to notice the differences among the various levels of concentration as you go through them.

Sometimes you settle down and you’re still hovering around the breath as you try to adjust it. Other times you can let yourself simply dive into the breath, to be bathed by the breathing, without having to analyze much at all. What you’ve done is that you’ve moved from using directed thought and evaluation to help with the concentration to the point where you don’t need them anymore. You can let them go. There’s a much greater sense of refreshment that comes, a greater sense of fullness, as you’re one with the breath as opposed to hovering protectively outside. That’s one way of releasing the mind. Then you can compare which state is more easeful, which state has more stress. You can provide the mind with what it needs.

Once you’ve learned these ways of dealing with the breath, the workings of your mind become a lot more transparent, just as the breath element in the body becomes more transparent. That’s when you’re ready to take the work of insight even deeper, seeing the inconstancy of anything that’s intended, whether it’s physical or mental—anything that’s fabricated in any way at all, whether it’s a bodily fabrication or a mental fabrication. No matter how easeful and refreshing and stable the mind in concentration may be, there’s still a slight instability, a slight wavering you can detect. As the mind develops a sense of dispassion for everything intentional, it grows disenchanted. It’s had enough of this. That’s when it’s really ready to let go—i.e., it loses interest in fabricating these fabrications, and so they stop. That’s when everything gets relinquished, including the path.

This is how you can get great benefit, great rewards out of the practice of breath meditation. It’s not simply a means for calming the mind down. The breath itself becomes a way of understanding the process of fabrication in both body and mind. Ultimately, it allows you to develop a sense of dispassion, not because you come into the meditation with a negative attitude, but because you’ve learned how to outgrow the exercises that the Buddha has set out for you. It’s like a child outgrowing a game. You’ve played the game enough so that you know everything the game has to offer. You’ve mastered all the challenges and are ready for something more. So the dispassion here is more like the dispassion that happens when you naturally grow up, when you mature. It’s the dispassion that comes when you realize there must be something better.

You sometimes hear that the point of meditation is to learn simply to accept things as they are and not to be too demanding of what you need to be happy. That principle works on an outside level, teaching contentment with your external situation, but it doesn’t work on the inside level. The Buddha said that he gained awakening by not resting content with the state of his mind. On the inner level, he said to notice what things can provide what level of happiness, and to see how far you can push this process of fabrication. Because that’s what you’re doing as you breathe in this way: You’re exploring the potentials for bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication to see how far they can go. Once you’ve explored their limits, you want something better. You realize that you can’t look to fabrication, to these acts of intention, for true happiness any further. You’ve got to go deeper. You’ve got to learn how to abandon even these skillful intentions.

What this means is that you maintain a high standard for what it means to be happy. In fact, you heighten your standards for what’s going to count as true happiness as you grow in the practice. You begin to realize that in the past you’ve been looking in the wrong place. You’ve been settling for a crude and unreliable happiness. You’ve been looking for all your happiness in things that are fabricated. Is it possible for there to be happiness in something totally unfabricated, totally unintended? You look for that—something that lies even beyond the intentions of equanimity, the intentions of calm or stillness, the intentions of insight. You can’t get to that level without having developed these other skills, because these are the skills that refine your powers of awareness. They’re not taking you to a place that you could create, which is what you’ve been doing all along, but they are taking you to a dimension you couldn’t have found without having created the creations. The act of creation sensitizes you, and as you get more refined in your skill, it clears away a lot of the static in your experience of the present. It sensitizes you to very, very subtle things.

It’s like tuning in a radio. The more sensitive your ear, the more you can tell whether you’re tuned into the radio station very precisely or you’re off a little bit. If you’re off a little bit, there’s going to be static, interference. So you keep tuning in, tuning in, as your ear gets better and better. You don’t want even the least little bit of static. That’s how you get right on target.

This is how the breath leads you all the way to nibbana. Of course the breath doesn’t do that itself. But if you follow the Buddha’s steps, learning how to master the steps he recommends for you to experiment and explore, the breath does become a path. It’s a path happening right here all the time. So try to take advantage of what’s right here and see how far you can go.

The Breath All the Way

October 2, 2010

Mindfulness of breathing, keeping the breath in mind, is the meditation theme the Buddha taught more than any other, and he praised it highly. He said that it can take you all the way to clear knowledge and release: clear knowledge of awakening, release from all suffering and stress. It’s also the meditation theme he taught in most detail. You can think of it as your home as a meditator. You may need to go foraging out in other areas, using other themes to deal with specific problems that come up in the mind, but it’s good to have the breath as home base, a safe place you come back to.

The Buddha was once advising the monks to practice breath meditation, and one of the monks said, “I already practice breath meditation.” So the Buddha asked him, “What kind of breath meditation do you practice?” The monk replied, “I put aside thoughts of the past, don’t hanker after thoughts of the future, and try to keep the mind at equanimity in the present as I breathe in, breathe out.” The Buddha said, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation but it’s not the most beneficial, not the most productive.” Then he went on to teach breath meditation in sixteen steps.

So it’s good to know the steps, because these are the most effective ways of making the breath into your home base.

The steps come in four sets, and each set follows a pattern: You sensitize yourself to an aspect of the mind focusing on the breath in the present, then you notice how that aspect is fabricated—in other words, how it’s shaped by your present intentions—and then you try to calm the fabrication. In the first set, the aspect is the breath itself, as part of your experience of the body. In the second set, the aspect you’re focusing on concerns the feelings created by the way you pay attention to the breath. In the third set, the aspect you’re focusing on is the state of the mind as it tries to stay with the breath. In the fourth set, you focus on the mental qualities that are involved in developing dispassion for the whole process of fabrication.

Because of the focus on fabrication, this is an insight practice. Because you’re using your understanding of fabrication to bring those fabrications to calm, it’s a tranquility practice. So you’re working on insight and tranquility in tandem, which makes this an ideal practice for awakening.

You begin with a simple exercise to make you sensitive to the breath, being mindful to notice when the breath is long and when it’s short. You can expand on this exercise to notice other variations in your breathing as well: when it’s heavy or light, deep or shallow, noticing whether it’s comfortable or not. When you can be sensitive to these variations in the breath, the Buddha gets you to become more actively involved in the breathing process. You train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, aware of the whole body as you breathe out. This requires some skill and practice, for you have to learn how to expand your sense of awareness and keep it expanded throughout the body without at the same time losing focus.

One way to approach this is to practice going through the body section by section, noticing how the sensation of breathing feels in different parts of the body. How does it feel in your abdomen? How does it feel in your chest? How does it feel in your head? How does it feel in your back, in your shoulders, your arms, your legs? Remember that breathing is a whole-body process. We think of it primarily as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but there’s an energy flow that goes throughout the entire body each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out. It’s beneficial to be aware of it in the different parts of the body to make sure it’s comfortable in each part and that the different parts are working together and not at cross purposes.

So make a survey throughout the different parts of the body to familiarize yourself with how the breathing feels. That right there is a project that can occupy you for the whole hour. You can do it for many days to get more and more sensitive to the breathing. Think of it as a way of showing goodwill for yourself and goodwill for other people—goodwill in the sense that, as you’re learning how to breathe comfortably, you’re learning how to create a sense of well-being that doesn’t have to depend on things outside. It just feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out. When the breathing feels good, you’re going to be much less irritable, much less likely to feel oppressed by the situations around you. So even when things go badly outside, you don’t sense that they’re weighing on you, because you’ve got your own space right here where you can still breathe comfortably. Having this safe inner space is an act of kindness for others as well, because when you’re coming from a comfortable spot here, a comfortable sensation here in the body, you’re less likely to act on greed, aversion, delusion, or any of the other ways of being unskillful with others. That way, other people will suffer less from your defilements.

This is an essential principle throughout the Buddha’s teachings: that if you care for your mind really well, you’re not the only person who benefits. The image that the Buddha gives is of two acrobats. The story goes that an acrobat once said to his assistant, “Okay. You get up on my shoulders and we’ll get on top of the bamboo pole. Then you look out after me and I’ll look out after you, and that way we’ll come down safely.” But his assistant said, “No, that’s not going to work at all. You look out after yourself, I’ll look out after myself, and that way we help one another to come down safely.”

In other words, you look out after your balance, because you can’t really look out for other people’s balance. The best way you can help them is to look out after your balance, and in doing so you don’t knock them off balance. So, in helping yourself, you’re helping others.

This is true for all the Buddha’s teachings. When you’re generous, you help yourself and you help others. When you’re virtuous, you help yourself and you help others. When you spread thoughts of goodwill, you help yourself, you help others. When you meditate in other ways, you help yourself and you help others. This blurs the line between who’s helping whom, or who’s going to benefit from your practice. You’re not the only person benefiting when you’re meditating—in the same way that, when you’re generous with other people, they’re not the only people benefiting. You’re benefiting as well.

The Buddha teaches a form of happiness that doesn’t have boundaries. And as a step in that direction, you need to train your awareness to be more expansive until its boundaries dissolve. This is what you start doing in the third and fourth steps of the first set, where you train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. Then you try to calm the breathing. This doesn’t mean that you stifle it or stop it. It simply means that you allow the breath energies to interconnect and grow more coordinated so that breath naturally grows more gentle. In any places where the breath feels harsh, you think of it getting lighter and more soothing.

One way you can do this is to think of the breath energy coming in and out of the body through every pore, so it requires less effort on your part to breathe in, to breathe out.

That’s the first set of four steps in breath meditation: being aware of short breathing, long breathing, training yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out, and then training yourself to allow the breath to grow calm as you breathe in, breathe out, so it feels gentle and soothing.

The next four steps have to do with feelings. First you train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture. The word rapture here can also mean refreshment. Ask yourself, what kind of breathing would feel refreshing right now? Remember that feelings don’t simply come and go on their own. The mind helps to fabricate them—in other words, there’s an intentional element in every feeling. The way you focus on the breath can give rise to feelings of refreshment, if you do it right. So, ask yourself, “How can I breathe in a way that would feel refreshing, feel full throughout the body, full as I breathe in, full even as I breathe out?”

Once you’ve mastered that, the next step is to breathe in a way that feels easeful and pleasant. The difference between refreshment and pleasure is that refreshment is like coming across a glass of water after you’ve been out in the desert. It’s a very intense, energetic pleasure—sometimes so intense or overwhelming that it’s actually unpleasant. Pleasure, however, is cooler, gentler, more easeful. Once the breath gives rise to feelings of ease, the Buddha tells you to breathe in and out sensitive to what he calls mental fabrication, to see how the feelings induced by the breath have an effect on your mind, and how your perceptions have an effect on the mind as well.

Perceptions are labels—the words or mental images you apply to things to identify them to yourself, such as the labels you apply to the breath. What kind of mental image do you have of the breathing? If you think of the body as a big bellows that you have to pump to pull the breath in and push the breath out, that’s going to make the breath coarse and tiresome. It’s not going to be so easeful and soothing for the mind. But if you think of the body as a large sponge, with lots of holes that allow the breath to come in and go out, just holding that perception in mind eases the breathing process. It’s also a more easeful perception to hold in your mind. It has a more calming effect on the mind.

If you find that your breathing is laborious, you can think of the breath energy coming in and out of the forehead, down from the top of the head, in through your eyes, in through your ears, in from the back of the neck going down your back, in at your throat going down through the chest to the heart. Just hold those images in mind and see what impact they have on the breathing and on your mind.

In the next step, the Buddha says to try to find the perception or feeling that’s most calming to the mind. If you find that the sponge perception is more calming, you hold on to that. If it’s more easeful to think of the breath coming down from the top of the head, or in and out of the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, then hold those perceptions in mind. There are lots of different perceptions you can play with. Try to find the ones that are most calming for you right here, right now.

Those are the four steps that deal with feeling.

The next four steps deal with the mind. To begin with, you just want to be aware of the state of your mind as you breathe in, the state of your mind as you breathe out. As you do this, you want to notice if it’s in balance or out of balance. If it’s out of balance, there are different ways you can deal with it.

If the mind is feeling depressed, sluggish, or stale, ask yourself how you could breathe in, how you could breathe out in a way that would be gladdening to the mind. What kind of breathing would give energy to the mind, give refreshment to the mind? Or you can branch out and use other topics of meditation to gladden the mind as well. Think about the Buddha, to see if that creates a sense of gladness. Try thinking about the Dhamma, the Sangha. See if that gives a sense of gladness. Think about the times you’ve been virtuous or generous in the past, and see if that’s encouraging. In other words, any Dhamma topic that helps to gladden the mind: You can bring that in and use it. Then, when it’s done its work, go back to the breath and try to maintain that sense of gladness.

Alternatively, if the mind is feeling scattered or restless, what kind of breathing could steady it? Or what other meditation topics could steady it? Here you might find that if you’re feeling lazy and don’t really want to meditate, you can focus on the reflection on death, or on those five reflections we chanted just now: remembering that you’re subject to aging, illness, death, and separation. The only things you really can hold on to are your actions. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. And if your mind isn’t trained, what’s it going to do? A lot of unskillful things. So the best way to prepare for aging, illness, and death is to train the mind. Thinking about death can have a riveting effect on the mind.

You can try the contemplation that the Buddha recommends: Every morning at dawn, as you see the sun rise, remind yourself: This could be your last sunrise. Are you ready to go? The usual answer is No. Well, why not? What changes need to be made in the mind so that you would be ready to go? After all, very few people know, at sunrise, that this is going to be their last day. You could be one of those people.

So you don’t want to be heedless; you don’t want to be caught off guard. Thinking in this way is an encouragement to practice. It focuses the mind. Then again, at sunset, the Buddha said, remind yourself that this could be your last sunset; you might die tonight. Are you ready to go? If the answer is No, you’ve got work to do—and you know what work you’ve got to do: You need to train the mind. At the very least, get it more steady, more resilient. Train it to let go of all its foolish attachments. That requires work. You need training. When these thoughts have focused the mind, bring that focus back to the breath.

Finally, if the mind is feeling burdened, figure out how to release it from its burdens, particularly if it’s being burdened with unskillful thinking. These might be thoughts of sensuality or thoughts of anger. How can you let go of those? Sometimes you focus on the object of the thinking, sometimes on the thinking itself. If the object is one that excites desire, look at the side that’s not so desirable. This is why we have the contemplation of the body. The body may look pretty on the surface, but if you took off the skin, you couldn’t look at it at all. You’d run away. Yet why is it, with just that little film of skin wrapping it up, that we perceive it as attractive? What’s the mind doing to itself? What games is it playing with itself, so that it focuses only on the things that it perceives as attractive and blots out everything else?

Similarly with anger: Usually, when you’re feeling angry at somebody, all you can do is focus on their unattractive side, the unappealing side, the unpleasant side. You can work yourself up into a real fury. But are you really being fair? Are you being fair to the other person? Are you being fair to yourself? After all, who’s suffering from your anger? You’re certainly suffering from it right now.

If you find that the mind is being burdened by things like this, you find ways of unburdening it. The Buddha takes this even deeper, into the subtlest levels of concentration. Each level has a certain element of stress that’s very subtle, but it’s there. When the mind gets focused on a level of concentration, sit with it for a while to get to know it really well, until you recognize what’s really going on in that state of concentration. This can take a while, because when you first hit a new level of concentration, you often don’t really see the whole thing. You see that the mind seems less stressful than before. You don’t see any stress in this concentration at all. But you have to get familiar with it until you begin to see that there is still a little bit of inconstancy, a little bit of wavering in the concentration, or there are certain mental activities that are a little bit burdensome—not much, but enough so that you can notice the variations in the stress. When you notice these activities and can see that they’re unnecessary, then you can drop them.

This last step combines both insight and tranquility: insight into the tranquility, and tranquility in response to the insight. As the Buddha says, insight is what releases the mind from ignorance; tranquility is what releases the mind from passion. They have to work together for the release from any burden—from the gross to the refined—to be complete.

That’s the last of the steps dealing with the state of the mind as a whole. But it moves you into the final set of four steps, which have to do with what they call dhammas, or mental qualities: the component factors that go into shaping the state of the mind.

The first step in this final set is learning how to look at inconstancy. Sometimes this word, anicca, is translated as impermanence, but the issue is not so much that things are impermanent, it’s just that they keep changing unreliably. If you think about that mountain over there, the mountain is impermanent, but you can tell yourself, “At least it’s solid enough for me. I could build a house on it and not worry about the ocean washing it away in my lifetime.” But if you apply the perception of inconstancy to the things you depend on for your happiness, you see that if there’s even the slightest bit of change or unreliability in those things, it’s threatening. That’s what the Buddha is pointing to. There are so many things in life that we pin our happiness on, pin our hopes on, but you have to look carefully at them to see if they really are dependable. They change right before your eyes. Even the state of concentration, which in the beginning seems so solid, after a while shows some wavering. It, too, has its ups and downs. So the question is, What’s causing that? What is the mind doing that’s creating that rise and fall in the level of stress?

This is where you begin to get into the four noble truths. As the Buddha said, each truth has a duty. The duty with regard to stress is to comprehend it, which means watching it carefully so you can see exactly what it is—in particular, to see where it’s coming from and then develop dispassion, both for the stress and for its cause. This is why watching inconstancy is an important part of seeing stress, because it allows you to see that the level of stress will go up and go down, which signals that certain things are happening in the mind to cause it to go up, and other things are happening to cause it to go down. But what are those things? Feelings and perceptions.

This is why the Buddha has you get sensitive to mental fabrication. What are your perceptions right now? What are the feelings? What are the perceptions that you apply, say, to pleasure, that you apply to pain? And how do they increase or decrease the level of stress in the mind? If you see that they cause an increase, drop them, because that’s the duty with regard to the cause of stress: to abandon it, to let it go. You do this by developing the path, which we’ve been doing all the way through, with all these steps of meditation, so you can induce the sense of dispassion that allows you to abandon the cause of stress. That’s why we look at inconstancy: to get a sense of dispassion for the things we’re attached to.

You really have to understand what attachment is all about. You’re attached to things because they give pleasure, and even when you’re attached, you can admit that the pleasure’s not constant and that it takes some effort. Still, it seems that you get at least enough pleasure to make the effort worthwhile. But what the Buddha wants you to see is that the pleasure is not worth the effort at all, that the drawbacks of that particular pleasure are much greater than the actual nourishment you get from it. After all, the mind tends to delude itself. It sees its pleasures as wonderful. It paints them up. It dresses them up. It elaborates on them so they seem much more wonderful than they actually are. The Buddha wants you to really look at that fact, that process in action. What is the gratification you get out of that pleasure? What are the drawbacks of that pleasure?

It’s through this kind of analysis that you gain the insight allowing you actually to let go of things. If you simply see things as empty, as changing in line with conditions, you can drop them temporarily, but they come back because there’s still a part of the mind that says, “Well, even if they’re changing with conditions, the pleasure I get out of them is worth the effort I put into getting those conditions right.” That’s what you have to look into. Where is the actual pleasure here? Where is the effort? Where’s the pain and stress in the effort? Do they give you a good deal or a bad deal? That’s what it comes down to: What kind of deal are you giving yourself? The Buddha has you look at this until you see how you’ve been fooling yourself. To see the foolishness on both sides—the side that likes to deceive and the side that likes to be deceived—gives rise to a sense of disenchantment and dispassion.

That’s the next step, focusing on dispassion, because it’s through passion that we get involved with things to begin with. We get attached to them. We create these things. As the Buddha said, in every experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness, there’s an intentional element. A thought arises in the mind and you get involved, turning it into a state of becoming, a little world in which you can dwell. A feeling arises, and you elaborate on it. A perception arises and either you go with it or you don’t. But there’s a choice being made there. Sometimes the arising of these things comes from past kamma, but then it’s up to you to decide whether you want to go with them or not. That decision is your present kamma.

It’s like somebody driving up in a car and saying, “Okay, jump in, let’s go.” You actually have the choice to jump in or not jump in, and if you’re wise you’re going to ask, “Who are you? Where are you going? What’s going to happen if I jump in?” That’s if you’re wise, because it turns out that this is not going to be a free ride. You’re going to have to pay for the gas. Will it be worth it? You may actually have to pedal the car, if it turns out to be a pedal car. Is it worth it? And where is the driver planning to take you? Is he going to rob you, kill you, and dump you off on the side of the road? When you see that it’s not worth it, your mind grows calm in the face of any temptation to jump in the car. That’s the tranquility that follows on discernment and releases you from passion. Dispassion comes in its place, and when the dispassion comes, fabrications begin to stop—because what keeps them going is your passion. When there’s no passion, fabrications all cease. So you watch them ceasing, ceasing, ceasing, because of dispassion. That’s the third step in the last set of four: focusing on cessation.

Then the final step of breath meditation is to stay focused on relinquishment as you breathe in and out. You let go of everything. Even the path gets abandoned at this point because you don’t need it anymore. It’s like having a set of tools. As long as you have to work with the tools, you take good care of them, you look after them. But there comes a point when the job is done and you let even the tools go. In other words, all your attachment even to the path—the concentration, the discernment—gets abandoned at that point as well—each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out.

This is the kind of breath meditation, the Buddha says, that gives great rewards. It develops the four establishings of mindfulness; it develops all the seven factors for awakening. You’re developing mindfulness in keeping the breath in mind. As you analyze how you’re doing this practice skillfully or unskillfully, how you’re fabricating your sense of the body and mind in the present through the breath and the feelings and perceptions around the breath, that develops the analysis of qualities as a factor for awakening. You try to do your best to fabricate these things in skillful ways, and abandon any unskillful fabrications: That’s your persistence, energy, effort as a factor for awakening. As you do these things skillfully, refreshment and ease arise: Those are the rapture and calm factors for awakening. You develop concentration and the ability to watch with equanimity all these things as they’re happening. When you have all these seven factors together, they can bring the mind to awakening. And these factors are all being developed as you practice these sixteen steps.

As the Buddha said, these factors lead to knowledge and release—the knowledge of awakening, understanding what the mind’s been doing that’s been causing stress and how it can let go of the cause. When you’ve completed all the duties with regard to the four noble truths, the mind is released and no longer creates any unnecessary burdens for itself. It tastes the deathless.

This is what breath meditation can do. It’s not just a preliminary exercise. It’s a path that can take you all the way. You can augment it with other practices, as I’ve said. When the mind needs gladdening or steadying, when you find that you’re stuck with unskillful mental qualities, you can use other techniques to pry the mind free from them. But the breath is where you always come back. It’s your home because it’s right here, where the body and the mind meet. It’s the ideal place to watch both what’s going on in the body and what’s going on in the mind. And it’s one of the few bodily functions you can control to give rise to a sense of well-being that allows you to stay steadily right here.

This way you can begin to see things as they actually are, as they’re actually happening and being fabricated, to see where your habits of fabrication are causing unnecessary suffering and stress. You come to see that the stress is actually unnecessary. There are choices you’re making as you fabricate your experience out of the raw materials that come from past actions and, through the path, you learn how to make these choices more and more skillful to the point where there’s really nothing more to do. Everything is at perfect equilibrium. Any further intention—either to stay there or to move on—would just cause stress. You see this clearly. At that point the mind lets go.

So whatever other meditation you practice, make sure that at the very least you’ve got your home base covered. As the Buddha said, when you get involved in other meditation topics, unskillful states can sometimes arise, in which case you should always come back to the breath. He compared it to the beginning of the rainy season in India. During the hot season everything is dry with lots and lots of dust in the air. But when the first rains come, they wash all the dust out of the air and leave the air very clean, clear, and refreshing. The same way with breath meditation: When you do it right, it can clear the mind, refresh the mind, wash away all its dust.

Give time to this skill because it’s the most basic skill in training the mind. It’s your foundation, and you want to make sure the foundation is strong. If you try to build a building with a weak foundation, it’s going to fall over. No matter how beautiful the building may be, it’s going to collapse. But when the foundation is strong, you can build as many stories as you like and you don’t have to worry about them falling down at all.

Exploring Fabrication

August 29, 2011

The Buddha once told the monks that they should practice breath meditation, and one of the monks said, “I already do practice breath meditation.” So the Buddha asked him, “What kind of breath meditation do you practice?” The monk replied, “I focus on the breath, let go of any hankering after the past, any hankering after the future. I try to be equanimous toward the present as I breathe in and as I breathe out.” The Buddha said, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation, but it’s not how you get the most out of breath meditation.” Then he described the sixteen steps, four tetrads of four steps each. What’s interesting about the steps is how much they focus on the process of fabrication.

In the first tetrad, the Buddha talks about training yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. Then the next step is to calm bodily fabrication, i.e., the effect that the breath has on the body.

In the second tetrad, he talks about training yourself to breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture, gives rise to pleasure. Then you breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, noticing the effect of feeling and perception on the mind: the feelings of rapture and pleasure you’ve been inducing, and also the perceptions by which you can stay focused on the breath. What affect do those have on the mind? Then you try to calm that affect. In other words, you move from rapture to ease, and then finally to equanimity. With the perceptions, you try to find ways of perceiving the breath energy in the body that make things easier for the mind, lighter for the mind.

In fact, that’s a lot of what it means to go through the various levels of concentration: Your perceptions of the breath grow more refined. For instance, you think of the breath as an energy filling the whole body. If it can maintain its fullness—everything is so connected in the body that you don’t need to breathe in or breathe out—then you move to even more refined perceptions: perception of space, consciousness, infinite consciousness without any end. You’re sitting here and you have no sense of where this consciousness ends. That’s the ultimate, as the Buddha said, in the oneness of the mind. Everything seems one. You’re one with your object, and your consciousness is one with everything. Then you drop the oneness and go to nothingness, from nothingness to the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. In every case, the feelings and perceptions get more refined; they have less and less of an impact on the mind. That’s called calming mental fabrication.

Then in the third tetrad the Buddha talks first about simply being aware of the mind, and then noticing when the mind needs to be gladdened, satisfied, or refreshed; when it needs to be steadied; when it needs to be released. Each of those approaches to bringing the mind into balance requires a certain amount of fabrication. After all, feeling and perception have an effect on the mind, and the breath has an indirect effect on the mind through the feelings.

How do you use these fabrications to gladden the mind? How do you use them to steady the mind? How do you use them to release the mind? In some cases, the Buddha says, you simply watch a particular defilement or a particular hindrance that’s weighing the mind down, and simply by your watching it, it goes away. Other times, as he says, you have to exert a fabrication to let go of a particular cause of stress. That can involve bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrications, which are directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrications, which are feeling and perception.

Now, all of this is to get you really sensitive to the process of fabrication. It’s not just a matter of things coming and going, arising and passing away. The mind has an intentional element in all of its experiences. Basically, you take the potential for, say, a form or a feeling or a perception, fabrications, or consciousness—these potentials come from your past kamma—and then you fabricate them into an actual experience of the aggregates. There’s an intentional element in all of these things.

As the Buddha said, the essence of insight is learning how to investigate the process of fabrication so that you see it with insight. So when you’re dealing with the breath in line with these steps, you’re developing tranquility and calm, but at the same time you’re gaining insight into this process of fabrication—because you play with it. The only way you can understand cause and effect is by adjusting the causes, changing the causes, and see what kind of impact the adjusting has on the effects. That’s when you actually see what is a cause and what is an effect. If you change a cause, and what you thought was an effect is still there in the same way as before, well, maybe that wasn’t the cause.

So you’re here to understand the impact that the breath has on the body. You try to understand the impact that feelings and perceptions have on the mind. You consciously try to sensitize yourself to them by trying to change that impact as you breathe in, as you breathe out. This way, you’re working on tranquility and insight together, by steadying the mind, by calming these fabrications. This doesn’t mean suppressing them. It means allowing them to get more refined, so that ultimately you’ll see the extent to which the mind shapes its experience, and the extent to which it’s causing stress that it doesn’t have to cause. That’s what the calming is all about. You can get the mind into really good states this way.

This is how you create the path. Remember, the path is something that’s fabricated. It’s not just a matter of letting go, letting go, letting go. You have to develop, develop, develop too. That’s the task with regard to the path. Because the path is fabricated, it too gives you some hands-on experience with this process of fabrication, learning how to do it well. And, in this context, all kinds of things that you might have rejected as not belonging to the path are actually admitted back in—but, on the condition that they be skillful.

Venerable Ananda talks about using craving and conceit on the path. It has to be a skillful craving; it has to be a skillful conceit, but these processes, which eventually we’re going to have to let go of, we first have to learn how to handle skillfully. The Buddha talks about papañca the kind thinking where you think of yourself as an object. Ultimately, you will have to let it go, but there are some uses for papañca on the path. It develops a good sense of samvega. You think about all the suffering you’ve had in the past and caused in the past, and all the suffering you’re going to cause in the future if you don’t get on the path. That’s a really good motivator.

So this is how we learn about things. This is how we gain insight into them, by working and playing with them, manipulating them. Manipulating is not all bad. If we didn’t manipulate these things, we wouldn’t learn anything about them. How do you think scientists learn anything about anything at all? They play. They fool around. They poke this, they change that, they set fire to this, explode that, so that they can learn exactly what is a cause, what’s an effect, and how they’re connected.

We’re exploring here too. Always try to take this attitude of exploration. Use your powers of observation, use your ingenuity to figure out how things work, both in the body and in the mind. And see how far this process of fabrication can take you, because you’re not going to let go of fabrications until you’ve pushed them as far as they can go.

That’s what the last tetrad is all about. You begin to realize that the raw material from which you been building these things has its limitations. It’s inconstant. It can provide only a certain amount of ease. Because it’s inconstant, that ease is going to wobble. A wobbly ease is not a very comfortable place to be. Think of a chair with uneven legs. If you’re sitting in the chair, you can’t really relax into the chair because the chair might tip over. You’ve got to stay tense, at least for a little bit, to maintain your balance.

That’s the way it is with all the ease and pleasure that comes from anything fabricated. It requires a certain amount of tension to keep your balance. And there will come the point where you ask yourself: Is it worth it? As long as the path hasn’t been fully developed, yes, it is worth it. But as these factors get more and more developed, you begin to realize that this is as far as fabrication can take you. You begin to lose your taste for feeding on these fabrications.

That’s where dispassion comes in. You lose your passion for fabricating. And because you lose that passion, the process of fabrication begins to fall apart. After all, fabrication depends on factors coming out of the mind, the mind’s hunger for these things, its thirst for these things. When it’s no longer hungry or thirsty, it just stops. When it stops, everything else stops. That’s where you let go of everything, even the path, even the discernment that got you there.

This is how we come to understand fabrication. This is what insight is all about—not just watching things arising and passing away, but realizing the extent to which the mind causes them to arise and to pass away. You’ve got to dig down into this deeper level.

That’s why we work with the breath, because the breath goes really deep into your awareness, both of the body and of the mind. When you’re close to the breath, you’re close to the sources of fabrication. That’s where you can see how these things come about. As you manipulate them, you get a sense of their range, how far they can go, and then how far they can’t go.

This is why all the great meditators of the past were not people who just got really tired of things, and got really world weary, and just stopped with a sense of depression. That’s not how they found awakening. They actively pursued it: How far can you go? What can you do to bring about true happiness? They used their ingenuity. They used their powers of observation. They actively explored it. That’s what brought them to the edge of fabrication, and how they got beyond.

So try to approach the meditation as a process of exploration. You’re exploring this process of fabrication in body and in mind. And the breath is a good place to start, a good foundation for your experiments. Remember the Buddha’s basic approach throughout his practice was: “I’m doing this, I’m getting these results. Is it good enough? Well, no. What can I do that’s better?” Then he tried something new, using his powers of observation and ingenuity, and setting really high standards for himself, really high standards for the type of happiness that would leave him satisfied. Because it’s only when you aim high that you can actually hit high. You never hit any higher than you aim.

Breath, Tranquility, & Insight

February 3, 2012

When the Buddha talked about tranquility and insight, he wasn’t talking about techniques. He was talking about qualities of mind—qualities that we all have to some extent. The problem is that we don’t have enough. That’s why we have to develop them. As we start out to meditate, some of us have more tranquility to draw on; others have more insight. So we both build on our strengths and try to make up for our weaknesses.

When you look at how the Buddha described breath meditation, you realize he’s trying to have you develop both qualities at once. Tranquility is developed by settling in and indulging in the pleasure of stillness. Insight is developed by learning how to look at the process of fabrication. When the Buddha describes how to do breath meditation in a fruitful way, he’s trying to get us to do both.

Once, when he mentioned to the monks that they should practice breath meditation, and one of the monks said, “I already do that.” The Buddha seemed a little skeptical. He said, “What kind of breath meditation do you do?” The monk said, “I try to let go of any concern with the past, let go of any hankering towards the future, and try to be equanimous to whatever comes up in the present moment, as I breathe in, breathe out.” Which sounds like the way breath meditation is ordinarily taught these days.

But the Buddha said, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation, but it’s not the kind that’s going to get great results.” Then he proceeded to talk about the sixteen steps in his normal way of teaching the breath. The steps are divided into four tetrads of four steps each. In all the tetrads he has you try to settle in, to calm things down, while at the same time you try to understand this process of fabrication. That’s how the steps combine tranquility and insight.

To begin with the body, the first tetrad: Be aware of short breathing; be aware of long breathing; get a sense of how it feels in the body. Then be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, be aware of the whole body as you breathe out. Here he’s talking about the breath not just as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but more primarily as the sense of energy flowing throughout the body. Gaining this large frame of reference right from the very beginning is very important. Otherwise, as you focus on the breath and it gets more comfortable, it’s very easy—if your frame of reference is small—to blur out, to find yourself suddenly someplace else.

It’s almost as if, to stay in the present moment, you have to fully inhabit the body in the present moment. Nail your awareness down so that the awareness of your hands is in your hands, your awareness of your feet is in your feet, your head is in your head. Because if your range of awareness gets small, it can very easily slip down the tube into the past or down the tube into the future. If it’s too big to fit into the tube, it won’t go. So establish this large frame of awareness.

Then the Buddha says try to calm the process of bodily fabrication, in other words, the way you breathe. Here, he’s introducing you to one of the three forms of fabrication. Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication is your directed thought and evaluation, as when you bring up a topic in the mind and then evaluate it. This is how we create sentences in the mind, ask questions in the mind. The third type of fabrication is mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings of pleasure, pain or neither pleasure nor pain, and then your perceptions. Those things—feelings and perceptions—have an impact on the mind. Perception is different from directed thought and evaluation in that perceptions are not really sentences. They’re more like images or single words—like “breath,” or “big,” or “short,” or “long.” Those things remain even as you get past the first jhana.

As you calm bodily fabrications in that first tetrad, you try to notice: What kind of impact is the breathing having on your sense of the body? As you calm that impact, you’re going deeper into tranquility.

At the same time, you’re trying to get to know fabrication. This is the Buddha’s technique for bringing the two together. Understand: What is causing unnecessary stress in the body right now? What can you do to minimize that stress? This is going to start connecting with the other forms of fabrication as well. The way you perceive the breath is going to have an impact on how you breathe, and the way you treat feelings in the body.

All too often, if there’s a pain in the body, it becomes a wall to your breath energy. You build up a little cocoon of tension around it, and the breath won’t flow properly. So try to perceive the breath in a different way, as something that can permeate through the wall of tension and not be affected by it.

As you’re working on the breath in this way, you find that you’re also working on the feelings. That list of sixteen makes it sound like you’re working on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and you have to go in numerical order. But what you really find as you try to focus on the breath is that you’re working on many of the processes at the same time, simply that you’re going to be focusing on different aspects. When you’re with the breath, feelings and mind-states are right there. When you shift your attention to feelings, it’s very much connected with the idea that you want to breathe in a way that feels refreshing, feels full, so that you’re not squeezing the breath energy out as you breathe out, and you’re not dragging things in as you breathe in. You allow the breath energy to have its fullness, to have its space. You do this in a way that gives rise to ease, pleasure. Then you try to notice the impact that that pleasure has on the mind.

This is where feeling plays its role as mental fabrication. The Buddha says in step 7 that you become sensitive to this process of mental fabrication. How do your perceptions of the breath and of the body, of where you place your awareness, have an impact on the state of your mind?

The next step is to try to calm that impact. Make it something you can settle into, to enjoy. At the same time, you’re gaining a sense of how you’re shaping your experience of the mind through the way that you perceive things, through the feelings you focus on, or the feelings you ignore, or how you relate to the feelings. What happens when the sense of ease is in one part of the body? Can you spread it to the other parts? If it runs up against something that seems to be blocking it, can you let it slip around, like smoke or water going around a barrier?

As you get more attentive to how these feelings and perceptions are having an impact on the mind, you move into the third tetrad. You’re aware of the mind and you’re aware of what needs to be done. Is your level of energy down? Do you feel tired, lazy? Discouraged in the practice? What can you do to lift your mind up, to give it a sense of gladness, a sense of well-being in the practice? This may involve the way you breathe. Again, it may involve the way you perceive the breath, the feelings that you encourage by the different ways that you breathe.

Or there are cases where you’ve got to put the breath aside for the time being, and start thinking about perceptions and verbal fabrications that give you more energy in the practice, that make you happy to be here, such as thinking about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha: how lucky we are that we have a teacher like the Buddha, how lucky we are that the Dhamma is still alive. Think about the members of the monastic Sangha you find inspiring. Or you can think about your own generosity or your own virtue, the good you’ve done in the world, the bad things you could have done but decided not to on principle. This gives you a sense of your own worth, your own dignity as a person. It gives you a sense of competence that you can handle these things. When it gives rise to a sense of well-being, then you can come back to the breath.

That’s for when the mind needs more energy. Then there are times when the mind has too much energy and it needs to be settled down, made more steady. If it’s flying all over the place, what can you do to steady the mind? One thing you can do is to use that energy to be more precise in how you notice how the breath energy is going through the body. Go through each of your toes, all the joints of your fingers, all the little muscles in your face, all the little muscles in your ribs, the areas that you tend to ignore, all those little tiny muscles down around your tailbone. Get very precise and methodical. In other words, put more energy into your evaluation of what’s going on. After all, you’ve got the energy, so put it to good use.

Or you can think about the other elements in the body that you experience along with the breath. There’s the earth element, the sense of solidity, which gives you a sense of being grounded. If your mind refuses to settle down, you might use some of the contemplations or recollections that are a little bit more brazen. Think about death. It can happen at any time. Are you prepared for it? Suppose that the Buddha is right, that death is followed by new birth, because of the birthing habits the mind has all along. It already grabs on to any piece of clinging and craving that can take it someplace,, so how can you expect that it won’t do that at the moment of death? Are you prepared that when you’re feeling desperate, the moment you know you can’t stay with the body any longer, you’re not just going to grab at whatever comes? There’s a lot to prepare for. Are you ready to go?

It could happen at any time, you know, and without warning. A little blood clot wanders around and gets lodged in your brain, and that’s it. It gets lodged in your heart, it gets lodged in your kidneys, and that’s it. Are you ready for that? This kind of blatant recollection helps settle you down, gets you a little bit more sober, realizing that important work needs to be done and it’s got to be done as soon as possible. You’ve got the opportunity right now, so let’s do it.

So, you’re using verbal fabrication, mental fabrication, and bodily fabrication to bring the mind into a state of balance.

The same with the last step in that tetrad, which is to release the mind. Releasing, here, can mean anything from simply releasing it from unskillful thoughts all the way to releasing it from the factors present in lower levels of concentration to bring it to very subtle states of concentration. The things that are weighing the mind down: What can you do to let go of them? The things that are getting in the way of settling down, the things that provide unnecessary tension, unnecessary stress in the body or in the mind: What can you do to think of them dissolving away so they’re not a burden anymore? Again, this can involve the way you breathe, the way you relate to the feelings, the way you picture the whole process to yourself and then evaluate it.

What you’re doing here is that you’re using fabrication to settle the mind down in freedom and, in the process, you’re getting more sensitive to the process of fabrication, seeing how much your experience of the present moment really does depend on your present intentions, how you shape things from the raw material that’s coming in from your past kamma. This is how tranquility and insight are developed together.

Ultimately, they lead to that last tetrad, where you step back from all of this and realize that no matter how good the concentration gets, it’s still fabricated. Now, for a long time in the practice, that fabricated ease is going to be good enough. But there will come a time when your sensitivities get sharpened and you start developing a sense of dismay or disenchantment around the concentration—that no matter how good it’s going to get, it’s still just fabricated. It has to be maintained. It’s going to end someday. What can you do to go beyond that? You notice how inconstant these things are. Then from inconstancy you go to the sense of stress, to the point where you don’t even want to identify with these things anymore, even the best state of well-being that can be attained through concentration.

As you develop dispassion in this way, you begin to realize that the whole reason you were fixing your food was because you wanted to eat it. When you get dispassionate for the food of concentration, you lose your interest, and that allows it to stop. You don’t replace it with any other intention. You give everything back. Instead of this constant feeding, feeding, feeding, you let go of all things. Even the path: You let go of that, too.

This is how breath meditation gives great benefits, as the Buddha said. You’re developing both tranquility and insight at the same time, in a way that’s really liberating.

So we’re not just hanging out in some nice peaceful state in the present moment. We’re here for strategic purposes, to develop our calm and tranquility on the one hand, but also to develop our insight on the other. We do this by approaching the issue of being at peace in the present moment as a skill. It’s one thing to hang out with something that’s calming, but it’s another to gain insight into how you’re actually shaping your experience right now, and how you can shape it more skillfully, and what the limits of that skillful shaping can be, to the point where you thoroughly understand fabrication and can let it go, because you’ve seen how good it gets, and that it’s not good enough.

The peace that comes from that is much different from simply hanging out in the pleasant place in the present. It actually takes you outside of time and space. That’s where the actual deathless is found.

So try to keep the Buddha’s steps in mind because they really are beneficial, they really do make a difference. They’re not just a pleasant place to hang out. They are that, but they’re more. How much more, you have to find by putting them into practice.

 

Dhamma Paññā

BQT trang Theravāda cố gắng sưu tầm thông tin tài liệu Dhamma trợ duyên quý độc giả tìm hiểu về Dhamma - Giáo Pháp Bậc Giác Ngộ thuyết giảng suốt 45 năm sau khi Ngài chứng đắc trở thành Đức Phật Chánh Đẳng Chánh Giác vào đêm Rằm tháng 4, tìm hiểu thêm phương pháp thực hành thiền Anapana, thiền Vipassana qua các tài liệu, bài giảng, pháp thoại từ các Thiền Sư, các Bậc Trưởng Lão, Bậc Thiện Trí.

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