The Thai idiom for meditation is making an effort: tham khwaam phian. And the important thing, of course, is to make the effort right. Brute force is not going to take nibbana by storm. As Ajaan Fuang once said, if you could get to nibbana simply through effort, we all would have been there by now. You have to make the effort, right effort. This involves an element of wisdom and discernment.
There are several ways of applying discernment to right effort. One that we’re probably most familiar with is the simple question of the amount. There’s that famous story about Venerable Sona, who was very delicately brought up—so delicately brought up, they say, that he even had hair on the soles of his feet. When he became a monk and was doing walking meditation for many hours, his feet started to bleed. And he got discouraged: “Here I’ve put in so much effort,” he said, “and still I haven’t gained awakening. Maybe I should disrobe, go back to being a lay person, and make merit.” The Buddha happened to read his mind, so he levitated and appeared right in front of Sona, and asked him, “Back when you were a lay person and were playing the lute, if you tuned the strings too tightly, what was it like?” Well, it didn’t sound good. “How about if they were too loose?” That didn’t sound good either. “How about if you tuned them just right?” That was when the music sounded right.
Then the Buddha said, “It’s the same with your meditation. You tune your effort to the amount that you’re able to do.” When you tune a lute, you first tune one string and then tune all the other strings to the first. In the same way, you tune your effort, then you tune the rest of your faculties—your conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—to the amount of effort you’re able to put in. And the meditation will go well.
So in this case, the discernment involves seeing how much energy you’re actually able to put in, when you’re pushing yourself too hard, when you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. And how do you know? Well, you try to push yourself in a way that seems too hard, and see what happens over time—because we do have a tendency to be lazy. We all want to belong to the group of easy practice and fast results. But the people with easy practice and fast results have pretty much all gone to nibbana already. We’re the ones left over. So you push yourself until you find that you’re pushing too hard. You can tell from your own experience: The mind gets frazzled; you have trouble focusing. So then you let up a bit. You don’t go back to the other extreme and say that effort is bad. You simply fine-tune your effort.
But the amount of effort also depends on the particular problem facing you. There’s another passage where the Buddha says that some defilements will go away simply by watching them. You don’t have to analyze them. You don’t have to put in much effort. Simply by noticing that “This is a defilement,” and realizing you don’t want to go there, it’ll go away. Other defilements, though, require what the Buddha calls exerting a fabrication. “Fabrication” here has many aspects: verbal, mental, and physical. Physical fabrication is the breath. In other words, when you see greed or anger or delusion arising in the mind, ask yourself, “How is the breath going right now?” See if you can change the mind state by changing the way you breathe.
That, of course, will involve verbal fabrications: directed thought and evaluation. Instead of chattering on to yourself about how much you want something, how much you’re angry about something, you start chattering to yourself about the breath. Ask yourself, “How is the breath right now? How does it feel? What would feel better?” Once you’ve got something that feels good, how about spreading it around? And how do you spread comfortable breath around the body? This is also an element of right effort. If you push too hard, you destroy the comfort you started out with. If you don’t ask questions, if you don’t take an interest, it just doesn’t happen. So again, you’ve got to find the right amount of effort for dealing with the breath.
And then finally there’s mental fabrication, which covers feeling and perception. In this case, once you’ve got a useful feeling of comfort or pleasure from the breath, you put it to use. You don’t just sit there enjoying it. You see what use can be made out of it, again by spreading the breath around, letting it permeate the whole body, giving the mind something to do. Because it’s very easy, when the mind gets into a pleasant place, for it to start drifting off, going into delusion concentration where everything is very pleasant but not very clear. You’re still, but when you come out of it you can’t quite figure out where you were. Were you with the breath? Well, no. Were you asleep? No. Awake? Not really. So in order to avoid that state, you’ve got to give the mind work to do with the feeling of comfort. This is one of the more radical parts of the Buddha’s teaching. Comfort is not an end in and of itself. It’s something you can use as a tool.
And then use your perceptions, the labels you have for things, to figure out how to get the most out of the comfort you’ve got and also how to analyze the defilement that was causing so much trouble. You can use your perceptions in lots of ways. If you find that you’re angry at somebody, remember the Buddha’s famous image of a person who is tired and thirsty and hot, crossing a desert, needing water, and finding a little puddle in a cow footprint—and being willing to get down in his hands and knees and slurp it up, because he needs the water so much. In the same way, when you’re angry with somebody, you have to realize that you yourself are tired, thirsty, hot, and trembling. In other words, the goodness of your heart is not yet strong. It needs nourishment. And focusing on the bad points of the people is not going to nourish the goodness of your heart. It’s going to make you even hotter and thirstier. You need to focus on the other person’s good points, even if it means getting down on your hands and knees and slurping them up out of a cow footprint. Hold that perception in mind. That’s one way of using perception to put yourself in the right mind state for dealing with whatever the defilement may be.
That’s called exerting a fabrication. So again you’ve got to use your discernment to see when the issue in the mind will go away simply by watching it and when you’ve got to make an effort with the three kinds of fabrication.
So when you’re making your effort here, realize that it’s largely a matter of discernment, understanding, and the willingness, the desire to give whatever effort is needed. Because sometimes it takes a lot of effort, a lot of patience, to overcome a particular problem in the mind.
So try not to bring a simpleminded attitude toward right effort. It’s a complex issue. But it’s not so complex that you can’t figure it out. It’s simply a matter of time and using your powers of observation. The Buddha once said that if you want to know a person, really know the person’s virtue, you’ve got to spend a lot of time with that person and be really observant. And the same principle applies to your mind. You’ve got to make observing the mind and spending time with the mind your top priority, because it takes time, takes effort, to determine what’s really needed—but it’s time and effort well spent.
The Noble Eightfold Path – Ajahn Geoff