Truth Through Training
August 13, 2023

When the Buddha was teaching about truth, he would talk about two kinds of truth: the truth of realities and the truth of words.

What he’s dealing with, where he wants us to go, is a reality: the reality of the end of suffering.

We suffer from the reality of pain, stress, and that’s because of the reality of clinging and craving. But there’s also reality of the path that can lead us to the reality at the end of suffering. So those are real things.

That’s where the teaching is aimed, but the Buddha has to use words in order to get us there because we have to understand the way and we have to be motivated to follow it.

So when he talks about abandoning the truth of the cause of suffering or comprehending the truth of suffering, it’s not a matter of comprehending the words or abandoning the words. You’re trying to realize: Where is the reality in my mind right now, in my heart right now, that’s creating the suffering and what is the reality of that suffering in my heart? And as he said, the way we learn these things is through following the path.

When he talks about discernment, he describes three levels: The first two— the discernment that comes from listening and the discernment that comes from thinking—deal with the words. But the discernment that comes from developing: That’s a truth that deals with the realities.

As he said, we learn about the mind not simply by sitting here watching it, but by training it.

It’s like getting to know an animal. You can simply watch the animal and learn a few things about its behavior. But you don’t really know the animal well until you’ve tried to train it. You see what kind of tricks it has in how it resists training. Then when the light bulb seems to go off in its head to realize, “Okay, it would be better off to accept the training and follow it,” you learn a lot about that animal, too.

There was an elephant trainer who came to see the Buddha once and he said, “Elephants are pretty plain, pretty wide open.” He added, “I can take a new elephant and drive it from here down to the next city and back. And by the time I’ve gotten back, I know all that elephant’s tricks: how it resists the training and how it can be made to want to train. But human beings,” he said, “those are a tangle.”

This is why in meditation it can take so long sometimes for us human beings to get the mind to settle down, and then, once it’s settled down, to get some insight. It does have lots of tricks, lots of different ways in which it resists the training. But when you learn how to overcome those resistances, you’ve learned a lot about the mind.

So the training here is to get the mind to settle down, to be one with its object. In the beginning, you’re not quite one yet. You’re thinking about the breath and the mind, evaluating them so that they fit together.

It’s like a carpenter trying to fit two pieces of wood together. You cut them, and then you realize they don’t quite fit. So you have to figure out: which piece do you have to cut off a little bit more, which piece do you have to sand so that they fit together nice and snug? If you sand them too much or cut too much, then the fit will be loose. So you have to have a sense of just right.

That’s what we do as we think about the breath and evaluate the breath: We’re trying to get a sense of just right with the breath, so that the breath feels good and nourishing coming in, relaxing going out. It’s not too heavy, not too light, not too fast, not too slow. So fine-tune your breathing right now—and then fine-tune your understanding of your mind.

Remember, your mind is not just up in your head. Your awareness fills the whole body. In some places, it’s more prominent than others but it’s actually everywhere in the body.

I learned the other day about how when people are getting organ transplants, they pick up a little bit of the memories and sometimes even the personality of the person from whom that organ came. This is most pronounced with the heart. So there’s a special awareness, a special clarity of awareness or strength of awareness, around the heart.

But you notice there are other parts of the body as well where you can have a sense that you’re here in the body with the breath, and your awareness can fill the whole body. That’s ideal, because it’s not squeezed or deformed. It’s allowed to grow and fill its natural space, which is the body as a whole. Usually, we tend to squeeze it out because we use different parts of the body when we’re thinking. Our thoughts have to have a marker someplace in the body so that we can remember a particular thought, and if the thought’s complex, there are going to be markers all over the body. So the breath gets squeezed out of those spots. But now we’re allowing the breath to have full range. And as the breath has full range, the body has full range, the mind has full range, then they begin to become one.

Now, on days when things settle down well, settle down easily, you don’t learn all that much. Those are the days we like. But the days where we actually learn are when the mind resists or the breath doesn’t seem to want to be comfortable. Then you have to ask yourself: Why is that? And what you can do to compensate, what you can do to correct the situation?

This is where you have to learn to use your discernment again: again, more evaluation and more ingenuity. As Ajaan Fuang would use two words very frequently when he was teaching meditation. “Use your powers of observation.” “Use your ingenuity.”

When a problem comes up, you may think of some of the recommendations from Ajaan Lee or the other of ajaans, things you’ve read in the Canon, or things you’ve heard, the things you’ve noticed for yourself in the past. You can try them out, and sometimes some of the old tricks work and sometimes they don’t. In which case, you have to think, “What might be a new way to approach this that would get some results?”

Again, you’re learning about the resistance of the mind, but you’re also learning about the mind’s ingenuity. You’re learning about areas in which the mind is in a rut and you have to get it out, but also about what ways of thinking you find help to get it out.

Ajaan Lee would often recommend, if you gain an insight, that you always ask yourself, “To what extent is the opposite true?” And that way, as he says, you have two eyes instead of one.

You also remind yourself of the possibility that some of the things you learn may be of use during some circumstances and not at others. There are some things that are true across the board, but there are other things that are just right for one particular time and place, and then not necessarily right for others. You have to learn to figure out which kind of insight you’ve got, which kind of understanding you’ve gained. And again, the best way to test it is through training the mind.

The Buddha talks about testing his teachings. As he says, you don’t really know their truth until you’ve tested them. This is how you test them: through training the mind. Follow his instructions that say, “Do this, do that.” See how the mind resists and see how you can come in and help with your ingenuity, either taking the Buddha’s teachings simply as they are or working variations on them. That way, you’ve learned about both sides of the mind: the recalcitrant side and the ingenious side.

It’s through this way that you get to find the reality of the path. And then the reality of the path can take you to the reality of the end of suffering. You’re going to have to know the mind’s ins and outs—both its good sides and its bad sides—if you’re really going to be able to free it. Otherwise, if you hide the bad sides from yourself, there’ll be a large part of the mind that remains untrained. And it just becomes one more obstacle.

Wherever you’re holding on, the Buddha says, you’re trapped. It’s when you learn how to let go: That’s when you’re free. And the only way you can let go is when you really understand all the tricks of the mind, and learn how to use its trickiness to overcome its bad habits. Then you can see that the words the Buddha used really do point this reality.

There is a dimension inside that is unconditioned. The path doesn’t cause that dimension, it takes you there—or to be more precise, when you follow the path you arrive there, just as a road to a mountain doesn’t cause the mountain, but if you follow the road, you get there. You may have a map that tells you how to get there, and then you have instructions that encourage you, a tourist guide that says, “This is a really good mountain to visit, and these are the interesting places along the way, and these are some of the dangerous things along the way.” But the book isn’t there just to describe the way, it’s there to motivate you to follow the way, and to understand when you’re on the path and when you’re off the path.

So the words have their uses, but the truth of the words is known only when you’ve put them into practice. And you see that they do deliver you to the true reality that the Buddha promised.