Action & the End of Action
October 13, 2023

The Buddha’s teachings are basically instructions on how to train the mind to put an end to suffering and to find true happiness. It’s interesting that in that précis right there, a lot of the terms are undefined: In the Pali Canon mind is not defined; suffering is not defined; happiness is not defined.

In fact, the Pali words for those things have many levels of meaning. Citta, the word for mind, can also mean heart. It also can mean a mental quality of being intent—to will something. Sukha, the word for happiness, can mean everything from ease to pleasure to bliss. Dukkha can be any level of pain—mental pain, physical pain, stress, suffering.

Each of those words has a wide range of meanings, and the Buddha leaves them pretty undefined. In the case of suffering, he does talk about some examples: the suffering of aging, illness, and death; of not getting what you want, of being with what you don’t like, of being separated from what you do like; of clinging to the five aggregates.

But where he really goes into detail is the training: what you do. There’s a story that after he had trained more than a thousand arahants, they came to a meeting in the afternoon. These are people who had gained awakening after hearing one Dhamma talk, and he was going to send them out to teach. Before he sent them to teach, though, he gave them a wider background in the teaching: everything from the most common details up to the more advanced.

It’s worth noting that all of the instructions he gave were about actions. There’s part of it that’s taken to be the heart of the Buddha’s teachings: never doing any evil, developing skillfulness to its highest degree, and then purifying the mind. Things you do.

So it’s important that you focus on what you’re doing. As he said, the Dhamma is nourished by committing yourself to doing the practice and then reflecting on what you’ve done, the results you’ve gotten, and how you can improve. So, you’re paying a lot of attention to your actions.

As for who’s doing the actions, in the beginning you want to think of yourself simply as someone who’s suffering and who wants to put an end to suffering. You’re responsible for your actions and you’re competent to do the path. That’s all you need in terms of defining yourself.

Self is another one of those words that the Buddha doesn’t define. When he was asked to pin down exactly who it is that’s doing this, who’s receiving the results, and when you’re awakened, then after you die, do you still exist, do you not exist, both, neither?—in all those cases, he refused to answer.

When the issue of rebirth came up—which was a hot issue in his day; it wasn’t the case that everybody believed in rebirth; even those who believed in rebirth didn’t all believe that your karma or actions had anything to do with it—everybody else would talk about what you are, and what it is that gets reborn. And then, based on their idea of what you are, they could decide whether what you are could actually be reborn or not.

But the Buddha was different. He never addressed what you are or what it is that gets reborn. He described the processes by which rebirth happens, saying that this is how you can direct them in a good direction, and this is how you can put an end to them.

The teaching is all about actions. So as you practice, you want to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. In the Forest tradition, there’s a lot of emphasis on being very careful about even the most basic chores of the day: being mindful while you’re doing them, being alert to what you’re doing, and trying to do them well.

Ajaan Fuang would tell me, basically, how to mop a floor. You mop in line with the grain of the wood and not across it, because that way, if any marks from your mop are left, you don’t see them because they’re parallel with the grain of the wood.

You’re careful about how you wash spittoons. You wash them making as little noise as possible. You do things as noiselessly as possible, even walking on a floor. In Thailand, a lot of the huts are built up on stilts, so they’re very sensitive to people who walk around like an elephant—as opposed to people who walk around softly.

As Ajaan Fuang said, you walk around clomping your feet, you’re shaking the head of the Buddha image in the hut. So you walk softly.

You can notice this down in the dining hall here. It’s up on stilts, and it does respond to people’s walking.

So pay attention to the little details, because your actions are there in the details. If you can’t pay attention to the little details of what you’re doing physically, it’s going to be impossible to notice what you’re doing mentally, in the mind. After all, that’s where all the training is aimed: at purifying the mind.

The mind isn’t something you can wash or scrub. You purify it by purifying your actions. And here again, you look at what you’re doing, try to act as skillfully as you can, but if you notice that you end up harming anybody—yourself or others—you resolve not to repeat that harm. So pay careful attention.

One of reasons we start with the breath as a topic for meditation is because it’s where all physical activity begins. If you pay attention to your breath, you’re right at the source of where an impulse comes out of the mind and goes into the body. You’re there to see it, to reflect on it, to pass judgment on it, and to decide whether you want to act on it or not. There’s a lot to be seen here, a lot to be learned.

Years back, I was teaching a retreat and there were a couple of people there with a Zen background. One of them complained, “Why all this emphasis on skillful actions? Can’t we just open up to the oneness that connects us all?” This particular person happened to have his girlfriend there at the retreat, and I noticed in the breaks that he was not treating her very well. I kept thinking, “If anyone needs to learn how to be skillful, you’re the first candidate here.”

It’s when you don’t pay careful attention to your actions that you can do a lot of harm, and you’re not even aware of the harm you do. Or you deny that it was harm, if you do know. Or you say that the other person doesn’t matter. There are lots of ways we can lie about our actions.

Which is why the Buddha said the type of person he wanted to teach was someone who was honest and observant: honest about what he or she was doing, and observant about what was getting good results and what was not. So when the Buddha says, “not doing any evil,” evil here sounds like a really strong word, but it has its subtle levels as well, in little tiny things.

You look at the way you interact with other people. Just the fact that you meditate a lot doesn’t mean you can get by with having unskillful attitudes toward others. You’ve got to look very carefully into your attitudes. If you’re jealous of other people, if you’re irritated by other people, you have to look into the jealousy, look into the irritation, and say, “Why? How can I get rid of this?”

This applies to all kinds of things you’re doing. You want to be skillful in everything you do. Treat every action as a potential skill and ask yourself, “How can I master this?” When you have that attitude toward your outside activities, you bring it into your mind and you can see very clearly that you are doing things here, and they’re yielding results.

When the Buddha talks about gaining insight from your meditation, it’s not a matter of gaining insight into the Oneness of all things, or to the ground of being, or infinite consciousness. Infinite consciousness is something you do. It’s one of the stages of concentration. And you need to see it as something you do—it’s something you’ve fabricated. That’s where the real insight is: seeing how you put things together, and how the way you put them together does cause stress and disturbance—and how you can learn how not to do that.

If you’re primed to look for the ground of being or your true identity, what you truly are, then you’ll find something in the meditation that seems to qualify and you’ll stop.

But if you keep remembering: Even ultimate Oneness, the Oneness of consciousness, the Oneness of the ground of being, is something fabricated—it’s put together by your intentions, and it’s going to fall apart—then you’re more motivated to look at what you’re doing and to learn how to not put these things together at all. The mind inclines to something that is not fabricated, not constructed.

And what it is that knows that? The Buddha said, “Don’t ask.” Or as Ajaan Suwat would say, “When the ultimate happiness has been found,” and your sense of what qualifies as happiness is going to get more and more refined as you practice, “When the ultimate happiness is found, you’re not interested in who’s experiencing it—whether there’s anybody there or not. The happiness in and of itself is sufficient.”

So, be very careful. If there’s anything in your habits, anything in your way of interacting with yourself, interacting with others, that’s unskillful, think about dropping it, think about going past it, even little things.

The same with developing skillfulness: If there are areas where you could be more skillful but you’re feeling lazy, ask yourself why. Here we’re practicing in a very conducive environment, and if you can’t get your act together in this kind of environment, what are you going to do in difficult situations?

You want to train the mind so that it’s ready for anything, so that it’s up for any challenge. And a lot of the challenges start with little things. This is how you purify your mind: You purify your actions.

This goes from outside actions to actions inside the mind—the movements of intention, attention, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. These things move. They’re activities.

You want to see where they come from, in terms of what activities inspire them, and what kind of feelings they lead to, and whether they lead to something that’s reliable or to something that’s not.

There’s a path of action, the Buddha said, that if you focus on it properly, will take you beyond action entirely. But before you can go beyond action, you have to get really good at seeing what you’re doing, how well you’re doing it, and how you can improve on what you’re doing. So pay careful attention to what you do, and be up for the challenges that the path presents, because the work of the path is all good work.

It may not be easy, but that’s not the issue. It’s a path that doesn’t ask anything of you that would be lowly, shameful, or harmful. It’s a noble path and it inspires noble actions in you. These are actions that are virtuous, that have integrity, but they also lead—in the Buddha’s sense of a noble search—to something that doesn’t die, something that’s not done, but can be attained through action.

So pay careful attention to what you’re doing right here, because that’s where all the important lessons are going to be learned.