To Know the Buddha
November 22, 2023

I’ve mentioned before the results of research that was done back in the early part of the twentieth century—observing infants—finding that what gives infants the greatest happiness is not so much hugging them or giving them pleasant sensations. It’s when they realize they can do something and get a result. They do it again, and get the same result. You notice that when they make a noise that they repeat over and over again. It drives you crazy, but they’re happy because they see that they have agency.

That’s the beginning of developing a skill. Psychologists have noticed—lots of people, philosophers, the Buddha—have all noticed that what makes us happy is what we do—when we do it well. The pleasures that come from the senses—nice sounds, smells, tastes, tactile senses—don’t give us nearly as much happiness as when we’ve mastered a skill.

It’s good to think about this. When we think about the Buddha’s analysis of suffering, it’s the mirror image: He defines suffering—dukkha, stress, pain—as the five clinging-aggregates.

Now, the act of clinging is an action, and the aggregates themselves are actions, even the body. As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re piles of gravel, but they’re actually activities.

And the activity itself is suffering, stress. We do these things for the sake of happiness—we cling to them, and yet they cause suffering. In fact, the clinging and the doing is suffering in and of itself—in the same way that the doing of a skill is happy.

This is why the discernment that the Buddha taught may start with the words he taught, but those words point to actions. When he points us to where we can look to understand happiness, where we can look to understand suffering, what we can do to understand how we’re creating suffering and how we don’t have to, he’s teaching a skill.

He illustrates his skills with analogies of other people who have skills: cooks who know how to “read the sign of their master,” as he says; archers who know how to shoot far distances, shoot in rapid succession, pierce great masses; even trained elephants, trained horses. What we’re doing is all about mastering a skill.

So, we hear what the Buddha has to say and we think it through. The hearing is the discernment that comes from listening: thinking about it and trying to reason it through to see if it makes sense is the discernment that comes from thinking. But then there’s the discernment that comes from developing, when we actually develop in our actions the qualities he talks about.

We can read about mindfulness. We can think about how mindfulness works together with ardency and alertness. We can come to certain conclusions. But the actual fact of being mindful and being mindful again, and then learning how to extend your mindfulness—to give it a good foundation; being alert at the same time, being ardent at the same time, how these factors work together: That’s a skill you have to develop. And it’s in developing the skill that we get in touch with what the Buddha was all about. He left behind the words, but the words were simply pointers.

I was reading today, someone saying that we can’t trust the various Buddhist traditions. We have to depend on historians, using the historical critical method to tell us how little we know about what the Buddha had to say, and to justify changing the Dharma as we go from one generation to another, saying that, “The Buddha is beyond our reach. We can’t really know what he actually said. All we know is what his disciples, generation after generation, said about what he said.”

But that’s not why we’re interested in Buddhism. We’re interested in Buddhism because it promises an end to suffering. It teaches us a skill. And that skill doesn’t change. It’s the same skill in the time of the Buddha as it is now.

We’re told sometimes that we can add new dimensions to the teachings of the four noble truths. For example, the Buddha never talked about social systems and the suffering they cause, but maybe we can add that to the tradition by talking about systemic suffering. Well, he obviously saw that there were problems in the social system then, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was craving and clinging. Those things are the same now as they were then.

And we can recreate that skill, we can master that skill inside us. When we get the results, that’s when we get in contact with what the Buddha found.

It’s like recovering old manual skills. They’ve been doing analyses of Roman concrete. It turns out that Roman concrete is pretty amazing. The Pantheon was made out of concrete, and look at it: this huge dome that hasn’t fallen down after many centuries. If it had been made out of the concrete that we usually use now, it would have been dust by now.

Through trial and error, they’ve learned to recreate the original recipe. They’ve analyzed what was in there, and they’ve found that the Romans added some unusual things to their concrete to make it so strong.

So, skills like that can be recovered. We may not be able to recover the Buddha’s precise words, but we can recover his skill. Take the sutta on setting the wheel of Dhamma in motion: Sometimes it reads as if it were just an outline of what the Buddha had to say. The Buddha mentions the five aggregates but doesn’t define what they are in the sutta, so maybe he actually did define what they were when he gave the talk reported in the sutta. That part may be beyond recovery, but the skill isn’t beyond recovery. It’s the part of the Dhamma that’s deathless.

So, if you want to know the Buddha, try to master this skill. He talks about how you relate to your breath. It’s something very immediate, it’s right here in your body. He talks about what you can learn by learning how to breathe aware of the whole body, learning how to calm the breath, learning how to breathe in ways that give rise to rapture, pleasure, to breathe in ways that allow you to be sensitive to how feelings have an impact on the mind, how your perceptions have an impact on the mind, and how you can calm that effect.

These are all part of his skill. So you go through the effort that’s required to master this skill. As he said, it basically comes down to commitment and reflection, and then he expands on that when he defines the four bases for success. The commitment starts with desire: You really want to do it, so you learn how to focus your desires in such a way that they don’t get in the way.

All too often it’s easy to focus so much on what we want out of this that we forget to pay careful attention to really wanting to do it right. It’s a meticulous job, like those movies of prison breaks: You have to be very careful, step by step. You can’t rush the steps, but of course you don’t want to be too slow.

So you’re meticulous in focusing your desire in the right place, i.e., on the causes. Then you put forth the effort, whatever is required, and you pay careful attention to what you’re doing. This is the beginning of the reflection. It’s not that you do and then look. You look while you’re doing. And then you look at the results.

The reflection doesn’t stop with just looking and being sensitive to what you’re doing and the results. This is where the fourth factor comes in, which Ajaan Lee translates as circumspection, but it covers all your mental activities that analyze, if something goes wrong—okay, what went wrong? Then you use your ingenuity to figure out, if it’s wrong, what would be a better way to try to tackle this? Then you use your desire again to come up with an ingenious alternative, and then to test it through your efforts.

These bases for success go around and around like this. They hover around your actions so that you do become skillful. And the act of becoming skillful in and of itself is pleasant, as you get a better and better sense of how you can breathe, talk to yourself, focus on feelings and perceptions, putting things together in a better and better way. You start using these aggregates as a fruitful path rather than as an unsuccessful path.

That’s why clinging to the aggregates is suffering, because the clinging is acting on them, using them, in ways where you’re not really getting the results you want. There’s a sense of frustration. You’re putting in the effort and you’re not getting the results: That’s the suffering. So when you start putting in the effort and you do start getting results, that’s happiness.

It’s a happiness that goes deeper than just the pleasure of having a comfortable breath and allowing the comfort to expand. That’s part of it, but more important is the sense that you know how to do this, and with time you begin to realize you can do it again and again and again—like the infant making a noise again and again—but now you’re doing something that’s actually useful. You’re exercising your agency in solving an important problem, and there’s a sense of pleasure that comes with that. There’s an even greater pleasure that comes when you begin to realize that the things you used to hold on to, used to cling to, used to do again, and again and again, are totally unnecessary. You don’t need them anymore. That’s what dispassion is all about.

Dispassion gets a bad rap in our society. It sounds dull and lifeless. But basically it means that you learn to outgrow your old bad habits. You used to shoot cocaine, but now you realize you don’t have to do it anymore. You can find happiness in a way that’s healthy. So you’re totally dispassionate for your old addiction. You’re free. The Buddha keeps pairing the word dispassion with words for freedom: escape, being unfettered. That’s the ultimate skill, and it comes as you get better and better in judging what you’re doing, the results you’re getting, what’s satisfactory and what’s not.

So, this is how we get to know the Buddha: through recreating his skill. He gives the formula and we can follow it. It’s just like the people who can make Roman cement again: We can rediscover the path within ourselves, we can find freedom within ourselves, and that’s the Dhamma that’s really worth knowing.