Tag Archives: anatta

ending kamma through insight

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Continued excerpts from, “Kamma and the end of Kamma,” by Ajahn Sucitto

Samādhi is generated through skilful intentions in the present. It also relies upon already having a mind-set that settles easily, and it naturally sets up programs for the future: one inclines to simpler, and more peaceful ways of living. Samādhi provides us with a temporary liberation from some kammic themes – such as sense-desire, ill-will, worry, or despond – and it gives us a firm, grounded mind which feels bright. But samādhi itself is still bound up in time and cause and effect; it is kamma, bright and refined, but still formulated.

Also, it takes time to develop samādhi. And meanwhile, the very notion of ‘getting samādhi’ can trigger stressful formulations such as: ‘Got to get there’, ‘Can’t do it’ and so on. Accordingly, the learning point for both one who does, and for one who doesn’t, develop much samādhi, is to handle and review the programming. ‘How much craving is in this? How much “me holding on” is there?’ That’s the process of insight. It’s always relevant.

The results of holding on can be discerned in our most obvious and continual form of kamma: thinking. Thinking plays a big part in our lives, governing how we relate to circumstances and other people, determining what potentials we want to bring forth and where interesting opportunities might lie – and just reflecting, musing and daydreaming. So moderating and contemplating thought is an all-day practice. This practice offers understanding – and therefore a means of purifying one’s kamma, and even getting beyond it.

To do this, notice the tone or speed or raggedness that thinking has. By doing this, there is a disengagement from the topic or purpose of thinking; and your mind settles and connects to how the thought feels in the heart. When your heart is grounded in the body, you don’t get captured by the drive or emotional underpinning of thinking. Whether you have a great idea, or are eager to get your idea acted upon, or you don’t have a clue and feel ashamed of that – all that can be sensed and allowed to change into something more balanced. So this hinges on referring to the interconnected system of body, thought and heart. Ideally we want to direct our lives with the full set, so that we’re not just acting on whims and reactions, and our thoughts and ideas are supported by good and steady heart. That heart is where kamma arises, so you want to make sure it’s in good shape and is on board with what you’re proposing. Get it grounded in the body before you let the tide of thought rush in.

Once you settle the heart, you can evaluate the current of thought in terms of its effect. Sometimes it feels really pleasant in itself (like when people agree with me), but when I refer to how it sits in my heart and body, thinking can seem overdramatic, self-important, petty or unbalanced. Too often thinking closes the opportunity for the miraculous to occur, or for a fresh point of view to arise. And as the after-effect of all kamma is that a self-image gets created, do my thoughts make me into a fault-finder; a compulsive do-er; a habitual procrastinator; a feverish complicator; or a slightly grandiose attention-seeker? Does thinking keep my heart very busy being ‘me’, or could it be just a balanced response to what a situation needs – something that can dissolve without trace?

And as self-images do arise, can they be evaluated and witnessed with steady awareness? Can openness and goodwill arise in that awareness to know: ‘this is an image, this is old kamma, don’t act on this but let it pass?’ In this way, we can avoid making assumptions, established attitudes, and directed intentions into fixed identities. These are the blades of the spinning fan – stored up as citta-saṇkhārā. If you train in samādhi and paññā, those self-programs can be un-plugged. True actions don’t need an actor.

What underpins the automatic plugging-in is ignorance, the programming that is most fundamental to our suffering and stress. Ignorance is easy: pre-fabricated attitudes cut out the awkward process of being with things afresh. Ignorance gets seeded in the familiar and blossoms into the compulsive – which feels really solid and ‘me’. That’s how it is. But as the sense of self centres around people’s most compulsive behaviour, the personal self is so often experienced as the victim of habit, a being who’s locked into patterns and programs.

This is why it’s always remedial to attend to the kinds of kamma that are about not doing. The not-doing of harm, for example, is an absolutely vital intention to carry out – if enough of us followed this, it would change the world. And what about the other precepts? We can fulfil these, day after day and not notice it because our hearts and minds were elsewhere, believing we should do more and not noticing the not-doing mind. But the crucial Dhamma actions are just this: to disengage from the compulsive, and mindfully engage with the steady openness of your own interconnected intelligence.

For example, when a verbal exchange is getting overheated, you can attune to what’s happening in the body – the palms of the hands, the temples and the eyes are accessible indicators of energy. Does this energy need to be more carefully held? Sometimes I find that just acknowledging and adjusting the speed of speaking or walking shifts attitudes and moods; softening the gaze is also helpful. Say you’re feeling dull or depressed: is your body fully present …? Giving some attention there with a kindly attitude helps the energy to brighten up, and shifts the mind-state.

Holding on, gaining, succeeding, losing: the programs that saṇkhārā concoct – deliberate or instinctive, driving or drifting – can be witnessed. We can notice the surge of glee or despond, the lure of achievement, and the itch to get more. But we can focus on these impressions, heart-patterns and programs just as they are, rather than believing ‘this is me’; ‘this is mine’; ‘I take my stand on this’; or even ‘I am different from all this stuff.’ This is the focus of insight. It’s about witnessing programs: how they depend on self-views, how they arise based on feeling, attract a grasping, lead to the creation of ideas and notions, create a self – and so keep saṃsāra rolling on. With insight, you contemplate the rigmarole of success and failure, of what I am and what I will be: it’s all more kamma, more self-view, more stuff to get busy with. But if you see the endlessness of all that, you work with the self-patterning and cut off stressful programs. And that’s the only way to get free of kamma.

When that point becomes clear, deepening liberation depends on staying attentive and learning from what arises and passes through your awareness. Because when one relates to bodily, conceptual and emotional energies as programs, that doesn’t support the view ‘I am’. Being unsupported by that view, the basis of feeling is exposed; with disengagement and dispassion, that feeling doesn’t catch hold. But it’s like scratching an itch, or smoking a cigarette: even though you get the idea that it might be good to stop, your system won’t do it unless it gets an agreeable feel for the benefits of stopping, and you develop the resolve and skills to do so.

To this end, ethics place discernment where it most often needs to dwell; meditation blends body, thought and heart together into firmness, clarity and ease; and wise insight disbands the defective programs. Then we can handle life without getting thrown up and down by it. We don’t have to keep on proving ourselves, defending ourselves, creating ourselves as obligated, hopeless, misunderstood and so on. Kamma, and a heap of suffering, can cease.

Continued next week October 17, 2024

consolidation through breathing

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Excerpts from “Kamma and the end of Kamma,” by Ajahn Sucitto

Once you’ve established a good foundation for meditation, you can pay attention to breathing in and breathing out. To be clear and attentive to breathing through the period of one whole inhalation and one whole exhalation and on to the next in a sustained way, reveals and unravels compulsive mind-states. Thus freed, the citta’s full potential can be realized; this is a powerful practice.

You can enter this practice by using a mantra such as ‘Buddho’, thinking ‘Bud-’ as you breathe in, so that the syllable extends over the entirety of that bodily process. Then do the same with ‘-dho’ on the out-breath. You can also initiate evaluation by adding the questions: ‘How do I know I am breathing?’ And then: ‘How is that?’ Use just enough to keep the mind engaged; you don’t need a lot of thinking – you just need to engage its receptive aspect. You may then notice that the direct experience of breathing arises as a sense of swelling, tightening and subsiding in the upper body as a whole. And sense it as a rhythmic flow of sensations and flushes. Of these, the most obvious aspects are the purely physical ones – for example, the repeated swelling of the chest or the abdomen, and the tightening and relaxing of the skin. More refined than these is the flow of air through the nose and down the back of the throat. And there’s also the subtle energetic effect: as you breathe in, you get a brightening effect, and as you breathe out, you get a quiet, calming effect. These are three strata of breath experience. Given time, you can discern them all.

The energetic effect is even discernible in non-breathing parts such as the face, hands and even the legs. This energy is intelligent. It seems to know what to do; so, you can relax. If the mind doesn’t interfere, breathing settles and calms by itself. Even when you’re asleep or distracted, this intelligent system takes care of itself. And if you can connect your mind and heart to it, this involuntary flow of brightening and soothing energy brightens and calms the citta.

Don’t force a tight focus. The Buddha doesn’t mention focusing on one point in the body, or even on the breath; rather, he speaks more in terms of being receptive to the kāya-saṇkhāra, the overall process of breathing. The discourse on mindfulness of breathing simply instructs: ‘Know you’re breathing in, and know you’re breathing out.’ So, the recommendation is just to be aware of the ‘in-out’, the rhythm. To me that’s significant, because rhythm has a heart effect. Every musician, every parent rocking a baby, knows that. If focusing feels tense, try receiving the rhythm – say the slight swell in the chest, or even the belt around your waist tightening and loosening; it should be something that keeps coming back so it is easily noted. So be aware of the body as a pattern of repeated sensations that occur with the breathing. When you pick up the repetitive quality, you’ll discern the energy, because that’s the source of that flowing vitality.

The training is to get simple. Give yourself whatever time you need to simplify – this alone reverses the trends of a lifetime. And when you lose focus, don’t make a problem out of it. That could turn another citta habit around. So just notice when you’ve drifted off, and at that point ask: ‘What’s happening with breathing right now?’ Then pick up whatever sensation comes to the fore connected with breathing. That makes the practice accessible. You’re probably shifting ingrained programs just by not pushing. Then, as you get lighter and simpler, the rest of the practice follows.

As your mind tunes in, you can refine the process by attuning to the full length of the breath. This gets you in touch with the ending of an out-breath, with its release and stillness; and with the complete fullness and stillness at the completion of an inhalation. This steady moving in and out of stillness is an aspect of bodily energy that we often miss out on in our normal way of life. But giving yourself the time to attune to the breathing allows you to be with that movement. And as you train ‘thoroughly sensitive to the entire body, breathing in … breathing out’, you attune to the body’s energies as they brighten, refresh and relax. This represents an important shift of attention from the rational or visual bases that normally dominate our lives. The sense-base of the body is highly sensitive and responsive: when I touch something, it touches me. So, when that contact is easeful, there is a sense of trust. And when one trusts, the energy relaxes, and the heart brightens. Hence, being in touch with breathing brings sensitivity and relaxation: bright kamma.

This gives rise to somatic and emotional effects: one feels deeply relaxed and refreshed. This is the experience of rapture (pīti), a buoyant and refreshed state, and ease (sukha). Rapture and ease carry the sense of being in the flow with something. It’s not just that one is doing good, but that good things are happening. As we pick up the sense of that, the citta and the body become calm and the breathing gets softer, and the combined effects permeate the entire system. The thinking mind, the heart, and the body come together, and their unification is both bright and calm. That’s samādhi, or ‘right concentration’.

Samādhi is richer than the concentration that we might develop for solving problems, or when being absorbed in entertainment. These pursuits work by flooding rather than training attention: you don’t develop much skill in sensitizing and handling your programs when you’re watching the World Cup! Samādhi is a conscious consolidation of bodily, conceptual and heart energy, brought around by applying the mind, and keeping the entire conscious system alert, sensitive and contained. The right kind of consolidation depends on modifying intention and attention: you have to learn how to encourage interest, how to appreciate, how to let go, and how to enjoy. Learning these skills alone is a good enough reason to practise.

To recap: with bringing to mind and evaluation, one both primes and guides the attention with appropriate prompts. Ordinary discursive thinking generally makes the body feel more hard-edged or agitated, notably in the hands or the face (the ‘do-it’ parts of the body), or in the diaphragm (the ‘brace yourself’ area of the body). If these occur, ask: ‘How is my entire body now?’ to release the grip; then, when things feel balanced: ‘Where is the breathing now? What if I wait for the next out-breath, and just let that flow through the whole body?’ Letting the breathing happen by itself takes time and skill.

In the case of repetitive, obsessive thoughts, you might relate the thinking to the heart: there might be a sense of hurt beneath the complaining of the thoughts; or a giddy whirl that’s connected to a great idea. The unpleasant or pleasant feeling has to be attuned to, met, and opened around. Then: ‘Can I be with this feeling?’ So you stop fighting it or believing in it. Rather than analyse and scold yourself for wandering off again (‘how many times …!’ etc.) – just pause. You might benefit from a sympathetic inner voice: ‘How am I? May I be well …’ If the thoughtfulness is simple and caring, it can bear with and perhaps discharge the push of the feeling. Or you might ask: ‘Am I settled in terms of my body?’ And, as you feel the whole body settle down, at some time ask: ‘Why not flow with the breathing for now?’ It takes responsive clarity to bring the mind out of hankering and criticising, or being blanketed by drowsiness, worry or doubt.

As attention is steered into an unhindered source of energy, the heart can linger and enjoy. There can be a radiant, uplifting effect as the breath-energy permeates the entire body. The hard edges and stiffness of the body dissolve and the body is sensed more as an energetic field. Ease then stabilizes attention within that to counteract any giddiness or apprehension. When this develops as an enduring effect, it gives rise to the state of absorption (jhāna).

Continued next week, 10 October 2024

virtue leads to release

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Ajahn Sucitto

[Excerpts from “Kamma and the End of Kamma”]

‘Bhikkhus, for a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous, no volition [cetanā] need be exerted: “Let non-regret arise in me.” It is natural that non-regret arises in a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous.

‘For one without regret no volition need be exerted: “Let joy arise in me.” It is natural that joy arises in one without regret.

‘For one who is joyful no volition need be exerted: “Let rapture arise in me.” It is natural that rapture arises in one who is joyful.

‘For one with a rapturous mind no volition need be exerted: “Let my body be tranquil.” It is natural that the body of one with a rapturous mind is tranquil.

‘For one tranquil in body no volition need be exerted: “Let me feel pleasure.” It is natural that one tranquil in body feels pleasure.

‘For one feeling pleasure no volition need be exerted: “Let my mind be concentrated.” It is natural that the mind of one feeling pleasure is concentrated.

‘For one who is concentrated no volition need be exerted: “Let me know and see things as they really are.” It is natural that one who is concentrated knows and sees things as they really are.

‘For one who knows and sees things as they really are no volition need be exerted: “Let me be disenchanted and dispassionate.” It is natural that one who knows and sees things as they really are is disenchanted and dispassionate.

‘For one who is disenchanted and dispassionate no volition need be exerted: “Let me realize the knowledge and vision of “liberation.” It is natural that one who is disenchanted and dispassionate realizes the knowledge and vision of liberation.’

(A.10:2; B. Bodhi, trans.)

Another major distortion is the assumption that thinking will make our lives happy and solid – that pre-judgement sets up all kinds of stress. We might, for example, become an incessant thinker, or someone who delights in thinking and enjoys generating ideas. Of course, some ideas are interesting, and it’s great to link up a remembered fact with an imaginative proposal and start nudging them towards a conclusion. And yet this inner speech can be so absorbing that we don’t see or think beyond the range of what we already know or have an attitude around; so we get tunnel vision, become obsessive and lose that open awareness within which one’s ideas can be held in a broader perspective, other people’s angles and sensitivities listened to, and the energy of thinking can be peacefully relaxed. In fact, if the energies of conceiving and evaluating, planning and speculating can’t be moderated or discharged, the system burns out with nervous stress.[22]

However, thinking about how to stop thinking only adds more energy and conflict to the mix. This is why meditative training directs thinking. You skim off what’s unskilful or unnecessary to consider right now, then steer your thoughtfulness towards the grounded presence of the body, taking in how it feels.

In this way, you steady the body, and through focusing on calm, repetitive experiences such as walking at a moderate pace, or breathing in a full and relaxed way from the abdomen, allow the citta to relax and open. Spreading attention slowly over the body as if in a slow massage is another good approach, one that adopts citta’s response to pleasure. You also can do this while standing, using the sense of balance to steady the mind. Take the time to notice the feeling of space around your body; then sit, walk or stand feeling that space, doing nothing more than being present with the embodied system. Deepen into simple moment-by-moment attitudes of well-wishing: ‘May I be well’ … ‘May others be well.’

I suggest this approach because attitude affects intention, which is the leader in the programming process. For many people, the energy of intention is set to the hyperactive mode of the business model: ‘You’ve got to work hard. Get out there and make it work for you.’ But if your heart is passionate or forceful, then your body gets signals to give you more energy, so your nervous system gets overstimulated and you tense up. Just notice how much nervous energy you can expend in getting emotionally worked up about things; notice how draining that can be. So, in meditation, train yourself to find a balance of resolve and receptivity rather than sustain ideals or imperatives that you can’t back up through the body’s energy or are beyond your psychological capacity. ‘Sitting here until I realize complete enlightenment’ is more likely to rupture your knee ligaments and stir up psychological turmoil than achieve the desired result.

A downshift in terms of speed and goals is a major shift. But you can begin by adjusting your attitude to one that makes the mind workable, fluid and curious. You move from ‘I’ve got to get it right’ to ‘How is this? Let’s take things a moment at a time.’ With this, you steady your energy, and use attitudes and intentions that bring your heart into play – so that it will be a supportive participant in this interconnected process.

This meditative kamma can then tone up the basis of all your intelligences; this brings around bodily ease, interrupts compulsive or habitual thinking, and also enables you to exercise authority over what you think about and how. And as this is about resetting your own conscious system, you can take the practice and its results with you wherever you go.

Continued next week 03 October 2024

the work of not-working

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Ajahn Sucitto

Let’s get on with the practice. Since how you attend as well as what you attend to affect the heart – and that’s where our self-impression (and its kamma) arises – it’s important to begin right there. Recollections of the Triple Gem, and of one’s ethical standards and good kamma, steadily applied, dispel worry and distraction and encourage the heart, so that you approach your experience in a peaceful but decisive way.

For this, you have to exercise authority over thinking. Because the mind is geared to this verbal activity, it easily picks up and follows trains of thought that take you away from your bodily presence, and from a cool place where they could be witnessed. So, one of the skills of meditation is to lightly apply thoughtful attention – without thinking of anything. It’s as if you’re about to think, and then, feeling the energy of your thinking, you steady it so that you can use it to lightly label an experience. Walking, you simply notice ‘walking’; breathing, you notice ‘this is breathing in … this is breathing out.’ Then, as you place your attention on these simple themes, you’re receptive, as in: ‘How is this?’

Any kind of thinking operates through this two-fold process. Firstly, the rational mind scans for a sensory impression or a heart-impression and names it: ‘cow’, ‘bell’. This is ‘bringing to mind’ or ‘placing thoughtfulness’, vitakka. In tandem with that, there is a momentary review to check out if the concept really fits, or to evaluate what attention has been placed on, as in: ‘the cow is speckled, and seems agitated.’ This evaluation is the more receptive aspect of thinking, vicāra. Evaluation connects to the citta by listening deeply. In meditation, you use it to listen out for the felt sense of bodily experience, such as ‘this sensation feels sharp’ or ‘this breath feels long and fades gently.’ These felt senses aren’t simply feeling (= pleasant or painful), nor are they full-blown meanings – such as ‘I’m being stabbed’ or ‘my body is dissolving.’ Many felt senses are quite neutral and don’t evoke much, but they provide an ongoing reference to direct experience – and that is grounding. As with the body: ‘Right now my body is just a sense of warmth, of solidity and rhythmic energies.’ That’s a lot less stressful than ‘I look a mess. I’m too fat.’ So, in meditation, you use the simple felt senses of groundedness, spaciousness and natural rhythm to elicit the felt meaning ‘I am really here, there is no pressure around me, I feel safe.’  Just to be able to let a breath go all the way out, and have the time to wait and let the inhalation come in at its own rate and fill you, can give you an assurance that isn’t always there in social contact. When your heart gets that, you can think, speak and act from that safe and fully present place.

So, as you bring your heart and thought into line, turn them to whatever is the most stable pattern of physical sensations that occur as your body is sitting still: the pressure of your body against what it’s sitting on, the sense of the upright posture, etc. Learn to steady the body in the sitting position, and to set the body upright and relax what muscles aren’t needed (such as in the face or hands). That means applying thought and heart to find out how best to sit in order to maintain alertness without stress. It can take some time to find an even balance because of habitual bad posture or residual tension in the body.

Also practise finding that balance when you are standing and walking. Keep referring to two bases: the spine, and the space around it. So, try to sit, stand or walk in a way that brings the whole spine into alignment, from the top of the head to the tail, as if you were hanging upside down. Aim for a balance whereby the skeletal structure is carrying the majority of the weight, rather than the muscles: that lessens stress. Secondly, let your “body sense the openness around it. This helps to get the front of the body to relax.

Stay alert to nervous energy. A high-pressure, fast-paced lifestyle can turn the entire nervous system into a mass of jangling wires. These energy patterns can shift from relaxed to tense, or receptive to aroused with one sight, sound or thought.  And it takes a lot longer to calm down than it does to get stirred up. This sensitive, impulsive and receptive experience of body is the area of kāya-saṇkhāra. Referring to the body as a system of energies helps you to be aware of how the body is affected, how to guard this sensitivity against being triggered, and how to then turn its energies to good use. Because, if it is steadied, embodied energy can be strengthening and bright.

So, if you get agitated or feel uncomfortable, or get lost in thought, keep coming back to these two reference points. The training is to keep your thinking minimal. This channels its energy and thereby brings around a more balanced state. This is necessary because although the verbal program is powered by an impulse to define and plan, it acquires distortions when out of anxiety we get lost in planning. So, thinking can carry an emotional bias, and can hastily prejudge an experience – ‘seeing’ the cow as threatening because we are nervous around cows.
[Continued next week: 26 September 2024]

body, thought, heat: interconnection

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Ajahn Sucitto

There are two processes that steer the kamma of meditation. The first process is one of strengthening and healing the heart through calming (samatha). Samatha practices use a steadying focus and a soothing attitude. The second process is ‘insight’ (vipassanā) – which is about seeing how things really are. The two processes work together: as you get settled and at ease, your attention gets clearer, and as you see things more clearly, liberating wisdom arises.

 In this way, calm and insight guide the mind to an alert, knowing stillness.

To enter a period of meditation, you put aside personal issues and circumstances in order to attend to the basis of your body-mind system. With even a cursory review, it’s clear how dynamic this system is: the body’s sensations throb and change, and its energies tingle and flow. Meanwhile, the mental domain has its own dynamic: moods swing, thoughts race and spark of memories; then there are plans and decisions and all kinds of options popping up – it can be such a flood that we’re often not completely with what we’re doing right now. So, the first step in meditation is to refrain from jumping into that flood, and instead familiarize yourself with how it happens. Then you’re doing one unusual but important thing – establishing a way of witnessing, and therefore learning about, your conscious system.

Notice that you get messages from three aspects of this system: bodily intelligence gives you a sense of being here; emotional intelligence is meanwhile telling you how you are while the rational faculty is suggesting what you should do about this – and many other things. All very lively; these three intelligences run on energy. And they interact: the energies of moods and thoughts trigger resonances in the body’s nervous system, and vice versa. Sometimes a burst of irritation or fear will cause a contraction in this somatic domain; or the notion of having lots of things to do generates an emotional spin in which you lose awareness of your body.

What you might not notice at first is that the three intelligences affect each other – so check that out for a while. If your mind is racing, is it possible to have a calm, aware bodily sense? Can you feel bright and assured if your body is slumped or tense? This interconnectedness is important in meditation, in which we use a steady, upright body to calm the mind. And calm gives rise to wisdom: you realize that although the sum total of this body-thought-heart interplay seems to be ‘me’, you can witness that ‘me’ – and the witnessing is equally ‘mine’, but it’s a lot steadier and more spacious. It isn’t coloured by the urgencies, discomforts and glitches of the personal world, and by referring to it, you lessen the spin of that world.

The personal world is kamma: old habits and concerns and reactions that get added to by fresh actions and responses. The mind is busy being, or creating, ‘me’. The dynamic that keeps recycling kamma is carried out by programs – coded instructions that we associate with computer software – which in this case are organic. The capacity to form concepts and articulate them is the ‘verbal program’ (vaci-saṇkhāra). The heart’s nature to be affected by feelings and impressions, and to formulate impulses and responses, is another program – citta-saṇkhāra. The body (kāya) also operates according to its program, which most crucially is geared to generating and circulating energy around breathing in and out. This program is called ‘kāya-saṇkhāra’. All these programs are established by another one: the life-force (āyusaṇkhāra).

On these universal foundations, more personal programs get built. That is: the ability to conceive and articulate is adjusted to operate in terms of specific languages, attitudes and ways of thinking. Our emotional program of liking and disliking also gets fine-tuned to a range of individual-specific responses. As these programs get fixed and made familiar, they become ‘mine’ and then ‘me’. ‘I am a Swedish woman’, ‘I am a rational humanist’, etc. This is the ‘self-construction program’ (ahaṃkāra); it collects these subjective attributes, inclinations and psychological patterns; that collection becomes ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – and that becomes the basis for actions and speech.

These inclinations and programs are active saṇkhārā – in which intention, the urge to do, gets the process going; and they result in baseline saṇkhārā, that is, the patterns of thinking, emotional response, and bodily energy that form the baseline for each individual’s fresh kamma. Hence saṇkhārā are also referred to as ‘formations’ or ‘kamma-formations’. The pattern of acquired attitudes, energies and behaviours becomes the old ‘me’; and that becomes the basis for further action.

But with regard to that ‘me’, as you witness it, its seeming substantiality is created by the interweaving of thought and emotion with nervous energy backing it up – just as the spinning blades of a fan create the appearance of a solid disk. As to why this feels so ‘me’ and ‘mine’: it’s the familiarity and specific form of these interplays that give rise to that. The person-specific nature of that form is old kamma; the interplay is new kamma. But do we have to keep chewing over and being chewed by kamma, and creating a spinning self out of it? Or is there something better to be?

Well, the aim of meditation, in fact of all Dhamma practice, is to get free from defective programs and even from encoding new ones – that’s the program of meditation! As the paradox suggests, practice entails using the mind in particular ways to counteract negative programs, generate more skilful ones, and not have to create a self out of any of it. To this end, samatha works on the energy of saṇkhārā so that we can still the activity of our habitual programs; then their biases and distortions can be witnessed and cleared through insight. Working together, these meditative processes bring mind and heart to rest.

[Continued next week 19 September 2024]

meditation: recollection

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Ajahn Sucitto

[From last week:] It’s Always Possible: So, whenever there is darkness in the heart, that’s when you practise bright kamma and ending kamma. You don’t have to figure out where the dissonance comes from and whose fault it is. All you need to know is that this is dark vipāka – and where it gets cleared. The process is like cleaning dirty laundry: it’s done both by the action of placing the laundry in a basin and swishing it around, and without action because the water does the cleaning. So, you take that dark residue and put it into the clarity or purity that skilful attention brings into play, and the dirt will begin to clear. We establish mindfulness, and deep attention lets go of what comes up. Whenever some of the dark residues get cleared, full knowing senses the lightness, or brightness. And you can tune in to that. This makes your citta broader, deeper and clearer. Over time there develops a ground of well-being, a gathering of puñña, that you can abide in. Through years of practice, your basin becomes a lake. But because with full knowing there isn’t the sense that ‘I’ve done this’ or ‘This means I’m this,’ the mind remains quiet and receptive.

Our practice then is led by Dhamma rather than driven by self-view; and it inclines towards stopping the old rather than becoming something new. It’s a cultivation that frees up, protects and gathers us into a free space at the centre of the heart. Bright kamma supports the kamma that leads to the end of kamma; it gives us a foretaste of that freedom.

Sit in a comfortable and upright position, one that allows your body to be free from tension and fidgeting while encouraging you to be attentive. Let your eyes close or half-close. Bring your mental awareness to bear on your body, feeling its weight, pressures, pulses and rhythms. Bring up the suggestion of settling in to where you are right now, and put aside other concerns for the time being.

Take a few long, slow out-breaths sensing your breath flowing out into the space around you; let the in-breath begin by itself. Sense how the in-breath draws in from the space around you.  Attune to the rhythm of that process, and interrupt any distracting thoughts by re-establishing your attention on each out-breath.

Bring to mind any instances of people’s actions that have touched you in a positive way in terms of kindness, or patience, or understanding. Repeatedly touch the heart with a few specific instances, dwelling on the impression and the mood that it evokes. You might extend this recollection to include uplifting moments or interactions from the past, or by bringing to mind teachers who have inspired you.

Stay with the most deeply-felt recollection for a minute or two, with a sense of curiosity: ‘How does this affect me?’ Sense any effect in terms of heart: there may be a quality of uplift, or of calming, or of firmness. You may even detect a shift in your overall body tone. Allow yourself all the time in the world to be here with no particular purpose other than to feel how this recollection affects you in a sympathetic listening way.

Settle into that mood, and focus particularly on its tone – which may be of brightness or of stability or of uplift. Put aside analytical thought. Let any images come to mind and pass through. Dwell upon and expand awareness of the sense of vitality or stillness, of comfort or stability.

Then notice what inclinations and attitudes seem natural and important when you are dwelling in your place of value. Then bring those to your daily-life situation by asking: ‘What is important to me now?’ ‘What matters most?’ Then give yourself time to let the priorities of action establish themselves in accordance with that.

The Kamma of Meditation

Resetting the Mind
Wisdom springs from training the mind;
without such training, wisdom declines.
Having understood these paths –
of progress and decline –
one should conduct oneself so that wisdom grows.
Dhammapada: ‘The Path’, 282

“The Buddhist Path proceeds according to the principles of training the mind in three complementary modes: ethics (sīla), meditation (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā). All these have active aspects, but what they lead to is a quietening and ceasing of mental activity. Meditation (samādhi-bhavanā) is the hinge between action and this restful alertness. It doesn’t look active: it often centres on sitting still, and within that, in silence. And as for doing anything … all it apparently entails are a few seemingly inconsequential things like walking to and fro, bringing attention to the sensations associated with breathing, or witnessing thoughts. But such actions bring around an engaged and responsive state. Furthermore, although the question might arise as to how doing this is supposed to improve one’s mind, one point about meditation is that it’s about moderating that very ‘doing’ energy. That can bring around very positive changes.

Towards this end, meditation practice uses the mind’s thinking in a particular way – not to think about experience, but to use thought to place attention onto your own body and mind and sustain receptivity to what is noticed. This brings around a positive change because the more we moderate our minds in this way, the more we steady and attune them – so that restlessness, worry and negativity either don’t arise or are witnessed and let go of. This process can generate far-reaching effects in our life: we get to enjoy and value stillness and simplicity, we don’t get caught by emotional upheaval, and we know how to let things pass. The result is calm, confidence and clarity.  [Continued next week 12 September 2024]

dhamma values become strengths

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Ajahn Sucitto

To establish mindfulness and full knowing in daily life relies on filtering the input of stuff coming at us from all directions, because the sheer deluge can overwhelm us. Because we build up saṇkhāra tracks and programs based on contact, we need to be responsible about what we give attention to. Part of cultivation therefore is about turning away from input and actions that pull the mind into craving or aversion or distraction. Hence the function of deep attention is to be discriminative. Rather than have the mind absorb into whatever is being pumped out by the media, we cultivate sense-restraint so that the citta doesn’t compulsively go out into the sense-fields without a filter. As in cases like the following: you’re walking down the street, or browsing the internet – do you need to gaze into the shop windows and advertisements? Does that hand you over to the consumer demon? Do you need to immediately switch on your phone as soon as you get up in the morning – get busy, get out there before you fully know where you are? With wise reflection, you can recognize a habitual saṇkhāra, and give attention to one or two long in-breaths and out-breaths to balance its impetus.

Recollecting Dhamma themes adds further support to the mind and heart. As in the case of the Triple Gem, recollection entails bringing up a concept and dwelling on it steadily and repeatedly until it touches the citta. Then a felt sense is established that can steady, rein in or gladden the heart. This process goes deeper than merely thinking: people can think about anything without necessarily reflecting on how the heart has been affected. And we can forget to think deeply about what would serve us best – like attuning to integrity. So, when you have the five precepts, you can make a daily practice of checking in with the harmlessness, honesty, reliability and clarity that they signify, and what heart-tones they give rise to. You may have wavered from these, but with recollection, you repeatedly bring them to mind, gain their meaning and settle into that. From there you can review your actions and attitudes towards other people, other creatures, and material resources: am I living with an attitude of respect towards the world I inhabit? Can I bring forth bright kamma – or at least turn away from dark kamma?

Once you’ve established values, you can recollect them, and linger on them until you feel the tonal qualities of non-violence, integrity, honesty, modesty, generosity and so on. These tones carry the energy of the value, and as you linger on them, you can discern a bodily effect: you feel cleaner, lighter and firmer. Worry, anger, passion and despair, on the other hand, have negative bodily effects. In simple instances like these you learn a useful truth: heart and body share the same energy, and the purity of the energy of bright intentions clears and strengthens them. This consolidated effect is called ‘goodness’, ‘merit’, or ‘value’ (puñña). Puñña steadies and supports you, not only when it comes to meditation, but also with resilience in the face of crisis. So, the advice is to recollect bright intentions that you’ve sustained in the course of each day; linger on the goodness and let the puñña sustain you. Shifts can then happen – if you let them.

Beware of idealism though. With that attitude the mind grabs hold of the ideas, proliferates around them, and creates a self who does or doesn’t have those qualities. All this contracts the heart and cuts off the body – until you lose touch with the body altogether. So, when people are not in touch with the embodied feel of the good heart, there are quarrels over truth, peace, love and freedom and the like. Passions or fears get mixed up with those ideals; and as the heart contracts and clinging to a view occurs, a righteous self is born.

I remember an incident in the accommodation block of a centre during a silent meditation retreat when one night two people started arguing over the relative importance given to compassion in Tibetan or Theravada Buddhism, and which was more compassionate. They were talking so loudly that the person in the next room started beating on the wall to get them to be quiet! Obviously, they missed the point: if you really get the feel of a value, you can’t quarrel over who’s more compassionate – because the grabbing, the contraction of the citta that accompanies attachment to a view, doesn’t support a heart-opening quality like compassion. Needing to be right is a source of suffering!

Another heart-opening recollection is of mortality. This is because the perception of mortality causes some of the sticky stuff the mind contracts around to lose its grip. Where’s the pressure to get, consume, or even be, something when everything you get, you lose? What is really worth giving time and attention to? If you are to die this very night, why hold grudges? Such recollection supports the quality of dispassion (virāga). With dispassion, we get a clear perspective: better centre attention in your values and your puñña. The recollection of mortality also reminds us that our energy, mental agility and health are finite and dwindling. We must use such resources in a way that will enhance or free our lives, or we will waste the time in fantasies and frustrations. Used wisely then, the recollection of death keeps the heart attuned to the good, the clear and the present.

One of the greatest sources of affliction and negative kamma is a loss of empathy with others. In modern urban life, we may experience many people through media stereotypes, or in the no man’s land of busy streets and public places. People then become ‘other’ – other nationalities, other customs, etc. – and we may feel either nothing, or mistrust, for them. In a relational field with such a bias, indifference and brutality find room to breed. But if we consider the common ground – that, like us, others have to endure stress, illness, bereavement and death – this generates empathy (anukampa), the basis of all forms of goodwill. For example, a friend of mine recounted having a picture of famine victims and people with terrible afflictions, and whenever he was starting to feel irritable or lose perspective, he would look at these individuals. Then he’d experience a sense of compassion for the human realm, as well as gratitude for the blessing of being healthy, free from punishment and well-fed.

Can we see the actions of others in a more tolerant or reflective way? ‘Other people’ are experiences that can teach you a lot. We can get good advice from wise people – and also learn from how they act and speak. Confused or misguided people can strengthen our patience and wisdom: ‘She’s showing me how “not to act! Thank you!’ And we can broaden empathy to recollect that ‘others too have joy and despair, humour and fear, birth, families, and their kamma – then why don’t I relate to others in the way that I’d like them to relate to me?’ Morality is empathy in terms of behaviour.

Another classic recollection feels disturbing at first. It’s the recollection of the unattractive aspects of the body (asubha); that is, the organs and fluids that lie under the skin: in fact, most of what makes up a body and keeps it going. The aim of this recollection is not to make us morbid, but to relieve the heart from obsession with the current notion of beauty. How much effort, time and money goes into glamourizing the most superficial aspect of our inheritance? How much anxiety, vanity, jealousy and passion does this give rise to? How much deep happiness or contentment can the outward appearance of the body bring? “And as you can’t see much of your own body, the outward appearance is for other people; it’s not even ‘your’ body.

After the initial shock of recognizing what anyone’s body consists of, what can arise is a cooling effect. This is the tone of dispassion. Then we associate with others, not through outward appearance but through the heart, and our perspective opens accordingly.

All these recollections, if lingered on with mindfulness, will evoke a steadying tone. This tone affects the body’s nervous energies; we feel stable, cool and open to a degree that exceeds a purely emotional effect. Such heart-opening qualities, if you give them deep attention and linger on them with mindfulness, lead into a place of stillness. Furthermore, even when the heart gets shaken with fear or grief or other forms of suffering, the puñña of repeated recollection is that its embodied effect can still be accessed. Then the reactive saṇkhāra that would otherwise rush out as ‘I’m this, it’s not fair, I can’t stand it’ (and so on) doesn’t arise, or having arisen, ceases quickly. It also leads into the place of stillness that is unoccupied, yet without boundaries – this is where intention and impulse come to rest and kamma ends.

[Continued next week 5 September 2024]

Link to the original, download:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/458-kamma-and-the-end-of-kamma

the skills of attention

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Ajahn Sucitto

[From last week… “If you use pūja on a regular basis, it aligns you to the ‘Triple Gem’ – Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha – by presenting content in terms of images, ideas and themes, and values and practices that guide the heart. It also occasions acts of steering and composing attention. So pūja works both on what the mind is dealing with, and how it operates.”]

Obviously, there’s a lot more to anyone’s life than doing pūja, but such ritual does support training in attention – the what and the how of experience – as well as in mindfulness and full knowing (sampajañña); they provide a skilful container and stable reference to the ongoing flow of experience. With these, we have some say over where our minds are running and how.

The what and the how of attention are co-dependent. Any kind of attention selects certain data from a wide range. It seeks content. But if, for example, you review your visual experience, you’ll note that although there is a wide field of seeing, the mind selects only a small portion of that to focus the eyes on. Then whatever attention has focused on leads the mind and affects the heart. How we attend selects what we notice, and what we notice affects how we attend – and that determines where the mind will go and what action will ensue. In detail: an underlying intention steers what attention selects, and through the twofold process of contact, a mind-state is born that sends out a train of thought.[16]

For example, an architect sees a house and notices the design and structure; a burglar sees it and notices the windows and doors. Even if the architect and the burglar don’t follow through with physical action, their hearts will have been aroused in certain ways and their minds will have considered and calculated. This mental process conditions their behaviour and even who they experience themselves as being. In abstract: underlying intention steers attention, attention gives rise to contact, and contact generates meaning and intention. Intention, attention and contact are all saṇkhārā; they lay down or “strengthen a track of mental kamma – and with that, the sense of ‘I am’ is born.

So, deep attention arises with the intention to consider how a perception of the scenario is affecting the citta. Rather than just reacting to sense-contact (including that of thought), you listen more deeply and sift through the flood of interpretations or digressions with an attention that looks into whether the sight, sound or thought (and so on) is useful or relevant, what the arousing or threatening feature of it is, and whether that sign is to be followed or not. Whereas untrained attention is like a bird that rapidly picks up any crumb and hastily moves onto the next crumb, deep attention is like a baleen whale that, while steering towards food, allows the ocean to pass through its mouth, catching edible krill in its baleen and letting everything else pass. This kind of attention is not judgemental, but it filters and gets “to the point, and thus moderates the psychologies that direct your life.[17]

This process reveals underlying biases – such as gratification impulses or impressions of being threatened – and it may also reveal unquestioned assumptions that program how we think and what we think about. So, if deep attention is strong, we can put analysis and further action on hold; we don’t try to fix things; we don’t go spasming into an opinion about ourselves based on that survey. And the simple beauty of this process is that when we suspend the reactions of what we assume we should and shouldn’t be feeling, there is clarity and spaciousness. That gives room for compassion or dispassion to arise.

Deep attention gets strengthened by mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to bear a theme, mood, thought or sensation in mind; it is defined in the discourses as ‘[one] bears in mind and recollects what was done and said long ago.’ When it is based on right view, ‘right’ mindfulness can linger on what deep attention locates in a way that corresponds to that view of cause and effect. For example, as it meets unskilful qualities like anger or greed, right mindfulness will bring around restraint and relinquishment; and as it meets skilful qualities such as generosity or truthfulness, the right view behind right mindfulness will support appreciation and lingering.

The steadying effect of mindfulness also allows for a fuller kind of knowing. This full knowing is of knowing qualities (dhammā) just as they are – void of the inference of ‘me, mine and myself’. Through freeing thoughts and moods from the reactive process of taking them personally, full knowing allows them to arise and pass. It’s also holistic and knows how the heart is being affected.

So, if the mind is getting overwhelmed or strained, full knowing may determine a shift of attention or of attitude. Guided by this, we may turn our minds to a more useful topic, or shift our attitude away from the notion of ‘making progress’ towards the practice of patience, inquiry and receptivity.

Without the filtering of deep attention, the mind loses direction and authority; without the lingering effect of mindfulness, there can be no steadying and moderating; and without full knowing, there would be no liberating insight. Instead, felt senses, meanings and mental feeling will tend to flood the citta, and become ‘What can I do? I’m stuck. I always will be …’ and thereby block a skilful response. But with the wisdom that trained attention brings, the first response we make is not to say or do something, but rather to firm up skilful qualities in the mind – and let go of reactions or hurtful responses. Consider the alternative: if I focus on my mental impressions and states through unprepared, insecure or biased attention, or view the world and others from the same basis, the more potent and firmly established afflictive meanings get. If I listen with an unsympathetic ear, or look with a critical stare, pre-judge, or fixate on what others do and say – all that will lead to suffering and stress. This is because such attention notices what it’s become accustomed to notice: her gracious demeanour (so much better than mine!), his irritating mannerisms (why can’t he be normal, like me?), my frustration at her inability to listen to me (just like my mother!), etc. It’s all about me; and it’s particularly sensitive to what I find uncomfortable. But if that’s all I notice, I get fixated on it, and these fixations psychologically locate me. I feel that ‘he’s always this way’ or I ‘see’ you in a certain way; or I only notice my bad habits. Careless, untrained attention is set to look out for old impressions, and is particularly attuned to any perception that fits the biases and wounds in the heart. It’s as if our wounds are looking for arrows to fill them. Thus, when we grab hold of wounded meanings, mental kamma is laid down, and the old perception is affirmed. Or even intensified. But if you want to get to the end of this cycle of kamma-vipāka, you have to cultivate skilful attention within the heart. [Continued next week 29 August 2024]

Link to the original: “Kamma and the End of Kamma” by Ajahn Sucitto. [Note, this is a Dhamma publication and you can download free of charge]:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/458-kamma-and-the-end-of-kamma

bright kamma: pūja

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By Ajahn Sucitto

(From last week): Thus, the old perception shapes me; in this case, as a fearful or confident person. And I act from that basis. This is why it is said: ‘Contact is the cause of kamma.’

To summarize: contact touches the citta, attention focuses it, and intention launches its response. This dynamic and formative process and the ‘track’ or ‘formation’ that it leaves in the citta is a saṇkhāra – the formative aspect of mental kamma, and what it forms. Saṇkhārā are crucial because they shape both action and actor – following their tracks, I become the tracker.

Now you could say that all meaning is factual: in the above instance, maybe a dog did bite me when I was four. That’s why I see dogs like that, and it’s quite reasonable. And it may well be the case that men in uniforms/red-headed women/people who talk fast (etc., etc.) have frightened me or let me down at some time or another. And it may also be the case that my fear or suspicion is based purely on somebody else’s opinion. But what the Buddha is pointing to is not historical circumstance or the attitudes of others – over which we have no say – but how fresh action arises when the felt sense that comes with designation-contact pushes a button on the citta and the established meaning jumps up.

What we might be encouraged to do then, is not to run away from, poison, slander, or get paranoid about dogs or people, but to handle the felt meaning and assess its validity in the here and now. Because to base one’s responses on one piece of data alone, even though it touches a sensitive spot, is only going to intensify the impression and bind you to it. Yes, as that’s a sensitive spot, that felt meaning should be responded to – but with skilful attention both to the actual dog, now (‘Is this dog, here and now, growling or baring its teeth? Or just sniffing around?’), and to your state of mind (feel the fear and pause on reacting to it). This is the kamma of handling and reviewing contact, attention and impulse – the kamma that leads to the end of further kamma (from that historical bias, at any rate).

Otherwise, it can be the case that even when there are no dogs (and so on) around, one can still be anxious that one might come by soon. Sounds ridiculous? No, paranoia is part of social life, even encouraged: look out for ‘suspicious’ people, Communists, radicals, atheists, men wearing hoodies, etc. … and when the citta collapses under all this, it’s chronic anxiety and medication. However, if we at least get the idea that these felt meanings are established in the citta, not in the object, we might also acknowledge the possibility that these historically-based perceptions could be reset or disbanded; also that positive ones – such as those associated with goodwill, generosity, integrity, and the many qualities perfected by the Buddha, proclaimed in his Dhamma teachings, and practised by his disciples – could be established. These perceptions can help the heart settle and bring forth the truth of its own goodness. This is the rationale behind devotion and recollection.

Pūja’: Ritual that Brightens the Heart

In Buddhism, and in other religions, access to and dwelling in the heart-tone of bright kamma is occasioned by devotion and recollection. In Buddhism, this is called ‘pūja’ – an act of raising up, and honouring that which is worthy of our respect. The very fact that there are human models and actions that one can feel deep respect for is itself a blessing to take note of: honouring opens and uplifts the heart. With pūja, we attend to a skilful felt meaning, linger there and allow the effects to nourish the citta. From this basis, it’s likely that inclinations or even specific ideas in line with bright kamma will arise. Either that, or the mind easily settles into a state that supports meditation. This is how and why one should linger in any bright kamma.

So, in the act of honouring the Buddha, one first opens the heart in respect and brings to mind the meaning of an Awakened One: someone of deep clarity; a speaker of truths that penetrate and bring healing to the human condition; one accomplished in understanding and action – a sage whose teachings can still be tested and put into action. If one has a Buddha-image, it’s something that should be held with respect – one cleans it, illuminates it with light, and offers flowers and incense to it. We place it on an altar, bow to it and chant recollections and teachings.

This is not a mindless activity; we use ritual means and resound words and phrases because this full engagement embodies and strengthens the quality of respect in a way that thinking can’t. With the openness of heart that these attitudes bring, any aspect of the teaching that’s brought to mind goes deeper. The act of offering that begins a pūja is a case in point: offering flowers “symbolizes bringing forth virtue, offering light is about bringing forth clarity, and incense does the same for meditative concentration. In this way, pūja introduces the heart to important Dhamma themes.

Pūja is especially helpful when people perform it as a group. Then we are participating in the Dhamma as both the expression and the Way of awakening, as well as in the collective commitment to, and engagement with, that Dhamma. This collective engagement ritualizes the ‘Sangha’, that is, the assembly of disciples. Chanting in a group has a harmonizing, settling effect: sonorous and unhurried, it steadies bodily and mental energies and supports an atmosphere of harmony with fellow practitioners. Tuning in and participating brings us out of ourselves and into a deep resonance with heart-impressions of the sacred. We can be touched by a sense of timeless stability, purpose and beauty. If these intentions, felt senses and recollections are established regularly, we know where to find good heart, how to attend to it, and how to allow ourselves to be uplifted. Such kamma feels bright.

The Benefits of Recollection

‘At any time when a disciple of the noble ones is recollecting the Tathāgata … the Dhamma … the Sangha … their own virtues: “[They are] untorn, unbroken, unspotted, unsplattered, liberating, praised by the wise, untarnished, conducive to concentration.” At any time when a disciple of the noble ones is recollecting virtue, his mind is not overcome with passion, not overcome with aversion, not overcome with delusion. His mind heads straight, based on virtue. And when the mind is headed straight, the disciple of the noble “ones gains a sense of the goal, gains a sense of the Dhamma, gains joy connected with the Dhamma. In one who is joyful, rapture arises. In one who is rapturous, the body grows calm. One whose body is calmed experiences ease. In one at ease, the mind becomes concentrated.

‘Mahānāma, you should develop this recollection of virtue while you are walking, while you are standing, while you are sitting, while you are lying down, while you are busy at work, while you are resting in your home crowded with children.’

(A.11:12; B. BODHI, TRANS.)

The expressions that are used in recollecting Dhamma are that it is experienced directly (not just as a theory), is of timeless significance, and is accessible and furthering for those who practise it. So that gives us an encouragement to look into what the Buddha taught and modelled: the way to the end of suffering and stress. With this, we recollect aspiration, learning and commitment as our common touchstone, and suffering and ignorance as our common challenge. Then we no longer feel so alone with our difficult mind-states, and we can handle them in a more open and aware way. Recollection of Sangha reminds us that although there is greed, anger and confusion in the human world, there are also people who cultivate a way out of that.

If you use pūja on a regular basis, it aligns you to the ‘Triple Gem’ – Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha – by presenting content in terms of images, ideas and themes, and values and practices that guide the heart. It also occasions acts of steering and composing attention. So pūja works both on what the mind is dealing with, and how it operates [Continued next week 22 August 2024].

Link to the original:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/458-kamma-and-the-end-of-kamma

bright kamma

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Ajahn Sucitto

The Blessing of Skilful Attention

Whoever cultivates goodness is made glad,

right now and in the future – such a one is

gladdened in both instances.

The purity of one’s deeds, if carefully recollected,

is a cause for gladness and joy.

Dhammapada: ‘The Pairs’, 16

In the last few weeks, a Buddha-image has been created in this monastery by Ajahn Nonti. He’s a renowned sculptor in Thailand, and he came to Cittaviveka to fashion this image as an act of generosity. It’s been a lovely occasion because the Buddha-image is being made in a friendly and enjoyable way. Many people have been able to join in and help with it. Yesterday there were nine people at work sanding the Buddha-image. It’s not that big, yet nine people were scrubbing away on it, and enjoying doing that together.

Bright and Dark Kamma Arise from the Heart

Nine people working together in a friendly way is a good thing to have happening. Moreover, the work was all voluntary, and came about with no prior arrangement: people got interested in the project and gathered around it. It’s because of what the Buddha represents, and because people love to participate in good causes. That’s the magic of bright kamma. It arises around doing something which will have long-term significance, and also from acting in a way that feels ‘bright’ rather than intense or compulsive. Kamma – intentional or volitional action – always has a result or residue, and here it’s obvious that the bright kamma is having good results. There’s an immediate result – people are feeling happy through working together. And there’s a long-term result – they are doing something that will bring benefit to others.

In a few days we hope to install the Buddha-image in the meditation hall. It’s an image that makes me feel good when I look at it. It has a soft, inviting quality that brings up a sense of feeling welcome and relaxed. This is a very good reminder for meditation. Sometimes people can get tense about ‘enlightenment’, and that brings up worries, pressure, and all kinds of views; but often what we really need is to feel welcomed and blessed. This is quite a turnaround from our normal mind-set; but when we are sitting somewhere where we feel trusted, where there’s benevolence around us, we can let ourselves open up. And as we open our hearts, we can sense a clarity of presence, and firm up around that. This firmness arising from gentleness is what the Buddha-image stands for. It reminds us that there was an historical Buddha whose awakening is still glowing through the ages – but when this is also presented as a heart-impression in the here and now, rather than as a piece of history, it carries more resonance. Then the image serves as a direct impression of what bright kamma feels like.

‘Bright’ kamma is the term used in the scriptures to denote good action, or that which leads to positive results. This is not a theory or a legal judgement; if you linger in the heart behind skilful actions, you can feel a bright, uplifting tone. Bright kamma is steady and imparts clarity; it has an energy that’s conducive to meditation. Dark kamma, on the other hand, lacks clarity and feels corrosive. As it makes the heart feel so unpleasant, mostly attention doesn’t want to go there; the heart gets jittery and distracts instead. So, this is something to check inwardly: can we rest and comfortably bear witness to the heart behind our actions? Do our thoughts and impulses come from a bright or dark state? Even in the case of owning up to some painful truth about our actions, isn’t there a brightness, a certain dignity, when we do that willingly? Look for brightness in occasions when your heart comes forth rather than in times of superficial ease or of being dutifully good. That bright, steady tone rather “than casualness or pressurized obedience, indicates the best basis for action.

Sense and Meaning: The Perceptual Process

The energy of kamma originates in the heart, citta. It can move out through body (kāya) and speech (vāca – which includes the ‘internal speech’ of thinking) and mind (manas). Both manas and citta can be translated as ‘mind’, but the terms refer to different mental functions. ‘Manas’ refers to the mental organ that focuses on the input of any of the senses. This action is called ‘attention’ (manasikāra). So manas defines and articulates; it scans the other senses and translates them into perceptions and concepts (saññā). Tonally, it’s quite neutral. It’s not happy or sad; in itself, it just defines, ‘That’s that.’

Citta, on the other hand, is the awareness that receives the impressions that attention has brought to it, is affected and responds. It adds pleasure and pain to the perceptions that manas delivers, and these effects generate mind-states of varying degrees of happiness and unhappiness. Owing to this emotional aspect, I refer to citta as ‘heart’. Note that citta doesn’t access the senses directly. Instead, it adds feeling to the perceptions that attention has brought it; but with that, the initial moment of perception gets intensified to give a ‘felt sense’. This is a simple note such as ‘smooth’, ‘glowing’, ‘foggy’, ‘intense’. Then as attention rapidly gathers around that sense, a felt meaning crystallizes. For example, manas may decide that an orange-coloured globe of a certain size is probably an orange. From that meaning, further felt senses such as ‘tasty, healthy’ may arise and resonate in the heart. So, a mind-state based on desire arises. And even though all this originates in mere interpretations, intention springs up – and citta moves attention, intention and body towards the orange with an interest in eating it.

In this way, impulse/intention occurs as a response to a felt meaning that itself has been conjured up by a graduated and felt perceptual process. This is how mental kamma arises. And the result of citta being affected in this way is that the meaning is established as a reference point. Then the next time I see or think of an orange, that established perception that ‘Oranges are tasty; they’re good for me’ becomes the starting point for action. But is that interpretation always correct? Ever bitten into a rotten orange, or been fooled by a plastic replica? More significantly, don’t perceptions of people need a good amount of adjustment over time? How true is perception?

Perception is initiated when attention turns towards a particular sense-object. So, all contact depends on attention. Take the case of when you’re intensely focused on reading a book or watching a movie: awareness of your body, of the pressure of the chair, and maybe even a minor ache or pain, disappears. The mind’s attention is absorbed in seeing and processing the seen, so other impressions don’t get registered. Contact with the chair has disappeared because one’s attention was elsewhere. How real then is contact?

Contact is actually of two kinds. The contact that occurs when the mind registers something touching the senses is called ‘disturbance-contact’ (paṭigha-phassa). But when manas ‘touches’ the citta at a sensitive point, ‘designation-contact’ (adhivacana-phassa) is evoked – along with a felt sense. Disturbance-contact occurs in the mind-organ, and designation-contact occurs in the heart; and it is designation-contact, the heart’s impression, rather than contact with something external, that both moves us and stays with us as a meaning. For example, ‘dog’ is tonally a neutral perception that we would agree upon as a definition of a certain kind of animal. But in terms of citta, that ‘dog’ could mean ‘savage creature that can bite or has bitten me’ or ‘loyal, cuddly friend that will protect me.’ Such contact is therefore formed by previous action, but present-day impulses and actions are based on it. Thus, the old perception shapes me; in this case, as a fearful or confident person. And I act from that basis. This is why it is said: ‘Contact is the cause of kamma.’

Continued next week 15 August 2024

Link to the original text. Download a few pages, or the whole book free of charge. It’s a Dhamma publication:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/458-kamma-and-the-end-of-kamma