6

RIGHT EFFORT

The kinds of researchers who count such things have said that the Buddha referred to effort, or energy, more than to any other topic in his teachings. This scholarly detail is not at all surprising, because the Buddha—whose teachings are always practical—was well aware that the spiritual practices he encouraged were challenging and required significant vigor on the part of his followers. In fact, in one popular story of the period just after his enlightenment, the Buddha decided that what he had learned was so difficult to practice that he would not even try to teach it—until he encountered a “heavenly being” who convinced him otherwise. Then, showing an uncanny ability to match his words to his listeners’ ability to comprehend them, he gave his first teachings to children from the village near the bodhi tree where he was enlightened.

The Buddha must have been a remarkably charismatic teacher. Many who personally heard him speak became enlightened in only a short time, but most of us who have come later have needed the kind of effort he advocated to even sustain our practice as we seek liberation. One of the most remarkable stories of such zeal involved Bodhidharma, the legendary sixth-century Indian master who brought Buddhism to China and is recognized as the First Ancestor of Chinese Ch’an and Japanese Zen Buddhism. Paintings depict him as a particularly fierce figure—his glowering visage supposedly resulted from his cutting off his own eyelids to keep from falling asleep when he was meditating. (A charming later version of this story is that he plucked off his eyelids and threw them into the ground, they sprang up as tea plants, and he afterward stayed awake by drinking tea.)

Although energy and effort are needed, most of us struggling with drowsiness during meditation resort to nothing more extreme than simply standing up. Throughout all his teachings, the Buddha stressed the Middle Way, and this moderation is the essence of right effort. In a story in the Vinaya, the Buddha compared effort to stringing a sitar, whose strings must be neither too taut nor too loose. As an old cliché says, “Easy does it, but do it.”

Right effort involves constant inner awareness and restraint. Why we make right effort is described by Achaan Chah in A Still Forest Pool, where he uses the metaphor of a lotus, an image the Buddha also often referred to:

We can see the mind as a lotus. Some lotuses are still stuck in the mud, some have climbed above the mud but are still underwater, some have reached the surface, while others are open in the sun, stain-free. Which lotus do you choose to be? If you find yourself below the surface, watch out for the bites of fishes and turtles.

TEACHINGS

Guidelines on energy and right effort are found throughout the Buddha’s teachings, but two of the most important statements are found in his major discourses on the foundations of mindfulness (MN 10; DN 22). It is no coincidence that both of these statements are contained within the Buddha’s foremost teachings on mindfulness, because right effort is most often considered within the context of mindfulness and meditation practices. Also, right effort acknowledges what is going on in our minds, involves willingness, and is created by the mind, not the body. As we’ll see in Chapter 8, right effort is our major tool for dealing with the hindrances that disrupt our meditation practice.

The Buddha described right effort to his Sangha as stirring up energy, exerting the mind, and striving (1) to prevent and abandon unwholesome states and (2) to produce and maintain wholesome states (DN 22.21). Elsewhere he paraphrased and summarized right effort as these four elements: restraining impulses that might cause unwholesome states; abandoning and dispelling any “thought of lust, of hatred, of cruelty that has arisen”; developing the seven factors of enlightenment; and preserving “firmly in his mind a favorable object of concentration which has arisen” (DN 33.1.11).

The first statement tells us what right effort does, and the second gives us the way to tap into the energy we need for right effort. One source of energy is explained as the seven factors of enlightenment: mindfulness; the three arousing factors of energy, or effort, investigation, and rapture; and the three stabilizing factors, of concentration, tranquillity, and equanimity. Among these seven it is the arousing factors that give us the energy for right effort (MN 10.42). The arousing factors work this way: First the very act of making effort for restraint, abandoning, development, and preservation generates energy. Second, investigation—specifically of the Dharma—arouses energy. Third, although we usually think of the word rapture as meaning some sort of awesome emotional or mystical experience, in the discourses it means keeping our heart and mind open. In Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, Jack Kornfield makes especially helpful comments regarding the last two of these arousing factors:

The quality of investigation requires courage. It is an acknowledgment of what we really don’t know and a willingness to examine the deepest questions in life. . . . The quality of rapture is an ease and openness of mind that receives with interest every kind of circumstance. It asks, “What do I have to learn from this new experience?”

Although right effort is often thought of in terms of meditation, another sutra (MN 117), gives us expanded guidelines that take us back to the “Eightfold Circle.” The Buddha told us to use right effort not just for the development of our meditation practice but also for our whole life. We are invited to use right effort to:

Abandon wrong intention (lust, hatred, cruelty)

Avoid wrong speech (lies, harsh language, gossip)

Avoid wrong action (killing, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct) and wrong livelihood

As Philip Kapleau notes in Awakening to Zen, we seem to especially need to exert right effort at the beginning of our practice. He urges us to be steadfast and patient and to exert this effort, because “energy begets energy. No energy exerted is ever lost.”

As we cultivate right effort—as well as the rest of the Eightfold Path—Dharma teachers and our sangha can play a critical role. The Buddha saw himself not as a god but as a teacher, and his relationship with his disciples was vital to their liberation and to the transmission of his teachings down through history to us. He stressed the importance of spiritual friends (kalyanamitra in Sanskrit, kalyana-mitta in Pali) on our journey to liberation, and today both our teachers and our sangha can support us when we find that generating right effort is most difficult for us. As we shall see below, the taking of the Three Refuges (in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha—including our teachers) can be a powerful part of a daily practice that sustains right effort.

IN PRACTICE

Buddhist practice is practice—not reading about the teachings but applying them in our daily lives, which takes effort. When I think of right effort, I often remember a statement made to me many years ago by a woman who appeared to be the most tranquil person I had ever met. I asked her how she had cultivated such serenity, and she replied, “Have you ever seen a swan peacefully gliding across a pond? Well, if you could look under the water, you’d see that it was paddling like hell.” Achaan Chah cautions us about how to direct that effort:

Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake in each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and defilement, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.

As we explore how we can incorporate right effort into our daily lives, we shall consider the four elements of restraint, abandoning, development, and preservation within the two broad categories of its negative and positive expressions: (1) arousing effort for the restraining and abandoning of unwholesome mental states and the resulting unskillful actions; and (2) arousing effort for the development and preservation of wholesome mental states and the resulting skillful actions. Then we shall see how we can use the Three Refuges to support the practice of right effort.

Before we turn to these broad areas of striving, let’s look at the word right, which has much more to do with the Middle Way, or what is appropriate, than with moral judgment or perfection. Whenever I think of right in this sense, I find it helpful to visualize what it’s like to drop and break a thermometer. To pick up the mercury, you have to do so gently but persistently; if you just grab it, it squirts out between your fingers.

Often we can learn a lot from negative examples, when things go awry. Particularly telling—though usually tragic—examples of wrong effort can be seen in the annual Darwin Awards, which, according to their website, “celebrate the theory of evolution by commemorating the remains of those who improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it in really stupid ways.” A Darwin Awards story that virtually caricatures wrong effort, which I first heard during a retreat from Insight Meditation teacher Myoshin Kelley, involves Larry Walters, a young man from Los Angeles who won honorable mention in 1982 and was one of the few people honored by Darwin Awards who lived to receive the award. Larry won this award as the result of the excessive effort he made on behalf of his great passion: flying. Larry was unable, because of poor eyesight, to become a pilot, but he didn’t give up. One day he implemented a plan long in development. He went out into his backyard, tied his lawn chair to his car, then firmly attached to the chair forty-five weather balloons, which he had bought at an army-navy surplus store and filled with helium. He strapped himself into the chair, along with cans of beer, some sandwiches, and a pellet gun. He intended to cut himself loose, float up about 30 feet, enjoy “flying” for a while, then shoot some holes in the balloons and gently drift down to his backyard.

Things went wrong from the beginning. When he cut himself loose from his anchor, he didn’t float gently up 30 feet. He shot upward for 16,000 feet. Afraid to shoot any holes that might unbalance the chair at that altitude, he just held on and drifted for the next fourteen hours. The first indication of his plight came when TWA and Delta commercial passenger-jet pilots radioed Los Angeles International airport that they had seen a man with a gun in a lawn chair at 16,000 feet. Needless to say, these reports were initially met with skepticism. When Larry finally risked coming down, he shot holes in several balloons and slowly descended until, near Long Beach, his anchor ropes became entangled in power lines. The police arrested him there, and the FAA fined him $1,500 for violating the Los Angeles International air corridor, the only charge that could be found for such an unusual situation, where effort was indeed extreme, if misguided, and therefore not “right.”

As we have noted, right effort is a critical part of the Eightfold Path because spiritual practice is not easy, and we need to consciously be aware of the kind of energy we must generate. In Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein urges us to practice right effort by working from our individual strengths.

We may free ourselves through the power of zeal, the great desire and motivation to follow the path; we may do it through the quality of heroic effort, an effort that cannot be stopped; we may come to awakening through our absorption in and love for the Dharma; or we may experience freedom through the power of investigation, the need to know and understand. Any one of these can be our path of fulfillment.

Our work is to recognize where our own strength lies, and to practice from that place of strength, to develop it, to cultivate it, and to make it even stronger. Our great life challenge is to do the work of awakening, to see that the path of practice lies in bringing these liberating qualities of heart and mind to each moment. . . . The Buddha pointed out the four roads to success. The rest is up to us.

Thus, we can practice right effort most effectively by arousing and working with the personal strengths that we already have.

Wherever we find the strength, we need to make a commitment to practice right effort over the long haul, because achieving liberation demands persistence. In Start Where You Are Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön compares the process to what happens when rain falls on hard soil:

We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and “get it,” but actually the truth sinks in like rain into very hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soften up slowly at our own speed. But when that happens, something has fundamentally changed in us. That hard earth has softened. It doesn’t seem to happen by trying to get it or capture it. It happens by letting go; it happens by relaxing your mind, and it happens by the aspiration and the longing to want to communicate with yourself and others. Each of us finds our own way.

But what do we do while the rain is falling and we’re softening up? We “act as if.” This does not mean that we pretend or lie but rather that we “take the action as if” we were practicing as fully liberated beings. This is the same perspective with which we introduced the Five Precepts in Chapter 4. There we saw the precepts as the expression of the actions of an enlightened being. In other words, we take the actions as if we were already enlightened—without pretending to be enlightened. In Encouraging Words, Robert Aitken explains it this way:

Practice is twofold. The first part is training; the second is the act itself. And these are not two things: when you train, the act itself is happening; when you are the act itself, your training is deepened. . . .

It is just as though you were trying to play the piano with Mozart’s hands. At first such action “as if” is awkward, but with practice your music becomes your own best creation.

Once we have used right effort to gain knowledge of the practice, we must then use right effort to apply it. Thomas Cleary’s translation of The Flower Ornament Scripture underscores that if we do not apply those teachings, we are

Like a man floating in water
Who dies of thirst, afraid of drowning.

 

Restraint and Abandoning of the Unwholesome

When an unwholesome mental state begins to occur, our first task is to prevent it from arising. Mara is assaulting us again, tempting us. As we saw in our exploration of right action, the temptation of an unwholesome mental state is readily combated by immersion in the Dharma and meditation. In A Heart as Wide as the World, Insight Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg describes a key aspect of restraint:

Restraint is the foundation for the development of the absence of remorse. When we restrain a momentary impulse to do a harmful act, we are able to see the impermanence and transparency of the desire that initially arose.

When an unwholesome state has already arisen, our charge is to abandon it. Again, taking refuge in the Dharma and meditation can enable us to forsake it. A critical element in this progression is that we recognize the unwholesome, whether it is waiting patiently or has set up housekeeping in our minds. Within meditation, these unwholesome states are known as the hindrances, but they can assault us at any moment of our lives. Whether in meditation or not, the five hindrances are expressions of separateness, of Self. Let’s look at how each of the five hindrances might manifest outside of meditation and see how turning to the Dharma can help us to restrain and abandon them.

Desire as Avarice

In Buddhist psychology and Buddhist cosmology there are various realms of existence in which one can live or be reborn. One of these realms—a “state of woe”—is the domain of “hungry ghosts,” expressions of craving and greed. Hungry ghosts are usually depicted as having huge, bloated stomachs, pinhole mouths, and needle-thin throats, so that they cannot possibly fill their cavernous bellies. As Chögyam Trungpa noted, they are more preoccupied with being hungry than with satisfying their hunger. Hungry ghosts thus “portray” craving for food, but they represent greed in all its many manifestations, which always come to us through one of the “sense gates”—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, or mind. If we are to restrain and abandon desire, therefore, we must sustain awareness of our sense doors.

Consider one occasion when avarice arose in a “multiple hindrance attack” through sense gates. A woman we’ll call Margaret was transferred by her company to Dallas and was looking for a new home to buy. The real estate agent first showed her a large but graceful mansion, beautifully landscaped, with a swimming pool, in a very fancy neighborhood—and way out of her price range, as Margaret told him. He then showed her six houses that were the right size and the right price. But no matter how many houses Margaret looked at, she could not get that mansion out of her mind. In the story she told herself, if she took it, her kids would love having their own rooms, her parents would be impressed, and everyone—including her new neighbors—would know that she really was successful.

Aversion as Jealousy

Aversion is the opposite of craving—and can be just as insistent. When something enters through a sense door and we experience it as unpleasant, we usually keep rejecting it until it—or we—goes away. But sometimes, especially when the aversion is reinforcing a sense of self, we hold on to it even while it causes us great suffering, which sometimes but not always is immediately obvious.

A classic example of how potent aversion can be, and how long we may hold on to it, is evident when we are in the clutches of the ugly emotion jealousy. Often jealousy arises in romantic relationships or in job or academic situations, but even some relatively innocent childhood experiences can have deep and lasting effects, especially when they involve sibling rivalry. One friend, for example, as a middle-aged woman found herself uncomfortably angry whenever she visited her acquaintances who had a golden retriever puppy. When she thought about what might be sparking these feelings, she realized that she still felt hurt because when she was eight years old, her parents hadn’t let her have a puppy but had let her six-year-old brother get a retriever. “Boys need dogs,” they said, just as boys needed to have their own cars—another thing she was later denied. But she was sure even as a child that her mother favored her brother because he was the “good boy,” while she was just a “moody girl.” After all these years, she still hadn’t forgiven him, or her parents, for that puppy.

When we don’t use the teachings to help us let go of powerful feelings of aversion, they can cause us great suffering. When we hold on for decades to jealousy or greed, like the monkeys who were killed because they would not let go, we too die a little spiritually.

Sloth as Procrastination

What we experience as “sloth and torpor,” or drowsiness, in meditation can take the form of procrastination in our daily life.

The sequence is much the same as for greed or aversion. Something arrives at our sense doors; we experience it as unpleasant or neutral; and we put it off. In some situations, fear is also a factor in procrastination. Many times procrastination is just an inconvenience to us or others, but sometimes the consequences are potentially serious. Consider a few examples:

“I’ve been too busy to get a mammogram.”

“I heard about the recall, and I’ll have my SUV checked before I take that trip next month.”

“I’ve got years until I reach retirement age. I’ll look into investing later.”

Awareness that we are procrastinating can enable us to muster the effort to do what we need to do when we need to do it.

Restlessness as Worry

We can physically experience restlessness in our everyday life in much the same way that we do in meditation—by being unable to be still. And we see restlessness all around us, with people rushing here and there, often with a cell phone to their ear. Restlessness can also affect us mentally in a number of ways, including worrying. Several things are generally at work when we worry: We are not in the present moment, and we are larding the situation with the stories we concoct. Those are the two places where effort needs to be applied through the Dharma.

Doubt as Skepticism

When Mara tried to divert the Buddha from his path to enlightenment, the last and most powerful hindrance he threw at him was doubt: not seeing clearly what is true. We all are afflicted by forms of doubt in our daily life—some blatant, some very subtle. In the sense that we tend to dress doubt up with stories, it is like worry, but unlike worry it tends to be in the present tense. In fact, one aspect of doubt is that it often produces indecision, so that we get “stuck” where we are. Consider these examples:

“I can’t ask her to marry me. She knows I’m not good enough for her.”

“I should have majored in a different subject. I’m just not smart enough to do engineering.”

“I’m not going to vote, because it doesn’t matter anyway who’s elected president.”

“If there is a God, how could this happen?”

In our everyday examples of the five hindrances, we can come into the present moment and immerse ourselves in the Dharma to keep ourselves from falling into unwholesome states or to abandon them if we are already there. Revisiting the twelve links of dependent origination, we can see in each example that something approached or entered one of our sense gates (usually the mind, except for desire and aversion); that we deemed it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral; and that we then got caught in craving or aversion. Seeing these dynamics and the karmic results if we continue in them can enable us to exert enough effort to interrupt the cycle. If we need further support in the Dharma, we can go to the heart of the Buddha’s teachings, the Four Noble Truths, and right understanding of suffering, craving, and impermanence will invigorate our efforts so that we can break the sequence. In all of these situations, in addition to returning to our understanding of the Dharma, we can work with the hindrances through meditation.

Development and Preservation of the Wholesome

In addition to restraining and abandoning unwholesome mental states, right effort is about achieving balance by seeking out and sustaining wholesome states. Right effort to develop and preserve wholesome states again involves thorough immersion in the Dharma, mindfulness, and meditation—all three with persistence and consistency.

The Buddha summarized the root of the wholesome as nongreed, nonhate, and nondelusion (MN 9.7). In another discourse (MN 8.12–13) he gave an extensive list of unwholesome states that “lead us downward” and invited us to engage ourselves in wholesome states that “lead us upward.” This list of “peaceful abidings” includes practicing the Eightfold Path and the Five Precepts; overcoming the five hindrances; practicing a few specific variations such as not being cruel, angry, or arrogant; as well as having good friends, having fear of wrongdoing, having great knowledge, and not tenaciously holding on to our own views.

This long list makes it sound as if we have to be perfect, but we do not. What we have to be is mindful in the present moment and committed to nonharming in any way. As much as devotion to the Dharma can help us in this commitment, it is often difficult to sustain it alone. Even if we lived alone meditating in a cave, we might be able to avoid harming others, but we would still have the companionship of our own minds. How frightening and generally unwholesome that company can be was revealed in the story of a monk who did just that, high in the Himalayas. After staring at a blank wall in the cave for a while, the hermit painted a remarkably realistic image of a ferocious tiger there. But every time he looked at it, he was frightened by this creation of his own mind.

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

Siddhartha, before his enlightenment, sought liberation by practicing with renowned teachers who had large numbers of disciples living communally. After he became the Buddha, communal practice continued to be an important aspect of the development of his teachings. Although he most often wandered with a retinue of monks and sent his other disciples throughout northern India to carry his teachings, during the torrential monsoon season each year he gathered his Sangha in retreat for the three or four months of rain in monasteries provided by wealthy lay followers. During this time he and his senior disciples taught, and the Sangha practiced together. One important and very practical aspect of this time together—which accounts for the repetitions found in the discourses—is that the teachings were transmitted orally. The Sangha recited aloud the Buddha’s major discourses from memory. There was a written language at this time, but whereas an individual might make a mistake in writing down a teaching, the group recitation aloud and in unison “corrected” the small changes and omissions and preserved the original teachings for centuries before they were written down.

Just as the disciples of the first Sangha were strengthened in their practice by doing it together, so can we draw on the strength and collective wisdom of our sangha for the right effort we need in our practice. In fact, as anyone who has tried to maintain a practice alone for any length of time has discovered, it is much harder to keep it going than with a group. If we choose, we can quite literally take refuge in a community of spiritual seekers, just as the Buddha’s Sangha did.

The Three Refuges

There are no fixed rules for “becoming a Buddhist.” Anyone who wishes to follow the Buddha’s teachings may do so and may, if they wish, call themselves a Buddhist, though they do not have to. During the Buddha’s time, a person became an “official” follower—monk, nun, or lay—by three times reciting, in front of an ordained follower, the Three Refuges (also known as the Three Jewels or the Three Treasures):

I take refuge in the Buddha.

I take refuge in the Dharma.

I take refuge in the Sangha.

At that time the Buddha was the enlightened teacher who lived among them. The Dharma was the body of his teachings. The Sangha was the community of his committed disciples. Taking the Three Refuges was and is a commitment to surrender the notion of a separate self. Today the original meanings are still intact, but many additional connotations have evolved. For example, the Buddha may also be seen as what is possible for us in our lives. The Dharma may also be seen as what is real and free of ignorance and delusion. The Sangha may also be seen as the worldwide community of all spiritual seekers or even all the living beings with whom we are interconnected in life.

Insight Meditation teacher Arinna Weisman invites her students to use several variations in addition to the traditional phrases, for example, in The Beginner’s Guide to Insight Meditation:

May I take refuge in my capacity to awaken.

May I take refuge in the ways of living that bring about my freedom and happiness.

May I feel open to all those who can support me on this path of freedom.

Taking the first refuge means taking refuge in our fundamental Buddha-nature, with its potential for enlightenment. Taking the second refuge means taking refuge in the teachings that awaken this nature (known as the Dharma). Taking the third refuge means taking refuge in the community that practices together (known as the sangha), which provides a resting place that is safe, nourishing, and transformative.

Many of us experience great support for our efforts through taking the Three Refuges as a daily commitment, perhaps at the beginning of each sitting period. Whenever we can practice with a sangha, our efforts also are enhanced. While meditating, we may be thinking that we cannot sit there for another moment, but quite amazingly our awareness of the others around us somehow enables us to persist.

Teachers play a very special role in our sanghas, helping us to cultivate right effort through their support and direction. The role of teachers varies considerably from one Buddhist tradition to another. In Insight Meditation, for example, teachers are the kind of “spiritual friends” that the Buddha referred to, who through their knowledge and wisdom can guide us on our path, but the emphasis stays on the individual’s practice. In Dharma talks Sharon Salzberg often quotes her teacher Munindra, who once said to her: “The Buddha’s enlightenment solved the Buddha’s problem, now you solve yours.”

In Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, students may make a more formal commitment and give formal devotion to a teacher, who for them is the embodiment of the Dharma and through whom the Dharma is transmitted. Zen priest Enkyo O’Hara, whom I quoted in The Beginner’s Guide to Zen Buddhism, lays out helpful guidelines for choosing a teacher:

Can I take risks with this teacher?

Can I be a fool in front of this teacher?

Can I say, “I don’t know?” to this teacher?

If you can say yes to all these questions—can trust this teacher in these ways—then you’ve probably found a good teacher for you. If you can’t answer yes, then you’ll spend ten years just looking good.

Philip Kapleau, in Awakening to Zen, describes the special karmic bond that forms between a teacher and student in the private interviews called dokusan. He refers to a teacher as his or her student’s “spiritual midwife.”

In all traditions, it is the teachers who have maintained the purity of the Dharma and have transmitted it through their lineages for nearly 2,600 years. We have the Buddha’s teachings today because of the efforts of the teachers who followed him.

I find it helpful to remember that when the Buddha became enlightened, he didn’t say, “Well, that’s it. Now I can go to the beach.” He himself continued to practice—as well as teach—for the next forty years. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki describes his efforts metaphorically:

Buddha was not interested in the elements comprising human beings, nor in metaphysical theories of existence. He was more concerned about how he himself existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing. How we become enlightened was his main interest. The enlightened person is some perfect, desirable character, for himself and for others. Buddha wanted to find out how human beings develop this ideal character—how various sages in the past became sages. In order to find out how dough became perfect bread, he made it over and over again, until he became quite successful. That was his practice.

We may sometimes feel discouraged that after we have put out so much right effort, we still feel so very unenlightened. Our bread just hasn’t risen, but we do not have to overachieve as some kind of Dharma Lawn Chair Larry. As Pema Chödrön says about rain falling on hard earth, and as the Dhammapada said 2,500 years earlier: “Do not think lightly of good, saying: ‘It will not come to me.’ Even as a water-pot is filled by the falling of drops, so the wise man, gathering it drop by drop, fills himself with good” (122).

And remember, as he lay dying, the Buddha’s final words were: “Strive on with awareness.”