none ‘ya

To round off these little blog posts of late on integration into saṅgha life, I want to talk about probably the most important thing I am learning about how to live in community, and an invaluable tool which I’ve found super helpful in facilitating it.

In life we are so conditioned to keep looking outside of us to solve our problems. It’s so ingrained that when we come to the Dhamma, a lesson we have to keep learning over and over again is that we must focus our attention on our mind, as this is the true source of our happiness and strife.

A challenge in living in monastic communities is that you are around the same people all the time, and this, coupled with a lack of stimulation and an inclination for the mind to flow outwards, creates a fishbowl where people can become overly involved in each other’s business, and conditions which can easily foster pettiness and small-mindedness. This is what happens when we spend too long staring at the same people across the room, day in, day out. If you haven’t got anything else going on in your life, that can easily become your life.

This can calcify into long-term behaviour patterns, where people become almost like spies, policing others around them and measuring themselves by comparison to others. People start defining themselves by the dead-end metric of what they oppose, rather than learning to define who and what they are by what they value and how they behave and contribute.

This can have a suffocating effect where privacy and space seem to disappear rapidly in robes, and the monastery can start to feel like a panopticon. This is a virus existent in many communities and if one is not aware of it and how to inoculate oneself against it, then we can easily become part of a toxic monastic grapevine and lose the plot with our practice.

The point is that none of this has any bearing on your monastic life. What other people are doing, how they are using their mind, their speech, their deportment, and so on, has no bearing on you at all. It is irrelevant to your practice, and one must not become entangled in it. If members of the community around you are behaving badly, it is, as we say in Australia, ‘none ‘ya’, as in ‘none of your business’.

Don’t waste your time in robes falling into the venus fly trap of rubbing shoulders with small-minded monastics offering sickly sweet gossip or wry degradation, or tying yourself up in gordian knots vilifying those who aren’t doing their share. This kind of attention on the other is a sickness and a cancer that is best avoided, and it’s kryptonite for samādhi. If people want to swan around and make fools of themselves, let them. That’s their kamma. As Ajahn Chah says, ‘They could stand on their head in the corner of the room, but don’t pay them any mind.’ (Quite an image if your reflect that we wear sabongs).

As well as getting sucked in by these things, people can also turtle up because they can’t deal. This is to be expected when you feel like the CIA operative monk of the week is going to pop out of your morning cornflakes and give you some unsolicited advice. It’s a natural inclination to recoil, but this is just the opposite side of the coin, where instead of being drawn into the banality, we stiffen and oppose it, and spend a lot of time in loops of resentful thinking, wishing that the people around us could be more restrained, wishing that we were in a monastery with monastics that were better trained, that were more like us. How vain this is, really, and if we start thinking like this, that everyone needs to be like us, it’s no wonder we suffer, as this will clearly never be the case (I mean, not everyone can be that awesome, right?).

So once again, we encounter the theme of finding the middle. Everyone will have a slightly different middle, depending on your disposition and character, but a middle we must find. When you find it, you know it, as the way it feels is compassionate without being overly involved, aloof, without being apathetic; it’s balanced. It’s also an on-going work in progress.

The tool I have found most useful for this, and so many other things, is mindfulness of the body or breath throughout the day. The Thais speak of this when they talk about their mantra ‘Buddho’. Whether it’s a mantra, or awareness of the tactile sensations on the body, or being with the experience of breathing, whatever it is, I’ve found anchors like that to be extremely useful in fostering satisampajañña, the kind of present moment attention that the Buddha praised not only for it’s presence, but for containing the contextual, or situational awareness of what one is doing, so as to foster wisdom in how one is receiving, and responding to one’s environment, including to the people around oneself.

By committing to working with an anchor like this, I’m not implying that we need to be rigidly focussed on one thing at all times, like some famous practitioners have recommended (for example Webu Sayadaw was an advocate of ānāpānassati, awareness of the breath, at all times). I’ve found this approach can be awkward, and even unsafe to practice - for example it’s probably not a good idea to watch your breath when driving, ideally you should be watching the road! Rather, we can stay with the anchor when we can, and then move our attention to something else, say the person we are talking to right now, before returning to the anchor once more. This becomes natural the more you do it, and when you see that you can keep fluidly moving between different anchors, such as breath and body, or reading the person in front of you, it becomes quite natural, you’re just experimenting with different things happening in the present, and the point is that you’re learning to live in the present.

Many meditators don’t seem to make the connection between the mind off the mat being the same as the mind on the mat. It always amazes me that people seem to think that if you let the mind wander around completely unrestrained when you are moving about and doing your activities during the day, or interacting with people, that you are going to give yourself a good foundation for stillness when you sit meditation.

One of the biggest obstacles is becoming overly involved with, or resistant to, the people around oneself, as this is the thing that will stir the mind the most, and fosters the two big nīvarana - the hindrances of desire and aversion. So if you can learn to move between the sticky gossip-mill or being clenched in resistance all the time, you’re on the path of learning about how to let go of the hindrances.

The Dhamma underpinning this is right understanding of the practice. Right view tells us from the very first teaching that the happiness we seek is nowhere other to be found than in the fabric of our five khandas, in our senses, our body and mind. There is nowhere else to look, and so if we are looking elsewhere, piling on with others who are taking issue in things around us, or becoming ensnared in endless not-so-merry-go-rounds of vengeful thinking, then we are missing the point of the path, which is telling us to look within.

The tools we use like a mantra, or the body, or breath, are tethers to help us keep coming back to understanding. When we do, we see that a new space opens up in the mind, and that we have a choice; we don’t have to get involved in the stories we see playing around us, or feel righteous indignation at the people we feel should be better. All of this is pointless. It doesn’t mean we become mute or emotionally barren, it just means we become more circumspect with how we use the energy of the mind, and we can see that we don’t need to waste it getting involved with trivialities.

What happens when we do this is that we become light, energetic, happy, and free. The path starts to open up because we are aligning our mind with right understanding of the teaching. When we find ourselves getting off track, we have given ourselves a useful anchor to remind us to come back and rediscover the beauty and freshness of the present, always here, always available, always now. We remember we have a teaching that is telling us to practice, to purify our own mind and conduct, and if we keep doing that, we will become cool in a burning world.

• Peace