Patient Endurance

There was a point early in the Buddha’s teaching career where over a thousand arahants came to see him. They hadn’t determined beforehand that they would come. They all came spontaneously. And these were people for the most part who had heard one Dhamma talk from the Buddha and gained awakening.

But now they were going to go out to teach, so the Buddha gave them a long Dhamma talk that afternoon that filled in the details, starting with some of the more basic principles, so they could teach the Dhamma to a wide range of people.

The talk began with the theme of patient endurance. As the Buddha said, this is the quality that burns away your defilements. Now, patience doesn’t mean you simply just put up with things.

There’s a skill to patience. Patience can often mean that you stick with an activity for a long time. You’re not just on the receiving end of being patient about pain, say, but you’re also going to go on the offensive, with the realization that it may take a long time to see the results. But if you don’t put in any effort, you’re just stuck where you are.

So you learn how to talk to yourself. This is one of those areas where all three fabrications come in because an important part of patience is learning that not everything is hard to bear in the present moment.

There have to be some ways that you can give rise to a sense of well-being, mental or physical, preferably both, and you start with the breath: How are you breathing right now? Where in the body does the breath feel good? Focus your attention there, and be patient with it because good may not be very good in the beginning.

To be protective of that spot in the right way, think of it being wide open and not allowing any thoughts to come in that would squeeze it up, tighten it up. After a while, the sense of fullness there will begin to grow, and then you have something good to spread around.

As you do this, you have to talk to yourself, one, to remind yourself that you’ve got to be patient, but that, two, the results are going to be good. The more you can get interested in the breath, the less you’ll be worried about the things that are weighing down the mind in other areas.

So talk to yourself about the breath.

Some people find that that spot where they’re very sensitive to the breath is right around the area of the heart, the area of the sternum. How do you breathe in a way that that spot stays open and unrestricted right there, both in the “in-breath,” and with the “out-,” and “in-between?”

And what perception allows you to maintain that feeling of fullness, feeling of ease, well-being?

Use your ingenuity. It’s one of the qualities the Buddha said you have to develop as you work on the path. Sometimes we look at the path and we say that “I’m not equal to a path like that.” But then, the person you are right now is not going to be the one who will finish the path.

As you develop the qualities that are developed along the path, you become a different person. You have new skills, and your sense of yourself will grow.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the talk “Nurturing Patient Endurance” given on October 21, 2020. [Also in (pdf) format.]