..续本文上一页m from fostering such obstacles to right concentration as sensual desire or ill will. Applied to feelings of serenity or the potential for rapture, it means viewing them in such a way that helps develop them into factors for Awakening.
Even within a particular category, there”s no one approach that works in all cases. In one of his discourses Buddha observes that some unskillful mental states wither away if you simply watch them with equanimity, while others require an active effort to take them apart. In another discourse he expands on this observation by recommending five ways of dealing with distracting thoughts: replacing them with more skillful thoughts, focusing on their drawbacks, consciously ignoring them, relaxing the tension that goes into maintaining them, and forcefully suppressing them. In neither discourse, though, does he give hard and fast rules for telling which type of thought will respond to which approach. You have to find out for yourself by sharpening your discernment through trial and error as to what works and what doesn”t in any given situation.
The same principle applies to skillful mental states. The Buddha”s final summary of his teachings, the wings to Awakening, lists seven ways of conceiving the path to the end of suffering—in terms of four establishings of mindfulness, four bases for success, four right exertions, five strengths, five faculties, seven factors for Awakening, and the noble eightfold path. And again, it”s up to you to learn through trial and error which way of conceiving the path is most useful at any particular time in your practice.
This means that applying appropriate attention to skillful and unskillful mental states is not a one‐shot affair. The tasks connected with each of the four categories of appropriate attention all have to be tested through trial and error, and mastered as skills. To borrow an analogy from the Canon, full Awakening is not a matter of picking up a bow and arrow and hoping for a fluke bull”s eye. The insight of Awakening comes in the course of practicing on a straw man until you”re able “to shoot long distances, to fire accurate shots in rapid succession, and to pierce great masses.”
As the Buddha noted in his first discourse, he didn”t claim to be awakened until he had fully mastered the tasks appropriate to all four categories. In fully developing the factors of the path, he fully comprehended the five clinging aggregates to the point of abandoning all passion and craving for them. That was when he fully realized the end of suffering. With that, the categories of appropriate attention had done their work in solving the problem of suffering, but even then they still had their uses. As the Buddha noted, even a fully awakened arahant would still apply them to experience to provide a pleasant dwelling for the mind in the here and now.
In all of these cases, appropriate attention means seeing things in terms of their function—what they can do—while the act of appropriate attention is itself a type of doing, adopted for what it can do for the mind. And the test for appropriate attention is that it actually works in helping to put an end to suffering. When we contrast this with the Buddha”s examples of inappropriate attention, we see that attention is inappropriate when it frames things in terms of being and identity, and appropriate when framing them in terms of actions and their results. In fact, appropriate attention looks at being itself as an action, with each act of being or assuming an identity to be evaluated by the pleasure or pain it produces. When we look at ourselves with appropriate attention, we focus not on what we are, but on what we”re doing—and in particular on whether what we”re doing is unskillful—leading to suffering—or skillful, leading t…
《Untangling the Present The Role of Appropriate Attention》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…