Adhiṭṭhāna: Determination

We are looking at this virtue, this pāramī, this perfection – the resolution, determination, adhiṭṭhāna. We have lots of words for it: persistence, tenacity, perseverance, doggedness, resolve, resolution, steadfast, willpower, purpose, purposeful, grit. All these are life's little nuances to our understanding of determination.

The word itself can be split into adhi and ṭhāna. Adhi means higher, above, superior. You get it in words like adhicitta, superior mind, or adhipati, who is a ruler. Ṭhāna is used both in a realistic sense – a place, a location – but metaphorically it means a state, a condition, a reason, an occasion. Most of you will know the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. The ṭhāna at the end is the establishment, the foundation. The paṭi is just reinforcing that – a deep and profound establishment of sati, awareness. And that is the discourse on how to establish awareness. I like the word perseverance for some reason – just dogged perseverance.

In the Visuddhimagga, it talks about the resolution to undertake and carry out the requisites of awakening without wavering. It is an unwavering commitment, an unshakable resolve. It also talks about an unshakable resolve directed towards a wholesome goal, grounded in wisdom and supported by the other perfections. So what we shall do is go through these perfections and show how adhiṭṭhāna is a binding force that brings them all together in order for us to attain a particular goal. Of course, here we are centred on liberation, but these things also work for making a relationship work, some task at work itself, anything that you undertake which is going to take effort, continued effort. All these factors come into play.

If we just go through the pāramī, starting with generosity: when you set yourself a goal on something, it is being generous to yourself, isn't it? You are giving yourself something. You are giving yourself an aim. And because we are always interconnected, always involving other people, it is also a gift for them. So that generosity comes in there somewhere, the feeling of giving.

When it comes to virtue, sīla, ethical conduct, you can see how if you don't have that, things can go a bit wrong. Somebody I think who has clear determination is Putin. He is prepared – when I say that, he is prepared to put so many thousands of young men at the front to be killed and wounded. It is not actually affecting him. He is probably enjoying caviar. But at least he has that determination to sacrifice everybody to that final aim of expanding the Russian Federation. And of course you see that in all of these authoritarians, these tyrants. We could point to other people too, but we shall not go into that. In terms of our practice of becoming fully liberated, obviously it needs to be virtuous.

Now, nekkhamma, renunciation. Consider we have just had a little baby in the family, and when you think about having a child – many of you will have had children – that is a huge commitment. You have to have perseverance. I think it was Kabat-Zinn who said bringing up children was like eighteen years on retreat. That sort of complete devotion – a baby is twenty-four hours, seven days a week conditioning. You have to give up something. You have to give up what you would normally have done – going to the pictures or however you amuse yourselves. So it involves some level of renunciation.

Paññā, wisdom. It has got to be a certain devotion to righteousness. I am thinking here of people who really spend an enormous amount of energy trying to get injustices corrected. The one that comes to mind recently, for those in the UK, was this huge miscarriage of justice about the Post Office, where the powers that be trusted this accounting software. It eventually ended up with nine hundred postmasters being dismissed. There were suicides. Some went to jail – a completely miscarried justice. And it was the actions of one man in particular, Alan Bates, who spent twenty years getting justice. Can you imagine that? Twenty years of perseverance. That is the sort of wisdom, that idea for justice.

Obviously, that is going to take energy, effort. Do not confuse effort with perseverance. Perseverance is a mental state, a mental attitude, whereas effort is the energy you need, both the physical and mental energy. Not having any of these can undermine the whole project.

And then of course there is patience. Like this man – twenty years, for heaven's sake – to actually have the patience and the willingness to endure. That is important too.

And then we have sacca, which is truthfulness. It is really being honest about oneself, about one's capabilities. Obviously, if you have an aim which is beyond your capability, you just get burnout and disappointment. I mean, if I started thinking about becoming a professional footballer and I got the kit and went training, turned up at clubs, it might be that a good friend of mine might come to tell me that maybe I was being a bit misguided, not having enough humility. So there has to be that sense of being real about oneself.

There is mettā, of course. Doing anything which is wholesome – and here we are talking specifically about liberation – is obviously an act of loving kindness, an act of care towards ourselves. And because it always involves other people, it is therefore an act of care towards others.

And then finally, this quality of upekkhā, which is equanimity. That is being able to bear with things, not to get caught up in disappointment, not to go berserk when something wonderful has happened, to keep that even keel, which of course reserves energy and helps us to be more narrowed in our focus when we want something.

So you can see how once you have brought a certain sense of persistence, a certain sense of commitment to something, all your virtues come to support you. Gratitude – once you think about the things that have been given us, then the natural thing is to want to give back. Virtues always support each other in some way or other. Whereas vices – anger, greed – they cancel each other out. You cannot be angry and greedy at the same time, even though it might feel like that. They are two mental states that cancel each other out.

So how much should our determination be when it comes to this process of liberation? This is taken from a particular discourse where the Buddha describes the sort of ascetic practices that he did. He starts off with this clear determination: "Let only my skin, sinews and bones remain and let my flesh and blood dry up. I will not give up my effort so long as I have not attained what can be attained by human strength." Now, this took him into those ascetic practices, like holding his breath for as long as he could, not eating, almost starving himself to death. And at some point he realised that this was over-efforting, it was a wrong sort of perseverance. With that, he leaves his companions, if you remember, and then he remembers this occasion in his life – which according to the academics is the only bit of biography you can actually believe – where he remembers watching his father doing an opening ploughing ceremony. He is a young kid, and you know how young kids get involved, and he is totally involved in what his father is doing, drawn by curiosity, by interest. This not only changes his practice from trying to attain something – liberation, trying to attain this – to investigating his condition. He realises that when he was in that state, he was actually very happy.

Now we call these things – when I say now, it has been only fairly recent in the past five, maybe seven, ten years – that the whole thing about sutta jhānas has come to the fore. The old jhāna was normally what they call the Visuddhimagga jhāna, where you become completely absorbed and lose all touch with the surroundings. They are beautiful, very enjoyable, but there is no insight in it. Whereas with these sutta jhānas, they are much lighter, you can still be aware of things, but it has that quality of curiosity, and so is a path to liberation. This is what he begins to practise, and this is what he refers to when he talks about people doing jhāna practice. It is a supportive thing to your enquiry. It was a case of him realising this when all the other stuff that the ascetics were practising had failed him.

There is a distinction to be made between that and willpower. Willpower in that sense of total commitment, but it is a sort of narrow vision. You are not aware of the mountains and the chasms that are in your way. You keep collapsing and push and push and push. And of course, it upsets everybody around you – this willpower business. So you know from the reaction of people around you that you might be doing something which is ego-based, pride-based, rather than coming from a sense of humility and of reality, being real about oneself and real about the situation. That often happens when we are practising and we move into over-efforting. That is the point where the determination, the perseverance, has actually gone a bit wonky. Normally in meditation, if you are sitting and you do that, the meditation just collapses. You just cannot do it for a while.

When adhiṭṭhāna, this perseverance, this resolution, is developed, there is always that clear understanding about what the goal is. There is a moral integrity about it. There is a consistency about your practice and about what you are devoted to. And there is the ability to endure. The Buddha reinforces this: "When a bhikkhu" – that means anybody who is listening – "has resolution, has developed it and has made it his basis" – now that is the ground of his practice, you might say – "then he attains the destruction of the taints."

These taints, the āsavā, are deep-seated mental defilements. There are four of them. There is craving, the craving for existence, wanting to live, which is understandable, but it is that sort of attachment to life. There is ignorance, ignorance about one's true identity – that is the basic problem. And sometimes wrong view is attached to those taints. They are also called cankers, which is a bit odd. A canker is some sort of white thing on your tongue, isn't it, that hurts? I do not know. Somebody has called them fermentations. Translators do have a good time, I think.

So finally, how do we actually develop this? It is the small resolutions that you make that you keep that builds up the muscle of perseverance. All of us have experienced, perhaps being on retreat or on a Zoom or something, making a resolution that you are going to sit every morning for half an hour, forty minutes, one hour, whatever it is. It works for two or three days. And then it all shrinks – it becomes twenty-five minutes, and then twenty minutes, and then it just all disappears, and you wonder what is happening. This is a lack of that resolution, a lack of that persistence, that perseverance. So one re-establishes it. To establish a habit you have got to put some energy into it, some commitment, and you must do it religiously for three months, and then it becomes ingrained. Not to say that we do not get lazy again and lose it and have to start all over again, but that is the purpose of resolutions throughout the day.

Sometimes – and I have made this mistake myself – you make a resolution to help somebody and you have done it without real reflection. I remember once a friend of mine said he was moving into a new flat and he was going to decorate on the weekend. I just blurted out, "Oh, I'll come and help you." Well, come Saturday morning, the last thing I wanted to do was decorate his apartment. But I was good. I was very good. I determined to go and I went and helped him out for the morning anyway. So sometimes we have to be careful what we resolve. It is a bit like being careful what you wish for.

And to praise ourselves when we have actually completed something which has taken a little bit of endurance. Often, I do not think we congratulate ourselves. We do not have that sort of self-love, that self-praise. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as it does not get into an ego and how wonderful I am. But when we complete a task, we should stop and just say, "Oh, that was good. I did good." And in that vein, it is good to remember past times when we persevered with something and achieved something. That builds up confidence. We can do, you see.

To end this off, there are always these little phrases that arahants seem to say when they become fully liberated. One of them is a lovely little thing. It just says, "What had to be done has been done." And you can imagine the relief, being able to say that. We set ourselves a task. We commit ourselves to it. We resolve to complete the task – always having to have a little small print: "save in emergency or extraordinary circumstance" – and you complete it. Then you can say to yourself, "What had to be done has been done." And you get that sense of deep satisfaction.

I can only hope my words have been of some assistance and that by your unshakable resolve, you will attain full liberation from suffering sooner rather than later.