Adhiṭṭhāna — Determination

I shall begin.

So we're just looking at this virtue, pāramī, this perfection. We'll come to that in a minute. This word, the resolution, determination, adhiṭṭhāna.

So we've got lots of words. Persistence, tenacity, perseverance, doggedness, resolve, resolution, steadfast, willpower, purpose, purposeful, grit. And all these are life's little nuances to our understanding of determination.

So the word itself, adhi, it'd be split into adhi and ṭṭhāna. Adhi just means higher, above, superior, etc. So you get it in words like adhicitta, superior mind, or adhipati, who's a ruler. Ṭṭhāna is used both in a realistic sense of place or location, but metaphorically, it's a state, a condition, a reason, occasion. And most of you will know the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. So the ṭṭhāna at the end is the establishment, the foundation. The paṭi is just reinforcing that—a deep and profound establishment of sati, awareness. And that's 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's an unwavering commitment, 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'll 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're centred on liberation, but these things also work for even making a relationship work, some task at work itself, anything that you undertake, which is going to take effort and continued effort. All these factors come into play.

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

Now, when it comes to virtue, sīla, ethical conduct, you can then see how if you don't have that, things can go a bit wrong. So somebody I think who has clear determination is Putin. I mean, he's prepared—when I say that, he's prepared to put so many millions, so many thousands of young men at the front to be killed and wounded. So it's not actually affecting him. He's probably enjoying caviar. So but at least he's got that determination to sacrifice everybody to that final aim of expanding the Russian Federation. And of course you'll see that in all of these authoritarians, these tyrants. Yeah, and we can point to other people too, but we shan't go into that.

So it has to be, in terms of our practice of becoming fully liberated, then obviously we need to—it needs to be virtuous.

Now nekkhamma, renunciation. Consider—we've just had a little baby in the family, and when you think about—and I'm many of you will have had children—so when you think about having a child, that's a huge commitment. And you have to have perseverance.

I think it was Kabat-Zinn, who some of you will know—all that stuff about mindfulness training—he said bringing up children was like 18 years on retreat. So that sort of complete devotion. I mean, a baby is 24 hours, 24/7, you know, conditioning. And you have to give up something. Yeah. You have to give up what you would normally have done—go to the pictures or whatever, however you amuse yourselves. So it involves some level of renunciation.

Paññā. So it's wisdom, of course. It's got to be a certain devotion to righteousness. I'm thinking here of people who really spend an enormous amount of energy trying to get injustices corrected. The one that comes to mind recently was—for those of you in the UK—this huge miscarriage of justice about the post office, where the powers that be trusted this accounting software and it eventually ended up with 900 postmasters being dismissed. And there were suicides and some went to jail—completely miscarried justice. And it was the actions of one man in particular, Alan Bates, who spent 20 years getting justice. Can you imagine that? 20 years perseverance. And that's the sort of wisdom—that the idea of justice.

Now obviously that's going to take energy, effort. Right? Don't confuse effort with perseverance. Perseverance is a mental state, it's 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's patience. Like this man—20 years, for heaven's sake—and to actually have the patience and the willingness to endure. That's important too.

And then we have sacca, which is truthfulness. It's 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 I 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 enough humility. So there has to be that sense of real, being real about oneself.

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

And then finally, this quality of upekkhā, which is equanimity. So that's 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 that's—you can see how once you've brought a certain sense of persistence, a certain sense of commitment to something, all these 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.

So virtues always support each other in some way or other, whereas vices—anger, greed—they cancel each other out. You can't be angry and greedy at the same time, even though it might feel like that. There are two mental states that cancel each other out.

So how much should we—what should our determination be when it comes to this process of liberation? So this is taken from a particular discourse where the Buddha describes the sort of ascetic practices that he did. And he says—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, of course, almost starving himself to death. And at some point he realized that this was over-efforting. It was a wrong sort of perseverance.

And with that he leaves his companions, if you remember, and then he finds this lovely place. Sorry, 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 plowing ceremony and he's a young kid. And you know how young kids get involved. And he's totally involved in what his father's doing, drawn by curiosity, by interest.

And this not only changes his practice from trying to attain something—liberation, trying to attain it—to investigating his condition. And he realizes that when he was in that state, he was actually very happy.

And now we call these things—when I say now, it's been only fairly recent in the past five, maybe seven, ten years—that the whole thing about sutta jhānas has come to the fore. So the old jhāna was normally—they call them the Visuddhimagga jhāna, where you become completely absorbed and lose all touch with the surroundings. I mean, they're beautiful, they're very enjoyable, but there's no insight in it. Whereas with these sutta jhānas, they're much lighter. You can still be aware of things, but it has that quality of curiosity and so is a path to liberation. And this is what he begins to practice, and this is what he refers to when he talks about people doing jhāna practice. It's a supportive thing to your inquiry.

So it was a case of him realizing this when all the other stuff that the ascetics were practicing had failed him.

There's a distinction to be made between that and willpower. So willpower in that sense of total commitment, but it's a sort of narrow vision. And you're not aware of the mountains and the chasms that are in your way. And you keep collapsing and push and push and push. And of course, it upsets everybody around you. It's willpower business, right?

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 that sense of humility and of reality—being real about oneself and real about the situation. It's a—that often happens when we're practicing and we move into over-efforting.

So that's the point where the determination, the perseverance has actually gone a bit wonky, right? Normally in meditation, if you're sitting and you do that, the meditation just collapses. You just can't do it for a while.

So when adhiṭṭhāna, this perseverance, this resolution is developed, there's always that clear understanding about what the goal is. There's a moral integrity about it. There's a consistency about your practice and about what you're devoted to. And there's the ability to endure, the ability to endure.

So and the Buddha reinforces this: "When a bhikkhu"—that means anybody who's listening—"has resolution, has developed it and has made it his basis"—now that's the ground of his practice, you might say—"then he obtains the destruction of the taints."

These taints, the āsava, they are deep-seated mental defilements. They include—well, there's four of them—just the craving, craving for existence, wanting to live, which is understandable, but it's that sort of attachment to life. Ignorance, ignorance about one's true identity. That's the basic problem. And sometimes wrong view is attached to those āsavas, those taints. They're also called cankers. It's a bit odd—a canker is some sort of white thing on your tongue, isn't it, that hurts? I don't know. So somebody's called them fermentations. Translators do have a good time, I think.

So finally, how do we actually develop this? So it's the small resolutions that you make that you keep that builds up the muscle of perseverance. So all of us have experienced perhaps being on retreat or on a Zoom or something and you've made a resolution that you're going to sit every morning for half an hour, 40 minutes, one hour, whatever it is. And it works for two or three days, and then it all shrinks. It becomes 25 minutes and then 20 minutes and then it just all disappears, and you wonder what's happening.

So this is a lack of that resolution, a lack of that persistence, right? That perseverance. So one reestablishes it, right? And to establish a habit, you've got to put some energy into it, some commitment, and you must do it religiously for three months. And then it becomes ingrained, right? Not to say that we don't get lazy again and we lose it and we have to start all over again.

But that's the purpose of resolutions throughout the day. Sometimes—and I've made this mistake myself—you make a resolution to help somebody, and you've done it without real reflection. So I remember once a friend of mine said he was moving into a new flat and he was gonna decorate on the weekend, and I just blurted out, "Oh, I'll come and help you." See? 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's a bit like being careful what you wish for.

And to praise ourselves when we've actually completed something which has taken a little bit of endurance. Often, I don't think we congratulate ourselves enough. We don't have that sort of self-love, that self-praise. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it doesn't 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's good to remember past times when we persevered with something and achieved something. And that builds up confidence we can do, you see.

And so to end this off, there's always these little phrases that arahats seem to say when somebody seems to say when they become fully liberated, and 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 of being able to say that, right?

So we set ourselves a task, we commit ourselves to it, we resolve to complete the task—save, you always have to have a little small print, yeah?—save in emergency or extraordinary circumstance. And you complete it and then you can say to yourself, "What had to be done has been done." And you get that sense of deep satisfaction. Yeah. Very good.

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.