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Pāramīs (5 of 10) Effort

So today is the fifth talk on the ten pāramīs^[1]. These ten perfections, these qualities of character, one of the values of them is that they really intend to bring our practice into the wholeness of our life.

Sometimes it's easy to focus just on meditation practice, and to hear the teachings of Buddhism through the vantage point of just how it relates to meditation. For some people, Buddhism is mostly a meditation practice, and that's fine. Meditation is fantastically useful. But the opportunity is to expand our practice to include our whole life.

In fact, one of the turning points for me in my own practice was when I was meditating twice a day, morning and evening for 40 minutes each time. It was very meaningful for me to sit that way, and I felt a feeling of integrity, authenticity, and wholeness that I had not been familiar with before in my life. And then one day I realized: why do I have those feelings of wholeness, integrity, and authenticity only in meditation? Isn't the line between meditation and non-meditation in my life kind of an arbitrary line? Why don't I have those in my life as well?

That was the beginning of my expansion of the practice out into my life. For years, the inspiration to deepen and engage in Buddhism more and more—which meant going to live in monasteries and practice—was not so much to go deep in meditation, but to find a way to expand what was happening in meditation into my daily life. It wasn't so much to become a Buddhist as it was to allow the goodness, the integrity, the wholeness, and the freedom that I was discovering in meditation to exist in my whole life, everywhere I went.

So these pāramīs are part of this whole-life endeavor of Buddhist practice.

Now we come to the fifth quality, which is viriya^[2]. It is generally translated into English as "effort." Effort is maybe a nice compromise word, or a middle-way word, for all the different ways it has been translated into English. I'll explain that as I go along here.

This viriya has an interesting etymology in Pali and Indian languages in that it comes from the word "hero." It has connotations of heroic effort. Now, I'm very aware that for an English-speaking audience, especially in the United States, because of our cultural and sociological conditioning, the word "effort" can carry the wrong connotations. It can feel like excessive work, striving, pushing too much, or having too much involvement of self. When we talk about "heroic effort," it's even worse for some people.

But a friend of mine told me yesterday, in talking a little bit about this word viriya and its connection to "heroic," she pointed out how nowadays we consider a lot of people heroes. People who have been going to work day in and day out—without maybe being seen as heroes previously—are continuing to do this, and now they are our heroes. People in the medical professions and first responders who are really working in the forefront of the COVID-19 epidemic, working in the hospitals and putting their own lives at risk (some of them actually dying)—we really appreciate their heroic effort with what they're doing.

So this word viriya, heroic effort, carries these connotations. There is in fact a heroic aspect—a tremendous effort—that can go into deciding to not just do some meditation practice. We have to be very careful about the kind of effort we make, but it is a kind of effort to really make this practice fill our whole being and fill our lives. It is taking the fullness and the potential of this and seeing that it is not only about stress reduction, relaxing, or being open and peaceful. This practice is a freedom that is meant to be total and full, expanding outwards in circles beyond ourselves into the world itself.

The Buddha was heroic in his efforts to teach and his efforts to practice. He didn't have any manuals, books, teachers, or AudioDharma to learn something about meditation and practice. He had no one to practice with for what he was going to discover: his freedom. He talks about going against the current of popular culture of his time in what he was doing. And he discovered something; he discovered the psychological heart depth of freedom, release, and goodness. The pāramīs are a kind of full flowering of the human potential in a spiritual way.

Was he heroic in doing that? And are we the recipients of that heroic effort? Maybe so.

As a pāramī, effort follows wisdom, and this is the protection for effort. The idea is to have wise effort. The idea of wise effort in Buddhism is very simply to avoid effort which is unwholesome or unskillful, and to engage in effort which is wholesome or skillful. One way I kind of translate this into modern English is to avoid effort which is not helpful, and engage in effort which is helpful.

Now, how do we know what effort is helpful and not helpful? This is something I've seen in myself, and also in people I've talked to: a strong tendency to want a singular definition or understanding of what effort is, and then measure everything against that one idea. But in fact, effort is something that changes all day long. The amount of energy we apply to what we do, the endeavors we're involved in, the amount of effort we put into those endeavors—it is quite variable. We are constantly adjusting and changing the energy level and the effort level that we are making.

In a sense, for Buddhist practice, there's never going to be a final, perfect, on-the-mark effort or energy level. We're always adjusting and changing through the day, through the weeks, months, and years. We're always finding it.

Part of helpful effort is this finding of right effort, which becomes second nature. It's not so self-conscious. In the same way that someone riding a bicycle is constantly shifting and changing the amount of energy they apply depending on going uphill, downhill, or whatever's going on, for a good bicyclist it's second nature to adjust and change. It's the same thing with Buddhist practice. It constantly becomes second nature to know when to make a strong effort, when to make almost no effort at all, and everything in between.

The word "energy" is sometimes a very nice translation of viriya, but "energy" does not say anything about what we're doing. Viriya, right effort, also has an implication of knowing what to do—knowing the particular endeavor we're engaged in. In the Noble Eightfold Path^[3], it is "right endeavoring."

The Buddha says something like, if you take a piece of gravel or a rock, no matter how hard you squeeze it, you will not get oil out of it. To get oil, you have to squeeze the olive, and then you'll get oil coming out. Making a lot of effort for the wrong thing is not helpful.

So what is the helpful thing to do? Again, as I said, this comes from wisdom. Wisdom teaches us how not to be harmful, how not to add stress, and how to understand where freedom is. It teaches us where letting go of clinging is, and where letting go of selfishness and self-consciousness is. It is engaging in an effort to keep opening to a way of working and being in the world that doesn't have a lot of selfishness, self-consciousness, self-preoccupation, or self-measuring—both in positive and negative ways. We engage in effort that's not greedy, pushing, or striving. But we still engage to make effort.

But what's the effort we make? There are so many different kinds of endeavors we do. One of the most powerful ones we can do is the continuity of simply inclining ourselves to the freedom, the teachings of freedom, and the practices of freedom that Buddhism is about. The difference between someone living an ordinary household life and working, versus someone living in a Buddhist monastery, is not so much that they have lots more time to practice. Rather, the context of the monastery puts them in the inclination and the reminder about the values, the possibility of freedom, and thinking in Dharmic ways throughout the day.

That doesn't take a lot of effort. You're just constantly there, being reminded to live a life where we're simply inclining throughout the day towards freedom, towards the Dharma, towards kindness, and towards mindfulness. It doesn't necessarily require a lot of self-conscious effort; it's just being reminded over and over again.

That's one example of effort, and exactly what that heroic effort is. Because as I said, it changes, but it's supposed to be a wise effort. And the more we become wise—by really learning a lot from the fourth pāramī^[4]—the more the efforts we make are onward-leading, liberating, and a delight. It's just so happy. I don't know if it's reasonable to say, but sometimes the effort feels like play. It feels like you're just in the playground of the Dharma. There's a lot of energy put into it, but it's the energy of play rather than energy that obstructs, strains, gets tight, or is exhausting.

I hope that you will consider your relationship to effort. Consider the ways in which the word "effort" maybe points to what you know gets in the way of practice and is not helpful, and what you know about effort that is actually helpful, meaningful, and maybe even a kind of play—something you delight in, enjoy, and feels really good to get in the flow of, just really doing it and being carried along.

May you make wise effort, and part of wise effort is to understand your relationship to effort and free it from all the ways in which effort is a hindrance. Thank you very much, and I'll see you on Monday.

Announcements: The Statue of Paṭācārā

For those of you here, I wanted to point out the statue that's here of Paṭācārā^[5]. I was hoping that she would be here for several months, and we would all enjoy her and appreciate her presence here. However, it's a brand new wooden statue that was gifted to us, and it was made in Bali, which I think is much more humid^[6] than dry, hot Redwood City in the summer.

It's meant to go to the Insight Retreat Center, our retreat center in Santa Cruz. It's developed a little crack in the base here, so it's probably not going to spread too far, but the decision has been made to bring it down to Santa Cruz. It's near the ocean, where it's a little more humid, in order to let it cure more slowly and maybe keep it from cracking any more than it is.

So I think it'll be here maybe on Monday, but then maybe that's the last day. If you see it here on Monday, or Sunday morning, you might enjoy her a little bit more here. Thank you very much.