Discipline
April 2021, Chiang Mai
Probably like most of my generation, with our aims programmed and centered toward pleasure, living a disciplined life is an ironically difficult practice to incorporate successfully. I say ironically because if one wanted to be somewhat cynical, the Buddhist path is one of hedonism, although that hedonism is substantially more refined than the baser understandings of the term. It is a path of seeking higher and higher pleasures at the sacrifice of lesser pleasures, and that’s where the discipline comes in. It’s a quality over quantity type of distinction. We’re not trying to get as many quick and dirty pleasures as we can under our belt, but instead are working up to experience the higher pleasures that only the few (and privileged, based on accumulated merit) get to experience. In order to achieve these higher pleasures, it requires ignoring lesser, easily accessible pleasures that most indulge in without being conscious of the resulting consequences. It’s an active understanding of the balance between pleasures and the less pleasurable baggage attached to them. You can pepper these little bouts of easy pleasures throughout your life, and experience the negativities attached to them at the same frequency, or, you can sacrifice, deprive yourself of all the minor pleasure so that in the future, or maybe more infrequently, you experience the larger, more profound pleasures that are not attached to negative kamma, but are instead attached to devoted discipline. For instance, when you go out for a huge night of drinking you’re getting a small amount of pleasure (time-wise) at the expense of the next day’s (or possibly the next few days’) nightmarish hangovers and their effects.
Speaking of drinking, my own personal experience with discipline actually started with drinking, or rather, with quitting it. Most of my friends probably wouldn’t have said that I was an out of control drunk. From what I could tell, they never looked at me as an angry or aggressive drunk, just a fun one. But to my own self-reflection I felt like I was a mess, and drinking had long lasting impacts on my personal life. My body and mind just couldn’t take it, and the anxiety that went along with it was one of the most difficult ordeals of my life. Even though I told myself that I loved drinking, and identified with the patterns involved with it, I had to get it out of my life in order to make any meaningful development, so I parted with it for good a little over a decade ago. I didn’t stop going to bars, and didn’t stop hanging out with my drinking friends, and didn’t need to go to any sort of program to get off of it, but I made a strong resolve to just stop doing something that I ‘loved’ doing, and this was all before I had any real encounter with Buddhism.
One of the things that initially impressed me about Buddhism—Theravada Buddhism, anyway—was that not drinking was one of the core tenets for lay followers. I was a little confused by this as some ninety-something percent of Thai people claim to be Buddhist, yet everywhere around me in that small Issan village I was living in, all I could see were some of the most ridiculous drunks I’d ever encountered. In those small towns it’s pretty common to see elderly ladies, but elderly men were a little harder to come by as they mostly drank themselves to death. I’d often walk to the school I was working at early in the morning and pass farmers getting blitzed with their friends before heading to the fields on nearly 200 proof rice whiskey. Like most other ‘religions,’ the majority is more interested in the superficial pomp and ritual virtue signaling than the actual practice. Whether all those ‘Buddhists’ actually followed Buddhism is kind of beside the point. The important thing was that I found a doctrine that was pretty clear about the rules that it had for its adherents, and since I’d found it at a time when I was getting comfortable and confident in my own non-alcohol discipline, it seemed like a perfect time to upgrade a bit and see what further benefits could be attained from it.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the reasons I love living in Thailand is because vice is ever present around you, just waiting for you to slip up. It keeps you in check. I’ve actually never had a drop of alcohol while living here, and this has stopped me from getting mixed up in other unskillful activities. Like the Buddha says, the precept of not drinking is the most important to follow because drinking will lead you to mindlessly break the other precepts. Thailand has a reputation of being a sex tourist destination and a place to indulge in prostitution, which it definitely lives up to. But one of the ways that I managed to never interact with this large section of the local economy was my refusal to drink. It may seem strange, but from what I’ve observed and what I understand is that the easiest way to getting access to prostitutes is via drinking at bars. The way that the bars are set up, they want to get as much money out of you as possible, so they have this modus operandi of getting you to buy drinks for yourself, getting you to buy drinks for the girls at the bar, and then paying her ‘bar fine’ for taking her away to a room (because you’re taking her away from all the other people who could be buying her drinks). I’ve never heard of someone just going to a bar and taking a girl away without first buying drinks. They want you inebriated so they can swindle as much money out of you as possible. So, because I haven’t drank here, I’ve found it easier to stick to my principles and not fall prey to the money-for-sex industry that’s intermingled with the bar culture directly aimed at exploiting and expanding people’s vices.
It’s very strange when you give up a vice, because the normal tendency is just to fill it in with another one. I tend to do this a lot, even today. But after doing it enough times, you start to notice the pattern and from there hopefully think of ways to mitigate it or break the cycle completely. The most difficult part for me is just maintaining a good new habit, as the tendency to backslide is strong. Part of me thinks that ‘backsliding’ is itself just a part of the process, and that this ‘protestant work ethic’ vocabulary doesn’t really help the situation. I try not to see personal ‘progress’ in discipline as a ‘big line go up’ line graph, but instead more like a descending spiral where you’re stripping away accumulated identities, habits, patterns, etc. More often than not you’re bound to circle back around to your old bad habits, but hopefully with a different point of view, a more matured vantage that notices the negativities that inevitably spawn from such behavior. From that conscious awareness, that ability to truthfully classify your behavior, see it for what it is, you continue to get deeper on the spiral until the essence of the issue morphs before the intense focus of your mind’s eye from one about a specific behavior, to the specific impulse or intention generating it. At this point, you’re in the roots of the issue and are better equipped and in a better position to deal with the habits you’ve found yourself in. The mechanics of the process probably differ for everyone, so it isn’t necessary to go into. The important part is knowing that an increased and frequently practiced focus and reflection regimen generates the abilities for success in higher discipline.
I had a lot of success in this, temporarily, during my three months isolated in the forest temple last year. Of course, naturally, when I left I reverted back to some bad habits again, knowing full well they were bad habits, and knowing that indulging in them wouldn’t serve any betterment. It’s taken probably the past three months to pull myself out of them and get to a good baseline again, but that experienced knowledge of just how difficult it is to circle back to a respectable point of conducting myself is invaluable knowledge. Because of it I’m less likely to lapse back into those unskilled behaviors because I know full well just how short those pleasures last, how much time they waste, and how ultimately useless indulging in them is. The self respect you get from proclaiming you’re going to do something, from proclaiming you’re going to conduct yourself in a certain way and actually seeing it through is infinitely more valuable than continuing to slip up over and over again in the same pointless ways.