The Fault That Keeps You From the Cushion

In the calm abiding instructions there are eight antidotes to the five things that get in the way. Most striking about the list is its distribution, rather than its length. Four of the eight, half the entire apparatus, go after a single fault. And that fault we call “laziness,” the one that keeps you from the cushion to begin with.

The proportion is telling. The tradition isn’t most worried about the mind wandering. It’s more worried about the sitting never starting.

“Laziness” here is not the word you are used to. Asaṅga defines it as the absence of heartfelt pleasure in doing what is positive. It’s not sloth and it’s not weakness of character. Instead, laziness is simply that the thing that would genuinely help you does not, at the moment of choosing, appeal to you. He says that its function is to hinder virtuous activity. That’s a description of a mechanism, not a verdict on a person.

Lama Samten follows the tradition in naming three forms of laziness. The third one surprises most people.

The first form is procrastination — putting off until tomorrow, next week, next month, a thing you could do now. The second is being busy with other things: pouring effort and time into activity that distracts you from doing the things that matter. Note that this one isn’t idleness at all. You can be extremely industrious and be squarely inside this fault; busy but not going anywhere.

The third is discouragement. Thinking: “How could a person like me ever manage this? ” The tradition classes that as a form of laziness, which sounds surprising until you see that the outcome is the same as the other two: you don’t sit. Śāntideva’s answer to it is almost comic in its generosity: even flies will attain enlightenment eventually. If a fly gets there, the argument runs, what exactly is your excuse?

Having defined what we mean by laziness, how do we counter it? Four things, and the order is the whole teaching, because each one produces the next.

It starts with confident faith — not blind faith, but the settled sense that this practice goes somewhere, a sense that forms by having looked into what concentration is actually for. From that, aspiration arises: because we have confidence in its value we want it. And because we aspire to it, we give joyful effort and work toward it happily. Note that this isn’t grimly forcing yourself onto the cushion; it’s sitting because we see it will help us. And finally, from sustained joyful effort comes suppleness, a workability of body and mind in which our mind begins to be focused with less and less strain.

That fourth one is the answer to the question everybody eventually asks. How do you make a meditation practice stick? The answer isn’t to white-knuckle it, forcing ourselves to sit for long periods because someone said it’s good for us. The four-step sequence we’re building lets the early links do the work of establishing the habit, and its last link is the point where the habit begins to sustain itself — where you sit because sitting has become a pleasure rather than something you force yourself to do.

None of the three forms of what we call laziness are evidence of a defect. They are simply the inertia that needs to be overcome to build a new, virtuous habit. This kind of laziness is expecte, and it has four remedies that flow one from another once we understand the value of the practice. Calm abiding meditation, as it’s taught here in Chattanooga and everywhere in this tradition, does not begin with a steady mind. It begins with getting yourself to sit down — and we aren’t shy about admitting that this is the hardest part.