The Fruit of Steady Effort
I have asked several groups of Insight meditation students: If your teacher asked you to bow 108 times before sitting each time, would you do it? The response is an uncomfortable silence. People feel a clear unwillingness to do that instruction. And also some complex feelings regarding to what degree they are willing to follow a teacher. All of this momentarily freezes their minds into the uncomfortable silence.
At least some of the unwillingness to do the instruction comes from a sense that repetition of 108 bows each sitting is a pointless endeavor. It may be interesting to know that this is a real instruction in the Korean Zen tradition. And in the Tibetan tradition, up to 108,000 full prostrations are required as important groundwork for practice.
Repetition as a mode of development is not popular these days. Instead, we expect quick results, even instant gratification. Or we pursue novelty, assuming that something fresh and new is superior. Or if we do engage in something for an extended period, we expect to be told why we are doing it and to have explicit milestones marking our “progress.”
Such attitudes miss crucial opportunities for development and insight. There was a several-year period in my life when I took a walk around my neighborhood about 5 days a week when I was in town. The same route, hundreds of times. One day, I suddenly felt every microclimate – every fluctuation in temperature, wind, and humidity on the scale of about 100 yards. I had been registering these at some subconscious level, and the awareness suddenly became conscious. It took all that time to organize into a clear perception. After that, I could always feel the microclimates. I also know that if I had walked that route with the purpose of discerning microclimates, it would have unfolded quite differently.
In a similar way, doing “the same thing” in meditation or daily life mindfulness slowly attunes the mind to certain patterns of experience. Meditation instructions are designed to be fruitful: If you keep observing or practicing in this way, you will eventually see more clearly, wisely, or compassionately, or some other beneficial change will come about. Dismissing repetition as pointless (or “boring”), or continually checking on whether it is “working,” interferes with the natural process.
It is also important not to pre-judge the result, remaining humble and open about what the specific fruit will be:
What we can know is that steady effort bears fruit. Sometimes step by step, in line with the effort, and sometimes abruptly after a period of seemingly little change. Sometimes the process is even reversed, where some initial effort produces an immediate large result, and then there is steady effort to draw out the full benefits of that result.
There is a place in practice for simply letting go into a process. “Just doing it” until it bears its fruit, whatever that may be. This approach is based in faith, or deep trust, and is not comfortable for all people. But I would suggest that it is a vital component of a healthy long-term practice.
You may wish to consider to what degree you make steady ongoing effort in various ways in your practice. What fruit has this borne over the time you have practiced? How do you feel about just letting things unfold without knowing what the fruit will be?
I have asked several groups of Insight meditation students: If your teacher asked you to bow 108 times before sitting each time, would you do it? The response is an uncomfortable silence. People feel a clear unwillingness to do that instruction. And also some complex feelings regarding to what degree they are willing to follow a teacher. All of this momentarily freezes their minds into the uncomfortable silence.
At least some of the unwillingness to do the instruction comes from a sense that repetition of 108 bows each sitting is a pointless endeavor. It may be interesting to know that this is a real instruction in the Korean Zen tradition. And in the Tibetan tradition, up to 108,000 full prostrations are required as important groundwork for practice.
Repetition as a mode of development is not popular these days. Instead, we expect quick results, even instant gratification. Or we pursue novelty, assuming that something fresh and new is superior. Or if we do engage in something for an extended period, we expect to be told why we are doing it and to have explicit milestones marking our “progress.”
Such attitudes miss crucial opportunities for development and insight. There was a several-year period in my life when I took a walk around my neighborhood about 5 days a week when I was in town. The same route, hundreds of times. One day, I suddenly felt every microclimate – every fluctuation in temperature, wind, and humidity on the scale of about 100 yards. I had been registering these at some subconscious level, and the awareness suddenly became conscious. It took all that time to organize into a clear perception. After that, I could always feel the microclimates. I also know that if I had walked that route with the purpose of discerning microclimates, it would have unfolded quite differently.
In a similar way, doing “the same thing” in meditation or daily life mindfulness slowly attunes the mind to certain patterns of experience. Meditation instructions are designed to be fruitful: If you keep observing or practicing in this way, you will eventually see more clearly, wisely, or compassionately, or some other beneficial change will come about. Dismissing repetition as pointless (or “boring”), or continually checking on whether it is “working,” interferes with the natural process.
It is also important not to pre-judge the result, remaining humble and open about what the specific fruit will be:
- Practicing metta will surely lead to a more loving heart, but how that will manifest for you is unknown. If you expect that it will solve a particular challenge in a particular way, that is an attempt to control your practice, which will hinder the full development of metta. (Until that pattern of “trying to control” is seen and let go of).
- Breath meditation goes very deep, despite being one of the first practices offered to new meditators. By observing the breath carefully, one penetrates not only to very subtle levels of the body, but also into the processes of mind. “Repetition” of this basic practice opens into surprising new vistas when done diligently over time, and hence hardly seems like repetition. (See also the Ānāpānasati Sutta, MN 118).
- Sometimes the fruit sneaks in peripherally. Doing 108,000 prostrations is not meant as a personal challenge, nor even as “proof” of one’s devotion. Instead, doing that much repeated practice has the potential to deeply connect you to your reasons for practicing – your deepest aspirations. Only you will know what those are. When my teacher was told that his period of “tangariyo” – a Zen practice of sitting outside the monastery gates until the abbot decides a practitioner can come in – was complete, he felt tears arise because he thought he would never be so profoundly connected to his own heart again. This was probably not the result he expected when he first sat down.
- More profoundly, practicing the Eightfold Path leads to Awakening… and we don’t know what that will be. Certainly not what we think.
What we can know is that steady effort bears fruit. Sometimes step by step, in line with the effort, and sometimes abruptly after a period of seemingly little change. Sometimes the process is even reversed, where some initial effort produces an immediate large result, and then there is steady effort to draw out the full benefits of that result.
There is a place in practice for simply letting go into a process. “Just doing it” until it bears its fruit, whatever that may be. This approach is based in faith, or deep trust, and is not comfortable for all people. But I would suggest that it is a vital component of a healthy long-term practice.
You may wish to consider to what degree you make steady ongoing effort in various ways in your practice. What fruit has this borne over the time you have practiced? How do you feel about just letting things unfold without knowing what the fruit will be?