Pulling up the Baobabs

“It is a question of discipline,” the little prince said to me... “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care. You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs…”

Now and then, when thinking about practice and realization and the effort required to do the one and achieve the other, I think of Saint-Exupéry’s little prince. Every morning, the story goes, the prince would cull dangerous young baobabs from harmless rose or radish seedlings, knowing, that if left to grow unimpeded, the massive trees would quickly overtake his tiny planet.
 

Virya (Skt.) or viriya (Pali), can be variously translated as “effort,” “energy,” “diligence,” or “enthusiasm.” As the sixth of the paramis or “perfections,” virya is the enthusiastic and sustained energy needed to free ourselves and others from the endless round of samsara. But when we link it to the fifth factor in the Noble Eightfold Path—Right Effort—it is, in a nutshell, the disciplined practice of nurturing the good shoots (mental states) growing up in our garden, and rooting out the bad ones. Needless to say, this kind of work needs to be sustained over time, so it's helpful that the manifestation of virya is indefatigability. Its proximate cause, a sense of spiritual urgency.

In his commentary to the paramis, Acharya Dhammapala says that energy has the function of striving—as in striving for enlightenment. In one sense, this is hard work. But as the little prince says of his own weeding, regularly pulling out baobabs is "very tedious work but also very easy." A statement that mirrors quite nicely Acharya Dhammapala words: “If even full enlightenment can be achieved by one’s own energy, what can be difficult?”
 
One of the things I remind myself about when I feel less than zealous, is that no moment is wasted on the path. A moment of laziness, complacency, or disappointment, is simply another opportunity for practice. It’s another chance to see what’s going on in my body and mind. And when I feel I need a little pick-me-up, I turn to others for inspiration—like Sylvia Boorstein, who has this to say about virya:
 
“Since habits are, by definition, deeply ingrained patterns, and all moments are immediately lost, I need to enlist every moment to teach me about suffering and the end of suffering. Knowing that I haven’t a moment to lose keeps my Energy level high.”
 
This is an edited version of a short piece that will appear in the next print edition of Tricycle as part of a series called "Pocket Paramis." This month I wrote about prajna, wisdom, which is the perfection that precedes virya, effort or energy.
 

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