Cattāri Brahmavihārā

Being on vacation in a Caribbean country and surrounded by scantily clad women on a daily basis has really reinforced for me (n a completely visceral and non-conceptual way) the importance of sense restraint in making any progress along the path. A kalyana-mitta of mine once asked Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu what was the most important aspect of the teachings to practice while still a householder to obtain real benefit and prepare for eventual ordination. Not surprisingly, it was precisely indriya-samvara (sense restraint) that the Venerable identified as the most important discipline for making progress and guarding one’s gains.

The virtue of restraining the senses (indriya-samvara-sila) is a very refined level of virtue — and a very useful one, too. If you develop this level of virtue, the other levels become more and more pure. If you don’t exercise restraint over the eyes, ears, nose, etc., then your five, eight, or ten precepts can’t stay firm. They’re sure to become easily soiled. If the eye, which is the bridge, isn’t restrained, then it focuses its attention outside. And when this happens, overstepping your precepts becomes the easiest thing in the world. If you allow the mind to get accustomed to running out after outside preoccupations, everything gets thrown into a turmoil. The turmoil starts there in the mind, and then it spreads out to your words and deeds, so that you speak and act in wrong ways.

Perhaps one of the best ways to practice restraint is to reflect on the bad qualities or the drawbacks of a desired object or the god points of something to which one is averse. I think it was Ajahn Chah (although it may have been another Thai Ajahn) who said something to the effect that we have to see things with two eyes so as not to be deluded by only the pleasant or unpleasant aspects of anything. When I asked Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu this question he recommended specifically that I engage in an ex tempore asubha (foulness) recollection whenever I encountered pleasant female forms. An excellent sutta which covers both asubha and indriya-samvara in detail is the Bharadvaja Sutta. I have taken the following excerpt from this sutta which should give you a brief overview of the way in which this recollection can be practiced:

“, this was said by the Blessed One who knows & sees, worthy and rightly self-awakened: ‘Come now, monks: reflect on this very body, from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin, full of all sorts of unclean things: “In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.”‘ This too is a reason, this too is a cause, great king, why young monks — black-haired, endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life — without having played with sensual pleasures nevertheless follow the lifelong chaste life, perfect & pure, and make it last their entire lives.”

Sources:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/kee/stoplook.html

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.127.than.html#asubha