The Threefold Defense – Sila, Samadhi, and the Path to Panna | Understanding Sexual Desire through Vipassana
By using the core of Buddhist practice: the Threefold Discipline — Sila (virtue, especially the Five Precepts), Samadhi (concentration), and Panna (wisdom). These three support each other like camping poles; if one falls, the whole tent collapses.
Sila – The Five Precepts
For me, the first step is to uphold the Five Precepts (Sila), especially the third precept: abstaining from sexual misconduct — including flirting — which helps prevent unwholesome bodily actions (Kaya-kamma) and verbal actions (Vaci-kamma). The mental actions (Mano-kamma) are addressed by the next step: mindfulness.
Sīla prevents us from falling into bad behavior such as flirting, cheating, or betraying a committed partner. Sila is your self-discipline — you uphold it regardless of the situation. Even if you have the chance to cheat and nobody would know, you refrain because your dedication to the precepts outweighs the urge to break them.
Once your commitment to upholding the precepts is stronger than the urge to break the third precept, you will naturally give up thoughts of cheating. And since flirting is the first step that leads to cheating, you will gradually want to cut down the urge to flirt or interact with other girls, knowing it leads nowhere.
Think about it: how can we meditate — let alone practice Vipassana — if our mind is busy planning ways to cheat, or making excuses and recovery plans in case we get caught? Such actions will damage your current relationship, and eventually could lead to divorce. By contrast, when you uphold Sila, you have peace of mind, a clear heart, and space for meditation.
In the Khuddakapāṭha (Khp 8, Sīlakkhandhavagga), it is said:
“Sīlena sugatiṁ yanti, sīlena bhogasampadā, sīlena nibbutaṁ yanti, tasmā sīlaṁ visodhaye.”
By virtue, beings go to a good destination.
By virtue, wealth is obtained.
By virtue, beings reach Nibbāna.
Therefore, one should purify virtue.
However, Sīla mainly protects us from committing sexual misconduct through bodily and verbal actions. Naturally, the mind will still try to “cheat” through imagination and thoughts. As long as the mind is wandering other girls, you won’t be able to meditate or find inner peace — because all your energy is being pulled into craving.
This is why we need something beyond Sila to deal with sexual desire. That is Samadhi.
Note: If you are single, or in an open relationship, technically it isn’t considered breaking Sīla if you have a relationship with someone who is also single — though, of course, this is a minority case. In that sense, you are “free” and could have a relationship with multiple people. However, this freedom comes with a cost when it comes to inner peace and having a clear mind for meditation.
For practitioners who are already in a committed relationship, they have only one person to focus their attachment on regarding sexual desire. In contrast, single practitioners or those open to multiple relationships have more possibilities, more factors to consider, and more distractions for the mind. Their attention can wander in many directions, making it harder to maintain mental clarity and stability.
Therefore, for a single practitioner, choosing to remain celibate or conduct themselves in a disciplined way — similar to a monk — offers a superior benefit: fewer distractions, a calmer mind, and better conditions for meditation and insight.
Samadhi – Seek for happiness from within
It was a big change in my life when I stopped feeding my mind with sexual thoughts and imagination, which probably occupied more than 50–60% of my daily thinking. That shift made a huge impact on me. By practicing mindfulness, I was able to enter jhana within a few weeks of steady practice, and the fruit of jhana is samadhi, which can help suppress sexual desire. If you’re interested, I’ve written another article detailing How I Learned to Enter Jhana Through Thai Forest Vipassana Practice — you can read it to explore this journey further.
Those of you who are more advanced practitioners probably know how it feels when you first come out of jhana. When you are still new, you may know the way to get into jhana, but you haven’t yet learned how to withdraw from it properly. My “third eye” (eye chakra) would usually feel tender after jhāna. My mind was completely blank, and I was happy just to sit still and enjoy that empty state—similar to the feeling when the effect of a THC gummy kicks in. I call this the post-jhana effect.
Some monks say that after jhāna, the mind is still satisfied with the happiness it just experienced, so it doesn’t need to go wandering through the five senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body) in search of stimulation to feed itself. That is one of the benefits of jhana: it creates very powerful concentration, or samadhi, which naturally suppresses sexual desire. In addition, you experience happiness from within and realize that there is no happiness greater than the peace you discover inside yourself.
In the lower jhānas (1–3), where piti and sukha are part of the factors, the post-jhāna feeling is incredibly blissful and satisfying—like returning from a 5-star spa retreat. For me, it gave much more happiness than sex ever did.
In the fourth jhāna, piti and sukha have already dropped away—pīti falls off after the second jhana, sukha after the third. What remains is equanimity, where the mind is balanced and free from being pulled to either side of emotions. Normally, we live like a pendulum: swinging toward emotions we like and clinging to them—for example, when you love someone, you want to hold on to them and keep them with you forever. On the other hand, we also swing away from emotions we dislike, trying to push them out of our lives—for example, when you no longer love someone, you want to push them away.
Our whole life is often spent playing this push-and-pull game. But through meditation, the mind can finally come to rest—just like a pendulum that stops swinging. That is when you discover the peace within.
In the Dhammapada, verse 202, he states:
“Natthi santi paraṁ sukhaṁ.”
“There is no happiness higher than peace.”
In my opinion, discovering the happiness from within is one of the very first step for Vipassana. You don’t need money to buy the happiness from Samadhi. You don’t have to go look for happiness from someone else. You don’t have to travel around the world no look for happiness. It’s already there within your mind whenever you stop sending your mind outwards to the world via your five senes and turn your attention inward to look from within. However, there is still a ultimate happiness that is more superior than the happiness from peace.
In the Dhammapada, verse 204, he states:
“nibbānaṁ paramaṁ sukhaṁ.”
Nibbāna is the supreme happiness
Luang Por Chah once taught about the peaceful from Samadhi VS the peacefulness from Panna (Vipassana Panna/ Wisdom). He quoted about putting rock on a lawn to prevent grass to grow, whenever we remove the rock, the grass will eventually grow back, the rock doesn’t kill the grass, it is just suppresses it. Jhana or Samadhi, as the rock, will only suppress our defilements temporarily, which are the root cause of suffering. (Yes, sexual desire also makes you suffer, i will explain later), so we feel so happy, calm and peaceful when we have Samadhi or get into Jhana and after. Our mind can be temporarily peaceful because the defilement is being suppress. Samadhi doesn’t kill the defilements, whenever the power of Jhana or Samadhi drops, your defilements will grow back and control your mind again. On the other hand, if we let the rock sitting on the grass and doesn’t move it, the grass will never grow back. We use Vipassana Panna to kill the defilements. Panna can kill the grass from its roots and eliminate the factors that cause the grass to grow, unlike Samadhi which is only suppress the grass to grow.
Vipassana (Panna) – Observing the Mind to Overcome Desire
Likewise, Vipassana can help us fight with sexual desire and all the defilements, it ceases the root cause of sexual desire; kill the grass from the roots. For Samatha Meditation, it is tricky because they are so many different ways and method to calm your mind, concentrate it, and eventually build up Samadhi. When it comes to Vipassana Meditation, there is only one way to do it, which is just observe your mind.
This is the key practice for Vipassana, according to the teachings of Luang Por Pramote:
“Be mindful of body and mind as they truly are, with a mind steady in concentration and balanced in equanimity.”
Sila supports Samadhi, and Samadhi supports Vipassana. I had practiced mindfulness and Samatha meditation to establish equanimity in my mind for Vipassana. With the right awareness (samma-sati), and the right absorption (samma-samadhi), we can observe body and mind working under the three marks of existence—impermanence, suffering, and non-self—through the practice of Satipatthana.
We are not only doing Satipatthana when sitting down with our eyes closed, similar to retreat styles. We also do Satipatthana in daily life, in every activity you are doing, and in every moment you are not focusing on your work, such as project planning or thinking about work. You shall observe anything that comes to your mind and any feeling or phenomenon in your mind.
Thoughts come from consciousness (vinnana) when it connects with the six sense bases—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. By watching them closely with mindfulness, you can see how thoughts and feeling arise. all I had to do was just observe and acknowledge my own thought phenomena in my mind.
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