by Ajahn Chah
“Employing simple, precise language, his words convey his belief that liberation is possible for each of us through diligent effort and sincere intention.”
—Tricycle
“Chah’s style of teaching Buddhism was informal and non-systematic; he was renowned for giving instructions in a way that an ‘uneducated rice farmer’ could understand. The talks in Being Dharma reflect Ajahn Chah’s fundamental orientation toward Buddhism as a way of life, rather than a set of rules or rituals.”
—Shambhala Sun
ABOUT THE BOOK
Chah offers a thorough exploration of Theravadan Buddhism in a gentle, sometimes humorous, style that makes the reader feel as though he or she is being entertained by a story. He emphasizes the path to freedom from emotional and psychological suffering and provides insight into the fact that taking ourselves seriously causes unnecessary hardship.
Ajahn Chah influenced a generation of Western teachers: Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, Joseph Goldstein, and many other Western Buddhist teachers were at one time his students. Anyone who has attended a retreat led by one of these teachers, or read one of their books, will be familiar with this master’s name and reputation as one of the great Buddhist teachers of this century.
AJAHN CHAH (1919–1992) was a beloved Thai Buddhist master whose teachings were refreshingly uncompromising in their clarity and certainty—the certainty of a meditator who has achieved deep understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. He was an important influence and spiritual mentor for a generation of American Buddhist teachers.
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BEING DHARMA
The Essence of the Buddha’s Teachings
AJAHN CHAH
TRANSLATED BY PAUL BREITER
SHAMBHALA
Boston & London
2012
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.shambhala.com
© 2001 by Paul Breiter
Cover design by Jim Zaccaria
Cover photograph by Jim Roy
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chah, Achaan.
Being dharma: the essence of the Buddha’s teachings / Ajahn chah; translated by Paul Breiter; foreword by Jack Kornfield.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN 978-0-8348-2338-9
ISBN 978-1-57062-808-5 (pbk.)
1. Spiritual life—Buddhism 2. Buddhism—Doctrines.
I. Breiter, Paul
BQ5650 .C43 2001
294.3′42041—DC21
2001020065
Dedicated to the long life
of all genuine spiritual masters
and the preservation
of their pure and authentic traditions.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Jack Kornfield
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 HEARING DHARMA
2 UNDERSTANDING DHARMA
• The Here and Now Dharma
• The Trapper’s Snare
3 PRACTICING DHARMA
• The Path to Peace
• Morality Brings Happiness: A Talk Given on Songkran, the Traditional New Year
• Meditation Practice
• Lay Practice: Don’t Let the Monkey Burn Down Your House
• Monastic Life: Why Do People Ordain?
• One Day Passes: A Talk to the Community of Nuns at Wat Pah Pong
4 SEEING DHARMA
• Kondanya Knows
• Fumbling and Groping
5 BEING DHARMA
• Beyond Cause and Effect
• Nibbana Paccayo Hotu
6 TEACHING DHARMA
GLOSSARY
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
CREDITS
E-MAIL SIGN-UP
FOREWORD
WHEN THE FIRST WESTERN DISCIPLES arrived at Wat Pah Pong in the 1960s, Ajahn Chah did not give them the special admiration and treatment that Western monks often received in Thailand. He did not excuse them from any of the demanding challenges and strict training of the monastery. Seated on a wooden bench at the foot of his cottage in the center of a huge forest, he peered at them like a watchmaker taking off the cover of an intriguing new piece, and demanded to know whether they understood suffering or how to find peace in this world. Then he would laugh in welcome and bid them to listen, and if they dared, to join him in practice for a while.
In those years, the monastic community was relatively small and Ajahn Chah was still unknown as a teacher. Twenty-five years later, he had become one of the most honored and revered forest masters of the century, and in 1993, nearly a million people joined the king and queen of Thailand at his funeral in order to pay their last respects at his temple. By then, his influence had spread worldwide, with a hundred branch monasteries and respected disciples teaching internationally.
Ajahn Chah’s natural wisdom expressed itself in the wide range of skillful means he used to bring students to freedom. The demanding discipline and mindful dignity of the monastery were his first line of practice. In the community, he also taught by anecdote and example, by story and piercing, koanlike questioning. He used humor and poked fun at the delusions of the world and those he mentored. He taught by close-knit relationship, by compassionate understanding and insightful no-holds-barred dialogue. Though his way of practice involved strict training of virtue, precepts, renunciation, and concentration, he taught them with a light heart, and all were done in the service of wisdom and freedom.
From the start, his teaching of meditation focused on this freedom. While he instructed students in many traditional practices of mindfulness and concentration, he deliberately chose not to emphasize remarkable meditation experiences, samadhi, jhana, or special insight stages. Meditation was a tool, a means to sit and examine ourselves, to quiet the mind and open the heart. He instructed students “to abide in the one who knows,” to discover the natural peace within. From a base of inner stillness, he pointed out, we can more directly see the truth, “the way things are.” We can recognize the impermanent, ungraspable nature of life; we can study suffering, its cause, and its end. He taught that meditation is a way for us to let go, to stop the war, to put down the struggle, to be at peace no matter what the circumstances.
Each day, the monastery had periods of chanting and mindful work, walking and sitting meditation, silence and community practice, all interspersed with informal guidance from the master. On occasion, usually after evening chanting, Ajahn Chah would close his eyes and give a more extensive Dharma talk, instructions to his monks, nuns, and other devoted disciples. These discourses could last from one to five hours. The new monks would call the longer ones “endurance sessions.”
Now Paul Breiter, a longtime student and beloved disciple of Ajahn Chah, has translated some of these discourses from Thai and Lao for Western readers. It is a blessing to have these teachings, the meat and potatoes of Ajahn Chah’s Dharma, the evening trainings where he would take the gloves off and challenge us to look squarely at human life. As you read these pages, you can imagine yourself deep in the forest in the early evening after two hours of meditation and sonorous chanting. The light is flickering from the candles, there is a quiet rust
ling of forest creatures settling down, the evening cicadas are singing—the time has come to reflect on your commitment to a life of wakefulness and truth.
Photographer unknown
Ajahn Chah (seated) with, from left, Doug Burns, Ajahn Sumedho, and Jack Kornfield; circa 1970.
Now the master addresses you sincerely, describing the nature of this existence. He knows that you too can awaken. “All situations are uncertain. This is the central truth in this worldly realm.” He goes on, “Live with things as they are. Don’t get drunk, carried away, lost in your desires, intoxicated by your situation, by ideas, plans, the way you think things should be.” He expresses the truth in simple ways. “You don’t own anything. Even your thoughts and body are not your possessions; they are mostly out of your control. You must care for them with compassion, but all things are subject to the laws of change and not your wishes for them. When you truly understand this, you can be at peace in any surrounding.”
In speaking to the nuns and monks at his temple, Ajahn Chah urged them to live up to the nobility of their station, to uphold the monastery’s reputation as sincere followers of the Buddha’s way. He urged a determination in their practice and a fearless self-honesty. He asked them to reflect: Have I truly taken the teachings to heart? Am I willing to remove all forms of greed, hatred, and delusion, to let go, to be free? Do I unwaveringly honor the practice of virtue and compassion, no matter how difficult? Am I one who is easy to speak to, easy to reach, not proud or rigid? “Don’t take the teachings for granted,” he went on. “They are not philosophy or ideals. Examine yourself, examine your mind and heart. Release your entanglement with pleasure and pain, and rest in the Middle Way, in the heart of freedom. Let the saffron robes you wear be a banner of the Buddha to demonstrate the living reality of peace and wisdom in the world.”
When he offered Dharma instructions to the lay practitioners, government officials, and military officers who visited, it was also the straight scoop, no holds barred. He didn’t go along with the superficial practices of devotion and merit-making that were common for lay visitors. He demanded that they embody the Dharma, live with virtue and compassion, purify their hearts, and let go of craving and delusion. These were what he insisted are the true blessings and genuine merit to be found in the Buddha’s way.
In all his teachings Ajahn Chah reminds us that liberation is possible. With sincere intention and diligent effort, each of us can awaken, each of us can discover the freedom and peace of the Buddha.
As you read, take these teachings to heart. Digest them slowly. Let them be an inspiration for inquiry. Let them be medicine for your spirit. Let them be a source of guidance for your unshakable deliverance.
May the words of Ajahn Chah carry the clear light of truth into the world. May they bring blessings and awakening to all who read them.
JACK KORNFIELD
Spirit Rock Center
2000
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
AMONG CONTEMPORARY Thai Buddhist masters, perhaps none have been as influential with Western students of Dharma as Ajahn Chah (1919–1992). One reason for his popularity is certainly the clarity and accessibility of his words to people of widely diverse cultural backgrounds and to followers of different Buddhist lineages. Hopefully, some of this will come across in the translations set forth in this book. Luang Por, as he was known to his disciples, could teach using the traditional concepts of Dharma, but he also put the truth into analogies and fables using animals, trees, and the events of everyday living in a way that penetrated the hearts of his listeners; he did so with much warmth and humor and without sacrificing anything in the way of profundity. “Simple yet profound” has perhaps become an overused and hackneyed phrase, but it applies to much of Ajahn Chah’s teaching.
Over the course of some twenty-five years of teaching and training, Ajahn Chah was able, as his senior Western disciple Ajahn Sumedho put it, to teach the ideas of Buddhism in a way that even an uneducated rice farmer could understand. Yet he was also able to answer the questions of upper-class Thai people and attract and train skeptical Westerners, many of whom stayed under his guidance for ten years or more and still continue the monastic life today.
Beliefs about Practice
AJAHN CHAH CONSTANTLY PUSHED people past what they were likely to consider their limits. The practice in his monasteries did not always follow what might seem to be reasonable, and the routine was always changing. He sometimes recounted his own difficulties in practice and the resolve with which he faced them and spurred himself on:
Before I started to practice, I thought to myself, “The Buddhist religion is here, available for all, yet why do only some people practice it while others don’t? Or if they do practice, they do so for only a short while and then give it up. And those who don’t give up still don’t knuckle down and do the practice. Why is this?” So I resolved to myself, “Okay . . . I’ll give up body and mind for this lifetime and try to follow the teaching of the Buddha down to the last detail. I’ll reach understanding in this lifetime . . . because if I don’t, I’ll still be sunk in suffering. I’ll let go of everything else and make a determined effort. No matter how much difficulty or suffering I have to endure, I’ll persevere. If I don’t do it, I’ll just keep on doubting.”
Thinking like this, I got down to practice. No matter how much difficulty I had to endure, I did it. I looked on my whole life as if it were only one day and a night. I gave it up. “I’ll follow the teaching of the Buddha. I’ll follow the Dharma to understanding why this world is so wretched.” I wanted to know. I wanted to see the truth, so I turned to the practice of Dharma.
Paul Breiter, translator and editor of Being Dharma, in Thailand in 1974.
While he was most tolerant of people’s shortcomings and limitations, he always wanted his disciples to make as much effort as they possibly could, simply for the goal of escaping from the clutches of Mara, “the Evil One,” who holds us prisoner in this realm of suffering. He did not see this as something easily accomplished—“If practicing Dharma were easy, everyone would be doing it,” he often said—but as really the only thing worth doing with a human life.
The worldly way of living generally involves filling life with busyness, distractions, and amusements in an endless pursuit of happiness and an effort to avoid boredom. But a constantly distracted and excited mind is a tired and worried mind. When a person makes a commitment to undergo Buddhist training, he or she is setting out to free the mind from all such dependence. It can be an extremely painful and frustrating process, as accumulated habits, hopes, and fears start to surface in the new open space of nondistraction. Ajahn Chah pointed out that there are people who think monastic life is some kind of escape, but when it is actually undertaken, facing oneself for the first time with nowhere to hide can be like walking into a raging storm.
Ajahn Chah often speaks about heedlessness. By that term, he means a careless, unaware approach to living, and he notes that it is often compounded by comforts. But until one starts to do without such things, these links remain hidden. Soft living tends to make the mind soft. He spoke about the simple way of life in the not-too-distant past in Thailand: “Before, when the country was not developed, everyone built their toilet some distance from the house, often out in the forest. You had to walk out there to use it. But now the toilet has to be in the house. The city people even have to have it right there where they sleep.” Such a concept struck him as funny. Laughing, he said, “People think that will make them more comfortable and happy, to have a toilet in their bedroom. But it doesn’t really bring happiness, and it increases the habit of laziness . . .”
His way of training was not meant to be an endurance test, however. When he saw disciples making great efforts in a mindless, mechanical way, he would correct them. And he was never ambiguous about where the emphasis should lie. After the Buddha’s years of fruitless asceticism, he came to realize the way to liberation lay in the mind. The body itself was just a material object incapa
ble of enlightenment. It was also not something evil that hindered spiritual development and needed to be tortured or weakened; this is as much a deviation as trying to beautify the body and seeking happiness through sensual pleasure and social approval. So the role of asceticism is in creating simplicity and noninvolvement in confusion, not deprivation for its own sake. And statements such as “destroy your body!” or “destroy the world!” do not literally refer to suicide or nuclear weapons, but, in the context of meditation and Ajahn Chah’s lively ways of teaching, to destroying attachment to these things.
One night, Ajahn Chah was welcoming a former lay patron who had just ordained and come to spend the rains retreat. He gave one of his informal rambling discourses, putting the Dharma across in recollections and personal observations. He spoke of traveling on tudong, the traditional ascetic practice of wandering in the countryside and wilderness, seeking solitude in forests and mountains and visiting spiritual teachers. “Sometimes I would walk forty kilometers in a day. It’s not that I was strong, but I had energy of spirit. Even soldiers can’t march like that. . . . Some days, I would go for alms and get nothing but rice. It was really interesting to watch my mind when I ate. I’d think, ‘If only I had some salt!’ Who would imagine that you could gain wisdom from eating plain rice?”
