by Ajahn Chah
Please think about this. When you see that all things are truly uncertain, what will you try to cling to? You will let go, leaving things to follow their own conditions. If you need to solve problems, you will act to an appropriate degree, not react with elation or depression over them. When you see them all as uncertain, they lose their value. Isn’t that so? Uncertain things won’t entice you; they will just be like refuse or leftovers. “This is trash, that is trash. Who would want them? This is not certain, that is not certain.” Why would you grasp things that aren’t certain? What would you want with things that have no value? So the fact of uncertain can forcefully bring you to enter into something that is certain. This is what you need to do. If you do this, I will say without hesitation that you will be able to practice meditation with success.
We don’t need to study a lot. Living in an ordinary way, we don’t need to control the mind too much. When we see that everything is uncertain, we don’t accept things through attraction or aversion. We let go. Why would we get involved with uncertain things? We lose the path only by thinking that things are certain.
If we don’t practice this and instead go asking questions, seeking knowledge from different people, what will we get? Who can speak the words that will cause knowledge to be born within us if we are not practicing correctly?
The Buddha was not so ambitious. He just taught a few people at a time. At first, it was the group of five ascetics. He didn’t teach them a lot. They learned from practice. When a person practices, he has experience, and this experience creates enthusiasm. There will be a happiness for which he is willing to dedicate his life and make great sacrifice. Others cannot understand why he feels like that. They don’t have any idea what the person experiences. If he tries to tell them about it, they may get some superficial knowledge from the words, but they can’t really relate to the experience. The practitioner alone realizes the fruit; others cannot see it.
If you try to get it only through others’ words, you are likely to become discouraged and give up. I feel it is really necessary to work in practice. You don’t need to do a lot of complicated thinking about it. Follow the trainings of sila, samadhi, and wisdom. Whatever various teachers may say, don’t get confused. They have to teach in different ways, employing skillful means to get people to understand the path, to practice, to feel satisfaction in practicing. Then disciples will gain realization for themselves through enthusiastic practice.
Perhaps you have not come to realization yet and this troubles you. You are being bound by tanha (craving). You wish to progress in a hurry. Don’t worry, it will progress by itself. If you plant a tree today, do you expect it to be fully grown tomorrow? Could that happen? Your work is to water and fertilize it; whether it grows fast or slow is not your business. That’s the tree’s affair, not yours. You can stand there and complain until you die that it’s taking too long to grow. You’ll start thinking that the soil is no good, so you uproot it and plant it somewhere else. But you will again think it’s not growing fast enough. Must be the soil again; you pull it up and try to plant it elsewhere. Keep doing this and the sapling will die.
What’s your hurry? Wanting something to happen in a hurry is tanha. If you want things to go slowly, that is also tanha. Will you practice according to tanha or according to the Buddha? It’s your choice. Troubles come only from straying like this. You need to employ patience and consistency in the practice of Dharma. When you arrive, there won’t be any Dharma. You won’t need to practice anything, and you won’t need to endure or use patience. But now you are trying to practice Dharma. You haven’t yet reached it; you just use Dharma as a tool. When you let go, there’s no more need for patience or endurance or any other efforts. All of that is finished. You are Dharma. Now you want to be something, and everything is too fast or too slow. Where are you going in such a great hurry? You need to stop.
Don’t speak with tanha. Don’t act with tanha. Don’t think with tanha. Don’t eat with tanha. But everything we do is with tanha, so when can we expect to meet the truth and attain realization? When will tanha come to an end? We keep on rearing it, feeding it every day, somehow thinking it will die in this way. It only keeps on growing. Think about the things you do. Why do you do anything? It is exclusively because of tanha.
Think deeply about this. If you let go and stop the stream of craving, your actions become steady. Whether you are feeling diligent or lazy, you will still do your practice. Whatever your mood, you just keep working. You don’t follow your feelings. But if you only practice when you’re in the mood, taking it easy when you feel lazy, this is just following tanha. When will you follow the Buddha instead? If you are feeling lazy, never mind that, just do your practice. If you’re feeling diligent, practice. You don’t need to depend on these feelings. Following moods, practicing according to your whims, you are not bowing to the Buddha. If you are bowing to the Buddha, laziness will not stop you from practicing. How long do laziness or diligence last in the mind? Take a look at their characteristics, their way of appearing. They keep changing, and you keep on going back and forth between them. Following changing impulses, you are constantly bowing to tanha.
The great disciples of Ajahn Mun, as well as the Buddha and his followers, practiced with determination. In the Buddha’s life story we see how, after long years of austerity, he sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and made the vow, “Let flesh and blood dry up, I will not rise from this place until supreme enlightenment is attained. . . .”
These were the words of the Buddha. We read the story in a book and think, Oh, he really went for it. I should do that, too. We may have been meditating only a year or so, but we feel inspired and decide to get right down to business. So we light a stick of incense and think, Until this incense has burned down, I will not get up, even at pain of death. We use the words of the Buddha. We’re really going to do it. But it doesn’t turn out to be so easy. We start to feel that three hours must have passed, so we open our eyes to look, but the stick is still quite long. We’re sweating and in pain. Oh! But I said I would die rather than stop. So we close our eyes again, go through the misery another two or three times. But the incense is still burning. Discouraged, we start feeling we don’t have sufficient good karma behind us. Our thinking runs like this. We have this big idea to be like the Buddha. But how long and hard did the Buddha work to cultivate the perfections?
After the Buddha was enlightened, he wanted to vanish, didn’t he? He didn’t want to teach people. Contemplating the way things were, he saw that the afflictions of beings are very dense. There is so much darkness, the condition of things even goes beyond darkness. Whatever one tries to say is not likely to be understood. Then he considered the four kinds of lotus; he saw that there were beings ready to be awakened, like the lotus about to bloom, and was moved to teach.
But we are not at that level. Just think about the five precepts. Merely teaching this much, people will say they can’t do it because they live in the world. The important point is to refrain from certain actions. But people have no restraint. Those who are in positions of authority and responsibility, with power over others, are usually the worst. There is no sila, no Dharma, in the hearts of people, even though they may know all the words and can practice the forms of various Dharma activities. There are those who have studied in great depth and can teach on any subject, but their minds are not where their words are.
So what should we do? The Buddha said that we should wish for things that are appropriate. If people don’t believe us yet, don’t go thinking they are stupid or worthless, as some teachers do. Actually we are stupid, because we don’t have the skill to teach them. You have to cultivate the practice yourself, improve yourself, and make yourself really know and believe first. Through practice, you can develop the wisdom and skillful means to instruct others according to their needs. You can’t just go trying to rearrange the world, forcing people to be as you would like them to be. Don’t make a big issue out of nothing. All people in the world have a reason
for being as they are. Many Buddhas have trained themselves here, putting down this burden. They didn’t go carrying the world with them. So don’t worry too much about this. Do what you can. Help yourself and help others to the best of your ability. Give up what you should give up and do what you should do. Don’t worry about teaching the whole world to follow Dharma.
There’s one monk who is a good example of this. You might have seen him here in the past—he used to come listen to me teach when he was a layperson. He wanted everyone to be well behaved and was always pointing out how he felt everyone should or shouldn’t act. I just let him be. Then he decided to ordain. He would give Dharma talks, and he hoped to inspire people to believe in the teachings. It did not go well for him.
I told him, “Two oxen are pulling one cart. If the two work together, the cart is lighter for them. Think about this. If one ox is faster than the other, it ends up pulling the cart as well as the other ox. How far can it get? If you were the lead ox, you would be better off slowing down to let the other one keep up with you. Pulling so hard all by yourself only increases the load for you. Wouldn’t it be easier to let up a little so you’re pulling with the other ox?”
He came back sometime later, and this little talk had gotten to him, because this was what he’d been trying to do. He wanted to train the laypeople. On the lunar observance days, he would try to get them to sit up and meditate all night. “Hey, Sir! Hey, Miss! Don’t sleep tonight, we are all sitting up.” But they would be falling asleep in their seats or going to lie down. No one seemed to want to practice hard. They didn’t have the correct determination. No matter how hard he tried to pull, he couldn’t get them to move along at the proper pace, and this started to make him tired. When he was sufficiently worn out, I think he remembered my words. “Hmm. It seems I’m pulling a cart and I’m pulling an ox; maybe I should slow down and let the other ox pull with me.” So he came back and wanted to hear some Dharma from me. I told him that I don’t have Dharma, only upaya, some words to speak.
I said, “When the time has not yet arrived, what can you do? If a child is born today and you want her to be grown up by tomorrow so she can help you with your work, she isn’t likely to satisfy your expectations. So what can you do? Obviously you should care for the child and raise it patiently. Otherwise, you are headed for madness. You can’t have it right away.” This is just tanha, wanting, pushing, ignoring cause and effect, and struggling meaninglessly.
In regard to livelihood, people these days want to do a little and get a lot, or better yet do nothing at all. The whole world will raise their hands for this. The Buddha said, however, that it is necessary to be diligent in whatever we do. We should be aware of income and expenses. There needs to be some training, and there needs to be moderation in the way we spend and consume. But when we are playing with tanha, there will be no moderation. Our income is never enough; it’s as if we are giving money to a mad person. He could consume everyone’s salary and not be satisfied, just like we were throwing the money in the ocean.
So who can be satisfied with what they have? The mad person will just go and request more from whomever he can. One’s thinking has to go a little deeper. I’ve considered this; for people who don’t understand, it is really a profound matter. They get what they deserve. The meditation masters talk bluntly, expressing it like this: “Serves you right!” Haven’t you heard? People complain that we only want to talk about Dharma when they are in such dire straits. . . . What will you say to these mad ones? It’s hard to make them see, as I’ve said, like telling a blind person about colors. We mention white, and they want to know, “What is the color white like?”
“It’s like gypsum.”
“And what is gypsum like?”
“Oh, it’s the same color as the clouds in the sky.”
“And what are the clouds like?”
“Well, they’re white in color.”
Foolish ones just continue on like this until they get frustrated. It would be better to find out about the person’s blindness, when it began, what may have caused it, and so on, and try to find a cure. We won’t have to explain about all the colors in the world. When one day they open their eyes and see the world, they will know for themselves. There will be no more questions. This way is probably better.
What will you employ to solve the problems and answer people’s questions and get to the end of things? Especially with those who have a lot of education, there’s nothing you can tell them. Sometimes we poor meditators will be driven to desperation when the university students come and ask questions. They want a quick solution to everything. You tell them to practice something, and they say they just can’t manage it. Well, they have to go back to the beginning and endure until they can manage to do it.
Believe me, over the years, I’ve been seeking all kinds of means to instruct people. Now, I just try to do what I am able to. Things that are beyond me, I will put aside for the time being. And there are some things I simply have to let go of. Some people are easy to teach, some are difficult. And there are some who don’t need to be taught; they can realize the truth by themselves, without much prodding from others.
You can see what I do these days with the monks who come here. I’m not teaching a lot now. People who have the capacity to see don’t need a lot of teaching. You can leave them in the forest. They will look at the trees and think, Ahh, trees are like people: the leaves and branches of a tree eventually dry out, and such is also the case for humans. This is called the ugghatitanyu (intuitive) type of person. Just staying in the forest, they can come to knowledge by themselves. They can see the nature of human life. They have this kind of mind and don’t need to be taught very much.
Other people must come to sit here and listen. The vipacitanyu (intellectual) people need to hear analogies and comparisons to ignite their understanding. They can’t be left alone. With some teaching, they can see. With the right instruction, they will come to have a change of viewpoint and realize what they did not see before.
Then there’s the neyya (trainable) person. For this type, you really have to instruct and train at great lengths, but it can be done. It’s like in a group of one hundred students, perhaps eighty will be able to pass, and this is the eightieth. He can still pass and move along with the rest of the group and eventually make use of the knowledge he has gained.
But beyond this, there are people who are going to remain on the outside.
“Today, you must not do such and such.”
“Yes, sir.”
But in a couple of days, they are back to doing those things again.
“Don’t do that anymore.”
“Yes, sir.”
And before long they’re doing it again, so again you say, “You must not do that.”
“Yes, sir.”
It’s, “Yes, sir” all the way along. Eventually, you have to let go and release them to their previous owner. Who is that? It’s karma. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do, and you really have to give up and leave people to deal with the karma they’ve made for themselves. You have to stop trying to change them and leave them alone. The old karma is too powerful. You can’t fight with the old owner.
Don’t forget this in your dealings with people. Sometimes people seem to develop little by little, only to fall back. When the truck gets to the end of the road, you can’t try to force it to carry the load any further. If you are still not satisfied and want it to keep going, it will only end up stuck or overturned. You have to know your own abilities and strengths and be satisfied with what you can do. Otherwise, you end up as a hungry ghost.
The world goes the way it will. We do what we can to solve problems. Still, the nature of things is that they appear in the beginning, change in the middle, and vanish in the end. Just do what you can, what is appropriate to the situation and your ability. Trying to do more than this is only creating a lot of grief for yourself. Think about this. It’s not being selfish. Some people will say, “This guy is so selfish, he doe
sn’t want to help.” You have to look at yourself to know whether it’s true or not. Don’t simply react to what someone else says, but look to see what is going on with you. If it’s true that you are being selfish, you can accept the criticism as valid. Depend on yourself in this way; what’s the use of relying on someone else’s words? If someone says your virtuous activities are no good, how will you react to that? It’s not a matter of arguing or getting angry over what someone says about you, rather you have to be aware of what is really the case with yourself and measure the words appropriately.
But these days, it’s a little difficult, especially for those in positions of responsibility. Perhaps the police arrest two people in a case of theft. One of them actually did it; the other is innocent. But when they are interrogated, they will both profess their innocence.
“Did you steal it?”
“Oh, no.”
“And what about you? Did you steal it?”
“Oh, no.”
It’s the same answer from both people, but only one is telling the truth. It might not be easy for the detectives to determine the facts of the case. One person is innocent and says, “No, I didn’t do it.” The other person actually committed the theft, and he also says, “No, of course I didn’t do it.” So what can the cops do? They have to make their own investigation without merely relying on the suspects’ words. The minds of people tend to be crooked and tricky like this, so it’s better to know yourself and be able to believe in yourself. Don’t be too ambitious; know what is appropriate and what you can do.
These days, I am not so keen on trying to interest others in my words. There doesn’t seem to be much benefit in trying to convince people. I am here in the monastery, where this way of life has been established; if someone wants to come and look into these things, they are welcome.
