“The first step is to develop mindfulness. This is like having the key to your car. Before you can drive the car, you need to get into the car first, right?

The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.

26 August 2024

“The first step is to develop mindfulness. This is like having the key to your car. Before you can drive the car, you need to get into the car first, right?

You need the key to unlock the door. Once you have the key, then you can put the key into the ignition switch and then start the car and drive the car to wherever you want to go. It is the same with driving your mind to Nibbāna.

You need mindfulness which is the key to open the door to samādhi. Once you have samādhi, then you can develop wisdom or paññā.

Once you have paññā, you can eliminate the desire which is the cause of your mental suffering. When you have eliminated all your desires, then there will be no mental suffering left in your mind, then your mind will be pure and peaceful forever. The mind is permanent. It is not temporary like the body. When the body dies, the mind doesn’t die with the body. If the mind still has a desire for a new body, it will take up a new body.

If you can eliminate the desire to have a new body, you don’t have to come back and be born again. If you are not born, then you will not get sick, get old and die, or get separated from the one that you love or the things that you love. So there would be no more suffering for you. This is basically what the Buddha taught us to do.

Do dāna. You stop using money as a means of buying happiness. Instead of buying things to make you happy, you give money away, helping other people, making other people happy and you will have a better kind of happiness, happiness (of heart) that arises from helping other people, making other people happy. 

You can then stop using money to buy happiness, which is only a temporary kind of happiness.

You buy something you are happy for a few days, then that happiness disappears, then you have a new desire to buy more things. If you give money away to charity, you eliminate the desire to buy things to make you happy, and when you don’t have money to buy anything, you won’t be affected. You don’t have any desire to buy anything.

If you keep buying things then you have to keep buying on and on, buying more and more until the point when you are unable to buy anything.

You become sad and unhappy. Use your money wisely. The best way to use it is to give it to charity. You will have mettā (loving kindness) and compassion for other human beings, then it will be easier for you to keep the five-precepts.

If you don’t do charity it means you are selfish. You want to make more money, and create more happiness just for yourself, and whatever you do, you don’t care if other people get hurt by what you do because all you want is to make yourself happy. If you help other people, you make other people happy, then whatever you do, even when you have to work to acquire money, to maintain your life, you will consider whether your actions will affect other people. If what you do will hurt other people, you will not do it because you have mettā (loving kindness), you have karuṇā (compassion) that arises from giving dāna.

Dāna will help you to develop mettā and karuṇā, and will enable you to be able to keep the five-precepts. 

If you can keep the five-precepts, your mind can be a lot more peaceful because if you are not doing anything bad, your mind will not feel bad. When you do bad deeds your mind will feel bad. So this is the way to avoid creating bad feelings in the mind and to keep the mind peaceful and happy by keeping the five-precepts.

Once you can keep the five precepts, then you can move up to the eight-precepts. The eight-precepts is necessary for your practice of bhāvanā because you have to restrain your desire to look outside of your mind to find happiness. If you keep the eight-precepts, you cannot go to a party, cannot go to a movie, cannot go outside but have to stay at a place without all these kinds of activities, such as in a temple. You cannot sleep with your husband or wife. You cannot eat after mid-day. All these things are activities which are going to disrupt your meditation practice. If you can stop these activities then you will have the time to focus on your meditation and then you will be able to achieve the result from your meditation. This is the step by step way that the Buddha taught us, starting from dāna to sīla, from sīla to bhāvanā.

Once you have gone through all these steps, the result will be the magga, phala, Nibbāna. That will be the eventual result.

This is my message for you today and hope you pick it up and do as much as you can.”

“Dhamma in English, Jan 17, 2015.”

By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
www.phrasuchart.com

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