From The Craft of the Heart by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo

From The Craft of the Heart by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo

In practicing meditation, if you direct your mind along the right path, you’ll see results in the immediate present. At the same time, if you lead yourself astray, you’ll reap harm in the immediate present as well. For the most part, if meditators lack the training that comes from associating with good people who are truly expert and experienced, they can become deluded or schizoid in a variety of ways.

How so? By letting themselves get carried away with the signs or visions that appear to them, to the point where they lose sense of their own bodies and minds.

Playing around with an external kasiṇa is a special culprit in this regard. Those who lack sufficient training will tend to hallucinate, convinced of the truth of whatever they focus on, letting themselves get carried away by what they know and see until they lose touch with reality, making it difficult for any sort of discernment to arise.

For this reason, in this guide I have taught to focus exclusively on the body and mind, the important point being not to fasten on or become obsessed with whatever may appear in the course of your practice.

There are a wide variety of meditation teachers who deviate from the basic principles taught by the Buddha. Some of them, hoping for gain, status, or praise, set up their own creeds with magical formulae and strict observances, teaching their students to invoke the aid of the Buddha. (Our Lord Buddha isn’t a god of any sort who is going to come to our aid. Rather, we have to develop ourselves so as to reach his level.)

Some teachers invoke the five forms of rapture, or else visions of this or that color or shape. If you see such and such vision, you attain the first level of the path, and so on until you attain the second, third, and fourth levels, and then once a year you present your teacher with offerings of rice, fruit, and a pig’s head.

(The Buddha’s purpose in spreading his teachings was not that we would propitiate him with offerings. He was beyond the sway of material objects of any sort whatsoever.)

Once the pupils of such teachers come to the end of their observances, they run out of levels to attain, and so can assume themselves to be Buddhas, private Buddhas, or noble disciples, and thus they become instant arahants. Their ears prick up, their hair stands on end, and they get excited all out of proportion to any basis in reality.

When you study with some teachers, you have to start out with an offering of five candles and incense sticks, or maybe ten, plus so-and-so many flowers and so-and-so much puffed rice, on this or that day of the week, at this or that time of day, depending on the teacher’s preferences. (If you can afford it, there’s nothing really wrong with this, but it means that poor people or people with little free time will have trouble getting to learn how to meditate.)

Once you finish the ceremony, the teacher tells you to meditate arahaṁ, arahaṁ, or buddho, buddho, until you get the vision he teaches you to look for—such as white, blue, red, yellow, a corpse, water, fire, a person, the Buddha, a noble disciple, heaven, hell—and then you start making assumptions that follow the drift of the objects you see.

You jump to the conclusion that you’ve seen something special or have attained nibbāna.

Sometimes the mind gathers to the point where you sit still, in a daze, with no sense of alertness at all. Sometimes you experience a bright light and lose your bearings. Or else pleasure arises and you become attached to the pleasure, or stillness arises and you become attached to the stillness, or a vision or a color arises and you become attached to that. (All of these things are nothing more than uggaha nimitta.)

Perhaps a thought arises and you think that it’s insight, and then you really get carried away. You may decide that you’re a stream-enterer, a once-returner, or an arahant, and no one in the world can match you. You latch on to your views as correct in every way, giving rise to pride and conceit, assuming yourself to be this or that. (All of the things mentioned here, if you get attached to them, are wrong.) When this happens, liberating insight won’t have a chance to arise.

So you have to keep digging away for decades—and then get fixated on the fact that you’ve been practicing a full twenty years, and so won’t stand for it if anyone comes along and thinks he’s better than you. So, out of fear that others will look down on you, you become even more stubborn and proud, and that’s as far as your knowledge and ingenuity will get you.

When it comes to actual attainment, some people of this sort haven’t even brought the Triple Gem into their hearts. Of course, there are probably many people who know better than this. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on those who know.

For this reason, I have drawn up this book in line with what I have studied and practiced, If you see that this might be the path you are looking for, give it a good look.

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From The Craft of the Heart by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/CraftHeart/Section0000.html

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From the Foreward by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

"Although Ajaan Lee’s teachings continued to develop over the course of later years, the basic outlines remained constant. Most of his later teachings are simply elaborations on themes already given in this book.

One of these later developments, though, deserves special mention here:

It concerns the question of how a beginner should get started in practicing meditation. Ajaan Lee’s eventual solution to this question, given in his book, Keeping the Breath in Mind: Method 2, can briefly be stated as follows:

Start right in developing the factors of jhāna by
(1) being clearly aware of each breath,

(2) evaluating and adjusting the breath so that it is as comfortable and satisfying as possible, and

(3) letting this comfortable sensation spread, along with a sense of present awareness, throughout the entire body.

If an individual meditator had trouble sticking with step (1), Ajaan Lee might recommend some of the methods given in this book—the repetition of the word “buddho” in conjunction with the breath, the contemplation of the basic properties of the body, etc.—but these methods were regarded as ancillary to the central practice of keeping the breath in mind.

Yet even though Ajaan Lee’s later teachings developed new perspectives on some of the individual themes contained in this book, none of his later writings have its scope or completeness. For this reason it remains to this day one of his most popular and esteemed works."