The teachings of Ajahn Chah

The teachings of Ajahn Chah

When people are born into the world they are without names – once born, we name them. This is convention. We give people names for the sake of convenience, to call each other by. The scriptures are the same. We separate everything with labels to make studying the reality convenient. In the same way, all things are simply saṅkhārā. Their original nature is merely that of compounded things. The Buddha said that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self. They are unstable. We don’t understand this firmly, our understanding is not straight, and so we have wrong view. This wrong view is that the saṅkhārā are ourselves, we are the saṅkhārā, or that happiness and unhappiness are ourselves, we are happiness and unhappiness. Seeing like this is not full, clear knowledge of the true nature of things. The truth is that we can’t force all these things to follow our desires, they follow the way of nature.

Here is a simple comparison: suppose you go and sit in the middle of a freeway with the cars and trucks charging down at you. You can’t get angry at the cars, shouting, ‘Don’t drive over here! Don’t drive over here!’ It’s a freeway, you can’t tell them that. So what can you do? You get off the road! The road is the place where cars run, if you don’t want the cars to be there, you suffer.

It’s the same with saṅkhārā. We say they disturb us, like when we sit in meditation and hear a sound. We think, ‘Oh, that sound’s bothering me.’ If we understand that the sound bothers us then we suffer accordingly. If we investigate a little deeper, we will see that it’s we who go out and disturb the sound!

~ Ajahn Chah