The teachings of Ajahn Suchart
“The mind is the more important part than your body.”
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Layperson: Everyone wants to have a stronger body, to provide better food for their children, to get richer, to become sexier or better looking so he can find a better partner and can have a better descendant genetically. But you are the example of how one should be in the natural wilderness.
Than Ajahn: Because we are using different measurements. Lay people use the body as their measurement. They have to have all these (material) things to make them happy. Monks use the mind as the measurement, not the body. And the happiness of the mind doesn’t rely on all these (material) things.
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Layperson: When I saw you, I saw my future, but a very far future.
Than Ajahn: It takes time. You just read the books and you will get to see the world in a different light. Right now you only see things in a very close perspective. You base your understanding about yourself on your body, not on your mind.
In our lives, we are not only made up of our bodies, but we are also made up of our minds. But unfortunately, the mind is invisible, so we cannot see the mind. We can only see the bodies and we think that the bodies are all we have. So, we concentrate all our efforts to look after the bodies, to give all kinds of happiness to the bodies, and in so doing we are neglecting our minds and making the minds miserable.
No matter how much money you have, your mind will still be miserable. This is the part that you’ve neglected. The mind is the more important part than your body. Because your body is temporary. At most it only lasts for 100 years, but the mind lasts forever. So, if you take care of your mind and make it happy then you will be happy forever.
The mind doesn’t need the body to be happy but due to the delusion, you think that you must have a good body, a strong body, and a healthy body to make you happy. You must have all the support the body needs to make you happy. But no matter how much you have; for example, if you have one hundred Ferraris, you will still feel bad. You will still not be able to get rid of the bad feelings you get from time to time because these bad feelings need a different kind of attention. It needs meditation. It needs peace of mind. And in order to become peaceful you have to give up everything.
When you meditate you close your eyes, you forget about everything. You concentrate on stopping your mind from thinking. If you can persist and control the mind, eventually the mind gives up resisting, becomes peaceful and you then find another kind of happiness. It is much better than the happiness you get from your body. That’s what the Buddha did. He was a prince and he had something equivalent to Ferraris and palaces, but he felt something was lacking. He was still worried. Every time he thought about the future of his body, he was worried. Because he had seen an old man, a sick man and a dead body. He knew that eventually his body would also be like that, so what was he going to do then? So, he wanted to get away from this body.
That's why he decided to give up his princely life and became a monk because he saw a monk and he asked his attendant: what was the monk doing? He was told that the monk was looking for peace of mind, looking for a way out of getting old, being sick and death. So, the Buddha also wanted to find the solution, and therefore he gave up his princely life and became a monk.
He meditated and eventually he found peace of mind.
He realised the mind is the most important thing, and the mind can be happy by itself without having to have a body. However, due to the delusion, the mind thinks that in order to be happy it needs to have a body, so it keeps going after one body after another. When it loses this body, it goes to look for a new body. This is called rebirth. It is the same mind that goes through different bodies like a driver driving different cars. You drive a car and when the car becomes old and when you cannot fix it anymore, you either sell it or you throw it away, and you buy a new one. The driver is still the same driver. Similarly, the mind is the same mind. It just keeps changing the body.
“Dhamma in English, Jun 30, 2015.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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