The teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
4 November 2024
Question (M): Could Than Ajahn give some pointers on ‘right view’ because I think it starts from the ‘right view’.
Than Ajahn: It’s about what I said today in Thai. The Buddha said that the most important thing in our life is our mind because it’s the mind who creates happiness and sadness.
Right now, we know how to create sadness, we don’t know how to create happiness, so we have to study from the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha who will tell us how to create the real happiness.
Right now, what we create is a false happiness, a temporary happiness, in which we will always end up in sadness because all the happiness that we accumulate or find in this world are temporary. When they disappear, they leave us empty, they leave us sad.
We should not look for worldly happiness such as happiness acquired by having money, having status, having accolades, going shopping, going on holidays or having fun with what you see or what you hear, because they give us false happiness and they will leave us empty when they’re gone. Like when you come here, you enjoy yourself, but when you go back to Singapore, all enjoyment disappear and you go back to the same old problems: this is what you should try to avoid.
You have to develop a new kind of happiness, the real kind of happiness—the happiness that arises from practicing dāna, keeping the precepts, and meditation: samatha and vipassanā. If you can do these, you’re creating the real happiness because this kind of happiness remains in your mind—they don’t disappear because they don’t rely on physical happiness, they give you mental happiness or spiritual happiness. So this is basically what Buddhism is about: it’s training the mind to find the right kind of happiness because right now, the mind is deluded, it looks for the false or fake happiness and you will end up disappointed and sad when this happiness disappears.
“Dhamma in English, Jan 3, 2019.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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