The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.

The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.

16 October 2023

Question:  I am a wife and a mother, could I just sit and do meditation all my life? What is it that matter in life?

Than Ajahn:  See, what matter is happiness. Everybody wants happiness. Everything that we all do today is for finding happiness. But somehow we don’t get that happiness or we get very little of that happiness. 

Usually, we get more sadness and unhappiness. That’s because we don’t know the right way of making happiness to happen.

The Buddha taught us that if we want to have happiness, we have to do three things.

The first thing is we have to stop doing bad things, stop doing things that hurt other people. 

We call it stop doing bad kamma. Stop killing, stealing, committing adultery, lying and drinking alcohol—these are the actions that will make us unhappy. They might make us happy initially, but after the initial happiness disappears, we will have a lot of unhappiness, we will have a lot of suffering. 

So, this is the first thing the Buddha said we should try to do: stop doing bad actions (bad kamma) by keeping the 5 precepts. The Buddha taught us to keep the 5 precepts: abstain from killing, abstain from stealing, abstain from adultery, abstain from lying, and abstain from drinking alcohol. If we can do these, we can prevent a lot of unhappiness to arise.

The next thing the Buddha wants us to do is to do good things, to make other people happy. For example, by giving to charity. Like today, the laypeople came to the monastery to give food and things to the monks, to support the monks so the monks can practice meditation. Giving to charity or helping other people is one way of making yourself happy.

When you help other people, when you make other people happy, you will feel happy. So, this is the next thing you should try to do is doing charity. Do charity based on the amount of money you can afford. You don’t have to give all your money away. You have to save some of it for yourself and for your family because looking after your family is also a form of charity.

Looking after your father, your mother, your husband/your wife and your children are also a form of charity. It makes you feel good, makes you feel happy.

The third thing the Buddha taught us to do is to meditate. If you want to have real happiness, you have to find it through meditation. But meditation is not for everybody because if you want to succeed in meditation, you have to commit yourself totally to the practice of meditation and not many people can do this. 

There are only a few people who become monks, live in monasteries and devote all their time to the practice of meditation.

But you can do meditation partially if you haven’t yet been able to stay in a monastery, or if you’re still living with your family. On your spare time, you should meditate, maybe do it for an hour or half an hour a day as the initial stage of practice.

You have to go slowly first. Do it on your own time. 

Find the time that you have to do meditation. 

After you have tried to meditate and if you can succeed, you’ll find it to be very rewarding. 

You’ll find a different kind of happiness. It’s the happiness that makes you feel stable and secure and it will make you want to have more of it. Then, you start looking for more time to do it by stopping doing other things that you find useless like watching television or going shopping.

Once you start to meditate, you can see the different kind of happiness you get from meditation. The happiness you get from meditation is different from the happiness you get from going to movies, going to parties, going to sport events, etc and then you might stop all these activities and start to stay at home and meditate. If you can stop those activities, you’ll have more time to meditate and you will have more happiness. 

And if you still want more happiness, eventually, when you can be free from everybody, from your family, then you can go live in the monastery where you can meditate full time. So, those are the ways that the Buddha has taught us if we want to have happiness with no sadness, no problems, no troubles.

Do these three things: first, abstain from doing bad kamma; second, do only good kamma; and third, learn how to meditate.

Question:  Ajahn mentioned that charity begins at home as we have to look after our family members first.

Than Ajahn:  That’s right.

Question:  In my case, I’ve looked after my family but my wife and my children don’t have the instinct to do donation, so sometimes they don’t agree when I give charity beyond the family members.

My wife is not working and I’m the only one bringing in the money for the family but I have extra to give it to others beyond my family. Is this the wrong thing to do?

Than Ajahn:  If it’s your own money, it’s not wrong. But if it’s also your wife’s money, then you have to ask permission from her. If she and you own the money, then you have to get her consent.

But if it’s your own money, you’re free to spend it in any way you like and it’s not wrong.

“Dhamma in English, Jan 23, 2019.”

By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
www.phrasuchart.com

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