The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.

The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.

9th October, 2022

Question:  How to overcome sexual desire? Is it possible to overcome sexual desire for a layperson?

Than Ajahn:  Yes, it’s possible.

The best thing is by going away and living alone because when you are close to the sexual objects, it’s easier for your sexual desire to come up.

To get rid of your sexual desire, you need many tools to help you, not just only one particular tool.

-  If you can, stay away from sexual objects.

-  If you don’t eat too much and stay hungry, then you will be thinking about food more than you think about sex. If you can fast, when you have sexual desire, just keep fasting for a few days, then your sexual desire will disappear and it will be replaced by your desire for food.

-  You need to be able to stop your mind from thinking about it. You need to develop mindfulness. If you can develop mindfulness, then you can enter jhāna. When you enter into jhāna, the mind becomes contented and is not hungry. 

This jhāna will be the strength of the mind. But when you come out of jhāna, you can still think about sex.

-  If you want to completely stop thinking about sex, then you have to develop the asubha—the images of the unattractive part of the body.

Keep looking at the other side of the body. We’ve been trained to look at the attractive side of the body, we’ve been taught to not think about the unattractive side of the body, so we don’t see that there are unattractive parts of the body in us. Therefore, we now have to force the mind to look at the unattractive parts of the body, like look at the body when it dies, look at its 10 stages of decomposition as mentioned in the sutta. You can use those to contemplate the unpleasantness of the body.

Or, you can look into the inner parts the body, under the skin.

Beneath the skin, there are many different parts that you don’t see like the skeleton, the bones, the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the liver, the kidneys—all these parts are inside the beautiful looking body. If you can look inside that beautiful looking body, then you will start to see that the body isn’t beautiful at all.

It’s just like the saying, ‘Beauty is skin-deep.’ Once you go see under the skin, its beauty is gone.

So, those are the various tools of getting rid of your sexual desire. 

But the most important tool is your commitment and your desire to get rid of it. You have to have strong desire to get rid of your sexual desire and you are ready to commit yourself to use all those applicable tools, then you will be able to do it. If you want to get rid of your sexual desire, but you don’t want to commit yourself to do those practices, you will never be able to get rid of it.

Question:  So, are those commitments also for laypeople, not only for monks?

Than Ajahn:  Yeah, monks were laypeople before. When they commit to the practice, they change their status from laypeople to become monks.

So, everybody starts as a layperson. Once you are committed to the practice, then you’d want to change your status because if your goal is to get rid of your sexual desire, then there is no point to remain as a layperson. The purpose of staying a layperson is to have sex, right? If you don’t want to have sex, you don’t have to remain as a layperson anymore, then you become a monk. It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? But nobody thinks of it that way. 

When you first start your practice, you think that you just want to find some peace and happiness from meditation practice. But once you advance in your practice, you’d find that remaining as a layperson will be difficult to achieve your goal. 

So, eventually you’d become a monk in order to help you to achieve your goal as quickly as possible.

There is a saying in English, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too’. If you want to keep your cake, you have to just put it in the ice box and watch it. If you eat it, then you’ll lose the cake. 

Similarly, if you want to get rid of your sexual desire, then you can’t remain as a layperson.

“Dhamma in English, Mar 15, 2019.”

By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
www.phrasuchart.com

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