Reflections of Ajahn Chah
Finally you’ll look on the breath as if it were some relatives come to visit you.
When the relatives leave, you follow them out to see them off. You watch until they’ve walked up the drive and out of sight, and then you go back indoors. We watch the breath in the same way. If the breath is coarse we know that it’s coarse, if it’s subtle we know that it’s subtle. As it becomes increasingly fine we keep following it, at the same time awakening the mind.
Eventually the breath disappears altogether and all that remains is that feeling of alertness. This is called meeting the Buddha. We have that clear, wakeful awareness called Bud-dho, the one who knows, the awakened one, the radiant one. This is meeting and dwelling with the Buddha, with knowledge and clarity.
It was only the historical Buddha who passed away. The true Buddha, the Buddha that is clear, radiant knowing, can still be experienced and attained today. And if we do attain it, the heart is one.
So let go, put everything down, everything except the knowing. Don’t be fooled if visions or sounds arise in your mind during meditation. Lay them all down. Don’t take hold of anything at all, just stay with this unified awareness. Don’t worry about the past or the future, just be still and you will reach the place where there’s no advancing, no retreating and no stopping, where there’s nothing to grasp at or cling to. Why? Because there’s no self, no “me” or “mine.” It’s all gone. The Buddha taught to empty yourself of everything in this way, not to carry anything around... to know, and having known, let go.
Realizing the Dhamma, the path to freedom from the round of birth and death, is a task that we all have to do alone. So keep trying to let go and understand the teachings. Put effort into your contemplation. Don’t worry about your family. At the moment they are as they are, in the future they will be like you. There’s no-one in the world who can escape this fate.
The Buddha taught to lay down those things that lack a real abiding essence. If you lay everything down you will see the real truth, if you don’t, you won’t. That’s the way it is. And it’s the same for everyone in the world.
So don’t grasp at anything.
Even if you find yourself thinking, well that’s all right too, as long as you think wisely. Don’t think foolishly. If you think of your children, think of them with wisdom, not with foolishness. Whatever the mind turns to, think of it with wisdom, be aware of its nature. To know something with wisdom is to let it go and have no suffering over it. The mind is bright, joyful and at peace. It turns away from distractions and is undivided. Right now what you can look to for help and support is your breath.
This is your own work, no-one else’s.
Leave others to do their own work.
You have your own duty and responsibility, you don’t have to take on those of your family.
Don’t take on anything else, let it all go. This letting go will make your mind calm. Your sole responsibility right now is to focus your mind and bring it to peace.
Leave everything else to the others.
Forms, sounds, odors, tastes... leave them to the others to attend to. Put everything behind you and do your own work, fulfill your own responsibility. Whatever arises in your mind, be it fear of pain, fear of death, anxiety about others or whatever, say to it, “Don’t disturb me.
You’re no longer any concern of mine.” Just keep this to yourself when you see those dhammas arise.
What does the word dhamma refer to?
Everything is a dhamma, there is nothing that is not a dhamma. And what about “world”?
The world is the very mental state that is agitating you at the present moment. “What are they going to do? When I’m gone who will look after them? How will they manage?” This is all just the “world.”
Even the mere arising of a thought fearing death or pain is the world.
Throw the world away! The world is the way it is. If you allow it to dominate your mind it becomes obscured and can’t see itself. So whatever appears in the mind, just say, “This isn’t my business. It’s impermanent, unsatisfactory and not self.”
Thinking you’d like to go on living for a long time will make you suffer. But thinking you’d like to die right away or very quickly isn’t right either. It’s suffering, isn’t it? Conditions don’t belong to us, they follow their own natural laws. You can’t do anything about the way the body is. You can beautify it a little, make it attractive and clean for a while, like the young girls who paint their lips and let their nails grow long, but when old age arrives, everybody’s in the same boat.
That’s the way the body is, you can’t make it any other way. What you can improve and beautify is the mind.
Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that, that sort of home is not our real home, it’s only nominally ours. It’s home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external, material home may well be pretty but it is not very peaceful. There’s this worry and then that, this anxiety and then that. So we say it’s not our real home, it’s external to us.
Sooner or later we’ll have to give it up. It’s not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn’t truly belong to us, it belongs to the world. Our body is the same.
We take it to be a self, to be “me” or “mine,” but in fact it’s not really so at all, it’s another worldly home. Your body has followed its natural course from birth, until now it’s old and sick, and you can’t forbid it from doing that. That’s the way it is. Wanting it to be any different would be as foolish as wanting a duck to be like a chicken.
When you see that that’s impossible – that a duck must be a duck and a chicken must be a chicken, and that the bodies have to get old and die – you will find courage and energy.
However much you want the body to go on lasting, it won’t do that.
~ Ajahn Chah
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