The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
12th March, 2022
Question: There is no direct connection between having samādhi at the moment, and having wisdom at the same time. So we have to practise samādhi to reinforce the mind to enable it to develop wisdom.
Than Ajahn: Right, samādhi will give you the strength to stop your mind from being greedy and angry.
But you need wisdom to stop your anger and greed permanently by seeing that the thing you are angry with is something that you can’t do anything about. Like when you are angry at someone because the person doesn’t do the thing you want him to do for you, when you look at the truth, you realized that you can’t force the person to do something for you if the person didn’t want to do it, right? So you see it as anattā then you can stop your anger.
With samādhi, you can stop your anger.
Without samādhi, even though you know that you can’t tell the person what you want him to do for you, you will still want to try it anyway.
So you need both, samādhi and wisdom, to get rid of your defilements, your greed, hate and delusion, permanently. They are like your right hand and left hand for you to do things efficiently.
You have to develop samādhi and wisdom separately. At one time, you develop samādhi, then the next time, you develop wisdom. You develop them alternately. You sit and meditate for an hour. After you’ve come out of meditation, you start to think in term of anicca, dukkha, anattā to teach your mind that everything will hurt you because everything is anicca, everything is anattā. When you see these in your mind all the time, when your defilement comes up, you can stop it right away. So you need to develop them both but not at the same time.
Some people have the misperception that once they have samādhi then wisdom will arise by itself. This doesn’t happen. Because when you are in samādhi, you have emptiness; maybe emptiness can be a form of wisdom too—that truly there is nothing. Emptiness is the real happiness: this is wisdom. But how would you maintain it? How can you stay with emptiness all the time while your defilements still want you to have things to make you happy?
So maybe you can use that emptiness to remind yourself that nothing is as good as emptiness; to be alone, to be by yourself and to not have anything—that’s wisdom. How can you do it as your mind keeps going after things all the time? So you need wisdom to tell your mind that the things your mind is going after will hurt you because they are temporary, they are impermanent.
“Dhamma in English, Nov 9, 2021.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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