The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
7 May 2024
“I teach the triple training: sīla, samādhi and paññā.”
Question from Myanmar: "Do you teach jhāna attainments?"
Than Ajahn: "I teach the triple training: sīla, samādhi and paññā. If you want to be a meditator, you need to keep at least the 8 precepts. If you’re ordained as a monk, you have to keep the 227 precepts. This will prevent the mind from running away.
Sīla is like a fence that keeps the mind in one place so that it will be easier for the next step of practice which is attaining samādhi, calming the mind, stopping the mind from any action.
When the mind becomes calm and inactive, the mind becomes happy.
Once the mind becomes happy by itself, the mind doesn’t need to have anything to make it happy.
When the mind withdraws from samādhi, cravings are still in the mind.
Then, we have to develop the knowledge that the Buddha has taught us: that cravings and desires are the problems - they are not the solution. Don’t follow them.
If you follow them, they will bring you more problems and troubles. They are the one that will lead you to have rebirth.
If you don’t want to have more rebirth, and you don’t want to run into problems and troubles, then you must not follow your desires and your cravings. You should stop them. You resist them.
Like when you want to smoke a cigarette, you should resist it because if you keep following your desire, it will keep coming back and it will ask for more. You smoke one cigarette, then a few moments later, it will ask you for another cigarette. But if you say, ‘No, I don’t want to smoke anymore,’ every time it comes back, you just repeat the same thing, eventually it will not come back because it cannot get what it asks for.
But you might not be able to withstand the desire, the pain that arises from the desire if you have no samādhi.
If you have samādhi (or jhāna), then there will be no painful feeling when the desires arising.
And you can resist the desires and eliminate the desires from your mind."
“Dhamma in English, Q&A session, .”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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