The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
12 June 2024
“The truth is our body can live with any form of pain and our mind will not be hurt if we can remain non-reactive to all kinds of feelings.”
Question: What is the relationship between vedanā and the four elements?
Than Ajahn: The four elements are elements: they are earth, water, fire and wind. Vedanā are feelings which arise from the body – they are painful feeling, non-painful feeling and neutral feeling. Vedanā arise from the four elements because the four elements made up the body.
The interaction of the four elements cause the feeling to arise, like when you have a stomach ache, it may be caused by eating some bad food, or contaminated water. The food is the earth element and the water is water element.
So the interaction between the four elements resulted in the arisen of painful feeling.
The way to cope with feelings is to accept it as it is, not trying to change it. If you want to change it, you will create another form of mental feelings which is a lot worse than the physical feelings. This is the purpose of practising Buddhism, to eliminate mental feelings, especially the arising of bad mental feelings which we call it suffering.
Our suffering arises because we want to manage the four elements, we want to manage the feelings, we always want to experience good feelings and as soon as we experience any bad feelings, we want to get rid of it.
When we want to get rid of painful feeling, the mental painful feeling in the mind arises.
When we practise, we want to prevent mental painful feeling to arise because the painful feeling in the mind is a lot more painful compare to the pain in the body. So we just leave the feelings alone because we cannot manage it, we cannot control it.
We know that the body is impermanent, sooner or later it will dissolve and we can leave with it. If we don’t want to accept the reality, we would think we couldn’t live with the dissolution of our body. We‘d think that it is beyond our ability to live with the pain. The truth is our body can live with any form of pain and our mind will not be hurt if we can remain non-reactive to all kinds of feelings, if we can leave the feelings alone.
By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto
Youtube: Dhamma in English
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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