The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
3rd November, 2022
Question: Do we have to teach ourselves in order for the mind not to feel bad, and then we don’t break the precepts?
Than Ajahn: You can teach yourself, but you can forget of what you learned. You have to experience it.
You have to meet the mind. You have to discover the mind. You have to see that the mind is the one who reaps the result of good actions and pays the consequences of bad actions. Then, you don’t have to teach the mind. If you haven’t experienced it yet, no matter how much you teach the mind, you can forget of what you just learned.
Question: That’s to get to upekkhā.
Than Ajahn: Once you have upekkhā, you can see the difference when you have upekkhā and when you don’t have upekkhā. When you have upekkhā, you have contentment, peace and happiness. When you don’t have upekkhā, then restlessness, cravings, desires, stress will come up. So, you have to get to upekkhā first, and then everything will fall into place, all the puzzle will fit.
Right now, you cannot put the puzzle together because you lack the important ingredient which is upekkhā. No matter how much you try, how much money you make, how many places you go to make yourself happy, they will fall apart afterwards. You will always go back to the same condition that you were in before, you are not happy.
So, get upekkhā. When you have upekkhā, then you know, ‘This is the real thing. This is the real happiness.’ After that, then you want to protect this upekkhā if you still haven’t yet established it to be permanent. You need wisdom to teach your mind to protect upekkhā from disappearing. The thing that will destroy upekkhā is your defilements; and the thing that will destroy your defilements is wisdom i.e. the three characteristics of existence. Can you see the relationship?
Once you’ve developed upekkhā (by stopping the mind from thinking), then you have peace, happiness and contentment. Because when the mind stops thinking, your defilements cannot function. But you can’t maintain it all the time when you develop upekkhā with mindfulness.
When your mindfulness is weakened, your mind will start to think, and your defilement starts to function again. When the defilement starts to function, it destroys the upekkhā that you get from stop thinking.
If you want to maintain upekkhā, you have to stop the defilement by using wisdom, not stopping it by using mindfulness. You see that the objects of your craving are all aniccaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā. Sensual pleasures, happiness from rūpa jhāna and happiness from arūpa jhāna, they are all aniccaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā.
When you see that everything is aniccaṁ, dukkhaṁ, anattā, then you stop craving for it—stop craving for sensual pleasures, stop craving for rūpa jhāna, stop craving for arūpa jhāna.
And when you don’t have any craving, then your upekkhā will become permanent. Because the thing that causes the upekkhā to disappear is your defilement. Once you destroy your defilement with wisdom, then there is nothing else that will destroy your upekkhā. Then, your mind has upekkhā permanently. Okay?
You have to have samatha before vipassanā.
First, you have to accumulate happiness with mindfulness.
Once you have happiness from mindfulness, then you want to protect it with wisdom. It’s because your defilement will destroy the happiness that you get from jhāna.
Before the Buddha became enlightened, nobody knew how to deal with this situation.
People knew how to get into jhāna, get happiness from jhāna. But when they came out of jhāna, they started to think. When they started to have contact with sensual objects, their defilements started to function. And then, the happiness from upekkhā would disappear.
Your mind from the state of cool starts to become hot when you start to become greedy.
Your mind starts to become hot, anxious, it’s no longer cool and calm like when you were in jhāna.
If you tell your mind that everything will cause you dukkha sooner or later, then why going after it? Once you get something you like, you will lose it sooner or later. When you lose something you love, what would happen? You get dukkha, right? For example, you want to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend because you think he or she will make you happy, but what happens when you lose your boyfriend or girlfriend?
You will get sadness. So you should look ahead before you leap, then you wouldn’t want to go for the leap. Why going after dukkha?
You cannot live with your boyfriend or girlfriend forever. Sooner or later, you will have to separate.
This wisdom is what you use when you want to stop your defilement, stop your craving: by seeing that everything you crave for will eventually cause you dukkha. Dukkha is the price you will have to pay, sooner or later. It’s because you have to lose all of them. Things will change, from being beautiful to become ugly, become old and sick or become incapacitated. What would you do with the incapacitated partner? You’d want to get rid of him or her instead of keeping him/her because you can no longer get happiness from that person anymore.
You have to see everything is anicca, then you can see dukkha. Like flowers, the flowers bloom, and after a few days, they wilt.
Everything is like that. Everything is under the law of change (anicca). Everything is anattā: they are natural conditions, no one can interfere with these natural conditions. All natural conditions keep changing, right? Rising and ceasing. If you hang on to them, then you’ll get dukkha.
When the thing that you cling on turns into something different, then you start asking,
‘Why?’ Because you don’t see the law of nature, the law of change.
So, that’s why if you can see that all things are under the law of change, that they are natural conditions that you cannot interfere with, then you stop having anything to do with them. You live with emptiness.
It’s better to live with emptiness because emptiness doesn’t change. Right? It always remains empty all the time. That’s why it gives the supreme happiness. The Buddha says, ‘The absolute emptiness gives you the supreme happiness.’ The absolute emptiness—nothing, not even the body (khandas); it is the mind alone by its self. It doesn’t rely on anything. It doesn’t rely on the body, on rūpa jhāna or arūpa jhāna to make it happy. It relies on emptiness.
“Dhamma in English, May 24, 2022.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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