The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
23 January 2024
Student: Yesterday I attended the funeral of a friend and I felt a little bit sad. In my memory of him, he was a cheerful and kind person so that’s why I felt sad. From the eulogy that I heard, he most likely would be supported with a better condition in his next life with all his good deeds he had done.
Than Ajahn: Your reaction on how you feel whether it’s sad, happy or neutral is more important. I think it would be better if you take it as a case study when you see a dead body, meaning that his body and your body are similar and one day you will be in the same position as his body so that you can then prepare your mind for the happening when it comes.
If you prepare your mind, then your mind will not be hurt. Your mind can absorb it peacefully if you accept that this is the truth that will happen to everybody because it’s anicca (impermanent), it’s anattā (something you can’t control). The body is not you.
You are not the body. You are the user of the body so you shouldn’t feel sad because you are not the one who die. The one who dies is the body and the body doesn't know that it dies.
The body is like a tree, a doll or a mannequin.
So this is the way to teach your mind to have the right perception of the body so that when things happen to your body you should not feel hurt, you should not be sad or stressful.
You should just say, ‘Hey, it's not me! and it's natural!
This thing happens to everybody! It's just a matter when.’
Then your perception toward people will change. Every time when you see a person, you’d say, ‘He/she is going to die.’ So what’s the point of getting excited or upset. You cannot change this anyway, right? You cannot stop people from dying. The Buddha said that once you’re born, you’re subjected to death. So you should use the real life example when you see a dead person. It has a stronger impact on your mind than thinking about death without a dead body. So it's good to go to funeral so that you can see the real thing rather than contemplating on death and not seeing the real thing.
If you are a meditator, you should use this as a reminder that this is how life will end, everybody will end in death.
So keep reminding yourself this, it will change your perspective of life from being permanent to being impermanent, and it will stop your mind from resisting the truth. The stress or suffering is caused by the mind resistance to the truth, not accepting the truth. But when you see the truth in front of your eyes and say, ‘How can I resist [this truth]’ then your mind will eventually accept the truth. When it accepts the truth, when death happens, it will not cause any suffering to the mind. So this is the goal of going to the funeral.
The goal of going to a funeral is not to worry about how good the person who died was, or worry about his past actions, that’s not our business. Our business is to use that corpse to teach us the Dhamma, teach us the truth, to give us enlightenment. This is what we call ‘seeing the Dhamma, seeing the Truth’.
Normally people don’t like to go see dead body because the defilements try to keep us from seeing the truth, the defilements want us to forget about death so we can enjoy life doing what the defilement wants us to do. So once you see death, you’ll find that, ‘What’s the purpose of doing what the defilement wants you to do?’
Because regardless of what you do, eventually you’ll end up in death and everything that you did before that wouldn’t mean anything. So you’ll have less attachment to life, less clinging to life, because there’s no purpose in clinging to them anymore.
Before you see that truth, you have a purpose of finding happiness from things in this world, from sensual objects, but once you see death, this passion for sensual pleasure will diminish or even eliminated entirely.
Once you don’t have passion for life, when you die, you don’t suffer. It’s the passion for living that cause you to have the suffering because you want to live but you are facing with the truth that you can’t live forever.
So keep reminding yourself that death is imminent. It can come any time. So you can change your priority and do something that is beneficial for your mind, not for your defilement, which is to practice more meditation to calm your mind, to make your mind peaceful and have equanimity so it doesn’t react emotionally to anything that happens or disappear.
It's your defilement that makes you feel sad because you want to live but you know that you can’t go against the truth. The truth is you will die. If you accept the truth then you will not feel sad especially if you know that the body is not you, you are the user of the body.
You are like the driver of the automobile. You are the driver of the body, you drive the body around, tell the body what to do. But you know whatever happens to your body doesn't happen to you (the driver), the user of the body.
So this is what you want to keep reminding yourself: separating your mind from the body, and accept whatever happens to the body. If you cannot do anything about it then you will have to accept it. If you can still look after it, you can look after it, but if you can’t do anything when it gets sick, then you just have to accept it.
Acceptance will make your mind peaceful and calm and not hurting.
“Dhamma in English, May 2, 2023.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
No comments:
Post a Comment