The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
23 March 2024
"Absolute truth and conventional truth."
Q: Recently a close family member had suffered a sudden loss and was very upset about it and when I was speaking to this family member, I also found that I took on board that kind of sadness and sorrow that he was experiencing. If this happens to somebody who is not close to me, I will be relatively neutral. Is this a negative reaction or muditā (where I feel sad for him when he was sad)?
Than Ajahn: Actually you should have equanimity regarding everything that you come into contact with.
Everything happens and is not under your control.
Whether you become sad or happy doesn’t change things so the best thing to do is to know it for what it is and let it be. If you have to comfort them, you can always use compassion or loving kindness but inside your mind you should have equanimity. In term of your reaction with other people, you still want to comfort them, to make them feel good whenever you can.
So they are two separate things: one is to look after your mind first and the best position for your mind is to remain equanimity in every situation; as far as your reaction to other people, you can use loving kindness, compassion or muditā but if you find that it’s not possible to use it, then you just remain silent.
All your reaction should be based on equanimity. If you lose your equanimity then you become sad again.
This is because you don’t see things as natural phenomena – anattā (no self in them). You put on label on each body and then you have information regarding that body, ‘Who this person is, what relationship is this person to you,’ then you have this attachment to this label and information.
But you have to look at it on the absolute scale. You have to look at it as natural phenomena like a tree.
The body is like a tree, really! It’s made up of the four elements and one day it will return to the four elements.
No matter what you do, you cannot stop this process of rising and ceasing or birth and death. So this is what you want to teach your mind when your mind becomes overwhelmed with things around you.
The problem is you get lost in the labelling.
You forget to look at the absolute picture that all bodies are just the composition of four elements and one day the four elements will go on their separate ways. Dust to dust.
Water to water. Wind to wind. Fire to fire. So this is what you want to teach your mind.
If you have the absolute information dominant in you, then you will not feel anything because you’d just say that it’s the work of nature. Things formed and unformed.
Things come and go, rise and cease. So you have to teach your mind to look at everything as the work of nature then you’d say, ‘What can I do? I can’t stop nature.’
You also have to practice a lot of meditation to have this equanimity, to remain non-reactive. If you don’t have equanimity, although you focus on this wisdom part a lot, you cannot follow through with what your wisdom is telling you. So you really have to do both: do meditation 50 percent of the time and do contemplation 50 percent of the time.
When you come out of meditation, you contemplate on the Three Characteristics and on the four elements.
Everything in this world is all made up of the four elements. If you want to use scientific terms, they are solid, liquid, heat and gas. When they combined, they form things like trees, human bodies, animal bodies.
They are not stable.
They keep changing. One day they will go separate ways. Everything.
In order to be able to apply this knowledge, you have to have equanimity to support your mind so you have to practice. First, if you haven't got any equanimity yet, you should concentrate more on developing mindfulness and doing meditation. Once you have equanimity, when you come out of meditation, you can then move from mindfulness to contemplation of the truth, on the Three Characteristics of existence.
You’re alternating between contemplation and going back to meditation when your mind seems to have lost the equanimity.
If you haven't yet got any equanimity, then your primary goal is to get to equanimity first because without equanimity you cannot apply wisdom. Without equanimity, your mind will not be able to accept the truth because the defilement is still very strong inside your mind. But you also have to contemplate when you're not meditating to remind yourself about the truth because your delusion will keep you away from the truth, make you forget about the truth and it makes you keep thinking of the conventional information instead of thinking of things as natural phenomena. You’d keep thinking about them as ‘My parents, my wife, my husband, my children, my possession’. If you think like this, you will be afflicted when something happens to them. But if you can see all the time that they're just natural phenomena, they are just four elements, then you won’t be afflicted if something happens to them.
This is the purpose of contemplation and you do it until it becomes second nature to you. Whenever you see things, you see them as four elements, as work of nature, not as your brothers, your sisters, friends, relatives and so forth.
But you also have to have this conventional information behind your mind. You don’t let the conventional information come in the forefront. You have to have both information (absolute and conventional) because if you only have the absolute information, you might treat everybody like dirt.
You have to look at people as human and relate to them in the conventional way. It’s just that we have extra knowledge of the world we live in that others don’t have.
Student: Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you.
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Q: I love the part when Ajahn expounded on the conventional truth and the absolute truth.
Than Ajahn: If you have the absolute truth then you can stop all your attachment or your craving toward things. If you see everything as anicca, anattā – there is nothing you can do about it – then to be attached to it is just useless. You will not always get what you crave for because nature is something you can’t control. So if you don’t want any dukkha, then you don’t want to have any craving for things.
Q: Do we keep the conventional truth behind our mind for practical reason?
Than Ajahn: When you deal with people, you don’t see them as the absolute truth, you see them as the conventional truth. Like when you go to Vietnam, you speak Vietnamese language, you have to speak the same language that the people in Vietnam use.
The absolute truth is more for yourself to let go, to have no attachment or craving toward anything. The conventional truth is for you to use it when you meet people or do things with people.
“Dhamma in English, May 9, 2023.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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