The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
12 March 2025
Q: You’ve just redefined smartness and stupidity for me. We spent on other things which are less useful for ourselves.
Than Ajahn: Yes. Everything you do in the world is useless. It’s worthless. Really! It doesn’t worth anything as far as your mind is concerned. It doesn’t make your mind happier. It doesn’t make your mind relieved from stress, from suffering. It doesn’t do that for your mind at all. So looking from the perspective of the mind, it’s useless.
It's only useful from the perspective of the defilements.
Defilements like to make money, spend money, be rich, be famous, be respected and so forth. These are all useful to the defilements but they are not useful to the mind. They don’t help you getting rid of the mental suffering of the mind at all. In fact, they increase more suffering, more stress and depression to the mind.
But you don’t see that. You think that having more money is good, getting a higher position is good, being able to spend money on traveling, buying a new car, or buying a new condo is good. What does it do to your mind? Nothing. It just produces more craving for your mind. It creates more hunger. There is no contentment arising from those things.
No peace. No contentment. Just restlessness, agitation, hunger and more craving. Have you reached the point where you’d say, ‘I have had enough yet?’ Just for sometimes, but eventually you’d want for more again.
You don't see how important your mind is to you.
Because you are being influenced by your defilements to see that what you can get for your body is more important than what you can get for your mind. But the body is temporary. Once the body dies, everything that you’ve accumulated for the body becomes useless to the mind. The mind couldn’t take anything with it at all.
Try to practice because whatever you accumulated from your practice the mind can take that practice with it.
You can take mindfulness with you, you can take wisdom with you, you can take jhāna with you; but you can’t take your Rolls-Royce with you, you can’t take your condominium with you. So what do you want?
You can’t take anything that is physical with you. You can only take the mental qualities with you like charity, morality, contentment, peace, calm and wisdom. These are the things that you can take with you. These mental qualities will keep the mind peaceful and happy.
But if you don’t have any of those mental qualities, if you keep hungering for this and that thing, when the body dies, the mind will be consumed with hunger because those were the things that you’ve been giving it to the mind everyday of your life. You give the mind more hunger, more craving, more desire. You will end up becoming a hungry spirit when you die. You take these poisons – greed, hate, delusion and fear – with you too.
If you have mindfulness and wisdom, you can get rid of those 4 poisons, so you don’t have to take them with you.
Just keep practising the triple steps: charity, morality and meditation. This is the path to freedom, path to everlasting happiness.
The path of the worldly things is not the path to freedom; it’s path to subjugation, path to imprisonment in the realm of saṃsāra – continuous rebirth: birth, ageing, sickness and death.
“Dhamma in English, Sep 19, 2023.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
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