The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
29 June 2025
Q: If we know that we did something bad and regretted it, what should we do?
Phra Ajahn: You should use it as a lesson to teach you not to do it again. What you have done, you cannot go back and erase it but you can use it as a reminder that ‘I should not do that again because if I do, I will regret it and I will feel bad again.’ So this is the only thing you can do with what you had done.
- - - - -
Q: Peace and happiness are hard to find but do you think they are something you can find and hold for a long time?
Phra Ajahn: Yes, this is the goal of Buddhism - to find peace and happiness that is truly lasting but it is within yourself. It is not the peace and happiness that you find from outside of yourself. The happiness from outside yourself are not true happiness. They are temporary happiness because they are impermanent.
The true and lasting happiness is to be found within yourself by the practice of meditation, mindfulness meditation and insight meditation. These meditations will eventually make your mind become peaceful and content and then you will have peace and happiness forever. Even long after your body dies, your mind doesn’t die with your body.
Your mind is the one who finds peace within itself. And then it will no longer need to be reborn again. So, this is what you want.
And what you need to do is to follow the teaching of the Buddha which teaches us to practice 3 steps.
(1) The first step is to practice charity if you can afford it. If you have lots of money, you shouldn’t spend it on yourself, you should spend it on helping other people. It will make you start realizing the first level of internal peace and happiness.
(2) Then you want to keep the precepts, the 5 precepts. And once you can keep the 5 precepts, if you want to move up to the third level, you need to change the 5 precepts to the 8 precepts.
(3) Then you will have time to meditate. First, you meditate to calm your mind. You will get this peace and happiness temporarily when you meditate but after you withdraw from your meditation, this peace and happiness can disappear. If you want to make it lasting, you have to practice the next level which we call ‘insight meditation,’ it’s to teach your mind to see the truth, to see what makes your mind unhappy.
The Buddha said what makes your mind unhappy are the 3 cravings: craving for sensual pleasure, craving to be and craving not to be. You can get rid of these 3 cravings by looking at the truth of things, that the things you crave for are impermanent, they cannot bring you true happiness, then you can stop your craving for these things. Once you have stopped your craving then your mind becomes completely peaceful and happy forever. So this is what you need to practice.
- - - - -
Q: I want to ask regarding the difference between samādhi and jhāna. Is samādhi the knowing mind?
Phra Ajahn: They are the same. Samādhi and jhāna are the same things. Samādhi means the calm of the mind; and jhāna means the concentration of the mind. When you concentrate, the mind becomes calm, becomes samādhi. You have different levels of concentration, different levels of jhāna.
You have the 1st jhāna, 2nd jhāna, 3rd jhāna, 4th jhāna until the 8th jhāna. They are the different intensity of your concentration. The more you can concentrate, the more your mind becomes calmer.
What you should worry is mindfulness or sati.
This is the tool that will make your mind concentrated.
You have to be mindful. Let your mind be mindful of only one object such as a mantra ‘Budho Budho Budho.’ This is the way to build up concentration of your mind.
Just concentrate on ‘Budho Budho Budho.’
No matter what you do, don’t let your mind go think about some other things. Bring it back with ‘Budho Budho Budho’ then your mind will stop thinking and become fully concentrated and your mind will become samādhi. When the mind becomes still, then it’s called, ‘samādhi.’ If it’s still for a brief duration, we call it ‘khanika-samādhi.’ If it’s still for a long duration, we call it ‘appanā-samādhi.’
“Dhamma in English, Sep 29, 2019.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
No comments:
Post a Comment