The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
30 December 2025
Q: When sankhāra (thinking) comes in, the five aggregates will mix together so there will be pain, otherwise there will be no pain, am I correct?
Than Ajahn: It depends on how your sankhāra thinks.
If you think with defilement then you have dukkha. If you don’t think with defilements, the mind has no dukkha. The painful feeling is not due to sankhāra but due to the impermanence of the body. Sometime your the body gets sick so you have painful feeling. You have to separate them.
There are two types of feelings: mental feeling and physical body feeling. The mental dukkha is caused by your defilement, by your cravings; the physical dukkha is caused by the impermanent nature of the body. When the body gets sick, hungry or when it’s hot or cold, you get painful feeling which you can’t do anything about.
But the mental feeling, the dukkha that arise from your craving, you can stop it by stopping your cravings.
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Q: You mentioned that physical pain is not as bad as mental pain. Does this mean that mental pain is caused by our defilement but physical pain is just from the body and if we know how to let go of the body, it will not be as painful as the mental pain.
Than Ajahn: That’s right. Because physical pain is only 10% of the total pain and the mental pain is 90% of the total pain so if you can stop the mental pain then you're only experiencing the 10% of the physical pain.
Like somebody who is afraid of the needle, when you take a shot, the mental pain is much stronger than the physical pain. Even before you get the physical pain, the mental pain has already started when you think of getting that shot. Or, when you go to see a dentist, when the doctor said that you have to take the anaesthesia injection, you start to feel the pain before the needle actually touch your body. But if you calm your mind and just say, ‘Okay, no problem,’ then when you get the physical pain, it's just a very small pain.
Sometimes you don't have any physical pain at all but you have mental pain like when you lose someone you loved. When you feel sad or depressed, that’s mental pain.
Q: The way to counter mental pain is to remind myself that this pain will go away, it will pass and I try to forget about it.
Than Ajahn: Accept the truth. Maybe the pain won't go away yet. If it stays on, let it stay. If it goes away, let it go. Don't expect because when you expect, you start creating stress, ‘When will it go away? When will it go away?’ So just be happy with the pain then your mind will be happy. Welcome the pain like you welcome the pleasure. They're the same things. They are only in the opposite end of each other, the pain is on one end and the pleasure is on the other end.
As long as you don’t have any craving - attraction or aversion - then there will be no mental pain. That’s why you need to practice a lot of mindfulness and meditation to train the mind to be neutral, to be merely knowing, to not reacting with aversion or attraction, then the physical pain will not hurt your mind at all it.
It will hurt the body but the body doesn't care because the body doesn't know anything anyway.
The body is like a car. If you smash a car, the car doesn't know that it's being smashed, right? The same way with the body. The one who knows is the one who is reacting. Once there is no connection between the mind and the body then you can take the body anywhere, you can bury it, you can burn it and the body won't react at all because the body is just like a car. The one who reacts is the mind and when it reacts, it causes suffering or stress in the mind.
So if you don't want to have any stress, don't react. Just stay calm, stay neutral. That's why you need to meditate, to practice, to teach your mind how to stay calm, how to stay neutral.
Just merely knowing. Know that ‘I have good feeling today.’ If you have bad feeling tomorrow, know that you have bad feeling. Know that you have painful feeling, you have pleasure feeling, they all come and go, they are all just feelings. They are impermanent, they keep changing. They are anatta, they are not under your control. You can’t tell them to go away or to come whenever you want them to come. If you learn to accept them for what they are, accept them as they are, then you will have no cravings. And when you have no craving, you have no stress in your mind.
“Dhamma in English, July 30, 2024.”
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Q: When I am suffering from pain, what should I do?
Than Ajahn: There are two ways to deal with painful feelings. First is the way of mindfulness. When you are experiencing pain in the body and if you don’t want it to disturb your mind, you have to recite a mantra. Keep reciting a mantra to prevent your mind from reacting with aversion or with the desire to have the pain to go away. If you can succeed then there will be no pain in the mind and the pain in the body will be bearable. But this is a temporary measure because when you fail to maintain the mantra, or fail to keep the mind from reacting, your mind will have aversion or the desire to have this painful feeling disappears.
[Next] How to deal this painful feeling permanently is to study the nature of pain.
According to the Buddha, the painful feeling is a natural phenomenon like the weather. Cold weather, hot weather, come and go.
They are affected by some other factors which we can’t control. What we can do is we can live with this pain by accepting it. Don’t try to deny it. Don’t try to have any desire to get rid of it. Just learn to live with it. This is the reality of life. We can stop our desire or our aversion to this painful feeling by accepting the truth that we can’t run away from it. It’s like the weather, hot or cold weather. If we can accept this then there will be no pain in the mind.
“Dhamma in English, Aug 13, 2024.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
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