The Teachings of Ajahn Suchart.
1 May 2026
Monk : Tan Ajahn, you spoke about Luang Ta Mahā Boowa and how you feel that he had practiced through the whole scope of practice. I’ve been struck by the talks, many of which you’ve translated. I’ve listened to your translation of Luang Ta Mahā Boowa speaking about aspects of the mind and awakening that I’ve never heard spoken so clearly elsewhere. I specifically remember one instance where he talked about states beyond space and time. Most Westerners, when they think of the word cessation or cooling nibbāna, have an intuition of cold blankness. I wonder how you would respond to a perception like that, specifically in relation to Luang Ta Mahā Boowa’s description of states that most of us have not had access to?
Tan Ajahn: Well, this is the state you access in meditation. When your mind eventually enters the fourth jhana, that’s when your thoughts stop functioning temporarily and all that you have left is the emptiness of mental space, which is comparable to the physical space when you are in space.
When you die, you’ll be all alone. All that is left is ‘you’ or the knower. Actually, there’s no ‘you’ anymore because the ‘you’ is a mental fabrication. Once the mental fabrication stops functioning, then the ‘you’ disappears.
And all that is left is the knower, knowing the emptiness and the state of equanimity within the mind itself. So this is what you will experience when you eventually get to that point.
Monk: How does one move from that state to liberation?
Tan Ajahn: You don’t. This is the end of meditation.
This is the result of what you get: calm, peacefulness, equanimity and a sense of peace and happiness, which the Buddha described as ‘the happiness that arises from a calm mind excels all types of happiness.’
Once you have this, then you have something to bargain with your defilements. Your defilements want to look for happiness but they want to find it through the sensual objects. If you study the teachings, you’ll realize that all sensual objects have the ‘Three Characteristics’ as their character.
They are dukkha because they are temporary. They are not permanent.
You may enjoy a meal but once it’s gone, it’s gone and you are left hungry and empty again, and it leaves you desiring more food.
When you cannot get it, then you become unhappy. So, this is the thing you can bargain down and say that you don’t need to have happiness from sensual objects anymore. All you have to do is go into jhāna anytime you feel like you want to have happiness. The only drawback about jhāna is that it is not permanent. You have to keep going back to get that happiness from peace of mind.
If you want to have this type of happiness be permanent, you need to develop vipassana (wisdom) to eliminate the defilements, which are the ones that destroy the peace that you gain from jhāna. Because when you come out of jhāna and start to think, the defilements will start coming up again and they will eventually drag you to go look for something – to see, to hear, to drink or to smell, and so forth, without even knowing it because you’ve been so used to looking for this type of happiness all the time.
But once we have the other type of happiness that we can experience from meditation, then we can use the wisdom that the Buddha teaches us to develop, to see the three characteristics in the objects that your defilements want to have, that they’re going to hurt you sooner or later. They’re going to give you dukkha because of their temporary nature or their uncertain nature. They keep constantly changing. What is good can become bad, right?
It’s the same with what you get. At first when you get it, it’s good, but a few days later, it might break down or you might lose it. So this is the nature of things that we want to teach the mind every time we desire or crave for them: that they are temporary happiness because they keep changing and they are not under your control (anattā). Right? Things are not under your control. You cannot say, ’This thing is going to be like this all the time,’ because it can change or it can disappear at any time without any warning.
So this is what you want to teach your mind: to see that what you crave for is not real happiness, but it’s real dukkha without knowing it. It’s dukkha in disguise in the form of happiness, of pleasure. They are like drugs.
People get addicted to drugs. They think, ‘Oh, this is pleasure,’ right? Smoke a joint or take some pills. They are high for a few hours and then after that, the effects of the drugs disappear. Then they come back down and then they feel lonely and sad, and have the desire to go back up again so they can become addicted. And anytime they cannot get what they are addicted to, then what do they get? They get dukkha (suffering). So everything is like this. This is what you want to teach your mind.
“Dhamma in English, Dec 18, 2021.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
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