Ajahn Sumedho
For each one of us, the way it is right now is going to be different: with our own moods, memories, thoughts, expectations or whatever. When we try to compare one person with another, we get confused because we’re all different. On the level of saṅkhāras, or conditioned phenomena, everything is different. Nothing can stabilize into a permanent quality or condition; it’s beyond the ability of saṅkhāras which by their very nature are changing. The Buddha taught, ‘Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā – all conditions are impermanent. This is the way it is. They change. Saṅkhāras are like this. They can be of any quality: low or high, good or bad, right or wrong, material or mental or emotional, and their nature is anicca (impermanent), dukkha (unsatisfactory) and anattā (non-self).
The Buddha laid down this teaching very clearly; it’s very simple and you can reflect on it. It’s not a teaching you grasp or a Buddhist doctrine that you must believe in, because belief just stops you from reflecting. You don’t just say, ‘The Buddha said that, so it’s true.’ Rather, you take what the Buddha said and use it to look in the direction that it’s pointing… it’s like this. This may sound very prosaic and boring, ‘It’s like this’, but it’s using words to open up the mind to the way it is, rather than try to determine whether the way it is right now is right or wrong, good or bad, true or false.
What we call meditation is really mindfulness. There are so many meditation techniques that are available now on the Internet, and various teachers teach different styles because that’s the way teaching is; it depends on words. It isn’t about whether what I’m saying is right or wrong, or about you trying to believe what I’m saying is right, or prove I’m wrong. It’s an invitation, an encouragement to reflect on the reaction that you’re having as individuals at this present moment. Whatever the emotional state or mood that arises – it’s like this. Whether it is right, wrong or a mixture, is not the issue. It is the way it is. When I talk about Dhamma, it’s the reality of the way it is.
Religion is a kind of outer surface of everything. Some people prefer one over another, but that doesn’t make one better than the other. It’s just the way things are. Nobody’s going to demand that we feel the same and agree on the one. That’s what tyranny is: ‘You have to believe what I believe, what I say.’ So much of religious teaching gets blocked off by doctrines, things you have to believe in order to be a functioning member of a particular group. Belief is grasping concepts that you are attracted to, or that you are interested in. Or maybe you’re not interested in it but you’re told that if you don’t believe in a certain way, you’re a sinner, there’s something wrong with you, that you’re an apostate and have to leave the group.
But that’s not reflecting on the way it is; that’s just a form of tyranny where one person determines what a group has to believe in without question. That’s one reason why Christianity broke up into so many different kinds of groups, because people had different takes on the basic teachings and history of the Christian religion. Buddhism also can be caught in just believing in Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, Thai Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism. We can all feel that the particular form we’ve chosen is better than the rest. Reflect on that. This feeling of ‘What I have is better than what you have’ is a feeling; words and feelings that arise and cease. That’s the very nature of all languages – it’s all words.
No matter how high-minded or beautiful the word may be, or how mean, low or nasty it might be, the one thing in common that all words have is that they are saṅkhāras, they’re conditioned phenomena. And that’s why I always encourage you to listen to the words that enter your mind without judging them, because if you learn to just sit still in a quiet place for a while, then various thoughts, memories and concepts arise and cease. You’re not trying to control them, reasoning everything out logically or judging if they’re right or wrong, true or false. But it’s like this.

This is reflecting on the nature of words – thoughts as they arise and cease – rather than trying to figure out what kind of thoughts you should think, or are wrong and bad and shouldn’t arise. If you have bad thoughts, you easily assume there’s some evil source in you, some devil trying to tempt you, or that you’re a bad person because a good person wouldn’t have evil thoughts. That’s conceptual proliferation. The mind goes around and around about right and wrong, good and bad.
I assume everybody here wants to be good. In the whole monastic form – in all religious forms – the ambition to be a good person is a common bond we share. But we can’t always have good thoughts. We are living in a community that has a structure to it that we all agree to: to surrender and live within the structure of the vinaya, the precepts. That’s an agreement that’s required to join the community of monks and nuns. All the Vinaya precepts are about right action and right speech, but not about right thought. Thought can be wrong, can be bad, can be evil, as well as good, the best, the highest possible thought you can think of at any moment. But you can’t sustain them. If you observe them, they arise and they cease. When you resist or try to suppress them, then you proliferate around them and blame somebody. Either you blame external sources – some kind of evil force in the universe is tempting you, is one way of expressing that – or think that someone in the sangha is trying to influence you in a negative way, or that you are just a bad person. But whatever take you have in regard to these bad or evil thoughts, it’s still the use of words, proliferating concepts that arise in your consciousness.
Many of the thoughts, emotional reactions and experiences that we have are still coming from the time we were little children, teenagers, young adults and onward. But what or who is it that is aware of thoughts as thoughts? Not the critic. The critic is not who you are. Your position in life isn’t to be stuck in a critical mind – caught always in seeing everything as what’s right and wrong about every condition, every situation – because all conditions, all saṅkhāras, are changing. You can’t sustain them.
Many of us have had insights through various forms of meditation, and then we remember them. For example, you think, ‘Yesterday I sat in the Temple and had the most profound insight into Dhamma.’ That’s a memory. It arises in the present moment. That’s the way memories are: impermanent. The next day you come back and sit in the same place in the Temple, and do the same things that you remember doing the previous day when you had this profound insight, and what happens? Your mind goes all restless, negative. You’re struggling with it; you feel disappointed and want to get up and leave. You’d hoped that the bliss that you experienced on a previous day could be sustained for your whole life. We would like to live in a state of what we call ‘bliss’ forever and ever because we don’t like to suffer.
The very nature of saṅkhāras is dukkha or suffering – unsatisfactoriness – because that’s the way they are. They’re not satisfying. No matter how good or beautiful or right, or the best that you can possibly have, they’re going to change because saṅkhāras are impermanent. That’s the way it is. Whose fault is that? You think, ‘Is it God’s fault? Why didn’t God create permanently blissful saṅkhāras for us, so that once we have this insight, we can stay in that peaceful state forever and ever, beyond death?’ We can imagine bliss as a permanent state. But the thoughts about bliss are still words and concepts that we create in the present moment. So, trying to remember previous insights is suffering.
Fifty-five years ago, before I met Luang Por Chah, I spent the first year as a sāmaṇera (novice monk) in a monastery in Nong Khai, in northeast Thailand. The head monk sent me off to a meditation monastery outside the town, where I spent a year meditating, at first using methods I found blocked me; I just couldn’t get beyond them. Then I’d feel if I wasn’t doing this method then I wasn’t meditating, and feel guilty and try to force myself to do this technique all day. And when you’re with yourself, you have no distractions. I didn’t take any books except one that I was given, The Word of the Buddha, the basic teachings from the suttas and the Tipitaka. That was the only book I allowed myself to read.

In the first three months, after desperately trying to perform this technique and I couldn’t do it), I just gave up. I was in a hut by myself and the people at the monastery were very good to me. The nuns and sāmaṇeras would provide me with food every day, and I also had good support from the lay community. The difficulty that I was experiencing wasn’t due to anything untoward that was happening around me in the monastery. But I was 31 or 32-years-old at the time, and I’d spent a lifetime repressing negative state. My self-image was that I was basically a very good-natured person, because at that time you had to get along in life and be friendly and open, and I considered myself a well-adjusted adult male. But then living alone with nothing to do for 24/7, except this technique, I couldn’t sustain it. The teacher who taught it to me said I had to keep doing this over and over until I got enlightened. Well, it wasn’t working.
There was nothing I could do, so I just learned to sit and watch. So much anger, resentment and fear started arising in consciousness. I looked at it – 32 years of repressed anger and resentment. In anyone’s life, there’s a lot to resent. Life has its qualities of fairness and goodness and also its opposite. But I was told anger was a sin. When I felt angry, I wasn’t angry at anyone in the monastery; it was just old resentment that I would remember from the time I was a child, the time when I was a student, when I was in the military. I decided I wasn’t going to try to stop this anger. I would just let it go, and I did. Anger is also a saṅkhāra. It isn’t permanent, it’s not self, it’s anattā. Resisting anger was a lifetime habit at that time – 30 years of resisting and repressing negative feelings, fear.
I started reviewing this book, The Word of the Buddha, and the Four Noble Truths, the first sermon of the Buddha. I started to contemplate suffering, the First Noble Truth. And I got it: the cause of suffering is trying to get something you can’t have. I began to have an insight into the fact that I didn’t have the bliss that I wanted. This is bhava-taṇhā, this is the desire to get something you remember or conceive of that you don’t have right now. So I started awakening to Dhamma, to the way things are. Bhava-taṇhā is like this. Wanting to get rid of things is vibhava-taṇhā; the desire to get rid of bad thoughts, of what you don’t like, what you don’t want, to kill the defilements. This is resistance, repression.
The teaching on the Four Noble Truths – that there are three kinds of desire, kāma-taṇhā (desire for sense pleasures), bhava-taṇhā, vibhava-taṇhā – really awakened me to reflect on desire. In terms of Dhamma, desire can be divided into these three categories, which are very helpful. See how much of your life here at Amaravati is about vibhava-taṇhā, the desire to get rid of things, or bhava-taṇhā, desiring to get something you want, to become enlightened, to become an arahant. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to become an arahant or get enlightened. It’s not about good and bad anymore. But it is a desire, and desires are saṅkhāras and are impermanent and not self.

Continued next week: June 6 2024