The following presentation was recorded at the Buddhist Society
of Victoria, Melbourne East, Australia.
Please visit our website at bsv.net.au Now we are going to
give a little talk. And one of the things I want to
emphasise or talk about today is something that is quite close to
me right now. Very often when you give a
Dharma talk, you want to give a talk about something which is
topical, something which is on your mind, because that's just
natural, it's on your mind to talk about it, it makes life
easier. And one of the things that's
kind of been on my mind over the last few weeks is the fact that
my father passed away about four weeks ago now.
And that's kind of, you know, for most people is a big event,
it is something that you kind of see as into your memory a little
bit, and often for many people it's quite traumatic when
someone close to you passes away.
So for me it was very interesting because, you know,
as a Buddhist monk you're supposed to have contemplated
things like death, or ideally over many years, many decades,
even if you have been a monk for a long time.
So because of that you really find out whether your
contemplations have worked or not, it hasn't had any impact on
you, have you benefited from these contemplations?
Are you able to deal with things that are difficult generally for
people? Are you able to deal with it in
a way that is more in accordance with the Dharma, whereby you can
see things in a slightly different way?
And I must admit I was quite pleased, you never know before
the events happen, you think that you have kind of
contemplated these things in the right way, but it's hard to know
before the kind of the events happen.
And that's when you get a test. So it's good to get a test
sometimes, otherwise you kind of practice along the path and you
don't really know whether you are succeeding or not.
Actually life is full of tests really, so it's not as if you
have to look for those tests, tests come really in small doses
every day, but sometimes they come in really big doses when
someone passes away and these things.
So it was, for me it was very interesting, and I realized that
my contemplation of death had really been worthwhile, and I
compared my own reaction to the reaction of many others, like my
family members especially, and the usual reaction when people
pass away, and this was also in the case of my mother for
example, of course for my mother it would have been far more
difficult than for me, because of living together with someone
for so many decades, over 60 years, and that's a long time.
So, but still I could see the difference in reaction there,
also for my siblings and other family members, and very often
people say things like, oh it happened so quickly, it happened
so soon, I wasn't really expecting, I wasn't really ready
for it, I hadn't kind of done the thing, said the things I
wanted to say before someone passes away, and this is a kind
of a recurring theme when people pass away, I have noticed so
often people say it happened so quickly, it kind of came out of
the blue, but this is precisely the point, that's exactly how
death tends to happen, it comes out of the blue, and this is why
it surprises us, it's very rare that it happens in a very
orderly way, actually even when it happens in kind of the
orderly way, still people say it happens too quickly, kind of the
orderly way is when you get really really old, then you go
to hospital, and you kind of deteriorate gradually, and then
eventually you pass away, and still people say, oh I didn't
really expect it, I thought it would hang in there one more
day, he's dying, what do you mean you didn't expect it?
So obvious, but still it's hard to take it fully on board, that
someone actually is passing away, so this is one of those
things of course, one of the points of this is that you want
to take this on board in such a way from the very beginning,
that you actually can, when it happens, it doesn't seem as a
surprise, it's more like you expect it to happen, and this
was what happened to me when I got the phone call from my
father, I thought yeah, I expected that, because I had
made that such a powerful kind of imprint in my mind, when he
died, that was it, and I tried to do that with everybody, in my
life, everyone I meet, everyone I know, I tried to make it clear
to me that I may never see this person again, this may be the
last time, I tried to make it clear about myself as well, I
could also die at any time, and there's something very beautiful
that comes out of that, if you remember that someone can pass
away at any time, and that you may never see them again, what
it means is that you treat people well, how can you, if
you're never going to see someone again, how will you
treat them, would you treat them by being angry or negative, or
saying something bad the last time you see somebody, it's
almost inconceivable, if I know that I may never see you again,
then I will try to treat you with kindness, with a degree of
compassion, to say something nice, that when we depart from
each other, we feel good about it, and then we can separate,
and there's no regrets, there's no problems, and then we can
move on in our lives, and on our separate journeys, but if we do
something which is not nice, it is actually often difficult to
move on, it's as if we are tied to the past, tied to the past,
through that bad action, because it lingers in our memory, and
that lingering in your memory, that is a tie, that is a fetter,
that binds you to the past, and you can't really let go, and
then mindfulness becomes difficult, it becomes difficult
to live your life fully in the present moment, and all of these
things, they make things far more difficult as a consequence,
so for me, it had been very useful, because I remember these
things, and I realized that I had to kind of make peace with
my father, and I tried to do that many, many years ago, it is
always the case when you grow up in a family, there's always a
degree of friction in the people who are nearest to you, and I
realized I wanted to make good for anything that had happened
in the past, so I spent a large part of my, when I was with my
parents, always trying to live up to the highest standard with
my parents, and that had a very powerful impact actually, it was
one of those very interesting things, that, do you disagree
with what I'm saying? He's complaining, not sure,
right? It's still a bit young to
contemplate death, I recognize that, but it has a very
interesting impact on your parents and your family members,
when you kind of turn around like that, and before you've had
kind of a more ordinary relationship, and then you
realize that how you deal with your parents is so impactful on
your practice, you may remember, and I always like to bring this
up when I read the suttas, but in the sutta, the very first
part of the noble eightfold path, of course, you have right
view, and one of the definitions, one of the aspects
of right view is, it says quite cryptically, there is a mother
and father, yeah, and I think now someone, I think Adam
Sudhato translates it as that you have responsibilities
towards mother and father, and when you see that, you think
what does this actually mean, there is mother and father, but
you realize it is an aspect of right view, and it is always
framed in the context of kamma and rebirth, and you realize
that actually how you treat your parents is a very important part
of the noble eightfold path, if you do it in the right way, it
enhances your practice dramatically, so that and
recollection of death and all of these things together, made me
realize I need to do something with this, and I did, I stopped
trying to proselytize, I stopped trying to say to my parents,
yeah, Buddhism is the best, forget everything else you
believe in, become Buddhist, I stopped saying that because I
realized that doesn't work, you can't say that to your parents,
so instead I started to act, I started to walk instead of
talking, I forgot, don't even walk to talk, don't even talk at
all, just walk, that's kind of the point here, so I tried to
walk, walk, yeah, and when you walk, and when you do the right
thing, something magic happens, something dramatic happens, even
though my parents were very disappointed and very against it
when I became a monk, yeah, surprise, surprise, have you,
most parents are like that, yeah, don't become a monk, no,
please, we didn't bring you up for this purpose, everybody gets
to hear that, most people get to hear that when they decide to
become a monastic, but I was stubborn, and I'm very glad I
was stubborn, it was the right thing to be stubborn about, and
what happens over time is that something happens in your
parents' hearts, they start to understand that you're doing
something very, very positive, that in fact everything else you
could do in life actually kind of pales in significance by
being a monastic, especially if you live your monastic life
well, they start to see that something very powerful, very
meaningful, very useful, useful not only for their son, but also
for them after a while, yeah, when you talk to them, you have
good conversations together, you talk about meaningful things
instead of gossiping and talking about all kind of nonsense, and
it's also good for other people, it's good for everyone, it was
one of those fundamental things that makes something into a
spiritual quality, is that it is good not only for you, but also
for the other people around you, when that comes together, it is
a spiritual quality, and then as you, as I try to live up to
these standards, the standards about how to treat your parents
in the right way, thinking of them as your initial teachers,
thinking of them as Brahma, these are all taken from the
sutta, this is how the Buddha recommends which we think about
our parents, thinking about your parents as Brahma means that you
reflect on them as being those who have the most loving
kindness towards you, just like Brahma has loving kindness, and
then as you do that, there's this gradual transformation from
being very against what you're doing, starting to take an
interest and eventually realize that you are doing what really
is important in life, and then they come to you and they ask
you, this happened to my father, my mother and my brother, and
finally also my sister, she was the last holdout, eventually my
sister also came on board, and they asked for, teach me some
meditation, teach me something about Buddhism, teach me
something about what you're doing, and when I used to meet
with my family in recent years, whenever we come together, I
would give them a dhamma talk, and we would have meditation
together, and they would all kind of take these things on
board to varying degrees, not everything of course, but to
varying degrees, and it came to the point, what my father said
to me, he said that I used to be your teacher, now you're my
teacher. This is very powerful, and it's
very beautiful, and the outcome, the reason why that happened is
because that you live these things the right way, you
remember death, it came out in large part because of death
contemplation, I've got to do something now, there may never
be a chance again to say the words that are right, to do the
right things, let me take the opportunity now, and I did that,
and it worked, and of course when that happens, when you feel
that you have done everything you can, you have remembered
death, then when death finally happens, there are no regrets,
there's no sense that anything was left undone, I've done
everything I can, so for that reason, it was for me, it was
fine, it was good, and not only that, it was another important
aspect to this death as well, and that was the fact that my
father was generally a good person, my father had been a
very successful businessman, and sometimes if you are a
successful businessman, you may kind of become a bit conceited,
yeah, you made it really, he started out in very simple, in a
very simple life, and he ended up quite a well-off man, he had
done everything kind of really well in his life, and sometimes
you get conceited, but he actually didn't, and he was
still open to new ideas, which he showed through kind of his
leaning towards Buddhism, towards the end of his life, and
for him, he was a good man, he lived a good life, he brought up
his children in a good way, he even allowed them to become a
Buddhist monk, that was pretty amazing, yeah, it wasn't ideal,
but he allowed it anyway, and then of course, when you look at
a life like that, why feel sad? It's a life well lived, you have
done your best with this existence, you have had a chance
to live this life for a few years, you've done your very
best with it, so why be too sad about that?
Instead, rejoice. And that was one of the things
that was interesting, because I was in charge of my own father's
funeral service, which was very nice, it's a nice way of sending
your dad off into the future, and thanking him for all the
things, and we did that, it was a large crowd present, and I did
it in a kind of Buddhist way, in an uplifting way, nothing too
sad, nobody was crying at this funeral, which is amazing, yeah,
in a kind of western country, where you have a Christian
culture, you're supposed to cry, people supposed to be sad,
nobody was sad, yeah, there was no crying, even my mother didn't
cry, and she was, that was kind of astonishing, yeah, and
afterwards people said, wow, that was the best funeral
service we have ever been to before in our entire life, yeah,
because usually we just feel sad and depressed, but now we felt
actually uplifted, and inspired by funeral service, so you know,
you recognize that there's something to these Buddhist
ideas, the Buddhist approach to life, where it is taken
seriously and fully on board, that is very powerful, and
people in secular cultures, and many western cultures are
becoming very secularized, it's true of Australia, it's true of
lots of European cultures, especially Northern Europe, and
in those cultures, they often need something more, they need
something additional, and here, Buddhism has something beautiful
to add, and it always reminds me, these were people, there was
over 200 people present for that funeral, people had no idea
about Buddhism at all, and all they did was kind of speak
common sense, yeah, ordinary things, and yet, they were
inspired by it, it shows you that there is a lack there, and
often all we have to do as Buddhists is to present the
Buddhist message in a way that is palatable, that is easy to
understand, and people will come to accept it, because it is
really just common sense, yeah, there's nothing kind of, I mean,
there are aspects of Buddhism that go beyond common sense, of
course, but a lot of it is just common sense, common psychology,
a common outlook that is sensible to the majority of
people, if they think about life carefully, of course, you have
to have an interest in life, you have to have an interest in a
kind of, what the purpose of life is, and all of these kind
of things, but a lot of people have that, and they are open to
these sort of things, so it was a very interesting experience to
me, and it kind of sounds maybe strange, saying that your
father's passing away is interesting, but it was, because
when you think about it in the right way, it actually enhances
your life, it makes something about it, which actually gives
it more value, because of the right outlook that you have, and
what is also interesting, because I always like to kind of
bring these things back to the suttas, and how the Buddha talks
about these things, and one of the stories about the Buddha,
the Buddha also passed away, obviously, and the story of how
the Buddha passed away in many ways kind of encapsulated the
general problems with passing away, and how we should look
upon life, and the story of the Buddha's passing away is found,
as many of you would know, in the Mahapranibbana Sutta, the
greatest course on the Buddha's passing away, it's a very
beautiful sutta, and if you have any interest in the word of the
Buddha, I would really recommend you to read that sutta, because
there are so many valuable lessons in that particular
sutta, the purpose of the sutta, of course, is the Buddha knows
that he's about to pass away, and he goes on this long walk,
starting in Rajagaha, the capital of the Magadan Kingdom,
and he walks all the way to Kushinara, which is, how far is
that? Four, five hundred kilometers,
maybe, something like that, it's a long way to go by foot, and he
does that, and of course, because he knows, especially
towards the end, that he is about to pass away, the
Mahapranibbana Sutta is where he kind of lays down what is the
essence of his teachings, he tells the monks, this is what
you should remember, this is what I've been really teaching,
so lots of interesting information like that.
Also, he explains to the crowd, explains to the people, how they
should live without him, how they can kind of carry on
without him, so a lot of information there, practical
information, about how to carry on in the future, and of course,
that's relevant for us now, because we are that future, here
we are, we are the future from the viewpoint of the suttas, and
so for us, it is incredibly relevant, many of the things
that you find in the Mahapranibbana Sutta, you get
direct information about how we are supposed to live, how we are
supposed to think about the Dhamma, how we are supposed to
organize ourselves, so that we can carry on with this beautiful
teaching that was bequeathed to us from the Buddha himself.
So this is all that is happening in the Sutta, and then of
course, towards the very end, the Buddha spends one of his
last, actually the last Reign's retreat in Vesali, Vesali being
the capital of the Vajrayana Kingdom, like a confederacy, it
was almost like an early democracy at that time, and
during this Reign's retreat in Vesali, the Buddha has some very
serious illnesses, and Venerable Ananda, who is his attendant, he
looks at the Buddha, and when he looks at the Buddha, and he sees
that the Buddha is so uncomfortable, he kind of loses
his sense of his bearings, he says, it's as if I'm drunk, my
sense of directions is completely lost, because
Venerable Ananda has been the Buddha's attendant for 20 years,
been with the Buddha probably almost every day for those 20
years, memorizing the Suttas, understanding the Dhamma fully.
So for him, you can imagine that it would be a very hard thing
when the Buddha is about to pass away.
And then he says to the Buddha that, my only consolation was
that, of course, Master, you would say something to the
Sangha, and you would say something to everyone before you
pass away. And this is where it becomes
interesting. First of all, the Buddha has to
use energy to kind of get out of that illness.
In other words, he has to try to overcome that illness.
It is very obvious that the Buddha is getting older here.
It's very obvious he talks about his body being like a cart that
is falling apart. It's almost as if it has to be
held together by straps like an old cart, and his body is a bit
like that. And this in its own right is
quite interesting and an important point.
Maybe I should just say a little bit about that.
Because one of the things is that when you read the Suttas,
there are two different pictures that emerge of the Buddha when
you read the Suttas. And one is the very naturalistic
picture of the Buddha. The Buddha as an ordinary human
being whose body is falling apart, who is getting old like
everyone else, and who gets sick and who has all the kind of
ordinary bodily problems and bodily things as everyone else
has. And he's on his way to passing
away. And that is kind of one side of
the Buddha. And then there's the other side
of the Buddha which is slightly more supernatural.
For example, one of the classic examples of that supernatural
part of the Buddha is when it says in the Mahapanibbana Sutta
that he could live on for the aeon if he wants to.
That's kind of a bit strange, isn't it?
How can you live on for the aeon?
If you have an ordinary human body, it would seem completely
madness to even try to live on for an aeon.
Imagine what this body is like after even a hundred years of
falling apart. If you think about what it would
be like after an aeon, it would be like a nightmare.
Yeah, you don't even want to dream about it because it would
be so terrible. So, who is the real Buddha?
And it seems obvious to me that when you read the Suttas,
especially when you do a bit of comparative study which is kind
of in vogue these days, at least in certain circles, and you
compare the Suttas across various recensions and all of
these things, it is fairly clear in my mind that the real Buddha
is the naturalistic Buddha, the Buddha who was a human being and
he had a physical body just like the rest of us.
And there's no way he could live on for the aeon.
And there are many reasons to think that that idea that the
Buddha could live for an aeon is actually not really correct.
And I'm not going to go into that now because it's too much
of a sidetrack, but just to mention that.
And very many of the more supernatural elements in the
Suttas, perhaps not all, but many of them have that kind of
problems with them. Remember the Buddha, he actually
said somewhere that he detests supernatural phenomena.
Yeah, and of course, if he detests them, it's very unlikely
that he will be exhibiting them or asking his monks to do so.
So the Buddha is a person, he's one of us.
Although he has purified his mind to the highest extent, and
in that sense he is different from us, he's mentally purified,
and in that sense he's different, still he comes from
the same root, he has the same kind of body, he's essentially a
human being. And this is a very useful thing
to remember because when you remember that, it makes the
Buddha's teachings so much more relevant to us.
Yeah, if the Buddha is somehow out of reach, if he's a
different kind of being than we are, actually his relevance to
our life is much more debatable. But because he is a human being,
which means that he understands exactly what we are like,
because he's been through the same problems, suddenly his
teachings are so relevant to us as well.
So think of the Buddha in that way, and I think it is far more
useful for our practice and for actually developing the Buddha
nusatthi and the whole path, because it makes the whole thing
more easy to grasp, more kind of natural and more relatable than
it otherwise would be. Little things like that can make
a big difference and big impact. Too many people treat the Buddha
as some kind of God. Some people go and pray to the
Buddha, please give me a new BMW, I need a new BMW.
That is the wrong way to treat the Buddha.
Buddha, yeah, so please don't do that.
So this is one of the first things that comes out of this.
The Buddha is natural, he is also subject to old age, he will
have to die, and towards the very end he specifically says, I
have to kind of rouse up energy to enable to sustain my life a
little further. And then he has all these other
things that he says around this time.
Many interesting things that I won't go into in great detail,
but he talks about at this stage about having no teacher's fist,
the Acharyamuddhi teacher's fist, which means that you hold
certain information back. You don't actually give out all
the Dhamma, you hold something back to kind of create something
esoteric, secret teaching, that kind of stuff.
He doesn't have that, there are no secret teachings in Buddhism.
It's a very useful thing to remember because sometimes in
Buddhist circles, that's exactly what you find, you find kind of
secret teachings. And once you hear about that,
you know, actually, this goes against the principles of how
the Buddha himself taught. He says it has no inner and
outer, there is no kind of inner circle of favorite disciples,
and then those on the outer trying to get into that inner
circle. Sometimes it is like that when
you have a kind of cultish type of leadership, you have like the
close disciples, and everyone else wants to kind of get into
that inner ring of disciples, so you kind of create this craving,
this kind of feeling of there's something special going on, and
everyone else trying to get in there.
But that is not how the Buddha operated, there is no inner and
outer. He treats everyone in the same
way, roughly. Of course, he looks at your
spiritual qualities and teaches you a little bit according to
that, but generally, he treats people in the same way.
There are no favorite disciples, there is no one who is kind of
given that special treatment, everyone is the same, and what a
wonderful thing that is, what a wonderful example that is.
We tend to treat people differently depending on who are
our favorites and these kind of things.
One of the things I also always notice about someone like Ajahn
Brahm, who is my teacher, of course, he always treats people
the same. Yeah, you never get special
treatment from Ajahn Brahm, and if you want special treatment,
find another teacher, you're not going to get it from Ajahn
Brahm. But you should never look for
that special treatment anyway, if you look for it, you're
looking for the wrong thing. It shouldn't be like that, we
shouldn't have special treatment, everyone should be,
we should feel that we are on the same level.
That is the appropriate way of practicing this Dhamma.
That leaves a sense of independence for each one of us
also, so it's a very positive thing when it happens in that
way. And the Buddha also said at this
particular point, he says that, he is asked, well, who should
lead the community after you passed away?
And the Buddha says, well, I don't even consider myself a
leader. So let alone, why should I kind
of make anyone else a leader? Kind of interesting, what do you
mean you don't consider yourself a leader?
Everyone looks to you for all the solutions.
Well, for the Buddha's point of view, because he has no sense of
self, and no sense of being anyone special, he is just
there, he just solves issues and he kind of does things in the
right way, but he doesn't have any personal sense or personal
identity as a leader. He maybe look as a leader on the
outside, but personally, he doesn't feel that way.
And now he says, in the future, there should be no leader in the
Sangha. The Sangha should be a
decentralized body that relies on the Dhamma and the Vinaya,
these teachings to carry on into the future.
And that Dhamma and Vinaya is still available to us at the
present day. That is our teacher.
And that is one reason why I like to quote the suttas, which
is exactly what I'm doing now, by the way, just to make that
absolutely clear. I'm just kind of recounting what
is in the Mahaparnibbana Sutta. But the main point of all of
this, I'm just kind of bringing these up, because there are very
interesting points that happen in the Mahaparnibbana Sutta.
I'm trying to sell it to you a little bit, so that when you go
back home afterwards, you want to look it up straight away.
This is what salesmen are supposed to do.
And if you don't look it up, I have failed as a salesman.
So it is quite hard to get people to read the suttas,
because people don't have time, sometimes the language is a bit
foreign, so you have to really kind of try your best.
Good to start when you're young very often.
But the main point here is that the Buddha is moving towards his
final destination in this life. He's about to pass away.
Ananda is distraught. He cannot really deal with this
whole thing. So then the Buddha says to
Ananda, he'd realized Ananda is so distraught, he says to him,
but haven't I told you that everything that is dear and
pleasing to you must become otherwise, must become separated
from you. And of course, this later on
becomes one of those core teachings of the Buddha,
something that you see in the suttas, and what the Buddha
specifically says that whether you are a lay person or a
monastic, whether you are a woman or a man, this is one of
those core things that we should remember at all times.
Everything in your life that is dear and pleasing to you must
become separated from you. And that of course is a very
powerful thing, because when you start to think about it, there
are so many things in this world that potentially either they are
dear and pleasing to you or potentially could become dear
and pleasing to you. And the more you reflect on it,
the more you realize that actually this entire world of
sensory existence, where we see, we hear, we feel, we smell and
we taste, that whole world in a sense is that area where we
become attached, where we hold on and where things become dear
and agreeable to us. So the Buddha then says, well,
what is the solution to this? How should we deal with this?
And what he says is that you have to be a refuge for
yourself. You have to take the Dhamma as a
refuge, and you should have no other refuge apart from that.
Yeah, a refuge for yourself, a refuge in the Dhamma.
So you have to have an inner refuge, that's what the Buddha
is saying. If the whole external world is
unreliable, and that's basically what he's saying, the whole
external world is unreliable, and if you think about it
clearly, you know that's true. You think about things in your
life, they all pass away, they all disappear.
At the very latest, when you die very often, long before that, it
is so inherently unreliable. You don't know what's going to
happen next. It's going to let you down.
That is all you know. So there's only one place you
can find that refuge, and that is within yourself.
And that is what it means to be an island unto yourself, or
being your own island. With the support of the Dhamma,
the teaching of the Buddha, to then kind of guide you in that
process of being an island unto yourself, then you have the two
pillars that make a real refuge possible.
Remember that whenever you live your life, and you see that you
become disappointed with something, or you become
distraught, or you suffer because of something that
happens in the external world, the reason why you become
distraught, the reason why you suffer, the reason why it's
difficult to take, is because you have taken refuge in that
world. You have taken refuge in the
sense that you expect certain outcomes.
You expect people to live. You expect your work to be
there. You don't expect to be fired.
You expect your kids to behave in a certain way.
You expect your parents to behave in a certain way.
You expect people to look after the environment.
You expect certain politicians to do the right thing.
Whenever you see the politicians or the environment going down
the drain, you get upset. Why?
Because you have different expectations.
Every time something goes wrong in our life, every time we get
upset about something, every time you can't take the
impermanence, you have taken refuge in that world, because
you had expectations of it. You wanted to go in a certain
way, forgetting that the world is out of control.
The world is always going to let you down.
So you have to find the inner refuge instead.
How do you do that? And this is where the Buddha
says that the way to be an island unto yourself, the way to
use the Dhamma as a refuge is to practice the four Satipatanas.
And the four Satipatanas can be summarized in one way, just as
mindfulness of breathing, watching your breath and going
using meditation as a refuge. Why is that a refuge?
Because when you go within, and when you practice meditation to
a deep level, and Satipatana is already quite a deep level, you
are going inside of yourself. You are allowing the senses to
gradually drop off. The external world starts to
disappear, and instead you find that solace, you find that
peace, you find the joy and all of these things within and
inside of yourself. And the more you have access to
that, the more you have access to these inner positive things,
the less reliant you are on the external world for your
happiness, for your peace and for meaning and all of these
other things. This is why meditation is so
powerful. It gives you a refuge in a world
that is usually without a real refuge.
And I always like that one of the things that Ajahn Chah,
Ajahn Chah of course, Ajahn Brahm's teacher, in case you
don't know, very famous, one of the perhaps the most famous of
all the meditation masters in Thailand in the 20th century.
And he said that going into meditation, deep meditation
especially, that's your real home.
That is your home because that is where you feel really safe.
And you feel you have a refuge from the entire world, which is
so unreliable, so uncertain, and that will always let you down in
the end. So finding that refuge within is
really a very important part of what the Buddhist teachings are
about. And perhaps you think that is a
high ask, because many people who are Buddhist, they may not
meditate very much, they may find meditation difficult, they
might find it difficult to give rise to joy or even peace in the
meditation. So what do we do then if we
can't do that? Well, remember that anything you
do in the Buddhist path, even if it's just being kind, keeping
the five precepts, we just did the five precepts, yeah,
wonderful, most people here seem to be keeping them, which is a
marvelous thing. It is not at all obvious that
people should be keeping the five precepts, but people here
seem to do it, and that's marvelous.
And all of these things that we do, the kindness that we give
out to other people, the compassion that we have for the
world, the metta that we have for others, all of that, every
time you do that, you are creating a little bit of refuge
within yourself. Why is that?
Because when we do things that have to do with kindness, that
have to do with all of these things, we are building up a
sense of contentment and happiness within ourselves.
And you know that's true, yeah? You know it's true that if you
really do an act of kindness towards other people, you tend
to feel good about yourself. If you're anything like me, and
I assure you, you are, because we're all the same.
Yeah, I really like to say that because people don't really want
to be exactly the same as others.
We always want to have a little bit of self, yeah, this is me,
I'm a bit like this, I'm different, actually, we're all
the same, yeah? So because of that, when you do
an act of kindness, you will feel good about yourself.
Sometimes you may not feel it, it may be kind of a little bit
subliminal, a bit kind of below the threshold of what you can
perceive, but sometimes you feel it powerfully, you don't know,
at times you feel really good about yourself.
But all the time we are building up this underlying thing where
we feel that we are living a worthy life, we're building up
self-esteem, building up a sense of feeling good about ourselves,
and that is where that refuge comes, because that goodness is
independent of external phenomena, it is a spiritual
kind of happiness, the spiritual kind of peace that we are
building up for ourselves. And then down the track, if you
continue doing that, eventually you will also be able to
meditate, because these things go hand in hand very closely.
So this is the Buddha's answer, if the world is so unreliable,
if things are so uncertain, we need something else in our
lives, we need a spiritual part in our lives, something where we
can find a true refuge. This is why we have the triple
refuge in Buddhism, that we talked about, that we actually
chanted just before. And for people who don't have
this, for people who don't have any spiritual leanings, who are
just materialists in the world, the world is very dry, the world
is like a desert, the Buddha says, you're going through this
desert, there's nothing to really nourish you, you feel a
sense of emptiness, purposeless, meaningless, you're moving
towards your death, and then when you die, that's the end of
everything, and all you did in the meantime was kind of just
running around chasing empty pleasures, kind of silly, and
really is kind of meaningless at the end of the day.
So wonderful, so fortunate everyone is who has that kind of
purpose in life, something else to give life meaning, and to
give life some kind of worthy goal and aim.
But there is more to this idea of dying and to the idea of
impermanence, and I'm just now talking about the end of the
Buddha's life, how to think about it, but actually this idea
of death and impermanence also comes in at the very beginning,
at the beginning of the Buddha's search for awakening, so it is
the conclusion of everything, but also it's part of the
beginning of everything, which is perhaps more surprising.
What has death got to do with the beginning of things?
And the answer to that is that when the Buddha was growing up,
as you know, the story of the Buddha, this is not just a
legend, but actually this is what you get from the suttas,
this seems to be a real historical account of how the
Buddha grew up, and he grew up in what would be considered a
wealthy family at that time. He wasn't a prince, he didn't
grow up in kind of great incredible luxury, anything like
that, but still to a very high degree of luxury and material
well-being considering the times.
Of course he didn't have any of the modern trappings of luxury,
but he had some of the ancient trappings of luxury.
You know what they were, ancient trappings of luxury?
They were lotus ponds. It's true, it actually says in
the suttas, the Buddha had three lotus ponds, one with blue
lotuses, one with red lotuses, and one with white lotuses.
So that was when he was growing up, this is how the young men
enjoyed themselves at the time of the Buddha, they had lotus
ponds. It's kind of sweet, isn't it?
These days things have changed just a little bit, and we don't
really enjoy those lotus ponds quite the same way we did two
and a half thousand years ago. And what else did he have to
enjoy himself? He had very nice clothes,
clothes made of the highest kind of cotton that was available,
high quality cloth from Benares, so his turban, his jacket, his
coat, his coat, his jacket and what he was wearing was made of
that kind of cloth. And then he had servants looking
after him, and he had three houses, that's kind of high
luxury, three houses and one for each of the seasons.
Maybe they were built differently according to the
weather or whatever, I don't know.
So he grew up in luxury, and amid all that luxury that he
had, one day he started to reflect about the realities of
life. And this is found in a number of
suttas, one of the most important ones is the Arya
Pariesana Sutta, which translates as the noble sutta on
the noble search. Yeah, the noble search being the
search of course for awakening and enlightenment.
It's also found in the Anguttara Thris in a sutta called
Sukkumala Sutta, which means like being, Sukkumala means like
refined or fine or something like that.
You've been brought up in a refined way, Sukkumala, I think
it is. And in the sutta, especially the
Arya Pariesana Sutta, where the Buddha talks about the noble
search, he says that while he was living this life, it
occurred to him, that I'm going to have to die.
In the middle of all this, I'm kind of enjoying all of these
things, but one day I'm going to have to die from this.
So what does that mean? Does that mean that I should
just keep on clinging and attaching to all of these
things? And then when I die, I'm going
to have to suffer the consequences.
What does that actually mean? But not only is it the fact that
I am going to die, but all of these things around me that I am
attaching to, wife and children, all my possessions that I have,
and it kind of counts up all the possessions that I have, the
cattle, the animals, the gold and the silver, all of these
kind of things. That too is subject to death.
And that of course, because it's all subject to death, and the
gold and silver is subject to death in the sense that it will
disappear one day, because it is all subject to death.
It may depart even before I die. So how can I go around when
these things are so unreliable and so uncertain?
How can I go around attaching to these things, enjoying them,
making this the foundation of my life, and then down the tracks,
they're suffering in the face, because that has to be the end
point of all of this. And this is what this kind of
reflection, the reflection on death is the fundamental one
that makes the Buddha decide to go forth.
Isn't that kind of astonishing? You may have heard the story of
the Buddha deciding he has compassion for all living
beings, he wants to find a solution to the problems of the
world, and he practices for four incalculable eons or whatever,
and then as a Bodhisattva, and then he decides to become a
Buddha. Well, that is a story.
It is a nice story perhaps, but it's just a story.
It is not actually, it doesn't have anything to do with what
actually happens. Sorry, what actually happened.
This is a story that was built up after the Buddha passed away,
in large part because people wanted to remember the Buddha,
and they wanted to kind of understand who he was as a
being, and it came in after the life of the Buddha.
There's a very nice book called The Genesis of the Bodhisattva
Ideal, and it talks about the foundations of this ideal, how
it arose based on certain passages in the suttas.
And if you read that little booklet, it's about 100 pages
long or something, you will never look at the Bodhisattva
Ideal in quite the same way afterwards.
It's very well researched and very worthy of reading.
So the reality is that the reason why the Buddha was
fought, what the Buddha himself says, as far as we know from the
earliest suttas, this was the reason.
Death is what actually motivated the Buddha to go out.
That is how powerful a recollection death actually is.
So the reason why death does not sometimes drive us on so much in
the spiritual practice as it should is because we haven't
contemplated it quite to the extent that the Buddha did.
We still haven't taken it on board fully in the way that the
Buddha suggested we should. So the Buddha, seeing all of
this, that all this clinging and holding on to these things, is
actually really problematic. There's two things here which
are kind of interesting. One thing is that you cling on
to all of these things in life and it causes suffering.
But the other thing which is interesting, and this is kind of
the Buddha's other understanding, I think here, it
doesn't even give all that much happiness.
It doesn't give any profound sense of satisfaction.
All the worldly things that we have, they give us a degree of
happiness and enough to kind of carry on, but not the profound
sense of happiness that you can find in meditation experiences,
for example. It's kind of weird, we cling on
to all these things, but at the same time these things can never
give us real happiness. What are we doing?
We're just causing suffering for ourselves and not experiencing
happiness. It's kind of really a bad idea,
isn't it? So the Buddha goes forth and
then based on that, based on that insight, then eventually he
makes the breakthrough and becomes a Buddha down the track
and then teaches us these teachings and then bequeaths
this beautiful dhamma for generations of people in
different cultures, different times, for two and a half
thousand years into the future. And all of that came about
because the Buddha, or the Buddha-to-be, thought about
death in a profound way. You could argue that the whole
of Buddhism, the whole of these teachings, emerged from the idea
of death. And that is very interesting
because it shows you some of the potential for this kind of
reflection. It shows you how powerful it
actually can be. So if you do it in the right
way, it really becomes something very powerful in your mind.
You're going to die. What does that mean?
Take it on board fully and then this is the consequence of that.
But one way, that is kind of how this ties in with the suttas.
And it can be argued, I think, that this idea of death is
really just one contemplation of a broader contemplation.
And that broader contemplation is that everything in the world
is impermanent, unsatisfactory, always changing.
Death is the starkest expression of that.
When you stare death kind of in the face, it's a very powerful
reminder of impermanence because everything has to go.
But actually, it is a more general idea that everything is
impermanent. This is kind of the general idea
which incorporates the idea of death.
Everything is always a bit out of control and a bit uncertain.
And even though it is a bit out of control and uncertain, and at
the same time, it doesn't really give any real satisfaction
either when you pursue all of these things in the world.
They are kind of nice, but you never really feel truly
satisfied. You never feel truly complete
because of these things. There is kind of always that
endless searching for more that never really stops.
So in concluding this talk, I thought it would be good to look
at one of the beautiful similes that the Buddha uses to explain
this. And how that eventually, if you
pursue that idea, eventually it gives rise to that real
satisfaction and real contentment on the Buddhist
path. And this simile that the Buddha
uses, and this has more to do with the dissatisfaction than
the impermanence of things. We could look at it from the
viewpoint of impermanence as well, but I like this simile, so
I'm going to look at it from the viewpoint of dissatisfaction.
And I just taught this simile recently on the retreat that we
had down in Anglesey. And it's the simile of the
hungry dog. Have you heard about the simile
of the hungry dog before? Maybe?
Okay, we'll see when I say it. This simile is the idea that the
Buddha says that the sensual world, the world of the five
senses and our pursuit of the objects in that world of the
five senses is just like a hungry dog.
A hungry dog, it usually runs up to the butcher shop, and this
was in ancient India, and it sits outside the butcher shop
and kind of looks into the window trying to look as cute as
possible, so the butcher will kind of have compassion and
sympathy for it. So it sits there and then hoping
for the butcher to throw in some meat, because dogs want meat.
This is kind of how they're carnivores originally.
So it sits at the butcher waiting and waiting, but the
butcher is a businessman. Butcher is not going to throw
away valuable meat to a dog. There's no way.
So the butcher kind of takes this kind of skeleton of this
carcass of an animal, cuts off all the meat, and when all the
meat is gone, there's nothing left, then he throws out the
bone to the poor dog. And this, of course, all that is
left on that bone is a bit of blood, and a bit of kind of gnaw
that bone a little bit, but there is no real sustenance
there. There's nothing to fill that dog
that is hungry. So all that happens to the dog,
it gets the taste of the blood, and then, of course, when it
gets the taste, craving becomes even more powerful.
But because the hunger isn't satisfied, because the hunger
isn't still there, the craving is still there just as much,
even more than it was before. So the poor dog runs off to the
next butcher shop, exactly the same scenario unfolds as before,
waiting outside, more blood on the bone, but no real
sustenance. And this way, the dog goes on
and on and on through its little life.
Then the dog dies, and then when the dog gets reborn, when the
dog gets reborn, how does it get reborn?
As a little puppy, yeah? And the puppy has exactly the
same problem as the adult dog in the past life, and it does
exactly the same problem, yeah? And it keeps on going like this.
And after a hundred lifetimes as a dog, it's still kind of doing
the same thing, probably. It's kind of...
You can almost get a sense of
repulsion towards that, yeah? It's kind of, oh, it's almost
difficult to look at, because you can see the suffering in
that. It's very kind of unpleasant.
But, of course, the point is that this is largely what we do
as human beings. Yeah, this is the problem.
We do exactly the same thing. We run after the sense of
objects of the world. We run after this thing and that
thing. And then never give that
satisfaction that we are really looking for.
Notice that, yeah? When you see that craving arises
for something, it looks like that craving, when you get it
satisfied, it will give rise to real satisfaction inside.
But look at what actually happens.
And you will see that it doesn't.
It gives maybe rise to momentary satisfaction, and that
satisfaction isn't really profound.
It's like a shallow one. The mind is a bit dull or
whatever. It's not really kind of anything
fantastic at all. And then soon afterwards,
because the satisfaction wasn't anything useful, the craving
comes back again. You run to the next butcher
shop. How many butcher shops are you
going to run to? When are you going to be fed up
with those blooming butcher shops?
It is time to realize that the butchers don't give away any
real sustenance. The five sensory world is that
butcher shop. It doesn't give any real
satisfaction. You can keep on running like
this. And then when you die because
you are in the middle of a project, satisfying a certain
craving, you carry on in your next life, and you move on like
that. And within one life, it kind of
seems bearable enough. But if you see that process
happening in life after life, that's when it becomes really
scary. That's when it becomes
intolerable, and you've got to do something about it.
So what do you do? So what you do is that one day
you find a different kind of butcher.
Actually, he's not a butcher at all.
He's just this nice old holy man called the Buddha.
And you come and listen to this old holy man.
It wouldn't be good karma to call the Buddha butchers.
I got away from that very quickly.
So you got to this holy man, and he tells you, you're looking for
happiness in the wrong place. Of course, there is no happiness
in that world. And the reason why there is no
happiness in the world is because you have a psychological
problem. There is a lack inside of you.
You don't really feel happiness. You don't feel content.
You need to solve the psychological problem inside of
you, not through external things to try to fill up a
psychological gap. You have to work with your mind
directly. You have to develop your mind.
Yeah, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
If we're going to fill up something that is inherently
problematic inside of us, you have to actually develop the
mind instead. So that is why the Buddha says
we should put our attention. How do we do that?
Well, the way we do that is by practicing the Noble Eightfold
Path. You start doing things like I
mentioned before by being more kind.
And when you are more kind, something magical happens.
You start to feel more content because you start to feel more
good about yourself. You start to be more generous.
You do little acts of kindness and generosity all over the
place. And you feel a bit of joy about
that. And when you look at that joy
inside of you, it is a very different type of happiness than
the happiness that you get through the sensory world.
It is a happiness that gives rise to satisfaction, to
contentment. It starts to fill you up inside
that hole, that craving, that eternal itch that is always
driving you on, starts to disappear.
And you feel the opposite, which is satisfaction instead.
And then you carry on on this path.
And you keep on practicing morality and kindness.
You keep on practicing all of these things.
And then one day you start to practice meditation.
And as you practice meditation, meditation deepens and deepens.
Until one day you find that final satisfaction, that final
contentment where the itch is completely gone.
Craving isn't there anymore. There's nothing driving you
forward. All you feel is joy and
happiness inside. And you realize, I have found
what I was looking for all along.
That's where it is. This is what craving was
promising you. But craving could not deliver.
You look in a different way. You look through the spiritual
path. You look to all of these things.
Then suddenly you find the answer to the question that you
had all along. And you feel 100% satisfied.
What that means is that it feels like it is essentially the
answer to the meaning of life. The craving that always drives
you on. You are always searching.
You haven't found the meaning of life yet.
When craving disappears and you feel 100% satisfied, 100%
content, 100% happy, there is no more searches needed.
It means you have found the answer to the meaning of life.
This is what it's about. Why isn't everyone a Buddhist?
This is what I ask. It's so obvious, isn't it?
This is what we should be doing. And of course, it goes a little
bit beyond that as well. Because beyond that is also the
insight. But this is the first taste that
you have of understanding the purpose and the meaning of life
itself. When you have your initial
feeling and experience of a little bit of samadhi and deep
meditation. So this is what the Buddhist
path is about. This is driven by the idea of
death. Death is one of those powerful
things that kind of drive us in the right direction.
Because death reminds us of the problems of the samsaric
existence. It helps us to turn in the right
direction. It helps us to start practicing
the path, practicing the Buddhist teachings of the
spiritual path in a good way. And it leads to all these
beautiful blessings, all this beautiful happiness all the way
along. Your life becomes meaningful.
You become a blessing for yourself.
And you also become a blessing for the world around you.
What a wonderful thing that is. So to each one of you, good luck
with your spiritual practice. And may you fare on well and
happily in this path. Okay, shall we take some
questions? Is that a good idea, Adrian?
So please, if anyone has any questions, this is a good
opportunity to ask. Or if you have a comment or
whatever, it doesn't matter. Whatever you want to say is
okay. Okay, please.
I've just got a comment. Adrian, what I did, I did it in
2015 and then I had to do it again this year.
When we were gone, pilgrimage, you have to write a letter.
So the one letter was to Adrian Achillo saying, you know, what
if I died, you know, what I wanted to have done with my
body, etc. And then the second letter is to
your family. So I have two boys, so I wrote
two individual letters to them. And that, I mean, I'd worked in
palliative care, but that was other people dying.
This is me dying. Right, exactly.
And that was really very helpful.
It was kind of really in your face.
And I couldn't do the two letters on the same day because
it was completely draining. So I did them on separate days,
but that can be quite a useful exercise to do.
That's very interesting, isn't it?
You do things that you have to do because of the situation.
And then it actually turns out to be a kind of a very positive
dharma thing. Yeah.
And so then you hand the letters to Ajahn and at the end he hands
them back to you. Okay.
In my case, no one died on our
pilgrimage. Okay.
Thank you. Okay, good.
Was that good or bad that no one died?
Well, I mean, I always said I'd really like to die.
I nearly died the year before when I fell over and hit my head
on marble and the monks actually thought I had died.
That's right. And then I said, oh, what a
shame I was in front of the Bodhi tree.
Ajahn didn't appreciate that. He didn't appreciate that.
Anyway, I'll hand over to someone else now.
Yeah. Vantye, you spoke about the
right view. Yeah.
Now, my understanding of right view or understanding is
understanding the Four Noble Truths and the Law of Karma and
cause and effect. Yeah.
You did bring in about mother and father, which I'm aware, but
I didn't quite understand how that fitted in with the right
view or right understanding. Okay.
So the reason I think it is there is because your parents
are a very powerful field of merit, either merit or demerit.
So in connection with the idea of kama and rebirth, I think the
Buddha brings up parents specifically because it's a very
potent way of making kama. So in a sense, what it means is
that if you want to progress on the spiritual path, you have to
make peace with your parents, you have to treat them in the
right way, and it will actually add a big oomph to your
spiritual practice. That's why I think it is in
there. And this is one of the things
that is always maybe slightly problematic about the
traditional way of talking about right view, as you say, kama and
rebirth and these things, is that it tends to become a little
bit theoretical. We need to somehow integrate it
in a practical way into our daily life.
So what does it mean in practice?
So for me, the idea, for example, of thinking about the
five sensory world as impermanent and always fading
away, being subject to, always kind of letting us down in the
end, is actually one way of bringing right view in a very
practical way into your life. Because we know that's true.
The world outside is always unreliable, always uncertain,
it's so obvious to us. So there's a way of looking at
the Four Noble Truths of Dukkha in a very practical way, rather
than allowing it to be some theoretical issue that is
lodging at the back of our minds or whatever.
We have a few online questions. The first one here, could Ajahn
please talk about how he helped his father's funeral be a happy
celebration? How I did that, are you?
It's just about how you focus, yeah, it's about kind of the
issues that you bring forth and how you actually reflect on it.
And first of all, as I said, one of the first reflections is the
idea that you just remember that your father's life was one well
lived, that was kind of one of the most powerful things for me.
And when you think about your father's life being one well
lived, you have a grant for rejoicing, a grant for
celebrating. I said this would be a
celebration rather than a sad occasion when my father's passed
away. This was the first one, the
first way of thinking about it. Another thing that I always talk
about at funeral ceremonies, it's a very simple little thing,
but it's one that was used by Ajahn Chah sometimes in
Thailand. And he would sometimes hold up a
glass, there would be a big audience present, this is a cup,
but it would be a glass, and he would say, can you see the crack
in the glass? Many of you probably heard this
simply before, it's very often talked about, but it's a very
beautiful one. And of course, there wasn't any
crack in the glass, everybody said no, can't see any crack,
and he says, well, it is there. It is there because this glass,
one day it will fall down, one day it will shatter in a
thousand pieces, because that's the nature of glass, it will
fall off the table or whatever. So because we know it is
impermanent, because we know it is fragile, we care for it, we
look after it, we don't actually just chuck it on the ground,
like a rubber ball, anything like that, because then you're
not really caring for the glass in the right way.
In exactly the same way, human life is fragile, we are so
fragile, yeah, suddenly you die, I mean, it's a miracle that
these human bodies work the way they do, for those of you who
are doctors probably know that, I mean, there's so many bits and
pieces in these bodies, and that they even work, to me, it's
like, yeah, I'm kind of astonished.
So they are very fragile, and before you know it, things go
wrong, yeah, and so we care for each other.
And that is the beautiful way of thinking about life, if you
think about the fragility of life and that we all die, and
that makes you a better person, then that is a wonderful way of
kind of making the Dhamma, getting Dhamma out of a death
situation. But then I also talk, this is
kind of one of the ways that I usually do my funeral service,
this is something I learned from Ajahn Brahm, and that is the
idea of how you actually focus when someone has died.
And Ajahn Brahm normally talks about, it's like going to a
concert, but he was into concerts when he was young, or
it can be any kind of very nice experience that you have in your
life, yeah, you have a really nice experience, and then
afterwards you can feel two ways about that experience, if it was
really, really nice and it kind of lifted up your consciousness,
it could be maybe a meditation experience, or a sensual
experience, or whatever, sometimes we feel transported to
a slightly different reality by these experiences.
Afterwards, you can either think, oh no, yeah, I lost that
experience, and you can feel really sad about it, and you can
get depressed and sad, because you lost a very positive
experience. But the alternative is to think,
wow, how lucky I was, how lucky I was to have a chance, this is
my ordinary life, it is so ordinary compared to such a peak
experience, how lucky I was to have that experience, I can
carry it with me, it gives life more meaning, it has enriched my
life in a very positive way. In exactly the same way, if you
are fortunate enough to have had a good father, which I did, and
many people do have good parents, not everybody, but it's
a fairly common experience, then you think, thank you so much for
being part of my life, thank you for being there and supporting
me, thank you for enriching my experience, for making my life
better, and then instead of grieving over the loss, you feel
grateful for what you have been given during that time together.
It's a very subtle difference, all that is, is a shift of
perception from loss to what you have actually gained, and that
makes all the difference between sadness and a sense of
gratitude. So these are some of the ways of
reflecting about death that we use at funeral services, and
people usually find it quite uplifting afterwards.
And then of course you have to make sure that the music is not
too sad, if the music is sad, everyone starts crying straight
away, so make sure the music is kind of nice, even uplifting,
and then you have the recipe for a wonderful funeral as a
consequence. Okay.
Is it normal to fear isolation when facing the idea of going
deeper into the inner refuge? I always thought we're not
supposed to be in an island onto oneself, I'm afraid of
disconnecting from others. You feel more connected to
others, yeah, if you do it in the right way, you don't feel
less connected, if you feel more connected, this is kind of the
point. So going inside of yourself, you
know, when you go inside of yourself, you go with positive
feelings, you have a sense of joy, you have a sense often it
is based on, specifically based on meta meditation, loving
kindness and compassion, these kind of things, and meta
meditation connects you to other people, you see the commonality,
you see the good aspects of other people, you feel, instead
of feeling isolated, you actually feel connected.
The deeper the Samadhi experience is, the more
connected you feel to the world around, to the world in general,
not to the world around you, but just you feel connected, that's
really all. This is kind of the paradox, you
know, you live in the forest by yourself, you go inside of
yourself to the rest of the world, you might be dead
practically because there's no movement to be seen, and yet you
feel utterly connected to the world.
And that's why people who come out of Samadhi, that's exactly
what you will hear, they will say that, well, I felt, I never
felt so connected before, I never wanted to lose that
experience because it is so beautiful, a sense of unity, a
sense of non-self, all the egotism, all that is gone, a
sense of beautiful bliss, a sense of wholeness that you
never experienced in your entire life, nothing lacking anymore,
these are wonderful qualities, very profound meaning, and you
feel the exact opposite of isolation.
Please. Okay, last one.
What should be cultivated to inspire oneself to meditate as a
lay person? First of all, remember that the
foundation of the Buddhist path is not meditation practice, the
foundation of the Buddhist path is kindness, it's virtue, it's
generosity, and all of these kinds of things.
So if you find meditation difficult, it may simply be that
you need to practice more of these other things first of all,
to kind of create that foundation that makes it
possible. So you don't have to meditate as
a Buddhist, but what you really have to is to be kind, to do all
of these good things, that's really a kind of requirement,
because otherwise not really practicing at all.
And if you do that in the right way, and you do it consistently,
you do it with integrity, you bring in all the various aspects
of morality on the path, then eventually there will come a
time when you will start to feel your mind settles down, you
start to become peaceful, and then meditation becomes
possible. So it is very closely connected
to meditation, you just have to get things in the right order,
and then meditation becomes possible.
So the question then maybe should be rephrased, what do I
need to do to be inspired, not just for meditation, but to be
inspired to practice the whole path, whether it is kindness,
whether it is generosity, whether it is meditation,
whatever it is, all of these things need to be inspired into
us. That is maybe, I would say
that's a better way of phrasing the question.
And the way to do that is to contemplate the teaching of the
Buddha. The source, the basic thing that
allows anything to happen on the spiritual path is the word of
the Kalyanamitta, the word of the Sāppurīśa, the word of the
Aryans, the word of the Buddha, that's the foundation.
Everything happens because of that.
So the more you build up this understanding of the teachings,
the more you reflect on these teachings by either reading the
suttas yourself, listening to Dhamma that is in accordance
with those suttas, you will actually gain that inspiration
after a while. Your view starts to change, your
idea of the world becomes slightly different.
And maybe there is time, I can just briefly mention one of the
beautiful similes in the suttas that I mentioned many times
before since I came here to Melbourne, but it's such a nice
one. And it's the idea of this
mountaintop and the rain falling on the mountaintop.
And as the rain falls on the mountaintop, and this is kind of
the idea of hanging out with the Buddha, reading the suttas, etc.
This is the rain, drawing in that information and
understanding and inspiration that comes from the suttas.
And as the rain falls, more and more and more, eventually it
forms into little streams. And as the rain kept falling,
the little streams merge into larger streams.
As the rain keeps falling, the larger streams go into the
little lakes and eventually the little lakes overflow.
As the rain keeps falling, the little lakes flow over into
large lakes. As the rain keeps falling, the
large lakes fill up. And then the large lakes
overflow into the rivers. And as the rain keeps falling,
the rivers eventually reach the ocean.
All you have to do is to make sure the rain keeps falling Like
this idea of a journey of a thousand miles starts with a
single step It's a kind of similar kind of thing You have
to keep stepping, keep walking and keep allowing the rain to
fall And as you do that, this whole thing just emerges and
happens almost automatically by itself That is how inspiration
works So keep on reading the suttas Keep on coming back to
the Dhamma Allow yourself to be inspired, understand what is
going on And as you do that, suddenly one day you find
yourself at the ocean What is the ocean?
The ocean is Arahant, it's Nibbana, it is the highest
happiness The ending of all suffering One day, bang, you are
there, what happened? Gee, all I did was kind of
allowing the rain to come down and now I'm there It's kind of
cool, isn't it? So all you have to do is keep on
reading the suttas, allow yourself to be inspired And the
consequence of that is that one day you will be there