“Going Against the Stream”

Sīla can also be called an awareness of the dangers and drawbacks in one’s actions and the intention or feeling that one doesn’t want to commit anything that is not good any more. Possessing such intentions – a sense of concern regarding actions that cause enmity and danger – we need to develop and improve our capacity to resist.

Bodily resistance depends on factors like food, the weather and our environment. Being a monk, food is something that we aren’t able to control or choose by ourselves, as we depend on people’s free will to sacrifice by practicing dāna (generosity). We need to realize that what we get is independent from what we would like to have.

Actually, the things that we want are very much conditioned by the things we are used to. Being monks, we need to understand that our practice has to follow the principle of being happy with whatever we receive or have. An attitude like this will make us feel normal about things.

As lay people we always did what we were used to. We’ve been practicing to call anything “good” if it was what we liked. Anything we disliked was “bad”. We’ve been supporting such an attitude over a long, long time. Now we need to go against it.

We have to train ourselves in going against what we are used to and what we like. An example of this is to sit meditation. If we have never sat in this posture before, the first time we sit, there are a lot of painful feelings. All one experiences are feelings of agitation and irritation, to put it simply: dukkha.

This is the same whenever we don’t get what we like or what we were used to. Sometimes we struggle so much that we become worried and start to doubt everything. This is where we need to learn how to let things go, how to put things down.

We need to realize that, as monks, we are not part of those people that can arrange things according to our wishes or ask for things. Which kind of food we get, for example, is up to the donor’s wish. So we need to be able to adapt and step back from our own ideas. Not getting what one wishes, one needs the quality of upekkhā (equanimity) or at least patient endurance.

This entails what is called “going against the stream” – to resist one’s moods, or going against what one was used to in lay life. So we train to go against the grain, even though it can be incredibly difficult. But it isn’t beyond anyone’s capabilities. To go against the grain is something that anybody can do.

If we go against our preferences, we get the chance to understand that they are merely saṅkhāra, conditioned phenomena, proliferations that we have been supporting all the time. Giving the saṅkhāra importance by identifying with them, saying we are like this or this is ours, they became very powerful and are able to tie us down.

This reflection by Luang Por Liem is from the book, The Ways of the Peaceful, (pdf) pp. 57-58.