Dispassion or Aversion?

There was a layman who used to come and see Ajahn Chah who had a lot of complaints: his fields weren’t producing very much and his buffalo was getting old and his house wasn’t big enough and his kids weren’t satisfying him and… He said he was getting really sick of the world and becoming dispassionate.

Ajahn Chah said, “No, you’re not. You’re not dispassionate. If you got more buffaloes, newer ones, healthier ones, and a bigger house and a lot more wealth, then you’d find that your dispassion with the world is very temporary. You just have aversion to the world.” He continued, “What you need to meditate on is, ‘It’s good enough.’ Whatever comes up in the mind: ‘It’s good enough’.”

So the man practiced that for awhile and the next time he came back to see Ajahn Chah he had become contented, just by meditating on “It’s good enough.”

Craving arises because we have discontentment with what we have. But when we have that sense of “It’s good enough” then the mind starts to settle down and come to a place of ease. And it’s from that place of ease, well-being, and contentment that the mind can go into what we call sama ̄dhi.

This reflection by Ajahn Ñāṇadhammo is from the booklet, The Spiritual Faculties, (pdf) p. 4.