I was reading something from a talk of Ajahn Sumedho that touched me very much. He was saying that when he’d just become a monk, he didn’t speak Thai at all and he met a Thai monk who had previously been in the Thai Navy; so, he’d met Americans and knew a bit of English. This Thai monk had been with Ajahn Chah for a while, so he was quite diligent in terms of discipline and meditation. Ajahn Sumed…

Greater in battle than the man who would conquer a thousand-thousand men, is he who would conquer just one– himself. Better to conquer yourself than others. When you’ve trained yourself, living in constant self-control, neither a deva nor gandhabba, nor a Mara banded with Brahmas, could turn that triumph back into defeat. This reflection from the Pāli Canon is from Thousands, Dhammapada Chapter 8…

It is important to recognize that the nature of becoming is generated through the force of desire, tanha, of craving—craving for sensuality, craving for being—for a sense of self, to be somebody, to be something, or craving for non- being—that sense of pushing away, of aversion, of negation. The becoming mind then seeks an object that is either internal or external. What does that seeking look lik…

How are we holding the practice? The Buddha taught many different aspects of technique and method, often from an organic, big picture, complete view. How do we encompass that for ourselves? How do we develop a context for using different methods, techniques and particulars of practice? One of the most clear and tangible examples showing the Buddha’s approach is the discourse in the Anguttara Nikay…

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 one…

In Dhamma practice, wisdom acts as the direct antidote to ignorance by examining the reality of life and the world with a stable, stilled and unbiased mind sustained in the present. The direct antidote to craving is the systematic and integrated development of wholesome mental states. In the case of love, the most prominent of these virtues are lovingkindness and the effort to be a good friend. Tr…

Now, the Buddha says that nibbāna is something indescribable, but he will talk about it to some extent so that we’ll desire to go there. To begin with, he says that it exists. This is unlike the case of the arahant, where he refuses to answer the question as to whether the arahant exists as a being. In fact, his refusal there is so thorough that he rules out all the possible answers to the questio…

The symbols we accumulate to structure the world around us are bound up with the faculty of memory. Memory is a database of all our previous experiences that runs like a continuous thread through the pattern of our mental activity. The data from memory comes in through the five senses; it’s the senses that tell us what to remember. An enormous amount of our thinking is based on memory. When we see…

When we direct our attention to mindfulness and to meditation, if that root of wholesome mental qualities is there, then the meditation is going to go a lot more smoothly; it’s going to be much more accessible to us. Purifying virtue is not so much about getting the legal description of the precepts and then seeing how much one has to do and how much one can get away with. It’s more about approach…

At Wat Pah Pong the emphasis was on communal activities, working together, eating together, etc., with all its rules. I knew that if I was going to live as a bhikkhu I needed the bhikkhu’s training and I hadn’t been getting that at the meditation centre that I had been in before. What Luang Por gave me was a living situation to contemplate. You developed an awareness around the monastic tradition…