There’s a story with which many of you are probably familiar, that begins with the Buddha walking in the woods with some of his disciples. At one point the Buddha bends down and picks up a handful of leaves from the forest floor. He holds out the leaves to his disciples and says, ‘Tell me, are there more leaves on the trees and on the ground or more leaves in my hand?’ His disciples say, ‘There ar…

That mind wants to know a lot: how far the next town is, which is the most agreeable route – and many times a day it asks for a progress report. I’d be walking along quite happily, then get an urge to look at the map. Then the organizing mind would come in with estimates of how long it was going to take, or what state I’d be in, or how I could lessen the weight of this backpack … and so compound s…

In many ways, one of the most important aspects of living in a community – so mundane and obvious that we tend to overlook it – is the daily schedule. This is what Ajahn Chah would teach us so often and what has been passed down to us through Luang Por Sumedho, Ajahn Pabhakaro, Ajahn Jagaro, Ajahn Pasanno, myself, and Ajahn Ñāṇadhammo: look at your mind, look at your body, and see what comes up…

…people suffer more from their mind-state in the present than they do from the results of past bad actions playing out in the external world. No matter how much justice you try to bring into the world, people are still going to suffer and be dissatisfied as long as their minds are untrained in the qualities that make them impervious to suffering…Not only do people suffer when their minds are untra…

One of the images that [Ajahn Chah] gave of the practice was of a coconut tree. A coconut tree draws nutriments from the planet; it draws elements good and bad, clean and dirty, up through the roots and into the top of the tree and then produces fruit that gives both sweet water and delicious meat. In the same way, as practitioners, we take all the different experiences that we have, all the diffe…

Sometimes we get lost – we blow up at each other, or we do things that aren’t very nice – but that’s not our intention; these are the heedless moments. I conduct myself in a moral way not only for my own benefit, for my own practice, but out of respect for you and towards the Sangha, and towards the community around us: to be someone who lives within the restraints of the moral precepts. Then my i…

You can think about everything, but don’t think about things too much. If you think about things [a lot] and they’re good, then they’re very good. If you think about things and they’re not good, then if you think about things a lot, they’re very bad. We have to learn that sometimes we have to stop thinking. This reflection by Ajahn Jundee Kantasaro is from the talk, An Expression of Gratitude.

“When people work with a spirit of self-sacrifice, it’s not difficult. Nobody made a fuss. Even when we worked late into the night, nobody asked when we were going to stop. Whether it was pouring with rain or the sun was beating down, there were no complaints. And so, the results every day were satisfying. It was a tribute to the harmony of Luang Por’s disciples and, as Sangha work projects go, it…

I’d like to share something else with you, because it was where this term ‘shared humanity’ came up for me. A few weeks ago there was an invitation to a rather mysterious meeting, a sort of inter-faith mingling of minds and hearts. There was a Sufi, a Swami, a Bishop, an Anglican businessman and a Buddhist monk, all of us invited to the same place to share something, though we didn’t know what unt…

Q: When I see nature, I am so full of gratitude, but that seems to be a kind of attachment. I try to see the attachment, but it’s difficult. Someone once told me: ‘If you go on like this, you will never be free.’ [Laughter] I just love trees and birds and nature … and I find I’m having to change … I don’t know how to deal with it. A: It’s true that some of these positive qualities of heart may com…