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Those who build canals channel the flow of water.
Arrowsmiths make arrows.
Woodworkers craft wood.
The wise tame themselves.
Dhammapada Verse 80
The abbot of ‘The International Forest Monastery of Bung Wai’ had
expressed an interest in visiting our monasteries in Europe and spending
some time here on retreat. Everything was in place for this to happen
except there being someone to take over his duties during his absence.
After living in Britain for twelve years, I was interested to return to
Asia, so it was a joy when, in 1993, I found myself heading for Thailand
for an extended stay in the place where I had done most of my initial
training as a young monk.
Twilight was falling by the time I once again entered the monastery
gates. Being greeted by old friends and new stirred feelings of
nervousness, gratitude and wonder. So much had happened both inwardly
and outwardly since I had lived there. The place was familiar and yet at
the same time different. The dark all-encompassing silence of the
forest, the fragrance of wild blossoms mingling with the scent of
burning incense, took me back to being twenty-four years old again, full
of hope for mystical experience and yet wonderfully empty of
expectations. But now electrical sounds drifted across the paddy fields
from the lit village of Bung Wai, where every house, not just the
headman’s, had its own television set and stereo.
After a day or two I discovered that the monastery hadn’t changed too
much. Although the dirt road from Ubon, the regional town, had been
upgraded to tarmac, and mechanical rotavators had replaced the buffaloes
in the fields, the monastery water was still pulled by hand from the
well; leaves were still swept daily; dye for the robes was still made
with resin extracted by hard labour from the jackfruit tree; and reading
at night was still done by kerosene lamp-light. The message so
characteristic of the Theravadin forest tradition, ‘Keep It Simple’,
still sounded out, like the resonating temple gong heard for miles
around, even above the new and modern noise.
The daily programme in the monastery was more flexible than I had
anticipated, so there was time to reconnect with the other resident
monks. There was also time to converse with local villagers.
Miraculously, they seemed to remember those of us who had lived there
when the monastery was founded in 1974. The older folk hadn’t kicked
their lifetime habit of chewing betel nut, nor had they lost their
radiant toothless smiles. We exchanged stories about developments in
monasteries around the world, some in countries that many of them had
not heard of.
As fortune would have it, there was an opportunity during this period of
residence to visit some of the meditation masters of the north-east,
including my first teacher whom I hadn’t seen since leaving his
monastery eighteen years before. Venerable Ajahn Tate was a highly
respected teacher somewhat senior to Ajahn Chah and had been a disciple
of Ajahn Mun in the 1930s. Having become a monk at the age of fourteen,
his whole life had been spent earnestly in the practice and service of
the Dhamma. He grew to be – along with Ajahn Chah – one of the
pre-eminent leaders of Thai Buddhism, eventually establishing and living
at Hin Mark Peng monastery. At the time of my visit to Thailand, he was
residing in nearby Wat Tum Karm, the mountain cave monastery of the late
Ajahn Fun. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have spent the first
months of my monastic life with him, before I came to live under the
guidance of Venerable Ajahn Chah.
When I first went to stay with Ajahn Tate he was seventy-four and had
recently been diagnosed with leukaemia. Eighteen years later, he was
miraculously still offering guidance to anyone who sought his help. So
with no small amount of joy and anticipation I joined the party
travelling the few hours north to pay their respects. ‘‘What shall I
give him? Will he remember me?” – such excited thoughts, memories about
the hard time I’d had in those early years, and a child-like
anticipatory delight filled my mind.
Even at the time I’d lived with him he had had a beautiful grandfatherly
appearance. Now, at ninety-three, he had little physical strength left,
yet his eyes shone, his quiet high-pitched voice was clear and his skin
glowed. I choked with tears as I bowed in respect and gratitude.
Although normally I was quite able to communicate adequately in Thai, I
needed one of the other monks to express my intense joy at seeing him
again. He didn’t recognise me and it didn’t matter as I sat at his feet
again. “How amazing!” I thought to myself, “All those years ago, I
struggled so much in my new life as a forest monk, enduring the furious
inner fires, yet here I am feeling such happiness! How wonderful!”
Ajahn Tate had been the meditation teacher of my preceptor Somdet
Nyanasamvara of Wat Bovornives in Bangkok, and I’d been introduced to
his teachings in the form of printed translations. When I happened to
meet some of Ajahn Tate’s disciples in Bangkok I was impressed by their
conduct and outward demeanour, and so, with the blessing of my
preceptor, I move up country to spend my first rains retreat (vassa) at
Wat Hin Mark Peng. I travelled there in the company of another western
monk I’d also met in Bangkok. We had coincidentally attended retreats
around the same time in Australia, and now shared the same interest in
spending time with this great teacher. Wat Hin Mark Peng was a remote
monastery on the forested banks of the Mekong River, about thirty miles
upstream from Vientiane, the capital of Laos. When I was there, the
communists were invading Laos. My kuti was high on a cliff, directly
above the river. When I first arrived we would go down to bathe each
morning, but as conditions between Thailand and Laos deteriorated,
Russian soldiers began patrolling the Mekong in their boats and there
was too much shooting going on for it to be comfortable to continue.
Living in a war zone certainly added to the intensification of my
experience. I was already trying to adjust to the food and climate, and
I couldn’t speak the language either. Where I came from in New Zealand,
living in the forest was a treat – no snakes, scorpions or even ants to
be troubled by. But in the tropical forest of Asia real care needed to
be taken as you got into bed at night in case a snake hadn’t crawled in
there first. There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the
night with my body covered in stinging ants, and the walls of the hut
apparently moving as they teemed over the entire building.
The Heart and the Activity of the Heart
On the occasion of the first interview my companion and I had with Ajahn
Tate, he was keen to hear about our practice. Since we were going to be
living in his monastery at least for the duration of the Rains Retreat,
he wanted to know what our understanding of practice was, so he called
us up to his kuti.
After asking a few questions, he spoke to us for some time, during which
he said something that has stayed with me; something that still seems as
significant as it did then. Through the translator, he said, “Your task
in practice is to realise the difference between the heart and the
activity of the heart. It’s that simple.” As I recall this now, I can
almost hear him saying it; his voice gentle yet strong and full, clearly
rich in experience and unshakeable understanding. I hadn’t expected him
to say something so straightforward. I suppose I had expected something
more complex and difficult to understand, but my response when I heard
what he said was, “Yes, I get that, I can relate to that.”
To observe inwardly, to direct attention so that we come to know
intimately for ourselves that which is the heart and that which is the
activity of the heart: this was and is the foundation of my meditation
practice and my enquiry. The words he used were jit and argarn kong jit.
Citta, a Pali word, is shortened in Thai to ‘jit’, and both words mean
‘heart’ or ‘mind’. Argarn kong jit means ‘the activity of the heart or
mind’.
I had heard a lot of talk about developing jhanas – states of meditative
absorption – and about attaining different levels of realisation and
insight, but Ajahn Tate was pointing out that it is important not to be
distracted by ideas of practice nor by the various experiences,
sensations or mental impressions that we are subject to. We should view
them all simply as the activity of the mind. They are all the content of
the mind. If the heart or mind – the citta – is like an ocean, then the
activities of the heart or mind are like the waves on that ocean. Our
practice should consist in seeing these waves as waves, passing on the
surface of the ocean.
Most of us are usually caught up in the activity. I still get caught up
in the waves, in the movements of mind, and I forget, I lose
perspective. Practice means remembering perspective, and cultivating an
awareness that distinguishes the knowing itself from that which is
known. We can know the sensations in the body; we can know feelings,
energetic movements, mental formations, ideas, impressions, concepts,
memories and fantasies. All these need to be known as activity. If we
don’t know them as activity, what happens? We become the activity and
get caught up in that activity. There is a poignant saying in Japanese
Buddhism: ‘Laugh, but don’t get lost in laughter; cry, but don’t get
lost in crying.’ We could also say, ‘Think, but don’t get lost in
thinking; enjoy, but don’t get lost in enjoyment.’
Sometimes people come across Buddhist teachings or Buddhist meditation
and they get the idea that peacefulness means getting rid of all the
content of the mind, making the mind empty. In meditation it sometimes
appears that the mind is very open and spacious and that there’s very
little happening. However, this does not mean that we’ve made it, that
we’re enlightened. In that state of openness, clarity and spaciousness,
we might experience vitality and pleasure, and if we’re not properly
informed and prepared, we can make the mistake of thinking ‘This is it!
This good feeling is the point of it all.’ Ajahn Tate was saying that
even this good feeling is also just the activity of the heart. The point
of practice is to know this activity in relation to that in which the
activity is taking place. What is it in which this activity is taking
place? What is it that knows? We should cultivate an awareness that
knows the knowing as well as that which is known.
The Effort to Remember
This teaching was the first gift I received from Ajahn Tate, a precious
gift, and one that very much set me up for the practice that I have
followed ever since. I was an enthusiastic beginner who’d had a bit of
pleasurable experience in meditation. I was determined to get somewhere
in my practice and I made a huge amount of effort. After having got up
early in the morning and gone out on alms-round I would eat the one meal
and, after a rest, spend the rest of the day sitting and walking. There
were few books in English there, but the few I could find I reflected on
seriously. The little talking I could do was with people whose language
I couldn’t speak. The other Western monk was meditating on death, an
object of meditation frequently recommended by the Buddha and favoured
in the forest tradition, and he didn’t seem to want to pay much
attention to me. As it happened, as the months went by, I looked more
and more like death myself, and I think he began to find me an
interesting object of contemplation. I hadn’t been getting on very well
with the diet of sticky rice, pickled fish and chillies, and I lost a
lot of weight. But I’d committed myself to stay for the three months of
the vassa, and that commitment added to the intensity.
I certainly experienced some benefits from the effort I made during this
retreat period of intensified practice. About halfway through the three
months, I had an experience of clarity that I can remember vividly – it
was a night or two before my twenty-fourth birthday. It was quite
spontaneous; I wasn’t doing any special practice. I was sitting there in
puja one evening, surrounded by the other monks. Puja took place in a
very basic, unattractive, open-sided wooden building with the usual
grass mats rolled out over the polished concrete floor. We chanted in
the same way as every other day, with the same mosquitoes biting and my
knees hurting as they usually did. Suddenly, without warning, I found
myself experiencing the most wonderful clarity – unlike anything I had
ever known before. I experienced an utterly natural yet at the same time
extraordinary sense of well-being. It seemed as though this perspective
on things should now last forever, because, in reality, things had
always been that way, only I hadn’t noticed it. When puja finished I
felt so elevated that I mentioned it to one of the other monks, and he
said, “Let’s go and speak to Ajahn Tate about it.”
There was a tradition in the monastery that eight or ten monks would go
and see Ajahn Tate after evening chanting and massage him, all at the
same time. Thai massage is gruesome. You dig your elbows in as deeply as
you can. Those Thai monks would really get to work on Ajahn Tate.
Somebody would be on his foot, someone else on his leg, someone else on
an arm, all digging away. He’d go through this every night. On this
particular evening, as we talked about what had happened to me, he
stopped the massage, sat up and said, “I want to hear more about this.”
So I explained what I had experienced. That evening he gave me what I
consider the second most helpful piece of advice that I’ve ever received
on practice.
He said, “These moments of clarity, this mindfulness and presence that
you have experienced, are very good. From now on what you have to do in
your practice is just to remember like this more quickly.” We were
talking through a translator, which wasn’t easy. If we’d been speaking
directly, he might have said, “Keep exercising mindfulness in the moment
and learn to come back sooner to this clear way of seeing. It’s that
simple – make the effort to remember.” Little by little, with the right
kind of effort, with consistent practice, as I am sure many of you have
realised, we can make a difference.
It was not for another seven years until, wrapped in a blanket during a
winter retreat in England, that I was able to acknowledge more fully the
relevance of what Ajahn Tate had said that evening. After that
conversation I had fallen into hell. The profound, amazing experience I
had had during that evening had soon been followed by horrendously
unpleasant mind states, indescribably terrible states of self-doubt.
This is why I often speak about how important it is to prepare oneself
properly for practice. At that time I hadn’t long been off the hippy
trail. Only a few months before my time with Ajahn Tate I had left the
commune in which I’d been living and had hitchhiked across the
Australian desert. After that, I island-hopped through Indonesia,
stopping for a little diving in Timor, batik-painting in Java, and then
went on up through various beach resorts and restaurants in Malaysia to
Thailand. And then, I found myself with a shaved head and in robes,
doing this intensive practice. I definitely wasn’t properly prepared.
Thanks to Ajahn Tate’s loving-kindness and consistent caring attention,
I survived those very unpleasant states. But it was about seven years
before I was able more fully to appreciate what he’d told me on that
occasion. Now I encourage people to make this effort to remember.
Sometimes, when we forget what we have learned, we can devalue
experiences that we’ve had, effort we’ve made, insights that have
arisen. Ajahn Chah had an image for this. He’d say, “These moments of
mindfulness and understanding are like drips of water coming out of a
tap. In the beginning it’s drip – drip – drip, with big gaps between the
drips.” If we’re heedless during those gaps, if we’re caught up in our
thinking, caught up in the content of the mind and the sensations we are
experiencing, we can think that our mindful moments were invalid and
dismiss them as accidents. But Ajahn Chah said, “Little by little, with
consistent effort, these moments become drip, drip, drip then
dripdripdrip and then they become a stream.” With constant effort, you
enter a continuous stream of mindfulness. The moments themselves are the
same, but they’re uninterrupted.
We forget, but the good news is that we can remember. We sit in formal
meditation, gathering our hearts and mind together, and we settle into
stillness. We gain perspective, we remember. The mind wanders off. ‘If
only I hadn’t done that,’ we think; or, ‘Why did they say that?’ We
wander into the future, thinking, ‘Have I got my ticket for tomorrow?
Where did I put it?’ We get caught up, we get lost, but then we remember
because our hearts are committed to remembering. If we simply remember,
that’s good, but if we come in with some sort of judgement and say, ‘I
shouldn’t have forgotten my practice is hopeless,’ then we’ve lost it
again. Remembering is the point. We don’t need to dwell on our
forgetting.
Being Careful
Ajahn Tate’s advice was, “All you’ve got to do is remember more
quickly.” I kept making an effort during that vassa and I was very
diligent, although by this time I was in such a state of despair,
occasional terror, distress and thorough unpleasantness, that it was
really just a question of survival. At the end of the vassa I wasn’t
well at all. They decided I needed to go down to Bangkok for a medical
check-up and to rest. In fact I ended up in hospital. I saw Ajahn Tate
before I left and he gave me a third significant and helpful teaching.
He gave it with such kindness and wisdom; he wasn’t just being nice to
me. He was so aware of the nature of this path. He said, “Be careful.” I
still remember this vividly. He said, “The place you are at within
yourself is very vulnerable – take care.”
I often begin our evening meditation at Ratanagiri by guiding us
together into our inner settling by saying, “Carefully paying
attention…” I think in many cases we could substitute the word
‘carefulness’ for ‘mindfulness.’ In the poor condition that I was in
when I saw Ajahn Tate, his words were just what was needed. I was so
unhappy that I could very easily have been unkind to myself, or
heedless. You know what it’s like when you get a little miserable; you
start blaming, thinking, ‘Well, someone has done something wrong.’ It’s
very difficult to feel unhappy without feeling that somebody, probably
including oneself, has done something wrong.
If we are feeling unhappy, what is called for is a willingness to simply
be with that unhappiness. If we’re not careful, we say something’s
wrong, though it doesn’t really help to say that. We say it either
inwardly or outwardly. This projecting of blame is a consequence of
having made an inner mistake of misperceiving our unhappiness, sadness
or suffering as being something wrong. We don’t receive it just as it
is. We don’t acknowledge it and feel it, allowing it to happen; we don’t
have the ‘knowingness’ to see it as activity taking place in awareness.
Because we don’t have that perspective, we struggle to do something
about our suffering, to deal with it in some way. To say that something
has gone wrong and that it’s somebody’s fault is a heedless way of
dealing with our unpleasant experiences. The habit of consistently doing
this is a symptom of what I call the compulsive judging mind. Ajahn
Tate’s parting gift to me, ‘be careful,’ alerted me to this, intuitively
if not conceptually.
One-Pointedness of Mind
I received a final teaching from Ajahn Tate on the occasion of visiting
him with the group from Bung Wai in 1993. Only a few months later he
passed away, at the age of ninety-four. We sat close to him so he didn’t
have to speak loudly. I felt almost too ashamed to attempt to engage him
in talk since he seemed so frail and tired; just to be near him was
enough. Yet with visibly keen interest and with great kindness he
responded to the questions he was asked. All the other visitors of the
day had departed; only our small group remained. As I recall, one of the
young monks asked Ajahn Tate if he could identify the essence of
Buddhist teaching. “Buddhism, you want a definition of Buddhism?” he
said. “Buddhism is one-pointedness of mind.” (Thai: ekaggata jit). A lot
has been written and said about Buddhism, and that such a great being
should give such a clear and simple presentation of the path was a
precious gift.
For those who don’t yet have a foundation in practice it would be
understandable if Ajahn Tate’s definition of Buddhism didn’t make sense.
Even for those who do, for the most part we don’t yet know how to abide
clearly, consciously and mindfully in a state of one-pointedness. If we
do have an appreciation of one-pointedness, even to a small degree, then
we will know that a mind that is distracted and fragmented is a mind
that is confused and which misperceives the way things are. In this
condition the natural well-being that we feel when there is one-pointedness
is obstructed.
Many of us went through years of our early lives being chronically
obstructed. We were trying to sort out the right philosophy, the right
political statement, the right lifestyle, the right type of
relationship, the right social arrangement, so that we would feel good
about life. It wasn’t until my first meditation retreat, during which I
learned to focus attention on the breath and to inhibit the tendency to
follow distractions that I discovered, or uncovered, the natural state
of well-being that comes when the mind is concentrated. Up until that
point I thought I had to do something or imbibe something to feel good.
When we remember or reconnect with the natural goodness of the heart –
which is still, calm, peaceful and clear – then, through seeing clearly
the nature of the world, our relationship with the world is changed. The
world remains what it is and what it has always been. There is still
pleasure and pain, both intense and mediocre. There’s still injustice
and struggle, disappointment, joy, delight and happiness. But when we
see with clarity that all of this comes and goes, when we see with
awareness all of experience arising and ceasing, we no longer, from
conditioned preference, invest ourselves in any experience in
particular. We invest instead in understanding the nature of experience.
So the fourth teaching from Ajahn Tate that I recall is that what is
really worth developing is not a sophisticated understanding of Buddhist
theory or lots of retreat experiences and insights but an appreciation
of how to abide more freely and more frequently with one-pointedness of
heart and mind. When we know this state and it is rightly focused on the
Way we will be best placed to progress in practice.
For these four simple yet wonderfully relevant teachings I will remain
eternally indebted to Ajahn Tate and I am happy to share them with you.
Thank you for your attention.
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© 2005 Aruna Publications |