Ajahn Chah

It was people who were just big lecturers but were suffering so badly when their wife died.

Then all your intelligence, can't you learn about life and use your wisdom to have some peace in your life and be able to accept the ups and downs in life which happen to each one of us? Why is it there that you're so full of knowledge but empty of wisdom? And this actually, I think, was one of the great things about Buddhist teachings, especially my experience with a teacher like Ajahn Chah.

He'd only done four years at school, but he was far wiser than these noble laureates I knew at Cambridge, because he knew about life.

Having an empty mind, without any concepts and ideas, he could actually hear and listen and respond with more sense of freedom.

I know that sometimes people will say, well, where does this all lead? It does lead to freedom.

It does lead to a sense of unencumbered joy, happiness which doesn't depend upon others or things, a freedom.

But I can't resist sort of telling one of the tales from my life as a monk with the great master Ajahn Chah.

He was always talking about emptiness.

that is able to be just alert and clear and present in this present moment.

And one of the ways that Ajahn Chah used to express mindfulness was the, you said, that quality, that quality of mind that is, say in Thai, it's a tan-na-rum.

It is...

in time for the moods of the mind, the impressions of the mind.

So in this respect, when Lumpur Sumedho first came to England in the 1970s, he arrived in May of 77 to settle in London.

He came to England with Ajahn Chah that year.

He visited briefly in 76, but he came to the invitation of the English Sangha Trust to settle in the Hampstead Vihara in London on Haverstock Hill.

And he hadn't taught very much in the West before.

So this is an extremely useful practice in terms of radical acceptance.

And so, as you'll have guessed, most of these are to do with attitude and And most of them are being worked with with wise reflection.

And if you read Ajahn Chah's teachings or if you can listen to them in the Thai language in the original, over and over and over again, you'll hear him talking about wise reflection, looking at his own attitudes and questioning, challenging his own patterns of thinking.

So a lot of radical acceptance is to do with noticing the lack of acceptance, challenging that, meeting that, and letting your own mindfulness and wisdom be the transforming agent.

Sons of the Buddha who have entered higher ordination come to live by the Vinaya, following its observances and practices.

For example, in the tradition of Venerable Ajahn Chah, whatever gains Ajahn Chah received were brought together and shared.

They were not kept as the possession of one person.

Otherwise, greed could arise.

You don't get knocked over by it when it comes in.

So how is this unshakable peace to come about? Ajahn Chah used a different image from the rock.

He said, if you are mindful and let things take the natural course, your mind will become still in any surroundings.

Like we were this evening in the meditations.

You can have an idea of what the elephant looks like, but you haven't seen it.

And now let us go back to the concept here of who we are.

And we take a book here, we learn something there, we read about the Ajahn Chah, we read about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we find a book telling us about the quantum idea about existence.

And then we form a belief about some part of who I am, my spirituality, my essence, my me.