Steal the Dhamma
July 22, 2024

When I went back to Thailand to ordain with Ajaan Fuang, he told me very early on that I would have to think like a thief if I wanted to learn the Dhamma.

If a thief wants to steal something from a house, he can’t go up to the front door, knock on the door, and say, “Excuse me, could you tell me where you hide your valuables? Could you tell me when you’re going to be away so I can come in and take them?” He has to watch very carefully, very secretly, notice things. When do the people come? When do they tend to go? Which part of the house do they seem to be most protective of? Then he can figure out how to sneak in, get what he wants, sneak out.

In the same way, Ajaan Fuang said, I couldn’t expect that he would explain everything to me. I had to notice for myself. When he did things, how did he do them? It started out with simple things like arranging his hut. Where were things placed? Where did they go? I started putting them in places where I thought they should go, and if I was wrong, he would just throw them someplace else. He wouldn’t tell me what the right spot would be. But I learned, well, that’s obviously not the right spot. I’d run into other issues as well. As he said, when you’re out meditating alone in the forest and problems come up, if you’re used to having everything handed to you on a platter, you won’t know what to do. But if you learn to figure things out on your own, you’ve developed a good quality.

In other words, instead of teaching the Dhamma as a body of information, he was teaching it as a skill.

And part of the skill is ingenuity, figuring things out on your own. He himself told me about the time when he was young and starting out meditating. The instructions back in those days were just, “Bring your mind down.” This was before Ajaan Lee had formulated his Method One and Method Two. So Ajaan Fuang would meditate, bring his mind down, down, down, down, and he got very depressed, very dull. So, he figured, “This must not be right.” So, he turned it around, bringing it up, up, up, up, up—and he went too far up. That wasn’t right, either. So, he tried to figure out what was just right. That was how he was able to get his mind into good concentration.

After all, we’re following the path called the Middle Way. Extremes are easy. You just go for the extreme, as extreme as you can. With the Middle Way, though, you have to be sensitive. What kind of middle is the Buddha talking about? One extreme is indulgence in sensuality. The other extreme is self-torture. But the middle doesn’t mean a neutral feeling. It turns out that, in that particular case, the middle is the pleasure of concentration, which can be very intense, but it’s not the pleasure of sensuality. It’s something else.

We can read in the Canon about how it took the Buddha a long time to figure that one out. But then again, who did he have to teach him? Nobody else. He had to use his own ingenuity.

This is one of the qualities you should look for and test in yourself in fostering what’s called attaññu, knowledge of yourself. You ask yourself, “How far have I come in conviction? How far have I come in generosity, virtue, discernment, learning, ingenuity?”

Four of those qualities—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment—are the qualities of an admirable friend. So, to what extent have you learned from your admirable friends? To what extent are you an admirable friend to yourself?

Then there’s learning, which means learning the Dhamma. What Dhamma do you know? Do you know enough to protect you, to give you advice when things get difficult?

And then finally, ingenuity. Do you have the ability to extrapolate, to think up Dhamma on your own? Ajaan MahaBoowa talks about this. He says the Buddha’s teachings are like a doctor’s basic tonic. Back in the old days, traditional doctors would have a general tonic that they would give to everybody and then they would adjust the ingredients—adding this, adding that—for specific diseases.

So, the Buddha is giving us the general tonic. As for the specifics of individual defilements, we have to figure out what to add. After all, we’re not dealing with generic defilement: generic greed, generic anger, generic delusion. We’re dealing with specific instances of these things. You have to know how to deal with the specific instances. A lot of that has to do with your ingenuity, your ability to think like a thief: to watch, observe, try things out.

You might say you’re here to steal the Dhamma. The Dhamma is proclaiming itself all the time, but we need to have the right ears to listen properly. That’s what we have to train. That requires powers of observation. This is why the two words that Ajaan Fuang would use in his meditation instructions more than any other words were, one, be observant, and two, use your ingenuity. Those are the qualities the Buddha developed, those are the qualities the ajaans developed, all the ajaans. And even though we’re depending on them for a lot of what we’ve learned about the Dhamma, there’s still a lot that we have to steal for ourselves.

So, it starts with simple things. How is this done? How is that done? When the senior monks do this, how do they do it? You have to learn pretty quickly that there are some senior monks you can take as examples, and others you can’t. That’s part of being observant. When you find somebody you can take as a good example, you watch carefully.

One of the mistakes that was often made by Western monks going to Thailand was that they would see the ajaan do something or say something that seemed odd to them, and all too often they’d write it off: “Well, he does that because he’s Thai.” The implication being that if you come back to the West, you don’t have to do it the Thai way.

But as Ajaan Fuang once said, “If the ajaan is good, he has a reason for everything.” After all, the ajaans didn’t think like ordinary Thais. They were the people who had left Thai society, gone into the forest, and come out very independent thinkers, very independent people. So, they had their independent reasons for doing things. Your ability to try to figure out “What would be a good reason for the ajaan to say that or do that?” may not be precisely what the ajaan’s reason was—it might actually be better—but at least it gets you to thinking. It expands your imagination.

So be all eyes. All ears. Watch. Listen. Observe. And that way you can steal some really good Dhamma.