Give of Yourself

Ajaan Maha Bua says that when he was staying with Ajaan Mun, Ajaan Mun would give long, long Dhamma talks every now and then. But according to Ajaan Maha Bua, what Ajaan Mun was giving was just the trunk of a tree. You had to work out the branches for yourself. There are times in the talks when he would reach a topic, skirt around it, and come up on the other side, leaving big blanks here and there. Ajaan Maha Bua’s explanation was that there were things that Ajaan Mun wanted you to figure out for yourself, and not have everything handed to you on a platter.

This is a phrase used all throughout the forest tradition: Don’t expect everything to be handed to you on a platter. You have to make yourself worthy of the Dhamma by putting yourself out.

As when Ajaan Fuang would be teaching meditation: He’d hand out Ajaan Lee’s “Method Two,” which ends with the descriptions of jhana. But he would never talk about jhana. If you wanted to know what level of jhana you were on, he wouldn’t tell you. He would ask you, “How is your breath right now? How is your mind right now?” After all, that’s where the real problems are: not with the words, but with what your breath is doing, what your mind is doing.

The Buddha himself would leave a lot of things blank. He mentions that there are two types of causes for suffering: those that go away simply when you look at them with equanimity, and those that go away only with fabrications of exertion. But which is which? He wouldn’t say. You have to observe for yourself.

And what does it mean to exert a fabrication? In that context, he doesn’t say. He says in other places, and it’s up to you to put them together: the three fabrications of body, speech, mind. When something comes up in your mind that entails suffering, how does it relate to the way you’re breathing? How does it relate to the way you’re talking to yourself? How does it relate to the perceptions and feelings you’re focusing on? How can you change those things, so as to get rid of that cause of suffering? That’s for you to discover. That’s for you to experiment with.

Or the question of sensual pleasures: As the Buddha said, he doesn’t denounce all sensual pleasures. He denounces only those that will have a bad effect on your mind. Now, which pleasures are bad for you? Which ones are not? Again, you have to observe for yourself. There are some things that he says across the board you want to avoid. Any sensual pleasure that involves breaking the precepts he would say is a bad thing. The pleasures of the wilderness, he says, are a good thing. But between them, there’s a wide range that’s going to vary from person to person. You have to discover for yourself which sensual pleasures you can indulge in without any harm, which ones you have to beware of.

Then there’s that passage about the potentials that can give rise to the factors for awakening. He says there’s the potential for energy. There’s the potential for rapture. There’s the potential for calm, concentration, within your body and mind. But where those potentials are and how you develop them through appropriate attention, again, he doesn’t say. You have to explore.

Then there’s the question of how to interpret his teachings. There’s a place where he says that some of his teachings are meant to have their inferences drawn out—in other words, you think about them and you think about their implications and explore their implications, apply them—but there are other teachings where you should just take the teaching as it is and not try to draw any further implications. He doesn’t lay out any standards for how to say which is which. This is important because, as he says, if you get them mixed up, you’re slandering him. Which means you have to pay careful attention to how he interprets his own teachings.

There are some examples he gives in other parts of the Canon. Like the teaching on not-self, or the teaching on all three of the three perceptions: There are certain cases where, he says, you don’t apply them. You don’t draw out inferences, like inferring from the fact that all feelings are fabricated that all feelings have to be regarded as stressful, painful. He says that when you’re talking about karma, that’s not the inference you should draw. You should talk about the three types of feelings that result from karma: pleasant, painful, neither pleasant nor painful, because they’re related to skillful, unskillful, and neutral actions. You’re talking about karma to get people to know what kind of actions they should and shouldn’t be doing. If you say that all feelings resulting from action are painful, who’s going to bother trying to be skillful? That’s a case where there’s a wrong inference.

Or the case of the monk who derived from the teaching on not-self that there’s nobody to act and nobody to receive the results of actions. The Buddha reads his mind and calls him a fool. He doesn’t explain why, but it’s pretty obvious: Don’t draw any inferences from that teaching that there is no self.

But still, you have to be very observant to figure out which category the Buddha’s teachings belong to. That’s why there are these blanks in the teachings. They force you to be observant and to use your ingenuity. How do you figure things out? How do you take this principle and apply it to your own specific circumstances? Like the sensual pleasures that are bad for you and those that are not bad for you: How are you going to gauge which pleasure belongs into which category? You have to be observant. You have to use your ingenuity to figure things out, especially in the case of the potentials for the factors of awakening.

You also have to teach yourself to be a reliable person so that you can rely on your powers of observation. It’s not that just anybody can come in and say, “Okay, I’ve tried the Buddha’s teachings for a little while and they don’t work, so I’m going to move on to something else.” Or, you look at this particular pleasure, “I don’t see any problem with it,” even though everybody around you can see problems with your indulging in it. You have to train yourself to be reliable, to check things again and again, so that you can be your own refuge.

After all, it is your suffering you’re dealing with—the actions you’re doing that are causing that suffering, and the actions you could do to put an end to suffering. How sincerely do you want to put an end to suffering?

Here again we come to that issue of how you make yourself worthy of the Dhamma. The Dhamma isn’t something that people are trying to sell to you. It’s not the case that you can say, “I’ll accept the Dhamma only when you prove it to my satisfaction that it’s true.” You have to be true in testing it. It’s a question of how sincerely you want to put an end to your suffering, which kinds of suffering you’re going to tolerate, and which ones you’re not.

The more demanding you get of yourself, the better the results are going to be. This is why some of the ajaans in the forest tradition are really strict with their students, because it’s so easy to get satisfied halfway along the path and say, “Well, this is good enough for me.” But is it really good enough? You get yourself into nice states of concentration. The Buddha talks about getting into jhana, getting into the brahmavihāras, and then going to Brahma worlds after you die. But if you’re not a noble disciple, then when you fall from those Brahma worlds, where do you go? Down to hell, the animal womb, the realm of the hungry ghosts. They’re not a safe destination, those Brahma worlds. You’ve got to become more and more demanding of yourself.

And this is how you do it. You’re willing to fill in the blanks, develop your powers of observation, develop your ingenuity, check things again and again, so that you become a reliable person. That’s when you get the best results out of the Dhamma—by making yourself worthy of the Dhamma, being willing to give of yourself and not expect to have everything handed to you on a platter.